192
GEORGE
DEAUX
he is force he answer for him, as he
should
have known to say from
the blackness of his old blood. The Worm he tell him, "Bred and
bawn in a briar patch, honey! Bred and bawn in a briar patch!"
Charlie, busy and oblivious of most of this, has finished. "There
you go, prof," he says. "All set for another thousand miles." As he
unpins the sheet.
The black boy brandishes his broom. "Make fun of me, will
you?"
"Get him," Mercer says. "Get the commie creep and there's
another six bits in it for you."
What do you mean
in a place like this?
The razors are out. The
pimpled boy screams as the lean man barber scrapes carelessly over
his boil. The corporate man hurries on his coat, turning up the collar
to hide his face. Charlie prepares to swish off the sheet, and at that
moment, after years of despair and days of crazy preparation, in the
face of this immoral confusion, these brushes, these red necks and
hairy noses, this incomprehension, this futility of speech and peace–
ful petition, this insane vulgarity enshrined as status quo, these good
people boiling babies, this tolerance among the killing jars, in the
face of this and after years of qualifying self-doubting tolerant
honesty, here against the backdrop of a brass spittoon, the Worm
turns.
As the sheet falls away, he rises in the chair, rising to the ceiling,
striking terror into callow hearts, rising out of the tangle of clothing
- tweed trousers, button-down shirt, Rooster tie - rising black and
menacing, arms outstretched, not pleading for justice but at last ready
to act to secure it. He rises up in the barber chair against all this.
All of it!
Hurriedly pulling on a black wool stocking cap to which he
has affixed a child's Halloween mask, Professor Claude Flowers
prepares to strike the fear at these fools. Stands there poised to leap
down upon them, stands baggy and a little paunchy in his long now
black underwear on the chest of which he has sewn a strange device
cut from blue felt, something like a spade it is. He expands his chest
to fill the room; he stretches out his arms, gigantic arms that bulge
with black muscle, fearful arms, eighteen-, twenty-, thirty-inch biceps
boom out his message of doom to evil. They fall back before him.
Mercer, the most immediate object of the Worm's indignation, cringes
