The Third Generation (40 page)

“What you shoot, kid?” someone asked.

“Not this time,” he said. His throat had contracted until his voice was barely above a whisper.

He backed from the crowded table and left the smoke-filled room. A voice was crooning, “Shooter for the game.” A sense of unreality settled in his mind; the night turned weird. He was overwhelmed by a kind of fear he’d never known. It was the first time since his injury he’d been completely broke. He felt naked and without friends.

As he went down the stairs a big, loutish-looking youth wearing a grass-green suit overtook him.

“You can’t beat them chiselers, man, they use crooked dice.”

“I didn’t lose much,” he muttered defensively and kept on walking.

The youth fell in beside him. “I seen you down at the cabaret. They call you Pigmeat, don’t they?”

“Sometimes.” He could scarcely remember it; something seemed to have happened to his memory.

“They call me Poker; I used to run a poker game in the Alley. My real handle’s John—John Parker. I know where there’s a game downtown that’s jumping. Ain’t nobody but squares. You stake me to a half a C and we can win ourselves a grand.”

It took a moment before Charles comprehended; he couldn’t think. “I got broke,” he finally said. “I haven’t got any money.”

“Hell, get some from them whores. I tell you, man, we can win a grand.” When Charles didn’t reply he said, “You collecting from them whores, ain’t you?”

“Collecting?” The persistent intimacy was picking at his nerves, but he didn’t have the will to send the fellow off.

“All them whores I see you with? You mean you ain’t getting nothing from ‘em?”

He walked a little faster as if to get away. They came into The Avenue of shabby store fronts and dingy buildings crowding on the broken pavement. Dim light spilled grotesqueness over the squalid scene. Drunken men and women, milling about the doorways, argued profanely about inconsequentials. The pungent scent of marijuana drifted in the air. Revulsion knotted in his stomach. He turned suddenly and crossed the street. But Poker stuck with him; he couldn’t get away.

“Not anymore,” he finally lied. “I don’t see them anymore.”

“Hell, man—” Two light-complexioned prostitutes, cruising by, caught his attention. “Hellooo, babes,” he drawled.

The whores slowed, raked him with their appraising scrutiny. From them came a scent, both putrid and perfumed. “Did you order coal?” one asked the other superciliously.

“This year, dear, I’m burning nothing but chalk in my fire box,” the other said with a spitting sound.

“You burning it all right,” Poker countered, argumentatively.

Charles walked away. But Poker caught up with him. “Where you got your car?”

“I haven’t got it anymore.” He stopped suddenly; he couldn’t stand it any longer. “Look, fellow, I’m broke, I don’t have a car; there’s nothing you can get out of me.”

“Hell, man, don’t be like that,” Poker said obsequiously. “You an’ me, man, if we run together we’d always have some money.”

The desperation and revulsion had clotted in his mind. He just had to have some money, he told himself. He just couldn’t get along without it; he couldn’t go home; he couldn’t do anything. He didn’t want to become involved with Poker, but he couldn’t break himself away.

“Well, how?” he finally asked.

“Come on,” Poker said.

After a moment’s hesitation, he went along. What did he have to lose? he asked himself. They went down a quiet side street and stopped before a cleaning and pressing shop in a dilapidated frame building. The windows in the apartment above were dark.

“Wait here,” Poker said. “If you see a light come on upstairs start whistling the
Bugle Blues
. You don’t have to worry ‘bout the cops; they don’t never come ‘round here.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to get some layers, man.”

Poker went around toward the back of the building and vanished in the dark. Charles crossed the street and stood in the darkness beneath a tree. Once he started to leave, but no one came in sight, and the pull of desperation held him to the outcome. Finally Poker came into sight, looking furtively up and down, then hurried over and took Charles’s arm.

“Come on, let’s beat it.”

He had thirty-two dollars. They divided it evenly. Suddenly Charles was conscience-stricken. “I’m going home,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow night at Dave’s.”

