by M. J. Bosse
From his pants pocket he displayed the black corner of a tiny coil of film.
“God,” I said.
Then Virgil gave me a slight tap on the knee. I followed his gaze and had a quick glimpse of Mr. Carrigan slouching past the window. Virgil flung down a couple of dollars and called to Jimmy, “Thanks!”
We almost ran into Mr. Carrigan at the doorway. His mouth dropped open when he saw us. “Hello there, Mr. Carrigan!” I said brightly, and we slipped past him into the street.
*
The rain had stopped. From the glistening cement lifted the sweet cool smell of rain, along with the faint odor of garbage and the rather heady aroma of dog shit. There was a single tree planted on the sidewalk, and in the aftermath of rain the leaves looked filmy, almost like lace. I linked arms with Virgil and we smiled at each other, both slightly giddy from the beer and our success at the Five Star. Maybe tomorrow we would learn about the racial incident at Naha and the secret meeting with the Russians. At least, we had zigzagged our way to the end of this crazy road, and no matter where it led, if actually it led anywhere, we had shared something. I mean, more was linked than our arms.
I began humming to the squeak of Virgil’s wet sneakers. Squeak squeak squeak with each step he took. Somehow the childlike sound represented for me the hidden side of my Virgil, the enthusiasm that Harlem and white oppression and Vietnam had not crushed out of him, the boyishness that enabled him to groove with a silly girl like me, the zest for life that now and then suddenly broke into the open, exploding through the practical, cautious man he otherwise was. Squeak squeak squeak on the glistening street. Ahead of us a cat appeared, slipping out from under a stoop, and for a moment, before she dived under a parked car, she preened and strutted, showing off for some imaginary tom, her tail, like, plumed and blossoming, sprung majestically over her arched back.
“Me,” I said.
Virgil enveloped me suddenly in his arms and gave me a resounding kiss. “Hallelujah!” he shouted, and the way he kicked up his heels—I really meant it, kicked up his heels—was the way they do it in those musical comedies where everything turns out romantically for the best, and if all this sounds corny and sentimental, it was, but what the hell.
Back in the apartment, I went straight for the kitchen, where I first fed the turtles and then started to do to a can of baked beans and a half dozen franks the thing I call cooking. I heard the phone ring in the other room. I couldn’t hear what Virgil was saying because of the sizzling of meat in the pan. Finally I took the rather blackened franks and beans on plates to the table. And there was Virgil, head cradled in his hands, sitting bent over in his armchair.
“Virgil,” I said. Slowly he brought his hands down. “Virgil,” I said again.
“Martin called,” he said in a voice I could hardly hear.
“What’s happened?” I asked. “Virgil?”
“He remembers where he saw the book on Perry.” Virgil got up and came over to the table, shuffling as if he were bone-tired. “We should have guessed,” he said. “At Tai Chi,” he said.
I looked down at the plate of smoking food. Of course, I thought. Henry.
“Martin remembers Henry carrying two or three books on Perry. I see it doesn’t surprise you.”
“No, but I don’t know why.” Of course it was Henry, I was thinking; the idea of Henry had recently flashed through my mind in another context—but which applied here.
“Judy?”
“I’m trying to remember something. When you say Henry had books on Perry it makes me think of something, but I’m not sure what.”
Silently we began to eat. I was still trying to remember something. Virgil looked exhausted; he picked at the beans unseeingly.
“If Henry had books on Perry, what does it really mean?” I asked finally.
“It means he might have the manuscript.”
“But why?”
“Why else would he be studying Perry? Obviously he’s trying to judge the value of the manuscript as a historical document. Judy,” he said, “what’s bothering you?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not surprised about Henry. It’s as if I had already known.” We continued to eat in silence. I guess nothing can curb my appetite, because I finished everything on my plate; Virgil picked blindly at a few beans.
And then I remembered.
Author type. Scholarly bag. I was remembering my rap with the Feeler about his being paid by an author type for his Bostonian name.
