'And in a business investment. I tried to explain." Duke fetches a bottle of Jack Daniel's from the cupboard, pours each of them a drink in a whiskey glass. His manner is edgy but controlled.
'Also, honey, as I said, household expenses. Life isn't cheap these days."
"But your job "Never mind about my job."
"Your commissions. Didn't you tell me "Persia, the money went. Money goes.
He pauses, smiling at her. He is standing, Persia is sitting.
His is the advantage of the natural actor who inhabits, not only his own body, with consummate ease, but the larger, invisible, indefinable body of the space about him. Watching Duke Courtney, though they have been married nearly fourteen years, have been joined together in lovemaking more times than Persia could wish to calculate, she feels her hair stir at the nape of her neck as if it were being caressed.
Duke says, "Hey. Love. My love. You know we love each other." He touches her as if shyly. Touches her breasts, loose inside the quilted robe. "That's the main thing, Persia."
"Is it?"
"Isn't it?"
"The main thing?"
Duke picks up his glass and drinks, nudges Persia to join him.
It is a lover's gesture: wordless, yet edged with reproach. More urgent than Persia wants to acknowledge.
But Persia doesn't drink. Not just yet. She is thinking-or, rather, the thought is forcing itself upon her-that the figure Duke scribbled on the notepaper is probably a lie.
Her eyes veer wildly, she makes an abrupt rising movement, for an instant Duke thinks she is going to hit him... but instead she embraces him, arms tight and crushing around his waist, warm face pressed against his chest. Her smell is that of something being crushed in a moist fist.
Early summer. But hot. Heat like a quivering wall you could press your hand against.
Upright as a sinewy black-glittery snake, Sugar Baby Fairchild jumps cannonball fashion from the topmost girder of the Peach Tree Bridge, screaming, "Bombs away."' And here's his fifteen-year-old brother, Jinx Fairchild, running off the girder as easily as another boy might run on a flat surface, thrashing his long legs, screaming, "Look out below!," a comical squarish grimace opening up the lower part of his face.
Cavorting and preening, performing flawless dives when they wish, for the benefit of the admiring white girls.
They all know that Peach Tree Creek, emptying into the Cassadaga River by way of the trashy ravine edge of the railroad yard, meandering through the scrubbiest of the back lots of Lowertown, is a dirty creek picking up sludge from factories in its passing and bottles, tin cans, old tires, bones, yes, and raw garbage and used condoms and sewage from drains-not a decent creek for swimming but it's close by, and fast-running in its approach to the river so the scum doesn't accumulate, and deep, as deep as twelve feet beneath the bridge, and dark, deliciously dark, a cool glossy serpentine feel to the current, reflections under the bridge dancing and darting like shreds of dream pulled out into daylight.
Unlike the open river where the shoreline is rocks and broken concrete, or the public pool at Cassadaga Park where, under the watchful eyes of white supervisors and the white lifeguard, playful black boys like the Fairchild brothers aren't made to feel welcome.
Here, they can do any damned crazy stunt they want to do.
The white girls Iris Courtney and Nancy Dorsey shouldn't be swimming in Peach Tree Creek... probably. They are not the only girls swimming here this afternoon but they seem to be the only white girls, and they know they're noticed.
But who's to know or care? Who would inform their families?
The Fairchild brothers haul themselves up out of the water, streaming water like seals. The sun strikes sparks on their dark skin: Sugar Baby first, then Jinx. Sugar Baby is always first. Slapping their thighs, dancing on the balls of their feet. Whoops of elation, yodels and yells. Someone in the water below calls up to them and Sugar Baby, pretending outrage, cups his hands to his mouth and yells back, "You the peckerhead! You gonna split you head like guts."' The Fairchild brothers are not twins but it's easy to mistake one for the other unless, like now they are standing together, with a look of boys contemplating themselves in the mirror and liking what they see. Sugar Baby is seventeen, taller than Jinx by an inch or two, must be six feet tall in his bare feet, ten pounds heavier, and very mature... very mature in his tight-fitting trunks like black elastic molded to his genitals and buttocks. His hair is springy and matted, his grin all curvy teeth. Girls stare at him and forget to look away blushing.
