The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (8 page)

‘Good friend?’

‘Good enough to spend the night with him.’

‘I just wondered--Which direction is Main Street? ’ She pointed to the right Two blocks down this way.’ Jake combed his mustache with his fingers and started off. He jingled the seventy-five cents in his hand and bit his lower lip until it was mottled and scarlet. The three Negroes were walking slowly ahead of him, talking among themselves. Because he felt lonely in the unfamiliar town he kept close behind them and listened. The girl held both of them by the arm. She wore a green dress with a red hat and shoes. The boys walked very close to her. ‘What we got planned for this evening?’ she asked.

‘It depend entirely upon you, Honey,’ the tall boy said. ‘Willie and me don’t have no special plans.’

She looked from one to the other. ‘You all got to decide.’

‘Well--’ said the shorter boy in the red socks. ‘Highboy and me thought m-maybe us three go to church.’

The girl sang her answer in three different tones. ‘O-K-And after church I got a notion I ought to go and set with Father for a while--just a short while.’ They turned at the first corner, and Jake stood watching them a moment before walking on.

The main street was quiet and hot, almost deserted. He had not realized until now that it was Sunday--and the thought of this depressed him. The awnings over the closed stores were raised and the buildings had a bare look in the bright sun. He passed the New York Cafe. The door was open, but the place looked empty and dark. He had not found any socks to wear that morning, and the hot pavement burned through the thin soles of his shoes. The sun felt like a hot piece of iron pressing down on his head. The town seemed more lonesome than any place he had ever known. The stillness of the street gave him a strange feeling. When he had been drunk the place had seemed violent and riotous. And now it was as though everything had come to a sudden, static halt.

He went into a fruit and candy store to buy a paper. The Help-Wanted column was very short. There were several calls for young men between twenty-five and forty with automobiles to sell various products on commission. These he skipped over quickly. An advertisement for a truck-driver held his attention for a few minutes. But the notice at the bottom interested him most It read: Wanted--Experienced Mechanic. Sunny Dixie Show. Apply Corner Weavers Lane & 15th Street.

Without knowing it he had walked back to the door of the restaurant where he had spent his time during the past two weeks. This was the only place on the block besides the fruit store which was not closed. Jake decided suddenly to drop in and see Biff Brannon.

The cafe was very dark after the brightness outside.

Everything looked dingier and quieter than he had remembered it. Brannon stood behind the cash register as usual, his arms folded over his chest. His good-looking plump wife sat filing her fingernails at the other end of the counter.

Jake noticed that they glanced at each other as he came in.

‘Afternoon,’ said Brannon.

Jake felt something in the air. Maybe the fellow was laughing because he remembered things that had happened when he was drunk. Jake stood wooden and resentful. ‘Package of Target, please.’ As Brannon reached beneath the counter for the tobacco Jake decided that he was not laughing. In the daytime the fellow’s face was not as hard-looking as it was at night He was pale as though he had not slept, and his eyes had the look of a weary buzzard’s.

‘Speak up,’ Jake said. ‘How much do I owe you?’

Brannon opened a drawer and put on the counter a public-school tablet. Slowly he turned over the pages and Jake watched him. The tablet looked more like a private notebook than the place where he kept his regular accounts. There were long lines of figures, added, divided, and subtracted, and little drawings. He stopped at a certain page and Jake saw his last name written at the corner. On the page there were no figures--only small checks and crosses. At random across the page were drawn little round, seated cats with long curved lines for tails. Jake stared. The faces of the little cats were human and female. The faces of the little cats were Mrs. Brannon.

‘I have checks here for the beers,’ Brannon said. ‘And crosses for dinners and straight lines for the whiskey. Let me see--’ Brannon rubbed his nose and his eyelids drooped down. Then he shut the tablet. ‘Approximately twenty dollars.’

‘It’ll take me a long time,’ Jake said. ‘But maybe you’ll get it’

‘There’s no big hurry.’

Jake leaned against the counter. ‘Say, what kind of a place is this town?’

‘Ordinary,’ Brannon said. ‘About like any other place the same size.’

‘What population?’

‘Around thirty thousand.’

