Going Down Fast (28 page)

“What are you risking with that toad except your own decency?”

“You just love shiny Jameson words like decency lately.”

“No wise man has been making me ashamed of where I come from, and who.”

They were pulled up out front of Leon's storefront. “You're so closeminded, you make me weep!” Paul flung himself out.

Rowley held that door open till Vera got the idea and moved up front. “Scared someone will think you're my chauffeur?”

“In a VW?”

She sat straight with arms folded. Now and again a spasm of anger bit her features.

Perhaps it was like taming a unicorn. She had stopped jumping at his touch. She would let herself be kissed. She would even curl up on his lap if he kept talking or listened to her. Once he asked her as she waited under his kiss, “Didn't anyone ever kiss you?”

Her amused face. “Do you think I come from Mars?”

So little trace. As little as he was leaving. Sometimes he grew sick with himself and thought he would take up molesting little girls. But she was a child only in stubborn pretense.

Friday he came to meet her where she taught in an ugly redbrick warren in the Black Belt, stinking, overcrowded, its dank halls and packed classrooms jangling like sore nerves. As he loitered smoking and waiting against the wire fence with the pitiful bleak schoolyard before him, he felt young, mean, truant. The wall was splattered with fucks and hearts, Candy Loves Willy, the names of gangs and would-be gangs. Someone had lettered carefully in purple
PUSSY IS GOOD FOR YOU
. A used scumbag fluttered off a spike in the fence.

The smell of fear choked him, continual buzz of the scatological sex of childhood, the warfare, the petty oppression, the unremitting oily boredom. The status world of the young hustler. Always someone to face down. Fear, fear. The bratty shrillness of the bells across the gravel yard made him think of the airraid drills of World War II. All of them sitting by classes crosslegged in the halls singing “The caissons are rolling along!” They had to sit crosslegged, their feet turned just so, because otherwise they might be comfortable. Still everybody enjoyed them so much the board of education had to issue a warning against too many airraid drills in certain schools.

Midmorning watery milk. Teacher prying, How many children brushed their teeth this morning? took a bath? The screws put on them to cough up dimes and quarters for defense stamps, for Christmas and Easter seals, for teacher's favorite charity. The smell of the gym floor and hard gray mats. Whether baseball or basketball the team leaders were Al and Babalu, and they would choose up the other colored kids first. He was always one of the first whites chosen because he was tall and a good hitter, but it incensed him that they'd choose PeeWee, who was as little as the bat, before him. Even mild prejudice always got whites indignant.

Other kids went to all white schools. His crowd learned that early. Something must be wrong with them. They weren't as white as other kids. But the real white kids were stupider in lots of ways. They didn't know the other language. There were many things they didn't know. Though school was stacked against the colored kids—like for Auditorium they always had to be giving oral reports on Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver and, by infection, Lincoln till the walls wept while the whites had Everybody—still something was exchanged. Soul, style. If he could explain about that, with his music.

One last bell and the volcano spewed kids. Landslides of kids. Hundreds, thousands poured out, they poured out. His first impulse was to run for his life. The building could not have held them. They must be jammed in six deep. As the hordes of children squeezed out the old massive double doors, he thought he heard the snapping of bones, he was sure little kids went down underfoot and were trampled to jelly. For ten minutes children thundered out, delirious to reach air. The pavement quivered. The air rang like metal with their cries. Finally the explosion dwindled to stragglers, and teachers began coming into the parking lot and through the door near him toward the busline.

A number passed before he saw her walking alone with small, tired steps lugging a black case as if it were full of bricks. He was amused how much a schoolteacher she looked, slight, spinsterish, weary. Then she saw him. Her head whipped up, her shoulders froze. He thought she would walk past without speaking and he swore if she did, he would forget her. With a twist of her lips she stopped in front of him. “What brings you around?”

“Thought I could give you a lift home.”

“Nothing like a little scandal to enliven these biddies. Is this doing me a favor? I'm too tired to know. Yes, I'm glad not to pack on the bus and stand all the way. But don't do it again. I'm not a regular teacher yet.”

