Going Down Fast (31 page)

Harlan looked tired through and through. He'd lost weight and he was down to sore nerves. Rowley looked aimlessly around his livingroom trying to think how to reach him. “It wasn't the way you lived, when you could help it. Now you hang a big sign on me Whitey, Guilty. I'm not taking that sign.”

“That's your problem. I can't afford to care about your feelings. Besides, I can't have you in the house and join the FBM. They wouldn't take me. Not that I'll be having a house long.”

“The Free Black Militia. Of all the pseudo-fascist splinters.”

“You can't win from the city and all you win in court is words. I can't work for them any more. I played into their hands too long. Riding herd on poor black girls with their miserable illfed kids, driving them out of their heads trying to find out if they're getting any. I've had it. Please, White Father, let me pay twice as much for this lousy little house and you can forget about cleaning the streets and picking up the garbage, we'll just eat it. At least in the FBM they're men.”

“It's not the black supremacy stuff per se that bugs me. It organizes people who have to be organized, and what group doesn't think they're God's own peepers? But this talking violent is an old scene. When violence hits, who gets their heads broken?”

“You lose every time till you win. But that's how you get pride.”

“Look, the less actual channels exist for action—given the being hurt, the anger and outrage—the tendency exists for the words to get hot. Like the Wobblies who talked sabotage a lot more than they practiced it—but the union got broken and the leaders jailed for enraging the public. If you talk violent enough you get the government down on you. Are you going to fight the real estate interests and the corporate interests with codewords and karate practice?”

“This society is trying to box me, is trying to tear my balls off and stuff them down my throat. I got to fight. But not fair any more. I can't afford it.”

“You're saying I got hurt, so I don't care how effective this action I'm going to take is. It's an outlet for my feelings. The race be damned.”

“When they drive the nails in you, let's hear what you yell. You're yelling now, cause you been comfortable and now you're getting pushed around a little. I'm saying they're killing me, and I'm going to choose my death. And it sure won't be ulcers or hypertension. And I'm telling you, clear out of my house.”

He looked at Harlan. His shoulders felt heavy with sadness and the acid residue of useless anger. “I'll move out tomorrow.”

Harlan shrugged, looking away. “You're paid up to the end of the month. Just start looking.”

“I'll move tomorrow. But we'll both be poorer for this, and I don't mean at the end of the month.”

“Don't you see why I feel like a fool?”

“No. I'm the fooled one. I thought I belonged here.”

“Look, I had you into my house and we pretended like this is a world where that makes sense, where people are naturally together. All the time my black brothers
need
places to live, need them desperately. You can find yourself an apartment anyplace. We have been pretending, and that's why I say we are both fools.”

“When you got this house you wanted your mother upstairs of you and me downstairs, because we were friends. If none of that finally worked, it's not hard to see why, but it sure doesn't mean it's wrongheaded to try … I'll have my stuff out by supper time.”

He parked his boxes in the basement of a friend's house. If it were spring he had the feeling he would keep on going down to the hiring hall and sign on a lake freighter.

Herb let him sleep on his couch, a thin pillgulping announcer born of the alliance of American Legion and WCTU in the dry prosperous northern suburb of Evanston, born wrong and running. Since Herb had just been divorced again and was sleeping at his new girl's, there was little pressure on Rowley to look for a place.

Herb had a suite in an apartment hotel a couple of blocks from the lake on Wilson Avenue halfway up the North Side—a location chosen by the vectors pulling him: Evanston, Loop job, girl on the near North Side, exwives and children in suburbs. A gamy and exhausting neighborhood with cheap kitchenettes jowl by jowl with uniformed doormen, girlie bars, secondhand stores and the rococo Waikiki nightclub. Rowley was growing his moustache again and out-of-work men in bars with veins of steel string, hill twang in their voices wanted to pick fights. Like the men in the mills. Men he would belong with except for the University, except for his music with its black roots. Under the El on Broadway the stores were festooned with plastic poinsettias. In the lobby an aluminum tree turned bathed in a blue spot.

