When he saw me come up with the gun, he smiled like a coon. For an old guy he had surprising white teeth even though all the rest of him was filthy. Then he took the arrow back and shot me square in the solar plexus with it, the crazy idiot. This filthy arrow was in me, it felt like right in my heart, and I looked over and all the agents were so juiced on corn beer they still thought it was a fun house when I needed help. So I shot about a quarter of the Tommy into him and he backed up ten yards and fell flat. I didn’t want to die alone. It sobered them up, quick, before I fainted. Luckily I had a big chest when I was young and the point was hanging in there a half inch from the fatals, said the doctor. The old Indian never bothered my sleep much. I think he wanted it bad.
Like me now, said Quarles on his bike. He saw the lights of La Guardia. I’m going to make it. Again, dammit.
I ride this bicycle in honor of the other one I got, he thought. The drive-in barbecue in Mobile when I chanced to go down again.
My wife had left to join Billy Graham’s World Crusade, in the choir. I never even knew she could sing before Graham came to Chicago. Graham came to town and she did a voice audition for the choir. They put her in the first rank of sopranos. Tokyo, Stockholm, The Hague, Glasgow, Dallas, and even New York. I saw her in my telescope at Shea Stadium, weighs about two hundred, but a mouth like a harpshaped cunt. Thank 01’ Massa I don’t have to run those rapids anymore, said Quarles Green. I used to play my little pieces on the cello to heat her up. She’d fall asleep and break her Christian wind.
If only I’d married a good pagan woman who never tired of the pleasures of the flesh, said Green in the wind of the entrance to La Guardia.
Don’t lie, he said louder. You would have done the same. You would have killed the same two. Perish clean at least.
I was in the new FBI of America. I had my card. Three of us were in the drive-in barbecue lot in Mobile. Somebody recognized me as the killer of Weeber Batson’s son. They started calling out at me when I was eating my ribs, which was a large part of why I took another Mobile assignment, the ribs at Boudreaux’s Pit. Some of the waiters used bicycles. I didn’t know they paid the Negro to come over and say these things to me.
“Pardon me. Is yo name Toid?”
“What?” I said.
“Erruh, yo name Mister Terrid?”
“He’s saying turd,” said one of the agents.
“It certainly is,” I said to the boy on the bicycle. “I’m Mister Turd. How did you find me?” He was a pretty mulatto boy and looked very wise.
“I just find you, Mister Terrid,” said he. He pedaled back to the rear of the blockhouse where the cooking was.
I put the silencer attachment on my pistol. It was the first mass-produced silencer to come out. I told them we had to follow that boy home. He knew things about me.
It was easy. He left at one in the morning on his bicycle and struck out toward the west end, heart of niggertown. We trolled behind as if looking at the bay. His bike was lit up front and back and you could see him like a new dime on black cloth. We got into niggertown and stopped at a vacant lot where an old house had been pulled over. Somebody came out of the boards in man’s clothes but you could tell it was a girl. She hugged him while he was standing astraddle the bike. We went by like an idle lost car and I saw the girl was white. She was a plain white girl, no beauty about her. But she was passionate. She was all over him.
The next time we passed, I got out of the car.
“Hi. I’m Mister Turd. Remember?”
“Yes suh.”
“What’re you doing, boy, begging on your hands and knees for bad news? Don’t you know anything about Mobile’s miscegenation law?”
“Its what?”
“No black on white.”
“But you with the federals. You kill Weeber Batson’s boy.”
“You know everything. Is that why you’re sweet on him, ’cause he knows everything?” I said. But the girl never uttered a word.
One of the agents told me to get back in the car. I told them shut up, I wasn’t any hothead. The thing was, I was mortified, confused and jealous.
“Wouldn’t nobody else have you at your high school?” I said to her.
Standing astraddle his bike, the boy chopped me right in the jaw. I had the gun and he saw it and he still chopped me. I was seeing through a hot orange mist. At least I had the presence of mind not to kill him. I only shot him in the thigh. You could hear the rush of a whisper from the silencer. I was immediately repentant.
“Let’s get you to the hospital, son,” says I. He was still astride the bike.
“I ain’t going to no hospiter you takes me to,” he said. “Miss Edith, you come sit behind and pedal for my bad leg. I’ll do the other one with the good one.”
She sat on the rear fender and they went off in the damned most bizarre juxtaposition you ever saw. Similar to a circus tandem but not for fun. This was loyalty and romance, brothers. I know he was leaving blood up the road, though you couldn’t see it at night. The bike was wobbling all over the place, but they were going ahead.
And since then I have been a worm.
I left the South for ten years, then got my quarters in Memphis. That was some man, that boy. I wouldn’t touch Mobile again with a three-hundred-mile pole.
Quarles Green made La Guardia and waited a cold six hours for the plane to Memphis. He was a miracle of patience. He read nothing, hardly changed position, smoked nothing, watched no pay TV, wet his underwear imperceptibly.
Reynolds will be the only one in Memphis who might be alive that would remember me from the old days, he thought. Reynolds who’s had thirty names in his time, on three continents. I did my bit in the Second. Cornered the Nazi czar of Fort Worth and his fifteen rifles.
When the plane was in the air he asked for the headphones.
The stewardess passed him. She was a big leggy blond girl, a superlative quite at ease in the jumbo jet. She was desire trebled out. Quarles Green felt the last big pang. He wanted to take up habitation in her, such as a baby kangaroo.
A terrific fist bashed him directly on the heart.
He smiled at her with his head phones on, snapping his fingers.
“Catchy,” he said, pointing at the phones. “Groovy, for your generation.”
She winked and passed by. He sat there awhile and died. The stewardess wanted to know the tune the old whitehaired boy was grooving on. She lifted up her own pair in her dressing room. Nothing was coming over them. There was only a howling, like waves in a storm of particles.
When she was out of the room, she saw Dana and asked her.
“The whole system’s screwed up by lightning or something. None of the headphone FMs are any good,” said Dana.
The stewardess walked back to look at Quarles Green. He had a tight smug smile on him, his eyes closed, like every dead man who finally hears his tune.