With Shuddering Fall

  Because of its position on the ocean and its tendency to attract northerly winds, Cherry River remained mild until August and September. Its horseshoe-shaped, picturesque harbor, in some places visibly rotting, attracted boatmen and retired landowners from farther south, who were sick of long summers. It also attracted a businessman who had already started small amusement parks and commercial beaches in small cities along the coast and by palatable lakes, and who had built a boardwalk along as much of the harbor as he was able to buy, beginning out of nowhere and ending nowhere. The beach was improved by mountains of sand from mysterious sources—fine, pure, sparkling sand. The first dance hall was built, and then, annexed to it, the first tavern of a sophisticated nature. Prohibition made the prosperity of the town a certainty: so promising was its future, so forward-looking its new inhabitants, that the first Cherry River—cotton and tobacco port, an English-settled town with the reputation of gracious eighteenth-century living—no longer had any relationship to the new Cherry River at all. The present and the past were so incongruous that when a horde of boys from the beach, most of them of foreign descent, tipped over and defaced the Civil War cannon by the church—in Cherry River, it was called the “War Between the States” cannon—nothing was done to repair the damage. The new people could not remember any such war and had no interest in it.

  Decades later, when the huge auto-racing track was first opened, the city was a strange blend of old buildings and new, sleek creations, many of them adorned by intricate neon signs. The old boardwalk had been replaced by a wide, gigantic walk that ran almost the entire length of the inner harbor, and between it and the beach (admission to the beach was now fifty cents) were restaurants and night clubs and side shows and games and tents—at one end, near the new racing track, fairly expensive and modern; at the other end, called “Wop Side,” cheap and noisy and dangerous after dark. The land to the north of Cherry River, bordering the ocean, had long since been sold to private, wealthy families, some of whom had made their fortunes during Prohibition and many of whom now owned interests in Cherry River. The commercial part of the city was operated by a congenial arrangement between two or three gambling syndicates to the north.

  The population of the city was now vividly mixed—there may have been descendants of the original inhabitants, but no one knew about them. Tourists were surprised to discover a little New England-looking town behind the hotels and restaurants, with its own churches and a red brick high school and homes that were not beach houses. Many of the old-fashioned buildings on what had been Main Street were now turned into apartment houses to hold the Negroes and other workers, mainly of Italian descent, who had been attracted to the town to work on the beach or as waiters or janitors or kitchen help. The city’s oldest inhabitants, who had boasted of never having seen a “Nigra” in their lives, were now accustomed to seeing Negro children running freely about on Main Street and seeing Negro families present themselves in church Sunday mornings, scrubbed and polished and dressed with a vengeance.

  Though the population was sharply heterogeneous and the most recent section of it expanding rapidly, there had been little conflict until recent years. During Prohibition there had been violence and occasional murders, but these had to do with private quarrels begun in northern cities; the population was not hurt or even offended by them. In recent years, however, there had been a few instances of brutality without apparent motive—a carload of Negro teen-agers had been forced off a highway, a row of Negro huts in the old “Nigger-town” section had been set on fire, and from time to time car windows had been smashed indiscriminately. On Hallowe’en the windows of the high school had been broken, but whether this had been done by the Negro children, who went by school bus to another school, or by the high school students themselves was never made clear. The first summer that Shar had come to Cherry River there had been some beatings of both Negroes and whites, and investigations, but nothing had come of them. Someone had had a shrewd idea and violated all precedent to appoint several Negroes to the police force—they would be assigned to their own neighborhoods—but no one could tell, of course, whether trouble had been averted by this. It was thought generally that it had been a good decision—it showed progressive thinking. Some of the oldest people, frightened by changing times, alternated between thinking of moving farther South and reflecting complacently that they did not have much longer to live.