Sugar Baby cups his hands to his mouth again and calls over to the white girls, whom he knows from the neighborhood, "Gimme the high sign, honeys! You gonna gimme the high sign?
Hnnnnnn?"
The girls have no idea what he's talking about; his Negro dialect is laid on so heavy, so rich, they can barely decipher a word.
Nancy Dorsey ducks her head as if fearful of looking up too directly at Sugar Baby, locking eyes with his. It has happened more than once between them... it has happened frequently. She murmurs a warning to Iris Courtney to ignore the Fairchilds, both leaning on the bridge railing overhead. The water casts a shivering reflection upward onto her face, giving it a dissolving look.
Iris Courtney laughs, the notion is so fanciful. Ignore them?
Iris, swimming in four feet of water, in and out of the sheltering shadow of the bridge, looks up and sees Sugar Baby and Jinx looking down. Two smiles, all white curvy teeth.
Sugar Baby teases, impudent, hooded-eyed. "Don't gonna gimme no high sign, hnnnnn? Don't know no high sign, hnnnnn?"
It's a relief when the brothers resume their diving and swimming, clambering up the sides of the rusted girders.
In the shadow of the bridge Nancy Dorsey cuts her eyes at Iris and presses a fist against the tight-swelling bosom of her swimsuit.
"Oh, God, my heart's beating like crazy.
Iris doesn't say a word.
Peach Tree Creek at this spot is a lovely cavernous region, sounds echoing from the cobwebbed underside of the bridge, the farther creek bank tangled and clotted with vegetation. There's a brackish smell, though, the girls don't want to get in their hair; they're swimming with their heads lifted out of the water, a little stiffly, self-consciously. Iris Courtney's hair is in a bunchy ponytail, Nancy's loose to her shoulders. The girls have little in common really except that both their mothers are working and they have no sisters or brothers (at least at home: Nancy does have an older brother somewhere) and their fathers are not living with them.
on a regular basis.
Balanced atop a high girder, lanky arms outstretched and hands flopping loose at the wrist as if broken, Sugar Baby goes into his Little Richard act: high-pitched jabbering screech-"'I'utti Frutti, Tutti Frutti 'I'utti Frutti"-as calmly he steps into empty air to fall like a dead weight into the creek.
Jinx, not missing a beat, executes a perfect somersault dive, hardly raising a splash.
Nancy Dorsey whispers shivering in Iris's ear some words Iris acknowledges with a sharp startled laugh.
The white girls stretch out languidly in the sun, on a flat bleached rock like the palm of an uplifted hand. A familiar old rock; they've lain here before.
It's a humming sort of day... time dragging backward. No purpose to going home.
There are some Negro girls swimming with the Fairchilds, some other Negro boys who glance their way from time to time, two or three white boys, small children splashing near shore... no purpose to going home. Iris says suddenly to Nancy, "My mother told my father he's mean-hearted, the other night: chunk of ice where his heart should be.
Now I'm worried I might be the same."
Nancy says vaguely, her eyes on the bridge, "I wouldn't worry.
Shit."
Iris Courtney is wearing a single-piece jersey swimsuit the color of dried blood; Nancy Dorsey is wearing a two-piece suit with a tight ribbed bodice, bright green parrots splashing in a maze of gold.
Nancy is the more physically developed of the two: breasts, hips, thighs, dimpled smile. Iris is leggy, long-armed, narrow boyish hips and small hard breasts. Glancing uneasily down at herself she sees flesh white and vulnerable as something pried out of a shell.
When Persia accused Duke of being mean-hearted, he'd flared up angry and incredulous. Icy eyes in a hot, slapped-looking face.
Now Iris is thinking it's surely a sign of mean-heartedness...
you can't know.
And if you can't know how can you change?
