The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  After a while, though, little Judd got tired. He had used up all his paper, and then, too, he noticed that the Sandman wasn’t making any more paint. Only from his mouth did a kind of pink something issue, but finally that stopped too.

  “Sandman, it’s time for you to leave. The day is coming, and nobody wants your sand in the sunlight.” Little Judd was looking at the orange light streaming through the window. “Sandman, go home,” he repeated. “Come back when it’s dark and bring me a different color for my paintbrush. . . .”

  Little Judd yawned.

  It had been an unusual night, he knew, but something was not unusual: he had not slept a wink.

  This began to puzzle him, for here the Sandman himself had spent all night with him, and all he had given him was red watercolors.

  Again, as so often in the past, Judd felt very sleepy now that day was actually coming. But his bed was too wet with the Sandman’s red watercolors.

  There was a strong strange smell in the room now, and large black flies had flown in the open window and come to rest on the face and chest of the Sandman. They buzzed and moved their feet in a slithery way, rose in the air, then alighted again on the quiet Sandman.

  The buzzing of the flies and the strange sweet smell in the bedroom made little Judd uncomfortable. He felt he was going to be sick. He whimpered a little.

  Then he began to realize that he had made a mistake, or Sister Nelle had not told him the exact truth. That is, the black man who lay there so still with the flies swarming on his mouth and chest was perhaps not a real Sandman, for if he was the Sandman, Judd surely would have slept, and he would not have had red watercolors bestowed on him but golden grains of sand.

  Then he began to cry very loud. He screamed finally, as he had when he wet his rubber pants.

  At last he heard Nelle’s step outside the door.

  “What is it now, little Judd?” He heard her voice against the closed door.

  “I have shot and killed the Sandman,” little Judd replied. “He’s all covered with watercolors and flies, and I have killed him.”

  “You try to get some sleep now.” Nelle still spoke through the wood of the door. “It’s only five-thirty in the morning. . . . Use the potty under your bed if you have to, little Judd.”

  “I thought he was the Sandman, but I guess he ain’t.” Little Judd went on speaking to his sister. “I shot him to death with my gun, I guess.”

  “Use the potty if you can,” Nelle told him. Her voice sounded as sleepy as if she had dozed off leaning on the closed door.

  “Shall I come in and help you, Judd?”

  There was no reply.

  “Little Judd!” Nelle cried.

  It was then that Sister Nelle opened the door. She stood a long time staring first at the dead man on the floor, then at little Judd, then at the bloodstains on the floor, and all over the many sheets of the watercolor paper. Then Nelle began to scream, at first a low scream, then a more prolonged louder one, and at last, from her astonished countenance, many piercing cries that recalled sirens and bullhorn. Little Judd screamed in response, as if they were singing to one another, echoing one another, as they did together with the red red robin.

  RAPTURE

  “Iwouldn’t have known you!” Mrs. Muir spoke to her brother.

  “You’ve grown so tall, and you’re so deeply tanned. Oh, Kent, it’s really you, then?”

  Kent put down his two valises, and kissed her dryly on the cheek.

  “You haven’t changed much, though, Gladys. The same sweet smile, and sky-blue eyes.” He hugged her ever so gently then.

  Kent was Gladys Muir’s half-brother. He had an extended furlough from the army, where he was stationed in West Germany. Before his assignment there he had been in the Middle East, and before that somewhere in the Pacific. But now, though still a young man, he was a few years over thirty, he was free from his military service at least for a while.

  He had been given so long a furlough in order to see Mrs. Muir because the doctor had told him she was not expected to live for more than a few months at the most. Kent, as he studied his sister’s face, was not certain if she knew how serious her illness was, and how brief a time yet remained to her.

  “Here is Brice,” Mrs. Muir said softly as her only son entered the front room of their Florida bungalow. “You’ve not seen him, Kent, since he was ten or eleven years old, have you?”

