-A novel in progress

HE SAT on the unpainted backstairs staring at its boards, at their knots and spirals fresh and bright, scrubbed clean by the galvanized scraper he had seen his mother every few weeks, on her knees, dress tucked up, scrape from end to end, splashing soapy water from a galvanized bucket over each plank, the foamy puddles sliding over the open back end of the stairs, dripping unto the dark earth below that was littered with pieces of coal whose sheen sparkled in rays of sunlight that sometimes fell between the cleanly scraped boards. On that dark soil behind and beneath him, where, if you looked carefully, you could see old dirt-coated buttons, rusted metal caps from pop, and beer, and rum bottles, the fragmented teeth of a broken comb, a small rusty corroded belt buckle… He had burnt his brand new ‘Maverick’ comic book, watching its glossy-coloured cover with the two Maverick brothers side by side in their elegant suits, guns drawn in a dramatic pose before a barn door, knees bent, curling up in the flames, its inked pages in bright colours turning black at their edges, the flames eating into the edition, as they watched, he and Quentin, both of them barefoot in short pants, staring at the flames destroying their favourite comic book series, which he, in a sudden change of attitude and habit that shocked and perplexed Quentin, had decided was a vain materialistic past-time.

This whole self-transformation Quentin would have understood if he too had been reading, or better yet, if he had shared an interest in the books and essays of Henry David Thoreau… But Quentin still pronounced the word ‘Calvary’ for ‘cavalry’, which was a popular word in their conversations because of Westerns they saw on the Hollywood Cinema village screen. “It’s no good to like things so much you can’t do without them,” he had said to Quentin, remembering Thoreau, and must have been referring to himself, of course, because Quentin never said he agreed, but looked rather sad as he watched the nice glossy ‘Maverick’ cover with the Dell label slowly disappearing along with its brightly inked pages of drawings.

Finally, Quentin had feebly repeated: “You could give it to me… you could have given it to me!” But the cinders became dark as the soil it burnt on. Quite a change from when he had first seen it on the line it had been selected from in the village shop owned by a taciturn, irritable, and to him, comical skinny white shopkeeper who always dressed in khaki, and made him feel self-conscious, as though those like him had never noticed their skin was black or brown, or their hair tough or curly, or their noses broad or big…or whatever.

When he entered the shop, he would usually be attended to in a normal way, except when he came to purchase any of the American comic books strung on a line above the counter, their names like Lawman, Cheyenne, Wagon Train, Tales Of Wells Fargo, The Lone Ranger, Tonto, Sugar-foot, Rifleman, Bat Masterson, Bonanza, Toruk, Maverick…on covers with glossy photos of poses, dramatic moments in frontier towns and landscapes, their pages sometimes lifted by seabreeze flowing over the seawall holding back an incoming tide about two or three hundred yards away, blowing down the village street, stirring up dust on the parapet outside the shop where a few  children always hung around, the breeze pushing cyclists down the street, making a few dogs with raised heads outside the shop turn their open mouths towards its gusts.

He would set down his fifteen or twenty cents on the counter, no hurry, awaiting the man’s attention, which was not forthcoming since he probably knew why he was there. Everyone else is being served their biscuits and sweets and bubblegum and soft-drinks and butter and toilet paper and candles and Cutex and hairpins and disinfectant… but his one or two coins still sitting there… what he had begged his mom for, or received from one of his young adult sisters, or sold old newspapers at three cents a pound to the fish mongers and butchers in the marketplace to accumulate. The whole shop filled with the gassy effervescent aroma of soft-drinks constantly opened, and the syrupy fragrance of squares of pink or yellow bubblegum boys like him peeled off between greaseproof paper and little glossy-coloured photos of the faces of cowboy stars, collected into decks held together by rubber-bands and seen bulging in the pockets of their short pants when they met to compare and swap such photo cards and comics.

Whenever there seemed to be the possibility of being served, he would say, pointing to the line above where his brown face was lifted: “Maverick, I want that Maverick please.” But still, the man ignored him and asked someone else what they wanted, as if he hadn’t heard, and sometimes some other boy he knew would rush in and slap his quarter down on the counter, announcing loudly: “Sugar-foot!  Gimme dat sugar-foot!”  pointing to the line above.

So now, the skinny shopkeeper, as though in a rage over this request, would grab the long stick he used to lift comics off the line and proceed to scan the selection, bringing down both requested comics, throwing them on the counter, almost yelling at his two customers who immediately ignored him: “What y’all want with them? You see anybody like you in them?” swooping up their coins, sometimes using an expletive, throwing them in a careless fashion into the till, sometimes finding change and throwing it in the same careless fashion back on the counter. Then, if someone he knew came in, children of some family he knew well with features like his, his tone would instantly change to that of a quiet, caring, gentle person, enquiring: “How’s your mother, son? Tell your father to come around for a gaff soon, you hear? Wait…lemme give you something child. Here, take this nice comic book,” and he would stick down one from the line as a present.

