them

  “I have to go out in a few minutes.”

  She was stricken.

  He looked away.

  “Go out where?”

  “To see someone.”

  “Someone, who? Who is it?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “But who are you seeing? Should I go along with you?”

  “No, I’ll be right back.”

  But he felt no energy to get up and go downstairs and face the street again. The air between himself and the door was opaque and dangerous, as if crowded with invisible shapes.

  “I don’t know why I’m always at you,” Marcia said, “I love you. I don’t mean to keep at you…” He was hearing now her flat wistful voice, the second and less attractive of her voices.

  “That’s all right,” Jules said.

  “I just keep thinking if you got a job somewhere else, I could get one too, and we could maybe get out of here. I keep hearing there’s going to be trouble, every weekend there’s going to be trouble. Mort and those stupid friends of his, those big-mouthed bastards, they think it’s going to be a carnival. I ran into him on the way home and could hardly get away. I think he’s going crazy with all this. He and those jerks are going to be like generals, guiding everything—fires and bombings—they plan on blowing up the bridge and the tunnel and the expressway intersection, and he said something about the water supply. Jesus, he looks bad too. He must be about ready to crack.”

  Jules nodded.

  “He says you’re working for him. Is that right? That community project thing? What are you doing for it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing.”

  “But you’re on the payroll? For how much?”

  “Not much. I haven’t been paid yet.”

  “But how much, approximately? A few hundred a month?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Marcia laughed. “One hundred a month? Fifty? It isn’t going to last long, him and his money. Or else one of his contacts is going to kill him. Don’t they know the niggers don’t give a damn about them? They don’t trust them and can’t understand their big words. A nigger is a nigger. I don’t mind a nigger, but it isn’t the same as a white man, and they don’t want to be the same as a white man. Mort is always so nervous, giggling. He wasn’t always that bad.”

  Jules got up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Tommy ran out of the bathroom. “I’m coming too,” he said.

  “No, honey, he’s just going out for a few minutes. Be still. I’m going to make supper.”

  “I don’t want supper.”

  Tommy had fair, curly hair; his eyes were blue. From so many hours at one nursery or another he had developed a crouch, as if expecting to be hit or shouted at. Jules could never think of anything to say to him, though he liked the boy. But perhaps he did not know how to like children at all—his imagination blanked out on them.

  Marcia followed him out into the hallway. “So you’re angry with me?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want anything to eat?”

  “No.”

  “Why can’t you look at me? Why can’t we talk? I don’t want anything much from you. I’d like to talk with you now and then, that’s all. All I want is someone to talk to, someone intelligent and not…not crazy, you know. Jules, why isn’t it working out?”

  “It’s working out fine.”

  “You don’t think about next year?”

  “What about next year?”

  “I mean the future. I mean leaving here, getting jobs somewhere else, getting married?”

  “No, I don’t think about it.”

  On his way down the block he ran into a small group of Negroes on the sidewalk. Several of the men wore handkerchiefs around their heads. A Negro in workclothes, very drunk, was being arrested by a Negro policeman. There was an air of festivity, of murmuring, hilarious silence. The drunken Negro was swaying from side to side, and the policeman was trying to straighten him up.

  Suddenly there was yelling, whining, the scuff of feet. Jules made his way around them politely. The drunken Negro was trying to fight the policeman, who looked like him—it was surprising how they looked alike, both in their thirties, with very black faces and vicious eyes. The policeman knocked his man back against a building and the man’s head bobbed foolishly. He took out his club and began striking him. One blow, another blow! Jules kept going. He wanted distance between himself and them.

