CHICKEN: That river in flood has got a mighty voice.
[He crosses to the door-frame: the river sound swells to a muted lion-like roar.]
MYRTLE: Oh, don’t go and leave me alone.
CHICKEN: If God had a voice that’s the way it would sound.
MYRTLE [beside him at the door]: How will you know if—
CHICKEN: It’s gonna flood the house? I’ll know for sure when I hear Mr. Sikes dynamiting the south end of his levee to save the rest from breaking.
MYRTLE: Don’t he care what happens to people below him?
CHICKEN: No. Mr. Sikes is like God, he’s got more to think about than people below him.
MYRTLE: Let’s go back in the kitchen and shut the door, and sit close together. You know, I feel like Lot was already gone.
CHICKEN: You got a marriage license?
MYRTLE: We got some kind of a paper.
CHICKEN: Well, go up and bring it down here. If I get rid of that paper I’ll be more likely to help you up on the roof. All right. All right.
[She goes quietly but rapidly upstairs. Chicken takes the lamp again to the wall with the colored nude picture tacked on it. Myrtle hurries back down.]
MYRTLE: Got it. Here it is.
CHICKEN: Tear it up.
[Myrtle tears it in two.]
Give it here, I’ll tear it up. [He tears it into fragments, goes to the door-frame with them and scatters the fragments outside. Returning—] The frogs and crickets out there don’t seem to know the place is gonna be flooded. Ignorance is good for them. How was Lot?
MYRTLE: Didn’t look at me. Said nothing. And I said nothing to him. I feel like our marriage is finished. He touched the maternal chord in me. That’s always been too strong a chord in my nature and he took advantage of it and told me nothing but lies. I pity him still. I think he’s just waiting to die. But I lost respect for that boy when I found out how he’d lied to me.
CHICKEN: Hm. Speaking of lies, this lie about my mother. Those people who say my mother had colored blood in her are telling a goddam lie. I’m one eight Cherokee and the rest is white, pure white, as white as Lot is, despite me being a good deal darker complected, from working out in the fields like a field hand.
MYRTLE: I been lied to so many times in my life it’s finally made me distrustful.
CHICKEN: Well, this lie, someone or other is going to tell you this lie if you stick around here. You’re bound to hear it.
MYRTLE: I could only stay here if I was staying with you.
CHICKEN: We’ll talk about that on the roof, under a blanket. But anyhow, now, you know the set-up, don’t you?
MYRTLE: I honestly don’t want it any way but the way you want it. —I’d like to ask you a question. How come you don’t have a woman living with you? Some woman or girl to live with you? Colored or white?
CHICKEN: I don’t need no wife. I went out with a girl around here for three years and then she got knocked up by some fellow. She claimed that it was by me and wanted me to marry her but I wouldn’t. Now she’s gone North but not till after she circulated that story about my mother having some nigger blood in her. Since that story there’s no white girl in the county that I could go out with. But that’s all right. I don’t bother about it. Every heard Gypsy Smith?
MYRTLE: Who’s he?
CHICKEN: The preacher.
MYRTLE: Oh, yes, that preacher. No, I never heard him, just heard of him.
CHICKEN: He saved me last spring. It last two months and then I started backsliding. Like everyone does. But that was an awful two months. You know how they preach about how you should keep the gates down on the lustful body? I put up a struggle against it but I wasn’t cut out for that kind of a struggle. Either you’re saved or you ain’t and I think you’re a hell of a lot better off with the hope of salvation cut off absolutely than putting up a struggle that’s bound to be useless. Sooner or later you backslide and then that’s that.
MYRTLE: I never did bother with it.
LOT [off]: Myrtle!
CHICKEN: Go on and see what he wants.
MYRTLE [crossly]: I’m comin’, Lot!
CHICKEN [reflectively, after a pause]: It’s like the preacher says, the gates of the soul is got to close on the body and keep the body out or the body will break down the gates and overrun the soul and everything else that’s decent in a human. But the fack of the matter is I never seemed to have no gates to close. Some people are made without ‘em. I’m one of that kind.
MYRTLE: That sure is the case with me.
