With Shuddering Fall

  He looked back at Max. The fat, well-dressed man stood in the middle of the walk, peering anxiously at Shar while a stream of people passed before and around him; he looked like a gigantic rock protruding up in the center of a creek. Max had a dough-colored face and thinning hair; he looked awkward even while sitting, or standing still, as if life itself were a struggle for him. Strange man! Shar thought it queer he should have anything to do with such a creature. Separated by the crowd, they were strangers—how did it happen they knew each other? Better for Shar to approach the young Negro and to embrace him, to embrace his youth and vitality, than to return to Max—a bloated, insatiable spectator, a product of a refined civilization. Shar felt for an instant as if he were lost.

  THAT AFTERNOON MARIAN HAD ANOTHER story to tell him. “Now, this girl used to be a friend of mine and I really did like her—I really did. I don’t mean anything there. We went to school together and went around together—the same guys. So you can guess how surprised I was to hear about what happened! That was just this morning I heard. The man is down at the police station. Nobody knows about it, and we wouldn’t yet, except for Hannie—he lives next door; I ever tell you about him?”

  Shar was staring at the window. The shade was drawn and moved idly in the wind. “No,” he said.

  “Hannie works for the Dew Drop Inn, that big place. It ain’t the biggest one any more, with those two new ones built last year, but it’s pretty big, and nice inside. He worked in the back room to keep things quiet—you know—and seen some things in his time. He says he saw a man knocked out, beaten over the head with a shoe—they couldn’t find anything else and didn’t want to use a gun—and some other things too that I oughtn’t to be telling about. I used to go around with him. . . . Well, he says this girl was all beat up so there was hardly a face there; one of the cops said that. The guy that was with her got found on the road, trying to flag cars down and none of them would have any of it except a cop car going by, and that was an hour or so afterward—after he woke up, anyhow, and seen what happened. They took his car and drove it in a ditch with water in it a few miles away, ’course he didn’t know about that then—the cops found it later on. So they picked the guy up and couldn’t make much sense out of him till they went back to see, and found that girl there. That was Veronica. Veronica herself, and her with a husband working down at the boardwalk! He was her second husband—she was married before, about sixteen then, to a kid her own age; but it didn’t work out. He worked on a freighter and was gone all the time and finally went in the Navy—so they broke up. He was a good friend of my brother’s. We all moved down here together, his family and mine, our fathers decided on it. . . .”

  Marian’s story was told calmly and with much interest, and she took it so seriously that she did not laugh at all. Shar watched her. At times, as she spoke, he wanted to put his hand over her mouth so there would be nothing to hear—there would be only her smeared face and perspiring, healthy body to see. Shar found himself wondering who the woman was and what he was doing with her, what he could have possibly wanted from her. He began to doubt his own sanity.

  “So it was Veronica, all right. The guy told the cops all about it and Hannie heard from one of them—he’s in good with them, from where he works. The guy says there were four niggers that did it. He says one of them was just a kid—maybe fourteen. He says the oldest one was maybe thirty, and had a familiar look; he seen him somewhere before, around the boardwalk probably, and thought he could remember him. But hell, no nigger that did that and had any brains would stay around here—he’d be on the first train out, hiding in a box car. Hannie told me that. He’s sure as hell right, they’ll never find them, they can take every nigger in the town and give them pills to make them tell the truth, or whatever they give them, and they won’t find the right ones. But Jesus! Veronica herself! She got warned to be careful, but no, not her, one man after another—’course her husband liked to twist her arm around, some judo trick he learned somewhere, and even bragged about it and did it to her with people around—to make her squeal. So he wasn’t an angel himself. But Hannie says he broke down when he heard about it and kept wanting to go see her, but they thought he shouldn’t. Veronica herself! I can’t get over it. It’s a hell of a thing!”

  “You stink,” Shar said suddenly. “Don’t you ever wash?”

