Without Prejudice (13 page)

Duval nodded.

She unplugged the iron, setting it upright on the board, then untied her apron. ‘Shit,’ she said, which was very rare. Bobby had only heard her swear like that when he’d scared her once, jumping out of the linen closet down the hall, shouting
boo
. Now she grabbed a broom and started towards the door, her jaw set in determination. ‘They still out there?’

‘They’re gone, Vanetta,’ said Bobby. ‘They ran away.’

She put the broom against the wall. ‘You sure they didn’t hurt you?’

‘One of them slapped me up side the head,’ said Duval. ‘But I’m all right. They was gonna hurt Bobby, but he hit one of them with the bat.’ He pointed to
Floyd Robinson,
lying on the kitchen table. ‘Bobby was brave. He stuck up for me.’

Bobby didn’t say a word. He knew he had been brave by accident.

That evening when Vanetta said goodnight, she hugged Bobby fiercely. ‘That’s for being brave,’ she said. ‘You two just like Damon and Pythias.’

‘Who?’ he asked, certain it must be people from the Bible. It almost always was.

‘Friends who helped each other when they needed it.’

Duval appeared with his coat on. ‘Come on, baby,’ she said affectionately, and turned to Bobby. ‘And goodnight, my other baby. Though you two is getting too big to call you babies any more. You be fine young men quicker than I can spit.’

After this Bobby felt even closer to Duval, though he remained embarrassed that his friend thought he had been heroic. They still played whiffle ball in the back, though Bobby was nervous the first few times, and kept a bat within reach, even when it was his turn to pitch. The safety of their play had been lost, and now when he climbed the maple to fetch the ball, he was reluctant to describe the Secret Garden. When Duval insisted, he would give only the most perfunctory account – ‘No new flowers, the fountain’s not got much pressure today.’ Somehow the fantasy had lost all its allure, especially since Duval seemed so unalterably gullible.

Though in other respects, Duval was more worldly than Bobby. Once a month or so Vanetta’s older sister Trudy would come to the apartment, usually when Vanetta had fallen too far behind in the ironing to get through it all without help. She was as grumpy as Vanetta was cheerful, but Bobby liked her just the same. If you talked baseball her mood would lighten, and when he mentioned Hoyt Wilhelm, the ancient relief pitcher who seemed old enough to be Bobby’s grandfather, the sour expression on her face would change to a grin, and she’d give a snorting laugh. ‘That ol’ Wilhoun,’ she’d say, ‘ain’t he something?’

But Trudy wasn’t as nice to Duval. ‘Why’s she always mad at you?’ Bobby asked him one day.

‘She mad at the world,’ said Duval, with unexpected sageness. ‘She black as coal and ugly with it. There ain’t no man in her life.’

‘There ain’t no man in Vanetta’s either.’

Duval looked at him a little scornfully. ‘Vanetta been married twice. Vanetta can have a man quicker than you can whistle. Look at her – she got big titties, and a pretty face. That’s all it takes, man.’

When it came to the facts of life, Duval for all his gawkiness knew more than he did. Bobby’s own knowledge was theoretical and skewed; his father had taken him aside and told him a long story about trout, and eggs, and sperm, which meant for a long time he imagined sexual intercourse to be two adults swimming oddly together. Sex was something that lay across a big divide for Bobby, the way Michigan was on the other side of the lake or England across the ocean. For Duval it seemed closer to home.

‘You ever seen your sister nekked?’ Duval asked one day.

‘What?’

‘You know.
Naked
.’ He exaggerated the long ‘a’, mimicking the way Bobby would have said it.

Bobby was confounded by the question. No, he guessed he hadn’t – at least, not for several years. Lily was punctilious that way. She dressed with her door firmly closed, made it clear that the bathroom was a strictly no-go zone while she was in the bath – everyone else took showers. But his sister’s anatomy was not a topic he wanted to discuss.

Duval took no notice. ‘Bet she got nice titties.’

‘Come on,’ Bobby said, disturbed rather than annoyed. He wished Duval would shut up, though he couldn’t have said why. It wasn’t as if he felt obliged to protect his sister’s honour.

