Now I was being a fine lad with my pal Horace, but not too fine, pulling out the bricks from the theater razement by honest sweat and toil, bored insane and almost to bed in Kosciusko. I looked down at the lobby desk from the balcony a long long time, but nobody came. It was just the old man sitting the night in the same chair, full speed ahead with his tangled stare, a silent movie of Godot even further gone into real life. Just to get a rise from him I spoke out the French title, like Harold loved to: “En Attendant Godot!” a little above normal speaking voice.
This worried the man, and he turned his head slowly around, then cocked it back at me, whose face denied anything had made a noise at all. He seemed very worried, even alarmed. Then for no good cause at all, I did my queer pantomime, slicking my eyebrows, running my tongue back and forth, my eyes big and avid, arms out as if to dive down on him. I was suddenly very angry at him for not being a woman. He was looking backward straight up at me. His arms began moving and a low rush of language I did not understand muttered from him.
I felt so good and healthy and showered, but I was using up all my potential here. My manhood was being sucked away by a dead town. My pal Horace opened the door of our room. He’d taken a nap to prepare himself for a real sleep in a minute, and gave a grogged palsy smile, feeling good too, with his body worked. I kept up the queer routine, which he always thought was a howl. He mimicked drop-kicking a homo in the groin. Horace was a bass player and quite a scholar, much better at books than I was. We passed much time mimicking the stone-dumb and depraved creatures of our state, especially the governor, who had recently suggested setting off large nuclear devices to blow open a canal way from the Tennessee River to Mobile.
“Come here. I want you to listen,” he said.
“Listen?”
“Come here.”
He took me to the window, which was open to the lukewarm Kosciusko evening, and told me not to look down, just listen.
At first I heard what I took to be just somebody mumbling on the sidewalk beneath us. Then a harmonica started up, very softly, lonely as a midnight highway dog. It was the blues, with no audience, for no money. For all my musical life, I’d never heard the blues erupt solitary and isolated like this. When the harmonica stopped, the voice went very high and strained in its grief — you couldn’t really tell whether it was a man or a woman.
“Let’s. .”
“Don’t look down,” said Horace.
“What? Why not?”
“Let’s don’t find out who it is. You don’t want to know, do you?”
I saw his point. Horace had a copy of Swann’s Way on the bed beside where he was sleeping and he was deep.
Kosciusko was a better town than we thought, if it afforded this tune at ten in the night. Maybe it was a man just released from jail, or maybe a woman just off a bus somewhere. Horace was right on, it was best not to know the source of this eerie, moaning thing. You couldn’t quite make out the words, but it had the blackstrap moan in it all right. The harmonica trailed in again, sweet and with a bit of terror in it. I grabbed the song. It was all mine. I heard something when the voice started and I could tell Horace had not caught it. Buddy, could you spare a future? This can’t be life. Then it just stopped and did not come back, like something swallowed up in a storm drain. I didn’t hear any steps going away. I looked over to shake my head, smiling, but Horace had already gone back to sleep.
I went out, closed the door, to see what more I could get from the balcony rail. Sometimes you see something that seems made for you, like a good fishing hole, and you won’t leave it although the hours prove there’s nothing there. The old man was still at his post, along with the gone tan carpet, the gone desk clerk, serried cubbyholes in a rack behind. But then, I could hardly believe it, feet in ladies’ sandals appeared, and a stretch of nice tan leg, black short-cut hair in bangs with a few strands of gray in it, and I could not question: a black long-sleeve slightly unseasonal sweater, bosoms small but prominent, and like great lamps in this stag-dark tedium. It was New York Slim, about ten years older than I had guessed her. I was back to New York Slim, instantly unfaithful to Natalie Wood, Natalie was nothing, this woman and I already having had two years of history in the head, you can’t deny old lovers. I couldn’t see all her face, but from the cut to the profile you knew she was at least summer chicken going into fall maybe. She talked to the old man, but he did not rise like an Old South gent should. Then she came up the stairs and saw me, kept going but slower, and the age in her face wasn’t too much — not quite in my mother’s era — with the muscles in her face making lines that matched those in her legs, drawing tight in strands as she took the last two steps. She did not look of this place at all. Then she smiled but at the same time shook her head, as if she knew something about me besides the fact I was nothing but a boy and felt that very much as I looked into her eyes — what color? — and sensed deep events decades long. Also, she was easy here, maybe she lived here, because without checking in she opened the door two away from ours and went in. I was so happy and tormented I looked at the last of her foot going in the closing door many times over, gathered to the rail like a great sinner at the bar.
I checked quickly, very quietly, to see if Horace was still asleep. Ever since the music out on the street I knew something was being made for me, only me, unshareable. It might have been her singing, though already I knew it wasn’t, no, but the singer could be an agent of telepathy as Harold believed in. Sure. The set of her was foreign here, I was certain of that. I had nothing to say. But Harold, now Harold would just go up to somebody and talk if he wanted to. With women he told me he just went right up and said I think we should be friends and probably sleep together, and it worked, he was right in with them. I went to her door and knocked, an enormous chill all over my body. It took a while. I thought I heard her say inside not yet. I knocked again. She opened the door barefooted with a bottle in her hand, a little clear one not for booze, and she was about to say something but I wasn’t who she thought.
“I feel I ought to know you,” I said. “You ring a bell.”
“You don’t know me. And I don’t want to know anybody else now, especially not anybody decent and young.” She took a pull on the bottle, and she seemed a little drunk.
“I’m not so decent as all that.”
“He thinks you are a Communist. He forgot to say you’re only a boy. Why’d you scare him?”
“That old man down there? I was just clearing my throat. Stretching.”
“He said you had symbolic gestures.”
“Oh. He’s a sick one, you know.”
“Yes he is. A very sick one.”
“Could we just talk? We’ve been working bricks and it gets lonesome. We’ve been at it now a week.”
She pulled from the bottle again and I could smell something familiar from it, not booze, something we’d had in the house. The label had microscopic print.
“Come in, oh Mister Communist Police. Arrest me if you must, but I will never break. I will never tell.”
“I’m no Communist. Don’t kid. Say, you’ve been living here.”
“I doubt it,” she said. Not only was she blurred in speech but the speech wasn’t quite American. I knew it.
“I go away, I come back. I go away, I come back,” she continued.
Besides some domestic things on the dresser, there was a bicycle raised on a jack to its axle. You could pedal and go nowhere. I pointed this out, asking if something was wrong with it. You never, also, saw a woman her age on a bike where I come from.