The Third Generation (42 page)

“I haven’t got any money,” Charles lied. “I had to pay Mrs. Johnson. You’ve got to wait until we collect tomorrow.”

“I’m gonna go down and set in the station. I’m cuttin’ out, man. You crazy.”

Charles watched him go, laughing to himself. He went down to The Block and hung about the pool halls, and from there over to George’s where he drank until bedtime. He was beginning to feel depressed, let down again. But sight of Poker asleep on the other cot when he returned to Mrs. Johnson’s perked him up again. It was as if everyone had finally gone home except Poker, who was still down there on the street, fourteen stories below, held in morbid fascination. He was laughing to himself when he went to sleep.

Next morning they went to the garage to get the estimate of the damages to the car. Poker waited for him at the corner a block away. It was just as Charles had hoped. The exhilaration began building up again. The estimate was less than he’d expected.

“Only eighty-five dollars?” he protested. “I thought it’d be at least a hundred and fifty dollars.”

The mechanic grinned. “Eighty-five is tops. I wouldn’t charge you but fifty.”

He pocketed the itemized statement and rejoined Poker. “See,” he said. “No cops.”

From there they went to the office building to collect. “You don’t have to come up—unless, of course, you want to,” Charles said.

“I’ll wait for you down here somewhere,” Poker muttered.

The man had a hangover. He had discovered, after he’d gotten home, that he’d bitten his tongue in the accident. He was in a vicious mood.

“Eighty-five dollars!” he fumed. “For that amount of damage! This bill is padded.”

A feeling of unlimited power swept over Charles. He felt as if he held the man’s destiny in the palm of his hand. He laughed. “Maybe it is.”

The man reddened with fury. “How do I know it’s even your car?” he raved. “You haven’t shown me any registration. It might be stolen for all I know.”

Charles met the challenge head-on. “Why don’t you call the police and ask them?” he dared.

For an instant their eyes locked. Charles felt stifled by the sensation of danger. He leaned forward, his breath catching, as the urge came up to press it to the limit. But the man unlocked his gaze and flung himself into his chair.

“Who shall I make it out to?” he asked, opening a check book.

The flat, sour feeling of letdown flooded over Charles. He felt his body sag. The man looked up, waiting.

“Taylor Manning,” he said finally.

He watched the man write the check. He felt depressed again.

“Here, boy,” the man said. “You’d better be glad I gave you my word.”

He took the check woodenly. “Thank you.”

Poker noticed the change in him immediately. “Didn’t the man pay you?” he asked anxiously.

“I got a check,” he said indifferently. “I’ll go to the bank and cash it.”

He didn’t have any identification and expected difficulty, but the teller cashed it without comment. On sudden impulse he asked for a book of checks.

“Do you have an account?” the teller asked.

“Yes, I do.”

The teller passed him the book of blank checks.

“Thank you,” he said, struck momentarily with a sense of unreality. It seemed for the moment as if everything he’d done was lawful.

Poker was waiting for him down the street. They stood on the sidewalk and divided the money.

“I ast the man in the station last night and he said we could get a train at one o’clock,” Poker volunteered. Now that the danger was past he’d gotten over his fear.

Charles was finished with him, through; Poker without fear was no good to him. “You go ahead,” he said. Tin going to stay.”

“You gonna press yo’ luck too far, man,” Poker said, and hurried off alone.

Charles looked the other way. The sensation of daring danger that had kept him in such high exhilaration was gone. He had taken every risk and nothing had happened. He felt depleted and at loose ends. People jostled him. He realized that he was standing at a busy intersection. The lunch hour crowd milled past. He began walking along aimlessly. A squirrel scampering up a tree attracted his attention. He noticed that the building in back of the park was the courthouse.

Suddenly he remembered the summons. It was as if he had opened Pandora’s box. All his panic and despair surged back like a tidal wave. He thought of his mother waiting for the turkey he’d gone out to buy two days ago. It was all he could do to keep from breaking into a run.

