The Moves Make the Man (18 page)

I was just a few steps inside the door and now I moved and Bix's stepfather shot a glance at me as he sat down, and then Jeb looked back over, and I saw his big flat tan face with blue eyes all crafty and a huge crooked smile but not for long did I see the smile. For when those eyes lit on me the smile cracked down into a scowl but fast, the eyes went narrow and the hand tightened over the spatula and tilted it toward me like it was a sword. Very fast then he jerked his eyes over at Bix's stepfather, who was looking down at the counter and saying, Coffee, Jeb, which Jeb ignored, staring at him and ferocious angry. Bix was bouncing around still happy on a stool away down, babbling about what he wanted on his hot dogs and maybe two with chili no wait one with slaw….

You must be crazy, Jeb said between his teeth to Bix's stepfather.

Just a cup of coffee, Jeb, said the man. Dogs for the boy.

Jeb shook his head, looked over at me, back at the stepfather, then hawked and turned and spat a wad onto his grill. It crackled and sizzled and bounced around making lots of noise and everything else got very quiet, even Bix for a second. Then Bix leaned out over the counter and looked down at me and said, Jerome, Jeb calls me Mickey Junior, know why? Because of Mickey Mantle, see….

I'll wait in the car, I said to the stepfather. I don't want any food from this joint anyway.

You won't wait in any car on my lot, said Jeb. Any car you're in will be moving, faster the better, and you, he said, slamming down the flat of the spatula SMACK on the counter an inch from Bix's stepfather's hand, you'd better be behind the wheel and fast.

Hey Jeb, said Bix, looking a little puzzled, what about
those dogs? Hey, look, Jeb, I brought my glove….

Jeb turned and scowled right into Bix's face. I watched the color drain out and Bix go from all pepped up to all of a sudden very scared and not understanding a thing, like he was hit in the stomach and had no idea why. Then Jeb helped him out, by pushing his face up near Bix's and saying, very rough like wanting to get in a fight even though Bix was just a kid, he said, Stick the glove up your ass and ride it out of here, nigger lover.

Bix just gaped. His stepfather slipped off the stool and took his arm, firm but gentle, and pulled him off, Bix holding his glove and stumbling a little and gaping still at Jeb, with the spit sizzling out to a whisper on the grill. They walked past me and out and I made like to follow them but then spun back. Jeb had walked behind the counter down to see us out but now he stopped dead when I turned. He stood there for a second looking almost scared like I was going to rip his guts out for a snack, then narrow and wary, holding his spatula. He pointed it at me and said, Get out, jigaboo.

All you had to do was give him one stupid hot dog and he would have made it okay, I said.

Get out, said Jeb, or I'll shoot your head off.

Uh-oh, I said, nobody told me that spatula was loaded.

Then I went out to the car and we drove away. Nobody said anything. His stepfather did not say Bix, I told you so. I did not say What a cracker bozo Jeb turned out to be, though the thought crossed my mind. Bix did not say any of the strange things that he might have been thinking. After a few miles, I thought somebody should say SOMETHING so I nudged Bix.

Hey, I said. Hey, Bix?

He just stared out the window. Just get me to my mother,
he said. He was very tight, talking very soft but tense. He said it again: Just get me to my mother.

Nothing I could add to that.

So we rode for a while all silent. A few miles down the road I started trying a couple of times to get Bix out of it, asking him dumb questions about stuff out in the fields, like did he know what kind of cow that was for it certainly was an interesting one, wasn't it? or did he know why tobacco barns have gaps between the boards. It was crap chat and he knew it and did not even look at me and his stepfather did not say a word either. Knowing if he answered me it would put Bix even more off by himself.

I guess Bix had some heavy thinking to do. Here he had insisted we stop at Jeb's when his stepfather said no, and it had not turned out too nice for anybody, least of all Bix who got the biggest surprise. Now he was on the way to see his mom which he insisted on when his stepfather once again said better not to. Maybe there were more surprises, and maybe he wasn't so sure he was ready for them.

