Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart Page 13

  So the boys rush at each other, using their fists, wild swings, clumsy blows, at the foot of Pitt Street in a debris-littered lot beside Ace Trucking, Inc. Jinx Fairchild is tall and vulnerable-seeming, not used to fighting, or anyway not used to fighting with such deadly seriousness, trading punches with a single opponent, none of his buddies watching, or his brother, and Little Red Garlock is a cunning opponent; his instinct is to bend at the knees, go lower, butt with his head.

  Why don't these blows hurt? There's blood flying from someone's nose but no pain, only the sharp surprise and weight of it or maybe the pain is floating in the air and won't catch up until afterward. One of the boys is panting, almost sobbing, the other is just grunting, lips drawn back from his teeth in a grin; he's used to fighting and he's used to fighting dirty, Little Red's style is using his knee, using his head that's wicked if it catches you in the forehead, how can you protect yourself against it... you can't.

  So then they're on the ground. Jinx goes to his knees and Little Red falls on him with a weird, happy yodel, all this time he's aware of someone watching, someone watching Little Red Garlock, so she'll tell the tale far and wide, or maybe it's the moon or maybe it's God up in the sky watching and smiling 'cause He's got to be on the side of who's winning, and if Iris Courtney wants to run for help where can she go?

  What can she do? No cars on Pitt Street or River Road, no houses close by, the closest place is a tavern a mile away on the river but she isn't thinking of that, she's too confused, upset, fearful, circling the struggling boys not knowing what to do, silent herself, wordless, in wonderment seeing that Jinx Fairchild is being hurt, his flailing blows aren't strong enough to hurt Little Red Garlock or even to stun or surprise him; what can she do? How can she help? She tries to pull at them as if to separate them but of course they ignore her, they're fierce as dogs struggling together intent to do harm but clumsy, grunting, cursing... she isn't there for them, doesn't exist, pleading, "Don't!" and "Stop!" and, to Little Red, "Leave him alone!"

  She's thinking she must get help: she'll run to get help.

  At the foot of Pitt Street, the vacant lot beside Ace Trucking, Inc. A wet gauzy light from the moon. A dull-eyed streetlight at the corner.

  Across the Cassadaga River-so wide in the darkness, so evilsme1ling, choppy there are lights glittering on shore, the lights of houses lifting into the hills. Atop the Hammond water tower a ring of lights, faint. And the winking red lights of the Hammond radio station, WHMM.

  She'll get help but she doesn't move, she's transfixed watching Jinx Fairchild and Little Red Garlock scrambling about on the ground; they're ravenous to get at each other, grunting like lovers now they're stuck together, the burning flesh of one stuck to the flesh of the other; Jinx's nose is bleeding badly, there's a slash on his forehead that's bleeding badly, and the blood is on Little Red Garlock too..

  .

  . Jinx's sweatshirt with the white H has been rudely yanked up to his shoulders, his gleaming dark back is exposed, and Iris wishes she could pull the sweatshirt back down, shield him.... Jinx, kill him.

  Jinx, don't let him live.

  The fight isn't going the way Little Red Garlock expected, he's been hurt though he doesn't yet feel it, yes, but he does feel something, the inside of his mouth is bleeding, he's in a frenzy suddenly...

  wet blubbery lips...cursing... picks up a chunk of concrete and slams it against Jinx Fairchild's back and Jinx screams in pain like a wounded animal, managing to roll free crazed with pain he rolls free there's something in his hand wedge-shaped and heavy, something his fingers close upon in desperation, and he's bringing it down on Little Red's head...

  again, and again, again... his breath in a whistling sob.

  Iris Courtney, watching Little Red Garlock die, stands transfixed.

  I've got to get help, she thinks.

  She watches. Can't look away.

  The day of her son's funeral, and the day following the funeral, and the next day, Vesta Garlock's absence is noted in the neighborhood.

