The Missing Person (26 page)

Ira Rorie moved the lamp to see the clock on the dashboard. It was midnight.
White
, he thought.
And beautiful. Kee-rist!
He put the chemical toilet back in its container under the seat and sat down.

The girl seemed to be asleep. He shook her gently.

“Whenever you're ready I'll walk you home,” he said.

She opened her eyes. “This is a great place you have here, Mr. Rorie. Like … like a cave or a bed with everything. I knew a woman in Utica once who had arthritis and couldn't move much. She had a potty built into the middle of her bed.”

“Something like that, I guess. Are you ready to go?”

“You want me to go?”

“No … but you know, if anybody …”
White. Lord God
.

“Nobody sees
you
here, do they?”

“Well no, but you know. I'm black, like Jeanette, and the night. But you shine, like, all over the place. Someone will see you leaving.”

“I won't leave, Mr. Rorie, if you let me stay. I don't have any place to go or anything, much, to do. My job, well, I don't like it …”

“Waitressing?”

“Something like that. And my husband, well, I'm a drag on him I think …”

Married
, he thought.
White. Beautiful. The living end, right here
.

“You don't have to go …”

“… So I left to get really tired so I could sleep and forget about Arnie and me and the part … the job, I mean.”

“Who's Arnie?”

“My husband.”

“Yes. Well, did you get really tired?”

“Oh yes, I'm tired now, Mr. Rorie.”

“Just Ira is enough.”

“Ira.”

A week later, with officials at Premium Pictures, Arnold Franklin, Lou Price, Dolores Jenkins, Olivia, Reuben Rubin, and Dempsey Butts looking for her, Franny was curled up in Jeanette in the shack at the back of the gas station. She read the magazines that Ira brought her each evening
(Popular Mechanics, Vanity Fair, Literary Digest)
, waiting, when she wasn't asleep, for the black man in his brown straw hat and his suit like an undertaker's. She was alone all day (Ira had instructed Alex not to clean the car until further notice) but not lonely, wrapped in the cocoon of Jeanette, like a voluminous fur coat, like a well-fitted-out tent. It was the first time since she had lived in the daze on her mother's bed that she felt safe, secure, and at home. She could talk to Ira Rorie. She did talk to him, during the long evenings they spent together:

“Makes me remember the time that I went with the 4-H girls for two weeks to a place on a lake near Utica. I wasn't in the 4-H, but my mother used to marcel the leader's hair and she told her about me and so they took me. I was twelve I think yes twelve and the scout leader whose name I remember was Scotty sat next to me on the train to Camp To-Pe-Kay because I didn't know the other girls and was scared of them. They talked and laughed together and had places they knew about that they'd all been. I thought they'd all been to the camp lots of times before but it turned out they hadn't, it just sounded that way to me. Well Scotty came over and sat beside me and told me about all the fun we'd have, the overnights and the cookouts and the campfire stew that we'd eat and I was really excited and glad to be going away from Mom and Frenchy Fry I think it was then and have some girls my own age to do things with. We got to the place and it wasn't much. We had tents with floors though and a big tent we called the rec tent and a fireplace outside where we ate weenies and sang songs at night. At the end of the fire at night we all held hands and sang about what good pals we were and how we'd be friends for evermore but I didn't feel I fit that place any better than I did the chesterfield in the front room at home. I couldn't play the games they knew and when we had to go down to the pond to swim I was so scared I would hide in the john so that I didn't have to go in the water. Once Scotty said I had to try it and near the edge I wet my pants. I could smell the pee through the wool tank suit, and I crouched down on the path and wouldn't go any farther.

“And I remember one night a real thin girl with teeth that came out so far they almost covered her bottom lip sat next to me at the campfire and we all lay back on the ground wrapped in blankets and watched the stars and she said you know it's
comfortable
here and I thought about it and it was right, it was one of the few times I can ever remember feeling comfortable anywhere. Warm, easy, with the stars there not so far, and not afraid, and this ugly girl talking to me and I wanted to reach over and touch her and tell her I loved her, buck teeth and all, I really did. But then Scotty got us all on our feet and I never said anything to the girl with the teeth or ever remember having that feeling again oh yes maybe once with Dempsey that first week …”

“Dempsey Butts, the football player?”

