The Salt Eaters

by Toni Cade Bambara

  It was the big fella with the alligator horn case, he figured. Seemed to be the leader. Had a loused-up mouth. Looked like some prison dentist had got hold of him. Fred knew about that. A half-ass examination with what felt like a pickax in the mouth, then the grabbing up of pliers. Not even a glance at the mixing plates, not a thought to the tubes of filling stuff. Just cold pliers coming at you to let you know your teeth like you are beyond salvation. He wondered if the big fella’s ruined smile ruined the lip too and approaching the horn again was like coming back to a woman you hadn’t held in four long years. Wondered if you had to court the horn, shy and clumsy all over again, fearing that what was missing was more than teeth, was something so deep down and necessary there’d be no getting back to how things had been in the sweet time. He wondered if the big fella with the bad mouth had had better luck with his comeback than he had had with Wanda. Least he had a gig. But what did he, Fred Holt, hard worker for nearly forty years, have? But he didn’t want to think about that or feel any kind of anything for the big fella. He had a gig, fine, and that was that.

  It was hot and the gears were slipping. Maybe the cotter pin was getting chewed up in the axle. Some new young jerk in the yard had changed the wheel, no telling what he was on, goofy and full of noise. The wheel could come off. Fine. Behind schedule stopping for them musicians and trying to find change. Then stopping again to try to quiet down them damn-fool white folks getting a head start on their convention blast or whatever it was they were going to Claybourne for. And the drunken couple he’d threatened twice, actually pulling over to the shoulders, to put off the bus. Though he’d welcomed a chance to stop, get out, splash his face with the remains of his ice tea. But he’d never make it to the terminal by three. It was nearly ten of as it was. And any minute the bus might do who-knew-what. So he’d probably have to toss a coin, a nap or some dinner, cause there was that charter run to make with the doctors at that infirmary place and he sure needed the dough.

  They were pitching beer cans out the windows, the loudmouths in the stupid hats. But damn if he was going to point to the sign overhead, read the regulations, recite the law. If he got flagged down, he’d just tell the cop to take them in, haul them all in for his money. Getting so people didn’t know how to act anymore. They talked in the movies like they were at home with the TV where any ole off-the-wall shit was okay. But at least the beer drinkers had gotten the hymn singers to shut up, so that was something in their favor. Though when the Jesus types had gotten on at the Farmer’s Market in their rummage-sale clothes, with their battered suitcases and juiceless faces, carrying their Bibles and their hymn books, he had hoped their presence would put a halt to the risqué jokes and the foul-mouth gab of the conventioneers. That was the least they could do, bringing all that gloom onto the bus. That was what white folks like that were supposed to do, he figured, check other white folks in their madness stead of leaving it to black folks, who had enough to do given all the crazy niggers and white folks too they had to deal with day in and day out. But looked like their off-key singing and no-spunk praying or just plain being there only egged the characters in the hats on, slinging naked-lady magazines around the bus and standing up in the seats to make underarm farts. White folks. But at least things were pretty quiet now, like the two camps of whiteys were holding each other down. Stabilized. There was a good puzzle word. He formed the letters, blocked them neatly in the boxes, then gave himself over to the black-and-white patterns in his mind.

  “J.D.?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “What say we lay over in this hick town awhile—the one we going to—and get somebody to drive the car up. We ain’t booked nowhere else yet.”

  “Suits me.”

  “Say, J.D.?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “What name were you born with, all kidding aside?”

  “Ask yo mama.”

  Fred Holt glanced at the big fella in the mirror. He was grinning, and a messed-up grin it was. Whatever that gig paid, he oughta use it to get his mouth fixed up, Fred was thinking. The grin was sure private and just as well, enough to scare little children. Whatever his name was, it was clear that he thought it made him a friend to his horn. He was hugging the case with one arm, drumming a little paradiddle with his other hand.