  On Gowanda Street, on Girard, on Chautauqua... in the alley behind the East Avenue stores where it's her custom to rummage through trash cans... in the park facing Precious Blood Church where she eats crackers and drinks Royal Crown Cola in all but the nastiest weather.

  .. in Woolworth's, in Rexall's, in the Mohigan Market & Butcher Shop, in French's Bakery, in Angelo's Diner, in Lulu's House of Beauty where she browses or prowls, makes unexpected visits... even as far away uptown as Montgomery Ward's on Main Street and Norban's Discount Clothing..

  in the cavernous vaulted lobby of the uptown post office... in the First Bank of Hammond with its regal marble-floored foyer from which, always courteously, the strange unkempt seemingly harmless woman is ejected on an average of twice weekly.

  You wouldn't think anyone outside the Gov'at"la'Street t'elghborhood would know who Vesta Garlock is, yet when Little Red's death is reported in the newspaper, given such extensive coverage, most people accustomed to seeing her guessed she must be the boy's mother.

  That one? That crazy woman?

  But she isn't crazy exactly, is she? Poor thing!

  People familiar with hulking Little Red Garlock, though, find it hard to think of him as "Patrick Wesley." Surely Little Red was no Patrick Wesley! It's as if Death has altered him, so great is Death's power; look at the photograph of him the newspaper prints, years old, an earnest smiling seemingly normal boy of about twelve, only oversized ears and teeth to suggest something that's Garlock, special.

  Then one day Mrs. Garlock is back on the street. Making her rounds.

  It's strange, the woman looks like a drifter or a somnambulist but in fact she keeps to a well-defined schedule and itinerary: leaves home at sunrise, returns at sundown (if she returns at all; sometimes in warm weather she sleeps out); visits stores in no pattern but never skips Precious Blood Square, where there's a park bench that's hers,' always rummages through the same trash cans in the alley behind East Avenue.

  A visit uptown, taking a city bus, is in the nature of a gift to herself, she'll be sure to go to Montgomery Ward's; "Monkey Wards" is Mrs. Garlock's favorite store in all of Hammond, she's almost smiling contemplating the wide aisles, the warehouse size, counters and counters of merchandise, and a certain smell over all, and she can use the ladies' room in the basement, sometimes sleep there; the floor manager isn't vigilant enough to have her ejected.

  This morning Mrs. Garlock looks different." it's clear that someone has fixed her up in honor of her son's death and funeral.

  Instead of her old shabby black coat stiff with dirt she's wearing a green-plaid coat, not new but almost new, a spring "topper," and she's wearing a black straw hat for mourning, and a black dress of some synthetic material that clings to her thin legs.

  Her hair, frazzled for years, has been washed and brushed and braided around her head by a deft, kindly hand, and her face has a scrubbed, shiny, almost fresh look. In Vesta Garlock too it seems that Death has worked a mysterious alteration.

  This morning, passing by Lulu's House of Beauty, Mrs. Garlock arouses a flurry of sympathetic interest where usually there's only pity, dismay, or outright scorn: both operators and both their customers stand at the window to observe, noting in amazement the change in the woman's appearance, and Madelyn Daiches who's so good-hearted hurries out to tell Mrs. Garlock how sorry she was to hear the bad news, the shocking news, she hopes the police find whoever did it soon, but Mrs. Garlock isn't interested in her, not a bit, just crinkles her face up in distaste and turns away, walks away, the fastest Madelyn has ever seen her walk.

  'And that's the thanks I get! 1 was only trying to be kind."

  One April morning Hammond city police bring Mrs. Garlock and several other Garlocks to the seventh precinct station; it's the lineup they are asked to see, suspects in Patrick Wesley's murder.

  Six men between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, arranged on a platform, in a lighted space, as in a burlesque show except every
thing is scaled down small; everyone is too close together.

  All the men are white, all are casually dressed.

  Since the killing, police making inquiries everywhere, along Gowanda Street door to door, have met with responses that aren't surprising (since they know the Garlocks) but haven't been helpful.