CHICKEN: But I did put up a struggle after that Gallaway girl told those stories about me and I was pretty lonesome around here for a while with Lot in the Memphis hospital.
MYRTLE: That was this spring?
CHICKEN: Last spring. I’ve quit thinkin’ about it.
[She sits on the edge of the table.]
CHICKEN: I guess I should of had more schooling or something. I never think of anything much to do but drinking and screwing and trying my damnedest to make something out of the place and not having much luck at it. I guess if a fellow could pick up a book at night, that ought to make a good deal of difference to him.
MYRTLE: Can’t you read?
CHICKEN: Sure, I can read, I can make out most of the words and I can write something that passes for a letter. But dogged if reading’ll close them gates on the body. I tried it a while and give it up in disgust. Made up stuff like that don’t satisfy me. Does it you?
MYRTLE: No, it don’t me neither. I never was much of a reader. I pick up a woman’s magazine now and then.
CHICKEN: I bet you don’t even get ha’f through a story.
MYRTLE: I us’ally don’t.
CHICKEN: That’s how it was with me. I’d get ha’f through an’ give it up in disgust.—Fooling the public . . .
MYRTLE: Uh-huh . . .
LOT [offstage]: Myrtle!
MYRTLE: For Christ’s sake what is he bawling about, I wonder.
CHICKEN: Go see.
MYRTLE: Later—maybe. [She picks up one of the cards.]
CHICKEN: What’re you doin’ with that card?
MYRTLE: Cleaning my finger-nails with it.
CHICKEN: Use a match-stick.
MYRTLE: Never mind . . . I’ve got some orange sticks somewhere. [Pause.] You play cards?
CHICKEN: Not much. [Pause.] I like to go in town and look at a movie or go to a carnival show when one is in town, but only ever so offen, not ev’ry night, the way some people do it. Lookin’ at them screen stars don’t close the gates on the body and don’t ever think it does.
[Myrtle laughs.]
They’s nothing that gets a fellow quite so horny as setting there in the dark and looking up at one of them beautiful actrisses messin’ around in a wrapper. I never have seen one picture in which they didn’t and there’s young kids that play with themselves in the movies. Did you know that?
MYRTLE: —No . . . .
LOT: Myrtle!
MYRTLE [softly]: Oh, shut up up there, will you?
CHICKEN: After the show it’s worse than before you went in. You come back out and there ain’t one inch of you not overrun by those longings.
MYRTLE: I don’t go to moves except when some fellow takes me.
CHICKEN: Poker, I like to play that, but always seem to come out at the little end of the horn.
[Loud coughing and gasping is heard from offstage.]
MYRTLE [getting up]: I’m going to go up there now and see what he wants. [But she remains by the table.]
CHICKEN: You don’t seem to be in much of a hurry.
MYRTLE: I’m too soft hearted. I can’t stand to see people suffer.
LOT: Myrtle!
CHICKEN: Is that why you’re sitting down here?
MYRTLE: I’ve had a bad time all my life. You don’t understand how it is for a woman like me. I used to work at a dry-goods store in Biloxi. I was fifteen and I was thin and pretty.
CHICKEN: Was this before you went to the drugstore for the peroxid
e bottle?
MYRTLE: This was before—pour me a little whiskey in this cup!—before I learned the scoop!
CHICKEN: What do you think is the scoop, Miss Myrtle Turtle?
MYRTLE: The hardness of people. There’s very few soft-hearted people, them that are, they work at a bad disadvantage. I was just too soft-hearted for my own good, so you can imagine what happened.
CHICKEN: No. I can’t imagine.
MYRTLE: The man that managed the dry-goods store in Biloxi kept walking by me and every time that he did, he would touch my body. First on my arm, he would just pinch my arm a little, and then on my shoulders and, accidentally like, he would feel my breasts. Finally he would come up behind me and put a hand on my hips. I told my girlfriend. I told my girlfriend about it . . .
CHICKEN: What did your girlfriend say?
MYRTLE: Honey, she said, just pretend you don’t notice.
CHICKEN: Ha ha!
MYRTLE: Just try and ignore it and he will quit after a while. But not Charlie, not him!
CHICKEN: So Charlie had the hots for you?
LOT [from above]: Myrtle!
