Dark Don't Catch Me

by Packer, Vin

  Rowan nudges Raleigh and says to Millard, “Down here’s the same way. White women come to The Toe hot and begging. You better not sit out on de Post porch after dark. Dem white women come in droves just pantin’ for some jog-jog.”

  “They just ribbin’ you, Miller.”

  “I’m hip!” Millard Post says.

  “We got to go meet Major,” Claus announces.

  “We ain’t ribbin’,” Rowan says. “Oh, we got good times in Paradise. You jest don’t know. Haven’t we, Pit?”

  “Sure, Jack. Big ole high times we got!”

  “We ought to show you around later, Yankee. Huh?”

  “I don’t mind,” Millard says, pleased now, glad they want to impress him.

  “Sho, Jack, we oughtta,” Raleigh agrees.

  “Course,” Jack Rowan says, “I still of not believin’ his story about humping white tail, but that don’t have to spoil me from showing him our sights. An’ after all, you is Major Post’s from-up-North cousin!”

  “You show me some white tail, I’ll show you what to do,” Millard Post answers curtly.

  Pit Raleigh guffaws: “Yeah, boy, we jest might do that too!”

  Rowan glances up behind him at the company clock, stretches, and pulls himself to his feet. “How ‘bout me and Pit meet you later on in the day, ‘round six o’clock, when we finish up.”

  “Sure,” Millard says.

  Claus Post beams. “My cousin sho am poplar.” “Oh, we’re doin’ it for Major mostly, ain’t we, Pit?” “Sure, Jack,” Raleigh answers. “We jest crazy ‘bout Major.”

  • • •

  Coming out of the small red brick clinic that afternoon, carrying his black physician’s bag and rushing so that he does not see where he is going, Doctor Edward James collides with the Reverend Joh Greene on the winding cement sidewalk.

  “I beg you pardon, Reverend.”

  “Hello, Doc. How are you?”

  “Fine, but very rushed. Old Mrs. Downs out on the highway’s got a stroke.”

  “Wait just a minute, Doc.” The reverend catches the small man’s coat sleeve. “Could you kindly take just a minute, Doc? I came out here especially to see you.”

  “Me, Reverend?”

  “I’ll be brief and to the point, Doc.” “Yes sir?”

  “You know, Doc. I never have made a practice of butting my nose in on matters that pertain to The Toe. You got your own minister for that, and I think he does a right good job, on the whole. Why, I have the highest respect for Reverend Fisher!”

  “Yes, Reverend?”

  “What I mean, Doc, is if I thought he could talk to you about this matter, I would not hesitate to let him. I never have made a practice of selling in another man’s territory, particularly when we’re selling — basically — pretty near the same product.”

  “Is something wrong, Reverend?”

  “Wrong, Doc? Well, I don’t know about wrong. Something’s just a bit off kilter, I’d say. I mean, I’m going to come right to the point because I know you’re in a hurry … Something is going on that isn’t right. It isn’t right in the eyes of the community, and it isn’t a very good advertisement for the Lord Jesus either in the Toe or in the rest of Paradise.”

  Doctor James looks carefully at the reverend. “I may know about it already,” he says.

  “About your daughter, Doc? You know about it?”

  “Yes, Reverend. I do.”

  “Now, Hollis Jordan may not be a very reliable sort of — ”

  Doctor James straightens himself and snaps angrily, “He certainly is not! Don’t gloss over it for me, Reverend. I quite agree that it is not right; I’m thoroughly disheartened at Barbara’s behavior.”

  Reverend Joh smiles benignly. “You know, Doc James, that’s the word I’ve been searching for since I first learned of this matter. That’s the word that most truly expresses my own reaction. I was disheartened too. Sorely disheartened.”

  “I’m searching my soul, Reverend, to find some course of action to stop this immediately, and I think this morning at breakfast I found it. It’s worth a try.”

  “Doc, I knew you’d be a man I could approach directly. We both know things like this have happened before in Paradise, but — ”

  “Not in my family, Reverend.”

  “Exactly! You’ve always lived like a decent colored man, Doc. You don’t want anything that isn’t rightly yours, and you don’t want your family to step outa bounds either. Now I know that.”

