Дэймон Найт: Orbit 6

‘Good, I’ll call them.’

‘Now?’ said she.

I couldn’t do it. I brought the poker in front of me and stood there with it, holding it in both hands. The stranger — who almost had to stoop to avoid our ceiling — wasted only a glance on me, as if I were hardly worth looking at, and then concentrated his attention on her. She had her chin in her hands. Then she closed her eyes.

‘Put that down, please,’ she said tiredly.

I did not know what to do. She opened her eyes and took the saucer off the other glass on the table.

‘Put that down right now,’ she said, and raised the glass of ammonia to her lips.

I swung at him clumsily with the poker. I was not sure what happened next, but I think he laughed and seized the end — the hot end — and then threw me off balance just as he screamed, because the next thing I knew I was down on all fours watching her trip him as he threw himself at her, his eyes screwed horribly shut, choking and coughing and just missing her. The ammonia glass was lying empty and broken on the floor; a brown stain showed where it had rolled off the white tablecloth on the kitchen table. When he fell, she kicked him in the side of the head. Then she stepped carefully away from him and held out her hand to me; I gave her the poker, which she took with the folded edge of the tablecloth, and reversing it so that she held the cold end, she brought it down with immense force — not on his head, as I had expected, but on his windpipe. When he was still, she touched the hot end of the poker to several places on his jacket, passed it across where his belt would be, and to two places on both of his shoes. Then she said to me, ‘Get out.’

I did, but not before I saw her finishing the job on his throat, not with the poker but with the thick heel of her silver shoe.

When I came back in, there was nobody there. There was a clean, rinsed glass on the draining board next to the wooden sink and the poker was propped up in one corner of the sink with cold water running on it. Our visitor was at the stove, brewing tea in my mother’s brown teapot. She was standing under the Dutch cloth calendar my mother, who was very modern, kept hanging on the wall. My mother pinned messages on it, one of them read ‘Be Careful. Except for the Bathroom, More Accidents Occur in the Kitchen Than in Any Other Part of the House.’

‘Where —’ I said, ‘where is — is —’

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Sit down here,’ and she put me into his seat at the kitchen table. But there was no he anywhere. She said, ‘Don’t think too much.’ Then she went back to the tea and just as it was ready to pour, my mother came in from the living room, with a blanket around her shoulders, smiling foolishly and saying, ‘Goodness, I’ve been asleep, haven’t I?’

‘Tea?’ said our visitor.

‘I fell asleep just like that,’ said my mother, sitting down.

‘I forgot,’ said our visitor. ‘I borrowed a car. I felt ill. I must call them on the telephone,’ and she went out into the hall, for we had been among the first to have a telephone. She came back a few minutes later. ‘Is it all right?’ said my mother. We drank our tea in silence.

‘Tell me,’ said our visitor at length. ‘How is your radio reception?’

‘It’s perfectly fine,’ said my mother, a bit offended.

‘That’s fine,’ said our visitor, and then, as if she couldn’t control herself, ‘because you live in a dead area, you know, thank God, a dead area!’

My mother said, alarmed, ‘I beg your par —’

‘Excuse me,’ said our visitor, ‘I’m ill,’ and she put her cup into her saucer with a clatter, got up and went out of the kitchen. My mother put one hand caressingly over mine.

‘Did anyone… insult her at the dance?’ said my mother, softly.

‘Oh no,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’ my mother insisted. ‘Are you perfectly sure? Did anyone comment? Did anyone say anything about her appearance? About her height? Anything that was not nice?’

‘Ruth did,’ I said. ‘Ruth said she looked like a giraffe.’ My mother’s hand slid off mine; gratified, she got up and began to gather up the tea things. She put them into the sink. She clucked her tongue over the poker and put it away in the kitchen closet. Then she began to dry the glass that our visitor had previously rinsed and put on the draining board, the glass that had held ammonia.

‘The poor woman,’ said my mother, drying it. ‘Oh, the poor woman.’

Nothing much happened after that. I began to get my books ready for high school. Blue cornflowers sprang up along the sides of the house and my father, who was better now, cut them down with a scythe. My mother was growing hybrid ones in the back flower garden, twice as tall and twice as big as any of the wild ones; she explained to me about hybrids and why they were bigger, but I forgot it. Our visitor took up with a man, not a nice man, really, because he worked in the town garage and was Polish. She didn’t go out but used to see him in the kitchen at night. He was a thickset, stocky man, very blond, with a real Polish name, but everyone called him Bogalusa Joe because he had spent fifteen years in Bogalusa, Louisiana (he called it ‘Loosiana’) and he talked about it all the time. He had a theory, that the coloured people were just like us and that in a hundred years everybody would be all mixed up, you couldn’t tell them apart. My mother was very advanced in her views but she wouldn’t ever let me talk to him. He was very respectful; he called her ‘Ma’am’, and didn’t use any bad language, but he never came into the living room. He would always meet our visitor in the kitchen or sometimes on the swing in the back garden. They would drink coffee; they would play cards. Sometimes she would say to him, ‘Tell me a story, Joe. I love a good story,’ and he would talk about hiding out in Loosiana; he had had to hide out from somebody or something for three years in the middle of the Negroes and they had let him in and let him work and took care of him. He said, ‘The coloured are like anybody.’ Then he said. The nigras are smarter. They got to be. They ain’t nobody’s fool. I had a black girl for two years once was the smartest woman in the world. Beautiful woman. Not beautiful like a white, though, not the same.’

‘Give us a hundred years,’ he added, ‘and it’ll all be mixed.’

Two hundred?’ said our visitor, pouring coffee. He put a lot of sugar in his; then he remarked that he had learned that in Bogalusa. She sat down. She was leaning her elbows on the table, smiling at him. She was stirring her own coffee with a spoon. He looked at her a moment, and then he said softly:

‘A black woman, smartest woman in the world. You’re black, woman, ain’t you?’

‘Part,’ she said.

‘Beautiful woman,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows?’

‘They know in the circus,’ she said. ‘But there they don’t care. Shall I tell you what we circus people think of you?’

‘Of who?’ he said, looking surprised.

‘Of all of you, she said. ‘All who aren’t in the circus. All who can’t do what we can do, who aren’t the biggest or the best, who can’t kill a man barehanded or learn a new language in six weeks or slit a man’s jugular at fifteen yards with nothing but a pocketknife or climb the Greene County National Bank from the first storey to the sixth with no equipment. I can do all that.’

‘I’ll be damned,’ said Bogalusa Joe softly.

‘We despise you,’ she said. ‘That’s what we do. We think you’re slobs. The scum of the earth! The world’s fertilizer, Joe, that’s what you are.’

‘Baby, you’re blue,’ he said. ‘You’re blue tonight,’ and then he took her hand across the table, but not the way they did it in the movies, not the way they did it in the books; there was a look on his face I had never seen on anyone’s before, not the high school boys when they put a line over on a girl, not on grown-ups, not even on the brides and grooms because all that was romantic or showing off or ‘lust’ and he only looked infinitely kind, infinitely concerned. She pulled her hand out of his. With the same faint, detached smile she had had all night, she pushed back her chair and stood up. She said flatly: