by Ann Petry
“J.C.!” Abbie said severely. “That’s enough. You must not repeat things you’ve heard. I’ve told you that time and time again.”
“It’s my fault, Miss Abbie. He was working his way around to answering a question.” Camilo has been looking for me? For what? Maybe she hasn’t found Muscle Boy Number Four yet. God help him. And God damn him.
“I didn’t finish yet,” J.C. said. “So Mamie asked Bill where you was and Bill said you was tryin’ out new ways to bust up your neck. Old Man John de Barber said you had to keep tryin’ out new ways to see would it really bust or not because you was young. He say if he had to listen to that funny talk you do all the time he’d bust it for you. He say he can stand it days but if you was in Bill’s place nights too, he couldn’t stand it.”
Abbie looked at J.C. and then at Link because Link was laughing. “There are times when I don’t understand a word he says. It’s just as though he spoke another language. What did he say that was so funny?”
“He was repeating what was said in The Last Chance when Bill Hod told Mamie Powther that I was up in Quebec, trying out a ski jump.” Well now, wait a minute, he said to himself, leave us make a fast switch here because sooner or later Abbie is going to mull this over in her mind, and get on a very high horse because Mamie Powther is a patron of Mr. Hod’s sinkhole of iniquity.
“Can you make an ‘A,’ old man?” he asked.
“I ain’t no old man,” J.C. said waspishly. “I kin make all de letters. But I didn’t finish yet. I ain’t told you what Weak said.”
“Don’t, old man, don’t,” Link said, hastily. “I’ll see you later, Miss Abbie. I’m going across the street to see if I can grab a seat in a poker game.”
“All right, dear,” she said. “Don’t stay out too late.”
Come the revolution, he thought. We have blown up on our lines, or else the script’s been changed. She should have said: Those poker games, that man, you get in so late, alone in the house, hear noises, someone walks through the backyard, knocks over the ashcan, you ought to wear a coat, Dumble Street not safe, people knifed, held up. So that I could say: Know everybody for blocks around, safe in Dumble Street, safe as a church, my end of town.
He changed his exit line. He said, “Do not worry, honey,” and patted her firmskinned, clearskinned brown cheek. “I have few fish to fry tonight. Few and small. And they will fry easy.”
He heard laughter from outside in the street, girls’ laughter, gay, musical, the pitch high enough to reach into the sitting room. Abbie heard it too, because she looked straight at him as though she were asking a question.
She wants to know what became of the girl, only she wouldn’t ask a thing like that. I couldn’t answer her anyway. I don’t know and I wish I could say I don’t care. But I do.
After he left the house he stood outside on Abbie’s front steps, looking at Dumble Street. He watched a group of girls walking arm in arm, heard a male voice lifted in song, caught a whiff of perfume, of aftershaving lotion. There were lights in all the houses. He saw the shadows of women, moving back and forth against the lighted kitchen windows, in the frame house next door. Thursday night. The tempo of the street was not as fast as on Saturdays, night music of the street, softer, slower, because this was the maid’s day off, cook’s day off, handyman’s day off, so it was a courting night. Almost eight o’clock so all Dumble Street would soon be en route to the movies. Two by two. Go home afterwards. Two by two. Or like L. Williams, one by one.
The Last Chance was giving off muted Thursday night noises, too. The boys lined up at the bar were drinking lightly, companionably. They looked extra clean, extra scrubbed.
Wertham, the night bar man, a big, dark young man, lifted a hand in salute, when he saw Link. “Hi, Jackson,” he said.
“Hi, Johnson,” Link answered. They used to say Hi, stud, to each other. But not any more. Not since the night Camilo showed up at the bar looking for L. Williams.
“Where’s the boss?”
“In the office, Jackson,” Wertham said and grinned. “Peace, it’s wonderful.”
“Great God Almighty! What’s he been eating?”
“I dunno. Could be Weak is sprinkling saltpeter on his food. Anyway, he hasn’t whipped a head for six whole days. Maybe he’s savin’ himself for you,” Wertham said, hopefully.
