Joyce Carol Oates - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Because It Is Bitter

  Not just sucking and tugging at his momma's breast but biting, gnawing, bruising: kicking and crying for more milk even as milk dribbled out of his mouth.

  As a young child Little Red was forever filthy. Soiled himself and anyone reckless enough to hold him. Soiled every item of his clothing, soiled the bedsheets and blankets, soiled the carpets and floors and walls of the Garlock house, even soiled things the family swore he hadn't been anywhere near! Mrs. Garlock was determined to love him above any of her children because before he was born she'd been granted a vision: the angel Gabriel appeared to her holding aloft in his hand a "bright-shining" baby with flamecolored hair that skipped back a generation to Vesta Garlock's grandfather, who'd been gassed to death in the Great War and buried in some common grave in a place called Normandy, France, of which no one had ever heard-this poor man who'd never had a chance to live out his own life wanted now to return to earth again.

  The baby was baptized in his name, Patrick Wesley, and Mrs. Garlock tried not to despair of his dirt and his dirty ways, his habit of peeing where he stood or doing worse, and sometimes playing with it, smearing it on the walls: baby shit caked in the poor woman's hair and wedged permanently under her fingernails, streaks of it on everything she cherished, her hand-embroidered sheets, pillowcases, doilies brought north from home.

  Years on end Mrs. Garlock did her best with the child. Tried to scrub him clean, teach him the ways of cleanliness. Fighting him down into the tub until her fingers were worn and scabby and Little Red began to get too strong for her, strong and mean. By the age of five Little Red had muscles in tight little bunches, made people stare and laugh, asking was he an adult midget; and that oversized head of orangey-red hair, that head the boy learned to use for butting, even against his daddy sometimes. Vernon Garlock disciplined the boy as he'd done all his children and as his daddy had done him, but a man's arm wearies.

  .

  . a man can lose interest even in whipping. Little Red's brothers and sisters soon learned to keep their distance. Thus it fell to Vesta Garlock solely to perceive of herself as the means by which one "Patrick Wesley" was redeemed in the flesh of a second "Patrick Wesley," not knowing where the first left off and the second began-or if the first was the second, whole and complete, even in his dirty ways.

  Mrs. Garlock prayed to God to show her guidance, then to the angel Gabriel. But where there had been a vision of radiance and certainty now there was nothing.

  Little Red was six, that Christmas when Mrs. Garlock made her final effort to scrub him decent and clean: she boiled a fivegallon pail of water on the stove, and this water she poured into the tub, and open-eyed in a dream she tried to force her son into the scalding water... but Little Red was too smart for her, and too strong.

  Naked as an animal in just his skin Little Red ran off yelping and hid away for three days in the bitter cold, probably under a neighbor's house, feeding himself out of garbage cans and the dumpsters behind Loblaw's Groceries, and when he came back home nobody took special notice of him at first since the household was upset with Mrs. Garlock's raving and lunacy... this poor woman was never to be the same again.

  There was Vernon Garlock at the kitchen table, a bottle of Genesee 12-Horse Ale in his hand, when Little Red appeared naked and battered and sick-looking in the doorway, and Vernon Garlock stared at the boy as if he'd never seen him before, or never seen such a disgusting sight. "You little shit," Vernon said, "where you been?"

  Adding, before the boy could reply, in words like the pronouncement of death, "You broke your momma's heart." nobody's home. It's almost 10

  P.M. So Iris Courtney slips on her mother's midnight-blue raincoat and runs out thinking she'll buy some cigarettes...

  like an adult woman.

  Like Persia: "Chesterfields, please."

  Nobody's home-Iris doesn't count herself-and she has no idea when they will be home or whether one will come home without the other, so she runs over to Chaney's Variety a few blocks away.

  It's an April evening tasting of something sweet as peaches, a smell too of rain, that shimmering feel to the streets and the streetlamps and the headlights of cars that make familiar landscapes look unfamiliar.

  Iris is going to Chaney's instead of the late-night Rexall's though it's farther away. And not on a block of Gowanda Street that Persia or Duke would like to see their daughter in, nighttime or day.

