Mitchie did not look at him. He seemed to feel embarrassment for Ponzi’s anxiety. He said softly, “Don’t you worry any about him. It’s most likely he won’t even notice you.”
But this was not what Ponzi wanted to hear. “What’s he like?” he said, leaning to Mitchie. “Is he—How old is he? What does he look like?”
Mitchie shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know him too well. I don’t do no business with him anyway.”
“But what is he like? Doesn’t he ever talk to you?”
“He does sometimes,” Mitchie said. “He told me he’d heard some good things about me, about my driving. He said Shar was the one told him that.” Mitchie could not help glancing at Ponzi as he said that. “Shar himself told it. Shar clocked me going around—”
“But Max, I mean Max,” Ponzi said. “What does he look like?”
“He’s a big man,” Mitchie said slowly.
A horde of boys stood about the sidewalk, smoking. They watched Mitchie and Ponzi silently. Behind them, as if protected by them, was a poster advertising the race: the garish picture of a racing car and a helmeted man who seemed to be lunging out of a halo of flame. The man’s eyes were hidden by his goggles, but his mouth—open, grinning, twisted—shouted of terror. The poster had not even been defaced.
For some reason a truck came down the street with banners draped about it—bright colors, red and blue—and boys of about ten years sat with legs dangling in the back, waving condescendingly at people on the street. Stones were thrown at them; some bounced up against the cab of the truck. One of the boys, who had been shouting and waving white fists, was struck in the face and scrambled up and started to cry. The truck passed out of sight. Horns blew, cars drove grandly down the middle of the street. They were filled with passengers and sagged gently.
Activity increased. As if spurred on by the frenzy of the music, new groups appeared around corners, drove down the street. A bus stopped to unload teen-agers, some of whom carried lunch bags. One of the baton twirlers stopped to ask Mitchie for a light for her cigarette. She was perhaps fourteen, but big for her age: her white satin outfit strained to contain her. She had red-blond hair and eyes outlined in black. As she inhaled the smoke she bent her head forward, making her white throat arch. “I never seen you here before,” she said. “You two in for the races, ain’t you? You got something to do with it?”
“Mitchie might be a driver,” Ponzi said at once. He grinned, sweating. He put one arm around Mitchie’s shoulders. “How do you like that? He might get to drive.”
The girl stared in awe. “No kidding?” she said.
“Me, I crawl in the grease. That’s what I do. I roll around in the grease.” Ponzi laughed extravagantly, as if he had said something funny. Mitchie pulled away so that Ponzi’s arm hugged the air. “It’s goddam safer there,” Ponzi said.
“No kidding you might race?” the girl said to Mitchie. “Is that no kidding?”
“I’m not the driver,” Mitchie said. He did not look at the girl.
“You’re not? Who is it then? Is it somebody around here?”
“The driver’s here. He’s here. Do you want to meet him?” Ponzi said. “Do you want me to take you to meet him?”
“Jesus Christ,” said Mitchie. He stared out at the street.
“No kidding you could?” said the girl. “He ain’t married, is he? Where is he?”
Seeing Mitchie’s look, Ponzi suddenly calmed. He said sadly, “I guess I can’t just yet. Maybe later.”
“Later when?” said the girl. She followed them along for a while. “Listen, mister, I never met a driver before. That’s the truth. I never yet met one. I—”
“Later on,” Ponzi said. “You come by later on.”
The girl called after them for a while, but was lost in the crowd. More people appeared, many of them in uniform. Some men blew noisemakers. The golden gleam of braid and buttons and musical instruments filled the air. Before a hardware store a girl who looked hardly more than sixteen stood on top of a chair, holding her baby up to look around: the baby, eyes closed and face as blank as if it had been erased, moved its lips helplessly. There was a smell of hot dogs in the air.
Mitchie walked in the street to get away from the crowd. Ponzi, hurrying with him, walked in the gutter. Mitchie began to talk suddenly, though his face showed no sign of expression: “Shar says it’s only fire that worries him. I thought about that too. If it could be a crash and everything over at once, all the bones broke you’re going to have, over at once—that wouldn’t be too bad. But the fire comes right away and keeps on. That’s bad.”
