by Pete Hamill
That poor bastard.
The driver stopped at the locker club and we got out, went in and changed clothes. Then we walked slowly down the road to the main gate. Miles was quiet for a long time.
“Back to Anus Mundi,” he said at the gate.
Chapter
45
By Saturday afternoon, there was still no message from Eden. I was trying to sleep when Bobby Bolden came to the barracks. He told me to get dressed. They were all going to a club that night to hear a blues singer named Champion Jack Dupree. Out in the boondocks somewhere.
“Catty loves this guy,” he said. “So she’s your date, if you get what I mean.”
He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go. He seemed to know that Eden wasn’t back from New Orleans and that I was feeling lost or abandoned or wasted. So he told me to go with them. And at dusk I was driving Bobby’s Mercury, with Catty beside me, Bobby next to the door, and Bumper, Rhode Island Freddie and Tampa crowded into the back seat. We drove northeast out of the city, along roads that Bobby Bolden knew, through a thousand acres of longleaf pine. He pointed out small clusters of unpainted houses, part of the turpentine camps where blacks had worked since slavery days. Tampa argued about the true name of the pine. His folks called it loblolly pine or sand pine, and Bumper said it didn’t matter, did it? Tampa said it sure did, ’cause after the Civil War, most of the cotton plantations closed. “Didn’t have no free labor no more,” he said. “So they planted the land with loblolly and sold it to the timber men. So it do matter, don’t it?”
“In Africa, they be callin it Mau Mau pine ’fore long,” said Rhode Island Freddie, and they all laughed. Catty glanced at me.
“We should’ve checked these damn local Mau Maus for guns,” she said to me. “Before we got in the car.”
“Not guns, woman,” Bobby Bolden said. “Knives. Long knives. As in the Night of the Long Knives …”
“It’s the Night of the Long Dicks everybody’s afraid of.”
They all laughed and then Catty pointed out a hawk circling over the pine forests and Bobby Bolden said, “Now that’s free. No guard duty. No salutin’. No racist bullshit. Free …”
The hawk suddenly dove out of our sight, and then Bobby Bolden directed me into a side road, through darker country, plunging across bogs where the odor was suddenly sweet and musky and we could see hundreds of shrubs blooming like white walls.
“Jesus, that’s beautiful,” Catty said. “What is that stuff, anyway?” Nobody knew the name of the shrubs, and I wished Eden was there, she would know, she knew everything, and Catty said she’d like to find a perfume that smelled like that, and then suddenly it was dark. I turned on the lights, and we were moving down a back road, unable to see much except the trunks of pines and a few black people walking slowly on the shoulder. Bobby Bolden leaned forward, peering into the darkness. He took Catty’s hand.
And then we began to hear music. It was way off, a thumping bass line at first, and then the tinny distant sound of brass, and now there were cars on the road, red taillights ahead of us, and more people walking in groups of four and five, all dressed up, and then we could see the lights of the club.
“Up there,” Bobby Bolden said. “Slow down. Real slow. Crawl, man. There’s people everywhere.… You see that white post? Take a right just past that.”
We pulled into a dirt field serving as a parking lot, and we all got out and stretched. Before us stood the Blackhawk. It was a long, two-story building with a neon sign glowing in the humid night, and music pounding from its open doors. And I realized that there were hundreds of black faces all around us in the dark, and black laughter floating on the night air, and the sibilant sound of black women shushing men and deeper voices answering with words I couldn’t hear.
“Better hold her hand,” Bobby Bolden said. “Never know who might be watchin from the woods.”
I took Catty’s damp hand, and Bobby Bolden led the way to the door, with Tampa, Bumper and Long Island Freddie behind us. I saw eyes fall upon us, looking at Catty and me, our white faces, then turning away, neither the men nor the women making eye contact with us, with the music louder and Bobby Bolden paying for us all at the door. A huge black man was taking the money, wearing a dark jacket and sunglasses, nodding as Bobby Bolden whispered something to him, then calling a thin light-skinned black man over, saying something to him. Catty’s hand was sweating now, and I wondered if she saw this as the future, barred from white clubs, excused, introduced, explained in the black world. I thought: No wonder your hands are wet. They might be wet for the rest of your life.
