Читаем Ginny Gall полностью

He repeated these two sentences to the Ghost later as they sat at the card table the Ghost had set up in the old tack room. He now used the room for a combo bedroom, office, dining room and kitchen.

“Probably all the usual,” the Ghost said. Just the day before he’d got rid of his beard and shaved his hair close; it looked like a bit of orange mist had settled on the top of his pale head.

“You as saucy as ever, aint you?”

“Worse.” The albino half rose from his chair. “Let me show you this.” He pulled a new Placer clasp knife from his pocket and laid it on the table. It looked like a sleek silver fish. When Delvin went to pick it up the Ghost skidded it out of reach, pushed it off the table into his other hand and held it up trophy style.

“You gon show it to me?” Delvin said.

“Your hands dry?”

“Let me see it.”

The Ghost gave him the knife.

“It’s right righteous,” Delvin said, though he had no interest in knives and didn’t open it. Still it had a lovely heft and felt compact and complete. He turned it in his hand. He would like to give Celia something that had this detailed perfection. He handed the knife back. In his pocket he carried an old tape-wrapped Barlow. “I mean,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to be doing next. In the next minute.”

“Me, I know my way on down the road. That’s the way I like it too.”

“I don’t know which of us is the lucky one.”

“Maybe neither,” the Ghost said, “not in this world.”

Delvin wondered if the Ghost wasn’t more intelligent than he’d thought.

“You want to go traveling with me?”

“Not for a thousand dollars.”

Delvin was troubled that he didn’t want to go alone. He wondered where the man Frank was by now. Maybe he should go over to the Emporium, get somebody over there to go with him. But he didn’t care to see any of that world again just now. He went back into the house and out onto the porch where by light of a kerosene lamp and sitting beside Mr. Oliver in one of the big pontific arm chairs he read a book the professor had given him, Who Is the Negro Man, by Dr. Quinton Merckson of the University of Pennsylvania. Merckson argued that the negro man was the bearer of the world’s troubles. This was because he had the strength to carry the weight. Delvin had read this sort of thing before, heard it before. He had a tendency to believe what he read, just because what he read was down in print. Later he would sort through it and find out what fit. For tonight he was the able negro man, hauler of the world’s burdens. A soul thing, the doctor said in so many words. The negro man had a deeper and more refined, a nobler soul. He’d heard this from preachers at funeral services. For the trampled-on it always came down to something like that.

He put the book down on a little wicker table and looked over at Mr. Oliver, who was listening to the Adelaide concerto, his favorite Mozart, on the wind-up Victrola, turned down low.

“You think the negro man is designed to carry the world’s burden?” Delvin said.

“If we are I spect we need to bulk up,” Mr. Oliver said, looking down his ample front. He flipped open a wing of his black vest, revealing the red silk underlining. Casey lay on the floor putting another jigsaw puzzle together. Assembled, so Delvin recalled, the puzzle would become a picture of lions resting under a tree in Africa. The tree had a squashed gray top that always seemed to Delvin a mistake until he saw a photo of such a tree in the professor’s museum. Acacia. They grew in Africa where everybody in this house was from. Everybody came from Africa, the professor had told him. White man caught the first train out, he said.

Tomorrow he would be back on the rails. Mr. Oliver had asked where he was off to this time. Delvin had told him about Celia. “Good, good,” Mr. Oliver had said, grinning broadly, “it’ll probably help take your mind off rounding up ladies for yours truly,” and they both had laughed. Delvin had talked a little about how painful the situation was. “What matters to us always makes us a little nervous and spooky when we draw up to it,” the funeral director said. “Look at me. I still live above my shop, like some old grocer off in the big city. I keep thinking I am about to move on to something that will be better, but when I think I am getting there. . I get shaky.”