As if barely remembering him, Joy asked to see Grack before we went to our brief sleep alone together. I led her around the caravan into the dark where an arching spark stood for the cigar which Grack was having by his lonesome, crouched on the ground and waiting to hear from us. The pleasure of the partying carnies rose above us, distant as the stars in Georgia.
She stood before him until he came to his feet, ambling, grinning, making a politeness of the head. He nodded. “You been growing up so fast, Joy girl,” he said.
“What did you do, kill somebody that you’re running like this?”
“Nobody so much as myself, Joy girl.”
“You ought to tell us. Why did you take the habit, Grack?”
“I hurt someplace, Joy girl.”
She was impatient with his tricks and his gaming with us. She waited for him to tell us. Instead he repeated, but in a softer voice:
“I hurt someplace.”
“A toothache?”
“Yes, that’s right, a toothache right here.…” He put his hand on his breast, as if to make another bow, but kept it there.
She looked at him in her bridal white, her fierce animal’s mug scowling, the sweetness of her person hidden under clothes and a harsh, demanding stance as she put it to Grack. “You were the king carnie of us all,” she said. “You talked like no one. The marks could never say no to you, Grack.”
“I had it,” he said. “I was good. Yes, yes.”
She came unknotted and moved to him; she peered up into the flesh-gone face of a man no longer needing food. There was a forgiving labor in the work of her mouth. She made her effort. She said: “Grack, I’m sorry.”
The hand turned to his chest and the bow was nice to her. He grinned and lightly touched a corner of his eye in the old gesture. “You been growing up real fast, Joy girl,” he said.
Get to the woods now, we’ll see you in the morning.
22. Muffler, tailpipe, mudguard, and journeying
AND this was our wedding trip. It would have been an odd one anyway, with stops to fix the carburetor or the fuel pump with chewing gum when they leaked and an occasional day in town to pawn Pauline’s beads. My way was to spend what I had on a time with Joy, doing what the good carnie never does, leaving the show in season. He doesn’t do it even for the death of his old pa. I would for him, too. I would to celebrate Joy.
And for Grack. And that was the way it happened. We opened the door for Grack at the roadside near the woods in the morning and he rode up north in the back seat with us, ducking with his head between his knees when he saw the cops’ black Fords, smoking his cigarillos, leaving us in the towns and coming back dreamy and high. In the towns Joy and I were often alone. I bought her nail scissors, balloons, a bracelet from some Indians, funny things like that; I tried to make it a holiday. It wasn’t. Nor for Grack either. He would return with the wart sleek and his eyes renewed for a time. Feeling good with the fresh kick in his veins, he talked. Old camie legends, tales from his Kiskeedee village in Quebee, advice for lovers from a master at con—such things. When he felt bad, he usually kept shut, a private sufferer, except once when he needed to admit to us: “I got in some real bad trouble for real, Bud.”
“I know, you were right not to say.”
“There was this—”
“You were right before, Grack. Don’t tell us about it.”
“There was this doctor tried to hold me up. I knew he was peddling, he even said okay, then he tried to hike the price on me—”
From the front seat Joy whirled about to him in a fury. “Listen, Grack, didn’t you hear him say about not to tell us? You ought to know for your own good. We know you got trouble, now be quiet about it.”
“Oh girlie,” he said, smiling and shrugging.
“Grack,” I said, “she’s just saying. You understand—”
“You want to be able to tell the fuzz the truth if we’re picked up?” His voice rose to a ferocious falsetto: “Oh me oh my, so this man is a criminal? But officer, he was always such a perfect gentleman!” He shook his head and added softly, “Man oh man, Pauline’s brat has really gone and growed up on us,”—and the secretive smiling.
No matter, it was a fact that he was taking orders from Joy now. In the old days Grack was Grack’s only chief, and there was that gorgeous hey-rube he started, and the gaudy way he had of jumping into a fight, feet first and roaring. Now he fell into silence down the eight miles of a dirtroad detour, smiling to himself, showing the yellow edges of his teeth, nodding in his misery of need, smiling without pleasure, and finally said, as we bumped out onto the blacktop road again: “Okay if you don’t want to hear, but you’re accessories after the fact anyway. Aiding and abetting the escape.”
