For some reason all three tiers of dogs start barking.
Presently Victor shouts, “You’ll be all right, Doc. Just rest here a while. You know what you need? Somebody to take care you. Why don’t you move in with your mama, Miss Marva? She be glad to do for you.”
I wait for the dogs to subside.
“You were there at number 11 on the old 18. This morning.”
“What you talking ’bout, Doc?”
“I was there, Victor. On the island. In the pagoda.”
“Oh, you talking about—” Victor begins to shake a loose hand toward the east as if he just remembered.
“What the hell is going on, Victor?”
“Like I told you, Doc—”
“Like you told me! You haven’t told me anything. I saw you, I saw Willard Amadie. Who was the third man?”
“Willard bringing meat for the swamp. Folks going hungry out there, Doc.”
“I saw the deer. Was that all?”
“All? How you say, all?”
“Victor, I heard you. I was sitting in the pagoda.”
“Oh, you talking about—” Again Victor salutes the east.
“Yes. Who was the third man?”
“Him? Doc, they say he mean,” says Victor, laughing.
“They?”
“Everybody. You talk about mean and lowdown!”
“Then what are you laughing about?”
“You, Doc. You something else.”
“Victor, is Willard trying to shoot me?”
“Shoot you! Willard!” Victor falls back.
“You mean somebody else is trying to shoot me?”
“Doc, why in the world anybody want to shoot you? You help folks. Like I tell people, you set up with my auntee when other doctors wouldn’t even come out.”
“You mean somebody is trying to shoot me and you tried to talk them out of it?”
“Doc, look. How long me and you known each other?”
“All our lives.”
“How long did I work for y’all, first for Big Doc, then for Miss Marva clearing land?”
“I don’t know. Twenty years.”
“And didn’t you set up with my auntee many a night before she died?”
“Yes.”
“You think I wouldn’t do the same for you?”
“I think you would. But—”
“Wasn’t I working as a orderly in the hospital last year when they brought you in and didn’t I take care you?”
“Yes, you did.”
“When you said to me, Victor, there’s something crawling on the wall, get it out of here, didn’t I make out like I was throwing it out?”
“Yes.”
Victor is laughing in such a way that I have to smile.
“I couldn’t see but I threw it out anyhow.”
“Yes, you did.”
“You think I wouldn’t tell you right?”
“I think you would.”
“Then, Doc, listen.” Victor comes close again, presses stomach against metal table. “Move in with Miss Marva. She’ll do for you. Miss Marva, she’d love nothing better. I help you move over there, Doc.”
“How come you want me out of my house?”
“I’m worried about you, Doc Look at you. Fainting and falling out in a ditch.”
“Victor, who were you waiting for in the pagoda?”
“Waiting?”
“I heard Willard say: Looks like he’s not coming.”
“Oh yeah. Willard.”
“Was he waiting for me?”
Victor is silent
“Did he or the third man intend to shoot me?”
“Shoot you! Lord, Doc. We just want to talk to you.”
“Well, here I am.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. Move in with your mama.”
“What’s she got to do with it?”
Silence.
“What about that other stuff?”
“What other stuff?”
“All that stuff about the Kaydettes, the doctors, and the school.”
“Doc, all in the world I want to do is help you. You say to me, do this, that, or the other, and I’ll do it.”
Victor’s his old self, good-natured, reserved, with just the faintest risibility agleam in his muddy eyes.
“How you feeling, Doc?”
“I think I can make it.”
But when I stand up, one knee jumps out
“Whoa, look out now. Why don’t you stay here till you are stronger? Ain’t nobody going to bother you here.”
“I got to get on up the hill.”
“I was going up there too. I’ll carry your bag—no wonder, Lord, what you got in here? Just hang on to Victor.”
We are near the top. Victor wants me to hang on to him, but I don’t feel like it.
“You never did like anybody to help you, did you, Doc?”
I stop, irritated with Victor and because the faintness is coming back. Flowers of darkness begin to bloom on the sidewalk.
