The Ivory Grin

Chapter 4

The fat man came back to the office, his belly rising and falling under the T-shirt. His forearms were marked with blue tattooings like the printing on sides of beef. One on the right arm said: I Love You Ethel. His small eyes said: I love nobody.

“Any vacancies?”

“You kidding? Vacancies is what we got plenty of.” He looked around his office as if he suspected something the matter but couldn’t exactly place it. “You want a room?”

“Number six if it’s empty.”

“It ain’t.”

“How about number eight?”

“You can have eight.” He rummaged in the desk for a registration blank, which he pushed across the counter. “You on the road?”

“Uh-huh.” I signed my name illegibly, omitting my license number and home address. “Hot today.”

“You ain’t seen nothing.” His defensive tone was accentuated by an asthmatic wheeze. “It’s barely a hundred. You should of been here around the first of the month. It was darn near a hundred and ten. That’s what keeps the tourists away in droves. The room is two and a half single.”

I gave him the money and asked to use the phone.

“Long distance?” he wheezed suspiciously.

“A local call. Private, if you don’t mind.”

He produced a telephone from under the counter and ambled out, slamming the screen door behind him. I dialed the number of the Mission Hotel. Una’s voice answered immediately when the switchboard called her room: “Who is it?”

“Archer speaking, from the Mountview Motel. Lucy Champion checked in here a few minutes ago. She was evicted by her landlady, a colored woman named Norris on Mason Street.”

“Where is this motel?”

“On the highway two blocks west of Main. She’s in room seven.”

“All right, fine,” on a rising note. “Keep a close watch on her. I’m going to pay her a visit. I want to know where she goes after I talk to her.”

She hung up. I moved into room eight by placing my overnight bag in the middle of the worn rag rug and hanging my jacket on the one wire hanger in the cardboard wardrobe. The bed was covered with a sleazy green spread that failed to conceal the economic depression in its middle. I didn’t trust the bed. I sat on a straight chair that I placed beside the front window and lit a cigarette.

The window gave me a view of Lucy’s door and window across the inner corner of the ell. The door was closed, the green roller-blind drawn down over the window. The smoke from my cigarette rose straight up through the stagnant air to the yellow plaster ceiling. A woman groaned behind the wallboard partition in the next room, number nine.

A man’s voice said: “Anything the matter?”

“Don’t talk.”

“I thought something was the matter.”

“Shut up. There’s nothing the matter.”

“I thought I hurt you.”

“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

My cigarette tasted like burning grass. I butted it in the lid of a coffee can which had been left in the room as an ashtray and thought of the people who had lain alone or in pairs on the iron bed and looked at the yellow ceiling. Traces of their dirt remained in the corners, their odors clung to the walls. They had come from all over the country to look at the yellow ceiling, stir in the iron bed, finger the walls and leave their indelible marks.

I moved across the floor to the partition between my room and Lucy’s. She was sobbing. After a while she said something to herself that sounded like: “I won’t.” And after another while: “I don’t know what to do.”

People were always sobbing to themselves and saying that they didn’t know what to do. Still, it was hard to listen to. I went back to my chair by the window and watched the door, trying to imagine I didn’t know what was going on behind it.

Una appeared in front of it suddenly like a figure in a dream. A marijuana dream. She had on leopard-spotted slacks and a yellow silk shirt. Leaning towards the door like an eager fighter, she struck it two backhanded blows with her right fist.

Lucy opened the door. Her curled brown hands came up to her mouth and hooked on her lower lip. Una pushed in like a small garish battering-ram, and Lucy fell back out of my line of vision. I heard her staggering heels strike the floor. I moved to the partition.

“Sit down,” Una said briskly. “No, you sit on the bed. I’ll take the chair. Well, Lucy. What have you been doing with yourself?”

“I don’t want to talk to you.” Lucy’s voice might have been soft and pleasant if fear hadn’t been playing tricks with it.

“You don’t have to get excited.”

“I’m not getting excited. What I do is my own business. It’s no business of yours.”

“I wonder about that. Just what does your business cover?”

“I’ve been looking for a job, a decent job. When I save a little money, I’m going back home. It’s not your business, but I’m telling you anyway.”

