Collected Stories Page 10

  And I being here, thought Luke; that’s the strangest of all. I somehow being a part of all this. Accidentally involved. A part of the general iridescence. A bit of spume in the flying tide. I being here. Somehow extraordinary beyond all measure. Sitting on the top rail of a low fence in the middle of night. Here in a strange town. Looking at a colored poster. Thinking about Restoration poets and the universe and social injustice. All without rhyme or reason. Listening to the chirping of a cricket in a field of wet grass. Astonishing, isn’t it! Ten minute stop in a strange town—home for me, but for you—just a ten minute stop! I get you, thought Luke. I don’t belong. I’m not one of the actors. That’s why I’m able to sit here and look at the show. No, I’m not really a part of it. Not one of the dramatis personae. Not dark enough or not light enough. Not enough—what do they call it? Centrifugal force? Specific gravity? Let it go at that…

  Here again his thoughts trailed off into nothing and he only heard the chirping of the cricket in the wet grass.

  Katy-did, did-she-Katy, did-she-kid-kid-kid.

  It seemed a sort of pointedly foolish commentary upon the fact of existence. Luke smiled to himself. It was pleasant, really, to be sitting here. Coolness of night air. Fresh smell of recent rain on the grass. Voices of unknown people and faint strains of music from a bright café. Quite pleasant. But what connection did it have with him? None whatsoever. These ten minutes had absolutely no bearing upon anything that had gone before or anything that might conceivably come after. Perhaps that was why he found this brief space of time so peculiarly agreeable. He seemed to be removed from the ordinary stream of life for this short interval and to be looking back or down upon himself with an air of quiet detachment. A kind of catharsis, it was, like being very drunk. Was he perhaps very drunk? Luke smiled to himself. Perhaps that was it. But not in the usual fashion. An intensifying of perceptions rather than the usual fantastic diffusion.

  He smiled to himself and turned his face back toward the street with an increased alertness. Felt himself vividly alive and upon the verge of taking some kind of definite action.

  At this moment the college boys were crowding out of the café door. Behind them the proprietor was shouting loud, outraged words. But the boys were jubilant, their voices shrill, their movements abrupt and erratic.

  One of them approached the huge Blueflyer and stood directly in front of it with an air of pygmy defiance.

  “Bush to Memphish!” he shouted. “Lesh all go to Memphish!”

  “Aw, the hell with Memphis!” shouted another.

  “No kiddin’, I wanta go somewhere!” pleaded the first, his voice trailing off from its defiant pitch and sinking to a childlike whine. “I’m sick an’ tired of school. I’m gonna quit school an’ go to Memphish!”

  The bus passengers were now streaming out of the café and returning to their seats in the bus. It was very late at night, an hour when no kind of behavior seems extraordinary, and the tired travellers only blinked their eyes and muttered sleepily as the drunk boy staggered among them, catching at their sleeves and shrilly enquiring:

  “Who’sh going to Memphish? I wanta know about Memphish!”

  Luke rose from the fence rail and went over to the boy swaying in the glare of the giant headlights.

  “I’m going to Memphis,” he said quietly. “What do you want to know about it?”

  The boy caught Luke’s sleeve and peered anxiously into his face.

  “How ish it down there? Like they shay in shongs?”

  Luke shook off his hand, fighting down an impulse to strike him.

  “It’s pretty hot this time of year,” he replied, still quietly. “But otherwise a very nice town. On the river and the people are friendly. Southern provincialism’s a rather good sort. People not constantly keyed up for competitive struggle, you know. Ideas of social justice rather blurred. But that’s inevitable where there’s two races that can’t be mixed and each of them scared of the other. Take the Arabs and the Jews. We don’t have things like that. Front Street and the levee, they’re pretty swell in Memphis, especially on Saturday mornings when the country people come into town from all three states, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee…“

  The college boy laughed and caught again at Luke’s sleeve.

  “Who shaid I was intereshted in all that?”

  “Nobody. I’m just trying to sell you a ticket.”

  “How’sh the night life down there?”

  “Very beautiful at night,” said Luke. “Five point standards with frosted globes all up and down Main Street. Gorgeous theatrical signs and…“

  “Aw, no, I mean the night life, the dancing, the…”

  “Dancing? They have dancing on the roofs of the Peabody and Claridge hotels. Also there’s…”

  “How’sh the mooshic?”

  “Sounds swell over the radio. I’ve never…”

  “And the girls, the girls, the girls?”

  The motor of the bus had started roaring. The pavement beneath them shook with its thunder. Luke heard his voice rising in tone.

  “Here! Here’s my ticket!” he screamed.

  Five or six of the college boys were now swarming around him. He extended toward the boy the torn white stub.

