I and I guess Robert, too, were in ecstasy!
We had to stop at one more farm to pick up a last milk can before going on to the dairy. “A fuckin’ little one-can shit hole — and that can ain’t never fuckin’ full. I’m not supposed to take the fucker if it ain’t fuckin’ full. But I’m a soft-hearted son-of-a-bitch; so I do it. Now your daddy — ” this to Robert — “he always kept a hell of a good-lookin’ farm. And your mom’s done pretty well by it since. But this ol’ shit hole we’re goin’ to now ain’t worth a damned dog turd!” The farmhouse we came up to, though, looked as neat as it could — if a lot smaller than Robert’s. Unshaven, with bib-overalls and long johns beneath them, a heavyset, elderly man came out; and without noticeable transition Eric managed once more to put his profanations aside. “Hello, sir. How you doin’ this mornin’, sir?”
“Hi, there, Eric. You want me to give you a hand up with that can — ?”
“No, sir!” Opening the door, Eric leapt from the cab. “No, sir — you don’t have to do nothin’ with it, sir. I’ll get it — that’s what they pay me for. So you just relax.”
From our seat in the cab, we heard Eric in the back, the can first rolling across gravel, then rasping on the truck bed.
From inside, we heard Eric call down from the truck, “How’s Bubba doin’?”
And from the ground the farmer answered, “Why, he’s doin’ just fine.”
“You tell ’im,” Eric said, “not to get in no trouble with that motorcycle.”
“Now, I’ll tell ’im just that.”
This apparently was some joke that set the two of them off laughing.
“You tell ’im,” Eric declared. “You tell Bubba that Eric said you was to tell him that!” (Eric pronounced his own name as one diphthongized, down-swung syllable that, for all the slurring of the Negro speech around me in Harlem I could sometimes assume, would have been beyond me.) “You tell ’im, I say!” They were still laughing. “Tell ’im! Don’t you forget it, now, neither!”
“Oh, I’ll teil ’im!”
Eric’s boots scudded on gravel. (In my mind I saw him vault.) A moment on, cap in hand, he swung up into the cab and slammed the door. “Bye, now, sir!” With one hand back and the other front, he tugged it over spiky hair the color of light coffee. “Bye, now — so long, sir!”
“Bye, Eric!”
Eric grabbed wheel and gearshift.
The motor revved beneath.
We started again.
“Now we’re fuckin’ outta here, boy — like pig-balls on butter! Let’s get the fuck on the road!”
We jogged along awhile. Eric kept up his banter. I remembered Robert’s awkward curses yesterday. By now Eric’s sentences seemed just as awkward when curses were missing. For, during this stop, I’d heard, as I hadn’t at Robert’s farm, the faint halts and false starts you couldn’t really write without burlesquing, that nevertheless told where a fuckin’ or a shit dearly yearned to fall.
“You know — ” We went round another curve, with Eric’s near elbow getting my ribs and me pushing Robert against the door (tools rattled in metal below the seat) — “when I throwed up the goddamn Navy an’ come the fuck home (Oh, they fuckin’ wanted me to stay but I told ’em to get fucked, I knew where I fuckin’ lived!), I shoulda gone the hell to Texas and been a goddamn cowboy, herdin’ fuckin steers and ropin’ fuckin’ calves — then I bet you little scumbags would really like shittin’ around with a wild-ass bastard like me!” He put his head back and sang out: “Whoopie-Fuckin’-Tye-Yi-Yippy-Shit-Ass-Yay! Well, now, hey — ” His gold-stubbled cheeks filled with air as he whistled, then his chin came down as we bounced over another stretch of broke-up macadam — “I bet I’d be a fuckin’ movie star by now, with fuckin’ fine music every time I turned the knob — that would be a goddamn sight better than rustlin’ fuckin’ milkcans for a bunch of shit-machine cows, you better believe your fuckin’ balls when they spit on ya’!” We bounced down the straightaway. “But it ain’t that fuckin’ bad around here, now, is it? You an’ your ma keep comin’ the fuck back.”
A few minutes later Eric pulled over again.
“Now don’t you two little peter-heads get all excited — we ain’t got there yet. I’m just takin’ a fuckin’ break to do somethin’ you can’t do for me.” He opened the cab door, dropped down to the shoulder, strode a few feet into the undergrowth, half squatted, then stood again. Rasping down his zipper, he hauled himself out, testicles and all, and began to spray grandly, goldenly, over leaves and logs and paired birch saplings. “Pick up the fuckin’ milk, then have to jump out an’ take me a fuckin’ leak — I do it ever’ mornin’, and ever’ mornin’ I’m goddamned for a sinner if I don’t fuckin’ forget.” Swinging his stream around, he turned to us, grinning.
The amber arc glittered through coppery leaf-dapple.
“You two assholes wanna come down here and have us a pee fight? I’ll drown the both of ya’, one ball tied behind my fuckin’ back!”
“No!” declared Robert, happy as I was. “You’d win!”
“I fuckin’ wouldn’t!” Eric protested as his stream lost its arch. Like Vladdy back in school, Eric was uncircumcised. Unlike Vladdy’s though, Eric’s cuff hung loose down over his knuckles, so that as it slid forward, the top interfering with his water, he splattered like a bright umbrella. Then the umbrella closed. Urine dribbled from his fist, wet his grimed fingers, dripped to the dried mud on his boot toe. “’Cause I just ran out of fuckin’ piss, an’ I don’t got me no more!” Shaking himself, he stuffed himself back in his pants. “Come on now, the two of you little bastards. Get on down here and irrigate some trees. I don’t want you sons-o’-bitches havin’ to go when there ain’t no fuckin’ place to do it at.”
So we got down and left our puddles in the ditch beyond the shoulder, then returned to the cab, where Eric sat, elbows on the wheel, sucking at his knuckles, biting at his cuticles. He glanced down at us from under his red visor.
“Get the fuck back on up here, now, ’fore I wail the piss out of you little shit-asses!” His grin held not a jot of aggression.
We climbed back into the cab, and Eric drove again. He talked about “… Jew-bastards. I guess some of them is as bad as ever’body says. But I knowed some that weren’t a hell of a lot worse than anybody else — though if I said that in the fuckin’ bar, some guy’d wanna pull me apart and shit on the pieces.” He talked about “wops.” There were, I guess, a lot of them in the Navy with him. “I just never understood the fuckers, is all. They all them Catholics an’ stuff,” and he shook his head. He talked about “niggers — Ooops!… Oh, shit! I done forgot. His momma told me, yesterday on the phone — you a nigger too, now, ain’t you? — to get me all prepared, so I wouldn’t start talkin’ no nigger shit: like this. Well, you sure as hell don’t look it — you could be a little wop kid, though. Or one of them Puerto Ricans. Well, now, it’s gonna always be like that with me: I open my fuckin’ mouth an’ I’m gonna stick my big toe — cowshit an’ all — right in it, till that ol’ fucker come out my fuckin’ ear like ya’ goddamn dick left hangin’ out ya’ pants and you don’t even know it!” He hauled on the wheel, went round a leafy curve, and leaned over to show us the side of his head. “See it there, that fucker wigglin’ out my ear? You look, you can see it. There it fuckin’ goes! Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle!” But, whether it was a penis or a toe, Robert and I were beyond offense and simply howled.