Dark Don't Catch Me

by Packer, Vin

  16

  “JUST what would I be giving up?” he says, knowing even his tone bespeaks the futility of trying to make her believe that what he is saying is possible; trying to make himself believe it too, as though now at this moment when they have finished and rest lying beside one another in the Naked Hag, he must promise her something more, and make himself believe he means to keep the promise. And I do, Dix thinks, and feels the softness of her long fingers explore his flank, creep upward languorously, loving his flesh.

  “Hush, Dixon, darling, hmm? Hush and let’s not talk about it now. What’s this?”

  “A birthmark … We’ve got to talk about it. We can go up North.”

  “I never noticed. Cute. Looks like a little strawberry.”

  “Barbara, I mean it. I’m not a kid. Younger than you, maybe, but not a kid. You know it too.”

  “Yes indeed, darling. You have a child too, hmm, Dixon? You don’t want to forget that.”

  “We’ll take him with us.”

  “Lift up, baby, will you? I want to pull the blanket around us. This is a chilly barn, isn’t it?” “Won’t you even listen?” “Oh, should I, Dixon?” “I swear we could. I swear it!”

  The moon coming in the window high above them is girdled with a crystal rim, giving its light to their bodies, both young and supple and white-looking in the white night rays; but the floor of the Naked Hag is hard as life, Barbara James muses. Out of the beaver-wood walls, and belly stoves with their black claw legs, the blackboards with their chalk dust smell, and the worn hand-me-down desks from the white school, they have made a boudoir; and out of Dixon Pirkle’s auto robe, the love bed, with the cracked plaster ceiling its canopy.

  She is a small, slender girl of twenty-six, with light golden skin and straight black hair; wide brown eyes, and lips that curve generously through her delicately featured, fair, lovely face.

  Pulling the blanket’s edge half over her body, she covers one side, leaving the half next to Dix uncovered, showing in the moonlight the crescent thigh, smooth-skinned slim waist, and one of the round pendulous breasts, wondering how long in time it will be before Dixon forgets to mention going up North together so they can live man and wife. Thinking just thank God for Dixon and me being together now; letting her palm travel the strong hardness of his stomach, and not expecting any more than this ever. Thinking that even this is ephemeral, will be taken away too, soon, like everything else, like in the beginning her mother was, and like, as she grew, her color was taken away — she was white in color, but it was taken away by fact; she was Negro. And like Neal was taken, taken away by war, his young, good body made dead by a bullet, his fine mind just stopped, useless.

  • • •

  After college, when she had come back to Paradise to teach at the Naked Hag, her hope had been taken away, too, many times — a day when a student shouted defiantly, “Well what we need an education fo? So we gonna be educated cotton-pickers?” Life in back county land left little honest optimism, that day and other days. And a night Doc Sell made an appointment with Barbara James to meet him at his house to talk about new books for the shelf in the Naked Hag, laughingly called the library; and when she went there, and found him alone there with books not on his mind at all, and a two-word greeting when the door shut behind her and he stood leering at her: “Get naked!” She had known optimism was white man’s cake, not food for colored, known it that night even while she tried to keep hope married to reason.

  Arguing: “Now, Doctor Sell, sir, you’re a good man, sir. You don’t — ” “Get naked, teacher, and teach me every way you know to do it. We got all night to do it in and you gonna stay here!”

  Pleading: “Please, Doctor Sell, please have some pity!”

  “I swear I’ll rip every stitch of clothing you got on your frame off your frame if you don’t get busy.”

  Thinly threatening: “If anyone ever found out, Doctor Sell, sir, they wouldn’t like what you’re trying to do, sir.”

  “Didn’t them niggers teach you the facts of life in that black college you went to, teacher? You think you’re white? Who the hell’d blink an eye if they heard you come up to my house and got naked and spread your nigger legs for me? Here, I’ll rip ‘em off you — ” He reached for her —

  Resignedly: “I’m sorry you’re doing this to me, Doctor Sell. I never thought you were that kind.”

  “Any man’s the kind when it comes to gettin’ what a nigger gal can give. Hurry it, up, teacher! Work them hands faster on them buttons!”

