“No, ma’am, I ain’t. Sorry. I mean I’m not.”
“I didn’t think you were. Your accent is not Mississippi and you don’t have a real Mississippi look about you.”
“I don’t have much connection with Mississippi.”
“Oh, but I heard that our junior state senator, I heard it from Mère, was preparing you for a political career in the state.”
“Senator Sharp was a very fine gentleman, ma’am, and he did tell me one time that he thought I was cut out for politics in the state.”
“And his wife, Mrs. Alice Sharp?”
“Mrs. Alice Sharp was a great lady, ma’am.”
“But inclined to…you know?”
“I know she wanted to take a jump off the fifth-floor window ledge without wings or a parachute, ma’am.”
“Oh, then Mere was right.”
“Is this Mere a female hawss you are talking about who was right?”
“Yes, I think so. Tell me. How was Miss Alice persuaded not to jump?”
“Me and the senator caught ahold of her just before she could do it.”
“Well, you know, Mr. Jones, I thought that this story of Meres was a piece of invention.”
“If this Mere was a female hawss, she done a good deal of talking.”
“That she did! Hmm. How long have you been in Greene?”
“Ill a been here six months and a week next Sunday coming.”
“Why, you must keep a diary to be so exact about the time you arrived here!”
“No, ma’am, I just remember.”
“Then you’re gifted with a remarkable memory,” said Miss Coynte, with a shaky little tinkle of laughter, her fingers still fussing with the wrapping of the package. “I mean to be able to recall that you came here to Greene exactly six months and a week ago next Sunday.”
“Some things do stick in my mind.”
“Oh!”
Pause.
“Is there a fly in the shop?”
“Fly?”
“Yes, it sounds to me like a horsefly’s entered the shop!”
“I don’t see no fly in the shop and I don’t hear none either.”
Miss Coynte was how convinced of what she had suspected.
“Then I think the humming must be in my head. This has been such a hectic week for me, if I were not still young, I would be afraid that I might suffer a stroke; you know, I really do think I am going to have to employ an assistant here soon. When I began this thing, I hadn’t any suspicion that it would turn out to be such a thriving enterprise…”
There was something, more than one thing, between the lines of her talk, and certainly one of those things was the proximity of this exotic young man. He was so close to her that whenever she made one of her flurried turns—they were both in front of a counter now—her fingers would encounter the close-fitting cloth of his suit.
“Mr. Jones, please excuse me for being so slow about wrapping up these things. It’s just my, my—state of exhaustion, you know.”
“I know.”
“Perhaps you know, too, that I lost my grandmother yesterday, and—”
“Wasn’t it six weeks ago?”
“Your memory is remarkable as…”
She didn’t finish that sentence but suddenly leaned back against the counter and raised a hand to her forehead, which she had expected to feel hot as fire but which was deathly cold to her touch.
“Excuse me if I…”
“What?”
“Oh, Mr. Jones,” she whispered with no breath in her throat that seemed capable of producing even a whisper, “if there isn’t a fly, there must be a swarm of bees in this shop. Mr. Jones, you know, it was a stroke that took Mere.”
“No, I didn’t know. The paper just said she was dead.”
“It was a stroke, Mr. Jones. Most of the Coyntes go that way, suddenly, from strokes due to unexpected…excitement…”
“You mean you feel…?”
“I feel like Chicken Little when the acorn hit her on the head and she said, ‘Oh, the sky is falling!’ I swear that’s how I feel now!”
It seemed to Miss Coynte that he was about to slip an arm about her slight but sinewy waist as she swayed a little toward him, and perhaps he was about to do that, but what actually happened was this: She made a very quick, flurried motion, a sort of whirling about, so that the knuckles of her hand, lifted to just the right level, brushed over the fly of his trousers.
“Oh!” she gasped. “Excuse me!”
But there was nothing apologetic in her smile and, having completed a full turn before him, so that they were again face to face, she heard herself say to him:
“Mr. Jones, you are not completely Caucasian!”
“Not what, did you say?”
“Not completely a member of the white race?”
His eyes opened very wide, very liquid and molten, but she stood her ground before their challenging look.
“Miss Coynte, in Greene nobody has ever called me a nigger but you. You are the first and the last to accuse me of that.”
“But what I said was not an accusation, Mr. Jones, it was merely—”
“Take this!”
She gasped and leaned back, expecting him to smash a fist in her face. But what he did was more shocking. He opened the fly that she had sensed and thrust into her hand, seizing it by the wrist, that part of him which she defined to herself as his “member.” It was erect and pulsing riotously in her fingers, which he twisted about it.
“Now what does Chicken Little say to you. Miss Whitey Mighty, does she still say the sky is falling or does she say it’s rising?”
“Chicken Little says the sky is rising straight up to—”
“Your tight little cunt?”
“Oh, Mr. Jones, I think the shop is still open, although it’s past closing time. Would you mind closing it for me?”
“Leggo of my cock and I’ll close it.”
“Please! Do. I can’t move!”
Her fingers loosened their hold upon his member and he moved away from her and her fingers remained in the same position and at the same level, loosened but still curved.
