Island (9 page)

He had watched, that night, fascinated, from the sidewalk and when people began to jostle him he had stood in the doorway and then with one foot inside the door, mindful of the signs that read: We do not serve minors; If you are under 21, do not enter; but entering nevertheless, although with one eye always careful of the door, while wearing that expression that he had often noticed on the faces of nervous gentle Negroes on the fringes of all-white crowds.

He had stopped then almost every evening for a week on his way home, standing outside or just inside the door, captured by the music and the odour, but most of all by the heavy men moving around the pool table. And then one night he had looked up at the man who was then holding the cue-stick and his eyes had looked into the eyes of Everett Caudell and their glances had met and held, somewhere there in the emptiness of the space above the table like the probing, seeking beams of two lonely mountain freight trains which round a bend at midnight and find themselves even in that instant forever committed to each other. And he had sensed even then the way that it would be; that Everett Caudell would never tell his father “I seen Jesse the other night,” nor would he tell Earl Caudell, who was in the same grade and played football in the same backfield, “I saw your father playing pool in a bar the other night.” Because some things transcend all differences in age, and chronology in the end is but an empty word.

And so he had begun. At night on the way home from the Grocery he would stop for ten or twenty minutes to watch, standing just within the door and against the wall. Always mindful of the sign which reminded him that he was a “minor” and as such should “not enter”; but realizing with the passage of time that no one really cared, no more than they cared for the other sign which read,
NO GAMBLING
. And he moved farther away from the door and deeper and deeper into the room, becoming slowly aware that the strange, violent, profane men seemed to like him, and winked at him when they sank the good shots and complained to him when they missed. And he discovered still later that the door was open even at four when he went to work as well as at seven when he returned. Often in the time when there was no football practice he would almost run from school to get there for a few precious moments, hoping with a desperate hope that the table would be empty and waiting so that he might deposit the quarter which was always sweaty because he held it so tightly while almost running. And then he would watch and listen to the balls as they rolled to their release and practise by himself the shots he had seen the night before; practise intently and relentlessly until four o’clock when the heavy men began to appear from the completion of their shifts. He had done all of this somehow without even daring to think that he would ever play in a real game himself, and now, seeing and feeling his body leaning over the table, he felt a strange sensation and kinship with those boys in the F. Scott Fitzgerald stories who practise and practise but never play until a certain moment comes along in their lives and changes them forever.

There had been four men playing when he had entered and taken his stand beside the wall and beneath the signs that forbade his presence. Two sets of middle-aged men who circled the table, first swiftly with their eyes and then slowly with their bodies, speaking to the balls with pleading profanity and wiping away the tiny beads of perspiration that formed upon their brows. They played for only the token dollar, which too was forbidden by a sign, and when the losers had paid, one of them said that he must go home and had gone almost instantly. And then his partner had turned and said to the figure that he had so often seen there beside the wall, “Me and you,” and offered him the cue-stick. So he had taken it, almost instinctively and if feeling like the boys of Fitzgerald, feeling also, and perhaps more, like the many youths of Conrad who never thought they would do what is now already done. And the commitment had been made and the night had so begun.

At first he was so preoccupied with the thought that he would lose, and have to pay a dollar he was not sure he had, that he played very badly, and they won only because of the shots his partner made, but in the second and third games he became stronger, playing cautiously and deliberately, and while he was not spectacular at least he did not lose, and he was surprised at how much he had learned from the solitary practice sessions and from the hours of standing and watching beneath the signs. And when the men they had played went out into the darkness he and his partner played against each other and after what seemed like a very long time he won and pocketed the dollar and stayed and stayed, seeing from the corner of his eye the challenging quarters being laid on the brown-black wood by the broken-nailed
fingers of the faceless unknown men, until he had recognized one set of fingers and looked into the face of Everett Caudell but said nothing, as nothing had been said on that first meeting here in a time that seemed so long ago. So they played quietly, both of them, very carefully and very slowly until only the eight-ball remained and the older man took his shot and scratched and then laid his dollar upon the table and went out into the night and was replaced by a set of nameless hands and another nameless face.

