The Third Generation (41 page)

C
HARLES WAS SUMMONED BY HIS
father’s attorney to give a deposition for the divorce proceedings. He was handed the summons on the eve of Thanksgiving as he was leaving the house to buy a turkey for his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner.

A small gray man came up the steps. “Are you Charles Manning Taylor?”

“Yes.”

He placed the summons in Charles’s hand and grinned. “A present for you.”

Across the street the high school was letting out and the sound of laughter drifted in the air. Charles read the summons without moving. It directed him to appear in the office of his father’s attorney the following Monday morning. The cold legal phraseology conjured up the thought of courts and jails and policemen and stern-faced merciless men sitting in judgment over a defenseless world. He could see his parents standing before the bar, caught in utter helplessness, hanging on his words that would betray one or the other. He would have to tell of how they’d fought and suffered; he would have to reveal all the mean, secret things about them which he’d tried so hard throughout his life to keep hidden from himself. They would ask him terrible questions: “Did you ever see your father strike your mother?…Did you ever hear your mother curse your father?…What did they quarrel about?…Was it you?…” For a moment his mind was gripped in terror.

“What is it, son?” he heard his mother ask from behind him. She’d noticed him standing there and had opened the door.

He slipped the summons into his inside overcoat pocket. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing. I was just thinking.”

“If you’re going to get a turkey you’d better hurry,” she said.

He went down the stairs and started toward the store…
Did your father’s color have anything to do with it—because he’s black and your mother’s white?
he heard them ask.
Do you know whether he was ever unfaithful?
…

“Jesus Christ!” he said aloud.

Two high school girls passing by gave him startled looks. Suppose someone asked them was their mother a little off, he thought. Suddenly he was panic-stricken. He began running. A streetcar came and he climbed aboard. But it didn’t go fast enough. He got off and began running again. An empty taxi passed and he hailed it.

“I got to get over on Cedar Avenue in a hurry,” he panted. The money for the turkey went for whiskey. But he couldn’t get drunk. His body got drunk, his legs wobbled, but the sharp bitter panic kept flaring in his mind. He started looking for Poker. It was night before he found him coming from the pool hall.

“I got to get out of town,” he said desperately.

Poker drew back instinctively, frightened by the raw terror blazing from his eyes. “The cops after you?” he asked tensely.

“My parents are getting a divorce—”

“Hell—” Poker breathed in relief.

“You don’t understand. I got to testify.”

“Hell, what about it?”

He looked at Poker for a moment as if trying to focus him. “I got a summons.” Now the paper seemed to come alive within his pocket; he could feel it burning against his chest, like some sinister invitation to his own execution. “They’re going to make me.”

“Hell—” Poker thought it over. “We could steal a car and go somewhere.”

“All right.”

Poker borrowed a car from the pool hall proprietor and they drove over past Euclid. When they found the car they wanted Charles got in to steer and Poker drove up behind and pushed it back to Cedar. Poker knew how to short-circuit the ignition switch and when they got it started Charles drove swiftly out of town. He drove as if the demons were after him again, the long lights lancing down the road as it came up over the hood, dropped away and turned, and came up again. The high sullen whine of the speeding motor rent the quiet night. Houses loomed eerily in the moonlight, like the abodes of ghosts, and the motor whine echoed back like the wail of banshees. Charles crouched down over the wheel, caught in the unreality of the night, almost but not quite free, not quite escaped, his foot jamming the accelerator to the floorboard as if to push still greater speed out of the laboring motor.
Faster! Faster! Faster!
it kept saying.
Just a little goddamned faster!
And he would be completely gone from all of them.
If he could just get this goddamned car to go a little faster
…

He was on the inside of a turn without slackening speed when the headlights of a truck loomed up ahead.

“Hey, goddammit!” he heard Poker yell and through the corner of his vision saw his hands fly up to his face.

