The Street (23 page)

She turned away and went into the kitchen so that Bub wouldn't see the expression on her face, because she was afraid and angry and at the same time she felt sickened. She could picture him, hungry-eyed, gaunt, standing there in her room crushing the blouse between his hands.

She opened the set tubs, dumped soapflakes in—
great handfuls of them—and ran hot water on the flakes until the suds foamed up high. She almost let the water run over the top of the tub, because she stood in front of it, not moving, thinking, He's crazy. He's absolutely crazy.

Finally she shut the faucet off and poked the blouse deep into the hot, soapy water. She couldn't wear it again—not for a long time. Certainly she wouldn't wear it tonight.

BUB STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of Lutie's bedroom, watching her dress. It was nine-thirty, and he kept thinking, If she's going out so late it will be a long time before she gets back home. He didn't want her to know that he was afraid to stay in the house alone. He wished there was some way he could keep her with him without telling her he was scared.

It would be like last night all over again. He hadn't fallen asleep with the light on as he'd told her. After Supe left, he sat on the couch and finally lay down on it, but he wouldn't turn the light out because even with his eyes held tight shut he could somehow see the dark all around him. The furniture changed in the dark—each piece assumed a strange
and menacing shape that transformed the whole room.

He leaned against the door jamb, standing first on one foot and then the other in an effort to see how long he could remain on one foot without losing his balance or getting tired. Lutie picked up a lipstick and he watched her intently as she made her mouth a rosy red color. She frowned a little as she looked at herself in the mirror.

‘You look awful pretty,' he said. She had on a long black skirt that made a soft noise when she walked and a white blouse and a red scarf tied around her waist. ‘Where you going, Mom?'

‘To a dance at the Casino. I'm going to sing there tonight.'

He accepted the fact that she was going to sing with a nod of approval, because he loved to hear her sing or to hum, and he took it for granted that other people would, too. But if she was going to a dance, she wouldn't be home until late. The floor would creak and the wind would rattle the windows like something outside trying to get in at him, and he would be in the house alone. When she was here, he never heard noises like that—footsteps in the hall outside and doors that banged with a loud, clapping noise. He never woke up frightened and not knowing why he was frightened like last night. The dark didn't bother him when she was with him, for he knew all he had to do was call out and she would come to him.

‘Will you be gone very long?' he asked.

‘Not very long. I'll tuck you in bed before I go.' She turned away from the mirror. ‘You start getting undressed now, so I can turn the light out when I go out.'

He lingered in the door, watching her fasten the straps on her high-heeled red shoes, wanting to ask her not to turn the light out when she left and remembering that the bill got bigger and bigger the longer the light burned.

‘Could I read some before I go to sleep?'

‘I should say not. You go right to sleep.' And when he still stood there, holding one foot up in back of him, she walked over and patted his shoulder. ‘Hurry up, honey. I haven't got much time.'

He went toward the bathroom reluctantly and spent a long time putting on his pajamas. He examined his shoes and socks with great care as though he had never seen them before and was puzzled as to what they could be used for. He ran water in the bathroom sink and stirred it with a lackadaisical finger, watching the little ripples that formed as his finger moved back and forth, and wishing that he had come right out and told her he was afraid to stay by himself. Perhaps she would have asked him if he wanted Supe to come up and stay until she got back. Supe would come, too. Only she didn't seem to like Supe very much. He washed his face and hands, picked up his clothes, and went into the living room.

Lutie was turning back the covers on his bed and he stood in the middle of the room looking at the way the long skirt sort of flowed around her as she moved. It looked as though the bottom of it bowed up at her, and as she leaned over and then straightened up, the ends of the red sash moved briskly as though the red sash were dancing. He watched it with delight.

‘Okay,' she said. ‘I'll put my coat on while you're getting in bed.'

He lay down in the middle of the couch and looked up at the ceiling, trying to think of something that would delay her going out. When she wasn't there, he was filled with a sense of loss. It wasn't just the darkness, for the same thing happened in the daylight when he came home from school. The instant he opened the door, he was filled with a sense of desolation, for the house was empty and quiet and strange. At noon he would eat his lunch fast and go out to the street. After school he changed his clothes quickly and, even as he changed them, no matter how quick he was, the house was frightening and cold. But when she was in it, it was warm and friendly and familiar.

There was a kid in school who had to stay home five days with a toothache. He could say he had a toothache. But he wasn't sure how quickly they came on, and he wouldn't want her to know the instant she heard him mention it that he was making it up. Or a growing pain might be better—lots of the kids at school had growing pains. He was trying to decide where the growing pain would be when she came back into the room. She walked over to the hall and clicked the light on.

Then she was bending over to kiss him and he smelt the faint sweet smell of her and he hugged her with both arms and all his strength, thinking if only she would stay just long enough for him to go to sleep. It would be just a little while because he would go to sleep quickly, knowing that she was close by.

He relaxed his arms and lay down, afraid that she
might be angry if he clung to her like that, for he remembered how angry she was this morning about her blouse being wrinkled and he might wrinkle this one she had on by squeezing her so tightly. She reached toward the light by the bed and he touched her coat in a light, caressing gesture.

‘Good-bye, hon,' she said and turned the light out.

Instantly the living room was plunged into darkness. He opened his eyes wide in an effort to see something other than this swift blackness. The corners of the room were there, he knew, but he couldn't see them. They were wiped out in the dark. It made him feel as though he were left hanging in space and that he couldn't know how much space there was other than that his body occupied.

The overstuffed chair near the couch had become a bulge of darkness so that it no longer looked like a chair. It was a strange, frightening object along with the card table in front of the window and the bookcase. It was as though quick, darting hands had substituted something else in place of them just as the light went off. His eyes slowly became accustomed to the darkness and he saw that the dim light in the hall reached a little way into the living room, leaving a faint yellow square of light on the blue congoleum rug. Even that was disturbing, for he couldn't quite make out the familiar plaid pattern in the rug.

