Hard Rain Falling (25 page)

Especially the kids, who were getting their taste of night life savored with illegality and the dirty game of pool; it often pleased their sense of daring to mingle with a Negro, even a pale one like Billy, buy him cups of coffee and listen to his advice on how to hold a cue, make a good game, assess a mark, learn the language. And these kids came in handy for Billy, too, as the source of his maintenance manpower. They would show up broke, with not even enough money for coffee or cigarettes, and Billy could hire them for the one night to sweep down alleys, empty ashtrays, sort pins, or even sweep out under the pool tables, the work being no disgrace because Billy was their boss. They worshiped him, these kids, and he knew they did, and basked in it.

It was not just his talent that drew them. Billy was one of the few, one of the very few, poolshooters with money. Another was old Larkin, a short gray man who wore dark blue suits, wine-colored shirts, and a gray hat. He was a snooker expert, retired from the postal service after forty years of traveling around the country on trains, but old Larkin carried only three or four hundred dollars on him and he was getting old and cranky. Billy always had at least a thousand dollars buttoned up in his left shirt pocket. Just knowing it was there made him special in the eyes of the kids; they were just at that point in life when money begins to show its importance, and a thousand dollars was a lot of money.

It was his caseroll, and he had had it for so long now, since the wild days on the road, that he sometimes dreamed about losing it and would wake up chilled with the remembrance of the emptiness of being broke and alone; sometimes it got awful, and cursing himself he would have to get out of bed and go to the chair, feel in his pocket to see that it was still there, and then even carry his shirt into the kitchen, turn on the light, and, still cursing his fears, take the money out and count it. Then he would go back to bed, and his wife might stir and ask him sleepily, “Where have you been?”

“Checkin the kids,” he might say. Often he would do just that, go quietly into their room and tuck them in, feeling that incredible tenderness allotted only to parents, and then return to his bed and his bad thoughts. But most of the time he was not at home nights, slept days, and the children were merely loud noises in the other part of the house. But his son and daughter had much to do with his increasing worry over his caseroll; for so long the roll had been his edge, his margin, the means of his escape at any time from whatever world he in-habited, and lately it had become more than this and yet less, as he thought about the children and what they were, and who they were.

Years before he had said and meant, “Fuck the niggers”—he had seen too many of his friends swallowed up in bitterness, and he wanted to escape, not drown. But now there was no escape and he was in the awful position of seeing his children grow toward that moment when they would know, would be shown, told, that they were niggers and not human beings.

Because no matter how Billy twisted and dodged his way through life he could not get away from the central fact of his existence; whether he liked it or not, he was black, and there was nothing he could do about it, no action he could take without first thinking about it. It was just there. He could not love it or fight it or be proud of it, it was just there. He could not even hate it any more.

His children were beautiful; how could anybody be so cruel? They were so affectionate and full of joy, so eager and innocent; why did somebody have to come along and with one stiff, ugly word, cut the innocence out of them? From the moment they understood
that word
they would proceed through life half-murdered of their ability to love; the moment their eyes became wary they would cease to be children, and Billy was certain that he himself would not love them so much. It might have been better, he thought with bitterness, if they had not been born at all; and then he saw them in his mind and knew that he could not stand their nonexistence; life without them would be life without life. And some day, a white kid, innocent himself, would tell them who they were, and there would be no path for Billy’s rage, no one for him to murder, only the emptiness of despair and frustration as he saw the hurt eyes of his children.

Sometimes he saw it that way, but other times he would try to remember his own reaction. It was a hurt, yes, but children get over hurts. It was not as if they were alone with it. And for that matter, they probably would not hear
it
from a white kid at all, but from their own playmates. As he must have. They are alive, he thought; they have to put up with misery, like every living human. That’s the only way you ever learn anything. So it might have just been self-pity, like when you lie there and torment yourself by seeing them killed by a car or turning out idiots. Self-pity and the night-dread of losing his money.

