Jordan County (2 page)

“Do what?”

“Love each other. Why dont they love each other?”

“Say, what are you anyhow? Some kind of a nut?”

“No — really. Why not?” He was not discouraged. He spoke stiff-lipped, his face wreathed with steam. “Were you ever wrapped in wet sheets, wrapped up tight? Thats what they need, and then theyd love each other. I’m telling you. Wrap them up, good and tight, leave them there for a while like that, then turn them loose, and believe me theyd love each other.”

“Look,” she said. “I’m busy.”

She went on down the counter and did not come near him again until she brought the ham and eggs. Then she only set them down in passing; she kept moving, out of reach. He ate hungrily, all of it, including three slices of toast, and when he had finished he took up the suitcase and started for the door.
The Greek proprietor stood at the cash register. He had the drawer open, looking at his money. Pauly paid for the meal and turned to leave. Then he turned back. He was blond and short, with wide shoulders, small gray eyes, and an aggressive chin. “Say,” he said. The Greek looked up from the cash drawer. “Could I leave this here for a while?” He raised the suitcase and lowered it again.

“All right,” the Greek said. “Put back here. But not responsible, unnerstand?”

“Sure. I’ll be right back.”

“Ho K.”

When he had put the suitcase behind the plywood partition he went to the front door and stood looking through the glass. A fine rain was still falling but there were pale gray shadows on the sidewalk. Pauly opened the door and saw the sun through the mizzling rain. “What do you know,” he cried over his shoulder. “The devil is beating his wife.”

He turned up the collar of his coat and went out into the rain, going west still, toward the river. The levee was a block and a half away, with the veterans’ sign in front of it, blue and white except for the red stars and stripes on the flag in the middle. He walked fast and soon he stood in front of it, holding his collar with both hands at his throat. The sign had words in big letters on both sides of the flag. To the left it said:
IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO SERVED IN WORLD WAR TWO
, and on the opposite side, in balance:
MAY THE SPIRIT OF OUR BOYS WHO FELL IN BATTLE LIVE FOREVER
. He had heard about that. Originally it was intended to put the names of the war dead on the signboard, the whites down one side and the Negroes down the other, with the American flag between. But the notion of having them all on one board caused so much ugly feeling — there was even some talk of dynamite, for example — that the service club whose project it was took a vote and decided that it would be better just to say something fitting about the spirit of our boys. That was what they did, and already it had begun to look a bit weathered around the edges. Pauly stood in the
rain, looking at it and holding his collar close at the throat. His hair was all the way wet by now and the rain ran in trickles down his face.

Presently he walked around the sign and climbed the levee, no easy job for the grass was slippery and under it there was mud. When he reached the crest the rain stopped as if by signal; his shadow darkened on the grass, and below him lay the river, the Mississippi. Tawny, wide, dimpled and swirled by eddies, it sparkled in the sunlight as it swept along to the south. Pauly was alone up here and a cold wind blew against his face. Behind him Bristol thrust its steeples through the overarching trees. “Hello, big river,” he said. He felt better now. He came down, slipping and smiling. “Thats one big river,” he said.

He did not stop at the base of the levee; he kept going east, back past the café where he had left his suitcase, past the depot — wondering if the corpse had got its round-trip ticket — past the courthouse where the Confederate soldier watched from his marble shaft, past the ramped tracks of the C&B, and on out that same street, until finally he came to a park:
WINGATE PARK
it was called on a wrought-iron arch above the entrance. Sunlight glittered on the rain-washed gravel paths; the grass was still green after the first cold snap of late November. He entered the park and sat on a circular bench that was built around the trunk of a big oak. Despite the coolness he took off his damp coat and sat with it folded across his lap. The stubble of beard was more obvious now, with a coppery glint in the sunshine. His clothes were even more rumpled. The whites of his eyes were threaded with red and each lid showed the edge of its red lining. He leaned back against the tree, and almost immediately he was asleep.

Singing woke him. At first he did not know where he was, nor then how long he had been there. The singer was a little girl who was playing with two dolls about five yards from the bench. She wore a short wool skirt, a beret, and a corduroy jacket. “Hello,” Pauly said. She did not hear him. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, and said it again. “Hel-lo.”

Turning her head she looked at him and her eyes were large and dark. She was very pretty. “Hello,” she said.

