The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (3 page)

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t belong to them.’

From the corner of his eye he noticed that the drunk slammed his fist down on a table and turned away from the men to whom he had been talking. Biffs voice roughened as he spoke to the youngster before him.

‘Your folks know you’re out after midnight?’

‘It’s O.K. There’s a gang of kids playing out late on our block tonight.’

He had never seen her come into the place with anyone her own age. Several years ago she had always tagged behind her older brother. The Kellys were a good-sized family in numbers. Later she would come in pulling a couple of snotty babies in a wagon. But if she wasn’t nursing or trying to keep up with the bigger ones, she was by herself. Now the kid stood there seeming not to be able to make up her mind what she wanted. She kept pushing back her damp, whitish hair with the palm of her hand.

‘I’d like a pack of cigarettes, please. The cheapest kind’.

Biff started to speak, hesitated, and then reached his IS hand inside the counter. Mick brought out a handkerchief and began untying the knot in the corner where she kept her money. As she gave the knot a jerk the change clattered to the floor and rolled toward Blount, who stood muttering to himself. For a moment he stared in a daze at the coins, but before the kid could go after them he squatted down with concentration and picked up the money. He walked heavily to the counter and stood jiggling the two pennies, the nickel, and the dime in his palm.

‘Seventeen cents for cigarettes now?’

Biff waited, and Mick looked from one of them to the other.

The drunk stacked the money into a little pile on the counter, still protecting it with his big, dirty hand. Slowly he picked up one penny and flipped it down.

‘Five mills for the crackers who grew the weed and five for the dupes who rolled it,’ he said. ‘A cent for you, Biff.’ Then he tried to focus his eyes so that he could read the mottoes on the nickel and dime. He kept fingering the two coins and moving them around in a circle. At last he pushed them away. ‘And that’s a humble homage to liberty. To democracy and tyranny.

‘To freedom and piracy.’

Calmly Biff picked up the money and rang it into the till.

Mick looked as though she wanted to hang around awhile. She took in the drunk with one long gaze, and then she turned her eyes to the middle of the room where the mute sat at his table alone. After a moment Blount also glanced now and then in the same direction. The mute sat silently over his glass of beer, idly drawing on the table with the end of a burnt matchstick.

Jake Blount was the first to speak. ‘It’s funny, but I been seeing that fellow in my sleep for the past three or four nights. He won’t leave me alone. If you ever noticed, he never seems to say anything.’

It was seldom that Biff ever discussed one customer with another. ‘No, he don’t,’ he answered noncommittally.

‘It’s funny.’

Mick shifted her weight from one foot to the other and fitted the package of cigarettes into the pocket of her shorts. ‘It’s not funny if you know anything about him,’ she said. ‘Mister Singer lives with us. He rooms in our house.’

‘Is that so?’ Biff asked. ‘I declare--I didn’t know that’

Mick walked toward the door and answered him without looking around. ‘Sure. He’s been with us three months now.’

Biff unrolled his shirt-sleeves and then folded them up carefully again. He did not take his eyes from Mick as she left the restaurant. And even after she had been gone several minutes he still fumbled with his shirt-sleeves and stared at the empty doorway. Then he locked his arms across his chest and turned back to the drunk again.

Blount leaned heavily on the counter. His brown eyes were wet-looking and wide open with a dazed expression. He needed a bath so badly that he stank like a goat. There were dirt beads on his sweaty neck and an oil stain on his face. His lips were thick and red and his brown hair was matted on his forehead. His overalls were too short in the body and he kept pulling at the crotch of them.

‘Man, you ought to know better,’ Biff said finally. ‘You can’t go around like this. Why, I’m surprised you haven’t been picked up for vagrancy. You ought to sober up. You need washing and your hair needs cutting. Motherogod! You’re not fit to walk around amongst people.’

Blount scowled and bit his lower lip.