  There had been a fight downstairs in his building a while ago, and out of curiosity Jules had gone down to look when everything was quiet. A few bloodstains on the floor. Someone told him that the landlord had beaten up someone with a baseball bat. The landlord was not really a landlord but a caretaker, a husky, light-skinned Negro who always wore a hat; the landlord was said to be another Negro, who lived up in Palmer Woods in a mansion. There were many tales. Behind one Negro there was another, more successful, and behind him another even more successful: everyone was proud of him. Jules did not believe these tales or disbelieve them. His own thefts were so small, so unimaginative, that he had no envy or interest or ability to rejoice when he was told about the exploits of fabulous thieves. Everyone was struggling, climbing up, but Jules was sitting off to one side in a daze, happy, unhappy, not waiting. In retirement. He had seen Faye’s photograph in a newspaper, after so many years, and it had not disturbed him. He had been her lover for a short while. What did that mean, to be a woman’s lover? What difference did it make? She was now someone’s wife and surely she never thought of Jules, could not remember him. He had seen, once, his own sister Betty on the street, in the company of other tough strangers, Betty dressed in very tight, chic, suede clothes, trousers and jacket and a silk scarf, looking both conservative and bizarre, her homely face done up to a look of raw contemptuous confidence—that cruel mouth was her best feature. And Jules, suddenly fearful of her, had turned away. So much for his childhood.

  Of his sister Maureen he no longer thought. Someone’s wife at last: she was saved. Nor did he think about Loretta, except when some dumpy loud woman on the street reminded him of her—and there was no mystery to his forgetfulness, nothing. He was like the weeds that grew to a height of three or four feet right through the sidewalk’s cracks, struggling upward but without cruelty or design, mindless and content. Or those weeds in vacant lots, growing up amid the rubble, squeezing around the rubble. They were permanent though they had no consciousness. Everywhere around them were things or parts of things that had been man-made at one time, and still bore the signs of someone’s consciousness, but the weeds were more permanent, being without design.

  Jules looked through a few bars. In the Lucky Horseshoe he had good luck; Vera hurried to him. She said, “I’ve been waiting here for you. Is there any trouble?”

  “No, is there trouble with you?”

  “Well, maybe. I don’t know, I can’t figure it out.”

  “Come on.”

  She was so wheedling and pathetic, with her long hair that bored him and her sooty over-large eyes, that face that was hopelessly young, that he could do no more than slip his arm around her shoulders.

  She leaned against him gratefully. “It’s just hell…”

  Jules said nothing. He walked her back to his room. She was unsteady on her feet or pretending to be, leaning against him.

  “I feel so beaten down,” she said, “so low. I’ve been waiting for you for hours and that place is filthy. I don’t feel well.”

  “Where?”

  “In the head, in the neck.”

  “How did you do?”

  “You won’t be mad?”

  “No, honey, how did you do?”

  “I got a little, but I didn’t feel well, so I went to Sheila’s place where some kids were. I don’t know what the hell they were talking about, it
was all fanciful and wild, you know. That bunch is really crazy.”

  Jules made a sound to show that he was listening.

  “There’s this Benny, he’s really crazy! He went over to Wayne today and walked around the professors’ offices and stole an electric typewriter, a big heavy one, and walked right out with it. He took the staff elevator down! And he sold it, he got fifty dollars. He’s always doped up, you can’t even talk to him. He looks like hell. I’d rather die than look like that, honey. I don’t look bad yet, do I? Do I look nice?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t be mad at me then? Because I really didn’t feel well and Sheila had some stuff to eat there, I thought I might as well eat there.”

  Up in Jules’s room she lay on the bed and covered her face with her arms. “My head hurts. The back of my neck is stiff. Do you think I might be getting polio?” she said.

  “Where’s the money?” said Jules.

  “In here,” she said. She sat up. She took a change purse out of her dress pocket and handed it to him. “I guess there’s forty or fifty dollars in there. Please don’t be mad at me…”

  Jules counted out sixty-five dollars, sixty-six dollars. He took fifty dollars for himself and handed her back the purse.

  “Honey, you’re not mad?” she said.

  “No, I’m not mad.”

  “You told me to get one hundred…” She looked at him with her wistful black-rimmed eyes.

