Hold Tight (20 page)

“So,” said the sailor. “You want to go on up?”

“Shortly. I want something to drink first.”

He expected the sailor to get it for him, to recognize who was master and who was servant here. But the sailor only said, “Nothing but beer. If you want something stronger, you’ll have to talk with Mrs. Bosch.”

“Beer will do,” said Blair, not making a move toward the table with the pitcher and glasses.

The sailor stood where he was, grinning and calculating at Blair.

Then the door opened and the colored boy entered with a bowl of chipped ice that he slammed on the table. “Suck on this,” he told the room, then wheeled around, and was almost out the door when he saw Hank with a customer.

The sailor was watching the boy. His smug confidence disappeared and he looked worried, uneasy.

The boy hung in the door. “Taking it slow tonight, aren’t you, Blondie? All this white dick’s getting mighty old.”

But the sailor didn’t tell the boy off or even laugh. He nervously turned his back on the boy.

“Lickorish!” hissed the boy, and he pulled the door shut.

“Crazy coon,” the sailor mumbled. “Pay him no mind.”

Blair thought Southerners hated coloreds, but the sailor seemed distressed by the boy, even frightened of him. Or maybe it was the mere suggestion of sex with a colored that disgusted the sailor. It disgusted Blair too, but to a Southerner it must be a fate worse than death. It would be as humiliating to a Southerner as sodomy is to a man. Blair wanted to humiliate the sailor.

“So. You said you wanted a beer?” The sailor seemed ready to get it for him.

“Not anymore. Let’s go up.” Blair knew he could not make his proposal in the presence of others.

“Fine by me. Time’s a’ wastin’.” He hurried to the door and opened it for Blair.

They started up the dark, creaking stairs and Blair waited until he reached the landing before he turned around and stopped the sailor. “This time, I prefer something different.”

“No skin off my nose.” The sailor stood a few steps down, so his face was level with Blair’s chest. “We can just sit up there and talk tonight. You don’t have to watch me do anything.”

“I want to watch you,” Blair said, smiling. “With someone else.”

The sailor looked at him, then looked up toward the top floor and over the bannister to the floors below, only there was nobody in sight. “Yeah?”

“Yes. You and the colored boy.”

It had all the effect Blair had hoped for. The smirky, blockish face looked confused, then blank, then horrified, then blank again. “Shoot.” The sailor tried to grin. “You serious, mister?”

“There’s fifty dollars in it for you.”

The sailor hesitated. “Nyaah. Let’s just talk tonight. You like talking, remember?”

“No. I don’t feel like talking tonight. It’s you and the colored boy. Or nothing.” Blair was so bent on humiliating the man, he didn’t care if he learned what he had come here for tonight. Or perhaps he could shake up the sailor so badly he could learn everything. Blair was amazed at what he was doing. He must be drunk.

There was still a look of watchful calculation in the sailor’s eyes, but his face was slack and numb. His tongue rolled around the inside of his mouth, as if there was a terrible taste there. “Fifty dollars?” he muttered.

“To be split with the boy as you see fit. Although I expect a colored would jump at the privilege of doing things with a white man
for free
.”

“I don’t know. What if
he
says no?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” It would be wonderfully cruel to hear the sailor ask a nigger to go to bed with him.

“You’re serious? This is really what you want?”

“We all have our odd peculiarities. Maybe this is one of mine.”

The sailor stood very still, wheels turning inside his head. He suddenly leaned over the bannister and hollered, “Juke! Hey, Juke! We need you!” He turned back to Blair. “He mighta gone out.”

“Call again.”

The sailor did. There were footsteps down below and the boy’s black hair and white eyes appeared in the narrow slit of the telescoped stairwell. Blair thought the boy’s straight hair made him look like a monkey wearing a toupee.

“Oh. It’s you,” the boy answered.

“Can you come up a minute, Juke? There’s something we have to ask you. Please?”

“Oh, yeah? What could you want from me?” But the boy started up the stairs.

“We’ll go to your room,” said Blair. “This kind of business should be transacted in private, don’t you think?” The humiliation that had already begun with “please” would be even sharper when observed in close quarters.

The sailor resumed his walk up the stairs, then stopped and said, “No. We can ask him here.”

