“Precious! Precious! For God’s sake!” George circled the bed, trying to grab her foot or hand. He was afraid she might drown too.

  “He’s … he’s …” Precious spewed and sputtered, going under, coming up again, thrashing.

  “Try to … try to …” cried George, but he couldn’t finish it because he didn’t know what he wanted her to try to do.

  Then it was settled for him. Precious, lashing about with incredible fury, kicked the end of the wooden frame out, and the water began to drain out into the room. As soon as the water started to recede, Precious unaccountably quieted, and in a matter of two or three minutes she and the boy were lying in the black lining of the water-bed. Precious’ wet cotton nightgown lay pink and close as skin. She and the boy might have been lovers, so intimately joined were their legs and arms and so passionately did she kiss him.

  George sat on the edge of the waterbed which was wobbly now that the end of it had been kicked out. He kept his face averted slightly because even in his grief he was embarrassed by his sister’s embrace. And it was only by accident that he happened to see the hawk down by the creek up on the stump caught in a slanting beam of sunlight so that she almost glowed as she ruffled and shook and preened and searched her feathers. On the edge of his vision he could see Precious rocking her son back and forth as she crooned his name. To keep from having to watch Precious, he squinted his eyes and concentrated on the hawk and heard again the gray bony lady of the night before shouting that he had no right to do what he was doing to the noble bird. She was not only the wife of a professor, she was a professor herself. She was a little crazy. Professors were always wilder if there were two in the family. She drove a Saab. He had put seatcovers on it once. Saabs were more difficult than Volkswagens, but thank God you didn’t see many of them. She had a long-term study underway for a book.

  George knew that it was called “A View of R Incidence In Black Dialect As Spoken In The Five Ghettos of Gainesville: An Evaluation” and knew also that she was talking about it when he walked into her conversation.

  “So I said to the little devil,” she was saying to a short pale Jew who had been pointed out to George because he was a new faculty member and because he taught Swahili, “I said ‘Let’s see who can say Rob ran right round the red rumped raccoon.’ And you know what that little devil did? Do you?” The pale Jew was shaking his head. “He kicked me right in the ankle.” She saw George standing there and without taking another breath said: “They’re not holding up very well.”

  “Oh?” said George. He was drunk and tired. He didn’t want to talk about Saab seatcovers. The Swahili Jew would never stick around and listen to it, and George would be stuck with her by himself.

  “I think it’s workmanship, not materials,” she said.

  “I’ll have to speak to Billy Bob,” he said.

  “You stand behind the work, of course,” she said.

  “Right,” he said. But he thought: Yes, goddamit lady, behind it, on top of it, inside it, around it, under it, and other ways you could not dream of.

  “You look drawn today,” she said.

  “I am drawn,” he said.

  “But whatever for on a Sunday?”

  “Work,” he said.

  She wagged a chalklike finger. “All work and no play,” she said. “You know what that does. Those seatcovers will be there when you’re dead and gone. They …”

  “Hawk,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I was busy with a hawk. I’m training …”

  “I hope you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”

  The Jew mumbled something George could not understand (Was it Swahili?) and walked backwards from the conversation.

  “I wasn’t saying anything,” said George. His glass was empty. He turned toward the bar, but she caught his arm.

  “You’ve got another hawk,” she said, “haven’t you?”

  He thought he would try to change the subject. “How is that study you’re doing?”

  “What?”

  That had caught her by surprise. Hell, he knew blacks had trouble with R’s. You didn’t have to be a professor to know that. Everybody in Bainbridge, Georgia, knew about the black’s trouble with R’s. But naturally she thought his mind stopped with Saab seatcovers.

  He said: “M n o p q arrrrrra s t.”

  “Don’t think you can get out of it by acting crazy,” she said. “Everybody knows that you’ve been starving the noble hawk.”

  “No,” he said, “I’ve been training …”

  “Training is not killing.”

  “Sometimes it is,” he said.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “And sometimes training is killing and killing is training. But I won’t kill this one. I …”

  “You have no right!” she cried.

  “Everything needs training,” he said indifferently.

  His mind was still back there working on training and killing. He thought he had said something important to himself but he did not know what it was. Besides, her gray bony face bored him. What she needed was to be tied down by the feet and trained herself; then she wouldn’t act this way.

  “You have no right! You have no right!” She had her eyes squinched shut and she was shaking her head, violently whipping her short gray hair from side to side, and rhythmically stamping her foot. “You have no right!”

  “Everything needs training,” he said softly, cocking his head to listen. “That’s why countries have presidents and armies have generals and universities have professors …” Marvin Hill—their host—was running over to see what was wrong with his party, and she was still shouting You have no right and consequently nobody at all heard him when he got to the end and said: “… and people have God.”

