Tales Read online

  “Man, be cool. Ha, the cat’s kissin’ Hutchens on the face, man. Um-uhmm. Yeh, baby. Damn, he’s puttin’ his hands all over the cat. Aww, rotten motherfuckers!”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Bastards shut out the lights!”

  “Damn.”

  “Gaw-uhd damn!”

  “Hey, let’s break open the door.”

  “Yeh, HEY, YOU CATS, WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THERE, HUH?”

  “Yeh. Hee, hee. OPEN UP, FAGGOTS!”

  “Wheee! HEY LET US IN, GIRLS!”

  Ricky and Jimmy run against the door, the others screaming and jumping, doors opening all along the hall. They all come out, screaming as well. “LET US IN. HEY, WHAT’S HAPPENIN’, BABY!” Rick and Jimmy run against the door, and the door is breaking.

  “Who is it? What do you want?” Bobby turns the light on, and his friend, a balding queer of 40, is hugged against the sink.

  “Who are they, Bobby? What do they want?”

  “Bastards. Damn if I know. GET OUTTA HERE, AND MIND YOUR OWN DAMN BUSINESS, YOU CREEPS. Creeps. Damn. Put on your clothes, Lyle!”

  “God, they’re trying to break the door down, Bobby. What they want? Why are they screaming like that?”

  “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM THIS DOOR, GODDAMNIT!”

  “YEH, YEH. WE SAW WHAT YOU WAS DOIN’, HUTCHENS. OPEN THE DOOR AND LET US GET IN ON IT.”

  “WHEEEEEE! HIT THE FUCKING DOOR, RICK! HIT IT!”

  And at the top of the stairs the leader stops, the whole hall full of citizens. Doctors, judges, first negro directors of welfare chain, morticians, chemists, ad men, fighters for civil rights, all admirable, useful men. “BREAK THE FUCKIN’ DOOR OPEN, RICK! YEH!”

  A wall. Against it, from where you stand, the sea stretches smooth for miles out. Their voices distant thuds of meat against the sand. Murmurs of insects. Hideous singers against your pillow every night of your life. They are there now, screaming at you.

  “Ray, Ray, comeon man help us break this faggot’s door!”

  “Yeh, Ray, comeon!”

  “Man, you cats are fools. Evil stupid fools!”

  “What? Man, will you listen to this cat.”

  “Listen, hell, let’s get this door. One more smash and it’s in. Comeon, Brady, lets break the fuckin’ thing.”

  “Yeh, comeon you cats, don’t stand there listenin’ to that pointy head clown, he just don’t want us to pop his ol’ lady!”

  “YEH, YEH. LET’S GET IN THERE. HIT IT HIT IT!”

  “Goddamnit. Goddamnit, get the fuck out of here. Get outta here. Damnit Rick, you sunafabitch, get the hell outtahere. Leave the cat alone!”

  “Man, don’t push me like that, you lil’ skinny ass. I’ll bust your jaw for you.”

  “Yeh? Yeh? Yeh? Well you come on, you lyin’ ass. This cat’s always talking about all his ‘babes’ and all he’s got to do is sneak around peeping in keyholes. You big lying asshole . . . all you know how to do is bullshit and jerk off!”

  “Fuck you, Ray.”

  “Your ugly ass mama.”

  “Shiit. You wanna go round with me, baby?”

  “Comeon. Comeon, big time cocksman, comeon!”

  Rick hits the leader full in the face, and he falls backward across the hall. The crowd follows screaming at this new feature.

  “Aww, man, somebody stop this shit. Rick’ll kill Ray!”

  “Well, you stop it, man.”

  “O.K., O.K., cut it out. Cut it out, Rick. You win, man. Leave the cat alone. Leave him alone.”

  “Bad Rick . . . Bad Rick, Bad ass Rick!”

  “Well, man, you saw the cat fuckin’ with me. He started the shit!”

  “Yeh . . . tough cat!”

  “Get up, Ray.”

