If He Hollers Let Him Go (17 page)

The thought pushed a laugh through my nose, loosened me slightly, then I remembered that Mac had said I’d lose my job deferment. I’d be in there soon myself, if I didn’t get my job back, I thought, looking at the long lean cruiser. I gripped the rail until my knuckles showed white through the brown, clamped my teeth until my jaws ached. I wouldn’t take it, I told myself; I just wouldn’t take it, that was all.

Then I thought of Alice saying, ‘But it’s not just you now, Bob. It’s you and I… . Don’t you understand?’ I began hurting inside, all down in my chest and stomach. I could see the planes of her face moving, the smooth mobile motion of her lips. ‘In the things you do and the decisions you make you just can’t think of yourself alone. You have to consider our future… .’ The plea in her eyes… ‘Is that too much to ask?’ The finality of her voice… ‘If you don’t go to that girl and apologize and try in every way you know to get reinstated— If you can’t do that much, Bob, don’t consider me as being with you any more… .’

I felt something hammering on my brain, banging away with a ten-pound sledge. I gave a violent shake of my head, trying to get it off. Me and my goddamned two-cent pride, I thought; my cut-rate muscle and my blind dukes. Who in the hell did I think I was?

I took a deep breath and pushed away from the rail. I really liked that chick, I thought—she was strictly tops.

Then I started looking for Madge. But not to apologize. I was going to rack her back, I told myself. I was going to ask her what the hell she meant by saying she wouldn’t work with a nigger, where did she get that stuff calling me a nigger, anyway? And if she didn’t like it I was going to kick in her teeth. And if it meant losing Alice I was going to lose her. Goddamnit, I was a man like any other man; I wasn’t asking any favours, and I wasn’t taking no kicks.

I found her on the deck below, working with the same two mechanics, tacking a conduit to the deck plating. She was sitting on the deck with her feet drawn underneath her, bending forward over the arc. Her skin showed in a white line where her jacket and waist hiked up, and below her hips spread tight in her leather pants like an hour-glass. Don stood to one side, shading his eyes against the flash with his outstretched hand.

‘What say, Don,’ I greeted, coming up. ‘How’s things breaking?’

He looked around, didn’t exactly give a start at sight of me, but his sharp brown eyes behind their rimless lenses got sparkbright. ‘Oh, hello, Bob,’ he said. ‘I want to see you.’

The arc died for a moment and he took a quick squint at the job, looked away before a flash could catch him, and said to her, ‘That’s good.’

The two mechanics took off their flash glasses, gave me nervous looks, and began piddling about. It wasn’t tense, but it was itchy.

I pulled the edges of my mouth down, dropped a flat-eyed evil glance on her hooded head, then looked at Don. ‘A rugged playmate,’ I said. ‘Must have snake in her. Will she bite you too?’ I wanted her to hear me, but she didn’t.

She kicked back her hood, flipped the rod butt across the floor, unhooked her stinger, and began chipping the scale off the weld burrs with her iron hand chipper. She didn’t see me either.

Don put his hand to his chin, worried at his lip with his index finger, then headed me off. ‘I’m sorry about it, Bob. Now don’t get down on me,’ he said. ‘I told Mac I’d let you have her; I told him how it was. I had no idea—’

Her sudden movement stopped him and we both turned startled looks on her. She came to her feet like a jack-in-the-box and went right straight into her act. She cringed back into the bulkhead and her big blue mascaraed eyes peered out at me in sheer terror.

I wouldn’t let her have it. ‘Get a load of this,’ I said to Don, dipping my head at her; then turned and found him studying me with that sharp speculating curiosity of white men watching Negroes’ reactions to white women.

She said something under her breath and now her face took on a wild raw excitement that shook me. She looked crazy enough to call me a nigger again, and I tightened instinctively against it; this time I knew I’d smack her. But instead she pumped a mean, hard contempt into her eyes and said in her flat, unmusical, nigger-baiting drawl, ‘Sometimes I sho wish I was back in Texas.’

I took a breath and held it. One of the mechanics said gruffly, ‘Come on Madge, we got a divider to put in before noon.’

Now I was ready to shoot her. I wrenched my gaze away, then felt Don’s eyes on me again.

But all he said was, ‘I want you to believe me, Bob, I had no idea she’d give you any trouble. If you want me to I’ll go with you to Mac and—’

‘Naw, I’m going to fight it through the union,’ I said. ‘I want some of Mac too.’

He was curious to know just what had happened, but he didn’t want to ask right out, so he said, ‘Did you have a fight with her before?’

‘Hell naw,’ I said. ‘I ain’t never seen her before.’ Then I decided to tell him; I felt I could talk to him all right. ‘When I went to get her, she started that phoney act you just saw and said she wouldn’t work with a nigger, and I called her a cracker slut.’

Red came up in his face in slow waves, but he didn’t pull away from it. ‘Some stinker,’ he said. ‘What she needs is a good going over by someone.’ I knew he wanted to say by some coloured fellow but just couldn’t bring himself to say it. Instead he got redder and said, ‘It’d take some of the stinking prejudice out of her.’

‘What she really needs is just some discipline,’ I said. ‘Some of these officials to tell her what’s what, to lay the line down and make her walk it.’

He blinked at me and his eyes got bright again. ‘I told you her name, didn’t I? Madge Perkins.’

I gave a little laugh. ‘I found that out. What I want to know is what’s eating her. She knows goddamned well nobody wants to rape her.’

He hesitated a moment, then said, ‘She hasn’t got a phone,’ digging out a little black address book. ‘But I’ll give you her address.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘I knew her room-mate, but she joined the WAC’s.’

I gave him a quick startled look; I didn’t get it. ‘What do I want with her address, man?’

Now he began getting red again, but he gave me a curious little look. ‘Maybe you can cure her,’ he said.

‘Look, man …’ I began, then didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell whether he figured I was making a play for the dame and was using the beef as an opening, or was trying to tell me how to get even with her, or whether he was trying to prove he didn’t have any racial bias himself. It could have been he felt badly about it from a white point of view and wanted to show me that all the men in his race didn’t approve of that sort of thing.

Whatever it was, he went on giving me her address with a painful insistence. ‘It’s the Hotel Mohave on South Figueroa …’ He gave me a downtown street number. ‘Room 202, that’s the front room on the second floor.’

‘Say, man, look,’ I began again. I wanted to tell him I didn’t want to go to bed with her, I wanted to black her eyes; but just the idea of her being a white woman stopped me. I felt flustered, caught, guilty. I couldn’t realize what was happening to me, myself. It was funny in a way. I couldn’t tell him I
didn’t
want her because she was a white woman and he was a white man, and something somewhere way back in my mind said that would be an insult. And I couldn’t tell him that I
did
want her, because the same thing said that that would be an insult too.

I started shaking my head and laughing. He looked put out, slightly offended, and his eyes blinked like butterfly wings. But he got it all out with the white man’s eternal persistence, ‘There’s a phone in the hotel, but I don’t know the number. It’s one of those joints, you know.’

I was blowing laughs through my nose; I felt lightheaded and giddy. ‘Now anybody in the world would think we were two fairly ordinary, reasonably sane guys,’ I said.

I wondered what a white man and a Negro could talk about that wouldn’t touch at some time or other on one of those taboo subjects that would embarrass one or the other, or both. Either both the Negro and the white man would have to accept the fact and even justification of white supremacy—then they could talk about what the white folks were doing and thinking and what the Negroes were taking and aping; or both would have to reject the theory of white supremacy and condemn all of its institutions, including loyalty and patriotism in time of war; or the white man could retain it and the Negro reject it, which didn’t make for conversation at all.

I began shaking my head again. ‘I’m telling you,’ I said. ‘It’s a killer.’

He didn’t get it. He blinked and his eyes went blank, absolutely lost; and I didn’t know where to go from there either. We’d taken it too far to back out; now we stood there at a loss for words, each wanting to escape the other but neither wanting to be the first to make the break.

‘There’re a lot of stinkers like her in the yard,’ he was saying, and I said, ‘Too many.’

It was a relief to both of us when Zula Mae came up and said, ‘Red wants you, Bob, he’s up a tree.’

‘Again,’ I said, and took her by the arm. ‘See you, Don.’

‘Take it easy, Bob,’ he said with a peculiar baffled look in his eyes.

‘Baby,’ I said to her. ‘You sure look good to me.’

She gave me a half-incredulous, half-hopeful look, and her red lips flowered in her dark face. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said in her husky plaintive voice, and I gave a long loosening sigh.

But the things had gotten me. Now I felt depressed, walled in, black again. Red noticed it right away.

