James Purdy - In a Shallow Grave

As I formed the last letter of my name, we both exchanged what was like one single same terrible look, a look like two shots which met and exploded together in the air.

I knew as I watched Daventry go with the message he himself had composed that it was going to happen, but I didn’t know the full terrible effect it was to have on me. I mean I thought I could die, was going to die pretty shortly, but I didn’t know there was so much pain left in my body that should already be dead. But when Quintus heard him leave, I think he knowed it, for he came into my bedroom, where I was already like laid out, and looked at me hard. “I don’t want to be read to, Quints,” I said. “Do you want your nightshirt put on?” he said, “It ain’t late enough to go to sleep,” I pointed out. “Well, you’re in bed though.”

“All right, put me in my nightshirt, why don’t you?” He had a terrible time getting me into it, for all of a sudden all the strength and power had gone out of my body, like it had when they first brought me into that army hospital and even the nurses and orderlies let out little moans and oh’s.

“Your white master ain’t feelin so good today, Quints,” I mumbled when he got me in between the sheets.

“Should I call the doc?”

I just shook my head a good many times because the motion kept me from feeling so dizzy.

Quintus began rubbing my feet, I think in pure desperation, and all at once I said a thing that made me as sick as if I had heard it on the news broadcast: He will fuck her tonight.

“Oh no he won’t, Garnet,” Quintus answered back. “She’s too upper for him.”

“Don’t you spoil me now.” I tried to raise my voice, and laughed.

It got fearful hot that night, well, we was about in July if I remember this review of my life, I think I saw a few fireflies floating around which means it was getting later into the summer.

That was the time Quints and me became almost as close as Daventry and me was getting before he stepped into the trap I had laid for him—to use his way of explaining it all.

“I ain’t going to die, Quints, so you don’t need to sit up.”

Well, he was already asleep in that mammoth old stuffed chair. He slept good and snored as loud as a water buffalo, but when the pains came I would hold his hand tight but he never woke up.

You see, I would talk to myself, telling myself the same story I have already told so many times, but it helped explain things somehow when I got in this state, when I was blown up, all my veins and arteries moved from the inside where they belong to the outside so that as that army doc put it, I have been turned inside out in all respects.

The hall clock struck three in the morning. Quintus stirred a little. A helpful breeze came drifting in, and brought me Quintus’ smell, which was like those night moths that hit you in the chest when you run sometimes through the woods as a boy.

“Quints,” I shook him, “what do I smell like? You never told me.”

“Stale shortbread,” he spoke in his sleep.

“Are you awake, Quints?”

“Old socks,” he said. He was sound asleep but he heard me too.

When morning came he brought me my coffee, but my tongue was hanging out, and my eyes were losing their focus. Daventry had not showed.

“Can’t you drink so much as a swallow?” Quints watched me try to down a sip of his strong brew. If I could have seen him I would have knowed he was scared, petrified, sick almost as me, etc., but my eyes did not focus now at all.

“I’ll call Doc then,” he mumbled, going off.

I couldn’t move then to do a thing.

I don’t remember anything till evening, and Doc come in with his old beat-up bag which might have looked black but was now just all wrinkles and creases and holes but with still enough leather to hold the medicines and syringe. He took out the needle right away the minute he seen me and I knew I was in for oblivion for maybe a day.

Doc told Quints a lot of things then, I could hear the words but not know the meaning, yet I knew kind of, it was like I had consumed a whole haymow of grass, and then I didn’t want to die after all, this life which was not worth the candle—I wanted to keep after all.

“Doc,” I began, trying to see in which corner of the room he was sitting, “Doc, can you hold me till Daventry comes, or did the son of a bitch go to Utah?”

I could sort of imagine the questioning look on the doc’s face, and the last I heard was Quintus telling him something on the subject of due taxes and dispossession.

It was after dawn, the birds were making a big fuss still, though they make their biggest to-do of course before dawn, but I knew it was after dawn by the way the light was pearl-gray on the cliff out there. So I wasn’t in the next world, but I wasn’t glad after all to be back, because of the pain.

Quintus was making me drink some bouillon as strong-tasting as the sweat off a horse.

“He’s waiting in the next room,” Quintus finally announced. “He spent the night in my room.”

“How many nights is this he’s been gone?” I inquired.

“Well, ah, let me see,” Quintus pondered. “Four.”

“I been hovering four nights then . . . I’ll be God­damned.”

Daventry came in. He looked all dolled up, and sheepish, and troubled, but I felt as exhausted as if I had lifted a horse and dray.

“No, I didn’t,” he said to that look on my face.

“You’re a fucking liar.”

“But she wanted me to, Garnet.”

“And you mean to tell me, you big stiff, you didn’t then?”

“I don’t think she really wanted it,” he went on.

I began to doubt if I was awake or still under the hypodermic, but I know now I was awake all right.

“I don’t know how to tell you, Garnet,” he mumbled on.

“Well, don’t wear yourself out in trying.”

“She is though in love with me. That’s for sure.”

“Aha, good. Well, it was your beautiful letter done it, and your general overall appearance.”

“All she wanted to do was look at me naked, she said, for the time being.”

I raised up on my left elbow at that, but it give out right away and I fell back on the matress.

“I stripped for her, since she wanted that, and she kissed me all over. She nearly drove me mad then, but she wouldn’t go beyond the kissing and feeling up . . . I ran out, but I couldn’t come home here . . . I stayed in some . . . old deserted crumbling dance hall . . .”

Daventry didn’t understand, nor did Quintus, nor did I why I screamed so, I got up and as I did I fell through the open window onto the lawn below. It was a wonder I didn’t kill myself, but the concussion made me feel better. They carried me in.

My grief, after I thought about it, was of course that he had discovered my secret. I didn’t want anybody to go to my ruined dance hall. Here he had taken my girl away from me in a worse way than if he had fucked her, and now he had stolen my secret.

I was sick then for about a month, and after that I got up and was strong again and decided I would live. But the next day they showed me the foreclosure notice. We was to have to vacate my grandfather’s and my great-grand-father’s house.

“See here. I will get you the money, Garnet,” Daventry told me while rubbing my feet.

While I was studying the foreclosure and dispossession papers which Mrs. Gondess had sent me, and was wondering what I would do with all my furniture, or rather my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s furniture, when I should be thrown out on the road, I was eyeing a strange long ancient limousine drawing up in the front driveway that looked like it was from the time of the ’twenties, or out from a museum, and this tall black gent gets out. I thought for a while I had smoked the wrong kind of grass, which by the way Daventry had brought. He said he only took it up after he became a murderer, and I noticed it didn’t agree with him too much, so he left it all for me, but since I have these pills that the doc left, I don’t use it, and it has all gone to Quintus.