Seeing America

by Nancy Crocker

  “Hold this,” she said.

  I did, and then she unbuttoned me and started washing me with her hands, and that was all it took for part of me to lose its shyness. She took the washbowl away and gave me a gentle push onto the bed. Then she hiked up her skirt and climbed on top.

  About a minute later, she climbed off and came back with the washbowl. I washed myself this time while she watched with a smile.

  “First time’s always quick,” she told me. “Next time’ll be better.”

  “How’d you know it was my first time?” I asked.

  She threw back her head and laughed.

  I fell off my stilts but fast.

  Henry showed up in the parlor fifteen minutes after I did with a shit-eating grin. “How long you been done?”

  I’d been there long enough to see three more men come in and go upstairs, but I said, “Just got here. Just now. A second ago.”

  “Uh-huh.” He called out, “Ma’am?”

  The woman who ran the house appeared as if conjured. “You got somethin’ to wet our whistle while we wait for Lover Boy?”

  She disappeared and came back with two bottles so cold they were sweating. “Sarsaparilla,” she said.

  Henry started to protest.

  She said, “No liquor. Not in this house. That’s all I need.”

  So we sat and waited. We finished our drinks, and the woman came through to collect the empty bottles. Two men came downstairs, and two more came in and went up.

  I was just past admiration and starting to worry about Paul when my darling with the yellow hair appeared at the top of the stairs holding a dressing gown closed at the breast. “Y’all can go on now,” she said. “Paul’s going to stay awhile.”

  My jaw dropped, and I turned to see Henry’s face mirroring mine.

  “Well, what’s ‘awhile’ mean?” Henry said.

  She laughed, and it was pure music. “Come back tomorrow about noon. I might let him go by then.” And with that, she disappeared again.

  Henry and I had no choice but to leave. We found a room at a boarding house nearby for three dollars and settled in for the night.

  “What the hell?” Henry asked.

  I knew without asking what he meant. “I don’t know,” I said. “I reckon we’ll find out when we go get him tomorrow.”

  But the girl with the blue eyes didn’t let Paul go the next day.

  We showed up at the cathouse at noon like she’d said, and we had to wrangle with the boss lady that we weren’t there for any six dollars’ worth more. Finally, she went up the stairs and came back with a disapproving look and no Paul. “He says come back when the auto is fixed.” She sniffed. “He’ll stay with Evangeline until then, he says. I do hope he has money.”

  My eyes went wide. “Oh, he does, ma’am.”

  “Ain’t all he’s got is my guess.” Henry’s voice was filled with marvel.

  Over supper that night, we decided we weren’t about to wait until the Ford was fixed before we collected him. No telling what all was going on out there, and I for one thought that some of it might not be to Paul’s benefit. So we came back yet again the next day around noon, and the lady of the house answered the door and said, “He’s not here. Or are you back as paying customers this time?”

  “What do you mean, he’s not here?” I said at the same time Henry said, “Yes.”

  I threw him a look.

  “What?” he said, all innocence. “It’s my money, ain’t it?”

  I supposed so. I peeled off three ones and handed them to him. He squeezed his way past the woman and went inside.

  “He’s at Evangeline’s place,” she told me and started to close the door.

  I stuck my foot in the crack. “So he is upstairs?”

  “Huh. She works here. She don’t live here. She can do as she pleases on her own time, but I told her to get him out of here. Out about a mile that way.” She tilted her head to the west. Then she hit my foot with the door hard enough I drew it back, and she was gone.

  I sat down on the stoop, took a boot off, and rubbed my foot. I contemplated waiting for Henry. But that made me think about what Henry was doing, and thinking about that made me stand up. I considered going back into the house, after all, but my pulse told me it would be enough just to keep reliving the best sixty seconds of my life for a little while longer. I got my boot on and started moving again.

