The Outsider (17 page)

Ought he bother with her? He wanted to, but his situation was too delicate for him to get mixed up with this fetching little tart. Yet he was suddenly hungry for her; she was woman as body of woman…

“I don't know anybody around here yet,” he said.

“Are you stingy with that fire water?” she asked, nodding toward his whiskey bottle sitting on the night table.

“Naw,” he laughed, making up his mind.

She entered slowly, glancing at him out of the corner of her eyes as she went past; he followed the movements
of her body as she walked to the center of the room and sat, crossing her legs and tossing back her hair and letting her breasts take a more prominent place on her body. He closed the door and placed the bottle between them.

“What do they call you?” he asked, pouring her a drink.

“Jenny,” she said. “You?”

“Charlie, just Good-Time Charlie,” he said, laughing.

He saw her looking appraisingly about the room. “Traveling light, hunh?”

“Just passing through,” he said. “Heading west.”

She sipped her drink, then rose and turned on his radio; dance music came and she stood moving rhythmically. He rose and made dance movements with her, holding her close to him, seeing in his mind the sloping curves of her body.

“Want to spend the afternoon with me?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Look, baby, seeing this is not the Gold Coast, what do you want?”

“I got to pay my rent,” she said flatly.

“The hell with that,” he told her. “How much do you want? That's all I asked you.”

“I want five,” she said at last.

“I'll give you three,” he countered.

“I said five, you piker—”

“I said three, and you can take it or leave it; I don't want to argue with you.”

“Okay,” she said, shrugging.

“Let's drink some more.”

“Suits me.”

When the dance music stopped she turned off the radio, pulled down the window shade, and rolled back the covers of the bed. Wordlessly, she began to undress and
he wondered what she was thinking of. Clad in nylon panties, she came to him and held out her hand. Her breasts were firm and the nipples were pink.

“I'll take it now, baby,” she said.

“But why
now
?” he demanded.

“Listen, I'm selling; you're buying. Pay now or nothing doing,” she said. “I know how men feel when they get through.”

Cross laughed; he liked her brassy manner. Nobody taught her that; sense of that order was derived only through experience. He handed her three one-dollar bills which she put into the pocket of her dress, looking at him solemnly as she did so. She pulled off her panties and climbed into bed and lay staring vacantly.

“They could paint this damn place,” she said matter-of-factly.

“What?” he asked, surprised, looking vaguely around the room.

“They could paint that ceiling sometime,” she repeated.

Cross studied her, then laughed. “Yes; I guess they could,” he admitted.

“You're not from Memphis,” she said suddenly.

He whirled and glared at her, a sense of hot danger leaping into his throat. Did she know something or was she merely guessing? Was he that bad an actor? If he had thought that she was spying on him, he would have grabbed the whiskey bottle and whacked her across the head with it and knocked her cold and run…Naw, she's just fishing, he told himself. But I got to be careful…So shaken were his feelings by sudden dread that he did not want to get into bed with her.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“You don't talk like it,” she said, puffing at her cigarette.

He relaxed. It was true that his accent was not completely of the Deep South. He drew upon the bottle to stifle his anxiety and when he took her in his arms he did not recall the fear that had scalded him. She responded so mechanically and wearily that only sheer physical hunger kept him with her. The edge gone from his desire, he lay looking at her and wondering how a woman so young could have achieved so ravaged a sense of life. His loneliness was rekindled and he lit a cigarette and grumbled: “You could have at least tried a little.”

“You're not from Memphis,” she said with finality.

“You're dodging the point,” he reminded her with anger in his voice. “I said that you could at least pretend when you're in bed.”

“You think it's important?” She looked cynically at him. “What do you want for three dollars?”

“You agreed to the price,” he said brusquely.

“Hell, that's nothing,” she said casually, squinting her eyes against the smoke of her cigarette. “I might've done it for nothing. Why didn't you ask me?”

She was fishing around to know him and he did not want it. He washed and dressed while she still lolled in the nude on his bed, her eyes thoughtful. He should not act now with these girls as he used to; things were changed with him and he had to change too. And she was taking her own goddamn time about leaving. Resentment rose in him as he realized that he had made less impression on her physical feelings than if he had spat into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls…

“Haven't you got something to do?” he asked her.

“I can take a hint,” she said pleasantly, rolling off the bed and getting into her panties.

“Be seeing you,” she said after she had dressed.

“Not if I see you first.”

“You'll be glad to see me if you're in a certain mood,”
she said; she touched him under the chin with her finger and left.

He lay on the bed, feeling spiteful toward even the scent of her perfume that lingered on in the room. He rose, opened the window wide, let in a blast of freezing air, and peered over the edge of the sill, his sight plunging downward eight floors to the street where tiny men and women moved like little black beetles in the white snow. I wouldn't like to fall down there, he thought aimlessly and turned back into the room, closing the window.

He went down for lunch and got the afternoon newspapers. The final list of the dead was over one hundred, making the accident the worst in Chicago's history. The mayor had appointed a committee to launch an investigation, for the cause of the tragedy was still obscure. The
Herald-Examiner
carried two full pages of photographs of some of the dead and Cross was pricked by a sense of the bizarre when he saw his own face staring back at him. He knew at once that Gladys had given that photograph to the newspapers, for she alone possessed the batch of old snaps from which it had been taken. By God, she really believes it, he thought with wry glee.

