Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [97]
He wanted to tell her how frightened he was, but she would have asked him what was frightening him, and he would not have known what to answer. She could be amused at the idea of generalized, even abstract, fear. Angst, Billy thought, drawing the word out of his memory, that’s what I got; eighteen pounds, four ounces of Angst. I’d be better off strung out; at least I’d know how to make me feel better. He knew Luanne was never troubled by such feelings. Or if she was she didn’t know it, would get drunk or loaded or find a man, and get rid of the bad feeling. She felt good, bad, or indifferent: it was that simple for her. She could go on a five-day drunk, sleep with eight or ten different men, get into a razor fight, end up in jail, get out and be ready to start all over again; she could talk, argue, listen to music, or dance with a rapt attention that involved her entire being, and five minutes later she could be bored and sulky. In fact, he realized, she seemed simply to absorb the mood of the place she was in, the feelings of the people with her, and she was sulky now because Billy was down himself; he had noticed in the past that when he had come over ready and willing to have a good time, needing a good time, she was always in the same mood. She was a sponge. There was that whole sponge world; the black world he had fought so bitterly to pull himself out of, a rathole in American society reserved exclusively for Negroes who refused to be like Billy and refused to climb into the middle class, who demanded their pleasures and terrors now, could not, would not, wait for the calmer satisfactions Mister Cholly promised but never quite gave. Billy snorted to himself. He envied them their quick pleasure, but he knew he was too white, too far gone, to travel that road; he knew he would be frightened. Yet he knew too much about the other world to try to pretend to join it. So he was not a member of anybody’s club, and he was lonely. Just a tourist, he thought; never a resident. Blah.
He was trying to think of a way to say good-bye to Luanne that would be neither ambiguous nor corny, when somebody pressed the buzzer. Billy felt a start of fear and gritted his teeth in self-anger.
Luanne opened the door and a big black man named Uncle Vance came in; Billy knew him, stood up and shook hands with him. He was not afraid of Uncle Vance. In fact, Uncle was kind of funny; blue-black skin, three teeth resembling yellowish fangs, two in his lower jaw and one in the upper; a suit that had once been in fashion and even a little flashy but was now spotted and shabby, the cuffs too thick, the pantlegs too billowy, the coat too long. He was even wearing a necktie with a Windsor knot which Billy could tell was never untied but merely slipped loose and over his head; the knot looked grimy.
But Uncle Vance was a nice man, and immediately, Billy was angry at himself for putting him down. Uncle Vance ran a trucking company, which is to say he and the finance company owned a truck, Vance’s eighteen-year-old son drove the truck, Vance went around getting loads to haul, and the finance company took the profits; but then, the very fact that Vance had the truck—the doors of which were lettered: VANCE TRUCKING COMPANY—FAST HAULAGE—ANYWHERE, ANYTIME—made him a member of the middle class in good standing, a voice in the church, a member of the Negro post of the American Legion, all that. He was a respectable man. He was not a man to settle things with a razor, and in fact he belonged to the NAACP, whose members, one wit cracked, spent their Saturday nights hidden in their basements.
He accepted a cheese glass of Billy’s whiskey and the three of them sat listening to the radio. It was dark out, overcast, and