The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  He was silent a moment, perplexed, then he said, “No joke? You mean she busted up the furniture and stuff?”

  “No, she didn’t break anything.”

  “What’d she do, then?”

  I wondered how to tell him. “She messed up the walls,” I said.

  “How?” he persisted.

  “What difference does it make?” I said evasively. “She messed up her room, and it made her mother awfully mad and her mother took her away, and that’s the last I saw of her.”

  “Come on!” he said, grabbing my arm and beginning to haul me out of his house. “We done already wasted too much time. I wish to hell you’d told me about it the first minute it happened.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Her house, you bodacious fool! Come on.”

  Chapter twenty-six

  But his car wouldn’t start. An ancient, rust-eaten Pontiac, it reposed at the curb of his house like a tired old horse put out to pasture and reluctant to stand again on all fours. After coughing and spluttering in a tentative sort of way, it became completely silent, and Dall got out and opened the hood and disappeared into it all except for his buttocks. I stood aside and watched. From the depths of the vehicle’s innards came muffled curses. All I could make out was something about how the goddamn triple-thierce camming pin on the goddamn glomhefter was shot to goddamn hell. Minutes passed, and eventually I heard him suggest that I run into the house and phone for a cab.

  I was about to follow his suggestion when a car pulled up alongside and stopped. A long sleek Prussian-blue Lincoln convertible. “Evenin, gemmens,” said the driver in an atrocious mock-darkie accent, tipping his chauffeur’s cap. “Could dis pore stupid nigger be of some hep to you good gemmens?”

  Dall emerged from the bowels of his car and stood to gawk open-mouthed at the black apparition. Then Dall put his hands on his hips and said, “Well, hush my mouf, if it aint the old booger-man hisself!”

  “Evenin, Cap’m Hawkins, sir,” said Naps politely and bashfully in the same mock-darkie tones. Then he said to me, “Evenin, Mister Nub, sir.”

  “You sho do turn up at the funniest times, in the funniest places,” Dall said, not without a little admiration in his voice.

  Naps grinned modestly. “If you gemmens is got car trouble, my car am at yo disposal, Cap’m.”

  “I don’t ride in nigger cars,” Dall rejoined.

  “Lordy, Cap’m, aint I done gone and rode in yo police car a whole lot of times? Just returnin the favor, Cap’m, just returnin the favor.”

  A cantankerous retort was on Dall’s lips, but he thought better of it. Time was awasting. He snorted in resignation and got into the rear seat. I sat up front with Naps. “Margaret’s,” was all I said to Naps and he sped the car down the street. Dall sulked in the rear seat and hung on. I asked Naps what coincidence of fate had caused him to come along at that particular moment. He replied that he had been parked down the street from Dall’s house for a little while, waiting to see if I would come out again. He said he wanted to help too, if he could.

  We arrived at Margaret’s house. Naps started to get out of the car too, but Dall said, “You stay here, nigger boy.”

  “Yassuh, Cap’m.”

  “And another thing, goddammit,” Dall said, pointing his finger at Naps’s nose, “don’t call me captain.”

  “Yassuh, Lootenant.”

  “Sergeant, dammit.”

  “Yassuh, Sawjunt,” said Naps and made himself comfortable in the car.

  Dall and I went up to the front door and rang the bell. There were no lights in the house. We waited and rang it again. Then we tried the door. Surprisingly, it wasn’t locked. We opened the door and went in, and Dall groped along the wall until he found a light switch and turned on the hall lights. Then he moved into the parlor and turned on the great chandelier. “What the dickens!” he said.

  “What?” I asked, and he pointed. There was a man in there. A thin, bald, somewhat disheveled old man, sound asleep on the Victorian sofa, an empty whiskey bottle held against his chest

  Dall moved quickly to him and began shaking him. “Mr. Polk,” he said, and slapped his jowls. “Come on, Mr. Polk, wake up.” He continued shaking him and slapping him for a while, but Mr. Polk wouldn’t wake up. “Goddamn,” Dall said, at a loss. Then he said to me, “Go out there and get that nigger and tell him to come in here and make us some coffee.”

  I told Dall I would make the coffee myself.

  “Get the nigger,” he said, so I went outside and asked Naps if he would like to come in and give us a hand. With pleasure, he said, and accompanied me back into the house. We located the kitchen, turned on the lights, filled the teakettle and put it on the stove. I explained to Naps that nobody was home except Margaret’s stepfather and he was dead drunk up in the parlor and we had to revive him. We made a pot of coffee, diluted it and cooled it with cream, and took it to the parlor, where Dall still was joggling the man. We got him into a sitting position and held the coffee cup to his mouth.

