Dark Don't Catch Me (11 page)

“I'm sorry, sir.”

She smiles again and goes back down the aisle, and Millard glances at the man. His face is all red; poor sucker, Millard thinks. Then, seeing the pillow squeezed in the pocket of the seat in front of him, Millard grabs it.

“Here” he says, pushing it at the man.

The man looks startled. “What the hell is this!” he bellows indignantly.

“For your lap,” Millard answers. “To put your tray on when it comes.” He smiles at the man. “It'll make it easier for you.”

For a moment the man stares at Millard; his eyes derogatory. Millard looks back at him, puzzled.

Then in a swift and violent movement of his big body, the man sweeps the pillow to the floor and kicks it over in front of Millard's feet. And in some fast and hotly trapped flash of thinking, Millard's mind says, You big fat sloppy jew-kike; you goddam yid, you — you — before words stop coming to his brain. The hands that offered the man the pillow slide under Millard, and he sits on them numbly, turning his head toward a sky that is suddenly unbelievably all white.

L
ATE
that afternoon, driving back from the site of one of the captured stills, Colonel Pirkle half-consciously composes the lead he intends to use in his write-up of the bootleg crackdown for the
Herald:
This morning the country jail yard in Paradise looked as if the sheriff had gone into the used car and taxi business….

It did too. There were six taxicabs, two trucks, and five private cars lined up in the yard. Chuckling a little as he remembers the scene, Colonel nonetheless stays staunch in his belief that there has been altogether too much laxity on the part of the courts in the moonshine drive. Despite the fact that the law did manage to confiscate and impound the machines transporting the “shine,” and to arrest fifteen men and one woman involved in selling, transporting and possessing it, Colonel, as well as everyone in Paradise, knows that before the ink is dry on the bonds posted the defendants will be back in business. That is one reason he had driven out to see the still; to check first-hand on how effectively the agent had destroyed it, and to confirm his conviction that the agents had done a thorough job, and that it was not they who were responsible for the perpetual recurrence of bootlegging in the county, but some of Paradise's own law-enforcing citizens. That really made Colonel angry.

Colonel is a medium-sized, solid-looking man in his early forties; a man who keeps Horace Greley's quotation about the function of a newspaper Scotch-taped to his desk blotter:

Beside this there is a picture of Dix and Suzie taken outside the Methodist Church right after Joh had married them; a photograph of Ada taken the very afternoon she had surprised him by coming down from Athens and announcing she'd marry him if they'd elope immediately.

Resting on top of the blotter is one of Dickie's baby shoes, which Colonel had sent off to Atlanta to have dipped in bronze and made into an ashtray….

Colonel drives slowly in the dusk, drinking in the sights and smells of the country surrounding Paradise, seeing not the drab and dreary look of the landscape as a whole, with its red dusty roads and unpainted shacks, from which television antennaes protrude, its gray houses with overgrown lawns where broken rockers rest to be rained on, and its worn-out barren poor look. Colonel sees singular things that spell home to him, and the approach of late fall — dying goldenrod, and sycamore leaves dancing in the dust a car makes, hay stacked in fields, cotton in fields and beside it the pickers who stay late still bent over the crops, and on the road now and then a truck filled with the cotton going to be ginned. At the crossroads he sees Hooper's place, and turning off into town, he sees the colored school up on the hill.

Whenever he sees that school, he becomes irritated with young Dix for Dix's support of Senator Henderson. Colonel and Dix don't disagree on very many issues, but on this one they do. What surprises Colonel about it is that Dix has been back and forth to the colored school a few dozen times — even written up an interview with the James girl for the
Herald;
and made any number of speeches at the P.T.A. and Masons about the loathsome conditions.

“It's going to stay that way as long as we got a fellow like Fred Henderson in,” Colonel had argued with Dix. “Now Fred's a nice fellow, mind — I don't have a thing against him. But he's too busy worrying about the international situation. He's putting fires out in houses across the street and
his own
house is on fire, Dix. You know the Nigraw school's a filth pot!”

Dix said, “Sellers won't do it any faster, Dad. The Negro school is up to us locally.”