  Kent stepped back a few inches when he set eyes on his nephew, and his right hand moved slightly upwards as it did when he saluted an enlisted man.

  “Here he is at last, your Uncle Kent.” Mrs. Muir spoke to Brice as if her brother would not hear her prompting her son. Brice blushed a deep brick red, and looked away.

  “Brice has so often spoken of you,” Gladys Muir went on. “He has collected all the snapshots of you, and keeps them over his dresser. Especially the photo of you coming out from swimming in the ocean somewhere. That seems to be his favorite of you.”

  Brice turned his gaze to the patio outside, and colored even more violently. He was then just sixteen and was shy for his age.

  “If Uncle Kent will excuse me, Mother, I have to practice my cornet. I have a lesson today,” Brice apologized. He almost bowed to his uncle as he left the room.

  Mrs. Muir and her brother laughed in agreeable nervousness as the boy took leave of them.

  “Brice wears his hair quite long, doesn’t he?” Ken remarked as they sat down, and began sipping some fresh lemonade.

  Soon they could hear the cornet coming from the garage where Brice practiced.

  “Say, he sounds like a real professional.”

  “He plays with a very fine group of musicians,” Mrs. Muir said. “But after his father’s death, you see, he left school. That was two or three years ago. He has been working in a restaurant days. He gets up every morning before five o’clock.”

  Her brother clicked his tongue.

  Mrs. Muir observed then how very short Kent’s own hair was, though he wore rather long and well-defined sideburns which emphasized his deep-set green eyes.

  “He does so much want to be a musician, Kent.” Mrs. Muir spoke as if giving away a secret.

  “How much have you told Brice about everything, Gladys?” Kent wondered, wiping his mouth from the tart drink.

  “Oh, nothing at all. He thinks I am just not feeling up to par.”

  “I understand,” her brother said, looking at one of his fingernails which was blackened owing to his having caught it in his car door that day.

  “Let me show you your room, Kent.” Mrs. Muir led him up the brightly carpeted stairs. “You’ll share the same bathroom with Brice, if you don’t mind,” she explained. “The bathroom which should be yours has been out of order for a few days. I hope this is agreeable.”

  When Brice came home from work in the restaurant in the late afternoon the next day, Kent was outside upon a ladder cleaning out the eaves of the roof. Owing to the sudden spell of hot weather, his uncle had taken off his shirt. He had worked so hard, repairing some of the broken parts of the eaves, and also fastening down some loose tiles on the roof, that rivulets of sweat poured down his chest to his bronzed thick arms.

  “Need any help, Uncle Kent?” Brice called up to him, smiling broadly.

  In answer, coming down from the ladder, Kent ruffled up the boy’s thick mop of hair, and grinned.

  “All fixed now, Brice, so the water won’t run out the wrong way.”

  Brice avoided his uncle’s glance, but smiled continually.

  Mrs. Muir observed the two men from inside, where she sat on a new davenport she had purchased only a few days before. She smiled at seeing her brother and son together.

  “Brice will be in good hands,” Mrs. Muir spoke softly to herself. “Certainly strong ones.”

  Gladys Muir still did most of the housework, though the doctor had advised her against doing so. She always scrubbed the bathroom immaculately, for she felt Brice liked to see it sparkling clean. On the s
helf above the washbasin, Mrs. Muir was accustomed to reach up and take down Brice’s comb, in which every day four or five strands of his gold hair were left behind. She would remove the hair, and place it in a small box in her own bedroom.

  But after Kent arrived, as she would go in to clean their common bathroom, she observed that there were no hairs now in the comb. The first time she noticed this, she stood for a long time staring at the comb. She lifted it up and looked under it. She felt then, strangely, unaccountably, as if a load had been lifted from her heart.

  She found herself from then on waiting, one might say, for the ceremony of the cleaning of the bathroom and the looking at the comb. But with each passing day, every time she picked up the comb it was clean, without one hair remaining.

