She came of a long line of country thieves that had grown shrewd in the mountains. Velma had grown yet shrewder in town. And at last, too shrewd to trust on the common highway, had become the shrewdest inmate at the Women’s Reformatory at Aldington. Not yet twenty when she’d been first sent up, she had immediately distinguished herself by saying to a colored matron – ‘Hold this for me’ – and had shoved a tableknife with a friction-taped handle into the woman’s abdomen.
‘Will you spread a clean cloth for dinner?’ she asked Dove, ‘You’ll find one in that bureau.’
Velma spread the clean cloth with Southern variety – okra, clobber, cornbread, yams, rice, chicken, onion gravy and sweet potato pie.
But Dove had never seen anyone eat like Gross. Velma didn’t even bother to lay a knife, fork and spoon for him. He went at everything with forefinger and thumb, being particularly careful, every time he dropped a fried egg, to get every bit of it on his pants.
‘Mighty fine chicken, m’am,’ Dove congratulated her. The chicken was fine, the yams were dandy, the gravy was great and the clobber was super. Unluckily the small reddish dust had gotten into the food as into everything, so it all came to a single dish: rubber. Gross liked the taste of rubber. When you work with rubber you not only eat rubber, but your very dreams arrive in rubberized folds. Within twenty-four hours Dove looked and smelled like Velma the Vulcanized Woman herself. Those weren’t dead ants between his toes but only particles fallen from the Flap-Happy mold that had worked their way down his socks.
They poured the rubber and heated the glue, forged the forms and painted the skins, glued the feathers and hung the O-Daddies and sorted the seconds and burned the culls and filled the orders; and never went dancing down below.
Velma taught Dove never to put a Cupid’s Arrow on a King Tut rack nor to let an O-Daddy wander among the Happy Hannahs. When the sun beat steadily they risked hanging a line to dry against an outside wall; when it rained or was overcast the big room was full of skins hanging in rainbowed rows above the dark gas range’s flame.
In the evening the three outcasts sat in the dark of their old strange house, hearing human voices rise and fall. There was an amusement park at the end of the wide-palmed street, letting laughter come to them from a place where human life was lived out on rollercoasters; while they endured the rubberish dark of O-Daddyland like three ghosts yet to be born.
‘Son,’ Gross always began his nightly lecture with the same phrase, ‘Son, not all the O-Daddies are hanging on a line. There’s one sitting right here in this rocker. Would you mind either turning the lamp down a bit or else not look directly at me? I have a little aversion to being examined. Thank you.’ Dove turned a bit to one side.
‘Son, you look to me like a man of two great weaknesses, either one of which may ruin you. Women and whiskey, in that order. Take my advice, if you don’t want to wind up being one more Barney Google like me. First thing you ought to do is throw away that shirt. Never wear light colors. They catch the sun. Blue is best – mailman blue. The whole secret of not ending up an O-Daddy on a line is to look as much like a mailman as possible – who knows what the mailman looks like? Who’d recognize him if he changed suits? Get a cap with a peak that shadows the eyes. Wear glasses that throw back the light. Grow a mustache but don’t go into bars. If you must drink, lock the door and drink by yourself. Conviviality leads to fist-fighting, fist-fighting leads to rage. Look out for rage, son. People never forget a man they’ve seen in a rage.
‘My own appearance was always such that I didn’t have to lose my temper to catch attention. I always fitted into the by-stander’s memory, so that five minutes after a rumble, my description, complete to hat-size, would be at headquarters.
‘Watch out for the inclination to trust, particularly toward women. It leads to giving. Look out for that one, it’s the worst of a bad lot.
‘Watch out for flowers, watch out for trust, watch out for women, watch out for giving. In short, don’t give flowers to a woman you trust.’
‘He’ll come to the point in time. Just have patience,’ Velma assured Dove.
‘No woman since the world began,’ the old man kept trying to say what he meant, ‘ever accepted a flower as no more than a token of affection. Does she seem pleased at a gift so humble? “What, a daisy for me?” Why shouldn’t she be pleased? it’s a down payment on your hand, your heart and your brain and she knows that even though you don’t. If you owe her a daisy you owe a box of candy, and how long do you think you’re going to get by just on candy and flowers? Where’s the perfume? Progress, that’s what women want in a man. What is more natural than the step from perfume to wristwatch – now let’s see how long you can keep from mentioning engagement rings. Your very silence betrays that you’re considering marriage and are only trying to get up the courage to ask. Son, you’re good as done. You’re in hock to a house, a car, children, maid – you give up your freedom and there still hasn’t been a word said about what does she owe you?
‘Why, that goes without saying – she’s giving you her virginal white body, isn’t she? Don’t throw it up to her that you’re giving her your little pink body, that’s cad’s work – no, son, you’ll never get your daisy back. But you’ll find that appeasing that little white body is a job like any job except that you don’t get three weeks off with pay. If you try, your friends will fill in for you. Why do you think they pay me two dollars for a contraceptive that tickles if it isn’t because they’re afraid that the cat is starting to slip?
‘“Look for the woman” they tell us – but I take it one step farther than that. “Look at them sperms” is what I advise. Son, did you know that under a microscope every sperm looks exactly like his old man when the old man has a jag on? There he is, the old man all over again, with no particular place to go or if he has, he’s forgotten it. Just staggering from pole to pole, up one street and down the next, can hardly tell one door from the next, just hoping somebody he knows will let him in. Really not doing anybody any harm. All of a sudden a lady sperm – looks exactly like the old lady opens a door off the alley ’n whispers – “in here, Jack.” Pulls him in and latches it. Now you know where all our troubles start?
‘Look out for love, look out for trust, look out for giving. Look out for wine, look out for daisies and people who laugh readily. Be especially wary of friendship, Son, it can only lead to trouble. And it isn’t your enemies who’ll get you deepest into the soup, it’s your friends.
‘You might keep that in mind if you’re ever called upon to point the finger of accusation and say “that’s the very man.” Remember that you have to be absolutely certain, son. If you have the leastest leastest doubt it’s your highest highest duty to say you’re not absolutely absolutely sure. Do you realize that if you sent a man to prison on a wrong identification you’re a criminal yourself, little better than a hardened murderer?’
‘He’s cutting in a little closer now,’ Velma observed.
‘Why,’ for once Gross spoke directly to her, ‘doesn’t an old man have the right to die in his own bed?’
The vulcanized woman made no reply. Her chair was vacant. She had tiptoed out just to make the old man sweat in anxiety – ‘Where’d she go? How long she been gone? Why didn’t you speak up?’
‘I think she’s in the bedroom, mister,’ Dove told him, and waited dutifully for the rest of the speech while Gross went to listen at the bedroom door. Satisfied that she hadn’t yet crossed the frontier, he returned to his rocking chair; but had no more to say that evening.