PARTISAN REVIEW
coming. Envy cramped
his
bowels, and he was a sick man. So they
were "letting"
him
go.
The truck, the big chains which moved steadily up one side to
descend another in rotary train, the vast black grease-grimed ma–
chinery he had had the illusion of being one with-the transformers,
the power, the ignited fuel and saturate action,
his
own exhilarated
brain, gears, muscles, and ice, the truck and the iceman-the wedded
were rent asunder.
The days flew at
him
like bullets. He walked around in a shock.
Julia was getting bigger and bigger
in
his feverish eyes; her still small
mound of belly looked big to
him.
Any day it would be known, and
how could he take her now? He had no job.
Enough that people would snicker and say it was all right, worse
had happened before. The new mode among Negroes was more con–
certed and bitter, an insistence on the remnants of dignity. He
dreamed at night of Asia, and he felt once more sixteen-years-old.
He got off one Saturday night, wrung into a knotted hawser of
tight strained nerves. He received
his
salary under the naked little
droplight. Sweat was running in rivulets down
his
dark shiny
skin.
"You needn't come back anymore, Montague," they said. There
was a husky boy standing among them like Jesus. He had a ruptured
duck button on
his
tan uniform. "Yeah, I want to get right to work,"
he was saying. "I don't want to lose no time. I missed the ole place.
Them Dago girls didn't fassnate me none."
"No, you needn't come to work Monday, Montague," they said
absently and kindly, as he pressed silently toward them. "It isn't nec–
essary."
NoT NECESSARY?
Do YOU KNOW WHAT IS AND WHAT IS NOT NECESSARY?
He went straight through the furry night toward the house in
which Julia lived. The mist blew itself up and wrapped around the
moon,
.a
wraith of a woman. There were little torques of breezes
in
the smoky pool of the air.
He stopped instead in a little store on
this
side of her house.
There was Sonny inside. "I heah you goh tha can tuhniii," drawled
Sonny.
Montague had a hallucination, drawn from
his
fears. Sonny
had spread the news. They were laughing at
him.
910