  The doctor stands silently for a moment, then says more quietly, “Thank you, Reverend, for confirming my suspicions. It makes me more sure my course of action is the right one.”

  “Not at all, Doc. I’m glad we could hash this thing out.”

  “Good day, Reverend,” Doctor James says.

  Joh smiles. “Bye, boy. And give my highest regards to Reverend Fisher.”

  • • •

  Kate Bailey rocks, darning socks, the afternoon sun streaming in on the glass shelf with its motley antique pitcher collection. Her mind wanders from the symphony on the radio back to the morning and her conversation with Storey about last night, and about Vivian Hooper. It had embarrassed her to a point of near tears at the time, to a point where Storey had to shout at her: “Well, if you want to hear my explanation, stop pounding the piano, Kate!”

  And she had wanted to say, “If I stop, I’ll cry,” but she would have cried if she had tried to say it; and so summoning up all the self-control she possessed, she had taken her hands from the keys, folded them in her lap; looked hard at them; and let him continue.

  “Now, Kate, you know there are women like that. There’s a name for them. A scientific name even. I mean I’m not just making it up. There’s a scientific name for them!”

  “But not Vivie,” she had murmured; yet she had thought to herself, Yes, maybe; remembering Thad’s eagle-eye way of watching her, his possessiveness, and his reluctance to let her too long out of his sight, a characteristic of Thad’s that Kate had always pitied Vivian for. She had thought often what a shame it was Vivie could not take up an instrument and meet afternoons with the Bigger Band, and felt vaguely uncomfortable at those times when Thad would flare up at Vivie over some little thing like that day at the Legion picnic when he criticized her for letting her skirt fly up while she was swinging; and Kate had imagined simply that it was a price Vivian Hooper paid for being so beautiful, so very beautiful that a man who had won her, even a strong man like Thad, must always be wary of losing her even in Paradise where almost nothing like that ever went on….

  Once, on television, Kate had seen a play about a beautiful woman whose husband forbade her to do any of the shopping in town, for fear she would meet another man. He forced her to spend all her time with him, and wherever she went, he went, always walking close beside her, with his hand touching some part of her, and his eyes never off her. While everyone in the community gossiped about it, and pitied the woman because of it, her husband never relented in this manner of treating his wife. Then one day, when a close friend came for tea with her, and managed while he was out of the room, to ask her how she stood it, the beautiful woman said: “Oh, I know that it does seem confining. But I stand it much easier, perhaps, than my husband. For I love him very much, and I know he loves me. But he, poor darling, is never quite sure … So it keeps us together a good deal of the time, and in the long run — I wouldn’t have it any other way.” The picture faded out on her smiling face as she added, “He’s quite charming, you know — but of course, you don’t know. How could you?”

  Kate had sat puzzling after; trying to decide whether it made any sense; and glancing over at Storey, she had said:

  “I don’t know why I think of Vivie and Thad, but it reminded me of them.”

  Storey had said, “Heck, Viv is a lot better-looking than that skinny toothpick.”

  “No, I mean — they’re sort of together all the time.”

  “Thad don’t have to worry about Vivs,” Storey had yawned. �
�A guy like Thad worry about his wife!”

  • • •

  Mulling it all over in her mind, Kate decides probably Storey was telling the truth about last night — about his sudden discovery that Vivian Hooper was one of those women — but it had pained her to hear him say:

  “… and I suppose she just couldn’t stand it any longer or something. She and Thad were having that spat and she just had to have some loving. Didn’t have to be me — could have been anyone.”

  “Then why was it you, Storey?” Kate had come close to bursting right into tears, because a thing like this had never threatened their marriage before, and because they had never once actually sat face to face and discussed the fact of sex. In bed, in the hushed darkness, they had often whispered about it; they were well aware that their sex together was good; and Kate often fancied it was more imaginative, too, than most of the couples she and Storey knew; that it was perhaps somehow unique.

