Such Sweet Thunder (17 page)

“That — that ain’ nothin’, Miss Jones.”

“Well,” Viola began, taking his hand.

“Hi, Tony!” Miss Derby, smiling from behind her screen door. “I see you on your way sho’ ’nuff!”

“Yes’m.”

“Mornin’, Mrs. Derby,” said Viola.

“Mornin’, Mrs. Jones. My, you two sho’ look nice! My boy’s gonna be a
fine-
lookin’ man when he grows up. I kin just see ’im now! You do what they tell you, an’ learn all you kin, ’Mer’go, you heah me? Never had the opportunity you gittin’ to git some schoolin’ an’ amount to somethin’. Got my schoolin’ in the cotton fields down —”

“Hi, ’Mer’go!”

“Hi, ’Mer’go!”

“Hi, ’Mer’go!”

“Hi, ’Mer’go!”

“Tee hee hee!”

“Mornin’, Mrs. Jones!” exclaimed a knot of children who were just crossing the yard behind Miss Ada’s apartment.

“Hi,” he said shyly to Tommy, Turner, Carl, Sammy, and Etta.

“Hello there!” said Viola, smiling at them, waving at the same time to Miss Sadie and Mrs. Derby who were waving back. Viola and the
children started through the shoot. Mrs. Crippa came out on the back porch to shake out the tablecloth.

“Eh! You taka Tony to school?… That eez gud. Ina the olda country I no go to school, buta my Karl, Frank, Johnathan, they havey money to go to school, but they no wanna, only Tina. She’s a go to college — an’ for what? To gita married an’ hava baby? What for?
I
have a baby — two, three, four babies an’
no
go to college! Tony do the right thing. He go to school an’ grow up to be a biga fina man. Keep out a trouble. No run after the girls an’ buy beeg cars an’ never come home to their momma!” She waved them away with a disparaging sweep of her free hand, and waved good-bye to Viola and the child at the same time, mumbling words in Italian to herself as she stepped back into the kitchen. Meanwhile Viola and the child made their way through the shoot, followed by the chattering bunch of children.

“Phew-whee! What’s that stinkin’?” cried Sammy.

“Smells like a turd!” exclaimed William.

“You gonna git a knot on your head if I hear you say that word agin in front a Mrs. Jones!” said Tommy. “Now say ’scuse me, niggah, ’fore I git you now!”

“ ’Scuse me,” said William, his big eyes clouded with shame.

“It does smell bad!” said Viola. “I wonder where it could be comin’ from?”

“I smelled it comin’ through the lot!” said Sammy mysteriously. “I bet it’s somethin’ in the empty house!”

“A rotten ghost!” said Carl.

“Aw ghosts don’ stink, niggah!” said Sammy.

“Well, it’s
somethin’
stinkin’ ’round here!” Carl retorted.

“Whew! This is better!” said Viola as they came out on the Campbell Street side. They crossed the little grassy yard in front of Miss Ada’s house and descended to the sidewalk. Miss McMahon was on her porch, talking to her brother, Officer McMahon. He was in uniform, with a silver star with numbers on it on his chest and a gun belt with real bullets in it and a gun. He smiled and waved at them. The sunlight shining on the lenses of his glasses obscured his eyes.

“Blue,” Amerigo thought, waving back. “Hi, Miss McMahon! Hi, Mr. McMahon!”

“You an’ your momma lookin’ mighty slicked up there. Where you off to, all dolled up like that so early in the mornin’?”

“To the kinnygarden!”

“Mornin’, Mrs. Jones,” she said, while Officer McMahon nodded a greeting and smiled. “Why it seems only yesterday,” she continued, “that you weren’ no bigger’n that!” snapping her fingers.

“No’m,” he said, as they turned down Campbell Street.

“You gonna come over an’ clean out the shoot Sad’dy?”

“Kin I, Mom?”

“I reckon so,” said Viola.

“Yes’m!”

“All right, then, I’ll be waitin’ for you!”

“Yes’m.”

They passed Mrs. Crippa’s house. It was fronted by a little flower garden with a trellis that covered the steps leading to the broad shaded front porch.

