The Last Worthless Evening (2 page)

All his life he has had white friends, so I think it is only my discomfort that makes his eyes shift from mine; a difficult evasion, for him, since mine are shifting too. But discomfort is of course not the right word for what I bring to our booths, our chairs at the bars, our room aboard ship. And he knows it, and understands my need to tell him all I can remember—with you, and before you: those horrors I saw and heard as a child, an adolescent, and whatever I was in college. I told him of imagining Christ in the electric chair, as I said the rosary on the night they electrocuted Sonny Broussard; then, with the terror and grief of the boy I was, seeing myself, through Christ and so through Sonny, strapped into the chair. Willie is not religious. Or, more precisely, he does not belong to a religion. But I am able to talk with him about saying a rosary for Sonny, trying to meditate on the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging at the Pillar, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion and Death. As I am able to tell him that I grew up with hardly any bigotry at all, because of the Christian Brothers' school and my parents—I think especially Daddy, with his contained and quiet sorrow about Negroes, while as a Southern man (Daddy would even say gentleman, since in the South money isn't a prerequisite for that) he followed the old ways, the traditions, the rules, but with an uneasiness I could sense even as a boy.

Almost no bigotry at all, save what I acquired simply by being there, by listening to—and telling—the jokes; by watching and hearing Negroes from that great distance between us, whether at their rear section of the bus or standing before me: Leonard taking the plate of food I gave him at the back door so he could eat under the sycamore's shade in the noon sun, while I watched (sometimes) from our dining-room window, and the oscillating floor fan blew on me and my family. Willie listens to all of this: from Christ, to Sonny Broussard's terror and final pain for raping a white girl, to Emmett Till, to Leonard, and the Negro section of town whose smells I rode through on my bicycle, going that hot summer afternoon with my friend on his paper route. And the Negro boys and girls going up to the balcony to watch from above us, as my friends and I sat downstairs for the Saturday serial and western movie. So he understands my need to—I was going to write “unburden myself.” But I shall use the real word: Willie understands my need to confess.

And like Christ, Willie's yoke is easy, his burden is light, and he gives me rest. On the second or third or whatever night in a booth in a bar in Yokosuka, I nearly cried when I told him about Daddy going outside, alone with his bourbon and water, when news came that Emmett Till was dead. So I muttered the male exorcism of tears.

“Fuck it,” I said, and completed the ritual: I swallowed some beer, and lit a cigarette. Then I looked at Willie, and he smiled.

“Did you tell your Daddy you almost stuck a knife in that guy?”

“No.”

“Pretty decent family, for crackers.”

“I'm not a cracker. I'm a Cajun. We're known to be tolerant, cheerful—let the
bon temps roulé
—and hot-tempered.”

“Carry blades too, I hear. You talk French to the slaves down there?”

“Always. Called them
bête noires
.”

“I hear we have a distinct smell. Maybe just to the cracker nose.”

“They did.”

“Did it smell a little bit like poverty?”

“Their part of town did. And neglect.”

“They do seem to go hand in hand. Smell like fear maybe too? Like a dog at the vet's?”

“I don't know. Sweat, maybe.”

“Ah: a little of both, then. Because they was workin' theah black asses off fo' the
cuh
nel, choppin' his cotton and wet-nuhsin' his chillun an' fetchin' him mint
joo
leps own the ve
ran
dah. White people smell like milk. We get nauseated in a theater full of white people.”

“They didn't have that problem at home.”

“Oh I
reck
on not. Smell
gun
powdah if dey go to a movie wif de white folks.”

“Do I smell like milk?”

“Right now you smell like Asahi. At sea you smell like wet dreams.”

“You too.”

“But dreams that stimulate a huge cock.” He held his hands apart, as though showing the length of a fish that fought him for thirty minutes and then threw the hook. “Actually I'm an insult to my people. Louisa thinks I've got a cracker in my woodpile.”

“You can dance, though.”

“Sing too. Want to hear something from
Porgy and Bess?
Or
Showboat?
”

“Want to hear a Southern joke?”