Jake opened the package of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette. His hands were shaking. ‘Mostly mills?’

That’s right. Four big cotton mills--those are the main ones. A hosiery factory. Some gins and sawmills.’

‘What kind of wages?’

‘I’d say around ten or eleven a week on the average--but then of course they get laid off now and then. What makes you ask all this? You mean to try to get a job in a mill?’

Jake dug his fist into his eye and rubbed it sleepily. ‘Don’t know. I might and I might not.’ He laid the newspaper on the counter and pointed out the advertisement he had just read. ‘I think I’ll go around and look into this.’

Brannon read and considered. ‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve seen that show. It’s not much--just a couple of contraptions such as a flying-jinny and swings. It corrals the colored people and mill hands and kids. They move around to different vacant lots in town.’

‘Show me how to get there.’

Brannon went with him to the door and pointed out the direction. ‘Did you go on home with Singer this morning?’

Jake nodded.

‘What do you think of him?’

Jake bit his lips. The mute’s face was in his mind very clearly.

It was like the face of a friend he had known for a long time.

He had been thinking of the man ever since he had left his room. ‘I didn’t even know he was a dummy,’ he said finally.

He began walking again down the hot, deserted street. He did not walk as a stranger in a strange town. He seemed to be looking for someone. Soon he entered one of the mill districts bordering the river. The streets became narrow and unpaved and they were not empty any longer. Groups of dingy, hungry-looking children called to each other and played games. The two-room shacks, each one like the other, were rotten and unpainted. The stink of food and sewage mingled with the dust in the air. The falls up the river made a faint rushing sound. People stood silently in doorways or lounged on steps.

They looked at Jake with yellow, expressionless faces. He stared back at them with wide, brown eyes. He walked jerkily, and now and then he wiped his mouth with the hairy back of his hand.

At the end of Weavers Lane there was a vacant block. It had once been used as a junk yard for old automobiles. Rusted pieces of machinery and torn inner tubes still littered the ground. A trailer was parked in one corner of the lot, and nearby was a flying-jinny partly covered with canvas.

Jake approached slowly. Two little younguns in overalls stood before the flying-jinny. Near them, seated on a box, a Negro man drowsed in the late sunshine, his knees collapsed against each other. In one hand he held a sack of melted chocolate.

Jake watched him stick his fingers in the miry candy and then lick them slowly.

‘Who’s the manager of this outfit?’

The Negro thrust his two sweet fingers between his lips and rolled over them with his tongue. ‘He a red-headed man,’ he said when he had finished. ‘That all I know, Cap’n.’

‘Where’s he now? ’

‘He over there behind that largest wagon.’ Jake slipped off his tie as he walked across the grass and staffed it into his pocket. The sun was beginning to set in the west. Above the black line of housetops the sky was warm crimson. The owner of the show stood smoking a cigarette by himself. His red hair sprang up like a sponge on the top of his head and he stared at Jake with gray, flabby eyes. ‘You the manager? ‘Uh-huh. Patterson’s my name.’

‘I come about the job in this morning’s paper.’

‘Yeah. I don’t want no greenhorn. I need a experienced mechanic.’

‘I got plenty of experience,’ Jake said. ‘What you ever done? ‘I’ve worked as a weaver and loom-fixer. I’ve worked in garages and an automobile assembly shop. All sorts of different things.’ Patterson guided him toward the partly covered flying-jinny.

The motionless wooden horses were fantastic in the late afternoon sun. They pranced up statically, pierced by their dull gilt bars. The horse nearest Jake had a splintery wooden crack in its dingy rump and the eyes walled blind and frantic, shreds of paint peeled from the sockets. The motionless merry-go-round seemed to Jake like something in a liquor dream.

‘I want a experienced mechanic to run this and keep the works in good shape,’ Patterson said.

‘I can do that all right.’

‘It’s a two-handed job,’ Patterson explained. ‘You’re in charge of the whole attraction. Besides looking after the machinery you got to keep the crowd in order. You got to be sure that everybody gets on has a ticket. You got to be sure that the tickets are O.K. and not some old dance-hall ticket. Everybody wants to ride them horses, and you’d be surprised what niggers will try to put over on you when they don’t have no money. You got to keep three eyes open all the time.’

