Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Part 2

The door opened and closed several times as a sudden spurt of customers began to come in. The night was over. Willie stacked some of the chairs up on the tables and mopped at the floor. He was ready to go home and was singing. Willie was lazy. In the kitchen he was always stopping to play for a while on the harmonica he carried around with him. Now he mopped the floor with sleepy strokes and hummed his lonesome Negro music steadily.

The place was still not crowded--it was the hour when men who have been up all night meet those who are freshly wakened and ready to start a new day. The sleepy waitress was serving both beer and coffee. There was no noise or conversation, for each person seemed to be alone. The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement.

The bank building across the street was very pale in the dawn.

Then gradually its white brick walls grew more distinct. When at last the first shafts of the rising sun began to brighten the street, Biff gave the place one last survey and went upstairs.

Noisily he rattled the doork.n.o.b as he entered so that Alice would be disturbed. 'MotheroG.o.d!' he said. 'What a night!' Alice awoke with caution. She lay on the rumpled bed like a sulky cat and stretched herself. The room was drab in the fresh, hot morning sun, and a pair of silk stockings hung limp and withered from the cord of the window-shade.

'Is that drunk fool still hanging around downstairs?' she demanded.

Biff took off his shirt and examined the collar to see if it were clean enough to be worn again. 'Go down and see for yourself.'

I told you n.o.body will hinder you from kicking him out.'

Sleepily Alice reached down and picked up a Bible, the blank side of a menu, and a Sunday-School book from the floor beside the bed. She rustled through the tissue pages of the Bible until she reached a certain pa.s.sage and began reading, p.r.o.nouncing the words aloud with painful concentration. It was Sunday, and she was preparing the weekly lesson for her cla.s.s of boys in the Junior Department of her church. Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.

And Jesus said unto them, 'Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.' And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him.' Biff went into the bathroom to wash himself. The silky murmuring continued as Alice studied aloud. He listened and in the morning, rising up a great while before day, He went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.

And Simon and they that were with Him followed after Him.

And when they had found Him, they said unto Him, 'All men seek for Thee.' She had finished. Biff let the words revolve again gently inside him. He tried to separate the actual words from the sound of Alice's voice as she had spoken them. He wanted to remember the pa.s.sage as his mother used to read it when he was a boy. With nostalgia he glanced down at the wedding ring on his fifth finger that had once been hers. He wondered again how she would have felt about his giving up church and religion.

'The lesson for today is about the gathering of the disciples,' Alice said to herself in preparation. 'And the text is, 'All men seek for Thee.'' Abruptly Biff roused himself from meditation and turned on the water spigot at full force. He stripped off his undervest and began to wash himself. Always he was scrupulously clean from the belt upward. Every morning he soaped his chest and arms and neck and feet--and about twice during the season he got into the bathtub and cleaned all of his parts.

Biff stood by the bed, waiting impatiently for Alice to get up.

From the window he saw that the day would be windless and burning hot. Alice had finished reading the lesson. She still lay lazily across the bed, although she knew that he was waiting. A calm, sullen anger rose in him. He chuckled ironically. Then he said with bitterness: 'If you like I can sit and read the paper awhile. But I wish you would let me sleep now.'

Alice began dressing herself and Biff made up the bed. Deftly he reversed the sheets in all possible ways, putting the top one on the bottom, and turning them over and upside down. When the bed was smoothly made he waited until Alice had left the room before he slipped off his trousers and crawled inside.

His feet jutted out from beneath the cover and his wiry-haired chest was very dark against the pillow. He was glad he had not told Alice about what had happened to the drunk. He had wanted to talk to somebody about it, because maybe if he told all the facts out loud he could put his finger on the thing that puzzled him.

The poor son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h talking and talking and not ever getting anybody to understand what he meant. Not knowing himself, most likely. And the way he gravitated around the deaf-mute and picked him out and tried to make him a free present of everything in him.

