“Not anymore,” he finally lied. “I don’t see them anymore.”
“Hell, man—” Two light-complexioned prostitutes, cruising by, caught his attention. “Hellooo, babes,” he drawled.
The whores slowed, raked him with their appraising scrutiny. From them came a scent, both putrid and perfumed. “Did you order coal?” one asked the other superciliously.
“This year, dear, I’m burning nothing but chalk in my fire box,” the other said with a spitting sound.
“You burning it all right,” Poker countered, argumentatively.
Charles walked away. But Poker caught up with him. “Where you got your car?”
“I haven’t got it anymore.” He stopped suddenly; he couldn’t stand it any longer. “Look, fellow, I’m broke, I don’t have a car; there’s nothing you can get out of me.”
“Hell, man, don’t be like that,” Poker said obsequiously. “You an’ me, man, if we run together we’d always have some money.”
The desperation and revulsion had clotted in his mind. He just had to have some money, he told himself. He just couldn’t get along without it; he couldn’t go home; he couldn’t do anything. He didn’t want to become involved with Poker, but he couldn’t break himself away.
“Well, how?” he finally asked.
“Come on,” Poker said.
After a moment’s hesitation, he went along. What did he have to lose? he asked himself. They went down a quiet side street and stopped before a cleaning and pressing shop in a dilapidated frame building. The windows in the apartment above were dark.
“Wait here,” Poker said. “If you see a light come on upstairs start whistling the Bugle Blues. You don’t have to worry ‘bout the cops; they don’t never come ‘round here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get some layers, man.”
Poker went around toward the back of the building and vanished in the dark. Charles crossed the street and stood in the darkness beneath a tree. Once he started to leave, but no one came in sight, and the pull of desperation held him to the outcome. Finally Poker came into sight, looking furtively up and down, then hurried over and took Charles’s arm.
“Come on, let’s beat it.”
He had thirty-two dollars. They divided it evenly. Suddenly Charles was conscience-stricken. “I’m going home,” he said.
“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow night at Dave’s.”
It was a long ride home, and he couldn’t keep from thinking. He hadn’t stolen anything for years, he realized. He wondered if he was going to end up being a thief. The thought frightened him. All of a sudden he wanted to see his mother; he didn’t care what she said to him. He just wanted to see her, be near her, be reassured by her presence.
She was waiting up for him. “I’ll not tell you again,” she said. “The next time you come in at this hour you just pack your clothes and get out of this house.”
Now that he’d seen her he lost the desire. Her presence didn’t give him anything. He felt the same as when he had left the house earlier in the day.
After that he went out every night with Poker, and stood watch while Poker broke into small, isolated stores and robbed the tills. His mother tried to force him to leave the house. But his father said he didn’t have to go. William was away in college. Again Mrs. Taylor became assailed with the conviction that Charles and his father were plotting to harm her in some way. She became frightened and moved into William’s room and locked the door. They were trying to run her away, she thought. But she refused to go. She couldn’t go and leave Charles there to destroy himself, she thought contradictorily. Once she dreamed of seeing him sink slowly into quicksand while she stood by, powerless to help.
One morning Charles awakened to hear his parents struggling in the bedroom. He heard his mother’s choked scream.
“You bitch, I’ll kill you!” he heard his father shout.
A chill ran down his spine. He leaped from his bed and ran into their room. His father was choking his mother. Blood streamed from a gash on his father’s forehead and a shattered hand mirror lay on the floor. His mother’s face was turning purple. When he pulled away his father’s hands she sank to the floor.
“Jesus Christ!” he cried in utter agony. “You’ve killed her.”
Then everything went blank. He didn’t know he’d hit his father until the words seeped slowly into his mind, “Son, don’t!…Son, don’t!…” His father was trying to struggle from the floor, one arm raised protectively, while he stood above him, gripping the stool of the dressing table as if to strike him with it.
“Jesus Christ!” he said again.
His mother had regained consciousness and was screaming in a strained voice, “You murderer! You beast!” Her face was livid and the tendons stood out in her neck.
He had to hold her to keep her from attacking his father again. He picked her up and carried her from the room. “I’m not afraid of either of you,” she screamed. “You can kill me if you want but you’ll go to the electric chair.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Mama,” he found himself saying over and over as he took her into William’s room and laid her across the bed. “I don’t want to hurt you, Mama.” He smoothed her hair. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Mama. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” he crooned.
He heard his father going down the stairs; heard the front door close. “He’s gone now,” he said.
“I’m going to have him arrested for murder,” she said, trying to get up.
“Please don’t, Mama,” he begged, gently pushing her shoulders down. “Please don’t, Mama. Please just lie down until you feel better. Please don’t do anything now.”
She made her body passive but her eyes condemned him bitterly. “You may think you’re helping him escape,” she said in a harsh, unrelenting voice. “But he’ll not escape; he’ll pay for this.”
“Jesus Christ!” he said.