“Black cat,” I said. “Black cat,” I repeated, understanding now that I had somehow put Henry and the black cat together in my mind. I explained to Virgil about the Feeler and his spaced-out talk of someone paying to use his Bostonian name.
Virgil listened intently. Then he said simply, “Go to the Club tonight.”
“But it’s my night off.”
“Go to the Club tonight. Talk to him again.”
“Believe me, that won’t be easy. The Feeler’s absolutely freaked out these days.”
“Ask him who the author type was.” Then Virgil looked at the franks and beans and really began to eat. Now and then, fork halfway to his mouth, Virgil paused and muttered, “Yes, yes.” When he had finished, he helped me clear the table. “Let’s assume Henry has the manuscript,” Virgil said as we moved back and forth between kitchen and table, bearing plates, ketchup, and those hot peppers which go on everything he eats except ice cream.
“Okay, we assume it,” I said.
“Henry must justify having it. He can’t say he got the manuscript in Japan, the way Don did. Henry’s never been out of the country.”
“But, like, when you told me about Boswell and those letters, how they were found in a butcher shop and stable and a croquet box—”
“Exactly. The manuscript’s found in an attic and in this case quite logically a Boston attic. That would be a way out for Henry: to obtain it from someone who found it there.”
“So he had to choose someone who came from Boston. Someone who had a Boston attic. I understand that, but why of all people the Feeler?”
“Well, he’s white. Henry couldn’t get a brother from a Boston ghetto to say, ‘Look what I found in my attic.’”
“But the Feeler’s so out of it now. Why didn’t Henry look for a student who would swear to the discovery?”
“A student asks questions. And anyway, all Henry needs from the Feeler is a signature.”
“Would Henry be this cautious and all?”
“Henry would. You have no idea of the cunning that Harlem breeds in a man.”
“So he’d do all this jiving to place the manuscript.’
“Ideally the choice would be someone non compos mentis, who would ask no questions or care one way or another.”
“The Feeler, snorting Meth and everything.”
“And from a good Bostonian family. Oh, the Feeler is quite perfect.”
I recalled Henry striding into Eros with the beautiful chick for about five nights in a row. I had seen him rapping with the Feeler. Then he had stopped coming to the Club.
“We are assuming, of course, the black cat really is Henry,” Virgil mused, slipping dirty plates into the dish-water I had drawn in the sink. “Go to the Club tonight,” he said.
*
I did. I homed right in on the Feeler, who was sitting in the band room, legs propped up on the dressing table. He was idly strumming the guitar, which he could play I guess as well as anybody, including Eric Clapton.
“Do you dig me at all?” I said to the Feeler, putting my hand on his arm.
“Dig you, baby? You’re a groove,” he said.
I took the chair next to him. “Then tell me, like, very straight.”
“What?”
“Like, all about the black cat.”
The Feeler stared at me from woozy blue eyes. “What cat?” And he strummed a great chord.
“You know, the one who paid for your Bostonian name.”
The Feeler strummed, his eyes fixed like pretty ma
rbles in his face. I could tell that he didn’t know what I was rapping to him. He was really spaced out.
“Come down, will you?” I persisted, and for a fleeting moment he gazed in my direction. “Tell me about the black cat who paid for your name. You know,”—I searched my memory for the words he had used—“the author type, the scholarly bag.”
The Feeler grinned and fingered off a beautiful chord. “Oh, sure, you mean that cat. That spade cat.”
I said, “Yes, that spade cat,” and waited, but the Feeler just kept picking the strings of his guitar. He wasn’t hanging together at all.
“The spade cat,” I repeated.
“Oh, sure.” For a moment he stopped playing. “Well, he says—” And stopped.
“Yes? The spade cat says?”
“He says to me, ‘Baby, how about a favor?’ ‘Lay it on me,’ I tell him. He—he says—”
“Yes, he says—”
“‘I got this thing,’ he says, ‘I got to authenticate.’ Educated cat, see.”