“You need to be funny?” Joy demanded, keeping her eyes on the long road ahead. “We know, we’re not babies now. But we weren’t with you when it happened, either—I got a story all set.”
Joy’s plans, pride, and craft were something new to me. I tended to my driving. He tapped me on the shoulder and I tilted my head to him, keeping the wheel steady. “You kids don’t think I’d let you get in any trouble, do you? Do you?”
“No, Grack.”
“No? For sure?”
I moved my shoulder to get his hand off it. “I know, Grack.”
He grinned. He groaned. “Lord of mine, how long before we get to town?” He rubbed the long crease in his blue-black, unshaven cheeks. “I’m not sure I got the address straight in this town here. It’s a pusher runs a shoeshine parlor in the big hotel.”
And I was figuring (and Joy knew it): All right, all right, go easy. Don’t make us be mean to you. Don’t make us look mean to each other. Remember how you were once king of things, Grack.…
Joy knew also, because I had whispered it to her head next to mine on the pillow, that it was not time yet to tell him to kick the habit. We had to wait. Truth to tell, besides, I was not strong enough to help him do it. Not that I was tempted for myself—I had much better things, I had a chance in life—but you need muscles all the way down to hold a man while he kicks his habit. And Grack had to be readier for it than he seemed to be on that slow trip up north. Sometimes we gave him money, but he seemed to have a boodle. I wasn’t even sure that he hadn’t gotten to Stan’s safe after all.
And then at other times Grack was cocky and tough and once he shook off his shoes and put his stockinged feet out the window to cool them as we ran up past a pleasant blue Virginia stretch of sea. He aired his toes like a drunken cracker on my wedding trip with Joy. I gritted my teeth. When he needed me it was easy; when he bragged like any carnie signifier, then I wondered where and why I was going. He cost a great deal in ease of spirit. It was expensive that way. My plan had been to come back with Joy, work up a nut, and then leave the carnie for the second time and for good. “Friendship is an interference,” I told Joy one night.
“You’re right to be interfered with,” she said. “You were picked out for it, Bud, but that’s fine. It’s a good thing about you, even if it’s trouble.”
“Turn over, honey, I got a headache from driving.”
“You call me honey and I won’t turn over.”
“Turn over.”
She laughed and reached for me. “I won’t anyway, honey. Where does the headache hurt?”
“Not where it did,”—and it was my turn to reach for her.
And we struggled and pulled and wrenched in the hot darkness of our motel cabin. Once she ran to make sure of the lock at the door, and I ached with wonder at the simplest thing, her balance on two tiny feet and all of her on tiptoe when she liked. And now (potent loveliness of girls) she stretched beside me. A young climbing animal, fierce and ungovernable, she had a way of suddenly flowering softly alive to me, and all my staying and staying with her said: Beautiful, I love you. And I loved her.
“Do you, Bud?”
It was too bad that afterwards, instead of sleep, came talk of Grack. It was like having a kid, I think, Mama and Papa
Williams rehearsing the day: What did he do all afternoon? What will he get into tomorrow? What will come of him? She interrupted: “Are you sure you love me, Bud?”
The days went by like this, and the days. We three could not hurry like hotrod kids: we had more voyaging to do on this journey than merely to trip Grack over the Canadian border. The inner voyage together was slower even than our Dodge with its choked carburetor and wickering fan belt. We climbed from the South slowly, almost with reluctance—red hills and pine barrens and sandlands and the swamps of the bony-wristed, leg-dragging crackers. They sprawled on their porches in the evening with their jugs of busthead and their hatred of the Negro, and then came the soft moon-burning beauty of the Southern night. Sometimes Grack said, “Step on it!” through the milltowns, and once we drove all night. Hurry, hurry, take coffee, go on. In the Southern morning a flood of yellow sunlight pierced the pale blue haze hanging in the valleys; the air smoked as the sun came up, smoked again as it settled back. Once a pretty girl, calico and eyes averted, awkward and shy, stood watching us stoop into the Dodge after stretching our legs and yawning in the Carolina air. She moved into the woods with a flutter of thigh and skirts.
