3 Day Terror (13 page)

I
NEVER SAID
you weren’t,” Dee answered, toying with the paper straw in her empty Coke glass, “but why are you so excited because the Negroes are going to school with the whites?”

After dinner at her house, they had driven out to Beggsom’s Place because she said she didn’t really feel like going into town. Richard Buddy wondered whether the real reason she had rejected his idea to go to a movie down at the Alabama was that she didn’t want to be seen with him. The juke box was playing “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and behind them, in back of the counter, John Beggsom was reading a newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. They were the only ones there. Beggsom showed sense. While he nodded and said hello when they came in, he didn’t act as though he knew Buddy at all. Every few minutes Buddy’s arm shot across the table and gave her another light for another cigarette.

“Did you see the play?” she asked, not waiting for him to answer the other question.

“What play?”

“Fair Lady.
The one this song is from. Maur and I saw it on opening night.”

He was not pleased with the way the evening was going. She was always referring to her ex-husband. Even her mother had noticed.

Said, “Delia
dear!
Mr. Buddy doesn’t want to hear about Maur all the time!”

And driving out here, when he had asked her where she’d lived in New York City, she had answered, “In the East Sixties.”

It had infuriated him. She could simply have given her street address, or said “61st Street,” “63rd” — whatever the street was, instead of inferring she was Miss Rich Bitch of all time.

He knew her type well enough. He had seen them walking jewel-collared poodles down Fifth Avenue, waiting under canopies for cabs or limousines along Park, huddling over frozen éclairs in mink-bedecked bands at Rum-plemayer’s, and sitting with supercilious arches to their carefully plucked eyebrows across the table from their well-tailored executive husbands, in the Pavillon, the Voisin, or the Oak Room. The rich, the privileged, the sick-chic few!

“I wouldn’t go to a play on opening night,” he told her. “It’s vulgar.” He knew a thing or two himself.

“Perhaps. It was a good play, though, Richard.”

“I know the play.” He laughed, thinking of the pamphlets. He’d spent his last cent on them. “I’m not arguing that the play isn’t good. I’m just saying it’s vulgar to go to opening nights.” He remembered something his mother used to say, and he added. “It’s as vulgar as wearing mink in the daytime. People with taste don’t do that either.”

“You’re angry at so
many
things, Richard.” She smiled, as if she were going to add,
poor baby.
He liked that about her. She seemed to sympathize with him, in some remote way. He couldn’t be sure why it was — or
if
it was — but he felt something there every now and then. Some veiled affection for him, as though she understood him, or wanted to.

“I’m not angry, that’s not the word for it, Dee. I’m just impatient with people who don’t have good taste.” He rubbed his thumb across the silver lighter. That lighter had cost plenty. He wondered if she recognized the fact that it was an expensive one, not a piece of junk. “And that answers your question too,” he said “You ask more questions without waiting to hear the answers, Dee.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Maur always says the same thing.”

Maur again!

She took another cigarette from her pack on the table, tapped it and waited for the light he gave her. As he leaned forward he could feel the letter on his inside pocket, feel its edges, the fat long letter she had written this Maur. He had lied to her, told her that he hadn’t come across it out at the Dip. He had intended to give it back to her

— he still wasn’t sure he wouldn’t — but for some perverse reason, perhaps because she seemed so eager to have it back, he kept it. He was torn between returning it to her and reading it, or finding a way to do both. But she had Scotch-taped it shut. It wouldn’t be easy to read it without her knowing about it.

He had decided to see how the evening went — thought of driving her out to the Dip for another look; then, dramatically, producing it, as though he had just found it. It would be a way of getting her off alone with him, and it would be a subtle way of making her rather obligated to him, or grateful anyway. He had a bottle in the car. He could take it from there.

She said, “But all this talk about
niggers,
Richard. That’s not in very good taste.”

“That’s a way of speaking,” he said, “so that one can reach the mass mind. You know how that works. During the war, we weren’t fighting the Germans. We were fighting the Nazis. And now, we aren’t fighting the Russians. We’re fighting the Reds.” “And the Negroes too?”

“No, Dee, not
the
Negroes. But the idea of integration. We’re fighting the Negro who wants to blend with the white. The
nigger.”