  “Here’s my ticket to Memphis! It’s yours for two bucks! Understand? Paid seven for it myself. All yours for just two bucks…”

  Now the bus driver was yelling something. So was the café proprietor. The motor’s savage roar had infected them all, even the sleepy passengers. They leaned out of the windows and laughed and hooted and made angry gestures. The air thundered and shook. The very walls and pavements of the street seemed to be roused to fury. The college boys pressed in close around Luke, clutching him by the coat lapel and the sleeves. Their breaths were strong with beer, their eyes and their faces demonically inflamed. Some of them shoved him toward the bus door, others dragged him backwards. The ticket stub dropped from his fingers and was trampled underfoot. He felt terribly frightened and with a desperate effort broke away. He darted in front of the roaring engine. The street was a momentary plethora of sound and motion. Then faded behind him. He splashed through water that seemed kneedeep. Then darkness gathered about him. The other side of the street. An areaway between two buildings. This is madness. Lost my mind. But what do I care? Ha, ha! Leaned against dark wall and breathed. Bricks rough and damp to the back of his head. Cool wind playing upon his face. Smell of wet grass. Coolness. Cool darkness. The night after fever…

  When he opened his eyes a few moments later the bus was gone. The confusion was over. Light glimmered faintly in the puddles scattered about the tarred street surface. Forms inside the brilliantly lighted café moved diffusely behind the rain blurred and beaded windows. Music drifted out faintly. An old tune. “Star Dust.” Very pleasant to hear. The scene was attractive. Symphonic completeness that reality seldom achieves. A picture by Turner. “Rainy Nocturne” might be the title…

  He went back across the street and advanced purposefully through wet grass, knee-high, toward the illuminated billboard. Stark Navle’s glittering black head grew larger as he approached. The face was outlined with a single stroke of purple paint. The mustache looked like the whiskers of a cat.

  Miaouuu, he purred mockingly as he drew closer.

  Jane Barlow’s hair was yellow. Her lips were crimson daubs. She was smiling at Navle with mouth open. Waiting to be kissed. The name of the picture was Sacramento. What was Sacramento? A city on the western coast…

  “No kiddin’, I wanta go somewhere!” That was what the drunk boy had said. What did it matter where? Memphis or Chicago or Sacramento. Or Champaign, Illinois. A strange town in the middle of night with a cricket chirping in wet grass and electric lights shining on the painted poster of a coming show. What did it matter what place? Any place that the night covered was all right for lying down and going to sleep.

  He advanced still closer to the painted poster, leaned against it with both palms, kissed the purple brush stroke at
the base of Jane Barlow’s throat, gave Stark Navle a loud bird: then stretched himself out in the tall grass somewhere near the spot where the cricket was chirping and turned his face away from the lighted poster and fell into a sound, blissful sleep.

  c. 1936 (Not previously published)

  Gift of an Apple

  For an hour since leaving the range of low hills he had walked with the sun very hot on the back of his neck. The rough canvas strap chafed his shoulders and the small of his back had grown sensitive to the pack’s rhythmic thudding. He shifted it now and then but no position gave him more than momentary relief. Cars passed very seldom. They were nearly all transient families in dusty jalopies. The kids grinned and waved but the older folks pretended not to see him. Once a 1932 Ford came along and stopped. There were three drunk men and a woman and the woman leaned out and asked him how much money he had. Sixty-five cents, he told her. That won’t do us much good, she said. We hocked our spare tire to buy this last tank of gas and now we got to take on a passenger that can buy us some more. You understand, don’t you? The car lurched forward and she flopped back and he saw that what she had said was true, there was just the rim of the spare above the orange and black New Mexico license plates.

  My God, he thought, suppose I had to walk all the way to Lexington, Kentucky. In California it was relatively easy to thumb a ride but as you went further east the people seemed to grow more suspicious. Maybe it was because your appearance deteriorated from the road, your clothes got dusty and out of condition and the series of disappointments made it hard to muster that gay, inviting smile which makes them stop. When you’re fresh and in good spirits you can exercise a sort of mental compulsion over the drivers. You do it with your eyes mostly. You sort of project something out of your eyes that attracts their attention and if they’re not sons of bitches they can’t help stopping. But that’s in the west. Further east they’re all sons of bitches. Half of the time if one of them stops he’s a queer and you have to be groped all over to pay for your ride. Or else he’s a drunk who criticizes his wife and curses his boss and scares you shitless careening all over the road at seventy-five miles an hour. Or like that Ford back there, they’re broke and they want you to help buy the gas.

  He looked back. The sun was dropping down toward the hills behind him. The shape of it became more distinct with the fiery brilliance waning. It was perfectly round, a little bit fuzzy at the edges, like one of those red tennis balls. In the less intense light everything seemed to stand out plainly. Some while earlier the town he approached had been lost in a wavering glare. Now it acquired definition. He could see the late sun glinting on a steeple and a few pointed roofs that were perched just on this side of the second low range of hills. He wondered if he would get there before dark and began to consider dully the problem of getting a bed.