  Told that Little Red was a thief, a vandal, a trespasser, a pervert.

  not right in the head... damned little bastard that if anybody ever deserved to get killed he did. The kinds of remarks that can't be printed in the newspaper or aired over WHMM radio. They've determined that Little Red was killed in a vacant lot about fifty yards from the river, that his body was dumped off a wharf and into the river, but they haven't located the murder weapon. '.

  clearly it's in the river too, sunk to the bottom, and will never be recovered.

  They've determined that he'd been seen hours earlier on the street, on various streets, not in the company of the other, younger boys with whom he sometimes hung out, but no one seems to have noticed him later in the evening, or to have admitted seeinghim.

  The only tip police have had thus laroddly, this tip has come to them from several apparently unrelated sourcesis that Little Red Garlock antagonized a gang of motorcyclists recently and that they'd vowed to take revenge on him.

  The other night there was a call from the Cassadaga House where some bikers from Buffalo and Rochester were drinking, and police went and arrested two men, charging them with drunk-anddisorderly conduct; in the precinct station, questioned rigorously and at some length about the Garlock murder, the men had incriminated two other men, who, they claimed, had boasted of stomping somebody the other night in Hammond and dumping his body in the river. "Why'd you do it?" these men were asked. Their reply: "We didn't like his looks."

  So S.L. and R.T two Hell's Angels from Buffalo brought to Hammond for interrogation, are in the lineup at the seventh precinct this morning: unshaven, dazed, pasty-faced, youngish fattish men in black leather vests, soiled T-shirts, oily jeans, and leather boots. With their bikers' costumes and their greasy Elvis Presley haircuts and the fright evident in the very set of their backbones it seems self-evident that, amid the lineup of local derelicts and a single plainclothes policeman, these two are the guilty parties.

  '. if anyone is guilty of having killed Little Red Garlock on the night of April 2. S.L."s and R.T."s alibis for that night too are highly suspicious.

  But the Garlocks can't agree. One of them points to one of the suspects, another to another, still another to a third; they're quarrelsome, short-tempered; Vernon Garlock, who hates all policemen, sits sullen and bleary-eyed and won't even speak. And suddenly there's Vesta Garlock's vague wandering incantatory voice, as if she's been speaking all along but without the volume turned up,"...

  his allotment of time on earth, and if it's your time there's nothing to be done. Praise the Lord. In His bosom. I saw the angel Gabriel set his foot upon a cloud, bearing my boy homeward. There is nothing to be done. It is writ, 'Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in Heaven."" Following this, there's an awkward silence.

  So there is no positive identification of the suspects, and the Hell's Angels from Buffalo must be released.

  The Garlocks are deeply ashamed of Vesta, want to take her home with them, but the woman's too cunning... slips away. Has a request for the police sergeant: "Can you take me up to Monkey Wards? Now?"

  The man stares at her. "Montgomery Ward's, ma'am?"

  Mrs. Garlock is buttoning up her coat; she's impatient to be gone.

  'Yes. I said. Monkey Wards."

  day and a night of rain, and now the Peach Tree Creek is overflowing its banks. Doesn't look like the same creek.

  There's a dizzy angry-seeming rush of water toward and beneath and past the bridge but it's really many waters snaky churning coils of waters of varying thicknesses with a stink to it like two white-hot wires going up your nostrils into your brain.

  After so much rain, the morning is mud. And glittering puddles.

  Dripping. Everywhere, the sound of dripping.

  And the knife-sharp sunshine that hurts the eyes right through the lids... like the human skin is transparent.

  Jinx Fairchild is standing on the Peach Tree Creek bridge thinking how the creek isn't any creek he knows, it's a place of perished things come alive again like that part-submerged tree trunk he sights, a tangle of mean-looking roots still attached, could tear a swimmer's legs off if he was fool enough to mess with it.

  .

  corpse of a red-furred dog... corpse of something resembling a rat more tree limbs, loose boards, part of somebody's rowboat all these things alive, noisy, smelly, splashing white water and frothy foam like laughter. Weird wild laughter! The kind, when you hear it, everything in you wants to join in but you can't, somehow.

