Ginny Gall полностью

“Idn’t that the truth,” Delvin said and they both looked away and laughed.

He walked out in the backyard and peered up at the second-story windows. They were lit softly with red or green or blue lights, some with a rich yellow that laid dim oblongs of light on the grass. Maybe the red one was hers. He stepped into the red rectangle that was more black than red and stood in it. He tried to put aside Kattie’s new business, but he couldn’t help but picture it. It wasn’t just the booting itself that got to him, it was the mechanics of it, the body angles and the wrenches and the wringing and the slop-overs and the beads of sweat and the stickiness in your mouth — he saw too much in his mind. Some other — some white man’s greasy face — naw, it was worse for it to be a colored man’s — panting his liquor breath into hers. He didn’t mind the business, not generally; it was his mother’s. . and where was she?

He looked up at the sky. Clouds at night. He loved clouds at night. And electric lights in daytime; he loved those too. And him lying on his bed with the shades pulled reading a book. Mr. O had put in another butterscotch leather chair in his bedroom and at night they sat on two sides of the little marble-topped table reading their books. Shakespeare and Milton (Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained) for Mr. O, Shakespeare and Conrad for him, or the explorer books he had begun to prefer, Arctic adventures, dog teams, adventurers stranded on shelves of blue ice.

Just then a flower — a dark carnation, possibly red — sailed by his ear. He looked up to see Kattie standing in an upstairs window. She hissed at him.

“Whoo, you boy, go get me a glass of punch.”

Hearing this, his body turned to stone and as quickly turned back to flesh. But a changed, suffering, jellied flesh, wobbling on jelly feet. He couldn’t speak. When he could his voice squeaked in his mouth.

“Go on, boy,” Kattie said.

He stumbled across the yard into the kitchen and dipped a glass from the crock sitting under a piece of cheesecloth on the counter. The punch was dark red and smelled of wine. He touched the surface in the glass with his tongue. It tasted sharp and sweet, a little of cherries. He carried the glass up the back stairs and into the hall that was lit with widely spaced electric bulbs with square red paper shades covering them. A large negro woman in a maroon silk dress so dark it was almost black snoozed in a brocade chair against the wall. Kattie didn’t even tell him the room number; no, he forgot to ask; he’d just run off like a child. But he wasn’t a child. He had been with a woman — Miz Pauly, a widow he visited, and Eula Banks, a girl others had too, who gave easily because she liked it. None of these pay-as-you-go gals either. But never Kattie.

He knocked on the door he thought was hers, but the laughing voice that answered was somebody else’s. The next down he found her. Even the words Come in were spoken with an imperiousness he hadn’t heard before. But he understood where it came from. The first time Mr. O had let him drive the horses — down the alley and across the road onto the circus grounds — he had felt like a king. This was the same thing. But that didn’t stop it from hurting. One hurt piled on another tonight; piled on all the others, he thought, as something twisted inside him, something acidic and sour. He entered the room with a sneer on his face.

She lay alone amid the fouled bedclothes, wrapped in an old silk robe that belonged to Miss Ellereen. He recalled it from years ago. Yellow silk with pictures of seagulls and sailboats stamped on it. “My mother wore a robe like—” he started to say, but she stopped him with a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she said. A yellow robe Miss Ellereen had given to Cappie and then taken back when she saw how she looked in it, back when Miss Ellereen was still one of the girls. That was the story about his mother Coolmist had told him as they lay in a foundling bed on a hot summer night that smelled of the creosote the city oiled the dirt streets with. He remembered the smell of the creosote and the story and his Coolmist crying tears of frustration. A yellow robe with sailing boats on it. No one else was in the room with her, not a man, not Miss Ellereen, not the Ghost, not his mother.

He placed the glass on the little parson’s table by the bed; hesitated.

“You can go,” Kattie said.

She was wearing lip rouge and her cheeks were powdered the color of cornmeal.

“No,” she said, “stay.”

“What you want?”

“Stay a minute.”

She pulled her legs up under her robe, indicating for him to sit on the bed. He let himself gingerly down on the lumpy mattress. She canted her face and looked at him with a bovine expression that dissolved and was replaced by pique. But not before he caught in her eyes the strangling disappointment and lonesomeness. Something in him that he hadn’t even paid attention to, something hard and ready to strike, whirled slowly.