Strivers Row (25 page)

He still didn't care, doing anything he could to be around them— especially Betty Jane Thibodeaux, who brought her lunch to school every day in an old honey can instead of wrapped up in newspapers, something which had convinced them all that she came from money. She was impressed by how fast he could run, and how far he could throw a ball, and Malcolm liked that she wore bright white stockings instead of the tan or black ones that all the other girls wore, and blue denim dungarees with shiny copper rivets at the stretch points.

By the time they were in the fifth grade, they spent nearly every afternoon together after school. They would go down to Eaton Rapids Road and climb a stand of Norwegian maples, and there she showed him how to hang an old purse on a string over the highway, trying to tempt the passing cars into stopping. As soon as they did, she and Malcolm would pull it back, giggling furiously and shinnying higher into the trees as the drivers swore and shook their fists at them. Sometimes he would even play house with her, high up in the maple branches where nobody else could see. Taking on any role she wanted—the child, the little baby; the screaming, helpless mother; the daddy.

He knew better than to ever go to her house, but sometimes he would go into the abandoned lot behind her yard, and wait for her there. Crouching down in the wild broom grass that grew as high as his chest. Pretending that he was a wild animal, a lion or a panther, while he waited for her. When she came out he would jump up and pull her down into the high grass—leaping all about her, over her head and back, and finally landing full on her. Listening to her hurried breathing, the sound of her heart pumping against his own chest. She would lie there giggling helplessly, pushing and grabbing back at him, kicking her white-stockinged legs that he couldn't help staring at, her skirt pushed up high on her thighs.

He would show off for her by leaping across a little creek that ran through their property, but then he would have to go back to help her get across. Standing in the cold, swift-running water in his bare feet. Holding her hand while she maneuvered her way across the rocks, or even taking her up in his arms and carrying her over himself. She would put her arms around his neck, and he was suddenly very aware of how close she was—the starched, fresh smell of her clothing, the heft of her small tomboy's body in his arms; her smiling, freckled face only inches from his own.

When the weather got warm, she showed him how to coon a watermelon, as all the white kids called it. Stealing off with the ripe red melon from a farmer's patch somewhere and smashing it open on a rock. Digging out the sticky, sugary innards with their fingers, spitting the black seeds at each other through the matching gaps they had in their front teeth.

Sometimes it was the only thing he had to eat in a day, and by the end of that year, the ladies from the Poor Commission were back. They were already talking about splitting up the family— sending some of them off to reform school, or to live with neighboring colored families like the Gohannases, who had said they would take them in.

But even then his mother hadn't given up. Instead she had joined the Seventh Day Church of God, which she learned about one day from the pamphlets a couple of evangelists were bringing door-to-door. Becoming more disdainful than ever of the social-worker ladies after that. Refusing to let her children eat any of the canned ham or pork they brought, even turning down the offer of a whole, fresh-slaughtered hog from a colored neighbor who kept pigs in a lot down the street.

“My family don't eat any unclean pig meat,” she told him on the steps of their porch, her eyes shining with pride, while the rest of them had watched longingly from just inside the door, smelling the almost unbearable, fresh-slaughtered scent of the pig bundled on his shoulders.

She fasted herself on every church holiday now, and always on the Sabbath. Her arms and legs turning into sticks before their eyes, her hair visibly thinning and starting to gray. She talked all the time about what Heaven was like, and the gold crowns they would wear, and of how Jesus would come down out of the sky one day, riding on a real white horse.

Worst of all, she made them go to the Seventh Day Church every Sunday. Malcolm hated it, just as he had hated all of the Baptist churches he had been to with his Daddy. A squat, sweaty, concrete chapel converted from a truck garage; white aluminum steeple fastened to the roof, the interior still reeking of motor oil and gasoline. Every Sunday morning he would watch the women swaying and fainting in their ecstasy over Jesus, the men booming out
Praise the Lord!
as they thrust open their arms. Shaking and moaning, writhing about in the pews and aisles, and on the hard concrete floors—their quiet, fathomless dignity abandoned once the services began and the preacher starting shouting. The women's bulky white-and-tan underwear visible to Malcolm under their Sunday dresses as they threw themselves about, the men's eyeballs rolling in their heads. Mouths slack, eyes staring blindly up at the metal industrial fans still embedded in the ceiling, as they gave themselves up to something that he could neither dismiss nor discern.

