Ginny Gall полностью

Delvin felt a running smoothness all along his skin, a smoothness that turned to an ache. But he didn’t want to do anything about it. Little worm of despair angling up through his body from a place that hardly existed. I would do. . , he thought, but no, he wouldn’t. A crease in his heart like a gouge in rock. Hot tallow seeping in. Hotter and hotter. Tears in his eyes. Tears running down his face. His eyes burning. It was old and had wandered through him all his life — this feeling now. Lonely and helpless and desperate. He pushed up, rose through creaking knees and an unlimberness like a bent branch and stumbled a tiny bit, just an edge of body striking the man, the locuter Frank, but not enough to remark on, and lurched a step or two out into the open space of the car and stood there looking at the door that was a completed picture of darkness. In the distance, low down, a star like a bit of fluff, winking out.

“Airplanes,” Mr. Rome said, his voice soft and frail. “They dropped firebombs on us. Like we was the enemy.”

“This world is full of murder and craziness,” Frank said.

Delvin headed down the car. He’d had enough of these stories for now. You heard them everywhere, a low people telling tales against the ones who held them down. He felt something fade and tremble in him as he walked toward the white men. Three of them were sitting in the open doorway. He stood near them looking out. The train rolled past fields that were glossed under the light of a bruised half moon, the only light for miles. Except for one lamp burning far out in a house across the cotton fields. Some sharecropper up late tending to a sick child maybe, worrying about his life. If you flew in a plane over this country, Delvin thought, you would be looking down into a world of blackness. Maybe we are going to rise up. But he knew that wouldn’t happen.

Just then, down among the card players, somebody raised a shout. A shout and a sudden cry of outrage. Came sounds of struggle, very brief as if half secret, then a tunk and a thin, brittle, cracking sound, followed by a strange meek tiny despairing yelp. Trailed by sounds of whistling, of sighing, of muttering. The humped backs, dark shirts, the white arm raised like somebody signaling, and dust in the air, drifting like a pale yellow smoke. “Jesus, God,” somebody back there said in a big, rich, disappointed voice as the group bowed outwards and men stumbled to their feet, scooted on their butts backwards, and, flailing, rose halfway into the dark above them, half caterwheeling, jumping, getting out of the space occupied by trouble. Leaving what was left, what could wait on trouble now, what could take its time.

At the center of the new circle a man, loosened from his stays, ordinary otherwise, lay on his back not moving, and another man — a little, twitchy man — raised up on his knees, was held in a slump by three other men. The captured man struggled feebly.

“Look at what you done,” one of the men holding him said.

Delvin wanted to ask what it was though he could see well enough. He needed the confirmation of voices, but these were white men so he said nothing, only leaned closer to the men standing in the doorway.

“Shouldn’t a’cheated I guess,” one said.

“If that wo what it was,” said another, a man with a heavy shock of dark hair.

The cardplayers holding the man — this short and scrawny man now selected, man with a clean, frightened face smooth as a child’s (or somebody very old) — dragwalked him to the door, not even hesitating for those standing there to scramble out of the way, and in a smooth motion that looked almost practiced, threw the little man from the train. He didn’t cry out. His arms flailed as he disappeared into the rushing-by dark, but he made no sound.

The evictors didn’t even look out after the tossed man. They returned to the one lying on the floor, a man who hadn’t moved, bent briefly over him — someone going softly skeeter bite skeeter bite all the while — picked him up, carried the middle-sized, regular-looking man, who had a small white bald spot on the shiny dark crown of his head, to the now cleared doorway, and threw him out after the other.

Delvin stood at the side of the doorway looking after the ejected men, but he couldn’t see them. The right of way was grown up in marsh grass and cattails. The moon was westering. To the north tatters of clean white cloud looked like the exhaust of machines invisible to the human eye. He shuddered, and felt the shudder traveling through his body. The wispy clouds had been rubbed into the night. Without realizing it he’d sailed out into a country where he was all by himself again; nobody to approach and linger with, waiting out a rain, say, or eating blackberries out of a cap.