MYRTLE: Yeah, coming, coming!
CHICKEN: Let him holler. It might strengthen his lungs.
MYRTLE: I don’t like to be hollered at. I’ll come up there when I’m ready. No, my girlfriend didn’t understand Charlie . . . He pinched me harder and hung around me longer all the time. What could I do? Pretend like I didn’t notice? How could I help but notice with black and blue marks on my body where he pinched me?
CHICKEN [squeezing her shoulder]: How hard did he pinch you? This hard?
MYRTLE: Ow!—Yes, that hard. I talked to my girlfriend about it. We roomed together. She gave me lots of advice and all of it bad. Honey, she said, just take him aside and have a sincere conversation. Tell him that you’re not used to that sort of treatment. Tell him that you have had a decent upbringing and you are religious!
CHICKEN: Tell him to shut the spiritchel gates on the body?
MYRTLE: Ah, something like that. I took her advice about it. I walked in his office at the back of the store. I even remember the hour. It was lunch-hour one Saturday afternoon in the middle of summer.
CHICKEN: —July? The month of July?
MYRTLE: Two days after the Fourth!
CHICKEN: Aw. Too late for firecrackers . . .
LOT: Myrtle! Myrtle!
MYRTLE: Shut up! Don’t holler at me!
CHICKEN: That’s the ticket. Show him who wears the pants!
MYRTLE: I’m through taking orders from people. —Yes, I went in his office and soon as I walked in the door he pulled the shade down. I should of walked right back out.
CHICKEN: Should of but didn’t.
MYRTLE: That’s right. Should of but didn’t.
CHICKEN: Uh-huh . . .
MYRTLE: I said to him, Mr. Porter, I don’t think that you are playing fair and square with me.
CHICKEN: What was his answer to that one?
LOT: Myrtle!
MYRTLE: You seem to be taking advantage, I said, of the fact that you are my boss. You are taking liberties with me.
CHICKEN: Ah-hah.
MYRTLE: This was in the depression, before the war, and jobs was scarce as hen’s teeth, so you can imagine how much nerve it took to go to a boss and make a complaint like that!
CHICKEN: Ah-hah . . .
MYRTLE: Well, I did it, I made it. And if I had lost that job I might have starved, because my girlfriend, Gladys, was hard as a rock and if I had been not employed, do you think she would of bothered? No. She’d of told me the room was suddenly crowded! With two people in it.
CHICKEN: Ah-hah. You have learned the scoop.
MYRTLE: Well, this is what happened. He walked up to me and put his hands on my hips. Is this what you mean, he said? And he started to kiss me. I tried to walk one way and Charlie pushed me the other.
LOT: Myrtle!
MYRTLE: He kicked the office door shut and backed me up against a great big roller-top desk and he took me by force right there in that office of his. He was a man about forty with sandy red hair. Built like you, very good, but older and heavy! Like a, like a—red—bull . . . Give me—a little more—whiskey . . . I like to drink from a tin cup . . . Thanks!
LOT: Myrtle!
MYRTLE: It riles me to be hollered at!—more than anything else. I don’t know why I’m telling you this story, you couldn’t be interested in it.
CHICKEN: If I wasn’t int’rested in it, I wouldn’t listen. It passes time till we hear that dynamite blast at Mr. Sikes’. When we hear that dynamite blast, we’ll have to move to the roof.
MYRTLE: How would we get up there?
CHICKEN: There’s a ladder and a trap-door to the roof.
MYRTLE: And you’ll get me up there with you? Promise me you will.
CHICKEN: Go on with the story about how you lost your cherry.
MYRTLE: They say you lose your heart when you lose your cherry . . . I did. I loved that bull. I loved that big red bull of a hard-hearted man. Some girls don’t like it at first, but me, I got to admit that right from the start I loved it.
CHICKEN: How about now? You still do?
