The man looked down at him and smiled.
“Where was you thinking of putting that, white boy?”
Vivaldo said nothing. He slowly began pulling on his trousers. The man was very dark and very big, nearly as big as Vivaldo, and, of course, at that moment, in much better fighting condition.
The girl sat on the edge of the bed, putting on her shoes. There was silence in the room except for her low, disjointed, intermittent humming. He couldn’t quite make out the tune she was humming and this, for some insane reason, drove him wild.
“You might at least have waited a couple of minutes,” Vivaldo said. “I never even got it in.”
He said this as he was buckling his belt, idly, out of some dim notion that he might thus, in effect, reduce the fine. The words were hardly out of his mouth before the man had struck him, twice, palm open, across the face. Vivaldo staggered backward from the bed into the corner which held the sink and a water glass went crashing to the floor.
“Goddamnit,” said the girl, sharply, “ain’t no need to wreck the joint.” And she bent down to pick up the bits of glass. But it also seemed to Vivaldo that she was a little frightened and a little ashamed. “Do what you going to do,” she said, from her knees, “and get him out of here.”
Vivaldo and the man stared at each other and terror began draining Vivaldo’s rage out of him. It was not merely the situation which frightened him: it was the man’s eyes. They stared at Vivaldo with a calm, steady hatred, as remote and unanswerable as madness.
“You goddamn lucky you didn’t get it in,” he said. “You’d be a mighty sorry white boy if you had. You wouldn’t be putting that white prick in no more black pussy, I can guarantee you that.”
Well, if that’s the way you feel, Vivaldo wanted to say, why the hell don’t you keep her off the streets? But it really seemed better — and it seemed, weirdly enough, that the girl was silently trying to convey this to him — to say as little as possible.
So he only said, after a moment, as mildly as he could. “Look. I fell for the oldest gag in the business. Here I am. Okay. What do you want?”
And what the man wanted was more than he knew how to say. He watched Vivaldo, waiting for Vivaldo to speak again. Vivaldo’s mind was filled suddenly with the image of a movie he had seen long ago. He saw a bird dog, tense, pointing, absolutely silent, waiting for a covey of quail to surrender to panic and fly upward, where they could be picked off by the guns of the hunters. So it was in the room while the man waited for Vivaldo to speak. Whatever Vivaldo might say would be turned into an opportunity for slaughter. Vivaldo held his breath, hoping that his panic did not show in his eyes, and felt his flesh begin to crawl. Then the man looked over at the girl, who stood near the bed, watching him, and then he slowly moved closer to Vivaldo. When he stood directly before Vivaldo, his eyes still driving, it seemed, into Vivaldo’s as though he would pierce the skull and the brain and possess it all, he abruptly held out his hand.
Vivaldo handed him the wallet.
The man lit a cigarette which he held in the corner of his mouth as he deliberately, insolently, began looking through the wallet. “What I don’t understand,” he said, with a fearful laziness, “is why you white boys always come uptown, sniffing around our black girls. You don’t see none of us spooks downtown, sniffing around your white girls.” He looked up. “Do you?”
Don’t be so sure, Vivaldo thought, but said nothing. But this had struck some nerve in him and he felt himself beginning to be angry again.
“Suppose I told you that that was my sister,” the man said, gesturing toward the girl. “What would you do if you found me with your sister?”
I wouldn’t give a damn if you split her in two, Vivaldo thought, promptly. At the same time this question made him tremble with rage and he realized, with another part of his mind, that this was exactly what the man wanted.
There remained at the bottom of his mind, nevertheless, a numb speculation as to why this question should make him angry.
“I mean, what would you do to me?” the man persisted, still holding Vivaldo’s wallet and looking at him with a smile. “I want you to name your own punishment.” He waited. Then: “Come on. You know what you guys do.” And then the man seemed, oddly, a little ashamed, and at the same time more dangerous than ever.
Vivaldo said at last, tightly, “I haven’t got a sister” and straightened his tie, willing his hands to be steady, and began looking around for his jacket.
The man considered him a moment more, looked at the girl, then looked down to the wallet again. He took out all the money. “This all you got.”
In those days Vivaldo had been working steadily and his wallet had contained nearly sixty dollars. “Yes,” Vivaldo said.
“Nothing in your pockets?”
Vivaldo emptied his pockets of bills and change, perhaps five dollars in all. The man took it all.
“I need something to get home on, mister,” Vivaldo said.
The man gave him his wallet. “Walk,” he said. “You lucky that you can. If I catch your ass up here again, I’ll show you what happened to a nigger I know when Mr. Charlie caught him with Miss Anne.”
He put his wallet in his back pocket and picked up his jacket from the floor. The man watched him, the girl watched the man. He got to the door and opened it and realized that his legs were weak.
“Well,” he said, “thanks for the buggy ride,” and stumbled down the stairs. He had reached the first landing when he heard a door above him open and quick, stealthy footsteps descending. Then the girl stood above him, stretching her hand over the banister.
“Here,” she whispered, “take this,” and leaned dangerously far over the banister and stuffed a dollar into his breast pocket. “Go along home now,” she said, “hurry!” and rushed back up the stairs.
The man’s eyes remained with him for a long time after the rage and the shame and terror of that evening. And were with him now, as he climbed the stairs to Rufus’ apartment. He walked in without knocking. Rufus was standing near the door, holding a knife.
“Is that for me or for you? Or were you planning to cut yourself a hunk of salami?”
He forced himself to stand where he was and to look directly at Rufus.
“I was thinking about putting it into you, motherfucker.”
But he had not moved. Vivaldo slowly let out his breath.
“Well, put it down. If I ever saw a poor bastard who needed his friends, you’re it.”
They watched each other for what seemed like a very long time and neither of them moved. They stared into each other’s eyes, each, perhaps, searching for the friend each remembered. Vivaldo knew the face before him so well that he had ceased, in a way, to look at it and now his heart turned over to see what time had done to Rufus. He had not seen before the fine lines in the forehead, the deep, crooked line between the brows, the tension which soured the lips. He wondered what the eyes were seeing — they had not been seeing it years before. He had never associated Rufus with violence, for his walk was always deliberate and slow, his tone mocking and gentle: but now he remembered how Rufus played the drums.