“Leave us hope not, Johnson. Mine doesn’t whip as easy as it once did.” He turned away and looked at Old Man John the Barber. The old man was playing his favorite game, staring out the front window, watching the girls go by. He said, “How are you, John?”
Barber looked at him, glared, looked away.
“Not yet, Barber,” he said. “See?” He held his neck up as if for inspection then leaned over and half chanted, half sang, in the old man’s ear, “Oh, de muscle bone connected to de shoulder bone; and de shoulder bone connected to de neck bone; and de neck bone still connected to de head bone; cry-in’, didn’t it rain, chil-lun, mah Lord, didn’t it rain?” Saying it so fast that it sounded like gibberish.
“Ah!” the old man snorted in disgust.
Peace, it’s wonderful, he thought, as he looked in Bill’s office. I bet if I returned in the year two thousand, he would be sitting with his feet up on that desk, wearing a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, the collar open at the throat, and his hair would still be black, and he’d have on a pair of brown shoes with a mirror shine on them, and the light from that desk lamp would not be on him but it would still be swiveled around so it would blind whoever comes in through this door.
“How are you, Boss Man?” he said. And moved away from the light.
“Jesus,” Bill said. “I thought we’d have to use bloodhounds and a posse.”
“Thursday, remember? I said I’d be gone two weeks. It’s two weeks, pal. On the nose.”
“Yeah. But how was I to know you hadn’t broken your neck, Sonny.”
“You and J. C. Powther and Barber the bastard,” Link said, irritably. “Whyn’t you make book on it?”
“Because I don’t make book on crazy sons of bitches,” he drawled. “If I did, I’d be out of business in twenty-four hours.” He crossed his legs so that one shined-up brown shoe was higher than the other, shoe practically covering his face.
Clink of glasses from the bar. Voices. Snatch of song. Thursday night quiet. Peace all broke up in little pieces and strewn around the office floor.
“You hungry?” Bill asked, amicably.
“Yeah. I could eat a horse. Stewed, fried, or picked fresh right off the vine.” Peace, again.
“Weak’s sitting out a movie. But he’s got enough filet mignon stacked up in the icebox to even take care of you. Come on in the kitchen and I’ll fix it for you.”
After they finished eating, he said, “Boss, you’re not in the same class with Weak but you’re damn good. I haven’t eaten a meal like this for two solid weeks.”
“I figured you were making noises like a maneating tiger because you had an empty gut.”
“You were about eighty per cent right.”
“Sonny—” Bill said, and stopped.
Here we go, he thought. Poppa is about to tell Junior the facts of life as they concern white women and gentlemen of color.
He was wrong. Bill reached in his pocket, took out his wallet, and counted out a fairsized stack of very pretty new bills, and laid them on the kitchen table. He watched him, thinking, I forgot that he lets every man bury his own dead unless the other man’s dead happens to get mixed up with some of his dead. But he’s always willing to drop something in the hat to help out with the funeral expenses.
“Two weeks’ pay. I thought you might be broke.”
“Thanks,” he said. Gentlemen, all. “It isn’t necessary, but thanks, anyway. I’ll give you a chance to get it back. How about a game tonight?” They all have cures. Abbie’s is a cup of hot tea. Weak’s is a cup o
f hot cawfee. Mr. B. Hod’s is cold hard cash. Mine is snow on a mountaintop. Cold, too. Maybe Mr. Hod and I are blood brothers. Some like it hot. Some like it cold. Some like it in the pot. All one-shot prescriptions are alike. They don’t work.
“Yeah,” Bill said, “can you get hold of Jubie?”
“I’ll try to flush him around midnight. At the dock.”
“Okay. Let me go break the news to Wertham that what he really wants to do is work until closing time instead of laying that nappyheaded high yaller from midnight on.”
He said, “Hold on a minute, Bill. Don’t do that.” Maid’s night off. Courting night. The high yaller would be waiting for Wertham. “Tell him to go on home and come back at midnight. I’ll take the bar over until he comes back.”
“You feel like it?”
“Sure. I’ll go take a shower and change and be downstairs in five or ten minutes.”
