Going Down Fast (15 page)

“Well now, how is that, Mr. Bones?”

“Because you never stop paying, you pay every month of your life, and it would be cheap at one tenth the price.”

Lederman had sent for him after he'd stumbled on Leon's suicide attempt. Sent him, questioned him, tried to charm him, ended haranguing him. What a need that man had to be right, to be acknowledged right. Forsake my son and cleave only unto me. In a strange way he had made Rowley think of his own old man, and that set his spine stiff. Both had been true believers in the American dream, both had looked on the bottom of the Depression and called it hell. Sheldon did not want to be beholden to him, but Rowley had told him that he didn't want a job or a letter of recommendation or introduction or a scholarship. “There's nothing you've got to give out that I want.” Sheldon had laughed in his face and finally sent him on his way, calling him a fool and meaning it, but slapping his back.

Finally he stopped at Vera's—an impulse he had been ignoring. Climbing the narrow stairs, he knew he would find her with a man. He felt raggedly a fool plodding up through the dim smells of wet worn wool, soft coal, male cat and piss, cooking oil and porkfat. Her voice questioned down at him, “Paul?”

Jealousy struck him before he remembered, walking into the light from her open door, that Paul was her brother. She sucked in her breath with surprise and danced backward. “It's Rowley. Come for my head, remember?”

Across the hall a door opened a crack, an eye watched.

“Oh?” She stood aside, her eyes razory. Wearing a loose olive sweater over slacks, she was lean and wiry, a girl on a smaller scale than he usually liked. Her thighs in the slacks looked resilient, hard. In one nice arc of movement she nodded him in, let the door shut and turn. Still moving she reached up, one knee on the bed, took the mask, spun around and handed it over. “Here you are.”

“Come on, want to rob me of my pretext?”

“For what? It's the only thing could interest you here.”

“For seeing you. Why not?”

“Do you usually chase after black girls?” The faintest of smiles: delicacy not of china but of the forelegs of a deer.

“Don't usually chase after any kind.”

“Don't start on my account.”

He noticed with a pang that her feet were bare: small, narrow, with a sharp bone jutting in the heel. “Do you think you have a special reason to mistrust me?”

She stood with her hands locked behind. “Whatever you think you want, you won't find it here. If you don't listen now, you'll lose your temper by and by as well as waste your time.”

“Because you're involved with someone?”

Her mouth thinned. “I don't belong to that whole messy game.”

Her words resonated strangely. “You mean people?”

“That isn't all there is to being human. If it were, yes, I'd be something else. Why not? Half those I pass on the street don't think I'm a person anyway.”

She stood like an exclamation point, ticking conviction. “You sound like a stubborn twelve-year-old.” He saw a child, skinny with wiry pigtails and broad ashy part, straight fragile colt's legs, black and arrowy body. Bastard image, half the young Sam, half the girls of his gradeschool, the despised haughty colored girls who fought it out with him for the top of the class in the fifth, the sixth, the seventh grades. Thelma Hawkens, Rosetta Townsend standing with him in tense agonistic spelling bees. He let the wicker rocking chair tilt far back. Vera suffered his stare with cold presence. Girls who could read and sum and spell to the top of the class but never were chosen to play the princess or act the Spirit of Christmas to Come.

“You're from a small town, right?”

Plainly puzzled she sat down in the armchair. “Green River, Michigan. Going to tell me I'm a product of small town morality?”

“No.” He smiled. “Caroline comes from your town too.”

“If you think I judge her, you're mistaken. I only think she mixes with people who make use of her and leave her unhappy.”

“Small town. With many blacks?”

She let out a silent laugh. “All in the way you look at it. In one of these suburbs they'd get excited. Ten families.”

“Were you all very close?”

“We knew each other. We lent a hand. But … my father's an educated man.”

“With money enough to send you to an expensive school.”

“I went to teacher's college in Kalamazoo and Paul is on a scholarship.” At that she got up and began clearing the small table by the window.

“Were you just going to eat?”

