Orbit 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  ‘What’s a Nielsen loop?’ I said.

  ‘Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today,’ she quoted.

  ‘What,’ said I emphatically, ‘is a—’

  ‘I’ve told you, baby,’ she said, ‘and you’ll never know more, God willing,’ and pulling into our driveway with a screech that would have wakened the dead, she vaulted out of the car and through the back door into the kitchen, just as if my mother and father had both been asleep or in a cataleptic trance, like those in the works of E. A. Poe. Then she told me to get the iron poker from the garbage burner in the back yard and find out if the end was still hot; when I brought the thing in, she laid the hot end over one of the flames of the gas stove. Then she rummaged around under the sink and came up with a bottle of my mother’s Clear Household Ammonia.

  ‘That stuff’s awful,’ I said. ‘If you let that get in your eyes —’

  ‘Pour some in the water glass,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Two-thirds full. Cover it with a saucer. Get another glass and another saucer and put all of them on the kitchen table. Fill your mother’s water pitcher, cover that, and put that on the table.’

  ‘Are you going to drink that?’ I cried, horrified, halfway to the table with the covered glass. She merely pushed me. I got everything set up, and also pulled three chairs up to the kitchen table; I then went to turn off the gas flame, but she took me by the hand and placed me so that I hid the stove from the window and the door. She said, ‘Baby, what is the specific heat of iron?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You know it, baby,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  I only stared at her.

  ‘But you know it, baby,’ she said. ‘You know it better than I. You know that your mother was burning garbage today and the poker would still be hot. And you know better than to touch the iron pots when they come fresh from the oven, even though the flame is off, because iron takes a long time to heat up and a long time to cool off, isn’t that so?’ I nodded.

  ‘And you don’t know,’ she added, ‘how long it takes for aluminium pots to become cold because nobody uses aluminium for pots yet. And if I told you how scarce the heavy metals are, and what a radionic oven is, and how the heat can go through the glass and the plastic and even the ceramic lattice, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about, would you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, suddenly frightened, ‘no, no, no.’

  ‘Then you know more than some,’ she said. ‘You know more than me. Remember how I used to burn myself, fiddling with your mother’s things?’ She looked at her palm and made a face. ‘He’s coming,’ she said. ‘Stand in front of the stove. When he asks you to turn off the gas, turn it off. When I say “Now,” hit him with the poker.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I whispered. ‘He’s too big.’

  ‘He can’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t dare; that would be an anachronism. Just do as I say.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I cried.

  ‘When I say “Now,”‘ she repeated serenely, ‘hit him with the poker,’ and sitting down by the table, she reached into a jam-jar of odds and ends my mother kept on the windowsill and began to buff her nails with a Lady Marlene emery stick. Two minutes passed by the kitchen clock. Nothing happened. I stood there with my hand on the cold end of the poker, doing nothing until I felt I had to speak, so I said, ‘Why are you making a face? Does something hurt?’

  ‘The splinter in my palm,’ she said calmly. ‘The bastard.’

  ‘Why don’t you take it out?’

  ‘It will blow up the house.’ He stepped in through the open kitchen door. Without a word she put both arms palm upward on the kitchen table and without a word he took off the black cummerbund of his formal dress and flicked it at her. It settled over both her arms and then began to draw tight, moulding itself over her arms and the table like a piece of black adhesive tape, pulling her almost down on to it and whipping one end around the table edge until the wood almost cracked. It seemed to paralyse her arms. He put his finger to his tongue and then to her palm, where there was a small black spot. The spot disappeared. He laughed and told me to turn off the flame, so I did.

  ‘Take it off,’ she said then.

  He said, ‘Too bad you are in hiding or you too could carry weapons,’ and then, as the edge of the table let out a startling sound like a pistol shot, he flicked the black tape off her arms, returning it to himself, where it disappeared into his evening clothes.

  ‘Now that I have used this, everyone knows where we are,’ he said, and he sat down in a kitchen chair that was much too small for him and lounged back in it, his knees sticking up into the air.

  Then she said something I could not understand. She took the saucer off the empty glass and poured water into it again; she said something unintelligible again and held it out to him, but he motioned it away. She shrugged and drank the water herself. ‘Flies,’ she said, and put the saucer back on. They sat in silence for several minutes. I did not know what to do; I knew I was supposed to wait for the word “Now” and then hit him with the poker, but no one seemed to be saying or doing anything. The kitchen clock, which I had forgotten to wind that morning, was running down at ten minutes to eleven. There was a cricket making a noise close outside the window and I was afraid the ammonia smell would get out somehow; then, just as I was getting a cramp in my legs from standing still, our visitor nodded. She sighed, too, regretfully. The strange man got to his feet, moved his chair carefully out of the way and pronounced:

  ‘Good, I’ll call them.’

  ‘Now?’ said she.

  I couldn’t do it. I brought the poker in front of me and stood there with it, holding it in both hands. The stranger - who almost had to stoop to avoid our ceiling - wasted only a glance on me, as if I were hardly worth looking at, and then concentrated his attention on her. She had her chin in her hands. Then she closed her eyes.

  ‘Put that down, please,’ she said tiredly.