  Jules sat on the edge of the window sill and tried to smile at her.

  “So you’re not mad after all.”

  “No, never.”

  He had an imprecise memory of beating this girl with a twisted coat hanger. He had been careful to beat only her back. This had happened a few weeks ago. Her back had bled slightly and had become bruised. But he had not been angry with her. It was for another reason, to make her understand something; but had that really been Jules beating this girl?

  “Can I tell you some things? You want to hear?” she said.

  “No, not particularly.”

  “Something real crazy. This one guy wanted—”

  “No.”

  She smiled in bewilderment at him. He saw how young she was and this did not move him, but settled him back farther, settled him down. His body weighed four hundred pounds, a thousand pounds. He could never move it. The girl’s delicate body, grown thinner since June, weighed maybe ninety-five pounds and was so flimsy that he could not quite believe in it. Could she feel pain? Feel anything?

  She said, “Are you staying here tonight?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you still seeing her?”

  He could not quite make sense of her question, though the words were clear enough. He felt himself growing very heavy, very hot. The girl’s mouth smiled, her eyes pleaded something complex and troublesome. If you get hysterical again, Jules thought, I’ll have to push you out the window. But even here his imagination had done no work; a week ago on this block a Negro prostitute had been pushed out a window by her pimp, and Jules had gotten the idea from that. He felt very weary.

  “Jules, come here? Come over here?”

  He lay down beside her but could not close his eyes. She began kissing him. She began to cry. “Jules, I love you,” someone was saying. “Jules, I love you!”

  Love, there was so much love! He felt her arms around him, he felt his own arms sliding around her. Flimsy ribs. Her beating heart. She was demented with too much love, too much hysteria. And if Marcia lost her job, what then? Then they had no money, nothing; then they could all live on Vera, or on Marcia herself, why not? He thought of Tommy cringing in play, alone. Tommy squinted perpetually as if sizing up threats. Invisible adults must hound him at all times. Wise and agile for his age, with airy blond hair and a patient look, the child of a man who’d taken off, a lost child…Jules could not help him and so he stopped thinking about him.

  He tried to concentrate on Vera. In her thin wheedling tone of love she spoke to him, calling him by an irrevocable name, calling him Jules—why hadn’t he thought to change his name when he got out of the hospital?—and moaning, “Jules, I’m in pain, for you, I love you and I need you inside me. Jules, only you, please, Jules…”

  After a few minutes Jules said, “Sorry, I can’t.”

  His veins burned with desire but he did not know what this desire was for. A woman? He was not sure, not any longer. Vera sobbed in his arms. Her knees were drawn up as if to protect herself, being wounded. Jules’s blood pounded, wanting some knowledge, some intensification of itself. The other night a woman had given him a shot of something, bent over him lovingly and with sly, cruel love sinking a needle into the vein that ran down the center of his arm, and Jules had come near to loving her for the pleasure that shot had given him, striking him high in the backbone and radiating outward, overwhelming him. So that was it—that was how it felt! But the memory of that shot left him adrift from himself, curiously light, uncommitted.

  Vera wept. She was one of his transparent beasts, helpless. Very warm. Slick with sweat, below the waist a helpless beast; he felt sorry for her. And Marcia had also wept in his arms. He had emptied his body in their bodies and the very violence of his love had shaken him free from them. The needle had sunk in and jolted him out of himself but that was not it, not what he wanted. He wanted only himself, nothing false. He did not understand what he wanted. He clung to Vera, forgetting her, and in her misery she seemed to be forgetting him, sinking into herself. Why couldn’t he think yet of that other woman whom he had loved for so long? He did not think about her. Around her being there was a deadly fog, a mist he did not dare to penetrate. Pleasure has no memory but love seemed to him all memory, a fatality of the mind, worse now than when he had lain with that woman in his arms…and now he was lying with another woman, the two of them sweating and miserable. He felt suddenly very sleepy. Vera’s sobs were muffled, she was falling asleep. He loved her at once for this, for falling asleep and leaving him. So you copped that mousy little girl? Marcia had asked, wisely and with irony, knowing everything. Well, he had her. He slept.

