Place Called Estherville (14 page)

She had torn open the pack of cigarettes and was lighting one. “Everything’s here, Ganus,” she said, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “It’s a wonder Mr. Daitch didn’t get my order mixed up, like he’s forever doing.”

“I’ll go right straight back and tell Mr. Harry you got just exactly what you wanted, Miss Vernice,” Ganus said in haste, turning with an eager glance at the door. “I’ll be mighty glad to do that right away for you, Miss Vernice.”

He opened the door before she had a chance to say anything. He was almost safely out of the kitchen when he heard her calling. He stopped where he was, but he did not look back.

“Ma’m?” he said weakly. “Did you say something, Miss Vernice?”

“Yes, Ganus,” he heard her say in a drawling tone that made him catch his breath. “Come back here, Ganus.”

He came back into the kitchen. When he closed the screen-door, he saw that she was sitting at the table and blowing large puffs of cigarette smoke at the ceiling. There was a loud ringing noise in both of his ears.

“Miss Vernice,” he said, trembling slightly, “Mr. Harry wants me to hurry straight back to the store right now. Mr. Harry said so himself. He never wants me to waste time getting back down there, because somebody might call up any time and want something delivered in a big hurry. He said so himself, Miss Vernice. That’s why I’ve got to hurry back down there right this minute. The Good Man knows I’m telling the truth!” He turned and ran from the kitchen. After getting the screen-door open, he leaped from the top step to the ground.

When he got on his bicycle, he knew Vernice had opened the screen-door and was calling him, but he rode away as fast as he could, pretending all the time that he did not hear her. As he pedaled around the corner of the bungalow he could see with a sidelong glance that she had come partly down the steps and was frantically waving for him to come back. He lowered his head over the handlebar and pedaled with all his might.

It took him only a few minutes to get back to the store, and he was breathless and shaking when he walked inside. He hurried to where Harry Daitch was waiting for him at the counter.

“Well, I see you got back in a hurry, Ganus,” Harry told him with a pleased look. “Now, that’s the way to hold down a job.”

“I sure tried my best to hurry back, Mr. Harry. I hurried like I’d never hurried before.”

“You got back just in time, too,” Harry went on as he finished wrapping up a package. “As long as you keep on hustling these orders out, I’ll know you want to keep your job. Customers appreciate prompt deliveries. It’s a sure way to build up good will in the grocery business.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Harry—but I’d like to say—”

Harry ignored him with an impatient gesture of his hand. “Here’s another delivery to make right away. Now see if you can’t hustle this one, too. If you keep this up, I’ll have to think I can’t do without you, Ganus.”

Ganus picked up the package. “Who’s it for, Mr. Harry?”

“It’s another order Mrs. Weathersbee phoned in,” Harry told him casually as he leaned over the counter and made an entry in the charge-book. “She phoned down just before you got back and said she’d forgotten to order cokes the first time. She wants them right away, so hurry up there with them while they’re still cold, Ganus. Customers always appreciate it when they get their cokes ice-cold in the summertime.”

Ganus had backed away from the counter. “Mr. Harry—” he said weakly, swallowing several times. “Mr. Harry, I— I—”

Harry looked up at him with an annoyed frown. “What’s the matter with you now?”

“Mr. Harry, I—I—”

“This’s the second time in the past half-hour that you’ve acted peculiar. What’s ailing you? Do you want to keep this job, or don’t you? You’d better make up your mind in a hurry, because I want a boy working for me who I don’t have to worry about every time there’s a rush order to deliver.”

“Mr. Harry—I want to hustle the orders—I sure do—please don’t go and hire another boy—that’s the truth, Mr. Harry!”

“Well, what’s all this hemming and hawing about then?”

Ganus twisted his feet uncomfortably. At the moment all thoughts left his mind except the important one that would not let him forget the need to pay Dr. Lamar English five dollars every Saturday. He had already made six payments on the bicycle and he knew that if he lost his job at the market he might not be able to find another one in time to keep up his payments to Dr. English. That meant, he reminded himself worriedly, that Dr. English would come and take the bicycle away from him. He backed toward the door.

“Mr. Harry, I don’t want you to worry one whit,” he said urgently. “I’m going to hustle all the groceries you tell me to, just exactly like you want it done. You won’t have to tell me the second time what to do from now on. Don’t you worry about it at all, Mr. Harry. No sir! Don’t you worry at all!”

