The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [190]
A hundred yards away the back streets are green and lovely, and the foliage of the trees meets overhead. The houses are old and pleasant; you cross a bridge and look down on a tiny stream winding and twisting gently over some soft rounded rocks; there are the sounds of things growing and the soughing of the leaves in the swollen torpid May breeze. A little farther on, there is always the small rotting mansion with its broken shutters, its peeling columns, and the dull black-gray of its walls like a tooth after the nerve has been killed. The mansion alters the loveliness of the streets, limns it with darker mortal lines.
The grass enclosure in the center of the town square is deserted, and the statue of General Jackson stands on its pedestal and looks with calculation at the cannon balls pyramided in cement, the old cannon whose breech is missing. Behind him the Negro quarter stretches out along the sandy roads into the farm lands.
There, in the black ghetto, the shacks and two-room shanties sag on their stilts, the wood dry and splintered and dead, the rats and roaches scurrying across the sapless planks. Everything withers in the heat.
Toward the end, almost out in the country, the poor whites live in similar huts, hoping to graduate to the other side of town where the shoe clerks and the bank tellers and the mill foremen live in cubical houses along rigid streets where the trees are not old enough to cover the sky.
Over it all hangs the torpid sullen breeze of May, stifling in the late spring.
Some people feel only the heat. Woodrow Wilson, almost sixteen, sprawls on a log along the sandy road, and drowses in the sun. His loins are warm and a lazy delight drifts along his body. In a couple hours Ah'll go see Sally Ann. Warm smells, the image of teat and female pubes, tickle his nose with passion. Ah, man, Ah wish this here evenin' was over. A man'll melt in the sun thinkin' about nookie. He sighs, moves his legs leisurely.
Guess Pa's sleepin' it off.
Behind him, on the slanting warped porch above the stilts, his father sleeps in a rusty swinging couch, his undershirt gathering soddenly about his chest.
Ain't anyone can drink like Pa. He giggles to himself. 'Cept me, come a year or two. Goddam, ain't anythin' a man wants to do but lie in the sun.
Two colored boys walk by, leading a mule by the halter. He rouses himself.
Hey, you niggers, what's that mule's name?
The boys look up frightened and one of them rubs his foot in the dust. Josephine, he mumbles.
Okay, boy. He chuckles easily to himself. Man, Ah'm glad Ah don' have to work today. He yawns. Hope Sally Ann don' find out Ah ain't nineteen. She like me anyway, she's a good little ole gal.
A colored girl about eighteen walks past him, her bare feet swirling tiny clouds of dust before her. Under her sweater she wears no brassiere, and her pendulant breasts look very full and soft. She has a round sensual face.
He stares at her, and moves his legs again. Goddam. Her strong hips roll slowly, and he watches her stroll away with pleasure.
One of these days Ah'm gonna try somethin' like that.
He sighs again easily, and yawns. The sun feels almost unbearably delicious on his loins. Ah guess it jus' don't take much to keep a man happy.
He closes his eyes. They's jus' an awful lot of fun a man can have.
In the bicycle shop it is dark, and the benches are stained with grease. He turns the bicycle about, scanning the hand brakes. He has never seen anything but a coaster brake until now and he is confused. Ah guess Ah'll ask Wiley how to fix these little buggers; he turns toward his boss and then halts. Might as well work it out for mahself, he decides.
He squints in the gloom, traces the tension of the brakes along the connecting rod, pushes the metal pad against the metal of the wheel. After a search, he finds a loose nut where the connecting wire fails to bind, and he tightens it. The brakes work now.
That's a smart man invented that, he says to himself. He is about to put the bike away when he decides