Читаем Ginny Gall полностью

I can not go on no longer in this foolish world without you, not a minute it’s likely sometimes, and the dust chokes me and the foul food and the whole wretched disorderly world of provocation and misery. There is no light, no place to rest in this world. I am alone with only the hope of your caress. Come to me. I am alive, trapped behind wire like an animal in a cage built on a sand hill. The sun beats down on us with a force that makes me think the god who designed this world was a madman. I must find shade or some way to believe there will someday be shade. It is not through power or money or arms that this can be achieved. I am left only with love. What a meager portion that seems some days. But it is great and endless, I know it. The love I mean between a man and a woman and through them to the children. This is my only hope in this bitter world.

There was more and Delvin’s hand grew tired trying to keep up. Jim would stop, hold his face to the light, sniffing like a hunting dog on a scent, and wait impatiently for him to catch up. “Yes,” he said, “the word is dereliction, spell it as best you can. It means wreckage.” It was strange that he would know so many unusual words and not know how to write. Or read either. Jim said this was because he had been read to in his youth by an actor traveling the vaudeville circuit out west. This actor, a black man, a feeder in a crow act generally but a sometime comedian himself, had found him wandering on a street in Dallas and taken him in.

“I had something like that happen to me,” Delvin said.

“Not like this,” Jim said. The man had raised him and he had traveled with him as his factotum for several years. The man had held him in the thrall of an iniquitous sexual relationship it had taken years to extricate himself from. He had finally had to beat the man half to death and throw him down the stairs of a boarding house in Kansas City and leave him for dead to get free. “Free,” he said smiling sarcastically. “There is no damn freedom for the likes of me in this damn world.”

He believed everything in the world was corrupt and diseased.

“Except for family love,” Delvin said.

“Yeah, that,” Jim said smiling grimly. “There’s that, thank God; if you can get to it. This world,” he said, looking around as if it was sneaking up on him, “is crooked and defiled. Yet still, right down to the smallest speck and scurrying roach, it runs just fine. Which leads you to the conclusion that crooked and corrupt is how the world likes it.”

His glance then from his cot where he sat scrunched up against his knees was haggard and determined, winded.

“What’s a man like me to do?” he asked. He looked around as if a crowd was waiting for his answer. He blew his breath out, not a sigh but so he could draw in a strong one behind it. “I conclude it is me who is out of step. I am a foolish man bound for ignominy. But I too it appears have a right to the tree of life. How do I know this?” He twirled his right hand as if he could spiral it through to the truth. “Because I am alive. If I wasn’t meant to be here I wouldn’t be able to suck breath, I’d be like a fish when you snatch it out of the water. Smothered by air. But I am not, am I? I draw breath and breathe and my heart beats and food sustains me, so I must belong here too. What do you reckon that means?”

He hadn’t waited for Delvin to answer any of these questions.

“It must mean that the opposition I bring to the facts of life is necessary too. So it doesn’t matter what these dumb white boys have to say about me because I belong here just like they do. And my opposition to them is just as right as theirs is to me.”

Delvin said, “I don’t think their opposition is right.”

“That’s because you haven’t got the heart yet to look at the world as it is,” Jim said. “Maybe that day will come, maybe not. For many it never arrives. Most, really. They see only their side of the struggle.”

He blinked into the dimness and made a smacking sound with his full lips. “Well, I am getting tired,” he said, and with that he turned on his side and went to sleep.