A Cry of Angels (12 page)

Tio dragged us inside to point out other recent improvements: a rotating display of canned goods, tilted shelves that allowed the next item to slide to the front to replace the one removed, the rebuilt motor in the meat case.

"You ain't messed with the drink box, I hope," I said.

Tio grinned. "I know when to leave well enough alone." We opened our Pepsis and covered the spurting ice with our mouths. "Come on out back," he said. He led us to the rear loading dock and pointed out a derrick with a swinging platform operated by a winch and chain. "My automatic freight elevator," he said. "Watch this." He levered a sack of potatoes onto the platform and winched it aloft into the second-floor storeroom. He pulled another lever and dumped it off.

"Not bad," Em admitted.

"And that gridwork runs the length of the store. Mr. Teague can't lift like he used to. I got the idea watching 'em move beeves at the packing plant. 'Course, I made a few modifications."

"Course."

"Got to know what you're doing, though. The wholesaler's driver tried it, and it threw him out down here." Tio made a wry mouth and dipped a thumb at his crotch. "Hey, I never showed you the awning raiser!" He hopped to the ground and ran up the stairs leading to the two rooms he and Mr. Teague shared over the store. "Y'all go back around front."

We returned to the front of the store. Tio was leaning out of the upstairs. "Now, here's how she works," he said. "There's a lever mounted up here just inside the window. You pull it down, the counterweights fall, which shifts those rods along that axis and lowers the awning, and at the same time cocks the springs. So then, if you want it raised, all you got to do is flip it . . ."

"
Tioooo
!" The front door burst open and Alvah Teague lurched onto the sidewalk, a wispy, thin little man with large ears and watery eyes and his galluses riding high on his rounded back. In his late seventies, Mr. Teague was at an age when the mind sometimes skips a beat, and familiar words began to hide, giving him a tendency toward long stares and vague answers. His hearing was starting to go, too, reducing his voice to a mumble, except when he was shouting, as he was doing now. "
Where is he? Where is that scoundrel now
?"

"Got him treed," said Em, pointing.

"Up here, Mr. Teague," called Tio.

Mr. Teague backed up until he could see that high. "Where you been? I told you to wake me at two o'clock!"

"It ain't two o'clock yet."

"
Don't argue with me
! Get down here and lock the store!"

"You want me to lock the store?"

"If you can spare the time from your other affairs."

"What for?"

"We're going to the Grand Opening of that new Valley Farm market everybody's talking about!"

"Aw," said Tio, "what you want to go there for?"

"Because, from all accounts it's going to put me in the poorhouse and relieve me of you and my other aggravations, and I'm going to pay my respects! Earl, get in the truck and help me steer. That wheel's gettin' too stiff for me."

"Tio can drive," I said.

"I know Tio can drive! It's what converted me to Christianity!
Em, get outa them peanuts
!"

Em dropped the lid of the parching machine and squirmed on the tailgate with a double handful. I got under the wheel and Mr. Teague squeezed in beside me, got settled, and turned the engine over.

"Hey, just a second," yelled Tio, "look at this." He flipped the awning lever. Nothing happened. He flipped it again, and again. Same result. Mr. Teague was worrying the truck into gear. Tio threw his arms in disgust and ran out and down the outside stairs. He made the tailgate just as we were backing away from the curb.

But as we turned to start up the hill, the old canvas awning suddenly contracted against the wall with such a prodigious, dust-clouding wallop that several passers-by jumped into the street.

We crossed the railroad and drove into Quarrytown, on streets that still showed patches of brick, into the four blocks of stores that made up the main business district, around the tree-shaded square with its Confederate soldier at attention, and out past the poolroom with its loafers at ease. The Little Holland highway, like most roads leading out of Quarrytown, was strung with corrugated metal granite sheds, their broad doors open to the light and air. Stonecutters, broad-backed men with features as sharp and gray-dusted as the stone they carved, guided the hammers and cable saws to satisfy that peculiar craving of man, who is content to mark his birth with a piece of paper, but wants his death recorded in stone.

The largest granite firm in town was Blue Light Monuments, owned by William Thurston, president of the Granite Association. The new shopping center was located on open acreage adjoining one of the largest Blue Light sheds, on land leased from Thurston, just inside the city limits.

