Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (17 page)

Sara came back but that didn't change things much. They weren't close like they had been before. Their Dad had thought it was time for her to come home but she didn't seem glad to be back with her own family. And all the next year she would often get very quiet and just stare ahead like she was homesick. They didn't go with the same crowd of boys and girls anymore and often they didn't even wait for each other to walk to school in the mornings. Sara had learned a lot of music in Detroit and her piano playing was different and very careful. He could tell that she had loved their Aunt Esther a lot but for some reason she didn't talk about her much.

The trouble was that he saw Sara in a hazy way at that time. That was the way everything looked to him then. Crazy and upsidedown. And he was getting to be a man and he did not know what was going to come. And always he was hungry and always he felt that something was just about to happen. And that happening he felt would be terrible and would destroy him. But he would not mold that prescience into thought. Even the time—the two long years after Sara returned—seemed to have passed through his body and not his mind. It was just long months of either floundering or quiet vacantness. And when he thought back over it there was little that he could realize.

He was getting to be a man and he was seventeen years old.

It was then that the thing happened that he had expected without knowing in his mind. This thing he had never imagined and afterward it seemed to have leapt up out of nowhere—to his mind it seemed that way but there was another part of him where this was not so.

The time was late summer and in a few weeks he was planning to leave for Atlanta to enter Tech. He did not want to go to Tech—but it was cheap because he could take the co-op course and his Dad wanted him to graduate from there and be an engineer. There didn't seem to be anything else that he could do and in a way he was eager to leave home so that he could live in a new place by himself. That late summer afternoon he was walking in the woods behind Sherman's Quarter, thinking of this and of a hundred vague things. Remembering all the other times when he had walked through those woods made him restless and he felt lost and alone.

It was almost sundown when he left the woods and started through the street where Vitalis lived. Although it was Sunday afternoon the houses were very quiet and everyone seemed to be gone. The air was sultry and there was the smell of sun-baked pine straw. On the edges of the little street were trampled weeds and a few early goldenrods. As he was walking past the houses, his ankles grey with the lazy swirls of dust that his footsteps made and his eyes tired from the sun, he suddenly heard Vitalis speak to him.

"What you doing round this way, Andrew?"

She was sitting on her front steps and seemed to be alone in the empty Quarter. "Nothing," he said. "Just wandering around."

"They having a big funeral down at our church. It the preacher dead this time. Everybody done gone but me. I just now got away from your house. Even Sylvester done gone."

He didn't know what to say but just the sight of her made him mumble, "Gosh I'm so hungry. All this walking around. And thirsty—"

"I'll get you some."

She got up slowly and he noticed for the first time that she was barefooted and her green shoes and stockings were on the porch. She stooped to put them on. "I done taken these off cause ever body done gone except a sick lady in one of them end houses. These here green shoes has always scrunched my toes—and sometimes the ground sure do feel good to my feets."

On the little stoop behind the house he drank the cool water and dashed some of it into his burning face. Again he felt as though he were hearing that strange sound ly had heard late at night along this street. When he went back through the house where Vitalis had been waiting for him he felt his body tremble. He did not know why they both paused a moment in the dim little room. It was very quiet and a clock ticked slowly. There was a kewpie doll with a gauze sash on the mantelpiece and the air was close and musty.

"What ails you, Andrew? Why you shaking so? What is it ails you, Honey?"

It wasn't him and it wasn't her. It was the thing in both of them. It was the strange sound he had heard there late at night. It was the dim room and the quietness. And all the afternoons he had spent with her in the kitchen. And all his hunger and the times when he had been alone. After it happened that was what he thought.

Later she went out of the house with him and they stood by a pine tree on the edge of the woods. "Andrew, quit your looking at me like that," she kept saying. "Everthing is all right. Don't you worry none about that."

It was like he was staring at her from the bottom of a well and that was all he could think.

"That ain't nothing real wrong. It ain't the first time with me and you a grown man. Quit your looking at me like that, Andrew."