Because the roll was the secret—with it he could cushion his children’s pain. Not prevent it; that was impossible; but take away some of the hardest edges. Money could make the difference; he had always believed it. He hadn’t really known what money was for until he had children. It is for them. Good skirts and sweaters for the girl, a fine mitt and shoes for the boy. College; it had failed for Billy but it would not fail for them, because he had gone to college to
find
something and they would go to
get
something; the personal right to jobs where you dressed nicely and met nice people who would have you over for cocktails before dinner on the patio. What difference did it make if all your friends were colored, as long as you did not have to live through the black agonies of poverty or the humiliations of government aid? The roll could do that. It was not his to play with. It belonged in the bank. Yet it was only a thousand dollars. It was pitiful. It was nothing. A little frantically, Billy felt the need for hundreds of thousands of dollars; he felt trapped and cornered without thick wads of money to save him, save his children.

And again, he would think about leaving them. Maybe that was the best way, after all. Teach his children the first hard lesson himself. “You can’t trust nobody.” And flee from all that burden, his children already tempered against injustice. Billy often thought of leaving his wife. He loved her, yes, but that was not enough. Maybe love is enough for a woman, he would think, but it’s not enough for a man. A man has got to have his
life
. He and his wife were constantly picking at each other. She knew, and of course he knew, that he did not have to spend all those long hours at the bowling alley. He was a man of some importance (isn’t that a joke? he thought) and he had assistants who could run things. She wanted some family life, some evenings out among friends, and Billy did not have a single real friend in the Negro community. She, of course, had dropped all her friends from college when she married Billy. She had to make do with the neighbors, and they were a poor lot. None but she among the women had been to college, and all they ever found to talk about was children, clothes, food, prices, television. When she was not busy with the children she was horribly bored, and she would not watch television, even though they had a set. The neighbors thought she was too sensitive about television, but to her it was just the white man’s world shoved rudely into her living room, and she would not have it. She let Billy know several times how dull things were.

That was a woman’s place, he would think angrily, to stay home and keep house and mind the children. If that
bored
her, tough shit. Nobody said life had to be one thrill after another. But inside himself he knew what a stupid lie that was; he knew he stayed away from home because he could not stand the boredom either, and secretly he sympathized with her—only he could not see how both of them being bored would help matters. It was a bind. He often dreamed of running away, and several times he did go out on the road, but he always knew he would be back.

So what was his
life?
Look out there at all the ten million things life can be, and tell yourself which are yours, and which you will never do. And there was the agony of it; so much he wanted to do, and so little he could do. Why wasn’t he content to be what he was? After all, look at it rationally. He was one in ten thousand already. He was a man of importance. He could earn enough money right where he was to support his family properly, and all that other dream-nonsense was wrong. He did not need hundreds of thousands of dollars for his children, he didn’t even need them for himself. He had a good life. He was one of the rare ones who actually loved his family, and one of the pitiful handful of Seattle Negroes who could earn a good living. He knew he had quit the road life for college because he had seen this possibility; he knew he could not have stood the life on the road much longer; the loneliness alone was murdering him; and he knew he quit college and got married not for any abstract reasons but because he had fallen in love and wanted with desperate urgency to begin his family. All this was true. What was the matter? Talent?

So he was a talented poolshooter. There were better in the world. He would never be champion, and so what? What was being champion poolshooter? That was no great thing to be. Certainly he got his few rare moments of joy, his first and his fullest, out of the game; but so what? He was a man now, with the responsibilities he
wanted
and
needed
. He did not feel whole without them. But, of course, he did not feel whole anyway. He felt that he needed to be challenged. It had been a long time since he had felt his heart in his mouth. He knew what he was: out of the running. He missed it terribly. He missed victory, and he even missed defeat. He had everything he had ever dreamed of, and it was not enough.

So he got himself a mistress. What else, he thought ironically. Isn’t that what the fellow does? He dreams of greater things, so he gets himself a girl friend and comes on with her about how Tom he is; he takes all that damned anxiety and focuses it in one place; he
bunches
it. Cool; now when I feel shitty, I can blame it on
her
.

