“I’m going and get something to eat, Dad.”
“All right, son.”
He started to eat in a restaurant on The Avenue, but found that he didn’t have but thirty cents besides his check.
On sudden impulse he rode out to see his mother. He was almost within sight of her house when he realized he couldn’t face her. He rode back to The Avenue and wandered about for a time. It was as if he were struggling against returning to Veeny. But finally he gave in and went back to her.
The dice game was in progress. Dave looked up and grinned.
“How’d you make out, Chuck?”
He wasn’t certain just what Dave meant. “I got broke again,” he said.
“How much you need?”
“I got a check for seventy-five dollars I want to get you to cash.”
“Sure thing.”
He paid Dave and took the change and went into the kitchen. Veeny was cooking pigs’ feet. She came up to him and ran the palms of her hands down over his waist and hips. “Hungry, baby?”
Suddenly he was very hungry. “I want a drink first.”
She mixed two drinks and sat down across from him, devouring him with her eyes. “Don’t get drunk, baby.”
“I won’t,” he promised.
By midnight he was broke and blind drunk. He vomited in the sink again. She took him into the bedroom and undressed him and put him to bed. An hour later Dave left. She stopped the game and put the people out, then came in and went to bed and held Charles’s head against her breasts. It was noon the next day when he awakened. She played her tongue over his lips. He felt too weak to struggle. He gave in. It was like a terrible horror of ecstasy; as if his blood were being sucked by a vampire.
Afterwards she fixed breakfast. While they were eating, Dave came in. He had a pair of large green dice.
“Let’s try ‘em out,” he said.
They began shooting on the kitchen floor. At first they bet a half-dollar on the roll. But as Dave began to lose he raised the bet. He lost twenty-five dollars, then took all the money Veeny had. They gambled for two hours. When Dave got even Charles said, “I quit.”
“Goddamn, all that work for nothing,” Dave cursed. “If you weren’t my pal I’d cut your throat.”
“I didn’t want to gamble against you,” Charles said.
Veeny smiled.
“I’ll be back later,” Dave said and left.
Charles couldn’t understand what was happening. He was sick and frightened.
“Why does Dave let me sleep with you?” he asked Veeny.
She came over and ran her tongue across his eyes. “He’s got to, baby. I want you. He’s got another whore and I got you.”
He wanted to leave and never come back. But he didn’t have the strength. He didn’t know what was happening to him. Instead of leaving he began drinking again. He was drunk every night for a week, awakening to be loved, fed, and begin drinking again. His thoughts became vague. He seemed floating in a nightmare of sensuality. Heat began growing in his brain in a thin, steady flame. When he couldn’t bear it he’d call her to bed. Each time he felt himself pouring out of himself into her as if giving her his life. He began to love the sensation of dying he derived from her.
He went to his room only for a change of clothes. Sometimes he saw his father. He made some vague excuse. His father never questioned him, never scolded him. He wondered if his father were sane.
He hadn’t visited his mother since the night he first met Veeny. He couldn’t understand why he felt such an intense fear whenever he thought of her. There was a period each night just before he became unconscious, when his mind seemed sharp and clear. Quite often, during this period, which sometimes lasted no longer than a fleeting moment, he thought of his mother. He’d recall an episode from his early childhood in Mississippi…
He and William had been to the store with their mother. They were returning down the long, dusty road in the magic twilight, the two tots trotting along beside their mother, vying for her attention.
“Mother, we saw a jackass.”
“We saw a guinea.”
“We saw something we didn’t know what it was.”
“Mother, there ought to be something on an animal to tell you what it is.”
“Something in its fur.”
“Suppose it’s got feathers.”
“In its feathers then.”
She had to laugh. “I’m a bear,” she said. “Be-ware.”
They laughed uproariously.
“I’m a fox—I’m sly.”
“I’m a weasel—I steal chickens.”
“I’m a rabbit—catch me.”