We sit on the wooden steps of an abandoned Chinese grocery angled into the hill. Again I invite Victor to go back—I know he’s along just to help me. He refuses.
“You’ve been away, haven’t you, Victor?” I say to hide my irritation.
“I been back for two years, Doc.”
“Where did you go?”
“I lived in Boston and worked in the shipyard. I made seven fifty an hour.”
“Why did you come back?”
“You know something, Doc? You don’t trust anybody, do you?”
I look at Victor with astonishment.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, Doc. I know that when you ask me a question like that you really want to know.”
I blink. “You’re humbugging me, aren’t you, Victor?”
“No, Doc. You know what I remember? You asked me why I came back. I don’t know. But I remember something. I remembered in Boston and when I did, you were in it. You remember the shrimp jubilees?”
“Yes.”
“The word would come that the shrimp were running and everybody would go to the coast at night and as far as you could see up and down the coast there were gas lamps of people catching shrimp, setting up all night with their chirren running around and their picnics, you remember? And long before that me and you learned to throw a cast-net holding it in your teeth.”
“Yes. Those were the days.”
“Not for you, Doc.”
I, who am seldom astonished, am astonished twice in a minute. “What do you mean?”
“You never did like—you didn’t even like the jubilees. You were always … to yourself.”
I shrug. “Are you telling me you came back because of the jubilees?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted to come back. You know, I been a deacon at Starlight Baptist for twenty years.”
“I know.”
“Mr. Leroy, though, he used to love the jubilees.”
“So you and Leroy Ledbetter like the jubilees and that’s why you came back?”
“Not exactly. But I remember when everybody used to come to the jubilees. I mean everybody. You and Mr. Leroy came one night, you and your family on one side of me and he on the other.”
“In the first place the shrimp don’t run any more. In the second place, even if they did, Leroy Ledbetter wouldn’t be next to you now.”
“That’s right, but you know something, Doc?”
“What?”
“You ought to trust people more. You ought to trust in the good Lord, pick yourself out a nice lady like Miss Doris, have chirren and a fireside bright and take up with your old friends and enjoy yourself in the summertime.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“What say, Doc?” Victor, who is slightly deaf, cups an ear.
“You kill me.”
“How’s that?”
“Here’re you complaining about me and acting like you and Leroy Ledbetter are sharing the good life. Hell, Leroy Ledbetter, yo
ur fellow Baptist, wants no part of you. And one reason you’re living in this pigpen is that Leroy is on the council and has turned down housing five times.”
“That’s the truth!” says Victor, laughing. “And it’s pitiful.”
“You think it’s funny?”
My only firm conclusion after twenty years of psychiatry: nothing is crazier than life. Here is a Baptist deacon telling me, a Catholic, to relax and enjoy festivals. Here’s a black Southerner making common cause—against me!— with a white Southerner who wouldn’t give him the time of day.
That’s nothing. Once I was commiserating with a patient, an old man, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis—he’d got out with his skin but lost his family to Auschwitz—so I said something conventional against the Germans. The old fellow bristled like a Prussian and put me down hard and spoke of the superiority of German universities, German science, German music, German philosophy. My God, do you suppose the German Jews would have gone along with Hitler if he had let them? Nothing is quite like it’s cracked up to be. And nobody is crazier than people.
“It would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful,” says Victor. He looks at me from the corner of his eye. Something has occurred to him. “Do you think you could speak to Mr. Leroy?”
“About what?”
“About—Never mind. It’s too late.”
“Victor, what in the hell is going on?”
He is shaking his head. “It’s so pitiful. You would think people with that much in common would want to save what they have.”
“Are you talking about you and Leroy?”
“Now everything’s got to go and everybody loses.”
I rise unsteadily. “Everybody?”
Victor jumps up, takes my arm. “Not you, Doc. All you got to do is move in with your mama. She’ll do for you.”
