Ginny Gall (51 page)

He was tired, a graininess in his mind, sand in his eyes; he drifted off to sleep.

How long it was later he wasn’t sure, and in the darkness he wasn’t sure where he was, or if he was somewhere else beside his sling bed at Acheron—or was it Columbia? Strange—he had almost
stopped waking in those places. The Ghost’s hand was lightly shaking him as no hand would in prison. He did not come up panicked or fighting. He came up dizzy, as if he was drugged and swimming through layers of drizzle.

“It’s you right on,” he said, swung his legs out and sat up. “I mean it’s me.”

The Ghost stood near enough to grab him. “You need to get a move on,” he said.

Delvin was almost alert. “Somebody call the police?”

“They will soon.”

“Damn. Those old women figure me out?”

“Somebody will if somebody hadn’t awready.”

“What you being mysterious about?”

“You just better come on. Time to move yo hocks.”

Again he could hear singing, a low rough female voice, singing the same song; he must have been asleep only a minute.

“No way I could spend the night here, hunh?”

“You wouldn’t want to do that.”

“Lord, I’m swackered.”

“You on the run already, aint you?”

“I’m on furlough.”

“Like one of them army boys.”

“How come you aint hitched up?”

“Weak heart. How come they didn’t put you in?”

Was he crazy? “They gave me a pass on the whole shebang.”

“Well, come on. It’s time for the civilians to air out.”

On their way, moving slowly, Delvin half alert and memorizing as he went, walls and floor, the hall doors like a cascade in his mind, the faint lights like a lost measure of something grim and unforgivable, half a dozen steps down the passage the Ghost reached to close a door that stood open. “I thought I told you to keep this door shut,” he said into the room.

“You don’t run me,” a woman’s voice said. It was the singer’s voice and a voice he had heard before.

The knob was jerked out of the Ghost’s grasp and the door pulled
open. Framed in the doorway, heavier than the last time he saw her, was Lucille Blaine, the woman who’d put him in prison. His mind churred in a white heat. He experienced a weightlessness and he felt as if he could fly—as if he would. He choked and quickly cleared his throat. His chest burned.

The woman looked straight at him and with the tensity that accompanies great acts he waited for what was coming—murder, sorrow, hanging—but then he saw she didn’t seem to recognize him. She had not even appeared at the last trial, and in the one before that her story had sounded so slurred and disembodied the judge laughed outright at her, but still they had not let him go.

He shivered and glanced down at his left hand that seemed to be rattling at the end of his sleeve. He felt as if he was shaking out of his skin but his hand was barely trembling. The woman stared at him. She gave no sign that she knew him. Had he changed so much?

Then she grinned, showing missing teeth—number one on the right, number two on the left—a grin offered like a bag of tarnished jewelry to whatever in the world showed up.

“Looks like you found a fresh fish,” she said to the Ghost.

She winked at Delvin and grinned.

“Come on,” the Ghost said to him in a flat voice. The words seemed to come from far away. “You got to be back at the camp.”

“You an army boy, hunh?” the woman said.

Delvin grunted.

“Mr. Go-Slow the GI Joe,” she said, elaborating on the grin.

Without wanting to—never once in the years having meant to—he saw the fear in her eyes, the lifetime of it. Fear, yes, cultured by hate, but not absolved. And he saw the marks on her skin from the grinding stones that crushed her in the dark and saw the streaks and creases where the burning waters had rolled over her and saw the gouges where the knives had flensed her and saw the pasty cadaverous leftover skin where the vampires of false witness had sucked her blood. A revulsion rose in him at this, a spurning, distant yet collapsible, showered over by his own hate and the hard blows of an old raised hammer. Seconds collected like specie, legal tender
for all debts public and private. He had beat the ground with fists, feet, hoe, shovel, cap, with his own bony head, banging the life out of her by proxy. He had screamed in a cell until they threw cold water on him, dragged him out and slung him still screaming into the dark closets of punishment. He had sobbed until his throat was raked raw, until his body ached in every acheable part. He could make a list. This cut, this scrape, this sprain, this blow from the shovel-faced guard, this unloosing of tendon, ganglia and fasciae, this cough, this wheeze, this shiver, this itch, this scar—this breath—issued him by Lucille Blaine of Chat-town, Tennessee.

