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Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude. There were boys and girls drinking coffee at the drugstore counters who were held back from his condition by barriers as perishable as their dwindling cigarettes. They could scarcely bear their knowledge, nor could they have borne the sight of Rufus, but they knew why he was in the streets tonight, why he rode subways all night long, why his stomach growled, why his hair was nappy, his armpits funky, his pants and shoes too thin, and why he did not dare to stop and take a leak.

Now he stood before the misty doors of the jazz joint, peering in, sensing rather than seeing the frantic black people on the stand and the oblivious, mixed crowd at the bar. The music was loud and empty, no one was doing anything at all, and it was being hurled at the crowd like a malediction in which not even those who hated most deeply any longer believed.

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening, and the people at the tables found it pleasant to shout over this stunning corroboration and the people at the bar, under cover of the noise they could scarcely have lived without, pursued whatever it was they were after.

He wanted to go in and use the bathroom but he was ashamed of the way he looked. He had been in hiding, really, for nearly a month. Someone would look at him with horror, then turn back to his business with a long-drawn-out, pitying, Man! He could not do it— and he danced on one foot and then the other and tears came to his eyes.

A white couple, laughing, came through the doors, giving him barely a glance as they passed. The warmth, the smell of people, whiskey, beer, and smoke which came out to hit him as the doors opened almost made him cry for fair and it made his empty stomach growl again. It made him remember days and nights, days and nights, when he had been inside, on the stand or in the crowd, sharp, beloved, making it with any chick he wanted, making it to parties and getting high and getting drunk and fooling around with the musicians, who were his friends, who respected him.

Then, going home to his own pad, locking his door and taking off his shoes, maybe making himself a drink, maybe listening to some records, stretching out on the bed, maybe calling up some girl. And changing his underwear and his socks and his shirt, shaving, and taking a shower, and making it to Harlem to the barber shop, then seeing his mother and his father and teasing his sister, Ida, and eating: spareribs or pork chops or chicken or greens or cornbread or yams or biscuits.

For a moment he thought he would faint with hunger and he moved to a wall of the building and leaned there. His forehead was freezing with sweat. He thought: this is got to stop, Rufus. This shit is got to stop. Then, in weariness and recklessness, seeing no one on the streets and hoping that no one would come through the doors, leaning with one hand against the wall he sent his urine splashing against the stone-cold pavement, watching the faint steam rise.

He remembered Leona. Or a sudden, cold, familiar sickness filled him and he knew he was remembering Leona. And he began to walk, very slowly now, away from the music, with his hands in his pockets and his head down. He no longer felt the cold.

For to remember Leona was also— somehow— to remember the eyes of his mother, the rage of his father, the beauty of his sister. It was to remember the streets of Harlem, the boys on the stoops, the girls behind the stairs and on the roofs, the white policeman who had taught him how to hate, the stickball games in the streets, the women leaning out of windows and the numbers they played daily, hoping for the hit his father never made.

It was to remember the juke box, the teasing, the dancing, the hard-on, the gang fights and gang bangs, his first set of drums— bought him by his father— his first taste of marijuana, his first snort of horse.

Yes: and the boys too far out, jackknifed on the stoops, the boy dead from an overdose on a rooftop in the snow. It was to remember the beat: A nigger, said his father, lives his whole life, lives and dies according to a beat.

Shit, he humps to that beat and the baby he throws up in there, well, he jumps to it and comes out nine months later like a goddamn tambourine. The beat: hands, feet, tambourines, drums, pianos, laughter, curses, razor blades; the man stiffening with a laugh and a growl and a purr and the woman moistening and softening with a whisper and a sigh and a cry.

The beat— in Harlem in the summertime one could almost see it, shaking above the pavements and the roof. And he had fled, so he had thought, from the beat of Harlem, which was simply the beat of his own heart. Into a boot camp in the South, and onto the pounding sea. While he had still been in the Navy, he had brought back from one of his voyages an Indian shawl for Ida. He had picked it up someplace in England.

On the day that he gave it to her and she tried it on, something shook in him which had never been touched before. He had never seen the beauty of black people before.

