Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

Back in the house he shucked his clothes and slid into bed next to the sleeping Minnie May. She slept on her back, making a soft purring noise, a snore with a tiny bubbling sound at the end of it. He nestled against her and she automatically turned away but he pressed on until she turned toward him. She wore a loose gray slip washed to a softness like fresh ginned cotton. Softer than that. He slid his hand up behind and pushed the slip up her smooth body that was almost as dark as his, so smooth he felt the rough chafe of his own fingers against it and was almost ashamed to touch her. He could smell her now, smell the spicy odor of her and the fresh sweat and the verbena spice oil she poured over herself and wiped off with a cloth, smell the barley soap and the shelled butterbeans and the okra she itched from and he could smell under these other, unplotted mysteries, deeper reeks and perfumes. He contorted his body until he could put his nose close to her lower back and he inhaled the rich odor of her woman smell and sniffed all the way to her girl smell, even, so it seemed, to her original baby smell, a faint residue of it like a thin sprinkling of garden rain.

With his scarred knees he drove her legs apart and he liked the forcing, liked the resistance, the body’s stiffness and her own pushing back and he kept on driving, hard work he bent to happily, the fullness of his power given to the task like turning a plow in heavy clay, forcing the big coulter with his own body, feeling as he did so the heat rising, the burning life of this slick, fumy soil. He leaned back and stared at her as he separated her from her steady opposition, uncovering her, exposing the black wallow and red pit of her. He touched her with his fingers, three, then only one, surveying, scouting the trail and found it. He slid along trough and excavation, rummaging, loosening. He had at last stopped thinking of Milo and the others. He had believed that if he kept on long enough, if he kissed deeper and held her tighter and stayed close to her and drew her perfumes and funks to him, listened to her and rubbed against her and spoke to her of her desires and longings and of his hunger, spinning a new life from smells and touches and sight and words, conjuring the bed and the house and the streets and the ungovernable city into shape around them, that he could sink into it, into her , and he would forget. And that was happening.

She had started moaning even before he entered her and when he did she stopped. He held himself still, waiting. In the silence he could hear a redbird whistling. Down the row a woman called. “Frankie,” she said. “Frankie, come on over here.” As he shanked into her, waxy leaves of pain slid off. He was raw and charged, alight. He started slow and picked up speed. She began to whimper, or was that him? He was cast forth in long looping lines swinging out over deceptively calm waters. Then she bucked back against him and surged forward, attempting to pull his body on a rope. He followed, shoved her down and jammed her back into the earth, crushing the juice out of her. She clucked and sputtered and banged against his side with her fist. Knocking, knocking, he thought— come on in —and abruptly he cut loose from what held him back and thrust himself hard through his own body, driving into her. But he was too strong to collapse.

“Not yet,” he said. “Not yet.”

She shoved and underbowed her back hard as if she was going to break bone.

Something ran through their bodies slamming door after door. Catch me, catch me. He did, and even as he did so he was aware that this confabulation was only a promissory note and appeal to the greater desire that was lodged, had been lodged, all his life deep inside him. What it was he didn’t know exactly but there were times, and they were not in a bedroom or bunk, when he almost caught a glimpse of what it was, what he really wanted, but then it shied, like a dragonfly catching the breeze, and he couldn’t say. In the meantime there was this. He pounded his way in and moved softly among the simple treasures he found.

After a while he got up, went into the kitchen, pumped water over a fresh rag, wrung it and brought it back to the bed and cleaned her.

They lay uncovered in the warm curtained air without talking, touching a little here and there, and then they fell asleep. He dreamed of cotton fields, of stopping at the end of a long row to take a drink from a bucket handed to him by a man whose face he couldn’t make out. As he held the dipper to his mouth he saw over its rim a fish-shaped cloud high in the east. The water tasted better than any water he’d ever drunk. Something was about to come clear, something he’d forgotten about until now but had always longed to recall. He had to remember it, but he couldn’t stop looking at the fish-shaped cloud or tasting the water. I’ve never tasted water in a dream, he thought and waked.

Minnie was gone but she’d left supper for him in the safe. A note written in her big looping hand, misspelled and hard to make out, said she loved him and would be back late because she had to go see her mother. He ate the butterbeans and picked the meat off the ham hock and gnawed her crumbly, agreeably sour cornbread and then he got dressed and went out to Longley’s Beer Bar and stood around drinking with a man he knew who had been in prison down in Florida and liked to talk about the life there. He didn’t mention that he too had been in prison but he listened to the man’s stories. He had a hard unforgiving nature familiar to Delvin. After a while he grew tired of listening and played a game of pool with a man who said his name was George Butters, a sawed-off, tan-skinned man with white patches of vitiligo on his face, and beat him handily.

About midnight the place was raided by the police looking for a draft cheat who’d supposedly robbed Calhoun’s grocery down the street. Delvin slipped out the back and ran down to the river where a man in a thin raincoat told him about a big freight forming up for St. Louis by way of Chattanooga and Memphis. Without deciding anything particularly he caught a ride on a jitney over to west Atlanta and walked six blocks to the rail yards, climbed aboard the freight and as the hundred-car lineup racked and creaked out of the yard he lay on top of a red boxcar watching the moon come up over the crown of the Mosley Hotel and Bathhouse, thinking of Mr. Oliver and the Ghost.

In Chattanooga, just off Wildmon street, he leapt from the train neat as a cat and slipped through the moody early morning foglicked streets into Red Row and across town and up hill to the old familiar corner of Columbia street and Arvy road, to find, instead of the comfortable, viney, outstretching old house and funeral home, a green and white Sinclair gas station. He stood out in the now paved street looking at this piggish oddity with wonder and sorrow. He couldn’t believe it. Magic had whisked the old place out of sight in some trickery that in a merciful blink would reveal the wide front steps and the big crape myrtle at the edge of the porch and the high white facade that always looked raked back. He became so shaky he staggered and backed up against a big cow oak across the street from this dwarfish foolery. A smooth, damp breeze slid along, touching this or that tree. The leaves of a large tulip poplar he recognized were already burned by fall. He wanted to embrace the familiar tree, pump it with questions foolishly, pump somebody.

He loitered on the sidewalk, squatting on his haunches, letting the facts push amazement and grief through his body. A man in gray coveralls drove up in a shiny blue Chevrolet car, parked by the station, crossed the paved court and unlocked the door. Delvin walked up to the man and with a sound in his throat stopped him.