“I’m a rabbit—fry me.”
She laughed delightedly. “In case you’ve never cooked a rabbit here is a recipe for rabbit fricassee.”
Her gay, tinkling laugh thrilled them…
For that instant he felt happy and excited. Then the memory was gone, leaving a bitter aftermath, in which he thought it strange that he couldn’t recall ever having heard his mother laugh with his father. Suddenly he remembered her laugh as he had heard it last. The next moment he was blotto.
27
HE HAD SLEPT DRUNKENLY all day. on awakening he felt exhausted and helpless. Veeny was kissing his chest and the sensation of her hot sharp tongue sickened him with revulsion.
“I can’t this morning—I can’t. Please don’t make me,” he pleaded.
“Pretty-pretty,” she moaned in a thickened voice, kissing his eyes and face. Her hair fell down about his head, covering him like a shroud, and he could barely breathe.
“Don’t, please don’t,” he begged, but his voice was muffled by her mouth.
She sucked his breath, forcing her long sharp tongue between his lips. He wrenched his face away, feeling faint. Savagely she bit his neck. He struggled to push her away but she clung to him tenaciously, like a carnivorous animal, devouring his flesh.
“My baby,” she moaned, scouring his ear with her tongue. There was a paralyzing evil in her consuming desire.
A strange wanton sensation overwhelmed him. It was as if she was drawing all that was good’ from him and poisoning his blood with something that was repulsive and weird and abnormal. He tried to hold on to the good but she was the stronger and pulled it loose from himself. Finally he gave up and let his will go. He closed his eyes and felt himself sinking down into her womb.
For an instant he thought he would faint. Then suddenly his blood flooded up in a warm ecstasy of surrender as if he were the whore of the two.
“Oh, give it!” she cried, wailing as if in the throes of death.
He felt the sweet acid shock of utter evil. Then he whimpered like a child as he gave himself to her. Afterwards he lay in a trance of passivity, looking into her eyes, for the first time realizing that she was on top. Now he wanted to give himself to her again in this different way where nothing at all mattered but the strange sweet ecstasy of defeat.
But she arose and said, “I’ll fix us some breakfast, baby.”
With the sound of her normal voice his revulsion returned. He jumped out of bed and began to dress in a world suddenly gone in filth and depravity. His soul vomited up the strange sensation of surrender and, as he looked at her, death flooded from his eyes.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
He avoided her gaze. If he looked into her eyes he would kill her. “I’m going home and change clothes,” he said.
“You’ll come back, baby.” He heard the triumph singing in her voice and felt nauseated with shame.
It had been raining earlier but now it had turned to soft wet snow. He stood for a moment outside the door, breathing deeply the damp cold air, trying to orientate himself, to adjust his emotions to the normal world. His mind was enveloped in weird unreality, as if he had awakened in a world he’d never seen.
Two men passed and their soft Negroid voices sounded the tone of reality. Slowly the street took perspective in a row of shabby houses. He saw a
dog sniffing a wet pile of garbage beside a broken step. He discovered with a shock he was thinking of his mother. He could hear her saying with a crying note of worry, “My little baby. What have you done now?” He closed his mind to her and began walking toward his room. He wanted to get his clean clothes before his father returned from work.
But his landlady met him in the hallway and said, “Now don’t you go disturbing your father. He’s sick.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.”
“You ain’t home enough to know anything,” she accused.
He tiptoed up to his room and found his father in bed. As he entered the room he heard his father mutter, “Don’t hurt the boy, Lillian. Don’t do it, honey…”
He bent down and shook his father. “Dad!” he said softly.
His father opened his eyes and made an effort to focus his gaze. “It’s all right, son, it’s all right,” he mumbled. His breath reeked with the odor of rotgut whiskey.
Charles drew back. He was surprised to discover that he felt no shock. It was as if he’d passed the point where degredation mattered; as if he now expected only the worst in everything.
“Is there anything I can do for you, Dad?” he heard himself ask.
