I kept expecting him to join us, but after that first evening he didn’t appear again, and I gathered from Karen that he’d recently come under some sort of house arrest, at least on weeknights. “He promised his old lady” was how she explained it. Karen was full of West End expressions like “old lady” for “mother.” Apparently Jerzy’s “old man” was dead, so it was just him and her and his brothers. Her own father wasn’t in the picture either, which was why her last name wasn’t the same as her mother’s, and she seemed to have concluded that this, too, was normal. Jerzy’s old lady was okay, Karen went on. She was just trying to keep him on the straight and narrow, because one more screwup and he’d be back in reform school for good and, after that, prison. So except for school and weekends, Jerzy was grounded. “You’re my only friend, Lou,” she concluded sadly. “How about a pack of those Parliaments?”
Though I continued to give Karen cigarettes, she was good about not lighting up in the store, for which I was grateful, because my father wouldn’t have liked that, even if they’d been come by honestly. Nobody was allowed to smoke in the store except Uncle Dec, who did as he pleased in all circumstances, though he rarely visited us. When I casually let it drop that I was thinking about taking up smoking “again,” Karen was adamant that I not. “Cigs give you cancer. Especially girls. They’ll probably have to cut my tits off by the time I’m thirty.” When she said this, she cupped a hand under each breast so I’d know which ones she was referring to. The word “tits,” coming from Karen Cirillo’s mouth, was nearly enough to make me faint, and when she cupped them, I don’t know what kept me on my feet.
If I was, as Karen claimed, her only friend, you wouldn’t have guessed it by school. Our paths crossed only in the hallways or on the property outside, but I quickly learned that our early evening friendship was something she had no intention of acknowledging publicly. I smiled a few times, maybe even waved, but though I was sure she saw me, her expression never changed. Karen possessed a special talent that I’ve seen in only one or two other people, the uncanny ability to look right at you and then, without appearing to shift her gaze, at some point over your shoulder. The change was so subtle that the only conclusion you could come to was that she’d never been looking at you in the first place, either that or you’d been there for a time and then disappeared.
At school Jerzy sometimes would be with her, but he never acknowledged me either. From being thus ignored, I learned a lesson: it might be true that I could choose who to be, but that didn’t necessarily make me memorable.
THE THOMASTON FREE LIBRARY WAS LOCATED, seemingly out of fairness, on Division Street, at the upper end next to the cemetery. From the rear windows of the first-floor stacks you could see, at least in winter, the obelisk that marked the tomb of Sir Thomas Whitcombe, next to the flagpole at the cemetery’s highest point. On Saturday mornings I generally rose early and helped my father open Ikey’s, but by eleven or so he’d shoo me out, telling me to go do something fun. The money I earned at the store got put directly into my college fund, but on Saturday I was given an allowance to cover the matinee that day and my small weekly expenses. The movie started at one, so I usually spent the two hours in between at the library, returning the books I’d read the week before and checking out a new batch. During the school year I couldn’t read as many books each week as I did in the summer, so I took more time making my selections. My habit was to take a dozen or so books over to a small table in the stacks and examine the plastic-sheathed back covers and inside flaps more thoroughly.
There, one Saturday, I thought I heard singing outside, and looking out the window I was surprised to see Gabriel Mock weaving down the path that led through the cemetery and into the library’s rear parking lot, singing at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t make out the words because they came too fast, but the refrain ran “no more, no more, no more, no more,” and this was the part he bellowed loudest. He carried a bottle-shaped brown paper bag, and at the edge of the parking lot he stopped, put the bag to his lips and drank, his head thrown back, until whatever was in the bottle was gone, after which he stared at it, dispirited. Then something funny occurred to him and he resumed his singing with an even greater gusto—no more, no more, no more, no more—as if the unexpected dovetailing of song and circumstance was just the funniest thing ever. He continued his journey, unfortunately without noticing the shin-high metal guardrail that ringed the lot, over which he tumbled.