  When Marian turned to gape at him, Shar made himself smile. She hesitated a moment, then slapped his stomach with her hand. “Who the hell are you talking about?” she said. She leaned over him. Shar saw a look of fondness start out from the loose pursing of her mouth, move to her eyes, which were heavy-lidded and smeared with mascara, and to her arms and hands, as she caressed him. She forgot her story—it was to Shar strangely incomplete, since she had not laughed abruptly at the end. “What a bastard you are,” she whispered, “you know what that smell is from. What a bastard, a bastard, a bastard. . . .”

  She struggled tenderly with him; she took hold of his back with her fingers, knowing enough not to scratch him. She murmured to him hoarsely, and Shar, dizzy with excitement, thought of the first time—it had happened only twice—that he had been able to make Karen feel this way. He had made love to her slowly and patiently and had talked to her, bringing his eyes close to hers, until she had cried out in fear and astonishment, as if she had been betrayed . . . lying in his arms with her face hidden, she had whispered something to him, something about being afraid, and that her body would not stop throbbing, and Shar had thought that he loved her. He loved her! The memory seized and overpowered him and when he lay beside Marian again he was filled with a peculiar tenderness for her, as if she were a victim he had discovered—the faceless woman found in a ditch, attacked by four Negroes and beaten to death!—and one Negro not more than fourteen.

  SHAR AND MARIAN WERE SITTING at an outside café on the boardwalk when Mitch and a white girl and another man Shar remembered from Synderdale appeared. The three of them looked as if they had been drinking, and it was with a mysterious, awkward leer that the fat young man, holding hands with the girl, approached Shar. “So we meet again! Did you think you had lost me? You and your boss!” the young man cried happily. He had pulled the girl along with him. She protested weakly, touching her curly hair, and arranged a smile for Shar and Marian. “Did you think I would be left behind? Just because he had me fired! Did you think I had no presence of mind, or parents to write home to? They sent me money to keep me for a month! What do you think of that?”

  Mitch put his arm around the sweating young man’s shoulders and said quickly, pretending to be more drunk than he was, “Ponzi said how he wanted to see you again. He was in the pit for you at Synderdale—you know. Got in some trouble there and Max sent Jerry over to fire him, that was after you left town. He’s all right, though. He’s all right. He come down here to Cherry River to see you day after tomorrow. Just come down to see the race.”

  “I come down to see my old friends again,” Ponzi said. “This is a friend. Him there, drives the car. What did I tell you, honey? I told you I knew the driver. That’s him. He drives. He won the race last week—a man was killed in it. An accident.” Here he laughed suddenly. “A goddam sad accident, with the car tilted up on end. He had his head sheared off.”

  Shar stared at him. He felt no emotion at all, not even disgust. Mitch, looking anxiously at Shar and trying to edge in front of Ponzi, gestured with his hands more than usual and even cracked his knuckles, trying to think of something to say. The girl whose hand Ponzi clutched against his stomach was young, with long, complicated hair tinted a pale red, curled in a loose crown around her head; she kept licking her lips and staring at Shar. Behind them on the boardwalk people passed in bathing suits and playsuits and straw hats, some of them carrying balloons.

  “I never met them before,” Marian said, leaning forward as if she meant to embrace them. “You just come down here?”

  “I just arrived this morning,” Ponzi said. His nose was sunburned and had started to peel.
He had a frantic, young, earnest look, as if he were having difficulty with the language. “Now what am I stuck with? A goddam chaperon! A chaperon!” And all the time he stared at Marian and back to Shar, as if something mystified him. “A chaperon. . . . They got me to walk around with them and hold her hand so it don’t look—it don’t look bad. But no mistake about it! It’s Mitchie she’s got her eye on, not me!” Here the girl giggled and allowed her face to turn red. She and Marian exchanged a look. Ponzi straightened his broad shoulders and sucked in his breath so that his damp shirt suddenly went tight across his chest. “Why the hell she would prefer a dirty nigger to me I don’t know. I don’t know. Because of Mitchie’s new suit? And that hat he’s got, a straw hat with a chicken feather in it! He catches all the girls’ eyes that way and I got to hold their hands and walk around with them—a hell of a thing. It’s embarrassing.” Mitch laughed with more enthusiasm than he felt. He had begun to look around at the other tables and at people passing behind him to see if anyone heard Ponzi.