  • • •

  Dix Pirkle moves beside her, fumbling on the floor for his shirt and the pack of cigarettes in the pocket; he takes one and sticks it in his mouth and scratches a match. “Barbara?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “What are you thinking about? You’re so quiet all of a sudden.”

  “Just being quiet. Not thinking, Dixon.”

  “I mean what I say about us going up North, Barbara. Don’t you believe that?” He leans on his side, propping himself on his elbow, watching her as she lies on her back; the blue smoke from his cigarette dancing up above them. “And as far as Dickie’s concerned, any place would be better than home is now … That’s why I was late again tonight, honey. My mother!”

  “Drinking more, Dixon?”

  “Yeah. Yes. God … She was already flying when I got home from Joh Greene’s. Then Dad went off to Hoopers’ without her, and I had to see that Cindy’d stay with Dickie. My mother was acting real crazy; not drunk — crazy. You know what she was doing, Barbara?”

  “What, darling?” She reaches out again to touch him, his fingers close tightly on hers.

  “Well, she was calling someone up in the telephone. She’d get him to answer, listen to him say hello, hello; then she’d hang up, wait, and do it all over again. I heard it on the extension.”

  “Calling who?”

  “I don’t know. Christ, she probably didn’t know either. Just bothering the bejesus out of someone. Real insane-acting.”

  “Poor Dixon.”

  “And I got mad at her before that, when Dad was leaving for the barbecue. I got mad because Dad said maybe he wouldn’t go, maybe he hadn’t ought to; and she said, ‘You go on. Dixon and me are going to spend an evening without you.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t spend an evening with you if I had to go to hell to keep from it!’ “ Dix sucks in on the cigarette; sighs the smoke out, shaking his head. “I shouldn’t have said that. I know I shouldn’t have, but God, I love my dad. In a lot of ways Colonel’s narrow, but I love him, Barbara. You don’t know!”

  “I think I do, Dixon,” she says. “I feel the same about mine.”

  Her words conjure up in Dix’s mind a vision of the doctor; a remembrance of how the doctor was conspicuous in the white people’s eyes when Dix was a kid, and the Jameses first moved to Paradise. He sees the small Negro as he saw him hundreds of times, heading down to The Toe for that strange one street in The Toe where the better-off colored live, colored whose backyards aren’t waving white folks’ wash every Monday, and colored whose hands don’t pick cotton, or clutch scrub brushes and mop handles for a living: a colored plumber, a colored insurance man, a colored dentist; oddities in Paradise — and oddest of all, mild-mannered, wise and gentle Doctor Edward James, carrying a black physician’s bag, smiling at passersby and speaking in that same way all the Jameses speak, casually and affably, but not presumptuously so, without the hesitating lapses, the slurring inflections and the haphazard Negro expressions coloring his sentences; and remembering Clint Green or some other boy in Paradise pointing him out to Dix, “See him?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That nigger’s a doctor.” “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, he’s a bona fide M.D. — that nigger!” “No kidding.”

  “Yeah, he’s got a degree in medicine.” Dix remembering that as he lies after love with the daughter of Paradise’s one colored doctor, feeling a sudden alienation from Barbara James then as she said: “I feel the same about mine.” Think
ing of the worlds apart they are from one another, wondering with some unaccountable awe why it is that her mention of herself as a daughter who has a father she loves, just as Dix loves his own, wedges their two worlds even wider apart. It suddenly shows Dix in a new light with her, brighter than the moonlight bathing their satiated limbs, love-wearied and young; a new harsh light that calls color, not even seen, into view: black as opposed to white. Her black family; his white one; forgotten by them both in those moments they had fed on one another’s lips and stayed kissing in exquisite pulsation through to the long last kiss; forgotten in the lingering aftermath, as they stayed together in that fond and late embrace; and forgotten, but pushing for recollection, in their conversation when they drew away from each other’s worshipped bodies, and Dix swore to himself he could take her North with him the way he was saying he would; marry her; be husband to her….

