Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  The putt-putt of the motorcycle stopped. Headlight turned off. Footsteps on the dock. Jubine. Any other night, any other time, but not now. Face of a snoop. Stand still, don’t say anything, and the bulging eyes and the cigar will go away. Hear all, see all, smell all will go away.

  A long beam of light cut through the fog, sweeping the length of the dock, beam of a flashlight, moving, Oh, goddamn him, he thought, the light now directly in his eyes. Then it was turned off.

  “Sonny!” Jubine said. “Jesus, what’re you doin’ here at this hour?”

  For a moment he didn’t answer, couldn’t. Then he said, angrily, “I don’t know.” Who did this to you? I don’t know. Where did it happen? Here in The Narrows? I don’t remember anything about it.

  Jubine was peering at him, trying to see his face.

  “I’ve missed you, Sonny. Where’ve you been? No poker game. Nobody to talk to. Nobody who speaks my language. Mr. Hod and Mr. Weak Knees and I have been desolate. For a thousand Saturday nights. How come you’ve divorced us?”

  Link was silent.

  Jubine said, “Why do you no longer sit out the late watch at The Last Chance? It disturbs all of us. Mr. Hod tries to kill his customers, nightly, instead of just once in three months, as was his wont. Mr. Weak Knees keeps brushing Eddie away, pushing him away. And I, Sonny, I watch for you, wait for you.” He lit a match, held it in front of his cigar, too far away from the cigar, held it high, staring at Link, and said, “Did the canary get out of the cage?”

  Sound of the river lapping against the piling. Fog. Girl running, running, running down the dock. It began here. It ended here. Fury dying in him now. I want her back, I want to hold her in my arms again, I want her, I want her. Smell of stock. Walk like a ballerina’s. Long neck of a ballerina. Blue eyes, innocent, candid. Warm, sweet mouth. What made me—

  Jubine said, in his soft, compassionate voice, “Was it your canary, Sonny?”

  I like him, Link thought, I like his snoop’s face, and his jeering talk, but if he doesn’t move off—I, executioner. The river. What more appropriate than Jubine and his cigar, and his inquisitive eyes, his snoop’s face, placed finally and irrevocably in his river. Abbie: Out of my house. Camilo: Black bastard. Bill Hod: I’ll cripple you for life. And Mamie Powther? Sure. She hung little Mr. Powther from the sour apple tree, a long time ago, and keeps him there, not only refusing to cut him down, but rehanging him, three or four times a week, so that he will dangle, in perpetuity. China? Sure. Stand in a doorway and pull a curtain aside, watching and licking her lips while Mr. B. Hod tries to break my spine. Executioners, all.

  Jubine turned the flashlight on. The sudden light blinded him, and he thought, Got to know, got to see what I look like, got to find out. Was it your canary? And how does a man look, what can you see in his face, what would you have had if you could have taken a picture of him at the moment when he lost his canary? Recording angel with a camera? Hangman with a camera.

  He headed straight into the long blinding beam of light. “You son of a bitch,” he said, “I’ll throw you in the river.”

  The flashlight went off. Jubine turned and ran. Thud, thud, of his feet in the GI shoes. Then the putt-putt of the motorcycle.

  He did not go back to Abbie’s house to live. He stayed at The Last Chance. He tried not to think about the girl. He could sit in the kitchen of The Last Chance, drinking a cup of coffee, listening to Weak Knees talk, hear what he said, and see, not the stove, or the copper hood, or the bare whitish wood of the table, or the pots and pans like a decoration on the wall, but see, instead, Camilo lying next to him, light from the street, even that far up, eighth floor of The Hotel, powerful enough so that the room was never completely dark, see her lying next to him, wearing a thin thin nightgown, pale pink stuff like gossamer, like cobwebs, pale pink ribbons at waist, at neck, at wrists, longsleeved cobweb, sleeves an artful accentuation of nakedness, like Olympia, with the shoes and the ribbon tied around the neck, seeming more naked than without them, Camilo like Olympia in this pink cobweb of a nightgown, see right through it; and the feet perfect, toenails painted with pale pink polish, hair tied back with a black ribbon, tied back in a kind of horse’s tail, pale yellow horse’s tail.