“What are you playing?”

“Dolls.”

“Oh. Have they got names?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, are they nice names?”

“Nice,” she said.

“What, for instance?”

“I’m sorry. Mummy says I mustnt talk to strangers.”

“Well, you just tell your mummy I said she’s wrong. Some of the nicest people I ever knew were strangers.”

She smiled at this and he smiled back. Then: “Sal Ann,” they heard a flat voice say, and Pauly saw a young Negress sitting on a nearby bench, holding a multicolored booklet in both hands. She wore loafers with new pennies in the flaps and bright green socks. “Come play over here,” she said. Her voice was expressionless; she did not look at Pauly. Sally Ann took up her dolls.

“I have to go.”

“You do?”

“Oh yes. She’s my nurse.”

“I know,” he said. “Ive had them myself. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

He watched her go, and suddenly feeling the chill he put his coat on. Presently, when the nurse had finished her comic book —
Bat Man
was its title; she seemed to have derived small pleasure from it — she rose and beckoned to the little girl. “Time for your nap,” she said. Leaving by way of the arch they passed a man who walked bent forward, leaning on a cane. As he drew closer Pauly saw that he was old and there was pain in his face. Then he saw Pauly and turned aside, taking the bench where the nurse had read through
Bat Man
. He sat with the cane planted stiffly between his shoes, both hands on the crook, and his face was empty except for the lines of pain.

The sun was past the overhead. Pauly rose abruptly and
went to the old man’s bench. From closer he saw that he was poor as well as old. His shoes were broken and there were holes in the ankles of his cotton socks. The cuffs of his shirt were badly frayed, as was the collar, and where the button was missing the points bunched forward, overlapping the knot of his tie, which had been tied and re-tied so often in the same place that the knot looked as tight and hard as a little piece of gravel. His coat, loose-fitting and almost as rumpled as Pauly’s own, gave him a scarecrow aspect. When he turned his head Pauly saw that the pain was old, like the rest of him; he had lived with it for years. “How do,” he said.

“Hello. Could I sit down and talk?”

“All right.”

Pauly sat beside him on the bench, and again that stiff-lipped expression came onto his face. “Ive been trying to figure,” he said. He paused and the old man watched him, unsurprised. “I came back from the war and all, back here where I was born and raised, and people dont even know me on the street. I see things all around me and it tears me up inside. A letter on the sidewalk, say, from a teen-age girl reaching out for love and already knowing she wont find it … Sad things, terrible things happen to people! Do you realize that right this minute there are people all over the world crying, weeping, lying awake in their beds at night, smoking cigarettes till their gums are sore, and looking up at the ceiling like they thought theyd find the answer written there? Kicked in the teeth, insulted, full of misery the way a glass can get so full it bulges at the brim with surface tension — what does it mean? What does it mean? It’s got to mean something, all that suffering.”

“It’s just people, the way they are,” the old man said. For a moment he was quiet. Then he added: “They got away from God.”

“God? Whats God got to do with it? What does He care?”

“Maybe they just werent meant to be happy, then.”

“No! Thats not true!” Pauly jerked his hands as he spoke,
clenching and unclenching his fists. “I want to live in the world but I dont understand, and until I can understand I cant live. Why wont people be happy? Not cant:
wont
.”

“I dont know,” the old man said. He looked away, across the park. “Ive been here going on eighty-seven years and I dont know. My wife died of a cancer until finally all that was left was teeth and eyes and yelling, like some animal. I asked myself all those things: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’ Then she died. She’d been a beautiful woman in her day, and she wound up like a run-over cat. I asked myself, again and again: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’ And you know, I finally found the answer; one answer, anyhow. It dont mean a thing. Nothing. Why should it mean anything? I stopped thinking about it is what I finally did. It’s what you better do, too. Dont think about it. Theyll lock you up, you keep at it too long. They wanted to lock me up, down at Whitfield, but I quit thinking about it and they let me alone. Now they say I’m harmless. And I am.”

