them
She snuggled against him in spite of the heat, needing affection, attention. She said petulantly, “Something always seems to be pulling at me, tearing at me. I don’t know what I want.”
It was an invitation for him to answer her, and he answered in spite of a sense of wild hopelessness, the futility of talking to her at all. “Maybe you want love?”
And she said, “But then what? What comes after that? Doesn’t anything come next?”
They had been driving for hours. Swinging down to the Gulf of Mexico, Nadine’s whim, they were a little baffled by the flat, dismal land and the long stretches of oil fields—oil derricks in fenced-off rectangles of dry land, with stray cows grazing nearby—and the surprise of a great thicket of trees. Beaumont was on the Neches River, a river that did not impress Jules. He had never heard of it before. To the east were the Sabine River and Louisiana; he felt a tug at his imagination, a yearning to see the towns behind such names as Sulphur and Creole. But the map had disappointed him enough; the tearing folds in it were like the disintegrating seams of his own mind.
“If you don’t want love, why did you come all this way with me?” he said.
She kept up a curious childlike expectancy, while Jules labored just to stay awake; she was always ready for a surprise in the town just ahead, on the alert for historical markers and homes that looked historical. Yet they never bothered to get out of the car. Cruising by, they stared at what presented itself to them and were always vaguely disappointed; Nadine found most things disappointing. Jules was glad they hadn’t been caught yet by the police.
“What you should do, honey,” he kept suggesting, “is telephone your parents and tell them you’re in California. You’re healthy and well and happy and in California.”
“I can’t talk to them any more.”
“Sure you can. For my sake.”
“I can’t even think about them.”
It startled him to see with what frigid casualness she dismissed them all—really, she never thought about her family except as subjects in the long monologue of her life. Was it possible to forget people that easily, Jules wondered, or were the effects taking a while to get to her? It chilled him to think that this young girl, the daughter of wealthy parents, sweet and delicate and well mannered, could be so shallow. The farther he ran from his own miserable family, the more immediate they appeared to him. Even on the road as he was, nobody’s obvious son or brother, he felt weighed down by their troubles. He was still responsible for them.
“But if you loved me,” Jules said wearily, in the car or in a diner or in bed, and Nadine sometimes answered wearily, “But I do love you. What do you mean? Why do you keep saying that?” She really could not understand. Sometimes she said in exasperation, as if trying to make herself understood by someone who spoke a foreign language, “You talk about love so much! I don’t know what you mean—why do you keep at me with it? Why is it always love, love, love? I never heard of anyone who talked about love so much, outside of books.”
Beaumont, Texas. No mountains, no beauty. Jules was sick of Texas. The city was larger than he had desired and already crowded on its peripheries by shopping plazas and outdoor theaters. The spread of land from Detroit to Beaumont was similar in the cities and in the country—in the country drainage ditches and dirt that ran from brown in the North to a fairly rusty red here in the South; in the cities miniature golf courses and rows of cheap new homes, American colonials, all of them colonials, colonials with aluminum siding, acres and hillsides of colonials, the distance filled with bright new colonial homes. Out of all this traveling Jules wanted at least to put together some kind of personality for himself, the personality of a young man in love or a born criminal or a millionaire on the first stretch of his “career”; all this land had to add up to something!
When they hit Beaumont, Jules said, “This is the end for today.”
“Can’t we keep going to the Gulf?”
“There’s nothing there, on the Gulf. Nothing to see. Look at the map and see what’s there. I can’t drive any more today.”
The air in Beaumont stank. It must have been gas from refineries; there was a faintly sickish taste borne on one wind and a faintly acrid taste borne on another. Nadine sniffed in her innocence and kept glancing around, puzzled. Jules, who had lived long in Detroit, knew that there would be nothing to see.
