The Smut Book

by Tito Perdue

  “Hi.”

  “Well hello.” (Her voice was like an adult’s.)

  “Want to dance?”

  She laughed. She was dressed in make-up, lipstick included, and had the sort of shiny legs that said she was wearing hose. He felt foolish, Lee did, but considered it far too late now to turn and go away.

  “Alright.”

  He was dismayed. Was he supposed to put his hand on her shoulder, which was largely exposed and no doubt had been touched by football players and others? Instead he coughed, once, politely, and then sought for her hand. The music was ninety percent over and there was nothing to be done until the next song. Meantime he was being watched by Preston’s mother, not to mention some fifteen or twenty boys and girls, all of them grinning in the patronizing way that Lee most loathed.

  “Are you enjoying the party?” (Already she was bored with him. How to interest a nineteen-year-old—it was a problem.)

  “Sure!” And then: “How about you?”

  “Did you get enough cake?”

  Cake! He had not come to this place for cake.

  “I didn’t come here for the cake.”

  The girl took two steps back and laughed out loud at him. He was about ready to abandon her there and never come back again when, that instant, the incredible “Till I Waltz Again with You” came on, blowing his resolution all apart. Now, slowly, he lifted his right hand and set it on the shoulder, partly exposed, of a nineteen-year-old girl. He swooned, his head grew dizzy, and his eyes, both of them, fell out of focus and began to spin. He must tell Cecil about this, this and his overall record with older girls. But no, it was private.

  He had further pieces of good fortune on that day when the music began playing “Ebb Tide” and “Harbor Lights” and then, finally, “My Heart Cries for You,” a song he had taken for his own personal theme. “Absolute scoundrel,” the school principal had called him more than once, and it was true that after two hours of this sort of stuff he was on the verge of disgracing himself in plain open view over an aesthetic breakdown having to do with perfume and girls, darkness and music. That was when the lights came back on.

  Lee groaned; in place of music, the time had come to take photographs of the dog. Lee, who had seen better animals wandering at large about the town, went and, inserting the four fingers of his right hand, Napoleon fashion, into his jacket, stood next to the creature while the man dithered with his camera. He estimated it at about four in the afternoon, giving him but little time before some of his better radio programs would come on. He was also aware of several other things—that the girls, born to pose, were cooing over the dog and, secondarily, that the maid was cutting up the cake into great big pieces and wrapping them in foil.

  “Would y’all like to see our new television?” the woman asked, addressing the group at large.

  Silence. Some had heard of this new discovery, and some had not. Even so, they followed into the next room and collected around what might almost have been an electrical washing machine, judging by the circular window of about the size of a dinner plate. He did not, Lee, really expect any result from it, and could feel a certain low-level exasperation while the husband and wife both got down in front of the thing and began fuddling with the little knobs that had something to do with it.

  “It’s a television,” someone whispered.

  “I know what it is! You don’t have to tell me what it is.”

  Reese spoke up: “Maybe it’s broken.”

  “You have to wait,” said Lee to the girl next to him, a tall person he had never seen before. “Wait for it to warm up.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not like a radio. It’s different.”

  The girl turned and looked at him with respect. Already they were beginning to perceive the faint, far-away sound of human voices, haunted noises coming from a cave or cavern, one might almost have thought. No one knew the depth and reach of the tubes and cables that attached this machine to the outside world.

  “Alright, here it comes! See?”

  They gathered around as vague forms that looked like photographic negatives began to manifest themselves in front of their eyes.

  “Hey! It’s a wrestling match!”

  “We know what it is. Just shut up, okay?”

  The images were inside the box. As familiar as he was with his father’s motion picture projector, he had a pretty good idea of the ingenuity of the thing.

  “Aw, it’s just a trick,” Reese said.

  “No, there’s a projector in there.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Projector.”

  “Interesting, interesting. No, I guess that’s just about the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life.”

  Lee could feel his gorge rising. The tall girl had meantime moved around to the other side, where he could no longer talk to her. That was when the negress came and handed off a good pound or more of vanilla cake wrapped in foil. Looking forward a few minutes into time, he could foresee himself carrying it home to his people.

  Five

  The next he knew, dawn had arrived, bringing morning with it. But as to how he had managed to get through the foregoing black night, he couldn’t recall. Abandoning the bed with great reluctance, he gathered the tacks that he had set up in the doorway and returned them to the box. The smell that came from the kitchen was an alloy of bacon and grits and, no doubt, eggs as well. Coffee, too, though he wouldn’t be allowed any. “Ah, me,” said he, yawning and stretching and getting into his knickers. “Late September it is, and this person here”—he touched his face—“it feels like me.”