This had never been in his mind. But it had been there waiting and had crept up and smothered his other thoughts—And this was not the only thing that would do him that way. Always. Always.

"Us didn't mean nothing. Sylvester ain't ghy ever know—or your Daddy. Us haven't arranged this. Us haven't done no real sin."

He had imagined how it would be when he was twenty. And she had a pale face like a flower and that was all he knew of her.

"Peoples can't plan on everthing."

He left her. Harry's chessmen, those precise and shrunken little dolls, neat problems in geometry, music that spun itself out immense and symmetrical. He was lost lost and it seemed to him that the end had surely come. He wanted to put his hands on all that had happened to him in his life, to grasp it to him and shape it whole. He was lost lost. He was alone and naked. And along with the chessmen and the music he suddenly remembered an aerial map of New York that he had seen—with the sharp skyscrapers and the blocks neatly plotted. He wanted to go far away and Atlanta was too near his home. He remembered the map of New York, frozen and delicate it was and he knew that was where he was going. That was all that he knew.

In the restaurant of the town where he had gotten off of the bus Andrew Leander finished the last of his beers. The place was closing and there would not be a bus to Georgia until morning. He could not get Vitalis and Sara and Harry and his Dad from his mind. And there were others besides them. He realized suddenly that he had hardly remembered Chandler. Chandler West who lived across the street—whom he had been with so often and who was at the same time so obscure. And the girl who wore red fingernail polish at high school. And the little rat of a boy named Peeper whom he had once talked with at South Highlands.

He got up from the table and picked up his bags. He was the last one in the restaurant and the waiter was ready to lock up. For a moment he hung around near the door that opened into the dark quiet street.

When he had first sat down at the table everything had seemed for the first time so clear. And now he was more lost than ever. But somehow it didn't matter. He felt strong. In that dark sleepy place he was a stranger—but after three years he was going home. Not just to Georgia but to a nearer home than that. He was drunk and there was power in him to shape things. He thought of all of them at home whom he had loved. And it would not be himself but through all of them that he would find this pattern. He felt drunk and sick for home. He wanted to go out and lift up his voice and search in the night for all that he wanted. He was drunk drunk. He was Andrew Leander.

"Say," he said to the boy who was waiting to lock the door. "Can you give me the name of some place around here where I can get a room for the night?"

The boy gave him some directions and in the surface of his mind he noted them. The street was dark and silent and he stood a moment longer in the open doorway. "Say," he said again. "I got off the bus half drunk. Will you tell me the name of this place?"

The jockey came to the doorway of the dining room, then after a moment stepped to one side and stood motionless, with his back to the wall. The room was crowded, as this was the third day of the season and all the hotels in the town were full. In the dining room bouquets of August roses scattered their petals on the white table linen and from the adjoining bar came a warm, drunken wash of voices. The jockey waited with his back to the wall and scrutinized the room with pinched, crepy eyes. He examined the room until at last his eyes reached a table in a corner diagonally across from him, at which three men were sitting. As he watched, the jockey raised his chin and tilted his head back to one side, his dwarfed body grew rigid, and his hands stiffened so that the fingers curled inward like gray claws. Tense against the wall of the dining room, he watched and waited in this way.

He was wearing a suit of green Chinese silk that evening, tailored precisely and the size of a costume outfit for a child. The shirt was yellow, the tie striped with pastel colors. He had no hat with him and wore his hair brushed down in a stiff, wet bang on his forehead. His face was drawn, ageless, and gray. There were shadowed hollows at his temples and his mouth was set in a wiry smile. After a time he was aware that he had been seen by one of the three men he had been watching. But the jockey did not nod; he only raised his chin still higher and hooked the thumb of his tense hand in the pocket of his coat.

The three men at the corner table were a trainer, a bookie, and a rich man. The trainer was Sylvester—a large, loosely built fellow with a flushed nose and slow blue eyes. The bookie was Simmons. The rich man was the owner of a horse named Seltzer, which the jockey had ridden that afternoon. The three of them drank whiskey with soda, and a white-coated waiter had just brought on the main course of the dinner.

