The Outcasts (10 page)

“I'll be all right,” Morrison said.

“I am not so sure. What about it, Tallie? Can you recommend a companion for Hamlet here? Someone spiritual.”

Tall Boy grinned uneasily and drank from the bottle.

“I worry about you,” Philips went on.

“Don't. Just leave me alone.”

“You reject modern plumbing and countless servants. You abjure the luxurious life of an American in foreign parts. You drink with the boys. But not with the girls.”

“Forget it,” Morrison said.

“No, no.” His eyes had reddened. His voice cut through the noise, and yet it was soft. “We must have someone here who would please you.”

“I'm not in the mood.” Morrison took up the bottle.

“Not in the mood. Well. You know,” Philips said, “while we have only the one color, we have many shades. Am I right, Tallie?”

“Right,” Tall Boy boomed.

“Shut your mouth,” Morrison said to Philips, and cursed him aloud.

Tall Boy's eyes were wide.

“You hold on now,” Philips said low. “Just hold on.”

Morrison cursed him again. “You come with me.”

Philips cocked his head in curiosity. “A scrimmage?” he said, with some pleasure. Then he stood up and Morrison marched him to the bar. The drinkers looked at him and made room. He was close enough to see the red veinlets in Philips's wary eyes. “You smart son of a bitch,” Morrison said. “And in front of Tall Boy. You can have my job when I go home. Not before.”

Philips said, “I do not want your job.”

“Then get off my back. And shut up about women.”

“Your lack of interest is impolite. And intriguing.” He must have thought he was being elegantly insolent. Morrison was suddenly sorry for him, and saw African potentates in silk hats. Curling lips.

“Horseshit,” he said. “Now you listen to me. What problems I have with women are none of your god-damn business. Understand? They are also not local and have nothing to do with color or shade. Understand? At the moment I am not a healthy buck like you. Got it?”

“Never call me a buck,” Philips said tightly.

“Then don't call me a white fag.”

After a moment Philips looked away. Then he said, easier, “Problems.”

“Problems. Mine. None of your business.”

After a longer silence Philips nodded. “Okay. Let's go drink.”

At the table he went on: “Tallie, I was rude to the boss. Forget this whole thing.”

Tall Boy grinned again. “Yay, I got other things to remember. That Lollie in the red shirt.”

“I remember Lollie,” Philips said. “By God I remember Lollie. Very important to remember Lollie.”

“Very important,” Tall Boy approved.

“The greatest importance. The only importance.”

“Do you really think that?” Morrison's anger was gone.

“Their
only importance,” Philips said.

“Talk about impolite,” Morrison said. “The bottle, please. That's the lowest opinion of women I ever heard.”

Philips slid the bottle forward and shrugged. “Different in your country, maybe. A great mistake, I would say. Tallie, get us another bottle, will you? Look at everything important that happens. That has ever happened. Men did it. The world is moved by men. In a man's world women never do anything important for the sake of the work. They do it to prove they can do it.”

“Joan of Arc.”

“An hysteric. A virgin,” with lofty scorn.

“Madame Curie.”

“You see,” Philips said. “There are so few exceptions that you can name them.”

“Queen Elizabeth. The first.”

“One woman,” Philips said, “who had a hundred good men around her.
They
did the work. The thinking. The fighting. But I will give you her. I will even give you Christina. She made a mess of things but she was strong. Not strong enough, though, and her weaknesses were a woman's. When things were hardest she passed as a man.”

“Who was she?”

“What do you learn in American schools? Queen of Sweden. Seventeenth century.”

“Greta Garbo.”

Philips laughed. They were feeling much better. “Yes. God help you. Greta Garbo.”

Tall Boy sat down. With two bottles. “Save a trip,” he said. Save ah treep. The rum was suddenly delicious. Morrison rolled it on his tongue and gargled discreetly. Saturday night. Tall Boy's scarlet fez. All these people having a fine time. From the Jomo Kenyatta Room of Mother Martha's Mahatma Motel, on the road to—where? what? Happy screams, happy shouts. Outside a radio, music, a man and a woman dancing, circling, backing, bumping, grinding. Teeth and sweat. Her blouse came off. Hips rolling. Breasts hanging, atremble. Arms high: whirl: atremble. Stomp, glide, shimmy. Soft and black like the night.

