Now Verlyn has finished his Rice Krispies, drunk down his second glass of milk in thirsty gulping swallows. The green and white knit capit is a beautiful capballed up carelessly under his arm as if to placate Minnie. On his legs, he towers over her Sweet faced boy so handsome the simple sight of him takes Minnie's breath away, sometimes. Lord, she'll forgive her Verlyn anything.
But these near grown boys, that's the last thing they want Momma staring at them all melting eyed with love.
Now that Woodrow Junior is turning out such a heartbreak, Verlyn is all the more special.
Verlyn: Jinx. Minnie hates these neighborhood names but lately she's been forced to think of her son that way, the way everyone else thinks of him. Like he doesn't belong just to her any longer.
G'bye, you, boy! Minnie growls, giving Jinx a kiss as he's out the door, thrusting his arms into the sleeves of his Hammond school jacket, and Jinx ducks his head, mumbling, G'bye, Momma.
Seeing Minnie's look like she's re calling him as a tiny baby nursing at her breasts or, worse yet, snug in her swollen belly. Schoolday mornings, Jinx leaves the house early, goes straight to the school gym to practice baskets before the first bell rings at 8:45 A. M.
Minnie too will be leaving in a few minutes. Has to catch the 7:50 uptown bus.
Outside it's that mean spirited damp cold, the worst kind for arthritis. A low sky, clouds soaking up the light like soiled cotton.
This exasperating habit of Minnie's! waits till Jinx gets out on the street, then calls after him from the doorway, a high pitched drawling yell more volume than substance. Jinx isn't sure what she's asking: Is he eating out that night? What time will he be back?
Jinx laughs and waves. Be home sometime, Momma!
Whether Minnie has heard clearly or not she waves energetically back, big happy smile, love in her face so plain it pierces his heart, Jinx Fairchild's black heart. like Minnie Fairchild is taking her rightful seat in that special row of the bleachers, where mister Breuer saves seats for VIPs, as he calls them, right there in the first row.
That white girl, Graice Courtney.
Now she's at the high school, Jinx Fairchild sees her frequently. And she sees him.
That look in her eyes, so raw in appeal, so without guile or girlish subterfuge. or pride. Jinx Fairchild is fearful of it even as he's excited, sexually stirred. She has told him, No one is so close to me as you, no one is so close to us as we are to each other.
Jinx supposes, yes, it's true. But he doesn't want to think why it's true or what he can do about it.
Over five hundred students at Hammond Central High School but somehow it happens that Jinx Fairchild, a senior, and Graice Courtney, a sophomore, are thrown together often, by accident is it accident? and in any room or field of vision, however vast, they are never unaware of each other.
There's a blindness in their perception of each other. As if, where each stands, the world is too suddenly flooded with light.
On the stairs. in the corridors. at the bus stop in front of the school. In the school auditorium where, each Friday morning like clockwork, the homerooms file into their respective rows of seats.
Jinx Fairchild, down front with the other seniors, can't resist glancing over his shoulder to where, at the rear Graice Courtney will be sitting with her classmates. And in the school cafeteria, that place of clamorous hilarity, romance, hurt feelings, ceaseless melodrama , where, from time to time, Graice Courtney will approach Jinx Fairchild at a table if he happens to be alone or in company hospitable to her, a white. Do you mind? Is it all right? Graice asks quietly, not lowering her tray to the table until Jinx gives her permission.
It's a free country, girl! he says. Baring his teeth in a mirthless smile.
No one is so close to me as you.
No one is so close to us as we are to each other.
At basketball games, this final season of Jinx Fairchild's at the school, 1957 58, Jinx will quickly seek out the white girl before the game begins. not to make eye contact with her, still less to wave and grin at her, as his teammates do with their friends and relatives, but simply to locate her, fix her in place. OK, girl.
There you are.
Once he'd wanted her dead; now he's worried he's going to fuck her.
In Hammond, the races don't mix much. Course they do but not in a good way.
White trash, says Minnie. You get you a good decent neighborhood colored folks owning their own homes, working to keep them up; then it's these hillbillies falling down drunk on the street, beating their wives and children as bad as any niggers, any of the worst cutthroat niggers. White trash moving in cause the whites that can afford it won't.
During the basketball game, ofcourseJinx Fairchild is wholly indifferent to Graice Courtney, never so much as glances in her direction. But then it's this cool black boy's style not to glance in anyone's direction off the court, except Hank Breuer.
sometimes not even him. Though he's well aware of the eyes riveted to him the white eyes how he appears through the prismatic lenses of their vision. He understands that whites study him as if he were not even a specimen of sorts but an entire category. They study him, amazed at his athletic gifts, admiring of his personal style, deceiving themselves they are learning something about this category when in fact they aren't even learning anything about Jinx Fairchild the specimen.
Except for Graice Courtney: she's the only white who sees him, knows him.
There's this mournful jazz song keeps winding through Jinx Fair child's head, sharp and poignant as actual memory though it's just a song he has heard on the radio, doesn't even re member the Negro singer, a man, he'd heard sing it, Went down to the St. James Infirmary saw my little baby there slow dirgelike lyrics with a clarinet behind stretched on a long white table, so sweet, so cold, so bare. And if he allows the song to continue, a snaky sort of caress that brushes across his very genitals, flooding blood and strength and purpose into them, Went down to the St. James Infirmary. all was still as night. My gal was on the table. stretched out so pale, so white.
St. James Infirmary has got to be a Negro song, Jinx Fairchild thinks, doesn't it? Sure sounds like it. And if it isn't, should be.
So pale so white.
So dead.
When he hears this song in his head he finds he's thinking of Graice Courtney without knowing it. Sometimes, watching the girl anhet notkno hA$wA\, he stY heMP the 5onE v his head.