The gas gauge showed nothing left. But they hadn’t run out of gas yet. What made Jules worry was the fact that he was like the gas in the car’s tank. He, himself, was the gas. He had to keep them going; he was running down; he had to be juiced up. What was happening to him? He laughed and kissed Nadine’s ear. “Find us a place, honey, so we can get some sleep. I really am finished.”
They were passing giant palm trees. Rose bushes were still in bloom. A heavy, cobweb-like dampness hung over everything. The palm trees were too thick, too large. Something about their blunt squat thickness made Jules’s eyes pinch. Also, the look of white frame houses and rainwashed shanties, side by side, jostled him and made him wonder how real all this was. Texas? Were they really in Texas? He got stuck behind a grimy bus, a city bus. The road had potholes in it—first the bus lurched, then Jules lurched. Nadine looked around in amazement. “Is this Texas?” she said. The road turned suddenly to dirt. It branched, and one branch led to what must have been the city dump. Jules followed the bus on the other branch. The smell of gas grew stronger. A gang of Negro children darted across the street in front of the car. Wood and tar-paper shanties appeared beside the road, chickens pecked in the dirt, a skeletal dog stared out mournfully at Jules with Jules’s own eyes.
“Now it’s starting to drizzle,” Nadine said. “This is a place to die in.”
She picked out a motel when they found the highway again—the same motel they had been seeing all along, made of concrete painted pink, with neon lighting and a few lawn chairs scattered out front. Jules was quick to note, with his parched eye and parched brain, that it was near a residential area of ordinary homes and a few stores.
He checked them in, not hesitating to sign his name in the register, happy to write down the number of his license plates. He was no criminal, not really. He had nothing to hide. Yet, signing his name, he was overcome by an immense weariness, and when he went back to Nadine the earth felt precarious beneath his feet.
She was still in the car. “It looks like the place we were in last night,” she said.
“That’s all right. We both need rest.”
“I don’t want rest.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know. Why is it so early? It’s only five-thirty and you want to stop for the night. I don’t understand.”
He opened the car door and she got out slowly. They embraced. Though it was bright daylight and traffic moved on the highway not far away she did not resist; she was inert and abstracted. “You seem so tired,” she said. “You know, I do really love you. I love you for bringing me all this way.”
He unlocked the door to the room. The room was dark, damp. It smelled strongly of insecticide. Jules switched on the light and a swift movement in one corner caught his attention—a cockroach—but fortunately Nadine hadn’t seen it.
She tested the bed with one knee. “Why is it so damp in here? It smells so damp.”
“It’s not bad.”
He sat down shakily on the edge of the bed. He tried to smile at her. He had been waiting for her to break down but she had never wavered, had shown nothing—what a triumph of nerve! Now he, Jules, seemed to be breaking down. He felt something move painfully in his bowels. Even his lust, on this hot drizzling afternoon, had grown feeble.
She knelt beside him and put her arms around him. She liked to kiss his eyes. She liked to be kissed by him—she brought to it the same vague, pleased expectation she showed in the car, awaiting a new landscape. It was a way of moving successfully through time. Seeing her young face and her dreamy eye
s, Jules thought of Detective Annals and wondered if there was someone to whom Nadine would be no more than a flash of arms and legs, a stifled cry, a frantic insignificant body. She was talking happily to him about something. Her words washed against him but made no sense. Jules was conscious of his body perspiring, his clothes rotting on his filthy body.
“Do we have money for something to eat?” Nadine said.
The thought of food made Jules nauseated, but he gave no sign. He washed up in the little lavatory and went out again, out to the road. This is Jules in Texas, he thought. No, they hadn’t money but that was no problem of Nadine’s; it was his problem. Like a dog, he was drawn to alleys and corners. His bowels felt sick but he acted out of habit. Mechanical movements seemed to Jules magical and therefore blessed, almost invisible—you couldn’t get caught doing something for the tenth time—surely he would never get caught. He smiled, thinking of Jules the born criminal, an invisible young man, never caught. Police swore the robberies had been committed by a large gang…He was in a white neighborhood but it looked poor; nothing worth hauling away. So he wandered on and crossed a series of railroad tracks and found himself in a better neighborhood, a subdivision erected upon spongy, swampy land, made up of brick ranch homes with high, narrow, horizontal windows. A housewife in a green shift walked barefoot across her lawn to pick up a folded newspaper. This sight pleased Jules—it was so ordinary and reasonable. Walking alone here, even in his sweaty clothes, he was close to the secret workings of things, the way people lived when they were not being observed. In himself there were no secret workings: he had no ordinary, reasonable life.