At some point hot goat's meat and cold tomatoes, and a grotesque grapefruit called an ugly. Always the rum. Man, you are killing yourself. Philips found another pitcher of water. The meat was stringy and sharp. More dancers. At the bar, singing, mournful, a heavy beat. Always the friendly rum. “Philips. How you goin?” Woman-smell. The air hot, eddies of smoke. A dog lifting a leg at the stacked beer. “Tall Boy. How you?” Lamplight flickered, shadows swooped. “We came out in a Dakota,” Philips was saying. “A live sheep, in a crate, a thousand pounds of local tobacco, and several cases of rum. Twenty-two of us and one Englishman, a chemist and teacher. A bucket-chemist, he called himself. Long and blond and with one of those high whiny Manchester street-boy voices. And you know the runnels down the floor of a Dakota? Well, the sheep pissed. And it ran down the runnel and past the Englishman, slow and dark yellow, and he came awake and looked at the cases of rum and smiled. Then he bent down and dipped a long professorial finger into it. No one moved or said a word. And then with that faraway look, deep concentration, expertise, the little wrinkles between the eyes, he licked his finger. Slowly, judiciously. Then he nodded, the sure, serious nod of the connoisseur, and fell asleep again. No one said a word then or later. But when we were off the plane and got into the trucks at the airstrip, and he was by the door of his private car, he turned to wave good-bye, and I led the men in three cheers. Hip-hip. You never saw a man so pleased. Right now at his club in London he is telling somebody about the natural and spontaneous love of blacks for the English.”

God, the energy. Song and dance and merry story, lurch and lunge, shout and spin in the smoky shed, and the moths flitting to death. Animal masks glowed blue-black; faces too, wet mouths. “Where's Tall Boy now?”

“Where indeed,” Philips said, pleased. “Spreading cheer. A busy bee. How doth the busy bee improve each shining houri.”

“What?”

“Good God. A bachelor of science.”

“Master. Magister.”

“But what do you know? You must know something besides numbers.”

“A little French,” Morrison said promptly, “and music. I know good music. The blessings of radio. Always while I work, in the office. Scarlatti is best for engineers.”

“There,” Philips said, much relieved. “Give thanks. A noble art. The Albert Hall. Bach Beethoven Brahms.”

“Fela Sowande.”

Philips foundered. “But he is Nigerian. How do you know about him?”

“Oh well,” Morrison said, and smiled airily.

“French, music, and drawing,” Philips murmured. “You sound like a most Victorian young lady.” But he meant no harm.

A lull. An ebb, and a gathering. The voices low, the radio noticeably loud. The second bottle was almost gone; it must have been late. But they had the third. They were speaking of women when Tall Boy padded in and sat down happily. “What I don't see,” Morrison was complaining unsteadily, “is how any European seduced a woman before nineteen-twenty. Byron. Liszt. All those Casanovas. It must have taken days to get all the clothes off them. Time for husbands to come home, children to wake up, whole cities to burn down.”

“What is he saying?” Tall Boy wanted to know.

“He is an historian,” Philips said.

“What is that?”

“Drink your rum.”

“Where did you get that hat?” Morrison asked, and Tall Boy removed it gravely and set it on Morrison's head. Where it settled to the brows.

“Stylish,” Philips said. “Suits you. Makes a new man of you.”

“Inch'allah,” Morrison said.

Some time later Philips was missing, and Tall Boy was missing, and Morrison was alone, far from home, in boozy repose. He was wondering if Philips and he would become friends. Then he forgot Philips and peered around him at the boiling crowd. There was no going home on Saturday night. A thought: Christianity's gift to the heathen was not Sunday morning but Saturday night. He tried to see himself then as they saw him, and was disturbed. He knew too many engineers who worked abroad and went home rarely or never; had no home, really, but the job. Had plenty of dusky servants and no manners. No wives, most of them. Thick men usually because they worked hard and were well fed. They drank too much because that was their mask; they lived up to drawings in adventure magazines. Hung together and fought each other in brawls sparked by false manhood. “You got to have balls in this business,” they would say. And count their native women for each other. And then retire to Panama or Florida or the Philippines, with more dusky servants, and live happily ever after swimming in gin and cursing inferior breeds and the second Roosevelt. And Morrison was one of them, maybe. Bwana Sahib Tuan. “Nobody in this world was ever
exactly
six feet tall,” one of them had threatened him. “You know why? Because Jesus Christ was exactly six feet tall, that's why. And he was perfect.” Bakedbrick face.

