[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
needed, waiting for a trip card to come up, you d be staked.
Now it was a dwindling few, and more and more of them winos, who
shipped sometimes or had long ago irrevocably lost their book for nonpay-
ment of dues.
Hey, came here to feel good. Down the hatch. Hell with you. You
got any friends? Hell with your friends.
Helen is back. So you still remember El Ultimo, Whitey. Remem-
ber when we first heard Joe recite it?
I remember.
Remember too much, too goddam much. For twenty-three years, the
watery shifting: many faces, many places.
But more and more, certain things the same. The gin mills and the
cathouses. The calabozas and jails and stockades. More and more New
York and Norfolk and New Orleans and Pedro and Frisco and Seattle
like the foreign ports: docks, clip joints, hockshops, cathouses, skid rows,
the Law and the Wall: only so far shall you go and no further, uptown
forbidden, not your language, not your people, not your country.
Added sometimes now, the hospital.
What s going to happen with you, Whitey?
What I care? Nobody hasta care what happens to M. Jacklebaum.
How can we help caring, Whitey? Jesus, man, you re a chunk of
our lives.
Shove it, Lennie. So you re a chunk of my life. So?
Understand. Once they had been young together.
To Lennie he remained a tie to adventure and a world in which men
33
hey sailor, what ship?
had not eaten each other; and the pleasure, when the mind was clear, of
chewing over with that tough mind the happenings of the times or the
queernesses of people, or laughing over the mimicry.
To Helen he was the compound of much help given, much support:
the ear to hear, the hand that understands how much a scrubbed floor,
or a washed dish, or a child taken care of for a while, can mean.
They had believed in his salvation, once. Get him away from the front
where he has to drink for company and for a woman. The torn-out-of-him
confession, the drunken end of his eight-months-sober try to make a go of
it on the beach don t you see, I can t go near a whore unless I m lit?
If they could know what it is like now, so casual as if it were after thirty
years of marriage.
Later, the times he had left money with them for plans: fix his teeth,
buy a car, get into the Ship Painters, go see his family in Chi. But soon
enough the demands for the money when the drunken need was on him,
so that after a few tries they gave up trying to keep it for him.
Later still, the first time it became too much and Lennie forbade the
house to him unless he were O.K. because of the children.
Now the decaying body, the body that was betraying him. And the
memories to forget, the dreams to be stifl ed, the hopeless hopes to be
murdered.
What s going to happen with you, Whitey? Helen repeats. I never
know if you ll be back. If you ll be able to be back.
He tips the bottle to the end. Thirstily he thinks: Deeck and his
room where he can yell or sing or pound and Deeck will look on
without reproach or pity or anguish.
I m goin now.
Wait, Whitey. We ll drive you. Want to know where you re shacked,
anyway.
Go own steam. Send you a card.
By Jeannie, silent and shrunken into her coat. He passes no one
in the streets. They are inside, each in his slab of house, watching
the flickering light of television. The sullen fog is on his face, but
34
hey sailor, what ship?
by the time he has walked to the third hill, it has lifted so he can see
the city below him, wave after wave, and there at the crest, the tiny
house he has left, its eyes unshaded. After a while they blur with
the myriad others that stare at him so blindly.
Then he goes down.
Hey Sailor, what ship?
Hey Marinero, what ship?
San Francisco 1953 1955
For Jack Eggan, Seaman 1915 1938
Killed in the retreat across the Ebro, Spain
35
O Yes
1
They are the only white people there, sitting in the dimness of the
Negro church that had once been a corner store, and all through the
bubbling, swelling, seething of before the services, twelve-year-old
Carol clenches tight her mother s hand, the other resting lightly
on her friend, Parialee Phillips, for whose baptism she has come.
The white-gloved ushers hurry up and down the aisle, beckon-
ing people to their seats. A jostle of people. To the chairs angled to
the left for the youth choir, to the chairs angled to the right for the
ladies choir, even up to the platform, where behind the place for the
dignitaries and mixed choir, the new baptismal tank gleams and as
if pouring into it from the ceiling, the blue-painted River of Jordan,
God standing in the waters, embracing a brown man in a leopard
skin and pointing to the letters of gold:
o yes
REJOICE
D L
O IS O
V
G
E
I AM THE WAY THE TRUTH THE LIFE
At the clear window, the crucified Christ embroidered on the
starched white curtain leaps in the wind of the sudden singing. And
the choirs march in. Robes of wine, of blue, of red.
We stands and sings too, says Parialee s mother, Alva, to Helen;
though already Parialee has pulled Carol up. Singing, little Lucinda
Phillips fluffs out her many petticoats; singing, little Bubbie bounces
up and down on his heels.
Any day now I ll reach that land of freedom,
Yes, o yes
Any day now, know that promised land
The youth choir claps and taps to accent the swing of it. Begin-
ning to tap, Carol stiffens. Parry, look. Somebody from school.
Once more once, says Parialee, in the new way she likes to talk
now.
Eddie Garlin s up there. He s in my math.
Couple cats from Franklin Jr. chirps in the choir. No harm or
alarm.
Anxiously Carol scans the faces to see who else she might know,
who else might know her, but looks quickly down to Lucinda s
wide skirts, for it seems Eddie looks back at her, sullen or troubled,
though it is hard to tell, faced as she is into the window of curtained
sunblaze.
I know my robe will fit me well
I tried it on at the gates of hell
If it were a record she would play it over and over, Carol thought,
38
o yes
to untwine the intertwined voices, to search how the many rhythms
rock apart and yet are one glad rhythm.
When I get to heaven gonna sing and shout
Nobody be able to turn me out
That s Mr. Chairback Evans going to invocate, Lucinda leans
across Parry to explain. He don t invoke good like Momma.
Shhhh.
Momma s the only lady in the church that invocates. She made the
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]