  There was a small aperture leading from the bathroom to a closet down the hall, a kind of register which conveyed hot air from the furnace in winter. The next day, when she heard Kent go into the bathroom, she opened the air register. She was trembling so badly she was afraid he would hear her.

  But Kent was completely occupied, she saw, in polishing his boots until they shone like a looking glass. But then, straightening up, she saw him gaze at Brice’s comb. He took hold of it with extreme care. He was completely absorbed in looking at the comb which she could see still held a few of Brice’s hairs in its teeth.

  Kent held the comb for a while close to his mouth, then lowering it, almost languidly, he removed the strands of hair and placed them in his khaki shirt pocket.

  Mrs. Muir stole away into her own bedroom, and sat down heavily. She could hear her brother in his own bedroom, moving about. He remained there for only a short time, then he went downstairs, got into his rented car, and drove away.

  When she felt her strength return, Mrs. Muir went into Kent’s bedroom. She made his bed, and did some dusting and sweeping. Then very slowly she advanced to the dresser and opened each drawer deliberately one after the other. She left the top drawer for last, as if she must prepare herself for what she would find in it. There was a small mother-of-pearl box there. She opened it. At first she saw only the reproduction on its underlid of a painting of John the Baptist as a youth. But in the box itself, arranged in pink tissue paper, she spied a gathering of the gold hair of Brice Muir. She closed the box. There was a kind of strange smile playing over all her features at that moment.

  Mrs. Muir felt, she did not know why, the same way she had when her father, the day of her wedding, had held her arm and they had walked down the aisle of the church together, and her father had then presented her to her bridegroom. She had felt at the moment a kind of bliss. She now felt she could give up her son to someone who would cherish him as her bridegroom had cherished her.

  But when Gladys Muir began to talk with Kent about her “going,” her brother became taciturn and embarrassed, and the serious commitment she wished from him was not made.

  The days passed, and Mrs. Muir realized that very little time remained. She knew positively that she had now only days, perhaps hours. The doctor had told her her passing would be so easy she would scarcely be aware of it, such was the nature of her malady.

  As she felt then that the time for parting was imminent, she took Brice’s comb in her handkerchief so that it could not be seen and joined Kent where he sat playing solitaire in the front room.

  He stopped playing immediately she had come in, and stood up in a kind of military fashion. Brice was outside practicing his cornet in the garage, so of course he could not overhear what she might say, or what her brother might answer.

  When Kent had put away his cards and was sitting on the new davenport facing her, Gladys Muir without warning brought out Brice’s comb.

  She saw the look of consternation on her brother’s face.

  “I want to tell you, Kent, how great a happiness I feel that you are close to my boy. The effort of speaking is very hard for me, as I believe I told you. So I have brought this to speak for me.”

  A deep silence prevailed.

  “Take it, Kent, for I have an identical comb upstairs in my room.”

  Kent took the comb. His eyes filled with tears.

  “You will keep him with you, Kent?” Gladys managed to say.

  She was pleased, and grateful, to see how strong her brother’s emotion was.

  “I don’t ever want to leave him,” her brother got out. “But do you think he will want to be with me equally?”

  “I know he will, Kent. He has a kind of worship of you, and always has. So you will have one another. . . . But what neither of you can know is the great burden that is being lifted from my heart knowing you will be close to one another.”

  “I will make him my life if he will let me.” The uncle spoke in a kind of incoherent manner.

  Mrs. Muir was sad she had forced it all upon him in so short a space, but then she saw that no other course would have been possible.

  Kent was so blinded by his tears, tears really of joy, he later was to realize, and also tears of so many strange and powerful feelings, that it took him some time to look over at his sister and then to realize she had gone.

  At the very moment of his realization he heard the cornet playing cease. He went to the door as Brice was coming through it. As if the boy read the meaning in his uncle’s face, he put down his cornet, and threw himself into the older man’s arms.

  THERE WAS ALMOST no one at the funeral. There was the minister, and a woman who played the organ and who sang one song in a faded alto voice, and then of course the gravediggers and the sexton.