Why? Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons--throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to. In some men it is in them--The text is 'All men seek for Thee.'

Maybe that was why--maybe--He was a Chinaman, the fellow had said. And a n.i.g.g.e.r and a wop and a Jew. And if he believed it hard enough maybe it was so. Every person and every thing he said he was--Biff stretched both of his arms outward and crossed his naked feet. His face was older in the morning light, with the closed, shrunken eyelids and the heavy, iron-like beard on his cheeks and jaw. Gradually his mouth softened and relaxed. The hard, yellow rays of the sun came in through the window so that the room was hot and bright. Biff turned wearily and covered his eyes with his hands. And he was n.o.body but--Bartholomew--old Biff with two fists and a quick tongue--Mister Brannon--by himself.

THE sun woke Mick early, although she had stayed out mighty late the night before. It was too hot even to drink coffee for breakfast, so she had ice water with syrup in it and cold biscuits. She messed around the kitchen for a while and then went out on the front porch to read the funnies. She had thought maybe Mister Singer would be reading the paper on the porch like he did most Sunday mornings. But Mister Singer was not there, and later on her Dad said he came in very late the night before and had company in his room. She waited for Mister Singer a long time. All the other boarders came down except him. Finally she went back in the kitchen and took Ralph out of his high chair and put a clean dress on him and wiped off his face.

Then when Bubber got home from Sunday School she was ready to take the kids out. She let Bubber ride in the wagon with Ralph because he was barefooted and the hot sidewalk burned his feet. She pulled the wagon for about eight blocks until they came to the big, new house that was being built. The ladder was still propped against the edge of the roof, and she screwed up nerve and began to climb.

'You mind Ralph,' she called back to Bubber. 'Mind the gnats don't sit on his eyelids.'

Five minutes later Mick stood up and held herself very straight. She spread out her arms like wings. This was the place where everybody wanted to stand. The very top. But not many kids could do it. Most of them were scared, for if you lost your grip and rolled off the edge it would kill you. All around were the roofs of other houses and the green tops of trees. On the other side of town were the church steeples and the smokestacks from the mills. The sky was bright blue and hot as fire. The sun made everything on the ground either dizzy white or black.

She wanted to sing. All the songs she knew pushed up toward her throat, but there was no sound. One big boy who had got to the highest part of the roof last week let out a yell and then started hollering out a speech he had learned at High School--'Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears!' There was something about getting to the very top that gave you a wild feeling and made you want to yell or sing or raise up your arms and fly.

She felt the soles of her tennis shoes slipping, and eased herself down so that she straddled the peak of the roof. The house was almost finished. It would be one of the largest buildings in the neighborhood--two stories, with very high ceilings and the steepest roof of any house she had ever seen.

But soon the work would all be finished. The carpenters would leave and the kids would have to find another place to play.

She was by herself. No one was around and it was quiet and she could think for a while. She took from the pocket of her shorts the package of cigarettes she had bought the night before. She breathed in the smoke slowly. The cigarette gave her a drunk feeling so that her head seemed heavy and loose on her shoulders, but she had to finish it.

M.K.--That was what she would have written on everything when she was seventeen years old and very famous. She would ride back home in a red-and-white Packard automobile with her initials on the doors. She would have M.K. written in red on her handkerchiefs and underclothes. Maybe she would be a great inventor. She would invent little tiny radios the size of a green pea that people could carry around and stick in their ears. Also flying machines people could fasten on their backs like knapsacks and go zipping all over the world. After that she would be the first one to make a large tunnel through the world to China, and people could go down in big balloons.

Those were the first tilings she would invent. They were already planned.

When Mick had finished half of the cigarette she smashed it dead and flipped the b.u.t.t down the slant of the roof. Then she leaned forward so that her head rested on her arms and began to hum to herself.