  In previous years, autumn had been better than this. But he had no reason to complain. The leaves, those that remained, were vibrating more and more fervidly as they turned to deeper and deeper grades of gold. He stopped and smote himself on the forehead—October it was and no longer September, to reckon from the days that had passed since the last time he had smoted himself there. He must cherish these days and store them up in memory against the decades yet to come. Far away he heard a dog screaming from the hills, the sound of bells, and neighborhood women gathering jars of unhomogenized milk brought to their front porches. Ten thousand years might go by, and still there’d be home deliveries of milk and doctors making house calls—such was Leland’s naïveté at that particular time.

  Nothing surprised him anymore, as he liked to think, and yet he was surprised, and greatly, to see Dexter waiting for him at the corner, the last thing Lee would have expected of October. Jumping into his bored expression, Lee moved forward, neither increasing his gait nor slowing it, either.

  “Where you headed? Piss ass.”

  Lee pointed. “School.”

  “And what you got in that little bag there? I don’t like that.”

  “Sandwich.”

  “What kind of sandwich! How many times I got to ask?”

  “Pineapple.” He looked off into the distance. Someday, when he was dead and gone, he expected to wander among mountaintops like those, where the atmosphere was blue and thin.

  “Pineapple my ass! I already told you about this once! Ham and cheese is what I like, stuff like that.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, I guess I’m just going to have to beat the shit out of you. I don’t want to do it, but I guess I got to.”

  Lee turned to the street. It was not impossible that one of the passing cars might have an adult in it who knew about him, and about Dexter. That was when a new concept came to mind, a stratagem that he hadn’t used before. Clearing his throat, he spoke out loud and clear: “I’m one of Cecil Price’s friends.”

  The boy’s face took on a pinched look. “No, you ain’t.”

  “I am too! So go ahead! Go ahead and beat the shit out of me!”

  “I bet you don’t even know Cecil.”

  “So go ahead and beat the shit out of me then! I want you to!”

  “Naw, I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Go ahead!”

 
But Dexter had no more to say, and the last Lee saw of him he had turned and was trodding off in the other direction.

  He, Lee, arrived at school in time and went and stood in the center of the grounds, a good location whence he could see everything that happened. He saw, for instance, a knot of girls whispering together excitedly about their trivia and then, further, his friend Cecil and his friend’s friend, the girl named Gwen. Today her sweater was red, a hue that sorted perfectly with the vivid personality that was hers. If he had a woman like that—but he hadn’t—he would have taken her out of general sight and kissed her on the mouth. But he didn’t. And then, too, some of the older boys were playing baseball in a corner of the field. And now, once again, he began to feel that these matters had taken place ten thousand years ago and that he was looking out upon the world through a pane of glass. Would he never be free of this? Worst of all was the absolute silence that had come over the scene. Too late, he realized that Craig was nudging at his elbow.

  They climbed the stairs together, both boys taking care not to collide into anyone from the upper classes. He regretted this wastage of the October weather, best time in the world for fishing and kites. “Ah, me,” said he, lumping forward with his clarinet and sandwich. “I’d rather be free now, this very moment, and then make up for it later on.”

  Today, the class discussion centered upon the Babylonians. He personally knew of any number of places about town where he could have picked up a calendar for free; why, then, was the woman so full of praise for the Babylonian one? In any case, he far preferred the Egyptians and their ways. Getting into a thoughtful expression (eyes closed), he began to tilt off to sleep, but only to be interrupted by the start of one of his three-day headaches, a routine affliction that had something to do with the person he was. Would only he could come back later on, snip out these next few days, and splice the rest back together once again! Something was wrong with him, of course, he knew that and was aware, too, of the discontinuity between the activity in his head and his childlike behavior. That was when a note came past, a brief one in yellow ink. But he had rather die at once than break the moral code of 1950 and read as much as a single word of it.

  He was largely unconscious when Cecil jostled him awake, forced him to the outside world, and prodded him forward toward the Teen Canteen.

  “S’matter?” the boy asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re looking a little bit peaked today.”

  “Naw.”

  “Okay, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  The place was dark, and they were playing one of the earlier versions of “Ebb Tide,” a song still much cherished by Lee whether he had a headache or not. Six boys were consuming Orange Drinks at the bar, one of them a football player surrounded by some half-dozen Corybantes in shoes and socks. Striding forward confidently, Lee came to within ten feet of that crowd before veering off toward his wonted table in the corner. He had decided to keep away from food, primarily because he had no funds. Cecil: “And so you’re just going to sit here. What, you been spending your capital on stamps again?”

  Lee admitted that he had. Not only had he invested his lunch money that way, but his thirty-five-cent a week allowance as well. Cecil went on: “Makes me mad! You need money, you’re supposed to tell me about it.”

  “Okay, I will.”

  “No, you won’t. I’ll come back someday and you’ll still be sitting right over here in this corner, getting smaller and smaller.”

