We. Swanly peeked straight at him then quickly away.
When I was a little guy, Tuck spoke in his mind, I held two marbles in my hand just the blue-green like his eyes. It was across the road under those chinaberries and us tykes had packed the clay down in a near perfect circle. Shot all day looking at those pretty agates. Too good to play with. My fist was all sweaty around them. I’d almost driven them through my palm. The beauty of the balls. There inside my flesh. Such things drive you to a church you never heard of before, worship them.
I have no troubles, the boy said. No we either. No troubles.
You came back to the real world.
I thought I was in it.
You’ve come back all alone.
Outside there’s a sign that says store, mister.
Down at the river pirates playhouse, you all.
Where you get your reality anyway? said the boy. Gas oil tobacco bacon hooks?
You know, wives can really be the gate of hell. They got that stare. They want to lock you down, get some partner to stoop down to that tiny peephole look at all the little shit with them. If you can forgive my language, ladies.
So you would be standing there ’mongst the Chesterfields seeing all the big?
Tuck did not take this badly. He liked the wit.
I might be. Some of us see the big things behind all the puny.
The hermit Sunballs appeared within the moment, the screen door slamming behind him like a shot. He walked on filthy gym shoes of one aspect with the soil of his wanderings, ripped up like the roots of it. You would not see such annealed textures at the ankles of a farmer, not this color of city gutters back long past. All of him the color of putty almost, as your eyes rose. The clothes vaporish like bus exhaust. The fingers whiter in the air like a potter’s but he had no work and you knew this instantly. He held a red net sack for oranges, empty. It was not known why he had an interesting name like Sunballs. You would guess the one who had named him was the cleverer. Nothing in him vouched for parts solar. More perhaps of a star gray and dead or old bait or of a sex organ on the drowned. Hair thicket of red rust on gray atop him.
He poured over the tin tops in the manner of a devout scholar. The boy watched him in fury. It was the final waste product of all maturity he saw, a creature fired-out full molded by the world, the completed grown-up.
Whereas with an equal fury the storekeeper saw the man as the final insult to duty, friendless, wifeless, jobless, motherless, stateless, and not even black. He could not bear the nervous hands of the creature over his goods, arrogant discriminating moocher. He loathed the man so much a pain came in his head and his heartbeat had thrown a sweat on him. The presence of the boy broke open all gates and he loathed in particular with a hatred he had seldom known, certainly never in Korea, where people wearing gym shoes and smelling of garlic shot at him. Another mouth, Tuck thought, seeking picking choosing. He don’t benefit nobody’s day. Squandered every chance of his white skin, down in his river hole. Mocks even a healthy muskrat in personal hygiene. Not native to nothing. Hordes of them, Tuck imagined, pouring across the borders of the realm from bumland. His progeny lice with high attitudes.
Tuck saw the revulsion of the boy.
You ten cents higher than the store in Pinola, spoke Sunballs. His voice was shallow and thin as if he had worn it down screaming. A wreckage of teeth added a whistle at the end.
Tuck was invested by red blindness.
But Swanly spoke first. I warn you. Don’t come near me. I can’t be responsible, you.
The hermit whispered a breeze off rags where feral beings had swarmed. Ere be a kind of storeman take his neighbor by the short hairs like they got you dead in an airport and charges for water next thing you know.
What did you say? demanded the storekeeper coming around the register. You say neighbor and airport? You never even crossed through an airport I bet, you filthy mouthbroom.
Sunballs stood back from the beauty of Swanly but was not afraid of the anger of Tuck. He was too taken with this startling pretty boy.
Oh yes, my man, airport I have been in and the airplane crash is why I am here.
He pointed at the oiled floor swept clean by the wife who was now coming in from the rear in attendance to the loud voices, so rare in this shop, where the savage quiet reigned almost perpetual both sides of the mutual gloom, the weary armistice, then the hate and lust and panting. Only lately had her own beauty ebbed and not truly very much. She was younger with long muscular legs and dressed like a well-kept city woman in beach shorts. Her hair was brunette and chopped shortish and she had the skin of a Mexican. Her lips were pulled together in a purse someone might mistake for delight by their expression, not petulance. Her name was Bernadette and when Tuck saw her he flamed with nostalgia, not love. Brought back to his own hard tanned youth returned from the Orient on a ship in San Diego. Swanly looked over to her, and the two of them, boy and married woman, in the presence of the gasping hermit, fell in love.
What’s wrong out here? she asked gently, her eyes never off the boy.
Said they can have it if that’s what’s there in the modern world, continued Sunballs. It was a good job I had too, I’m no liar. They was treating me special flying me to Kalamazoo, Michigan, on a Constellation. We was set upon by them flight stewards, grown men in matching suits, but they was these beatniks underneath, worse, these flight stewards, called, they attended themselves, it didn’t matter men women or children, they was all homos all the time looking in a mirror at each other, didn’t stir none atall for nobody else in their abomination once the airplane began crashing. It took forever rolling back and forth downward near like a corkscrew but we known it was plowing into ground directly. These two funny fellows you know, why when we wrecked all up with several dead up front and screaming, why they was in the back in the rear hull a’humpin’ each other their eyes closed ’blivious to the crash they trying to get one last ’bomination in and we unlatched ourselves, stood up in the hulk and they still goin’ at it, there’s your modern world I say, two smoky old queers availing theyselve and the captain come back with half a burnt face say what the hell we got. Ever damn thing about it a crime against nature. No money no Kalamazoo never bring me back in, damn them, yes I seen it what it come down to in your modern world.
Tuck watched Swanly and his wife in long locked estimation of each other, the words of the hermit flying over like faraway geese.
People is going over to the other side of everything, I say, and it all roots out from the evil of price, the cost of everything being so goddamned high. Nothing ain’t a tenth its value and a man’s soul knows it’s true.
What? Tuck said, down from his rage and confused by everybody. You ain’t flapped on like this in the seven years you been prowling round.
Sunballs would not stop. Old man Bunch Lewis up north in the state, he run a store and has a hunchback. The hermit spoke with relish, struck loquacious by the act of love proceeding almost visibly between the boy and the wife, each to each, the female lips moving without words. It behooved him, he thought, to announce himself a wry soldier of the world.
Fellow come in seen Lewis behind the counter with a ten-dollar shirt in his hands. Said Lewis, What’s that on your back? Lewis got all fierce, he say, You know it’s a hump I’m a humpback you son of a bitch. Fellow say, Well I thought it might be your ass, everything else in this store so high. What he say.
Neither the storekeeper nor his wife had ever heard the first word of wit from this man.
The hermit put a hand to his rushy wad of hair as if to groom it. The plain common man even in this humble state can’t afford no clothes where you got the Bunch Lewises a’preying on them, see. After this appeal he paused, shot out for a time, years perhaps.