  THOUGH SOME OF THE NIGHT clubs and hotels remained open all winter, summer was still the most prosperous season for Cherry River. The Fourth of July race was the most important event of the year, since it attracted people from remote parts of the country. On the days before and after the race the streets would be crowded, the boardwalk milling with humanity, the night clubs and restaurants filled to capacity; on the sloping beach hordes of people would lie in the sun or swim or fend their way around, walking stiffly, as if walking itself had become a struggle. The sunny air would be filled with excitement and expectancy as well as with the tumultuous din of voices and music from transistor radios, held fondly up to ears and evoking in eyes a dreamy, narcotic peace.

  Toward the end of June Shar and a few men had come to Cherry River to prepare themselves for the race. Shar had come immediately after leaving Synderdale, alone, and was joined before long by the mechanics and his alternate driver, Mitch. Following Shar’s example, they declined Max’s offer of rooms in a motel he partially owned—the offer included even the Negro Mitch—and rented rooms in an old boardinghouse not far from the garage they used when they were in Cherry River.

  The days before the race passed calmly. Shar woke early in the morning and went down to the beach to swim, sometimes alone, sometimes with Mitch or one of the other men. In the early morning the beach, though littered with papers and refuse, had a pale, clean glare, and the water smelled hard and salty. Shar felt his strength returning. The air intoxicated him. Mornings at Cherry River had always been good; it was later, when the afternoon and night crowds dominated, that he hated the place. The look of the crowds with their sweating faces and bright clothes tightened his stomach so that only working out with the car relaxed him, or, if that did not work, he could begin drinking after supper until all tension dissolved into a hot stupor. One morning, a little groggy, Shar had explained to Mitch the secret of his life: “You got to keep going. When you stop, it all catches up. Being a nigger, you’ll understand that.”

  Mitch agreed with him. They were sitting at the edge of the beach, their feet waiting for the waves. “I been going for a long time,” Mitch said, as if to help Shar with his argument.

  “They can buy anything,” Shar said, “as long as it stands still for them. They can buy anything, the best drivers, the best mechanics, the best races. They can buy me, I s’pose . . . I s’pose they have. But when I’m out there, there’s no bastard that owns me, a fat millionaire or whoever it is. And they Jesus-well better remember that.”

  “He said anything about a circuit?”

  “Hell! What is he waiting for?” Shar said angrily. “How much more money does he need? No, he puts it off; he puts me off. I got both arms broke once or twice, a leg broke—I forget which—collarbones a few times, lost count of it, ribs up and down and back again—and wrists and fingers and feet, off and on. What is he waiting for? That fifty-thousand-dollar policy he has on me? If I belonged to somebody else he’d have taken me over there a long time ago—I’d be a grand prix winner. How’d you like that last son of a bitch that won—foreign bastard!” But as he spoke, he felt odd—as if he were not telling the truth. As if Mitchie had said something, Shar snapped, “And I’m not old! I’m good for another ten years. Look at the South American bastard, how old is he? Forty-six?—What they’re grooming you for, Mitch, isn’t motor-racing. They fooled me with it. For them it’s money and for me, waiting to die.”

  “The hell with that!” Mitch said. He looked at Shar with proper astonishment. “Who are you kidding?”

  “But over there, driving a car, a thousand mil
es of a real road! How’d you like that, a real road for once? Not a goddam horse track—a greyhound track! I been so many times around a circle I’m sick to death of it; how do you get out of a circle but carried out in parts? I’d like to stuff that fat bastard Max’s money down his throat, stuff him up to his mouth. He won’t let me go. . . .” Shar’s argument, familiar to him and his friends, lost its enthusiasm. He could not help but feel that the American track, compressed and spectacular, answered his own hunger for brutality in a way that the European track would not. But that was not the only reason he no longer wanted to leave the country.

  Later, swimming with Mitchie, lunging against the surf, Shar felt the strength of his body like electricity buoying him up. The sun was just above the horizon, streaking across the water. The staleness of his mind was freshened by the water and air; he felt young. The surf pounded behind him up to the empty shore, but before him there was nothing but water and light—nothing that was familiar. He yelled over to Mitchie.

