Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [91]
So what was his life? Look out there at all the ten million things life can be, and tell yourself which are yours, and which you will never do. And there was the agony of it; so much he wanted to do, and so little he could do. Why wasn’t he content to be what he was? After all, look at it rationally. He was one in ten thousand already. He was a man of importance. He could earn enough money right where he was to support his family properly, and all that other dream-nonsense was wrong. He did not need hundreds of thousands of dollars for his children, he didn’t even need them for himself. He had a good life. He was one of the rare ones who actually loved his family, and one of the pitiful handful of Seattle Negroes who could earn a good living. He knew he had quit the road life for college because he had seen this possibility; he knew he could not have stood the life on the road much longer; the loneliness alone was murdering him; and he knew he quit college and got married not for any abstract reasons but because he had fallen in love and wanted with desperate urgency to begin his family. All this was true. What was the matter? Talent?
So he was a talented poolshooter. There were better in the world. He would never be champion, and so what? What was being champion poolshooter? That was no great thing to be. Certainly he got his few rare moments of joy, his first and his fullest, out of the game; but so what? He was a man now, with the responsibilities he wanted and needed. He did not feel whole without them. But, of course, he did not feel whole anyway. He felt that he needed to be challenged. It had been a long time since he had felt his heart in his mouth. He knew what he was: out of the running. He missed it terribly. He missed victory, and he even missed defeat. He had everything he had ever dreamed of, and it was not enough.
So he got himself a mistress. What else, he thought ironically. Isn’t that what the fellow does? He dreams of greater things, so he gets himself a girl friend and comes on with her about how Tom he is; he takes all that damned anxiety and focuses it in one place; he bunches it. Cool; now when I feel shitty, I can blame it on her.
Billy’s wife, like himself, was pale and semitic, with thin lips, small breasts, and slender limbs. Neither of them had more than an eighth of Negro blood. This was satisfactory, and Billy always thought if he ever fooled around on the side it would be with a woman even paler than his wife, perhaps a white girl. Just a fling, a fillip, getting some strange just for the sake of strange. But that is not how it happened. Actually he fell into a panic of love for the blackest girl he had ever seen in his life.
Early in the affair he felt confident and happy, even though he knew he was completely out of control. The girl, Luanne, worked at the lunch counter in the bowling alley for about three hours one night, and then was fired for being drunk. She was short and slender, with large breasts and buttocks and a thick gravelly voice that reminded Billy of Bessie Smith at her guttiest; she was fired after spilling a cup of coffee down the front of a customer and then laughing about it, and when the manager came out of his office and tried to reason with her she put up a fight and Billy had to come and help them eject her from the place. Two others, white men, had her by the arms and were pulling, and Billy got behind and shoved; close up to her like that he could smell the French whorehouse perfume she was drenched in, and for days the memory of the odor stayed with him, and finally he went into the office and got out her employment card and copied down her telephone number. He had a fine time planning the affair in his imagination, and it was only a week later,