He left her and went to his room and dressed quickly and left the house. He went over on The Avenue and began drinking. But the whiskey filled him with despair. He was crossing the street toward the pool hall when he was struck by a terrible fear. Suppose his father returned while he was away and killed her. He began running and ran until he flagged a taxi and urged the driver to hurry.
“This may be a matter of life and death.”
He found his father packing a suitcase. His father’s sister, Mrs. Hart, sat in the bedroom while he gathered up his clothes. It was the first time either of his sisters had ever stepped foot in the house. Mrs. Taylor stood in the door berating them both.
“If it wasn’t for my children I’d have you arrested and sent to the penitentiary,” she was saying.
“Now, Lillian, you brought it all on yourself,” Mrs. Hart came to her brother’s defense.
“This is my house,” his mother began to scream. “Don’t you dare—”
He rushed up and pulled her away to her room. “Now, Mama, don’t start another fight.”
“You just wait and see,” she said harshly, more to herself than to him. “He’ll not get away with it.”
Charles walked down to the door with his father and his Aunt Lou.
“Take care of your mother, son,” his father said.
“I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
“I know you didn’t, son. I lost my head too. Your mother aggravates us both. But you must take care of her.”
“I will.”
That evening his mother telegraphed her brothers for some money. When it came she engaged a white attorney and sued for a divorce. At the time she didn’t intend to carry through on it. She wanted to punish her husband, and at the same time frighten him into doing his duty as a father. She knew how deeply he opposed divorce, that he regarded it as a mortal sin. She thought she could make him face up to Charles, take a firm stand, commit him to an institution if need be.
Professor Taylor pleaded with her for a reconcili
ation. “Don’t break up our home, honey. We’ve been married twenty-six years.”
She acceded on the condition that they send Charles to a boarding school the city maintained for recalcitrant youths.
He was trapped. As much as he wanted to save their marriage, he couldn’t do this. He was convinced it would kill his son to be locked up. The boy was hurt somewhere deep inside, he thought. He needed time for it to heal. If there were some way to get him among good boys his own age. Maybe he’d decide to return to college if they let him alone for a time, he argued.
“It would kill him, honey; it would kill him,” he said. “It would do no such thing,” she contradicted. “He must be disciplined—he must! You won’t do it, so you must let others do it for you.”
“I won’t do that,” he said.
She couldn’t change him. So in the end she carried through her suit for a divorce. She charged him with cruelty and desertion and deliberately shirking his responsibility as a father; and requested that Charles be placed in her custody. She would rather get rid of her husband than lose her son. For in the final analysis, even though she no longer admitted it to herself, he was still her own lovely baby, and deep down she loved him in the same intense, passionate manner she always had.
Charles had remained at home ever since his father left. He’d become fearfully concerned for his mother. He’d noticed her absentmindedness and her habit of locking herself in her room at night. He was afraid she might do something to herself, or hurt herself accidentally. She didn’t seem able any longer to perform the common chores about the house. He did most of the housework and cooking.
One night at dinner she said, “If your father had been any account at all you children could have had a decent home all your lives and wouldn’t have been running around all over creation getting yourselves maimed and crippled and into God only knows what kind of trouble.”
He was frightened by the consummate bitterness in her voice, and tried to pacify her. “Try not to think about it, Mama. It’s going to be all right.”
Suddenly she began to cry. She rose, crying, and fled upstairs to her room. He followed in alarm. She had flung herself across the bed and was crying disconsolately. He stroked her hair.
“Don’t cry, Mama. Don’t cry.”
But she couldn’t be consoled. Although she’d told herself, ever since their wedding night, how much she hated and despised her husband, in the end it hurt to give him up. He was the only mate she’d ever had, the father of her three sons, and there was still a part of her that wanted him for herself. It was as if he was bound to this part of her in some unbroken way. And there was the memory of all the years they had spent together. Even now she didn’t want another woman to have him.
Charles became so immersed in her suffering that all the world blacked out. The urge to sacrifice himself for her became his only thought, and for that instant she was his beautiful young mother again and he wanted to take her in his arms and go out beyond the edge of life, where it was dark and peaceful and they could be together and free from all the troubles they’d ever known.
“I’ll look after you, Mama,” he choked. “Ill take care of you. Don’t cry.”
Down in the old deep-sunken eyes, red-veined from crying, the bitterness flickered. “If you had just tried to be a good boy,” she sobbed.
It was as if she had suddenly slapped him. He felt a sharp, brackish shock such as he had experienced as a child when attending Crayne’s Institute in Augusta, Georgia, the night he had run off to a fire and had offered his services to a strange, lost whore standing in the doorway of the one remaining shack. The memory returned vividly in the wake of his sensation. He could see the bitter forlornness in the young woman’s posture and recalled his tremendous urge toward self-sacrifice as he went forward to help. And he could hear her harsh cursing voice, “Git der hell away frum heah an’ mind yo’ own bizness,” and feel again the cold shocking hurt of being utterly rejected.