He passed a home with shades drawn and front porch littered with papers—a temptation—but next door a dog was barking. Jules hurried on, thinking of Nadine, her arms, her lovely face, the slightly damp look of her eyelids, wondering how it had happened that he was in love and brought so low by love, when nothing connected him to Nadine or to anyone else. He had only to keep walking to be free…Another housewife, thick-waisted but sprightly, hurried across another lawn to rap at the door of the next house; she called a name, someone opened the door, she went inside. This looked right: the hairs on the back of Jules’s neck stirred. Instinct drew him to her house. His legs moved him up the walk without hesitation. No mistake here. He was safe. He went right to the front door and pretended to ring the bell and, after a moment, for the benefit of anyone who might be watching him, he pretended to be greeting someone as he pushed the door open.
Once inside he had no time to waste: right to the kitchen. The house was cool, air-conditioned, and smelled of insecticide. He walked quickly through a living-room, through a dining-room, into the kitchen. In a nearby room a television set was on. Children were probably watching it. But he had no fear of them, and in the first second of entering the kitchen his eyes located what he wanted—a woman’s purse. He went to open it, moving silently, without fear. He took the billfold out and slipped it into his pocket. An open door drew him: a bedroom, the bed carelessly made, his own reflection looming guiltily in a bureau mirror. On an impulse he lay down on the bed, his feet side by side. He smiled. So this was what it was like.
After he’d left the house, a few minutes afterward, he broke out into a sickening sweat. He counted the money in the billfold—over fifty dollars. But the money did not make him feel better. He was still sweating. He headed back toward the motel, retracing his steps. He had a certain moronic instinct about directions, never making a mistake. Back past the railroad tracks, down into the shabbier neighborhood, on his way, nervous but unhurried, a kid who might belong around here. A local kid. Doomed by Texas heat. His hair had grown long again and gave him a countrified, sleepy look. He appeared harmless.
He entered a small grocery store. Already, he knew Nadine’s likes; he wanted only to please her. But near the counter stood two policemen, white, and a colored man, chatting in an explosion of drawls and surprised exclamations. One of the cops bent over nearly double, laughing. It was worrisome to Jules to see a cop laugh, as it had bothered him in the old days to see a priest laugh very hard. Jules picked out some milk, some cheese, bread, a box of chocolate cookies for Nadine. Still the cops hadn’t left, and he wandered around at the back of the store, feeling his bowels begin to writhe with pain, waiting for them to leave. The pain was not more than he could bear. He tried not to let his face show what he felt. A white woman in slacks glanced back at him from the cash register, watchful of her customer at the same time that she was delighted with the cops and the Negro, their hilarious conversation, and Jules felt that he must go to her and pay for the food and escape. He had to walk up there, right by the cops. The pain in his stomach turned sharp and hot.
“Here,” one of the cops said, reaching out for Jules, “you wouldn’t never believe what this boy is tellin’ us!” Jules did not flinch. The cop looked no more than his own age; he was shaking his head helplessly. Both cops were grinning. The Negro, who might have been in his forties, or his sixties, shook his head in bewilderment, trying for a comic effect, protesting in a high, raspy voice of the kind Jules had often heard on the Detroit streets, “I ain’t never told any lies! What you think! Ain’t goin’ to start that kinda thing now!” It made no sense to Jules, it was like music he hadn’t heard the beginning of and had no interest in; he smiled at them blankly and put his things down on the counter. The woman giggled and looked past Jules, waiting for more.
