“Nub, don’t cry,” he said. “You’re too old to start that.”
I turned and glared at him. His mangled face was all wet: beads of tears trickled over the scars and scabs. I went to him and hugged him as fiercely as I could without hurting his sores or aches.
You old half-assed bastard, I said.
You stupid prick, he said.
You big stinking turd, I said.
You worthless old egg-sucking polecat, he said.
You old shit-eating dog, I said.
“We never even went fishin,” he said, his one partly usable arm around my shoulders. “We never did nuthin. We just sat around and talked a little. Seems like just this afternoon that I first saw you, and now you’re leavin already.”
“I’ll be back,” I said, admitting it to myself now. “I’ll always keep coming home.”
“You do that, Nub. We’ll always keep lookin for you.”
“And you’ll be the Chief of Police and you’ll fix tickets for me.”
“Damn right. And you’ll be a big-shot world traveler, and you’ll bring us all kinds of presents from the four corners of the globe.”
“And we’ll go fishin,” I said.
“Man, yes, we’ll really go us afishin. There won’t be no end to the fish well get us.”
“And sometimes you’ll do me the favor of talking good English.”
“I’ll talk good Russian and Hindoo too if you want me to.”
“Just English.”
“Whatever you say, Nub.”
I released him and stood up. Thirty more seconds with the guy and I’d be lost; a team of horses wouldn’t be able to drag me away. I shook his hand. “Well,” I said, “take care of yourself, old buddy. And take care of Margaret. I know you will. But if you don’t, my genies and sprites will find out about it and they’ll descend on you and thrash you soundly.”
He wished me good luck and he told me to set the world on fire.
“So long,” we said in unison, and I waved and departed.
Later I congratulated myself that I had successfully withstood the temptation to mention Slater.
Chapter fifty-one
But Margaret said he didn’t feel very guilty about Slater anyway, and she said she couldn’t blame him. While my grandmother was visiting with him, Margaret and I strolled down a long corridor and went through a door and found a balcony in the open air overlooking the broad city. From this vantage point the whole town was laid out in a grid of little white lights and the red neon glow that pulsed above the business district far away, and, farther away, the beacons of the airport. It was a mild spring night, and the scintillating lights of the town were reflected in the stars of the sky. We stood at the edge of the balcony and took in the breeze. Margaret lit a cigarette. Just to be sociable I took one too.
“His only feeling about it,” she said, “is a sense of relief that there won’t be any trial, and thus he and I both are spared the embarrassment of having to testify. He’s glad of that.”
“Aren’t either of you the least bit sorry about Slater’s death?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “But, you know, the only thing that passed through my mind when I first heard about it was that I had been cheated. I envied him that final spectacle. Every suicide gets some kind of pleasure out of showing off, or of showing people. Jimmy really showed us, didn’t he? That’s partly the way I felt when I went to jump into the river, I was going to put on a show by killing myself. But he was successful. He went through with it. I couldn’t. So I can’t help feeling a little envious in a perverse sort of way.”
“Suicide expiates self-guilt, is that it? It allows the person to inflict his guilts on others. So now we are all carrying Slater’s guilts around with us. But you have to carry your own too. Unless you can inflict some of them on Dall.”
“I am guiltless,” she said. “Of course I feel very sorry for Jimmy, and I think it’s just horrible that he couldn’t have found some other solution, but I really believe that I don’t have to answer to anybody, not even to my own conscience.”
“That remains to be seen. You’ll be haunted, I bet.”
She shrugged. “I’ll be too busy trying to be happy to be haunted.”
I stared at the side of her face. She was leaning with her arms on the balcony rail, her hands clasped together. She gazed out at the distant pinpoints of light in the townscape. The night breeze ruffled her long black locks. I swear, her face was almost beatific. “You know,” I said to her, “I don’t think I really like you. In fact, I don’t think I like you at all.”
If she heard me, she didn’t respond. After a while she said, “Beautiful night, isn’t it?”
“I don’t like you, Margaret,” I said.