  He’d heard the old musicians talking when he was a kid and used to sit there in the hall of Miss Hazel’s boardinghouse, hugging his knees, that naming was no miscellaneous matter. You took a name and gave your ax a name that made you both amiable to the music. They made it sound like this music was a person who could be called over and made to work for you. He’d wanted to be a musician, cept he never got around to learning anything worthwhile. What he could do on a harmonica didn’t amount to a hill of beans. And too, he’d really wanted to be some kind of outdoor worker, a builder, thick leathery gloves with the fingers cut out, a hard hat, tough work boots. Old Jimmy Lyons, who used to tear up the Hammond organ over at Stompit had told him he was a four, and fours were builders, but lots of fours never got around to doing what they were put on the earth to do cause they was so busy feeling boxed in by them four sides of their nature that they didn’t have sense to look up and appreciate all that space they could build into. And Jimmy Lyons had told him another thing, that the Negro people were fours and so long as they paid more attention to folks trying to pen them in, hem them in, box them in on all four sides thinking they had them in prison than to the work at hand, why then they would never get a spare moment to look up at the sun and build. That Jimmy Lyons was one philosophizing fool. Porter would have liked him. They would have taken to each other right off. But then they would’ve been so delighted with each other’s company, Fred wouldn’t’ve been able to get a word in edgeways.

  Something made him look toward the back of the bus. Something strong and not to be denied pulled him from the past to make him straighten up and check out the boy with the wire basket in the center of the back seat. Of course, snakes. He’d had an inkling it was something weird when the strange-looking youth had got on. Goddamn snakes. On his bus. Who would believe that? Who, in fact, could he even tell it to anymore?

  “Snakes! Can you manage that?” he might’ve said to Porter.

  And Porter would’ve said right back, “Can you live? Can a nigger live?”

  But Porter was dead. Porter was dead and he was driving an unsafe bus with drunken white folks, severe, righteous whiteys looking just like the ones in the lynch mob pictures, a pack of strange talking women with troublemaking shirts, and a retarded looking farm kid with a basket of snakes. Beat me Jesus, he muttered, beat me all in my chest. Snakes. Can you manage that?

  There’d be no one to pick up the cue anymore. A pair of knitting needles had seen to that. Two goddamn needles stuck in Porter’s neck at the Pit Stop. Some in-a-hurry passenger taking exception to Porter’s second slice of pie, or to his neat look and fresh smell of bay rum and talc, or to the way he hadn’t answered—who knew why? Not a single Claybourne paper could piece together a story from the witnesses. And not a single witness could offer a description of the woman. “It was a woman,” the counter girl had told him when Fred’d asked, hiccuping so hard through the telling he couldn’t make sense of any of it. So no one could say whether she was Black, white, blond, fat or a bear in a wig or a moose in a dress. For all he knew she could be on this run. The drunken woman with hair like granite, blubbering chatter, trying to talk to one of the colored guys. Or one of them T-shirts. Knitting needles, snakes, can you manage that? Life was a danger and every minute.

  Wasn’t that Porter’s theme song? You’re minding your business, staying off the streets, paying your bills and trying to make a go of your marriage. And some asshole expert releases radioactive fumes in the air and wipes you out in your chair reading the funnies. “As we sit here,” Porter used to say, grabbing the edge of the counter, “we are dying from overexposure to some kind of wasting shit—the radioactive crap, asbestos particles, noise, smog, lies.
” And Fred would nod and push his plate away.

  “Palma, were you able to reach anyone at home?” Mai was leaning across the aisle.

  “No answer.”

  “You all right?”

  Who was there to say, “Fred, you all right?” Or, “Pass the thermos to Fred. He looks a bit overheated”? Porter, the only other colored guy on the shift, used to hail him—“Hey, Fred, how’s your hammer hanging?” And he’d mount the stool and holler back, “It ain’t ruined my crease none.” And the Pit Stop would become an okay place despite the gluey pie and the “specials” that tasted just like the regular fried newspaper meals. It beat going home.

