Clock Without Hands (13 page)

"Oh, the Confederate money ... I'm off now."

"Wait, Son, this colored boy is coming today and I thought you would screen him with me."

"I know about that," Jester said. He did not want to be there when Sherman arrived.

"He's a responsible boy, I know all about him, and he will help me with my diet, give me my injections, open my mail, and be my general amanuensis. He will be a comfort to me."

"If that Sherman Pew is a comfort to you, just let me know."

"He will read to me ... an educated boy ... immortal poetry." His voice was suddenly shrill. "Not dirty trash like that book I banned at the public library. I had to ban it because as a responsible man I'm determined that things in this town and state are going to be in order, and this country too, and the world if I can accomplish it."

Jester slammed out of the house.

Although he had not set the alarm clock and could very well have daydreamed for a long time before getting out of bed, the spring of energy and life stirred violently that morning. The golden summer was with him and he was still free. When he slammed out of the house, Jester did not race but took his mortal time, for after all it was summer vacation and he was not going to any fire. He could stop to look at the world, he could imagine, he could look with summer vacation freedom at the border of verbena that lined the drive. He even stooped down and examined a vivid flower and joy was with him. Jester was dressed in his best clothes that morning, wearing a white duck suit and even a coat. He just wished his beard would get a hump on and grow so he could shave. But suppose he never grew a beard, what would people think of him? For a moment the vacation joy darkened until he thought of something else.

He had dressed fit to kill because he knew that Sherman was coming, and he had slammed out of the house because he did not want to meet Sherman that way. Last evening he had not been the least bit witty or sparkling; in fact, he had just goofed off, and he did not want to meet Sherman until he could be witty and sparkling. How Jester was going to accomplish that this morning he didn't know, but he would talk about introverts and extroverts ... where that would lead him, he wondered. In spite of the fact that Sherman utterly disagreed with him about his theories of flight and was unimpressed about Jester's flying, he walked automatically to J. T. Malone's pharmacy and stood at the corner waiting for the bus that went to the airport. Happy, confident, free, he lifted his arms and flapped them for a moment.

J. T. Malone, who saw that gesture through the window of the pharmacy, wondered if, after all, the boy was dotty.

Jester was trying to be witty and sparkling and he thought that being alone in the airplane would help him in this. It was the sixth time that he had soloed. A great part of his mind was taken up with the instruments. In the blue, wind-rushing air his spirits lifted, but witty and sparkling in his conversation ... he didn't know. Of course it would depend a great deal on what Sherman said himself, so he would have to hinge the conversation and he just dearly hoped that he would be witty and sparkling.

It was an open Moth Jester was flying and the wind pulled his red hair backward from his scalp. He deliberately had not worn a helmet because he liked the sensation of wind and sun. He would put on the helmet when he went to the house and met Sherman there. Careless he would be, and busy, a helmeted aviator. After a half an hour of wind-rushing cobalt and sun, he began to think of landing. Zooming carefully, circling to get just the proper distance, he had no room in his thoughts for Sherman even, because he was responsible for his own life and for the training Moth. The landing was bumpy, but when he put on his helmet and jumped out with careful grace he wished somebody could have seen him.

The bus ride back from the airport always made him feel squashed, and the old bus itself was plodding and terribly restricted compared to the air; and the more he flew the more he was convinced that every adult had the moral obligation to fly, no matter what Sherman Pew's convictions were about this matter.

