Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [89]
Especially the kids, who were getting their taste of night life savored with illegality and the dirty game of pool; it often pleased their sense of daring to mingle with a Negro, even a pale one like Billy, buy him cups of coffee and listen to his advice on how to hold a cue, make a good game, assess a mark, learn the language. And these kids came in handy for Billy, too, as the source of his maintenance manpower. They would show up broke, with not even enough money for coffee or cigarettes, and Billy could hire them for the one night to sweep down alleys, empty ashtrays, sort pins, or even sweep out under the pool tables, the work being no disgrace because Billy was their boss. They worshiped him, these kids, and he knew they did, and basked in it.
It was not just his talent that drew them. Billy was one of the few, one of the very few, poolshooters with money. Another was old Larkin, a short gray man who wore dark blue suits, wine-colored shirts, and a gray hat. He was a snooker expert, retired from the postal service after forty years of traveling around the country on trains, but old Larkin carried only three or four hundred dollars on him and he was getting old and cranky. Billy always had at least a thousand dollars buttoned up in his left shirt pocket. Just knowing it was there made him special in the eyes of the kids; they were just at that point in life when money begins to show its importance, and a thousand dollars was a lot of money.
It was his caseroll, and he had had it for so long now, since the wild days on the road, that he sometimes dreamed about losing it and would wake up chilled with the remembrance of the emptiness of being broke and alone; sometimes it got awful, and cursing himself he would have to get out of bed and go to the chair, feel in his pocket to see that it was still there, and then even carry his shirt into the kitchen, turn on the light, and, still cursing his fears, take the money out and count it. Then he would go back to bed, and his wife might stir and ask him sleepily, “Where have you been?”
“Checkin the kids,” he might say. Often he would do just that, go quietly into their room and tuck them in, feeling that incredible tenderness allotted only to parents, and then return to his bed and his bad thoughts. But most of the time he was not at home nights, slept days, and the children were merely loud noises in the other part of the house. But his son and daughter had much to do with his increasing worry over his caseroll; for so long the roll had been his edge, his margin, the means of his escape at any time from whatever world he in-habited, and lately it had become more than this and yet less, as he thought about the children and what they were, and who they were.
Years before he had said and meant, “Fuck the niggers”—he had seen too many of his friends swallowed up in bitterness, and he wanted to escape, not drown. But now there was no escape and he was in the awful position of seeing his children grow toward that moment when they would know, would be shown, told, that they were niggers and not human beings.
Because no matter how Billy twisted and dodged his way through life he could not get away from the central fact of his existence; whether he liked it or not, he was black, and there was nothing he could do about it, no action he could take without first thinking about it. It was just there. He could not love it or fight it or be proud of it, it was just there. He could not even hate it any more.
His children were beautiful; how could anybody be so cruel? They were so affectionate and full of joy, so eager and innocent; why did somebody have to come along and with one stiff, ugly word, cut the innocence out of them? From the moment they understood that word they would proceed through life half-murdered of