I stripped the gown from her. Then I picked her up and put her in the tub, turning on the water very slow as I lathered her all over.
I gave her a shampoo. Pulling an arm up, I saw what was needed, ran the razor gently over her pits, then saw to the slight stubble on her legs. This is when she always sang. A high but almost inaudible melody of the weirdest and most dreamlike temptation, it would never come from another person in this world.
I began sobbing and she detected it.
“I love you with everything that lives me,” she said. “You love me the identical?”
“Everything. Yes.”
“Mickey,” she said. She clutched one breast and with the other hand she raised the red curls and lips of her virgin sex. “Are you like me?”
I looked away and was getting a towel.
“Yes. I’m exactly like you. We’re twins. We’re just alike,” I said.
“That’s why we can love each other everything,” she said.
“Exactly. Just the same.”
“Show me you.”
“We can’t. I can’t because of the rules.”
“Oh, yeah, darling, the rules!”
She’d always shown a peculiar happiness about the rules.
When I got her in bed, I wound up downstairs, no memory of having traveled anywhere.
I was breathless. My heart was big. Sometimes like this I thought it would just burst and spray its nerves into the dark that would not care, into the friends that would not care.
In bed again I found Carolyn was not asleep at all. She was sitting up.
“Did you finish with her?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t tell me what went on. I don’t want to know. I love you too much to do anything about it. But look what you’ve dragged me into.”
“I know.”
“You can’t sleep with me tonight. Get out of here.”
“I know,” I said.
I got the flashlight and got in the closet again, pulling the door to. I went through all the newspaper notices and the college term papers and picked up the love letters. They were on lined paper, grammar-school paper. It was the summer after I’d taught her to write.
Mickey I love you. There isn’t anything but love of you for me. I see the way you walk and your shoes are nice. I desire to thank you with my tongue and my legs too. The tongue and legs are good places. But the most is under my chest where it beats.
Sincerely yours,
Patricia
I held all the others, her letters, as the handwriting improved, and saw the last ones with their graceful script, even prettier than I could write on a good day. My essence yearned and rose from the closet and my roots tore from me, standing up like a tangled tree in dark heaven. My mother gave Patricia to me before she threw herself into what she called her patriotic suicide — that is, she used Kentucky whiskey and tobacco and overate fried foods in a long faithful ritual before she joined my old man in the soil near Lexington.
I thought heavily and decided I’d go back down South.
I was tired of Washington, D.C.
I was tired of my vocation.
I was tired of me.
Somewhere near the sea we’d go. Carolyn and Patricia both loved the sea. I’d find a town that would appreciate me for my little gifts and we’d move there. Have new friends, more privacy. I might turn back into a Democrat.
Changes like that never bothered my heart.
Eating Wife and Friends
We were very fond of Mrs. Neap’s place — even though it was near the railroad. It was a rambling inn of the old days, with its five bathrooms and balcony over the dining room. We had been harboring there for a couple of weeks and thought we were getting on well enough. But then she comes downstairs one morning holding a swab, and she tells me, looking at the rest of them asleep on the couches and rug: “This is enough. Get out by this afternoon.”
“Last night you said we were your adorable vagabonds.”
“In the light of day you look more like trash. I had too much of that potato liquor you brought,” says Mrs. Neap.
I say, “Give us another chance. It might be your hangover talking. Let’s have another conference, say two o’clock. Invite down all the tenants. We’ll talk it out.”
She says, “It’s my decision. I own the place. Property is ninetenths the law,” forearm muscles standing out as she kneads the cleaning rag, one of the lenses of her spectacles cracked.
I say, “But we’re the tenth that gives existence quality, the quantum of hope and dream, of laughter, of music. Further, please, Miz Neap, we’ll clean, keep this place in shape, paint it up.”
“Where paint? What paint? It’s ten dollars a quart if you can even find it. You can’t find more than four quarts in all South and North Carolina.”
“We make our own liquor. We can find a way to make paint too. Gardiner there is close to being a bona-fide chemist.”
She says, “None of you is any good. You never brought any food into the house. Oh, that sack of onions that fell off a truck and a few blackbirds.”
I say, “How can you forget the turkey we brought when we came?”
“Sure,” says she, “that’s what you got in with, the turkey. But what since, besides potato liquor? Then you ate all the magnolias,” says she.
“One foolish evening. Your other tenants ate some too,” say I.
“You broke the handle on the faucet.”
“Nobody ever proved it was one of us.”
“There was no fleas before you came, no cockroaches.”
“Unproven. Besides, seeing as how there’s no more turkey. .”
The house begins the shiver it does when a train is entering the curve. The train is always, beyond other concerns, an amazement. Mrs. Neap and I walk out to the warped porch to watch. The train is coming in, all right, rolling its fifteen miles an hour, and you can see the people, hundreds and hundreds, standing and sitting on the wooden platforms the company built over the cars, those pipes and chicken wire boxing in about ninety “air-riders” per car top.
Even an air-riding ticket is exorbitant, but that fifteen-mile-an-hour breeze must be nice.
The train passes three times a week. This one must’ve been carrying about five thousand in all if you were to count the between-car riders and the maintenance-ladder riders.
Resettlers.
When the bad times really came, they brought families back together, and mainly everybody started coming South. Everybody would travel back to the most prosperous member of his family, taking his own light fortune along to pool it. It healed a lot of divorces and feuds. The best thing you could have was a relative with land. You showed up at his place offering your prodigal soul and those of your family as guards of the land, pulling out your soft hands to garden up the soil and watch over it.
There are no idle murders to speak of anymore. Almost all of them are deliberate and have to do with food, water, seeds or such as a ticket on the train. For example, if I tried to jump that train Mrs. Neap and I are looking at, a man in street clothes (you’d never know which one but usually a fellow mixing with the air-riders) would shoot me in the head. The worst to come of that would be some mother would see her child see the cloud of blood flying out of my face, and she’d have to cover its mouth before it could yell because you don’t want a child making noise in a public area. Be seen and not heard applies to them, and better not even to be seen very much.
The little ones are considered emblems of felony.
When bad times first settled into reality, the radio announcers told us what conversationalists and musicians Americans were proving to be and that our natural fine wit was going to be retreasured. People began working on their communication. Tales were told. Every other guy had a harmonica, a tonette or at least was honking on two blades of grass. But that was before they started eating grass in New York and then buying up the rest of the nation’s.