Yet Duval seemed fascinated with Lily, to Bobby’s bafflement – it was as if Lily’s indifference was a challenge to Duval. Bobby couldn’t see any other way to explain his friend’s interest in someone who wasn’t remotely interested in him.

Then one afternoon Lily came into the back bedroom, where he and Duval were setting up the blanket for a game of soldiers. ‘Have you been going through my drawers?’ she demanded of Bobby.

‘No,’ said Bobby, bewildered. Why would he bother doing that?

‘Are you sure?’ she said insistently, in what Mike called her Little Madam voice.

‘Yes, why?’

‘Well, somebody has, because my . . . my clothes are all messed up.’

When she left, trouncing along the hallway to her room, he looked at Duval and shrugged, as if to say his sister was nuts. But Duval was smiling, as if he had some information he was keeping to himself.

‘What is it?’ Bobby asked. Duval didn’t usually act like this; Duval was normally an open book. ‘Go on, tell me.’

But he wouldn’t, and it was only the next morning when Bobby opened his drawer to take out new underwear that he saw what Duval had done. Underneath the pile of socks on the right side something white protruded; when Bobby tugged at it and pulled it out he found himself holding three pairs of his sister’s panties. Duval must have taken them out of her drawer. But why? It wasn’t funny, it just seemed weird. That afternoon when Lily was still at school Bobby returned them, taking pains to leave the other contents of the drawer undisturbed.

Lily must have not complained to his father or Merrill, because there was no comeback. But a week later she came back to his room again, fuming. ‘Did you put this in my bed?’ And she threw a magazine at him.

He looked at it with amazement. It was an old copy of
Playboy,
dog-eared and beat-up. He’d never seen a copy up close – when he peeked furtively at the men’s magazines in Sarnat’s, Mr Odess would always cough loudly until Bobby stopped looking.

This time Lily must have talked, for that evening his father came back to his bedroom after supper, while he lay on his bed watching television. ‘What is this about
Playboy
magazine?’ his father asked, switching off the set.

He shrugged, avoiding his father’s eye. It was a crucial moment; for years he would have told his father what had happened immediately, without hesitation and truthfully. But life had changed since the arrival of Merrill. He knew he still had his father’s love, but he no longer felt he had his attention. There was no one else to explain the situation to: Lily would hang Duval out to dry without a second’s thought; Mike would have listened, even been sympathetic, but there was nothing he could do to help. And Vanetta, usually the one emotional certainty, was the person he most wanted to protect from the truth.

‘It was just a joke.’

‘Your joke, or Duval’s?’

‘Just me. Duval had nothing to do with it.’

‘Where did you get the magazine?’

‘I found it at school. In the playground.’

His father eyed him suspiciously, but Bobby looked him directly in the eye – his father always claimed liars didn’t do that. ‘Well,’ said his father at last, ‘it wasn’t a very funny joke. I want you to apologise to your sister, and not do it again.’ His voice softened. ‘Girls get a certain age, Bobby, and well, you know, lots is going on with them, and they get very private about things.’ He was sounding resoundingly inarticulate, which meant his father really didn’t know what to say. And at least he hadn’t blamed Duval.

He felt almost sorry for his father, he had been so easy to fool – or that is what Bobby thought at first, though he was perturbed to hear Merrill talking about it with his father in the living room. Merrill sounded ‘concerned’ – almost her favourite word, which Bobby was learning meant she was on the warpath. He heard his father say, ‘I’ll speak to Vanetta.’

The next week Duval only came on one afternoon to the apartment. When he asked Vanetta where Duval was, she didn’t give him an answer – ‘He’s busy today,’ she said on both days he asked. When he did come, Vanetta shooed them both outside right away, and when they came in later he heard her tell Duval to stay in the back bedroom with Bobby. ‘Don’t you be goin’ where you don’t belong,’ she said fiercely.

So his father must have said something to Vanetta, which meant he had seen through Bobby’s lie. Bobby felt mortified on his friend’s behalf – what was such a big deal about a pair of panties and a magazine? He wanted to talk to his father about it, but didn’t want to be confronted by his earlier lie. While he tried to get up the courage to approach Johnny, events overtook his plans.