But it didn’t penetrate his concentration. He was sealed within the single determination to hold to the wide arc of his curve. Given the exact relation of time to speed he’d make a perfect tangent, which for once, goddammit, even his physics professor at the university could appreciate, and come out safely on the right side of the road. He crossed in front of the big truck lights without once veering, the whole goddamned putrid sickening world coming up inside him like vomit at the instant of infinite danger, and then he was past, his left rear fender pinging faintly against the heavy steel bumper of the truck. Letdown spread through his mouth and down into his stomach like the acid flow of bile. Now only the brooding sense of safety lay in the long, empty road, filling him with all the hurt and panic, and for a moment he closed his eyes.

He opened them to the sound of retching. Poker had vomited.

“Sonafabitch, goddammit, you tryna kill us,” he heard him gasp.

He pulled over to the side of the highway and stopped. He felt totally depressed. “Here, you can drive.”

Poker had a pint bottle of gin. They drank in the dark beside the car. Afterwards they cleaned up the vomit. Poker got behind the wheel. Charles sat silent, watching the night go by. It was almost as if some complete certainty had failed, like the night God erred when his brother was blinded.

“Where we going?” Poker asked. They hadn’t thought of it until then. “Let’s go down to the university,” Charles said. He didn’t know why he thought of the university, but thinking about it, as they drove along, it seemed as if something were waiting for him there, something he had left, forgotten.

They drove up to Mrs. Johnson’s boarding house. It was late and most of the students had gone to a Thanksgiving dance. He went in and spoke to Mrs. Johnson and she said she could put them up for the weekend. Two freshmen whom he didn’t know were on their way to the dance. Charles offered to take them. One of the freshmen gave him directions. He drove around the university campus and came into a colored shanty town beyond the railroad. He felt a strange sensation when he drove past the university. It was as if he were revisiting a city in which he had lived during a former life and there were something peculiar about it which had affected him. But at the moment it had slipped his mind and he couldn’t recall whether it was good or bad.

The dance was being held in a big, dilapidated barn that had been converted into a dance hall. He parked and let the freshmen out and he and Poker lingered for a time about the entrance, watching the dancing couples inside. They didn’t have the price of admission. No one came out that he knew.

“Come on,” he said. “I know a place I can get a drink on credit.”

He drove across town to the house where Rose had lived. Rose was gone. “Left right after you did,” George said.

George didn’t seem happy to see him, but he gave him a pint of gin on credit and loaned him five dollars. They drove back to Mrs. Johnson’s and she fixed two cots in the third-floor dormitory. They were asleep when the others returned from the dance.

Next morning Charles asked for some of the students he’d known. Most of them had gone home for the weekend. Only those who couldn’t afford to go had remained. Charles knew several of them by sight, but none very well. They asked him what he had been doing, whether he was coming back. He felt so depressed he found it difficult to talk. Poker was nervous and ill at ease. Charles used whatever toilet articles he found about, brushed his teeth with someone else’s toothbrush, found a clean pair of socks. Poker had already dressed. They went down to breakfast and Mrs. Johnson sat and talked to him.

“Aren’t you coming back, Charles?”

“Oh, I suppose so.”

“Don’t you want to?” She seemed as concerned as if he were her own son.

If she asked him another question he felt he would scream. “I’m coming back next quarter,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of studying.”

“I’m so glad,” she said.

He was shocked by the sight of tears brimming in her eyes. I got to get out of here, he thought as the panic began building up again.

They were interrupted by the sound of a crash out front. One of her daughters rushed in and said someone had run into Charles’s car. He and Poker ran outside. He was glad of the respite.

A well-dressed, middle-aged white man had driven an expensive car into the rear end of theirs. The man was so drunk he could barely stand.

“There’s no need to call the police, boys,” he said. “I’ll pay for everything.”

Charles examined their car. The gas tank was punctured and the luggage compartment smashed in. Gasoline ran down the gutter.

“Don’t nobody strike a match,” Poker said.

The man was fumbling for his wallet. “We’ll fix this up between us, boys. Here’s my card.” Charles noted that he was an insurance company executive with offices downtown. “Here’s twenty dollars. Now—now, that’s not all,” he added quickly, seeing Charles about to protest. ‘That’s just for your trouble. Come down to my office tomorrow morning and I’ll give you a check for the garage bill.”