  In Paradise it was not common practice among the women to confide their feelings about the intimacies of marriage; but things were dropped now and then, and Kate Bailey had gradually begun to learn that there was a surprising lack of actual passion among those of her friends to whom she was closest. Marianne Ficklin, for instance, had spoken once of how she sometimes dreaded “those fifteen minutes every third night, like clockwork, when the urge comes over Fick just as we get into bed.” She had added: “Sometimes I just wish it’d take seventeen minutes, it’d happen in the middle of the night, or we’d do it on the living room rug — anything to stop the monotony of routine. But I’m just a rebel, I guess; always have been.”

  Hearing her say that, Kate’s mind had wandered back to all the nights and days, and ways, which she and Storey had had; and she had felt suddenly gratified to realize that they were — she had heard the expression somewhere — good in bed together, not dull victims of routine, not tired old married folk.

  So it had stunned Kate to know that Storey was vulnerable to Vivian Hooper. Even though it was little more than an embrace between them, it had stunned her and disappointed her that he could be tempted by the kind of woman he said she was.

  “Because,” he had said, “I happened along, and Kate, I’m only human.” “Human?”

  “A man is a man. Even when he’s happily married.”

  “But, Storey, she wanted just anybody. Not just you. You said that yourself. That makes it seem so — common. Why you had to go ahead and — ” Her voice had trailed off.

  “Kate, you’ve always agreed she was attractive.”

  “Yes, I’ve always admitted that.”

  “Well, Kate, don’t you see? It was just one of those things. I had a lot to drink and she — well, she seduced me, damn it!”

  “All right,” she had said. “I guess it’s just silly to carry on about a little thing like that … but it seemed — maybe it still seems — like a big thing, Storey.” And she had left it at that, thinking that it had dulled some of the shine of her sense of security with Storey, even though Vivian Hooper was a vamp. Kate had always been so sure that despite her physical plainness, she was the only woman who could arouse in Storey the lust their marriage reveled in as love.

  Storey had sworn — she hadn’t asked him to — that it would never happen again. “Gawd, how could it, Kate?” he had said. “Don’t you think I feel pretty tacky for even touching her?”

  And when he had left the house after breakfast and started toward his car, she had watched him without his knowing it from the dining room window, hoping that what did happen would — that he would turn and come back, despite the fact it was payday at the mill and the time lost would make the day even more harassed than usual.

  Letting it all fade now from her consciousness, Kate Bailey rocks and darns, until eventually she is concerned half with reminding herself to send a spray to the Pirkles for the funeral, and half with concentrating on Mozart’s Jupiter.

  • • •

  “What do you study?” Major Post asks, ripping the wax paper off the sandwich, propping himself against a tree in Black Patch, gulping a bite from the bread hungrily.

  “Save that paper,” Claus tells him. “Ma say to save it,” he says, reaching for the frail wrapping Major has absently tossed to the ground. He folds it carefully.

  “Books,” Millard answers, squatting but not touching the ground; keeping his sweet-tapered pants clean.

  “Naw, I mean, what? History? English? Arithmetic?”

  “All that stuff.”

  “What’re you going to be?”

  “You going to get the stomach cramps, you gulp like that, brother,” Claus says.

  “Can’t help it, got to get back to Ficklins’. She sure has the bug today. Moving things around. Move this, move that. That’s why I was late. Got to get back.” He swallows another huge piece of the sandwich and asks Millard Post again, “You know what you’re going to be?”

  “I got contacts,” Millard answers.

  “What you mean?”

  “Big men!” Millard says. “I know plenty.” “Lawyers?”

  “Lawyers? What for? I mean big money men.” “I don’t follow you.” “Big shots. You know.” “What’s their line?”

  Claus Post says, “Miller had him white tail. Lotsa times!” Major Post glares at his brother. “You shut up!” he says. “You little clown! Where the hell you get so big you got to talk smart?”

  “I’m sorry,” Claus murmurs.

  “I have,” Millard Post says, “but that’s not news.”

  “I’ll tell you different.” Major stops eating and looks at him carefully. “You want trouble down here you keep thinking that isn’t news, boy. Hear?”

  Millard turns his eyes from his cousin and shrugs.

  “I mean it!” Major Post says.

  “Okay! Okay! Don’t blow your top!”

  “I don’t care how you talk up North, you just put on the brake pedal down here.”