The other thing that the Jeb's business had done was, it took away one more person from Bix, somebody he had thought things were cool with but they were not and now things were over. Jeb was nobody to Bix really, but I was, his stepfather was, his momma was, and going back in time he had messed up things pretty bad with each of us one by one. He was getting another shot at his momma, but the holes behind him were showing. I read a poem once about an army burning bridges it crossed. The look on Bix's face seemed like he was sniffing some pine smoke in the wind.

So we sat in the car and it got dark and no one talked, all the way to Durham and Duke hospital. We parked and walked into the main entrance and not a word. We got inside, and
all of a sudden we were surrounded by all kinds of bustle, but not a peep from us three. There were doctors and nurses and people in pajamas and wheelchairs with blankets over their legs so you could not see what the matter was. There were people walking down the halls pulling beside them these iron stands on wheels, and what was on the iron stand was a bottle with liquid in it that was running right at the very moment down a tube and into the person's arm. On top of everything was a stream of announcements clanging over loudspeakers everywhere DR. ABERNATHY REPORT TO INTERNAL SURGERY DR. JOHNSON PLEASE RESPOND CODE SIX and so on. It was very hectic.

But not us, we were not hectic in the least. We were a little troop of gloom, quiet as if we were all on our way back from surgery where they took out our vocal cords and smile muscles. This seemed okay for we were definitely heading in the direction of more gloom, to judge from the changes in the hospital as we walked, through doors and up steps and winding through halls. The halls got smaller and darker every time we turned into a new one, and the steps seemed like they were steeper and emptier too. You got to feeling very far away from all the bustle back in the main part of the hospital. When we finally stopped, in a narrow old hallway with gray walls and flickers in the buzzy ceiling lights, you felt very far indeed, a different country all of a sudden, and you looked back on those old dudes with wheelchairs as quite gay fellows and good company.

In this hall there was one door and a buzzer. Bix's stepfather pushed the buzzer. Bix just looked at the door.

There was a crackle of electricity noise. I jumped four feet, being a little nervous about how they used electricity in this place, but it was just a man's voice coming over a
little speaker grate lost in the shadows above the doorway. The voice said something I could not follow but I guess the stepfather did, for he spoke back at it saying he was here to visit his wife. There was a crackle and then nothing for a time. Then on the other side of the door you could hear a lot of locks turning and clacking. It opened inward. A big white man in a light green pair of pajamas but he had shoes on so I guess it was really a uniform motioned us in and we went.

Wait here, Bix's stepfather said to us, as soon as we were inside. It was a sort of hallway but with a big glass window on the right looking directly into the next room. While the stepfather went down the hall with the big white dude, Bix and I stood there. I let my eyes adjust to the dark and then I peeked through the window to check out the action on the other side. I wish I had not looked.

I felt for a second like you do when you are casually watching somebody you don't know in a restaurant and they take off their coat and all of a sudden they are missing one arm. For a few minutes you stare and cannot understand it—where is that arm? There ought to be an arm there, shouldn't there? You check your own and see, yes, two are standard, so what is going on? It is just impossible to adjust, even to something you know exists like one-armed people. You cannot get over how peculiar in the flesh.

That room had crazy people in it. They were doing crazy things. But though I knew there were such people and this was the place to find them, I could not come to understand the things they did as crazy things, the way when that one-arm man opens his wallet and then holds it under his chin while he gets a bill out you think Now why in the world is he holding it under his chin like that? Instead my mind got
right in there and tried to take the weird actions for what they were. One lady wearing three or four dresses and two pairs of shoes one inside the other kept picking up things, ashtrays and magazines and such, and trying to wear them, putting them on some part of her body but they all fell off except one empty tissue box that stuck on her elbow. Now, I thought, I wonder why she is so cold? One old dude was looking hard up in the air over his head and grabbing at things that he thought were up there. So I strained my eyes and wondered why in heck I could not see them myself. Another woman was walking around the room and kept looking behind her and motioning like someone was back there and dragging behind, and I wanted whoever it was to keep up too.

