3 Day Terror (9 page)

I
T WAS
crazy for Duggan Allen to think it but he half did anyway; half thought before the meeting that John Beggsom might maybe lean across the kitchen table and say to Duboe: “Know what, Dube? Riding over here with your nigger this morning, he told me he didn’t cotton to Ginny Lee Polk Ann Towers one whit at all. Told me he couldn’t be bothered studying any light-skinned housemaid with five names and four eyes. I always thought him and her was sweet on each other, but no, he says; says wouldn’t even miss her if she turned to dust next Wednesday and blew away with the wind like a train cinder.”

Just to show Duboe what the hell did Duggan Allen care, because Duboe said this morning when he came out to the gin, “Whew! I didn’t catch much sleep last night! Some little gals from the Nelly are most practiced, Duggan, hah? A-yeah, what
you
think? You say I was right to make such a statement, or wrong, Duggan, hah?”

Duggan knew Tappie was lying through her front tooth last night when she said, “Naw, course she ain’t up, nigger. Ginny Lee Polk Ann ain’t gonna study midnight waitin’ for yo’ black hide to show hisself. She is in on the pallet like any respectable member of Baptist Union Church at this hour.”

“Yeah, then what you doin’ up, Tappie? If she in sleep-in’ off Sunday, who you waitin’ on, de Lord Jesus?”

“You mind yo’ black sassy mouth, nigger! Ginny Lee Polk Ann is where I say.”

“Somebody else say she out by the dump a while ago.”

“Somebody out by the dump talk dumb talk, and I don’t study dumb talkers.”

Duggan knew Tappie was lying, knew what Duboe was getting at that morning; now he wished he could get back to Duboe the information that Duggan Allen was a soot-black nigger who didn’t think high yeller hung the moon. Let him hump high yeller all he want back in the bushes, cause the good Lord knows that what the bushes is full of, on the first count, is snakes and vipers, like the kind got Eve to begin with.

Duggan drove the pickup down the dirt road away from Beggsom’s place, with Beggsom in the front seat beside him. There was going to be a meeting in half an hour, and Duggan was told by Duboe to go and cart Beggsom to it, and Duggan would have liked to know what in hell Beggsom and Suggs and every other gum-assed troublemaker in the county was on their way to being up to.

Still he wished he could get it brought up; maybe just before the meeting, to show Duboe; and Lawd he guessed he’d kill that five-named four-eyed, milk chocolate bitch by time he caught her that night, once he got off work.

“… so as I was saying,” Duggan told Beggsom, “got me some new tail, lot better ‘n her.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the gin, is there, Duggan?”

“Aw, naw, sir. Don’t know what’s the meeting for. The boss just said I should go and tote you there.”

“Well, I hope he don’t need money this time.”

“Naw, sir, search me. I don’t know … Anyway, I don’t miss
her,
I tell you.”

“Who?”

“Ginny Lee Polk Ann. Lot better’n her.”

“Yeah. You boys get a lot of fishing in before you go to grass, I’d guess.”

“How much I miss her,” Duggan said, “is how much you see the hole if you sticks your finger in a pond and pulls it out and looks for the hole.”

“Look down there,” Beggsom said. “Down by the Dip.”

“Car in trouble.”

“Looks like a stranger … Yeah,
is.
New York plates.”

“Car overheated, heee — lookit! ‘Mind me of some women ah know. Now, like Ginny Lee Polk Ann. Used to be I thought she was pretty nice, see. But you know how much I care now for her? It’s like when you set out on a cow to catch — ”

“He’s flagging us down,” Beggsom said. “Why’nt you pull over, Duggan? See what it is he wants.”

Duggan kept the motor running, and yelled out: “You need help, boss?”

“I stopped to take a leak,” the man said; “left my motor running and came back to find it stalled.”

“We’re going up the road to Chandler’s gin,” Beggsom said. “Could push you that far, if it’d help.”

The man said, “Duboe Chandler?”

“That’s right,” said Beggsom.

“Look,” the man said, “I want to see Duboe myself. How about letting your nigger get my car going, while we ride up together and start him with a push. I’d like to talk with you, if you’re a friend of Duboe’s.”

Beggsom said, “Okay.”