He left the bus at the corner of J. T. Malone's drugstore which was in the center of town. He looked at the town. On the next block was the Wedwell Spinning Mill. From the open basement window the heat from the dye vats made wavy lines in the sweltering air. Just to stretch his legs, he strolled around the business section of town. Pedestrians stayed close to the awnings and it was the time of late morning when their shadows cast on the glittering sidewalk were blunt and dwarfed. His unaccustomed coat made him very hot as he walked through town, waving to people he knew and blushing with surprise and pride when Hamilton Breedlove of the First National Bank tipped his hat at him—very likely because of the coat. Jester circled back to Malone's drugstore thinking of a cherry coke with cool crushed ice. On the corner, near where he had waited for the bus, a town character called Wagon sat in the shade of the awning with his cap on the sidewalk next to him. Wagon, a light-colored Negro who had lost both legs in a sawmill accident, was toted every day by Grown Boy and transported in the wagon where he would beg before awninged stores. Then when the stores closed, Grown Boy would wheel him back home in the wagon. When Jester dropped a nickel in the cap, he noticed that quite a few coins were there, and even a fifty-cent piece. The fifty-cent piece was a decoy coin Wagon always used in hope of further generosity.

"How you do today, Uncle?"

"Just tollable."

Grown Boy, who often showed up at dinnertime, was standing there just watching. Wagon today had fried chicken instead of his usual side-meat sandwich. He ate the chicken with the lingering delicate grace with which colored people eat chicken.

Grown Boy asked, "Why don you gimme a piece of chicken?" although he had already eaten dinner.

"Go on, nigger."

"Or some biscuits and molasses?"

"I ain payin no min to you."

"Or a nickel for a cone?"

"Go on, nigger. You come before me like a gnat."

So it would go on, Jester knew. The hulking, dimwitted colored boy begging from the beggar. Tipped panama hats, the separate fountains for white and colored people in the courthouse square, the trough and hitching post for mules, muslin and white linen and raggedy overalls. Milan. Milan. Milan.

As Jester turned into the dim, fan-smelling drugstore, he faced Mr. Malone who stood behind the fountain in his shirtsleeves.

"May I have a coke, sir?"

Fancy and overpolite the boy was, and Malone remembered the dotty way he flapped his arms when he was waiting for the airport bus.

While Mr. Malone made up the Coca-Cola, Jester moseyed over to the scales and stood on them.

"Those scales don't work," Mr. Malone said.

"Excuse me," Jester said.

Malone watched Jester and wondered. Why did he say that, and wasn't it a dotty thing to say, apologizing because the pharmacy scales didn't work. Dotty for sure.

Milan. Some people were content to live and die in Milan with only brief visits to relatives and so forth in Flowering Branch, Goat Rock, or other smaller towns near by. Some people were content to live their mortal lives and die and be buried in Milan. Jester Clane was not one of those. Maybe a minority of one, but a definitely
not
one. Jester pranced with irritation as he waited and Malone watched him.

The coke was frosty-beaded on the counter and Malone said, "Here you are."

"Thank you, sir." When Malone went to the compounding room, Jester sipped his icy coke, still brooding about Milan. It was the broiling season when everybody wore shirtsleeves except dyed-in-the-wool sticklers who put on their coats when they went to lunch in the Cricket Tea Room or the New York Café. His Coca-Cola still in hand, Jester moved idly to the open doorway.

The next few moments would be forever branded in his brain. They were kaleidoscopic, nightmare moments, too swift and violent to be fully understood at the time. Later Jester knew he was responsible for the murder and the knowledge of that fact brought further responsibility. Those were the moments when impulse and innocence were tarnished, the moments which end the end, and which, many months later, were to save him from another murder—in truth, to save his very soul.

Meanwhile Jester, Coca-Cola in hand, was watching the flame-blue sky and the burning noonday sun. The noon whistle blew from the Wedwell Mill. The millworkers straggled out for lunch. "The emotional scum of the earth," his grandfather had called them, although he had a great hunk of Wedwell Spinning Mill stock which had gone up very satisfactorily. Wages had increased, so that instead of bringing lunch pails the hands could afford to eat at luncheonettes. As a child, Jester had feared and abhorred "factory tags," appalled by the squalor and misery he saw in Mill Town. Even now he didn't like those blue-denimed, tobacco-chewing mill hands.