  “Ain’t this a goddam good thing!” Mitchie put his hand to his ear as if he were deaf; he grinned clownishly. “It does you good to have it like this! God, how I love this world!” Shar muttered fiercely. “A damn good world! I can’t get close enough to it—”

  Mitchie shrugged his shoulders; he could not hear. Shar did not look at him. He stared at the skyline and the hot sun. With the coarse water lunging about him he thought again that he could not get close enough to it, just as he could not get close enough to anything, finally—not even his racing, certainly not Karen. At the thought of her he felt his heart sink, as if he had succumbed to something forbidden. “A bitch!” he said. He trembled with anger at her. “Dressed like that, looking like a kid, to shame me! To shame me!”

  In those days Shar was accustomed to leaving places suddenly, getting up and walking out, when he gave in to thoughts about Karen. He seemed to think that in this way he would elude her. With a vague explanatory wave of his hand he left Mitchie looking after him and went back to his room.

  Mitch came up a while later, his clothes changed, and he and Shar went to have breakfast at a diner. It was made of rusted tin and had tinfoil in its windows to keep out the sun. Mitchie noticed how some of the men inside—workingmen on their way to jobs—looked at him and Shar, but Shar, settling arrogantly into himself, noticed nothing. Mitchie said to Shar in a low voice, “You heard about that fight last night? It was after you left. Right out in the street in front of Max’s place.”

  “No,” said Shar. “Was it anything to do with us?”

  “A nigger had too much to drink was being kicked around. They used their knees on him,” Mitchie said.

  “Anybody you know?” said Shar.

  “No,” said Mitchie, “but I—”

  “But you for Christ sake had better keep your nose out of it,” Shar said, as if reading off something that had no interest for him. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  Shar spent his days at the garage or sitting in a bar nearby or driving south along the interstate highway that overlooked the ocean. He showered many times in one day, discovering himself sweat-stained and dirty—there was dirt under his fingernails he could not get out, though he spent half an hour one day digging at it with a toothpick. Night began after supper, and he would spend it in one of the cheap bars that the Cherry River workers frequented instead of the tourists. Sitting at his table, there would be an Italian-looking woman not much younger than Shar, with a big, healthy, smiling face, a large body, a loud, vulgar laugh; it had been the laugh that, for some reason, had attracted Shar to her. He would drive out with her along the highway and listen to her talk—she was full of anecdotes about things that happened to gamblers in the back rooms of the night clubs and children on the merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels and misguided Negroes and friends of hers, girls, who took up with one man after another; all tales would be followed by her satisfied laughter. In Shar’s room she would hold him, strong as a man, she would moan and rub her arms tightly about his body. Shar wanted to put his hand over her mouth. Her big, sweating body dazzled him, her opened red lips, her strength, and her response to him—they left him dazzled but oddly unmoved; he reacted by instinct most of the time. The first time they had met they spent the night together and did not get up until three the next afternoon. Shar had brought a bottle up with him and the woman had been sick off and on, but infatuated with him, and both had staggered downstairs with white, brutal faces, pleased with each other. In Shar’s mind, whatever past he had had was obscured by a thick mist.

  15

  When Max arrived, Shar allowed himself to be persuaded to eat at Max’s motel and to spend part of the night there, but he refused to move in. It was a gigantic building, made mostly of tinted glass. People with colorful clothes and straight, white teeth milled about in the doorway and in the lobby; they smiled tentatively at Shar, mistaking him because of his dark, surly look for the gunmen who were rumored to be around. In the lounge of the motel there was a cascade of water bubbling blue and red and green, falling in sparkling crashes onto rocks. Max was particularly proud of this, which he had insisted upon himself, and he and Shar sat at the bar so they could see it better. “Now, outside the sun would get in your eyes. There would be mosquitoes or ticks or snakes—bears, anything. A herd of cows with horns, maybe, that would be enough for me. But in here—” Max sighed. The lounge was dark and spacious and voices were no more than murmurs in it because of the thick rug and the special ceiling. “In here there is no trouble—it is all under control. This is what civilization brings to us. I could exist nowhere but in civilization.”

  “You Jesus-well couldn’t,” Shar agreed.