So too do dreams continue their autonomous narratives be neath the threshold of consciousness, apart from our volition.
The dreaming self beneath the thinking I.
That I I I we can't imagine ceasing to exist even as, like Jinx Fairchild on the basketball court, we sense how precariously it's there: how provisional, even nominal, the terms of its existence.
Graice Courtney is saying in a rapid lowered voice, just loud enough so that Jinx Fairchild, beside her, can hear over the rattling bus noises, a bad dream about it last night, and I woke up so scared, thinking it was all ahead, and going to happen again. She pauses, not looking at Jinx. The two are sitting side by side, stiff as strangers.
Do you think about it, much? I mean.
Jinx Fairchild makes a wincing, shrugging gesture, staring out the window. It's an overcast March afternoon, descending jaggedly toward dusk: not yet five o'clock and already deep in shadow.
Yah. Sure. All the time.
Graice asks shyly, Do you think there'll ever be a time when.
we won't?
Jinx shrugs again.
If we each leave Hammond, live somewhere else I'm sure as hell gonna live somewhere else.
You're going to college next year, and after college. ?
Jinx shrugs and doesn't re ply. He's sitting with his arms folded awkwardly across his Hammond school jacket, hands gripped be neath his armpits. The green and white knit cap is pulled down low on his forehead, to his eyebrows: makes his long lean face look pushed together. Graice Courtney blows her nose in a crumpled pink Kleenex.
Says, as if they'd been arguing, But we did the right thing, back then.
Any other thing would have been a terrible mistake.
Jinx says, almost too loudly, What right thing' you talking about, girl? Not telling anybody what happened, you mean, or killing the fucker himself?
Graice Courtney leans forward suddenly as if she has become lightheaded. There's a small pile of schaolbooks in her lap, a red simulated leather purse, a badly soiled duffel bag of the kind gym clothes are carried in; she leans her elbows on the duffel bag and presses her fingertips hard against her eyes, stretching the skin.
It's a gesture Jinx Fairchild has seen before. She says so softly, Not telling anybody what happened, that Jinx almost doesn't hear.
They're on the East Avenue bus plummeting to Lowertown in a sequence of short, steep hills. Jinx was on the bus first, sitting in a double seat near the rear directly over the wheels, his cap pulled low on his forehead and his jaws grinding an enormous wad of gum, a cold crinkly steely look of Iceman's that means he isn't in the mood for company.
If passengers on the bus recognize him he isn't in the mood for their praise or congratulations or questions about what comes next, now the Hammond team is set for play offs.
maybe for a state championship. But Graice Courtney, entering the bus at the front, alone, with no girl companions this afternoon and no boyfriend Jinx seems to know that Graice has a white boyfriend, he's seen them together at basketball games , made her way to him unerring as a sleepwalker, murmuring, Can I sit here, is it all right? even as the bus swerved and pitched her into the seat.
Jinx Fairchild said, as he always says, It's a free country, girl!
The first time Graice Courtney sat with Jinx Fairchild on the city bus, as if they were old friends, as if, maybe, they were going out together, pretty white girl and her brown skinned boyfriend, Jinx was annoyed, upset, embarrassed; in fact he was desperate to escape, wanted nothing more than to jump up, yank the bus cord, get off at the first stop. Wasn't she asking for trouble? Wanting people to see them together and to wonder?
He'd remained where he was, of course. Hot faced and trem bung and resentful
Feeling the eyes crawl over them. Whites, mainly. But a few blacks too.
Though this is the North, not the South. And it's 1958. All Hammond public schools are declared officially integrated.
even if most of the residential neighborhoods, de facto, are not.
Jinx Fairchild hadn't guessed he was in the mood for talking, but seems he is. Practically poking his nose in Graice Courtney's bushy hair, breathing warm and damp as a dog in her ear. I did the right thing, I didn't have any choice. We talked about this before.
Once it got started, only way it was going to end was that peckerhead bastard dead, or me. He's so riled up he nudges the girl, closes his big hard fingers around her elbow; if they weren't in full view of a crowded bus of passengers, he'd sling his arm around her neck and catch her in a vise hold. just in play, like you'd throw a hold on a younger brother or sister. Jinx Fairchild is the kind of boy who likes to touch and sometimes to touch hard.
He's saying, And every hour of every fucking day I'm gonna give thanks it wasn't me.
Graice Courtney continues to stretch the skin around her eyes in that old looking gesture. Like she's thought the same thoughts so many times and can't get free of them. Jinx wants to slap her hands down.
He sees the nails are bitten, especially the left thumb. To the quick.
She says, If only. I had it to do over again. It was my decision, it was my Jinx says, Yah, honey, but you did, didn't you. As my daddy says of certain things, It is writ. It is writ, Amen.
Graice Courtney says, as if suddenly calmed, placated, It is writ.
Amen.
They sit for some minutes not speaking, a kind of equilibrium between them.
Jinx sees Graice has a tiny cold sore on her upper lip. Her eyes are strange to him: icy, pewter colored, deep set beneath her brows.
Her skin is pale, smooth, thin, sprinkled with freckles like dirty raindrops. She could be a plain hard looking girl or she could be beautiful; Jinx can't judge, sitting so close. He's nervous, excited, this close. Smelling the girl's warm, slightly yeasty odor. A stab of desire sharp as pain between his thighs.
No one is so close to me as you.
No one is so close to us as we are to each other.
Since April 1956, Graice Courtney has matured a good deal, has the features of an adult woman set in that girl's face. Jinx can't re ally remember her, what she'd been like, before the trouble with Little Red Garlock: just a neighborhood girl, very young. Pretty, flirty, reckless seeming. The kind any intelligent black boy would have sense enough to avoid.