Meanwhile, Wagon had only two pieces of fried chicken left ... the neck and the back. With loving delicacy he started on the neck which has as many stringy bones as a banjo and is just as sweet.

"just a teeny bit," Grown Boy begged. He was looking yearningly at the back and his rusty black hand reached toward it a little. Wagon swallowed quickly and spat on the back to insure it for himself. The phlegmy spit on the crusty brown chicken angered Grown. As Jester watched him, he saw the dark, covetous eyes fix on the change in the begging cap. A sudden warning made him cry, "Don't, don't," but his stifled warning was lost by the clanging of the town clock striking twelve. There were the scrambled sensations of glare and brassy gongs and the resonance of the static midday; then it happened so instantly, so violently, that Jester could not take it in. Grown Boy dived for the coins in the begging cap and ran.

"Git him. Git him," Wagon screamed, histing himself on his sawed-off legs with the leather "shoes" to protect them, and jumping from leg to leg in helpless fury. Meantime Jester was chasing Grown. And the hands from the mill, seeing a white-coated white man running after a nigger, joined in the chase. The cop on Twelfth and Broad saw the commotion and hastened to the scene. When Jester caught Grown Boy by the collar and was struggling to seize the money from Grown's fist, more than half a dozen people had joined in the fray, although none of them knew what it was about.

"Git the nigger. Git the nigger bastard."

The cop parted the melee with the use of his billy stick and finally cracked Grown Boy on the head as he struggled in terror. Few heard the blow, but Grown Boy limpened instantly and fell. The crowd made way and watched. There was only a thin trickle of blood on the black scalp, but Grown Boy was dead. The greedy, lively, wanting boy who had never had his share of sense lay on the Milan sidewalk ... forever stilled.

Jester threw himself on the black boy. "Grown?" he pleaded.

"He's dead," somebody in the crowd said.

"Dead?"

"Yes," said the cop after some minutes. "Break it up you all." And doing his duty, he went to the telephone booth at the pharmacy and called an ambulance, although he had seen that look of death. When he came back to the scene, the crowd had drifted back closer to the awning and only Jester remained near the body.

"Is he really dead?" Jester asked, and he touched the face that was still warm.

"Don't touch him," the cop said.

The cop questioned Jester about what had happened and took out his notebook and paper. Jester began a dazed account. His head felt light like a gas balloon.

The ambulance shrilled in the static afternoon. An intern in a white coat leaped out and put his stethoscope on Grown Boy's chest.

"Dead?" the cop asked.

"As a doornail," the intern said.

"Are you sure?" Jester asked.

The intern looked at Jester and noticed his panama hat that had been knocked off. "Is this your hat?" Jester took the hat, which was grimy now.

The white-coated interns carried the body to the ambulance. It was all so callous and swift and dreamlike that Jester turned slowly toward the drugstore, his hand on his head. The cop followed him.

Wagon, who was still eating his spat-on back, said, "What happened?"

"Dunno," said the cop.

Jester felt lightheaded. Could it be possible he was going to faint? "I feel funny."

The cop, glad to be doing something, steered him to a chair in the pharmacy and said, "Sit down here and hold your head between your legs." Jester did so and when the blood rushed back to his head he sat up, although he was very pale.

"It was all my fault. If I hadn't been chasing him and those people piling in on top of us," he turned to the cop, "and why did you hit him so hard?"

"When you are breaking up a crowd with a billy stick you don't know how hard you are hitting. I don't like violence any more than you do. Maybe I shouldn't even have joined the force."

Meantime Malone had called the old Judge to come and get his grandson and Jester was crying with shock.

When Sherman Pew drove up to bring him home, Jester, who was not thinking about impressing Sherman any more, was led to the car while the cop tried to explain what had happened. After listening, Sherman only commented, "Well, Grown Boy has always been just a feeb, and in my case, if I was just a feeb, I'd be glad if it happened to me. I put myself in other people's places."

"I do wish you would shut up," Jester said.