  And then the door does open and Bobby Hutchens stands in the half light in his shower shoes, a broom in his hands. The boys scream and turn their attention back to Love. Bald Lyle is in the closet. More noise. More lies. More prints in the sand, away, or toward some name. I am a poet. I am a rich famous butcher. I am the man who paints the gold balls on the tops of flagpoles. I am, no matter, more beautiful than anyone else. And I have come a long way to say this. Here. In the long hall, shadows across my hands. My face pushed hard against the floor. And the wood, old and protestant. And their voices, all these other selves screaming for blood. For blood, or whatever it is fills their noble lives.

  The Largest Ocean

  in the World

  for Larry Wallrich

  Toppled. Cold dark stone, spread thru the darker night. And night. Again he would come down. Come thru it settling fast, without breathing, as disguised as the day itself had become. Sun dead. The bright instincts. Hurdled, years before, after all had formed. Settled, the ripples of weather, darkness, flesh, among the torn stones.

  He came down the stairs with motors crippling his face. Where the brain sagged, and ran into deeper colors. They spread. The walks ran together. Voices of the students. Voices of the preachers. Voices of the simple past. Kept toward missions. All repose, response, dulled. At last to a single dripping cock. It sat inside his heart. And hardened at what the moon proposed. What the night meant to have breathing around, and so quiet, and so sure, and without the madness turned him inside, killed him, made him, what you called “a murderer.”

  The street was dark, without their hands. They slept. So, the street would not.

  Whistling. He had his hands in the back pockets.

  A thin man. A small boy. A naked thing for any who looked. For any would stick their mouths to his. Or watch him breathe. This man, boy, self, had not come here to see you. (Where you live now.) Had not asked you for your life, or proposed a vile connection, i.e., “I Love You”: “Come With Me,” or simpler, “Listen, Please, Listen To Me.” But you had not lived then. Or come from where the things set up dark words in you.

  This is an old song. Where the street, a wide avenue, turns and is lost as it approaches the river. Not knowing himself, or the town. Just what pushed him. He could move. He could move, himself. And scream, scream it to him. You, not some other, are like this. Were of this flesh. You, talk to him, pass him by, hold up a hand to see what he will say. Run, from you. (From me, who came back, now, in some fit, to play God.)

  No one passed him on the street. Then someone did. Then a car went by. And one with a kissing couple slowed at a light, then pulled quickly toward the park. (Is it meaningful to speak of form, and say, there is a form love takes? As meaningful as the woman slumped in the hallway, weeping, under those coarse lights, weeping, for all her hurts, my own.)

  How many worlds; for blood infests our minds. The eye is its own creation. The fingers. There are men who live in themselves so they think their minds will create a different place of ecstasy. That it will love them.

  A ridge of trees. Tall thin lights, lighting only the tops of leaves. Soft as it reached us. Harsh at the top, making shadows that moved without flesh.

  A long sloping walk. His head had bent, was bent, always. (They will say that you are abstracted. That you are funny. That you are not what you seem, but evil. And fall out drunk and sick and shed that skin. Shed it now. To this. An “X” on the graph, where you paused.)

  Up near the theaters, where the city changed. Was softer, grew wilder, and green even beneath the darkness. A drugstore at an intersection with the full white moon pressed under the glass. A tree at its edges, folding slowly. The dead fill the streets. And their dead thoughts. I do not know this place.

  Seeing no one. Not wanting anyone. But you all. I want now to have all your minds. Want now, to be them. To feel all you feel. Think, your hundred thoughts. Sink down on your lover, and tell about myself. Yourself. (The thin boy at the corner, under the blurred lights, green tops and wires under the moon.) Seeing no one, and wanting, no one. Wanting. He could press himself against the darkness and suck it into himself. He could sit down here and weep. He could die. He could grow older, and find himself calmer, more detached, disposed to sit and talk w
ith us about himself. He could find himself lying about his life, and see back across blood, to the blank marquee and quiet intersection of his discovery. Balboa. You have made your move. The waters move softly here. Blue clear warm water, barely moving. And smooth sand for miles. No one here. Or where you came from. (We will give a date for your madness, stretched at the sea’s edge screaming at the new sun as it came up. We will say, of you, that you were always “alone.”)

  To move again. Let it sink in. (Let the waters turn, the ocean, mount. Huge waves, strike down trees. So far down beneath where you sprawled and watched the light change the water’s pigment.)

