Dark Don't Catch Me (7 page)

“Don't you, Vivs?”

“Oh, he's all right, Storey.”

“All right? You ought to be proud! He's going to be mighty big some day. You'll see!”

“Yes sir, he mentioned your name several times.”

She liked Storey Bailey in a different way from the way she liked Thad. In Paradise, Thad was the county promise; got along with everyone, was considered bright and aggressive and good. He was a serious sort, made serious, some said, when his twin sister died; and he was more mature, harder — Vivian Hooper always thought — to talk to, maybe because of his age. But Storey was the kind of boy she'd sit with with her hair done up in curlers, and laugh and talk with him without even thinking about it. And Storey was shy in some ways in which Thad Hooper was more reserved than shy. Thad Hooper had principles; while Storey just seemed to have pent-up emotions that he was scared to let loose….

How they ever got out to Mike Fairchild's place that night, both Storey and Vivie remember in separate ways. Storey has long since put it out of his mind; but if it were recalled to him, he would remember that Vivs made the remark in the car.

“Storey, you know what I hear? I hear out at Mike Fair-child's you can buy moonshine and soda, and sit right there and drink it.”

And Vivian Hooper remembers it as Storey saying:

“Did you ever have any moonshine before? Oh, I suppose Thad's introduced you to that long ago.”

And herself answering, “Naw, gaw, Storey — you don't know Thad well. He wouldn't touch it. Since his sister's death he's vowed … I guess he's right, isn't he?”

“Oh, a little won't hurt anyone, Vivs.”

No matter how each one remembers it, the fact stays they went to Mike's and drank glass after glass; until they were giggling up a storm; and Storey, as Vivie remembers it; and Vivie, as Storey remembers it —

Said: “We better go out in the car and sit in the fresh air a bit, and get ourselves back to normal before we drive on into town.”

As they both remember it they just got to kissing each other out in the car, lightly at first, laughing about it; and then after a while she was telling Storey: “No farther than that, Storey! I never let anyone do this. Gaw, Storey!”

Then, as Storey remembers it, Storey broke away before they had gone all the way; and as Vivie remembers it Vivie pushed Storey away when she heard a zipper unzip. But as they both remember it, they stopped; said seriously to one another that what had happened was awful and neither one's fault; and Storey said he would step inside Mike's for just a minute, and she should fix herself there in the car; and he would be back, in a minute and drive her on home the way he should have, the way he'd promised Thad to begin with….

Inside Mike's, Storey went into the men's room; leaning dizzily against the sink there, shaken and sorry as he thought about Thad, but wildly excited at the thought of the girl waiting out in the car; he stood remembering her gasps and moans of joy as his hands explored her. He remembered her body moving in that strange rhythm of passion he had never recognized in any other woman but the one in Mary Jane Frances Alexander's establishment, where he and some of the other seniors had gone the night of graduation from Hoschton High; and he had felt himself torn terribly between a loyalty to Thad and an immense and tender emotion toward Vivs, who had given him the gift of her response. He stood pondering this new plight for a long time, unable to find any solution, but staying there in fear and some uncertain glory. Just as he was leaving the men's room, Vivs got out of the car, worried at his absence, to come into Mike's and get him.

Storey was sober by then; sober and unnerved; and when he passed by Mike and Mike said, “How about it, Bailey? Want a shot for the road?” Storey summoned up some false tone of bravado and laughingly shouted, “Hell, I can get
two
fingers in!”

And that was what Vivie heard when she opened Mike's door. She heard it and was horrified to think she knew what Storey Bailey was referring to. She slammed shut the door with a ringing bang and ran crying to the car.

“Two fingers it is!” Mike said, pushing the glass toward Storey.

And Storey, staring toward the door where a second before he had seen Viv, murmured, “Now, what the dickens?” drank his corn down in a gulp and took after her.

“You're filthy!” she said the instant he entered the car, giving him no explanation for her wrath. “You're rotten clear through, Storey Bailey!”

Storey could find no reason for her to turn on him in that way, save for the fact during the interval they were separated she had thought over what had happened and regretted it and then decided to blame it on him.