“This boy is a real bugger,” the cop said to Jules, tapping his arm, “he ain’t goin’ to last out the year!” There was a gracious, jovial brotherhood here, the cops and the Negro and Jules, a kind of dance, but Jules couldn’t dance; his body ached so that he was afraid he might keel over into the cop’s arms. “Lookit what his wife done to him! You ever goin’ to let your wife treat you that way?” the cop said to Jules, raising his eyebrows dramatically.
Jules looked politely at the Negro. He saw that his face was scarred—strangely scarred, in long, thick patches, like dribbles. The skin of part of his face was thickened like an alligator’s skin. Jules stared. He saw nothing funny. The Negro held in his laughter for a moment, then surrendered in a surprised, soprano giggle, as if it were too much for him, himself and these two cops who were making so much of his face, and even Jules, a newcomer who obviously wanted to hear everything.
“What happened to his face?” Jules said.
“His wife got sick of him runnin’ around,” the cop explained, still clutching Jules as if to help Jules restrain his own laughter, “and she got a nice big pot on the stove boiling and she put some sugar in it—you know, some sugar—and when he come home she didn’t waste no time sayin’ where-you-been or nothin’—nosir, she just dumped that water right on top of him—ain’t that the craziest thing you ever heard?”
“Why did she do that?” Jules said, trying to grin, “I mean, why the sugar?”
“Let him tell it,” said the other cop, and they all looked at the Negro.
He shook his head wonderingly. “She put sugar in it ’cause that sticks to you, boy, that’s what makes it stick—water don’t stick, it run right off. Sugar stick, boy, you better remember!”
The cops broke into hoarse laughter, and Jules managed a wheezing laugh, to show that he was one of them. He took advantage of their good will to push his items toward the cashier. Jesus, would he ever get out of this dump!
“Sugar stick!” one of the cops cried, overcome with laughter.
Their laughter followed him out to the street. He had to go to the bathroom violently now, and that was enough to capture his imagination. He forgot the cops. Their laughter thinned out, then thickened again—so much to laugh at in this world! He could not remember having laughed honestly; stuck in a body like this, a body burning with pain, how is laughter possible?
He got back to the motel room and put the things on the bed and went immediately to the bathroom. The door did not quite shut, not firmly. In desperation he yanked it but still it di
d not lock. He carried the image of Nadine with him, Nadine out in the other room—surprised when he’d passed her by and said, “I’ve got to go in here,” alarmed at the look on his face, not thinking he was handsome now. In this miserable little room he groaned with pain and tried to rid himself of the foulness that had formed in him, but he could do nothing—nothing happened. He pressed his forehead against the warped wood of the bathroom door and began to weep.
After a while he came out shaking. “I guess I got the flu,” he said.
“Are you sick?”
“The flu.”
She looked away from him. The loaf of bread was opened, on the night table. “That smells of insect spray, that bread. I can’t eat it.”
“I’m sorry.” Jules was too weak to talk. He lay down on the bed.
Nadine said, a sense of sympathy stirring in her, “I can prop these pillows up for you.”
“I won’t be sick long.”
“Should I do anything for you?”
“Maybe you could get me some…some aspirin at the drugstore.”
“Where is the drugstore?”
He had begun to tremble violently. He crawled under the covers, his eyes shut. It was all he could do to keep from groaning aloud.
“Should I get a doctor?” Nadine said, frightened.
“It’s just the flu.”
“You look so sick.”
The pain was so sharp that he opened his eyes, startled. Then, throwing the bedclothes off, he stumbled back to the bathroom. The diarrhea seemed to scald him. Shaking, overcome by the stench of his own bowels, he rocked back and forth on the toilet seat and pressed his palms against his ears. What had he wanted from that girl in the other room? What did human beings try to get from each other? He could think of nothing but his foulness.