Ponzi had begun to pant. “Fire?” he said. “What about it?”
“I don’t like it none myself. Dream of it sometimes.”
“A big strong nigger like you?” Ponzi said. “Hell, don’t let it worry you. I wouldn’t let it worry you.”
“I ast Shar if he dreamt of it too and he said he did a few times, when he first started. But then he said too after you die worms and things eat you; if you was burnt away they couldn’t get at you. You got to think of that.”
“Shar said that?”
“Shar got it all thought out.”
“He doesn’t like me much,” Ponzi said, grinning.
“Telling that girl I was the driver, like you did, it got me to think for a minute I was it. Scairt me some.”
“Hell—”
“Sure it did. That’s how it is,” Mitchie said. They stopped in the street and Mitchie lit a cigarette. Ponzi saw some people watching Mitchie: he was a tall, handsome Negro, and people could not decide whether he knew it or not. “Now,” he said, tossing away the match, “Shar told me one time we were drinking together something he thought out. He said, ‘Why should anything be safe?’ I wondered that too; why should it? Who says so? A man fell in love with a car, like some of us, he don’t owe it to himself for things to be safe. They ain’t worth it to be safe. I understand that.”
“You’re a hell of a lot smarter than me if you do,” Ponzi said.
His irony was lost on Mitchie. He did not even think Mitchie heard him. “Now, even a piddling race like this one today, even with no special guy to beat, Shar takes it the same as any other. ’Course Max and them want him to practice up for the Fourth of July race; but Shar don’t think of that. He just thinks of the car. You ever seen a driver around a car so much? He come in early with it himself and balanced the wheels himself. He won’t let anybody else at it, he checks over the parts himself. He does it every time. How many guys, got up to be drivers, would bother with that? They’d s’pose it was below them. He told me how a man has got to love his car or else he won’t win.”
“Love his car!” Ponzi laughed. He looked around as if for an audience. “I heard different about your driver!”
“This first race we had he mostly burnt his foot off, taking the car around that goddam gravel track at Jasper. But he kept on going till he won.”
“A hell of a stupid thing to do,” Ponzi grinned.
“His foot was about cooked from all that heat, but he said it was just numb. He said he never felt it so long as he kept on going, but Max got mad as hell, told him he ought to take care of himself more; ’cause Max loves him,” he said oddly. “I seen that. He takes it hard, any trouble of Shar’s. But you got to love the car! I know that for a fact. Look at them all, Shar and the other drivers—their hands all blisters and eyes burnt, cars about ready to explode or fall apart—wheels, axles, anything—but they love it all the way! A man puts in years out on the track—in ten minutes he gets that much living out of it. And you see how Shar takes a race. All quiet, like he was under a shot.”
“Nerve but no nerves,” Ponzi announced, as if he had just thought of the phrase.
THEY FOUND SHAR AND ANOTHER driver standing on the pavement outside one of the bars. Ponzi squinted at Shar while at the same time trying not to be seen, because something about the man worried him. It might have been his closeness to mutilation and death. Shar an
d Mitchie nodded solemnly to each other; Ponzi, behind Mitchie, nodded too. “Weather ain’t getting any cooler,” Mitchie said. Ponzi had been surprised at the amount of attention given to the weather by racing people, but he was grateful for it too, since it was something he could understand. Shar, wearing sunglasses, stared coldly at him as if he could read Ponzi’s mind. “You,” he said to Ponzi, “what the hell time is it?” He held out his arm and they compared watches. “They’re late. They’re an hour late,” he said to himself. Ponzi wondered if he wanted anything more from him. In Shar’s presence Ponzi’s self-mocking slovenliness ebbed; he no longer thought himself funny, or thought anything very funny. “Who’s late?” he said.
But that was a mistake. Shar turned away as if he did not like the smell of Ponzi, and did not even answer. Mitchie made a face at him. “Goddam big mouth,” he said. “Why do you pretend things all the time?”
“Did he mean Max?”