He had thought while playing against Caudell many different things. First he had been embarrassed and afraid that the man would attempt to make conversation, and then he had thought, that if he were to lose, it would be very fitting that his loss should be to the only man of all those present that he really knew. And then he had, right until the end, been very much afraid that Everett Caudell would purposely lose the game, the way a fond father loses at checkers to his seven-year-old child, and he had hoped and almost prayed that they would both not have to go through such an emasculating loss of dignity on this his night of realization. And when he finally was certain that Caudell was playing his very best he felt deeply grateful for the unspoken acknowledgement and when the defeated man departed he was overcome by a mingled feeling of loneliness and sorrow, regret and anger and fierce exultant pride that made him almost ashamed. The way one feels when standing at the graveside of a loved one who has died.

And the night flashed on and he played as if still in the dream, unaddled by the beer that began to affect his opponents with the hours passing and unaddled by the music or the activities that
became more frenzied as the night wore on. Once he had raised his head, to the twanging bass chords of a Duane Eddy composition, and looked along the bar’s surface where one of the perspiring middle-aged dancers spread her heavy net-stockinged limbs and lowered herself gradually and gradually until she was almost sitting on the bald head of the man who had leaned forward across the bar, holding him there with a hot, heavy inner thigh against each of his ears and grinding herself backwards and forwards across the baldness of his pate. And he had felt almost sick then and had quickly averted his eyes and taken his shot too quickly and missed.

At one-thirty a man tapped him on the shoulder and told him someone wanted to speak to him and he had turned to see his younger brother, Donny, beckoning him from the street through the door that was still open. He excused himself and went out quickly, pulling the solid door behind him so powerfully that it slammed, as if by doing so he protected his brother from the woman on the bar and perhaps himself from the men within.

Donny’s brown eyes were wide in their sockets and he began to speak in fast little uneven sentences: “Gee, you better come home. They’re walking around looking out the windows. It’s awful, especially Dad. He’s smoking like mad. He’s got that funny look on his face. They don’t know where you’re at.”

At first he was afraid but he tried to act amused. “Look, what’s the difference? I’m too late now. I might as well stay out all night, eh?”

“But Jesse, you know what it’ll be like when you come home.”

“So? Will it be any worse in the morning?” The look on Donny’s face plainly indicated that it would.

“Jesse, what will I tell them?”

“Tell them I’m playing pool.”

“They don’t know what pool is, and what if they ask where?”

“Tell them.”

“Jesse, you’re nuts. The old man will be down here in five minutes if he knows. You know what he’s like. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”

He thought then of the awful violence that was within his father; a something that rumbled deep below like some subterranean mountain stream of roaring white water, splashing and pounding dark rocks within deep unseen caves. He remembered seeing it only once as a child, in Hazard or Harlan and he could not now remember which, the man his father had hit, literally flying like a grotesque rag doll across the space of the behind-the-store parking lot and how he had lain there so crumpled and still for so long with the blood trickling past his broken teeth in slender, threadlike, crimson streams. And his mother had prayed, “O Lord, may this man not die, I’m asken you.” And his father had buried his head within his arms and leaned against the wall of the store, perhaps praying too while his fists remained so tightly clenched that the knuckles showed white, as if he were trying to hang on to something very desperately but was uncertain what it was. And after a while they, as children, cried too, because they knew there was something wrong but did not know what else to do.

Behind him now, the door opened and as he turned he saw the dancers again along the bar, and the man framed in the doorway saying, “you goen to finish this game? I ain’t got time,” and he started nervously and said to Donny, “Look, I gotta go.
Make up your own story. Tell them I’m okay. I’ll be home later.” As he turned to the building he averted his eyes from his brother’s face in order to avoid the tears that he sensed but did not wish to see.