  After we had managed to get two cupfuls down his throat, he began to come out of his fog. “Mr. Polk,” Dall said. “Sit up a bit and talk to us.”

  “Who?” Mr. Polk muttered.

  “It’s me, Dall.”

  Mr. Polk looked up and stared at Naps. “You nah Dall,” he said to Naps.

  “Here, Mr. Polk,” Dall said, taking his shoulders and trying to turn him. “Look here at me.”

  Mr. Polk slowly turned his head and his eyes came to rest on me. “Youn nah Dall nee’er,” he said.

  “Goddammit, Mr. Polk, here, look at me,” Dall said and he finally got Mr. Polk to see him. “How come you’re so drunk, Mr. Polk? What for did you go and get all tanked up about?” Mr. Polk didn’t say anything. “Where’s Margaret, Mr. Polk? Where’s Margaret and her mother?” Mr. Polk stared blankly at him and mumbled incoherently. “Come on, Mr. Polk, don’t you know? Tell me where they went.” Who? muttered Mr. Polk. “Margaret and her mother! Your wife and your stepchile!”

  Mr. Polk’s head was teetering dizzily from side to side, as if it were perched precariously on a tightrope and might at any moment fall off. Then he opened his mouth. First some saliva trickled out. Then a word trickled out: “H’sprigs.”

  “What?” Dall said. “Hot Springs? Did you say Hot Springs, Mr. Polk?” Mr. Polk nodded. “What’d they go to Hot Springs for?” Dall asked. Mr. Polk shrugged. We gave him some more coffee. “Why?” Dall said. “Why’d they go there?”

  “Wan geddouta Li’lrock,” Mr. Polk said. He shrugged again, and belched thunderously. “She…she…don wan Margit t’be in Li’lrock. Gon shta’n H’sprigs tree, four weeks.” Why? Dall repeated. Why? “Margit bad,” Mr. Polk said, “badgul. Messer-roomallup.” Dall began shaking him again, too violently. “Hurtin me,” Mr. Polk said. Dall, beside himself, continued to shake Mr. Polk. Naps and I had to grab Dall’s arms and restrain him.

  “Talk!” Dall begged him. “How come you’re so drunk?”

  “She…she…sh’says t’me, you clean th’room. Me? Aint gon cleanit. Caint cleanit. All covered’ith potpot.”

  Dall turned to me. “Where’s her room, Nub? You know?”

  “Dall—” I began, trying to say something monitory.

  “Tell me where’s her goddamn room!” he ordered me, so I told him. He dashed out of the parlor and took the stairs three or four at a time. We waited. Naps and I exchanged nervous glances. Mr. Polk hung his head and began mumbling to himself. We gave him another cup of coffee. In little over a minute Dall returned. He held up one of his hands, the fingers outstretched, and rotated it slowly on his wrist. The finger pads and the palm were brownly stained. “Mr. Polk,” he said, “you got any turpentine around here?”

  Mr. Polk said, “Wha y’want turptine for?”

  “Mr. Polk,” Dall said, “there’s some paint on the walls up in Margaret’s room.”

  Naps turned to me, beaming, and whispered, “I tole you! I tole you!”

&
nbsp; “Paint?” Mr. Polk said. “Tha’aint paint, y’idiot, it’s doodoo.”

  “Boys,” Dall said to Naps and me, “let’s see if we caint find us some turpentine and old rags and then let’s see if we caint get this old feller to stand up and walk, and then let’s see if we caint all go upstairs and do us a little housecleanin.”

  Which we did. It was a tableau, a weird but jolly spectacle: these four workmen busily removing thick brown oil paint and linseed oil mixed with dirt from the walls of a small attic room. A police sergeant. An old, bald, drunken bank clerk. A Negro book salesman. A Boston museum curator. Each of us wielding a spatula or scraper and a rag soaked in turpentine, we took it all off and put it on some sheets of old newspapers. We worked fast—except Mr. Polk—and in twenty minutes we were finished. Now, Dall said, all it needed was a new paint job. I felt a great burden lifted from my shoulders.

