The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

by John Waters

  Tim made a grimace with his lips that looked like the smile on a man I once saw lying dead of gunshot wounds on the street. I looked away.

  “He expects you to go home with him, Timmy,” I warned him.

  “Oh, Christ in heaven!” He sat down in the big chair, and picked up the coffee cup his dad had left and sipped some of it. It was my turn to show a queer smile.

  Tim just sat on there then for an hour or more while I pretended to do some cleaning up of our apartment, all the while watching him every so often and being scared at what I saw.

  Then all at once, as if he had heard his cue, he stood up, squared his shoulders, muttered something, and without a look or word to me, he went to the bedroom door, opened it, and went in.

  At first the voices were low, almost whispers, then they rose in a high, dizzy crescendo, and there was cursing and banging and so on as in all domestic quarrels. Then came a silence, and after that silence I could hear Tim weeping hard. I had never heard him or seen him cry in all our three years of living together. I felt terribly disappointed somehow. He was crying like a little boy.

  I sat down stunned as if my own father had come back from the dead and pointed out all my shortcomings and my poor record as an actor and a man.

  Finally they came out together, and Tim had his two big suitcases in hand.

  “I’m going home for a while, Freddy,” he told me, and this time he smiled his old familiar smile. “Take this.” He extended a big handful of bills.

  “I don’t want it, Timmy.”

  His father took the bills from him then—there were several hundred-dollar ones—and pressed them hard into my hand. Somehow I could accept them from Mr. Jaqua.

  “Tim will write you when he gets settled back home. Won’t you, Tim?” the old man inquired as they went out the door.

  After their footsteps died away, I broke down and cried, not like a young boy, but like a baby. I cried for over an hour. And strange to say I felt almost refreshed at shedding so many bitter tears. I realized how badly I had suffered in New York, and how much I loved Timmy, though I knew he did not love me very much in return. And I knew then as I do now I would never see him again.

  THE CANDLES OF YOUR EYES

  As late as two years ago a powerfully built black man used to walk up and down East Fourth Street carrying a placard in purple and crocus letters which read:

  I Am a Murderer

  Why Don’t They Give Me the Chair?

  Signed, Soldier

  Strangers to the East Village would inquire who Soldier was and who it was he had murdered.

  There were always some of us from Louisiana who had time enough to tell the inquirer Soldier’s story, which evolved as much around Beaut Orleans as it did the placard-carrier.

  Beauty Orleans, or Beaut, who came from the same section of Louisiana as Soldier, grew more handsome the older he got, we thought, but he was always from the time he appeared in the Village a cynosure for all eyes. At seventeen Beaut looked sometimes only thirteen. His most unusual feature, though, happened to be his eyes, which someone said reminded one of flashes of heat lightning.

  How Beauty lived before Soldier took him over nobody ever tried to figure out. He had no education, no training, no skills. He wore the same clothes winter and summer, and was often even on frigid December days barefoot. In summer he put on a German undershirt which he pulled down almost as far as his knees. He found most of his clothes outside the back door of a repertory theater.

  After considerable coaxing and begging Beauty agreed to settle down with Soldier in a run-down half-vacant building, not far from the Bowery.

  Because of Beaut’s extraordinary good looks and his strange eyes, artists were always clamoring to make drawings of him.

  His friend Soldier, whose own eyes were the color of slightly new pennies, protected or perhaps imprisoned Beaut out of his love for the boy. If you wanted to get permission to draw Beaut, you had to go straight to Soldier first and finagle the arrangements.

  Soldier would hesitate a long while with a suing artist, would leaf through an old ledger he had found in the same theater Beaut got his clothes from, and finally, after arguing and scolding, would arrive at a just price, and Beaut was begrudgingly allowed to leave for a calculated number of hours.

  I don’t know which of the two loved the other the most, Beaut Soldier or Soldier Beaut.

  Soldier used to hold Beaut in his arms and lullaby him in a big rocking chair which they had found in good shape left behind on the street by looters.

