by Ann Petry
And they went along and they went along and the house was a stone pile, pile of stone, huge, formless, so few lights in it that it would be impossible to guess at the architecture, nothing to define its shape to the eye, no indication of windows, doors. The car stopped.
One of the trenchcoated gentlemen said, “Come on. Get out.” His voice tense, excited. The GrotonHarvard accent blurred with fear.
They went in through a side entrance. He saw ivy on the walls, wet, slicklooking on the walls, rippling in the wind. Then they were standing in a hallway, hesitating there, uncertain.
The woman said, “This way.”
It was a small room, no rug on the floor. Seemed to be a small sitting room, with a stone fireplace across one end. There was a moment, awkward, fleeting, during which they looked at him, and then looked away, and then looked again.
He dismissed the three men as unimportant, all of them cut from the same tree, perhaps elm, a soft wood no good for burning. But the woman. The woman is dangerous. It’s in the face, the eyes, the mouth—determination, intractability. Danger in the shaking. There’s a tremor running through her that she can’t control, running all through her body. Not fear but hate.
I know because I once shook like that myself. I watch this woman shake and I am standing in that dark little corridor outside Bill’s office, holding his gun, and I am shaking so that I can hardly stand up, I have to lean against the wall, because I am remembering how he caught me in China’s place again. We walked back to The Last Chance together and he said, Go in my office and he closed the door and locked it and picked that rawhide up, it was on top of his desk, and when it landed I gasped, and went on gasping because he kept hitting me with it.
When I got so I could walk again I tried to kill him, was going to shoot him with his own gun, and stood, shaking and trembling, not even able to point the gun, let alone hold it up, because I kept hearing his voice, seeing his face, when he bent over me, with that rawhide in his hand, “Get up, you bastard, or I’ll kick your guts out—” I went down that long flight of stairs, leading into the kitchen, stood outside his office door, shaking and trembling, because I saw him sitting there, feet up on his desk, his back to the window, sunlight on the black hair, on the white shirt, the clean starched white shirt that he put on every morning, and that F. K. Jackson said was a fetish.
L. Williams: Bill!
B. Hod (looking up, voice deceptive, mild): So you’re feeling better. What’s the gun for?
He lifted his arm, tried to aim the gun, and his hand was shaking so that the gun went back and forth, back and forth, as though he had reverted to infancy and was waving byebye with it, his hand shaking and trembling so violently that the gun began moving in wide loose circles. Bill got up, walked toward him, hit his arm, one short sharp blow, and the gun went out of his hand, landed on the floor.
B. Hod: I suppose you’re sore because you got a licking. What’re you sore about?
L. Williams: You tried to kill me.
B. Hod: I told you not to go in that whorehouse again. And you did. So I took some of the hide off your back.
L. Williams: You tried to kill me.
B. Hod: So as soon as you can walk down those stairs again, you come in here and pull a gun on me. My own gun. Get the hell outta my face.
L. Williams: You bastard. You beat me until I couldn’t stand up, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. What do you call that?
B. Hod (voice ugly, voice furious): I ever catch you in China’s place again, I’ll cripple you for life. Get the hell out of my face.
The trenchcoated gentlemen, his escorts, keepers, bodyguards, said, together, in their GrotonHarvard voices, only GrotonHarvard had not prepared them for the handcuff technique so that they sounded solemn and dimwitted at the same time, “We’ll wait outside. If you want us, just call.”
Just call, gentlemen. On call. Call house.
The man with the reddish-blond hair, the goodlooking face, the poor bastard of a husband, closed the door behind them, waited a moment, hesitated, and then said, “Do you know who I am?”
He didn’t answer, thinking, I could have predicted that you would start off that way, at an angle. You’ve chosen this tortuous, adumbrative approach, out of embarrassment. Because you’ve been horsed into this and you don’t know what to do with it. So keep on circling around it because it’s still your move.
Silence.
The man said, “I think you know who I am.”