His father didn’t answer. He had already closed his eyes. A moment later he was breathing stentorianly.
Charles put a pitcher of water and a glass beside the bed, and straightened the covers over his father. Then he began to change clothes. After a time he became aware of tears streaming down his face. He didn’t know how long he had been crying.
Before leaving he searched the room for whiskey. He intended to throw it away. At least he could do that much for his father. But he didn’t find any.
It had darkened outside, filling the early night with gloom. He began walking. There seemed something sacrilegious about his father drinking. He tried not to think about it. For a time he didn’t think of anything. He felt the tears trickling down his face, and every now and then he sobbed spasmodically. He blew his nose and wiped his face.
Suddenly he realized he was thinking of his mother again. She must have been in his thoughts all along. He wondered if she had begun drinking too. The thought fired him with unbearable horror. He hailed a taxi and rode out to the home where she lived. The window of her room was dark but he knocked anyway. A pleasant middle-aged woman with a kind brown face came to the door and he asked if his mother was at home.
“No, she went out early this afternoon and hasn’t returned.”
“Did—did she seem ill?” he found himself asking.
The woman looked at him strangely. “Why, no—no more than usual.”
“Oh!” He wondered what she meant but couldn’t bring himself to ask.
He thanked her and said he would return. Then, for more than two hours he walked about the neighborhood, passing the house on the opposite side of the street every fifteen or twenty minutes to look up at her window, hoping to find a light. He felt such a craving for whiskey he was tempted to return to Cedar Avenue, but the deep dark sense of dread anchored him. A movie theater loomed up before him. He went in and sat in the dark. But after an hour the urgency returned. He jumped to his feet, rushed outside and ran all the way back to her house. Her room was still dark. He wondered if she had returned while he was in the theater and had gone to bed. He was afraid the woman might think it was he who was in trouble if he inquired again, so he stationed himself across the street to wait. The soft wet snowflakes blowing against his face were like the touch of cool gentle fingers.
“Please don’t let anything happen to her,” he prayed.
The cold seeped through his clothes and he began trembling. He needed a drink the worst way. It began to snow heavily. After a time he had to give up his vigil. He rode back to Cedar Avenue on the streetcar, but the moment he alighted the dark terrifying dread returned to haunt him. He went into a whiskey joint and drank a half pint of the strong rotgut, hoping to calm his fears. But instead his emotions were intensified and the dread began roaring through his mind like a chimney afire.
He took a taxi back to her house. The jolting of the car over the bumpy streets made him sick and his mouth ballooned as he strained to keep from vomiting.
Now the whole house was dark. But he staggered up the front steps and knocked anyway. A man clad in a red flannel robe came to the door. In a thick blurred voice Charles asked for his mother.
The man looked at him sympathetically. “You’re Charles?”
“Yes sir.”
“You were here earlier this evening, weren’t you?”
“Yes sir, I was.”
“Your mother went down to the college to see your brother and hasn’t returned yet.”
“Oh!” He swayed drunkenly as the porch rolled crazily beneath him.
“You can wait for her in her room if you wish,” the man offered.
He thanked him and followed up the stairway, trying to keep from stumbling: The man opened the door to his mother’s room and turned on the light. Charles thanked him again, closed the door and, without removing his overcoat or hat, fell across the bed.
After a moment he turned to make himself more comfortable. His gaze lit on the ash tray on the dressing table. It held the butts of two cork-tipped cigarettes marked with lipstick, and the butt of a homemade cigarette stained brown with spittle. His body went rigid; his neck was caught in the angle of turning, frozen in shock. His father had been there….
