The Heavenly Table

38

CRAWLING ON HIS belly until he reached the woods, Sugar then ran for another quarter of a mile or so before collapsing behind a fallen tree. He stayed there barely moving a muscle for over an hour. At one point he counted six shots being fired, and he hoped that maybe the motherfuckers had killed one another before one of them picked up his bowler. Finally, he got up the courage to sneak back to the field to look for it, but it was nowhere to be found. He kicked at the weeds and cursed his bad luck. The finest hat he had ever owned and now some sonofabitch dressed like Billy the Kid was going to take a dump in it.

He made his way through the field and back up the bank. Yellow-winged grasshoppers flew up in front of him. He hadn’t gone but a few yards down the flat road when he came upon the remains of the bowler, still smoldering a little around the edges of the bullet holes. Goddamn them! What kind of sick sonsofbitches would do something like that? He would have given anything just then, even the rest of his time on earth, for the chance to slit that skinny ferret-looking bastard’s throat with his razor. Or, if not that, at least to be shacked up for the night with a whore and a bottle and a good dinner. He didn’t think that was asking too much out of life. The thought of it swept over him like a tempest, driving him half insane, and he flung his arms about in frustration and anger. As his rage mounted, he thought again about his people in Kentucky, that poor bunch of God-fearing, Hallelujah-shouting, ass-kissing sharecroppers. Not once had they ever given him credit for anything. Everybody was against him, even his own mother. And when she finally kicked him out, he had made his way across the Ohio and headed for Detroit, telling them all when he left to go fuck themselves, that he was going to get a job building those fancy motorcars everyone was talking about, and bragging that the next time they saw his black ass, he’d own a whole fleet of them, one for each day of the week. Not only that, he’d have a white man for a chauffeur, and another just to keep them shined up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

That had been over a decade ago, and he had lasted exactly two weeks working for Mr. Ford. With his first paycheck, he had bought a cheap suit and a toothbrush and went out for a drink. Five days later, he woke up sick with a hangover in a damp basement room curled up next to a woman he’d met in an after-hours club out celebrating her fifty-seventh birthday. She gave him the first blow job of his life that morning while he chewed on a piece of the tough flank steak she fried him for breakfast; and he realized, as he watched her gray head bob up and down in his lap, that with as many women as there were in a city the size of Detroit, a young man could get by without hitting a lick if he wasn’t too particular about what he laid with at night. He had stayed with her two months, until he’d spent every last dime she had saved up for her old age, and then he had moved on to a friend of hers whose husband had just died of a heart attack. Over the years he had pretty much stuck to the same strategy, squeezing all he could out of them, and then finding some excuse to leave as soon as they started hinting around that he needed to find a job. But then he met Flora, a pretty woman in her forties with an appetite for young bucks and a big, round ass like two ripe pumpkins fitted together. She made good money managing a laundry over on Beacon Street for a white man, and Sugar decided that maybe it was time to settle down. Every evening for the next eight months she came home to a clean apartment and supper cooking on the stove, and he thought everything was going just fine until one night she appeared in the kitchen with a long-legged, freckle-faced boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. “Who this?” Sugar said as he set out the plates on the table, thinking it was probably another one of her goddamn relatives looking for a free meal or a corner to sleep in.

“This here be Winston,” she said. “He’s my new man.”

“Your what?” Sugar said, whirling around to look at the boy again, standing there with a cocky grin on his face. “What you talkin’ about, woman?”

“Look, honey, I ’preciate all this moppin’ and tater peelin’ you been doing, but truth is, I got no use for a maid.”

“Maid! I’ll show you a goddamn maid.” He took a step toward her, brandishing a fork in his hand.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” she said calmly. “You’ll be packing your fuckin’ clothes and gettin’ out, that’s what you be doing. And just in case you think you goin’ to start some trouble, you better look out the window first. All’s I got to do is say the word and they’ll be in here on you like stink on shit.”

Sugar stepped over and pushed the curtain back. A pair of squat, burly men he’d seen a few times at Leroy’s, a gin joint he and Flora frequented on Saturday nights, were standing on the steps looking back at him. One was tapping a truncheon against his leg as if he were keeping the beat to some song in his head, and the other was peeling an apple with a pig-sticker. Jesus Christ, she was serious. He turned and looked at the brown gravy simmering in the skillet, the pork chops stacked on the platter in the middle of the table. “But why?” he asked, his voice now sounding almost plaintive.

“To be honest, I need somethin’ with a little more pep when I crawl under the covers at night, that’s all.”

“Well, shit, why didn’t you say so? You want more meat, by God, let a man give it to you. You don’t need this young punk.”

“No, you done had your chance, and I done made my decision,” she said. She opened her purse and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “Here, you take this and go get your stuff packed up. There’s some things me and Winston need to discuss.” The boy winked at Sugar, then pulled a chair back at the kitchen table and sat down. After adjusting the bulge in his pants, he reached over and picked up one of the pork chops. Before he took a bite, he ran it back and forth under his nose several times, loudly sniffing it.