The woman said, “Why don’t we sit down?”
That’s right, lady, he thought, because if you don’t, you’ll fall down. I know how that feels, too, to hold oneself up, keep forcing oneself to stand up when the bones the muscles the nerves won’t co-operate, and signal their lack of co-operation by shaking, shaking, shaking, and the shaking says, Sit down, lie down, or you’ll fall down.
The woman sat down but the man stayed on his feet. The man said, not looking at him, “We don’t want to harm you, to hurt you in any way. We just want to talk to you—to—” and his voice stopped, died.
“Suppose we stop playing tag with it,” he said. He sat down in an armchair, directly across from the woman. “What do you want to talk about, Captain Sheffield?”
The woman tried to get up, almost managed it. What did I say that caused that change in her expression? If she’d had a gun, she would have shot me, right then, at that moment. But why? Voice. It’s the sound of your voice, Bud. You hadn’t spoken before and she took it for granted you would sound like AmosAndySambo, nobody in here but us chickens. And it has for the first time occurred to her that you and Camilo were making the beast with two backs. An old black ram has been tupping her white ewe. She will never let you get out of this room alive, and how will she manage to keep you from being alive. She has the shakes. These gentlemen that she is depending on to help her in the blood sacrifice are weak sisters, sad sacks.
Silence again. The man was leaning against the mantel now, staring at him. He looked at the woman, she was breathing at a faster rate, and the trembling had not increased, but somehow, the expression on her face, the outrage in her eyes, had changed the feel of the room. It was like a change in the tempo of a song, faster now, the woman had made it go faster.
She said, “We want you to sign a confession.”
He kept watching her face. “A confession?” he asked, slowly. “Mea culpa?” He thought, I have no weapon, I have nothing to attack you with but my voice. I will make you wait and wait and wait and wonder what I am going to say, and finally tell you—tell you—
“How far back shall I go?” he asked. They were both staring at him, fear in the woman’s face, tension in the man’s, fear and tension, building.
He began to use his voice as though it were an instrument, playing with it, reminiscent now, speaking deliberately, letting his voice range around. “I stole a lollipop when I was five, stole it in a candy store run by a man named Mintz. I ran away from home when I was eight. I went a long ways, too, just across the street.” He stopped again, thinking, well, I might as well at some point name the complication, the inflammatory complication that the choreographer rang in on the old rigadoon of adultery and cuckoldry, because The Race with his deathshead face unmasked walked right in here with us, with me. “But the distance that I went was farther away from where I had been living than if it had been the coast of Africa where your rapacious Christian ancestors went to kidnap the Guinea niggers who were my ancestors.”
He paused again, watching the uneasiness, the fear, the hate. “When I was sixteen I tried to kill a man. Between then and now, well, I have not always loved my neighbor as myself. I have, on occasion, looked on the wine when it was red, looked too long, and with too tender and yearning an eye.” He grinned, remembering Old Man John the Barber, If I had to listen to that funny talk he does— “I have been guilty, also on occasion, of running swiftly with the hares, gamboling with th
e hares, and at the same time running swiftly with the hounds, baying the moon at midnight, with the hounds.” Pause again.
“How about you two people?” he said, conversationally. “Do you want to join me in the confessional? All of us culpa?”
Captain Sheffield moved farther away from the mantel. “You raped my wife,” he said, “there on the dock. You—”
“No.”
Captain Sheffield said, “You raped my wife, you—”
He watched the woman, though he addressed the man, speaking softly, taunt in his voice, “What was she doing on the Dumble Street dock at midnight? Why don’t you keep your wife home—at midnight? Why don’t you keep her home—at night, Captain Sheffield?”
He watched the woman. She opened her mouth, tried to say something, and she couldn’t control the trembling of her lips. She tried to get out of the chair, force herself to stand up, and couldn’t make it, sat down again.