When he came upstairs with her she kicked off her shoes and let him pull her down on his lap. She did not sit on him as if he were a chair the way she usually did, but collapsed, burying her face in his neck. “One of my boys is in trouble for having a knife. He's just a baby. I'm sure it's his brother's and he was showing off, but the principal's treating him like a criminal.”

She taught, she attended evening classes at the Art Institute. She had a friend, an older Negro woman, Mrs. Hamilton, who went around with her like two nuns elbow to elbow in the museums, galleries and exhibitions. Mrs. Hamilton was earnest and admiring. With her Vera's face was closed as the trunk of a tree. Afterward she would tell him the flashes of charlatanism, of pomposity she had seen.

For that she needed him: to share her sense of absurdity. When she made her masks of derision, of wit and even of wonder she must have someone to see them. He measured her need and moved in. No wonder his days had gone hollow.

Returning late from her that night he was coming down his street, walking from the parkingplace he'd found around the corner. One of the streetlights was out, had been broken all week. Trash scattered around the sidewalk. City was cutting down services already. He saw the kids coming toward him but did not think twice. Neighborhood kids. Perhaps he knew them. They split to pass him. When they were level, the one on his left lunged into him.

“Hey, Whitey! Get Whitey!” The kid on the right closed in, ricocheted off.

His thigh burned. Then cold air. He swung after them, his hand going down. Touched torn cloth, touched smear of wet. He let them go. They had not cut him deeply but the wound stung.

Yente rose stifflegged from under the steps yowling welcome.

“Hi, tuxedo-cat.” He stooped to ruffle his shaggy fur.

The door opened above them. “Rowley? Where you been?”

“With a girl. What's wrong?”

“The commissioners voted this afternoon.”

“Already? They didn't take long to decide.”

“No, they didn't take long. They passed it two to one.”

“Shit. Look, I'll be up in five minutes.”

“Don't. I got no stomach for talk tonight. No stomach at all.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Maybe.”

In the john he examined his leg. A slash ran half the length of his thigh in a jagged seam. Maybe a froe? Some kind of broken knife. The blood rolled over the winter-sallow skin and dripped on the white toilet seat. With plaintive meows Yente rubbed against the leg he was standing on and nuzzled his boot querying, hey?

“What's the world coming to, cat? The power structure deals and I get cut. Aw, tonight I feel rotten.”

Then he heard Harlan's words and let the cap of the tincture of Merthiolate fall into the basin. They were beaten. They had made a good case, they were right and within their rights. But they had lost. A huge baffled anger formed in him as he went over the steps of their case again and again. The last thick syrup of bleeding oozed over his thigh.

Saturday, December 13

The breaking wave of her breasts against the white wall. Firm small breasts like fists. The musculature of her sleek back was marked and beautiful.

“I'm strong for my size. All those generations of farmhands.” The vaccination mark showed in the resilient flesh of her upper arm: bite of closeset pointed teeth. Shadowy hollows in her throat.

“Don't keep saying I'm pretty, it leaves me cold. Bodies are jokes.”

“Then some jokes are prettier than others. What do you think you're defending now?”

“I must be the first female Jameson to commit immoral acts in four generations, since freedom. Think of it, the shock among the elder saints up there watching.”

“If I think of that there won't be an act. You're fighting.”

“What you call fighting, I call breathing.”

“Breathe through your skin then.”

“It was silly mysticism to suppose I'd be any different when you got my clothes off.”

Yet the fruity silk of her thighs, warm against warm. Belly's dull gloss. At times her body would answer him, follow.

“I've wanted
objects
. Certain drawings downtown. An Egyptian cat. A Japanese monkey screen.” In the slack flutter of her eyelids the sheen in the plumage of grackles. Color of very dark tulips. One hand rested on his back.

“I began making my clothes when I realized they didn't like me trying on clothes in Ransom's. I understood why my mother ordered from Sears. I learned to sew then. A woman from the church gave me lessons.”

“Do you blame me for wanting you?”

“Of course.”

The wall of masks watched, among them his own lewd face. With her he felt conscious of his bulk, his hair, the buried clubs of bones. Her small hand floated on him without pressure or urgency. She said, “I never know how much I should be watching out for you. You seem so clumsy with your guts dragging and your pockets full of yourself. But you want, you want.”