He went down hard enough to hurt himself, but was quickly back on his feet and looking around to see who’d tripped him. The bottle lay at his feet, apparently unbroken, and he took it out of its bag and held it up to the light to make double sure it was empty, then turned it upside down and shook it like a ketchup bottle to make triple sure. “No more no more no more no more,” he warbled, with somewhat diminished enthusiasm now, the joke having worn thin. Hearing the commotion outside, Mrs. Dirkus left the circulation desk, came over and peered out my window, shaking her head at the sight of a little drunkard singing in the parking lot, then, muttering, returned to her desk.
Gabriel was standing between two cars, one of which happened to be Jack Beverly’s new Cadillac. I knew whose car it was only because I’d seen him and Nan climbing out of it just a few minutes before with an armload of books. Now they were standing at the circulation desk while Mrs. Dirkus stamped due dates on the little cards in the jacket sleeves, a task she approached with utmost seriousness, making sure each stamp sat squarely in the center of the next tiny rectangle on the grid. Other librarians stamped willy-nilly, but she countenanced no such slipshod work, and I admired that about her. The impatient look on Mr. Beverly’s face suggested he didn’t share my appreciation. Nan, peering down the long row of stacks, saw me in my window seat and smiled, causing me to look around to see if there was someone else she might be smiling at, and by the time I’d determined that her smile must’ve been intended for me, she and her father had picked up their books and turned for the front door.
I was contemplating all of this when I heard the sound of glass shattering outside and saw my fence-painting friend doing a little jig next to the Cadillac, the ground around it now glinting with broken green glass. “No more, no more, no more, no more, hit the road, Jack,” he sang with renewed enthusiasm. The Caddy’s rear window, I saw, now sported a diagonal crack. Gabriel must have heard the Beverlys approaching, then, because he darted off between parked cars, showing more speed and agility than I would’ve predicted in his drunken state. Just as he disappeared around one corner of the building, the Beverlys hove into view around the other, and Mr. Beverly stopped and put his hand on his daughter’s forearm. His intention, I suppose, was to keep her from doing what she now did, which was run over to the car for a closer look, right through the broken glass. Her father stood where he was, gazing off in the direction where Gabriel had beaten his hasty retreat.
What happened next was perhaps the most surprising thing of all. Nan Beverly began to cry. Father and daughter were twenty or thirty yards from where I sat, but I was still able to read the bewildered, frightened look on her face as he took her in his arms and, I suppose, tried to explain why anybody would want to do such a hateful thing. At some point he noticed me watching, and after getting Nan calmed down and helping her into the front passenger seat, he came over. The windowpane was thick, so his voice was muffled, but of course I didn’t need to hear much to know what he was asking. Had I seen who’d done it? I shook my head, no.
Back at Ikey’s, after the matinee—which Nan, showing no sign of her earlier upset, attended with her boyfriend—I found myself still wishing I hadn’t lied to Mr. Beverly. I told my father what I’d seen Gabriel Mock do, though I didn’t mention lying to Nan’s father, and he responded just as I’d expected, saying it wasn’t right to damage other people’s property. Maybe Gabriel had a reason, he wasn’t saying he didn’t, but that still wasn’t no excuse. Because I continued to be fascinated by how differently my parents saw things, I later discussed the e
pisode with my mother, going into even greater detail in describing how drunk Gabriel had been, shouting no more, no more, no more, no more before smashing the whiskey bottle on the rear window of the Beverlys’ Cadillac. When she offered no immediate comment, I confided to her what I’d withheld from my father, that I’d claimed to have seen nothing. “You know,” she said, “sometimes you make me very proud.”
I thought about that before falling asleep. It was tempting to take pride in my mother’s being proud of me. But with her, nothing ever came to you clean, and it occurred to me that if “sometimes” I made her proud, there must be other times when I didn’t.
THE NEXT DAY, Sunday, I found Gabriel sitting with his back up against the Whitcombe Park fence, his legs splayed out in front of him. A recent cut cleanly bisected one eyebrow, and I didn’t have to ask where that came from. He must’ve heard me ride up the gravel drive, but his eyes remained closed, and I wondered for a moment if he might be dead. Finally, when I leaned my bike against the fence, he opened one eye—the wrong one, since it caused the eyebrow to split open again and ooze tiny spots of blood.