  He rocked Beaut in the chair as one would a doll. It was their chief occupation, their sole entertainment. It was an unforgettable sight, midnight-black strapping Soldier holding the somewhat delicate, though really tough, Beaut. If you looked in on them in the dark, you seemed to see only Beaut asleep in what looked like the dark branches of a tree.

  Soldier earned for them both, either by begging or stealing. But he was not considered a professional thief even by the police. Just light-fingered when the need was pressing.

  Soldier insisted Beaut always wear a gold chain he had picked up from somewhere, but the younger man did not like the feel of metal against his throat. He said it reminded him of a gun pointed at him. But in the end he gave in and wore the chain.

  People in the Village wondered how these two could go on so long together. But it was finally understood that Beaut and Soldier had reached some kind of perfection in their love for one another. They had no future, and no past—just the now in which Soldier rocked Beauty on his knees and kissed his smooth satiny reddish-gold hair.

  “Beaut,” Soldier said once near the end of their time together, gazing at him out of his brown-penny eyes, “you are my morning, noon, and night. But especially noon, you hear? Broad noon. Why, if the sun went out, and no stars shined, and I had you, Beaut, I wouldn’t give a snap if all them luminaries was snuffed out. You’d shine to make me think they was still out there blazin’.”

  Then he would rock Beaut and lullaby him as the night settled down over the city.

  We knew it couldn’t last. Nothing perfect and beautiful has any future. And these two were already overdue in their paradise together. Doom is what perfect love is always headed for.

  So then one night Soldier did not come back to that shell of a building they had lived together in.

  Beaut stirred after a while in the chair, like a child in his mother’s body wanting to be born. Still, no Soldier.

  Hunger at last drove Beaut out into the street. Outside, he rubbed his eyes and stared about as if he had been asleep for many considerable years.

  “Where’s Soldier?” he asked of everybody he met, friend or total stranger.

  By way of reply, we gave him food and drink. No one thought to rock him.

  As days and weeks passed, the young boy got older-looking, but if anything more beautiful. His eyes located deep in his skull looked like little birthday candles flickering. A few wrinkles began forming around those candlelike eyes. Some of his teeth came out, but he looked handsome still even without them.

  All he ever said when he said anything was “Where is Soldier at?”

  Beaut stole some reading glasses from a secondhand store in order to go over the ledger which Soldier had left behind and into which his black friend was accustomed to put down sentences when he was not rocking Beaut.

  But the sentences in the ledger, it appeared, all said the same thing over and again, often in the same wording, like the copybook of a schoolboy who is learning to spell.

  The sentences read: “Soldier loves Beaut. He’s my sky and land and deep blue sea. Beaut, don’t ever leave me. Beaut, never stop loving me and letting me love you. You hear me?”

  Beaut rocked in the chair, singing his own lullaby to himself. He broke his glasses, but managed to read the ledger anyhow, for in any case he had got by heart the few repeated sentences Soldier had put down in it.

  “He’ll come back,” Beaut told Orley Austin, a Negro ex-boxer from Missis
sippi. “I know Soldier.”

  One day Orley came into the room with the rocking chair, and closed the door loudly behind him. He looked at Beaut. He spat on his palms and rubbed them together vigorously.

  “Say,” Beaut raised his voice. Orley bent down and kissed Beaut on the crown of his head, and put his right hand over Beaut’s heart, thus testifying he had come to take Soldier’s place in the rocking-chair room.

  So they began where Soldier had left off, the new lover and Beaut together, but though the younger man was not so lonesome with Orley around, you could see he was not quite as satisfied with the ex-boxer as he had been with Soldier—despite the fact that if anything Orley rocked Beaut more than Soldier had. He could rock him all night long because he smoked too much stuff.