“That’s a good thing, Lucy. Because you’re not going back to Detroit, now or ever.”

“You can’t stop me!”

There was an interval of silence. “No, I can’t stop you. I will tell you this. When you step off that train, there’ll be a reception waiting for you. I phone Detroit long distance every afternoon.”

Another, longer pause.

“So you see, Lucy, Detroit is out for you. You know what I think you should do, Lucy? I think you made a mistake leaving us. I think you should come back with us.”

Lucy sighed very deeply. “No, I can’t.”

“Yes. You come back. It’ll be safer for you and safer for us, safer for everybody.” The bright clatter of Una’s tone took on an illusive softness: “I’ll tell you what the situation is, dearie. We can’t just have you running around loose the way you have been. You’ll get into trouble, or you’ll have a teensy bit too much to drink in the wrong company, and then you’ll blab. I know you people, you see. Blabbermouths every one of you.”

“Not me,” the girl protested. “I’d never blab, I promise you faithfully. Please leave me go on the way I been, minding my own business, please.”

“I’ve got my duty to my brother. I’d like to leave you alone, Lucy. If you’d co-operate.”

“I always co-operated before, before it happened.”

“Sure you did. Tell me where she is, Lucy. Then I’ll leave you alone, or you can come back to us on double the salary. We trust you. It’s her we don’t trust, you know that. Is she here in town?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said.

“You know she’s here in town. Now tell me where she is. I’ll give you a thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead if you’ll tell me. Come on now, Lucy. Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said.

“A thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead,” Una repeated. “I have it right here.”

“I won’t take your money,” Lucy said. “I don’t know where she is.”

“Is she in Bella City?”

“I don’t know, mum. She brought me here and left. How do I know where she went? She never told me nothing.”

“That’s funny, I thought you were her regular little confidante.” Harshly, with a sudden change of pace: “Was he hurt bad?”

“Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”

“Where is he? In Bella City?”

“I don’t know, mum.” Lucy’s voice had sunk to a stolid monotone.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know who you talking about, mum.”

“Rotten little liar!” Una said.

I heard a blow. A chair scraped. Someone hiccuped once, loudly.

“You leave me be, Miss Una.” The pressure of the situation had thrown Lucy back into sullen nonresistance, and slurred her speech. “I don’t have to take nothing from you. I’ll call the police.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to hit you. You know my bad temper, Lucy.” Una’s voice was husky with false solicitude. “Did I hurt you?”

“You didn’t hurt me. You couldn’t hurt me. Just stay away from me. Go away and leave me be.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you won’t get nothing out of me.”

“How much are you holding out for, honey?”

“And don’t you call me honey. I’m no honey of yours.”

“Five thousand dollars?”

“I wouldn’t touch your money.”

“You’re getting pretty uppity for a nigger gal that couldn’t get a job until I gave her one.’

“Don’t you call me that. And you know what you can do with your job. I wouldn’t go back to it if I was starving to death.”

“Maybe you will,” Una said cheerfully. “I hope you do starve to death.”

Her footsteps marched to the door, and the door slammed. In the hollow silence that ensued in the room, a series of slow dragging movements ended in the creak of bedsprings and another yawning sigh. I went back to my window. The sky blazed blue in my eyes. At the entrance Una was climbing into a taxi. It went away.

Two cigarettes later, Lucy came out and locked her door with a brass-tagged key. She wavered on the concrete stoop for a moment, gathering herself like an inexperienced diver for a plunge into cruel space. Thick powder clung like icing sugar to her face, imperfectly masking its darkness and its despair. Though she was wearing the same clothes, her body looked softer and more feminine.

She left the court and turned right along the shoulder of the highway. I followed her on foot. Her steps were quick and uncertain, and I was half afraid she might fall in front of a car. Gradually her stride took on the rhythm of some purpose. At the first traffic-lights, she crossed the highway.

I went ahead of her and ducked into the first store I came to, which happened to be an open-front fruit-and-vegetable market. Bent over a bin of oranges with my back to the street, I heard her heels on the pavement and felt her shadow brush me, like a cold feather.