  We went back downstairs, and Mr. Polk treated us all to a cold can of beer. He was soberer now, and obviously much relieved himself, although rather sheepish at having been fooled by the appearance of the room himself. Poor bastard, I couldn’t blame him for having hit the bottle, if his wife had browbeaten him into the responsibility for cleaning up the room. I reminded myself that I, too, had become drunk in reaction against it. Dall asked him where in Hot Springs the mother and Margaret were staying. But Mr. Polk didn’t know. Some hotel or motel, he figured. His wife hadn’t told him, except to say that she would send him a card later on. Dall asked Mr. Polk if he weren’t aware that Margaret was supposed to be in a play which was opening tomorrow night at the Arkansas Arts Center. Mr. Polk said yes, he knew all about the play and even had tickets for it, but that his wife was determined to prevent Margaret from being in the play. Why? Dall wanted to know. Well, Mr. Polk said, partly because of what Margaret did to her room, and partly because the mother had become suspicious, on account of certain things Margaret had written on the wall, that Margaret and Slater were “fooling around together,” and she didn’t want her daughter to see that man ever again, or be in one of his plays.

  Dall thanked Mr. Polk and expressed the hope that Mr. Polk would not again bedrunken himself, and then we left the house, walked out to the curb near the old carriage-stoop, and hunkered down on our heels in the old country fashion of farmers discussing the weather or meditating the problems of a defective hay-baler or manure-spreader. Dall was the first to speak, after a long silence.

  “Don’t that beat all?” he said. “First chance Margaret ever has in her whole life to do something really important like be in a play, and then along comes that…that—” he swelled with rage in search of a sufficiently vehement expletive “—that mean, low-down, no-good mother of hers, and robs poor Margaret of that first and only chance.”

  A great pity, we all agreed. But what was to be done?

  Furthermore, Dall said, he was convinced that he knew why Margaret had messed up her walls—because she was counting on some way developing for her finally to get away from that house—perhaps the play would be a success, or perhaps she thought that either Slater or I would provide some way for her to escape her mother permanently—and therefore she had defiled the walls of that small prison as a kind of parting gesture. Margaret was not crazy at all, just bitter and vindictive.

  Good for her, we all agreed. But what was to be done?

  “And another thing, goddammit,” Dall continued to reflect aloud. “Most likely Margaret is pretty damn upset and depressed about the whole thing, and no tellin what she might do over there in Hot Springs without nobody to watch out for her except that screwed-up old bat of a maw of hers, who aint even got sense enough to come in out of the rain by herself, let alone keep Margaret from doin somethin drastic like…like hurtin herself or maybe worse or maybe God knows what the hell she might do!” Gently I tried to reassure Dall by reminding him that he himself had told me that he didn’t think Margaret was actually suicidally inclined. “Hell yes, I did!” he blazed back. “But what I meant was that she was happy and all because of the play, and even because of Slater, dammit, but if her mother won’t let her be in the play, she might just get unhappier than she’s ever been!”

  A dangerous situation, we all agreed. But what was to be done?

  “Gemmens—” Naps began.

  “Shut up, nigger, I’m tryin to think,” Dall said, and we all lapsed into silence and meditation again. Call Slater and let him try to handle it? No. Cancel the play? No, Margaret had an understudy who was ready to take her place at a moment’s notice. I suggested that there was a possibility that Margaret might escape from her mother and come on back to Little Rock by herself, but Dall reminded me that Margaret had never yet in her life successfully escaped from her mother.

  “Gentlemens, I—” Naps tried again, but Dall hushed him.

  Dall was patting his pockets in search of his pipe and tobacco, without luck. He needed a smoke bad. “Nub, you got a ceegret on you, any chance?”

  “You know I don’t smoke, Dall.”

  “Hab one ob mine, Cap’m, sir,” said Naps, offering his pack.

  “You call me cap’m sir one more damn time, nigger, I’m gonna kick your goddamn teeth down your craw right where you’re sittin.”

  “Well, I got some fine ceegars in de car, Sawjunt, sir, if you druther hab one ob dem.”

  “I’ll get them,” I offered, and stood up to get the box of maduros out of the glove compartment. I opened the lid and thrust them at Dall.

  He scowled. “Nigger ceegars,” he said.

  “Aint nebber touched one ob dem, myself,” Naps said. “Dem. is clean ceegars, Sawjunt, sir.” Naps’s exaggerated Negro dialect was beginning to annoy even me. Did he have to talk this way in front of the police?

  “Well—” Dall said and, as I waved the fine box under his nose, he gave in to the temptation, took one, unwrapped it, smelled it, stuck it in his mouth and lit it.

  “Say thank you,” I prompted.

  He ignored me. “Now,” he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke, “where was I?” And we all lapsed into silent meditation again.

  After a while Naps hesitantly spoke up. “Sawjunt, sir, could I just open my big fat stupid mouth long enough to say just a word or two?”

  “Awright, goddammit, what d’you want?”