He said: “It's not me that's filthy or rotten! Oh, Christ, didn't I see you squirming like some bitch all hot, didn't I!” He was furious with her for turning the incident that had thrilled him into something evil.

“Rotten, filthy, rotten!” she had wept.

And Storey, seething now: “All I feel sorry for is Thad, who doesn't know you got a whore's body. All I care is to get you home and out of my car!”

So that neither ever understood the other or what had happened between them; but they rode each hating the other for what each one imagined the other had made of the affair.

And Storey, on the way back down Route 109, stopped, got out and vomited, while she cried the whole time, neither one saying any more.

• • •

Whenever they met after that time — each avoiding that first meeting until ultimately it was inevitable in the smallness of Paradise — there was a noticeable strain upon them in the beginning, a too-conscious effort at civility, which though alleviated in time, nevertheless cropped up again at certain intervals through the years. Though Thad, who never knew, still said, “Storey's my best friend … Funny that he married Kate … Not that Kate isn't one wonderful woman, but she's so serene for Storey.”

And Vivian Hooper knows that only that night — parked outside Mike's with Storey — did she ever feel passion — not before or since. And she resents Storey for it, and for the fact that when she had gone in Mike's after him, before she had heard his remark, she had wanted to say, “Storey, I don't want to marry Thad. Gaw, Storey — I'm not sorry for what happened just then. It was something beautiful, and I could be me. I could be
me!”

• • •

“You look beautiful even tending a filling station, Vivs,” breaks through the wall of memory.

“Why thank you, Storey.” He has forgotten, she thinks to herself; he doesn't think about it as I do. “Why thank you.”

“Yeah, you do.”

Softly in the background the radio plays:

Even if Thad didn't make out better, Storey thinks as he looks across at her, he deserves Viv; Viv needs him too. Joh Greene often said: “Men and women got the devil in them, got the apple embedded right in them; and some fight the apple and some let the apple grow bigger and bigger until it's bigger than them. And every man and woman knows what they're doing about their own apples; and nobody has to tell them that. And I say, you man — letting the apple grow, you man — find you a woman who'll fight that apple in you like she fights her own apple; and you woman with that apple in you growing — find you a man who'll fight that apple in you like he fights his own; for the weak hold the strong up and the strong gets stronger with the weak leaning on them. And that way only shall we all know God, and we got to know God. We're nice folks — we got to know Him, for God likes good folks.”

And Storey remembers once Doc Sell said after church service, “Hell, Storey, it's gaw-awful plain whose apple's growing and whose apple ain't in your family; but what I never could figure out is whose apple's growing and whose ain't in the reverend's house!”

“What you sitting there grinning at, Storey?”

“Huh? Oh, something Doc Sell said one time, Viv.”

“Bill Ficklin told me the other day Doc's the only one opposed to building the new colored school.”

“Oh, well, you know Doc well's I do, Vivs. He don't think the nigger's got any business going to school in the first place.”

“Fick's real hot under the collar about that school, isn't he?”

“Yeah, he is. I think being married to a Northerner's got something to do with it. Course I like Marianne.”

“She's got Major Post working for her now, you know. The other day Thad asked him why he wasn't picking any this year and he said he had a job over to the Ficklins.”

Vivian thinks to herself that she is sorry Major is not up on the hill as much as he was before the Ficklins hired him. Major and she always got along — he wasn't at all like Post niggers. Where'd he learn all he did — from Doc James? Ever since Doc James moved over from Criss County, the first colored doctor in Paradise, he stuck out like a sore thumb before the other niggers; widowed and with that near-white daughter. Then he married himself to some nigger lawyer's girl from Macon, brought her back and him and his family never held down niggers' jobs; never talked much nor acted either like niggers. She remembers Thad saying, “I saw a nigger on Main today wearing a necktie. What next!”

“No.”

“Yes, I did. And this'll rock you. He's a doctor.” “No.!”

“Yes, he is … Well, Vivie, I don't know. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's high time Paradise had a nigger doctor. I think maybe it's a good thing. Niggers get sick like anyone else, and white doctors shouldn't have to handle them. Syphilis and all.”