  I did not know what to do. She opened her eyes and took the saucer off the other glass on the table.

  ‘Put that down right now,’ she said, and raised the glass of ammonia to her lips.

  I swung at him clumsily with the poker. I was not sure what happened next, but I think he laughed and seized the end - the hot end - and then threw me off balance just as he screamed, because the next thing I knew I was down on all fours watching her trip him as he threw himself at her, his eyes screwed horribly shut, choking and coughing and just missing her. The ammonia glass was lying empty and broken on the floor; a brown stain showed where it had rolled off the white tablecloth on the kitchen table. When he fell, she kicked him in the side of the head. Then she stepped carefully away from him and held out her hand to me; I gave her the poker, which she took with the folded edge of the tablecloth, and reversing it so that she held the cold end, she brought it down with immense force - not on his head, as I had expected, but on his windpipe. When he was still, she touched the hot end of the poker to several places on his jacket, passed it across where his belt would be, and to two places on both of his shoes. Then she said to me, ‘Get out.’

  I did, but not before I saw her finishing the job on his throat, not with the poker but with the thick heel of her silver shoe.

  When I came back in, there was nobody there. There was a clean, rinsed glass on the draining board next to the wooden sink and the poker was propped up in one corner of the sink with cold water running on it. Our visitor was at the stove, brewing tea in my mother’s brown teapot. She was standing under the Dutch cloth calendar my mother, who was very modern, kept hanging on the wall. My mother pinned messages on it, one of them read ‘Be Careful. Except for the Bathroom, More Accidents Occur in the Kitchen Than in Any Other Part of the House.’

  ‘Where —’ I said, ‘where is - is —’

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Sit down here,’ and she put me into his seat at the kitchen table. But there was no he anywhere. She said, ‘Don’t think too much.’ Then she went back to the
tea and just as it was ready to pour, my mother came in from the living room, with a blanket around her shoulders, smiling foolishly and saying, ‘Goodness, I’ve been asleep, haven’t I?’

  ‘Tea?’ said our visitor.

  ‘I fell asleep just like that,’ said my mother, sitting down.

  ‘I forgot,’ said our visitor. ‘I borrowed a car. I felt ill. I must call them on the telephone,’ and she went out into the hall, for we had been among the first to have a telephone. She came back a few minutes later. ‘Is it all right?’ said my mother. We drank our tea in silence.

  ‘Tell me,’ said our visitor at length. ‘How is your radio reception?’

  ‘It’s perfectly fine,’ said my mother, a bit offended.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said our visitor, and then, as if she couldn’t control herself, ‘because you live in a dead area, you know, thank God, a dead area!’

  My mother said, alarmed, ‘I beg your par —’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said our visitor, ‘I’m ill,’ and she put her cup into her saucer with a clatter, got up and went out of the kitchen. My mother put one hand caressingly over mine.

  ‘Did anyone ... insult her at the dance?’ said my mother, softly.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ my mother insisted. ‘Are you perfectly sure? Did anyone comment? Did anyone say anything about her appearance? About her height? Anything that was not nice?’

  ‘Ruth did,’ I said. ‘Ruth said she looked like a giraffe.’ My mother’s hand slid off mine; gratified, she got up and began to gather up the tea things. She put them into the sink. She clucked her tongue over the poker and put it away in the kitchen closet. Then she began to dry the glass that our visitor had previously rinsed and put on the draining board, the glass that had held ammonia.

  ‘The poor woman,’ said my mother, drying it. ‘Oh, the poor woman.’

  * * * *

  Nothing much happened after that. I began to get my books ready for high school. Blue cornflowers sprang up along the sides of the house and my father, who was better now, cut them down with a scythe. My mother was growing hybrid ones in the back flower garden, twice as tall and twice as big as any of the wild ones; she explained to me about hybrids and why they were bigger, but I forgot it. Our visitor took up with a man, not a nice man, really, because he worked in the town garage and was Polish. She didn’t go out but used to see him in the kitchen at night. He was a thickset, stocky man, very blond, with a real Polish name, but everyone called him Bogalusa Joe because he had spent fifteen years in Bogalusa, Louisiana (he called it ‘Loosiana’) and he talked about it all the time. He had a theory, that the coloured people were just like us and that in a hundred years everybody would be all mixed up, you couldn’t tell them apart. My mother was very advanced in her views but she wouldn’t ever let me talk to him. He was very respectful; he called her ‘Ma’am’, and didn’t use any bad language, but he never came into the living room. He would always meet our visitor in the kitchen or sometimes on the swing in the back garden. They would drink coffee; they would play cards. Sometimes she would say to him, ‘Tell me a story, Joe. I love a good story,’ and he would talk about hiding out in Loosiana; he had had to hide out from somebody or something for three years in the middle of the Negroes and they had let him in and let him work and took care of him. He said, ‘The coloured are like anybody.’ Then he said. The nigras are smarter. They got to be. They ain’t nobody’s fool. I had a black girl for two years once was the smartest woman in the world. Beautiful woman. Not beautiful like a white, though, not the same.’

  ‘Give us a hundred years,’ he added, ‘and it’ll all be mixed.’