Abruptly he sprang to his feet. For a moment he stood perfectly still, his head tilted as if listening for a sound. His gaze was unfocused, inturned; he didn’t see anything now. He could feel his heart beating in the sealed silence. That was why he was drunk. He looked again at the cigarette butts, studying them as if they contained a clue. Suddenly, uncomprehendingly, his senses were stunned in the manner of a lover’s by discovery of his loved one’s infidelity. Then he was caught up and hurled into a sea of bitter torment. Everything he had tried to forget, to push from his consciousness, to drown in drink and dissolution—the despair over the loss of his home, the breaking up of his family, his parents’ divorce, his failure in school; the open sores of sorrow in his father’s face, the unread blood-and-thunder stories, the vacant stare, the pile of smoldering cigarette butts; the bitter hurt living in his mother’s eyes, the brittle laugh and hennaed hair; and his own remorse for all the things he had done to bring them to such an end—all of it was dug up and brought alive in the picture presented by those three cigarette butts.
“Jesus Christ!” he gasped.
His mind blazed with panic, setting off motion within him as the lighting of a fuse. He was running even before his feet began to move. He ran from the room, hurtled down the stairs. He heard the man shout, “Hey, what’s going on!” He fought the front door, trying to get it open. The demons had broken out and were charging down behind him. He got the door open, leaped across the porch. His foot slipped on the fresh snow and he skidded headlong down the stairs. His hat flew off. He got up and ran bareheaded down the street. Behind him he could hear the man calling, ‘Taylor! Taylor!”
He ran until he was exhausted. But he could not rid his mind of the agonizing picture. He sat on the curb and sobbed, “Goddammit, goddammit,” over and over. Why couldn’t his father leave her alone; just leave her alone and let everything rest? The sour flow of acid, brought on by his torment, mixed with the rotgut whiskey, spewed up from his stomach and made a brownish-yellow blot on the white snow. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, feeling the snow melting in his hair. He looked down the long white street, his thoughts turned inward. “I can’t go through that life again,” he thought.
Then he rose and walked all the way back to Cedar Avenue. His body was giving out but he was unaware of it. He returned to his room. His father was sleeping drunkenly as he had left him, his wide bold nostrils flaring as he snored. His mouth was open and saliva drooled from one corner of his lips.
For an instant hate blazed in Charles with murderous intensity. But his fa
ther looked so completely defeated and helpless in his drunken sleep that compassion welled up in his mind, putting out the hatred. He felt an impulse to wipe his father’s mouth, but he didn’t want to awaken him. He turned out the light and stood quietly in the darkness, listening to his father snore. Strangely, he felt his heart listening also, straining itself to hear something, he didn’t know what. It ached from the effort of listening. He held his breath. Some sense warned him of another presence in the room. Quickly he turned on the light again. But there was no one. He stood for a moment longer, wondering what it was, and his emotions were invaded by a sense of death.
“That would be all right,” he heard himself say softly. “That would be fine.”
He turned off the light and tiptoed from the room, down the stairs and from the house.
The street was still and silent beneath its mantle of snow. He walked down toward Cedar Avenue, his footsteps muffled by the snow. For a moment he experienced the queer sensation of moving in a dream. He’d get a taxi and ride out to the lake and just keep on walking out into the water until he’d left the world behind. But there were no taxis in sight, and when he came to the first whiskey joint he went inside.
Mrs. Taylor returned home shortly after one o’clock that morning.
Early the previous afternoon Professor Taylor had called to plead for a reconciliation. He’d been offered a teaching post in a small southern college, and he proposed that they remarry and begin over.
“They’ll give me a house and we can have Charles with us.”
The thought of having Charles again almost tempted her to accept. But deep inside herself she could never forgive him for having let her go.
So she refused. “After what you and your family have done to me I wouldn’t live with you again if you were the last man on earth. Never! Never!” Her voice was pitched in the old harsh tone she had always assumed when addressing him.
But afterwards she was beset with doubts and uncertainties. Was she denying her son his last chance for a normal life because she couldn’t abide his father? She didn’t know. She was tired—so tired. And living alone made decisions so difficult to reach, so hard to defend; she was becoming afraid to trust her judgment any longer.
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