From that slough of despond he turned his thoughts to the bridge. The overhang of the roadway would cast a graceful shadow on the arching wall beneath. With the sun high the road would gleam and the arch would be cool and floating, all shadowed. With the sun low the bridge would shine white at a distance. He saw it in those lights; in moonlight; under cloud. Mysterious in starlight hanging pale above nothing. Truly floating then. One straight white line, and a white arch beneath. Pure.

Closer up it would be very different. The men who built it would know what tangles of steel slept within the concrete, and what streams of crushed stone; what mastic cushioned sections, what chemistry bound the whole. In a hundred degrees of heat a man who could not write his name would talk knowingly of retarding densifiers, and would tell you ever after, in teachers tones, that without them concrete will set too quickly in great heat, and will be weak. And I had a lucky stone, he would say, a green lucky stone that I always carried, and I threw it in when we poured the center section. Yes sir. My
luck
is in that bridge.

Morrison's luck seemed to be in the bottle before him. Even the bridge bored him. Saturday night.

What about a woman? What do you care what people think? And maybe it would be good, perfect, early times with Joanne.

Joanne. Silly piece. And what did you want more than a silly piece? Brains of solid gold, but you knew that all along. Curlers. God strike dead all women in curlers, now and forever, and blight their improbable descendants.

Joanne! My fault. I wanted a silly piece and that is exactly what I got. My fault. And that woman today, gentlemen, is … where? Gone. Years. Married, doubtless. Six kids. Curlers in the supermarket. Those sunglasses.

And that man today, ladies, is a surly eunuch boozing it up on a hill in the jungle and weeping rummy tears for himself.

So he stood up, blinking, lacking youth and vigor, joyless, and took the bottle by the neck and wandered uphill. Reality is downhill, love is uphill.

He heard first the silence and then the shouts, and quit dawdling.

He had not known what to expect: a primitive rite, an orgy, perhaps lady wrestlers. What he found was the classic circle of safely exuberant bystanders, in the glow of the shed, ringing a brawl. Delight, bloodlust, screeched advice. Swelling murmurs. Laughter. He moved unnoticed this once, seeking Philips, taking pleasure in the warm press of dark bodies, the comfortable crush of a whistling, hooting, nickering crowd. Girls straddled their men's napes, skirts rucked high, long black thighs gleaming, heels hugging hard flanks.

He found Philips. Kid Philips. In this corner. Main attraction. A moment later Philips was on the ground, and a moment after that, as if the roar had borne him up, he was on his feet. The other fellow, Craddock probably, was taller and slower. As Philips danced and grinned, queasiness twisted Morrison. A chill. A large man beside him shouted, “Hit him, Craddock! Hit him, Craddock!” Morrison was turning to retreat when Philips hit Craddock full on the temple, and Craddock fell to one knee, and the man beside Morrison raged shrilly and lumbered forward.

Well, Morrison was not much for fraternity and such, no, but in any crew there is a loose solidarity, the tighter when you, or they, may be killed on the job. All big bridges took lives, and many small ones. Heights. Swinging booms. Defective materials and a grafter banking. So he was cold and afraid, and wanted to be anywhere else, but stepped out all the same, and took the man by the shoulder and said, “Where you going?”

Without an audience the man might have subsided, and God knows Morrison would have. But Morrison was a visitor of note, it seemed, and the crowd hushed, and his man snarled. Then Craddock was up, and Philips moved in swiftly, and Morrison's man shook himself loose and drew back a ponderous left fist. He seemed to be making lengthy preparations for a roundhouse blow; to be recalling instructions, and consulting ethereally with a possible manager. Perhaps it was the illusion of slow motion, of stasis even, often evoked by critical moments. Morrison had infinite time and was infinitely aware; time to swallow once, to set his back teeth together, to sense his own cold fear and the hot excitement of a hundred strangers. Time to know that whatever he did, he was wrong. Time to think that he might be hurt, and to feel foolish at the thought; time to remember that he was a coward, but to remember too that pain passed like cold or thirst.