  Silently watching the smoke from his cigarette curl above their intertwined hands, Dix imagines voices of people he won’t know any longer say in the future: “Sure, Dix Pirkle went and married that colored doctor’s daughter. Went on up North with her, f’Chrissake. Imagine Dix and a nigger living under the same roof like anybody ought to do it! Wonder what color their kid’ll be?” And Joh’s voice crouching in his memory, whispering: A man that turns a colored girl, a decent, intelligent, fine colored girl into the object of his lust, turns that lovely girl, whose color is not his, into a nigger in the eyes of all the world.

  I don’t want Barbara just for that! I think of Barbara James the way I’d think of — well — Suzie!

  Suzie. Suzie and their tender, ripe love marriage, Dix thinks of it with a certain aching sadness; Suzie sweet and naive and silly, whom he had loved less passionately, but more proudly, than he loves this girl beside him. Suzie whom he could take by the hand into the sunlight and see Paradise smile on them together; innocent, shy Suzie, whom Dix had never seen naked in a bright light until he stared at the dead flesh of her corpse, that morning, when she died in the upstairs bedroom and a nurse in white bathed her for the grave.

  Suzie and the long dragging days and weeks immediately after Joh had blessed her coffin into physical oblivion; the dragging days and weeks that Dix emerged from, in time, for the sake of his son, wrecking his grief then in work, consoling himself in “causes,” until the afternoon he drove the hill to the Naked Beggar-Hag to interview a colored teacher, and found a white-looking, lovely woman.

  “Yes, I’m Barbara James. Are you Mr. Pirkle?” and said for the first time ever to any Negro, “Yes, ma’am. I am.” He remembered even as he said it, a voice from his boyhood: “My God, Dix, do you know what happened to me today? I was hurrying down Church Street not looking where I was going and I bumped into a woman, and I said, ‘Oh, excuse me, ma’am, and my God, Dix, I’d a like to died when I looked up and saw she was a nigger I was ma’am-ing.”

  • • •

  An interview, and another; and then a committee formed with Negroes and whites looking across a table at one another in the county courthouse, with fund-raising talk; and Dix Pirkle’s eyes fixed on the pure, strong face of Barbara James, until, aware of it, her eyes met his, and Race couldn’t stop them looking at one another that way; and Race couldn’t tell them they were wrong in thinking more was going to come out of that committee meeting than a proposed program of action for building a new Naked Hag, and a vote of confidence; because that night Dix dropped her off in his car in The Toe, neither one saying a blessed word to the other until she was halfway out of the back seat.

  Then: “Barbara?”

  “Yes, Mr. Pirkle,” she said, not looking at him but at the pavement of Brockton Road; his motor running; headlights on, ready to go on.

  “If you’d like — it’s a nice night. We could drive.”

  “I don’t think so, thank you, Mr. Pirkle.”

  “You could call me Dix. I wish you’d call me Dix.”

  “I don’t think I can do that either, Mr. Pirkle.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m — s-sorry.”

  “So am I,” she had said; and that should have been the end of it. She had gone up the gravel path and into the house; and Dix had driven on home; and it should have stopped there.

  But the next afternoon Dix had an errand near the hill right at the close of school time; and he “happened” on her walking down the hill, and drove her home again. That time and times after that, until one night she agreed to meet him out near Awful Dark Woods, and both were so uncommonly shy and silent walking near where he had parked his car in the shadows of the black pines that each one knew it would be a long time and a lot of trouble before their love would feel real, before they would even speak of it, or do one single thing for it but realize it.

  • • •

  I don’t want Barbara just for that! Dix hears his own words, spoken that afternoon, echo again as he lies smoking beside her; thinks of what else he wants her for; a wife living with him, where? Once he had said: “We could go somewhere nobody’d know. You could pass, Barbara. You’re white enough to! Who’d ever know?” And she’d said, “The only two that really matter, Dix. Us. We’d know.”

  A mother to Dickie? Yes; with her goodness growing around his son; a goodness better than he could give his son — stronger, and his own stronger for it; and the subtle, sharp clean keenness of her mind; this and the infinitesimal little things about Barbara James he wanted her for. God, what kind of a belly laugh is sounding in hell for the joke of her blackness and Dix Pirkle’s whiteness making stripes out of them that can’t be people, black and white stripes; a study in color contrast, instead of just the one difference that there is between a man and his woman….