But, staring at Ida, who stood before the window of the Harlem kitchen, seeing that she was no longer merely his younger sister but a girl who would soon be a woman, she became associated with the colors of the shawl, the colors of the sun, and with a splendor incalculably older than the gray stone of the island on which they had been born.

He thought that perhaps this splendor would come into the world again one day, into the world they knew. Ages and ages ago, Ida had not been merely the descendant of slaves. Watching her dark face in the sunlight, softened and shadowed by the glorious shawl, it could be seen that she had once been a monarch. Then he looked out of the window, at the air shaft, and thought of the whores on Seventh Avenue.

He thought of the white policemen and the money they made on black flesh, the money the whole world made. He looked back at his sister, who was smiling at him. On her long little finger she twisted the ruby-eyed snake ring which he had brought her from another voyage.

She would have said, My Lord, Rufus, you got no right to walk around like this. Seven months ago, a lifetime ago, he had been playing a gig in one of the new Harlem spots owned and operated by a Negro. It was their last night. It had been a good night, everybody was feeling good.

Most of them, after the set, were going to make it to the home of a famous Negro singer who had just scored in his first movie. Because the joint was new, it was packed. All kinds of people had been there that night, white and black, high and low, people who came for the music and people who spent their lives in joints for other reasons. There were a couple of minks and a few near-minks and a lot of God-knows-what shining at wrists and ears and necks and in the hair.

The colored people were having a good time because they sensed that, for whatever reason, this crowd was solidly with them; and the white people were having a good time because nobody was putting them down for being white. The joint, as Fats Waller would have said, was jumping. There was some pot on the scene and he was a little high.

He was feeling great. And, during the last set, he came doubly alive because the saxophone player, who had been way out all night, took off on a terrific solo. He was a kid of about the same age as Rufus, from some insane place like Jersey City or Syracuse, but somewhere along the line he had discovered that he could say it with a saxophone. He had a lot to say. He stood there, wide-legged, humping the air, filling his barrel chest, shivering in the rags of his twenty-odd years, and screaming through the horn Do you love me?

Do you love me? And, again, Do you love me? This, anyway, was the question Rufus heard, the same phrase, unbearably, endlessly, and variously repeated, with all of the force the boy had. The silence of the listeners became strict with abruptly focused attention, cigarettes were unlit, and drinks stayed on the tables; and in all of the faces, even the most ruined and most dull, a curious, wary light appeared.

They were being assaulted by the saxophonist who perhaps no longer wanted their love and merely hurled his outrage at them with the same contemptuous, pagan pride with which he humped the air. And yet the question was terrible and real; the boy was blowing with his lungs and guts out of his own short past; somewhere in that past, in the gutters or gang fights or gang shags; in the acrid room, on the sperm-stiffened blanket, behind marijuana or the needle, under the smell of piss in the precinct basement, he had received the blow from which he never would recover and this no one wanted to believe.

The men on the stand stayed with him, cool and at a little distance, adding and questioning and corroborating, holding it down as well as they could with an ironical self-mockery; but each man knew that the boy was blowing for every one of them. When the set ended they were all soaking. The crowd was yelling for more but they did their theme song and the lights came on.

And he had played the last set of his last gig. He was going to leave his traps there until Monday afternoon. When he stepped down from the stand there was this blonde girl, very plainly dressed, standing looking at him. Everybody was busy all around them, preparing to make it to the party.

It was spring and the air was charged. She had said enough. She was from the South. And something leaped in Rufus as he stared at her damp, colorless face, the face of the Southern poor white, and her straight, pale hair.

She was considerably older than he, over thirty probably, and her body was too thin. Just the same, it abruptly became the most exciting body he had gazed on in a long time. His smile could be very effective. She carried a light spring coat, her long hair was simply brushed back and held with some pins, she wore very little lipstick and no other make-up at all.

Others, considerably less gala— they were on the western edge of th Street— stood in knots along the street, switched or swaggered or dawdled by, with glances, sidelong or full face, which were more calculating than curious. The policemen strolled by; carefully, and in fact rather mysteriously conveying their awareness that these particular Negroes, though they were out so late, and mostly drunk, were not to be treated in the usual fashion; and neither were the white people with them.