This is a pretty street, he thought, allowing his gaze to take in its quiet cleanness, enhanced by flowers and trees. Opposite Mrs. Crippa’s house was an apartment building where white people lived:
I-talians
. Next to that was an empty lot that gave onto a hill covered with grass and weeds and wildflowers and bushes. His back to the hill, he took mental note of the fact that next to the hill, on the corner, was a big unpainted wooden house where colored people lived, opposite which was another vacant lot with an even higher hill covered with weeds fronted by a big billboard facing the boulevard. A string of tumbling houses slanted back down the hill where Mr. Mose, an old iceman, lived with his daughter Freda who was black and ugly and mean. Next to Mr. Mose lived the Chauncys, a skinny yellow man with a fat yellow wife, both over fifty, with their son, Bud, of whom all the little kids were afraid because he was mean, too. “That niggah’ll kill you!” he had heard Sammy exclaim. He squeezed his mother’s hand a little tighter, diverting his attention to the man who lived next door. Old man Barnes. Suddenly he saw a tall black gray-headed man with bluish brown eyes and yellow teeth. He used to work on the railroad but he was retired now.

Irish! he thought suddenly, for no accountable reason.
Yesterday …
Miss McMahon was saying,
You were no bigger’n that!
The sound of her fingers snapping exploded in his ears.

And then there was the violent clanging of a trolley bell, followed by the loud irritating blast of a honking horn. A big truck backed out of the spaghetti factory on the corner of Independence and Campbell, blocking the streetcar tracks. The streetcar looked like a strange toy. He tried to coordinate the image of it with the sound of it heard from
afar, from the back porch, in the dark, just before he fell asleep. He listened to the strange and not unpleasant sound of its motor, a quivering rhythmical sound that made him want to tap his foot and hum a tune to match it. Just as they reached the foot of the hill the truck emitted a loud belch and jerked down the avenue, and then the streetcar conductor clanged the bell a few times more, turned the stirring knob in a circular orbit and the streetcar, half filled with black, beige, brown, yellow, and one white man, rattled clumsily down the avenue, past the spaghetti factory.

“Come on, here, boy!” said Viola.

“Yes’m.”

Past Goldberg’s ice cream parlor, Magedy’s grocery store, past the mouth of the alley, imagining it as he usually saw it from the front porch, a low streak of sunburned orange by day and a flash of pumpkin-orange perforated with squares of candle-flame yellow by night.

Viola tightened her grip on his hand as they crossed Campbell Street and proceeded up the avenue, east.

“Tomorrow you’ll be goin’ to school with Tommy an’ you’ll have to learn to cross the streets by yourself. All you have to do is stop at the corners, look both ways, and wait till you don’ see no cars coming! An’ then cross. But don’ run! You don’ have to run. If you have to run to make it, don’ try. That’s the way you git killed. But you don’ have to crawl, neither. Just take your time an’ cross as quick as you kin, without breakin’ your neck you hear?”

“Yes’m.”

“I’ll show ’im, Mrs. Jones,” said Tommy, keeping pace with them. Viola smiled at him tenderly.

Miss Leona’s dead
, he thought, seeing Tommy’s mother, sitting in the kitchen door, the sun cutting her bare legs just below the knees — just before … 
Miss Gert’s his momma now
. Viola took out her purse and took out a dime and gave it to Tommy.

“Here. You kin buy some candy at the drugstore. An’ give the rest of the kids some.”

“Yes,
ma’am!
” Tommy said with a broad smile.

Meanwhile cars and trucks ground their greasy, smoky, paper-littered way up and down the avenue, through the lane of big brick buildings with wooden porches, interrupted here and there by storefronts filled with fruit and groceries, or signs (in big colored letters that you
couldn’t
rub off with your fingers) indicating places to eat or drink, with people
sitting inside. All the appropriate smells within the dominant smell of humid autumnal heat were cooled by evaporating dew, which was beginning to mingle with the dust of the streets, the topsoil of hundreds of miles of prairies. The smell of sweat and bottled liquor, fish grease, barbecue and beer, was agitated by the penetrating odor of sour wine and meat markets; of spices and fresh and cured meat; of cheeses, sour cream in wooden buckets, and big dill pickles reposing in huge glass jars of briny water spiced with little black peppers and red peppers and bay leaves; of hard candies in jars and in boxes; bread and cakes, canned goods, dry and leather goods exposed in dank gray shops; of shoes and glue and little old men with dirty hands and mouths full of nails; of pollinating trees — cottonwood, maple, walnut, oak, fruit trees, tomato vines, grapevines.

Smells attacked his sensibility firing the objects to which they adhered with myriad colors, while the sounds jolted him with the force of lightning heralding thunder before rain!

Suddenly he pressed his face against his mother’s hip in a wave of passion that made him want to cry. But Viola did not notice. “There’s where your Aunt Edna usta live,” she was saying, pointing to a shabby frame house near the corner of the cobblestone alley they were now crossing. He looked warily at the house. “An’ there’s where they found your Aunt Ruby — lousy with T.B.” He looked obediently in the direction indicated, but just then a passing streetcar and a transfer truck, cutting in behind it, plus the now upsurging thought of Aunt Edna’s alley, which “Ain’ as pretty as our’n,” along with the image of Aunt Ruby when she was eighteen, so pretty and smiling, distracted his attention.