She turned and gave me a quizzical look with a touch of superciliousness to it. “Is that why you were burning your bridges?”
“Possibly. I’m glad I’m leaving. I don’t think I could ever have got to know you well enough to really like you.”
“As it is,” she said, “you’ll be carrying a false conception of me around with you for the rest of your life. You know something? It’s silly to cry over spilled milk of course, but have you ever stopped to think that if you had really known me back when we were dating each other in high school, none of this would have happened? None of it. I would have gone away to college with you—at your invitation, which never came—and we would have had a very close and intimate relationship during our college years, and then probably we would have married, and you would have taken me with you to Yale or beyond, and both of us would have forgotten about Little Rock, and we never would have known that Jimmy Slater even existed. But now look where we are. Now see what things have come to.”
Indeed. In the mnemonic speculativeness of it I lapsed into silence and languished languor. I was not going to admit, even to myself, that the reason I didn’t like her was that my failure to understand her lowered my estimate of my own intelligence. I decided not to spoil our last rendezvous with further hostilities or ill humors anyway. Say a few nice parting remarks and be gone, that’s what I would do.
But what could I say? What deserved a nice remark from me? The town, perhaps. I gazed out at all the lights, sucked in the spring-laden air, and delivered myself of an equivocal accolade: “From here the old town almost seems to have a dreamlike enchantment.”
“It’s the new town that does that,” she said. “In the old Little Rock, that you mourn the loss of, they had candles and coal-oil lamps and that didn’t give enough light to make much of a display from afar.” She turned and looked into my eyes as she continued. “I’ve been thinking about us—you and me—and how we’re different, and one thing I’ve decided is that you like old things but I like new things. Why? Because every new thing, whether it’s a building or a house or a car or a work of art or anything, is still loose and free, I mean it’s still open to change and fluctuation, it hasn’t settled down into a mold. We can’t put it into a pigeonhole yet. We can’t freeze it into history. You want to make history out of everything. If there were any word to describe the opposite of history, to mean for the future what history means for the past, then that would be my favorite word, my favorite subject, just as history is your favorite subject. Futurity? Would that do? Then you are lost in history, and I…I want to be lost in futurity.”
“That should make it easy for you to forget about me…and Slater and everybody.”
“I don’t want to forget about you.” Very intently she said this, gripping my arm. “I’m not going to. Whenever you come back, I guess I’ll still be around.”
“Well, thanks,” I managed to say, choking up. “I guess I won’t forget you either. I hope not. I—”
We stood as though transfixed upon some ultimate pinnacle of time and kinship, both of us (same size, same height) caught together in final speechlessness and the realization that we had either said all that could be said or else we would never have time to say what had to be said, we had lost the c
hance forever. What happened next was so natural that it didn’t surprise me at all, it simply tickled me down to the soles of my feet: we sprang at each other in a wild, uninhibited enfoldment that was all a tangle of impetuous arms and legs, mashing our mouths together eagerly and entwining our tongues; her sharp breasts pierced and deflated my lungs and my hips squashed her hips against the balcony rail. On and on we squeezed and squirmed in a long mad kiss that seemed it could never stop. I have never been kissed like that before, and I doubt very much if I ever will be again. It defied description, really, and I can only say that one vertical kiss like that was better than all the horizontal sport I had ever had with Pamela. Gasping for breath at last, I pried my lips away from hers and breathed, but I didn’t let go of her; as soon as I had my wind back I began to kiss her hair and her face and her neck, and it was while I was nuzzling her neck that she whispered something very strange into my ear: “I don’t suppose that my persistent virginity is so precious that I couldn’t give it to you, as a farewell present.” Then she suggested that after my folks had gone to bed I should sneak out of the house and come over to Dall’s house and spend the night with her.
Ah God, that was a beguiling temptation if ever I had one, and it literally faire venir l’eau à la bouche, and I was on the verge of expressing my slobbering thanks and taking her up on it, but something held me back, probably the realization that I had no real rights on her, but also the realization that this was the first time I had ever kissed anybody without having Stone-ache afterward. Why not? Had Tatrice already released me? I had to confess to somebody eventually, so I decided it might as well be Margaret.