Yet he continued to stand there in the dim yellow light. On a radio down the hall Mr. Jack Benny, another white man, mock-argued about a restaurant bill. The studio audience—gentle people, wizards, unapprehended malefactors, old ladies in itchy undergarments, girls with fever sores, men smelling of licorice schnapps—ignorant white people—laughed, as they say, fit to bust. Out there, among the passing audience of uncharged felons and saints and collectors of trash and the rustled and fractured losers and freakish layabouts and all the good people of the earth, among the tedious miles of the great republic, war-spooked and weary, in the elaborating dusk, these two, jailbird and slattern, doing their best to keep their feet as the cold ball rolled on through endless space, gazed at each other, eyes light-brown-gone-to-green peering into eyes dark-almost-to-black, and, as if nudged or prodded or slipped, or in frazzlement fallen, shifted the final micro measure that separates nothing from something.

Delvin began to turn away, but she called him back.

“Hey,” she said, “I’m sorry, soldier boy. Why don’t you come in.” There was a softening in the rasp of her voice, quiet, not quite kindness, almost a plea. “Hey,” she said, “you come a long way to get here, I bet, so why don’t you sit a while with me.”

She began to make room for him on the bed, swept soiled undergarments, pages torn from movie magazines, broken nail files, crumbs of misery, off the pale blue cotton cover.

“Come on,” she said.

She was trying, a little, to make up for her harsh manner just now, he could see this. He could see she still didn’t recollect who he was.

“I get to shooting off my mouth,” she said, “no telling what’s going to come out. You want some pop—or some gin? I got a little gin. Pete,” she said, speaking to the Ghost, “go down and get us a bucket of ice. And another bottle.”

Delvin looked into the Ghost’s pale eyes, into the eyes of this man who knew him. “It’s all right,” he said.

“Don’t take my foolishness to heart,” she said, smiling crookedly.

Delvin saw the brokenness, the faltering about to spill into helplessness. He thought of his mother and he could hardly remember her and this had been the truth of it for years. This woman’s unlucky hair, like wire rusted on her head, her pudgy graceless fingers reaching to grasp the lid of a jar of cold cream smeared at the rim with a streak of rouge, the yellow warty elbow showing from under the loose sleeve of her brownish, sweat-streaked wrapper, reminded him of something that had nothing to do with this place and time. Not his mother, and not anyone he recalled, but another world, faltering as it passed.

The Ghost was standing just out in the hall in the sight line of both people, waiting for Delvin to come along, waiting for the moment representing reason and hope for the future and the house’s wish for no disorder among the help to take hold.

“Where you from, soldier boy?” the woman asked, and even though she sounded as if she was reading from a paper Delvin could hear the restless appeal in her words.

She screwed the pale pink lid on the jar, set the jar aside on a table from which half-dollar-sized flakes of yellow paint had peeled and slopped gin into a squat glass she first wiped with a grime-gray handkerchief. A wire strung under the corner ceiling held a couple of fake-fancy dresses on hangers. She offered the glass to him.

This was a moment of great import. Did he take the glass that would in some sense extend forgiveness, if only in the most cursory way, to her? Or did he refuse? Did he in refusing dash the glass to the floor? Or did he take the glass and smash her across the face with
it? Was this a trick? Had she recognized him after all and was only playing along—coldly or stiff with terror—until she could signal for Winston to get the laws up here?

He accepted the glass and set it on the low dresser that was close by, close enough to make it easy—appropriate even—to set the glass down; as if the universe had colluded with direction and destiny. He set the fluted cloudy glass down, just snagging it with his little finger and almost but not quite tipping it so she made a barely perceptible move toward it, the two of them leaning closer. She smiled in an unhappy, self-regarding way.

“Yes,” she said, “a drink might not be what you need just now.” She dipped her finger in the metallic-shiny gin and licked the liquor off it. “You must be from around here.”

“I can’t stay,” he said as one might to an unmarried older relative, sad solitary person without recourse or hope for fun, blurting the words like a rube or a boy.
But I must be on my way. The living—the freshly escaped—have to be on their way.

“I can make love come down around us,” she said. “I got tricks. I got conjures.”

