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  You don’t ask an old soothsayer like Theenie herself, who in this case could not be asked because she didn’t stop running, save for the brief talk she had with the Doctor, until she got safely back on John’s Island. You ask a great old earthy philosopher like Theenie something truly mysterious too directly and the answer you get, if you get one, will be as evasive as your question was blunt. I’m sitting on the commode one day and look off at the trash can by my knee and see some gauze, a bandage, and open it up and there’s blood on it, with black flecks like pepper in it—I about faint. “Theeeenie!” I yell. “Theenee!” I’m buckling up in a white fine sweat and pointing at the can when she opens the door. “Who got cut?”

  “Hmmp!” she says. “No one.” And slams the door, leaving me there in the surgical chamber.

  That leaves the Doctor sole heiress to the fortune of secrecy that has her quietly jubilant about losing her maid and welcoming into the house the man who chased off her maid, and she gives him the maid quarters when he doesn’t ask for them, and charges him with taking me to school. It leaves the Doctor, who had quite a little chat with Theenie, it would seem.

  There was nothing for it but direct questions, no one but the new man and the Doctor to ask.

  “How’d you scare her that bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  I took my cake back to the Cabana, where the Doctor was perfectly blumbery. I took her drink and freshened it without being asked (she holds the glass out and says, “Do me?”).

  “How come that dude scared Theenie?”

  “Have you been writhing?”

  “Yes ma’am, a whole story just today. But tell me how he scared her.”

  “She believes she’s her grandson—he’s. He’s her grandson. He’s come to avenge them for leaving him in New York.”

  “Who?”

  “Her daughter. Her daughter and she did.”

  “A baby?” I asked. Didn’t sound like Theenie at all.

  She nodded.

  “Because he was not …”

  “Half,” she said. “And she says it was sick. Anyway, I’m not sure she’s right.”

  “But she’s scared,” I said.

  “Yes, she’s scared,” she confirmed, with a slow, exaggerated nodding of her head.

  “Well, good night.”

  “Sleep tight,” she said. “Sweet dreams.” It wouldn’t do to ask any more. I can make it up just as true as she can. So I got out my spiral notebook and corrected for the lie I told about writing a story that day.

  BETWEEN LIVING AND DYING

  by Simons Manigault

  Between living and dying, she had made two mistakes. One was letting her daughter go to New York to be a singer, and the other was letting them take her daughter’s baby from its grandmother, herself, who got there in time to get it and take it home and raise it right, whether he was half white or not and sick. It was the sick that got him away from her, the sick that her daughter gave it, junk in it. Her daughter in New York messed up on drugs and taking things called fixes got the baby away from her and got her half convinced he was going to die so she let them take him and then she was never able to get him back and her fool daughter crazy enough to go to a place like that was too crazy to want him if she could have had him and she was just an old colored lady a long way from home and she left. It grinded her up to think about it and she never forgot it and she knew it was not true about having only to die and live till you die. You had to be careful somewhere in between or you could be chased by something like losing your daughter’s baby because you weren’t careful somewhere else, and you lost your daughter herself or she lost her sense, which is the same. You could be chased by it and even caught up with.

  And it would come for you, not your daughter who had no sense, but you who did, who knew better all along, you the wrong one in it. You would have to leave Simons and Mizmanigo and weave baskets again, but that would be the price.

  So Theenie and Taurus never talked, not after her terrible recognition, trundling kawhoosh past him, floorboards bending and springing her off the porch over the steps she would have stumbled down, her crooked-worn and polished pump heels flying in the sand. And her turning the yellow-and-white eyes on him for one last look and whirling at last into the ushering arms of the rat palms. I call them rat palms because we were pulling them off, the dead butts of branches, one night for a fire, and because you must pull very hard to rip them loose, I learned the hard way that whatever is between the husk and the coconut-hair bark of the tree comes down on your arm, and that night in the dark my whatever-in-between was no drowsy rumpled sparrow or polite silken tree frog but a rat about the size of possum and texture of armadillo, and it landed all over my arm from hand to shoulder in one shuddering rush, and I nearly shook my arm out of socket and got a chronic case of girls’ fear of rats from that and still have it, and you would too.