Christmas Eve at cocktail time he was leaving the studio, passing the Blackhawk, when the Lovises emerged with a small party. Tom was thick with a portly tanned old man, but Nina svelte in leopardskin saw him. Saw him, looked, looked through him. Turned away her perfect chin and slipped her arm through Tom's, laughing.

Christmas he worked the six
A
.
M
. shift. Then he drank sour mash while a blizzard howled in the streets, and played Herb's records. After a while he took out his Gibson instead and began to feel a little action in his blood. Herb was off splitting Christmas among his previous begottten households and his girl, with a visit to god's country also on schedule. He would arrive late and drunk. A mirror was hung to reflect the couch, giving him the feeling of the WCTU watching. Feet up he played and sang to himself:

Did you ever wake up lonesome
—
all by yourself
,

Yeah, did you ever wake up lonesome, all by yourself
,

And the one you love was loving someone else?

My friends don't see me, they just pass me by
,

Yeah, my friends don't see me, they just pass me by
,

Wouldn't mind it so much, but they hold they heads so high
.

Ragged moustache, leathery face, bloodshot eyes. He looked, he felt, mean. So, so let her go, he thought about Vera with a raw angry ache. He lacked the gall to try her iron virginity again. He missed the way she tilted her head, her fresh laugh and the taut line of her thighs. But he could not want to see her. Nothing to say.

That makes me evil, oh Lord, so evil
,

Yea, I get evil, baby, when my love comed down
.

Caroline carrying that lump she called his. She had phoned before he left Harlan's and gotten truly angry, truly indignant. She could get in touch with him through the studio. He knew his mother and Sam were disappointed he did not come to Gary, but he could not face them, play older brother and sturdy son, play man with the answers. He didn't feel like going to work or fucking or talking.

If you want to have plenty women why not work at the Chicago mill?

You don't have to give them nothing, oooh well, just tell them that you will
.

After Harlan bought the house they'd gone to see his mother. Harlan wanted her to live upstairs and he told Rowley that they'd just go and move her. A hot dusty July day. She had been living with one of Harlan's half sisters on South Buffalo but they were all gone. Rowley sat in the car while Harlan asked around and finally they found them a couple of blocks away on Green Bay, living in a shotgun house—the rooms getting smaller as it backed off the street.

His mother would not move though it was obvious they were in bad times. “At first I didn't like Shirley for nothing,” his mother said, shaking her head with a blank, benign smile. “Now I know she good for you. But she wouldn't be good for me. Now every week I wonder how are we gonna do, how are we gonna make out. But if I come and live with you, I know how: war!”

They went out with two of the boys to a shingled rickety corner store for icecream and beer and a few groceries. A little money infused in the house made everybody happy. Mrs. Williams cooked a crazy hot chicken stew that Harlan and Rowley ate till they were stuffed. Near the turning basin in Calumet Harbor. Cottonwood, sumac, patches of tall weeds. A rubble dump and towers of high tension wires. Railroads crossed at grade level. Dogs trotted through the dusty streets and kids hung around on the corners. Remote, hot, isolate. Ships came and went slowly, potently, past the scrawny handmade looking houses. Near the grain elevators a big gray ship was hosed down. Highway 41 stood up on end to let a frighter pass. In the sky trucks trundled along the expressway. A concrete rainbow of no particular promise arched over the deadend houses. Harlan stayed hours past the time he had promised to be home, and he did not go out to a payphone and call Shirley, he ate supper and drank with his brother-in-law and nephew and mother, ate till he hurt, laughed himself silly: and that day they were close and understood each other without needing to talk about it. Gone.

Maybe in a place like that he'd turn up Black Jack. He had let that slip, let that go. Maybe it was the one real thing left for him to do. The one person he could talk to, that he had anything to say to. And one other. On the seventh day of his drinking, Saturday, he rose and drove in glittery sunshine past the frozen baroque of the lake to the South Side to see Leon, for friends are friends and what the hell.