Duggan got out. It was crazy for him to have wished it anyway, wish Beggsom would maybe lean across the kitchen table and say to Duboe: “That nigger of yours — that Duggan, he don’t need one gal, he need
ten;
and he got twenty. I used to think he candied to Ginny Lee Polk Ann Towers, but
no,
he says; says wouldn’t miss her no more than a duck pond’d miss a hole a finger made in it — ” just to show Duboe what the hell did Duggan care. But then, as Duggan got into the Chevy and watched through the rear mirror for the pickup to come up from behind, his eye caught a stack of pamphlets. Whatever the hell the words said he’d never know, but the picture on the front said something that would show Ginny Lee Polk Ann just how much Bible-swearing
he’d
do by Tappie’s word; just exactly how much he knew about white vipers in the bushes with colored Eves; just spelling-out-in-the-sky-with-an-airplane what he knew she’d been up to.

Duggan reached a long arm back and took one of the pamphlets off the pile.

Then he felt the pickup bump him forward.

T
HE ONLY TWO
who didn’t call her Mrs. Gus were Gus Chandler and Duboe, her son; and except for Duggan Allen, who did her errands when they could spare him from the gin, they were the only two who really saw her. Sometimes, like this morning, she would crawl out of the big iron bed which was heaped with magazines, scratch paper and stubby pencils, and go and stand by the crack in the doorway of her room, next to the kitchen; and sometimes, one of the men sitting around the table there — drinking coffee and gabbing, like now; or playing poker and beer drinking, like other times, would be aware of the shadow, or the faint pink color of her wrapper, and know she was up and prying, but beyond that they didn’t care to see or think. She was Gus and Duboe’s problem.

Beggsom was the exception, but even old John never saw her. He thought to bring her magazines, though; old issues left behind in one of the cabins out in back of his place, where he still got an occasional tourist. He’d tie a string around a stack of them and he’d do what he did this morning — just hand them to Gus, and end the matter right there. Gus never actually thanked him, merely reached out his red wrists and grabbed them with his work-rough hands, nodded or mumbled, “All right, I got ‘em.” No one ever figured out what got Beggsom started doing it, or
why
he did, maybe because no one thought very hard on the subject.

In Bastrop proper, there was the rumor she was crazy, but out at Gus’s she was just a fact everyone accepted. She was Mrs. Gus and she stayed in her room, and people who lived out there or came and went out there with any regularity, had long ago stopped commenting on the fact.

Gus himself never mentioned her, but occasionally, when he went in there for some reason, he could be heard calling her “little girl Lettie” or “Lettie-Lou,” always in the tenderest tones, and Duboe never refrained from mentioning her, but spoke of “Mommie,” said things like: “I was telling Mommie this morning — ” “When I took the papers to Mommie — ” or: “Have to get Mommie’s radio fixed down at town,” — in a random, off-hand way, as though any boy’s mommie might one day decide to haul all her belongings down to a windowless room that had once served as a pantry, and stay in there for five years.

By actual count it was five years, four months, and nineteen days. Lettie-Lou had checked it only a few hours before the men came. It was important to know, because this time she had a plan she was convinced would work; this time she was sure it would not be long before she could announce to Gus and Dubby: “I been asked.”

Duggan was already near to carrying out her instructions, and Mrs. Gus walked barefoot around the wooden floor, pulling out the folds of her wrapper and giggling softly to the walls.

On the bed, piled high with copies of
Your Life, House Beautiful,
and
Seventeen,
was the new magazine which Mrs. Gus had never seen:
Charming,
open to the article she had finished reading last night:
CHARMING YOUR WAY
INTO THOSE VERY SPECIAL GROUPS….

She had liked that article better than
CHARMING YOUR HUSBAND’S BOSS (GUS
was his own boss!),
CHARMING

AFTER FIVE, CHARMING AT A CHILI BUFFET, OR CHARMING IN THE “POURING-DOWN.”

With a new glimmer to her tired light-blue eyes, she had sat on the bed under the naked electric bulb which hung from a black cord above her, squeezing her long toes in delight as she read:

“You know who we mean …
the very special
…
special
in everything they do — They have a flair — a way — a secret something about them that makes you say: ‘Me too?’ ‘Can I play?’ Oh, maybe it’s the scrumptious centerpiece on their buffet table (just a feather and some multicolored thimbles, but you try to do it and you’re all thumbs) or maybe it’s that extra little red ribbon under the pearl lapel pin — but — ”

On and on she had read, shaking her gray head up and down vigorously, and when she came to the five-point program she copied down each point in her neat, curly hand, in ink on lined paper, the way she kept all important notations.

