Once, even when the hut was less finished, when the walls were unplastered and the glass louvers hadn’t been fitted, the hut had been noisier and gayer. That was when Stephens was there. But Stephens had gone, and other boys had followed him; and now more than half the beds were empty, with bare mattresses that looked alike, and with only the newspaper and magazine pinups glued to the wall above (the yellow glue making what was printed on the other side of the paper show through) speaking of the boys who had occupied those beds.
The boys who had left were boys who had places to go back to; somewhere in the city they had mothers or aunts or women they called aunts. Those who had stayed had nowhere to go. They were like Bryant, boys spawned by the city, casually conceived, and after the back yard drama and ritual of their birth gradually abandoned, attaching themselves as they grew up to certain groups and through the groups to certain houses that offered occasional shelter or food.
Bryant grieved for Stephens. Stephens had made Thrushcross Grange a happy place. Stephens talked a lot; Stephens read books; Stephens had ideas and a lot of common sense. Little Stephens, with the funny blob of a pimply nose: funny, until he began to talk. Stephens didn’t have to stay in a place like the Grange; he had a mother and a house. But Stephens had come to the Grange because of his ideas; and that had made a lot of the boys feel better. Bryant didn’t understand all the things Stephens said; he knew only that he felt happy and safe being where Stephens was. Stephens knew how to give a man courage. And now Stephens had gone away. He hadn’t gone back to his mother’s house in the city; Bryant had checked. No one knew where Stephens had gone.
Without Stephens, and the boys who had left one by one after Stephens, Bryant didn’t like being in the Grange at night. He didn’t like being with the boys who had stayed behind. They were too much like himself; with them he felt lost. He wanted to be outside, among other people. He had the dollar the woman had given him, and some other money; and the money made him restless.
Almost as soon as he had seen the woman he had decided to take the risk and ask her for money. He wasn’t sure that she would give; she might even complain; but as soon as he had seen the fright in her face, when he had called to her, he knew it was going to be all right. The little victory had set him apart from the other boys in the hut. But then he had begun to feel that the victory might somehow turn sour, and he became nervous. He didn’t talk; he kept to himself and behaved as though something had happened to offend him.
They ate early, rice and a meat stew. When he was finished he took his plate out to the thatched lean- to at the back of the hut, dipped the plate in the bucket and put it on the wash stand. He didn’t go back inside. He walked round to the front and, avoiding the light from the doorway, went down to the road. Soon he had left the dim lights of the hut behind and was walking in the dark to the highway. He didn’t like the dark and the nighttime scuttlings and squeaks of the bush, but his excitement gave him courage. It was a three-mile walk. He walked fast and was sweating when he carne to the highway.
He knew it wouldn’t be easy to get a taxi. Thrushcross Grange had a reputation; he remembered how, in the time of Stephens, on occasions like this, they had relished that reputation and sometimes acted up to it. The cars went by, four or five a minute, and their headlights picked him out: a young black man in jeans and a striped jersey, small and venomous in appearance, with his twisted face sweated and shiny, deliberately ugly with his pigtails, the pigtails like serpents, signals of aggression. He waved and the cars didn’t stop; and there on the highway, the bush all around him, he began to feel lonely and frightened, excitement turning to a sick sensation in his stomach at the thought of the evening being lost, going sour, of having to walk back unsatisfied the way he had come.
At last a taxi stopped. It was nearly full; that was no doubt why the driver had risked stopping. He sat next to a fat woman and he could feel her shifting away from the contact of their shoulders. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the taxi turned off the highway and they came to a little town that had grown up around crossroads in the factory area. The taxi stopped near the center, at a shop with an illuminated clock, and Bryant got out.
It was just after eight. Half an hour before the evening movie shows began, half an hour before the streets grew quieter, that precious last half hour of the evening when, with the relaxed groups on the pavements, the coconut carts doing brisk business, the cafes and the rum shops, the food stands and the oyster stands below the shop eaves, even a little religious meeting going, with the neon lights, the flambeaux smoking in stone bottles, the acetylene lamps like Christmas sparklers, so many pleasures seemed possible. But Bryant was wise now; he was no longer a child. He knew that these moments were cheating. He had money, he had to spend it; it was like a wish to be rid of his money, and it went with the knowledge that it was all waste, that the day would end as it had begun.
He went into the green Chinese cafe, a barnlike old wooden building, two unshaded bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and asked for a peanut punch, banging on the counter as he did so and shouting “Ai! Ai! Ai!” for no reason, only to make a little scene, and to see the look in the eyes of the Chinese man in vest and khaki shorts behind the counter. The man hardly blinked. The peanut punch had gone rancid and bad; but Bryant didn’t spit it out. Instead, he put the waxed carton on the counter, paid, and went outside.
He thought of the movies. He had seen most of the films: in these country movie houses certain films were shown over and over. When he was younger he used to go to the interracial-sex films with Negro men as stars; they were exciting to see but depressing afterward, and it was Stephens who had told him that films like that were wicked and could break up a man. He chose the Sidney Poitier double feature. He went into the shuttered little movie house with the noisy electric fans and was alone again, the evening almost over.
In the first film Poitier was a man with a gun. Bryant always enjoyed it, but he knew it was made up and he didn’t allow himself to believe in it. The second film was For the Love of Ivy. It was Bryant’s favorite; it made him cry but it also made him laugh a lot, and it was his favorite. Soon he had surrendered to it, seeing in the Poitier of that film a version of himself that no one — really no one, and that was the terrible part — would ever get to know: the man who had died within the body Bryant carried, shown in that film in all his truth, the man Bryant knew to be himself, without the edginess and the anger and the pretend ugliness, the laughing man, the tender joker. Watching the film, he began to grieve for what was denied him: that future in which he became what he truly was, not a man with a gun, a big profession, or big talk, but himself, and as himself was loved and readmitted to the house and to the people in the house. He began to sob; and other people were sobbing with him.
The usher scrambled about, turning off the electric fans, creating a kind of silence, opening the exit doors and pulling curtains to shut out the street lights. It was quiet outside; traffic had died down. Bryant was already afraid of the emptiness, the end of the day. He had already come to the end of his money and was as poor as he had been in the morning. The excitement of money was over. The cafes would be closed when the film finished and he went outside; the rum shops would be closed; there would only be a coconut cart, more full of husks than coconuts, a few people sleeping below the shop eaves, drunks, disordered people, and an old woman in a straw hat selling peeled oranges by the light of a flambeau. There would remain the journey back, the taxi, the walk in the night along roads that would barely glimmer between walls of forest and bush. So even before the film ended he was sad, thinking of the blight that came unfairly on a man, ruining his whole life. A whole life.