Atlantis: Three Tales (9 page)

“That's true,” Corey said, uncharacteristically pensive, “that's true . . . .”
And for a moment Sam wasn't sure if memory had made him miss something important in the present.

That night, after Hubert came back from taking Clarice home and went into his own room to study, then to sleep, Sam got up, moved the drape and curtain back, to hang them in a great down-descending arch over the wing of the chair. Then he got back in bed and lay awake, covers over his mouth and ears, blinking at the moonlight out the window.

At work a few days later, Sam asked: “Mr. Harris, you seen Mr. Poonkin?”

“Awww . . .”
Mr. Harris said, like someone with something real sad he'd forgotten to tell you: “Last week, Poonkin—he got the pee-neumonia. I guess it was on the Tuesday you didn't come in. They took him over to Manhattan Hospital on Ward's Island—”

“—for the
Insane?”

Mr. Harris frowned. “Well, they got a lot more people out there than just the looneys now, you know. I guess they got pretty much everybody over there who can't pay for hisself. But Poonkin got the pee-neumonia—the old people's friend.”

Sam looked puzzled.

“That's what they call it.” Glare slid left to right across Mr. Harris's gold tooth. Denting green silk, Mr. Harris's tiepin was gold. “At least it's the friend of old people like Poonkin who ain't got nobody to care for 'em. It takes 'em quick and, as dying goes, goes pretty easy. I wouldn't be surprised if old Poonkin's dead by now—though nobody's told me that, yet. Though why they'd come and tell me, I don't know. I'm no kin of his. Poonkin been around here long before I got here. Now he's gone.”

While he worked in the cellar, sometimes looking over at the boards against the cement wall, Sam thought about going to visit old Poonkin on Ward's Island. He tried to picture himself in a great public hospital, endless dividing sheets rippling white between the beds, talking to the old man, propped on his pillow: “Mr. Poonkin, tell me about what you
did in the War—about the rifle and the barn—behind the spruce, before you could read—what of it you can remember . . . ?” But he didn't really know if Poonkin were first name or last. (Those idiosyncratic memories of the War, what it was to be a fifteen-year-old black boy with a rifle in a barn, not to mention everything that had brought that child to the cellar two doors away, an aged, half-blind, brief and taloned guardian to those magazines—suddenly winking out. Memories—like spume from a broken wave . . . ) In the hospital, weakly he calls to me. I start to leave, he calls again, but before I turn . . . there was Hubert, chained to the water pump, and Papa gasping, drawing back the orange crate in his brown hands, his collar loose and no shirt under his black vest, the arms of a man in his fifties, yes, but deeply dark in the evening blue. “You are not a man—you are a little
animal!”
Papa shouted. “And if you will live like an animal, I will
treat
you like an animal! I will
beat you
like a
beast
till you
beg
to be a
man
again . . . !” Crate slats splintered against Hubert's shoulder; he remembered the precise sound of his father's grunts.
“Ah . . . !”
The slats splintered again.
“Keh . . . !”
On the next blow they smithereened.
“Dah . . . !”
Hubert fell, pulled himself backward, shouting: “Papa!
No, Papa . . . ? No—!”
Papa hit him with the stump of what hung from his hands, then hurled the bottom, missing Hubert, gouging grass.
No. . 
.

No. (Sam walked slowly through the cold street.) For suppose he went over there and Mr. Harris was right: Poonkin was already dead.

“You shouldn't
do
that!” Clarice said one day. “You don't do it at Elsie and Corey's. I'm sure you didn't do it in front of your Mama and your Papa at home.” Which was true.

“If he's going to do it,” Hubert said from the wing chair where he'd begun to read, “I'd just as soon he did it in front of me. You don't want the boy sneaking off to do it behind my back, now.”

Sam was surprised at Clarice's upset. He'd thought her unconcerned about the matter till now.

“Hubert, you should speak to him—you
said
you were going to speak to him. Oh, I'm sorry—it isn't any of my business! And I shouldn't have
said anything.” Then, with her coat still unbuttoned, she went to the door and out.