  Two hundred?’ said our visitor, pouring coffee. He put a lot of sugar in his; then he remarked that he had learned that in Bogalusa. She sat down. She was leaning her elbows on the table, smiling at him. She was stirring her own coffee with a spoon. He looked at her a moment, and then he said softly:

  ‘A black woman, smartest woman in the world. You’re black, woman, ain’t you?’

  ‘Part,’ she said.

  ‘Beautiful woman,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows?’

  ‘They know in the circus,’ she said. ‘But there they don’t care. Shall I tell you what we circus people think of you?’

  ‘Of who?’ he said, looking surprised.

  ‘Of all of you, she said. ‘All who aren’t in the circus. All who can’t do what we can do, who aren’t the biggest or the best, who can’t kill a man barehanded or learn a new language in six weeks or slit a man’s jugular at fifteen yards with nothing but a pocketknife or climb the Greene County National Bank from the first storey to the sixth with no equipment. I can do all that.’

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ said Bogalusa Joe softly.

  ‘We despise you,’ she said. ‘That’s what we do. We think you’re slobs. The scum of the earth! The world’s fertilizer, Joe, that’s what you are.’

  ‘Baby, you’re blue,’ he said. ‘You’re blue tonight,’ and then he took her hand across the table, but not the way they did it in the movies, not the way they did it in the books; there was a look on his face I had never seen on anyone’s before, not the high school boys when they put a line over on a girl, not on grown-ups, not even on the brides and grooms because all that was romantic or showing off or ‘lust’ and he only looked infinitely kind, infinitely concerned. She pulled her hand out of his. With the same faint, detached smile she had had all night, she pushed back her chair and stood up. She said flatly:

  ‘All I can do! What good is it?’ She shrugged. She added, ‘I’ve got to leave tomorrow.’ He got up and put his arm around her shoulders. I thought that looked bad because he was actually a couple of inches shorter than she was.

  He said, ‘Baby, you don’t have to go.’ She was staring out into the back garden, as if looking miles away, miles out, far away into our vegetable patch or our swing or my mother’s hybrids, into something nobody could see. He said urgently, ‘Honey, look—’ and then, when she continued to stare, pulling her face around so she had to look at him, both his broad, mechanic’s hands under her chin, ‘Baby, you can stay with me.’ He brought his face closer to hers. ‘Marry me,’ he said suddenly. She began to laugh. I had never heard her laugh like that before. Then she began to choke. He put his arms around her and she leaned against him, choking, making funny noises like someone with asthma, finally clapping her hands over her face, then biting her palm, heaving up and down as if she were sick. It took me several seconds to realize that she was crying. He looked very troubled. They stood there: she cried, he, distressed - and I hiding, watching all of it. They began to walk slowly towards the kitchen door. When they had gone out and put out the light, I followed them out into the back garden, to the swing my father had rigged up under the one big tree: cushions and springs to the ground like a piece of furniture, big enough to hold four people. Bushes screened it. There was a kerosene lantern my father had mounted on a post, but it was out. I could just about see them. They sat for a few minutes, saying nothing, looking up through the tree into the darkness. The swing creaked a little as our visitor crossed and uncrossed her long legs. She took out a cigarette and lit it, obscuring their faces with even that little glow: an orange spot that wavered up and down as she smoked, making the darkness more black. Then it disappeared. She had ground it out underfoot in the grass. I could see them again. Bogalusa Joe, the garage mechanic, said:

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. Then they kissed each other. I liked that; it was all right; I had seen it before. She leaned back against the cushions of the swing and seemed to spread her feet in the invisible grass; she let her head and arms fall back on to the cushion. Without saying a word, he lifted her skirt far above her knees and put his hand between her legs. There was a great deal more of the same business and I watched it all, from the first twistings to the stabbings, the noise, the life-and-death battle in the dark. The word Epilepsy kept repeating itself in my head. They got dresse
d and again began to smoke, talking in tones I could not hear. I crouched in the bushes, my heart beating violently.

  I was horribly frightened.

  * * * *

  She did not leave the next day, or the next or the next; and she even took a dress to my mother and asked if she could have it altered somewhere in town. My school clothes were out, being aired in the back yard to get the mothball smell out of them. I put covers on all my books. I came down one morning to ask my mother whether I couldn’t have a jumper taken up at the hem because the magazines said it was all right for young girls. I expected a fight over it. I couldn’t find my mother in the hall or the kitchen so I tried the living room, but before I had got half way through the living room arch, someone said, ‘Stop there,’ and I saw both my parents sitting on two chairs near the front door, both with their hands in their laps, both staring straight ahead, motionless as zombies.

  I said, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, what’re you —’

  ‘Stop there,’ said the same voice. My parents did not move. My mother was smiling her social smile. There was no one else in the room. I waited for a little while, my parents continuing to be dead, and then from some corner on my left, near the new Philco, our visitor came gliding out, wrapped in my mother’s spring coat, stepping softly across the rug and looking carefully at all the living room windows. She grinned when she saw me. She tapped the top of the Philco radio and motioned me in. Then she took off the coat and draped it over the radio.