Storey finishes the grape pop, sets it on the table, stretches, and yawns. “Well, I know this much anyway. If we don't get the niggers a new school, we gonna have them in white schools ‘fore we know it. Supreme Court made that ruling about desegregation, and ‘less we got something to fight back with, we gonna have to abide by it!”

“Thad says we never will. Says we'll just change the white schools into private schools.”

“Yeah, but we still got to give the niggers better ‘n what they got now or we can't
do
that. We get someone like Tom Sellers in this year — and get rid of Senator Fred Henderson — things will be getting done around Georgia.”

“That's what Thad says. Practically everybody's seen Sellers; shaken his hand and all.”

“That's right. Thad's right.”

“Yeah, Thad is … I guess always.”

“You know how I feel about Thad,” Storey says. He looks at Vivian Hooper furtively as she collects the empty pop bottles; looks at the black cotton dress, knowing the voluptuous world of flesh the cotton conceals. It's right she's married to Thad, he thinks; good that she is. Thinks, I ought to run down to Church Street and see if Kate's finished. He wonders why Thad let himself take on so much weight. He's nearly fat now, and Viv stays the same, never seems to change.

“Yes sir, I think the world and all of Thad,” Storey says, pulling himself to his feet.

“I know you do,” she tells him, thinking Storey has no right to drive out here and look me over like he does, like he doesn't know I know he does; and then go on back to Kate. Like back from hell and the devil himself. Is that how he thinks of it?

Thad always says: “Some men, I suppose, think just because you're built so well, you're one of these physical kinds of women. It's a narrow-minded conception. I know if Thel had lived she would of had to deal with that problem herself. She was well developed even at fifteen, you know, Vivie … I remember she was. Would have been beautiful … Everyone would have thought she was one of those physical kinds … She was
good,
though, I can tell you … Not like that at all.”

“You tell Thad I was by, hear, Vivs?”

“I'll tell him, Storey. See you tonight.” “Colonel coming?”

“Umm-humm. Him
and
Ada, I expect.” “Ada too?”

“Well, that's what Colonel said.”

“You give Thad hell for me, letting a pretty girl like you tend the station, hear?” Storey laughs, hanging on to his hips — the same way Thad does, she thinks. How he mimics Thad — ”I'll be looking forward to tonight, Vivs.”

“Sure enough, Storey.”

“Well, bye!”

“Bye, bye!”

“See you tonight. You tell Thad I was by looking for him.” “All right, Storey. So long.”

Then she turns the volume back up on the radio; oblivious to the hillbilly music that blares out of it; and sitting, rocking, she again remembers:
“Oh, Christ, didn't I see you squirming like some bitch all hot, didn't I?”

And: “…
just because you're built so well, you're one of these physical kinds of women. It's a narrow-minded — ”

And:
“We married ourselves to good people, Vivs.”

Then worries: Hope Hus thinks of the okra for the stew; Hus always forgets the okra.

“This is Washington, D.C.,” the voice of the hostess says. “We will depart immediately upon taking aboard the new passengers. Those remaining on the flight, please keep their seats.”

The woman beside Millard Post shoves her knitting into her bag, and sighs. “That was a nice smooth landing.” “You're getting off here, huh?”

“That's right. Well, it's been fun talking with you.” “Same here, ma'am”

“How far do you go before you change planes?”

“I think to Charlotte.”

“Well — have a nice trip, Millard”

“Same here, ma'am”

“Bye.”

“So long,” says Millard.

He leans forward and looks out the window of the plane at the Washington airport. There is a clock inside and he can just make out the time through the glass window. Two o'clock. At North Trades High the cafeteria would be emptying; the Panthers would be heading with their trays back from the table on the left, which was their special spot. Some of them would cut this afternoon and head off to the poolroom to hear the Series play-off. A lot of them were for the Dodgers because of Willie Mays, but Millard had his dollar on the Yankees, because they could play better ball sitting on their hands. There'd be a lot of excitement at the poolroom. What the hell!