The End of a Primitive (27 page)

“Fix this bitch right now,” Jesse thought and staggered to the kitchen to get the big kitchen knife.

“Don’t cut her, man, don’t cut her!” Harold said in alarm when Jesse returned, brandishing the knife. “Hit her with your fist but don’t cut her.”

“Don’t tell that son of a bitch to hit me, you son of a bitch!” Kriss screamed in a rage now directed toward her erstwhile protector.

“Man’s right,” Jesse thought. “Bitch just needs a little blacking for the coming cakewalk.” Aloud he said, “Right-O!” and, placing the knife carefully atop the storage cabinet so as not to scar the finish, hit her on the jaw as hard as he could. In amazement he watched her bang against the television set and crumple to the floor. “White bitches fall on their ass just like all other bitches when they’re smacked on the jaw,” he thought.

“Don’t kick her, man,” Harold said quickly.

“Got you, coach,” Jesse said. “Don’t bruise the stuff.”

Harold chuckled. “Consider the depreciation.”

“Trouble with us niggers now—”

Neither of them moved to help Kriss as she struggled to her feet. With clinical curiosity Jesse watched her first straighten the television set on its stand, then pull down her skirt which had flown up about her waist, thinking, “Property first, virtue second—” and when at last she gave him the full malevolence of her look, added, “—hatred third. Good thing to know.” She kept silent for fear he might hit her again, but said to herself, “Jesse! You son of a bitch! I’ll never let you sleep with me again as long as I live!” dictating his ultimate punishment in much the same attitude as Puritans sentencing a witch to burning, or white southerners a Negro to lynching. Then, silently, she took off all of her clothes and threw them on the floor, staggered to the kitchen and mixed a gin drink, came back into the hall and posed naked long enough for him to see what he was missing; then she giggled and went into the bedroom and slammed the door with a bang that sounded like a shot.

“Ought to be hot now,” Harold said, chuckling.

“Just exploded,” Jesse said.

By accord they went to the kitchen to get a drink and finding the gin gone opened the bottle of sherry. “I’m getting good and goddamned tired of these hurt white bitches taking it out on me,” Jesse muttered, finding himself slowly burning with what was the beginning of accumulated rage.

“You hear me!” His voice thickening with growing passion. “TIREDDDDDDDD!” And with that he took a huge swallow of sherry to cool his blazing brain. But whatever comment Harold made on this revealing outburst, he never knew, for with the warm pungent fiery wine exploding in his stomach, his conscious awareness blanked out again and did not return until he began to dream shortly before awakening.

Chapter 12

H
e dreamed he was writing a soft sweet lyrical and gently humorous account of his experiences as a cook on a big country estate somewhere, and as he completed each chapter it was being printed on pale green pages of stiff Irish linen, each page with an individual hand-painted border of various ancient Egyptian designs; the book itself with both the printed pages and those yet to be filled bound in dark green morocco leather with gold leaf comers and with the title
Hog Will Eat Hog
, branded on the leather, and his name in heavy silver letters beneath:

I discovered I didn’t have to kill the hogs because they’d give six or seven inches of sausage each day, neatly stuffed in their intestines, and I’d simply have to go down to the pig sty and cut it off. There’d always be plenty for everyone and some left over, and by the next morning they would have grown an equal amount. The lady I worked for—I won’t mention her name because she is very famous and might be embarrassed—didn’t want to eat the sausage at first because she thought it was being cruel to the hogs to cut if off like that. But when I showed her that the hogs did not feel any pain whatsoever, and how happy they were to be giving a little sausage each day instead of being slaughtered all at once and butchered for hams, she consented to eat the sausage and liked it very much. The way I discovered she liked the sausage came about like this: She was sitting on the terrace with Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
open in her lap, but instead of reading she was looking across her sunny acres with a dreamy expression.

“If I may be so bold as to ask, what are you thinking, madame?” I asked.

“About sausage.”

“What about sausage, madame?”

“About how good it is.”

It made me happy to see her happy, and the hogs were happy to see us both happy.

But one day one of the hogs refused to give his bit of sausage. I knew he was not going dry because he was eating as much swill as any of the other hogs and he was also just as fat. So after breakfast that morning I took him down to the slaughterhouse to have a good talk with him.