“There's where you're wrong, Dix,” Coloned had insisted. “Now you know damn well there's no one more in favor of states rights than Governor Tom Sellers. He speaks right out against segregation too! Fred don't do that! No siree, Dix. Sellers will get things done in our state. He knows goddam well that if we don't get to providing equal rights around here, we're gonna have those Nigraws going to school right alongside the whites. And, Dix, that just ain't fair to the Nigraws. It'd give ‘em all inferiority complexes, and stir up a whole whale of trouble. Now you know that!”

• • •

The colored school is a two-room shack set on the hill; heated in the cool months by two black potbellied stoves. Twenty-two years ago, in a flush of public enthusiasm, it was painted bright red, but since that time the weather has eaten away at the paint and on into the wood. Five years ago a citizens emergency committee headed by Bill Ficklin erected a new outhouse for the girls, because theirs had been swept away in a wind storm and they were using the same one as the boys.

“I don't see what the hell difference it makes,” Doc Sell had argued at the town meeting when the proposal came up. “Them niggers ain't shy about doing it in front of each other. They ain't like us.”

Joh Greene had cinched the proposal by saying, “But we got to provide them with the chance to be like us. If they can't, they can't, but we got to give them equal chance. So I say put the outhouse in. If it's never used, no one can say it's because it isn't there to be used!”

In his editorial supporting the outhouse proposal, Colonel had written: “It's a step in the right direction, and there are still bigger steps to be taken. The colored school in Paradise stands up there on that neglected hill like a naked beggar-hag!” That's why the school is called the Naked Hag.

“Well, anyhow,” Doc Sell had laughed when he read it, “can't say that's a hag without a pot to pee in.”

Driving down East Street with its rows of comfortable frame houses, with their lawns and dying flower beds looking bleak after the summer's bloom, Colonel parks in front of his own two-story yellow frame house. As he goes up the sidewalk he notes with some irritation that the lights are on in every room; and remembers Ada's insistence last month, “I don't know how the electric bill grew to that size, Pirk. Must be the meter's off kilter!”

Opening the door, tossing his cap on the straight-back chair in the hallway, Colonel calls, “Dix?”

He listens for an answer. Then he calls, “Ada?”

Walking back through the hallway and into the kitchen he sees Cindy, the maid, holding Dickie on her lap as she spoons strained spinach into his mouth.

“Hello, Cindy,” he says, walking over, removing his handkerchief from his pocket and bending to rub off a drool of the liquid from the baby's chin. “Hi yah, Dickie-bird. Hey, boo! You're drooling!”

“Ain't gonna do no good whiping it off, Mr. Pirkle, sir. He just gonna drool more.”

Cindy is a tall, skinny Negro in her twenties, a pretty, lazy-looking girl with a beanpole shape and an almost too placid disposition. Often her complacency irritates Colonel, as it does now when she answers his question: “Cindy, where's Mrs. Pirkle?”

“I guess she's upstairs.”

“What do you mean, you guess, Cindy? Is she or isn't she?” “Was the last time I looked, Mr. Colonel.” “Did she tell you to feed Dickie?”

“I reckon I don't have to be told no more,” Cindy answers, heaving a long sigh. “Dix isn't home?”

“No, sir, Mr. Colonel. He ain't come in all afternoon.” “Well, what are all the lights doing on?” Colonel snaps impatiently.

“I guess they was left on, Mr. Colonel.”

“Well, I guess they'd better be left off, Cindy! I'm not a millionaire who can afford to be paying thirty-dollar light bills every month.”

“Yes sir.”

“When there's no one in the room, the lights should be out.” “Yes sir, Mr. Colonel.”

“I'll see you at bath time, Dickie-bird,” Colonel says to the baby. “I'll bathe him tonight, Cindy.”

He leaves the kitchen and starts up the spiral staircase, portraits of his grandfather, great-grandfather, and their wives, staring at him from the wall, along with the framed letters from John Howard Paine and John Paul Jones. Outside the door of his and Ada's bedroom, he waits a moment to still his anger. He realizes he is really angry over what he anticipates, and not simply over the fact of the lights being on all over the house and Cindy's vague responses. Once inside the room, he sees he is justified in his anger — what he anticipated is so.