  Night after night he sat in the kitchen of The Last Chance and listened to Weak Knees, and saw Camilo in his mind’s eye.

  End of February and he was doing the same thing.

  Finally, on a Friday night, Weak Knees said, caution in his voice, curiosity, too, “Sonny, you had a rumble with somebody or somep’n? Not that it’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help noticin’ you don’t never go anywhere no more at night.”

  Link put his feet up on the kitchen table, tilted his chair back against the wall, consciously assuming Mr. Bill Hod’s favorite position. “I guess you’d call it a somep’n.” It sure to God wasn’t a fight. “I don’t know exactly what it was.”

  “You goin’ to be here for the game, tomorrow night?”

  “Yeah.” I have let Mr. Hod bait me, four Saturday nights in a row, while we played poker, I have let Mr. Jubine photograph me with his eyes, watched him record in his mind’s eye how a man looks who has lost a canary, while we played poker; both gentlemen seem quite aware of the fact that I have lost something, though only one of them is certain that it was a canary. Tomorrow will be the fifth Saturday night, in a row, that I have let Hod wave red capes under my nose, and ignored them. By the sixteenth or seventeenth Saturday night, in a row, I will stop feeling as though I had lost an arm or a leg, the sickness will have gone out of me. Sickness, anger, regret, fury, ebb and flow of all four.

  Weak Knees poured coffee into a mansized white mug, “Here, Sonny,” he said, not moving away from the stove, “lay your lip over this.”

  “Don’t make me move, Weak. I’m too damn comfortable. Bring it over and put it on the table.”

  “Name-a-God, Sonny, I got a sauce cookin’ on this stove. I can’t leave it. Come and git this coffee. Wassamatter with you, anyway?”

  Bill attacked the swinging door, announcing his arrival in the kitchen.

  Weak Knees said, “Boss, make him git up off his can and come and git this cup of coffee. Wassamatter with him anyway?”

  Bill put the coffee cup down on the table, in front of Link. “You in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, Mr. Boss.”

  “What’s the matter then?”

  He didn’t answer that one. He watched Weak Knees turn away from his sauce, turn away from the stove, to stare at them. He’s always afraid of trouble, afraid he’ll be an eyewitness to trouble between me and Mr. Hod. But Mr. Hod and I are at peace, for the moment. I can tell by Mr. Hod’s face, by his eyes. No warfare tonight.

  “Are you broke?” Bill asked.

  “Thank you, sir, I am not. My funds are ample for my modest needs. At the moment. I hasten to add that qualifying phrase because I never know when they may run completely out. Funds have a way of doing that at the most—”

  “Don’t talk that crap to me. If you’re not broke and you’re not in some kind of trouble, whyn’t you go out at night any more?”

  “I have no place to go, friend. I got an eviction notice.” And now we’ll end the audience, we’ll switch over to you. “Did you ever get one, pal?”

  Bill said, “Yeah,” and walked out of the kitchen.

  “Ain’t no way to fight a eviction,” Weak Knees said, relief in his voice. “Man says he wants his property why he’s got a right to it. Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do about it ’cept let him have it.”

  “Yeah,” he said and thought, At night, in The Hotel, in that queer, reflected light that reached into the room, she looked like something out of a store window, dreamed up by an artist who quit painting and took a job decorating store windows before he got so hungry he started eating grass in Central Park, grazing like a horse in Central Park, and the starving boughtandsold tal
ented painter transformed what had been a dummy in a window, breathed life into it, created a female to haunt a man’s dreams. Haunt his dreams? Haunt him for the rest of his life, waking or sleeping, in his bloodstream like a disease.

  “Girls?” he had said. “Other girls?” They always wanted to know, who they were, were you in love with them—

  “Only you. You only,” he had said.

  “Really and truly? Link, I don’t believe you.”

  “You shouldn’t. I had ’em by the hundred. I had ’em by the thousands. I had ’em by the millions, millions and millions of ’em, honey, round ones, square ones, triangular ones, up to and including the octagonal—”

  She had poked him sharply, in the side, with her elbow.