It was a funny thing--but nearly all the time there was some kind of piano piece or other music going on in the back of her mind. No matter what she was doing or thinking it was nearly always there. Miss Brown, who boarded with them, had a radio in her room, and all last winter she would sit on the steps every Sunday afternoon and listen in on the programs.

Those were probably cla.s.sical pieces, but they were the ones she remembered best. There was one special fellow's music that made her heart shrink up every time she heard it.

Sometimes this fellow's music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.

There was the sudden sound of crying. Mick sat up straight and listened The wind ruffled the fringe of hair on her forehead and the bright sun made her face white and damp.

The whimpering continued, and Mick moved slowly along the sharp-pointed roof on her hands and knees. When she reached the end she leaned forward and lay on her stomach so that her head jutted over the edge and she could see the ground below.

The kids were where she had left them. Bubber was squatting over something on the ground and beside him was a little black, dwarf shadow. Ralph was still tied in the wagon.

He was just old enough to sit up, and he held on to the sides of the wagon, with his cap crooked on his head, crying.

'Bubber!' Mick called down. 'Find out what that Ralph wants and give it to him.'

Bubber stood up and looked hard into the baby's face. 'He don't want nothing.'

'Well, give him a good shake, then.'

Mick climbed back to the place where she had been sitting before. She wanted to think for a long time about two or three certain people, to sing to herself, and to make plans. But that Ralph was still hollering and there wouldn't be any peace for her at all.

Boldly she began to climb down toward the ladder propped against the edge of the roof. The slant was very steep and there were only a few blocks of wood nailed down, very far apart from each other, that the workmen used for footholds.

She was dizzy, and her heart beat so hard it made her tremble.

Commandingly she talked out loud to herself: 'Hold on here with your hands tight and then slide down until your right toe gets a grip there and then stay close and wiggle over to the left. Nerve, Mick, you've got to keep nerve.'

Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing. It took her a long time to reach the ladder and to feel safe again. When she stood on the ground at last she seemed much shorter and smaller and her legs felt for a minute like they would crumple up with her. She hitched her shorts and jerked the belt a notch tighter. Ralph was still crying, but she paid the sound no attention and went into the new, empty house.

Last month they had put a sign out in front saying that no children were allowed on the lot. A gang of kids had been scuffling around inside the rooms one night, and a girl who couldn't see in the dark had run into a room that hadn't been floored and fallen through and broken her leg. She was still at the hospital in a plaster parish cast. Also, another time some tough boys wee-weed all over one of the walls and wrote some pretty bad words. But no matter how many Keep Out signs were put up, they couldn't run kids away until the house had been painted and finished and people had moved in.

The rooms smelled of new wood, and when she walked the soles of her tennis shoes made a flopping sound that echoed through all the house. The air was hot and quiet. She stood still in the middle of the front room for a while, and then she suddenly thought of something. She fished in her pocket and brought out two stubs of chalk--one green and the other red.

Mick drew the big block letters very slowly. At the top she wrote EDISON, and under that she drew the names of d.i.c.k TRACY and MUSSOLINI. Then in each corner with the largest letters of all, made with green and outlined in red, she wrote her initials--M.K. When that was done she crossed over to the opposite wall and wrote a very bad word--p.u.s.s.y, and beneath that she put her initials, too.

She stood in the middle of the empty room and stared at what she had done. The chalk was still in her hands and she did not feel really satisfied. She was trying to think of the name of this fellow who had written this music she heard over the radio last whiter. She had asked a girl at school who owned a piano and took music lessons about him, and the girl asked her teacher. It seemed this fellow was just a kid who had lived in some country in Europe a good while ago. But even if he was just a young kid he had made up all these beautiful pieces for the piano and for the violin and for a band or orchestra too. In her mind she could remember about six different tunes from the pieces of his she had heard. A few of them were kind of quick and tinkling, and another was like that smell in the springtime after a rain. But they all made her somehow sad and excited at the same time.