  Suddenly he saw not far ahead of him an automobile with a trailer. It was a very old car, cream-colored with dust. The tires were off the trailer’s back wheels. It must have been there a mighty long time. A little tin stove-pipe projected from the peaked roof and sent up a thin curl of smoke. All around were baskets and pottery which were apparently for sale and along the wall of the trailer facing the road were hung strings of velvety red coxcomb, bright orange bittersweet and pale yellow gourds. It was a roadside stand which had probably been there all summer long selling this stuff to tourists on their way back from vacations in the hill country.

  The back of the trailer faced him and as he approached it he could see through canvas flaps the shape of a woman. She was huge and black-haired. He wondered for a moment how she could manage to live in such close quarters. He thought of a bottle that he had once pulled out of the Sunflower River. He had dived from a log and his hands, touching the sandy bottom, came on this five gallon jug. He fastened a rope to the handle and he and another boy lugged it out of the river. Inside was a large catfish. They all wondered how it had gotten in there for now it was much too large to get through the mouth of the bottle. It must have swum in when it was a minnow and somehow grown up inside. Too big to get out. He thought about that as he looked at the big foreign woman. The others had wanted to break the jug open and cook the catfish for supper but the idea of this had repelled him because there was something not normal about a catfish that had grown up inside a bottle.

  He started to walk on by but caught the woman’s dark eyes staring out at him through the canvas flaps. He stopped in the road and said “Hello” to the woman.

  She came out on the small platform. He heard the boards’ groaning slightly beneath her weight. She stood above him blinking with the sun in her eyes. She had a face like the catfish. Dark and blunt-featured. Coarse hairs along her upper lips. Her arms were folded against the great loose bulge of her bosom. She was dressed in a cheap silk underslip. Her legs and arms were bare, loose-fleshed and brown. He was shocked to see there were even a few dark hairs in the middle of her chest where the neck of the underslip sagged down. He had never seen a woman before with hair on her chest. It made him think of that hermaphrodite in the sidewalk show at Dodge City. The barker pointing to the woman-man standing in the window, one side of her a fully developed female and the other a man, according to what he claimed. It didn’t seem possible, though.

  “Hello,” said the woman. “You want to buy something, huh?”

  “I don’t have any money,” he told her. “But I thought you might have something to eat you could give me.”

  The woman said nothing. She blinked her eyes at the sun in a good-humored silence.

  He looked at the dried ropes of sage, dill, garlic and red pepper that curtained the upper part of the doorway. He thought of rich, oily foods—his mouth watered.

  The woman backed into the trailer. He heard heavy movements inside like the catfish floundering in the bottle after the water had been poured out. A mean thing to do. They had crouched on the bank and watched it until it quit flopping.

  The woman came back to the platform.

  “I give you an apple,” she said.

  “Oh, thanks.”

  He stretched out his hand. Saw the palm of it glittering darkly with sweat. Drew it back and quickly wiped it on the side of his corduroy pants and then held it out once more to receive the apple. It was a dark wine red. He could tell the moment his fingers touched it how it would taste.

  The woman seated herself on the top step of the trailer.

  “Sit down,” she said hoarsely.

  “Thanks.”

  He seated himself on the bottom step, at the same time raising the apple to his mouth. The hard red skin popped open, the sweet juice squirted out and his teeth sank into the firm white meat of the apple. It is like the act of love, he thought, as he ground the skin and pulp between his jaw teeth. His tongue rolled around the front of his mouth and savored the sweet-tasting juice. He licked the outside of his lips and felt them curving into a sensuous smile. The pulp dissolved in his mouth. He tried not swallowing it. Make it last longer, he thought. But it melted like snow between his grinding teeth. It all turned to liquid and flowed on down his throat. He couldn’t stop it. It is like the act of love, he thought again. You try to make it last longer. Draw out the sweet final moment. But it can’t be held at that point. It has to go over and down, it has to be finished. And then you feel cheated somehow.

  “That was good,” he said to the woman. “I never tasted an apple as good as that!”

  “Maybe it tasted good because you was hungry,” she said.

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  She went back inside. He saw her stoop over the basket again and take out another apple. Good. He removed his pocketknife from his pants and shaved the remaining bits of white meat off the core of the apple that he had already eaten to let her see that he was hungry all right.

  She came out again but she didn’t offer the second apple to him. She ate it herself. Opened her own huge jaws and munched like a horse. He looked away from her. He felt very tired, his legs ached. It was good to sit facing the s
un, a round orange ball directly above the low purple line of the wooded hills. Wind came up across the fields now and stirred the tall seeding grass and made the willow leaves sigh.

  He thought of the woman being here in this spot all summer. Sleeping at night on a cot by the side of the road with the moon looking down at her big dark female body and her arms thrown out to receive the cool wind like a lover, her flesh moist with sweat…