  Henry caught up with me at our rooming house later. “What do you suppose is going on?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought we’d go out and find something to do after supper.”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

  My face got hot. I couldn’t think about where Paul was without picturing him with Evangeline the way I’d been with that red-haired girl, and that made me feel as bad as if I was watching them through a window. “I guess they hit it off,” I finally said.

  Henry snorted. “I’ll say.” He whinnied and pawed the ground with one foot.

  I looked away, blushing harder.

  So he and I didn’t have much choice but to explore Denver. We set out from our room on foot to see what we could see. Time and again, I’d tell myself I was going to walk out to Evangeline’s to check on Paul, but two steps in that direction, I’d find myself red faced and I’d turn around. He was a big boy, I kept telling myself, older than me. Worry might keep me looking to the west, but it wouldn’t move my feet very far in that direction.

  It was the first time since the stockyards in Kansas City that Henry and I had been together just the two of us, and getting around without Paul along was so much easier. I felt guilty for noticing. Just being able to say, “Hey, look at that,” was a treat.

  I offered to get work since we were going to be there a while, but Henry said, “Naw. We can go till the money runs out, and if it does, we can all get work.”

  I thought, Hot damn. That’s the spirit, Henry.

  We found a woman who took in washing and gave her everything we weren’t wearing. The next day we changed in her outhouse and gave her our last dirty clothes to wash. In clean clothes and out of the all-day sun, I felt brand-new. At least until I got around people other than Henry.

  Denver was a Kansas City–sized town but a whole lot more cowboy, and that didn’t translate into much friendliness. Folks were more or less polite, but their eyes looked wary even when their mouths were smiling. We learned to eavesdrop everywhere we went to learn about the goings-on in town without needing to ask outright.

  Maybe folks would have been nicer if we’d come at a different time. But the Jeffries and Johnson fight was less than a week off and had taken over Denver. It seemed like it was something in the very air. Folks took in a breath and came out with an opinion.

  Reno had been decided upon for the site, just as Paul had predicted. Both fighters were there and had set up camp by then, and I guess that gave folks solid pictures in their minds to help fire their imaginations. For sure, to fuel their mouths.

  Paul had gotten me in the habit of reading the newspaper, and now there was very little but talk of the fight there too. The Denver Post had sent one of their reporters to Reno, and his columns and lots of others repeated from other cities’ newspapers pretty much covered the front page every day.

  Just about everything on the page painted Jeffries as a hero and Johnson as some kind of animal. Jeffries had set up camp in an ivy-covered cottage surrounded by a tall fence with a sign that said Private: Keep Out. Johnson’s people had taken over a roadhouse and resort outside of town and were supposed to be whooping it up all day and night, drinking and dancing. There was an armed guard patrolling the grounds at night because Johnson was getting so many death threats in the mail, and some writers in the Post even made it sound like any reasonable white person would send him one.

  The movie palace in Denver took advantage of people being all fired up and showed boxing pictures every single night. Henry and I went once and saw the 1908 fight between Jack Johnson and Tom
my Burns in Australia—the one where Johnson first took the championship away and started this whole firestorm. Watching that put the upcoming Fourth of July fight in a whole new light, seeing the spectacle played out of black skin against white, set to smash and destroy.

  Neither Henry nor I had ever seen anything bigger than a fistfight in the schoolyard, and it was a shock to see grown men—any grown men—going at it like roosters, like they’d be happy to fight to the death.

  Walking out after the show amid the shoving shoulders and muttered cussing of the crowd, we saw a colored boy get pushed to the ground for the offense of walking by at the wrong time. One man shoved him, and others went out of their way to step on him—his hands, his head, all over. The boy closed his eyes and took it. He never made a sound.

  Henry started that way.

  I pulled him back and pointed him in another direction.

  “Goddamn them to hell,” he said low.

  I just nodded.

