The Blue Guitar
Page 3
Then: “Here,” she said. She took hold of his arm. “It’s right over here.”
They walked together down the beach to where the towel was. Miss Smith picked it up, handed it to the young man.
He started to dry his face slowly, then his chest and arms. Miss Smith watched him.
Finally the young man said, “I’m afraid I didn’t know it was you.”
“That’s all right,” Miss Smith said.
“Sygen is usually waiting for me when I come out,” he said. He continued to dry himself as he spoke. “Lots of times, I keep track of just where I am out there.” He smiled with a shy kind of pride that showed mostly around the edges of his eyes. “Then when I come back, I can find the towel myself.”
“Aren’t you cold?” Miss Smith asked him.
He smiled, the shyness gone now, and said, “Not when I’m swimming. I only feel the cold when I’m out of the water.”
Miss Smith saw Sygen running from the house toward where they were.
“My name is Jean,” the young man said.
Miss Smith took hold of his hand and said, “I’m Miss Smith.” Then quickly she added, “She’s coming now. You won’t need me.” And she walked off along the beach, away from the house, walking into the wind that was blowing up cold from the south.
five
Pojo, as always, sat on the wet sand and talked evenly, with some edge of laughter, of good humor in his gruff voice, to the gulls who strutted busily back and forth across the beach.
“Damn bastard birds,” he was saying with a lopsided grin, mouthing the words heavily. “Sssssssssssssss . . .” He made this sound as if to amuse children, sucked his teeth and went on with, “You damn . . . Jesus oh you bastard birds, I ain’t never seen your like, I ain’t. You never gonna teach old Pojo how to fly now, will ya? Huh? Don’t I feed . . . give . . . don’t I feed you when I got enough for both of us, huh? Don’t I? Jesus!” He wailed seriously, almost in anger for an answer, his chest heaving with the effort mere breathing always was with him. But the birds made no answer, pebble eyes stiff in staring at vague shapes of sea and sky and barren land. He was not there to them. They paraded in pomp, strutting one way and the next like minor officials in tight new uniforms.
“Course I do, Jesus, damn you!” Pojo shouted to answer his own question. He moaned. He watched a thin cloud twist apart. His toes wriggled sand loose in his brogans. “And all . . . all I ask . . . all I ask, Jesus is you damn fucko bastard birds . . . is you teach old Pojo to fly huh Jesus!” He sniggered in a hoarse voice, rocking back and forth in the sand, deeply enjoying the mad jest he was forever in the process of making.
“Oh now Jesus Christ hey wouldn’t old Pojo fly, wouldn’t he? What fine places . . . places there’d be to fly to! What fine places! Woooooeeeeee . . .” that turned into moaning, but not in pain, in a kind of dismembered joy, the moaning loud enough to startle at least a dozen of the birds into the air and he laughed out of the sniggering at their fear, rocking on his heels, slapping his chunky thighs with both palms.
When he was done laughing, he dug into the paper bag again, took out the bit of beef that was left. He tore off a small corner in his teeth, lifted it into the air, waving it. “Here now . . . look . . . hey Jesus look at what old Pojo got for you, damn bastard birds, huh. Hey!” And he threw the piece of meat off to one side. The birds swooped down screeching in a wild flutter of gray-and-white wings, battling savagely over the meat, causing Pojo to laugh even as he started to bite off a piece for himself.
“That’s it now,” Pojo shouted to the birds, his mouth full of meat. “Sure you bastards spill a little . . . blood for your eats, huh? That’s what old Pojo likes to see.”
He stuffed what was left of the beef in his mouth, chewed powerfully. Swallowing, he turned the paper bag over, shaking it with a great angry violence. But it was empty, and when he saw this he grunted displeasure, said, “Oh dear now,” so odd-sounding in his gruff blunted voice, like something said out of an image of him far removed from what he now was: one man seen like a history a hundred times through a hall of mirrors, each image being what he has been or is or could be or even could never be: and the words “Oh dear now” came more from the could never be than from any of the ninety-nine others in the frigid glass.