  His home was beginning to feel more like a trailer every day than a house, the kind of trailer he imagined they made dirty movies in, the kind of dirty movies he always watched holding his breath, expecting Margie to turn up in them, for there was always someone who looked like her—big sloppy tits, rough skin, never quite clean—doing something low down near the end of the movie. Margie. With her streaked and stringy hair and flat ass acting like she was some kind of movie star, prancing about the house in her drawers. Giving him her back at night like he was supposed to be grateful for whatever she offered. But he couldn’t talk about that with Porter. Porter was a race man. So for all the time of their friendship, he’d never once invited him home for supper or talked about any wife but Wanda. But Wanda had left years ago. Now Porter was dead.

  Porter. Had to bribe a doctor to get his papers through and get the job with the bus company. Some kind of wasting disease was eating him up. Yucca Flats, 1955, atomic test blasts—his theme song. That might be something to chat about with the T-shirts if the bus broke down. Hospitalized, discharged, no compensation, no records, not service-connected they said, goodbye, get lost buddy, drop dead. She stabbed him, they said, in the side of his neck as he leaned into his cup, lips pursed, hot coffee. He fell, they said, like cattle fall in the stockyards. Yucca Flats, Pit Stop. It was enough to make a grown man weep. Enough to make you mean. Make you want to wrench the wheel and drive the bus right through the rails and into the marsh. So easy to do, the crunchable rails rolling past, dull gray, bent and rusted here and there. So easy, the embankment sloping down a bit toward the swamp punk. So easy. He’d often dreamt of it, and the dreams hadn’t scared him at all. He’d been intrigued with the notion of sinking and of being on the embankment watching. Being in the grasses hearing the thick gurgling as the waters sucked the bus under. He often thought of it, of what it would be like. Lying there at night, resting on his arm and projecting pictures on the ceiling, he wouldn’t have to look at Margie’s blue flannel back.

  Speeding past the marshes, Fred Holt was brimming over with rage and pain and loss. He watched the upcoming rush of rails with such intensity, could see the bus crashing through the metal and thundering through the bushes down to the depths with such searing clarity, it etched an imprint on the surroundings. An imprint that became magnetized, drawing substance to it, sucking plasma from the underbrush creatures, draining colors from the trees and shrubs, snatching sound from birds, crickets and from Fred Holt’s lungs, pulling life to it for manifestation in a tangible form. A complete happening it would become for any daydreamy hitch-hiker who might walk that way, for any of the bus passengers who might look that way, off-guard, susceptible.

  Porter. So neat, so well read, so unfull of shit. One of the few guys around who could talk about something other than pussy, poker, pool and TV. Had wanted to be a newspaper reporter, go all over the world, go to Africa and see what that was like. They used to sit on them stools in the Pit Stop like truck drivers with their knees out and talk about Africa, piecing together whatever they knew and trusted to counter the hooey handed them in newsmagazines. They’d sit there with their knees out while the whores, half of them with jaws like Joe Palooka, five o’clock shadows and all, sat sidesaddle at either end of the counter eying them like they’d ever be that hard up. And they’d talk about family, Fred’s in New York, Porter’s wife and kids in Canada. And the kids spinning around on the stools would interrupt, begging a quarter for the jukebox. They argued the merits of growing up in Memphis or in Harlem. Porter talked about Speaker’s Corner, calling it “holy ground.” Fred would talk about the tenements behind Beale Street they used to call “The Arks.” They’d laugh together at their fathers’ old-time courting tales, when they’d jam a tomato stake with their name chalked on it in the girl’s yard and hope like hell her father wouldn’t come yank it out and fling it back over the fence. Or about their own courting days, Fred sitting up in the Palace with his hat in Wanda’s lap, Porter sitting up in the Apollo with his arm around Irene, his thumb grazing her breast.

  And hunched over the liver and onions with no smell to it, they’d talk about the characters in Claybourne: the slick-time gangster who called himself Doc Serge and ran the Infirmary that never paid its bills but managed to stay open somehow; Portland Edgers, who like Porter had been a race man but wasn’t quite the same after that time he’d had to beat the woman who was taking in all the civil rights workers; Jay Patterson with his shit-eating grin, who never remembered your name but always wanted to shake your hand, would shake your hand two and three times a day and try to pin a button on you; and James Lee Henry, who ran the Academy of 7 Arts, where it was rumored the stash of guns and ammunition stolen from the armory was hidden; the old geezer they called The Hermit cause he lived behind high hedges in a dark house and only once in a blue moon came out, like at carnival when he’d make a speech in the park and then slip away. Of course, toward the end, Porter had made it impossible to speak any other way but reverently of The Hermit.