“Junior,” he said. “How you be doin’ this fine morning?”
“It’s afternoon,” I said, sitting down next to him.
“Already?” he said. “Can’t be. It’s mornin’. I can tell by the sun.”
I knew better than to argue when Gabriel was sure about something, but in this instance it was hard not to. “It’s afternoon,” I told him. “I can tell by my watch.” I showed him, but he wasn’t interested.
“Must be fast,” he said, both eyes closed again. “You go on home and tell your mama you forgot to wind your watch. Tell her you don’t know what time it is.”
“If I forgot to wind it,” I said, “it would run slow. Or stop. It wouldn’t run fast. That’s illogical.”
“Junior, do me a favor? Go away. I don’t have no strength to argue with stubborn white boys, not today, I don’t. Normally I do, just not today.”
I just sat there, annoyed, until he finally opened that same eye again, causing the cut to show pink and bubble a second time. “You still here?”
I said I believed I was.
“I believe you are, too. So tell me ’bout what all you did last night. You go out howlin’ or what?”
Over the last month or so, Gabriel and I had agreed on the fiction that I enjoyed howling as much as he did. Sundays we’d each describe the howling we’d done the night before and express surprise that we hadn’t run into each other when the howling was upon us. Gabriel guessed that we howled in different circles. Usually, it was fun trading these stories, but after what I’d witnessed yesterday I wasn’t in the mood, so I said I’d stayed home.
“You nothin’ but a ama-teur howler, is why,” Gabriel said. “Bet you don’t even know what last night was.”
“What was it?”
“See? That’s what I’m talkin’ about. You a ama-teur.”
“What was last night?”
“Last night be a full moon, Junior. A real howler would of knowed that. Best night to howl, full moon. You ama-teurs, you don’t know your full moon.”
Where we were headed, I feared, was yet another discussion that would end with Gabriel telling me I didn’t know up from down. “Why do you like to howl so much?” I asked, since that’s what I’d been puzzling about.
“I don’t,” he said, surprising me. “Up to me, I’d never howl. Drove to it, is what I am. You’d know that if you wasn’t a ama-teur.”
This was proving to be an even slower conversation than usual. As a general rule, Gabriel liked to talk but was never in a hurry to arrive anywhere. Two steps forward, one back, was the sort of dance he preferred. And the one step back was usually an insult of some kind.
“Don’t know why I waste my time tryin’ to educate white boys and ama-teurs. Specially you. You both a white boy and a ama-teur. No hope for you at all.”
Though they were nothing alike and spoke a different language entirely, at times Gabriel reminded me of my mother, both of them having concluded that I was a slow, reluctant learner. “What drives you to howling?” I asked.
“Pussy,” Gabriel said. “What you think?”
I shrugged, instantly uncomfortable. I’d heard the word used in a similar context before and had a pretty good idea what it meant, and that I shouldn’t be discussing it.
“Pussy make you crazy,” Gabriel elaborated. “You still too young to know ’bout that.”
I shrugged again, hoping to concede that he was right and thus open a new line of inquiry.
“You like it, though, I bet.”
Yet another shrug.
“Don’t you be shruggin’ at me now. You old enough to know that much. You like it or you don’t like it. Even amateur white boys know if they like it or they don’t like it.”
In that case, I said, I supposed I liked it.
“Ain’t no suppose about it. Suppose.” He snorted. “You a white boy if ever they was one.”
I said fine, okay, I liked pussy.
“Watch your mouth now,” he advised. “Your mama hear you goin’ on about likin’ pussy, you be in big trouble. Don’t come to me for help neither ’cause I’ll have to tell her the truth. How you told me your own self how much you like pussy. Be in trouble, then, won’t you.”
Gabriel’s spirits appeared to be improving by the minute. He had both eyes open now, and his voice, thin a few minutes ago, was robust.
“Good news is, you prob’ly ain’t gon have no brown girlfriends. Just as well, too, take my word. Start out, you all they need. That’s what they tell you. ‘Sugar, you all I need. You so sweet.’ Then one day you ain’t payin’ attention, they find Jesus. Black girl find Jesus, she might as well sew it up with a needle and thread. Put a zipper on it, for all the good it gon do her or you.”
