The Salt Eaters (9 page)

“Before we sit down to work out the program with the brothers from the Academy, we need to go through these folders. These are the skits and poems and some of the posters from International Women’s Day.”

He hung on to the talk around him lest he overheat too. He felt light and feverish, as though he might float away in delirium any minute, leaving thirty-one passengers stranded. Which might not be a bad idea, he was thinking, his teeth bared in a grin or a sneer, he wasn’t sure which. Too hot to care. And it had been one crummy lunch. And he was late. And he couldn’t afford to blow the extra job, the chartered bus of doctors visiting the Infirmary. And the train was taking its own sweet, mile-long time.

“Mai, change seats with Nilda and help me with this. A piece on John Henry and Kwan Cheong. The Spirit of Iron … something like that. We never did work it through.”

“The Central and Union Pacific race for profit.”

“We could do it as a mime and narrative musical for Sister of the Rice and Sister of the Yam.”

“Anything to do with metals should be done by the brothers, I think.”

“Unfortunately they’re all Black at the Academy, aren’t they? And for the Kwan character—”

“Would you care to expound a bit on that ‘unfortunately’
before Sister Palma of the Yam and Sister Cecile of the Plantain whip out their switchblade and machete, respectively?”

“You think Velma might join us? Do the music? Palma?”

“John Henry and Kwan Cheong. I’ll take the notes. Keep talking.”

Some notes, the driver, Fred Holt, thought. He mopped his face with a handkerchief. He’d like a gander at those notes. For three hours the women in the T-shirts had been fumbling with cameras, tape recorders, weird machines, clipboards, note pads, babbling about corn and rice and plutonium bombs and South Africa and Brer Rabbit and palm oil and the CIA and woodcuts. Now John Henry. If he knew a good psychiatrist to recommend to them, he would. If he could keep the sweat out of his eyes long enough, he’d like to look over those notes himself. Women.

“Look.”

He stole a glance around. The tall Indian woman who wore a man’s hat with an oily black feather stuck in the band was mashed up against the windowpane pointing up. He followed her finger, scooting down in his seat to see. A flock of birds in a low swoop over the train was sharply changing direction and heading back over the roadway as if pulled by an invisible hook.

He thought of what his buddy Porter had said the night they watched the moon walk and the shots of the earth, going through three six-packs without batting an eye. Porter talking about going to where the ice ends and the Antarctic meets the dark southern oceans of the great whales. And he had listened in a blurry way as Porter had droned on and on about dying before he ever got to see all of the earth from that view. “Only the albatross,” he’d said, like he was reciting a poem, “the albatross and the swift and the shearwater see it all at once.” And he wondered if Porter wanted to be an astronaut or a bird or what. Poor, poor bastard.

“Arrows in the sky,” the woman in the hat said, licking two fingers and smoothing the feather from its fat to its taper.

“The arrow of Ra,” someone else muttered, the one who hadn’t had too much to say since boarding in Barnwell.

He didn’t hear what the other women said, abandoning for a moment the machines they took apart, cleaned, oiled, fondled lewdly was the way he felt it, jerking them off, cranking handles, blow job on the lenses, he chuckled. They leaned into the windows and were talking all at once. What was there to say about this perfectly ordinary sight? A bunch of birds doing what birds do. Porter, though, might’ve pointed out what there was to see, what was escaping his eye. Would have made a poem out of how they ride the currents, ride sheer sunlight. Porter would have had something hip to say.

Fred Holt wiped his face again, wiped his shades, dangling them by one stem, then stuffed the damp handkerchief back into his pocket. The train was roaring in and he was alert now, not drifting, so no more need of the women, their words, their presence to anchor him. Besides, half the time they were talking Spanish or West Indian or some other language. The only one who spoke good English was the Jap, or maybe she was a Chink. Though even in regular English they rambled, interrupting each other, finishing off each other’s sentences—baffling. He hadn’t heard a word from the two fat ladies behind them in a while, rattling tin foil and juggling paper plates on their laps, determined it seemed to eat their way across country. They’d been talking at him a blue streak from the minute they got on until the colored women got on in Barnwell. So that was a blessing. He didn’t have to answer a bunch of dumb questions about how he liked being a bus driver, about the route, about where one could get a good hot meal in this or that town. They were content now to talk to each other and leave him alone.