‘You won't let anyone in, will you?' Lutie asked.

He had forgotten she was still in the room and he looked in the direction of her voice, grateful to hear the sound of it. ‘No, ma'am.'

There was a strained, breathless quality in his voice,
and Lutie turned toward him. ‘Are you all right, hon?' she asked.

‘Sure.' He had hoped she would notice there was something wrong with him. Then, when she did, he suddenly didn't want her to know he was a coward about the dark and about staying alone. He thought of the hard-riding cowboys, the swaggering, brave detectives in the movies, and the big tough boys in six B in school, and he said, ‘Sure, I'm all right.'

Lutie walked toward the square of light and he saw her clearly for a moment—the shine of the hair on top of her head, the long, soft-flowing black skirt, the short, wide coat.

‘Good-bye,' she said again, and turned toward him smiling.

‘Bye, Mom,' he answered. Then the light in the hall went off. She was still there, though, because he heard her open the door and for an instant the dim light from the outside hall came into the room. He leaned toward it because it left pools of black shadows in the corners of the room, even in the small foyer. Then she closed the door.

The whole apartment was swallowed up in darkness. He listened to the sound of her key turning in the lock. Her high heels clicked as she walked down the hall. He sat up straight in order to hear better. She was going down the stairs. Her footsteps grew fainter and fainter until strain as he would he could no longer hear them.

He lay down and pulled the bedcovers up to his chin and firmly closed his eyes. They wouldn't stay closed. He kept opening them because even with his eyes shut he was aware of the dark all around him.
It had a heavy, syrupy quality—soft and thick like molasses, only black.

It was worse with his eyes open, because he couldn't see anything and he kept imagining that the whole room was changing and shifting about him. He peered into the dark, trying to see what was going on. He sat up and then he lay down again and pulled the covers over his head. There was an even stranger quality to the black under the covers. He shut his eyes and then opened them immediately afterward, not knowing what he expected to find nestling beside him under the sheets, but afraid to look and afraid not to look.

Heavy footsteps came up the stairs and he threw the covers back and sat up listening. Maybe it's Supe, he thought. The steps went past the door, on down the hall, and he lay down again disappointed. The stairs outside creaked. A light, persistent sound started in the walls, a scuttering, scampering noise that set him shivering and cowering under the covers, for he remembered the vivid stories Lil had told him about the rats and mice that ate people up.

There was a fight in the apartment next door. At first he welcomed the sound of the loud, angry voices because it shut out the sound of the rats in the walls. There was a crash of china. Something heavy landed against the wall and then plaster dropped down. He could hear it trickle down and down. The voices grew more violent and the woman screamed.

He put his fingers in his ears. The covers slipped down from his head with the movement of his arms and instantly the darkness in the room enveloped and enfolded him. He gripped the covers tight over his head
and the horrid sound of the voices and the screaming came clearly through the blanket and the sheets.

‘You black bitch, I oughtta killed you long ago.'

‘Don't you come near me. Don't you come near me,' the woman panted.

Someone threw a bottle out of a window on the fourth floor and it landed in the yard below with a tinkling sound that echoed and echoed. There was silence for a moment. A dog commenced to bark and the voices next door started again.

The woman sobbed, and as Bub listened to the sound he became more and more frightened. It was such a lonesome sound and the room quivered with it until he seemed almost to see the sound running through the dark. There was nothing around him that was familiar or that he had ever seen before. His face tightened. He was here alone, lost in the dark, lost in a strange place filled with terrifying things.

He reached up, fumbled for the light, found the switch, and turned it on. Instantly the room lay all around him—familiar, safe, just as he had always known it. He examined it with care. All of the things that he knew so well were right where they belonged—the big chair, the card table, the radio, the congoleum rug. None of it had changed. Yet in the dark these things vanished and were replaced by strange, unknown shapes.

The sobbing of the woman next door died away. From somewhere downstairs there came the sound of laughter, the clink of glasses. He lay down relaxed, no longer frightened. Mom would be mad when she
came home and found him asleep with the light on, but he couldn't turn it off again.

It occurred to him that she wouldn't mind the light being on if he could figure out some way of earning money so that he could help pay the electric bill. He frowned. She hadn't liked the shoeshine box. But there must be some other way he could make money, some way she would approve of. Finally he dropped off to sleep, still trying to think of something he could do to earn money.

At about the same time Bub was falling asleep, Lutie entered the lobby of the Casino where the smell of floor wax and dust and liquor and perfume hung heavy in the air.

At this hour the big dance hall was deserted and lifeless. The bold-eyed girls in the checkroom talked idly to each other. Their eyes constantly shifted to the thick white china plates on the shelves in front of them, as though they were fascinated by the prospect of the change that would be added to the solitary quarter and dime they had placed on the plates earlier in the evening. The rows and rows of empty coat hangers in back of them emphasized the silent, waiting look of the place.

As Lutie pushed her coat toward one of the checkroom girls, she was wondering if Bub was afraid to stay by himself and ashamed to admit it, for she remembered the sudden, frightened look on his face when she woke him up by opening the door last night.

She mechanically accepted a round white disk from the girl and put it in her pocketbook. There was something inexpressibly dreary about the Casino
when it was empty, she thought. You could see all of it for what it was worth, and it was never good to see anything like that. The red carpet on the lobby floor was worn. There were dark places on it where cigarettes had been snuffed out. The artificial palms that stood at the entrance in big brass pots were gray with dust. Even the great staircase which led to the dance floor above was badly in need of a coat of paint.