“They have those?”

“It's sociological.”

“It ought to be.”

“Maybe it's even philosophical. Maybe Eleanor Roosevelt started it. Sent a chain letter to Negroes.”

“I didn't know they could get mail down there. Can't read enough to vote, how can they get mail?”

“It's very complex. There are heroic deliveries.”

“Night riders?”

“Of the New Frontier.”

So I told him those two jokes. There in the booth, which was small like everything, it seems, in Japan; our feet and legs bumped and drew back and shifted beneath the low table. In that bar lit by softened red lights, much like the passageways aboard ship, to protect the pilots' night vision. But the lights were softer, and came from behind the bar and perhaps a couple of dim ceiling lights. Faces at nearby tables were shapes with vague features. Cigarettes rose to them, glowed, descended. My eyes burned. At the tables and in booths and sitting at the bar were officers in civilian suits and ties (Willie and I had taken off our coats, unbuttoned our collars, loosened our ties), and sailors and Marines in uniform, some with women, some waiting their chance, a few oblivious. The waitresses carried trays among the tables as if they did not need to see. They were slender shapes in kimonos, wide sleeves moving like shadows with substance, their hair darker than the darkness of the room, their faces in the light a pale glow, with brightly darkened lips and eyes. While men stumbled and bumped their way to the toilet, these women glided, like the figures a child is afraid he will wake to see entering his bedroom and, without a sound of breath or feet, crossing its floor.

“There's this boy living on a cotton plantation, and he goes off to college, and after a while he writes to his daddy and says everybody in the fraternity has a monkey and will his daddy buy him one too. So the man buys his son a monkey, and the boy brings him home on vacations, and when he's finished college he asks his daddy if he can leave the monkey at home, because he's going out into the world. So his daddy says sure, son, that'll be fine. So the boy leaves and the monkey stays, and one day the man goes outside and sees the monkey out in the cotton field. He's carrying a gunny sack and going down the rows, picking cotton and putting it in the sack, and the man watches him for a while, going down the rows and filling sacks, and then he says to himself, Now if I had me a hunnerd monkies like that, I wouldn't have to pay nobody to pick my cotton. So he goes to the pet store and orders a hundred monkies, and the owner of the pet store wants to know what he's going to do with one hundred monkies. So the man tells him, and the owner says: Nossir, I ain't goin' to order you them monkies, and I'll tell you why. The next fellow down the road'll see them monkies in your field, and he'll get to thinking, and he's goin' to order him two hunnerd. Then some old boy with a bigger plantation he's goin' to order three hunnerd, and pretty soon the South'll be overrun with monkies, and some damn Yankee lawyer's goin' to come down here and turn 'em loose and they'll go to school with my chilren.”

Willie laughed. He laughed till his eyes watered, while so many of my white friends, from the Northeast and West and Midwest, had never given it more than a courteous sound resembling laughter, and some had frowned and said: Bad, Gerry, bad. But Willie understood the true butt of the joke.

“It's economic,” he said. “So I guess that makes it sociological. Even philosophical. Course it generally is economic.”

“Sure. It was an agrarian society. An aristocracy even, with—”

“Not just Negroes and whites. It's generally economic when somebody's shitting on somebody else.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Northern mills went South after the Civil War. You think it was for the climate?”

“Cheap labor.”

“Cheap white labor. That's how Shoeless Joe Jackson got started playing ball. Played for a mill. Baseball was good for the mo
rale
. Fat cats always have ideas about how to keep poor folks happy without signing a check. You think those mills have unions yet?”

“Nope. But I have another joke.”

“From down home?”

“Again.”

“Sounds to me like you hung out with some liberals. I thought the good old boys kicked their asses on Saturday nights, till they all went North.”

“I seem to be in Yokosuka myself.”

“Indeed you do, my friend, indeed you do. You going to retire down there? If you can stand this Navy bullshit for twenty years?”

“Never,” I said. Then: “I don't think so, anyway.”