The sound of his footsteps seemed to come from some distant corridor in which a giant was striding barefooted away. She heard several sounds besides that; she heard the blind being jerked down and the catch of the latch on the door and the switching off of the two green-shaded lights. Then she heard a very loud and long silence.
“You’ve closed the shop, Mr. Jones?”
“That’s right, the shop is closed for business.”
“Oh! No!”
“By no do you mean don’t?”
He had his hand under her skirt, which she had unconsciously lifted, and he was moving his light-palmed, dusky-backed, spatulate-fingered hand in a tight circular motion over her fierily throbbing mound of Venus.
“Oh, no, no, I meant do!”
It was time for someone to laugh and he did, softly.
“That’s what I thought you meant. Hold still till I get this off you.”
“Oh, I can’t, how can I?” she cried out, meaning that her excitement was far too intense to restrain her spasmodic motions.
“Jesus,” he said as he lifted her onto the counter.
“God!” she answered.
“You have got a real sweet little thing there and I bet no man has got inside it before.”
“My Lord, I’m…”
She meant that she was already approaching her climax.
“Hold on.”
“Can’t.”
“OK, we????ll shoot together.”
And then the mutual flood. It was burning hot, the wetness, and it continued longer than even so practiced a stud as Jack Jones had ever known before.
Then, when it stopped, and their bodies were no longer internally engaged, they lay beside each other, breathing fast and heavily, on the counter.
After a while, he began to talk to Miss Coynte.
“I think you better keep your mo
uth shut about this. Because if you talk about it and my color, which has passed here so far and which has got to pass in this goddamn city of Greene till I go back to buy me a piece of land and raise cane in Louisiana—”
“You are not going back to raise cane in Louisiana,” said Miss Coynte with such a tone of authority that he did not contradict her, then or ever thereafter.
It was nearly morning when she recovered her senses sufficiently to observe that the front door of The Better Mousetrap was no longer locked but was now wide open, with the milky luster of street lamps coming over the sill, along with some wind-blown leaves of flaming color.
Her next observation was that she was stretched out naked on the floor.
“Hallelujah!” she shouted.
From a distance came the voice of a sleepy patrolman calling out, “Wha’s that?”
Understandably, Miss Coynte chose not to reply. She scrambled to the door, locked it, got into her widely scattered clothes, some of which would barely hold decently together.
She then returned home by a circuitous route through several alleys and yards, having already surmised that her mission in life was certain, from this point onward, to involve such measures of subterfuge.
As a child in Louisiana, Jack Jones had suffered a touch of rheumatic fever, which had slightly affected a valve in his heart.
He was now twenty-five.
Old Doc Settle said to him, “Son, I don’t know what you been up to lately, but you better cut down on it, you have developed a sort of noise in this right valve which is probably just functional, not organic, but we don’t want to take chances on it.”
A month later. Jack Jones took to his bed and never got up again. His last visitor was Miss Coynte and she was alone with him for about half an hour in Greene Memorial Hospital, and then she screamed and when his nurse went in, he was sprawled naked on the floor.
The nurse said, “Dead.”
Then she glared at Miss Coynte.
“Why’d he take off his pajamas,” she asked her.
Then she noticed that Miss Coynte was wriggling surreptitiously into her pink support hose, but not surreptitiously enough to escape the nurse’s attention.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Miss Coynte, although the nurse had not opened her mouth to speak a word about what Miss Coynte’s state of incomplete dress implied.
It is easy to lead a double life in the Delta; in fact it is almost impossible not to.
Miss Coynte did not need to be told by any specialist in emotional problems that the only way to survive the loss of a lover such as Jack Jones had been before his collapse was to immediately seek out another; and so in the weekend edition of The Greene Gazette, she had inserted a small classified ad that announced very simply, “Colored male needed at The Better Mousetrap for heavy delivery service.”
Bright and early on Monday morning, Sonny Bowles entered the shop in answer to this appeal.
“Name, please?” inquired Miss Coynte in a brisk and businesslike voice, sharply in contrast to her tone of interrogation with the late Jack Jones.
Her next question was: “Age?”
The answer was: “Young enough to handle delivery service.”
She glanced up at his face, which was almost two feet above her own, to assure herself that his answer had been as pregnant with double meaning as she had hoped.
What she saw was a slow and amiable grin. She then dropped her eyes and said: “Now, Mr. Bowles, uh. Sonny, I’m sure that you understand that ‘delivery service’ is a rather flexible term for all the services that I may have in mind.”
Although she was not at all flurried, she made one of her sudden turns directly in front of him, as she had done that late afternoon when she first met the late Jack Jones, and this time it was not her knuckles but her raised finger tips that encountered, with no pretense of accident whatsoever, the prominent something behind the vertical parabola of Sonny Bowles’s straining fly.
Or should we say “Super Fly”?
He grinned at her, displaying teeth as white as paper.
Sonny turned off the green-shaded lights himself and locked the shop door himself, and then he hopped up on the counter and sat down and Miss Coynte fell to her knees before him in an attitude of prayer.