Stepping back, disengaging myself from her, I told her I could not make love to her with a clear conscience. I told her that it was she herself who had told me that I had a streak of dishonesty in me and that because of my dishonesty I did not deserve to have her. Then I told her I had laid Tatrice.
“You did what?” she said.
“I laid Tatrice. I think. Last night. Naps was gone, he was out at Slater’s place with his friend Feemy. I went over to his house and got drunk. Then I went downstairs to Tatrice’s workshop with her and I picked her up and put her on one of her antique harvest tables. I was so drunk I can’t remember what happened, but she was sort of drunk too, so—”
Margaret stared at me in awe, her mouth open and her head tilted to one side.
“You don’t believe me?” I asked. “You don’t think I have what it takes to do a thing like that?”
“No, I believe you,” she said quietly. “But why did you want to do it?”
“It’s like you said, frankly, that other afternoon on the riverbank: I do a poor job of concealing my sex drives.”
“But you don’t know for sure whether or not you—”
“No, and that’s the hell of it. She wouldn’t tell me. Maybe she doesn’t know, herself.”
“But why Tatrice? Did you just want to see what it would be like to have sex with a colored person?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I don’t think that idea hardly entered my head. She was just convenient, that’s all.”
She studied my eyes. Old barriers had risen up between us again, for good this time. “But that couldn’t be all,” she objected. “Surely your only motive wasn’t—”
“All right, if you need a high ulterior motive, some lofty reason for such a thing, then let’s just say that I was a man in search of salvation, and she…well…something Tatrice said to me…She told me that my nickname, Nub, has a special meaning in the vernacular of the old darkies. It means an unborn child.”
“So did she give birth to you? How does it feel?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember a damn thing—”
She smiled forbearingly, and turned and placed her arms again on the balcony rail, and leaned there, looking out at the town lights. We stayed there a while longer, not talking, and then it was time to go. We re-entered the hospital and walked down the corridor. We saw my grandmother sitting in the lobby waiting for us.
We would all get into Dall’s old Pontiac and Margaret would take us home. But first, before we rejoined my grandmother, Margaret said to me, “You spent so much time accusing me of needing a father figure. Did it ever occur to you that what you’ve always been looking for is a mother figure, somebody to replace the one that died when you were a boy? That’s something I probably never could have been for you. And as it turns out, perhaps it’s just as well.”
And that was about the last thing she said to me.
Chapter fifty-two
Sometimes…I feel…like a motherless chile: some…times! I feel…like a motherless chile: sometimes I feel like a motherless chile! So far, far away from my home…
“Now what are you singing that for?” I asked Naps, eying him suspiciously. We were loitering on the upper deck of the Missouri Pacific station, above the tracks and platforms. The train would be late, after midnight. My father and grandmother were sitting in the waiting room. Naps and I had wandered out to the upper deck to look at the trains and to talk, but we hadn’t been able to say much to each other yet, and he had begun to croon old spirituals to himself, dolorously. It was a sad occasion, my leaving. He had a rich, moving voice, and I liked to hear him sing, but it disturbed me that he had chosen that particular refrain.
“Jes my favorite song, is all,” he said, quitting.
“Do you really feel like a motherless child?” I asked him.
“My old mom been dead a long time too,” he said, and his “too” told me that he was aware my mother had been dead as long as his. This, too, we had in common, and I wondered if Tatrice was a suitable mother substitute for him. Then my self-reproach caught up with me again, and I wanted more than anything to confess to him my sinful error and ask him to forgive me. But I lacked the nerve. “Besides,” he said, “don’t you know what day this is? Sunday, May the tenth. It’s Mother’s Day, man.” Yes, I know, I said and then I said to him, Go ahead and sing that song. But he shook his head. Then he turned abruptly and put his hands on my shoulders and spoke with profound sincerity: “Sure wush they was some way I could talk you out of leavin.” I told him it was too late, nothing would do any good, I had already bought my ticket. He began to shake his head sadly, and then he turned again and looked out across the dark railroad yards and improvised a last song:
“Went to the station, to tell my friend good-bye,
He doan like this place, but he never did try.