  So he goes in the house and reads W.P.A. stories on the walls where the roaches have eaten away the flour but not the ink of the newspapers, and he naps, wakes, and emerges into the old, bored heat of this named but never discovered small place of the South and hears the tin roof tic, tic in that heat.

  So they never talk. One runs calf-eyed into the woods from the other, who later watches her on Sony monitors in a wall bank of federally funded TV sets. On a tape he sees what he sees of her, what he sees of—I found out—of his only known or at least speculative origins, watches as calmly as a surgeon an operation.

  What would she have told him if she could have stayed? Probably the usual speech she would make to coroners courting the Doctor.

  “She got a double use for you, mister. If you cain’ see that, why you scudgin’ us all. Ever since Mr. M. left, it’s been a trile with that Simons. Because iss onliess us here. He roundbunction, in trouble, fallin’ out of buses, ekksetra. All she wont is somebody to keep him right. Even she know that. And Law knows I do, I see enough of that in my own. Somebody got to hep that boy kotch up. He so far ahead he’s behine. Yes, he is.” Her head nodding, in a rhythm like a small, gentle locomotive; her whole head rolling on the syllables. “Yessuh.”

  A fine speech and well-intended. But she’d tell it to every coroner and tennis attorney aiding and abetting Arabs to come around here. A wonderful bunch of suitors. Penelope never figured on such a healthy run of dudes when the Progenitor bagged it, I hope.

  Taurus came in the house, played a game, accepted an invitation to spend a while with us, told me everything I asked, and otherwise kept his eyes open and his mouth shut. He was somebody you figured knew something. And he was supposed, as Theenie would have put it, to “rescure” me.

  I was going to have to modify the Boy Act. He was definitely modifying the Coroner Act.

  We See a Fight in Charleston

  I TOLD HIM NOTHING ever happens here but he wouldn’t listen, and couldn’t we hike in the woods, he wants to know. The woods, I say. What woods?

  “All that dark close noise I passed coming down here,” he says. “The black changing sound.”

  So I had to tell him they was no woods, they was leftovers.

  “From what?”

  “From, number one, from nothing happening to them except heat and afternoons of Negroes in white shirts with their eyes turning yellow looking at the road. And from, two, from the heat and the rain making so much grow that since no planters or even Sherman ever got here to weed anything out, it became a giant unpruned greenhouse festering in its very success,” I said. “Burning up in an excess of youth, like city slums,” I said. “Only this city is a rich unturned city of no lights.

  “And it became a bog of verdure and got scurvy sort of and the big oaks became turkey oaks and the palm trees became palmettos, and then the Arabs landed.

  “And they bought the choicest squats what were touched by wind or water, and hired some American scalawags who somehow got that tennis-ball-velvet grass to grow on sand and so converted sand dunes to sand traps,
and they cemented the rest and painted it green and so the tennis pros showed up next (not the big ones, only ones like Rod Laver and I saw a college kid beat him), and then the tennis groupies in their German cars and then the Germans themselves came, BASF chemical conglomerate, but an old-time referendum took care of them and sent them home. They didn’t hide their intentions.

  “So after the tennis groupies got moved into their exclusive condominia, their dogs came, replacing the natural old squatters like skunks and possum with Irish setters, a new breed of them that ignores birds for Frisbees, and then they shored it all up with fake redwood and yardmen disguised as gardeners and attorneys as world travelers on their sailing yachts that never leave the marina. That leaves the scurvy woods and the rickets people right where they were. Right here.”

  We had walked into this anemic scrub a ways. Before us I showed him an old homesite I call the Frazier ruins.