The light-skinned man led us to the last empty table in the large smoky room, and we sat down, I to Catty’s left, Bobby Bolden to her right. I glanced around and saw the silhouttes of men and women against a bar along the far wall. At the tables beside us, all the faces were black, some shiny with sweat, the men dressed in suits, the women wearing flowers in their hair and bright dresses, bottles and ice buckets in front of them, a few people turning to look at the white faces, then turning back to the music. On the bandstand in front of us, seated at a piano, was a small neat man. Champion Jack Dupree. Singing.
Now some people calls me a junker …
The crowd roared.
Cause I’m loaded all the time.
Another roar.
I just feel happy and feel good all the time …
Bobby Bolden laughed and said we wouldn’t hear this on the radio, a song about being a junkie, and then told me to watch the way Champion Jack played the piano with the thumb tucked under the fingers of his left hand, to make the bass notes jump, told me the man was a legend back home in Naptown, where he’d played for years in the thirties, told me he came from the same New Orleans orphanage where Louis Armstrong lived as a kid, was a boxer during the Depression, later played at the Cotton Club. Bolden glanced at the door then and looked around sternly at the other black faces, as if saying to them, Be cool, don’t start any shit, these white folks is my guests. And Dupree sang on: Please write my mother, tell her the shape I’m in …
Then Rhode Island Freddie waved in the direction of the door, while a waiter set up ice and a bottle and glasses for our table. I turned to look at the door and three black women were moving through the room, men looking up at them with greedy eyes, the three women all round and their hair piled up high and their dresses fitting them like tattoos. One of them was Winnie. In a white dress.
“Yo, yawl,” she said, and Bobby Bolden covered his mouth with a finger and nodded toward Dupree. No talking, the move said, until the man finishes. Winnie sat next to me, and leaned close, her breasts pressing against my arm, and whispered in my ear. “Member me? Ah’m Winnie.” I said I sure did remember her and she reached past me for the ice and the bottle.
I want you to pull up your blouse
Let down on your skirt
Get down so low that
You think you’re in the dirt …
Dupree smiled widely as the crowd yelled, stomped, banged on tables. Winnie squealed and then tried to introduce the other two women, Velma and Cissy, and then Rhode Island Freddie was moving on Cissy and I saw Bobby holding Catty’s hand below the table and Bumper had moved beside Velma. Champion Jack Dupree was finishing, the whole room cheering and standing, the little man nodding and smiling and walking off in a hurry.
“Sure do love the way that man sing,” Winnie said. “Whad you think?”
“Great.”
Her eyes were fixed on me as if I was the only man in the place. She looked even darker in the dim light of the Blackhawk, her skin offset by the white dress, and she wore a lot of black makeup around her eyes. Her lips were thick and full, covered with glossy coral lipstick. She asked me again about New York, while Dupree’s musicians left the stand and some burly men in T-shirts began to set up for another act. I tried not to look at her too hard or to stare at her breasts. I didn’t want her to say, Ain’t you never seen no cullid girl before? Recorded music played on the sound system,
slower stuff, some of those records I’d heard up in the Kingdom of Darkness. Lowell Fulsom. Roy Brown. The small dance floor was immediately crowded. Rhode Island Freddie led Cissy away by the hand and Bumper took hold of Velma and Tampa went away somewhere and came back with a bony woman with scared eyes and slipped past us into the dancing crowd. Winnie said, “Dance?” I glanced at Bobby, thinking: What is this? Is she some gift? Bobby said, “Why in the fuck not, man? Go ahead …”
Winnie led the way, holding my hand, and I felt strange, wondering if this was the way black men felt when they were in a place where everyone was white. I was sure everybody was looking at me or looking at Winnie, or both. Just waiting to see if I made a grab at one of their women. Just waiting for a sign of arrogance. So I held her hands in a formal way, hoping everybody would think I was polite, that I was a visitor, a friend of the girl and the guys at our table, just a guy passing through. But the floor was packed now, bodies jammed against bodies, and Winnie pulled me close and said, “Relax, man,” and we began truly to dance. I could smell soap in her kinky hair and felt her breasts against my chest and her syrupy belly against my crotch and I thought about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, I thought about Robert Henri and John Foster Dulles, but nothing worked: I got a hard-on. Not a mild run-of-the-mill Saturday afternoon hard-on. Not the hard-on you get from the shaking of a bus or seeing some luscious pearly-skinned Zsa Zsa Gabor in a movie. Not some piddling venial sin of a hard-on. This was a throbbing mortal sin, iron hard, thrusting right out my shorts and pressing for release from my trousers. She felt it. She squeezed my hand. Her voice was a growl.