  “A girl don’t hold it against a man on account of his color,” Marian said seriously, “when he looks like him. If he was fat or real black it would be different. But a good-looking man is a good-looking man.”

  Ponzi roared with delight. “That’s right! And I’m the fat one, aren’t I? I don’t have no straw hat with a chicken feather either. A hell of a poor slob of a bastard I am—got the same stinking clothes I had on at Synderdale, can’t get them off, all grease and dirt got so stiff I can’t get the pants down. What do you think of that?”

  “They’re going to hang looser on you before long,” Shar said. He looked from Ponzi to Mitch and laughed. Ponzi, who had not heard or had not understood, lunged forward and brought his face close to Shar.

  “Where is she?” he said. “What did you do with her? Is her head sheared off too? Where is she?”

  Mitch pulled Ponzi back and, grinning tightly at Shar, said, “Ponzi been hitchhiking out in the sun. He been trying to get down here in time for the big race—never ate much, drank his supper instead—you know. He come down specially to watch you win.”

  “You come with him too, honey?” Marian said to the girl.

  The girl brightened. Now, recognized, she cleared her throat and said softly, “No, I live nearby here. On a farm.”

  “What the hell, ain’t I just explained how I’m their chaperon?” Ponzi said. “Are you thick-skulled? What happened to the other one?”

  “This Ponzi just had too much to drink,” Mitch said. “Maybe I better take him down to the beach—put his head in the water.”

  “No nigger is going to do that to me,” Ponzi said angrily. Then he laughed and turned affectionately to Mitch. “Except Mitchie, who don’t count. I explained to him how niggers are—how they come to be all brown, and white folks mostly white. Because the allotment of freckles on them was so numerous at childbirth that the freckles converged and went together and overlapped, sometimes making the area darker—you know—so it turned out all brown; one freckle.”

  The girl and Marian turned to stare at Mitch, as if seeing him differently. Shar said to Ponzi, “Maybe you better go back home.”

  “Why should I go back home? Why can’t I stay here? Ain’t this a free picnic up and down here? Girls in bathing suits—barefoot! And ladies of forty giving me the eye! The very dogs run along the boardwalk shaken with excitement, all a world of legs for them—brown legs, white legs, thin legs, fat legs, bare legs! Why should I go home?”

  “You ain’t going home till after the race, for sure,” Marian said. “That’s the big thing.”

  “How long you known him?” Ponzi said suddenly to Marian, indicating Shar with his chin as if Shar were not listening.

  “Why, I knew him all my life,” Marian said with a loud laugh, putting her hand on Shar’s head. “Aren’t you a nosy bastard?”

  Everyone except Shar laughed, Ponzi loudly, Mitchie rather nervously. The girls were grateful for the moment.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Marian said, standing, self-conscious of her body—she wore a red dress with heavy white beads—and smiling warmly at Ponzi, “since you ain’t seen anything around here I’ll show you through. They got a new show down at the other end I ain’t seen yet—nor Shar neither—he ain’t seen anything himself. The most he does is go down to the beach. Don’t you? How come you don’t care about the boardwalk?”

  “He doesn’t like the people there!” Ponzi said accusingly. His words came out so fast he must have been astonished at what they said. “He doesn’t like the way they smell, maybe, or look—he likes them off a ways, sitting in a grandstand; he likes to hear them clap. He likes them set up for a target, ready to get spun off the track! But nobody to get too near, and girls to last him one—”

  For some reason Shar looked at him in alarm. He felt an odd rush of pity, as he had felt pity for Marian earlier that day. “What did she say to you the other night?” Shar said. He stood and took hold of Ponzi’s arm. “I heard her say something. What was it?”