‘Now, don’t take offense and get your dander up. Do what I tell you. Go back in the kitchen and tell the colored boy to give you a big pan of hot water. Tell Willie to give you a towel and plenty of soap and wash yourself good. Then eat you some milk toast and open up your suitcase and put you on a clean shirt and a pair of britches that fit you. Then tomorrow you can start doing whatever you’re going to do and working wherever you mean to work and get straightened out.’

‘You know what you can do,’ Blount said drunkenly. ‘You can just--’

‘All right,’ Biff said very quietly. ‘No, I can’t Now you just behave yourself.’

Biff went to the end of the counter and returned with two glasses of draught beer. The drunk picked up his glass so clumsily that beer slopped down on his hands and messed the counter. Biff sipped his portion with careful relish. He regarded Blount steadily with half-closed eyes. Blount was not a freak, although when you first saw him he gave you that impression. It was like something was deformed about him--but when you looked at him closely each part of him was normal and as it ought to be. Therefore if this difference was not in the body it was probably in the mind. He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America. He was like a person who had been somewhere that other people are not likely to go or had done something that others are not apt to do.

Biff cocked his head to one side and said, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Nowhere.’

‘Now, you have to be born somewhere. North Carolina --Tennessee--Alabama--some place.’

Blount’s eyes were dreamy and unfocused. ‘Carolina,’ he said.

‘I can tell you’ve been around,’ Biff hinted delicately.

But the drunk was not listening. He had turned from the counter and was staring out at the dark, empty street. After a moment he walked to the door with loose, uncertain steps.

‘Adios,’ he called back.

Biff was alone again and he gave the restaurant one of his quick, thorough surveys. It was past one in the morning, and there were only four or five customers in the room. The mute still sat by himself at the middle table. Biff stared at him idly and shook the few remaining drops of beer around in the bottom of his glass. Then he finished his drink in one slow swallow and went back to the newspaper spread out on the counter.

This time he could not keep his mind on the words before him.

He remembered Mick. He wondered if he should have sold her the pack of cigarettes and if it were really harmful for kids to smoke. He thought of the way Mick narrowed her eyes and pushed back the bangs of her hair with the palm of her hand.

He thought of her hoarse, boyish voice and of her habit of hitching up her khaki shorts and swaggering like a cowboy in the picture show. A feeling of tenderness came in him. He was uneasy.

Restlessly Biff turned his attention to Singer. The mute sat with his hands in his pockets and the half-finished glass of beer before him had become warm and stagnant. He would offer to treat Singer to a slug of whiskey before he left.

What he had said to Alice was true--he did like freaks. He had a special friendly feeling for sick people and cripples.

Whenever somebody with a harelip or T.B. came into the place he would set him up to beer. Or if the customer were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whiskey on the house. There was one fellow who had had his peter and his left leg blown off in a boiler explosion, and whenever he came to town there was a free pint waiting for him. And if Singer were a drinking kind of man he could get liquor at half price any time he wanted it. Biff nodded to himself. Then neatly he folded his newspaper and put it under the counter along with several others. At the end of the week he would take them all back to the storeroom behind the kitchen, where he kept a complete file of the evening newspapers that dated back without a break for twenty-one years.

At two o’clock Blount entered the restaurant again. He , brought in with him a tall Negro man carrying a black bag.

The drunk tried to bring him up to the counter for a drink, but the Negro left as soon as he realized why he had been led inside. Biff recognized him as a Negro doctor who had practiced in the town ever since he could remember.

He was related in some way to young Willie back in the kitchen. Before he left Biff saw him turn on Blount with a look of quivering hatred.

The drunk just stood there.

‘Don’t you know you can’t bring no nigger in a place where white men drink?’ someone asked him. Biff watched this happening from a distance. Blount was very angry, and now it could easily be seen how drunk he was. ‘I’m part nigger myself,’ he called out as a challenge. Biff watched him alertly and the place was quiet. With his thick nostrils and the rolling whites of his eyes it looked a little as though he might be telling the truth. ‘I’m part nigger and wop and bohunk and chink. All of those.’There was laughter. ‘And I’m Dutch and Turkish and Japanese and American.’ He walked in zigzags around the table where the mute drank his coffee. His voice was loud and cracked. Tm one who knows. I’m a stranger in a strange land.’

