THE HEART OF THE AFTERNOON
twitches and shakes upside down on top of him and finally falls back,
leaving his blood uncovered in the sun, while a buzz of people appear
out of the emptiness and swarm around the spot. They are dressed
in light colors but look black, and when they go away the man and
the machine are gone too and it is as if they had eaten him.
The whine of a police car rises and fades away, and then for
a little while there is only the distant dry ticking of typewriters in
the government building at the corner.
The boy passes the sole of
his
shoe slowly over the doll's body,
and at last picks it up and starts slowly up the stairs. The head came
off a long time ago from so much falling to the ground every day,
and of the doll's clothing
all
that is left is a bit of tom chemise, but
his
grandmother could not live without it, and if she
is
made to wait
too long after she has thrown it out the window the blood comes
to her face and she begins to rap angrily at the window-sill.
This time, however, she has been distracted by the family's
gathering around her chair at the window.
"Dead as a doornail I tell you. You look in the paper tomorrow
if he wasn't."
"Dead. You want everybody to be dead. Maybe he passed out
a minute."
"I saw him move," the boy's sister says, lying as always when
she is excited. "I saw him open
his
eyes."
"All right, all right, here it
is,"
the mother says. She takes the
doll and shoves it with a little sigh into the grandmother's hands, which
close on it hard. "You ought to brought it up quicker."
"I did bring it up."
"I said quicker. You ought to brought it up quicker. We've
got enough trouble already without you chasing after everything in
the street."
"Leave the kid alone," his father says. "It's only natural."
"It ain't a fit sight for a child."
His father is a night-watchman, and this is
his
early morning.
In the dark cubicle beyond the kitchen they can see the bent iron
bed he has just left, the sheets pulled half to the floor and the flies
lighting here and there to sip at the creases in it. He goes over to
the sink to shave, the naked upper half of his body smeared with the
sweat of his daytime sleep.
1333
