‘What she sing?’
‘Don’t Bite The Hand That’s Feeding You.’
‘They aint like you and me,’ Dove explained, ‘they’re simple people. But I could stand a worsh-off myself.’
‘You’ll get one uptown,’ Kitty promised – ‘Look – I throw like a damned man,’ and she hurled the Ivory clear across the tracks.
‘Mighty fine whip for a girl,’ Dove had to concede.
‘For a girl hell. Walter Johnson never throwed better. I’m a big-league kid from a big-league town.’
‘I never did see a real big town,’ Dove admitted, ‘full of store-bought marvels. They got them in Houston?’
‘They got ’em, but you’ll have to go shopping yourself. I go down the main stem and I’m on my way back to The Home by morning. I got a W on me, Jack.’
‘I’ll see law-folks don’t snatch you, Kitty,’ Dove promised.
‘I’ll see you get shoes and a shirt too, Red,’ she returned the favor – ‘I’ll dress you up in the finest.’
‘I’ll get you a red silk dress with a tasselly-sash ’n goldy year-rangs too.’
‘Red, what I’m trying to say is I’ll hustle for you if want me to.’
‘I’ll hustle for you too,’ he promised.
‘My God,’ the girl thought, ‘he thinks I mean I’m going to be a shoe-clerk for him. I’m going to have to straighten him out till there’s nothing left but kinks.’
Although Kitty Twist had never hustled, she knew the trade from older hands with whom she’d been institutionalized, and had run off upon the prospect of going into business for herself.
Down a side-street a sign invited them – PRISONERS’ VOLUNTEER AID SOCIETY.
‘The usual fee here is two bits,’ the ex-con at the desk confided, ‘but if you boys are short I’ll accommodate you both for that. Got two bits between you?’
‘What’s the accommodation?’ Kitty was curious.
‘One meal, one flop, one shower apiece.’
The ex-con pocketed her quarter and they followed him into the kitchen. He put two bowls of withered cole slaw before them and two cups of cold chicory coffee.
‘That’s the meal,’ he explained. ‘You still got a shower and a flop comin’.’
‘Go get your wash-off right away, Red,’ Kitty urged him as soon as she’d tasted the coffee – ‘They’re running out of well-water hereabouts.’
An old man stood under the stream letting the water trickle in and out of his navel while keeping a worried eye on a lean and vulturous creature crouched above his clothes. The vulture had just finished examining the old man’s rags and was cupping his palms to the light; then kicked the bundle off to one side without taking his eyes off his palms. He had caught something all right.
‘Extryordinary!’ the old man seemed to know what it was. ‘Extryordinary!’
The louse-runner ground his palms together under the water.
‘Them that don’t git crushed gits drowned,’ he announced with barbarous glee.
Then hovered over Dove as Dove undressed in turn.
The shower was cold but there was strong brown soap. The touch of it burned the bruise on his lip, but he scrubbed himself till his fingers went numb. The water kept getting colder and colder.
The louse-runner returned Dove’s clothes with a disappointed air. Dove asked him for a cap, and after some rummaging was presented with a battered and sunburned floater of straw. It would keep the coal out of his hair and the sun out of his eyes. He lacked the courage to ask for shoes.
Then down some wide and quiet street the pair trudged past windows curtained and shaded. Although it was only midafternoon everyone seemed asleep. They came to a playground where no children played.
‘School’s out!’ Dove decided in a shout, and made for the nearest swing. Standing spreadlegged, he got it pumping high. Kitty’s little sexless face looked up at him from below. Every time he swung past her she said, ‘We don’t have time for fooling, Red.’
He came down off the swing in a shambling run. She watched to see what was next.
The rings: around and around, toes scraping the ground, his hair in his eyes and his mouth in a shout, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’
‘I never seen anything like it.’ She decided to watch a while.
‘How’s this?’
Dove had looped his knees into the rings and was hanging head down, hat gone and hair brushing cinders and sand.
‘Just let me know when you’ve had enough, Red. I got all day.’
But his childhood had just begun and he hadn’t had nearly enough.
‘Catch me when I come down!’ he warned her from the top of a chute. And she, the wingless jay of alley and areaway, had to stand at the foot of the chute as he came down head first to prevent him from breaking his neck. He grabbed her hand and hauled her to the teeter-tawter.
‘Break your back or bust your ass,’ Kitty Twist had had enough – ‘I’m New Orleans bound myself.’
Dove sat on the useless teeter-tawter, a see-saw boy with no one to see-saw. And watched his only friend go out the playground gate. The teatless little fly-by-night outcast wandering the wild earth just to get even with everything upon it.
‘She acts like she done me a favor letting me save her life,’ Dove thought, ‘let her go.’
He pumped himself high again on the swing. He took a flyer, even faster than before, on the rings. Then climbed the highest chute in the yard. When he reached the top he was breathing hard and had strangely lost heart for sliding. He slid down at last only as a way of getting back to the ground. Stumbling with loneliness, he hurried after anyone who could keep him from being alone again. Leaving his boyhood at the top of the chute and his true manhood still unreached.
Kitty was nowhere in sight. Nobody at all down the sunstricken street. Dove wanted to run back home.
‘Here’s your hat.’ She stepped out of the shadows so softly that he knew she had been watching him.
‘I’m not yet sure you’re real, Red,’ she told him as though to explain his suspicion.
‘If I don’t ask you to prove something like that yourself,’ he told her thoughtfully, ‘then you wont have to have ask proof of me.’
‘I’ll watch it after this,’ she told him, always wary. But he was lost, she saw, in wonder of the houses lining either side of this avenue where private footpaths led to every door.
‘How many folks you figure live in jest that one place?’ he asked, pointing at one.
‘None at all,’ she informed him, ‘the sign says FOR SALE.’
After that Dove noticed many such signs on houses whose paint was beginning to crack. Weeds grew in the paths guarded by oaks that had guarded Indian trails.
In a small suburban park they came to a line of sleepy stores, in several of which no business was done any more. Kitty took him for a leisurely arm-in-arm stroll down one side of the little half-dead town and up the other.
‘You got kin-folks around here?’ Dove asked because of the way she lingered.
‘Neither chick nor child,’ she assured him, bringing him up in front of a window where sawdust lay scattered. As they watched, a musty-looking rabbit hippety-hopped from a corner, got halfway across the window and turned back to its home-corner. Kitty left Dove to conduct inspection of the areaway behind the shop and returned briefly.
‘We’ll look in here after dark,’ she reported back, ‘I’ll need a little boost. Don’t worry – I’m the best damn stinker for my size and age in the business.’
‘I can’t help you in that business, sis,’ Dove informed her, ‘account I prefer a daytime trade. Like on one of them big white boats I seen a picture of in N’wawlins.’