  Then you remember that terrible winter that broke all weather records. Usually New York doesn’t have such fierce cold as say Boston or northern Maine, though for those from Louisiana even a little taste of Northern winter is too much. And you have got to remember the house with the rocking-chair room didn’t have much in the way of a furnace. The pipes all froze, the front windows turned to a kind of iceberg, and even the rats were found ice-stiff on the stairs.

  Ice hung from the big high ceiling like it had grown chandeliers.

  The staircase collapsed from broken pipes and accumulations of giant icicles.

  At the first break in the weather, wouldn’t you know, Soldier returned. He had some difficulty getting to the upstairs on account of there was no stairs now, only piles of lumber, but he crawled and crept his way up to the rocking-chair room.

  What he saw froze him like the ice had frozen the house.

  He saw his place taken by Orley, who was holding Beaut in his arms in the chair, their lips pressed tightly together, their hands holding one another more securely than Soldier had ever dared hold Beaut. They looked to him like flowers under deep mountain streams, but motionless like the moon in November.

  “Explain me” was all Soldier was able to get out from his lips. “Explain me!”

  When they did not answer, and did not so much as open their eyes, he brought out his stolen gun.

  “Tell me what I am lookin’ at ain’t so,” he thought he said to them.

  When nobody spoke, he cocked his gun.

  He waited another minute in the silence, then he fired all the bullets. But as they flew through the melting air, he saw something was wrong even with the bullets, for though they hit their target, their target deflected them like stone, not flesh and blood.

  We have decided that Soldier had gone crazy even before he emptied the gun on the two lovers, but the realization his bullets did not reach flesh and blood caused him to lose his mind completely.

  After the shooting he went to the police station and charged himself. The police hardly said two words to him, and took down nothing he said. But they did finally get around to going to the rocking-chair room in their own good time. They must have seen at once that Beaut and Orley had been dead for days, maybe weeks, long before Soldier reached them. No gun can kill people who have frozen to death.

  Every day for many weeks Soldier went to the police precinct and confessed to murder. Some of the cops even pretended to take down what he said. They gave him cigarettes and bottled soda.

  Soldier lives in a different building now with an older white boy. But every day, especially on Sundays, he carries up and down Fourth Street this placard, whose letters are beginning to fade:

  I Am a Murderer

  Why Don’t They Give Me the Chair?

  IN THIS CORNER . . .

  When he was 42, Hayes’s second wife, like his first, died unexpectedly. She had left instructions that there were to be no special services for her, that she should be cremated and her ashes scattered over the water. The farewell note did not say what water, and her husband one late evening threw the ashes into the river near the docks in Brooklyn. Once they had been disposed of he felt a loosening of tension such as he had not experienced since boyhood. This was followed by a kind of exaltation so pronounced he was nonplused. He breathed deeply and looked out over the dark river on which a small tugboat with green and orange lights was gliding in perfect silence.

  A few moments later he found himself whistling.

  When he got to his flat near Middagh Street, he opened the seldom-used store room which contained his archery set and his punching bag. He got his boxing gloves out, and punched the bag until he was tired. That night he slept with the deep unconsciousness he had experienced as a soldier on furlough.

  It was beginning to get nippy, for they were in late September, and yet he went to his Wall Street job without bothering to put on his jacket or tie.

  For some time now, whenever he got off at the Bowling Green subway stop, he had been noticing a young man, almost a boy, holding up a stack of missionary tracts. Today, on a sudden impulse, Hayes bought up all the tracts the boy had for sale. The vendor did not seem too pleased at this unusual generosity, but managed a husky thanks.

  The next time he got off at his subway stop, he looked immediately for the young man with the tracts, but when he went up to him, the boy turned away abruptly and began talking with a vendor of Italian ices. Hayes did not feel nervy enough to buy any more tracts.

  There was an unexpected killing frost, which was supposed to have set some kind of record, and the next day, shivering from the change in weather, Hayes, as he came from underground, caught sight of the boy with the tracts sitting on a little folding chair. He had no tracts in his hands, and was wearing only a thin summer shirt, very light trousers, and worn canvas shoes without socks.

