“How come you want me out of my house?”
“I’m worried about you, Doc Look at you. Fainting and falling out in a ditch.”
“Victor, who were you waiting for in the pagoda?”
“Waiting?”
“I heard Willard say: Looks like he’s not coming.”
“Oh yeah. Willard.”
“Was he waiting for me?”
Victor is silent
“Did he or the third man intend to shoot me?”
“Shoot you! Lord, Doc. We just want to talk to you.”
“Well, here I am.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. Move in with your mama.”
“What’s she got to do with it?”
Silence.
“What about that other stuff?”
“What other stuff?”
“All that stuff about the Kaydettes, the doctors, and the school.”
“Doc, all in the world I want to do is help you. You say to me, do this, that, or the other, and I’ll do it.”
Victor’s his old self, good-natured, reserved, with just the faintest risibility agleam in his muddy eyes.
“How you feeling, Doc?”
“I think I can make it.”
But when I stand up, one knee jumps out
“Whoa, look out now. Why don’t you stay here till you are stronger? Ain’t nobody going to bother you here.”
“I got to get on up the hill.”
“I was going up there too. I’ll carry your bag — no wonder, Lord, what you got in here? Just hang on to Victor.”
We are near the top. Victor wants me to hang on to him, but I don’t feel like it.
“You never did like anybody to help you, did you, Doc?”
I stop, irritated with Victor and because the faintness is coming back. Flowers of darkness begin to bloom on the sidewalk.
We sit on the wooden steps of an abandoned Chinese grocery angled into the hill. Again I invite Victor to go back — I know he’s along just to help me. He refuses.
“You’ve been away, haven’t you, Victor?” I say to hide my irritation.
“I been back for two years, Doc.”
“Where did you go?”
“I lived in Boston and worked in the shipyard. I made seven fifty an hour.”
“Why did you come back?”
“You know something, Doc? You don’t trust anybody, do you?”
I look at Victor with astonishment.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing, Doc. I know that when you ask me a question like that you really want to know.”
I blink. “You’re humbugging me, aren’t you, Victor?”
“No, Doc. You know what I remember? You asked me why I came back. I don’t know. But I remember something. I remembered in Boston and when I did, you were in it. You remember the shrimp jubilees?”
“Yes.”
“The word would come that the shrimp were running and everybody would go to the coast at night and as far as you could see up and down the coast there were gas lamps of people catching shrimp, setting up all night with their chirren running around and their picnics, you remember? And long before that me and you learned to throw a cast-net holding it in your teeth.”
“Yes. Those were the days.”
“Not for you, Doc.”
I, who am seldom astonished, am astonished twice in a minute. “What do you mean?”
“You never did like — you didn’t even like the jubilees. You were always … to yourself.”
I shrug. “Are you telling me you came back because of the jubilees?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted to come back. You know, I been a deacon at Starlight Baptist for twenty years.”
“I know.”
“Mr. Leroy, though, he used to love the jubilees.”
“So you and Leroy Ledbetter like the jubilees and that’s why you came back?”
“Not exactly. But I remember when everybody used to come to the jubilees. I mean everybody. You and Mr. Leroy came one night, you and your family on one side of me and he on the other.”
“In the first place the shrimp don’t run any more. In the second place, even if they did, Leroy Ledbetter wouldn’t be next to you now.”
“That’s right, but you know something, Doc?”
“What?”
“You ought to trust people more. You ought to trust in the good Lord, pick yourself out a nice lady like Miss Doris, have chirren and a fireside bright and take up with your old friends and enjoy yourself in the summertime.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“What say, Doc?” Victor, who is slightly deaf, cups an ear.
“You kill me.”
“How’s that?”
“Here’re you complaining about me and acting like you and Leroy Ledbetter are sharing the good life. Hell, Leroy Ledbetter, your fellow Baptist, wants no part of you. And one reason you’re living in this pigpen is that Leroy is on the council and has turned down housing five times.”
“That’s the truth!” says Victor, laughing. “And it’s pitiful.”
“You think it’s funny?”
My only firm conclusion after twenty years of psychiatry: nothing is crazier than life. Here is a Baptist deacon telling me, a Catholic, to relax and enjoy festivals. Here’s a black Southerner making common cause — against me! — with a white Southerner who wouldn’t give him the time of day.
That’s nothing. Once I was commiserating with a patient, an old man, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis — he’d got out with his skin but lost his family to Auschwitz — so I said something conventional against the Germans. The old fellow bristled like a Prussian and put me down hard and spoke of the superiority of German universities, German science, German music, German philosophy. My God, do you suppose the German Jews would have gone along with Hitler if he had let them? Nothing is quite like it’s cracked up to be. And nobody is crazier than people.
“It would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful,” says Victor. He looks at me from the corner of his eye. Something has occurred to him. “Do you think you could speak to Mr. Leroy?”
“About what?”
“About — Never mind. It’s too late.”
“Victor, what in the hell is going on?”
He is shaking his head. “It’s so pitiful. You would think people with that much in common would want to save what they have.”
“Are you talking about you and Leroy?”
“Now everything’s got to go and everybody loses.”
I rise unsteadily. “Everybody?”
Victor jumps up, takes my arm. “Not you, Doc. All you got to do is move in with your mama. She’ll do for you.”
Victor takes me as far as the Little Napoleon. There I make a mistake, a small one with small consequences but a mistake nevertheless, which I’d ordinarily not have made. But it has been a strange day. Hanging on to Victor, I did not let him go until we were inside. I should have either dismissed him outside or held on to him longer. As it was, letting go Victor when the bar was within reach, I let go a second too early, so that Leroy Ledbetter, turning toward me in the same second, did not see me let go but saw Victor just beside me and so registered a violation. Not even that: a borderline violation because Victor was not even at the bar but still a step away. What with his white attendant’s clothes and if he had been a step closer to me, it would have been clear that he was attending me in some capacity or other. A step or two in the other direction and he’d have been past the end of the bar and in the loading traffic where Negroes often pass carrying sacks of oysters, Cokes, and such. As it was, he seemed to be standing, if not at the bar, then one step too close and Leroy, turning, saw him in the split second before Victor started to leave, Victor in the act of backing up when Leroy said as his eyes went past him, said not even quite to Victor, “The window’s there,” nodding toward the service window opening into the alley; even then giving Victor the benefit of the doubt and not even allowing the possibility that Victor was coming to the bar for a drink, but the possibility only that he had come to buy his flat pint of muscatel and for some reason had not known or had forgotten about the service window. In the same second that he speaks, Leroy knows better, for in that second Victor steps back and turns toward me and I can see that Leroy sees that Victor is with me, sees it even before I can say, too late, “Thank you, Victor, for helping me up the hill,” and signifies his error by a pass of his rag across the bar, a ritual glance past Victor at the storm cloud above the saloon door, a swinging back of his eyes past Victor and a saying in Victor’s direction, “Looks like we going to get it yet,” said almost to Victor but not quite because it had not been quite a violation so did not quite warrant a correction thereof. Victor nods, not quite acknowledging because total acknowledgment is not called for, withholding perhaps 20 percent acknowledgment (2 percent too much?). He leaves by the side door.