At midnight he was still behind the bar, talking to Weak Knees. The door opened and Wertham came in. He said, “Hi, Jackson, and thanks.”
“Don’t mention it, Johnson, the pleasure was all mine,” Link said. “Come to think of it though I guess it was all yours.”
“It was all mine, Jackson,” Wertham said, solemnly.
Weak Knees said, “Sonny, you know—” and then his voice hit high C and died away, almost like a siren, the tailend of the wobble of a siren, because the door had opened again.
Link turned to see who it was and saw Camilo walking straight toward him, smiling. He thought, I’ll never get her out of my blood. All I managed to do was just forget how beautiful she is. She still walks as though she owned the world, and come to think of it, she does. That’s why she walks like that.
“Link!” she said. “Where’ve you been?” smiling, holding out her hands, reaching across Bill Hod’s bar, long mahogany bar that came out of an old New York hotel, the pale yellow hair looked like silk, same kind of gleam and shine, back straight, head up, either unaware of, or ignoring the silence, the stares. Well, of course, he thought, not moving, pretending that he didn’t see her hands, if you’re a multonmillionaire and white, you don’t give a damn what the black peasants think.
Wertham nudged him. “Here’s your coat,” he said. “Give me the monkey jacket.”
“Okay, stud,” he said. When Wertham glared at him, he laughed. “Thanks, pal. I’m going to get you over a barrel someday just like this.”
He put the coat on, said, “Come on, honey,” to Camilo and held the door of The Last Chance wide open. “Leave us go bay the moon.”
They walked toward the dock. Both silent.
She said, “Darling, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you.”
Darling, he thought. I’ve been sweetie, and you black bastard, but—darling. “Quebec. Washing the gold dust out of my hair. Off my skin.” Angry again. Sorry again. In love with her again.
She moved closer to him, and he could smell liquor mixed with the old familiar smell of her perfume. You’ve been drinking, he thought. You’re just this side of a binge, lee side of a binge. And I shouldn’t have said that business about gold dust but I still react to you, and I don’t like the smell of whiskey, smell of The Moonbeam, smell of The Last Chance, smell of the twobit whores, mixing and blending with the smell of your perfume.
“I’m in love with you,” she said, softly. “I’m so in love with you that nothing else matters. You can’t even insult me.”
“Camilla—” he said.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Isn’t that your name? Camilla Treadway Sheffield? How should I say it? You tell me. Perhaps I shouldn’t say it at all. I really ought to call you Mrs. Sheffield. I ought to say, Mrs. Sheffield, you picked the wrong man. Or did your husband, the captain, pick me out to keep you happy? I’ve heard of things like that being done—only among the very rich, though.”
“Don’t—” she said. She tried to light a cigarette, and the wind blew the match out. Tried again, and the match illuminated her face. Her eyes were filled with tears. Blue eyes. The innocence still there, intact, the lovely mouth trembling. After the match went out it was darker on the dock. The sound of the river lapping against the piling was louder, more insistent, in the sudden darkness.
“You can’t stop being in love with me,” she said, voice shaking, voice blurred, as though her throat were filled with tears too, “any more than I can stop being in love with you. I tried it and it doesn’t work.”
Her hand was shaking, both hands probably, but the one that held the cigarette was shaking because the lighted end was bobbing up and down like a buoy in the river, a warning signal, bobbing up and down.
“Listen, honey,” he said carefully. “You keep forgetting that there are two sides to this. From your point of view it was just good clean fun, and it still is. You were shacked up with a dinge in Harlem, or here in The Narrows. You were rich enough to keep all the exits open, to have your cake and eat it, too. But from my point of view—”
She interrupted him and the blur was gone from her voice, there was sharpness in it and something like anger. “You know it wasn’t like that,” she said. “Why do you keep harping on my money? What’s that got to do with it? Everything was fine until you found out—”
“Yeah. Until I found out I was just one of a collection. Back in the eighteenth century I would have been a silver-collar boy. Did you ever hear about them? The highborn ladies of the court collected monkeys and peacocks and little blackamoors for pets. Slender young dark brown boys done up in silk with turbans wrapped around their heads and silver collars around their necks, and the name of the lady to whom they belonged was engraved on the silver collar. They were supposed to be pets like the peacocks and the monkeys, but in the old oil paintings, the lady’s delicate white hand always fondled the silkclad shoulder of the silver-collar boy. So you knew they were something more useful, more serviceable—”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said angrily.