He remembered how he had come in that morning, stopping off on his way to class to shower and change, and found Leon. When he went to see Leon in the hospital and after, he had felt closer to Leon than Leon felt to him. Then Leon got married and moved out.

Leon had admired him, imitated him, dogged him. He was a shy pimply suburban kid. When he got excited his voice would go way up. He was so awkward around girls that he sounded rude. Sometimes he courted insult. Always he came obliquely at what he wanted. Grimacing, Rowley called up time after time when he had known what Leon was getting at (wanting to meet a girl, wanting to be taken along, wanting Rowley to say out loud that he was welcome, wanting Rowley to come out to his folks' house with him) and pretended not to, pretended to him and Leon that as long as Leon hadn't spoken out loud, there had been no communication. Why? His mean streak, only. Leon had been a vulnerable kid, and they'd all had a crack at hardening him. Yes, meanness.

The plateglass window was steamed up. When he banged on the door he could hear Leon moving but when the door opened, Annie stood there. She stared. He thought she was about to slam the door before she produced a broad smile, perhaps at her own shock, and motioned him in.

Her dark tangled mane was caught back on her nape. She wore no makeup. Her face was flushed with exertion and looking around he saw a vacuum cleaner plugged in. The room looked bigger, lighter than he remembered. She seldom wore levis—thought herself too broad in the beam—but she was wearing them now with a striped jersey. She looked younger, leaner, yet domestic: the vacuum, the splash of cleanser on her pantleg.

“Leon's out, probably for the day. Let me think where you could look …”

“Forget it. I'll catch him some other time. Are you living here?”

“Me? Sure.”

His impulse was to march out but he was too curious, too annoyed. He sat down heavily. “You've left your mark. Can Leon bear it?”

“He likes it clean, but it's hard for him to throw junk out. He hoards every last butt and popbottle of his life. I understand that, I'm enough that way myself. Maybe I'll learn to dispose of my own collections.” She laughed easily, throwing herself into the chair opposite. Quickly her eyes covered the room, measured her progress and allotted herself a break. Her embarrassment had evaporated, and obviously she was relaxed with him as any casual visitor.

That was her style. A little bitterly he recognized the ease with which she had played hostess to married couples and bachelor friends. Once Herb had fluttered round her in the kitchen while she was making sesame lamb: she had turned on him and said sweetly if he did not exit at once she would roast him. Herb had scurried into the livingroom, convinced that she would. She presided where she sat now ankles crossed and head pensive on hand, eyes cleaning the rest of the room.

“Been living with Leon long?” He wanted to ask her what had become of that independence she used to rub his nose in.

“My building's coming down. Half the tenants are out and the city's using indirect persuasion. Heat's off. Last week two people got mugged in the upstairs hall. So Leon insisted I clear out, and I'm staying here—my stuff's still in my apartment—and looking for a place.” Her large eyes flashed over him.

“I'm looking for one myself.”

“Is Harlan down already? My god.”

Then he wanted to tell her. He wanted to talk about it and he did, even drawing out the story. Trying to convince himself? Or trying to make her react to him?

“You shouldn't have left like that, getting your back up. How do you know he wouldn't have changed his mind? He was sore. You have to leave doors open for people.”

“I've never been able to force myself on somebody or stand around biding my time while they cool down.” He was doublesaying but damned if she got it.

“But you've known him so long. It has to heal.”

“Nothing
has
to work out.” He shrugged. She was insufferably friendly, helpful, remote. He felt like punching her. “I didn't mean to startle you. Just looking for Leon. Had no idea you were here.”

“It's just that you've been the missing man all week.” Pushing the hair from her face she smiled into a corner of the room, smile of recollection and something harder. “Caroline's been around.”

“Did she come to you with that story too?”

“Too?” Her gaze twitted him. “She's been crying on Leon's shoulder, and you'll admit, won't you, she has something to cry about? Couldn't you have been more careful?”

“Caroline can reach me through the station any time she wants.”