  Iris thinks, The hell with them.

  Iris tightens the belt of Persia's raincoat, which is a size or two too large for her. Casting her gaze downward at the coat's sleek blue sheen she feels a rush of excitement.

  Thinking, The hell with her.

  The words of a popular song by a singing group called the Platters are running repeatedly in Iris's head; she can't seem to dislodge them. 0 yes! I'm the Great Pretender! Iris resists anything jammed in her head but it isn't easy to unjam such things; they seem to float about in the very air-lonely but no one can tell 0 yeslike the tinkly mind-numbing tune of a commercial or a movie cartoon, its very rhythms primitive and hypnotic. The human will is a weak muscle, Duke Courtney says, unless it is brought under strict discipline. Sometimes Iris becomes conscious she's been humming a song without knowing it, even singing the words under her breath. Breathy as a prayer.

  The brain is what? a radio with a million million tubes, wires, connections? You can't know they're there until something goes wrong and the static starts, every station blasting at once. What you think you are, then... where is it?

  Still, Iris believes in the will. Intends to exercise and discipline and control it like a muscle of her very body.

  In Chaney's Variety, the talk is loud and hilarious and punctuated by hoots, howls, laughter: laughter like donkeys braying, like monkeys screeching at the zoo, like that lunatic high-pitched cicada of late summer that Persia calls, hands pressed over her ears, the "razor-bug."

  The air's adrift in cigarette smoke.

  Iris Courtney stands breathless in the doorway. It's as if she has run a long distance through the rain... though it isn't raining. A light like candle flame lifts in her eyes, her smile is quick and hopeful, what can be sweeter than the chorus of "H'lo, Iris" and "Hiya, Iris" and "Hey girl!" But her head is buzzing so she can't sort out which one is Jinx Fairchild, or if he has even said a word.

  Though he's smiling toward her, eyes hooded, just slightly shy; she guesses, yes, he has.

  Iris hasn't been in Chaney's for maybe a week but it seems, now, she'd been here only the night before.

  Her quick-darting eyes take in with relief the fact that there is another white girl in Chaney's tonight: Bonnie Haugen with her (white) boyfriend Steve, sitting at the counter. Five black boys and Bonnie and Steve, all of them classmates at the high school, talking about something that has them convulsed with a prurient sort of laughter.

  .

  . drinking soft drinks, smoking cigarettes, killing time. Chaney's is the neighborhood place for killing time; it's as if, inside Chaney's, there is no actual time.

  Though an illuminated wall clock advertising Sealtest Ice Cream is conspicuous on the rear wall, glowing like a moon.

  Only Jinx Fairchild has any purpose to being here; he's lazily mopping part of the linoleum floor with a big wooden-handled mop. Jinx works in the variety store after school and much of Saturday. Iris believes that Chaney's, a rundown shabby little place but a cheery little place, is one of the few Negro-owned businesses in the neighborhood; she has reason to think that the owner, a fat good-natured older man, might be a relative of Jinx's, but she has never asked. She doesn't know Jinx Fairchild quite that way, to ask such a question.

  Careful as if stepping on patches of thin ice Iris steps over the damp, shining spots in the linoleum. Jinx hasn't been able to get the filthy floor very clean but it's surely cleaner where he has mopped than where he has not.

  Iris gets a soft drink from the cooler, selects a pack of Chesterfields from the cigarette display. There is a New York State law forbidding the sale of
cigarettes to minors, but the law isn't invariably enforced. When Jinx rings up the sale he says, teasing, "Them cigarettes for your momma, Iris, like last time, or for somebody else?"

  Iris says, "My momma. You know that." Jinx says, "Yah, your momma ain't seen many of them cigarettes, I guess, last time.

  Or's gonna, this." Iris says happily, "Oh, she won't mind me opening the pack just to test out one or two... she's an understanding kind of momma." Jinx makes a smile of his big white damp-looking teeth and says, "Poor lady ain't got much say in it, any case. These words are so honeyed and melodic they could be anything, even obscenities. It's the music Iris hears, not the sense. Staring up at Jinx Fairchild-such a tall gangling boy the vertebrae at the back of her neck feel the strain-she couldn't say what is the sense.