“No!” Rapidly she packed the plates away in her corner kitchenette. “Our father's a farmer.” She sat back down. Coming aware of her bare feet she took her sharp heel in her hand, squeezing. “You can see I'm a country girl.”

“I'd believe you came off the moon. Caroline has more of that Michigan flatness in her voice.”

“You mean I don't sound colored? You aren't the first to comment.” Her face screwed up monkeylike. “Our father was a stickler for proper diction.”

“In Green River you must have been isolated when kids started dating. Even around here gradeschool kids play together block by block, but highschool kids sort out. People begin to watch them together.”

“If you see me dramatically alone, you're dead wrong. For one thing, there were four of us. Sylvia married too young, but the rest of us were close. Particularly Paul and I.” She glanced at the clock.

“You're expecting him?”

“Yes.” Her face contracted in anger, smoothed.

He thought if he politely asked if he should leave, she would surely agree. “An educated farmer. What was he doing there?”

“Our family has farmed in Green River for five generations,” she said with glacial precision. “Our greatgrandfather, a freedman, came North and settled there …”

Hearing the lock turn he looked. With her back to the door she went on in the same tone. “The farm we have is the original minus a few acres lost in depressions, plus what our father has added since the last war. The farm has always passed to the oldest son, the others being trained for teaching or the ministry and moving out, except during hard times when the farm supports the extended family—”

“God! The holy Jamesons, chosen to rake manure by the Lord himself. Pure, pennykissing, squeaky with religion, highminded in the presence of their cows, anointed with grade AA butter, even their pigs decent and clean!”

“The brother,” Rowley said with satisfaction and got up, extending his hand.

Tucked up even tighter in the armchair Vera introduced. “Mr. Rowley. He's a friend of Caroline's.”

After a perfunctory shake Paul collapsed on the bed. At Caroline's name he threw Rowley an amused curious look: like, are you getting a piece of that?

“Would you mind wiping your filthy boots on the mat rather than my bedspread?”

“My boots—if you'd look instead of sticking your righteous Jameson nose in the air—are clean. I did not get them wet, because I had a ride here.”

“By way of Alaska? You are a mere two hours late.”

“I wasn't aware I was being timed.”

“What did you expect me to do with supper?”

“Eat it.” He giggled in simple enjoyment. The boy was tall but loosely built, a couple of years younger and shades lighter than Vera. Family resemblance, yes, and they probably all were handsome. But Paul's face was softer, easier. It lacked that cameo precision that caught his nerves: he was pleased it was so.

Paul caught his examination and swung around to stare back. Then he laughed. “I know you now. Yes indeed.” He rose on an elbow to scan the wall. Scanned it again. “Vera, since when are you so polite? Where's his head?”

“I am not! I gave it to him.”

Obediently Rowley held up the mask.

She folded her arms, drumming her fingers. “Well, where were you?”

“I ran into some people.”

“Hard enough to knock you out? You could have called.” She hugged her thin arms. “That's the last time I cook supper for you.”

“You bore me when you make threats you have no intention of keeping.” Leaning back he played with the braids of a lewd/innocent face of chintz and straw. “It was someone I owe a favor—”

“That
toad?
”

Paul made a warning face. “You don't know him.”

“I'm surprised you want to. Your taste is rotting.”

Paul rolled to his feet and glared equally at her and at Rowley. “You never annoy me so much as when you don't know what you're talking about but think you do. The family arrogance.”

“Lately you've been down on the family.” Tipping her cropped head toward Rowley. “What do you think, is he too old to put himself out for adoption?”

“I come in to find you reciting the litany of holy groans.”

She laughed: a clean rapping in her throat. They appreciated each other. They had a common notion of style. Perhaps that was what he would find himself knocking his head against. She was leaning back in the chair, her smooth long throat tilted and the pants sleek to her thighs. He got his gaze off just as Paul caught him. Letter yesterday, Mrs. Eugene Warwick. Eugene into Gino, progeny of chemistry. While Rowley meets the farmer's daughter, jig-a-jig-jig
très bon
. By Christmas, at this rate.