The other driver was about Shar’s age, but already balding. He looked nervous. Shar stood staring out at the street and the man talked behind his back, loud enough for Shar to hear if he wanted. “We were hoping for a little rain this morning, to keep the dust down. Hell they might not even have sprinklers here—this is a two-bit track. My first time here too. I’d like to be in the Cherry River race—that’s Fourth of July—but my manager had some trouble getting us in; I might get in, though.”
“That’s a good track,” Mitchie said cautiously.
“Cherry River, yeah. That’s good. The money’s good too,” the man said, winking. “But the competition’s bad!” He laughed, glancing around at Shar’s back. Shar did not turn around. “I was telling your boy here what some local bastard is doing. Did you hear about it? The seats in the stands go for a dollar or more, and they let kids and people sit around on the grass by the track for half a buck. But this bastard—runs a shoe store in town—got up the idea to rent some space there, and paid five bucks for it, nobody any wiser. So what does he do but put up some kind of goddam stand himself! Made out of pipes and things, like in a kid’s playground where the kids climb around on them, going up in the air, so he figures to put thirty people on it, not counting little kids, and the ones right on top can see as well as anybody in the stands. A hell of a wise bastard—somebody ought to teach him a lesson. And he figures to make a lot by it—him and some friends are in the bar there laughing about it, and how they put one over on the racing people. My manager will be mad as hell when he hears of it.”
Shar turned. He had lit a cigarette. Ponzi thought idly that he did not look so calm—his face looked strained, pale, his lips turned up in a tight, mocking grimace. Whether he was angry at the other driver or at something else was not clear. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Yeah, it’s a goddam thing,” the man said, as if Shar had agreed with him. “Nobody knew what he was up to.”
“You talk too goddam much,” Shar said.
The driver blinked at him. He laughed nervously. Shar said to Mitchie, “If you see them tell them I’m at the hotel. I had enough of this waiting.”
“I’ll sure do that,” Mitchie said. When speaking to Shar he looked down at the man’s feet, as if he thought looking at Shar’s face would annoy him.
“Good luck this afternoon,” the other driver said as Shar left. He shrugged his shoulders and moved closer to Mitchie and Ponzi. “He’s really a son of a bitch, isn’t he?” he said cautiously. “I mean, gets mad pretty fast. He told somebody’s manager inside there he’d send his boy spinning off the track today, dump him right in the guy’s lap. Nobody knew how to take it—serious or not. Shar wasn’t smiling much when he said it.”
Mitchie frowned and licked his lips and looked away. Ponzi pretended to be angry at what the man had said about Shar and glared at him. “He doesn’t joke much,” he said importantly.
The man ambled back into the bar, wiping his balding head. Outside the bar the sidewalk was crowded—there were firemen perspiring in their gaudy uniforms, and boys in tight, surging hordes, and small children, barefoot, and the girls who would march in the parade: proud and slyly shy they were, sipping soft drinks from perspiring bottles, looking at the men, ignoring the boys, now and then lifting arms to caress their hair and to show the little half moons of perspiration under their arms. Ponzi was drenched with sweat; he seemed to glow in it and in the crowd’s excitement. He liked being jostled, especially when one of the girls pushed against him, and he even liked the incredible wailing from the loud-speaker, a voice that could have been either male or female, screaming about love:
“Searching, searching,
I spent my whole-life-through
Searching, searching for someone
Just like you!”
Ponzi saw the automobile at about the same time Mitchie did. It had been edging in and out of traffic down the street, traveling fast, and approached them with its horn blaring impatiently. Four or five old women scurried to safety on the sidewalk, gasping for breath; in his haste to get away a boy on a bicycle fell over, hard, right on his side. Uniformed men in a great friendly crowd pointed at the boy and roared with laughter. The boy, his face almost swollen with blood, ashamed, trying not to cry, dragged himself painfully over to the gutter.
The car was black—a black convertible. People pushed out to look at it. It was piled in back with boxes and suitcases and a man sat on top of the pile on the left, smoking, looking at the people who stared back at him. In the front seat sat a neat-looking man with black hair, driving, honking his horn without any show of impatience, judging from his face; next to him sat a big man with a pale, dough-colored face, looking at the town as if he were delighted with it. Beside him, pushed against the door, was a girl with blond hair who sat with one arm outstretched, fingers idly spread to catch the warm wind. All wore sunglasses, even the man in the back, who nodded mysteriously at people on the sidewalk.