‘Baby,’ said Vanetta the following Monday as, Duval-less, she met him across from Steinways. ‘I got some bad news.’

He felt panicked. ‘You’re not leaving, are you?’ he asked. Maybe Merrill had persuaded his father to let Vanetta go.

‘No, Bobby, I ain’t goin’ nowhere. Don’t you worry about that. But Duval’s not coming to see us any more.’

‘Because of Lily?’ He started to feel outrage.

‘It’s nothing to do with Lily. It’s Aurelia; she’s moved to St Louis, and Duval’s gone with her.’ She shook her head unhappily.

‘He didn’t even say goodbye,’ Bobby said as the news sunk in. Then he burst into tears.

When Vanetta hugged him Bobby realised she was crying too. ‘He said to tell you goodbye, baby. He says y’all to look after the Secret Garden while he’s away.’ She stood back, wiping her own eyes. ‘He’ll be back to visit. He got to come see his grandmother, now don’t he? You’ll see him, don’t worry.’

Later that day, just before supper, Vanetta told his father the news.

He said, ‘I hope she can kick this thing, V,’ and Bobby knew they were talking about Aurelia.

‘I just don’t know,’ said Vanetta, and she did not sound optimistic. ‘I’m worried about Duval, but I didn’t think I could try and take a boy from his mother.’

‘Of course not,’ said his father. Why not? wondered Bobby. Aurelia didn’t seem like much of a mother.

For the first six weeks Bobby was bereft at the departure of his friend. He knew Vanetta felt the same, but by mutual pact they didn’t talk about Duval. Life intervened with other things to worry about: Vanetta’s brother Alvin got real sick, and she was anxious, and on edge – Bobby had never seen her so snappy before. When summer arrived they went to Michigan for a month, where Duval was never part of his life anyhow, and when the school year started Bobby found himself going down the block to see Eric again, and discovering he liked basketball almost as much as baseball.

As Vanetta had promised, Duval came back to visit, and in the following year Bobby saw him three times. But these visits were awkward, as if they each sensed a split between them greater than mere geography. On Duval’s first visit, they played a desultory game of whiffle ball, seizing the excuse of a drizzle that would never have stopped them before to go inside. The next time they didn’t even pretend to play ball, but watched TV together instead. On the last visit they stayed in the kitchen, talking more to Vanetta than to each other.

After that he had only indirect news of his old friend, though once it proved memorable. One day he came home – unaccompanied, since his father said he no longer needed a chaperone – and found Vanetta very excited. She told him there had been a fire in an apartment next to Duval’s church in St Louis. Duval had saved a woman’s baby, braving flames and getting badly burned. She proudly showed Bobby a clipping from the St Louis paper, which had a picture of Duval receiving an award from the Chief of the St Louis Fire Department. Bobby noticed how tall Duval looked, a good head higher than the white fire chief, but the face was the same: the shy smile and the slightly protruding teeth, the ugly glasses and the dark eyes. He was a real hero, thought Bobby.

Lily made appreciative noises when Vanetta showed her the picture, but with Bobby she was contemptuous. ‘I don’t care what he’s done. He’s still a creep in my book.’

Sometimes Bobby still played in the back yard, but now it was by himself, in the shallow alleyway by the fire escape. He was throwing a tennis ball against the wall one day when he became aware that he had company.

This time there were just two of them, the runt and Mule. The runt went to the end of the alleyway leading to the apartment, while Mule blocked the way out through the gate.

‘What do you want?’ asked Bobby, trying to sound nonchalant, but he knew his voice was shaky. He threw the tennis ball high against the wall. As he moved forward to catch it two arms reached out and grabbed the ball. Mule laughed, holding the ball high above his head.

‘Give it back,’ said Bobby. The big boy held one arm out, holding the ball, but when Bobby reached for it Mule flipped it underhand to the runt, who had reappeared. He let the ball fall to the pavement, where it dribbled slowly onto the grass. Then he turned menacingly towards Bobby.