“Oh, no. People might hear us. I have my reputation to think of.” As if he cared what these lowlife degenerates thought of him. “Come along. You don’t want to make me cross and lose your fifty dollars, do you?”

That fifty dollars actually seemed to give Blair complete power over the sailor, because, disgusted as the man was, he nodded and trudged on up the stairs.

“Come along, boy,” Blair called down. “Time is money.”

The sailor opened the door to his room and nodded Blair inside. He hesitated a moment, then entered, whistling as soon as he stepped into the room, walking into a corner and out again, whistling to himself as if terrified.

Downstairs, Erich was thinking about the celibacy of Brahms when he heard the tuneless whistling just below his ear. He pulled the headset on, adjusted the hard earphone and listened.

Sullivan looked up from his gun, now laid out in pieces on the cloth at his feet. “Our good fairy’s got a customer?”

“No. I mean, yes,” said Erich. “But not just any customer. He gave the signal.”

“Damn.” Sullivan stared at the pieces of his gun. He began to screw things back together. “Well?”

“Nobody’s talking.” Erich heard footsteps, then a straining chair, then another string of whistled notes.

“Maybe there isn’t anybody,” said Sullivan. “What if your fairy’s up there alone and he does different voices. Maybe he’s up there with Charlie McCarthy.”

Erich raised his hand to silence Sullivan. Someone else had come into the room. Someone began to speak.

“Uh, close the door, will ya. Juke? I told him what you were gonna say, but this man here wants to ask you anyway.”

Erich recognized Fayette’s voice, edged with static like a news broadcast from across the ocean. What was the houseboy doing up there?

“Yeah? What didja want to ask me?”

The boy sounded as sassy as ever, but, without seeing his face, Erich didn’t think he sounded especially Negro, at least not like Negroes on the radio.

“It’s not my responsibility to ask. That’s your prerogative, sailor.”

The third voice was cool and measured, as precise as an Englishman’s, but with the faintly nasal flatness of Americans. It did not sound like the voice of a spy. All Erich could picture was the kind of overaged young man you saw portraying youths on the New York stage.

Nobody spoke for a moment, then the houseboy said, “Been getting piss-elegant, Blondie? Oh, but darling, that paper lantern doesn’t do a thing for this room. You have to turn off the light and turn on the one in the lantern.”

Erich went pale.

“They’re queering off already?” said Sullivan. “You’re gonna make yourself sick if you listen to everything. It’s gonna make
me
sick watching you listen.”

Erich pressed the cup of the earphone hard over his ear, as if listening could stop the boy from giving them away.

J
UKE STOOD UNDER THE
Chinese lantern, fingering the cord and looking for a switch. He seemed to have gone to it only to prove his indifference to the tension in the room.

Hank had to blurt out the proposition, just to get the boy away from the microphone: “This man wants to watch. Us.”

There. As soon as Hank said it, humiliating himself and Juke, he wanted to kill the man. Ever since he saw him tonight and remembered the man’s contempt, Hank had been hating him, disguising his hatred with all the friendliness he could fake. Now he wanted to break the man’s neck. But there were the men in the cellar to think of, listening to every word, and his country. The man should die for being a traitor, and not because of something personal.

Juke stood as still as an eight-ball, eyeing Hank. He had to be insulted. He was already angry with Hank and the idea that Hank and the man wanted to use him should make Juke furious, Hank thought.

The boy slowly turned to the well-dressed man already sitting in the chair. “Did I hear right? Not me watching you and him, but you watching him and me?”

“That is correct,” said the man, narrowing his eyes and smiling at Hank, holding the seat of his chair with both hands.

“I told him you’d say no,” said Hank.

“Yeah? You told him that?”

The boy’s surprise sounded sarcastic. Hank hoped Juke would spit spiders at both of them, even if it meant driving the spy away.

Instead, the boy said, “How much you paying?”

“I’m paying your
friend
enough to make it worth his while,” said the man. “It’s up to him what kind of arrangement he wants to make with you.”

“So, Blondie. What’s a man have to pay to make you lay with me?”

“You don’t have to do it, Juke. We don’t need his money,” Hank insisted.

“Fifty dollars,” the man announced, relishing his ability to make trouble. “And if you don’t do it, I’m leaving and neither of you will see a cent.” He lowered his voice and snidely added, “Offer the boy a dollar. That should be enough.”