He said, “Oh dear now,” and then spit off to one side, then cleared his throat, spit again, a yellow tight glob of phlegm this time and he said, “Ah-ha! That’s better!” Nodding.
He sat there in the wet sand a long time, looking out of opaque eyes to the sea. Each time a new wave broke into soft splashing sounds, his tiny eyes flinched and he grinned.
When he saw the lady coming toward him, perhaps sixty or seventy yards away, he laughed, sniggered quietly, scratched hard at his groin with both hands, and said, “Oh my now yes.”
But he did not wait for her. He got to his feet with groaning effort and ran off as quickly as he could, his huge body wobbling like a lustful duck on short legs, muttering to himself as he ran, turning only once to look back at her, and again exclaiming, “Oh my now yes!”
six
“I told you I thought she was you,” Jean said to his sister as they lay beside each other on the sand. He had put on a pair of white cotton trousers, a gray sweatshirt.
Sygen laughed when he said this, but the green gazing of her eyes upon him was no part of the laughter; confusion masked fear in the eyes, turning the green a deeper dull color as her face caught reflections of heavy clouds overhead. “Oh did you now?” she asked him with playful sarcasm.
He said, “Come here.”
She said, “No,” as his hand reached for her. “No . . .” She rolled away, laughingly. He came at her. She jumped quickly to her bare feet, her shoes half buried in sand.
“Come here.”
She only laughed, said nothing.
He reached again and when his hand fell on sand, then the side of a shoe, he got up. He ran toward the laughter. “I’ll fix you.”
She said, “Never.” And again the laughter broke from her, wild, like more than laughter, some racing lust of old joy and a new vague fear.
He ran a dozen feet toward her. She dodged easily, but always stayed just barely beyond his reach, never moving to where it would be impossible for him to find her.
“Sygen . . .” He paused. He searched from side to side with eyes that had not even memory of sight within their depths.
“I don’t want you to catch me now, and you won’t,” she said.
He lunged at the voice and she let him reach her. She made no move and the force of his coming at her with such urgency tumbled them both over onto the sand, laughing as if everything but laughter had been forgotten. But then the laughing stopped. He moved again to kiss her. Lightly she said, “I don’t want you to kiss me. Not now.” She turned her mouth from his so he found only the side of her face. She said, “Please, not now.”
Jean did not speak. He always knew when she was playing games with him. Usually he went right along with these games, but now he did not feel like playing, and his silence told her this even though she alone, at this point, knew she was not playing.
Then: “Tell me,” she said, “does she kiss as well as I do?”
Jean was silent. His fingers moved about slowly in the sand with the knowing ease of creatures who live their life there.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t have come at all,” Sygen said finally.
“She has a strange voice,” Jean said.
Sygen lifted herself up onto one elbow so she could look down into her brother’s face. She traced a light line across his forehead with tips of her fingers barely touching, then down the side of his face. She was thinking, You have two lines there . . . when he reached up, took hold of her hand.
“She was like some other world,” he said.
She turned slowly from him, as if against her own true will, looked out at the sea, saw gulls circle slowly beneath a gray cloud that seemed low enough to touch if one were just a little taller.
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Then Jean tightened his grip on his sister’s arm and said, “I’ve never been afraid before. I mean if you weren’t here . . .”
“I’m sorry,” she said, without looking at him. And the very pain and fear she felt thickened desire in her, drew it up out of a depth of herself she had never known, like suddenly being able to see in absolute darkness.
“Come here,” he said softly.
“No . . .”
“Sygen . . .”
“I told Mother I’d help her with the kitchen this morning.”
“Not now.”
“I’m going in.” She turned to him and saw such a troubled look on his face her heart ached her like an old wound that had been forgotten, and she too was afraid. “I don’t want you to kiss me now,” she said. But an instant later she said, “Jean, kiss me.” And after he did, she had to laugh and say, “I’m very silly.” And then, raising herself, she took her brother’s face between her palms, holding it that way as she pressed her mouth gently to his and let her body down slowly upon him until she could feel both their lives in her flesh.