Up the street someone stepped off the sidewalk: it was Shar. He waved to them. The car screeched to a stop, dust rising immediately around it. The man in the back seat stood and began yelling something but no one paid any attention. Shar opened the door and pulled the girl out, leaned across to talk to the heavy man with the big, pale face for a minute. The car started and stopped again, rocking. The man in the back seat picked up some suitcases and handed them to Shar, but Shar refused to take them; they were put back in the car. The little man in the driver’s seat, dispassionate and hardly glancing around, now started the car again and drove away.
Shar and the girl crossed the street. On the sidewalk Shar embraced the girl. She allowed him to hold her: Ponzi stared at them through the thin, hot, dusty air. His eyes were stinging a little. He stared at them, though Mitchie wanted to go—they stood on the sidewalk with people passing and looking too, Shar holding the girl anxiously and the girl in white high-heeled shoes, with bare white legs, straining upward, leaning forward against Shar’s chest and straining up to him, her black skirt showing the backs of her knees, her blouse pulled out and up in back by Shar’s embrace so that Ponzi could see, below the wrinkled blouse and the wrinkled cotton of Shar’s sleeve, the girl’s bare skin.
“He’ll be all right now,” Mitchie said. “He’ll be better now.” He even smiled at Ponzi, he was so pleased, so relieved. But Ponzi, struck by something—it might have been the girl’s youth—felt strangely depressed. He pulled his collar away from his throat. The excitement of the crowd, titillated by Shar and the girl and the magnificence of that automobile, no longer interested him. For a moment he felt afraid, though he did not know why.
9
Rich orange sunlight glowed against the drawn shade of the room in which Shar lay with Karen. Down on the street there were shouts and murmurs and a sound like firecrackers being set off, but in the room it was quiet, still, even a little restrained. Shar lay beside Karen and looked at her: her hair was outspread on the pillow, as it always was, sleek and fine, her eyes matched his in their seriousness, her lips were a little open as they were w
hen she slept. Their reunion had been violent—Shar felt he was hurting her—and the knowledge that she felt little, that she did not really share in the sensation that overwhelmed him, had made his brutality more unchecked. Now, watching her closely, as if he did not see she was aware of him, Shar thought of the few times he had been able to draw her along with him: the memory shot through him, a pang of excitement. “Are you happy?” Shar said. Karen smiled gently. “Will you watch me out there today? Will you?”
“Yes,” said Karen.
“How was your drive down here? Jerry drives all right, doesn’t he?”
“It was a good drive,” Karen said. “I wanted to come with you, though. You shouldn’t have made me stay behind.”
“No, I had to do it,” Shar said seriously, “I had to work that car out by myself. I don’t put enough time in it. I got to know it before I can drive it.”
“I wanted to come with you,” Karen said.
Shar hardly heard her. The smell of her hair and of her body enchanted him. He touched her face; she held his hand gently. In his violence, when desire was so strong it made him anxious, almost desperate, Karen’s gentleness did not soothe him but goaded him—as if deliberately; he felt himself entrapped, falling, incomplete until he gave himself to her. At night he would wake from dreams of Karen so vivid he could smell the rich perspiring warmth of her body and remember her expression: frank, innocent, brutal in its simplicity. It was only in his imagination that she lured him to her; Karen herself did nothing, or seemed to do nothing. He thought that at times he could touch the queer love she had for him, but they had never talked about it. Only in the last two months, when Shar had begun racing for the summer, had they begun to speak much to each other. Their conversations seemed incomplete, as if they could not really understand each other’s language. Much of what Karen said Shar understood to be paraphrases of things he had said, or anticipations of things he would say. When she spoke he would listen to the self-assured sweetness of her voice and watch her face, allowing himself to be enchanted. Now she spoke about something: it did not matter what she said, what mattered was the manner in which she said it, luring and captivating him, and at times Shar believed she understood this as well as he.