“It was an accident. Let me help you,” I said.
“I worked on those tickets all morning,” the old man spoke, very dry. “It looked like you just … knocked them, son.”
“Something nervous happened to me.”
“That was crazy.” His face meant something deeper than this. I felt sorry for him; he started hopping from ticket to ticket on the floor.
“Let me help.”
“You can’t help. You go on home and … get well, boy. Sometimes you scare us. You know that? Donna says you close up your room in the afternoons and lie on the bed listening to the phonograph in the dark. What does that mean?”
The only answer to that was I liked to do it. Hell — kick a guy because he favors salt in his beer, peanuts in his soft drink, dark with his music: he happens to be a guy who likes to grip the sheets and close his eyes until greenish movies featuring him as the hero appear, changing scenes and milieux with the changing climes of music — Harry happy, Harry sad, Harry bitter or melancholic, Harry truculent, but always Harry marvelous, Harry celebrated by the high-class babes of Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, New York, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and of such shady places as Vicksburg, Natchez, Biloxi, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston, twentieth-century holdouts of the romantic Southland, where it would be all magnolias, swamps and bayous, Spanish moss, cigarillos, piers, catfish, subtly brewed Bourbon drinks, and extravagantly well-dressed, complex, historic vagina, for Harry suave. Caving in a pier by his sheer presence. And lately, dreams of Malibu, California, in the simple cottage with Ann. Kick in a fellow’s head for wanting the dark, and the evocative phonograph. Very well.
I suffered in behalf of Ann and in behalf of, really, my-self, the way I happened to be. I had enough pride to be proud of it, though. Times were when I felt like God’s special friend, I was suffering so much. Like the Jews. We were reading about the unspeakable persecution of the Jews under Hitler in history about that time. Of course I had dug into all that lore years ago. The old teacher was married to a Jewish woman from Chicago. He held forth on the sins against the Jews as if he suffered a chronic nightmare one week a year about it. The atrocity photographs he showed were the only attraction of the year’s history class. He’d bring them out of an old cardboard folder and just sigh pitifully as he passed around the pictures. Guys would take his class for reason of the photographs alone. The pictures they were really awesome and sordid, showing open mouths and exposed pubes. The year I was under the old boy, a girl in my class threw up, and the principal came in the next day to say he couldn’t show those pictures around any more. So right in front of us the old boy got his folder together, put on his overcoat, caught up his briefcase, and quit the school, giving us some kind of hopeless salute. So what? everybody says. The only thing he was good at was telling about the Jews and about how time flies — tempus fugit, and all that, with a few other Latin phrases that seemed to grip him personally but never affected any of us. The principal read to us out of the textbook the rest of the year. And let me take this opportunity to say that this man, the principal, had an acute breath problem; air like from a cavern full of dead men came out of his mouth, and I caught it all, being on the front row, attempting as a sort of last ditch effort to create a scholarly air around myself by sitting there. I was doing so mediocrely at Dreams of Pines, and my parents wanted me to get in such a mighty college. They had the money. They wanted me at Harvard, or Princeton, or better yet, Columbia, in New York City. As I said, my old man was partial to New York because it had all that unimaginable money.
Another time I came to the factory to see Ann. I had managed to force myself into another dream about her. This time she was a kind of puppet that said, “I love you. I need you. I love you. I need you.” She’d taken off her clothes again and revealed a painted-doll type of nudity, showing two red dots and a black V that seemed varnished and inaccessible. The old man happened to be out of the office. I waved at her vigorously at the office window. She was talking to a stumpy fellow in gray coveralls and smoking a cigarette. When the fellow saw me, he hiked off instantly to another shop. Ann kept her eyes on me. Then she lifted up her hand and gave me the finger. I couldn’t believe it But the familiarity of the old signal somehow gave me some hope.
I followed her home. She was in some smoky car of the women’s car pool and I was in the black station wagon of old. They let her out at her slum-pocket and she walked rapidly over her lawn toward the house. I say lawn, but what it was was a soil flat that looked beaten out by a goon whose duty it was to let no sprig grow. I drove up with her and began calling her name. She seemed to be ignoring me and was almost running into her house, thinking to be rid of me in there. What a dump to run to for safety. I saw her doing this, and I could not believe the story about her having a baby. This was a furiously shy girl I was dealing with.
I lay down on the car horn. I had quite a horn. It was loud, and by some accident at General Motors, played a whole harmonic chord, like C against E and G. It sounded like a band tuning up. It pierced, was rather regal, and could not be ignored except by the deaf. All right. Ann gave up and walked back to my car and got in, leaving her door open. She was the first girl I’d had in the car.
“Ann. Why aren’t I good enough for you?” I said right off. I knew good and well that wasn’t the issue. All the signs were that I was too good for her and was bending down to her heroically.
“You do talk, don’t you?” I asked her further.
“I know a guy that would kill both of us if he knew we were together,” she said. God, she’d spoken to me. She looked beautiful in the sunset at five-thirty — thatwas when I was talking to her. Her raincoat came apart.
“You don’t wear a brassiere, do you, Ann?”
“Don’t you talk like that.” Her voice was steady. It had a low harsh music in it. That pleased me.
“I’m sorry, Ann.”
“Don’t write me notes. Don’t follow me around. You’re not big enough or old enough. You wouldn’t want me if you knew you might get killed for wanting me.”
“I heard you had a baby. Did you?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
“You did, didn’t you? I don’t care. I had a dream about us. You liked me and took off your clothes…” I stuttered this out.
“Oh yeah?” she took it up. “What’d you do in this dream?”
“I just stared. Looked at you.”
“You see. You’re not ready to do anything yet, you see.” She looked away from me toward the sunset, and then all around at the scraggly pines growing outside her lawn; she seemed to be inspecting the whole globe. It was just a minute before night, and very red in the sky. “You know I’m the best piece of ass at Dream of Pines that has ever been, don’t you, Harry?”