  Bells thread the night. He is twisting his hips like a young girl, hands in his hair. He is walking quietly, with his lips pinched and cheeks drawn to kiss someone. (He kisses his own hands, and smells their palms.) He is putting his hands on his flanks to feel them jerk, as he sways gently through his night. He is a soft young girl, running his hands over his own body. The bells shake the darkness. The waves draw up over all the land. But there was no one else. The girl is pulled under, and as the waters die she drifts facedown and quiet. It was getting light. More cars moved up the streets, and he waved at one.

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

  Alternate Ending

  “6½” was the answer. But it seemed to irritate Miss Orbach. Maybe not the answer—the figure itself—but the fact it should be there, and in such loose possession.

  “OH who is he to know such a thing? That’s really improper to set up such liberations. And moreso.”

  What came into her head next she could hardly understand. A breath of cold. She did shudder, and her fingers clawed at the tiny watch she wore hidden in the lace of the blouse her grandmother had given her when she graduated teacher’s college.

  Ellen, Eileen, Evelyn . . . Orbach. She could be any of them. Her personality was one of theirs. As specific and as vague. The kindly menace of leading a life in whose balance evil was a constant intrigue but grew uglier and more remote as it grew stronger. She would have loved to do something really dirty. But nothing she had ever heard of was dirty enough. So she contented herself with good, i.e., purity, as a refuge from mediocrity. But being unconscious, or largely remote from her own sources, she would only admit to the possibility of grace. Not God. She would not be trapped into wanting even God.

  So remorse took her easily. For any reason. A reflection in a shop window, of a man looking in vain for her ankles. (Which she covered with heavy colorless woolen.) A sudden gust of warm damp air around her legs or face. Long dull rains that turned her from her books. Or, as was the case this morning, some completely uncalled-for shaking of her silent doctrinaire routines.

  “6½” had wrenched her unwillingly to exactly where she was. Teaching the 5th grade, in a grim industrial complex of northeastern America; about 1942. And how the social doth pain the anchorite.

  Nothing made much sense in such a context. People moved around, and disliked each other for no reason. Also, and worse, they said they loved each other, and usually for less reason, Miss Orbach thought. Or would have if she did.

  And in this class sat 30 dreary sons and daughters of such circumstance. Specifically, the thriving children of the thriving urban lower middle classes. Postmen’s sons and factory-worker debutantes. Making a great run for America, now prosperity and the war had silenced for a time the intelligent cackle of tradition. Like a huge gray bubbling vat the country, in its apocalyptic version of history and the future, sought now, in its equally apocalyptic profile of itself as it had urged swiftly its own death since the Civil War. To promise. Promise. And that to be that all who had ever dared to live here would die when the people and interests who had been its rulers died. The intelligent poor now were being admitted. And with them a great many Negroes . . . who would die when the rest of the dream died not even understanding that they, like Ishmael, should have been the sole survivors. But now they were being tricked. “6½” the boy said. After the fidgeting and awkward silence. One little black boy raised his hand, and looking at the tip of Miss Orbach’s nose said 6½. And then he smiled, very embarrassed and very sure of being wrong.

  I would have said, “No, boy, shut up and sit down. You are wrong. You don’t know anything. Get out of here and be very quick. Have you no idea what you’re getting involved in? My God . . . you nigger, get out of here and save yourself, while there’s time. Now beat it.” But those people had already been convinced. Read Booker T. Washington one day, when there’s time. What that led to. The 6½’s moved for power . . . and there seemed no other way.

  So three elegant Negroes in light gray suits grin and throw me through the window. They are happy and I am sad. It is an ample test of an idea. And besides, “6½” is the right answer to the woman’s question.

  [The psychological and the social. The spiritual and the practical. Keep them together and you profit, maybe, someday, come out on top. Separate them, and you go along the road to the commonest of Hells. The one we westerners love to try to make art out of.]

  The woman looked at the little brown boy. He blinked at her, trying again not to smile. She tightened her eyes, but her lips flew open. She tightened her lips, and her eyes blinked like the boy’s. She said, “How do you get that answer?” The boy told her. “Well, it’s right,” she said, and the boy fell limp, straining even harder to look sorry. The Negro in back of the answerer pinched him, and the boy shuddered. A little white girl next to him touched his hand, and he tried to pull his own hand away with his brain.