“Least you aint no queer,” she said. “Least Ah know that.”
“I—uh—”
“Hush, now,” she said, grinding into it, the heat coming off her, while I tried to keep my back to the people at the tables, so nobody could see what had happened to me but feeling that everybody had seen it already, that it was like Pinocchio’s nose, getting bigger and longer by the second.
“We should take a walk,” she said.
“I can’t walk now,” I whispered.
She eased away from me an inch or two. “Nobody can see you. Look aroun. Yawl see any other mens?”
I could barely see the couple next to us in the hot warm darkness.
“Where to?” I said.
“We got us a borried car. Outside.”
And I knew then that she wanted it as much as I did, that maybe I was the first white man she’d ever been that close to, that I was as new and strange and dangerous to her as she was to me. We started to leave. And then the room got brighter, and the dance floor started to clear, and there was someone on the PA system talking in a blurred voice. The hard-on vanished. “Later,” I whispered. She looked annoyed, but said, “Aw right … later.”
I had to piss and said I’d be right back and started walking toward the entrance. Over the microphone, I heard the word “… Upsetters” and turned around and Rhode Island Freddie was right behind me.
“Don’t wantchoo getting lost,” he said, and smiled. He guided me away from the entrance and along the back wall and down a corridor. There were a couple of bare forty-watt bulbs hanging from electric wires strung along the ceiling. I could hear a roar from the main room. Then in front of me I saw Champion Jack Dupree arguing with the large black man with the sunglasses.
“Ah, juss wunt muh fuckin money, man. Tha’s all.”
“You play you second set, you get the green.”
“Shit,” the old man said, turning away. “Shit.”
Freddie and I went into the john. There was a shallow trench along one wall, and we stood there and pissed into it.
“Po fuck cain’t get his bread,” Freddie said. He stuck a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth. He lit up, finished pissing, took a deep drag, then passed it to me.
“Little reefuh?” he said.
“Nah. Hey, what’s with this Winnie, man? How come none of you guys want her? I feel funny, you know—”
“Doan feel funny, feel her.”
Champion Jack Dupree walked in and went to the trench and pissed in silence.
“I still don’t get it,” I said.
“Her husbin’s on the Midway,” Rhode Island Freddie said with a sigh. “Mos’ of us, we know the dude. Wouldn’t be right, us knowin him and all. But it seem lak such a waste, hear? And you don’t know the man.… Hey, Champion,” he said to Dupree, “want a toke?”
Champion Jack Dupree zipped up his trousers and reached for the reefer. “You hear that fat mothafucka?” he said. He inhaled, held it, let the smoke out slowly. “If he still in the county when I finish the second set, itd be a fuckin miracle.” He looked at me. “What the fuck are you dune in this shithouse?”
“Came to hear you,” I said.
“Don’t bullshit a bullshittuh, white boy,” he said. “I hoid yiz talkin. You here for da fine brown pussy …”
Rhode Island Freddie giggled.
“Know what I’m saying to you?” Champion Jack Dupree said. “But ya better watch it, white boy. Pussy drive men into da valley of fuckin deat’.”
