The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  He had not finished this speech when he remembered what Bella had told him about his handing over Fenton to Grainger.

  Fenton turned now from the boarded window and faced him. His whole appearance had grown surprisingly ominous as though Parkhearst had destroyed some great promise and hope.

  “We don’t have no choice,” Fenton said, his words more gentle than his expression, and he looked at Claire, although he addressed his words to no one.

  “I don’t know what I’ll do in the house of a greatwoman,” Fenton went on. “Why do you call her great?”

  “Oh I don’t know,” Parkhearst replied airily. “Of course she isn’t, really. But is anybody? Was anybody ever?”

  “I never did hear anybody called that,” Fenton said. He looked at Claire as though he might have heard someone called that.

  “Why is she great?” he wondered aloud again.

  Parkhearst felt flustered despite his years of looking and collecting the “material” and talking with the most intractable of persons.

  “If you come tomorrow, I feel you’ll understand,” Parkhearst told him, getting up. “I don’t see why you act like this when you’re in trouble.” Then: “Where’s your gun,” he said irritably.

  Fenton put his hand quickly to his pocket. “Fuck you,” he said, feeling nothing there.

  “Don’t think I can get offended,” Parkhearst said. “Neither your talk nor your acts. You just seemed a bit young to have any gun.”

  “Young?” Fenton asked, as though this had identified his age at last. His face flushed and for the first time Parkhearst noticed that there was a scar across his lip and chin.

  “Please come, Fenton, when we want to help you,” he said, almost as soft as some sort of prayer.

  “I don’t like to go in big houses. You said she was rich, too. Claire and me don’t have the clothes for it. . . . Say, are you trying to make us a show for somebody?” Fenton asked, as though he had begun to understand Parkhearst. His face went no particular color as this new thought took hold of him. “Or use us? You’re not trying to use us, are you?”

  When he asked that last question, Parkhearst felt vaguely a kind of invisible knife cut through the air at him. He could not follow the sources of Fenton’s knowledge. At times the boy talked dully, oafish, and again he showed a complete and intuitive knowledge of the way things were and had to be.

  “I want to help you,” Parkhearst finally said in a womanish hurt voice.

  “Why?” Fenton said in an impersonal anger. Then quickly the fight in him collapsed. He sat down on the cheap kitchen chair occupied a moment before by Parkhearst Cratty.

  “All right, then, I’ll come for your sake. But Claire has to stay here.”

  “All right, then, Fenton. I’ll be here for you.”

  They argued a little about the hour.

  Fenton did not look at Parkhearst as he said goodbye, but Claire waved to him as though seated in a moving vehicle, his head constantly turning to keep sight of the visitor.

  “WHO IS THAT, Fenton?” Claire asked as soon as his brother had returned from closing the front door.

  “He’s a man who writes things about people,” Fenton said. “He wants me to tell him things so he can write about me.”

  Fenton looked up at the high sick ceiling; the thought of the man writing or listening to him in order to write of him was too odd ever to be understood.

  “Like you write in your little note papers?”

  “No,” Fenton answered, and turned to look at Claire. “I only put things down there to clear up in me what we are going to do next. Understand?”

  “Why can’t I see them, then, Fenton?”

  “Because you can’t, hear?”

  “I want to read your little note papers!”

  Fenton began to slap Claire, rather gently at first, and then with more force. “Don’t mention it again,” he said, hitting him again. “Hear?”

  Claire’s weeping both hurt Fenton deeply and gave him a kind of pleasure, as though in the hitting the intense burden of Claire was being lightened a little.

  He had written once in the “note papers” a thought which had caused him great puzzlement. This thought was that just as he had wished Mama dead, so that he felt the agent of her death, so now he wanted Claire to be dead, and despite the fact that the only two people in the world he had loved were Mama and Claire.

  Then he had to realize that the thing which stung him most about Claire when they were with strangers was his brother’s not being quite right and that when he had been with the writer he had not felt this pain. There was this about the man who had turned up in the park, you did not feel any pain about telling him things, things almost as awful as those he had put down in the note papers.

  “Why is it?” Fenton asked, raising his voice as though addressing a large group of people, “when I am so young I am so pissed-off feeble and low?”

  Claire shook his head as he was accustomed to when Fenton put these questions to him. He had never answered any of them, and yet Fenton asked more and more of them when he knew that Claire did not know the answers.

  Then Claire, seeing his chance, watching his brother narrowly, said, without any preparation: “I heard God again in the night.”

  Fenton tried to quiet himself in the tall room. It was always much easier to calm yourself outdoors or in a farmhouse, but in a small but high room like this when sorrow is heard it is hard to be quiet and calm. Fenton nevertheless made his voice cool as he said, “Claire, what did I tell you about talking like that?”

  “I did.” Claire began to cry a little.

  “Are you going to quit talking like that or ain’t you?” Fenton said, the anger welling up in him stronger than any coolness he had put into his voice.

  “Don’t hit me when I tell you, Fenton,” Claire cried on. “Don’t you want to know I hear Him?”

  Fenton’s hands loosened slightly. He felt cramps in his insides.

  “I told you those was dreams,” Fenton said.