MYRTLE [gravely]: Yes. Still do. But I’m not the ignorant girl that I was when I worked for—Mr. Porter . . . He got tired of me, I reckon. Men seem to get tired of women after a while. He told me his wife had found out about us so that he had to let me go. Some girls would have made him trouble but I had too much pride to. So I left Biloxi and lived a while different places. Pensacolo, I lived there a while. Mobile, a while there. New Orleans, lived there a while. If you asked me how long I lived in a place I honestly couldn’t tell you. Each place, it was so much the same, or the way that I lived was the same, and now it seems like it happened all of a sudden, all of that time gone by, I’m not fifteen, I’m twice that. But I want you to understand something. I never been a prostitute in my life, I never been a street-walker.
CHICKEN: But you do go out on the streets.
MYRTLE: I can’t stay inside all day. I guess I live a strange life, I don’t know how to describe it. Each new city I got to, I find a girl-friend to bum around town with. When I wake up I call her or she calls me, and if we’re not working, or get off work at five, we make a date to meet somewhere and just, just—kill time together. No special plan, you know. We eat together and go to a movie and wind up in some bar we’re used to, and always meet a man or a couple of men there. What’s strange about my life is each day is like the day before or the next day. Just killing time, no change except time going. It begun to scare me, the way the days and nights all seemed like one day and night gone over and over and over. So, then I met Lot in a drugstore in downtown Memphis. He was looking through movie magazines on the magazine rack in that Walgreen’s. We struck up a conversation. He looked like a kid, my girlfriend Georgia said I was robbing the cradle. Well, I have this maternal chord in me and he touched it. It was my birthday. I don’t suppose it would have happened except on my birthday. My birthday reminded me how long I’d been just wand’ring around on the loose, each day like the other and no change in the future except time passing me by. I was scared. And Lot touched this maternal chord in me. So I took Lot home to my place and he spent the night with me, slept in my arms like a baby.—When he woke up he said to me, “Let’s get married.” At first I laughed, it seemed ridiculous to me. But then I thought, oh, well, as the fellow says, there’s a hell of a lot more to this business of sex than two people jumping up and down on each other’s eggs.
CHICKEN: So you said “Yes.”
MYRTLE: Yes, I did, I said yes. And we married yesterday and drove down here this morning. —The trouble with my life is I don’t plan it, it’s just an unplanned thing that happens to me. A thing like that can’t go on forever, you know.
LOT [from above]: Myrtle! Myrtle!
MYRTLE: Excuse me while I go up there and see what he wants.
[As she goes up the stairs, Chicken returns to the nude colored p
hoto on the back wall of the kitchen and stares at it till Myrtle rushes back down, almost immediately after going up.]
Y’know what he wanted? He wanted to call me a whore, that’s all he wanted. I won’t stand being called names, so I went right out. He’s jealous because we’re down here talking. I said, I asked him, who else but Chicken is going to save me from drowning? Lot could never get me up on the roof if the house is flooded.
CHICKEN: I’ll tell you how I look at it. A man can’t be soft in this world. I think that life just plain don’t care for the weak. Or the soft. A man and his life both got to be made out of the same stuff or one or the other will break, and the one that breaks won’t be life. Because life’s rock. So man’s got to be rock, too. Life, rock: man, rock. Because if they both ain’t rock, the one that’s not rock won’t be life. The one that’s not rock will be man, so man’s got to be rock, too. The soft one is broke when the two things come together, and life is never the soft one. And this is how I look at it, too. There’s nothing in the world, nothing in this whole kingdom of earth, that can compare with one thing, and that one thing is what’s able to happen between a man and a woman, just that thing, nothing more, is perfect. The rest is crap, all of the rest is almost nothing but crap. That one thing’s good. And if you never had nothing else but that, no money, no property, no success in the world, but still had that, why then I say this life would still be worth living, and you had better believe it. Yes, you could come home to a house like a shack, in blazing heat, and look for water and not find a drop to drink, and look for food and find not a single crumb of it. But if on the bed you seen you a woman waiting, maybe not even very young or good-looking, and she looked up and said to you, “Daddy, I want it”— Why, then I say you got a square deal out of life, and whoever don’t think so has just not found the right woman. —That’s how I look at it, that’s the way that I see it.
LOT [from above]: Myrtle!
MYRTLE: I guess I better go back up there.
CHICKEN: Go on up an’ make him stop that bawling!
MYRTLE [calling]: Awright, awright, I’m coming! [She goes upstairs.]