The stiff-lipped expression had turned to horror; Pauly jumped up. He was about to speak, but then instead he turned and walked away. Near the entrance he looked back. The old man was just sitting there, his hands on the crook of the cane; he looked out across the park, the graveled paths glittering in the sunlight; he sat there, empty-eyed, and the young man might never have spoken to him at all. Pauly went under the wrought-iron arch. He walked three blocks fast, then three blocks slow, and by that time he was back in front of the courthouse, looking up at the Confederate, the blank stone eyeballs under the wide-brimmed hat. Within the next three blocks he passed the depot and was within sight of the post office. He went past it, walking fast again, and re-entered the café.

He took a booth this time, one in back. The same waitress came with a glass of water as before, still wearing the detachable-looking nails and the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. “Hello,” he said.

“What will it be?”

“Look: I’m sorry about all that other. I meant it, but I’m sorry I bothered you with it’s what I mean. I was lonesome.”

“I’m real busy. What will it be?”

This was not true. There were only a few people in the place, three men drinking beer in a booth across the way and three others seated singly on the stools along the counter. It was two oclock, the postlunch lull. “O.K. Whats good?” he asked. She was about to speak but he held up one hand, pontifical. “It’s
all
good,” he said mournfully. “Bring me liver and onions. Coffee. Apple pie. Can you do that?”

“All right,” she said.

He went back to the men’s room, the walls of which were penciled with obscenities so crowded that the later entries had had to be squeezed into the margins and even between the lines of the earlier ones. Pauly tried to close his eyes to them, pictures and text, just as he tried to close his nostrils against the stench of creosote and urine, but the two attempts were equally unsuccessful.
Kilroy was here
was scrawled in several places, opposite one of which someone had written:
A good place for him
.

When Pauly returned to the booth he saw through the front window that the rain had come on again, no drizzle now, but true rain, big drops pattering hard against the glass. Outside, the street was darkened and the buildings were hidden across the way.

“Say, thats
rain
,” he said to the waitress as she set the food in front of him.

“Yes,” she said, and left.

While he ate he heard one of the beer drinkers in the adjoining booth tell the other two a story. He was a young businessman but he broadened his accent, pretending to be more country than he was. “There was this scratch farmer, a white man working about sixty acres. But it was a wet year and the weeds began to get out of control, so he brought in some help, a dozen hoe-hands, and went down to the field to
work alongside them. One of the women was brown-skinned, not yet middle aged, and he took him a notion. So he called her aside where the cotton was high, and the two of them lay down between the rows. Well, his wife came to the field about this time, bringing a pail of water, and she walked right up on them in the act. When he saw her he jumped up and began to run. She yelled after him: ‘You, Ephraim! It aint no use to run. You know I caught you!’ ‘Yessum,’ he said, ‘I know you did. But I believe I’ll run a little ways anyhow.’ ”

There was laughter, including the laughter of the man who told the story, and when it died down, one of the other beer drinkers said, “I can see how that might help.” They laughed again.

Pauly frowned. He motioned to the waitress and she came over, still with the mistrustful look. “Bring me another cup of coffee with that,” he told her, pointing at the pie. She brought it, and as she set it down in front of him he said, “I was wrong, baby, wrong and never wronger. It’s not love they need. I know what they need. And I’m the one can give it to them, too. Wait till I drink this.” He put three big spoonfuls of sugar into the coffee and stirred in the jug of cream. The waitress went away but he did not notice. His face was not stiff-lipped now. He looked happy, with a peculiar glint to his eyes.

When he had finished the coffee he rose from the booth and went up front, where the Greek stood looking into the register. “Hand me my suitcase, will you, bud?”

“Here,” the Greek said, and held the swing door ajar.

“Thanks.” Pauly leaned inside and took up the suitcase.

He came back to the booth with it. The waitress was still there, removing the dishes, all except the uneaten pie, but he did not look at her. He set the suitcase on the floor and opened it. From the jumbled disorder of faded khaki and books and shaving gear he took out an Army .45 and four loaded clips. He set them on the table, then turned back to close the bag. “Wait,” he said. “Lets do this right.” He rooted in the suitcase
until he found what he was looking for — an Expert marksmanship badge, the maltese cross inclosed in a silver wreath, with three bars suspended beneath it like a ladder;
Pistol, Pistol, Pistol
, it said on the rungs. He pinned the badge to the rumpled lapel of his coat, and took up the pistol, drawing back the slide. It went back with a dry, thick, deadly sound, then forward with a snick, the hammer cocked. “Now,” he said. He was talking to himself by then, for the waitress was nowhere in sight.