Charles took command. “Okay.”

“If the police come tell them everything’s been fixed up.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve had a few drinks. You know how it is.”

Several of the students who had gathered extricated the stranger’s car and pushed it down the street beyond the flow of gasoline. The front end had been smashed but the motor started.

“I’ll see you boys tomorrow morning,” the man promised as he drove away.

“We’ll call a tow truck and see how much it’s going to cost,” Charles said. He had already begun to feel he owned the car.

Poker called him to one side. “Hell, man, we can’t take this car to no garage. It’s hot. We better get out of town and leave it where it is.”

But something about collecting for damage to a stolen car appealed to Charles. It was a strange sensation, as might be experienced by standing on a ledge fourteen stories high and looking down. At the time he had no intention of jumping. But it gave him a wonderful feeling of power to know he had a choice. So far the only element of risk existed within his mind. It offered a completely absorbing diversion—to jump or not to jump.

“I’ll do it myself,” he said.

He went inside and telephoned until he found a garage that was open. They promised to send a tow truck. Poker was thoroughly frightened.

“Hell, man, you’re crazy,” he kept saying. “I’m gonna get out of this.” He could break into a deserted store after dark. But handling a hot automobile in broad daylight was too much. “Gimme some money, man. I’m going over where we was last night and get a drink and let you handle this.”

Charles derived a perverted pleasure from Poker’s fear. He gave him the five dollars he’d borrowed the night before. “I’ll meet you at two o’clock in front of the gates to the university.”

“If you ain’t in jail,” Poker said, hurrying off.

Charles laughed for the first time in days. While he was waiting for the tow truck a police car drove past and the policemen got out to investigate the wreck. Charles told them that it was his car.

“I talked to the fellow who ran into me and we’ve gotten everything fixed up.”

“Was anybody injured?”

“No, no one was in my car and the driver was alone in the other car. He didn’t get a scratch.” He laughed; he was in a gay mood. “Only my feelings were hurt, and he paid for them.”

The policemen grinned. They drove off without writing a report. Charles became lightheaded with exhilaration. He was standing up there on his ledge and way down on the street a crowd was forming. People were pointing at him now. It was as if he had drunk the wine of the Gods; he’d never been drunk like this.

When the tow truck came he told the mechanic he’d drop by in the morning and get an estimate of the damages.

“I’m not paying for them so make them high,” he said, winking at the man.

“I’ll give her all she’ll take,” the mechanic promised.

Poker was hiding behind an arch when Charles arrived at the university entrance. Charles bent double laughing. A couple of white students grinned in his direction. Finally he choked, “Come on out, Poker, the enemy’s gone.”

“You crazy, man,” Poker muttered angrily. Fear had got down into his body, his spine had tightened; he stood with his shoulders hunched and his hands rammed down into his pockets.

Charles took him to the Union cafeteria for Thanksgiving dinner. They sat at a table with several fellows he remembered and he was in high spirits throughout the meal. Poker was silent and uncommunicative. Someone passing in back of him inadvertently bumped his shoulder. He gave such a start his fork fell from his hand and clattered on the table. Everyone looked at him.

“Don’t pay any attention to my friend,” Charles said, laughing impishly. “He’s just escaped from Alcatraz and he’s still a bit jumpy.”

The fellows laughed. Poker gave Charles a look of such fury they became silent again. Soon afterwards the fellows left.

“Man, you sho’ nuff crazy,” Poker said. He believed it now.

After dinner they went back to the Johnsons’. Poker was afraid to go but Charles insisted. Between the time they’d left Cleveland and then, Charles had become the master. It added to his exhilaration. He began contemplating ways to add to Poker’s fear. They found the boarding house deserted.

“Let’s go back to that place where we were last night and hole up,” Poker suggested. “I couldn’t find it.”

“Let’s steal another car,” Charles teased. “Why should we walk around on a day like this?”

“Man, gimme some money,” Poker demanded. “I’m going home.”