Old Powder Man (8 page)

Common? he had said.

From the street car, he stared at the grey, winterized city. Everything beneath the bleak winter sky blended into the greyness. Everything seemed drawn in, closer, smaller. People, colorless in dark heavy clothes, huddled, their faces nipped-looking. Telephone poles stood out more starkly against a leafless background, and all the trees looked fire-burnt, charcoal-colored, withered and old. Sparrows, secured to telephone wires that seemed too thin to hold them, black string stretched across a grey and gigantic world, surveyed everything from above, loftily, motionless and fluffed.

He had ridden the street car a full circle of seasons and this was the second winter. At a junction where car tracks fanned to all parts of the city like bicycle spokes, silvery in the sun, Poppa transferred to Son's car. They rode mostly in silence, upright against the stiff seats, jounced one way and another, toward the window and toward the aisle, until the little blunt-nosed car, screeching in flight, deposited them finally, feeling as if they had been on a small ship, in the wake of a larger. They alighted at Mississippi Street just up the bluff from the river where, no matter the season and dependent on the wind's direction, they smelled one of two things, the unbearable stench of sewage or a smell of vegetation, hay, grass, marsh, with a hint of vapor lifted from the river, so that country people who had never seen one, passing there, thought of the ocean.

The first six months, Son and Poppa separated to remeet for lunch. Poppa brought his in a brown paper sack and only Son's most violent refusal prevented Cally from sending him one too. By noon the pendulant bottom of Poppa's sack was a circle of grease and the longer they were in the city, the more that circle irritated Son. Poppa carried the sack even into cafes Son selected, ordering only buttermilk. When they did not meet, Poppa ate in back of his store, for gradually Son went to lunch with friends and was learning to share their favorite tables and places and waitresses. But one day recently, meeting Poppa, Son watched him come slowly, the greasy sack bumping his thigh, and his irritation was such that when Poppa reached him, he grabbed the sack and squashed it into the nearest trash can, to Poppa's total astonishment, who in all the years of his life had never seen food wasted and had not recovered from the incident the day he died. It was a story Son would tell a long time; eventually all up and down the river, men would want to know the story of his throwing away his old man's dinner, how the old man had stood, and looked and never got over it. The river men would laugh hard anticipating the end as Son would laugh telling it, being men who had grown up on the same thing as Poppa, hard times, and who had Poppas who would have reacted the same. Son had afterward ushered Poppa into a restaurant and told the waitress, “Bring this old man the best T-bone steak you got, well-done,” over Poppa's protests, who knew neither his stomach nor his teeth could handle it. Poppa, hiding steak pieces beneath his napkin, longed for Cally's homemade biscuits drowned in sorghum wasting in the trash outside.

Afterward when they met, Son bought Poppa's lunch, though Poppa brought his sack. Cally would not hear of his leaving home to buy food when she had food in the ice box he could take. Poppa gave the lunch to his Negro stock boy or any Negro lounging about behind the store, and they were always glad to get it. Today, having eaten, Son and Poppa came out of the cafe to a rain the grey morning had promised, Son wearing a heavy raincoat, just warm enough with winter on the verge of giving up. But within a block Poppa was wet as a soaked dog, rain having matted his slick old wool coat. Son was about to ask if he didn't have a raincoat and realized suddenly he never had had one. Jesus, he thought, he'd buy the old man at least a two dollar slicker to pull on over that old coat, and telling Poppa so, huddling against buildings, hurried him to the best men's store on Main, where instead of a slicker, he bought him a coat like his own.

“It's the best we carry,” the salesman said, a tape measure slung like a snake about his neck. “It'll last a lifetime.”

Poppa wondered, Whose? He had no lifetime left. Who would they give the coat to when he was gone?

Wearing the coat he said, “Thank you,” and Son, holding him back from crossing the street, said, “Hell, old man, I'd rather buy you a coat now than pay for you to have pew-monia later on.”