It embarrassed him, and made him want to run right out the door, just as he had wanted to run from his Daddy's churches. He was frightened by how his mother, especially, looked during services. She had always held herself so rigidly, with so much pride— her mouth yawning open stupidly now, her eyes glazed, waving her sticklike arms in the air. It was then, for the first time, that he thought he saw the look of death on her.

But with the church had come a boarder—Herbert Walker, a member of a Seventh Day congregation in Chicago. A barbershop-supplies salesman who dressed in bright-checkered suits and spats, like some kind of vaudeville comedian, and who always smelled of the products he peddled—congolene and talcum powder, and Caldesene and Cohop and septic.

Malcolm and his brothers and sisters hadn't liked him at first, not least because it meant they had to double up again. All seven of them, boys and girls, living in the same upstairs room now, while Herbert Walker moved into the big front bedroom. He was a tall, loose-jointed man, with reddish skin not unlike Malcolm's own, and Malcolm resented how people would sometimes mistake them for father and son. But he was always friendly, and even-tempered, slipping them nickels, and slices of the green-and-silver-wrapped spearmint gum he chewed incessantly. Bringing home with him all the barbershops he had been to at the end of the day, telling them jokes he had heard, whistling and singing snatches of some new tune from the radio, smelling sharp and fresh and clean.

Malcolm could see how pleased his mother was when he sat down at table with them, or on Sunday mornings when he sat next to her in their pew, singing enthusiastically away at the hymns in a pleasant tenor voice. Soon, he noticed, she had taken to eating with them again, and had even begun to gain back a little weight. She got Mrs. Stohrer to take the gray out of her hair, and started to pay more attention to the condition her dresses were in. At supper she hung on everything he said, Malcolm saw, and quoted him approvingly to the neighbors—

“My boarder, Mr. Walker, he says that this Depression is just about over, and business conditions should be improving shortly...”
—never seeming to notice the amused or knowing looks on their faces.

And he started to pay more attention to her in turn, which made Malcolm suspicious. Complimenting her on how nice she looked when she had had her hair done, flattering her cooking and how well she kept the house, and raised seven children.

“Yessir, Louise,” he would tell her. “I know you loyal to the memory of your good husband, but you ought to
consider
marryin' again. A woman with all your talents—you truly are a blessing.”

She would tell him not to exaggerate, but Malcolm saw how her face lit up when he said such things. She would even give a little, pleased laugh when he told her that she was a blessing.

Best of all was the five dollars he insisted on paying every week for his room and board, so that they didn't have to eat leeks, or catch lungs at the slaughterhouse anymore. He helped Malcolm get a paper route of his own, too, through one of his barbershop clients, so that now he could buy nickel Hersheys and Three Musketeers and Chicken Dinner bars for Betty Jane Thibodeaux and some of the other girls he liked. He bought a bat and glove, for the ball-games they played continuously, all day on Saturday, down in the schoolyard, and a pair of secondhand skates for the hockey games they played at night, by the light of trash-can fires, on flooded gravel pits and sinkholes at the edge of town.

He was good at sports—so tall by then that the other boys gave him still more new names, jokingly calling him the Mountain, or Little Malcolm. But he hated it when the play began and they ran into him. He could not stand any physical contact with them—their bodies on his when they pulled him down, the stale reek of their breath against his face. He could not forgive himself or anyone else for their shortcomings. From his position out in center field, he would laugh, and rag at them whenever they made an error or struck out, or did anything that looked stupid. He was unable to help himself, although he knew that he should, that it made them mad. Unable to stay off himself, either—reminding the others over and over again of every bad play he had made, until they gave him yet another name, calling him Harpy for how he would harp on everything. He could not help it, he could not shut himself up— always jibing and laughing, trying to come up with something that would make the other boys pay attention.