  Precious was sitting up in the damp polished lining of the waterbed rocking and moaning. The pink gown everywhere stuck and sticking to her body. Her breasts hung straight down over her stomach like deformities. Her hair was wet too now and matted and her eyes were swollen and red and stunned. Fred was still face down in his black and gold pajamas. Through the window the hawk was off the stump again, beating the earth relentlessly at the end of the leash.

  “What did my baby do?” wailed Precious. “What did my baby do to deserve this?”

  “Nothing,” said George.

  “I can’t stand it,” cried Precious.

  “Yes, you can,” said George.

  Looking through the window at the straining bird, beautiful and doomed in the slanting sunlight, he thought: I’m at the end of my road. I was warned about everything except what I should have been warned about. I was warned about tobacco and I don’t smoke. I was warned about whiskey and I don’t drink except when I can’t stand it. I was warned about women and I never married. But I was never warned about work. Work hard, they say, and you’ll be happy. Get a car, get a house, get a business, get money. Get get get get get get get. Well, I got. And now it’s led me here where everything is a dead-end.

  “What’ll we do?” asked Precious.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  But that was a lie. He knew at least what he was going to do. He was going to put the hawk wild on his arm and watch her as long as it took to man her, three days, five days, as long as it took. It would not be easy. They would say he was crazy. And the thought came again that maybe he was. But he didn’t care. Putting the hawk on his arm made sense and nothing else did.

  “We’ve got to do something,” Precious said. She was shaking uncontrollably.

  “Yes,” said George.

  They sat for a long time without doing anything, watching the boy lying face down on the black shining plastic.

  “Call somebody,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Call somebody,” pleaded Precious. “Call Ma.”

  He supposed they would have to call his mother. And she would come and there would be a funeral. He saw crying and heard screaming. He strained all of his attention onto the hawk where she still flew tirelessly at the end of the leash. She was a great hawk. Watching her beat her frayed and bleeding wings against the earth, there was no question about it any more. She might even kill herself. He half hoped she would. It was an alternative and hers to take.

  “And Alonzo,” said Precious.

  “No,” he said, turning from the window, “not Alonzo.”

  “Fred was his son, too.”

  “Not since he deserted.”

  “Well, he was my son and I want Alonzo here.”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “You know?”

  “Ma’s kept in touch,” Precious said. “Ma knows where he is.”

  Yes, Ma would know. She would know where every last one of their blood kin was and she would track them down before she was through and all of them would know the boy was dead. Death was an excuse to get the family together, what was left of it. It was a time to show off the new babies and tell stories of when everybody was young and share new ailments, diseases, catastrophes, and finally it was a time to issue new warnings. His mother was one warning after another: Keep clean; eat much rich food; sleep a lot; take nothing stronger than tea; clean all scratches, bumps, and cuts with alcohol; when in doubt or distress, work. Take care of your work and your work will take care of you.

  But she would have trouble getting to him—they all would have trouble getting to him—if he had a wild hawk on his arm.

  Precious was crying and moaning again, collapsed onto the corpse of her son. Her cries were growing sharper and sharper, her ragged sobs catching and choking her. It sounded like the beginning of hysteria and she was violently rocking the corpse as though presently she would throw it out of the bed. George knew he had to do something. He put his hands on his knees and started to get up. But he did not. He froze in that position. There between his feet, sticking out from under the wooden frame, was a light blue piece of white-laced silk. He knew what it was before he ever touched it. Precious was screaming louder than ever, but he ignored her. He caught the silk between thumb and forefinger and gingerly pulled at it as though he had hold of the fuse to a bomb. It was a pair of brief panties. They belonged to Betty. Written right across the crotch, so that she wore it between her legs was the word Sunday.

  8

  George finally managed to get Precious to her feet. He spread a sheet over the body, not because he thought he ought to but because he had seen it done in the movies, and it gave him the impression that he knew what he was doing, that he was in charge of things. Dazed, he stuffed the bit of blue silk into his pocket. It smelled slightly of urine, which conjured the entire student-ridden house into his head, making it difficult for him to think. Betty had been up reading from a paperback novel when he and Precious came in from the party the night before. Precious went immediately to Fred’s room, as she always did, and found him sleeping peacefully.

  She came back and asked hopefully of Betty, “Did you have a good time, dear?”

  “All right,” said Betty in a small sullen voice.

  Betty had insisted on leaving immediately although Precious had tried to get her to stay for a little milk and cookies. But she refused. George walked her out to her car. “Well?” said George when they were outside.

  Betty only glanced sourly at him and said nothing.

  “I’m surprised Fred’s asleep,” said George. “It’s not like him to go to sleep if there’s anybody in the house to talk to him.” He waited for her to say something but she got in the car and closed the door. George leaned at the window. “What did you do?”

  “Talked.”

  “Talked?”

  “Yes.”

  “About… ?”

  “Everything.”

  “Did you look at the hawk after I left?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not interested in the goddamed hawk. Move. I’m exhausted.”