  “I know. I been all through it.” “All through what?”

  “Traveling. I know.” Millard claps his hands together and cracks his knuckles. “Came down in a goddam DC-Six.” “Yeah?” “You ever fly?” “Naw.”

  “Big deal!” Millard shrugs. “Once you get off the ground it’s not like anything. Nowhere. Everybody always talking about what a big deal it is to fly. Haw.”

  Major continues to eat, watching his cousin thoughtfully, listening to him talk. Millard talks in an idle, compulsive way, finding it difficult to think of things to say to this big Negro with the somber eyes and great, strong build, feeling himself scrutinized by him and peeved, even resentful of the quick way Major Post had reprimanded him for talking about white women. Who the hell was he Major of; what the hell proof did he want? It was true — nearly true — that Millard had had a white girl in a gang line-up once, some little spic had spread for the Panthers, but Millard had not been able to do anything, and the other boys had pulled him off her. But it was nearly true; if he’d wanted it, he could have had it. And Major Post made out like he was just so much blow; well fug him, with his: What do you study? Why the hell didn’t Major Post ask him where he got his sweet clothes? Bet Major never saw them sweeter, but he doesn’t mention them; just a lot of polite crap about whadda you study. Didn’t even notice the jacket: oh, noticed it all right. Just didn’t say.

  What’re you going to be when you grow up? Pansy birthday-party talk for four-year-olds.

  Put on the brakes. Afraid I’ll show you up, boy? “The Panthers are the toughest gang up in the barrio,” Millard continues, “they can beat any — ” “What’s that mean, barrio?”

  “It’s a region. A section. I don’t know what the word means. It’s spic.”

  “Oh.” Major Post wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and stretches.

  “We have wars and everything. Rumbles.”

  “Yeah?” Major looks at him coolly.

  “People get killed. Man, like, they’re real wars!”

  “Yeah?” Claus Post says, his eyes s
aucer-wide. But Major Post acts like he doesn’t hear; he pulls a weed from the lawn and sticks it in his teeth.

  “I got to get back,” he says. “Have to hear about your wars some other time, Cousin Millard,” he says sort of sarcastically. Millard takes a burn at it — cocky square! What the hell’s he know about wars with a fuggin Major for a name; why the hell can’t he act like a cousin; show a little goddam interest; well, fug him and his mask for a face.

  Major Post gets up. “Wanna remember something, Cousin,” he says, standing with his hands slipped into his rear pockets. “Don’t know much about wars down here. Don’t know much about big men, ‘cept big in size, see. That kinda big man totes easier than the rest. That’s a big man down here. It’s sorta different.”

  Major and Millard eye one another momentarily; Millard thinking he’d like to show this guy, like to show him; Major thinking he should have let him blow his steam off, comes all the hell the way down for nothing. Should have let him strut, dumb kid’s probably scared, strange place, kin carrying on like he’s the Fuller Brush man staying overnight or something. Ought to do more for your own kin, but Lawd it don’t work out that way, with the chores and the aches and the worlds apart kin from up North is. Lookit his clothes; dressed up like a band-box, playing tough and all. Should have given him more room to roll in, but we can study that tonight. Tonight he can play the colonel. What the hell — all the way from up North.

  • • •

  Major’s face relaxes suddenly into a grin. He slaps Millard on the back. “Well, see you later,” he says. He smiles, meaning well. “Don’t get the burying clothes dirty.” Must have bought them special for the funeral.

  “These are just everyday,” Millard answers.

  “Yeah?” Major patronizes him. “If you say so. Look right peart.”

  And Millard senses that he is being patronized, senses it and resents it; how come that big boy thinks he’s so special? What’s the matter with everyone around here? Cripes, it’s like another world. Man, it’s like Mars.

  22

  FROM inside the large, two-storied, white-colonnaded house, Marianne Ficklin watches Major Post as he comes up the front lawn from burning the trash, lugging the empty, dusty big aluminum can. As she watches him, she removes her black cotton gloves and black-veiled hat in an abstract fashion, setting them on the round redwood lamp table by her suede pocket-book, and on top the note from Fick announcing that he will be at a board of trustees meeting probably until after eight.