As she pulled it after her, it stuck—with a noise like
Pra
, then, when she opened it an inch and pulled it to again, with a
Ja
. Outside, she yanked it, and it closed on two beats:
Pa-Ti
. The tensions of her leaving turned the sound into a kind of thunder that left the room whispering its silence. Sam thought about saying:
Hubert
, you
said you didn't mind if I—

But Hubert cut the thought off: “You know, I used to work in the tobacco fields—and by and large, it's a pretty ordinary sort of Negro you find there.”

“That's right. In Connecticut. What do you mean?” Sam asked; because Hubert was speaking in his serious, older-brother voice. Another sort of thunder.

“Well, you got hardworking Negroes. You got lazy Negroes. Then you got no-accounts—that shouldn't be news to you . . .”

Sam nodded.

“But you got another kind you're going to run into up here—only thing to call 'em is animals. Maybe there're white people like that too—I guess there must be, someplace. But, now, there were some good men working with me in the Connecticut fields. And there were some lazy ones. Lots of them were no-accounts—but even more of them were just animals.” Hubert pointed his finger. “And
that's
why I don't smoke no cigarettes.”

“I don't understand . . .”

“When they pick tobacco,” Hubert said, “they cure it before they make those. But they don't wash it.”

“I still don't–”

“Where does an animal make water or do his business?”

“Right where he's standing.”

“Well,
that's
what I mean,” Hubert said. “And I don't mean once or twice; I mean all day every day—right in the row where they're hooking tobacco. They don't even go to the side. And at least ten times or more I come across some feller doing a lot worse than making water or his
business—grinning and telling you he's gotta do it now 'cause there ain't much more to life but that and getting drunk and he's just
got
to do it! Right on top of what you're putting in your mouth and sucking into your body! They know white people going to be smoking them things—they think it's funny.”

“What's a lot worse?” Sam took the delicate white paper from his lip, feeling its faint adhesion unstick, to look at the tube of fire and flavor in his clubbed fingers.

“If you can't figure it for yourself,” Hubert said, “it's not my place to tell you. It's not my place to preach to you, neither. And I'm not going to talk about it to you anymore.” With a theatrical finality Sam found much more maddening than any preaching (that, at least, with Hubert, meant you could turn it back into an argument), Hubert got up from the wing chair and walked, slowly and with the deliberation of a silent, primal force, into the other room—and did
not
close the door. Sam watched him pull out the chair, move two heavy law books over, sit down, settle one forearm on the desk, and begin studying.

Within the silence, which was almost a rumble, like a train's thundering off somewhere, Sam tried to detect the instructions that would release him from his own paralysis. He really
didn't
know what Hubert meant by “a lot worse.” But the veiled suggestions went immediately with the things that could happen to you in the vestibules of subway cars. It wasn't scarifying so much as it defined an area wholly constituted of his ignorance. Sam hated that and felt stupid before it.

It didn't stop him from smoking. But it stopped him from smoking in the house when he was around Clarice—or Hubert.

He sees an image of the bridge springing from a remote past and propelled upward, spiraling, arching the sky, casting its shadow down upon us and vanishing in space.

—
HORACE GREGORY
, “Far Beyond Our Consciousness”

Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.

—
ROBERT HAYDEN
, “Middle Passage”

The intricate interpenetration of the senses, woven into that proto-historic textile—the tapestry of day—sleep and forgetfulness unravel, as effectively as any Penelope, largely before the next day's panel is begun. (Forget a city in which you've once lived, and it might as well have fallen into the sea.) But it would be as naive to think that all forgettings are random as it would be to think thus of all dreams: the first things to go are, systematically, the incidents confirming our own weaknesses which, because we are lucky enough not to
have
to talk about, there's no particular reason to recall. The incidents we will, likewise, retain are among those that tell of a certain strength. We may talk about them or not. In between are all the positive and negative lessons of life that life itself will not let us lose. But even among these, on imagination's intricate loom, one can be reworked into the other with astonishing rapidity, strength into weakness, weakness into strength.