“Richard, what’s in it for you? Why do you care?” “I’m a private citizen,” Richard Buddy answered, “and I care the same way a lot of private citizens care about what happens to their country. Only I care enough to do something about it. Dee, it cost me money to come down here. No one paid me; it came out of my own purse. A man believes in something strong enough, he does something about it. Dee, remember that fellow who believed in world citizenship? He had his picture in
all
the papers.” She said, “Oh, yes. Vaguely. I didn’t remember his name.”

“Oh, Lord, yes — he was in
Time
and
Life
and the newsreels. Everything! Well, he believed in something enough to fight for it, too. Dee, I simply believe the Negro is better off segregated. That’s the way I feel!”

“I suppose you’re entitled to your opinion,” she said, “and I guess you’re entitled to make speeches about your opinion. But Richard, just a word of advice from an old

Bastropian, hmm?” “What’s that?”

“You’re in with a bad crowd. You may have very well-thought-out ideas about integration — I don’t know. But the Chandlers — people like that — I saw you with Duboe out in front of Porter’s this afternoon. Well, here in Bastrop they’re just troublemakers.”

He lit another of her cigarettes for her. “Listen, Dee,” he said, “There was a crowd down there at the Wheel. A crowd! Not just the Chandlers, Dee, but a mob! Did you ever think that
you
might be in the minority?”

“I don’t care one way or the other, really. I’ve been away too long. I’m not a fighter any more.”

He thought: And you’re soft now, after soft beds with
the
sheets changed daily; after soft silk and soft velvet; and soft living in the East Sixties; after sick, soft-soft, you don’t have to fight.

He said, “I drew a big crowd, and I didn’t get booed, Dee.” I got cheered, he thought; God, I did!

“On Saturdays,” she said, “the hill people come to town. A lot of people come to town Saturdays we don’t see all week.”

“I didn’t think you’d try to belittle me, Dee.”

She reached over and touched his sleeve. He wore a petulant expression — one he’d perfected that was a cross between an offended look and a disappointed one — the expression Lennie Gold used to call his “fey” look. Lennie used to say, “Don’t act for
me,
please! I didn’t pay to get in!”

Lennie was a goddam fool, trying to get his ass in med school so he could be another Freud. He’d fixed Lennie, goddam him.

“Richard,” she said in an incredulous tone, “I wasn’t belittling you. I was trying to explain a fact to you. You weren’t talking to people in Bastrop. You were talking to people from around the country, from up in the hills, and off on farms. Backwoods folks, and white croppers.”

He looked at her with his “searching” expression — one he’d perfected that was a cross between an interested, wondering look and a disappointed one — the expression that had made Lennie Gold blow his top that last afternoon they were together. Lennie had said: “Don’t tell me you didn’t report it, Richard, because I know you did! Don’t give me that look! You were the only one who knew

I’d never paid state income tax! The only goddam one, Richard!”

Richard Buddy said to her, “Dee, you’re something of a snob, aren’t you? After your years in the East Sixties.”

It worked. He could tell by the look in her eyes.

After she got through denying it, he’d suggest helping her find the letter.

He looked at the clock on the wall of Beggsom’s Place. Nine-ten.

At nine-ten, Jack Chadwick stood in the hallway between the living room and the dining room. As he listened to Doris Towers voice over the telephone, he could hear Cass’s in the other room.

“… that when Crabb Suggs come into my back yard and goes up to my child, I’m plenty scared! What if something should happen to Johnny-Bob as a result of all this! No, you can say all you want, Jud, about duty and responsibility to the Nigra, but I’m thinking about my own!”

Poppy answered her, “Don’t you think I haven’t got kids, Cass? That’s why Jud’s right! If Crabb Suggs and his kind take over around here, our kids aren’t going to have a safe — ”

Cass interrupted her: “Is that really why you think Jud’s right, Poppy? Or is it because Jack suggested the idea in the first place!”

Damn her, Jack thought! God damn her. She was on some kind of morbid tear tonight, and she didn’t care who she ripped into.

Into the phone’s mouth, he said, “Doris, you tell your people that we’re going to do everything we can to see that there’s no violence on Monday. I know there’ve been threats. I know it. I’ve been threatened myself. But I’ll guarantee you — ” Jack Chadwick said …

• • •

“I’ll guarantee you,” the young man with the brush cut said, sitting in Julius’s down in Greenwich Village that Saturday night at nine-ten, “that wherever he’s gone, he’s causing trouble.”