She hummed one of the tunes, and after a while in the hot, empty house by herself she felt the tears come in her eyes. Her throat got tight and rough and she couldn't sing any more.

Quickly she wrote the fellow's name at the very top of the list--MOTSART.

Ralph was tied in the wagon just as she had left him. He sat up quiet and still and his fat little hands held on to the sides.

Ralph looked like a little Chinese baby with his square black bangs and his black eyes. The sun was in his face, and that was why he had been hollering. Bubber was nowhere around. When Ralph saw her coming he began tuning up to cry again. She pulled the wagon into the shade by the side of the new house and took from her shirt pocket a blue-colored jelly bean. She stuck the candy in the baby's warm, soft mouth.

'Put that in your pipe and smoke it,' she said to him. In a way it was a waste, because Ralph was still too little to get the real good flavor out of candy. A clean rock would be about the same to him, only the little fool would swallow it. He didn't understand any more about taste than he did about talking.

When you said you were so sick and tired of dragging him around you had a good mind to throw him in the river, it was the same to him as if you had been loving him. Nothing much made any difference to him. That was why it was such an awful bore to haul him around.

Mick cupped her hands, clamped them tight together, and blew through the crack between her thumbs. Her cheeks puffed out and at first there was only the sound of air rushing through her fists. Then a high, shrill whistle sounded, and after a few seconds Bubber came out from around the corner of the house.

She rumpled the sawdust out of Bubber's hair and straightened Ralph's cap. This cap was the finest thing Ralph had. It was made out of lace and all embroidered. The ribbon under his chin was blue on one side and white on the other, and over each ear there were big rosettes. His head had got too big for the cap and the embroidery scratched, but she always put it on him when she took him out. Ralph didn't have any real baby carriage like most folks' babies did, or any summer bootees.

He had to be dragged around in a tacky old wagon she had got for Christmas three years before. But the fine cap gave him face. There was n.o.body on the street, for it was late Sunday morning and very hot. The wagon screeched and rattled. Bubber was barefooted and the sidewalk was so hot it burned his feet. The green oak trees made cool-looking black shadows on the ground, but that was not shade enough. 'Get up in the wagon,' she told Bubber. 'And let Ralph sit in your lap.'

'I can walk all right.' The long summer-time always gave Bubber the colic. He didn't have on a shirt and his ribs were sharp and white. The sun made him pale instead of brown, and his little t.i.tties were like blue raisins on his chest. 'I don't mind pulling you,' Mick said. 'Get on in.'

'O.K.' Mick dragged the wagon slowly because she was not in any hurry to get home. She began talking to the kids. But it was really more like saying things to herself than words said to them. 'This is a funny thing--the dreams I've been having lately. It's like I'm swimming. But instead of water I'm pushing out my arms and swimming through great big crowds of people. The crowd is a hundred times bigger than in Kresses' store on Sat.u.r.day afternoon. The biggest crowd in the world. And sometimes I'm yelling and swimming through people, knocking them all down wherever I go--and other times I'm on the ground and people are trompling all over me and my insides are oozing out on the sidewalk. I guess it's more like a nightmare than a plain On Sundays the house was always full of folks because the boarders had visitors. Newspapers rustled and there was cigar smoke, and footsteps always on the stairs.' Some things you just naurally want to keep private. Not because they are bad, but because you just want them secret. There are two or three things I wouldn't want even you to know about' Bubber got out when they came to the corner and helped her lift the wagon down the curb and get it up on the next sidewalk.

'But there's one thing I would give anything for. And that's a piano. If we had a piano I'd practice every single night and learn every piece in the world. That's the thing I, want more than anything else.'

They had come to their own home block now. Their house was only a few doors away. It was one of the biggest houses on the whole north side of town--three stories high. But then there were fourteen people in the family. There weren't that many in the real, blood Kelly family--but they ate there and slept there at five dollars a head and you plight as well count them on in. Mr. Singer wasn't counted in that because he only rented a room and kept it straightened up himself.

