by Tito Perdue
“May I have two Cokes?” he asked sweetly. He had the coins for it, but the man wasn’t listening.
“Umm?”
“Two Cokes.”
“Yeah, but you aren’t even supposed to be here. Are you?”
“I’m going right back!”
“Does Mr. Morton know you’re out here gallivanting around when you’re supposed to be in class?”
“Not yet.”
Lee watched as he gathered up two bottles and opened both of them with a device that was attached to the counter itself. Lee thanked him but had then to go back and hand over his quarter. Would he, or would he not, be given the change that was owing to him? At the back of the store a negro was delivering provisions of some sort, and meantime the jukebox was playing at high volume. Under circumstances such as these, it was altogether possible that Lee would get no change.
“Could I have my change, please?” he asked calmly.
A high school girl entered. Later on, looking back at her, he recalled her as a flaxen-headed creature, very cheerful (about five feet tall or more), and chewing gum. She was dressed in a light pink sweater and had a bracelet at her wrist and a brooch in her hair. Intimidated by the sight, Lee drew off into the shadows. She smoked cigarettes, this one, and had the sort of figure that was mostly lacking in girls of his personal acquaintance. Glad was he when finally, she abandoned the place.
“Could I have my change, please?”
“Umm?”
“Change.”
The man produced it. “Don’t want to see you in here again.”
“No, sir.”
The change was mostly in pennies, and although Lee had not far to go, yet it was difficult to travel with an opened bottle in each hand. Twenty yards into the trip, he actually dropped one of the containers (his own) and lost perhaps a fifth of the contents. Came then to him from various places the smell of honeysuckle, the sound of a train running through town, dogs barking, and several other measures of this particular moment in the history of civilization. But must he indeed go through life remembering everything? Suddenly he stopped and checked for his change, finding it intact.
He climbed the stairs. Bringing his unfortunate imagination into play, he had felt for the past fifteen or twenty seconds that he was perhaps the only person still left alive in all the world; instead, that moment, he perceived Lloyd loitering just next to the classroom where the mechanical drawing students used to meet. Lee sauntered over to him in the sort of lazy indifference that he had been practicing these last weeks.
“What, you in trouble again?”
“Yeah.”
They shook. The boy’s hand was larger than Lee’s, of course, and had a quantity of chalk dust on it.
“How long do you have to stay out here?”
“I don’t know. Don’t care, neither. Shit, I just as soon be out here as . . . Hey, what you got there?”
“Coke.”
“Okay, I’ll have one of those.”
Lee gave over one of the bottles, his own.
“Hey, this one ain’t full!”
“Okay, I’ll take it back then, if that’s the way you feel,” said Leland, his toughness showing.
“No, no, that’s alright. What the hell.”
They drank. Or rather it was Lloyd who did the drinking. Far away, down toward the end of the corridor, it appeared that one of the faculty might be watching. This person soon disappeared, however, into one of the rooms, and gave no further trouble. He needed no great length of time, Charlie, to finish off his Coke and give the bottle back to Lee.
“I got to get going now,” Lee said, nodding toward the restroom where, as he believed, Smitty would be waiting with growing impatience.
“Pro-ceed, pro-ceed. Ain’t nothing out here to do, that’s for sure.”
Lee thanked him and continued on. There was at this time a work of art on the restroom wall that portrayed a man and woman in sexual congress, an image so accurate (Lee assumed), so garish and well-drafted in three colors of chalk, that not even the janitor had had the heart to wash it off. Distracted by that, Lee did not at first fully appreciate that Smitty and the others had gone away. Dread came down on top of him. Someday, if not this day, he would be caught out in the open and given a beating for failing to deliver the promised Coke. On the other hand, the room was empty, and, if he were quick about it, he could urinate in peace. Thus Lee. He was standing in position, his eye on the art, his free hand clutching a bottle, and his mind beginning to fog over from last night’s lack of sleep. That was when Carl entered and, finding Lee occupied, started to go back out again.
“It’s okay,” Lee reported. “I’m just about finished.”