Because we haven't even talked about it, you and I, and until Willie asked me I had not known I had thought about it at all. But something in me had. Or had at least made a decision without telling the rest of me about it, through the process we call thinking. (Maybe all murders are premeditated but the killer never knows it.) Because I said
never
at once, with firmness and certainty and, in my heart, the awakening of an old dread that had slept, but lightly, on the edge of insomnia. As though Willie had asked me whether I would sleep with a coral snake.

“Some of my people miss it,” he said. “They go down at Christmas. My grandparents went back to Alabama last year, to stay.”

“I didn't know you were from Alabama.”

“I'm not. My parents were born in Philadelphia.”

“Why did they go back?”

His shoulders tightened, and just as quickly his eyes were angry. He said: “Social Security buys more down there.” Then his eyes softened, and his shoulders relaxed—no: slumped toward the table that was so low I could see his belt—and he said: “To see their people. To die at home. They left it to have my father and aunts and uncles in the North. But Alabama was always home. Isn't it strange? Home? How it can shield you from all the shit out there? The evening meal of the poor—beans and greens and cornbread and rice—and the old bed and the tarpaper roof.”

“You've been down there?”

“No. I wouldn't be able to stand it. I couldn't get leave anyway. My father wrote to me, after they went down last Christmas.”

“Did he say it was bad?”

“Hell, no. It was a happy letter. He said compared to the sixth floor of a tenement, it was a Goddamn resort. A little house with a little yard with flowers, and they have a vegetable garden, and two oak trees, and a dirt road, and a front porch with a swing where they can sit. And friends. Old people. They gather on the porch at night and drink coffee and talk. No gangs of punks. No junkies. No dealers. Sometimes there's a fight at the bar.”

“That's the best kind.”

“Of fight?”

“Of bar.”

“I forgot. You don't like the officers' club. Mean-ass Cajun carries a knife. Holds it at a redneck. Poor guy's celebrating. Just being happy because they found what the fish and the river left of Emmett Till.”

“A pocket knife. For fishing and hunting. And in general.”

“In general.”

“I've always had one. Since Daddy gave me my first one—”

“When you were two.”

“Eight. To go with my first long pants.”

“No button on it? Makes the blade come out smelling blood?”

“Here.”

I twisted in the seat and tried to put my hand in my pocket, but he said: “Shit no, man. Don't pull that thing in here. This is your kind of place, not mine. I like quiet plastic bars. I don't need some drunk Marine charging over with a bayonet. Just happens to be taped to his leg. Tell your joke.”

“You're not kidding, are you?”

“About what?”

“Violence.”

“Not at all, friend. If it weren't for the draft, I wouldn't even be a public relations man in a fucking uniform.”

“I think—”

Then I stopped, and looked away, at the reddened darkness and the moving shapes of people.

“You think what?”

I looked at him.

“That if I were a Negro I'd be dead now.”

“Or you would have learned how to stay alive. The joke, Mr. Fontenot. And I hope it's not as complex as you are.”

“I'm not complex.”

“No,” he said. “You're not.” He finished his beer, looked at my near-empty glass, and raised his hand without looking at the bar, or at the waitress when she somehow and at once noticed him and came and he ordered Asahis. He was looking at me, at my eyes. “My Cajun shipmate,” he said.

“There's a monkey walking down the road. In the South, a gravel road, a country road, and he's walking on the side of it. He hears a pickup coming behind him, and he looks around, and there's a white man at the wheel, speeding up and aiming at the monkey, and the monkey jumps off the road just in time and lands in a deep ditch. Truck goes on and the monkey climbs out and brushes himself off and shakes his head. Then he starts walking down the road again. After about a mile he sees a car coming toward him, on the other side of the road. There's a Negro driving, and when he sees the monkey he comes across the road at him, and the monkey jumps in the ditch and the car misses him and goes on by. Monkey climbs out of the ditch again. He brushes off the dust and watches the car driving away, and shakes his head and says: My people, my people …”