Shared experience, he thought. I know about that, too. Know how it feels. After Dr. Easter’s last visit I tried to get out of the chair, sat back down again, tried again, and made it. I walked across the hall, went in Bill’s room, and got the gun from under his pillow and went down the stairs, slow, because I couldn’t go fast because of the shaking and the trembling. I used the wall for support, leaning against it, going down that enclosed staircase, no railing, stairs went straight down, no turn, walls were pine, they call it knotty pine these days, but to me, at sixteen, it was just wood, dark brown wood, and I leaned against it, going down three steps and then standing with my back against the brown wood of the wall, waiting until my heart stopped trying to jump out of my chest, and the damn gun was so heavy I was afraid I’d drop it.
There was a tremor in the woman’s voice. She said, “Bunny, there’s no use talking to him, there’s no use, don’t let him—”
He watched her try to get out of the chair again. This time she succeeded but the effort she put into it made the shaking worse. She walked over to the sofa, bent over, fishing for something under the cushions, hands shaking, groping, reaching for something. Gun in the shaking hand.
It was a forty-five. He stared at it in disbelief. Tribal law, he thought. Man who breaks a taboo must die.
One for the money. Two for the show. Three to make ready. “It wasn’t rape, Captain Sheffield.”
The woman tried to point the gun, and couldn’t lift it. It kept slipping down, and she tried to hold it with both hands, and the weight was too much, still couldn’t raise it, muzzle kept pointing down at her own feet, downdangling. A forty-five.
You’ll shake like that for the rest of your life, he thought, watching her. Like you had palsy. He knew. He’d had the tremors too, that time after Bill beat him up. He hauled ice for Old Trimble, in the belief that if he got his body rockhard he wouldn’t shake and tremble every time he caught a glimpse of a man in a white shirt. Stole F. K. Jackson’s gun because once he got rid of that shameful trembling, he was going to kill Hod. He hadn’t succeeded the first time. He was going to try again. Because he hated him. Was afraid of him.
When Abbie found she couldn’t make him quit hauling ice, she froze up, refusing to speak to him, turning her back on him, acting as though he had cut off his right arm and were peddling bits and pieces of it on the corner of Franklin and Dumble.
But he wouldn’t stop. He went on hauling ice, grimly, despairingly, stubbornly returning to the job, day after day, lived with an icecold woman at home, and handled ice at work, hauling it into dirty kitchens, walking through dark foulsmelling hallways, up long flights of filthy stairs. At night he collapsed into bed, and slept as though he were dead, not moving, not dreaming. Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, sweating, cold sweat from head to foot, shaking again, because he’d heard a sharp cracking sound outside in the street, and cringed because he thought Bill was standing over him with that rawhide in his hand, cursing him. And he’d get out of bed and reach up in the chimney, one hand braced against the marble mantel, reach up where he’d put F. K. Jackson’s gun and take it out and heft it in his hand, and find he still couldn’t hold it, that the trembling got worse, somehow, just from the feel of the gun.
“I want the truth from you,” the man said. “We brought you here to tell the whole story of what happened there on the dock. And I want the truth.”
He isn’t geared for this, isn’t geared for violence. But the woman is. Unfortunately, or fortunately, she’s geared up so high she’s practically paralyzed.
“If you won’t talk, we’ll make you talk,” the woman said.
“I thought you said you wanted a confession,” he said politely. “Sometimes there is a difference. The truth. Confession. Not always the same thing.” Fight back. With what? Sitting duck. A forty-five. Never get out of this room alive. And how will she manage it? Do the boys from GrotonHarvard know what a forty-five can do?
The woman sat down. She laid the gun on a table. Too heavy for her to hold. She sat there staring at him, and shaking.
He finally got his shaking under control. After six weeks of hauling ice to those stinking airless top floors in the tenements on Franklin, on Dumble, always to the top floors, he finally stopped shaking. And Abbie got colder, and more unbearable. He began to forget that he was going to try to kill Hod—to try again.
