He seemed depraved and perverse, this old boy who should’ve been out of the running years ago. I didn’t like him. I suspected him of really having tried something with Ann, of maybe keeping her in some kind of wagebondage lust. I thought of the old boy naked, using her like a trampoline. I’m sure he never did anything but look, like me, but uncertainty in me has always bred a phantasmagoric imagination.
Well, to the credit of his honesty, the old man instantly gave up the sham and said, “She’s quite a slut, isn’t she?”
We broke out laughing when he said that. The old man and I are both amused by the concept of a whore. The idea of women being gored for lucre by some poor man has al-ways been a joke to bring down the house between us. We heard it called the oldest profession, and then thought of a cavewoman doing it for a glowing coal, a piece of fire from his cracking wealthy bonfire; an Egyptian woman doing it for a leek; a Hebrew woman doing it for water; a Roman woman doing it for an acre of German tundra; a World War II woman doing it for a radio. The only contact the old man and I had for years was whispering whore jokes to each other. We started giggling when the word whore was first mentioned. The worst of them all was told by me during a terrible period of my college life. It was about a seventy-year-old whore thrusting a bag into a dark closet where her lover was hidden; he thought they were potato chips, but they were actually the scabs off her own body. The old man closed his eyes and edged away after I told that one, not knowing his own flesh and blood son all over again. I really hadn’t wanted to tell it, but it had gone around for bowelish laughs among the terribly unhappy crowd I ran with at college. My resources were low; in my crowd, whatever gagged a maggot passed for humor. After I’d told the old man that joke, the whore jokes between us stopped completely, and there was, as a matter of fact, no further communication between us. I did us in as father and son when I told that last rotten one.
However, now we laughed together. I forgot all the vile imaginings about the old man. I forgot everything and laughed with him till I cried. I do believe it was all because of the pleasure of finally forgetting Ann. He’d called her a slut, and I at last believed him. She was a comic whore. I told her goodbye. You’ll be waiting a long time for me to grow up enough for you, Ann, I thought. The old man and I got out our handkerchiefs and wiped the tears off our cheeks. He reached over and held my shoulder. Too bad for you, Ann, I thought, looking at her still, past him. She looked up and saw us in the office and her mouth fell open with some surprise. That’s the most I ever evoked from her. Too bad you don’t get to go to that cottage in Malibu with me, Ann. What kind of gimp did you think I was? You whore. How dare you?
What a farce! I had come to the office with my suitcase packed and in the bed of my station wagon. I was intending to draw out the $800 in my account that afternoon. I had come to the factory for no other reason than picking up Ann, persuading her, and driving straight to Malibu with her. I thought I’d drop in and see her through the glass window again, and see the old man too, for sentimental rea-sons. I was laughing over the ruins of my first dream. The facts were of course that Ann was not strictly a whore. She never took money, that I had heard of. She did it with mature athletes because she liked it. I knew that. But it was somehow less humbling to the old ego to think of her as a whore than as a woman of pleasure. There were too many muscles involved in that.
And sometimes things are so monstrous you can’t do any-thing else but laugh. The old man liked to have her around him; he liked to look at her and think of her putting out; he liked to think of that tee shirt rolled up to her chin and of that red hair writhing and of her yellow teeth biting her underlip and of her shut eyes and smile when she was getting her paroxysms. Great God, he was the same as me, and that was what was monstrous. He could not bear to be picturing the same woman that his son was. He thought it was depraved. All that he knew of Presbyterian decorum was brought into question. That’s why he got so upwrought at me in the garage.
There was a light rap on the office door, and then the door opened and in stepped that devil Harley Butte. Don’t think I hadn’t been thinking of this man for a couple of weeks. I’d never heard of such an officious nigger. I just couldn’t figure him, the man who handed my note to Ann to my old man. Mainly what I couldn’t figure was what the old man had said about Harley thinking for a week before he decided to hand the note over. I didn’t know anything about a thinking nigger at the time. I knew of wild niggers, romantic niggers, lazy niggers, comic niggers, fishing niggers, foxy niggers, even rich niggers, but I knew nothing about yellow thinking niggers.
Harley was colored more toward white than I’d imagined him. He was my size and handsome, with points of brown at the brows and eyes, and stiff hair; he had an orange pretty face. His eyes closed every other breath he drew. He was a baby bursting forth with dark points of maturity and had on his face a sort of amazement that all this growth had come to him so suddenly. He looked toward me, immediately shut his eyes, and talked only to the old man.
“I’m afraid they’ve scheduled another game on Friday afternoon. I’ll have to have Friday off again, Mr. Monroe. I can’t help it I’m the director of the band, and there isn’t any way I can get out of it”
The old man looked to me.
“Have you met Mister Butte, Harry?” The Mister threw me. Especially as used toward a man whose parents you wondered about first thing when you saw him. Yellow man. I made a point out of despising him as a mixed breed. I be-came an authority and a prophet about his certain doom. I gave him no more chances than the chances a child begat of human sperm and sheep egg had. I knew there were special laws against doing it with sheep, because something would produce — something unspeakable. I thought, Butte, you’ll probably die at thirty at the latest, of simple natural causes. Go ahead and be a foreman for the old man, be the band director out at Grell, hand in notes I wrote, kick around a few more years, then you’ll be gone, buddy. You look too strange to make it, my friend. It satisfied me to think such thoughts.
“I don’t think you’re going to get much out of him. Your boy doesn’t like me,” said Harley. He and the old man laughed.
“But now, Harry and I know each other from way back. I and he were introduced one evening he was throwing fire-crackers. He was having lots of fun.”
The old man bent his brows impishly. I couldn’t tell whether he knew what Butte was talking about. It’s among the old man’s habits of snobbery to make out like nothing is unknown to him. I began feeling watched, or worse, spied upon, and went home.
Butte is a spy in the old man’s hire, I thought. I was out-raged. What else has the yellow son of a bitch seen? How long has he been watching? Then I imagined that unlikely scene with the old man and Ann again, such things as his saying, “Come here, my pet, and sit on my lap,” with him sitting in nothing but an underwear shirt, and Harley Butte smiling cynically at the window, every now and then lifting up binoculars to spy out for me. It all a depraved inside joke on me.
Put some shotgun holes in that yellow son of a bitch, then he can sigh and play his intestines like a flute, I thought. Then I regretted dismally that the old man had been able to make me give up Ann so easily. Something filthy had been going on against me.
I went to bed and lay there. I had the phonograph way up loud on an old record of marimba music. Looble Loo Loo Loooble Boooble Looooo Loo Pi Pi Looble! “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket …!” was the tune. Ordinarily I detested this record, but now it evoked bereft, dispossessed emotions in me. I imagined that it was the musical version of the cliffs and seascape of Malibu, California, where I had wanted to take Ann. I saw the National Geographic picture flood out of its frame in thick gorgeous colors of blue, wheat, and green, and I saw the cottage sag into rivulets of white. It was dripping away, all gone: Loo Looble! And I was left floating on this bed somewhere between Dream of Pines and Malibu, alone, Harry tragic. The suitcase was still in the car, the silver ballpoint which would have signed for the release of my money was in my hands.