The boy returned. He was harmless and shy and, like most people, smaller and younger than those from the other side of town.
“What’s going to happen to us, Lee?”
“I don’t know. Just take it one day at a time, I guess.”
The boy nodded and then went into one of the cells and locked the door, and soon after began to urinate in his own small and intermittent way. From outside they could hear the church bells suggesting it must be ten o’clock. Ten o’clock, and thus far no education had taken place in Alabama. From the window he watched as the bakery truck went past, an indication that the economy, at least, was continuing forward.
“Miss Beasley wants to know where you are. She knows you’re not in class.”
“So? Nothing surprises me anymore. Anyway, what do I care?”
“But she knows you aren’t playing poker. I told her.”
Lee thanked him. In any case, the class was almost finished, to judge by the hands of his Eisenhower watch. And then, too, his soft drink was getting warmer, all the more so as time went by.
“Want this Coke?”
The boy took it, sniffed it, and then very courteously set it on the window sill. He had rather to perish of thirst than contravene the rules.
They walked back together. He had expected (Lee) to be greeted by girls grinning appreciatively at his misconduct; instead, no one appeared to have noticed that he’d been gone. Meantime Cherise was standing and reading in her bright, clear, and rather theatrical voice that told a great deal about the sort of person she was. She was smart and tidy and well turned out, but Lee could see which of the girls had spiritual depth and which didn’t. Truth was, he was in love with the brown-headed girl who sat behind Sonya Hunter. But by now it had come to that part of the day when the Sun reached the first three rows only, leaving the rest of the room in semi-darkness. Ensorcelled in the obscurity, Lee began to lapse into that mental state that came just about as close to actual sleep as could be managed under the circumstances. The teacher, too, was nodding off every once in a while, and then suddenly came awake again. No one wished to disrupt her. A note came by, this one addressed to Steven who, however, refused it. Such a strange silence now prevailed that Lee once again began to feel that he was dwelling in a ball of glass with many thick inches between himself and the world outside. He knew, of course, that something was wrong with him. These others, classmates of his, were normal people, but not so he who had to rehearse his gestures and facial expressions if he wished to have any sort of friendships and/or make a path through the world.
Noon did come, marked by the sound of bells, cars moving past, and dogs calling from the hills. According to regulation, he was to go downstairs and march direct to the cafeteria; instead, he fell in behind Cecil, where he could not be seen. In this position he found himself moving abreast with the boy called Travis, a large person with rotted teeth, said to be a Navy veteran. Lee put his age at about nineteen or more. They turned and looked at each other.
“Where’re you headed?” the boy asked. “Over to the Canteen?”
“I’m going with Cecil.”
“Well, where’s he going?”
Lee shrugged recklessly. “I don’t know. Canteen, I guess.”
But for Clarence, the yard itself was empty. That boy had been expelled the previous year, a
nd now spent his time loitering about the building. Leland watched helplessly as the girls in their pastel dresses proceeded on toward the cafeteria where, had things been different, he might have joined them. It was a bright day, full of light and painted leaves and the scent of winter coming down from Tennessee. But must he also put this away in the storehouse of his all-too-cluttered mind?
Waiting until the last moment, they diverged, Cecil, Lee, and Travis from the line of march and dashed to the Canteen, already crowded with high school people. Music was playing, and he could see couples dancing in the back room. Suddenly he dug for his money, recollecting too late that he possessed just fifteen pennies. A tall girl was wearing lipstick and hose, her age about sixteen or more. By habit he then followed Cecil to the bar and waited as the boy ordered up a cheeseburger and Orange Drink. The food here was so far superior to that served anywhere else, he regretted sorely his lack of funds.
“What’cha having?” Cecil asked.
“Naw, I’m not hungry.”
“Bullshit. What, you broke again? Give him a cheeseburger.”
The man obeyed. (It was just two hours before that Leland had been commanded by this same individual never to reappear in this place.) And then, too, it was amazing to see the insides of Cecil’s wallet, which had the paper bills in it that one might expect of an adult. The burger itself proved thick enough and had a wealth of fried onions on top.