  “Ouch! That hurt.”

  Male and female horseplay.

  “It was supposed to.” She had traced the line of his torso, with the tips of her fingers, and he thought he could feel the blood pulse down his side, in the wake of her fingertips. “Hey, you’re tickling me. Stop it!”

  “You are the most beautiful color,” she said. She kept running her fingers up and down his side. “I remember the first time I saw a colored woman. When I was a little girl. I wondered if the color would wash off, and then I wondered if she was that color all over. Or was it just the face and hands.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “All the missionaries who come back from Africa or India tell that same story, in reverse. I used to listen to ’em, on Sundays, in the colored Congregational Church, and us dark folks whose black souls had been saved practically at birth, would titter when we heard about those ignorant black Africans, those ignorant brown Indians, who were hellbent on finding out if the missionaries were white all over, or was it just the face and hands, we rocked back and forth tittering when we heard how those heathen dark folks peeked at the white missionaries when they took their baths.” Silence. “Even a missionary, a fisherman of souls, is aware of, and proud of, his white skin.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re not a missionary. Or are you?” He remembered that he had turned over on his side, remembered that The Hotel’s too-soft bed had been long since replaced by a kingsize bed, the suite changed, from week to week, in subtle ways, comfortable, then positively luxurious. He had turned over on his side so he could look at her. “Did some beneficent Board of Missions send you into the jungle to save me from perdition?” She didn’t answer. He said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I wish I was colored, too.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve begun to be afraid—”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “I’m afraid that sometime you’ll fall in love with a colored girl.”

  The wheezegroan of the elevator was an overture, a prelude, a finale, playing on and on, outside in the corridor.

  You black bastard.

  He remembered thinking, She sleeps like Bill Hod, like a cat, all of her relaxed, stretched out, remembered Hod walking barefooted, in a room full of sunlight, full of cold air, Hod, making no sound as he moved, air-borne, creature from another planet, Mars, perhaps, looked at her and thought of Bill Hod.

  Weak Knees was no longer talking about eviction notices. He was talking about people—religion—but he was still stirring the sauce: “When they’re young they don’t go to church. Then when they gets false teeth and they waterworks run all the time, they gets scared, they think that well, after all, everybody’s got to die some time and so mebbe they could, too. It’s a funny thing but when they’re young, Sonny, they don’t believe they can get old or die. Then one mornin’ they gets up and looks in the mirror and they got gray hair and a bald spot and they kind of adds themselves up, and they got a full set of uppers and lowers and two sets of glasses and some kind of funny crick in the middle of they backs and they begin to figure mebbe they better start goin’ to church. I used to stand out there on that sidewalk in Charleston and watch ’em go by. Sunday mornin’. All them baldhead white Christians.”

  That first night in The Hotel he had looked out of the window, thinking, Well, yes, the sheets are clean, and there’s a view from the windows of these rooms which pass for the royal suite, view at night, mostly neon signs, harsh red, harsher blue, and there’s the night music of New York, sound of busses and cars, whine of siren on ambulance and fire engine, and police emergency squad, but it is hardly a place that I would choose to spend much time in. The bed’s too soft; and the slipcovers on those chairs and the sofa outside in the sitting room are covered with the grease marks from the heads of the Jacksons and the Johnsons, the kind of place where you put a quarter in the radio, and it plays for exactly a half-hour and then dies on you, without warning, slowing down, the sound fading out, a horrid sound like a death rattle.

  Suite on the eighth floor of a downattheheels hotel, hot water faucet in the bathtub dripped, dripped, and when you turned it on you got a gush of lukewarm water, place operated on the principle that noise would serve as a screen for shabbiness, as a cushion for the high prices. Yet he had to admit that the view was, well, it was New York, a crosstown street, extending and extending, lights in the buildings, street stretching away and away, and up, slight rise in the ground, small hill, so that the lights were not only strung out but seemed to rise, ascend, and if you didn’t know what the place was like in daylight, saw only that, the lights reaching up and up, you could say it was beautiful. New York at night.