It was a long ride home, and he couldn’t keep from thinking. He hadn’t stolen anything for years, he realized. He wondered if he was going to end up being a thief. The thought frightened him. All of a sudden he wanted to see his mother; he didn’t care what she said to him. He just wanted to see her, be near her, be reassured by her presence.

She was waiting up for him. “I’ll not tell you again,” she said. “The next time you come in at this hour you just pack your clothes and get out of this house.”

Now that he’d seen her he lost the desire. Her presence didn’t give him anything. He felt the same as when he had left the house earlier in the day.

After that he went out every night with Poker, and stood watch while Poker broke into small, isolated stores and robbed the tills. His mother tried to force him to leave the house. But his father said he didn’t have to go. William was away in college. Again Mrs. Taylor became assailed with the conviction that Charles and his father were plotting to harm her in some way. She became frightened and moved into William’s room and locked the door. They were trying to run her away, she thought. But she refused to go. She couldn’t go and leave Charles there to destroy himself, she thought contradictorily. Once she dreamed of seeing him sink slowly into quicksand while she stood by, powerless to help.

One morning Charles awakened to hear his parents struggling in the bedroom. He heard his mother’s choked scream.

“You bitch, I’ll kill you!” he heard his father shout.

A chill ran down his spine. He leaped from his bed and ran into their room. His father was choking his mother. Blood streamed from a gash on his father’s forehead and a shattered hand mirror lay on the floor. His mother’s face was turning purple. When he pulled away his father’s hands she sank to the floor.

“Jesus Christ!” he cried in utter agony. “You’ve killed her.”

Then everything went blank. He didn’t know he’d hit his father until the words seeped slowly into his mind, “Son, don’t!…Son, don’t!…” His father was trying to struggle from the floor, one arm raised protectively, while he stood above him, gripping the stool of the dressing table as if to strike him with it.

“Jesus Christ!” he said again.

His mother had regained consciousness and was screaming in a strained voice, “You murderer! You beast!” Her face was livid and the tendons stood out in her neck.

He had to hold her to keep her from attacking his father again. He picked her up and carried her from the room. “I’m not afraid of either of you,” she screamed. “You can kill me if you want but you’ll go to the electric chair.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Mama,” he found himself saying over and over as he took her into William’s room and laid her across the bed. “I don’t want to hurt you, Mama.” He smoothed her hair. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Mama. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” he crooned.

He heard his father going down the stairs; heard the front door close. “He’s gone now,” he said.

“I’m going to have him arrested for murder,” she said, trying to get up.

“Please don’t, Mama,” he begged, gently pushing her shoulders down. “Please don’t, Mama. Please just lie down until you feel better. Please don’t do anything now.”

She made her body passive but her eyes condemned him bitterly. “You may think you’re helping him escape,” she said in a harsh, unrelenting voice. “But he’ll not escape; he’ll pay for this.”

“Jesus Christ!” he said.

He left her and went to his room and dressed quickly and left the house. He went over on The Avenue and began drinking. But the whiskey filled him with despair. He was crossing the street toward the pool hall when he was struck by a terrible fear. Suppose his father returned while he was away and killed her. He began running and ran until he flagged a taxi and urged the driver to hurry.

“This may be a matter of life and death.”

He found his father packing a suitcase. His father’s sister, Mrs. Hart, sat in the bedroom while he gathered up his clothes. It was the first time either of his sisters had ever stepped foot in the house. Mrs. Taylor stood in the door berating them both.

“If it wasn’t for my children I’d have you arrested and sent to the penitentiary,” she was saying.

“Now, Lillian, you brought it all on yourself,” Mrs. Hart came to her brother’s defense.

“This is my house,” his mother began to scream. “Don’t you dare—”

He rushed up and pulled her away to her room. “Now, Mama, don’t start another fight.”

“You just wait and see,” she said harshly, more to herself than to him. “He’ll not get away with it.”

Charles walked down to the door with his father and his Aunt Lou.

“Take care of your mother, son,” his father said.

“I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to—” He couldn’t bring himself to say the words.

“I know you didn’t, son. I lost my head too. Your mother aggravates us both. But you must take care of her.”

