“No, you don’t know. You was up under the bar when me and Moon grabbed her.”
“I know what she had.”
“Won’t be no Moon in this room tomorrow. And no Guitar either, if I listen to you. This time she might have a pistol.”
“What fool is gonna give a colored woman a pistol?”
“Same fool that gave Porter a shotgun.”
“That was years ago.”
“It ain’t even that that bothers me. It’s the way you acting. Like you want it. Like you looking forward to it.”
“Where’d you think that up?”
“Look at you. You all dressed up.”
“I had to work in Sonny’s Shop. You know my old man makes me dress up like this when I’m behind the desk.”
“You had time to change. It’s past midnight.”
“Okay. So I’m clean. So I’m looking forward to it. I just got through telling you I don’t want to hide no more….”
“It’s a secret, ain’t it? You got yourself a secret.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Two? You and her?”
“No. You and me. You’ve been making some funny smoke screens lately.” Milkman looked up at Guitar and smiled. “Just so you don’t think I ain’t noticed.”
Guitar grinned back. Now that he knew there was a secret, he settled down into the groove of their relationship.
“Okay, Mr. Dead, sir. You on your own. Would you ask your visitor to kind of neaten things up a little before she goes? I don’t want to come back and have to look through a pile of cigarette butts for your head. Be nice if it was laying somewhere I could spot it right off. And if it’s her head that’s left behind, well, there’s some towels in the closet on the shelf in the back.”
“Rest your mind, boy. Ain’t nobody giving up no head.”
They laughed then at the suitableness of the unintended pun, and it was in the sound of this laughter that Guitar picked up his brown leather jacket and started out the door.
“Cigarettes!” Milkman called after him. “Bring me some cigarettes before you disappear.”
“Gotcha!” Guitar was halfway down the stairs. Already his thoughts had left Milkman and had flown ahead to the house where six old men waited for him.
He didn’t come back that night.
Milkman lay quietly in the sunlight, his mind a blank, his lungs craving smoke. Gradually his fear of and eagerness for death returned. Above all he wanted to escape what he knew, escape the implications of what he had been told. And all he knew in the world about the world was what other people had told him. He felt like a garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people. He himself did nothing. Except for the one time he had hit his father, he had never acted independently, and that act, his only one, had brought unwanted knowledge too, as well as some responsibility for that knowledge. When his father told him about Ruth, he joined him in despising her, but he felt put upon; felt as though some burden had been given to him and that he didn’t deserve it. None of that was his fault, and he didn’t want to have to think or be or do something about any of it.
In that mood of lazy righteousness he wallowed in Guitar’s bed, the same righteousness that had made him tail his mother like a secret agent when she left the house a week or so ago.
Returning home from a party, he had hardly pulled Macon’s Buick up to the curb and turned off the car lights when he saw his mother walking a little ahead of him down Not Doctor Street. It was one-thirty in the morning, but in spite of the hour and her turned-up coat collar, there was no air of furtiveness about her at all. She was walking in what seemed to him a determined manner. Neither hurried nor aimless. Just the even-paced walk of a woman on her way to some modest but respectable work.
When Ruth turned the corner, Milkman waited a minute and started up the car. Creeping, not letting the engine slide into high gear, he drove around the corner. She was standing at the bus stop, so Milkman waited in the shadows until the bus came and she boarded it.
Surely this was no meeting of lovers. The man would have picked her up nearby somewhere. No man would allow a woman he had any affection for to come to him on public transportation in the middle of the night, especially a woman as old as Ruth. And what man wanted a woman over sixty anyway?
Following the bus was a nightmare; it stopped too often, too long, and it was difficult to tail it, hide, and watch to see if she got off. Milkman turned on the car radio, but the music, which he hoped would coat his nerve ends, only splayed them. He was very nervous and thought seriously about turning back.
Finally the bus pulled up at the intracounty train station. Its last stop. There, among the few remaining passengers, he saw her go into the lobby of the station. He believed he’d lost her. He’d never find out what train she was taking. He thought again of going back home. It was late, he was exhausted, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know any more about his mother. But having come this far, he realized it was foolish to turn back now and leave things forever up in the air. He parked in the lot and walked slowly toward the station. Maybe she’s not taking a train, he thought. Maybe he meets her in the station.
He looked around carefully before pushing open the doors. There was no sign of her inside. It was a small, plain building. Old but well lit. Looming over the modest waiting room was the Great Seal of Michigan, in vivid Technicolor, painted, probably, by some high school art class. Two pink deer reared up on their hind legs, facing each other, and an eagle perched at eye level between them. The eagle’s wings were open and looked like raised