Sugar grabbed the money from her hand and stormed out the door past the men. He was three blocks away before he remembered his clothes. Fuck it, he thought. He’d go back after the bastards left, stick a shiv in the boy’s guts the first time he dared to step outside Flora’s door. But then it started to rain, and he ended up down by the railroad tracks in a dive called the Depot. He spent the next several days drinking and bemoaning his predicament to any barfly who would listen, going on and on about all the cooking and ironing and pussy licking he had done for the bitch; and then, although he couldn’t remember doing it or why, he’d hopped a train headed south.

Standing in the road beside his ruined hat, looking down at the hoofprints of the horses in the thick dust, he went over everything that had occurred since he’d left Detroit. When he came to in that empty freight car with no idea of where he was or how long he had slept, the first thing he saw when he looked out the open door was a sign announcing Mansfield, Ohio. The train slowed down long enough as it passed through town for him to jump off, his only intention being to find a bottle or something to eat, whichever came first. He was walking along the tracks when he spied an old white woman sitting on her porch fanning herself with a piece of cardboard. He hid behind a stack of rail ties and bided his time. Finally, just before dark, she got up and shuffled inside. A light popped on and then went off a few minutes later. He waited awhile longer and then climbed through a window into her kitchen. He searched all around, but to his disappointment there was no liquor or meat to be found. He was buttering some stale bread and gulping his third glass of water from a bucket on the table when she awoke in the next room. Fifteen minutes later, and twenty-four dollars richer, he went back to the tracks and caught another freight.

By the next morning, he figured he’d put enough distance between him and Mansfield to be safe, and he got off when the train made a stop in Meade. It only took a couple of breaths of the stinking, sulfurous air emitted by the paper mill for him to realize that he’d passed through here once before, on his way to Detroit years ago. Walking around, he finally found a colored diner on the south side of town. He was halfway through a big breakfast when the old woman’s bloody face appeared in his plate and he shoved the food away. “Something wrong?” the waitress asked. He looked up at her. She wasn’t as dark-skinned as he liked them, but she had a nice set of cocksucker lips and fine white teeth and a way of swiveling her hips when she walked that he figured probably got her some good tips, even in a dump like this. She smiled and refilled his coffee cup, and he was just beginning to imagine following her home and screwing her little brains out when he noticed the wedding band on her finger. Despite his many faults, Sugar had never lain with a woman whose husband was still living. It was the one rule he stuck by. Even the weakest and most cowardly of men could become outright dangerous if they were cuckolded, and there were too many unattached females out there to risk getting your head blown off in a fit of jealousy. “No,” he told the waitress, shaking his head, “just tired is all.” He was relieved in a way. In the past few days, he had lost Flora in Detroit and then lost himself in Mansfield, and he needed something more substantial than a quick piece of ass to make him feel better about himself, this time anyway. He finished off the coffee and stood up, laid a dollar on the table.

As he recalled what had happened next, he cursed and stomped what was left of his hat into the dusty road. He had stepped out of the diner and noticed a small shop across the street. A cardboard placard advertising FINERY FOR ALL AGES had hung in the single, flyspecked window. He counted his money, then entered the store. A few minutes later, he purchased the bowler from a bald, hunchbacked man in a white linen suit. He had never owned such a nice hat before, and he immediately felt better, like a different man almost. “What about some new clothes to go with it, young buck?” the cripple had asked him. “Those ye got on are looking pretty rough.”

“No,” Sugar said, as he looked at himself in the mirror and adjusted the hat’s angle, “this is all I need.” And it was, at least for the length of time it took him to walk up the street to a joint with no name and rent a room for the night.

After sleeping fitfully through the hot, sticky afternoon, he had gone downstairs and bought two bottles of cheap whiskey and a fat black whore named Mabel. By the time she sucked him down to the nub, he had finished off one of the bottles and was down to his last four dollars; and he wondered, in his insane drunkenness, just how much was a white woman’s life worth anyway? Not much, he calculated sadly, as he watched the whore wipe his seed off her chin. A greasy breakfast and a sporty hat and two bottles of rotgut hooch and a fishy-smelling slut with a wart on her lip. That was what a white woman’s life amounted to in the end.