“Oh … yes,” said Franny, whispering, realizing she had made a mistake. But Ira did not notice. In this rash of “telling” as the teacher used to call it in kindergarten, he had been waiting his turn. Butts the football player gave him a lead.

“I've always been interested in sports. Specially in a man named John A. Johnson. Ever hear of him?”

“A … football player?”

“No. Oh no. A fighter. A great man. The first black man to be champion of the world. Hear how that sounds? CHAMPION OF THE WORLD! Hear it? He was a heavyweight oh about two twenty I would guess and about six feet and a nobody. Just a real determined black guy. At that time around 1910 there was this white champion named James J. Jeffries, beloved of all the country, the papers said, and he'd been champion a lot and retired.

“On this day a great day the Glorious Fourth of July in 1910 he had come out of retirement, two years before, to fight this black man Jack Johnson who the papers said had a yellow streak. This Jim Jeffries was pure white and had a face that looked like it was cut out of stone, handsome and solid. He was thirty-five years old but then the black man with the ugly, bald bullet-head and the fat nose and lips was no chicken, thirty-two I think. So they set up this great fight on this great day in July nineteen hundred and ten. All the newspapers in the country sent reporters to cover that fight and so sure were they that the big white man would beat the scared yellow black man that one sportswriter from San Francisco sent back a report that said he
had
won and the
Record
put out an extra about it. JIM WINS OVER JOHNSON. But it wasn't so. It was just what they
hoped
would happen. Johnson waited until the fourth round and then right in front of all those watching white “World-Famous Gladiators” it says in the books, like Tom Sharkey and Tommy Burns and Bob Fitzsimmons and the greatest one, John L. Sullivan who was a real old guy by then, that black ugly plug who knew he would win that fight, went in and just about killed that pure white guy. I've read everything about that fight. Back in 1910 it was, and to my way of thinking it was the beginning of the end of the picture everyone had and liked of the Big White Hero beating up on the scared yellow-streak ugly black guy …”

“And I remember the noontime I had to go see the principal of the school because I hadn't been there in the afternoons for a long time. I'd been going to the movies. I'd get a guy in the office who liked me, I guess, to sign a pass slip and then I'd write my name on it and go out a side door. I'd go to see Pola Negri or Vilma Banky or someone like that. Once I got caught. The principal said I was a truant and could get into a lot of trouble if I went on doing that. I said, all right, I wouldn't do it anymore.

“Then the principal who was fat and wore glasses with no rims and had two pieces of left-over hair across the top of his head came around from behind the desk and put his hands on my shoulders and pushed down hard so that I felt as if I was going down right through the chair and the floor into the gym or something. ‘No more truancy, hear?' he said to me.

“I was scared and said, ‘Sure, Mr. O'Brien.'

“Then he leaned down and put his face in my hair and bit on it and pulled some out with his teeth. I pushed at him with my knees and he went back against the desk. He looked like he'd lost his breath, gasping like. I didn't care. I had this pain in my head where the hair had come out, and I kicked at his fat belly and he went
gug
, and then I left. I went out the front door on another made-up pass I'd been saving, to see a Ramon Novarro movie I think it was. I knew then there wasn't anything different about people who ran schools or ran anything. One minute they'd be saying official things. Then all of a sudden they'd change and they'd be down on your level doing strange things, secret things that you thought they would not think of, that you'd never thought of.

