Little Big Man (24 page)

I never did like dirty tales, true or false; if they’re any good, they just make you wistful; if not, there’s nothing more boresome in the world, I reckon. As to Luke, the more he talked, the more I was convinced that his experience consisted solely of playing with himself to the point of idiocy.

Nonetheless when Mrs. Pendrake come up and asked us both if we’d like a glass of buttermilk and I says no and showed I was tired, and he says yes and she took him off to the kitchen, with him staring at her up and down soon as her head was turned, I was pretty jealous. For you take even a rotten-looking kid like that, he was of the male sex, and Mrs. P. knowed it. She couldn’t help reminding you she was a woman. I don’t mean she did one thing you could see with the naked eye, and as I have said she was downright cool to most men and acted as if they was standing in horse manure about ten feet below her location.

After enough time for him to have drunk a gallon, Luke come back upstairs, where he had forgot his cap. He was licking his thick lips, which I guess was reasonable enough on account of there was a margin of buttermilk around them. But I had my knife under the pillow, and I remember vowing that if he made one reference to Mrs. Pendrake, I would cut out his black heart.

But he just said: “Well, I’ll tell my Pa you ain’t going to die from that beating I give you. I ain’t got no hard feelings if you ain’t. When you get back on your feet I’ll innerduce you to a good whore down at Mrs. Lizzie’s.”

I had been a man before my time, and now I was being a baby
after it, just laid there day after day and when I wasn’t being talked to, looked at the ceiling and saw a naked woman imprinted on it. Not Mrs. P., I hasten to say—nor the Indian females I had seen now and again without clothes though the Cheyenne is modest, and you take Nothing, had I come upon her bare it wouldn’t have been a striking experience—but rather a
picture
of a nude woman that used to hang back of the bar in the saloon in Evansville years before when my Pa preached there.

Now that is a funny thing that come back to me from a time when it didn’t mean nothing. They put a blanket over it during services, and I can recall Bill sniggering and my sisters blushing, but to me it had been right dull: she was fat as to breast and hip, and had one meaty haunch crossed over the other so as to hide her loins. Her nipples was purple, that was all I could have said at the age I had been then, because they reminded me of plums.

But here she was on the ceiling of my bedroom. It went along with everything else in that house, I suppose, the image and not the reality: Mrs. Pendrake’s motherhood, the Reverend’s spiritual authority, Lavender’s freedom, and my woman who had never existed.

At last I got strong enough to take outside walks so long as I dressed warmly, for it was winter now with a fall or two of snow while I had been laid up. And then one afternoon when we had finished our dinner, the Reverend having so far as I was concerned outdone even his own record in laying waste a turkey singlehanded—for Mrs. P. took very little and I was still on soup—Mrs. Pendrake says: “Dear, it might be diverting for you to walk downtown with me. We might take a glass of soda water and buy some new clothes.”

I won’t go into the shopping, which Mrs. P. accomplished in amazingly short time for a woman though she bought a big load of stuff for both herself and me. I reckon she was about clothes like the Reverend was concerning food: gluttonous but tidy. Nevertheless, I wasn’t any too robust yet and even when well I get dizzy in shops. So she noticed that and says: “Now we’ll have our soda water.”

I had never been in the place we went, which had just been opened up while I was sick, pretty fancy with little marble tables and wire chairs and some brasswork, and there was a big marble bar and on it a vessel like a funeral urn which was silver-plated, with a cupid sitting on top and two elephants’ heads projecting from the bowl. In the base of this structure was six or seven knobs under
which they’d put your glass, squirt some flavor into it, then stick it beneath an elephant’s trunk, turn his ear, and out would come the soda water.

I took an immediate dislike to the fellow who run the place, for he thought quite a lot of himself, wore a brocade waistcoat and a artificial flower in his lapel, and was mighty tall. I guess you’d say he was handsome by the light of some, clean-shaven and with black curly hair. He sure thought so, anyhow. What I didn’t like was the snooty manner in which he run a place where women and children went for refreshment.

Now this fellow would draw the soda himself, then put the glasses on a silvered tray which a small colored boy who was dressed like a little Arab, turban and balloon pants, would tote to your table. I tipped the kid a penny the Reverend give me, and he wasn’t in the least grateful for it, just bit it to see if it was genuine, and put it in his curly-toed shoe. I done that because I wanted to play the grown man at this point and escort Mrs. P. rather than vice versa, for I was almost sixteen. I was shorter than her while walking, but seated here we was about the same size.

She got the idea, for Mrs. Pendrake knew every minute the exact situation when it come to male and female, and without calling attention to it she slipped me a dollar so I could pay the bill when time came.

It was perfect for about two minutes, me and her together like that, and she called me “dear” a good deal and the cherry-flavored soda that she drunk left a flush on her underlip. I had never seen anything more lovely than her fair face between the fur hat and collar. She and I, we just cared for each other and hated everybody else in the soda shop and maybe the rest of the world thrown in.

Then over comes that bastardly proprietor sneering with his front teeth, though he means it as a smile I reckon, and says to Mrs. P.: “Maybe Buster would like to eat a cake.” He didn’t talk cultivated like her or ignorant like me, just cheap. He was also the first man I had ever saw who didn’t give way before Mrs. Pendrake, but looked at her insolent with his eyelids falling.

In return she faltered towards him, then said to me: “This is Mr. Kane, Jack.”

I knowed by then what was manners and stood up so as not to shame her, but he didn’t put out his hand nor acknowledge the introduction in any other wise, but went back to the marble counter
and fixed a tray of cookies and sweetmeats and had them delivered before me by means of the little colored boy.

“Isn’t that kind,” said Mrs. Pendrake. She picked her muff from the spare chair. “I wonder, dear, whether while you are occupied with these, you might permit me to finish my shopping. I must make several more purchases and should not forgive myself for tiring you on your first day out.”

It was always such a pleasure for me to hear her speak, I sometimes failed to gather the sense of it. So it was now. I didn’t realize she was leaving me there until she touched my shoulder and went to the door, having to open it for herself, for that manager kept his back turned then, though a minute later when two ugly, scrawny females who I recognized as the wife of an elder of our church and her old-maid sister prepared to go, he sprang out and in his oily fashion bowed them on to the walk.

Well, I thought, if he thinks he’s going to get the better part of my dollar with them cakes, he is wrong. I wasn’t hungry, anyway, and grew a little resentful that Mrs. Pendrake hadn’t recalled the doctor saying I should go easy on sweets. Feeling sulky, I gazed up to the ceiling of that place and saw my old tormentor, the woman of the saloon picture, printed on it. It must have been the thought of Luke English, for I remembered what he said about the whore at Mrs. Lizzie’s. He no doubt had lied, but I knowed where Mrs. Lizzie’s was, over a saloon at the other end of town, and there was sure whores there, which you could see hanging in the windows, and sometimes if you was a boy my age they would call down: “I’ll grow you up for a dollar.”

It’d fix Mrs. Pendrake right if I went over there with her dollar. She hadn’t ought to have left me alone, I was thinking. I got up and went to the counter to pay my bill, realizing then that I wouldn’t have a dollar left, for that soda water was a nickel apiece and maybe that skunk would charge for them cakes though I hadn’t ate a one, and yet I was sort of relieved at not having to go to Mrs. Lizzie’s. I was a real mess at that time of my life, never having an idea but it was canceled by the next.

The skunk, however, wasn’t there; I don’t know where he went, leaving behind an old fellow with a handlebar mustache who allowed my reckoning was already taken care of. So I still had my dollar, which seemed unfortunate when I reached the street, for a great weakness hit me in the hamstrings. I looked up and down for
Mrs. Pendrake, wishing I could see her so I wouldn’t have to go no further. There was nothing in the world I wanted so little as a whore at that moment, but I felt it was a challenge once I had got up instead of waiting in the soda-water place.

Then I saw the tracks of her boots in the slush. I couldn’t tell you what made them distinguishable from the other footprints; I just knowed them, for I was familiar with her every particular. I could smell a room and tell you if she had been in it during the last two days. That’s the one respect in which my senses hadn’t got blunted while living in town. Them tracks went along the walk, down to the corner, took a left, north another block, again a left—I followed them though pretending to be dawdling along like a sappy kid—and when they had took that second left onto a residential street running parallel to and behind the block of shops, I understood she had lied.

Halfway along the block was an alley that run back to the commercial street. A cart had been through it but lately, pulled by a mule led by a colored man about seventy years of age: an Indian would have knowed the age of the mule as well.

Anyway, right along this alley had gone Mrs. Pendrake’s little boots, out towards the shops again, except when they come to the back of one of the stores, they turned through a gate, crossed a short yard past the privy, up to a door, and ended.

I paused at the fence, for here come that colored fellow with his cart again, and sure enough he looked about seventy and was leading a big mule. Negroes was great for talking like Lavender of what secrets is seen in eggs and so on, but I believe the reason why they knowed everything in those days was they was always trucking things through back alleys, cleaning up bedrooms and the like, and you can pick up a lot of dirt that way without even looking for it. He bid me the time of day and went creaking past, and then a black dog begun to growl on the other side of the alley and then hushed.

There was a minute when the alley was empty and quiet, and I took it to go through the gate on Mrs. P.’s trail. O.K., I reached the door as she had, but what now? It didn’t have no keyhole and anyway probably opened into a dark hall. I put my ear against it and never heard a thing. Suppose I barged in and she was being fitted for a corset? I felt awful at the thought, but at the same time right excited. You have to recall I was fifteen years of age then and not the relic I am today. I am a dirty old man now but in that time I was
only a filthy young boy, and I hope it is not so disgusting to you, for you must believe I was never before nor since in that much misery.

I certainly didn’t barge in. Over to the side of the door was a big woodbox and beyond it a window onto the porch. A person my size could scrooch down next to the one and peer into the other, through a teeny crack in the shutters closed on it, and nobody using the alley were the wiser.

For all the things I noticed on the route here, it never struck me that I was at the back of the same building in which the soda-water place occupied the front. I saw that, if nothing else, when I staggered on out a couple minutes later and somehow drug myself back home.

What I seen through the crack was that proprietor and Mrs. Pendrake. They had their clothes on, but was pressed together. And just as I peeped in, he had bared his big teeth, pulled her high collar down a little, and bit her white neck. I would have broke in and killed him, but for her look of liking it immensely.

CHAPTER
11
Hopeless

THANKSGIVING TRANSPIRED
during my time of bed-bound illness, and I missed it for that reason. So Christmas was the first white holiday I was to celebrate in more than five years. I had been looking forward to it back in the fall, but by the time it come, I had seen that episode through the shutters and it was ruined for me before it started, like everything else.

I passed that winter in a blur of pain, but apparently the breaking of my heart sort of fertilized my mind and I did real well at my studies. When I was over the pneumonia Mrs. Pendrake forgot she used to tutor me afternoons and went out more and more. So I got to staying later at the school, where we had a pretty, young teacher to replace the ugly old maid who retired or died or something. I don’t want you to think I got a crush on this new woman. I was finished with that sort of thing for good: I don’t mean love and I don’t mean lust, I mean that half-witted captivity I had imposed on myself as regards Mrs. Pendrake, which come as a result of lack of decision. I had never been able to make up my mind whether she was my mother or my sweetheart, until I looked through the shutter and saw she was neither.

So if I stayed at school after hours it was because home had become hateful to me and I also took satisfaction in the company of this new teacher from the fact that I had no interest in her aside from what she could impart in the way of learning, for she was bright. Therefore I suppose it was inevitable that once she saw my immunity, so to speak, she got stuck on me, white women being nothing if not contrary. Her name was Helen Berry, and she was only about eighteen. She was real pretty, sort of plumpish with a
pug nose. She’d smile at me in class, but when I was there alone with her she’d turn right shy if I looked her in the eye.

I could have kissed her any time I wanted. Reason I didn’t was the Reverend had really got to me with that talk of sin—in a sort of backhanded way, through his wife getting her neck bit by that cake-eater. I was finished with golden chalices that might get turned into slop jars, just as I had stopped seeing that purple-titted painting. The way I accomplished that was to go right to the slop jars to begin with. By the time I turned sixteen, early in February, I was a regular customer at Mrs. Lizzie’s.