  “They ain’t! I hear it all day when I don’t dream. . . .”

  “Maybe somebody lives here, that’s all.” Fenton waited as though to convince himself. “I could forgive you if you dreamed about Mama and she come running to you to say comforting things to you. But you always talk about God. And I strongly doubt . . .”

  “Don’t say it again, Fenton, don’t say it again!” Claire sat up in bed.

  “. . . not only strongly doubt but know He’s not real. . . .”

  Claire let out a strange little cry when he heard the blasphemy and fell back on the bed. Claire fell so awkwardly it made Fenton laugh.

  After this, Fenton felt the cramps again and he knew he must go out and get a drink. Yet because neither of them had had anything to eat since morning he feared that if he began drinking now he would not remember to get Claire anything to eat.

  He began to rub Claire’s temples gently. If only they were safe from trouble he would always be kind to Claire, but trouble always made him mean.

  “It’s so crappy late out!” he began again, moving away from Claire. “Why does it have to feel so late out everywhere?” This was one of the things which he had written on the note papers so he wouldn’t feel so burned up and dizzy. “Even the writer says I am so young,” Fenton muttered on, “yet why do I feel I only got two minutes more to do with?”

  “It’s late, all right,” Claire said, still weeping some, but with a happy look on his face now. The small boy had gotten up out of bed and was walking over to where Fenton now stood near the window.

  “You heard me tell you to stay in bed, didn’t you. . . . Didn’t you hear, crapface?”

  The boy paused there in the middle of the room, his mouth open disgustingly. But he had already turned his mind away from Claire. He whirled out of the room and was gone.

  “He forgot his gun,” Claire said looking out into the awful night of the hall. “He don’t know how to use it anyhow,” he finished and went back to the littl
e bed.

  Everything had changed so much since he had been Mama’s son, nothing as little as forgetting a gun was remarkable.

  “He’s gone, he’s gone,” Claire kept repeating to himself. “Fenton’s gone,” he repeated on and on until he had fallen asleep again.

  FENTON HAD SOON found the taverns where his existence aroused no particular interest or comment. People occasionally noticed his accent or his haircut, but generally they ignored him. There was such an endless row of taverns and the street itself was so endless he could always choose a different tavern for each day and each drink. In the end he went to the places that served both colored and white. It would have been unreal of him to Mama had she known, but this kind of tavern made him feel the easiest, perhaps it was more like home.

  He knew now (he began all over again) that Kincaid was not coming to find them in the house. And as he went on with his drink he knew that nobody was ever coming to the house because it was the “latest” time in his life and maybe the “latest” in the world.

  “Then where will we end up?” he said quickly, aloud. He felt that some of the customers must have looked at him, but when he said nothing more nobody came over to him or said anything. He got out a pencil stub and wrote something on the note papers.

  “Things don’t go anywhere in our lives,” he wrote. “Sometimes somebody like Mama dies and the whole world stops or begins to move backwards, but nothing happens to us, even her dying don’t get us anywhere except maybe back. Yet you have to go on waiting, it’s the one thing nobody lets up on you for. Like now we’re doing for Kincaid and for what?”

  Someone had left a newspaper on the bar, open to the want ad section. Fenton began reading these incomprehensible notifications of jobs. Someone once had told him, perhaps Kincaid, that nobody was ever hired this way, they were only put in there because the employers had to do it, and actually, this somebody had told him, they were really all hired to begin with, probably when you read about them.

  Fenton remembered again that he did not know how to do anything. He had no skills, no knowledge. That was why the big old house with tall rooms was getting more ghosty for him, it was so much like the way he was inside himself, the house didn’t work at all, and he was all stopped inside himself too just like the house. That was why it was like a trap, he said.

  As he drank a little more he decided he must move on to another drinking place because the bartender had begun to watch him write in the note papers too much and it scared him.

  He went on in search of the next place, but before he reached it he saw the All Night Theater, a movie house that never closed. Instead of choosing another drinking place, he decided to choose this, for the price of admission was nearly the same as that of a beer.

  There was the same sad smell inside, a faint stink from old men and a few boys who had been out in the open, standing or lying on the pavement during part of the night. The seats did not act as though they were required to hold you off the floor. Faces twisted around to look at you, or somebody’s hand sometimes came out of the dark and touched you as though to determine whether you were flesh or not.

  Fenton did not notice or care about any of these things. He scarcely looked at the picture, and half the audience must have been sleeping or looking at the floor, at nothing.

  HE DID NOT know what time he woke up in the All Night Theater. The audience had thinned out a little. The screen showed a horse and a man crossing a desert, walking as though they were not going to go much longer if they didn’t find some water or perhaps just a cool place to stop.

  It was then that Fenton remembered Parkhearst Cratty and the greatwoman. For the first time he began to think about them as having some slight meaning, some relationship to himself. That is, they knew about him, and he existed for them. He had gotten as far down in the dumps as possible and still be alive, and now he began to come up a little out of where he was and to think about what Parkhearst Cratty was jawing about.

  The thought that anybody called the greatwoman should want to see him struck him suddenly as so funny that he laughed out loud. Then he stopped and looked around him, but nobody was looking at him. The dead world of the shadows on the screen seemed to look at him just then more than the men around him.