To Poppa, the light turned green, that funny milky green it turned, like green in a marble; but when he started forward, Son held him back speaking roughly. But why? Because he had started to cross the street, or because Son truly did not want to pay if he was sick? Son cursed too much these days, Poppa thought, like those friends of his he had met. Now people who had stood impatiently on the curb, smelling as bad in their steamy wet clothes as wet dogs, crossed; but, to Poppa, the light looked the same. And crossing catty-cornered at Main and First, he admitted finally there was nothing the matter with the lights; it was him. Too many times recently he had started to cross wrongly and been pulled back by strangers or his own instinct. His eyes had been checked and were in order. He promised himself to see a doctor.

Poppa returned to his failing store and his need for sleep was something he could not shake off. He lay on a cot in the back, telling himself if anyone came, Willie, the stock boy, would wake him. But the store contained a golden burst of late afternoon sun when he woke. The day had cleared, the streets were drying. Dragging himself into the store, Poppa saw several displays of shoes badly disarranged by people he had not heard. Willie, sitting on top of a ladder, picking his teeth, stopped doing it to say, “I tried to waken you up, Mr. Wynn, I couldn't.”

Poppa walked straight toward that golden burst of afternoon sun, his bones gathering warmth as he went, and confided to the Negro what he could not to his family: “Willie, I just can't stop sleeping. Whew.”

“Naw sir,” Willie said who already knew it, who had already told his young wife, Mr. Wynn was one of the sweetest white persons he had ever known; he sure hated for anything to happen.

But not only Poppa's physical disability was causing the store to fail; he did not understand big city selling, did not know how to bargain, haggle or outwit. If a customer said he could get shoes elsewhere for a certain price, Poppa would lower his. It was only when he strolled down the street, he would learn from the other merchants, you could not sell for that price without losing money. Invariably, he would fall into the trap again. Everyone seemed honest to Poppa and he was sorry for people buying shoes that were not going to last and for kids brought in with toes so scrunched up in old shoes they could hardly walk. Anybody with a quarter he let put something in the Lay-Away. It was Willie who once pointed out they had as much in the Lay-Away as they had out to sell. Poppa would always believe people were coming back to get what they had started paying on. Too late, the merchandise, out of season or out of style, would be returned to the selling counter. Facing the brilliant after-rain sunlight, Poppa watched people emerge from a movie and glance about happily, glad to have escaped a few hours not only their troubles but a rain storm as well. The gutters rushed, full. The sun had brought spring after a winter morning. Poppa pulled his coat close and went out for air. Feeling directionless, he directed himself to the corner and bought an apple from the Italian vendor. He returned eating it, looking at prices in other shops, patting the heads of children who passed, speaking if spoken to, but turned even into his own store without seeing any of it. He saw only the fine white fall of lint from two rows of cottonwoods, dark green fields with cotton buds turning pink at evening, a storm heralded by a rise of yellow dust and the rain itself pocking the soft yellow road outside the commissary door. Closing his own door, he told Willie they would leave early; he had a doctor's appointment.

Son thought about Poppa a short while after lunch, then, picking his teeth, went down Main toward his office, thinking about business. He was happy, even in rain, to brush through crowds on a city street. Thank the Lord he was out of that hick place that hadn't even been a town, just a mill and a store at the end of a country road. But entering the small marble lobby of his office building, he did not fool himself any. He was tired of hard floors and a desk and of air coming mostly through windows. His stomach, unexercised, was beginning to push his belt and he did not like the feeling at all.

A pretty little girl ran the cigar stand in the lobby. He tried usually to buy something from her. “You doin' any good?” he said.

“Hel-lo!” she said. “Folks crowd in on rainy days. Good business today.”

He bought cigarettes and a pack of mints; giving his change, she looked at him obviously. She had a pretty face; that was all his interest. He said, “Well, don't take any wooden nickels,” and went to the elevator where the white-gloved operator held the door. The cigar stand girl sighed, wishing he would take her out. She, her replacement, the cleaning women, the elevator operators all long ago agreed Mr. Wynn, on twelve, was the handsomest man in the whole building.