  “Because I forgot a few details,” I said. “Before the Arabs, but in the same choice sites they bought, the Marines bought the very first island, and for one simple and sufficient reason: it contained an adequate, maybe the largest, population of the region’s first and final indigenous denizen: the sand flea. So grunts get out there on Parris Island at attention and they tell them not to move a muscle on pain of whomp upside the head, and they become hamburger, and it probably won World War II. Because sitting in a foxhole with Jap bullets zinging all over Guam or shooting a flame thrower into a cave or walking waist-deep over a half mile of razor coral reefs because the LSTs ran aground and seeing half of you shot wasn’t as bad as doing pushups in sand fleas, so we won.

  “And one other detail. Joe Frazier.”

  The homesite was little pine trees coming up through powdery old two-by-fours and rusty tin panels in the hot sand. Taurus was already looking at the skinks. Skinks are lizards made for speed.

  “And the skinks.” He already knew how to hold them in place with eye contact. You can walk right up on skinks sometimes if they know you are looking right at them and you do not break eye contact, but if you look away to take a step, they are gone, because they know you don’t know which way they went.

  “This could have been where he trained,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Frazier.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe right under this tin is the rotten old croker sack, just resting in the sand after the hard work of getting Joe on his way to Everlast leather bags and Philadelphia and the big time and—”

  “What croker sack?”

  He stopped me, but of course he didn’t really want to know. I think he hadn’t been paying attention to me. And he was right: Who knows if Joe hit a croker sack? He might have just torn up a nightclub or something and somebody got him to a gym in time to put his natural destructiveness to work. But the time I took a Dixie cup of the Doctor’s Early Times out here to see what she saw in it, I was sure about Joe and the bag.

  He was at the bag in his snot-dauber routine. On a short arm of rope swayed the bag, as large and solid as a piece of ocean, as heavy as tide. Joe hit it and it veered and he blew snot out of his left nostril and hit it coming back and stopped it still. Joe got on a bus. The bag hung there, the beam held it, the barn held on, the town, the heat. The green browned, Joe won.

  In Philadelphia they had canvas bags with pockets worn in them by professional punches. They tied a rope across the gym chest-high to Joe and made him step across the gym under it, bobbing from side to side. They said, “Touch it with your ears, Frazier, but don’t make the rope move or you’ll do it all day.” Joe got so good and fast at it that it sometimes seemed the rope moved, not his head, like you think only the cloth moves but a sewing machine needle doesn’t. He got so good he threw in extra touches: rolled his shoulders, hooked the snot off his nose, went hinh hinh to keep time, faked and mimicked punches. Off this motion would spin his success, would come long looping punches that would have busted croker sacks to pieces. The rope was steady; he followed it. It led him to the Heavyweight Championship of the World. The liquor didn’t make me numby or anything, but I did eat the wax out of the Dixie cup, which was a childhood thing of mine, and the liquory, stainy wax tasted much better than the snort itself.

  “You want to see him fight?”

  “What?” I said. “Who?”

  “Frazier.”

  “Where?”

  “Charleston.”

  “Sure if we—”

  “I’ll get tickets.”

  I was a goofball not to know about the fight; it was the Ali fight. Taurus just stood there in the sun, smiling. We walked all over the ruin, the tin breaking in great ka-thunks, spurting the skinks out of and back into their jillion million corrugated bunkers. The little bastards had it made: pinstriped miniature monitor dragons, gun-blue survivors, pen-and-ink leftover pygmies of the dinosaur days, living in modern galvanized tunnels buried in the sand like long Quonset huts shrunk down so small even the government lost them.