  He took his arms off the window and she roared out of the driveway. Now, after getting Precious to lie down, he called her, even before he had called Precious’ doctor which he had promised her he would do. The telephone rang a long time.

  “Hello.” She sounded very tired.

  “What did you do to that goddamed boy?”

  “What is it, George?”

  He was delighted to hear fear in her voice. He shouted even louder into the phone: “He’s dead!” There was no response. He could hear her breathing. “He’s dead, and I want to know what happened.”

  He heard a short impatient sigh, a kind of snort, and she hung up. He stared at the phone, and then dialed her number again. He let it ring twenty times, counting each ring aloud. But she never answered. He finally hung up. He sat down and looked up the doctor’s number. All the while he was running his finger down the list of physicians and marking the number and then dialing, a little voice somewhere in his head kept wondering if he was doing this right, if he was feeling what he ought to be feeling. It seemed to the voice that he was too calm, that he was not nearly grief-stricken enough, that his lack of hysteria was shameful.

  “Doctors Hires, Fraines, Leep, and Pit, could you hold please?”

  “Listen, I …” But the nurse had already put him on hold without waiting for his answer. Back in the bedroom Precious was chanting her son’s name. George didn’t know why he was calling the doctor or exactly what he was going to say. He had never had to deal with death before, and when Precious had told him to call Doctor Leep it had seemed the right thing to do. But now he didn’t know what he was going to tell him. It was embarrassing.

  “Yes, may I help you?”

  The nurse’s voice was cool, relaxed even, but with just enough tension in it to let you know that other callers were waiting. A busy world. State your name and your trouble. Get on with it. Don’t waste time.

  George sat there trying to say his name and his trouble. Knowing he was wasting time. “Listen,” he said. “Let me talk to Doctor Leep.”

  “What is the nature of your ailment?”

  “A drowning.”

  “A drowning,” the cool efficient voice repeated.

  There was a long pause and George could see her writing it down on a little green card. “I have to talk to Doctor Leep,” he tried to get a little hysteria into his voice, but it came out as an incongruous anger.

  “You want to report a drowning to the doctor?”

  The nurse was trying to keep it cool and efficient but implicit in her voice was the fact that the doctor did not take such reports, that he had no interest in them, that he had never had any interest in them.

  Then: “Hold, would you please?” There were a couple of beeps and the nurse came back on the line and said, “He’s in consultation, but the doctor will be with you momentarily.”

  George waited what seemed a very long time and couldn’t help wondering what would happen if somebody actually was drowning at this moment, and then he thought that somewhere somebody was actually drowning in an actual bed of water in an ocean pool lake river, black and awful water pushing their screams back into their lungs, stuffing their eyes ears noses, packing everything with suffocation.

  “Dr. Leep here.”

  George couldn’t talk, couldn’t get his breath.

  “This is Leep. Hello.” The voice was a little out of sorts.

  “I didn’t know who to call.”

  “Yes, well, can I help you?”

  “This has never happened and I didn’t know what to do and Precious said call you.”

  “Just try to be calm. Precious who?”

  “My sister.”

  “Nurse said something about a drowning.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has there in fact been a drowning? Is this an emergency?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “Have you tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

  There, the first direct question had caught him. He should have thrown himself onto the corpse immediately but poor Fred had seemed so completely and obviously dead. Where was the point?

  “No,” he finally had to admit. He was aware of an overwhelming sense of acting, as though these were lines given him to speak in a bad play. “It was too late. I was too late. He …” George didn’t think he’d spoken his lines very well. He had once been in a grade school play. That’s what this reminded him of. He’d forgotten his lines in that play, too.

  “Who is this?” Dr. Leep wasn’t happy with the way it was going either.

  “George Gattling.”

  “George Gattling?” There was a heavy pause. “You mean … George? Is this you, George?”

  He had put new seatcovers on the doctor’s Eldorado and on his wife’s Porsche. He had an awful feeling that the doctor was going to start talking about materials and workmanship.

  “Yes.”

  “University Trim Shop?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “Pool?”

  “What?”

  “Did it happen in the pool?”

  “I don’t have a pool,” said George.

  “Well, where did it happen?”

  To keep from having to answer that, George said, “It was the boy.”

  “Fred?”

  “Yes, Fred.”

  A pause during which there came a sound as though the doctor was drumming his fingers impatiently against the telephone receiver.

  “I’ll send an ambulance. Where?”

  “Here. I’m at home. 1800 NW Eighth Avenue.”

  “But you said you had no pool.”

  “I don’t.”

  “For God’s sake, man, where …”

  “He … ITHAPPENEDINBED,” cried George, and immediately slammed the phone down.

  As soon as the phone was out of his hand, he became aware of Precious flapping up and down the hallway in her pink night gown chanting her son’s name over and over again. He felt as though everything were going mad, and felt at the same time as though the madness had been just below the surface of his life all along, waiting to break through. And now it finally had.

 

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