“Besides you have no cause to complain. You had company.” Paul's gaze flicked him.

“Uninvited. About to depart.” Standing he shrugged on his jacket. Politely Vera rose and followed him toward the door. He saw her notice the mask on the floor beside his chair and her lips part on the impulse to speak, then shut. Smiling into her eyes, he went out the door.

Still smiling down the steps he considered it his right to interpret that silence not only as wanting to keep the thing she had made, but as his license to come back. He was on his way to hear some new field tapes, and if he had time there was a party for a visiting rock group he should make. Damn that kid brother for having a key. Descending he had the sense of entering his whole life as if all of Chicago were open to him now except her room, which existed in another dimension.

“Why did you want us mixed up in a neighborhood ruckus, Rowley dear?” Cal sat at his cluttered desk with his hands together in Gothic prayer. “Why, I beg you tell me?”

“Because action never hits one community: people dumped from my blocks will crowd other neighborhoods, giving the real estate boys a field day. Because housing for anyone who makes less than ten thou is scarcer than dragons these days. Because this scene bugs me more and more the harder I look. Once again the comfortable are looking after their greater comfort and the powerful are making money, and it's all being done to slogans about urban renewal—and who wants to say they're for slums?—and the usual liberal rhetoric.”

“I know the left wing of the Church is up for justice and the right wing because they don't want Negroes in the West Side parishes. The old line CIO actionists are mad. The Communists are dancing. And you want us to join the picket-line? This is a music and art station, not the thirties revival rally of the air.”

“If you're scared, come on before and after with disclaimers. Give the opposition time. But let me put a program together. We've done controversial things before. We did Berkeley and Selma.”

“Rowley, the University is the only thing that keeps Chicago from turning into a vast shallow pool of warm beer. It's so flat here. Civic planning always involves shoving the poor around, from Burnham on. That's how you create parks and boulevards and expressways and civic centers. They're always in the way.”

Rowley crossed his arms over Cal's view: the slate gray lake, a freighter on the horizon, the black blattlements of the Loop. “During the Depression when there was first talk of turning part of the Black Belt back to white high income housing, someone asked the real estate spokesman what would become of the poor shits living there. Perhaps, he replied, they could all go back to the South.”

“We're a liberal station. The advertisers we attract aim at that clientele. But that clientele works for Inland, graduated from there. The middle class has to protect itself, or there won't be a thing but Negro and hillbilly slums from Evanston to Calumet City.”

“It's that increasingly hereditary middle class I want to reach.”

“Buy an ad in the
Tribune
.” Cal's fingers strummed. “Wake up, sweetheart. Who keeps us slinging culture? Remember the Moss Foundation grant? Our subsidy from the American Steel Foundation? Who pays your salary? Moss and Barker are both Inland trustees—”

“That's why we can't get a story in the papers, because Moss owns—”

“Because there isn't any story. Curtis Brothers own this building, fifty percent, and John Curtis sits on the board of Trustees, and John Curtis builds all the new university construction.”

“It's a conspiracy.”

“It's business as usual. Don't turn into a revolting paranoid. Curtis Brothers really are masters of steel frame construction—they're almost aesthetic at times. Really. For instance, the big New York firms are so much grosser.” Cal rose and clapped him on the shoulder. “You're getting bored, Rowley, getting flat. Looking for trouble. Such a bother. But not on the station I've built from nothing. Someday you'll take my analyst's name. You do look a bit haggard.”

“Yeah, so I went into that UNA meeting, you know, to try to talk to them. They're so respected and interracial and reformist. I started out to get them to support us, but before an hour passed I was down on my knees putting it to them, if you go before that city board and defend this proposal, you're shooting us down, that's all. I was wheedling and dancing like a real Tom.”

They were slumped at the diningroom table. Harlan's mouth was slack, eyes bloodshot, voice hoarse and drained. Rowley kept rubbing at his eyes. The corners felt swollen. The last pot of coffee sloshed in his belly. “It was the first time Cal's ever slapped me down. He always gave me a free rein, so I never knew till now I was on one.”