With Mr. Teague pumping the bleeding brake and both of us riding the wheel, we managed to guide the old jalopy to a jolting halt in the field next to Galaxy Plaza. The parking area was jammed with milling crowds. A miniature carnival was in operation—kiddie rides, candied apples, a man shooting dogs from a cannon. We moved to the edge of the crowd listening to the mayor's welcoming speech in front of the Valley Farm store. A man gave Tio and me free balloons.

When the mayor had finished his speech, lauding the new supermarket as "the most modern unit of the fastest growing food chain in the United States," and congratulating the company official, a man in a blue serge suit and buttondown collar, for electing to locate it in Quarrytown, "the crossroads of the Emerging New South," he and Miss Quarrytown High cut the ribbon, then picked it up and pretended to cut it several times more for the
Star
photographer. Then the mayor led the people inside, he and Miss Quarrytown High pushing a decorated cart on a ceremonial shopping tour with the photographer ranging around them popping flash bulbs like a giant lightning bug on a leash. The crowd fanned out through the aisles, pointing, marveling, leaving the children behind to jump up and down on the magic mats that made the doors pop open. Mr. Teague squeezed through the maelstrom, dodging the doors, nodding to people he knew, and once inside, stopped cold.

The old man stood blinking in the fluorescent glare, the celestial sweep of music. He was dwarfed in sudden pyramids, shelves of goods higher than his head. The aisle stretching away before him held more foodstuffs than his entire store, and there were others, hills of them under the signs and streamers; bins of hardware, a housewares section, a complete drugstore displayed along the wall.

Mr. Teague moved down the aisle, fingering, touching labels, ticking off the numbers of different brands. He stopped to wave his hand in the fog of open dairy cases, to peer in the upright freezers. At the end a white enameled meat market ran the entire width of the store. A half-dozen men in paper-boat hats ran up and down filling orders, and behind a glass wall others operated on the blocks. Unbelieving, Mr. Teague moved to the counter, piled high with cellophaned chickens and preweighed slabs of meat. He lifted a package and read the blue-stamped price, tilted his glasses and examined it again. "That's
sirloin
, mind you," he whispered to Tio, "sirloin going for that price!" A young man in a spotless apron appeared at the counter. "Help you with something, sir?" Mr. Teague looked at him, waved his hand absently, put down the package and moved away.

At the produce department he stopped to lift bars of packaged tomatoes, nearly the same size as billiard balls, and to examine the okra, pole beans, asparagus, all of a uniform length and all encased in see-through wrap under the slanted mirrors.

He had to rove every aisle, finger every stacked display. It seemed hours before we finally moved past the weighing station and out past the clacking registers. At the door, the man in the blue suit stepped out of the cubicle office. He looked at Mr. Teague's apron and smiled and put out his hand.

"I'm John Ramsey, regional vice-president," he said, "nice of you to drop in." Mr. Teague gave him a vague stare. "Well, now that you've seen us, what do you think of us?" The man folded his arms complacently. He had confronted a lot of small grocers.

Mr. Teague looked puzzled, trying to place something. He stood looking out over the store. Finally it struck him, his eyes grew wide. "It's the smell!"

"Beg pardon?"

He pointed an accusing finger. "Your store's got no smell!"

"I'm afraid I don't . . ."

"And how can it have any, when you got everything embalmed in plastic? People like to get to the food, man, sniff a little, pinch a little. Even your meat market's got no smell, it's more like a damned hospital! And your produce, everything portioned out that way, that's the way you feed livestock, not people!"

"Our methods," said Mr. Ramsey quietly, "are dictated by efficiency in handling volume merchandise. People don't want to take the trouble to punch and poke and feel and weigh. They haven't the time anymore. They want to be fed in the quickest possible way in the least amount of time. That's what we're doing. The little grocer on the corner had his day, Sir, and a fine day it was, but this," he waved his arm, "this is tomorrow."

"Then all I can say is God help us," said Mr. Teague. "God help us all." He started for the door and jumped back when it sprang open for him, and went out muttering and shaking his head.

Em put his arm around Mr. Teague's shoulder. "Didn't seem much to me, Alvah . . . All your place needs is dressin' up a little! Here, let me tell you what you oughta do . . ."