“Wasn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“No. And if there weren’t something wrong with you, you’d know it. We had something wonderful.”
“Yeah. You had a platinum collar and a diamond leash and I had a neck. But that kind of collar doesn’t fit my neck any better than the imitation-leather ones people have tried to buckle around it from time to time.”
“You’re just making up excuses.”
“No, I’m not. I’m trying to show you how this thing looks from where I sit. You think there’s something wrong with me because you tagged me for your collection of muscle boys and I stood up on my hind legs and shook the tag off—”
“Collection?” she said. “Collection of muscle boys? What are you talking about?”
“Stevedores. Prizefighters. Big-muscled chauffeurs. The he-men boys with the big muscles that the little millionaire girls lay up with overnight or for a weekend, after they begin to get bored with their husbands but still don’t want to divorce them.”
“You don’t mean that,” she said, slowly.
“But I do. You’re not in love with me. You think you are because I ran out on you. And it should have been the other way around. So you’re kind of frantic. That’s all. Apparently I had the right build for the muscle boy role but my mental equipment’s all wrong and, curiously enough, I’ve got the wrong kind of moral equipment, too. You know, even the white muscle boys run out on the little rich girls, eventually. Even with them the gold finally and awfully sticks in their throats.”
“Weren’t you in love with me?” she asked.
“Sure.” And I still am.
“Well—”
“Look,” he said. “Much as I loved you, and may still love you, I’m just not built to be anybody’s shack job. Yours or anybody else’s. No matter how you slice it, honey, that’s what I was.”
She put her hands on his arms, hands trembling, body trembling. Ang
er, he thought. No. Frustration? Perhaps. Love? No. Too much whiskey.
“Can’t we go somewhere and talk?” she asked.
“There isn’t anything to talk about.”
He pushed her away, gently, firmly, thinking, We started here much like this, with me pushing you away. Difference in time, and in degree, of course. We have made love to each other, we have lived together, I suppose you could call it living together in that suite in The Hotel that you turned into a replica, smallscale, of course, but a replica of Treadway Hall, where you footed the bills, creating a silken bower for the silver-collar boy. I lay beside you and thought you were like a pink and white figure straight out of one of those Fifth Avenue store windows, thought, looking at you, that even sleeping was something you did completely, totally involved in it, relaxed all over, as though nothing else existed but you and sleep, you surrendered to sleep. Total involvement.
It would have ended anyway, eventually, not this soon, not this way, but even without the Treadway Gun, and the husband, the poor bastard of a husband, it would have ended because with you love is like sleep or dancing or driving a car, everything you do, you do too hard. You dance as though that was all there was in the world, you and me, the only dancers, the music playing for us, you creating an atmosphere of the dance, just the two of us, so that we had all the fluidity of motion, the matched rhythm, seemingly spontaneous, not rehearsed and worked over and sweated over, but the perfection of rhythm of a professional dance team, so that no one could say who led or who followed. Making love to you was almost like that, too.
He frowned, remembering the warm perfumed skin, the rounded softfleshed arms that clasped him, held him, the slender body arching up toward him, the absolute and complete surrender, the abandonment to surrender. It is at the moment the Treadway Gun and the husband, but it would eventually have been a matter of survival, a refusal to be suffocated, owned, swallowed up. He supposed she inherited this trait from her father, John Edward Treadway, the mild little mechanic, softspoken, dreamylooking, who set up shop in an old barn on the outskirts of Monmouth and tinkered and puttered, and puttered and tinkered with guns, until he perfected and patented the Treadway Gun just before the First World War. The story of the Treadway Gun was drilled into the students at Monmouth High School as an outstanding example of a rags-to-riches success story. American success story. The one goal. The total involvement in it.