“He’s got this thing to authenticate.”
“So I says, ‘Dig it, what’s my route?’ He says, ‘Sign this paper, man, saying I got this thing from your, like, attic.’” The Feeler sort of giggled at this recollection.
“From your attic,” I repeated.
“Yeah, like it was, you know, in the family. Big Boston family, that’s me baby. No shit. My family’s beautiful in Boston. He says he’ll do me a good turn, but I says, ‘Don’t Tom me, man. I’ll do it for kicks. Just get me a pen and I’ll groove.’”
“And?”
“And I did.”
“You signed a paper?”
“Dig.”
“And this paper says you found some kind of—was it a document? A manuscript?”
“Yeah, like, you know—” he said vaguely, and he strummed.
“You found it in your family’s attic?”
“Digit.”
“And this spade cat author type could use it?”
“Digit.”
“And you, like, saw this manuscript?”
“You kidding?” He strummed louder, which meant I had used up all of his attention span.
But I had a parting question. “Feeler, baby, was this cat o the great big guy who came in here a lot with a fantastic-looking spade chick?”
The Feeler snapped his fingers and called out excitedly, “That’s him, the one with the fantastic-looking spade chick!”
So it really was Henry.
*
I called Virgil and told him. There was a long pause. Then Virgil asked if I wanted him to come to the Club. I told him Linda was there and I’d go home with her. The thing was, I didn’t want him within a mile of Eros, because passing from the band room to the public phone booth, I had glanced into the Club, which was filling with customers, and there in a corner sat Ray Hack.
After my call to Virgil, I walked right out and over to Hack’s table. I didn’t wait for him to ask. I sat down. He grinned. He really could grin, only it didn’t come across pleasantly to me. His grin was what a facial tic is in someone else: I mean, a sign of nervousness, a signal of some kind of inner turmoil.
“How goes it?” he asked.
I sat there wondering what to do now that I had come to his table. Why had I confronted him again? I guess that was obvious enough—I wanted to learn how close he was to finding Virgil. Not knowing what to do, I resorted to an old ploy: complaint. “I’m on a real bummer tonight,” I told him.
“Yeah? Why?”
“Oh, I guess it’s everything you see on TV and read about. Riots, crime, and all. And the war.” His grin didn’t change, so I added, “Were you in the war?”
“I look like I was?”
“I just wondered. Like, I read in the paper today some of our soldiers threw an old man in a well and tossed a grenade in on top of him.”
“Yeah?” His grin didn’t change.
“So I think it’s inhuman.”
“What’s human about the slants?”
“The slants?”
“The Vietnamese, the gooks. What’s so human about them going around planting mines, blowing your guts out?”
“You were a soldier.”
It was one of the only times I saw Ray Hack frown.
“You civilians,” he said, his mouth working nervously, “you think Nam’s some kind of game with rules, but what it is, it’s fuck them before they fuck you, and that’s it.” He drew a deep breath and said in a rising voice, “And you people call us murderers when what we’re doing out there, we’re saving your skins.” Abruptly, as if he had been caught at something, Ray Hack stopped talking. I wanted to keep him on the subject of murder, even though I had no authorization from Smith to do it and even though it might be a dangerous thing. I wanted to hear him justify murder. I wanted to look him in the eye and say, “Okay, Mr. Hack, let it all hang out.” But I had been with Virgil long enough to understand the uses of patience. I bit my lip and sat back quietly until Hack himself began the conversation again.
“You’re a strange chick.”
“Am I?” I said with a coy smile I had to grit my teeth to make.
“Why won’t you go out with me?”
“Did I say I wouldn’t?”
“You haven’t said you would. You’re always busy.”
“I don’t know you very well yet.”
“Come on, a chick like you?” He leaned forward and touched my hand. “Look, we understand each other. I like to ball, you like to ball, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“Okay then. What’s holding you back?”