But Rufus suddenly realized that Leona would soon be the only white person left. This made him uneasy and his uneasiness made him angry. Leona spotted an empty cab and hailed it. The taxi driver, who was white, seemed to have no hesitation in stopping for them, nor, once having stopped, did he seem to have any regrets.

Now that they were alone together, he felt a little shy. He had planned to visit his family but he thought of what a ball it would be to spend the day in bed with Leona. He glanced over at her, noting that, though she was tiny, she seemed very well put together.

He wondered what she was thinking. He offered her a cigarette putting his hand on hers briefly, and she refused it. When I drink. She looked out of the window on her side. They were on Riverside Drive and nearing their destination. To the left of them, pale, unlovely lights emphasized the blackness of the Jersey shore.

He leaned back, leaning a little against Leona, watching the blackness and the lights roll by. Then the cab turned; he glimpsed, briefly, the distant bridge which glowed like something written in the sky.

The cab slowed down, looking for the house number. A taxi ahead of them had just discharged a crowd of people and was disappearing down the block. Rufus said nothing.

He paid the man and they got out and walked into the lobby, which was large and hideous, with mirrors and chairs. The elevator had just started upward; they could hear the crowd.

She looked at him, a little startled. I just wanted to see Harlem and so I went up there tonight to look around.

And I just happened to pass that club and I heard the music and I went in and I stayed. I liked the music. She turned from him as they heard the sound of the closing elevator door reverberate down the shaft. Then they heard the drone of the cables as the elevator began to descend.

She watched the closed doors as though her life depended on it. There was something halting in her manner which he found very moving. He remembered, suddenly, his days in boot camp in the South and felt again the shoe of a white officer against his mouth. He was in his white uniform, on the ground, against the red, dusty clay. Some of his colored buddies were holding him, were shouting in his ear, helping him to rise. The white officer, with a curse, had vanished, had gone forever beyond the reach of vengeance.

His face was full of clay and tears and blood; he spat red blood into the red dust. The elevator came and the doors opened. He took her arm as they entered and held it close against his chest. In the closed, rising elevator her voice had a strange trembling in it and her body was also trembling— very faintly, as though it were being handled by the soft spring wind outside. He tightened his pressure on her arm. It gave him an instant to locate himself.

For he, too, was trembling slightly. He wondered if he should proposition her or wait for her to proposition him. But perhaps she could. The hairs of his groin began to itch slightly. The terrible muscle at the base of his belly began to grow hot and hard.

The elevator came to a halt, the doors opened, and they walked a long corridor toward a half-open door. But he shook the suggestion off. He just wanted her for tonight. He knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an answer. Straight ahead of them, in the large living room which ended in open French doors and a balcony, more than a hundred people milled about, some in evening dress, some in slacks and sweaters. High above their heads hung an enormous silver ball which reflected unexpected parts of the room and managed its own unloving comment on the people in it.

The room was so active with coming and going, so bright with jewelry and glasses and cigarettes, that the heavy ball seemed almost to be alive. His host— whom he did not really know very well— was nowhere in sight. To the right of them were three rooms, the first of which was piled high with wraps and overcoats.

The horn of Charlie Parker, coming over the hi-fi, dominated all the voices in the room. He wandered through the house, looking for a relatively isolated telephone, and found one in the kitchen.

I thought you were going to call me sooner. The girl leaned against the sink, the boy stood before her, rubbing his hands slowly along the outside of her thighs. They barely glanced at Rufus. There was a pause. Rufus realized that Jane was probably lying on the bed, listening. So long. She stood helplessly in the foyer, watching the host and hostess saying good night to several people. The host turned away from the door and came over to them. He owed his present eminence more to his vitality and his looks than he did to his voice, and he knew it.

He was not the kind of man who fooled himself and Rufus liked him because he was rough and good-natured and generous. But Rufus was also a little afraid of him; there was that about him, in spite of his charm, which did not encourage intimacy. He was a great success with women, whom he treated with a large, affectionate contempt, and he was now on his fourth wife. He took Leona and Rufus by the arm and walked them to the edge of the party.

