10
He sat on the bar stool with his heels hooked on its chrome ring, holding his knees together stiffly to avoid touching the man next to him. “God damn right I’m a bigot,” the man was saying. “I’m a better man than any nigger I ever met.”
He was big without much black hair left on top of his skull; a man who worked with his hands and probably with his back. Grease-smeared gray trousers, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows and hair crawling on his arms. If he had tattoos they weren’t on his forearms but he looked the type.
There had been a black couple in the place: well-dressed in flaunt-it-baby outfits, the leather and the bright colors and the Afro hair. When they had left the bar the big man had turned without preamble and started talking to Pauclass="underline" “Fucking spades come in here like they own the place. You work for a living, right? I work for a living, my kids go to crummy schools, they don’t get to no summer camps — the fucking politicians ain’t worried about my kids, all they worry about is the fucking spades get the summer camps and the schools. You know how many million niggers we got on welfare you and me are supporting with our taxes? Here I read in the paper this morning some fat welfare niggers put on a demonstration march down at City Hall, you read about that?”
“No...”
“Demanding — not asking, demanding a fucking allowance for Christmas presents for their fucking bastard kids. Anybody ever send you a Christmas allowance for your kids? Christ, I work for a living and I don’t get no fancy presents for my kids, I can’t afford it, they’re lucky they get a couple toy cars and a new outfit of clothes to go to school in. And everybody always bleeding about the fucking spades, Jesus H. Christ if I hear that three-hundred-years-slavery number one more time I’m gonna strangle the son of a bitch that pitches it at me, I swear to God. They don’t just want to move in next door to you, they want to burn your fucking house down, and what happens? Some niggerlovin’ son of a bitch says we got to pay more taxes and give the spades more of our hard-earned money and let them take our jobs away from us because that way maybe they’ll be nice to us and they won’t burn my house down after all. Well I’m tellin’ you” — he leveled a finger at Paul — “it’s all a crock of shit and any spade bastard tries to toss a brick through my window is gonna get his nigger hide blown in a lot of pieces. I got a legal registered shotgun by my front door and I see any black son of a bitch prowling around my place he’s gonna get killed first and asked questions later. You got to get tough with the bastards, it’s the only thing they understand.”
A month ago Paul would have tried to find a way to show him it wasn’t that simple, wasn’t that cut-and-dried. Now he was no longer sure the man wasn’t right. Permissive societies were like permissive parents: they produced hellish children.
He thought bitterly, A man ought to be able to keep a few illusions...
Finally the man looked at the revolving clock above the bar, drained his beer and left. Paul ordered his third gin and tonic and sat rotating the glass between his palms, seeking something to look at. There were five booths along the wall behind him; two were occupied by couples who seemed to be arguing in tense whispers. A big woman sat alone in the front booth watching the street; now and then she would turn to signal the bartender and Paul had glimpses of a puffy face, too old and ravaged to go with the blonde-dyed hair. She kept getting up and putting coins in the jukebox by the door; the room vibrated and Paul wondered why saloon jukeboxes inevitably emphasized the heavy bass thumpings.
All I’d have to do is go over and say, ‘Mind if I sit down?’
He didn’t; he knew he wouldn’t.
Once she even stopped on her way back to the booth and stared straight at him. He dropped his eyes and had an impression of her shrugging and turning away. When he looked up she was sliding into the booth, buttocks writhing, the cotton dress stretched tight across her fullnesses.
The bartender refilled his glass and Paul tried to strike up a conversation but the bartender wasn’t the talkative kind, or possibly something had put him in a mood. There were five or six men clustered at the far end of the bar, half-watching the television ball game, talking among themselves with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance; probably neighborhood shop managers — dry cleaners, shoe repairmen, delicatessen types — and they didn’t look as if they would welcome a stranger’s intrusion.
He paid the tab and got off the stool and swallowed the fourth drink too fast, and felt the effect of it a moment after he hit the sidewalk. The traffic on Broadway seemed to be moving too fast for his eyes to track. He had to make an effort to walk without weaving. At the corner of Seventy-fourth Street he decided to cut across town on the side street because he didn’t want all the people on Seventy-second to see him in this condition.
He was several yards into the block before the fear hit him. There was no one in sight down the entire length of the street; the shadows were sinister and the heavily massed buildings threw dangerous projections into the street — steps, awnings, parked vans: killers could be hiding behind them, or in the narrow service alleys...
He remembered the other night, his terror crossing the East Side in the Forties; he drew himself up. It’s about time to quit getting railroaded into panic. He walked forward with quicker steps; but his hand in his pocket closed around the sock-wrapped roll of coins and his bowels were knotted and it was no good pretending the soul-sucking darkness wasn’t alive with terrors. The beat of his heart was as loud as the echoes of his heels on the concrete.
At first he did not hear the movement behind him.
In the corner of his vision an apparitious shape. He did not stop or turn; he kept moving and kept his eyes straight ahead in the insane hope that if he pretended it wasn’t there it would go away. He was walking fast but he couldn’t betray his fear by breaking into a run. Life was suddenly all he had, and all he wanted. Maybe it was his imagination after all — maybe there was no one, only the echoes of his own steps, his own shadow moving across a stucco wall? Yet he did not look back, he could not. Half the long block yet to traverse, the street-lamp throwing a pool of light that made the shadows deeper.
“Hey, hold it, motherfucker.”
The voice like a blade against his spine.
Close enough to touch. Right there behind him.
“Hold up. Turn around, honkie.”
I’m hearing things it’s my imagination.
He stood bolt still in his tracks, shoulders tensed against awaited violence.
“Motherfuck, I said turn around.” It was quiet, tense — high-pitched, a little crack in it. An adolescent voice, a tone of raging bravado — bravado to mask fear.
Petrified. But: My God he’s as scared as I am!
And as Paul turned slowly to face his fear he heard the snap-blade knife open with a click and something inside him exploded like a brilliant deafening burst of discovery:
Anger.
A furious physical rage.
The adrenalin was shooting through him and he felt the heat exploding through his head; even as he came around and the attacker came in view Paul was lifting the roll of coins from his pocket, whipping his arm up overhead, stretching to smite this enemy the mightiest blow his inflamed muscles could deliver...