Billy’s wife, like himself, was pale and semitic, with thin lips, small breasts, and slender limbs. Neither of them had more than an eighth of Negro blood. This was satisfactory, and Billy always thought if he ever fooled around on the side it would be with a woman even paler than his wife, perhaps a white girl. Just a fling, a fillip, getting some strange just for the sake of strange. But that is not how it happened. Actually he fell into a panic of love for the blackest girl he had ever seen in his life.

Early in the affair he felt confident and happy, even though he knew he was completely out of control. The girl, Luanne, worked at the lunch counter in the bowling alley for about three hours one night, and then was fired for being drunk. She was short and slender, with large breasts and buttocks and a thick gravelly voice that reminded Billy of Bessie Smith at her guttiest; she was fired after spilling a cup of coffee down the front of a customer and then laughing about it, and when the manager came out of his office and tried to reason with her she put up a fight and Billy had to come and help them eject her from the place. Two others, white men, had her by the arms and were pulling, and Billy got behind and shoved; close up to her like that he could smell the French whorehouse perfume she was drenched in, and for days the memory of the odor stayed with him, and finally he went into the office and got out her employment card and copied down her telephone number. He had a fine time planning the affair in his imagination, and it was only a week later, when he actually telephoned her, that he felt even the slightest doubt.

She vaguely remembered him, and he came on all niggery and boasted his way into a date with her, and after that one furtive night with her, which ended up on the shabby carpet of her one room (they didn’t find the time to pull down the bed), all the real pleasure went out of the affair, and Billy became obsessed. She had been fantastic, beyond anything he had ever known. He could not keep away from her, and he felt terribly guilty. He wondered how long he could stand it. When he would come home early in the morning and climb into bed with his wife, he dreaded her awakening for fear she would want to make love; he did not have an ounce of energy left in his body and he was afraid she would understand, and move away and take the children. The thought of this almost panicked him; it was all right for him to dream of leaving her, but the very hint of a suggestion that she might leave him was terrifying. And what if she, too, had a lover? After Luanne, Billy knew to a certainty that he had been a poor lover with his wife, infrequent, hurried, uninventive—in short, everything he suddenly
was
with Luanne, he had not been with
her
, his wife, the woman he ought to have been loving in increasing depth and passion; the woman he had been neglecting, avoiding, keeping fed and housed and clothed and little else—the woman he had imprisoned to raise his family. Wouldn’t she have every right to seek out a lover? And wasn’t it possible (and the way he felt about himself, statistically probable) that this lover of hers would give her the passion and depth of intimacy she needed and didn’t get from her husband? And wouldn’t she be tempted to run away with him?

It did not occur to Billy yet that she, if his nightmares were true, would probably feel as guilty about it as he did; it did not occur to him that she ought to feel guilty. He was the one in the wrong, not she. If she went into an affair, it would be out of need; but in his case it was—well, something else. Pride, randiness; something less honorable than need. He knew that. He did not even like Luanne; every time he left her furnished room he swore to himself that he would never return and that in a couple of days, when he had his strength back, he would come home and make love to his wife as she had never been made love to before. But he never did, and by the time he had his strength back he would again have visions of Luanne, and cursing himself he would telephone her for a date.

Luanne did not care; that was part of her attraction. She was unwomanly in that she did not need affection, lived without it, considered it corny and disgusting. Anyone who would bring her a few dollars, a handful of joints, a bottle, was welcome. She loved to make love and seemed to have an endless supply of wriggles, groans, and passionate profanity; but between bouts she was terribly dull. When she was drunk or naked, Billy decided, she was a ball; but sober and dressed she was nothing at all. Another thing she lacked, from Billy’s viewpoint, was time. A girl like that was popular, and Billy had to content himself with being squeezed in between the other men in her life; many of them bigger and blacker and tougher than Billy. At one point there were no fewer than three pimps hanging around dreaming of the fortune to be made of this abundance, but she never did fall for their patter; life was too easy to go professional.