“I told you, I don’t know you very well, Any girl in this weird city knows better than to take any invitation that comes along. I don’t want to end up in the East River.”
“You think I’m that kind of guy?”
“Of course not, only I want to know you better.”
Hack glumly looked down at his hands, unable to talk his way out of my logic. But then he said, “If another guy wasn’t in the picture, you’d go out with me.”
“Another guy?” I laughed. “Maybe three or four.”
“Don’t give me that.”
“I won’t give you anything.”
“Always got an answer, haven’t you?” he said irritably; but I had managed him, I thought, just right.
“Look,” I said. “A few more nights, a little more rapping, and then we’ll see.” I added suggestively, “You’ll like me.”
“But not tonight?”
“I told you.”
“You living with somebody?”
“It’s none of your business, but no. At least, not with a man.”
“Come on, a chick like you?”
“Ray, you’ll turn me off with talk like that.”
“Okay, okay, no harm done.” He appeared to believe me, and he acted like a guy really trying to make it with a girl. But something in his small, searching, intelligent eyes made me uncertain of Ray Hack. He was giving me the creeps, sitting there grinning, so I left him before my feelings began to show. I went into the band room and stayed there until closing time. Now and then I peeked out to see if Hack was still there. About a half hour before closing, I looked and he was gone.
Sally had a date, so I left the club alone, and I walked rapidly down the street toward the subway. At the corner I glanced around and saw someone almost a block away. I couldn’t see well in the semidarkness, but the man looked stocky, and I was pretty sure it was Ray Hack. I started off walking quickly but not actually running, and I kept in the center of the sidewalk as if I intended walking a long way. But when a cab came along, I ran to the curb and flagged it. Inside the cab, I turned and looked down the block, but the stocky figure was nowhere in sight. If ever I needed a joint I needed one at that moment, and I kicked myself for having left the oregano jar at Virgil’s place.
Back at Linda’s I poured myself a glass of red wine and lay half the night, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. I was feeling so scared
and lonely that I wouldn’t have minded at all if Linda had been home, instead of at her boyfriend’s, coming and screaming behind a thin curtain.
*
Next day when I got to the library with the bartender’s microfilm, who should I see lounging on the front steps but Roger Wales, a tall, tan, light-haired History of Economics major. He was wearing long sideburns, a love medallion, faded jeans, sandals, and a Union jacket. Whenever Roger saw me, his face assumed an amused expression. It was as if he were trying to tell me something. He always asked me was I “still seeing that guy?” Roger would have died if anyone ever called him a racist, and I honestly don’t think he knew that he was one. But when he asked me was I still seeing that guy, what he was really asking me was if I still had my rebellion thing going.
I understood Roger Wales. I am sure he thought he understood me. And I bet that he had some kind of fantasy, stowed deep in his subconscious, in which finally we’d both chuck all the jive and come together the way we should. I guess we were comfortable clichés to each other. I could gaze up at his smooth tan face and know what Roger would look like in twenty years, practically how much weight he would put on. I could predict his political opinions, almost draw the plans of the house he would be living in—depending, of course, on exactly how much he inherited. And he could predict with similar ease the sort of woman I would grow into—assuming I remained the girl from Omaha.
Well, I was already no longer the girl from Omaha, only he didn’t dig that fact. I had changed. Ever since meeting Virgil, I’d had this wild and wonderful feeling of being able to change: Whatever I am today, I can change tomorrow. That was the miracle of life I had learned from Virgil, and for that alone I would have loved him.
“Still seeing that guy?” Roger asked, smiling down at me. He was handsome, I’ll say that for him. He would look good coming naked toward a girl waiting for him in bed, I’ll admit it.
I said, “‘That guy’ is Virgil Jefferson.”
“Sure.” He snapped his fingers in faked recall. “He’s in grad school, isn’t he?”
“He’s writing his dissertation, and you know it. And yes, I’m still seeing him, okay?” I brushed past Roger Wales, racist in love beads, and entered the dark, cool interior of the library.