  It's a morning following one of his bad nights. He's leaning on the railing looking into the creek that's a familiar creek, known to him as anything is known to him, except it isn't. He's letting that dreamy sensation come over him seems to start up from the legsthey'd noticed when they were boys, he and Sugar Baby: when you're standing on the bridge, which is solid and unmoving, watching water rush beneath your feet, holding your eyes open and unblinking, there's a mysterious moment (when is that moment? is it always the same moment? and why?) when the water becomes still and you're the one who is moving.

  Jesus, must be ten years ago. Jinx and Sugar Baby and some other children playing in the creek, messing around-except it was hot then, late summer, that airless dead time, and you could see the water's skin starting to form in the shallow places and you could sure smell it though they hadn't thought the smell was actually bad, only that it was the smell of Peach Tree Creek as natural as any smell, building a little stronger and ranker day by dayand there's a shout, there's Momma calling Woodrow." Verlyn! in that way she had when they were little that lifted their heads like she already had hold of their hair at the crown of their heads, jerking them around, and they looked up to see Minnie Fairchild furious and disgusted striding in their direction in her white uniform, whitish shiny stockings on this steamy summer day, and her face, thinner then, seemed black with rage "You two! Damn you!

  Where's your sense! I told you never play here, didn't I? Get your asses out of that shit and get 'em out right now!"and she'd chased them home so angry she hadn't time to pause and scold the other children, neighbor's kids, as if it didn't matter, much, that they were playing in shittoo.

  At home she'd scrubbed them. That was the worst. Their heads, and inside their ears, even their fingernails and toenails which were dirty, but was it from Peach Tree Creek, or just any old harmless dirt?

  Made the two of them gargle with that evil-smelling mouthwash she brought home from the white doctor's, and no diluting it with water either, the way, if she was feeling kindly, she'd dilute their teaspoonfuls of cod-liver oil with orange juice.

  Sugar Baby giggled in Jinx's ear, "Now this stuff is horse piss, I bet you and Jinx started to gag.

  But they'd outfoxed their smart momma. Smartest momma of any they knew but they'd outfoxed her 'cause naturally they came back to Peach Tree Creek to play, year following year... wasn't any other place.

  Shit or no shit, thinks Jinx Fairchild, it's ours.

  Mr. Hannah, tenth grade math, is gently chiding Jinx Fairchild for messing up his geometry test. Was he daydreaming? during the actual test? like his brain didn't know what his hand was doing?

  Jinx Fairchild mumbles no.

  Jinx Fairchild mumbles no, sir: tricky little courtesy his momma has instilled in him so now it's habit, almost.

  How then, Mr. Hannah asks, can Jinx account for the fact that he worked problem number eight flawlessly but made the same glaringly obvious error on number three that every dumbbell in the class made?

  Jinx Fairchild mumbles he doesn't know, takes the red-inked test paper in his fingers, and stares at it uncomprehending: 84 percent isn't a low grade but, yes, it's low in this
case; ordinarily he'd be puzzled and embarrassed but not today; he's thinking how he did the test last Friday in a haze like a dream, blacked out, and didn't remember a thing of it afterward.

  Mr. Hannah has favored Jinx Fairchild all year above even the majority of the white students in his class. He's a white man, Jinx has thought, who favors certain selected Negroes Negroes easy to like as a means of demonstrating it isn't anything racial, certainly can't be racist, the way he dislikes the others.

  Hates fears loathes the others.

  Says Mr. Hannah as Jinx turns to leave, 'A mistake like that isn't like Jinx Fairchild, was the thought passed through my head," and he means it half teasing, like most of the teachers at the high school he takes himself very seriously, so Jinx nods, backing off; his eyes too hooded and achey to meet his teacher's, he says in parting, "Guess if I did it, Mr. Hannah, it is me." Just the slightest edge of defiance in his voice.