  But whatever they talked about, Porter always managed to bring it round to Yucca Flats, 1955, atomic blasts, no compensation. The man was haunted. And now he was gone. Spun around on a stool by some crazy bitch with no better place to put her knitting needles but in a good man’s life. What would he do now with his fitful nights but rehearse bus accidents on the ceiling or glare at Margie’s back and get dangerous?

  He saw it dart out from the marshes, scoot under the shrubs at the railing. Saw it run out onto the highway and stop, its eyes like road reflectors. A dark and furry thing offering itself up. So he took it. Eyes right on it, foot to the floor, he killed it, felt it go lumpy then smooshy in the wheel. And he dropped his hands away one at a time to wipe them on his pants. Barreling down the highway away from it, he kept his eyes strictly off the rear-view mirror. He felt hot and swarmy, felt the chili turning on him. If he could just make it to the terminal before it caught up with him. But already it was rushing him and he was helpless to keep ahead of it, could smell it jamming up his nostrils, jamming up his lungs. Fire.

  The fire that time and him leaning against the house throwing up his insides. Trees like blazing giants with their hair aflame, crashing down in the fields turning corn, grass, the earth black. Birds falling down out of the sky burnt and sooty like bedraggled crows. The furniture blistering, crackling, like hog skins crackled on Grandaddy’s birthday. His mother dragging the mattress out sparking and smoldering, beating it with her slipper and the matting jumping like popcorn all over the front yard. And her screaming, screaming at him as if she knew. And she probably did. His pop’s store coming away from the house, leaning over and crashing down. The store a hole in the ground and just the apples stored in its cellar recognizable. Him standing in the piece of doorway swaying, char and ash sucking at the soles of his feet threatening to take him under the few floorboards left down past the apples and straight to hell for what he’d done.

  Swaying in the doorway not a doorway, tar gas filling up his mouth and lungs, and all the sun that ever was crowding in behind him to make him look down where Pop had been, where a lone tin can was now, its label scorched away, a scorched patch of label here, a shine there. And whatever it held about to explode. Beans, soup, tomatoes, okra about to explode in his face. Knocked off the shelf maybe in the first cave-in, pushed to the side by a falling
beam, it had gotten smacked to the side by the hoses drowning the place and gotten finally stopped by his father’s head before the men gripped him by his stocking feet and dragged him out, taking their time. Speed no longer mattered for Pop. And then he was alone with the tin can parked at his feet, accusingly, growing fatter and fatter and ready to explode.

  He felt like he was sitting on burrs. He couldn’t afford to stop again, not with the hot-metal smell and the lateness. He just might make it. But one more holler from the grand wizard or whatever the joker in the spangled hat was, one more cranking of a camera, one more anything and he’d snatch free the pistol taped underseat and blow their fucking heads off. All of them. The pains in the ass and the ones who hadn’t yet given him any trouble. Not yet. But they all did eventually. Loyal, loving, there one minute, gone the next. Troubling. But he’d gotten over Wanda and had rewarded himself with blond hair. Soft, caring one minute, pain in the ass the next, face to the wall, in a stew, in a freeze, giving him back talk or worse, just her back and no talk at all.

  And of course when he got home tonight, he could count on her to ask him the same dumb thing: “Have a nice trip, Freddie?” No sleep, brains cooked, lousy meals, the worse shift, Porter dead, uniform a mess, so she had it coming. “I ran over a coon. As in raccoon. Not to be confused with the coons your daddy used to lynch.” And she’d cry. Not for him, not for his chafed neck and his jounced nuts, his loss, his threatened pension. But for herself and some dead animal.