Sonny Bowles was employed at once by Miss Coynte to make deliveries in her little truck and to move stock in the store.
The closing hours of the shop became very erratic. Miss Coynte had a sign printed that said OUT TO LUNCH and that sign was sometimes hanging in the door at half past eight in the morning.
“I have little attacks of migraine,” Miss Coynte explained to people, “and when they come on me, I have to put up the lunch sign right away.”
Whether or not people were totally gullible in Greene, nothing was said in her presence to indicate any suspicion concerning these migraine attacks.
The Better Mousetrap now had four branches, all prospering, for Miss Coynte had a nose for antiquities. As soon as a family died off and she heard about it. Sonny Bowles would drive her to the house in her new Roadmaster. She would pretend to be offering sincere condolences to relatives in the house, but all the while her eyes would be darting about at objects that might be desirable in her shops. And so she throve.
Sonny had a light-blue uniform with silver buttons when he drove her about.
“Why, you two are inseparable,” said a spiteful spinster named Alice Bates.
This was the beginning of a feud between Miss Bates and Miss Coynte which continued for two years. Then one midnight Miss Bates’s house caught fire and she burned alive in it and Miss Coynte said, “Poor Alice, I warned her to stop smoking in bed, God bless her.”
One morning at ten Miss Coynte put up her OUT TO LUNCH sign and locked the door, but Sonny sat reading a religious booklet under one of the green-shaded lamps and when Miss Coynte turned the lamp off, he turned it back on.
“Sonny, you seem tired,” remarked Miss Coynte.
She opened the cash register and gave him three twenty-dollar bills.
“Why don’t you take a week off,” she suggested, “in some quiet town like Memphis?”
When Sonny returned from there a week later, he found himself out of a job and he had been replaced in The Better Mousetrap by his two younger brothers, a pair of twins named Mike and Moon.
These twins were identical.
“Was that you, Mike,” Miss Coynte would inquire after one of her sudden lunches, and the answer was just as likely to be;
“No, ma’am, this is Moon, Miss Coynte.”
Mike or Moon would drive her in her new yellow Packard every evening that summer to the Friar’s Point ferry and across it to a black community called Tiger Town, and specifically to a night resort called Red Dot. It would be dark by the time Mike or Moon would deliver Miss Coynte to this night resort and before she got out of the yellow Packard, she would cover her face with dark face powder and also her hands and every exposed surface of her fair skin.
“Do I pass inspection,” she would inquire of Mike or Moon, and he would laugh his head off, and Miss Coynte would laugh along with him as he changed into his Levis and watermelon-pink silk shirt in the Packard.
Then they would enter and dance.
You know what wonderful dancers the black people are, but after a week or so, they would clear the floor to watch Miss Coynte in the arms and hands of Mike or Moon going through their fantastic gyrations on the dance floor of Red Spot.
There was a dance contest in September with a dozen couples participating, but in two minutes the other couples retired from the floor as Miss Coynte leapt repeatedly over the head of Mike or Moon, each time swinging between his legs and winding up for a moment in front of him and then going into the wildest circular motion about him that any astral satellite could dream of performing in orbit.
“Wow!”
With this exclamation Miss Coynte was accustomed to begin a dance and to conclude it also.
“Mi
ss Coynte?”
“Yes?”
“This is Reverend Tooker.”
She hung up at once and put the OUT TO LUNCH sign on the shop door, locked it up, and told Mike and Moon, “Our time is probably about to expire in Greene, at least for a while.”
“At least for a while” did not mean right away. Miss Coynte was not a lady of the new South to be demoralized into precipitate flight by such a brief and interrupted phone call from a member of the Protestant clergy.
Still, she was obliged, she thought, to consider the advisability of putting some distance between herself and the small city of Greene sometime in the future, which might be nearer than farther.
One morning while she was out to lunch but not lunching, she put through a call to the chamber of commerce in Biloxi, Mississippi.
She identified herself and her name was known, even there.
“I am doing research about the racial integration of Army camps in the South and I understand that you have a large military base just outside Biloxi, and I wonder if you might be able to inform me if enlisted or drafted blacks are stationed at your camp there?”
Answer; “Yes.”
“Oh, you said yes, not no. And that was the only question I had to ask you.”
“Miss Coynte,” drawled the voice at the other end of the phone line, “we’ve got this situation of integration pretty well under control, and if you’ll take my word for it, I don’t think that there’s a need for any research on it.”
“Oh, but, sir, my type of research is not at all likely to disturb your so-called control; if I make up my mind to visit Biloxi this season.”
Enough of that phone conversation.
However…
The season continued without any change of address for Miss Coynte. The season was late autumn and leaves were leaving the trees, but Miss Coynte remained in Greene.
However, changes of the sort called significant were manifesting themselves in the lady’s moods and conditions.
One hour past midnight, having returned from Red Dot across the river. Miss Coynte detained her escorts, Mike and Moon, on the shadowy end of her long front veranda for an inspired conversation.
“Not a light left in the town; we’ve got to change that to accomplish our purpose.”
“Don’t you think,” asked Mike or Moon, “that—”