A PLACE TO LIE DOWN
5
in sleep, his mouth drooled saliva, then he woke with a start,
his eyes budging out; there was, for one moment, no flicker of
understanding in his eyes.
"White-folks' park, nigger. Git a-goin' 'for ah fan yore
fanny."
He twirled his club-on-a-cord significantly, boy-fashion,
threatening.
Tex waited on the street. He'd like to josh the nigger a
little now. But when the Negro joined him they walked on
silently, and Tex said nothing at all.
On a street lined with radios competitively blasting the air
into splinters, they sat down on a Keep-Our-City Clean box.
Both were hungry enough to chew their tongues; but they were
both too weary to think consistently even about food. Tex
rested his feet on the curbstone and watched the gutterflow swirl
past.
Much was being borne on that gutter-tide: a frayed cigar–
butt came past first; then a red beercork; and then, its pages
flung wide in a disgraceful death, a copy of
Hollywood Gossip
came floating by. It lay flat on its back, a whore-like thing.
T ex sniped the cigar and the magazine, crushed tobacco onto
a dry page, and rolled a rude cigarette. Smoking, he loked at
the magazine's pictures. One page bore a picture of Douglas
Fairbanks, Jr., in a stove-pipe hat, hugging two girls in one–
piece bathing suits. Out of Fairbanks' ears Tex fashioned four
long cigarettes, but the figures of the girls in the bathing suits
Tex McKay preserved, studying them as he smoked.
The cigarettes were strong, hence good; he offered Mack
one, but the boy shook his head as though he were too tired
even to smoke. To make a few more, Tex ripped one of the
bathing girls up the middle. He had an odd feeling when he did
that, and looked through the book for more bathing girls' pic–
tures; but there was no other dry page, and he began to feel
tired again.
As he sat Tex recalled that, the last time food had passed
his lips, he had been in some place where there was snow on the
streets. But he could not remember the name of that place,
though his mind sought sleepily and long. Somehow, much
seemed to depend upon the remembering: Chicago, Little Rock,
Memphis too. His brain stopped on Railroad street in Baton
Rouge, and could go no farther. So he dropped the magazine
in the gutterflow, wiped his nose on the back of his hand; and