  Brice had put on his best Sunday suit, a little too small for him, and a brand-new tie which his mother had purchased for him only last week. Uncle Kent wore his captain’s uniform with several bright-colored citations across the jacket.

  Kent noticed that Brice did not shed any tears at the service, and he looked very pale. His lips moved from time to time as if he was playing his cornet. They went to a very expensive restaurant later, but neither of them was able to eat very much. Neither Kent nor Brice drank at all, so there was nothing somehow to give them any kind of solace.

  “I am going to take care of everything, Brice,” Kent told him just before starting the motor of his car. “I don’t want you to have to worry about the smallest detail.”

  It was only eight o’clock in the evening, but Brice said he must go to bed soon as he was due at the restaurant the next morning no later than five-thirty.

  “You don’t need to work there anymore, Brice,” Kent said thickly as he sat on the new davenport. “Unless you want to, of course.” He amended his statement when he saw a look of uneasiness on the face of his nephew. “I have enough, you see, for both of us.”

  “I think, Uncle Kent, it might get my mind off of everything if I did go to work just as usual.”

  “All right, Brice. But, remember, you don’t have to. As I said, there’s enough for both of us.”

  Kent stood up then, and made a motion to take Brice in his arms, but something in the way the young man looked at him caused him merely to shake hands with him and give him a husky good-night.

  It began to rain outside, and presently there was a distant peal of thunder, and flashes of silver and sometimes yellow lightning. Kent closed the door leading to the patio. He took out a pack of worn cards, and began his game of solitaire.

  All at once it seemed to him he could hear his sister’s voice as she showed him the comb with the gold strands of hair.

  “She knew everything and was glad,” Kent said aloud. “But then, after all, I am his uncle, and too old for him.”

  THE RAIN HAD wet the top blanket on his bed, so Kent threw this off. He had this small transistor radio and he decided he would just lie in bed and listen to some music.

  The rain whipped against the roof and the windows. Kent felt very restless and edgy. His sister’s sudden death did not seem real, and he kept seeing her showing him the comb. He could not believe Gladys had meant what she had said, but then what else could she have meant?<
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  He had dozed off when a noise wakened him. It was, he soon realized, Brice taking a shower, and the sound of the water in the bathroom mingled with the sound of the steady downpour, outside, of the rain. He dozed off again, and then he thought he heard someone call. Rising up in bed, he saw that Brice had entered his room. He had no clothes on. At first the thought crossed the uncle’s mind that he was walking in his sleep, but then he saw this was not true.

  “Can I come in, Uncle Kent?” Brice’s voice reached him as if it came from a far distance, and sounded like a small child’s in the dark.

  “Please, Brice.”

  “You don’t ever drink or smoke, do you. Uncle Kent?”

  The uncle shook his head. They both listened to the radio which was playing a waltz.

  “May I sit on the edge of your bed?” Brice inquired.

  “You’re crying,” Kent said throatily. “And you’re still wet from your shower.”

  “No, it’s from the rain. I stepped out on the porch for a while. I felt so good with the rain coming down on me. . . . But I shouldn’t get your bed wet.”

  “The rain got my top blanket wet also before I turned in,” Kent explained.

  He suddenly took Brice’s outstretched hand in his.

  “It’s all right to cry in my presence,” Kent said, but he had hardly got the words out before Brice threw himself into his uncle’s arms. He began weeping convulsively, almost violently.

  Kent held him to his chest tightly.

  “You’re shivering, Brice. Get under the covers for a while at least.”

  The boy obeyed, and Kent found himself holding him very tightly under the blanket as the boy sobbed on.

  Kent all at once kissed the boy on his cheek, and as he kissed him some of the tears came into his mouth.

  The sobs began to subside.

  “I feel very close to you, Uncle Kent,” Brice said. “Do you to me?”

  “I do.” Kent heard his own voice coming, it seemed, from beneath the floorboards, and unrecognizable as his own.