Grack paused with his head cocked, watching her swing down the path. Not interested in the girl, watching only Grack, I thought of how finicky he remained despite everything, constantly washing his underwear in motel sinks and putting it at the window to dry.
Joy pulled at my shoulder. “Bud, make a pillow for me. Ouch, you have a pencil in your pocket.”
We were dawdling up the coast, later heading inland with Grack’s idea to cross the international bridge at Detroit into Canada. A man is tired when he wants that much to go home, and home to a place which is no longer home to him. I knew this tiredness for an old companion. Pittsburgh had been my Quebec. The funny thing, of course, is that the direct way would be straight to New York or maybe New Hampshire, but many thoughts ruled us. Grack had a route of pushers up through Detroit, neatly spaced where he needed them, and this was the route we took. They were picked by their good reputation for not overmixing the stuff with powdered sugar.
Sweet honey and travel, heroin and discovery, we motored north and west, eating, going to the pot, putting Murine in our eyes, Joy and I whispering each other asleep, chugging over the miles of our pet America. We had a sandwich in a juke joint of this big place, and it seemed small; we made love and made it big. When rain, there was mud for company; when sun, there was light, and the many lights of American skies. It rained and sunned and the weather changed. We unpacked wrinkled sweaters. We worried when Grack coughed; we smiled at each other when he finished his plate.
Fine honeymoon.
Once we were stuck and I had to back-squirm beneath the car to see what I could see. I learned machinery from that old Dodge; I learned to crawl on my elbows, face to its innards. The drain oil we burned was cheap, but it seemed to give the gripes to our motor. I crawled out finally, satisfied, having relieved the pain, my tongue furred with dust, to find the road sifting in the wind and Grack and Joy sitting with their feet in a dry ditch and not talking although they were three feet apart and both watching me.
When a breeze stirred the dust, it flew into a cloud, so thick and red that we could look straight at the sun through it, the sun swollen to a mass of glowing red fiber, and our stinging eyes were veiny and swollen. There were smudges at Joy’s nostrils. She was breathing now with her mouth open, and I could imagine the dust dampened to mud in her lungs. I wanted to protect her from the heat. I wanted to command the dew to settle the soft and sifting world for her. She took a handkerchief and tied it about her throat. I put one around my forehead to keep the sweat from rolling into my eyes. Grack was breathing quickly and shallowly with the sick, hopeless gasps of desperation. It was easier to give up his breath than to take it. But somehow at this terrible break midvoyage, although it was the heat which stifled me, there was something more which made it hard for me to breathe: the curious, patient, and guarded looks which passed between Joy and Grack.
Stopping again that night for the last time on Route One near the ocean before dipping inland toward Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit, I came outside to stretch and wring out a handkerchief that Joy had washed for me. Grack was squatting on a stoop, doing nothing but busy. He was catching flies in a quick fisting gesture, holding the closed hand to his ear for the buzz and struggle, flinging the flies to the stone walk to break their backs. “You’re worried, Grack,” I said.
“You mean you didn’t notice it before? I always look like that,”—and he looked at Joy, who had stuck her head out the door, a bath towel wrapped tightly and clinging after the shower. We were in the usual row of motorcourt cabins—dry with asphalt and sun, thick with many sleepings, presided over by a man who thought he knew everything because he knew how people go to bed. Joy glanced at us and then retreated inside.
“Yes, it’s how you are now,” I said impatiently, “but more and more worried you look, Grack. Is this what you have to do?”
“I don’t like it either, boy.”
“If you’re in so much trouble with the law, maybe you just better take the trouble. I don’t mean snuggle up to it, but if it’s no use … I mean they’ll help you kick the habit, too, Grack. They got ways that’s easy on the heart.”
“No, no.”