  His long fingers, stained brown, but a lighter brown, almost a pale rosy-pink, on the insides... when he scoops change out of the cash register, he presses it into her hand like they're shaking hands, black-boy style, the way she sees them do in school.

  Blond pony-tailed Bonnie Haugen calls out, as if Iris Courtney were a close friend, not a younger neighborhood girl she'd ordinarily snub, "You're out kinda late, Iris you alone?"

  Iris says, coloring faintly, "Oh, I don't mind." She feels the subtle insult, a puddle of awkwardness as they all look at her.

  Though perhaps Bonnie, aglow with her boyfriend's attention, shiny-faced, crimson-lipsticked, basking too in the nerved-up company of the several black boys, means no insult at all. She clutches at Iris's arm and says with a snort, Wait'll you hear the weird stuff these guys been telling us. I mean... weird." Bobo Ritchie protests, "It's all in the newspaper, man! Ain't no secret!" And Roosevelt Shields says, cutting his eyes at Iris, "Hell, I bet Iris know all about it-she the kind don't keep her head in no sand."

  Thus Iris feels encouraged to stay in Chaney's. For a while.

  Though it is late.

  Though Persia will be worried about her, if Persia comes home before she does. It had not occurred to Iris to leave a note.

  They're talking about the lurid case of a Buffalo doctor named Pilcher who was arrested the previous day for "trafficking" in human body parts and organs. For fifteen years, according to police, Pilcher had sold heads, brains, genitals, hands and feet, ears, hearts, kidneys, livers, intestines to medical research laboratories as far away as Tennessee, Florida, Colorado... sending them through the mail SPECIAL DELIVERY: FRAGILE. Iris read of the case in the local newspaper, turned on the six o'clock television news to learn a little more. A white man, clerical in appearance, with earnest eyes and a mild slammer, Pilcher was accused of bribing morgue workers at various Buffalo hospitals to provide him with body parts and organs

  "indiscriminately" from white and Negro corpses... though naturally, indigent corpses being predominantly Negro, the body parts and organs were predominantly from Negroes.

  On television, Dr. Pilcher denied acting out of profit. His reasons were "purely altruistic... in the service of medical science.

  In his loud braying voice Bobo Ritchie says, "How they found em, some heads wrapped loose in some box, startin' to leak. Man, this is the post office! Some cat hadda open that box an' see what's inside!"

  Blond Bonnie, coarse-skinned but good-looking Bonnie, sucks in smoke from her cigarette and exhales it contemplatively.

  She says, shivering, "Jesus, is that weird! I mean... sick! You got to wonder," she says vehemently, "what kinda doctor's that."

  Something about Bonnie's remark, delivered in such innocence, sets them all laughing. It's a moment of high hilarity.

  Jinx Fairchild observes, face suddenly crinkled as if this is a thought that hurts, "Man, your head you give so much thought to your eyes you been studyin' in the mirror... winding up like that. And then all kinds of people don't know you and don't give no damn about you, smart-asses, making jokes."

  Jinx's voice is an adult voice suddenly, shading off into an aggrieved silence.

  The red minute hand of the Sealtest clock continues round and round.

  Amid the talking and laughing-the white boy, Steve, is doing an imitation of something he's seen in a movie-Iris's gaze is drawn to it repeatedly, yet unseeingly. The clock face is bright-lit, and Chaney's is bright-lit, like a Christmas tree; which is why Iris Courtney is here.

  Iris has been clutching her package of Chesterfields; she's forgotten to open it. Now, as if expertly, she tears the cellophane with her thumbnail.

  She says, "Jinx, are there matches?"

  Bobo Ritchie steps up, says, "I got some, honey, you wanna find 'em."