She watches Jinx Fairchild scale a sharp-angled girder to get to the top of the bridge, as easily as if he's been doing it all his life.
Her toes twitch and cringe in sympathy. As if somehow it's Iris Courtney up there too.... Nancy complains of Sugar Baby, he's got a mouth on him, that guy, he'd better watch that mouth of his. 'A colored boy could get into trouble saying the wrong thing to a white girl. I do mean trouble."
On the bridge's topmost girder Jinx Fairchild stands cautiously, straightening his long lanky legs. Iris has seen him play basketball in the neighborhood park and at school: those long legs, long arms, playful deadpan smirk. Jinx is darker-skinned than Sugar Baby, as if the sun has baked him deep and hard. His woolly hair is cropped short, his rib cage shows fleet and rippling inside his skin. Clowning pop eyes rimmed in white in a dark dark face.
Iris knows that Jinx's true name is Verlyn: Verlyn Rayburn Fairchild.
She has seen it in official lists at school; Jinx has just graduated from ninth grade, two years ahead of her. And she knows where he lives, in a small wood-frame house with a porch and a side garden in the "good" section of black Lowertown, East Avenue as it shifts from white Lowertown, a quarter mile, maybe less, from her own building.
.
. a short distance across weedy back lots and the old canning factory property and an open drainage ditch. Beyond the Fairchilds' short block East Avenue is unpaved and the neighborhood changes abruptly: tarpaper shanties, yards heaped with trash, small children spilling over into the road, wandering dogs, that smell of garbagey overripeness and things burning, a place where human distinctions are overrun. But the Fairchilds don't live there.
Sugar Baby's true name is Woodrow: Woodrow William Fairchild, Jr. Last season he was a star basketball player at the high school, the best colored player on the team. But he isn't returning in the fall, says he's got better things to do. Nobody ever needed a diploma for carpentry or bricklaying or construction or hotel or railroad work: nigger-boy vocational-school shit like that. Says Sugar Baby in that voice you can't tell is it quavering with hurt or anger or jivey good humor, he's got better things to do.
Anyway, Sugar Baby says, Jinx is the real thing. You watch him coming along.
Iris watches: Jinx Fairchild atop the Peach Tree Bridge, executing a backward dive even as his friends try to distract him: a single astonishing fluid motion, arms and legs outstretched, unhesitating, flawless, slicing the dark water fast and clean and sharp asaknife.
august 20, 19
55: Leslie Courtney s fortieth birthday.
Which is not going to be celebrated, as Leslie Courtney's birthdays have frequently been celebrated, in the Holland Street flat since things there, as Persia Courtney says, are still unsettled.
"Unsettled."
This word, neutral, fastidiously chosen, evokes in Leslie Courtney's mind's eye a vision of a small boat being tossed in stormy water.
Leslie telephones his sister-in-law Persia two or three times a week, to see how things are. If Duke is home, he speaks with Duke.
Duke is not often home.
It's one of those summer days when the sky is banked with rain clouds like plum-colored bruises. Heat lightning flashing soundless above the river.
How on such an afternoon, did they both forget the umbrella?
Persia doesn't think of it until, getting off the bus, a sulfurous-tasting wind rises in her face. She says, "Oh, damn."
Then, "You know I can't be expected to remember every damn thing."
She and Iris are carrying Leslie's two wrapped birthday presents, plus the cake, which is probably why they forgot the umbrella.
Iris has learned that the most innocent remark-though few of Iris's remarks to her mother are in fact innocent can trigger a quarrel. So it's with caution she points out that they can always borrow an umbrella from Uncle Leslie if it's raining when they leave.
Persia says with her helpless-sounding laugh, the new laugh that means hurt, anger, befuddlement, "It's the principle of the thing. The forgetfulness. Like an old sweater unraveling.
She's on the street with a cigarette slanting from her lips, wavy hair streaming, mouth very red. Iris recalls, a few years back, Persia nudging her to observe a woman smoking on the street: cheap. No matter how good-looking the woman, Persia warned: cheap.