He ran out of the store before Harry had a chance to say anything more to him and got on his bicycle. He pedaled slowly up Peachtree Street, each time the wheels turned over feeling less confident of his ability to escape a second time from Vernice Weathersbee and dreading to think what might happen to him if he could not get away. He reluctantly turned down Cypress Street toward the yellow bungalow with the green trim. He tried to think about what he was going to do when he got to the kitchen door, but it made him so nervous to think of seeing Vernice again, and wondering what she was going to do this time, that he could not think clearly. Twice he rode around the block, unmindful of the hot afternoon sun, before he could make himself turn into the driveway.

With the fearsome feeling that he was doing something he would surely regret, but knowing no way to avoid it, he rode into the backyard and leaned the bicycle once more against the fig tree at the bottom of the brick steps. He remembered having looked overhead at the ripe, luscious figs hanging only an arm’s length away when he was there the first time that afternoon and wondering if it would be all right for him to eat some of them, but now he was too worried about what might take place in the house even to look up at the figs again. After getting off the bike and picking up the package, he listened carefully for several moments. A group of noisy children was playing in the alley, but he could not hear a sound of any kind in the house and he hoped the silence meant that Vernice was in one of the other rooms. While he stood there in the hot sun, he could see Vernice in her short pajama jacket as plainly as if she had been actually within sight, and his heart began thumping in his chest. He ran up the steps, threw open the screen-door, and went toward the kitchen table. He was not conscious of seeing Vernice until he was halfway there. She was seated in the same straightback chair smoking another cigarette. He stopped and stared at her in consternation, wondering why it was that she was always wearing only the top of her pajamas every time he delivered her groceries. He held his breath and listened to the racing thump of his heart.

“I’m glad you came back, Ganus,” she said with a disturbing smile. “I was really all out of cokes.”

He swallowed painfully. “You were, Miss Vernice?”

She got up and said, “But what I really needed you for was to do something for me.”

He wondered what she was talking about, but he dared not ask her at a time like that. “Yes, ma’m,” was all that he could say.

Vernice walked past him and latched the screen-door. Then she walked back across the kitchen again and continued on into the parlor. She was out of sight for only a few moments when he heard her calling him. Curious, and tense with excitement, he crossed the kitchen and looked through the doorway into the next room. She was sitting on the divan and holding up a bottle.

“You’ll have to open this for me, Ganus,” she said, beckoning to him. “I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t seem to be able to do anything with it.” When he did not move, she began beckoning insistently. “Come on in here, Ganus. It’s all right.” He hesitated for a long time before going a step farther, but finally he found himself crossing the threshold. She stood up and placed the bottle and corkscrew in his hands. He was shaking all over so much that he almost dropped the bottle. “Go on and open it, Ganus,” she told him. “It always takes a man to do things like this. I’m so helpless about such things.”

He was so nervous that he fumbled blindly with the corkscrew until she came and screwed it into the cork for him. He then twisted it deep into the neck of the bottle and, much to his surprise, easily pulled out the cork. Some of the whisky spilled on his shirt and pants and the odor made him think what Harry Daitch would say if he saw him now.

“Miss Vernice,” he said uneasily, “I’ve got to hurry back to the store right away. Mr. Harry said for me to. The Good Man knows that’s the truth.”

She was shaking her head at him with a scolding frown long before he could finish telling her.

“No, Ganus,” she said. “Don’t go away now.” She poured an unusually large portion of bourbon into two glasses and then some of the coke. “You’ve got to stay now. I’ll lose my mind if I have to keep on drinking alone.” She placed one of the glasses in his shaking hand. He hastily clutched the glass with both hands to keep from dropping it, but even then some of the bourbon-and-coke spilled over the rim and splashed on his shoes.

He tried to make her take the glass back by holding it out toward her. “I can’t drink this, Miss Vernice. Please don’t make me. Please take it back and let me go.”

“Haven’t you ever had bourbon-and-coke before, Ganus?”

