Delvin walked the streets. He felt like a sailor home from a long voyage. He still had the feeling that he was being followed. Don’t be crazy, he said to himself, but he couldn’t completely shake it. At the picture show the couples seemed huddled together in fright. Pedestrians looked lost. Just past the lights of a store he stopped to look back for his trailer, his devotee. There was no one. He was touched by how shabby the buildings were — the Empire office building with its entablatures and foamy cornices, the Western States building with its red brick front and tiny windows that caught the west-tending, falsely glamorous sunlight. The courthouse looked like something left over from the worst of Roman times, a building no one thought enough of even to tear down. Goldman’s offered anoraks and Maine jackets and low-priced formal wear. Dark stains on the mock Greek front of the Mountaineer Bank. The Peacock Hotel with its jowly stone face and its gazebos set like little guardhouses on the corners at the top of its six stories seemed to brood. He noted familiar trees. Cracked buckeyes and thick-waisted poplars and hickories that looked bitter and worn by life. He had always loved city bushes and patches of urban grass and flowers in window boxes and as he walked he recalled these, mostly gone now except for a big patch of red-throated nandina bushes over on Story street planted by the wife of the owner of Holston Hardware to decorate a blank gray brick wall, and pittisporum at Mott’s, Mrs. Combine’s mock banana bushes. He looked in on still-vacant lots spotted with pokeweed and goat sorrel and stopped to gather seeds from bolted morning glories in a fence on Governor Piddle street, where the Munger house, a large building with peeling french doors and concrete vases stuffed with ragged azaleas, had been torn down to put up a center for state culture. He noted broken walls and bellied chicken wire fences, alleys where old men propped themselves against stacked crates, splashing their water on the unwashed bricks. People were living out in the open now, in tents and board shacks and residing in crannies behind buildings and tucked into holes in embankments and under the bridge down on Custer where the street dipped low and made a pond on the rainiest days and down by the river where the muddy water foamed against the pilings of the Converse Bridge. Along a yellow wall with the words CHESTER APPLIANCES written in black letters on it, white men lined up. What were they waiting for? Tractor wheels propped in a row against a wall behind Puckett Machine Shop. Broken metal parts and black, oily ground and a big tub used to cool off the hotwork. He breathed in the rich, heavy, fluid stink of burning metal and thought he too was becoming a man like the other men walking the streets, peering into alleys and vacant lots. In the yard of Manger Auto Repair skeletal cars rested, waiting for armorers to refit them. He preferred — no, not preferred, felt a wobbly, living nostalgia for — the old wagons, returning to the city in force now, horses and mules pulling milk carts and Murphy and Studebaker wagons and buckboards piled with farm produce and, layered under gunny sacks and crushed ice, seafood hauled up by night train from the Gulf. At the ice plant big cloudy blocks coughed out of the chute and were grabbed by shirtless men with tongs and swung onto the back of Carson wagons and stacked in trucks that had ISSOM ICE COMPANY written in gold on their green sides. Here too men hung around, sucking ice slivers, waiting for something to happen. Pointless lines of men, men in bunches and listless groups, solitary men picking shreds of tobacco from their teeth, idlers, worriers, cashed-out men, strong men grown weak and sluggish, skeezing into bars and restaurant doorways. He marked the tremor of a bottom lip, the troubled brow, the picked-at sore on the face of a man reading a newspaper folded to a dozen lines of type; noted the africano lady who looked familiar — but he wasn’t quite able to place — with a cast in her left eye that gave her a cockeyed aspect that didn’t interfere with the small eager smile she directed toward the Embers Supper Club on Mareton Avenue; traced the harried looks, the looks of displacement and earnest willingness to do anything that might engender money or kindness or love or simply a few moments without being shamed or hit; caught the brokenhearted, the outright weepers, with or without handkerchiefs; scoped the cornered, the effusively lying, the desperate making wild claims. He marked the practiced liars, the hard-pressed guilty, the twitching and fluttery humiliated, the dazed, the obnoxious attempting to pass themselves off as simply loud, the ones with stone faces that hid nothing really, checked the self-mocking and envious. He studied the faces swollen by beatings or tears or genetic malformations, birthmarks and such; angled the ones battered into cripples, or the natural cripples, the deaf and dumb, the palsied, the blind, including the blind seller of peanuts, Willie Perkins, still sitting in his little cupped tractor seat by his stand over on Montgomery street; and Ethel Beck, great beauty of the east side, blinded at age eight by an overdose of wood alcohol supplied by her father, still tapping along — more rapping than tapping — with her bamboo cane painted white. He observed the pinched places in people’s cheeks, their noses pointed up sniffing for a change in the weather; considered women barely able to hold back screams, women raging at the mouths of alleys, old ladies pressing their backs against brick walls, mothers crying, laughing, scolding children, harlots with melted ice cream dripping from a paper cup onto stone steps, women without stockings, women with — and men: men resting, waiting, men telling uneasy stories, men shouting into barrels, picking up pennies from the street, men hitting horses, men shaving in alleys, spitting into their hands. . men waiting for what wasn’t coming. . or what was. .