And Juke began to grin at Hank, first with the right side of his mouth, then the left, the grin growing more shark-like as it stretched to its limit. “Okay. I’ll give you a dollar.
Boy.
”

“That ain’t what he meant,” said Hank.

“I know what he meant. And I’m offering you a buck. Or are you worth that?”

“Beautiful,” said the man. “Perfect.”

Juke and Hank stared into each other’s eyes, Juke viciously grinning, Hank stunned by the boy’s craziness. Juke flared his nostrils as he took a deep breath.

“I don’t want to put you through this,” Hank whispered.

“Baby, I want to,” Juke whispered back. “I’m gonna flush you down the toilet and out the sewer. And you’re gonna be the cheapest piece of ass I ever had.”

“No whispering,” said the man. “I pay to hear everything. What’re you saying?”

“Nothing,” said Hank, staring differently at the boy.

Juke answered the look by thrusting his chin up and yanking his yellow necktie open. Then he stepped back and began to unbutton his fancy red shirt.

“You, too, sailor. Off with your clothes.”

Hank glanced at the man—he sat there smiling bitterly, his jaw clenched—then at the paper lantern. The men downstairs were going to think him an idiot for letting this happen, and sick for doing it, but Hank didn’t know what else could keep the man here long enough to start talking. He drew his blouse up over his head, wondering what he had done to make Juke hate him so much.

Juke was quickly undressing, coolly at first, with a steely look at Hank as he shook his shirt off his shoulders. But he stopped looking when he jerked his two-tone shoes off and threw them at the floor, then pulled at his belt as if he wanted to cinch himself in two. Undressing angered him and his anger confused Hank. If Juke wanted sex, if he was horny for Hank, Hank could understand that, queer as it was having a colored hot for you. Coloreds preferred coloreds, and found whites lousy lays. Juke said so himself. But Juke seemed to be doing this out of hatred.

Juke dropped his striped cotton trousers and kicked his feet out of them. He wore white boxer shorts that made him look blacker than ever. Then he bent over, yanked the shorts down and stepped out of them. When he stood straight again, he was a dark skinny kid with slicked hair, squashed nose and a prick that stuck out like a spike.

“Ah,” went the man. “They’re right about coloreds being…born ready.”

Juke looked at Hank, but with less fight in his eyes. He looked almost resentful, or hurt, lips parted as if to tell Hank this was his fault.

Hank turned away to take off his pants. It embarrassed him to see Juke like this. Juke naked and hard wasn’t quite Juke anymore. But seeing any hard cock was enough to work Hank up. Looking down at himself, he turned back to Juke, his cock becoming more like Juke’s. Neither of them were cut. Two country boys, they stood there looking at their own and each other’s bones.

“But it must be a myth about size.”

The man’s voice broke the trance. Juke glared at him, turned and shook his hips at the man, wagging his stick at him as if it were up for his benefit. And shook his black bottom at Hank.

“No! Get that thing away from me, nigger! Get on the bed. I don’t want either of you closer to me than the bed.” The man shooed Juke away with the back of one hand, his other hand still gripping the seat of the chair.

“I sure the hell don’t want to touch
you
,” said Juke, backing up to the bed, then stretching out on it.

“Now you. Get on the bed,” the man ordered Hank. “Touch him. Touch the nigger.”

If they were alone, Hank could forget who and what Juke was, forget everything but the sex, just as he always did, no matter how old or fat or ugly they were. But with the man insisting how vile this was, with Juke watching Hank and waiting to see what he could do, with the men somewhere inside the paper lantern, like God looking over your shoulder, Hank remained painfully conscious of everything.

He sat on the bed. He was naked but he still felt dressed, he was of so many minds. Touching another cock usually erased everything. He took hold of the cock in front of him. It felt like any boy’s bone, a roundness with something square about it, like an end splice in a piece of half-inch rope, more slender and tense than a man’s bone, as springy as a jew’s harp. It was the best thing about sex with boys, although Hank preferred men. He drew the skin back and there was a sweet moan.

Juke was watching him. His pinched smile looked like a sneer, but there was still a pinch of hurt or something personal to his eyes. Then he reached out and grabbed Hank’s cock.