‘Perhaps so, but mine don’t fall into your classification.’ ‘What are they then?’
‘Inoculation or vaccination marks, I should say.’ ‘Now young man, you are kidding.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You mean some herb was rubbed as antidote into those marks when they were made? By the way, who was it made them? A medicine-man? And did he actually cut you with some knife not sterilized at all, and you wide awake?’
‘There, there, you two,’ our kind hostess came between us, ‘are you two still teasing each other?’
At that, both of us protested, at the same time, and with these same words: ‘Of course, I am not teasing!’ After which, we let ourselves be led apart and helped separately to more drinks or food, but such was the attraction of the subject to us both, like a pair of tongs stuck at the middle, that several times we sought each other out, although never quite meeting, in vain fitful efforts to probe what must have appeared to his scientific mind a sore as it was to me a dying fire.
On the way home I asked to be dropped. The young couple who had offered me the ride would not hear of it.
‘We will take you right up to the Graduate College,’ they extended their offer, ‘Don’t you see it’s so cold? And the hour is late, you know. There can’t be anything on in Princeton at this time of night.’ They really were anxious for me, but seeing they had a stubborn fellow to deal with, let me out into the night, and probably were somewhat relieved to see me blend so well with it. The young professor of mathematics or something had got out from behind his driver’s seat and held the door of the car open for me to come out. Now as he climbed back behind the wheel I heard him shout over his shoulders and the roof of the car: ‘Hey, man, give her a good screwing!’
‘What’s that?’ I turned round although I had heard him all right. In the cold and dark there with snow beginning to flake again I was rather unprepared for the sudden thawing and loosening of tongue in a fellow guest who all night in the warmth and brightness of a close party had refused to touch any cocktail, draining cup after cup of black coffee when he was not helping his wife to some of the inebriating fare lying half taken in the self-service set up. So it was more in mischief than misunderstanding that I had thrown my question, although this did not quite throw him out of his new gear.
‘I said give the black beauty a good fucking,’ the man fumbled for his keys.
‘You didn’t hear what my husband said, did you?’ his wife assured me over and across his back. I noticed she was actually holding the man down.
‘No, of course, I didn’t. That’s why I asked,’ I said. ‘Well, John was wondering if you shouldn’t come over and have a drink with us,’ she smiled.
‘I said nothing of the sort,’ John grunted. ‘You know there is no drink in the house.’
‘Darling, don’t be silly! Of course there’s beer left in the ice-box.’
‘But I drank it all up before we set out for the party,’ he chuckled.
‘No!’ the woman glared. ‘When was that?’
‘Well good night,’ I waved to them, not wanting to be exposed further to the heat of some family brawl.
‘Yes, good night then,’ the young woman barely smiled, and then to her husband who was again telling me to make sure I had a good time: ‘Stop fumbling, John! Don’t you see you left the engine running all the time?’
And so under the lash and steam of her tongue, they drove off at last, the man still chuckling to himself and the car coughing and careering dangerously down the frozen road and into the cold and dark of the night.
Hard luck for me, it was no lover maid, black beauty or blonde, that I went to wake up that night. One side-street into another brought me to the door of a house half-hidden in front by shadowy elm trees flecked with snow. My fingers were numb, so I must have knocked at the door louder than was necessary. A man opened it just wide enough for him to block the passage, but with a brusque ‘hi’ greeting, which brought between the man and me a thick screen of smoke from my lungs, I brushed past him and several other persons, straight into the bar and lounge, and because the cold and wetness in my shoes were at this point two thorny shoots growing into me, I kicked free my boots and peeled off my overcoat and gloves before coming to a stop at the bar. ‘Hey’ the man who had let me in called out to everybody there, ‘never met this brother before!’ Nor it seemed had the other brothers and daughters of the place, for they all regarded me in silence, their eyes shifting between my face and the glasses arrested empty or half-way in their hands. I felt like the Iceman himself. Until the girl at the bar looked past the customers who hugged her all round and cried out in real surprise and joy: ‘Hey, man, where have you been?’
‘Been seeing more of your country,’ I laughed back. ‘And how are you, Becky? You look great.’
‘Really?’ she beamed, not putting a finger wrong on her cash machine which she kept at a steady run. At that, somebody from among the brothers and daughters there gathered, said: ‘She ought to thank the good Lord for that.’
‘Oh, now,’ another tossed down a drink. ‘It’s herself she should thank. Why, Becky’s got enough mouths to make a cow’s teat turn rags. But there she’s still with a figure to light the fire in a man’s heart.’
‘There, you haven’t told me that before!’ Becky laughed.
‘His missus at home don’t let him do any such thing. She got the big stick!’ someone said.
‘Oh, let her lie,’ Sam rubbed his palm and smacked his lips, ‘I do what I have mind to.’
‘Like pinch girls on their backsides?’
‘You shut your trap, will you? I should’ve brought her roses long time before, a bunch of them bigger than any you’ll ever get from the undertaker. But fellows like you will stick out their tongues.’
‘Now, now, aren’t you shooting your mouth wide? As if your fires can be stoked up anymore than by striking match on snow.’
‘Maybe it’s yours that bum no more,’ Sam sucked his teeth. Then turning his hunched-up back on everybody there, he reached out his glass and said: ‘Some poison please, Becky, my sweet.’
I got myself a drink too and settled on a very high stool against the counter. At my elbow was a young man who said he had met me before, the first time I came in there with some friends of mine. One of them, he said, was from Yugoslavia, wasn’t he? ‘Hey, man,’ my new found friend nudged me in the ribs, ‘Isn’t that country behind the Iron Curtain?’
‘Rather astride it,’ I said.
‘Funny, that.’ He scratched his close-cropped head. ‘How come you moving with fellows like that?’ I laughed, but before I could get in a word, he shifted on his seat and so on to another matter entirely.
‘Hey, honey,’ he motioned to Becky, ‘let that drink be on me. No, no,’ he brushed off my half-hearted protests. ‘You come from Africa, don’t you?’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘Then we are brothers,’ he announced. I took his offer and there in the glare of eyes stronger than all the neon-lights dancing in the mist of the place I ventured to ask whether he was a Black Moslem.
‘I ain’t nothing of the sort,’ he stayed me with one hand as the other ferreted in his overcoat pocket for loose dollar bills and change to pay for the beer he was standing me his brother from Africa. ‘No, I ain’t nothing like what you call a Black Moslem’ he underlined his point. ‘I do my job at the post office and when I feel like it, I come over here for my ‘Scotch and soda.’
‘That’s right,’ said Sam from the corner into which he had sunk. ‘That’s right, son. A man’s got no right not to serve you a pint some, after a day in yonder salt mines. Now, look here, honey, pour me out the poison. Will you?’
‘I knew we were heading for that.’ A daughter kicked the counter. Everybody laughed.
‘I don’t need no excuse to have me booze,’ Sam dismissed it all.