The next thing he noticed was the railroad station. The idea came to him to buy a ticket to some place where he could never be found. Then he realized he didn’t have enough money to carry him as far as he had to go. His thoughts, moving in a cycle of association, took him back to the bank where he had cashed the check. Next he recalled the book of checks in his pocket. He suddenly realized that with one of the green identification cards issued by the university, he could fill them out for small amounts and cash them almost anywhere. His mind became aflame with the possibilities.

No one was in the dormitory when he returned. He searched through the various lockers until he found a green card someone had left over the weekend, and substituted the name Taylor Manning. Before leaving he filled out all the checks for twenty-five dollars each, payable to Taylor Manning, and signed them with the name of the man who’d given him the check earlier.

Next he went down to the shopping center across from the campus and entered a haberdashery. He bought two pairs of woolen socks.

“I wonder if you can cash this check for twenty-five dollars,” he asked the proprietor, presenting his green card.

The proprietor looked at the check, turned it over and extended his fountain pen. “Endorse it.”

Charles wrote, “Taylor Manning.”

The proprietor compared the signature with that on the green card, then counted out the change in bills and currency.

He went from one store to another, making small purchases. He encountered no difficulty anywhere. In a tobacco shop he ordered a carton of cigarettes. Another customer came in as he presented the check. He was a big ruddy man, hatless, and in his shirt-sleeves. He recognized Charles immediately.

“Say, I just cashed a check for you at my bookstore.”

Charles looked up, startled, and tightened into a knot. “What about it?” he challenged.

The man reddened. “What about it!” He took the check from the tobacconist’s hand and glanced from it to Charles. “By God, you’re passing bogus checks,” he shouted.

“Give me my check,” Charles demanded and tried to take it from the man’s hand.

The man held it out of his reach. “Oh no you don’t.”

Charles turned suddenly and started toward the door. It was more a reflex action than from a conscious desire to escape. His mind had gone completely blank.

The man leapt after him and clutched his arm. “Call the police!” he shouted to the tobacconist. “I’ll hold him.”

Charles’s first impulse was to break loose and run. But two students entered the shop at that moment.

“Help me hold this fellow,” the man appealed to them. “He’s been passing bogus checks.”

The students looked from the man to Charles uncertainly. Charles caught a sudden picture of them chasing him down the street. Revulsion came up in him. To be chased had always impressed him as an intolerable indignity. It was an impression from his childhood, indelibly implanted in his mind when he first read of Achilles chasing Hector around the walls of Troy while all the city looked down, weeping in anguish at the sad spectacle of this once brave and mighty warrior fleeing for his life. Then all of a sudden he was consumed with rage. His body stiffened but he didn’t struggle.

“Take your goddamned hands off me,” he said in a low intense voice.

His voice had such a tone of deadliness the man drew back in alarm. Charles turned and looked at him. “I’m not going to run.”

By the time the police arrived a small crowd had collected. They stood about looking at him with fear and embarrassment. He glared back at them defiantly. They thought he looked desperate; they expected him to make a break at any moment. He resented their staring at him; otherwise they didn’t matter. Deep down he felt triumphant. It was as if he’d broken out of prison, escaped.

Over the weekend he was held in a strange, cold jail in a cell with other prisoners waiting for the Monday morning court. At mealtime he was taken with the others into a large barren mess hall where they sat at long wooden tables and ate their potatoes-and-cabbage soup. Across from them sat the city prisoners who were serving jail terms. The prisoners wore overalls and talked across the aisle, trying to frighten them.

“See dat li’l nigger dere.” The speaker pointed at Charles.

“Which ‘un?”

“Dat li’l nigger dere in de gray suit. Ah’m gonna ast de man tuh gimme dat li’l nigger. Ah’m gonna wo’k his ass off scrubbin’ dem flo’s down in numbah one. W’en Ah git through wid dat li’l nigger he ain’ gonna look so hincty.” Raising his voice. “You heah dat, doncha, li’l nigger?”

