Charlie Smith: Ginny Gall

This was a moment of great import. Did he take the glass that would in some sense extend forgiveness, if only in the most cursory way, to her? Or did he refuse? Did he in refusing dash the glass to the floor? Or did he take the glass and smash her across the face with it? Was this a trick? Had she recognized him after all and was only playing along — coldly or stiff with terror — until she could signal for Winston to get the laws up here?

He accepted the glass and set it on the low dresser that was close by, close enough to make it easy — appropriate even — to set the glass down; as if the universe had colluded with direction and destiny. He set the fluted cloudy glass down, just snagging it with his little finger and almost but not quite tipping it so she made a barely perceptible move toward it, the two of them leaning closer. She smiled in an unhappy, self-regarding way.

“Yes,” she said, “a drink might not be what you need just now.” She dipped her finger in the metallic-shiny gin and licked the liquor off it. “You must be from around here.”

“I can’t stay,” he said as one might to an unmarried older relative, sad solitary person without recourse or hope for fun, blurting the words like a rube or a boy. But I must be on my way. The living — the freshly escaped — have to be on their way.

“I can make love come down around us,” she said. “I got tricks. I got conjures.”

She flopped back down on the bed, staying just upright enough not to be defenselessly collapsing or offering, and smiled foolishly. He could see that her hand wanted to come up and hide her snaggle mouth. He wondered if she was drunk. The room had a faint medicinal smell.

“Well,” he said, half turning away.

“Wait,” she cried, leaned forward and pulled out the top drawer. “I’m famous.”

In the drawer were packets of newspaper clippings tied with red cotton string, half a dozen of them. She started to draw a fat packet from the drawer but he stopped her with his hand on top of hers. He could feel her soggy skin, the soft reddish hairs. His fingers were damp.

“I been in the news,” she said, “all over the country. Ask that boy there, he’ll tell you.” The Ghost had become ghostlike, silent, staring, the fingers of one hand twitching in the palm of the other. “Aint that true, boy.”

“Yes. . m,” the Ghost said, the final syllable or smear of syllable, the m or mam , still faintly snugged against the s , almost erased. The woman heard in this sound, so stifled it could hardly be caught by God himself, the disrespect, but she was infused with a thin solution of yearning — for kindness, for a tenderness that existed only in faint early morning dreams, themselves fading. The sound was like a distant bell tolling out the days of her life. Delvin saw her for what she was. He saw the unerasable sadness and the hate and the bitterness she couldn’t quite contain and the cravenness and beggary she couldn’t contain either; he knew the back precincts of near worthlessness she long ago had stopped trying to crawl out of — yearning even so for a little fanciness, a respite, a cool spot on a hot day — he had learned all about this yearning in prison and was an agent of it himself and he knew this too, and he had tried out the lame and careless usages of it that led nowhere except into deeper pain.

His eye twitched, once, twice, and he covered it with his hand. Out in the hall the Ghost shifted his feet. Delvin heard the rubber soles of his house shoes scull on the dry carpet. He removed his hand from hers.

“It’s sufficing,” he said.

He meant she didn’t have to sell him anything, leastwise not reports of his own life’s catastrophe.

“You ought to read some of these,” Lucille Blaine said. “It was me that saved the day on this one.”

Her voice faltered as she spoke.

In her voice — accent of ridgeback Tennessee, one of the cast-down — he heard a river winding, dark, shining river of life descending the falls and granite steps from the high mountains to the valley, running onward through the hay fields to the plains and the sea. Was it simply too dim in this room for her to make him out? Had he changed that much? She’d never seen him anyway, really, not close. Maybe she had not even paid attention. The single long-necked bulb was shaded on the window side with a sheet of yellow paper taped to it. He could smell the hot paper. He could smell too the sumpy odor of female blood and, wearing at the sharp blade of it, the odor of a familiar perfume, elixir of the bordello, all-purpose solvent concocted of middle eastern fossil life soaked in essence of decomposing lilies, Heaven’s Night — Whore’s Holy Water, it was familiarly called — shipped out of Detroit City by the tankcar load throughout whoredom, perfume she was at that moment even as she continued to clutch their two lives in beggarly embrace atomizing into the air between them; his mother’s perfume.

For a second rage filled him. It flashed like a hot white light, like something alive and so strong its grip hurt him to feel it. But it was passing through — he knew this, felt it give and start to swirl away just as the Ghost, who had snuck up close, hit him from behind.

He lurched into the woman who with surprising agility shoved him away. He fell onto his face on the bed with the Ghost’s knee standing in his back. Against his throat he felt the sharp edge of a razor. “You collect that, don’t you?” the Ghost said. “You collect what that is?”

Delvin said nothing. The woman in a swirl of garments and perfume had scrambled to her feet away from him. His head was turned to the side and he could see her standing against the wall staring shock-eyed at him, as if he was — not the the devil, but worse, and she recognized him. All right. He waved at her as once in a moment of hopeless hilarity he had waved in a courtroom at her, and before the Ghost could cut him reared and knocked the razor away. The woman sprang on him but he too was quick and he slipped under her flailing and away and as she fell hard on the bed he cracked her in the side of the head with his fist. She slumped senseless into the pillow. He too had a razor. The Ghost was scrambling around after his on the floor. He came up with it, a short cutter with a pearl handle, and saw what Delvin was holding.

“You better get out of here,” the Ghost said.

Delvin looked hard into his eyes.

“I got to preserve order here,” the Ghost said.

“Think you can?”

“I don’t know, but I got to.”

The woman on the bed looked asleep.

“Jou kill her?” the Ghost said.

“Naw, boon. I knocked her out.”

“Well, you better hightail it.”

He didn’t want this man telling him what to do. But he knew he had to go.

“Stand away from the door. “

The Ghost edged away, closer to the woman on the bed. She was snoring.

“Don’t come after me. Don’t call anybody.”

“I won’t.”

Delvin grinned at him. “It’s all yours,” he said.

“Has been — is — will be.”

“Sho.”

He turned and dashed out into the hall, bounded down the stairs and then, walking calmly, quietly, left the house.

Over the mountains to the west the stars were up, little white parings. He headed that way, the woods weren’t far. In his mind he was already gone, riding a freight north. As he ran, the train faded and was replaced by a small, spare room. . in Ypsilanti maybe. . or Toronto. He was in the little kitchen making himself a pot of chinese tea. On his desk a fresh page poked up from the typewriter. In it he was running through a field of blossoming sorghum, escaping from Uniball prison. He ran toward the blue bristling escarpment of leafed-out mountains. As the first cries started up behind him he entered the dark woods of his freedom.