  As he was late for work, he hurried on, but that evening as he left work he observed the young man still sitting on the folding chair.

  “Hello,” Hayes called out. “Where’s your tracts?”

  The boy’s lips moved fitfully, and then after considerable effort, he got out the words: “I’m not with the missionary society any more,” and his eyes moved down to the pavement.

  Hayes walked on toward the subway entrance without having been able to make any rejoinder to the boy’s explanation. Then all at once before descending he stopped and looked back. The boy had followed Hayes with his eyes. The expression on his face was of such sad eloquence Hayes retraced his steps, but could think of nothing to say. Studying the boy’s features he could not miss the evidence that the boy had been crying.

  “Supposin’ we go over there and get something to eat,” Hayes suggested, pointing to a well-known chop house.

  “Suits me, but I don’t have a dime to my name.”

  They sat in the back part of the restaurant, which was nearly deserted at this hour owing to the fact that most of their clientele were luncheon patrons.

  “What looks good to you?” Hayes went on, shifting his weight in the roomy booth, and watching the boy study the elaborate pages of the menu.

  “Oh, why don’t you choose for me?” the boy finally said, and handed over the bill of fare to his host.

  “We’ll have the deluxe steak platter,” Hayes told the waiter.

  “So that’s that,” Hayes smiled awkwardly as they waited for their order. The boy flushed under his deep tan, and brushed a lock of his straw-colored hair from his eyes.

  When the deluxe steak platters were set before them, the young man kept his knife and fork raised over the still sizzling Porterhouse, as if unsure how to begin. Then after the first hesitant motions, he was eating almost ferociously, his tongue and jaw moving spasmodically.

  When the boy had finished, Hayes inquired: “Wouldn’t you like my portion?”

  “You don’t want it?” the boy wondered blankly, looking down at the untasted steak.

  “I had a very hearty lunch today,” Hayes explained. He pushed his platter toward the boy. “Please don’t let it go to waste.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Hayes nodded weakly.

  “Well, then, if you say so.” The boy grinned and began on the second platter
. He ate it with even more relish.

  “I love to see a young guy with a good appetite,” Hayes congratulated him when he had finished.

  “How about some dessert? Their pies are all baked here on the premises, you know.”

  The boy shook his head and put his right hand over his stomach.

  “By the way, what is your name?” Hayes wondered bashfully.

  “Clark,” the boy raised his voice. “Clark Vail.”

  “And mine is Hayes.” The older man stood up and extended his hand, and Clark followed suit. Their handclasp resembled somehow that of two contending athletes before the fray.

  “Where do you live now that you’re not with the missionary society?” Hayes wondered after they had finished their coffee.

  Clark gave a start. “To tell the truth, nowhere.” At a long look from Hayes, Clark lowered his eyes and said, “I’ve been sleeping . . . out.”

  “Out?” Hayes spoke with something like affront.

  A kind of warmth was coming over Hayes. He felt little pearls of perspiration on his upper lip. He wanted to take out his handkerchief and dry himself but somehow he felt any movement at that moment would spoil what he wanted to say. Finally, he forced out:

  “Clark, you are more than welcome to stay the night at my place. It’s not too far.”

  Clark made no answer, and his mouth came open, then closed tightly.

  “If you are sleeping out, I mean,” Hayes went on. “I insist you come where you’ll have a roof over your head.”

  They both rose at the same moment, as in a business meeting where a project had been approved.

  Owing to the clatter and noise on the subway they did not speak again until they had got out at their stop.

  “I live near the river,” Hayes told the younger man.

  “YOU HAVE BOXING gloves,” Clark cried, picking the gloves up admiringly when they were inside his apartment. “Were you a boxer?”

  “Amateur,” Hayes colored. “Golden Gloves,” he added almost inaudibly.

  “I was in the CYO bouts a few times,” Clark volunteered.