“Well, you wanted that monkey screen.”

“I have a cold faith in myself.” Her eyes mirrored him in obsidian. He was dug in for a long siege, prepared and patient. “If I really want that screen, I can reproduce it. It may take a year to learn brushstroke technique and longer to master it, but then. Suppose I make a screen? Is that what I wanted? If not, what did I want?”

“We have different problems.”

Her fresh laugh. “Friend, you noticed that?”

She never completely shut her eyes. Sometimes she filtered him through long lashes. Sometimes she fixed on middle distance, above the ceiling. Sometimes she challenged his eyes. He laid his hand on her flat midriff. In her free floating a bubble world: two dark skinny minnows in clear cold water, in a hard early morning light with the colors sharp as scallions but few. In his arms, her: in her, that water world. She spoke of her brother.

“We kept each other's secrets. We were always acting stories. We like the Bible best but we'd do King Arthur and Robin Hood and Tarzan and lots of martyrs. He'd be Moses and I'd be the children of Israel—all of them. That's how the masks started.”

She sat up against him suddenly, groping. “What's that? On your leg there?”

He winced. Rough scab. “Accident.”

“You cut yourself shaving? What kind of accident?”

“It's getting tough in the neighborhood. Ran into some kids the other night.”

She lay back still touching it. Line of lamp on her cheek. Her nails teased his back indolently. She moved her head slowly to and fro on the pillow. Hollows came and fled in her arched vulnerable throat. The breaking curve of her breasts interminably against the wall. In a slow teasing voice she told a story. “Once upon a time in a cold country lived a king who had two hundred daughters. Finally a son got born named Peter Moses Joseph George Washington Frederick Douglass—”

“A heavy name for a kid.”

“You don't know the half of it. Of all his two hundred sisters, now, he liked Joan best, just older. The kids found out that much was expected of them at home—only perfection—and that out in the world people had expectations too but the opposite. Once they got off the farm the world seemed pretty mean and badly run. Even the folks who depended on their father thought the family stiff and proud. Their sisters became giddy and boycrazy or household drudges under the strain. The boy Peter was spoiled, yet beaten by his daddy so he'd improve. And he tried and she tried all through their childhoods to be
good
. Their daddy was superintendent of the little Sunday school, where every week in trepidation and glory and cold, cold sweat they performed like tortured parrots.

“Now in everything Peter led and Joan came running after, cause she was trained always to give her brother the bigger piece—which meant in practice she let him do the cutting. Their relations with the town whites were sometimes tense, sometimes muddy. But they were never afraid of their white teachers the way some colored kids were, because their daddy was much scarier. And they could trust each other. Old Joan had had it so dunned into her that her duty was to her brother that she would even lie to her daddy to protect him and then wait for God to cause her wicked mouth to be sewn shut.

“Things went along like that till Peter was in highschool and Joan was in teachers college. A mean pablum-minded school where she paid tuition and the cost of a dreadful room five nights a week by doing domestic work—but that's another fairy tale. Now through wide reading, Peter lost his faith. He started pointing out flaws in their religion.”

“Did Joan lose her faith then?”

“At first she argued, but then she couldn't stand to be outside, so she joined him. In fact each time she came home for the weekend she would bring new contradictions she had worked out. She'd always been thorough in her lessons. Peter was sick and tired of the whole project long before Joan had finished busting up their tight little world. It was busted good, too.

“Summer came, and Joan came home. But Peter, who'd always had his charm, was discovering what to do with it. Life was nature, he said, to replace the broken world, and sex was natural. He picked out the daughter of a man who did odd jobs. Not one of her father's churchgoing families but those bad niggers on the outskirts of town they'd been raised to scorn. One hot Saturday Peter went off to town nervous like before an exam and selfimportant—oh! Joan lay on her bed and read and reread a short story of Hemingway's called
Up in Michigan
which seemed horridly appropriate and her zoology book's vague chapter on reproduction. Of course she's seen animals together though told nice girls didn't watch, but thinking of chickens and cows and dogs made it worse until she cried. This grubbiness was clearly not the sort of thing that could replace that tight world in which they'd tried to be saints, together.”