There was one young dude in a corner and he got me the most. He was acting like he was listening hard to somebody talking to him only nobody was. But this guy was listening and nodding very polite and fascinated, but with one trouble. He kept realizing he had something important to say and he just could not remember it to save his neck. He frowned and opened his mouth and snapped his fingers and tapped his lips but it would not come. This really sucked me in. I was pressing my nose against the glass and nodding at the dude, like I was the person he was trying to say it to, and I started doing it myself, trying to remember and help him out. I probably would have started, and gone from there to snapping at invisible flies, except this smooth voice came over my shoulder and said:

Well well, little brother, I thought our people had better sense than to bring their crazy selves into a dump like this.

I turned around and there was a young black dude wearing those green pajamas, and patent leather shoes glinting in the
dark. He was very bright and smiling very crafty. I would have said something to him but just at that moment, because he broke the spell of watching through the window, I suddenly got the sense of what I had been watching, crazy people doing genuine crazy mess, and I was sort of surprised to see it that way so sudden. I gaped back through the window and watched them grab some air and do some spinning, and it was worse watching when I knew.

The dude watched with me and said, Pretty wild, eh bro? These white folks can sure throw a groovy party! He laughed at that, then said, Do you plan on joining this bunch?

What? Oh, I said, no. I'm not here to be crazy. I'm just visiting.

Ah, he said, I see. Well, in a way for you that's good, but in a way it's too bad. This place will probably be the last joint in the country to get integrated. He laughed again.

What about you? I said. You look like you have integrated it okay.

Oh, touché, brother, he said, watching me closely and sizing me up again, but very amused. Touché. But alas I am not technically OF this place, you see. I do not technically PERTAIN here. Not just because of the skin, dig—because of the threads even more. Anybody you see wearing this kind of funny suit is OUTSIDE all this jive in that room, and they will never get into these people's society OR their heads.

What does that uniform mean?

It means, little man, that I am what is called an ORDERLY. Any black man you see in this hospital is called the same thing, you dig? That is their name for nigger around here. And when you think of it, the name is not such a terrible one in a place where everyone else is either sick or
playing bwana. Not bad, eh? Niggers be the secret police in charge of order! He laughed some more, very soft.

Why aren't there any black patients? I said, looking through the window and seeing that the guy in the corner had still not remembered his important message for me.

I told you before, said the black dude. Better sense than to go all the way nuts. Dig, we are half crazy as it is, ALL the time. That's HEALTHY. He laughed and winked, like to show he was proud of being half there himself, and said, The idea of taking it to extremes so you can treat it like malaria, that's the white man's.

I started to say something but I felt Bix move behind me and I spun around. I had forgotten about him for a minute and now he was walking off down the hall behind his stepfather who must have come back. I took a couple of steps, and then turned back to say good-bye to the black orderly. He was gone, vanished, almost like he had not even been there.

I hurried and caught up with Bix and his stepfather at this large doorway leading into a well-lit room. They were waiting on the edge, Bix's stepfather with his back to the room blocking the view in. As I came up he said, Braxton, do you want me to tell her you are coming?

Bix shook his head.

All right, said the stepfather. Then he looked over at me.

I helped him out. Hey Bix, I said, if it's okay with you I will just wait here for you. Okay?

He barely nodded.

His stepfather looked at me gratefully. Then he stooped down and said to Bix, Are you ready? Bix nodded again, barely. All right, said the man, straightening up. I'll just go in first, and you come in just a minute.

Then he turned and walked into the room. We stepped up and stood on the edge of the dark and looked in.

It was one of those long rooms with beds on both walls and a big aisle down the middle passing by the foot of every bed. There were people on or near every bed, all dressed in white smocks. I did not look at them to see how their craziness was going, being curious instead to see Bix's momma. Most of the people were so old I cruised right by them when checking to find her. I only had my sight of her at the baseball game, in her black dress and her hair full of wind bouncing up and down, and I almost did not recognize her when I passed my eye by her. In fact, if it had not been for the stepfather coming up beside her bed and bending over and saying something to her, I would have kept looking. She was that different.