I would have liked to change the subject, not because Gabriel’s views on women were without interest but because something else interested me even more. Knowing what I did about his howling, I had no trouble understanding why his wife might be growing weary of his shenanigans. What I would’ve liked to know was what he’d done to cause his own son to say he didn’t have a father. I tried to imagine what my own father could do that would make me deny his very existence that way, and failed utterly.
“Black girl find Jesus, the next thing she find is the devil. You know who the devil is?”
I had a pretty good idea. “You?”
“Damn straight. Now you the devil. Yesterday you sugar, you so sweet. Today you the devil. Turn you out so fast it make your head spin. Say ‘Don’t you be coming round here no more.’ While back she like to howl just like you, but now it’s ‘Don’t you be comin’ round here with your howlin’ ways. This child studyin’ you,’ she say, ’cause by now you got one, maybe two, if you ain’t lucky. Pretty soon she got the child poisoned against you. Don’t want you for his daddy. Want some other man don’t have nothin’ to do with him. Preacher, prob’ly. Somebody too good to howl. You stick to white girls, you know what’s good for you. Older they get, the better they like it. Even the ugly ones. Nothin’ better than a old ugly white woman. Grateful’s what they is.”
That seemed to be the end of the lecture. Gabriel closed his eyes again and was silent for so long I figured he’d fallen asleep. When I climbed back on my bike, though, he spoke again, eyes still closed. “So, you tattle on me yesterday, or what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t get cagey on me now. I seen you sittin’ there in the liberry window watchin’ it all. They must of asked you who done it.”
“I said I didn’t see.”
He just nodded and said, without opening his eyes, “You look just like your daddy, Junior. Spittin’ image. But you your mama’s boy.” He must have sensed me glaring at him. “You don’t like me sayin’ that, I guess.”
“It wasn’t very nice what you did,” I told him. “Breaking that bottle on Mr. Beverly’s car. He never did anything to you.”
/>
“How you know what he did and didn’t do?”
He had a point, but I wasn’t about to concede the moral high ground. “Okay,” I said. “What did he ever do to you?”
He didn’t reply at first, but finally he said, “Nothin’. Man never done nothin’ to me. Truth is I’m ashame of myself, acting like God’s own fool. Woman right, she don’t want nothin’ to do with me. Right to warn the boy against me, too. My own damn fault, the whole mess. There, you happy now, Lou Lynch Junior? Got it all straight now? Know up from down now, case somebody ask you?”
I wasn’t happy, and I think he knew it. It was the first argument I’d ever won with Gabriel Mock, and it was worse than losing. It was true; I hadn’t liked him saying I was my mother’s son, even though he meant it, so far as I could tell, as a compliment. And when he’d called me Lou Lynch Junior I hadn’t liked that either, sensing an insult. One or the other, it seemed, should’ve given me pleasure, but neither did, and in the end, pedaling away from Whitcombe Park, all I’d felt was guilty. Which didn’t make any sense either. I wasn’t the one who’d gotten drunk and smashed a bottle on somebody else’s Cadillac. It wasn’t me sitting on the ground with a hangover, oozing blood from a torn eyebrow, the embodiment of my own foolishness. He could be sarcastic all he wanted, but it was all his fault, just as he said.
Still, the closer I got to building an airtight case against my friend, the worse I felt and the more convinced that I was a slow, stubborn learner. Maybe I didn’t know up from down.
IN THOMASTON, then as now, the only taxi service was Hudson Cab. Their ad in the Yellow Pages referred to a “fleet” of taxis, all clean and spacious, with courteous, punctual drivers—proof, my mother said, that you could claim just about anything and get away with it. Hudson Cab favored big rusted-out station wagons with torn vinyl upholstery and tailgates fused permanently shut by rear-end collisions. It wasn’t unusual to hear one of these, its dangling exhaust system sparking along the pavement, before you saw it, and all the drivers looked as if they’d just that morning come off a four-month bender. Courtesy was hardly an issue for these men, who seemed incapable of any utterance at all.