Patterson led him to the machinery inside the circle of horses and pointed out the various parts. He adjusted a lever and the thin jangle of mechanical music began. The wooden cavalcade around them seemed to cut them off from the rest of the world. When the horses stopped, Jake asked a few questions and operated the mechanism himself.

‘The fellow I had quit on me,’ Patterson said when they had come out again into the lot. ‘I always hate to break in a new man.’

‘When do I start?’

Tomorrow afternoon. We run six days and nights a week--beginning at four and shutting up at twelve. You’re to come about three and help get things going. And it takes about a hour after the show to fold up for the night.’

‘What about pay?’

‘Twelve dollars.’

Jake nodded, and Patterson held out a dead-white, boneless hand with dirty fingernails.

It was late when he left the vacant lot. The hard, blue sky had blanched and in the east there was a white moon. Dusk softened the outline of the houses along the street. Jake did not return immediately through Weavers Lane, but wandered in the neighborhoods nearby. Certain smells, certain voices heard from a distance, made him stop short now and then by the side of the dusty street. He walked erratically, jerking from one direction to another for no purpose. His head felt very light, as though it were made of thin glass. A chemical change was taking place in him. The beers and whiskey he had stored so continuously in his system set in a reaction. He was sideswiped by drunkenness. The streets which had seemed so dead before were quick with life. There was a ragged strip of grass bordering the street, and as Jake walked along the ground seemed to rise nearer to his face. He sat down on the border of grass and leaned against a telephone pole. He settled himself comfortably, crossing his legs Turkish fashion and smoothing down the ends of his mustache. Words came to him and dreamily he spoke them aloud to himself.

Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty. Yeah.

It was good to talk. The sound of his voice gave him pleasure.

The tones seemed to echo and hang on the air so that each word sounded twice. He swallowed and moistened his mouth to speak again. He wanted suddenly to return to the mute’s quiet room and tell him of the thoughts that were in his mind.

It was a queer thing to want to talk with a deaf-mute. But he was lonesome.

The street before him dimmed with the coming evening.

Occasionally men passed along the narrow street very close to him, talking in monotones to each other, a cloud of dust rising around their feet with each step. Or girls passed by together, or a mother with a child across her shoulder. Jake sat numbly for some time, and at last he got to his feet and walked on.

Weavers Lane was dark. Oil lamps made yellow, trembling patches of light in the doorways and windows. Some of the houses were entirely dark and the families sat on their front steps with only the reflections from a neighboring house to see by. A woman leaned out of a window and splashed a pail of dirty water into the street. A few drops of it splashed on Jake’s face. High, angry voices could be heard from the backs of some of the houses. From others there was the peaceful sound of a chair slowly rocking. Jake stopped before a house where three men sat together on the front steps. A pale yellow light from inside the house shone on them. Two of the men wore overalls but no shirts and were barefooted. One of these was tall and loose-jointed. The other was small and he had a running sore on the corner of his mouth. The third man was dressed in shirt and trousers. He held a straw hat on his knee. ‘Hey,’ Jake said. The three men stared at him with mill-sallow, dead-pan faces. They murmured but did not change their positions. Jake pulled the package of Target from his pocket and passed it around. He sat down on the bottom step and took off his shoes. The cool, damp ground felt good to his feet. ‘Working now?’

‘Yeah,’ said the man with the straw hat. ‘Most of the time.’

Jake picked between his toes. ‘I got the Gospel in me,’ he said. ‘‘I want to tell it to somebody.’

The men smiled. From across the narrow street there was the sound of a woman singing. The smoke from their cigarettes hung close around them in the still air. A little youngun passing along the street stopped and opened his fly to make water.

‘There’s a tent around the corner and it’s Sunday,’ the small man said finally. ‘You can go there and tell all the Gospel you want.’

‘It’s not that kind. It’s better. It’s the truth.’

‘What kind?’

Jake sucked his mustache and did not answer. After a while he said, ‘You ever have any strikes here?’

‘Once,’ said the tall man. They had one of these here strikes around six years ago.’