The house was narrow and had not been painted for many years. It did hot seem to be built strong enough for its three stories of height. It sagged on one side.

Mick untied Ralph and lifted him from the wagon. She darted quickly through the hall, and from the corner of her eye she saw that the living-room was full of boarders. Her Dad was there, too. Her Mama would be in the kitchen. They were all hanging around waiting for dinner-time.

She went into the first of the three rooms that the family kept for themselves. She put Ralph down on the bed where her Dad and Mama slept and gave him a string of beads to play with.

From behind the closed door of the next room she could hear the sound of voices, and she decided to go inside.

Hazel and Etta stopped talking when they saw her. Etta was sitting in the chair by the window, painting her toe-nails with the red polish. Her hair was done up in steel rollers and there was a white dab of face cream on a little place under her chin where a pimple had come out. Hazel was flopped out lazy on the bed as usual. 'What were you all jawing about?' It's none of your nosy business,' Etta said. 'Just you hush up and leave us alone.'

'It's my room just as much as it is either one of yours. I have as good a right hi here as you do.' Mick strutted from one corner to the other until she had covered all the floor s.p.a.ce. 'But then I don't care anything about picking any fight. All I want are my own rights.'

Mick brushed back her s.h.a.ggy bangs with the palm of her hand. She had done this so often that there was a little row of cowlicks above her forehead. She quivered her nose and made faces at herself in the mirror. Then she began walking around the room again.

Hazel and Etta were O.K. as far as sisters went. But Etta was like she was full of worms. All she thought about was movie stars and getting in the movies. Once she had written to Jeanette MacDonald and had got a typewritten letter back saying that if ever she came out to Hollywood she could come by and swim in her swimming pool. And ever since that swimming pool had been preying on Etta's mind. All she thought about was going to Hollywood when she could sc.r.a.pe up the bus fare and getting a job as a secretary and being buddies with Jeanette MacDonald and getting in the movies herself.

She primped all the day long. And that was the bad part. Etta wasn't naturally pretty like Hazel. The main thing was she didn't have any chin. She would pull at her jaw and go through a lot of chin exercises she had read in ft movie book. She was always looking at her side profile in the mirror and trying to keep her mouth set in a certain way. But it didn't do any good.

Sometimes Etta would hold her face with her hands and cry hi the night about it.

Hazel was plain lazy. She was good-looking but thick in the head. She was eighteen years old, and next to Bill she was the oldest of all the kids in the family. Maybe that was the trouble.

She got the first and biggest share of everything--the first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and she was soft.

'Are you just going to tramp around the room all day? It makes me sick to see you hi those silly boy's clothes. Somebody ought to clamp down on you, Mick Kelly, and make you behave,' Etta said.

'Shut up,' said Mick. 'I wear shorts because I don't want to wear your old hand-me-downs. I don't want to be like either of you and I don't want to look like either of you. And I won't. That's why I wear shorts. I'd rather be a boy any day, and I wish I could move in with Bill.'

Mick scrambled under the bed and brought out a large hatbox.

As she carried it to the door both of them called after her, 'Good riddance!' Bill had the nicest room of anybody in the family. Like a den--and he had it all to himself--except for Bubber. Bill had pictures cut out from magazines tacked on the walls, mostly faces of beautiful ladies, and in another corner were some pictures Mick had painted last year herself at the free art cla.s.s.

There was only a bed and a desk in the room. Bill was sitting hunched over the desk, reading Popular Mechanics. She went up behind him and put her arms around his shoulders. 'Hey, you old son-of-a-gun.'

He did not begin tussling with her like he used to do. .Hey,' he said, and shook his shoulders a little.

'Will it bother you if I stay in here a little while?'

'Sure--I don't mind if you want to stay.'

Mick knelt on the floor and untied the string on the big hatbox. Her hands hovered over the edge of the lid, but for some reason she could not make up her mind to open it 'I been thinking about what I've done on this already,' she said.