“Do you see?”

“Yes’m.”

They passed in front of a place with pictures stuck on boards propped up by sticks standing out on the sidewalk and pasted on the windows and doors. On either side of the entrance was a big double door and between them a window with two holes in it, a round one in the middle and a longer narrow one at the bottom.

That’s the show! He remembered that was where Viola had gone, but not to this one, to the other one on Eighteenth Street, to see Rudolph Valentino in
The Sheik
, four nights ago, after the day he had killed the cat and threw it in the empty house where Old Jake had poked with his stick
before
he had given him the star that morning. He touched the star within the darkness of his pocket:
The cat!
hearing Carl’s voice
when they passed through the shoot: Somethin’s stinkin’ ’round here! “Kitty-kittykitty,” called Aunt Lily, and the cat crawled along the row of shadowed heads in the soup line, as the redness of the sky had threatened him with five o’clock — So soon! — and night and day three times, until he looked at the pictures stuck on the boards and on the windows and thought: That’s the show and a feeling of wonder came over him.

“Gloria Swanson was
my
favorite!” he heard Viola say. “She was the best of ’um all! An’
beautiful
 … those eyes! I usta cry an’ cry.” He thought of his aunt Ruby who was beautiful. He wanted to cry. A lump rose in his throat, but the tears were stayed by the sound of his father’s voice:

“Yeah, what was the name of that picture she was in where she was so sad, Babe? Had
all
the niggahs cryin’!”

“The Lady of the Camelias,”
said Viola, “or was that Greta Garbo?”

“Now, talkin’ about a actress, she was great! The greates’!”

“She sure was.”

“I liked ’er best with John Bowles.” Viola sighed pleasantly.

“He was a great lover, Amerigo,” Rutherford explained.

“Yeah, but don’ forget Douglas Fairbanks!” Viola cried.

“He was a lover, too,” Rutherford admitted, “but he was more of a actor, Babe. He put down some deep stuff. I never will forgit ’im in
The Count of Monte Cristo
, by Alexander Dumas!”

The smartest man in the whole world! he had thought, looking at his father with admiration.

“An’, aw Rutherford, ha!” Viola cried. “An’ the
Perils a Pauline!
Boy that’s sure one woman
al
ways gittin’ into somethin’.”

“Yeah, Amerigo, she was a famous lady daredevil! She was always hangin’ out a airplanes — or gittin’ hung up in runaway trains!”

“But wait!” cried Viola, “Lon Chaney was
my
man!”

“Mine, too!
The Phantom of the Op’ra!”

“The Unholy Three!”

“The Seven Sinners!”

“The Cathedral of Notre Dame!”

“He,” said Rutherford, “was a joker who could twist his body into all kinds a twisted shapes, Amerigo. I mean, like a real humpback or a cripple or anythin’.
The Phantom of the Op’ra
— that was the one! Picture this, Amerigo: He was settin’ there, playin’ the organ, Jack, dressed in a — in a mean cape. Sharp, Jack. With his back to the audience. He had on a black mask — always wore it so nobody couldn’ see
who he was. An’-an’-an’ then his girl, she come slippin’ up on ’im all in love with ’im an’ ever’thin’. She was gonna find out who he was. An’ he was still playin’, all lonely-like, somethin’ deep — classical, Jack! ’Cause, you see, he was in love with her, too. So she slipped up on ’im in ’er pretty dress an’ all an’ he didn’ hear ’er ’cause he was playin’ so hard he was so in love an’ all. An’-an’-an’ she was gittin’ closer an’ closer, pantin’, an’ er bosom was a heavin’ up an’ down, an’ he was playin’ an’ playin’ like a madman! An when she got close enough she jerked it off!

“Amerigo, boy, I’m tellin’ you, when that cat turned a-round, he like to run
e-v-e-r’-b-o-d-y
out a the show! He turned around in a flash! pointin’ a l-o-n-g crooked finger in ’er face, an’ his face was all tore up, wrinkled an’ scarred, like a monster — like a devil, Amerigo.

“ ‘eeeEEE — YOU!’ he hollered at ’er, grittin’ his teeth! An’ his eyes was all sunk in an’ ever’thin’ an’-an’ then — he went crazy! An’ all hell broke loose!”

All the while Rutherford had been speaking, the face of Old Jake had been constantly before his eyes, the words
crazy
and
deep
, fixing the images of the phantom and the old man firmly in his mind. He saw Aunt Ruby slipping up on Old Jake, and his heart welled with pity when the monster pointed his finger at her, and
killed
her.