It was astonishing how quickly Sam forgot Poonkin. Guilt he'd felt for not trying to see him on Ward's Island was replaced by guilt at not wrapping up some of the magazines, trudging to the post office—stripped now of its green and red and silver—, and mailing them to Lewy, who, with his small dark hands, with his chocolate chest, with his crisp-haired enthusiasm, would pass them on to tobacco-colored John: a much smaller guilt, since they'd all already traded so many. Back home, they'd received dozens from Sam; Sam had received dozens from them. Probably they'd seen most of these anyway. (Five among the eighteen Sam had actually read before.) But when the last bedsheet-sized pulp was closed and returned to the pile under the daybed beside the wicker, both guilts extinguished each other. He never thought of Poonkin again.

Or anything Poonkin might have remembered.

Over the next few years, half-a-dozen-odd encounters with Paul Robeson, now in a concert, now in another play—along with the tremendous presence Robeson acquired in the black community—soon muddled for Sam the exact memory of the first time he'd seen Robeson on stage.
Had
he seen
All God's Chillun?
No. But then, what was the name of the play he'd seen at the Lafayette? Had he seen Robeson in
The Emperor Jones
, that alternated with
Chillun
at the Provincetown through that spring and summer? No—but some years later he saw the movie. And there was so much talk about, and so many articles on, Robeson, that, on occasions one or two decades by, Sam
said
he'd seen
Chillun
because he knew he'd seen
something
with Robeson in it from around that time. And when, in 1944, Sam and his second wife attended—with Hubert and
his
second wife—the Robeson production of
Othello
at the Metropolitan Opera House, with José Ferrer as Iago, Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Margaret Webster as Emilia, and Phillip Drury as Cassio, they all went very much as Negroes who'd frequently seen Robeson perform.

Sam had seen him just not
quite
so frequently.

He remembered the little girls at the post office a good while. Taking care of them for even those moments had allowed him to retain their
ruined visages with a kind of pleasure.

But the other thing Sam remembered was the first time he walked across Brooklyn Bridge.

Two weeks after the full moon, Clarice told him: “If you're going down there, honey, you've got to dress warmer than that. May up here just isn't like May where you and Hubert come from.”

Thoughtfully, Sam stood at the secondhand bureau Hubert had gotten him just for his things. (He had on Hubert's long johns.) With what little was left over from his pay, after he'd contributed his two dollars a month to Corey and Elsie for food and three-dollars-fifty-cents a week for his half of the rent, Sam had still saved enough to buy first one, another, then a third magic trick from underground Cathay.

Sam fingered the objects on the dresser.

Just that afternoon, down on the table in the hall, he'd found a brown paper package, wrapped in twine, the mailman had brought—from Lewy! Ripping off the paper, he'd found May's
Weird Tales
, featuring the first installment of a novel by . . . Harry Houdini!

Imprisoned With the Pharaohs
.

Folded up and slipped around the first pages, Lewy's letter said: “High Priest Manetho here to Imhotep off spying in the Upper Kingdom,” which made Sam smile at their mutual joke from the afternoon before he'd left that he'd forgotten till now: that Sam was supposed to be a spy in the north and report back to Lewy and John what was going on. “Hi, y'all! You have got a birthday coming up, as I recall. And I got this yesterday—just finished it last night. (I wonder if it's
really
by Houdini?) Consider it your present. And write back quickly and tell me what you think. Though I don't expect a letter from you too soon, as I'm sure you're awash in beautiful women and bathtub gin (while freckled Rust-Top and I do content us with simple moonshine) and the general sins of the northern fleshpots—and you simply haven't the time. But I know you: you'll wait (or try to wait) for the next two installments and read the whole thing at a swoop! But if, in another two months, I haven't heard from you, then I shall do me magic and ju-ju spells on the assumption
that thou hast forgotten thy brothers in the southlands.”