“Why do you refuse to give your bit of sausage, like the other hogs do?” I asked.

“I have run out of sausage,” he said.

But I knew by his hang-hog expression and the guilty manner in which he avoided my eyes that the sausage manufacturers had bribed him.

“Why do you lie to me?” I asked. “I can tell by looking at you that you have gone over to the other side.”

“But it is true,” he contended. “Besides which I have no more guts.”

“Would you rather be slaughtered and butchered by the sausage manufacturers, or give us, your friends, a little bit of sausage each day?” I asked bluntly.

“I don’t know why I hate you so when you’ve been so good to me,” he squealed pathetically, lard drops streaming from his little hog eyes.

On hearing this, the other hogs who had followed down to the slaughterhouse expecting to see him slaughtered, thought that I might forgive him and began shouting, “Slaughter the traitor! Slaughter the traitor!”

But when I saw their cruel sadistic expressions, I recalled the words of our Saviour, and I said to them, “He that is without pork chops among you, let him first cut his brother’s throat.” Then I turned to the recalcitrant hog and said, “Let this be a lesson to you: hog will eat hog the same as dog will eat dog…”

At the moment of awakening he remembered the dream entirely and thought, half-amused, “Damn right!” Then, as he became oriented, he realized he was sleeping on the sofa in the living room. “Good thing you’re not a hog, son,” he thought as he reached behind him and switched on the table light. “You’d have to eat your own sausage.”

The room looked a worse wreck than it had the morning before. “I had Kilroy wrong,” he thought, eyeing the signs of havoc. “McCarthy’s been investigating here.” Kriss’s clothes were piled as she had left them on stripping, but there was no evidence of his own. He got up and found them hanging neatly in the hall closet. “Now I know I was tight,” he said aloud.

Next he examined his face in the bathroom mirror. It looked the same. “Stuff embalms you good enough,” he thought.

His head felt funny and he suffered streaks of sharp brain ache when he moved it too quickly, and his mouth felt cottony and tasted brown. His body was slightly numb as if his sense of feel was impaired, and did things contrary to the commands of his brain.

He had no idea what time it was. When he went into the bedroom to look at the clock, he noticed through the partly open window that it was dull gray and raining outside. Without turning on the light for fear of awakening Kriss, he stooped and peered at the clock. But the clock had stopped at 3:16 and he had to switch on the light to find her watch. In the meantime he took a good look at her. She lay flat on her back with her arms straight down as if laid out for burial and slept so peacefully she seemed scarcely to breathe. “Bitch is so quiet she must be dead,” he thought. The covers were pulled up about her throat and only her face was exposed, and it was serene and very white and astonishingly beautiful. “All bitches look best flat on their backs,” he thought as he studied the marble countenance, “Too bad they can’t function in their sleep. When you wake up their brains the trouble begins.” He saw by the watch on her dressing table that it was 8:23 and started to wake her so she’d be in time for work, but changed his mind. “Leave her to Gabriel, son, too late to score now,” and then, “we got no twat but too late to plot another shot, eh wot?—bestseller…” and went to the kitchen for a drink. Finding only the two bottles of vermouth left, he opened one, drank a tumblerful and muttered sourly, “Ladypiss,” quickly adding, “Some other lady’s, not hers.” Taking a bottle and glass back to the sitting-room he decided suddenly to dress and leave before Kriss awakened. While showering he entertained himself by imagining an invention whereby one could bite into a set of electric brushes attached to the wall and have his teeth cleaned while taking a shower. “Wonder someone hasn’t thought of it before,” he said. “Typical American innovation. Fits smackdab into the American way. If so many million gainfully employed U.S. citizens spent thirty seconds every morning brushing their teeth, look how much time would be saved to earn more money to pay for this machine on the instalment plan.” Then, “It’d be the easiest thing in the world to sell; a natural for an advertising slogan: Why be whiny when Packer’s electric shower-brush will make your teeth so nice and shiny?—Too long, though—Don’t Beef! Shine your teeth!…That’s better…” He could envision a fine, fat, somewhat paunchy but still bustling bald-headed businessman, B. Smart, taking his morning’s ice-cold shower with his teeth clamped about the electric brushes when all of a sudden he has a spell of lockjaw brought on by staying beneath the icecold shower too long and trying to sing the chorus of
Old Shagging Riley
while his teeth were being shined. And before he can get loose his teeth have been worn down to the roots and the busy little brushes are busily polishing away his jawbone. “Nothing serious,” he can hear the firm’s executives saying. “People expect such things. Perfectly normal accident of our mechanical age. Good publicity, too. Couldn’t sell the damn things without an element of risk. Great gamblers, the Americans. Got plates myself, thank God…” He laughed until he cried, thinking of old B. Smart chomping up fillets in “21” with his razor-sharp jawbones. “I got a beautiful sense of humour,” he thought laughingly. “As typically American as the tooth-shining machine. Laugh my ass off at misfortune. But somebody else’s, not mine. Must remember to tell them that next time I apply for membership in the human race.”