‘What the hell happened to you, Bob? Don’t the union wanna help you?’ he asked.

‘I got it all fixed,’ I lied, but my voice was flat, dispirited.

‘He been reading in the paper where all young men gonna be called to the Army,’ Peaches said. ‘He got the GI blues.’

‘Got something,’ Conway said.

Red didn’t want anything in particular; just wanted me there so Tebbel couldn’t take charge. I stood around for a time.

‘I don’t know what the hell I’d do if they called me,’ Ben said. ‘Every time a coloured man gets in the Army he’s fighting against himself. Of course there isn’t anything else he can do. If he refuses to go they send him to the pen. But if he does go and take what they put on him, and then fight so he can keep on taking it, he’s a cowardly son of a bitch.’

Smitty had stopped his work to listen. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he argued. ‘You can’t call coloured soldiers cowards, man. They can’t keep the Army from being like what it is, but hell, they ain’t no cowards.’

‘Any man’s a coward who won’t die for what he believes,’ Ben flared. ‘If he’s got principles he’ll die for them. If he won’t he’s a cowardly son of a bitch—excuse me, ladies.’

The other fellows stopped to listen now.

‘Any time a Negro says he believes in democracy but won’t die to enforce it—I say he’s a coward,’ Ben declared. ‘I don’t care who he is. If Bob lets them put him in the Army he’s a coward. If you let them put you in the Army you’re a coward. As long as the Army is Jim Crowed a Negro who fights in it is fighting against himself.’

‘If Bob gets called sure ‘nough and listens to you and gets sent to the pen, he’s a fool,’ Zula Mae said.

Ben gave me a swift look. ‘Bob’s all right. If they call him he’ll go on and make the best of it. Nobody expects him to be a martyr. But one thing I’ll tell you, and you remember it—’

Tebbel stepped from one of the shower nooks where he’d been standing and Ben gave him a glance and kept on. ‘One thing … You’ll never get anything from these goddamn white people unless you fight them. They don’t know anything else. Don’t listen to anything else. If you don’t believe it, take any white man you know. You can beg that son of a bitch until you’re blue in the face. Argue with him until you’re out of breath and no matter how eloquent your plea or righteous your cause the only way you’ll ever get along with that son of a bitch is to whip his ass—excuse me, ladies.’ He looked around defiantly. ‘Bob’ll tell you that’s right. Isn’t that right, Bob?’

‘That’s right.’ I said.

‘Then he gonna be your friend from then on,’ Conway chuckled.

‘That reminds me of a story,’ Tebbel said. ‘There were two coloured soldiers—’

‘Was one named Moe?’ Pigmeat cut in.

I chuckled and went out.

When I went down to turn in the time cards Kelly said, ‘Wait a minute, Bob, I want to talk to you.’

Then he went on telling this joke to the two white guys from the shop.

‘So he took this gal out in the shed out of respect for old Aunty, see, because all old Aunty had was this one-roomed shack where she and the gal lived.’ He took a quick glance to see if the tool-crib girl was out of hearing and lowered his voice slightly. ‘It’d been raining like hell, see, and the shed didn’t have any floor and it was all sloppy and muddy where the hogs had been wallowing. But this guy was hard up, see, he’d been on the road for two weeks …’

I wasn’t ready for that one; wasn’t even looking for it. I didn’t even have time to dodge it. He’d tricked me into listening by having me wait, and now without giving me time to get mad he said, ‘How’s Danny Tebbel getting along Bob? Do you think he’s going to be able to handle your gang?’

The other two guys looked at me curiously to see how I was taking it, and the tool-crib girl came over and said, ‘Those boys in your crew are breaking too many of those 9/32 bits; they’ll just have to stop it or they can’t have any more.’

They couldn’t have done it any better if they’d rehearsed it. I couldn’t take offence because Kelly didn’t tell the joke to me and he could always say if I hadn’t wanted to hear it I didn’t have to listen. And even if I still wanted to take offence, the girl had stepped into the picture and whatever I might say to Kelly was sure to offend her. I never wanted to get out of a place so bad in all my life; I wanted to just take my tail between my legs and slink on out. It was a gut punch and my stomach was hollow as a drum; it took all I had to keep standing up straight, to keep on looking at him.

I did something with my face, trying to make it smile, and I had to reach down my throat and pull out my voice with my hand, but I got it and I said, ‘I’ll get mine by and by.’