“I will.”

That evening his mother telegraphed her brothers for some money. When it came she engaged a white attorney and sued for a divorce. At the time she didn’t intend to carry through on it. She wanted to punish her husband, and at the same time frighten him into doing his duty as a father. She knew how deeply he opposed divorce, that he regarded it as a mortal sin. She thought she could make him face up to Charles, take a firm stand, commit him to an institution if need be.

Professor Taylor pleaded with her for a reconciliation. “Don’t break up our home, honey. We’ve been married twenty-six years.”

She acceded on the condition that they send Charles to a boarding school the city maintained for recalcitrant youths.

He was trapped. As much as he wanted to save their marriage, he couldn’t do this. He was convinced it would kill his son to be locked up. The boy was hurt somewhere deep inside, he thought. He needed time for it to heal. If there were some way to get him among good boys his own age. Maybe he’d decide to return to college if they let him alone for a time, he argued.

“It would kill him, honey; it would kill him,” he said. “It would do no such thing,” she contradicted. “He must be disciplined—he must! You won’t do it, so you must let others do it for you.”

“I won’t do that,” he said.

She couldn’t change him. So in the end she carried through her suit for a divorce. She charged him with cruelty and desertion and deliberately shirking his responsibility as a father; and requested that Charles be placed in her custody. She would rather get rid of her husband than lose her son. For in the final analysis, even though she no longer admitted it to herself, he was still her own lovely baby, and deep down she loved him in the same intense, passionate manner she always had.

Charles had remained at home ever since his father left. He’d become fearfully concerned for his mother. He’d noticed her absentmindedness and her habit of locking herself in her room at night. He was afraid she might do something to herself, or hurt herself accidentally. She didn’t seem able any longer to perform the common chores about the house. He did most of the housework and cooking.

One night at dinner she said, “If your father had been any account at all you children could have had a decent home all your lives and wouldn’t have been running around all over creation getting yourselves maimed and crippled and into God only knows what kind of trouble.”

He was frightened by the consummate bitterness in her voice, and tried to pacify her. “Try not to think about it, Mama. It’s going to be all right.”

Suddenly she began to cry. She rose, crying, and fled upstairs to her room. He followed in alarm. She had flung herself across the bed and was crying disconsolately. He stroked her hair.

“Don’t cry, Mama. Don’t cry.”

But she couldn’t be consoled. Although she’d told herself, ever since their wedding night, how much she hated and despised her husband, in the end it hurt to give him up. He was the only mate she’d ever had, the father of her three sons, and there was still a part of her that wanted him for herself. It was as if he was bound to this part of her in some unbroken way. And there was the memory of all the years they had spent together. Even now she didn’t want another woman to have him.

Charles became so immersed in her suffering that all the world blacked out. The urge to sacrifice himself for her became his only thought, and for that instant she was his beautiful young mother again and he wanted to take her in his arms and go out beyond the edge of life, where it was dark and peaceful and they could be together and free from all the troubles they’d ever known.

“I’ll look after you, Mama,” he choked. “Ill take care of you. Don’t cry.”

Down in the old deep-sunken eyes, red-veined from crying, the bitterness flickered. “If you had just tried to be a good boy,” she sobbed.

It was as if she had suddenly slapped him. He felt a sharp, brackish shock such as he had experienced as a child when attending Crayne’s Institute in Augusta, Georgia, the night he had run off to a fire and had offered his services to a strange, lost whore standing in the doorway of the one remaining shack. The memory returned vividly in the wake of his sensation. He could see the bitter forlornness in the young woman’s posture and recalled his tremendous urge toward self-sacrifice as he went forward to help. And he could hear her harsh cursing voice, “Git der hell away frum heah an’ mind yo’ own bizness,” and feel again the cold shocking hurt of being utterly rejected.

He stood up and groped blindly from the room. He went down to the dining room and tried to finish his dinner. He took a mouthful of food and chewed and chewed, but he couldn’t swallow. Suddenly he felt the deluge coming up from down inside of him. It was as if his blood had begun to cry.

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