  Lee had to laugh. He had a delicate temper, Cecil, but Leland was pretty sure he’d never use it against him. He was too small. And then, too, the jukebox had begun with “Now and Then There’s a Fool Such as I,” and Lee could feel himself falling back into the aesthetic trance that made him turn his head one way and another to look for girls. The place was dark, people were dancing, and the music was good. That was when Gwen, the loveliest girl in seventh grade, came and sat across from them. Never had he had seen her at such close range, and he was determined to get as good a picture of her as might be possible in the encompassing dim. Already their fingers were intertwined, hers and Cecil’s, as Lee could plainly see by looking at them. Her sweater was fire green and had a piece of jewelry on it. As to how much further these two people were ready to go, Lee could only speculate. Suddenly she turned and smiled at Lee.

  “It’s all right, Lee. Because we’re in love.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “It hurts, we’re so much in love. I just can’t hardly stand it anymore.”

  “Yeah. Cecil told me.”

  “What did he tell you?” (The question was directed at Lee, but the girl was watching Cecil.)

  “Said you were in love.”

  “And did he say whether he loved me?”

  “Sure!”

  “What did he say?”

  “Love.”

  They were looking deep into one another’s eyes, those two, so much so that Lee felt he ought really to arise now and leave them to their project. The music meantime had rotated over once again to “Till I Waltz Again with You,” Lee’s seventh- or eighth-favorite piece at that particular time. Across the way, one of the boys was slapping at his pants, whereupon Lee now bent and examined his own cuff to be certain no one had deposited something there. There were at least five high school girls at the bar, including a certain Jenny Bird, a twelfth-grader who took lessons in ballet and was known to own a car. As for the girl who had forced a kiss upon him, Lee found her nowhere, neither on the floor, nor at the counter, nor in the green room where now and again he could see figures dancing in the gloom. Cecil meantime had joined up his spare hand with Gwen’s, and it seemed to Lee that probably they were playing with each other’s feet beneath the table. How, really, did it feel to be like that, in love in 1950? He knew this much, Lee, that it was a new romantic age in the history of the world, and never mind how brief.

  Meantime the music had gone over to “Harbor Lights,” making it impossible for Cecil and Gwen to resist going to the floor to dance. Lee watched studiously as the boy brought her up close and gazed down unsmilingly into her eyes. Such was the music, it seemed that some of the couples had actually fallen to sleep in one another’s arms. It was a serious and private business, and, really, a person ought not be watching. Working hurriedly, he finished off his Orange Drink and was in the process of getting to his feet when he experienced a hand on his shoulder, the hand of an adult, as it seemed to him.

  “Leland?”

  “Sir?”

  It was an adult.

  “If you’ll just step outside, please. If you’re not too busy, that is.”

  “Okay.”

  He rose—people were watching—and followed the man through the dark. He could almost certainly have outrun this person, but was unwilling to do so owing to the indignity it would have involved. Instead, putting on a bored face, he stepped out into the painful light of the Sun and turned to face the individual whom he had seen once or twice before when he had also been in trouble.

  “Is this how you spend your time, Leland? Over here with these people?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re supposed to be in the cafeteria! Just like everybody else.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t like those pimento cheese sandwiches all the time.”

  “Anybody else in there?”

  “No, sir. Some high school kids.”

  “I’m not talking about them! I’m talking about junior high people.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Smitty’s not in there?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Cecil?”

  “Who?”

  “Cecil Price!”

  Lee thought. “I know a guy named Pratt.”

  “Well, I guess you better come with me. Mr. Debarbeleben’s going to want to talk to you.”

  “Yes, sir. Maybe I could talk to him later.”

  “You’ll talk to him rig
ht now, is what you’ll do!”

  It was not the first time Lee had seen these precincts. The same woman sat at the typewriter, a motherly sort of person who smiled sympathetically as Lee strode past with his reckless and nihilistic air. He had promised himself not to urinate on this occasion, no matter how many blows he was to be given or which of his many paddles the man might opt to use. There was a portrait of General Hood on the facing wall, and Lee was able to concentrate upon that man’s life and activities, and in that way fortify himself against the ordeal still to come. Thus passed two minutes, Lee making no comment to the boy sitting next to him.

  “What are you in for?” he courteously inquired at last.

  “Smoking.”

  “Whew!”

  “You?”

  “Canteen.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “But I was only there a little while!”

  “That don’t matter. I know a fellow who . . .”

  Lee waved it away. He didn’t wish to hear about these fellows who in some cases had already taken thirty or forty blows in the course of September alone.

  “. . . got more than a hundred last year.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “It’s getting worse. And he’s getting meaner all the time.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know if I can take any more myself.”

  “How many have you had?”

  “Fifteen. And this is just October.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “But he might go easy on you. ’Cause you’re so little and everything.”

  “I am small,” Lee admitted. “But my grades are pretty good.”

  “That won’t do you no good. How old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Eleven, shit! I’m fourteen myself.”

  Lee was not surprised, certainly not in view of the boy’s incipient moustache.

  “Well,” Lee said, stretching and making his face more bored even than before, “I’ll never see fourteen, that’s for sure.”