Studying the list long past midnight — she had even heard Dubby come in, called out to him: “Dubby, what’s it doing out?” and he’d called back, “Stopped raining, Mommie. G’night.” — still, stayed there in the bed with her light burning, going over the list and trying to decide which one was
the
one.

Some of them just weren’t right — number 4, for instance. If she were to, get it told around that she and Gus were giving a cruise party, Flo Benjamin would call it a lie, like Gay Porter and the rest would; would cackle: “A cruise party out to the Chandlers’. Haw-w-hee, gaw, that’s a lulu!”

And Number 3 didn’t make good sense. If she were to go around Bastrop carrying a gaily colored umbrella, even when it wasn’t raining, like the magazine said, everyone would sure say she was off her stick.

She’d studied the list and studied it, and then it struck her — Number 5! Her heart raced and pounded and she had to laugh, law, Number 5! If anything would do it, that one would:
SPLURGE ON SOME EXPENSIVE, FRAGRANT SOAP
FOR YOUR GUEST BATHROOM.

It took her two more hours to page through the magazine for the name of a soap, and to write out the message on the violet note paper, and after that was over, she couldn’t sleep. She kept tossing and turning and thinking of morning, when Duggan came and she sent him off on the errand.

She hadn’t counted on the meeting Gus had called. “Now, Lettie-Lou,” he said. “Duggan’ll do your errand when he brings John down from his place. There’s plenty of time for your errand, honey.”

“You know how long it’s been now, Gus?” “Yeah, Lord, Lettie, little girl, now, you g’wan back to bed, now, that’s a big girl.”

“And this time they won’t disappoint me, Gus. Not no more. Flo Benjamin never did have my hand. I beat her in penmanship, you know, Gus. Did I tell you I beat her? It was a county-wide contest, that summer of the Galveston hurricane. She shouldn’t be putting on airs, when I’m the one who won. Took first place and she was only honorable mention, Gus. I swear it on a stack of Bibles. It’s the truth!”

“All right, now, Lettie-Lou. All right now.” “You’ll be seeing, Gus. Maybe by nightfall.”

That morning as she stood in the crack of the door listening, before Duggan brought Beggsom there, she could hardly concentrate on what the men were saying. Sometimes, so she could remember the conversations, she wrote them down in notebooks with a pencil, and read them over at night and thought about them, but whenever she had a
new plan,
it took all her energy. Like today.

She heard Crabb Suggs say: “Hell, Duboe’s got something more than just a gripe for us to get out of our systems, with this nigger thing. Hell, since that goddam black ape started his own store down near the feed company, the jigaboos buy from him. Niggers buy from niggers, when they can, and I’m tired of these school-learned niggers that get it in their wool heads they’re too good for the gins and the fields any more. My store’s going out of business, goddam it!”

Mrs. Gus wrote: “store going out of b.” but then looked behind her on the cluttered bureau and saw the violet envelope; and bit on the rubber eraser of the pencil, smiling. Gay Porter would probably call up Flo Benjamin right away.

“… like to break his neck for him,” Duboe Chandler was saying, “when he ran them articles on the croppers’ diet, ‘member?”

“Yeah,
do
I!” Gus Chandler slapped the table with his large hand. “Hell. I had croppers on my land b’fore that bastard was standing up to pee, ‘n he gonna tell
me
some nigger dream like pellagra caused by fatback and pot likker!”

Suggs laughed, “P’lagra caused by every darn thing the nigger
gets,
caused by; caused by the fact he got no buttons on his pants.”

Duboe said, “John don’t cotton to him even though Cass hooked up with him.”

“We gonna get the niggers,” Chandler said, “or Jack Chadwick?”

“Git what there is to git,” said Suggs. “Nobody looks like a black ape is goin’ to school with my boy or my girl. You sold me, Duboe.”

Mrs. Gus always omitted the dirty words when she took down the conversations. Men could rarely help it, particularity men from the land. “They just talk that way, goddam it, Lettie-Lou!” her daddy used to say when she was a child, and Gus courting her, “and sure, maybe they can’t strut Miss Lucy Hill as fine as them white knuckles you go to high with, but a man who works on the land is a man, baby. And only a man can make you feel like a woman!”

Mrs. Gus wandered around her room touching her finger to dust screens and thinking back to when she won the penmanship prize. The year of the Galveston hurricanes, and Flo Fulton Benjamin got only honorable mention; and Mrs. Gus’s daddy cried, first time and only time — right there in the auditorium.