I been respectable all my life. They been stealing the colored folks blind, man. And niggers helping them do it. Once they were gone, the party would change character and become very pleasant and quiet and private. The lights would go down, the music become softer, the talk more sporadic and more sincere. Somebody might sing or play the piano. Somebody might break out with some pot and pass it slowly around, like the pipe of peace.

Somebody, curled on a rug in a far corner of the room, would begin to snore. Whoever danced would dance more languorously, holding tight. The shadows of the room would be alive. Toward the very end, as morning and the brutal sounds of the city began their invasion through the wide French doors, somebody would go into the kitchen and break out with some coffee.

Then they would raid the icebox and go home. The host and hostess would finally make it between their sheets and stay in bed all day. From time to time Rufus found himself glancing upward at the silver ball in the ceiling, always just failing to find himself and Leona reflected there. She held out her glass.

He walked to the table and poured two very powerful drinks. He went back to her. He called back. He seemed, from where he stood, to hear a faint murmur coming from the water. When a child he had lived on the eastern edge of Harlem, a block from the Harlem River.

He and other children had waded into the water from the garbage-heavy bank or dived from occasional rotting promontories. One summer a boy had drowned there. He threw back his shoulders, as though he were casting off a burden, and walked to the edge of the balcony where Leona stood.

She was staring up the river, toward the George Washington Bridge. She turned and looked at him and sipped her drink. Can I trouble you for a cigarette now? But— how do you give up? She looked at him as though she were slowly coming out of a dream. She dropped her eyes. Someone was playing the piano. Blast Little Eva with some pot.

Let her get her kicks. He felt fine, clean, on top of everything, and he had a mild buzz on when he got back to the balcony. This curtain seemed to move as she moved, heavy and priceless and dazzling. He waited.

Everything seemed very simple now. He played with her fingers. Tell me. He had said this before, years ago, to someone else.

The wind grew cold for an instant, blowing around his body and ruffling her hair. Then it died down. He wanted to put his mouth there and nibble it slowly, leaving it black and blue.

At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before. He could make it his, every inch of the territory which stretched beneath and around him now, and, unconsciously, he began whistling a tune and his foot moved to find the pedal of his drum. He put his drink down carefully on the balcony floor and beat a riff with his fingers on the stone parapet.

He knocked the glass out of her hand and it fell dully to the balcony floor, rolling away from them. I like it. Is this the way they do down home? At the same time, she ceased struggling. Her hands came up and touched his face as though she were blind. Then she put her arms around his neck and clung to him, still shaking. His lips and his teeth touched her ears and her neck and he told her. He tried, with himself, to make amends for what he was doing— for what he was doing to her.

Everything seemed to take a very long time. He got hung up on her breasts, standing out like mounds of yellow cream, and the tough, brown, tasty nipples, playing and nuzzling and nibbling while she moaned and whimpered and her knees sagged. He gently lowered them to the floor, pulling her on top of him. He held her tightly at the hip and the shoulder. Part of him was worried about the host and hostess and the other people in the room but another part of him could not stop the crazy thing which had begun.

Her fingers opened his shirt to the navel, her tongue burned his neck and his chest; and his hands pushed up her skirt and caressed the inside of her thighs.

Then, after a long, high time, while he shook beneath every accelerating tremor of her body, he forced her beneath him and he entered her. For a moment he thought she was going to scream, she was so tight and caught her breath so sharply, and stiffened so. But then she moaned, she moved beneath him. Then, from the center of his rising storm, very slowly and deliberately, he began the slow ride home.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

They murmured and sobbed on this journey, he softly, insistently cursed. Each labored to reach a harbor: there could be no rest until this motion became unbearably accelerated by the power that was rising in them both. Rufus opened his eyes for a moment and watched her face, which was transfigured with agony and gleamed in the darkness like alabaster. Tears hung in the corners of her eyes and the hair at her brow was wet. He wanted her to remember him the longest day she lived.