One morning he almost bumped into Weak Knees, right at the corner of Dumble and Franklin. And was ashamed because if he had seen Weak first, he would have crossed over on the other side of the street, pretended he hadn’t seen him. Weak said, “Sonny, Sonny, Sonny,” over and over, and his eyes filled with tears and he patted his arm and then went off down the street, shambling worse than ever, weaving from side to side as though he were dead drunk. He saw Weak stop and brush that imaginary figure away and knew that he was muttering, “Get away, Eddie, get away!”
Weak hadn’t done him any harm. Neither had Bill. Not really. They had balanced that other world, the world of starched curtains and the price of butter, the world of crocheted doilies and what will people think, the world of white bedspreads and pillow shams and behavior governed by what The Race did or did not do.
He went home and ate lunch and Abbie looked down her nose at him. When he finished eating he went straight across the street, went in through the open door of The Last Chance.
Bill was behind the bar, reading a tabloid, the clean white shirt open at the throat, the clean white apron tied tight around his lean waist.
When he looked up his gaze was as impersonal as though Link had been down the street, trotting around town on those thousand-and-one errands they were always sending him on. Impersonal and penetrating. He didn’t know that he’d ever been looked at quite so thoroughly.
B. Hod: Well?
L. Williams: I came over to tell you I think you were right and I was wrong. I thought—
B. Hod: What’d they do, put you out across the street?
L. Williams: No.
B. Hod: You get tired of playing horse?
L. Williams: No. It’s just that I’m not mad any more.
B. Hod: So? (reading the paper again)
He had waited, not knowing what to say next or what to do.
B. Hod: Now that we’ve kissed and made up, whyn’t you go in the kitchen and kiss Weak, too. (not looking up)
He stood there wishing he hadn’t come. There didn’t seem to be anything he could say that would make Bill get over being sore. Why should Bill be sore? Then Frankie came from somewhere in the back, old then, but he jumped up on him, snuffing around him, licking his hands, slobbering on him, panting, acting like a puppy half crazy from the joy of seeing him. He hugged him and patted him and turned toward Bill, grinning.
Bill said, “Yeah. Even Frankie’s been acting droopy since you quit us. And Weak has been looking as though he just came back from his mother’s funeral, if he’d ever had a mother who had a funeral.” He paused and the
n said, “I’ve been wearing full mourning myself.”
So the next Sunday morning when the smell of Canadian bacon, yeasty smell of freshbaked rolls, drifted up into his room from the kitchen, along with the sound of Weak singing, “Give me a girl with a curl, give me a girl I can furl,” he ducked under the shower, got his clothes on, and when Weak yelled, “Come and get it,” he let Frankie get a head start down the hall, and then ran down the hall, sat down on the top step and kicked his heels against the riser, drumming, drumming, drumming with his heels, and then sat motionless, waiting and listening, and then drummed again, and Bill’s voice, deep, outraged, furious, assailed his ears.
“For Christ’s sake cut out that goddamn racket what the hell you trying to do wake up the whole goddam neighborhood,” in one breath, on the same note of absolute rage.
He kicked the stairs again, drumming, drumming, drumming, and Bill came tearing out of his room, came down the hall, roaring, “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
He laughed and choked and went on laughing and had to lean against the wall, choking and laughing.
Bill leaned over, “Sonny, are you all right?” concern in his voice. Bent all the way over him, put his hand on his shoulder, “What’s the matter with you?”
“I just wanted to hear you carry on like a crazy man again. I missed the sound of it for six weeks.”
Bill said, “You—all that goddam noise—” hauled him to his feet, lifted his hand as though he were going to clip him, drew his hand back and laughed. He said, “Go on. Hightail it down those stairs, Sonny, before I change my mind and lay one on your jaw.”
The woman got up, handed the gun to the man. The man held it, gingerly, as though it were a hardshell crab, a big one, and it might turn on him.
He thought, The gutless bastard. She’s using him, just as though he were a hired gunman. Let’s see what he’ll do with it. Gambler. You’re gambling with your own life. So let’s see what he’ll do with it.