  “Sawjunt, sir, I just been thinkin. Dey’s a whole bunch of folks in Hot Springs is friends of mine, and dey ever one ob um owe me a favor, so dey’d be just delighted to hep us hunt fo Miss Margaret, if you gemmens would care to hop in my car and git right on ober dere.”

  Dall stared at Naps and then he stared at me and then he stared at Naps some more. “Nigger—” he said, harshly, but then he softened his tone. “Mr. Howard,” he said, “I don’t believe you ever told me your first name.”

  “Hit’s Napoleon. Just call me Naps.”

  “Naps,” said Dall, “what’re you tryin to do to me, anyway?”

  Chapter twenty-seven

  There is a new road to Hot Springs now, half part of the Interstate 30 out of Little Rock, half a new stretch of U.S. 70 laid alongside the Missouri Pacific tracks in a relatively straight course in contrast to the old twisting and dipping Route 5. With a good car you can take the fifty-four miles in less than an hour. We did it in forty minutes flat, the mighty Lincoln given plenty of rein but still under wraps, held back from getting us a ticket. (“Okay, Naps,” Dall yelled to him from the rear seat as we were whizzing past Meadowcliff, “you better slow down now, cause we’re out of the city limits and if you get a ticket you’re all on your own, I caint help you.”) Thoroughly I enjoyed that ride. I have been to Hot Springs a number of times by several means—bus, train, car, even a bicycle once—but never before in a big convertible with the top down. The night air, the cool spring-drenched breeze whipping around my face, the craggy silhouettes of pine-forested hills against the starlit sky, and the lights, the nebula of scintillating house lights speckled and sparkled out there in the darkness of the plain and the glade and the hollow—these particulars re
fined our mad dash and lifted it out of the realm of necessity and into the realm of delight. Getting away from Little Rock was in itself a deep satisfaction. We talked the whole way. “That Hawkins,” Naps whispered to me and winked. He drove relaxed, his left arm crooked free over the door, the fingers of his right hand delicately responding to the power steering, his head tilted slightly sideways as he studied the running domain of the headlights. “That Hawkins,” he said again, just loud enough for me to hear. He bore no malice, no resentment; there was even a tinge of admiration in his assessment of the efficient way Dall had handled the situation at Margaret’s house. Naps had never been injured by the sergeant, he explained, speaking loud enough now for Dall to eavesdrop if he cared to; one time when Naps had foolishly resisted arrest at the beginning of his career as a sit-in demonstrator, Dall had kicked him in the seat of his pants, but not viciously. “I do believe he must really kinda like me,” Naps opined, “else why would he cuss at me so hard?” Go to hell, Dall called from the rear seat.

  “De bess time fo de black man to hep de white man,” Naps concluded idiomatically, “is when de white man caint hep hisself no mo.”