  Mr. and Mrs. Williams, Syracuse, New York. Hotel maid came in at six in the morning and closed the windows, turned the heat on in the radiators, and then left. He got up, dressed, and found breakfast for one in the sitting room, and wondered how come in this fifteenth-rate hotel—and remembered that Camilo had slipped Room Service a neatly folded bill the night before, Room Service, with the face of a pimp, face of a whore, a could be bought, could be paid for, all of him for sale, and would see nothing and tell all any time, and Camilo knew how to get service even in a fifteenth-rate hotel, all front and no behind, all lobby and the rooms, rundown. No hot water that night, but the next morning it was damn near boiling when he took a shower.

  Weak Knees finished whatever he had been doing at the stove, came and sat down at the table, with a cup of coffee, stirring it with vigor. He said, “You know, Sonny, I get sick of all these whafolks askin’ me first thing, first drop of a hat, what do I think about Paul Robeson. The meat man he come in here this mornin’, a brokedown dogass white man if I ever see one, all bandylegged from carryin’ carcasses, and he come in here with my order, and before he gets the meat put down on the table good he wants to know what do I think about Paul Robeson. So I made him happy, I said I thought he oughtta hightail it back to Russia where he come from, and that softened him up, and I waited awhile and I give him a cup of coffee, and then I says, The reason he oughtta have stayed in Russia, mister, is because over there if he went around talkin’ about the changes he wanted made, why’d he get hisself shot full of holes, but nobody over there would be goin’ around about to piss in their pants because he was a black man talkin’ the wrong kind of politics.

  “And if his boy went and married hisself a little white chickadee over there in Russia, the whafolks wouldn’t waste their time runnin’ to all the colored folks they see askin’ ’em what they thought about it. I says over there they wouldn’t give a damn, mister, and I don’t give a damn over here. Any country where the folks can’t marry each other when they got a heat on for each other why—”

  On Saturday nights, Link thought, sitting here in the kitchen, you could hear, faintly, far-off, because of the weight of the door between, a murmur from the bar. The only time you could hear it. The rest of the week, nothing at all. The door cut off sounds. Friday nights—no sounds at all, a good night in which to think, to remember, to taste regret, to stand off and look at yourself—

  The door opened suddenly. Mr. B. Hod, he thought, the only man in the world who could make a s
winging door perform in that fashion, make it erupt, not open, erupt. Bill Hod stood still, just inside the door. What in hell’s the matter with him? Murder writ all over his face for any man to see, usually only in his eyes when he’s about to sap somebody up, this time, all over his face, what’s happened in the bar to make him look like that?

  He stood up. It’s me, he thought, and I always knew that someday you would look at me like that again, and I would decide, finally, that I could take you apart, piece by piece, and find out whether you’re a son of a bitch all the way through, or just in sections.

  Bill said, “You’re wanted out front, Bud.”

  “Wanted?” he said, glaring at him, not moving, thinking, Stallions? Bucks. Find the antlers in the underbrush, years afterwards, still locked.

  “Yeah.” Hod turned, went out through the swinging door.

  Weak Knees said, “Old Gruff and Grim’s got his habits on. Don’t you go lockin’ asses with him, Sonny,” pleading note in his voice. “You leave him be, Sonny. You hear? He’s spoilin’ for a fight. You leave him be, Sonny—”

  The bar was comfortably full, Friday night crowd, yeasty smell of beer, fruity smell of rye, bourbon, blue haze of smoke, strangely quiet though, no male voices lifted in song, in tall storytelling, in laughter. He looked along the length of the bar, seeking Old Man John the Barber, the barometer, the weather vane. Barber had his back turned to the street. At night the old man always stood near the front window, studying the street (man in his private club, watching the world go by), stood where he could catch the street sounds, see the car lights, movement of people, watch the women’s legs, all legs redorange under the neon sign, accept or reject them as they passed, play kingemperormaharajahsultanshah standing in The Last Chance watching the women’s redorange legs, estimating their rumps, no good, off with her head, fair to middlin’, decision reserved, let her live awhile, this one, but definitely, I will take this one for tonight, you could tell when the old man picked one because his fierce old eyes lit up, he bent forward, the thrust of his jaw accentuated, I will take this one, an old man with shaggy eyebrows playing a game.