August ended, and with it, the last of summer freedom. The day after Labor Day I dutifully greased down the sprigs of my new haircut, found a pair of socks that would stand exposure on the gymnasium floor for calisthenics in
P.E.
class, and with Gwen Burns beside me on that first day, walked over to College Avenue to enter the bewildering fracas of high school.

In those days, we attended elementary school through the seventh grade, then moved up to high school as "sub-freshmen" in the eighth. Quarrytown High, the only white high school in town, was an old brick building with white cornerstones that stood crumbling majestically a block from town. On its left were the band-room annex and the gym, and behind, below the little barrackslike shop building, in a natural hollow between the school and the courthouse, was the Granite Bowl, the football stadium with granite seats fitted into the hillsides.

Gwen tugged me down the long cement-apron walkway, past club initiates in grotesque makeup and inside-out skirts—boys shining shoes and getting paddled, girls sweeping leaves and chanting club creeds—and into the crowded hall to the principal's office to fill out the forms to get me enrolled.

Back in the hall again, Gwen stood hugging her notebooks, surveying the tumult, her eyes lit with ecstasy.

"Oh, Earl, it's finally happening! I just can't wait!" And she hurried off to take charge of her own homeroom and left me to find my way through the halls jammed with girls in see-through blouses and rustling crinolines and boys fingering ducktails and greeting each other in jovial obscenities with honking male teenage voices:

"Blow boy!"

"Fish mouth!"

Stiff little middle fingers ranting in the air.

Overall, it was a uniformly lackluster small-town student population. In Quarrytown the children of the wealthy were sent off to exclusive prep schools in the mountains, or up North. Quarrytown High was made up of middle-class town kids mostly, who fortified themselves in tight little cliques and clubs; a few busloads from the country, most of whom were kin; and a scraggly fringe of lower-class poor, untalented and ugly, who sat in the corners of classrooms and waited for age sixteen to set them free.

"Earl Whitaker?" My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Barnes, looked up from the stack of registration cards. "Whitaker? Is he here?''

I raised my hand from the back of the room.

"Your enrollment card was signed by one of the teachers. Your parents are supposed to sign."

"I live with my great-aunt," I said.

She studied the card. "Sunflower Street, where is that? I don't believe I've ever heard of . . ."

"It's over by the fairgrounds," I said quickly.

"It's in the Ape Yard," corrected Benny Ford, who actually did live by the fairgrounds. "He lives in niggertown!"

"My God," roared another boy, "we got a coon in the room!"

Mrs. Barnes quieted the laughter and went on with the business of checking the roll. I kept my eyes down, making long, slow circles in my Blue Horse tablet. It was going to be grammar school all over again.

We spent the rest of the day finding our classes and getting acquainted with what our teachers expected of us. Math was going to be plain hell as usual, and General Science, with its physical laws and drawings of plants and engines, didn't promise to be much better, until Joe Breisner, the doctor's son, smuggled in a human anatomy book. While the teacher, Mrs. Claxton, droned on about flower pistils and stamens, we sat in the back trying to get worked up over close-up photographs of female genitals. Few of us found anything sexy in them, and a couple of the boys skipped lunch.

That afternoon, English and civics, both under Gwen Burns, proved to be the most threatening courses of all. We were going to "immer-r-rse" ourselves in great literature, majestic poetry. We would have playlets, we would have dramatic readings, we were going to make the arts "come a-li-i-ive!" As for civics, there would be none of this rote learning of the levels of government, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We would become the government! We would elect our own mayor and councilmen, set up our own judicial system, and learn the workings of democracy firsthand!

Afterward we straggled out to the gym for a final
P.E.
class under Coach "Stumpy" Rayburn, who shouted us through a furious half-hour of calisthenics on the basketball court, then gathered us into a circle for a fatherly talk on the proper care and treatment of the Christian body, complete with charts on balanced diets and exhortations about sleep and exercise. After looking about to see that the girls were out of the gym, Coach also warned us about "abusing." We had to stop it, he said. It was like losing a pint of blood. And, as a Christian athlete, he believed it was a sin against the body, the temple of the soul. He finished by calling on every boy there who had indulged in the practice to be man enough to stand before the class and take an oath never to do it again.