Down the beige marble corridor, quiet as a hospital's, every office door was shut, keeping in heat. Son missed the easy cordiality of warm weather when doors stood open, fans whirred, and shirt-sleeved men visited back and forth. On twelve, they sat above the city with nothing between them and the river; sometimes only their floor, out of the entire city, had a breeze. Behind the opaque glass door panel of his office, a shadow crossed; knowing Scottie was back from lunch, he opened the door, having touched once briefly, for fear they would not be intact, the gold letters that read,

American Powder Co.

Frank Wynn, Representative.

In the lower right hand corner was the office telephone number, with Day written after, and his home number, with Night. His predecessor had not allowed the latter; Scottie, whom he inherited along with the office, had said, “You're crazy to put that on. Some bozo, with a load on, will call you up in the middle of the night.”

Son had swung his feet to his desk, stared at the river as he spent too much time doing, and said, “If it gets us some business, it's all right with me.”

Scottie had grown up around river people and was as tough as you needed to be in this business. She used curse words even Son did not, and though he would not have wanted Lillian to know them, he admired Scottie for it. Often he and Scottie held a cussing contest. One after another, they said every word they could think of. In visiting weather, people on their floor dropped in to listen; the contest was considered a draw. Scottie had made her way since she was sixteen, and at thirty-five still was, because of a husband who alternately had a job or did not. Her dark hair curled tightly to her head and her legs were large. Son thought she was a good woman who worked hard and never shot off her mouth unnecessarily. It was long after their lives had gone divergent ways, he learned how Scottie had loved him.

Today as he came in, she said, “A Mr. Rollins called. His number's by the phone.”

“Sho nuff,” he said. “What'd he want?”

“Wants to buy some dynamite is all I know,” she said.

“Hell, that's all we need to know isn't it?” he said. Having given the number, he glanced out at the sky which seemed it would clear and at a pigeon sitting on the window sill looking in. Then he sat forward seriously when a voice said, “Wildwood Country Club.”

“Frank Wynn, American Powder Company, calling Mr. Rollins,” he said. “Hell, I don't know which Mr. Rollins, he called me.” A door closed on a room noisy with the partying of women, then a voice said, “Mr. Wynn, Carl Rollins. I'm head of a committee for building a golf course out here, beautiful eighteen holes.” Mr. Rollins' voice rose, swelled with pride. “We've got some rough acres to clear first though. I wonder if you'd like to give me an estimate on the work? The other three dynamite representatives have been out and are turning in one next week.”

“I'm always interested in selling some dynamite,” Son said. “I'll come on out now if nothing else's going on.”

“It's mighty wet,” Mr. Rollins said.

“Hell, I've never known the rain to hurt me yet,” Son said.

“Well, come on then,” Mr. Rollins said.

Son had a secondhand company car to use for business. He drove it to the club, where Mr. Rollins met him on the porch: to Lillian's consternation when she heard, perishing to know what the club was like inside. They rounded the building to woods behind it, Mr. Rollins going ahead, his rubbers squeaking and squishing in and out of the soggy ground. Following, Son felt dampness penetrate the soles of his shoes.

“I'm told any method but dynamite clearing will cost me more money,” Mr. Rollins said.

“It'll cost a whole lot more if you got to pay men to dig up trees, break up stumps and haul them away too,” Son said. “And it'll take you three times as long.”

Mr. Rollins said, “Suppose the windows in the club all get blown out, or something like that? The woods seem awfully close to me.”

Son, looking back, suddenly felt exhilarated wondering about it himself and laughed beyond what the moment called for. “I can't guarantee it, but I don't expect to blast out any windows. Might shake you up a little now, though,” he said.

“I guess we can stand that,” Mr. Rollins said. “How long do you think the work will take?”

Son had no idea and guessed: “Two weeks.” He saw by the quick surprise on Mr. Rollins' face he had said a time shorter than the others. “Of course, I'll have to let you know definite when I've thought about it a little more,” he said.

But Mr. Rollins was saying, “Two weeks.” He looked at the old woods in surprise as if, if they could disappear in two weeks, they could disappear instantly.

“I'll blow you those stumps into nice sized little pieces,” Son said. “Hauling them away will be as easy as feeding candy to a little boy.”