Tar Baby

  There weren’t going to be any impalas or water buffalo; no mating dance, no trophies. There was dice instead of tusk; a job when he wanted a journey. And the lion he believed was exclusive to his past—and his alone—was frozen in stone (can you beat it?) in front of the New York Public Library in a city that had laughed at his private’s uniform. Like an Indian seeing his profile diminished on a five-cent piece, he saw the things he imagined to be his, including his own reflection, mocked. Appropriated, marketed and trivialized into decor. He could not give up the last thing left to him—fraternity. On the ocean and in lockups he had it; in tiny bars and shape-up halls he had it, and if he was becoming cierto Americano, he’d better go where he could never be deprived of it—home. He wanted to go home but that woman was on his mind. The one whose dreams he had tried to change and whom he had insulted to keep her unhinging beauty from afflicting him and keeping him away from home.

  She is on my mind, he thought, but I am not on hers. What must it be like to be on her mind, and he guessed the only way to know was to find out. The next morning he asked her if she would like to eat lunch with him down on the beach, and she said, “Sure, I want to sketch down there before I go, anyway.” It surprised him into awkwardness and the word “go” sent a ripple through him, exacerbating the awkwardness. She was getting ready to leave? Go somewhere?

  They took the Willys and she drove, saying almost nothing. She sat quietly under the wheel in an expertly crushed white cotton halter and a wide, wide skirt that rich people called “peasant” and peasants called “wedding,” her skin damp and glowing against the Easter white cotton—all temptation and dare.

  When they got to the dock and parked, she jumped out with her sketch pad and box of pencils. He followed her with the basket for she was leading the way—making little prints in the hard-packed sand. They walked about half a mile to a bend of good clean sand and a clump of pineapple palms. They sat down and she took off her canvas shoes. It was after they ate that carelessly assembled, hurriedly packed lunch that she seemed really aware of him but only because she was opening her sketch pad and fiddling with the wooden box of pencils. She examined him then with an intent but distant eye and asked him a casual question which he answered by saying, “My original dime. That’s all. My original dime.” The sun was hiding from them and the mosquitoes were held off by a burning can of commercial repellent. The olives, French bread, uncuttable cheese, ham slices, jar of black mushy cherries and wine left them both as hungry as they were when they started.

  It was a deliberately unappetizing lunch which she had literally dumped into a beautiful brown and purple Haitian basket as though to disabuse him of any idea that this was a real picnic or that it was important to her. But they ate it all up and wished for more. It was probably that yearning for more that made Jadine ask him, “What do you want out of life?” A tiresome question of monumental ordinariness, the kind artists ask models while they measure the distance between forehead and chin but one which he had apparently given some thought to. “My original dime,” he said. “The one San Francisco gave me for cleaning a tub of sheephead.” He was half sitting, half lying, propped upon his elbow facing her with the sky-blue blue of the sky behind him. “Nothing I ever earned since was like that dime,” he said. “That was the best money in the world and the only real money I ever had. Even better than the seven hundred and fifty dollars I won one time at craps. Now that felt good, you know what I mean, but not like that original dime did. Want to know what I spent it on? Five cigarettes and a Dr Pepper.”

  “Five cigarettes?”

  “Yeah. They used to sell them loose in the country. That was my first personal, store-bought purchase. You believe that? Wish you could have seen how it looked in the palm of my hand. Shining there.”

  “The Dr Pepper?”

  “The dime, girl. The dime. You know I picked up money before. In the street and a quarter once on the riverbank. That was something too, you know. Really great. But nothing, nothing was ever like that sheephead dime. That original dime from Frisco.” He paused for a comment from her, but she made none. She just kept busy behind the screen, the wall of her sketch pad. “Just before I left home, I heard he got blown up in a gas explosion. Old Frisco.” He murmured the name. “Son of a bitch. I heard about it on my way out of town, and I couldn’t wait for the funeral. He worked in the gas field and got blown to bits. I left town crying like a baby. He was a nothing kind of dude, mind you. Treated his wife like a dog and ran other women all over town. But I still cried when he got blown up and I was a full-grown man. It must have been that dime, I mean, no money ever meant much to me after that. I couldn’t work just for that—just for money. I like to have it, sure, it feels fine for a while, but there’s no magic in it. No sheephead. No Frisco. And nothing to buy worth anything, anyway. I mean nothing like five Chesterfield cigarettes and a Dr Pepper. Talk about good!” He threw his head back and directed his laughter into the sky. He was beautiful, like that; laughing like that: teeth lips mustache perfect and perfectly disarming. Jadine paused. She could not draw his laughing heaven-raised face. “Well, anyway, I guess that’s what I want, all I want, in the money line. Something nice and simple and personal, you know? My original original dime.”