  We drove half the night that night, up Highway 17, watching all the flintzy old motels with names like And-Gene Motel that are about closed for good since I-95 opened up and drained the blood out of the old roads. And clubs, or joints, or jernts, the Negroes say, umpteen eleven jernts with neon tubes running all over them, broken so the color and the gas leaked out with the road blood. It’s very sad. There’s one place built like a mosque or something, with this bulbous outline like a fancy sundae, and the neon still works: purple and red. We stopped to get some beer because Taurus said you needed beer to go to a fight because you had to understand the people who might get carried away after it and start a fight with you. In the jernt was a gritty floor and a jukebox and some red booths. A woman in tight black pants and a red stretchy shirt sitting by the cash register got the beer, took the money, rung it in, got back on the stool, picked up a cigarette, blew smoke up at the ceiling, and we left.

  Well, I took one. Taurus looked in the sack when I did, as if to count the remainder, but he didn’t say anything.

  It was awful, but I used it to hurry up and get there with.

  We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly and got some food. They had Hoppin’ John so I got some in a square carton with a nifty wire handle and intricate closing designs cut into the flaps like a goldfish carton at a fair.

  We finally got there. It was in a gym, a big blood-colored thing probably built by the W.P.A., because it had those heavy, square, useless blocks of stone all over so you couldn’t tell if it was a museum or what. It was as big as an airplane hangar, with third-story windows they open with chains and pulleys from the floor, and fans in the windows the size of propellers.

  Five thousand people were in there on bleachers and metal folding chairs around a boxing ring in which a Negro who looked like a moose was trying to box a pink-white dude with a snow-white flat-top haircut. I say white, but he had green-and-blue tattoos all over his body—a standing bruise. I never had seen any real boxing before and what got me was how nobody seemed to get hit and they spent a lot of time hugging each other until the referee would tell them none of that. The Negro was as big as James Earl Jones and as bald and looked scared, and the white man was bobbing all the time and sliding and grinning all the while like he knew a private secret.

  “The black guy’s with the promoter’s stable,” Taurus told me.

  “Stable?” I said. “Like horses?”

  “The other guy’s from prison.”

  “You mean like Sonny Liston? He learned to box there and got out—”

  “No,” he said. “He’s in there. He lives there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw their bus.”

  “Wha’d it say?”

  “C.C.I.”

  “Charleston Cornhole Idiots.”

  “Columbia Correctional Institution.”

  Well, that made all the difference in the world. Now I saw the white guy’s secret. He was grinning because he was on the town, out of stir for the night, chained up and bused d
own and unchained for a night of freedom. And the Negro twice his size was scared because he was in the ring with a convict.

  Behind the boxers loomed an almost drive-in-sized luminescent screen, white as the moon. The real fight would come on that. You could see a big cable running across the floor away from it that I guess the broadcast had to come through. The moose and the bruise performed their bobbing and hugging, their tiny terrors like mortal shadows against the very sky.

  “What’s that fireman doing here?”

  “He’s the fire marshal. I don’t know.”

  We watched the fire marshal talk to a dude with pointy shoes and skinny pants near the door. Then the dude sort of held his hands up in the air and pushed it several times like he was saying “All right” or “Calm down” to the fireman. Then the fireman left and they began closing the doors, but people pushed through. Then they locked them with chains around the handles, the bar kind you press to open school doors. People hit the doors with chairs, which you could tell were chairs because their legs came popping through the glass, that thick, glue-colored glass in school doors with chicken wire set inside. It sounded like guns.

  When the first flicker of light hit the screen, it threw up the boxers’ shadows bigger than Olympic giants and the whole crowd shut up. Like that. We must have looked like a photograph of a crowd, faces silent, still, looking through blue cigarette smoke.

  One more tiny flicker and the hum-drum cranked up louder than ever and I didn’t hear any more chairs go off. It flickered a bunch and the fighters started sort of ducking from the light, crouching down and taking a peek at the screen so not to miss anything. When it flickered off they were huddled in a little clench, taking a peek, and when it came on it cast their shadows up on the screen, and we laughed, because you’d see tiny mortals in a huddle and then they’d start fighting and it would come on and they’d be bigger than Godzilla for a couple of crazy, huge hooks; then sloppy amateurs again, then birUP: Killers on the Skyline, the biggest sluggers of all time.