‘Quiet down,’ Biff said to him.

Blount paid no attention to anyone in the place except the mute. They were both looking at each other. The mute’s eyes were cold and gentle as a cat’s and all his body seemed to listen. The drunk man was in a frenzy.

‘You’re the only one in this town who catches what I mean,’ Blount said. ‘For two days now I been talking to you in my mind because I know you understand the things I want to mean.’

Some people in a booth were laughing because without knowing it the drunk had picked out a deaf-mute to try to talk with. Biff watched the two men with little darting glances and listened attentively.

Blount sat down to the table and leaned over close to Singer.

There are those who know and those who don’t know. And for every ten thousand who don’t know there’s only one who knows. That’s the miracle of all time--the fact that these millions know so much but don’t know this. It’s like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat and only Columbus and a few other fellows knew the truth.

But it’s different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While this truth is so obvious it’s a miracle of all history that people don’t know. You savvy.’

Biff rested his elbows on the counter and looked at Blount with curiosity. ‘Know what?’ he asked.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Blount said. ‘Don’t mind that flat-footed, blue-jowled, nosy bastard. For you see, when us people who know run into each other mat’s an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That’s a bad thing. It’s happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.’

‘Masons?’ Biff asked.

‘Shut up, you! Else I’ll snatch your arm off and beat you black with it,’ Blount bawled. He hunched over close to the mute and his voice dropped to a drunken whisper. ‘And how come? Why has this miracle of ignorance endured? Because of one thing. A conspiracy. A vast and insidious conspiracy.

Obscurantism. The men in the booth were still laughing at the drunk who was trying to hold a conversation with the mute. Only Biff was serious. He wanted to ascertain if the mute really understood what was said to him. The fellow nodded frequently and his face seemed contemplative. He was only slow--that was all. Blount began to crack a few jokes along with this talk about knowing. The mute never smiled until several seconds after the funny remark had been made; then when the talk was gloomy again the smile still hung on his face a little too long. The fellow was downright uncanny. People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things nobody else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human. Jake Blount leaned across the table and the words came out as though a dam inside him had broken. Biff could not understand him any more. Blount’s tongue was so heavy with drink and he talked at such a violent pace that the sounds were all shaken up together. Biff wondered where he would go when Alice turned him out of the place. And in the morning she would do it, too--like she said. Biff yawned wanly, patting his open mouth with his fingertips until his jaw had relaxed. It was almost three o’clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night The mute was patient. He had been listening to Blount for almost an hour. Now he began to look at the clock occasionally. Blount did not notice this and went on without a pause. At last he stopped a to roll a cigarette, and then the mute nodded his head in the direction of the clock, smiled in that hidden way of his, and got up from the table. His hands stayed stuffed in his pockets as always. He went out quickly. Blount was so drunk that he did not know what had happened. He had never even caught on to the fact that the mute made no answers. He began to look around the place with his mouth open and his eyes rolling and fuddled. A red vein stood out on his forehead and he began to hit the table angrily with his fists. His bout could not last much longer now.

‘Come on over,’ Biff said kindly. ‘Your friend has gone.’ The fellow was still hunting for Singer. He had never seemed really drunk like that before. He had an ugly look. ‘I have something for you over here and I want to speak with you a minute,’ Biff coaxed. Blount pulled himself up from the table and walked with big, loose steps toward the street again. Biff leaned against the wall. In and out-in and out. After all, it was none of his business. The room was very empty and quiet. The minutes lingered. Wearily he let his head sag forward. All motion seemed slowly to be leaving the room. The counter, faces, the booths and tables, the radio in the corner, whirring fans on the ceiling--all seemed to become very faint and still. He must have dozed. A hand was shaking his elbow. His wits came back to him slowly and he looked up to see what was wanted.