  Jadine’s eyes followed the movements of her charcoal. “Lazy. Really lazy. I never thought I’d hear a black man admit it.” She rubbed the line with her thumb and frowned.

  “Uh-uh. I’m not admitting any such thing.” Son’s voice cracked with indignation.

  “Ah got duh sun in duh mawnin and duh moon at night.” Jadine waggled her charcoal stick and rocked her head like “truckin on down.” “Oooooo, Ah got plenty of nuffin and nuffin’s plenty fo meeeeeee.”

  Son laughed in spite of himself. “That’s not lazy.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s not being able to get excited about money.”

  “Get able. Get excited.”

  “What for?”

  “For you, for yourself, your future. Money isn’t what the scramble’s all about. It’s what money does, can do.”

  “What can it do?”

  “Please. Don’t give me that transcendental, Thoreau crap. Money is—”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who’s who?”

  “Thoreau.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Don’t look disgusted. I’m illiterate.”

  “You’re not illiterate. You’re stupid.”

  “So tell me; educate me. Who is he?”

  “Another time, okay? Just hold your head still and stop making excuses about not having anything. Not even your original dime. It’s not romantic. And it’s not being free. It’s dumb. You think you’re above it, above money, the rat race and all that. But you’re not above it, you’re just without it. It’s a prison, poverty is. Look at what its absence made you do: run, hide, steal, lie.”

  “Money didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Sure it did. If you had some you could have paid a lawyer, a good lawyer, and he would have gotten you off. You think like a kid.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to get off.”

  “Then what did you run away for? You told Ondine you got into some trouble with the law and jumped bail.”

  “I didn’t want to go to prison.”

  “But—”

  “That’s not the same thing. I didn’t want their punishment. I wanted my own.”

  “Well, you got it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you might end up with theirs and yours.”

  “No way.”

  “You’re like a baby. A big country baby. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  “No. Nobody ever told me that.”

  “Well, you are. Like you were just born. Where are your family?”

  “Home, I guess.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I haven’t been back in a long time.”

  “Where in Florida are you from?”

  “Elo
e.”

  “Eloe? What on earth is that? A town?”

  “A town, yeah.”

  “God. I know it already: gas stations, dust, heat, dogs, shacks, general store with ice coolers full of Dr Pepper.”

  “No shacks in Eloe.”

  “Tents, then. Trailer camps.”

  “Houses. There are ninety houses in Eloe. All black.”

  “Black houses?”

  “Black people. No whites. No white people live in Eloe.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Black mayor?”

  “No mayor at all, black or white.”

  “Who runs it?”

  “Runs itself.”

  “Come on. Who pumps the water, hooks up the telephones?”

  “Oh, well, white folks do that.”

  “I’ll bet they do.”

  “But they live in Poncie, Ferris, Sutterfield—off a ways.”

  “I see. What work do these ninety black people do?”

  “Three hundred and eighty-five. Ninety houses, three hundred and eighty-five people.”

  “Okay. What work do they do?”

  “They fish a little.”

  “Sheephead. Right. Oooooo, Ah got plenty of nuffin…”

  “Don’t laugh. They work in the gas field too, in Poncie and Sutterfield. And they farm a little.”

  “God. Eloe.”

  “Where’s your home?”

  “Baltimore. Philadelphia. Paris.”

  “City girl.”

  “Believe it.”

  “Oh, I believe it.”

  “Were you ever in Philly?” She put the pad and pencil down and rubbed her fingers together.

  “Never.”

  “Just as well.” Jadine dug her fingers in the sand then brushed them.

  “Not so hot?”

  “Well, better than Eloe.”

  “Nothing’s better than Eloe.”

  “Oh, sure. When’s the last time you were there?”

  “Long time. Eight years.”

  “Eight, huh. You haven’t seen your family in eight years. Even your mother must have forgotten your name by now.”

  “She’s been dead. My father raised us.”

  “He know your name?”

  “He knows it. Sure, he knows it.”

  “I don’t. What is it?”

  “I told you already—everybody calls me Son.”

  “I want to know what’s on your birth certificate.”

  “No birth certificates in Eloe.”

  “What about your Social Security card. That says Son?”

  “No. That says William Green.”

  “At last.”

  “One of them anyway. I got another that says Herbert Robinson. And one says Louis Stover. I got a driver’s license that says—”

  “Okay. Okay. But I can’t call you Son. ‘Hi, Son. Come here, Son.’ I sound like a grandmother. Give me something else.”

  “You pick.”