So he went back in and thought of how Donny was the greatest little brother in the world. Of how he had never broken any of his brother’s confidences, of how he would spend hours shining that brother’s shoes or running faithfully after the baseballs he lofted into the skies and of how when the brother had first started smoking he would go all over town like a tireless little robot gathering bottles until he had acquired enough for the precious package of cigarettes. Sometimes he had the feeling that if he told Donny to walk off the edge of a towering building he would do so without a moment’s hesitation, and the thought of the awful power seemed to tighten around his heart.

At three he left the bar that had officially closed at two and felt that he had no place to go. It was both too late and too early to go home. He went into the street and then entered an alley and stood in the darkness, listening to the scuffle of the rats and waiting for the dawn; he shivered in the cold and tried to think of what he would say if anyone should come along and see him standing there, shivering in an alley with his books beneath his arm. Almost fearfully he backed into the shadow of a building and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. It was then that he felt the money and jumped as if he had been shocked. He had been so intent on playing that he had forgotten about the dollar bills he had been pocketing. But now he felt them in two tangled, crumpled lumps. Lumps that were now a chilly damp, but had once been warm and almost soggy from the
perspiration of his thighs. He tried to count them without light and without taking them from his pockets, fingering what he thought was a new corner, and then another, and counting the corners of one pocket and then the other, and finally in despair, because he never got the same number twice, giving it up altogether and starting suddenly back into the street.

When he entered the all-night coffee shop he sat on the second last stool and laid his books on the very last, hoping that he would not be noticed there and that he might have at least some privacy. The cloth of his trousers pulled tight against his thighs when he sat and he could feel and sense the protruding of the pockets’ bulges, knowing what they looked like without even looking down, and afraid to look down lest his worst fears be confirmed, or that by so doing he should draw attention to something he had no wish to publicize. Thinking it was like the mysterious coming of the ill-timed adolescent erection, when one knows that it is there, unbidden and unwanted and unbecomingly wrong.

He ordered the coffee and then slowly drew the crumpled bills from the right pocket. Probably, he thought, because he was right-handed. One by one he uncrumpled and flattened them. They were still damp and smelled faintly of salt. There were nineteen. Then he did the same with the contents of the left. There were twelve. Thirty-one dollars.

He left the coffee shop with the bills neatly folded in the breast-pocket of his shirt and with his mood completely changed. He would go home and he would give it to them, he thought. It would be the first worthwhile gift that he would give to those from whom he had always taken. And he was filled with
a great love for the strange people that were his parents. Parents whom he found so difficult to understand, who still made treks to Kentucky and who were not above being openly emotional when their battered old car crossed the mighty bridge from Cincinnati to Covington, and who would not wash the red hill mud from that car on their return, waiting for the rains to do so as it stood out in the yard, and who listened always to their hillbilly music.

And he was ashamed now of the times he had been ashamed of them. He remembered the awful experience of the “Parents’ Night” when he had been in fourth grade, the year after the move, and of how he had wildly begged them to accompany him to view the wonders of his school, and of how they themselves had become even mildly excited and had washed and scrubbed themselves to redness in anticipation of the big event. Once inside the great building, however, what natural dignity they possessed had seemed to drain from them immediately, as if some magic stoppers had been pulled beneath their shoes. And they had become blank and dumb and very nearly overcome by panic in that strange foreign world of animated numerals and foot-high ABC’s and posters that told one how to do everything it seemed, from brushing one’s teeth to crossing at street corners to feeding birds in winter. His mother had said, “Mighty fine,” “This sure is mighty fine,” “It sure is mighty fine,” over and over again as if her mind were locked in a groove, and his father’s line, while crushing his hat in his massive hands, had been, “Ah sure do appreciate all this here,” and he had said it indiscriminately, to teachers, to other parents and to janitors alike. And in the eyes of Miss Downs, the fourth-grade teacher, he had seen the
unspoken question: “How can such a bright little boy as Jesse have parents such as these?” He remembered now that he had rather wondered how, himself.