  7

  Jules, having lost count of nights and days, woke suddenly with his heart pounding. “Who’s there?” he cried. For a moment he could not remember where he was, what time it was, whether he was eighteen years old or thirty.

  There was something empty inside him and outside him…a slow motion. He lay very still, testing himself. He could see objects in the room, though dimly, so he was not blind. He could see. His lungs did not ache very much. It was his skin that ached, as if he had been burned. He scratched himself and flecks of skin came off under his fingernails. He peered down at himself: he was sunburned in patches. How had that happened?

  Drowsily he recalled a park, a field of mowed weeds with their brown stubble fragrant, and himself wandering through it. Slow motion…moving. He must have fallen asleep in the field—a city park—and got burned by the sun. Or had that happened years ago? He rubbed at the sore patches on his skin and tried to figure out what they were, then forgot them.

  It was important for him to remember what had happened yesterday. He had left Marcia, but that might have been several days ago; it did not help him to remember that now. Her angry, tear-stained face, her reddened eyes…a muscular neck, that girl. A good woman. Too good for him, he had to admit it and make her admit it, he’d woken up long enough to get that said. I’m not the one! Not me! he had cried. A barrage of pop bottles…slowly, as if dreaming, he remembered a barrage of pop bottles. Had he wandered into a fight between some kids? Or had Marcia thrown something at him? The end of the world would come in slow motion, drifting over the horizon like a sail. He felt peaceful in this knowledge. Even the ache in his body was peaceful.

  The sailing pop bottles had come from the park: some kids fighting one another. Then, for some reason, they had all turned on Jules. He hadn’t the energy to run away. He’d lain down in
the stubble. They had screamed at one another and not at him, throwing bottles, sticks, rocks, all of them Negro kids and not very big, stamping around in an enchanted violence. One pop bottle, only one, had struck Jules on the side of the head. A Coke bottle, returnable. The blow had made him fall into the stubble, into the heat. “Now you killed him!” someone yelled. Jules in mowed grass, fragrant and wild, lying in the sunlight with no one to see him…Yes, that had happened a few days ago.

  He got out of bed. Rising, moving his back. His backbone was stiff. The window shade was tangled at the top of the window, as if it had snapped up viciously by itself. Was it twilight or dawn? He went to the window and looked out. Only then did he hear what had wakened him…a siren. The siren seemed to curl through the air, a red curl, a metallic red curl, striking him. He put his hands to his ears.

  “Jesus Christ!” He thought for some reason of his boyhood. He had heard too many sirens.

  Down on the street a Tactical Mobile Unit car raced by. Heavy with cops. Jules leaned out the window, dizzy, empty, waiting to be filled with news. But he had no faith in news. It must have been the other night, only Friday night, that he had been sitting on a door stoop somewhere and a man had sauntered up to him and said, “Your little girl’s been busted. You interested in getting her out?” Jules had not seen Vera for two days. He thought she must have gone home. But really he had not thought of her at all. In his wallet was five dollars, five dollars remaining…from something…a handout from Mort or money from Vera or Marcia, he could not recall. So he had not thought of Vera. “I said, your little girl’s been picked up, kid,” said this jaunty Negro, putting himself out to be Jules’s friend. “Don’t nobody keep you informed? How you operate, kid? A & S they got her for, just ask me. I know everybody up and down the street.”

  Jules had gotten to his feet and staggered away, confused. He felt sorry for Vera, in jail, but since she had already been in jail for two days it was really too late to think about her. The Negro caught up with him. His voice was a little impatient. “I said, kid, look here—you gonna do the thing for her? You tell me, huh? How much money you got?”