  Fenton sat a little while longer in the All Night Theater holding his notebook down to a little of the light at the end of the aisle so that he might write down some more of what he was thinking. Then having written a little more, he gazed at the want ads again that he had carried along with him and saw the words MEN MEN MEN under the difficult light.

  Finally he got hungry and walked out into the gray street. It was six o’clock in the morning and it would be a long day until night came and brought Parkhearst Cratty and his plans.

  Fenton went into a cafe called Checker where some colored men were drinking orange pop. He ordered a cup of black coffee, and then drinking that, he ordered another. Then he ordered some rolls and ate part of those. After that he ordered some coffee and rolls to take out, and started home to Claire.

  Just before getting to the house, he went back to a small tavern he had missed before and had a whiskey.

  It was funny, he reflected, that before coming here to the city with its parks and vacant houses he had almost never had a drink, and now he had it, quite a bit.

  CLAIRE STARED AT him, his face red and swollen from bites. Fenton had him get up and they began going through the mattress looking for the bugs.

  “Where was you?” Claire wanted to know.

  “All Night Movie.”

  This answer perfectly satisfied Claire.

  “Why don’t you drink the coffee I brought you and eat those rolls?”

  “I ain’t hungry, Fenton.”

  “Drink the coffee like I tell you.”

  Fenton kept looking at the mattress. “I don’t see any of the bastards,” he said. “They must be inside the fucking mattress.”

  “Fenton,” Claire soothed him. “I didn’t dream last night at all or hear anything.”

  “So?” Fenton spoke crossly. He set the mattress down and then lazily began eating the rolls Claire had not touched.

  “I didn’t even feel the bugs biting,” Claire said, pushing his face close to Fenton to show him, but his voice trailed off as he saw Fenton’s heavy lack of interest in what he had done and thought.

  Then all at once Fenton saw his brother’s face, which was almost disfigured from the bites. Fenton’s own fear and amazement communicated themselves frightfully to Claire.

  “You look Christ awful,” Fenton cried.

  “Don’t scare me now, Fenton,” Claire began to whimper.

  “I don’t aim to scare you,” Fenton said with growing irritability. “Have you been crying over Mama or is your face just swelled from bugs?”

  “I don’t know,” Claire said, and he quit whimpering.

  There was something terribly old and pinched now in Claire’s small face.

  Fenton took him by the hands and looked at his face closer.

  “Ain’t you well or what?” he said, the irritation coming and going in his voice, but finally yielding to a kind of sadness. “Why don’t you tell me what is bothering you?” he went on.

  He put his mouth on the top of Claire’s head, and half-opened his lips noticing the funny little boy smell of his hair.

  “You can tell me if you have been thinking about God now, if you want to, Claire.”

  “I ain’t been thinking about Him,” he said.

  “Well,” Fenton said, “you can if you want to. It don’t matter anyhow.”

  “I don’t think about Him,” Claire said, as if from far off.

  “I think I’ll go to bed now,” Fenton complained, looking at the cruelly narrow cot. “You slept some, didn’t you, Claire.”

  “Yes,” Claire said, a tired sad duty in his voice.

  “Can I walk around outdoors now?” Claire asked, watching Fenton’s oblivious brooding face.

  “Yes,” Fenton replied
slowly. “I guess it’s all right if the house is open when it’s daylight. Nobody ain’t coming in anyhow.

  “Don’t get lost, though,” Fenton went on quietly as Claire began to go out.

  “What’s going on inside the little thing’s mind?” Fenton said to himself. He loosened his heavy belt and lay down on the cot.

  Fenton thought about how Claire thought about Mama. He himself thought a lot about her when actually he wasn’t very aware even that he was thinking about her. Maybe he thought about her all the time and didn’t even know it. But he never thought she was waiting for him on some distant star as Claire did.

  “Claire,” he said, beginning to sleep, “why is it one of us is even weaker than the other. When West Virginia was tough why did we come clear over here? . . .”

  Even though it was day it was night really, always, in this city and night like night in caves here in the house.

  Fenton lay thinking of the long time before Parkhearst Cratty would come. He thought of Parkhearst as a kind of magicman who would show different magic tricks to him, but he knew not one would take on him.

  “No damn one,” he said, becoming asleep.

  IT WAS EVEN darker somehow when he awoke, and he knew at once that Parkhearst Cratty was there, shaking him.

  “Wake up, West Virginia,” Parkhearst was saying.

  Fenton’s mouth moved as though to let out laughter but none came, as though there were no more sound at all in him now.

  “She’s waiting for us,” Parkhearst said.

  Fenton said quiet obscene words and Parkhearst waited a little longer, situated as though nowhere in the dark.

  “Where’s Claire?” Parkhearst wondered vaguely.

  “Ain’t he here?” Fenton said.

  “No,” Parkhearst said, a kind of uneasiness growing in him again.

  “Claire went out, but he’ll be back,” Fenton said, remembering.

  Then when Parkhearst did not say anything in reply, Fenton said rather angrily: “I said he’d be back.”