He was sitting on the backstairs thinking about that shopkeeper, turning over in his mind the things he used to say…used to, because now that he had given up buying comics. Not that he didn’t like them; no. Just for the discipline of it, he no longer had to endure the same insulting routine. But it wasn’t because of the skinny white-man’s behaviour he had stopped reading comics; it had nothing to do with anybody but himself.

The whole thing…the burning of the ‘Maverick’ while his friend, Quentin, white as the shopkeeper, watched. Quentin, who would arrive any minute now to take him to matinee with an extra complimentary Hollywood ticket, was a coincidence. Quentin had simply come over at the wrong time. It wouldn’t have seemed so bad to him if he had told him later what he had done, what he had decided to do, instead of him standing there watching Bret and Bart Maverick burn. Maybe he would tell him all this when he came. The anticipation was mounting, as it always did; he could already see them walking up the winding turquoise stone stairs to Hollywood’s House. He fingered the three black Hacks menthol sweets in their orange cellophane wrappers in his right pocke
t, and stared at his soft black leather moccasins with their two leather bows over the instep, his white socks folded over just above his ankles. He could faintly smell the deep aromatic scent of naphthalene balls his mom had put in his little drawer on the left side of his parents’ vanity case with the huge circular mirror in the middle, and upon which she would always quickly throw a blanket during an electric thunder storm. In the drawer, he kept the white handkerchief with his initials at one corner; it was folded into a triangle and in his back pocket right now. But the children’s gold ring he had outgrown, a few marbles covered with wild colours running into each other abstractly, sheets of coloured kite paper rolled up and held with a rubber-band, an oval gold tin of green pomade he had rubbed on his hair this afternoon, a stack of coloured film-star photos that smelled of bubblegum, all those were in that drawer right now. In fact, it was the same suave way Robert Mitchum and Howard Duff and Russ Tamblyn and Victor Mature and Robert Taylor often appeared on those bubblegum cards with their sleek open-neck shirts and jerseys that inspired the way he dressed right now, and the way Quentin would be dressed when he came over. And now it struck him that all these habits, these values, these  pleasures he had acquired, were not supposed to be his to acquire, according to the wiry shop-keeper. And he suddenly felt empty, depressed, because he also enjoyed so many things made by people who did not look like him…like the cavalry soldier on a moonlit night guarding a fort in the Wild-West, unaware that the clumps of bushes scattered across the white sand he overlooked were really moving, and disguised Red Indians were creeping closer, until it was too late and an arrow thudded into his chest, cutting off the completion of his cry:”Indians!” which ended up as “Indiaaaaah”…

And then the title of the trailer for ‘The Oregon Passage’ was slapped across the screen in bright red… Or George Montgomery dressed in black, who was riding into a lonesome frontier town — a few stores, a stable, a saloon, in a crisp wintry landscape. You could almost feel the chill of the snow on the ground and on the mountaintops behind him, which felt so good because, outside the cinema windows which had just opened at dusk — it’s always after the end of the first feature — was the hot scent of curry cooking coming from Oriental houses among the coconut trees black against the mauve tropical sky, the meh-meh-mehing of sheep trotting home along a side street outside the Hollywood Cinema that stood on a corner, the laughing or conversing voices in creolese… all this at the same time as George Montgomery was dismounting, tying his horse to a hitching rail, then slowly climbing the short wooden stairs to the veranda outside the saloon, his spurs clinking as he pushed aside the bat-wing doors. Then the title of the trailer appeared on the screen in yellow: ‘The Man From God’s Country’.

That double had finally arrived as this afternoon’s matinee, and he had been lucky to have been offered to share the complimentary Quentin, his neighbourhood buddy had acquired, even though now he was feeling uneasy, even upset, because that crazy shopkeeper had said none of those films, none of those stories, concerned him, since people who looked like him were not in them.

Here was Quentin now, walking over from his house, a stone’s throw away through the tall grass and damp earth of a wild yard that stood between their houses. He was walking a little slow, not with his usual excited hop whenever he picked him up for matinees; he was walking with his head down, and when he stopped at the bottom of the stairs, he kept looking down, looking at his shoes and socks, his fingers fumbling at the sides of his short-pants pockets. Then all he said was: “I can’t take you anymore; I have to take my brother.” And before he could say anything, his friend was hurrying back across the yard of tall wild weeds.

He stood up, leaned on one banister, his mouth about to say something that never achieved sound, his mind already embarrassed, thinking of what excuse he would give his mom, who had said it was ok for him to go the cinema this afternoon.