“That’s enough, son,” Daddy said.
“That’s all right.” Victor squatted down in front of me. His hair was black, shiny with hair oil and combed straight from the front to the back. “Want to see where I got hit?”
“I guess so,” I said, not sure if I did or not.
Victor turned his shoulder and pulled his shirt away so I could see the back of his neck. At the bottom was an ugly white dug-out-place, a gash that looked like somebody took a knife and cut.
“That from a real bullet?”
“Shrapnel,” Victor said. “A piece of mortar shell hit me there, right at the base of my neck. Any higher and it would have taken my head.”
“God.”
“I spent six weeks in the hospital. That was it. They sent me home after that.” Victor stood up. “I used to believe in war. Anymore, I’m not so sure.”
It got a quiet time between all of us there, even with the noise of all the big cats and the people walking around. Out the corner of my eye I could still see the white tiger, going from one end to the other of his cage. Victor got a faraway look about his eyes. Then his chin started to quiver.
“Lord have mercy,” Momma whispered.
Victor was sad, but I wasn’t sure why. To me, you had to have battles. So the good people could win. You had to have blood and guts and bombs. That was the fun part.
Victor blinked and a tear slid down the side of his face. He wiped at his eyes with a hankie. “Forgive me. I didn’t expect this.”
“War’s a terrible thing,” Momma said.
Daddy nodded. “Yes it is.”
Later, when Victor was gone Momma said, “Such a sad, good person he is. And so kind too. He’s got spiritual ideas, don’t he? I liked what he had to say, didn’t you like what he had to say, Jessie?”
“Sure did,” Daddy said. “He ain’t like them other foremen over there. At Ford’s, I mean. Them fellers’ll look at you one way and you’ll think that’s it, but then when they walk off, you’ll see more eyes popping out the back of their heads. Staring at you in ways you didn’t expect.”
I wasn’t sure what Daddy was talking about, but what he said about Victor was true. All I saw when he walked off was just hair, black hair — and no eyes.
“Huh… Huh… Huh… Huh…,” the tiger went. Circling. Going round and round in its cage.
Shortly after that, Daddy started fixing things on Victor’s truck. The first time was spark plugs. The second, a broken mirror. Then brakes and a door handle. Sometimes Victor would help. Other times he went in the house and talked to Momma.
“How come you’re all the time fixing on his old truck?” I asked Daddy one day.
Daddy was leaning up with a can; pouring water in the radiator. “I thought you liked Victor.”
I wasn’t sure if I liked him or not.
Daddy set the water can down.
“You like Victor?” I said.
“Yes I do.”
“You think he’d get mad if you didn’t work on his truck?”
“He might be disappointed some. It don’t pay to disappoint people, son.”
“How come?”
Daddy banged the hood closed. “It just don’t is all.”
“What about the other day?” I said.
“What other day?”
“When them men came. When you was washing the car.”
“You heard that?”
“Some of it. The window was down. They were from the Union,” I said. “They wanted you to do something but you said ‘no’.”
“That’s right. I thought you were coloring.”
“I was,” I said. “That man with the pushed in face smiled at me.”
“Lord God,” Daddy said.
A couple days ago I was coloring in my coloring book, sitting in the back seat of Momma’s Ford. Daddy had been going around outside the car, washing it down with a hose when another car pulled up in the driveway, a shiny red Mercury with a Davy Crockett coon tail tied to the aerial.
Two men got out of the car and came up to Daddy. Daddy was holding a sponge in one hand and a hose in the other. One of the men was big as two men put together. His thick wrists stuck out the sleeves of a white sports coat that looked two sizes too small. He wore white-framed sunglasses over a face that was sunk in on one side like a balloon loosing air. The other man was tiny, shorter even than Daddy. He wore a gray suit and a slantwise hat like Dick Tracy’s. He even looked a little bit like Dick Tracy, all high-cheek-boned and sharp-eyed. He came up to Daddy with his hand out, wanting Daddy to shake. Daddy couldn’t though, because of the hose and the sponge. The Dick Tracy man saw this and grinned.
“What did they want?” I asked.
“Nothing much. Wanted me to help them.” Daddy pulled a rag out of his back pocket and began to wipe his hands. “Said they was Inspectors; said they was hired by the Union. Even had badges.”
“You disappointed them,” I said.
Daddy looked at me straight on. “That’s right son. I told them ‘no’.”
When Victor went in to talk to Momma, sometimes I’d go on the floor by the table in the kitchen with my coloring books and listen. I heard Victor tell Momma how his parents had to get a divorce. How he had to live with his mother, then with his father. How his parents had come overseas from the Old Country on a boat and didn’t have any money and had to work hard and stand in a bunch of soup lines. He talked about his grandparents too. How they lived on a farm in Poland where they raised pigs and cows and grew cabbages and carrots and still they almost starved.
He was obliged to live with his father, he said, because his mother did bad things. He never said what the bad things were, but every time he talked about his mother his voice would go all soft and low. Then a sad still quiet would come over the kitchen.
Momma would drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and listen. She liked Victor. I could tell. I think she liked his glow. She even let him bring his beer in, something she never allowed Daddy to do.
“There’s very little alcohol in beer,” Victor said.
“I reckon if you’ve got to have it, you’ve got to have it,” Momma said. “My church don’t allow it though.”
“I don’t have to drink, if it offends you.”
“It don’t,” Momma said. “They’s folks where I come from drinks moonshine. Good Christian folk, some of them. I’d rather you was honest than slipping around.”
“Thank you,” Victor said. “My own parents were Catholics. They both drank. Like fish, you might say. Maybe that’s why Catholics and Protestants don’t get along, generally speaking.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Momma said. “Born again folk don’t drink unless they taking Communion. Then it’s just that Mogen David wine.”
Victor held up his beer. “Sangre de Cristo!”
“Excuse me?” Momma said.
“Sangre de Cristo. The Blood of Christ.”
“We don’t believe that way,” Momma said. “It’s just a remembrance. That’s what the Bible says. ‘This do in remembrance of me.’ Sometimes we’ll use grape juice.”
“I’d like to go with you sometime,” Victor said all of a sudden. “With you and Jessie, I mean. To church.”
Momma smiled. “It’s just a store-front church Victor. Folks there, well, they’re just like me.”
“If that’s the case, I definitely want to go,” Victor said. He took a sip off his beer.
Momma giggled. “Oh now Victor, I told you. I didn’t get no farther than the eighth grade.”
“I don’t care about that,” Victor said. “When I talk, you listen. You understand. That’s what counts.” Victor took another sip. “Formal education is overrated anyway. My father, he worked hard to get me two years of college. Then there was the war and I got drafted. What I’ve learned since, I’ve learned on my own. I read. I write a little. That doesn’t make me better than you, or anybody else for that matter. Farmers? Tillers of the soil? I’m from that stock too.”