No, those tapering-off drugs and hot baths and wiggle-the-toes aren’t easy either. “No what, Grack?”
“Not this trouble, boy. You don’t just walk up and say you’re ready to serve your time. They want me—”
“Don’t tell me, Grack!” I found my arm raised as if to hit him down. “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear.”
“I already told you.”
“Let’s make it”—and the shrillness of my own voice—“you never said.”
The long mirthless smile and the eyes closed with grinning answered me: “Why, sonny, afraid to think about the reward?”
“Grack!”
He stopped smiling and looked with full and placid curiosity into my face. His hand moved, but he let alone the corner of his reddened eye. The tear duct was swollen and angry. He said: “I’m wanted for robbery and homicide on a man—”
“Attempted?”
He shook his head no, slowly, solemnly, no to that, and caught a fly in his fist and took it indoors with him.
That night I fell dead asleep in a hurry, as if to dream my way out of this trouble fast. As I already had occasion to know, this pleasant way is not the way to escape trouble. The trouble was not just what Grack had done outside and what trouble might come to us from outside. It was inside, what Grack felt about Joy and me and what I was coming to feel about that heroic Grack the Tuscan, Grack the Frenchie, of my first carnie days and nights. Disloyalty is a trouble to the disloyal man. What Joy thought of me in this was not the least of it, either.
You have to make something of the trouble you are given or else you will be made by it.
I had things to do besides dreaming of trouble.
All right, one way of slipping the trap was to bring Grack back to the way I remembered him. We would kick his habit as he had helped me kick mine. I felt that he was not yet ready, but we would try to do it. I dozed to the image of Grack the Talker, flagrantly playing the marks, finger to eye, wart wet and compelling, long and tense and hand drumming on his stand as he brought them in: “Step up! Oh you Tricksie! Step up! Come and say hi to old Grack.…”
And woke with a start of my legs and shoulders: Past the trick of the eye and the wheedle and tease and the hoarse croak, could he ever have been the way I remembered him? I had needed him to be that way.
Yes? No? Not fact about how he held me to that cabin until we untangled the habit wrapped in my brains and guts? How he told me stories of the free man I intended to be? How he put the bed over me to stop the threshing and crazed arching of my back? Then he held my forehead and made the lovely harsh words I needed. “You did it, chief, you’ve done it.…”
Despite Joy by my side, sleeping her calm sleep with two corners of smiling at her mouth, I dreamt one of the harried carnie dreams: Stow the stuff, load, unload under the morning sun. Fork and spoon the chow, push the table away, run to the crowd. Make it big! Flash your boodle! Signify! Talk, jingle change pockets, hear the calliope all day long, and calculate the dumb marks, the smart marks, all the many larcenous hearts. Go slow and score on Saturday! Get with it or be without it!
If the fret of my sleep meant that I wanted to leave Grack and run from him now, I would not do it. The day of flight was over for me, although I might move and move with Joy over the roads of America. I was a traveler. I was no longer pursued. I would wait and tinker under the hood with chewing gum and follow Grack through as he had followed me. The thing which he had tried for me was to kick the habit and kick me back among the living. It had been done.
“Do you really belong to me?” Joy asked almost every day. “I need to know, Bud.”
The softness and wrongness of my life did not disappear by her side, of course. Irritations with predictable presence doing female work, dreams of an impossible freedom, smug certainties and dry doubts, and what astonished me most of all—once a heart-turning nostalgia for that first fainting excitement when Joy and I swam together in a Georgia pond. Already I could look at her and see this wonderful, hurtful time of first discovery lost.
She turned away and would not kiss me. She read my search for mystery in my wife’s face. Vanity, vanity! Did I want to love and hate myself alone once more during such moments? She had a right to veil her love in scorn and lock me out.
These times passed, passed. We had much to do together about Grack now. Memory helped me, too—what it had really been like was something I could never dress up in fine colors. Or always beneath the fine colors of the grass-eating dog and John Peel’s high pleasure, I could remember in my own body the faulty balance, the murder of fever, and the deprived flesh.
Man Who Was Not With It Page 17