  He’d been quick enough to jump on the bandwagon with the Johnson haters back in Kansas City, but back then, he’d put no more thought into anything than a parrot does. Now he was spending a lot of time in our room, staring at his shoes. I didn’t ask him what he was thinking, but I was pretty sure what he was thinking about. I figured he’d talk when he was ready.

  I’d not been of any opinion at all when the fight was a far-off proposition, but now I was ready to call it a flat-out mistake. The whole thing. You couldn’t walk down the street without overhearing snippets of conversation: “Sparred eight rounds yesterday . . . Strong as ever . . . The black ain’t even workin’ out . . . How much you wanta bet?” I was tired of taking in tension every time I drew breath. It wears you down.

  Henry and I wondered out loud behind the closed door of our room what Paul would make of all this and if he was keeping up with the news. Of course, then speculation would turn to what Paul was doing at the moment, and I would change the subject fast as I could.

  Tuesday was one day sooner than the dealer had guessed the car might possibly be fixed, but by then I was more than ready to leave Denver.

  “Headlights came. Still waitin’ on the axle.” The man at his desk in the Ford dealership barely glanced up from his newspaper, reading about the fight.

  “Are you sure?” Henry asked. I guess he wanted to leave as bad as I did.

  The man looked up at him over his half glasses and from under his brow. He didn’t blink.

  I grabbed Henry’s arm. “Come on, pardner. Let’s go look in on Paul.”

  Outside Henry said, “What the hell does that mean? You wanna watch him with that girl?”

  That was an image I could have done without. “Aren’t you the least bit worried about him?” I said.

  “No. Why?”

  “Four days, he’s been there.”

  “Yeah. Lucky dog.” Henry waggled his eyebrows at me.

  I walked faster and didn’t answer. No car, no Paul, anger building to a boil all around us—I was the most unsettled I’d been since we’d left home. If Henry wouldn’t go to check on Paul, by God, I’d go alone. All the way this time. Yessiree. One foot in front of the other.

  I was about halfway to Evangeline’s when it started to rain. It was the first shower I’d seen since early Kansas, and that set me to thinking about the Heverson brothers. Already that seemed like four or five lifetimes ago.

  I was plenty warm even once I was soaked, but I could have done with dry shoes by the time I spied a shotgun shack standing all by its lonesome some fifty yards back from the road and nearly hidden by juniper trees.

  A little blonde girl about five years old answered my knock at the door, and I was so surprised, I took a step backward. Then I heard Paul’s voice ring out. “Who is it, Rae?”

  “I don’t know. They ain’t said.” She tilted her head back and smiled up at me—and I saw then that anybody who didn’t know better might think she was Paul’s little girl. She looked just like him. Same hair, same cheekbones.

  She even had his eyes.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Paul came to the door wearing clothes I’d never seen—a white shirt with no collar and a pair of brown pleated pants, both in fabric that looked as soft as that little girl’s skin. “Who’s there?” he said.

  “Paul?”

  His face split into a smile. “John! Come in! Come in! Is Henry here too?”

  I stepped into a spotless little room with just a few pieces of furniture. “No, he’s”—I looked at the girl—“where Evangeline works.”

  “Ah.” He just nodded. “This is Rae Ann, Evangeline’s daughter.”

  “Hello, Rae Ann,” I said, and she curtsied. To Paul, I said, “I was just . . . I mean, we didn’t know what . . . You know, I wanted to make sure . . .”

  “You wanted to make sure I was okay.” Paul smiled.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is the Ford fixed?” He looked so relaxed and natural.

  Before I could answer, Rae Ann jumped in with “Does Paul really have a auto, mister?” Her face looked like Easter morning.

  “He sure does,” I told her and then said, “No, Paul, I’m afraid not.”

  “Ah.” He considered this. “Well, then, more time for Puddin’ Pie here to learn how to read.”

  “Paul’s learnin’ me how to read!” Rae Ann told me.

  “I’m teaching you,” he corrected her.

  “You sure are!”

  He and I both laughed.