13
Victor takes me as far as the Little Napoleon. There I make a mistake, a small one with small consequences but a mistake nevertheless, which I’d ordinarily not have made. But it has been a strange day. Hanging on to Victor, I did not let him go until we were inside. I should have either dismissed him outside or held on to him longer. As it was, letting go Victor when the bar was within reach, I let go a second too early, so that Leroy Ledbetter, turning toward me in the same second, did not see me let go but saw Victor just beside me and so registered a violation. Not even that: a borderline violation because Victor was not even at the bar but still a step away. What with his white attendant’s clothes and if he had been a step closer to me, it would have been clear that he was attending me in some capacity or other. A step or two in the other direction and he’d have been past the end of the bar and in the loading traffic where Negroes often pass carrying sacks of oysters, Cokes, and such. As it was, he seemed to be standing, if not at the bar, then one step too close and Leroy, turning, saw him in the split second before Victor started to leave, Victor in the act of backing up when Leroy said as his eyes went past him, said not even quite to Victor, “The window’s there,” nodding toward the service window opening into the alley; even then giving Victor the benefit of the doubt and not even allowing the possibility that Victor was coming to the bar for a drink, but the possibility only that he had come to buy his flat pint of muscatel and for some reason had not known or had forgotten about the service window. In the same second that he speaks, Leroy knows better, for in that second Victor steps back and turns toward me and I can see that Leroy sees that Victor is with me, sees it even before I can say, too late, “Thank you, Victor, for helping me up the hill,” and signifies his error by a pass of his rag across the bar, a ritual glance past Victor at the storm cloud above the saloon door, a swinging back of his eyes past Victor and a saying in Victor’s direction, “Looks like we going to get it yet,” said almost to Victor but not quite because it had not been quite a violation so did not quite warrant a correction thereof. Victor nods, not quite acknowledging because total acknowledgment is not called for, withholding perhaps 20 percent acknowledgment (2 percent too much?). He leaves by the side door.
A near breach, an insignificant incident. A stranger observing the incident would not have been aware that anything had happened at all, much less that in the space of two seconds there had occurred a three-cornered transaction entailing an assignment of zones, a near infraction of zoning, a calling attention to the infraction, a triple simultaneous perception of the mistake, a correction thereof, and an acknowledgment of that—a minor breach with no consequences other than these: an artery beats for a second in Leroy’s temple, there is a stiffness about Victor’s back as he leaves, and there comes in my throat a metallic taste.
It is not even worth mentioning even though Victor withholds perhaps 2 percent of the acknowledgment that was due and his back is 2 percent stiffer than it might be.
“What’s wrong with you, Tom?”
“I’m all right now. It was hot in the Hollow. I got dizzy.”
He gives me my toddy. I peel an egg.
“Is that your lunch? No wonder you fainted. And you a doctor.”
I look at the mirror. Behind the bar towers a mahogany piece, a miniature cathedral, an altarpiece, an intricate business of shelves for bottles, cupboards, stained-glass windows, and a huge mirror whose silvering is blighted with an advancing pox, clusters of vacuoles, expanding naughts. Most of the customers of the Little Napoleon have long since removed to the lounges of the suburbs, the nifty refrigerated windowless sealed-up Muzaked hideaways, leaving stranded here a small band of regulars and old-timers, some of whom have sat here in the same peaceable gloom open to the same twilight over the same swinging doors that swung their way straight through Prohibition and saw Kingfish Huey P. Long promise to make every man a king on the courthouse lawn across the street. Next door Gone with the Wind had its final run at the old Majestic Theater.
The vines are sprouting here in earnest. A huge wisteria with a tree-size trunk holds the Little Napoleon like a rock in a root. The building strains and creaks in its grip.
The storm is closer, the sun gone, and it is darker than dusk. The martins are skimming in from the swamp, sliding down the dark glassy sky like flecks of soot. Soon the bullbats will be thrumming.
Leroy Ledbetter stands by companionably. Like me he is seventh-generation Anglo-Saxon American, but unlike me he is Protestant, countrified, sweet-natured. He’s the sort of fellow, don’t you know, who if you run in a ditch or have a flat tire shows up to help you.