She flopped back down on the bed, staying just upright enough not to be defenselessly collapsing or offering, and smiled foolishly. He could see that her hand wanted to come up and hide her snaggle mouth. He wondered if she was drunk. The room had a faint medicinal smell.

“Well,” he said, half turning away.

“Wait,” she cried, leaned forward and pulled out the top drawer. “I’m famous.”

In the drawer were packets of newspaper clippings tied with red cotton string, half a dozen of them. She started to draw a fat packet from the drawer but he stopped her with his hand on top of hers. He could feel her soggy skin, the soft reddish hairs. His fingers were damp.

“I been in the news,” she said, “all over the country. Ask that boy there, he’ll tell you.” The Ghost had become ghostlike, silent, staring, the fingers of one hand twitching in the palm of the other. “Aint that true, boy.”

“Yes . . . m,” the Ghost said, the final syllable or smear of syllable, the
m
or
mam
, still faintly snugged against the
s
, almost erased. The woman heard in this sound, so stifled it could hardly be caught by God himself, the disrespect, but she was infused with a thin solution of yearning—for kindness, for a tenderness that existed only in faint early morning dreams, themselves fading. The sound was like a distant bell tolling out the days of her life. Delvin saw her for what she was. He saw the unerasable sadness and the hate and the bitterness she couldn’t quite contain and the cravenness and beggary she couldn’t contain either; he knew the back precincts of near worthlessness she long ago had stopped trying to crawl out of—yearning even so for a little fanciness, a respite, a cool spot on a hot day—he had learned all about this yearning in prison and was an agent of it himself and he knew this too, and he had tried out the lame and careless usages of it that led nowhere except into deeper pain.

His eye twitched, once, twice, and he covered it with his hand. Out in the hall the Ghost shifted his feet. Delvin heard the rubber soles of his house shoes scull on the dry carpet. He removed his hand from hers.

“It’s sufficing,” he said.

He meant she didn’t have to sell him anything, leastwise not reports of his own life’s catastrophe.

“You ought to read some of these,” Lucille Blaine said. “It was me that saved the day on this one.”

Her voice faltered as she spoke.

In her voice—accent of ridgeback Tennessee, one of the cast-down—he heard a river winding, dark, shining river of life descending the falls and granite steps from the high mountains to the valley, running onward through the hay fields to the plains and the sea. Was it simply too dim in this room for her to make him out? Had he changed that much? She’d never seen him anyway, really, not close. Maybe she had not even paid attention. The single long-necked bulb was shaded on the window side with a sheet of yellow paper taped to it. He could smell the hot paper. He could smell too the sumpy odor of female blood and, wearing at the sharp blade of it, the odor
of a familiar perfume, elixir of the bordello, all-purpose solvent concocted of middle eastern fossil life soaked in essence of decomposing lilies, Heaven’s Night—Whore’s Holy Water, it was familiarly called—shipped out of Detroit City by the tankcar load throughout whoredom, perfume she was at that moment even as she continued to clutch their two lives in beggarly embrace atomizing into the air between them; his mother’s perfume.

For a second rage filled him. It flashed like a hot white light, like something alive and so strong its grip hurt him to feel it. But it was passing through—he knew this, felt it give and start to swirl away just as the Ghost, who had snuck up close, hit him from behind.

He lurched into the woman who with surprising agility shoved him away. He fell onto his face on the bed with the Ghost’s knee standing in his back. Against his throat he felt the sharp edge of a razor. “You collect that, don’t you?” the Ghost said. “You collect what that is?”

Delvin said nothing. The woman in a swirl of garments and perfume had scrambled to her feet away from him. His head was turned to the side and he could see her standing against the wall staring shock-eyed at him, as if he was—not the the devil, but worse, and she recognized him. All right. He waved at her as once in a moment of hopeless hilarity he had waved in a courtroom at her, and before the Ghost could cut him reared and knocked the razor away. The woman sprang on him but he too was quick and he slipped under her flailing and away and as she fell hard on the bed he cracked her in the side of the head with his fist. She slumped senseless into the pillow. He too had a razor. The Ghost was scrambling around after his on the floor. He came up with it, a short cutter with a pearl handle, and saw what Delvin was holding.