He got dose runnin-off blues, oh yeah he got dose runnin off blues.
Train gonna come, whistle gonna moan,
Got de runnin-off blues dat makes him groan.
Yeah, he may go wherever he choose, Caint help but get dose runnin-off blues.”
Yeah, I agreed when he finished and turned grinning to me; wherever I go I’ll always get the running-off blues. Then I asked if he didn’t think he would ever want to leave this town himself. He said, Oh yeah, I got de runnin-off blues too. Everybody got em, he said. Not Margaret, I said. Aw yeah, she got em too, he said. Cept she wanter keep em. Keep em till dey go runnin-off demselfs. Then he quoted another old blues song, to the effect that: Now, when a woman gets the blues, Lord, she hangs her head and cries. But when a man gets the blues, Lord, he grabs a train and rides.
“But we not gonna be no different, wherever we go,” he said. “We just gonna feel a little different maybe.”
We are just going to make it a little harder for the world to stomp all over us, I said, alluding to the sermon he had given me.
Dat a fack, he said. You just gon get a better chance to be Somebody, stead of Nobody.
Ah, I said. Amen. Naps and I began to pace up and down the deck, restlessly. Would that train ever arrive? I was reminded of the previous time I had thought of leaving town, when Naps had first given me that fine parting aphorism: if you obliged to eat dirt, eat clean dirt; and the time, before that, when I had actually come on into the station (wondering: Do I, leaving, leave, or
come, or, rather, by coming, go?) but had discovered that the train wouldn’t leave for hours, so that I had wandered off through the town and wound up in the movie theater where I had met Margaret; and I reflected that if I had stayed in this station and read a book or found some way to amuse myself I would never have met her again and I would never have become involved in these entanglements of the past week—but I knew that if I had stayed in this station and not met her again she might not still be alive at this moment. The dirt I had eaten had been clean dirt; I could bear no grudges, except a single large unfocused grudge against the town itself.
We tried to talk, Naps and I, but there really wasn’t much that we could say on this occasion. Why is it that the more desperate the need for talk the less likely the talk will come? We had agreed to write each other occasionally. I knew I would write to him sometimes, and to Dall and Margaret too, for a long time, and then, as the letters became less frequent—then it would be time for me to come home again. Naps had given me, as a going-away gift, a really sumptuous two-volume gilt-edged morocco-bound set of the 1834 edition of William Dunlap’s A History of the Rise and Development of the Arts of Design in the United States, Where he acquired this rare treasure I have no idea, but I was no longer surprised at the things he could accomplish: I was both humbled by his generosity and distressed by his extravagance, and I wanted to tell him I was no longer worthy of his friendship, but I couldn’t.
Making conversation now, I inquired after his friend Feemy. I said I wondered what Feemy was going to do now that Slater was dead.
“Aw, he done already quit and we got im over to my place,” he said, and he paused, then resumed speaking, but he spoke this time without a tinge of any dialect, as if he were desperate that I should share the significance of this last bit of news with him, that I should know exactly what it meant: “Feemy called me this afternoon and asked me to come out there and get him. I went out and got him and took him to my house, and he’s going to stay there for a while until he can get him another job. I’ll be glad to help him out. Tonight at supper he told me what had happened out there this afternoon. All of Mr. and Mrs. Slater’s old friends, people they hadn’t seen or heard of for years, most of them, came out to pay their respects to Mrs. Slater and help her mourn or hold a wake or whatever she wanted to do. Feemy let them into the house and served them coffee. Thirty or forty people, he said it was. Then he started to go upstairs to get Mrs. Slater and wheel her down to meet her friends. But just as he started up the staircase, there she came down it, walking, walking on her own two feet to meet all those people.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 185