“What d’you want to drink?”
“Well . . .”
“Give him an Orange Drink.”
Lee accepted it, a frosty bottle that, placed on the floor, would have come up to the level of his knee. The music had meantime changed over to Teresa Brewer, and the crowd had quieted somewhat to listen to it. He did not appreciate at that time, Lee did not, that it was 1950, and the town was going through a Golden Age of romance and music and life in a place where everyone knew each other.
He had hoped that they would not go into the back room, where it gave him a helpless feeling to see football players and boys with motorcycles dancing with girls in lipstick and hose.
“Let’s go back here,” Cecil instructed, making his way precisely into the back room. Lee shrugged. They were being followed by a Navy veteran of weak intelligence who also had invested in a cheeseburger and Orange Drink. It was dark in there, and he could see the faces of girls gleaming in the shadows. “I’m too young for this,” said Lee to himself. “And yet, I feel pretty sure that Cecil won’t let anything happen to me.” Suddenly, just then, the music changed over to “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” an insidious piece that brought twenty couples out onto the floor. It would not have surprised him to see people kissing in the corners of the room, although nothing of that sort took place while he was actually watching.
“Look at that one,” Travis said, pointing with his cheeseburger at a blasé-looking girl with a cigarette. “I wouldn’t mind screwing that one.”
Lee had expected it, language of that sort. He regretted that he had not gone on to the cafeteria.
“She’s alright,”
“She’s got a baby, is what they tell me.”
Lee was appalled. He might be in the same school with her but was very far from wanting aught to do with babies at his age. He stretched and yawned, saying, “Well, maybe we better get on back.”
“We just got here! What’s the matter, Sloan?” asked Cecil, using his second-favorite appellation for the boy. “You’re not getting nervous on us again?”
“Not me.”
“Hey, look at that one. Now that’s a good-looking woman!”
She was, as said, exactly as Cecil described her. And then, too, she had a friendly way of dancing that resulted in her head resting against her boyfriend’s chest. She was happy, perhaps sleepy as well, and was dressed in a red sweater that was as merry and vivid as the dimples that adorned her blameless face. Lee suffered. He had known this girl when she was a knock-kneed child of seven or eight. And if thus far the day had been a mediocre sort of thing, all that changed at once when she recognized him among the tables and smiled in his direction.
Lee put on a bored expression. He had been in this place a good five or six minutes, and although he was the smallest and youngest person there, no one so far had asked him to leave. Suddenly, that moment, the music changed over to the beautiful “Tennessee Waltz,” Lee’s favorite all-time piece. A thousand years might go by, and people would still be waltzing in Tennessee—such was his impression both then and thereafter as well. He watched as one of the high-school girls, his second-favorite, went out onto the floor and began to dance with Holly Parker, a high-quality basketball player and the best trumpet-player in town. Music filled the space, people were dancing and drinking drinks, and yet he had the certain feeling that in times to come no one would remember any of it save only he alone. He scarcely noticed when Travis gathered up his Orange Drink and decanted most of it into his own bottle. The veteran had a tattoo on his forearm showing an unclothed woman entwined in a python of some kind.
“You going to finish that cheeseburger?”
Lee gave it over to him. The music, to his grief, was coming down to an end, and with it some of the magic and luridness that invested the place. He realized then that Cecil was no longer with them and had in fact gone over to a group of girls where he could be seen chatting with them in his calm and pleasant style. He was as large as a man, almost, had money in his wallet and a pair of leather boots with chains on them. For one, brief moment, Lee actually thought of sauntering over to the same girls and loitering there alongside Cecil, which is to say until he came to himself and stayed where he was. It troubled him that Travis had taken out another cigarette and, after two or three efforts, had managed to ignite the match with his fingernail. Troubled him, too, that a policeman had come into the place and was scrutinizing the students one by one. Lee put on a cheerful and healthy expression. Having brought no books with him, he read his watch, saying, “Well, maybe we better get on back now.”
“Watch this.”