Charles didn’t look up. He dreaded the meals most of all. He was frightened by the viciousness and obscenity of his cellmates and outraged by the callousness of his jailers. But all of it together kept him preoccupied, enclosed in an impenetrable nightmare, shutting out all thoughts of his parents and his home. He drifted in the horror, letting it enfold him.

His parents had been notified of his arrest. But by the time his mother arrived late Monday afternoon, he’d been bound over to the grand jury and transferred to the county jail. There was nothing she could do. His bail had been set at fifteen hundred dollars. She couldn’t raise it. She sat across from him at the wooden table in the visiting room along with the other mothers and fathers and relatives of the prisoners and cried as one or two of the other mothers did.

“You’ll just have to stay here until your trial comes up.”

“That’s all right,” he said.

He felt sorry for her, but underneath it all he was glad he wouldn’t have to testify at her divorce. Now no one could make him.

“I’ll engage an attorney for you. There’s a friend of my sister Gert who’s practising here. I’ll ask him to take your case.”

“I haven’t been indicted yet.”

“You’ll have to pay him out of your compensation. Your mother doesn’t have any money now.”

“That’s all right.”

“You’ll have to tell him the truth, son, if he’s going to be able to help you.”

“There isn’t anything to tell. I just forged some checks, that’s all. I needed some money and forged some checks.”

Her face hardened into the grim, bitter mold. “If you had listened to me and saved your money—” she began in her harsh nagging voice, but he cut her off:

“You had me arrested for forgery once. Only this time I’m guilty.”

They tore at each other until it was time for her to go.

His father came down the next day and brought him a package of cigarettes.

“You keep them, Dad,” he said. “I have some money and they let me buy what I want.”

“I’ll see if I can make bail for you, son.”

“Don’t bother, Dad, I’m all right.”

“If there is anything you need, son—”

“I don’t need anything, Dad.”

Neither of his parents visited him again. They were embroiled in their action for divorce. His father contested her plea for alimony on the grounds that she had destroyed his earning capacity by refusing to live in the South where his profession would take him. She contended that he resigned every teaching post he’d held without consulting her and that he hadn’t returned South for the simple reason he could no longer get a teaching post.

His father’s relatives testified for him, and all the old bitterness of color that had smoldered for years between the families was brought out in their testimony. His wife had ruined his life because she hated black people, they swore. William was called from school to testify for his mother.

It was a bitter, vicious action filled with abuse and recrimination and colored with disorder as the contestants screamed at one another. His mother pictured his father as a debased and spineless scoundrel who had tried to kill her on more than several occasions. She brought out the whole long, sordid story of Charles’s behavior in an effort to prove her husband incapable of parental discipline. He countered that she had ruined her son’s life by nagging him beyond endurance. She reiterated that he had destroyed Charles’s life to hurt her. Although he was absent, Charles became the bone of their contention as his mother fought to have him given in her custody.

The proceedings dragged on and on, bleeding them both. Charles read his mother’s letters and was glad he wasn’t there. At first it was just the relief of having escaped that torture. But after a time he came to like it in the jail. He’d been assigned to a single cell in a row that faced an identical row across a wide corridor called the “bull pen.” Colored prisoners celled on one side, white prisoners on the other. They were let out into the bull pen between meals. They shot dice and played cards. During mealtimes they were locked up and their meals brought around in tin plates and shoved beneath the doors. There were many fights between the white and colored prisoners and something exciting was always happening.

At night a short black prisoner with a barrel chest sang “lowdown” blues in a bull-tone voice. Some nights he’d sing:

Ah’m blue

But Ah won’t be blue always

Cause de sun’s gonna shine

In my back do’ some day….

And other nights:

Ah feel like layin’ mah head

On some railroad line

An’ let dat midnight special

Pacify mah mind….

From over on the other side of the jail came the sound of women screaming, “Sing it, lover!”

It was the first time in Charles’s life he’d been completely without responsibility or obligation. He didn’t have to worry about what he did or what his mother thought or what he thought himself. He didn’t have to think at all. All his thinking was done for him. He didn’t care what happened to him. And there was nothing else to worry about. He felt completely safe at last.