He stood up and groped blindly from the room. He went down to the dining room and tried to finish his dinner. He took a mouthful of food and chewed and chewed, but he couldn’t swallow. Suddenly he felt the deluge coming up from down inside of him. It was as if his blood had begun to cry.
25
CHARLES WAS SUMMONED BY HIS father’s attorney to give a deposition for the divorce proceedings. He was handed the summons on the eve of Thanksgiving as he was leaving the house to buy a turkey for his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner.
A small gray man came up the steps. “Are you Charles Manning Taylor?”
“Yes.”
He placed the summons in Charles’s hand and grinned. “A present for you.”
Across the street the high school was letting out and the sound of laughter drifted in the air. Charles read the summons without moving. It directed him to appear in the office of his father’s attorney the following Monday morning. The cold legal phraseology conjured up the thought of courts and jails and policemen and stern-faced merciless men sitting in judgment over a defenseless world. He could see his parents standing before the bar, caught in utter helplessness, hanging on his words that would betray one or the other. He would have to tell of how they’d fought and suffered; he would have to reveal all the mean, secret things about them which he’d tried so hard throughout his life to keep hidden from himself. They would ask him terrible questions: “Did you ever see your father strike your mother?…Did you ever hear your mother curse your father?…What did they quarrel about?…Was it you?…” For a moment his mind was gripped in terror.
“What is it, son?” he heard his mother ask from behind him. She’d noticed him standing there and had opened the door.
He slipped the summons into his inside overcoat pocket. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing. I was just thinking.”
“If you’re going to get a turkey you’d better hurry,” she said.
He went down the stairs and started toward the store…Did your father’s color have anything to do with it—because he’s black and your mother’s white? he heard them ask. Do you know whether he was ever unfaithful?…
“Jesus Christ!” he said aloud.
Two high school girls passing by gave him startled looks. Suppose someone asked them was their mother a little off, he thought. Suddenly he was panic-stricken. He began running. A streetcar came and he climbed aboard. But it didn’t go fast enough. He got off and began running again. An empty taxi passed and he hailed it.
“I got to get over on Cedar Avenue in a hurry,” he panted. The money for the turkey went for whiskey. But he couldn’t get drunk. His body got drunk, his legs wobbled, but the sharp bitter panic kept flaring in his mind. He started looking for Poker. It was night before he found him coming from the pool hall.
“I got to get out of town,” he said desperately.
Poker drew back instinctively, frightened by the raw terror blazing from his eyes. “The cops after you?” he asked tensely.
“My parents are getting a divorce—”
“Hell—” Poker breathed in relief.
“You don’t understand. I got to testify.”
“Hell, what about it?”
He looked at Poker for a moment as if trying to focus him. “I got a summons.” Now the paper seemed to come alive within his pocket; he could feel it burning against his chest, like some sinister invitation to his own execution. “They’re going to make me.”
“Hell—” Poker thought it over. “We could steal a car and go somewhere.”
“All right.”
Poker borrowed a car from the pool hall proprietor and they drove over past Euclid. When they found the car they wanted Charles got in to steer and Poker drove up behind and pushed it back to Cedar. Poker knew how to short-circuit the ignition switch and when they got it started Charles drove swiftly out of town. He drove as if the demons were after him again, the long lights lancing down the road as it came up over the hood, dropped away and turned, and came up again. The high sullen whine of the spe
eding motor rent the quiet night. Houses loomed eerily in the moonlight, like the abodes of ghosts, and the motor whine echoed back like the wail of banshees. Charles crouched down over the wheel, caught in the unreality of the night, almost but not quite free, not quite escaped, his foot jamming the accelerator to the floorboard as if to push still greater speed out of the laboring motor. Faster! Faster! Faster! it kept saying. Just a little goddamned faster! And he would be completely gone from all of them. If he could just get this goddamned car to go a little faster…
He was on the inside of a turn without slackening speed when the headlights of a truck loomed up ahead.
“Hey, goddammit!” he heard Poker yell and through the corner of his vision saw his hands fly up to his face.
But it didn’t penetrate his concentration. He was sealed within the single determination to hold to the wide arc of his curve. Given the exact relation of time to speed he’d make a perfect tangent, which for once, goddammit, even his physics professor at the university could appreciate, and come out safely on the right side of the road. He crossed in front of the big truck lights without once veering, the whole goddamned putrid sickening world coming up inside him like vomit at the instant of infinite danger, and then he was past, his left rear fender pinging faintly against the heavy steel bumper of the truck. Letdown spread through his mouth and down into his stomach like the acid flow of bile. Now only the brooding sense of safety lay in the long, empty road, filling him with all the hurt and panic, and for a moment he closed his eyes.
He opened them to the sound of retching. Poker had vomited.
“Sonafabitch, goddammit, you tryna kill us,” he heard him gasp.
He pulled over to the side of the highway and stopped. He felt totally depressed. “Here, you can drive.”
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