  “We both think a lot of our fathers, Dixon,” she says suddenly after the silence had seemed to sink in and set on them. “That’s just one reason we shouldn’t expect more. It’d kill them both.”

  “Your too?” Dix could bite off his tongue for saying it. “Of course, mine! Dixon, my father is very proud.” “I didn’t mean it.”

  “Meant it, but didn’t mean to say it. Aw, Dixon, it’d be so long; even if we did have a chance outside Paradise, it’d take so long for us to get used to it. And maybe we wouldn’t. I love my people almost as much as I love you. You’re the same way.”

  “I never think of my people. I never think of that.”

  “You don’t have to,” she says, rising a little, leaning into him, her finger touching his cigarette. “Let me have the last drag on it, darling. No, let’s just thank God for what we got now.”

  He frowns, watching her take the smoke. “If we only knew who saw us, who told Joh. Oh, Joh won’t say anything to anyone but me, but I wonder who saw us, Barbara, that’d give us trouble.”

  “I don’t know.” She tamps the burnt-down cigarette on the concrete, touching him again lightly on the chest. “You’re too skinny, Dixon, you need more fat on you, baby. No, I don’t know. We should have thought to come here and not go there. We went there too much; our luck gave out.”

  “Joh thinks last night was the first time.”

  “My Dad too. Thinks it was Hollis Jordan.” Barbara gives a little high hoot. “Gawd, him! Dad sure hates him.”

  “Why him?”

  “Cause of the woods, sugar. Because he lives up there, I guess. I should have let you drive me on into The Toe, but I was afraid to. You have too often as it is.”

  “What would he say if he knew it was me, honey?”

  “Dixon, I don’t know. He just hates Hollis, though. Don’t know why.”

  “Nobody likes him much. He didn’t fight in the war.”

  “He’s crazy, I guess.” She runs her finger across Dix Pirkle’s lips, slowly, lovingly, gently. “Dixon, they’re going to take it away from us some time, but be glad about now, baby. Don’t be sad about right now, cause there’s nothing we can do for it, baby. Hmm?”

  She leans on him, her fingers reaching up to tangle with his hair, while her mouth leans his in a soft, searching way, until his arms
pull her into him.

  “We got to get out of Paradise, Barbara,” he whispers; her breasts crushing against his chest, the moonlight glistening in jagged shadows across her golden-soft buttocks and his hands pressing them; white on black, stripes in the fight of the night. “We got to!”

  “Hush, Dixon …”

  “Barbara …”

  “Baby, hush now. Don’t talk.”

  17

  THE HIGHWAY snakes through back-country land, dark in the night as the car careens past deserted cotton fields, dimly lit farm houses, Sinclair stations, gas and pop stands, and the stretch of black pines, lonely-looking shadows sticking out of the earth; while over the radio the interminable sound of hillbilly tunes, peppered with spot announcements for anti-acid pills.

  Hollis Jordan reaches over and snaps off the button, drives silently thinking, Of course it was her, couldn’t mistake that giggling on the fourth call. Just giggling — not saying anything; drunk, no doubt. Gawd, Ada, what’s to become of all of us!

  Thinking: Why can’t Ada just let it go; it happened too far back to be still bugging her. Thinking that and remembering how for years after she married Colonel it was just, “Hello, Hollis,” and “well, hello, Ada,” whenever they met in Paradise; except for two times. And tonight, giggling at him over the telephone — the third time.

  The first time was a while after Dixon Pirkle married Suzie Barr, and Ada appeared outside Hollis’s house one afternoon like a ghost, sitting in her car looking at his house until he came down off the porch and walked over to her.

  He said, “Why, hello, Ada. What brings you out this way?”

  “Dixon got married, you know, Hollis. He’s a doer.”

  Then he noticed, as he leaned his arms on the edge of the car’s window, that Ada had been drinking; her breath reeked of liquor.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

  “You were never a doer, were you, Hollis? Never as long as you lived did anything about anything — did you, Hollis?”

  “Ada, Ada, it was a long, long time ago. Now don’t you think you better drive on home?”