But he had been alive, electric, and hungry.
Now he sat in a diner, and she had not come.
He clutched himself and rocked back and forth, like an old Hebrew praying,dovening for deliverance. That was the word … deliverance.
The tremors passed, and before fresh ones could replace, he slid out of the booth and paid the fat man who must be Puffy, of Puffy’s Diner.
The cab deposited him in front of Nancy’s leprous-faced brownstone. Inside. The dark hall, the odor of dead rodents, peculiarly the smell of cosmoline, wetted burned paper. Nancy.
The door was locked. He knocked then knocked louder then called then screamed and there was no answer. He took two steps backward long legged and hit the door with his shoulder. He was a small man; the door hung on years-rusted hinges, silent and discolored. He was thrown back.
His shoulder was bruised raw when the door finally flew open inward and banged against the inner wall. The building was quiet, had no one heard? It was possible; this was a neighborhood of fear. Many things can not be heard if the incentive is great enough.
The smell of sweetness. She had been tooting pot.
More. The mugginess of bedsheets. The closed dry of dust settled in gloom.
He raced through the railroad flat and she was there, in the bed with a man. His tousled hair was all that showed from under the sheet. Caulder pulled back the filthy covering. They were both fully dressed. So it had been a shoot-up session, no sex. It had never been that way with him, he mused. Nancy felt gratified to have a well-known, respectable psychiatrist making love to her; that had been something else. Desire was killed by the drug.
He had to have a fix!
He pulled her out of the bed by her hair and dragged her across the room, into the hall, down to the bathroom. There he propped her on the toilet, and threw great handfuls of water in her face. It seemed to have no effect on her. He slapped her wrists, massaged pressure points at her neck and shoulders.
Finally, the girl’s eyes opened to thin slits.
The pupils had a message. The message was simple: I’m gone. “How many caps?” he demanded. “How many, Nancy! I waited for you … you knew I needed a shot, and you — ”
He was speechless. She had shot up with a customer, leaving him to withdraw and suffer.
“H-hi Pops,” she mumbled. Her eyes closed.
“Nancy! Nancy, I need a fix,now! I’ve got pain, Nancy.”
Eyes closed, the thirsty lips opened. “Tough, pops.”
“Nancy, where is it, where’s the stuff, Nancy! I’ve got to — Nancy, I’ve got to have a fix, Nancy!” His hands were busy, his terror rising as the pains shot through his stomach, as the lost Arctic chill came to him again. She laughed lightly and lolled against the tiled wall.
There was nothing he could do. So he searched. With the frantic wildness of a man who is dying painfully, he searched. The man in the bed did not stir. He was far out on a cloud of goldspun and nothing. When Caulder finally came back to the bathroom, he was convinced that if she had a boodle somewhere —
He would never find it.
“Tough, Pops,” she said, softly, nastily. “Guess you’ll have t’ tough it out solo.” Her eyes closed again, and she rolled her forehead against the chill tile of the bathroom wall.
Then Walter Caulder was slumped on the rim of the bathtub, crying. Holding his head in his feverish hands, his grey, floss hair falling over the fingers, he wept softly, because it hurt and it hurt so much he could not help himself.
From far away he heard her say, “Oh, Doc, don’t do that, for Chrissakes! I — I ain’t got any more snow here … I’m — I’m sorry, s-sorry … he came over at the last minute …Doc! Please! Look, why don’t we go inna other room an’ get together, we can — ”
He grabbed her by the shoulders, his hands biting into her flesh: “Where can I get a fix? Where can I get a shot, damn you!”
He shook her; her blonde hair swirled about her like amputated bird’s wings, and she gasped, “I d-don’t kn-know, I d-don’t know, maybe Spadesville, there’s u-usually a g-game going in one of the garages on Ardmore Boule-boulevard.”
He pressed her, and she came up with a number, an approximation of a remembrance, and he left her, slumped on the toilet, her head hanging, her senses plastered to the ceiling, whispering to them high above, “You was nice, Doc, so n-nice, stay with m-me …”
7103 was wrong.
It was 7003, and the garage was silent when they saw his white skin. They held the dice, bleached squarenesses on black flesh, the ebony of the dice-eyes matching their own hues.
“What you want?” the bearded one asked, settling back on his haunches.
Walter Caulder took three steps into the garage, and the pains hit with mule-kick ferocity. He staggered, clutching his belly, and stumbled clangingly up against the side of the Oldsmobile. He squealed in anguish, and the dice players stared with open wonder.
“Hey, Andus,” the bearded one rib-elbowed the man beside him, “close them damn doors before we got the whole damn neighb’hood in heah.” Andus rose and, catlike, glided around Walter Caulder, aswim in a sea of pain.
“Who is he, Beard?” asked a little yellow-skinned Negro on the far side of the craps circle.
Beard turned abruptly and gave the little man a hard glance. “Now how the hell am I supposed 'ta know who he is? You think I know ev’body in this yeer city?”
Walter Caulder’s mouth was filled with alkali dust.
“H-help m-me …” he mouthed the words with rubber lips and splintered tongue.
The Beard jerked a thumb in signal and two of the gamblers went to Caulder. They lowered him to the cement and one of them pulled a flask from an inner coat pocket. He unscrewed the jigger cap and offered it to Caulder’s mouth.
“N-not th-that …” Caulder whimpered. “Shot, I need a … a …”
He did not finish the sentence, and there was no need for him to finish the sentence, because the sentence had been finished years before by another mouth and by many mouths down through the hungry, devastated years.
They stared at one another.
“Who ah you, Tom?” The Beard asked.
“I’m a guy who, who c-can p-pay for a shot, I n-need a, I’m dying please PLEASE!”
The sweat was cold as crystal tombstones on his face. His skin crawled. His belly heaved. His legs ached. His eyes burned. There were rivets in his nerve ends.
“I think you with the nabs, Tom,” The Beard ventured, huskily.
“Damn you, d-damn you black — ”
The line had been drawn, the chip had been put to the shoulder, the name of the Mother had been defiled, the war between the worlds had begun. “You don’t call things down here’n Spadesville, ofay Tom. You don’t call, ’cause we beat you futzin’ head in.”
And the little yellow-skinned gambler took a sharp, short step across the circle. The sharp Italian point of his highly polished black shoe caught Walter Caulder high on the right cheek, tearing a raw gash in his chilled flesh.
Caulder did not feel the blow.
Yet there was a basic embarrassment in him: he had no hatred of Negroes. He was not prejudiced. It had been the aching driving gimme hunger of the shoot he had wanted, and it had conditioned a reflex he had never known he possessed.
“Listen to me, l-listen, I — I — ”
How to explain to black men that you don’t hate black men. When the wrong impression has exploded, how do you cover it, send it away like spring mist?
They beat him terribly, cut him with small knives that left tearing hurts on the surface of him, and threw him into a gutter.
Someone urinated on him.
When the army ants had feasted on his corroded flesh; when the hobnailed boot of the moon had ceased to step and step on the exposed grey of his brain; when the spoon had quit its rhythmic clink-clink-clink in the coffee cup, he saw the red light.