Then anxiousness seized him. If Jenny saw that photograph, would she not recognize him? He studied the photograph again; it showed him wearing football togs, sporting a mustache, and his face was much thinner and younger…No; Jenny wouldn't recognize him from that…

Early that evening the snow stopped falling and Chicago lay white and silent under huge drifts that made the streets almost impassable. Cross was glad, for it kept down the number of pedestrians and lessened his chances of being seen by anyone he knew. Near mid
night he went to 35th Street and bought a batch of Negro weeklies and rushed back to his room, not daring to open them on the street or in the trolley. There, on the front pages, were big photographs of himself. His funeral had been set for Monday afternoon at 3
P.M.
at the Church of the Good Shepherd. He laughed out loud. It was working like a charm! He wondered vaguely, while downing a drink, just how badly mangled his body was supposed to have been. Then he saw the answer; an odd item in the
Chicago Defender
reported:

He giggled so long that tears came into his eyes.

A little after two o'clock that morning, when the snow-drenched streets were almost empty, he took a trolley to the neighborhood of his wife. He was afraid to loiter, for he was well-known in this area. From a distance of half a block he observed his home: lights were blazing in every window. She's got a plenty to do these days, he said to himself, repressing a desire to howl with laughter. But as the faces of his three sons rose before him, he sobered. He was never to see them again, except like this, from a distance. His eyes misted. They were his future self, and he had given up that future for a restricted but more intense future…

He went next to 37th and Indiana Avenue and crept into a snow-choked alleyway back of Dot's apartment building and figured out where her window would be. Yes, it was there, on the third floor…A light burned behind the shade. Was Dot really sorry? Had she wept over him? Or had her weeping been over her own state of unexpected abandonment? The light in her window
went out suddenly and he wondered if she was going to bed. He hurried around to the street, watching like a cat for passersby, and secreted himself in a dark doorway opposite the entrance of the building in which she lived. Half an hour later he saw Dot and Myrtle come out, moving slowly through the snow and darkness with their heads and shoulders bent as under a weight of bewildered sorrow. He noticed that Myrtle was carrying a suitcase. Yes, Dot was no doubt on her way to see a doctor about the abortion. Only that could account for their having a suitcase with them. He could not have arranged things so neatly if he had really tried dying for real!

The next morning was Sunday and it was clear and cold, with a sharp, freezing wind sweeping in over the city from Lake Michigan. He felt driven to haunt the neighborhood of his mother. How was she taking his death? Her lonely plight saddened him more than anything else. She lived in an area that did not know him and he waited in a bar near a window to get a glimpse of her as she left for church. His overcoat was turned up about his chin and his hat was pulled low over his eyes. He smoked, toyed with a glass of beer, keeping his eyes hard upon the entrance of her house. True enough, at a quarter to eleven she came out, dressed in black, her face hidden by a veil, and picked her way gingerly over the deep snow toward her church some two blocks away. Cross felt hot tears stinging his cheeks for the first time since his childhood. He longed to run to her, fall on his knees in the snow and clasp her to him, begging forgiveness. His poor, sad, baffled old Mama…But if he went to her, she would collapse in the snow and might well die of the shock.

His worry that something might go wrong with his burial was what kept Cross awake the whole of the Sun
day night before his funeral. Had there been no inquiries about the Negro's body that they had mistaken for his own? Who had that man been? Would his family come forward at the last moment and ask questions? Maybe his wife would claim the body? In fact, anybody's raising a question would endanger his whole plan. But perhaps no one had known that the Negro had been on the train. As he recalled now the man had seemed rather shabbily dressed. Perhaps the man's wife, if he had had a wife, thought that he had run off. Cross chided himself for worrying. In the minds of whites, what's one Negro more or less? If the rites went off without someone's raising a question, then he would consider the whole thing settled.

Monday morning was bright and cold; the temperature dipped to ten below zero. Gusts of wind swept in from Lake Michigan, setting up swirling eddies of powdered snow in the quiet streets. Cross stood moodily at his window and stared out at the frozen world, occupied with the question of how he was to spy on his burial. The
Chicago World
had reported that his body had been laid out at the Jefferson Resting Home and that “his postal colleagues and a host of friends” had sent numerous floral wreaths; his death had been referred to as a “great loss to the South Side community”. He felt that if he could get a sneaking glimpse of Gladys and the funeral procession, he would feel certain in judging how soundly his death had been accepted. Spying upon the church was easy; he had, late one night, rented a top floor room in the building opposite the church, identifying himself to the old black landlady as John Clark, a student visiting Chicago as a tourist for a week. He had already made two visits to the room, bowing respectfully to the landlady, and had observed the church at leisure.

A little after ten that morning, just after he had returned from breakfast, Jenny came to see him and her manner was so friendly that one would have thought that she had known him for years. Cross was decidedly in no mood for her company, fearing that she might ask him where he was going when he was ready to leave to spy on his last rites.

“I got the blues today,” he growled at her.

“Maybe I can cheer you up,” she chirped, seating herself even though he had not asked her to. There was something in her manner that warned him to be on guard. She had a mouthful of chewing gum.

“Nothing to drink this morning?” she asked.

“Empty pocket, empty bottle,” he lied.

“What kind of work did you do in Memphis?” she asked.

“Why in hell do you want to know that?” he demanded.

“Just curious, that's all,” she answered innocently, chewing vigorously. “Something tells me you got some money.”

“Yeah; I opened the safe with a bar of soap and got a million bucks,” he joshed her. “Now tell me, are you working for the police?”

She paled. Her jaws stopped moving. Then she said: “Well, I never…!”

“Then why in hell do you keep on questioning me?”

“You
are
scared of something!” she exclaimed.

She had trapped him so neatly that he wanted to slap her. Yet he knew that it was he who had betrayed his fear and made her suspicious of him. He decided that she was honest; but honest or not, he could not use her. Her present attitude might be buttressed by good faith, but she was tough and if she found out that he had something to conceal, might she not blackmail him?