  “Okay. I will. Let’s see. I need something that fits. I know. I’ll ask you a question—a question I want to ask anyway and the best name will fit right in. Here I go. ‘Why did you have to leave Eloe on the run, leave so fast you couldn’t go to Frisco’s funeral, uh, uh, Phil?’ That’s good. That’s Anglicized French for son.”

  “Not Phil. Anything but Phil.”

  “Well, what then?”

  “What about Sugar? ‘Why did you have to leave Eloe on the run, Sugar?’”

  “All right. ‘What did you do to have to leave Eloe on the run, Sugar? So fast, Sugar, you couldn’t go to the funeral of the man who gave you your original dime?’”

  “I killed somebody.”

  Actually he didn’t look like a baby or even a big old country boy dressed up in a white man’s suit. His hair was cut and his nails filed, but he had lived in the house and hid in the closet and pressed his face into her hair and his hips into the back of her skirt and underneath the light cologne was a man with hair like snakes. It was hot. Hazy and hot. A bad day for a picnic.

  “Should I be scared?” asked Jadine.

  “Not if you have to ask.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “Who was he? The man you killed?”

  He stood up, untangling himself gracefully but swiftly. They always assume that, he thought. That it was a man. “Let’s change the subject,” he said. His voice was soft, a little sad, it seemed to her, and he gazed out into the water as he spoke. Fake, she thought. He’s faking remorse and he thinks I am impressed by it.

  “I hate killers,” she said. “All killers. Babies. They don’t understand anything but they want everybody to understand them. Lotta nerve, don’t you think?”

  “Killing doesn’t take nerve. It takes no nerve, no nerves at all.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you, you know. I think you ought to be in jail. So you can stop looking pitifully into the sea and thinking how terrible life’s been to you.”

  He glanced at her, briefly, as though she were a distraction from the major work of looking at the sea. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t thinking about me. I was thinking about the person I killed. And that is pitiful.”

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  “There is no why. The reason doesn’t hold. I mean it wasn’t a good reason; it was a mistake.”

  “Sure. You didn’t mean to, right?”

  “Oh, I meant to, but I didn’t mean to. I meant the killing but I didn’t mean the death. I went too far.”

  “That’s not so smart. Death frequently follows killing. Definitely unhip.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Temper, temper, temper,” she sang.

  He looked down at her again wishing it had been temper. Something simple like that or something forgivable like that. But he knew better and for eight years wherever he looked—in the molten sea, in shape-up halls, in canneries and on flophouse cots he saw that mouth dying before the eyes did when it should have been the other way around and while he could not regret the fact that she was dead, he was ashamed of having been unable to look her in the eyes as she died. She deserved that. Everybody deserves that. That somebody look at them, with them, as they face death—especially the killer. But he had not had the courage or the sympathy and it shamed him.

  He looked at Jadine. Now it was her turn to gaze into the sea. “Who’d you kill?” she said.

  “A woman.”

  “I should have known. That’s all you could think of to do with your life? Kill a woman? Was she black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course. Of course she was. What did she do? Cheat on you?” She said it ugly. Cheat. Like “Take away your candy?”

  He nodded.

  “My my my. And you, I suppose, were the faithful boyfriend who never looked at another girl.”

  “Never. After I got out of the army, never. I played a little—piano, I mean, at night. Nothing much but okay until I could get on at the gas field. I had this gig in Sutterfield. Off and on for about three months. Then one morning I came home and…”

  “No,” sang Jadine, “don’t tell me. You found her with somebody else and shot her.”

  “No. I mean yes, I found her—that way, but I didn’t go in. I left. I got in the car. I was just gonna drive off, you know, and I backed the car out in the road, but I couldn’t leave, couldn’t leave them there so I turned the car around and drove it through the house.”

  “You ran over them?” Jadine’s upper lip was lifted in disgust.

  “No, I just busted up the place. But the car exploded and the bed caught on fire. It was a little place we had, just a little box, and I drove through the bedroom wall. I pulled her out of the fire but she never made it. They booked me after that.”

  “What about the man?”

  “It wasn’t a man; it was a boy. Thirteen, I heard. Singed him bald, but nothing more. They had me up for Murder Two.”

  He was still standing a
nd now he looked down at her and noticed that she had folded her legs under her white cotton skirt. She is scared, he thought. In the company of a killer on an island, far away from the house, she is too scared. Suddenly he liked it. Liked her fear. Basked in it like a cat in steam-pipe heat and it made him feel protective and violent at the same time. She was looking into the horizon and kept her legs hidden under her skirt. Does she think I’ll cut them off, or is there something under there she is afraid I will take out and kill? The idea both alarmed and pleased him and he dropped down on one knee and said very softly, “I won’t kill you. I love you.”