“Ya figure epidemics then, Gracie? Have another, baked them myself.”

“My son-in-law says Legionnaires’ disease is just the beginning. He says those doctors do not know what they’re doing playing around with viruses and germs and things. Will kill us all, my son-in-law says. He works in a hospital, my son-in-law does. A matter of reap what you sow, I guess.”

“But innocent people, Gracie.”

“Chickens coming home to roost.”

“But what about the people who haven’t done anything, Gracie?”

“Date nut bread with orange peel. You must give me this recipe.”

“I don’t want to die, Gracie. I think the government should stop those doctors. Take away their licenses.”

“Tie them up with their own stethoscopes. Did I tell you what that doctor who took out my you-know-what had the nerve to say to me when I told him about all the … gas I was letting out? Most embarrassing.”

The train was thundering by, jiggling Fred Holt in his seat. Wood, coal, racks of jeeps, sealed cars with stenciled lettering revealing nothing at all about the contents. He’d heard they shipped trash from nuclear plants in cars like that. Flat cars bearing the weight of freight cars he usually saw traveling under their own steam when he did the run from St. Louis to Memphis. Dirty yellow, smudged orange, rust, gun-metal gray going by. Hear that long lonesome whistle … riding the blinds … Please please mistuh brakeman, let a po’ boy ride yo’ train … O the Rock Island Line is a mighty good … How long, how long has the evening train been gone … I’m Alabamee bound. Then a clear view. A clear view of
EAT GAS ROOMS DON’T LITTER POST NO BILLS NO TRESPASSING JESUS LOVES YOU
.

On his left up ahead a salvage yard, bathtubs and kitchen
sinks. Old men in tatters huddled around a burning trash can. One carefully spreading newspaper across another one lying down by an upturned tub. It could be the Depression again, he was thinking. The old bum on the ground could be dead, starved to death. He thought of the Depression years, of how the neighbors at night used to trade flour and beans and salt pork in the shadows of the tool sheds on the q.t., lest word get out food was around and they get hit in the head. How his father and mother would send him the back way to deliver sacks of sweet potatoes or meal to the poorer families. How the women would accept the food, say thanks and move off. How the men would drop their eyes and scuff their boots in the dirt and mumble and keep him standing there. How his own family ate with the lights off and the shades pulled down. How they wouldn’t eat at all till his father’s older brother got in from the trains, food from the dining cars wrapped in napkins and stuffed in shoe boxes. How they ate again when his father reopened the store, the platters near full, his father standing over them all with a stick and they better not grab.

A fat man with three different-colored sweaters on rushed out of a shack and chased the old bums away. Yes, it could be the Depression all over again. It is, he thought, lips drawn back. But he couldn’t afford to think too long of that, the pension-fund scandal still front-page news and all the talk about oil rationing and food shortages and his years slipping by and prices being what they are. Inflation, inflation, why you want to be so mean? I got the high-price blues and I … and I …

Porter said that pretty soon the only work the likes of them would be able to get was in those nuclear plants. “The rate those places are falling apart,” Porter had said, showing him some of the articles he was always tearing out of the papers, “they’ll only hire the old.” And Fred had had to dampen his
fingers to spread the newsprint flat and to read quickly about the plants constructed right after the War, their War; how they were rapidly coming apart now. “That way,” Porter said, putting another clipping down to read, smoothing out the crease and tearing it some, “we old workers are dead and gone before anybody can do a study about the effects of radiation on workers.” And Fred had nodded, then muttered “coldblooded,” quickly reading over the second item about a suit against a chemical plant by workers who’d left years ago and were dying of cancer.

“That’s all the good we old timers’ll be,” Porter had said, folding the articles neatly into his billfold. “Now, you watch,” pointing his bread knife in the direction of the Infirmary, “those big shots over at Transchemical’ll level that place before long. Too many agitator types over there, the educated kind, too, and they’re collecting information about conditions at the plant, its effect on our lungs, I bet. Probably making tests.” And Fred had stared out the diner window toward the building he’d been meaning to go by for the longest time for a checkup. But not if agitators hung round there. He’d had enough trouble in life.