When the spring came, Mr. Herbert Walker had packed his bags and told them that he had to go pay a call on the barbershops of the camps and the little vacation towns of the Upper Peninsula. Louise had cried when he left, and again for days afterward—suddenly and unnervingly, in the middle of doing the laundry in the afternoon, or while cooking their supper, and at first Malcolm had put it down to her missing him.

Before long, though, he had begun to hear from the other kids on their street that his mother was knocked up again. He refused to believe them—hating the knowing, nasty words “knocked up”— chasing them away with sticks and rocks. But after that he had begun to study her carefully and, soon enough, he was able to make out the bulge in her stomach, standing out prominently in her still skinny body.

It filled him with disgust. Reminding him as it did of how the rail-thin stray cats that lived in the empty lot down the street looked when they were about to breech their litters. Wondering how many children at once his mother might give birth to.

Soon the news about her condition was all over the block, the neighbors who had taken pity on her as a widowed mother shunning her now. She tried to go back to the Seventh Day Church, but that Sunday there was a line of deacons in front of the church door with their arms crossed over their chests, physically barring them from entering the building. Malcolm had stood outside with his brothers and sisters, squinting up through the sun at that line of sober men in their dark suits and jackets, staring back down impassively while their mother railed at them, even beating at their arms with her fists. Screaming at them,
“It was you put him there! You put the serpent in my home!”

The church refused nevertheless to take any of the blame for Mr. Herbert Walker, or to so much as give her his forwarding address. Nor would his mother admit to anyone else that the child was his, even when the insurance company cut off her widow's pension because she would not say who the father was. But Malcolm came home one afternoon after school to find her sobbing over an opened envelope, holding two ten-dollar bills in one hand. Moaning over and over again through her sobs,
“That's all I am to him. That's all!”

He remembered, now, things that he thought he had dreamed. The creak of footsteps at night on the loose floorboards in the upstairs hall. The sound of adults speaking in whispers. How often he had awakened early in the morning and gone downstairs to find Mr. Walker already seated at the table—his salesman's case by his feet, whistling snatches of the latest radio tunes at his mother while she made breakfast, the two of them casting playful glances at each other. He could never remember any such purely joyful moments between her and his Daddy, which made him hate Herbert Walker all over again.

It was only after he left, he decided later, that she had finally given in. It was after Mr. Walker that she had stopped going outside altogether, keeping the shades drawn all the time and the lights off. She spent all day in her rocking chair in a corner of the kitchen. Swatting suddenly at their heads when they got too close, screaming incoherently about what they had done to her, or how the devil was in them—strange, round, weltlike marks appearing on her arms and legs.

Malcolm was filled with a constant feeling of dread after that. It was a fear that made his stomach knot up, knowing that everything was going to go wrong, but possessing no idea of how to stop it, or what would happen to them all. Watching every day, while the floors and walls grew steadily filthier, and darker. The bedbugs infesting the house in such numbers that no one but their mother could sleep with all the incessant itching and scratching, the youngest children wailing in their misery. They tried soaking all the sheets and the mattresses, and even the floors around the beds in kerosene, until the smell was almost as bad as the itching and Malcolm walked gingerly around the house, sure that the smallest spark would cause him to burst into flames—but even that didn't get rid of them.

In school now he sat in the back, and drew crude pictures of the teachers that made the other kids laugh. He cracked jokes all the time, and squeezed his hand under his arm to make fart sounds— even leapt up and waved his long arms about, scratching at himself and making noises like a monkey when everything else failed.

He no longer stayed around to play baseball, or hockey, or anything else after school, but went straightaway to pick up his papers, roaming the empty streets in the early winter darkness. Peeking through the front-parlor windows when he went to lay the paper up on the porch, or cutting through people's backyards. Staring into house after house at the little yellow squares of light—the families gathered around the kitchen stove, or the fireplace, or the living room radio. He would pull close the oversize, hand-me-down sweater that was all he had to wear against the coldest weather, shivering in the darkness until he couldn't take it any longer. Then he would run on soundlessly to the next house in his sneakers— watching his breath make thin, white traces in the air, pretending that he was invisible, and master over everything he surveyed.