The Negro with him bit into his hamburger. “He just likes to talk big, that’s all! He’s just a character, going off like he was on some kind of secret mission.” He laughed. “He’s a character.”

“He’s not very funny, if he is. Look, Artie, I know that guy. I roomed with him. He’s never gotten over the fact he was rich once, and then suddenly he wasn’t rich. His old man went bankrupt, and little ole Richard had to go to work. He’s never gotten over it. And when he went to work, he couldn’t hold down a decent job because he knew it all. Had a goddam Napoleon complex! Once he had a job up at Crub & Corrigan, writing copy. His boss called him down once on something and our boy Richard screams at him, ‘Don’t be impudent to me! Don’t you dare be impudent to me!’ And when the boss canned him, our boy picks up a bottle of ink, takes off the top, and turns it upside down on top of the boss’s desk … Artie, when he told me about it, his eyes were blazing like he had a fever, and he said to me, ‘Lennie, I know something that’s going to ruin that Mr. Havermayer. Something about the way he voted back in forty-eight. I just think some of C.&C.’s clients might be interested.”

Artie said, “He just talks, Lennie. Richard’s all right, boy. My sister was sure soft on him.”

“Sure,” the brush cut said. “He used to love to go where Vie was singing, didn’t he? Loved the way she sang right to him and everyone looked. Loved the way she came and joined him after at the table. Old attention-starved Richard. Killed him ‘cause he lost his money! I was with him one night down on Jones Street when he sprained an ankle kicking the side of a Cadillac. He was yelling ‘I could have had this nothing! This nothing! I could have had a whole fleet of nothings like this!’ “

“I think he really liked Vie,” Artie said. “They were sweet on each other a long time.”

“Until she ditched him. Then he wasn’t so sweet. Remember the night he stood right here, Artie, right by the bar, and yelled at her? Remember? ‘I’ll get even, you — nigger,’ “ he said.

“Aw, he was hurt, Lennie. You know Richard. Blows a lot of steam off.”

“Ever hear his ambition? Told me one night when he was drunk.”

“He used to tell me he thought he might go into politics. He did a lot of speech-making, remember? He was all right.”

Lennie Gold said, “He just liked to hear himself talk. Liked to get upon those sound trucks and shoot his big mouth off. Naw, his ambition, Artie, the way he told me, was to be on the cover of
Time.”

“Nothing wrong with that, Lennie. You just got a chip, boy.”

“I just got a stomach-full, Artie. That’s all.”

• • •

At nine-ten Mrs. Gus peeked from the crack in the doorway at the men sitting around the kitchen table. Goodness, some of them she didn’t even know; never saw before in her life, and when she made notes it was hard to distinguish one talker from the other.

Big-nose said: “Naw, now I don’t go for sending any kind of threatening note to Jud. Hell, Jud — he ain’t just a Sunday-in-the-pulpit-Christian. He come out to my place last winter, when Irie took down with arthritis, and — ”

Gus Chandler interrupted, “I don’t have anything against Jud either. Like him all right. But if Duboe’s right and he’s meeting down to Chadwick’s with all of ‘em — ”

“Hell,” Big-nose said, “we don’t even know what’s going on down there.”

“Well, Duboe will be back soon,” Crabb Suggs said. “But Jud Forsythe ain’t gonna be on our side. A note don’t hurt none. A good strong note, to let ‘em all know we ain’t going to have no interference on Monday when we meet them niggers going to school.”

“I say leave Jud out of it,” Big-nose said.

“It’s his church the young folks go to, and it’s them giving us trouble.” Suggs said. “ ‘S the goddam Episcopalians! Progressive element!”

Mrs. Gus threw her pencil down and wandered over to her bed. She picked up the soap and smelled it.

“I got a notion they’ll ask me on Monday,” she said, “and I’m going to
refuse!
I’m going to tell them they can have their old smelly soap!” she said. “I’ll tell them all!”

Behind her, someone pulled the door shut. The men’s voices were muffled now so that she couldn’t hear.

• • •