  Ponzi drew back. His face became mottled—white and red. His sunburned nose began to glow. Seeing their concern and feeling shame for his own obvious cowardice, he shrugged his shoulders. “A hell of a lot of difference it makes,” he said. “This is Cherry River, ain’t it? Synderdale is back there—a goddam hick town.”

  “What did she say?” said Shar.

  “What did who say?” said Marian, pulling at Shar’s arm.

  “Tell him what she said,” Mitchie murmured. “He ain’t going to hurt you.”

  “I’m not afraid, for Christ’s sake,” Ponzi said. His face had begun to relax; the blood returned. “She said—she said—” He made an effort to straighten his shoulders and looked fiercely at them. “She said that I . . . I suffered.”

  For a moment no one spoke. The redheaded girl stared earnestly at Ponzi, waiting for him to continue. Mitch, who had heard this before—who had heard it many times—sucked at a tooth and stole a look up at Shar. Marian, her red dress tightening around her as she breathed, had a bright, vague, amused smile—she turned to Shar as if he might explain this. Shar, who had been lighting a cigarette, stood without moving and stared at Ponzi’s wet face. It was the first time anyone had seen him look honestly puzzled.

  Then Shar laughed. Easily, gratefully, the others laughed with him—Ponzi giggled hysterically. He poked his chest with his thumb. “Me! Me!” he said. “How the hell do you like that? I am bedazzled by such illumination! A martyr! I see myself—I see my destiny.”

  When they stopped laughing Marian said, “So now we’ll go through the boardwalk. There’s lots of things there. Honey, I didn’t get your name—Kathie? Well, Kathie. I’m Marian. Funny I never saw you. Well, even if you seen it before it’s all right, ain’t it? I mean, I saw it a hundred times—a million times. I never get sick of it. Should we go through?”

  “Maybe we ought to go over to the garage,” Mitch said to Shar.

  “The hell with the garage!” Ponzi said. “You like people, don’t you? You like people?”

  “I like anything to do with people,” Shar said.

  WALKING IN THE SUNLIGHT, FENDING his way against the crowd, Shar felt that he had been drinking too much. He felt tired, and not even the effortless vitality of the others—especially Marian—could touch him. About them people pushed in a great sweat of excitement: there were young couples in bathing suits carrying wet, dirt-smeared towels, and groups of boys with hard round bellies wearing swimming trunks, and men in T-shirts and shorts, gaudily dressed, wearing sunglasses, and women of all ages—in sun suits and wearing earrings, in high heels, in low-cut dresses, in overalls. Many carried red balloons.

  They stopped at a shooting gallery. Ponzi insisted on paying for everyone. The man inside the booth was fat, dark, Italian, and nodded a surly hello to Marian. Shar said to Mitchie, “Jerry ought to try this.” Mitchie, glad to hear anything Shar might say, turned to him with a grin. “A little runt of a bastard,” Mitchie said. Marian crowde
d them and wanted to know who they were talking about, and when they shrugged and looked away she seemed hurt. “You always do that,” she said.

  Someone shouted to the man in the booth, speaking Italian in a rapid, excited way. “This-here is America, you bastards,” Marian said. She had been drinking too much; she stood swaying on the boardwalk and shaking her fists at the men. “They don’t talk that way here! You greaseballs!”

  They got her away with some difficulty. Around on the boardwalk tourists stopped to stare with interest. A woman with blue-dyed hair approached Shar, who looked the most respectable, and said, “Is it trouble? I know a little Italian. Is there some trouble?”

  Hot wind blew dust up against their faces. “That across the way is the best place,” Marian was saying, pointing out a motel of beige and aqua. She spoke particularly to Ponzi and the girl, whose hand he still held. “That’s a new one. There’s s’post to be some gangsters own it.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Ponzi said. “I believe you. This place is run by those bastardly gangsters.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Marian said, “I mean, if they’re so bad and all. . . . What would this place be without the boardwalk? A crummy hick town. What would it be? I wouldn’t be living down here, you wouldn’t of come, Shar wouldn’t have no race—none of us would of met here! They ain’t so bad.”