Before she quit going to church down at Second Methodist she told Reverand Baird once about it, and he said: “Why, Mrs. Gus, I think you should be mighty proud.”

But Gus and Duboe just kept grabbing napkins and soaking up the creamed chicken she’d spilled all over the table; and there were people around her snickering, and Lettie-Lou never knew why, so she wouldn’t go back.

Dubby said they were all skunks down at that church.

Mrs. Gus giggled. She’d go back, one day; maybe even one day this week; and she skipped across to the sink, lit a match and looked up at the calendar. It was Saturday, all right. Maybe tomorrow.

The door of the porch opened then.

Mrs. Gus ran to the crack in her own doorway. There was a stranger, a tall, young stranger, standing by the kitchen table with John Beggsom.

“… fellow I was telling you about. Hell,” Duboe said grinning, “this is a coincidence.”

“Met him on the road,” Beggsom said.

Beggsom pulled out a chair, and pointed to one for the stranger. “What’s this all about, now?” he asked.

“It’s about niggers,” Duboe answered.

Gus Chandler said, “Here comes Duggan. Stall off a second.”

Mrs. Gus heard her husband’s steps start toward her room.

She grabbed the envelope and held it behind her back, but she couldn’t keep the grin from curling her lips. He closed the door behind him.

“Have you got something for Duggan to do, little girl?”

“Yes. An errand.”

“To the drugstore, Lettie-Lou?”

Mrs. Gus hesitated.

“Lettie-Lou, lookit, honey,” Gus said. “I pay that boy to gin cotton. Now, it’s in season, and I can’t spare him. And I can’t spare a picker, either. Not just to go down to the drugstore and tell lies, Lettie-Lou. Now, they know we ain’t inherited no money, or we ain’t come across no famous ancestor, or we ain’t got a reward or an
a-ward
of any kind. Now, little girl, there’s no sense sending Duggan there to sit on a stool and lie. People ain’t even going to listen.”

Mrs. Gus smiled. “You know how long it’s been now, Gus?”

“Yeah, Lettie, and I know you won the penmanship contest, and I know you never meant to throw the creamed chicken, down to church, but — ”

“Oh, I never threw it, Gus.”

“What do you want him to say?” Gus sighed. “What’s Duggan supposed to say this time?”

“It’s a note, this time,” Mrs. Gus said, “a note requesting a special kind of soap.”

He held his hand out. “Let me see it, Lettie-Lou.” “You won’t rip it up?”

“No.”

“Gus, you
swear?”

“Swear!” he answered solemnly.

She handed it to him, and he took it out of the envelope. He jerked the electric light chain; then, mumbled as he read:

Please rush by this boy six pieces of expensive, fragrant soap:

He looked across at her.

“What the hell is this, Lettie-Lou? This is what? Mumbo-jumbo?”

“I copied the soap right out of here.” She started for the magazine, but he stopped her, placing his hands on her shoulders. She was a small, very thin woman, pale and frowning. There were no more buttons on the front of the wrapper and she held it tightly around her.

“You want this soap?” he said. “You really want this?”

“Gus, it’s just a little plan. It won’t hurt nothing.”

“You want the soap, Lettie?”

“Oh, yes. I want it. I do, Gus.”

“They ain’t gonna believe nothing about no guests, Lettie.”

“I read up, Gus.”

“You can stay in here and read up and read up,” her husband said, “but there ain’t gonna be no invitation forthcoming from those Methodist Amuses. God damn it, Lettie, how’d you ever go off your head because of them? How’d you ever — ”

She was looking at him with tears close to coming in her eyes.

“You think there’s something funny about me, don’t you, Gus?”

He sighed, “Naw, Lettie. Naw, I didn’t mean that.”

“I was just as pretty as they were, Gus. Senior Porter asked me to drive with him once. I remember, it was the summer — ”

“Give me the letter, Lettie,” Gus Chandler said. “I’ll get Duggan to take it down.”

“It’s close to noon now, Gus. Senior will be home for lunch. I’d like for Senior to handle my account, so Duggan better go right on to the Porters. Then tell him to come and bring me the soap and tell me the answer they sent.” She giggled. “Will you, Gus?”

“Yes, Lettie,” he said. “I will.”

He started toward the door.

Mrs. Gus said, “Gus?”

“Huh?”

“Gus, tonight maybe — tonight maybe I can say I been asked.”