'And it may work and it may not.'

Bill went on reading. She still knelt over the box, but did not open it. Her eyes wandered over to Bill as he sat with his back to her. One of his big feet kept stepping on the other as he read. His shoes were scuffed. Once their Dad had said that all Bill's dinners went to his feet and his breakfast to one ear and his supper to the other ear, that was a sort of mean thing to say and Bill had been sour over it for a month, but it was funny.

His ears flared out and were very red, and though he was just out of high school he wore a size thirteen shoe. He tried to hide his feet by sc.r.a.ping one foot behind the other when he stood up, but that only made it worse.

Mick opened the box a few inches and then shut it again. She felt too excited to look into it now. She got up and walked around the room until she could calm down a little. After a few minutes she stopped before the picture she had painted at the free government art cla.s.s for school kids last winter. There was a picture of a storm on the ocean and a sea gull being dashed through the air by the wind. It was called 'Sea Gull with Back Broken in Storm.' The teacher had described the ocean during the first two or three lessons, and that was what nearly everybody started with. Most of the kids were like her, though, and they had never really seen the ocean with their own eyes.

That was the first picture she had done and Bill had tacked it on his wall. All the rest of her pictures were full of people.

She had done some more ocean storms at first--one with an airplane crashing down and people jumping out to save themselves, and another with a trans-Atlantic liner going down and all the people trying to push and crowd into one little lifeboat.

Mick went into the closet of Bill's room and brought out some other pictures she had done in the cla.s.s--some pencil drawings, some water-colors, and one canvas with oils. They were all full of people. She had imagined a big fire on Broad Street and painted how she thought it would be. The flames were bright green and orange and Mr. Brannon's restaurant and the First National Bank were about the only buildings left.

People were lying dead in the streets and others were running for their lives. One man was in his nightshirt and a lady was trying to carry a bunch of bananas with her. Another picture was called 'Boiler Busts in Factory,' and men were jumping out of windows and running while a knot of kids in overalls stood scrouged together, holding the buckets of dinner they had brought to their Daddies. The oil painting was a picture of the whole town fighting on Broad Street. She never knew why she had painted this one and she couldn't think of the right name for it. There wasn't any fire or storm or reason you could see in the picture why all this battle was happening. But there were more people and more moving around than in any other picture. This was the best one, and it was too bad that she couldn't think up the real name. In the back of her mind somewhere she knew what it was.

Mick put the picture back on the closet shelf. None of them were any good much. The people didn't have fingers and some of the arms were longer than the legs. The cla.s.s had been fun, though. But she had just drawn whatever came into her head without reason--and in her heart it didn't give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music.

Mick knelt down on the floor and quickly lifted the top of the big hatbox. Inside was a cracked ukulele strung with two violin strings, a guitar string and a banjo string. The crack on the back of the ukulele had been neatly mended with sticking plaster and the round hole in the middle was covered by a piece of wood. The bridge of a violin held up the strings at the end and some sound-holes had been carved on either side.

Mick was making herself a violin. She held the violin in her lap. She had the feeling she had never really looked at it before. Some time ago she made Bubber a little play mandolin out of a cigar box with rubber bands, and that put the idea into her head. Since that she had hunted all over everywhere for the different parts and added a little to the job every day. It seemed to her she had done everything except use her head.

'Bill, this don't look like any real violin I ever saw.' He was still reading--'Yeah--?'

'It just don't look right. It just don't--' She had planned to tune the fiddle that day by s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the pegs. But since she had suddenly realized how all the work had turned out she didn't want to look at it. Slowly she plucked one string after another. They all made the same little hollow-sounding ping.

'How anyway will I ever get a bow? Are you sure they have to be made out of just horses' hair?'

'Yeah,' said Bill impatiently.

'Nothing like thin wire or human hair strung on a limber stick would do?'