The combination of warm shower and dry herb wine had a sobering effect on him and again he felt a dread of going outside into the unknown day. So instead of dressing as he had intended he went into the living-room and sat naked on the sofa and finished the bottle of wine. “Courage, son,” he said, feeling slightly better, “it’s cheaper by the bottle—bestseller,” But lacking the high proof courage of bottled-in-bond bourbon he still did not feel up to facing the unknown outside. “Reason why Italians never won a war,” he thought. “Drink this lady-piss.” Then corrected himself, “Raped Abyssinia, though. So must be good for raping.” Taking the empty bottle back to the kitchen for the full one, he thought, “Maybe if you drink enough of this, son, you’ll get in some raping too. Do the bitch a world of good.” Then, “But then Abyssinia was a nigger; don’t know how it’ll work on a white bitch.” While drawing the cork he looked about the kitchen at the night’s devastation. “Tell we won the war,” he thought. “Don’t know who we whipped but this is sure hell a liberated nation.” Pouring a tumblerful of the aromatic wine, he drank it down without pause, then cautioned himself, “Just don’t fuck up like Mussolini, son. That bastard got so het up over raping a nigger he set the whole world on fire.” For some reason he didn’t know, he was assailed by a feeling of remorse. Taking the bottle and glass to the sitting-room, he stood for a moment as if bemused. With one part of his mind he thought, “They’re all watching Russia. Better watch Mississippi too—more firebugs there than in the Kremlin,” and with the other part, for no evident reason, “
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
…” Then with the first part, half-amused, “No tonic manufactured good as whipping a nigger’s ass. Makes you feel more powerful than cocaine,” and with the second part, strangely depressed, “All his conscience in his dick, though, never yet no higher.” Then with the first part, “Poor Kriss, too bad she’s not strong enough to whip your ass, son; she’d give you all of hers to heal it,” and again with the second part, “Can’t change nature, son, nuts and brains taste just the same; fact, nuts taste better, got more soul.”

Involuntarily he went over and tuned in the television set, then sat widelegged on the sofa, staring absently at his penis and thinking the while, “Doctors know. Can’t prescribe it though. Whip nigger’s ass—unlawful even in Latin. But know just the same. Aphrodisiacal, too, just like whipping a bitch’s ass. Works the same way. In the glands. Tightens them. Glands slack? Whip a black!—spot add…”

The voice from the television drew his attention: “—peace treaty re-establishing Japan as an independent and sovereign nation, will go into effect. On May 6, a federal law requiring gamblers…” On sight of the two faces grinning at him from the television screen, he realized that Gloucester was conducting his weekday morning interview with the prophetic chimpanzee, and involuntarily rushed in to call Kriss, thinking, “She’ll want to hear this.” But his call didn’t awaken her and he could hear the chimp saying: “East Germany will announce plans to form an army to protect itself against aggression…” So he let her sleep on, thinking, “We must have been drinking different stuff,” and went back to his seat.

“—twenty-seven year old Negro porter, Irving Greene, will confess to setting twenty fires in Brooklyn during the past two years, including the June 18th fire in which seven persons died. When asked why he did it, he will reply that he liked the excitement.”

“—black Nero—” Jesse thought.

“—U.S. will allocate a fifteen million dollar working fund to aid business in West Berlin—”

“—thicker than conscience—”

“—new series of reports of flying saucers over Washington and other parts of the nation resulted in an Air Force announcement that the objects were not a menace to the U.S.—”