He and the girl kept drinking, and around midnight she puked her guts up in the washbasin. The windowless room filled with her stench, and she dropped to her knees and started crying about leaving her sick baby at home by itself, and shit like that always brought Sugar down. He climbed out of bed and punched and kicked her until she rolled over on the filthy brown rug and farted once before passing out. Her impertinence enraged him even more, and he spread her ass cheeks apart and fucked her from behind, the salty sweat pouring off him and splattering like raindrops on her broad, bruised back. When he was finished, he wiped himself off in her nappy hair and got dressed. The sour smell in the room was suddenly overwhelming. He slipped down the back stairs with her comb and the money he had paid her in his pocket. Stumbling down an alley, he curled up on a pile of garbage with his bowler and awoke the next morning with his head pounding and his tongue dry as leather. Lying there in the trash, he looked up at a pigeon perched on a wire and swore to God Almighty that he was going to straighten up. And since he was so close anyway, he thought, why not go down to Kentucky and show his folks his new hat? It wasn’t a shiny car driven by a white chauffeur, but it was better than nothing. He could see them now, gathering around and slapping him on the back, asking a million questions, his mother hugging him until he couldn’t get his breath. He had picked himself up and begun walking. Two blocks away, he came across an old man on his knees pulling weeds out of a little vegetable patch and asked him for a drink of water. “Got the dry pipes, have ye?” the old man said, looking at Sugar’s bloodshot eyes. “I ’member what that was like. Why, I used to wake up so thirsty I’d pay ’bout anything for a nice cool drink.”

“I ain’t got no money,” Sugar remembered telling the man.

“Sho you ain’t,” the old man said, nodding his head and grinning, his toothless gums a wet pink that made Sugar queasy all over again. “Spent it all last night, I expect. I ’member when—”

“Can I have a drink or not?”

“Sho you can,” the old man said. “Got a well right there.”

There was a rat swimming around on top of the water when Sugar lifted the wooden top, and the old man scooped it out with a shovel and started beating it to death; and watching him go after it like he did, yipping and bashing and pounding on it like he was getting back at every dirty bastard who had ever done him wrong, made Sugar think about the white woman again. It wasn’t his fault he had gone crazy on her; shit, she would still be alive if Flora hadn’t kicked him out. She was the one to blame, her and that goddamn baby-faced nigger she was fucking. He watched the old man pick up the bloody gob by the tail and fling it over into a neighbor’s yard, and then he got down on his knees and washed the whore’s smell off his face and drank until his belly felt like it was going to burst. A few minutes later, he was on his way out of town, heading for Kentucky.

That had been just yesterday morning, and now here he was standing in the middle of a lonely road miles away from the old man’s well and staring down at his hat sieved with bullets and flat as a pancake. Insects buzzed madly in the weeds and a bird called out weakly in the heat. He almost wished he had taken the farmer up on his offer. A dollar a day wasn’t much, but at least he’d still have his bowler. He began moving again, feeling the most awful pity for himself. As far back as he could remember, there hadn’t been a day when he wasn’t yearning for something he didn’t have. And that wore a man down after so many years, fighting that feeling day after day without any letup. Why couldn’t he ever be satisfied? Why did he keep fucking up? Suddenly he stopped and looked up into the sky. “Lawd,” he sobbed, “please, Lawd, I don’t want to live like this no more. I’m not a-lyin’ this time, I swear. I just want to see my folks now. You help ol’ Sugar through this one and I promise you…” He searched his mind for what he could pledge, but he couldn’t imagine what it might be. “I promise you…” he began again, but then he stopped. He had nothing of his own to offer. Even the little bit of money in his pocket was somebody else’s. A murdered woman’s, no less. He was nothing but a bum, a goddamn, worthless bum. Not once in his life had he ever done anything worthwhile. Wiping at his eyes, he took a deep breath to steady himself and continued on.

Before he was around the next curve the cravings kicked in again, and he beat his head with his fists until his nose and lips were bleeding and his clothes soaked with sweat. Exhausted, he dropped his arms to his sides and cast a hopeless look down the empty road. He was completely and utterly alone. “Lawd, ol’ Sugar…” he started to implore again, but then he realized, with a start, what he needed to do to make a clean break from his old life. It was so clear to him now, what he had to pledge. He did have a proper name, had been baptized with it in Finfish Creek when he was but three months old. And from this day forward, he was going to use it again. George. George Milford. Sugar was just some fool nickname a dirty whore had cursed him with, but no more. His pace quickened as the idea took hold. “What’s your name?” he asked himself in a strained, high-pitched voice. “George,” he answered in his own deep baritone, “George Milford.” He repeated this a number of times, letting it wrap around him, the old name salvaged from the past and the saving grace it would surely bring him in the future. He should have been in jail awaiting the hangman’s noose, or, if not that, lying with a bullet in his head back there in that field. But no, the Lord had kept him safe, been keeping him safe all along. Then he stopped and watched openmouthed as the most beautiful sunset he could ever recall unfurled like a richly colored carpet across the sky. He had been staring at it for several minutes before he noticed, off in one corner, a swatch of the golden shore that his mother used to talk about all the time. Dropping to his knees, he was just getting ready to sing the Great Redeemer’s praises when a hornet as big around as his thumb smacked him in the face and drove a black stinger deep into the fleshy tip of his nose; and before he could catch himself, he was clawing at his stinking skin again and screaming curses at Flora and all the other dirty motherfuckers who had ever done him wrong and begging the Devil for just enough liquor — a drop, a spit, a spoonful — to make his pain, his endless, endless pain, go away, if only for the time it took to get around the next bend.