We were partners and owners of the old Paradise Bowling Lanes until the riot five years ago. In fact, the riot started when Leroy wouldn’t let a bushy-haired Bantu couple from Tougaloo College have an alley. I wasn’t there at the time. When Leroy told me about it later, an artery beat at his temple and the same metallic taste came in my throat. If I had been there… . But on the other hand, was I glad that I had not been there?
“Lucky I had my learner ready,” Leroy told me.
“Your learner?” Then I saw his forearm flex and his big fist clench. “You mean you—”
“The only way to learn them is upside the head.”
“You mean you—?” The taste in my mouth was like brass.
Where did the terror come from? Not from the violence; violence gives release from terror. Not from Leroy’s wrongness, for if he were altogether wrong, an evil man, the matter would be simple and no cause for terror. No, it came from Leroy’s goodness, that he is a decent, sweet-natured man who would help you if you needed help, go out of his way and bind up a stranger’s wounds. No, the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, some fault in the soul’s terrain so deep that all is well on top, evil grins like good, but something shears and tears deep down and the very ground stirs beneath one’s feet.
“Ellen was looking for you,” Leroy is saying, leaning close but not too close, a good drinking friend. He’s fixed himself a toddy. “She’s got some patients.”
“That’s impossible. I don’t see patients Saturday afternoon.”
“You’
re a doctor, aren’t you?”
Leroy, like Ellen, believes that right is right and in doing right. You’re a doctor, so you do what a doctor is supposed to do. Doctors cure sick people.
The terror comes from piteousness, from good gone wrong and not knowing it, from Southern sweetness and cruelty, God why do I stay here? In Louisiana people still stop and help strangers. Better to live in New York where life is simple, every man’s your enemy, and you walk with your eyes straight ahead.
Leroy believes that doctors do wonders, transplant hearts, that’s the way of it, right? Isn’t that what doctors are supposed to do? He knows about my lapsometer, believes it will do what I say it will do—fathom the deep abscess in the soul of Western man—yes, that’s what doctors do, so what? Then do it. Doctors see patients. Then see patients.
“Looks like it’s going to freshen up,” says Leroy. We drink toddies, eat eggs, and watch the martins come skimming home, sliding down the glassy sky.
In the dark mirror there is a dim hollow-eyed Spanish Christ. The pox is spreading on his face. Vacuoles are opening in his chest. It is the new Christ, the spotted Christ, the maculate Christ, the sinful Christ. The old Christ died for our sins and it didn’t work, we were not reconciled. The new Christ shall reconcile man with his sins. The new Christ lies drunk in a ditch. Victor Charles and Leroy Ledbetter pass by and see him. “Victor, do you love me?” “Sho, Doc.” “Leroy, do you love me?” “Cut it out, Tom, you know better than to ask that.” “Then y’all help me.” “O.K., Doc.” They laugh and pick up the new Christ, making a fireman’s carry, joining four hands. They love the new Christ and so they love each other.
“You all right now?” Leroy asks, watching me eat eggs and drink my toddy.
“I’m fine.”
“You better get on over there.”
“Yes.”
I leave cheerfully, knowing full well that Ellen must be gone, that I shall be free to sit in my doorway, listen to Don Giovanni, sip Early Times, and watch the martins come home.
14
The back doors of the Little Napoleon and my father’s old office let on to the ox-lot in the center of the block. It is getting dark. The thunderhead is upon us. A sour rain-drop splashes on my nose. It smells of trees. The piles of brickbats scattered in the weeds are still warm. A dusty trumpet vine has taken the loading ramp of Sears and the fire escape of the old Majestic Theater. In the center of the ox-lot atop a fifteen-foot pole sits my father’s only enduring creation: a brass-and-cedar martin hotel with rooms for a hundred couples. Overhead the martins wheel and utter their musical burr and rattle. They are summer residents. Already they are flocking with their young, preparing for their flight to the Amazon basin.