“I’ve tasted it. I know what it’s like. But Mr. Harry wouldn’t want me to. I know that, for sure. If I lost my job at the market, I couldn’t pay Dr. English every Saturday and he’d come and take it away from me. The Good Man knows that’s the truth, Miss Vernice.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said lightly. “If you owe Dr. English money, let him get down and beg for it. Doctors make it too easy, anyway.” She winked at him. “Let’s me and you make it rough on doctors, Ganus.”

“But Mr. Harry—”

She laughed out loud. “What do we care about Harry Daitch!” she said in a loud hoarse voice, pushing his glass upward and holding it firmly against his lips. “Here we go! Shove off, Ganus! It’s every man for himself now! Let Harry Daitch get down on his bony knees and beg like Dr. English! Heave-ho!” Her body swayed rhythmically. “Heave-ho! Heave-ho!”

Ganus closed his eyes and gulped down the bourbon-and-coke. When he opened his eyes, Vernice was refilling both glasses. As she bent over the table, the flaring butcher-boy pajama jacket seemed to be shorter than it had ever looked before. The gleaming curves of her bare buttocks began to shimmer in his sight. He turned away long enough to glance fearfully at all the windows, fully expecting that somebody would surely have been there watching him and getting ready to dash off to tell the whole town. He had only momentary relief, however.

“Miss Vernice—a colored boy like me—you’re not in all your clothes. You know that, don’t you? I declare, Miss Vernice, I’m awfully worried—I got to go!”

She turned and handed him the refilled glass. “Don’t be silly, Ganus,” she chided him. “Heave-ho!”

“I know, Miss Vernice, but—”

“I’m very lonely, Ganus,” she said appealingly. “It’s plain hell to be so lonesome, all the time. Nobody’ll ever know. You don’t think I’d tell on you, do you?” She placed her hand under the bottom of the glass and pushed forward. “Heave-ho!” she said in a loud singsong manner, her body swaying. “Heave-ho!”

He drank it down as fast as he could, hoping she would let him leave as soon as he had finished the second glass. She had put only a small amount of coke into the glass this time, and his throat burned and his eyes watered. When he saw that she was pouring more whisky into the glasses, he ran to her and tried to take the bourbon bottle away from her. She easily pushed him aside with her elbow.

“Miss Vernice, I’ve just got to go. I’ll lose my job. I’ve got to give Dr. English five dollars every Saturday. You’re not staying in your clothes far enough like you ought to, neither.” He tried once more to wrest the bottle from her, but she was surprisingly strong. He watched the amber liquid gurgle into the glasses with a helpless feeling. “Miss Vernice, that little short coat—it looks like it’s getting shorter all the time—you’re near about out of all of it now. Maybe you don’t know it, but it’s rising up higher and higher all the time. If they caught me now—please, Miss Vernice!”

She pushed him backward and he dropped heavily to the divan. He felt as though he had fallen a mile through space. Once more the glass was coming toward him. He tried to evade it by moving his head from side to side, but it persisted in coming straight to his mouth. He could dodge it no longer. He shut his eyes and drank the glass dry. He did not open his eyes right away, but when he did, everything in the room seemed to be going around in circles. Even Vernice looked as if she might fall over, and he reached out and caught her just in time. Then he held on to her, because the room itself seemed to be revolving faster and faster with each breath he drew. In a little while both of them seemed to be turning over and over like a runaway wagon wheel on a steep hill, but it did not matter now because he was holding on to her with all his might.

“I’m going to lose my job, for sure,” he said, weeping. Tears began running down his cheeks. “Mr. Harry’s going to get himself another boy to hustle the groceries now.” He tried to pull Vernice’s short jacket down over her gleaming white thighs. He jerked and tugged at it desperately in an effort to cover the glow of her white skin. “I know what they do to colored boys who get in trouble,” he tried to tell her convincingly. “I don’t want to get in trouble—but I don’t know how to keep out of it now—I’ve tried to stay out of trouble all my life. But it looks like something’s always working against me. I can’t hold out much longer, Miss Vernice.” He stopped, weak with exertion, when he saw how useless it was to try to pull the jacket down. He looked up at her beseechingly while tears ran down his face. “It’s not my doing, Miss Vernice—when a white missy—”

She smiled comfortingly as she watched him in his agony. He found himself listening intently to something she was saying. “Ganus, have you ever had a party with a white missy before?” He tried to answer her right away, but his lips were dry and numb. “Have you, Ganus?”