  Very soon I got an inkling of what he meant. We dropped down into Hot Springs, where the streets and their buildings are scattered every which way like water bursting forth from a spring. I suggested that we ought to try the Arlington, the Majestic and other large hotels, to begin with, but Naps ignored me and did not turn into Central Avenue at all but continued on, until we were lost in a dark residential section. He turned left, and turned right, and I had not the least idea where we were, but he seemed to know what he was doing. At length he pulled up in front of a long old shotgun house, completely dark except for the faint red glow of a single bulb in one window. Beyond explaining that it was “Miss Melba’s place,” he said nothing but indicated that we were to accompany him inside. “I aint gonna go in there,” Dall protested. “I know what kind of place that is, plain as day, and you aint gonna catch me dead inside of that kind of place.” Suit yourself, Naps said to him, and Naps and I left him sitting out in the breeze under the night stars. Naps did not knock but opened the door and walked on in, with me timidly at his heels. After a brief wait in the large, glaringly lighted foyer, which was empty except for a dozen or so chairs lined against the wall, we were greeted fervently by the most immense Negro woman I have ever seen. Over six feet tall, at least four hundred pounds heavy, she caused Naps to vanish from sight entirely by hugging him to her bosom. Loudly she upbraided him for having failed to visit her more often. When Naps introduced me, she did not shake my hand but instead made a sort of curtsy which resembled a circus elephant trying to execute some difficult and uncustomary maneuver. She opened us both a can of beer, then she said to me, “Let’s just take our pick,” and started to push a button, but Naps stayed her hand, saying, “Naw, honey, we just here on business.” She sat down again, sighing, whether in disappointment or simply to rest after the exertion of moving about, I could not tell. She beckoned to Naps, and he went and sat on her lap. “Well, tell me what,” she said, and he told her what. “I see, I see,” she punctuated his explanation, glancing over at me from time to time. Naps looked like a doll—no, like a ventriloquist’s dummy. I hoped she wouldn’t require that I sit on her lap too. When he finished his explanation, she said to me, “See can you reach me dat phone,” and I picked it up off its table and handed it to her. With Naps still on her lap, she began to dial numbers. “Sherm? Melba. We lookin for a white woman, please. Mawgrit Austin. Twenty-seven, black hair, bout five foot seven. Got dat?” She hung up, dialed again. “Dat you, Lyle? Melba. Naps’s here. We lookin for a white woman, friend of a friend of his. Mawgrit Austin. Yeah. A-u-s-t-i-n. She got black hair, bout yo size, twenty-seven years old. Git to it, chile.” Another number. “Scooter, what you doin? Well, dis is Melba. Put down dat funny-book and go look see fewken find Miss Mawgrit Austin, snow-white, black hair, twenty-seven, five seven. Right. Jump, sweetie-pie.” She dialed again, and Naps slipped off her lap to come and explain to me, “She’s callin bell captains,” then he climbed up on her lap again and snuggled there while she called a dozen more numbers. The bell captains and porters taken care of, she contacted a few maids, a few waitresses, a few taxi drivers, a few peripatetic pimps. Wondrous are the workings of the underground, I mused. At last she was finished, and she said to us, “Well, guess they nuthin to do now but sit tight and stick aroun. Mo beer, boys?” We twiddled our thumbs and drank our beer and waited. Replies began to trickle in. “Naw, Ozzy, it’s Mawgrit Austin. M-a-r-r-g-r-e-t,” she said to one caller. To another: “Well, thanks just the same. Loosh. Keep lookin, anyway.” The front door opened and a squadron of white teenage boys, pimple-cheeked punks, came shuffling in, their faces cracked with forced grins which were supposed to be worldly but only succeeded in being hangdog. Miss Melba lumbered to her feet and went to welcome them. She asked them to sit down and to produce their wallets for inspection. Satisfied that they had real money on them in sufficient quantities, she pushed the button, and a moment later a slender Negro girl, dressed in nothing but a green camisole and an expression of bored and supercilious distraction, came and got them and escorted them to the rear of the house, whence came the remote thumping and throbbing of a syncopated phonograph. The last of this file of horny bucks, a short towheaded kid in a windbreaker and dungarees, turned and winked at me and rounded his thumb and forefinger in an A-Okay sign, conspiratorially, fraternally, and I admired him, thinking: That’s me. There I go. O Hot Springs, the first true bed for our young appetites! With fond nostalgic recognition I raked up the memory of how I in one impetuous evening of my seventeenth year, not knowing what to make of or do with shy Margaret, had accompanied Steve McComb and Guy Hammond and a bunch of others on an expedition to Hot Springs, to kiss good-bye forever my virginity in some white side-street bordello off Grand Avenue. Fierce leaps the first pulse of the urge! hot springs the young spurt from the glands! Rachel she said her name was, and for fifteen minutes she was my first wife. With a tendresse that could come only of being twenty years older she had admitted me, hiking her skirt above her hips as she scrootched supine on the grayed sheets with a fresh hotel towel spread to catch the glue. Throughout I was conscious only of the sound of my breathing, and of my regret that she was the wrong size, her aperture seemed too large for me. When my quarter of an hour and my five dollars and my virginity were all gone, Rachel scoffed at my plaintive self-accusation of inferiority, telling me tonelessly that I was the equal of them all, and I told her I would never forget her and she smiled tolerantly and walked with me to the door and said, Next. Guy Hammond anointed me with beer, and we all got drunk and drove somewhere, and they held me down and painted my parts with a stolen cherry-red lipstick and we drank and cavorted and we woke up the next morning tangled head-on-foot inside Steve’s car, parked beside the patina-green waters of Lake Catherine, and we spent an hour in naked swimming, and I created a lot of spectacular dives, double-gainers and somersaults and belly busters, yelling, “Look at me! I aint a tadpole anymore! I’m a goddamn bullfrog now!” and they all laughed and threw rocks. O yesteryear. Now I am old and inhibited and backward, cold and funless, sitting here in a nigger whorehouse on a chivalrous, eunuchal, harebrained errand. Pamela would be flabbergasted if she knew where I was, what I was doing—or even more flabbergasted if she knew where I was but didn’t know what I was doing. Who, or what, am I really looking for? And now I realize that I am stupid too, because I’ve been sitting here all this time without being aware of the essential possibility that if Margaret and her mother were registered in a hotel, they would most probably be registered under the name of Polk, Mrs. Austin’s acquired name.