Fred Holt fingered the bumps and grooves of the steering wheel and tried not to be sick. Tried not to think about the lunch, or about Porter. He hunched over the wheel, staring out, and dared himself to go get a checkup at the Infirmary.

Passing on his right was a huge plain of mud, red, like the deep-red mud near the river mouth behind the old house when he was in short pants, then knickers. A plain of fresh destruction, he composed, as if to report this sight to Porter. Not there when last he had this route. Stores gutted, car shells overturned, a playground of rust and twisted steel. Mounds of broken green bottle glass, rusted bedsprings, bald tires, doors off their hinges leaning in the wind, flower-pot shards and
new-looking brick and lumber strewn about but not haphazardly, as if a crew had brushed them off with profit in mind. Panes of glass up against a half-wall for pickup later, looked like. A project not long ago put up was now this pile of rubble. And in the middle of it all a crater. He specially did not want to look at that. Not in all this heat. Not with his stomach churning up the lousy lunch. No time for another rest stop. Late as hell. No way to make it by 3:10
P.M
. And them bastards just looking for the chance to dump him before pension time.

Same old number, he thought, rumbling over the tracks. Redevelopment. Progress. The master plan. Cut back in services, declare blight, run back from the suburbs and take over. There’d be no Hoover towns sprouting up here. There’d be high rises and boutiques next time through. Blondes with dogs on leashes and teenage kids on bikes in parking lots and station wagons and new street lights and. He sucked his teeth. Niggers. Compliant, movable niggers forever going for the oakie doke. He dropped his eyes into his lap and the light and the blue shadows there fed his mind’s adventures. A raid on the lumberyards. Taking over construction companies. The revolving drum of the cement mixer. Him riding shotgun on a derrick and crane. New housing going up and him going up in a glass elevator with a hard hat on. Schools, playgrounds, stores, clinics. And they, the older men the young ones were quick to call over the hill and through, would defend it all with guns.

“What’s the delay?” A voice from the middle of the bus.

Exactly. There’d been too much delay. And he meant to do his part before they wiped him out. Maybe he hadn’t done all he could to help his boy through school. Maybe he’d been too much the worried father, too much the angry father, too much the put-aside father, in those days when the boy suddenly a man and making decisions he couldn’t go with was going to jail every time he turned around. But he was nobody’s Tom, nobody’s good nigger, nobody’s sit-around-on-the-porch fool. He
was still fumbling with the gear stick as he slowly passed what had once been a lot of people’s homes. Home one minute, a crater the next. Flower boxes, stoops, lawns slipping into the maw of the mechanical monster. The bite of the hydraulic bit breaking up potsy courts and basketball courts. Over and over in fuck-you repetition. How long, how long? A gaping hole, a grave, a pit. Nothing to even pass by in a car with the grandchildren on a Sunday drive and point to and say … nothing. Nothing.

Like the home he’d known for too short a time, but a sweet time for a while. Pruitt-Igo raised up a monument one minute, blown up a volcano the next. And near the crater that had been their home was the pit that had been the elevator shaft down which he’d dropped Sen-Sen wrappers and matchbooks with phone numbers on them lest Wanda jump salty with him. And down at the bottom of the shaft the other dumpage. Eleven dead bodies. The rotted remains of bill collectors, drug dealers, wives, husbands, raped and missing girls of East St. Louis.

“What’s happenin, my man?” The musician with the horn case in his lap was getting impatient.

Exactly. What? Everything ruined and wrecked, made old and garbage before its time. He picked his way carefully through memories to keep from tripping over one that might cost him too much. Like his lunch, the chili he should’ve known better but ordered anyhow. On his last run to Memphis, he’d gone to look at his young man haunts. The bakery shut down, the hardware store that sold everything and was perfect for hanging out in to get the news boarded up, the Palace a ghost place, shreds of bills featuring Bukka White, Willy Dixon, Muddy, Bilbo hanging near-unreadable from the falling walls. Church’s Park deserted, no tents, no more music, as if Bobby Bland and B.B. had been done gone and he had no past and no future.

“Hey, my man, we’re trying to make a gig.”