But even then the fear was not gone, and what was worst of all, and almost a part of the laughter itself, was that she was not even sure what it was she feared.
seven
The former prisoner stood with his face to the wind and smiled as if he himself had told the wind to blow. His name was Thomas Reeves, but he had been called Tico since he had been a small boy not much past five years of age. He had told his mother on an April evening of an old Indian man he had met one day on the road. The Indian man had been very tall, so tall, in fact, that to the small boy looking straight up at him, he had seemed as tall as any tree and he had told this to his mother too so that she smiled and stroked his head and whispered for him to go to sleep now, there would be time enough in the morning for him to tell her whatever he had to say. But he himself, even that small, was not sure about what time the morning would have, knowing only that he did have to tell what had occurred to his mother now. He told her the Indian man had given him a gold bird and the bird’s name was Tico. The bird, of course, was not gold (though the mother would never tell him this), merely a trinket one can buy in the five-and-ten. But the boy had treasured it three long years, until he was just past eight. It was a mysterious bird, one that could be found on no tree, waiting upon no stone; yet it was, in the very depths of its own peculiar mystery, more of a bird than any bird the boy had ever seen. It had the appearance of a creature whose powers are limitless and made of the magic of all that can never be understood.
But he lost the bird one day in a stream where he had gone swimming, diving with great child’s laughter after catfish who were swifter than time itself. He had cried so that night in bed, his mother had told him his golden bird did not have to be really dead. She told him how he himself had been named after his grandfather and in that way, his grandfather was not really dead, men living on always like that. So now she would call him Tico and in that way his golden bird would not have to be dead. He had stopped crying and had thrown both arms around his mother’s neck with that complete abandonment to love which only children can ever know; and from that night, his name was Tico.
He was twenty-nine years old now as he stood on the beach tasting the salt air the way a man might taste cold water when he has been thirsty a long time. His eyes smiled nervously and caught the color of the sea.
He had come a long way to this place, having been dead fifteen years, given his life back again with contempt and words to carry with him like a huge stone they tried to tie fast to his neck.
“You do what you did again, boy,” they said to him, “and your neck’ll snap like a chicken bone. You mind God’s way, boy, or your guts’ll be fed up to the crows.”
They spoke justly out of their gutted mouths because their business was justice the way the business of another man is to sell eggs or to shovel the warm manure of horses into barrels that men with fields will buy to feed their crops.
And Tico Reeves, when he heard them always using God’s name like a fat thumb they had to place upon the scale of their own opinions to give the proper weight to whatever action had to follow, thought that God would be no more really than the sum of all that which these belly-mouthed, loud-preaching, cloth-hearted men themselves could never be.
He had come once fifteen years ago, when he himself was turning onto fifteen, to a place that was to be marked only with doom for him. He was big then, the size he was now, with almost the same look to his face and a man’s blood scorching his flesh most every hour of any day. He had saved seven dollars and had walked forty-six miles from the farm run by him, his mother, and three brothers, to reach New Orleans and find a woman for himself there, because that’s where the men, those who had known women, told him to go.
But he did not reach New Orleans. Walking the bleak tar road that had no curve and would not pass in under any tree for shade in the terrific August sun, he found a woman long before he reached that city.
She was walking slowly toward him, wearing a white loose dress and a brown straw hat square on her head, a foolish flat crazy hat covered with decrepit cloth flowers and dust. The sun hit sharply into his eyes, so he squinted to see her, and in the course of a single minute’s blindness he invented at least six faces for her. But none was the face that belonged to her. He saw that face when they were no more than a dozen feet from each other. It was a face that looked as if it had been found in an attic. It was a face that could once have been at least attractive, but now, with all color drained out of it, with hardly any mouth, seemed indecent, like a mask worn by someone posing for obscene photographs.
She stopped, raised one hand slowly to touch the corner of her mouth as if she feared it had finally started to fall apart and had to be held together, being the loose gesture of an idiot. But she was not this. She said, “You look like you been walkin’ a far distance, young man.”