“So then I had no more trouble about truancy. I went any time I wanted to and got away from all that civics and guff and saw a new picture as soon as it changed twice a week and sometimes over again the next day twice. I would see Mr. O'Brien in the halls and he would look at me with those cow-eyes and stroke his two wet hairs down on his head and suck in his gut, but he never said anything to me again. I think he was scared of me then, the way people get who do something to you that they're ashamed of …”

“Oh yes, I remember once when I got stuck in the latrine at the Y. I tried to crawl out the bottom but I couldn't make it. It was cruddy on that floor, full of wet toilet paper and urine. I tried to climb over the top from the seat and I couldn't make that. Then I shouted and finally the director of the Y was passing by and heard me and came in and kept saying: ‘All right, all right, young man, don't panic. I'll get you out in just a moment,' and I was quiet. He worked at the door with a wire. The door opened and he saw me. He said: ‘You stupid nigger …' The director of the Young Men's Christian Association said that.”

The talk between them went on in this way. For a week, in the evenings, they told each other about the wounds, the secret sores they had acquired growing up. They resurrected from the bottom of their memories whatever they had not been able to say to anyone before. In the process, prodded into revelation by the agonized force of each other's histories, they found themselves in wonder at their mutual, recollected pain.

“I didn't know I still thought about that,” Ira Rorie said more than once. Franny Fuller, who now referred to herself as Beauty, listened, and when he had finished, like the run-on stories that children tell, one stopping and the other picking up the narrative, she would start. Night after night they went on, remembering aloud, listening to each other.

On the fourth night, when it grew very late, they made love. They approached the act as they had their talk. Each took his turn at a display of prowess, entrancing the other with his performance. Ira Rorie acted out of love and pity, feeling more and more deeply for his guest. Franny, who felt she had nothing but her ugly autobiography to give Ira, offered him her acquiescent self. She tendered him evidence of what had been done to her, her acquired experience, what she had been through, her education in the art by the men in upstate New York, by Dempsey, and Arnie.

She felt pleasure at the way Ira's brown skin glistened with sweat as he approached his moment, she enjoyed the roll of his tongue in the pink, avid cave of his mouth and, when it was over, the light sigh and the sleep of content into which he fell. To her it signified the successful execution of her woman's duty. So seldom in her life had she had a chance to know she had rendered good service. Feeling nothing of the curious excitement herself, this alone was enough to give her pleasure.

When he had finished and they lay together, she would take his hand. Holding it tight, she went on with her unending memories, pouring out to him what she had always before refused to think about since it happened.

“I remember the time I was getting bathed by my mother. There never was very much water in the tub because she hated to use the hot water. She had to pay a lot for it, she said. The tub stood on paws, like claws maybe, not paws, like it was ready to creep around the bathroom if it wanted to. So I was never really sure when she put me in it if it would stand still. My mother liked to wash me hard because she said that was the only way to get clean. Then all the scaly dead skin would come off, the brown fuzz in your belly button and the scum behind your ears and between your toes and in your bottom. She washed me so hard that I hurt and cried. Besides, I think it was cold because we had no heat in the bathroom and so little hot water in that claw-footed scabby tub. When I cried she always got mad.

“But that night something else made her mad earlier, I don't remember what. Her temper was like one river going into another, so she was mad as hell by the time of the bath. I tried to climb out of the tub. She took my hair in one hand and held me tight so my ears ached and with the other she pushed me back and when I cried harder I remember, I'll always remember, she said:

“‘I'll fix you. You behave and shut up or you'll go down the drain.'

“Down the drain in a tub, I thought, that will crawl away after I've gone down and I am gone with the scum and the tub will be gone so I can never get back. But not Mom and her ManBoy. They'll still be here.

“I was so scared when she finally let me out of the tub I got sick on the bathroom floor. And the ManBoy who was there then, I don't remember which one it was, laughed, oh yes, I remember now, he was some kind of Canadian, Frenchy Fry, my mother called him, he laughed in his funny broken voice that sounded like a crow cawing and said that all that was left for me to do now was shit on the floor and then he laughed louder and slapped my mother on the backside while she was mopping up my mess, and that made her madder. And I cried on and on.

“Now I hate the sound of water coming in and going out, even in the toilet. Arnie hated it when I didn't flush the toilet. Do you know, I've got to stand up and then stand back before I can flush the thing. And then when I do, I've got to get out of there fast or it all starts over again and I can hear her: