He Who Hesitates Page 5

  He had never really had a pretty girl in his life, and Molly was plain as hell until about two o'clock in the morning, he supposed that was when it was, well, never mind that. This colored girl behind the counter was pretty to begin with, which was why she hadn't come out to meet him, he could have told her beforehand she wouldn't, none of the real pretty girls ever did. It was probably just as well. Anybody from back home spied him in the city with a colored girl on his arm, even though she was part Spanish, hell, he didn't want his mother getting wind of nothing like that. Not that he cared much about what his mother thought. If he cared about that, he'd be running right back home to Carey instead of staying here and planning to have a little fun with his time.

  He wondered where he should go now that the colored girl had spoiled his plans. Actually, he hadn't had any plans even when he was hoping she'd come out to meet him. But she'd have been somebody to laugh with and talk to and show off for, and, well, he'd have come up with something, he just knew he would have. Maybe he'd have taken her to a movie with a stage show, he'd been to one the last time he'd come to the city, it was pretty good.

  "Hey," the voice behind him said, "wait up!"

  He recognized the voice with surprise and turned to see Amelia running to catch up with him. She was wearing a pale-blue coat with the collar pulled up high against her chin, her head covered with a vibrant-blue kerchief. She came up to him panting, vapor pluming from her mouth. Catching her breath, she said, "You sure are a fast walker."

  "I didn't think you were coming."

  "The boss had to arrange for relief. It took a few minutes."

  "Well, I'm glad you're here," Roger said.

  "I'm not sure / am," Amelia said, and laughed. Her complexion was smooth and unmarked, her color a warm brown, her eyes a shade darker, her hair beneath the electric-blue kerchief a black as deep as night. When she laughed, a crooked tooth showed in the front of her mouth, and sometimes she lifted her hand self-consciously to cover the tooth, but only when she remembered. She had good legs, and she was wearing dark-blue, low-heeled pumps. She was still out of breath, but she kept up with him as he began crossing the street, and them impulsively took his arm.

  "There," she said, "what the hell! If we're doing this, we might as well do it, huh?"

  "What?"

  "I mean, if I'm with you, I'm with you. So I'm with you, so I'll take your arm the same way I'd take the arm of a colored fellow I was with, right?"

  "Right," Roger said.

  "I've never been out with a white man before."

  "Neither have I," Roger said, and burst out laughing. "With a colored girl, I mean."

  "That's good," Amelia said.

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. I wouldn't like to think you were one of those guys who just dug, you know, all colored girls. That would make it a drag."

  "There isn't a single colored girl in all Carey," Roger said.

  "They're all married?" Amelia asked seriously, and he burst out laughing again. "What's the matter?"

  "I mean there aren't any," Roger said. "Not a one."

  "That's too bad," Amelia said. "What do you do for race riots?"

  "We pick on Jews," Roger said, and realized he had made a pretty good joke, and was pleased when Amelia laughed at what he'd said. He didn't really know why there was any humor in his comment, except that the people in Carey didn't pick on Jews. In fact there was one Jew in all of Carey, a man named Samuel Silverstein, who ran the hardware store and who had arthritis, poor man, why would anyone want to go picking on him? He knew he never would have said anything like that to his mother or to Buddy, but somehow being with Amelia made him seem witty and daring, which was why he had made the joke. He was suddenly very glad she'd come after him.

  "You always go chasing strange men in the streets?" he asked.

  "Sure. You always go telling strange girls to hang up their aprons and pretend to be sick and—"

  "A headache isn't sick," Roger said.

  " — and meet you on street corners, and then disappear?"

  "Right into thin air!" he said. "Mandrake the Magician!"

  "That's what you do, huh?"

  "Yeah, I'm a magician," Roger said, beaming.

  "You go into drugstores and work your charms on poor little colored girls."

  "Are you poor?" he said.

  "I'm very poor."

  "Really?"

  "Hey, mister, you think I'd joke about being poor?" Amelia said. "What the hell is that to joke about? I'm very poor. I mean it. I, am, very, poor."

  "I am very rich," Roger said.

  "Good. I knew one day I'd meet a white millionaire who'd take me away from it all," Amelia said.

  "That's me."

  "Mandrake."

  "Yeah," he said. "Yesterday, I made one hundred and twenty-two dollars. How about that?"

  "That's a lot of money."

  "Today, I've only got, oh, maybe fifteen dollars of it left."

  "Easy come, easy go," Amelia said, and shrugged.

  "What I did was mail a hundred to my mother."

  "Up in Gulchwater, right?"

  "Up in Carey."

  "Oh, I thought it was called Gulchwater Basin."

  "No, it's called Carey."

  "I thought you said it was Gulchwater Depot."

  "No, Carey."

  "Alongside Huddlesworth, right?"

  "Huddleston."

  "Where they toboggan." , "Where they ski." f "Right, I knew I had it," Amelia said.

  "Anyway," Roger said, laughing, "I sent her — my mother — I sent her a hundred, and I paid four dollars for my room, and I bought the cards and some stamps and had some coffee and paid for Ralph's hot chocolate and—"

  "Ralph?"

  "A fellow I met." Roger paused. "He's a drug addict."

  "You meet nice people," Amelia said.

  "He was," Roger said. "A nice person, I mean."

  "My mother has told each and every one of us in our house," Amelia said, "that if we ever touch any of that stuff, she will personally cripple us. She means it. | My mother is a very skinny woman made of iron. She ' would rather see us dead than on junk."

  "Is it that easy to get?" Roger asked.

  "If you have the money, you can get it. In this city, if you have the money, you can get anything you want."

  "That's what Ralph said." [

  "Ralph knows. Ralph is a very wise man."

  "Anyway, here's what I've got left," Roger said, and I reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded packet of bills and transferred those to his left hand, and then reached into his pocket again for his loose change. The change totaled seventy-two cents, and the bills were two fives and four singles. "Fourteen dollars and seventy-two cents," he said.

  "A millionaire. Just like you said."

  "Right."

  "Right," she said.

  "What would you like to do?"

  "I don't know," she said. "Show me the city. Show me your city."

  "My city? This ain't my city, Amelia."

  "I mean the white man's city."

  "I wouldn't know his city from your city. I'm a stranger here."

  "Looking for a friend outside the police station," she said suddenly.

  "Yes," he said, and watched her.

  "Who you never found."

  "Who I never bothered looking for."

  "Bad place to look," Amelia said. "Where are you going to take me, mister? Uptown, downtown, crosstown? Where?"

  "I know where," he said.

  "Where?"

  "There's a place I've always wanted to go. My mother brought me to the city for the first time when I was ten years old, and we were suppposed to go then, but it rained that day. Come on," he said, and took her hand.

  "Where?" she said.

  "Come on."

  The Ferris wheels were motionless, the roller-coaster tracks hung on wooden stilts against a forbidding February sky, devoid of hurtling cars or screaming youngsters. The boardwalk stands were sealed tight,
shuttered against the wind that howled in over the ocean and raised whirling eddies of sand on the beach, leaping the iron-pipe railing and hurling itself hopelessly against the weathered boards. Last summer's newspapers fluttered into the air, yellowed and torn, flapping wildly like alien birds and then soaring over the minarets of an amusement called The Arabian Nights. The rides huddled beneath their canvas covers in seemingly expectant watchfulness, waiting for a sparrow, silent, motionless, the wind ripping at the covers and making a faint whistling sound as it caught in metal studs and struts. There were no barkers touting games of chance or skill, no vendors selling hot dogs or slices of pizza, no sound but the sound of the wind and the ocean.

  The boardwalk benches were a flaking green.

  An old man stood at the far end of the boardwalk, looking out over the ocean, unmoving.

  "You've never been here before?" Amelia asked.

  "No," Roger said.

  "You picked the right time to come."

  "It's kind of spooky, isn't it?" he said, and thought of Molly the night before.

  "It's like standing on the edge of the world," Amelia said, and he turned to look at her curiously. "What is it?" she asked.

  "I don't know. What you said. I felt that a minute ago. As if there was just the two of us standing on the edge of the world."

  "The three of us."

  "What? Oh, yes, the old man down there."

  "He's really my duena," Amelia said.

  "What's that?"

  "A duena? That's Spanish for chaperone. In Spain, when a young girl goes out with a boy, she has to take along a duena, usually an aunt or some other relative. My father told me about that. He's Spanish, you know, did I tell you?"

  "Yes."

  "I mean, he's not Puerto Rican," Amelia said.

  "What's the difference?"

  "Oh, in this city, there's a big difference. In this city it's pretty bad to be colored, but the worst thing you can possibly be is Puerto Rican."

  "Why's that?"

  "I don't know,' Amelia said, and shrugged. "I guess it's more fashionable to hate Puerto Ricans now." She laughed, and Roger laughed with her. "My father's name is Juan. Juan Perez. We always kid around with him, we ask him how his Colombian coffee beans are coming along. You know, have you ever seen that television commercial? It's Juan Valdez, actually, but it's close enough. My father loves when we kid around with him that way. He always says his coffee beans are doing fine because he's got them under the tree that is his Spanish sun hat. He really is from Spain, you know, from a little town outside Madrid. Brihuega. Did you ever hear of it?"

  "Brihuega Basin, do you mean?"

  "No, Brihuega."

  "Oh yes, Brihuega Depot."

  "No, Brihuega."

  "Near Huddlesworth, right?"

  "Near Madrid."

  "Where they fight camels."

  "No, bulls."

  "I knew I had it," Roger said, and Amelia laughed. "Well, now that we're here," he said, "what are we supposed to do?"

  Amelia shrugged. "We could neck, I suppose."

  "Is that what you want to do?"

  "No, not really. It's a little too early in the day. I got to admit, though . . ."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm very curious about what it's like to kiss a white man."

  "Me, too."

  "A colored girl, you mean."

  "Yes."

  "Yes."

  They were both silent. The wind caught at their overcoats, flattening the material against their bodies as they looked out over the water. At the far end of the boardwalk, the old man was still motionless, like a salt-sodden statue frozen into position by a sudden winter.

  "Do you think the old man would mind?" Amelia asked.

  "I don't think so."

  "Well . . ." she said.

  "Well . . ."

  "Well, let's."

  She turned her face up to his, and he put his arms around her and then bent and kissed her mouth. He kissed her very gently. He thought of Molly the night before and then he moved away from her and stared down at her face and she caught her breath with a short sharp sigh and then smiled mysteriously and shrugged and said, "I like it."

  "Yes."

  "You think the old man would mind if we did it again?"

  "I don't think so," Roger said.

  They kissed again. Her lips were very wet. He moved slightly away from her and looked down at her. She was staring up at him with her dark brown eyes serious and questioning.

  "This is sort of crazy," she whispered.

  "Yes."

  "Standing here on a boardwalk with that wind howling in."

  "Yes."

  "Kissing," she said. Her voice was very low.

  "Yes."

  "And that old man watching."

  "He isn't watching," Roger said.

  "On the edge of the world," Amelia said. And suddenly, "I don't even know who you are."

  "My name is Roger Broome."

  "Yes, but who?"

  "What would you like to know?"

  "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-seven."

  "I'm twenty-two." She paused. "How do I know . . ." She stopped, and shook her head.

  "What?"

  "How do I know you're not ... a ..." She shrugged. "A... Well, you wanted to know where the police station was."

  "That's right."

  "To meet a friend, you said. But then you came back to the drugstore and you hadn't met this friend of yours at all, so how do I know . . . Well, how do I know you're not in some kind of trouble?"

  "Do I look like somebody who's in trouble?"

  "I don't know what a white man in trouble looks like. I've seen lots of colored people in trouble. If you're colored, you're always in trouble, from the day you're born. But I don't know the look of a white man in trouble. I don't know what his eyes look like."

  "Look at my eyes."

  "Yes?"

  "What do you see?"

  "Green. No, amber. I don't know, what color are they? Hazel?"

  "Yes, hazel, like my mother's. What else do you see?"

  "Flecks. Yellow, I guess."

  "What else?"

  "Myself. I see myself reflected, like in tiny funhouse mirrors."

  "Do you see trouble?"

  "Not unless I'm trouble," Amelia said. She paused. "Am I trouble?"

  He thought again of Molly and immediately said, "No."

  "You said that too fast."

  "Don't look at me that way," he said.

  "What way?"

  "As if ... you're afraid of me all at once."

  "Don't be silly. Why should I be afraid of you?"

  "You have no reason to—"

  "I'm five feet four inches tall, and I weigh a hundred and seventeen pounds. All you are is six feet nine—"

  "Six-five," Roger corrected.

  "Sure, and you weigh two hundred pounds and you could break me in half just by—"

  "Two hundred and ten."

  " — snapping your fingers, and here we are all alone on a godforsaken boardwalk—"

  "There's an old man down there."

  " — in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but the ocean in front of us, and those deserted buildings behind us, so why should I be afraid? Who's afraid?"

  "Right," he said, and smiled.

  "Right," she agreed. "You could strangle me or drown me or beat me to death, and nobody'd know about it for the next ten years."

  "If ever," Roger said.

  "Mmm."

  "Of course, there's always the old man down there."

  "Yeah, he's some protection," Amelia said. "He's probably half-blind. I'm beginning to wonder if he's real, as a matter of fact. He hasn't moved since we got here."

  "Do you want to go?" he asked.

  "Yes," she said. And then, quickly, "But not because I'm afraid of you. Only because I'm cold."

  "Where would you like to go?"

  "Back to the city."

  "Where?"

  "Do yo
u have a room?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  Amelia shrugged. "We could go there, I guess. Get out of the cold."

  "Maybe," Roger said.

  They turned their backs to the ocean and began walking up the boardwalk, out of the amusement park. She looped her hand through his arm, and then rested her head on his shoulder, and he thought how pretty she was, and he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm, and he remembered again the way he had never got any of the pretty girls in his life, and here was one now, very pretty, but of course she was colored. It bothered him that she was colored. He told himself that it was a shame she was colored because she was really the first pretty girl he had ever known in his life, well, Molly had been pretty last night, but only after a while. That was the funny part of it; she hadn't started out to be pretty. This girl, this colored girl holding his arm, her head on his shoulder, this girl was pretty. She had pretty eyes and a pretty smile and good breasts and clean legs, it was too bad she was colored. It was really too bad she was colored, though her color was a very pleasant warm brown. Listen, you can't go losing your head over a colored girl, he told himself.

  "Listen," he said.

  "Yes."

  "I think we'd better get back and maybe ... uh ... maybe you ought to go back to the drugstore."

  "What?" she said.

  "I think you ought to go back to work. For the afternoon, anyway."

  "What?" she said again.

  "And then I can ... uh ... pick you up later, maybe, after work, and ... uh ... maybe we can have supper together, all right?"

  She stopped dead on the boardwalk with the wind tearing at the blue kerchief wrapped around her head and tied tightly under her chin. Her eyes were serious and defiant. She kept both hands gripped over the brass clasp at the top of her handbag. Her hands were motionless. She stared up at him with her brown eyes flashing and the blue kerchief flapping in the wind, her body rigid and motionless.