He nodded and then said, “I’m on my way to New Orleans, ma’am.”
She didn’t answer for a long time. She stood and stared at him. He felt uncomfortable, but he did not move. He was not accustomed to strangers.
Finally she said, “Come here a minute, please.”
He walked to where she was. He could feel the heat of the tar road through his shoes. When he was close to her he could see her bleak eyes were without color; they looked to be made of old glass. And behind her thin unpainted lips, he would have sworn, there was only a huge cavity.
He said, “I guess I’d better be on my way.”
But she said, “No . . . please.” And she reached out to touch his bare arm where the rolled-up sleeve ended. “Don’t go just yet,” she said. “It’s very early. Why, it surely can’t be past noon.”
“I figure I can get there before dark,” he said. “I don’t want to be sleeping another night out.”
Then, without another word, she pressed her body in that loose white dress against him. He felt her breasts. They were much larger than he had imagined, the dress hanging on her the way it did. Whatever life there was in her was in her breasts. He could feel this.
She said, “I was hoping I’d meet a nice young man like you on the road. That’s just why I came walking.” Her hands reached up, touched his face, and then he felt her mouth like two spread fingers flat on his mouth. He felt his body go to her against any will he might have exerted to stop it (without even thinking until much later how he might have saved the seven dollars), against what his eyes could see of her. His body went to her like a creature apart from him, a wild beast he had carried with him, nameless and secret and having waited maybe even more than his fifteen years for only this moment.
What followed never became clear in his mind. She began to scream, and the scream itself seemed to have been what started to blur his entire memory of the incident. She screamed in a high, shaking, dead voice and then flapped her arms in the heavy air like a crippled bird trying to fly off the earth. He stepped back, raising his own hands as
if to demonstrate only to himself that he had not tried to touch her, the two of them seeming to be caught in the most difficult step of a lunatic ballet. But she continued to scream. The hat fell over to one side of her head. He said, “Be still.” But that only made her scream louder, and she lifted the loose long skirt almost past her knees and ran with the hopping toy steps of a doll, looking so crazy he nearly broke out laughing.
He remembered then the men coming in from the red clay road that led off to one side, not more than fifty yards from where he stood. He remembered them all looking alike as she went running to them, screaming and pointing back at him. As they came closer, he could see they were wearing black trousers soiled with mud and oil. Their faces were whiskey-red and weary and tinted with only vague anger first. One had a wrench. He wore no shirt. His huge chest was covered with red hair and sweat. And when he came at Tico Reeves through the woman’s loose screaming, he brought the wrench down, striking the side of the boy’s head, stunning him. And that was when Tico Reeves pulled the knife and lunged blindly at the man through the red veil of his own blood.
The man did not die. They told him this in the fly-filled courtroom with the black fans overhead turning as slowly as damnation itself. They told him he had tried to rape the wife of the town undertaker, Warden Haas. Then he had tried to kill Kep Barlow.
He was sentenced to serve at hard labor for fifteen years and told by a judge whose vein-covered face looked raw that he was lucky not to have been lynched for what he’d done.
As soon as he was released he had decided, without even having to think about it before, to hitchhike north; there was no choice to be made, only this one direction in the same way there is no compass to mark those destined roads we walk in dreams. He gave himself a reason though, walking a good part of the distance before the reason came to him: he wanted no part of the land where he had been born, raised, had gone seeking a woman, and had encountered the loose white skirt of lunacy instead. There it was all prison land to him, a savage place where the beasts had died and men were imitating their cries and howls and burying their hungers in the kind of fiercely haunted conscience that makes fires burn and ropes dance in the dangling still air. It was swamp and red clay and water moccasins, flies, mosquitoes big as cigars, and morning mist that soaked through to the inside of a man’s bones. He wanted to be thoroughly rid of all he had ever been, the way a snake sheds skins perhaps in the hope each time of becoming some other kind of creature. All this was what he told himself after he had traveled a good part of the way he had to go.