  “Well, that’s right, class. That’s exactly right. You may sit down now, Mr. McGhee.”

  Later on in the day, after it had started exaggeratedly to rain very hard and very stupidly against the windows and soul of her 5th-grade class, Miss Orbach became convinced that the little boy’s eyes were too large. And in fact they did bulge almost grotesquely white and huge against his bony heavy-veined skull. Also, his head was much too large for the rest of the scrawny body. And he talked too much, and caused too many disturbances. He also stared out the window when Miss Orbach herself would drift off into her sanctuary of light and hygiene even though her voice carried the inanities of arithmetic seemingly without delay. When she came back to the petty social demands of 20th-century humanism the boy would be watching something walk across the playground. OH, it just would not work.

  She wrote a note to Miss Janone, the school nurse, and gave it to the boy, McGhee, to take to her. The note read: “Are the large eyes a sign of___________?”

  Little McGhee, of course, could read, and read the note. But he didn’t of course understand the last large word which was misspelled anyway. But he tried to memorize the note, repeating to himself over and over again its contents . . . sounding the last long word out in his head, as best he could.

  Miss Janone wiped her big nose and sat the boy down, reading the note. She looked at him when she finished, then read the note again, crumpling it on her desk.

  She looked in her medical book and found out what Miss Orbach meant. Then she said to the little Negro, Dr. Robard will be here in 5 minutes. He’ll look at you. Then she began doing something to her eyes and fingernails.

  When the doctor arrived he looked closely at McGhee and said to Miss Janone, “Miss Orbach is confused.”

  McGhee’s mother thought that too. Though by the time little McGhee had gotten home he had forgotten the “long word” at the end of the note.

  “Is Miss Orbach the woman who told you to say sangwich instead of sammich?” Louise McGhee giggled.

  “No, that was Miss Columbe.”

  “Sangwich, my christ. That’s worse than sammich. Though you better not let me hear you saying sammich either . . . like those Davises.”

  “I don’t say sammich, mamma.”

  “What’s the word then?”

  “Sandwich.”

  “That’s right. And don’t let anyone tell you anything else. Teacher or otherwise. Now I wonder what that word could’ve been?”

  �
��I donno. It was very long. I forgot it.”

  Eddie McGhee Sr. didn’t have much of an idea what the word could be either. But he had never been to college like his wife. It was one of the most conspicuously dealt with factors of their marriage.

  So the next morning Louise McGhee, after calling her office, the Child Welfare Bureau, and telling them she would be a little late, took a trip to the school, which was on the same block as the house where the McGhees lived, to speak to Miss Orbach about the long word which she suspected might be injurious to her son and maybe to Negroes In General. This suspicion had been bolstered a great deal by what Eddie Jr. had told her about Miss Orbach, and also equally by what Eddie Sr. had long maintained about the nature of White People In General. “Oh well,” Louise McGhee sighed, “I guess I better straighten this sister out.” And that is exactly what she intended.

  When the two McGhees reached the Center Street school the next morning Mrs. McGhee took Eddie along with her to the principal’s office, where she would request that she be allowed to see Eddie’s teacher.

  Miss Day, the old lady principal, would then send Eddie to his class with a note for his teacher, and talk to Louise McGhee, while she was waiting, on general problems of the neighborhood. Miss Day was a very old woman who had despised Calvin Coolidge. She was also, in one sense, exotically liberal. One time she had forbidden old man Seidman to wear his pince-nez anymore, as they looked too snooty. Center Street sold more war stamps than any other grammar school in the area, and had a fairly good track team.

  Miss Orbach was going to say something about Eddie McGhee’s being late, but he immediately produced Miss Day’s note. Then Miss Orbach looked at Eddie again, as she had when she had written her own note the day before.

  She made Mary Ann Fantano the monitor and stalked off down the dim halls. The class had a merry time of it when she left, and Eddie won an extra 2 Nabisco graham crackers by kissing Mary Ann while she sat at Miss Orbach’s desk.

  When Miss Orbach got to the principal’s office and pushed open the door she looked directly into Louise McGhee’s large brown eyes, and fell deeply and hopelessly in love.