It was Sylvester who first saw the jockey. He looked away quickly, put down his whiskey glass, and nervously mashed the tip of his red nose with his thumb. "It's Bitsy Barlow," he said. "Standing over there across the room. Just watching us."

"Oh, the jockey," said the rich man. He was facing the wall and he half turned his head to look behind him. "Ask him over."

"God no," Sylvester said.

"He's crazy," Simmons said. The bookie's voice was flat and without inflection. He had the face of a born gambler, carefully adjusted, the expression a permanent deadlock between fear and greed.

"Well, I wouldn't call him that exactly," said Sylvester. "I've known him a long time. He was O.K. until about six months ago. But if he goes on like this, I can't see him lasting another year. I just can't."

"It was what happened in Miami," said Simmons.

"What?" asked the rich man.

Sylvester glanced across the room at the jockey and wet the corner of his mouth with his red, fleshy tongue. "A accident. A kid got hurt on the track. Broke a leg and a hip. He was a particular pal of Bitsy's. A Irish kid. Not a bad rider, either."

"That's a pity," said the rich man.

"Yeah. They were particular friends," Sylvester said. "You would always find him up in Bitsy's hotel room. They would be playing rummy or else lying on the floor reading the sports page together."

"Well, those things happen," said the rich man.

Simmons cut into his beefsteak. He held his fork prongs downward on the plate and carefully piled on mushrooms with the blade of his knife. "He's crazy," he repeated. "He gives me the creeps."

All the tables in the dining room were occupied. There was a party at the banquet table in the center, and green-white August moths had found their way in from the night and fluttered about the clear candle flames. Two girls wearing flannel slacks and blazers walked arm in arm across the room into the bar. From the main street outside came the echoes of holiday hysteria.

"They claim that in August Saratoga is the wealthiest town per capita in the world." Sylvester turned to the rich man. "What do you think?"

"I wouldn't know," said the rich man. "It may very well be so."

Daintily, Simmons wiped his greasy mouth with the tip of his forefinger. "How about Hollywood? And Wall Street—"

"Wait," said Sylvester. "He's decided to come over here."

The jockey had left the wall and was approaching the table in the corner. He walked with a prim strut, swinging out his legs in a half-circle with each step, his heels biting smartly into the red velvet carpet on the floor. On the way over he brushed against the elbow of a fat woman in white satin at the banquet table; he stepped back and bowed with dandified courtesy, his eyes quite closed. When he had crossed the room he drew up a chair and sat at a corner of the table, between Sylvester and the rich man, without a nod of greeting or a change in his set, gray face.

"Had dinner?" Sylvester asked.

"Some people might call it that." The jockey's voice was high, bitter, clear.

Sylvester put his knife and fork down carefully on his plate. The rich man shifted his position, turning sidewise in his chair and crossing his legs. He was dressed in twill riding pants, unpolished boots, and a shabby brown jacket—this was his outfit day and night in the racing season, although he was never seen on a horse. Simmons went on with his dinner.

"Like a pot of seltzer water?" asked Sylvester. "Or something like that?"

The jockey didn't answer. He drew a gold cigarette case from his pocket and snapped it open. Inside were a few cigarettes and a tiny gold penknife. He used the knife to cut a cigarette in half. When he had lighted his smoke he held up his hand to a waiter passing by the table. "Kentucky bourbon, please."

"Now, listen, Kid," said Sylvester.

"Don't Kid me."

"Be reasonable. You know you got to behave reasonable."

The jockey drew up the left corner of his mouth in a stiff jeer. His eyes lowered to the food spread out on the table, but instantly he looked up again. Before the rich man was a fish casserole, baked in a cream sauce and garnished with parsley. Sylvester had ordered eggs Benedict. There was asparagus, fresh buttered corn, and a side dish of wet black olives. A plate of French-fried potatoes was in the corner of the table before the jockey. He didn't look at the food again, but kept his pinched eyes on the centerpiece of full-blown lavender roses. "I don't suppose you remember a certain person by the name of McGuire," he said.