  Bobo makes them all laugh by flopping his arms out, comically inviting Iris to go through his pockets, frisk him, and in the high spirits of the moment Iris hesitates, comes close to doing so. Bobo Ritchie is sixteen years old, built like a baby bull, saddlehued skin and nose that looks as if someone flattened it with the palm of a hand, wearing a stained white T-shirt that fits his big muscles snug as a fist in a tight glove. Iris knows that Bobo Ritchie's father was killed by police but she doesn't know why, exactly; he'd been beaten up and killed out of white-cop meanness or had he beaten up some white woman and brought his trouble on himself? Of Jinx Fairchild's friends Bobo is the loudest and the brawliest, and Iris has always shied away from something derisory in his manner. C'mon, girl," Bobo says, grinning, crowding Iris back against one of the stools, "I got lots of matches."

  Jinx tosses Iris a matchbook. Says, "Why're you smoking, anyway? Just gets a habit."

  Roosevelt leans in, smirking. "Jinx, he in trainin'. He a good boy."

  "Yah," says Bobo, "he one of the best."

  Iris lights her cigarette, her hands not quite steady. Out on the street there's the sound of a car backfiring, loud as gunfire.

  Jivey Bobo clamps his arm around Jinx's neck as if in a wrestling hold and bawls, with a sniggering grin and a wink at Iris, "Yah, this nigger's one of the best. Gonna get him a basketball schol'ship someday-go to college." Like he a white boy! Shittin' in a gold-plate bucket."' Jinx wrestles him away, angry, laughing. "Fuck you.

  Steve, whose last name Iris doesn't know, draws his comb out of his jeans pocket and in one fluid motion sifts it through his hair: dark-blond, oiled, serrated as a rooster's comb. He's a quiet boy a little older than the others, and for a moment Iris envies Bonnie that he's hers. However rough and loud the black boys get... flaring up like black boys seem to do.

  As if she's only now noticed, Bonnie Haugen says to Iris, "Hey, I like your coat-that's cool. Is it new?"

  Iris stares down at the midnight blue, the stiff waterproofed fabric, the cheap plastic buttons. She neither recognizes the coat nor knows what Bonnie has asked.

  It must be the cigarette; she's beginning to cough. "I don't know," she says softly. Each word is a mysterious effort... as if sound and sense have cracked apart. "I guess so."

  Bonnie looks at Iris strangely, doesn't ask anything more.

  The bright moon clock with the perpetual-motion minute hand is showing 10:47 when Iris Courtney leaves Chaney's for home.

  She walks quickly, head lowered. The air is cool, the wind from the river chill as March. In Hammond it's always wintryfeeling except in the deeps of summer when it's too hot... the fault of living too near the Great Lakes. Snow piled seven feet high bordering the streets in January. Snowstorms blinding the sun.

  Iris thinks, I'll go live somewhere else; I'll be a photographer who travels.

  The stores on Gowanda Street are darkened of course except for a tavern or two and a bright-lit Negro diner with a homemade sign RIBS... a few cars, some of them teenagers with noisy mufflers, blasting radios.

  .. a city bus marked EAST AVENUE, only a few passengers aboard. But there are people on the street, young Negroes, couples, some children running loose: Negro children of the kind Iris instinctively shrinks from when they charge in her direction, as they are now, yipping and squealing at one another in a little pack, oblivious of others on the sidewalk. Not that they mean harm, they're just obl
ivious.

  Though sometimes they snatch purses. Aunt Madelyn's, once.

  Where was I? Oh, I was just... out. With some friends...

  Well, I just didn't think to. You didn't leave a note, yourself Iris has been sucking at her cigarette out of stubbornness; now she tosses it into a gutter. She feels mildly sick. A few days before she'd overheard Persia speaking to Duke on the telephone, Duke at one of the downstate racetracks, Persia speaking with unaccustomed hesitation, sadness. "Not angry at all, honey, just brokenhearted.... Oh, Jesus, he is so beautiful.... But if Mr. Clay and the trainer think if that's how things are, an injury like that oh, honey, look: just don't tell me any details, please?

  Don't tell me or Iris, please?"

  And after a pause, "Probably won't ask, after a while. She's like that. Picks up on things... doesn't have to be told."

  And after another pause, "Truly I don't blame you, honey; like I said, that's water under the bridge.. just feel so sad. He's so beautiful, or was."