My efforts were useless. I folded my hands between my legs and hung my head. “No, sir.”
“Let’s sleep on this. Tomorrow everything will look different. You’ll see.”
He adjusted his rimless glasses and looked down at the page he had been working on, his attention already far away, perhaps on a hillside in Virginia where grapeshot and canister hummed louder than bees through the warm air, while a drummer boy about to die stood mute and powerless amid the horror taking place around him.
I went into the kitchen, where my mother was pulling a pie from the oven. She was an attractive woman and often caught the eye of other men, in whom she had no interest, even as flatterers. She always seemed to be waking from a reverie whenever someone walked up to her unexpectedly. On occasion she cried without cause and walked in circles, knotting her hands, her lips moving as though she were conversing with someone. Her peculiarities were so much a part of her life that they seemed normal. “Why, hey there, sleepyhead. Did you have a nice nap?”
“I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Where have you been?”
“Talking with Daddy.”
“Tell him dinner is ready. Have you done your homework?”
“I’m not feeling well. I’d better not eat.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m going outside.”
“Outside? What are you going to do outside? Why are you behaving so strangely?”
“Everything is fine, Mother.”
“Why do you have that wrinkle between your eyes? I don’t like it when you have that. Come back here, Aaron.”
I went out the screen door and down the driveway through the porte cochere and began walking down the block. I walked until my feet hurt. Then I hitchhiked with no destination in mind and by dark was in a part of town where sundowners and people in the life frolicked and Judaic-Christian law held no sway.
THE JUKE AND barbecue joints were loud, the doors wide open, the elevated sidewalks inset with tethering rings and littered with paper cups and beer cans, rust-stained where the rain spouts bled across the concrete. Outside speakers at the beauty parlors and barbershops played Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, Guitar Slim, LaVern Baker, and Gatemouth Brown. Mexicans and blue-collar whites and people of color melded together in dress and dialect and the addictions and poverty and lucre they shared. The only authority figures were black Houston cops who drove battered patrol cars and parked inconspicuously at an abandoned filling station under an oak tree on a corner and were prohibited from arresting a white person. The prostitutes often carried either a gun or a barber’s razor; the pimps and dope dealers stood on the sidewalks, dressed in the zoot style of the forties; for a free beer, a kind soul was always willing to go inside a liquor store and buy what a white teenager needed. For me that was one can of malt liquor.
I sat down on the curb and drank it. It was hot and tasted like wheat germ with lighter fluid poured in it. I kept hearing a sound like an electrical wire shorting in a rain puddle, and I thought the buzzing sound might be coming from the neon sign over the pawnshop behind me. Except there was nothing wrong with the sign. I got up from the curb and dropped my empty malt liquor can in a garbage barrel and looked at the glittering display of saxophones and trumpets and trombones and drums inside the pawnshop’s windows. There was even a J50 acoustic Gibson in one window, just like mine, along
with rows of private-investigator badges, handcuffs, brass knuckles, blackjacks and slapjacks, and pistols of every kind.
I had seven dollars in my wallet. I went inside and bought a stiletto with a thin black handle and a tight spring and a six-inch rippling blade. One touch of the thumb and the blade sprang to life, and I felt a sense of power in my palm that was almost sexual.
I walked back down the street toward the police car parked at the filling station, the switchblade riding in the back pocket of my jeans. I was sure the cops in the patrol car were watching. But they were black and I was white, and I knew they would not bother me. That I was taking advantage of the unjust way colored police officers were treated made me ashamed, but not enough to cause me to turn back from my destination.
What was my plan? Where was I bound? I had no idea. I knew only that I was going somewhere to do something that seemed disconnected from the person I was. It was like stepping onto a carousel and disappearing inside the music of the calliope and the mirrors on its hub while the horses and children spun round and round, unaware that I had become their guardian.
Or at least that was what I told myself.
Chapter
4
IN THE EARLY A.M. I found myself by a phone booth under a streetlight ringed with humidity somewhere in North Houston. I had fifteen cents in my pocket and no bills in my wallet. The air smelled of sewer gas and dead beetles in the gutters and a coulee where the owners of a filling station had poured fifty-gallon barrels of oil. I dropped a nickel into the pay phone and woke up Saber. “I need a ride.”
“Where are you?” he said.
I looked through the window of the booth at the street signs and gave him their names. “I think I’m not far from North Shepherd. I’ve got some blank spaces in my head.”
“You had one of your spells?” he said.
“About three hours’ worth.”
“My folks are going to brown their pants.”