  “So . . . I’d offer you some coffee or something, but Evangeline’s about out of everything. She’s supposed to go to the store when she leaves work.” For all the expression in his voice, she might have had a job as a seamstress.

  My head spun with unasked questions. “No, no, that’s okay. I need to be going.” Lord, we were talking like neighbors our parents’ age. “I guess if you’re okay—”

  “I am,” he said and reached out to comb Rae Ann’s shoulder-length hair with his fingers. Then he said, “Honey pie, you haven’t been to Odessa’s since I got here. Why don’t you go say hello to her and see if she’s got an egg we can borrow?”

  Rae Ann twisted the toe of her shoe on the wood floor. “You said Mama’s goin’ to the store today.”

  He laughed. “She is, but she doesn’t know I used the last egg for your breakfast. Run along, okay?”

  It was obvious she didn’t want to leave, but she curtsied in my direction again and ran out the door.

  When it closed behind her, I half stumbled into a chair. “What the hell, Paul? What the holy hell is goin’ on?”

  He laughed again, easy as could be. My guess was he hadn’t done any nervous finger rubbing at all the last few days. “Where do you want me to start?”

  “At the beginning! I mean, not all the . . . details, you know . . .”

  He sat there with his movie actor smile. “Well, you were there when Evangeline picked me.”

  My heart sank the same way it had then. “Yeah?”

  “It doesn’t take much imagination to think that was because of Rae Ann. Evangeline had never met another blind person. We spent most of that first night talking.”

  “Talking.”

  “Yes, is that so hard to believe?” I didn’t answer, and he went on. “She wanted to know where I was from, what my life had been like. She’d never heard of the school in St. Louis, and she doesn’t have . . . she doesn’t have a lot to go on here, as far as knowing what’s out there in the world. What the possibilities are for Rae Ann.”

  “I see,” I said, then winced at my choice of words.

  He answered as though he’d seen me cringe. “Figure of speech, John. Drop it.”

  “Okay. But none of that tells me how you ended up here. At Evangeline’s house. Four days ago.”

  “We hit it off,” Paul said with a smile so wide I had to start laughing. He joined me. “And of course I wanted to meet Rae Ann. And then . . . well, isn’t she just about the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  I had to agree. T
hen I thought of Catherine with a pang that reminded me how long it’d been since I’d thought of her last.

  “Okay . . . who’s this Odessa she just went to see?”

  “Colored woman Rae Ann stays with part of the time while Evangeline’s working. Lives near here. Rae Ann adores her.”

  There it was. “But, Paul. Doesn’t it . . . bother you when Evangeline’s working?”

  He sat for so long, his face a mask, that I felt sorry for asking. But then he cleared his throat and said, “No, John. When I think of the entire spectrum of things that have bothered me in the course of my nineteen years, Evangeline’s job barely registers.”

  Not much I could say to that.

  Rae Ann came busting through the door again, radiant as the sun and with an egg in her hand. “Here you go!”

  Paul swung her up in his arms and hugged her.

  I was having trouble swallowing all of a sudden. “So I’ll just . . . come back out when the car’s ready?”

  “You do that. I’ll be here.”

  I walked the mile back to town. The sun popped out and made me think of what my grandma had said when I asked where I came from. “The buzzards laid you, and the sun hatched you.” Could be true, for how I felt.

  Henry had as good as made a family with the Heverson brothers. I couldn’t imagine him going farther than their place on the way home. And now Paul had moved right into a family of his own here in Denver. Peculiar as the circumstances were, I could see him staying on.

  And I was alone. I still had no idea where I wanted to live. Where I belonged. What I was capable of doing, other than a few things I knew wouldn’t make me happy. I went back to the room in town, pulled off my rain-damp clothes and climbed under the covers in my drawers and a dry shirt.

  I knew something was wrong as soon as I came to. I sat up and puked all over myself and then stared at the mess.