He took another toke, then sang a few lazy bars:
See, see, rider, see what you have done
You made me love you, now your man done come …
We all laughed, and started back to the hall. The place was going crazy. Women were standing, screaming, shouting, and the men were shaking their heads, and laughing, and tugging at the women. And up on the stage was the craziest looking black man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t very big, but his hair rose high over his head in a pompadour, all greasy and wild, and he had on a long draped baby-blue jacket and red shoes and he was standing up at the piano, banging hard while horns and saxes honked behind him and his eyes rolled around, out of control. I couldn’t hear the words. But words didn’t matter. He came to a crashing windup and whirled, and did a double split, stood up, and bowed. The crowd went wild, calling at him, shouting for him. He had the mike in his hand, gazing in a glassy-eyed way around the room, and then saw me about to sit down again next to Winnie, who was very sweaty now, with deep stains under her arms and down her back.
“Why, hello, Miss Thang!” he said, and pranced toward me, and raised his eyes as the room laughed, and then abruptly turned around, furrowed his brows, stared into the darkness and started another song:
Awop-Bop-a-Loo-Mop Alop-Bam-Boom …
Chapter
46
Winnie had a room on the first-floor right of Miss Harper’s Boarding House on East Dancer Street. We lay together on the small bed.
Where you learn to do such a thang? she said.
I said I just learned, but I didn’t say where.
She said, No black man ever did that.
No?
She said, He just be worryin bout his own sweet self.
I said she was beautiful. But she knew that. Beautiful women always do.
She said, You do such a thang, word get around, black ladies be lining up side yo house, boy.
I said she must have men lined up at her house too.
Winnie said, No, they all know mah man. Caint do nothin round here.… That’s why when Ah saw you, Ah said, him, Winnie, grab him.
I asked her if she’d ever slept with a white man before.
She said, Hell, no.… Not that these crackers don’t come own to me.… Oh no, they come own. But Ah wunt sleep with one of them, if they paid me a hunndid dollahs.
She looked at me, her breast dark against my chest. Her hand was playing with me.
Winnie said, It ain’t really white anyway, is it? More like pink.… Hey, what about you? You slepp with a black woman before?
No.
That’s not whut Ah hear, boy, she said, and laughed in a dirty way. You damn sailors.
I said, Don’t believe every thing you hear about sailors, Winnie. She sat up and dragged the tips of her breasts across my face. She said, Kin you do that thang again?
Chapter
47
&n
bsp; All day Sunday, I ached with shame. Not guilt. This was old-fashioned shame, as raw and pulsing and systemic as a toothache. In a way, of course, making love to Winnie was a corporal work of mercy, as they called it in the Catholic catechism. She’d been alone too long, trapped in a neighborhood where everybody knew her and her husband, growing old every minute. Or so I told myself (a lie I would tell myself all my life). I had given her pleasure in the here and now, while Winnie was young, while she needed it. We hadn’t hurt anyone. Her husband didn’t know and probably never would, unless that winter Winnie presented him with a blue-eyed boy. And yet I was ashamed of myself. The shame wasn’t about screwing the wife of another guy, a sailor I didn’t know. Nor was it about sleeping with a black woman, becoming at last, for a couple of hours, what Harrelson called a “nigger lover.” No, the shame was about something else. Out of weakness, in a moment of opportunity, I had betrayed Eden Santana.
Yes, she had gone away and I didn’t know when she’d be back. Yes, we had no deal, no verbal or written contract. But I knew that I couldn’t tell Eden what I’d done. I was ashamed of that. And I hadn’t used a rubber. Suppose Winnie gave me the clap? Suppose she’d given me a good dose of something her husband picked up somewhere? I could give it to Eden. And what if Winnie was pregnant? Nine months from now, her husband would show up at the hospital and a nurse would bring out the baby, which would have my eyes and skin that was lighter than Winnie’s and lighter than his and the smile would shift into rage. And if the child was mine, wasn’t that my responsibility too? A son. A daughter … my flesh and blood. I couldn’t go around and say to Winnie, I’ll give the child my name, I’ll send some money. If I did, the husband would cut me (in Bobby Bolden’s phrase) long, deep, and continuously. But if Winnie did have a baby, and it was mine, then all my life I’d wonder how that kid was doing, my kid, raised black in the back end of a small town on the Gulf of Mexico. I couldn’t tell Eden about that either. Or anyone else.