Lee watched, astounded to see the veteran bend forward and plant his glowing cigarette in the trouser cuff of one of the boys standing at the edge of the dance floor. He hoped to see the thing suffocate in there and cause no damage; instead a thin wraith of smoke immediately emerged and began to rise to waist-level where, however, it soon dissipated into the general red and purple murkiness of the place. The policeman had gone. Across the way, Cecil had picked up dancing with a girl whom Leland had not seen before, a milk-colored person in a virid-green sweater with bosoms in it. It was too much. He rose, stretched, and then made as if he were about to leave the place when, that moment, “Take Away the Breath of Flowers” came on, a new recording that he particularly liked and that seemed to represent this whole epoch in history and time. He didn’t fully approve of these surroundings, and yet he knew that he was dangerously close to one of his “aesthetic experiences,” as later he would call them, a mystical business that came to him from time to time when his system was overloaded with insights too hurriedly brought forth, as he later explained it, or too far prolonged as it were. If this were life and Leland could expect another seventy years of it . . . Well!
He waited for the moment to pass. There was such a wealth of girls in the place, all of them smiling and laughing, all of them tilting back and forth, eagerly pushed by natural law to fulfill their earthly missions. There had to be a reason for lipstick and eye shadow after all, for patent leather shoes and other methods of applying pressure on unsuspecting boys. Some, it is true, were to capitulate sooner than others. But what Lee could not understand, and never would, was how girls could operate that way in the first place. They were sweet and dimpled and fitted out in colored sweaters, whileas for the males, they were but box-shaped boys with noses and oversized feet. Thinking of it, he could feel himself losing some of his regard for the women and girls who sought male attention.
The larger part of that regard he still conserved, however. The girl called Barbara, for example
, the leader of the majorettes—he regarded her so highly that he couldn’t turn his gaze away. They lie, who say that girls weren’t happy then; this one had been born for life and loved it to the hilt. It was while he was looking at her, lost in dreams, that suddenly a tall boy standing just next to the dance floor—it appeared that his pants cuff was on fire—began jumping up and down. He was torn, Lee, between laughing along with the crowd or keeping his eye on Barbara. Travis meantime had abandoned the café altogether while Cecil had disappeared into the “green room,” so-called, a famous place where occasionally one could see silhouettes moving back and forth in candlelight.
He walked back in a state of excitement and despair. A thousand years might go by, but he’d still be just eleven years old. His wrists were so thin, and, truth was, he was intimidated, and not just by life but a great many other things as well. Nor could he talk to himself, not when he was approaching a building with faces in the windows. Instead he read his watch and, after putting on an annoyed expression, ran to catch up with Craig. Behind him, far away, a Hank Williams song could be heard coming faintly from somewhere.
“Hi,” he said. “Cecil and I went to the Canteen.”
“Figured you would.”
“I had a cheeseburger myself. What did you have?”
“Anyway, you’re not supposed to go over there.”
“So what! So what if I’m not supposed to go?”
Craig didn’t answer. His face was serious and full of concern. A thousand years might go by, and he’d never do anything.
“We were dancing, too.”
The boy stopped. “Who with?”
Lee shrugged. They were coming close to the building, and there wasn’t time for details. Three stories up, he saw Miss Beasley at her desk. Her lenses were thick and highly refractive and tended to conflict with windowpanes.
Lee reported to his locker and, after taking down his little clarinet, hurried off to the band room, where already Mr. Hudson was forcing the three flutists to go through certain measures that needed more work. It surprised Lee, it always did, to see that Cecil had somehow arrived there before him and was dithering with his trumpet, even going so far as to remove one of the valves and run his handkerchief through it. The seventh grade had six fine athletes, and all but one had chosen trumpets. Came then the half-dozen majorettes, pretty girls assigned to loiter in the back of the room in short pants. He nodded to Cherise, who nodded back. But with her it was simply a matter of common friendliness, whereas Lee could imagine the day when he might actually rise and go and talk with her, as when they had both been nine years old. Those days, lost in the confusions of time, would never come back again, as well he knew. The sixth athlete played drums.