• • •

Ada sits at her vanity in her slip, before the large leather-framed photograph of Dix, by the mirror. She has a glass in her hand but quickly pushes it under the green taffeta skirt of the dressing table when she sees him come in. She gets up unsteadily, trying to mask her consternation in a sudden vivaciousness.

“Oh, are you home, Pirk? I just got in and I was going to dress and — ” She sways toward him, and Colonel, conscious of her breath, draws away with an almost unintentional gesture of distaste.

“What's come over you, Pirk? You'd think something was wrong with me, the way you're acting.”

“Ada, you know I try to understand but I can't see why you have to — ”

Ada looks at him with that specious expression, lips pursed slightly, eyebrow raised, eyes falsely surprised, and her choked voice reflects injured dignity. “Well, really, Pirk, are you accusing me of drinking? You know I hardly ever touch liquor. But tonight I thought I'd just have a glass of wine — I was so tired today that I thought it would help me relax. And it did.”

“Ada …”

She turns back to the vanity, lifts the top of the powder box and begins to powder her nose with exaggerated care. She hiccups loudly and clamps her hand over her mouth.

“I ate asparagus this noon for lunch,” she laughs. “Sparrow grass, as Cindy always says. It never agrees with me. I was just going down to feed Dickie. Dix has been gone the whole afternoon. I wonder where he is.” She stands up cautiously. “I hope he'll come along to the barbecue. Vivie wants him to real bad. She asked special that he come.”

“Dickie's being fed, Ada. You stay up here. I'll bathe him.”

“That's my job. He's
my
grandson, after all.”

“He's ours. I'll bathe him tonight.”

“Ours, ours, ours,” she says in a sing-song tone. “No, really, Pirk, you
will
make a scene if you can, won't you? Now I'm just going right on down and — ”

“Please,” Colonel says.

“Leave me alone. I'm very relaxed. I was just going down to feed Dickie.” “Listen to me.”

She stumbles toward the door, but Colonel catches her by the arm. “I don't want Cindy to see you like this. Be reasonable, Ada. Do you want it all over town?”

“What do you mean by that?” Ada maneuvers out of his grasp, her voice becoming louder and tinged with hysteria. “Because I have one glass of wine or maybe two you're implying that I'm drunk. Me, drunk! I don't drink bourbon. You know as well as I do that you're the one who drinks bourbon in this family. I had two glasses of wine and I don't see anything wrong in that.”

Colonel frowns; then his voice softens. He runs his hand along her bare arm. “Look, Ada, you get some rest, hmm? You've had a busy day. Now you rest yourself up and we'll see about whether we want to go to the barbecue or not, hmm?”

“Dix is invited. Vivie wants him to come real bad. She asked special.” Ada sits down on the bed where Colonel steers her. “I worry about Dix and where he goes nights. If Suzie were only alive, I wouldn't have to worry. I worry about Dix.”

“That's a good girl,” Colonel says. “You get some rest.”

“Suzie used to try and boss Dix like she was his mother or something instead of me, but I worry about Dix now. He alienates himself, doesn't he?”

“You get some rest, Ada, honey, there's a good girl.” Gently Colonel pushes her head back on the pillow of the twin bed, pulls her feet out straight, and covers her with the comforter at the foot of the bed. “I'll be back up soon, Ada, honey. You rest.”

When she shuts her eyes he knows she will sleep, and quickly, so as not to disturb her, he slips out the door.

On his way back down the stairs, Colonel wondered again how this problem had come upon his house. During the war years when Ada and he, and Dix, who was no more than a boy then, were traveling from one base to the next, both Colonel and Ada had downed more liquor than was their custom. Restored to civilian life, things quieted down and became as they were before in Paradise when he and Ada drank at parties. Sometimes, at a barbecue or on a special occasion they might even drink too much. But so did most people. It was only after Dix married Suzie that Colonel noticed Ada was getting high more and more often.

For a short while after Suzie's death, she stopped abruptly; and seemed her old self again, but just as abruptly some six or seven months back, she resumed the habit.