  At their first meeting Shar had cautioned Max about speaking of Karen, so that now, at times, Max had a blank, stopped look and his lips worked enviously; he looked at Shar as if pleading for the opportunity to say what he was thinking, but Shar ignored him. “A son of a bitch for not even asking,” Jerry said to Shar’s face. Shar, who had been drinking, did not think Jerry worth answering. “No, no,” Max had said, upset, “you do not understand. You are sentimental—I am sentimental. Shar is different from us, we can’t understand him. He is a brutal child. How I envy that! A brutal, clever child!”

  Most of their conversations were about the impending race. Shar’s only important rival, Max informed him, was a young Negro who had begun racing just this season. He was twenty-one, a slender, jet-black boy with a reputation for being wise as well as a skillful driver. He called himself Vanilla Jones. Max had pointed him out to Shar one day on the boardwalk: he had been standing in conversation with two white men and a white girl, waving his hands, throwing his head back with laughter. He had sideburns and wore sunglasses of the silver metallic kind that look like mirrors; Shar had despised him at once. “It isn’t because he’s a nigger,” he had said, “but that might have something to do with it.” He wondered if perhaps another accident like the one at Synderdale would happen.

  “This time you must take care,” Max had said seriously. “Not because of the car—what is the car to me? But because of you. Because you cannot be replaced. You must win the race straight.”

  “Mitch can always put in for me,” said Shar, “if you don’t like the way I do it.”

  “My dear God, Shar,” sighed Max, “you misunderstand me . . . you weary me—and this weather . . . this weather is so hot. I am thinking of you yourself. I am worried about you.”

  “Worried about me?”

  “Of course I am worried. You know how you are—”

  “How am I?”

  “You don’t look well. You don’t eat. How do I know? I watch you eat, I see what you leave. I ask Mitchie what it is you have for breakfast. And too much drinking—you drink too long, too much. You are with bad companions.”

  Shar laughed aloud, though he did not know why. He did not like Max’s observations, which he felt to be true, but he did not know what to do about it. “I’m not taking any shots,” he said peevishly. “Y
ou should be happy for that.”

  “I am happy for that,” Max said, making a bowing gesture with his big head.

  “I haven’t had any since April. Since before I went up to that—” He stopped. A memory of that trip came to him at once, a startling picture: he saw his father burned alive, crawling out of bed just as the fire began and shouting curses at Shar, waving his bony fists at him. “At Eastertime. But this was no son that got laid out by his father,” he said strangely. He felt feverish. He despised Max for Max’s shrewdness, for the man’s little piercing eyes, and he despised himself for his own weakness. He thought of asking about Karen but said nothing.

  “Now, they tell me you started this out well,” Max went on. “They tell me you got up early—went swimming. They tell me you had a good breakfast and spent the day at the garage and the track. They said you looked well, you were—”

  “What kind of bastards are they?” said Shar “Who is this that tells you?”

  “The men. The men like you—they worship you,” Max said apologetically. “They want you to win the race. They want you to survive.”

  “But I don’t give a good damn about them,” Shar said. “I wouldn’t care if I had to rip through them to get the car in. Like me? Do they like me? But how could anyone—like me!” Shar shouldered his way along the boardwalk to get a better look at Vanilla Jones. He stood against the railing and lit a cigarette, watching the Negro. But his anger was not directed at the young man, whose behavior was self-conscious and very foolish—he even wore a cotton shirt with leopard spots on it—but against the men who had professed liking for him, against Max, who loved him, and against himself. The purity of hatred appealed to him: how easy to hate a Negro, to spend no time with complexities but to jump right away to the righteous conclusion of hatred! How much that appealed to Shar, who discovered, with some surprise, that he could no longer love and hate immediately and distinctly: his life had become too complicated. He had left behind in the uncertain world of childhood such healthy, clear distinctions—a “brutal, clever child,” Max had called him fondly, but that was not true. Shar, standing alone on the boardwalk, felt strangely old—aged—and he could not help but think it fitting that this young Negro would triumph over him, that youth would always triumph over age—and happily, too, and blindly, without even grinning back over his shoulder.