And, shortly, nothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry.

A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies. He lay on his back, breathing hard. He heard music coming from the room inside, and a whistle on the river. He was frightened and his throat was dry. The air was chilly where he was wet. She touched him and he jumped. Then he forced himself to turn to her, looking into her eyes.

Her eyes were wet still, deep and dark, her trembling lips curved slightly in a shy, triumphant smile. He pulled her to him, wishing he could rest. And these words, though they caused him to feel no tenderness and did not take away his dull, mysterious dread, began to call desire back again. He sat up. He watched her. He wanted to hear her story. And he wanted to know nothing more about her. She put her head against his chest. He began to feel affection for her again.

She watched him. He watched the vein in her neck throb. She seemed very fragile. She looked down. I did drink too much, it was the only way I could stand living with him. Her tears fell on his dark fist. Him and my mother and my brother is as thick as thieves. It was beginning to be chilly on the balcony; he was hungry and he wanted a drink and he wanted to get home to bed.

His shorts were like a rope between his legs, he pulled them up, and felt that he was glued inside them. He zipped up his fly, holding his legs wide apart. The sky had faded down to purple. The stars were gone and the lights on the Jersey shore were out. A coal barge traveled slowly down the river. She looked like a tired child. Vivaldo came by late the next afternoon to find Rufus still in bed and Leona in the kitchen making breakfast.

It was Leona who opened the door. Let the liberal white bastard squirm, he thought. You just in time for breakfast. For short. His real name is Daniel Vivaldo Moore.

Whenever he was uncomfortable— which was often— his arms and legs seemed to stretch to monstrous proportions and he handled them with bewildered loathing, as though he had been afflicted with them only a few moments before.

He took it, looking up at her with his quick, gypsy smile, and spilled some on one foot. Then Vivaldo grinned. You going to get your ass up out of that bed? He raised his arms high and yawned and stretched. Rufus put on the shorts and an old pair of gray slacks and a faded green sport shirt. I had my troubles last night. As usual? You know. His buoyancy evaporated; sour suspicions filled him.

He stole a look at Vivaldo, who was sipping his beer and watching Leona with an impenetrable smile— impenetrable exactly because it seemed so open and good-natured.

Perhaps Vivaldo was contemptuous of her because she was so plain— which meant that Vivaldo was contemptuous of him. Then Leona looked across the table and smiled at him. His heart and his bowels shook; he remembered their violence and their tenderness together; and he thought, To hell with Vivaldo. He had something Vivaldo would never be able to touch. He leaned across the table and kissed her.

Leona took his glass and went to the kitchen. Rufus stuck out his tongue at Vivaldo, who was watching him with a faintly quizzical frown. There was silence at the table for a moment. I mean, sure you like her. Vivaldo dropped his eyes. It stared unsympathetically out at them from the eyes of the passing people; and Rufus realized that he had not thought at all about this world and its power to hate and destroy. He had not thought at all about his future with Leona, for the reason that he had never considered that they had one.

Yet, here she was, clearly intending to stay if he would have her. But the price was high: trouble with the landlord, with the neighbors, with all the adolescents in the Village and all those who descended during the week ends. And his family would have a fit. But he knew that Ida would instantly hate Leona. She had always expected a great deal from Rufus, and she was very race-conscious.

Then, for the first time in his life, he wondered about that— or, rather, the question bumped against his mind for an instant and then speedily, apologetically, withdrew.

He looked sideways at Leona. Now she was quite pretty. She had plaited her hair and pinned the braids up, so that she looked very old-fashioned and much younger than her age. A young couple came toward them, carrying the Sunday papers. Rufus watched the eyes of the man as the man looked at Leona; and then both the man and the woman looked swiftly from Vivaldo to Rufus as though to decide which of the two was her lover.

And, since this was the Village— the place of liberation— Rufus guessed, from the swift, nearly sheepish glance the man gave them as they passed, that he had decided that Rufus and Leona formed the couple.

The face of his wife, however, simply closed tight, like a gate. They reached the park. Old, slatternly women from the slums and from the East Side sat on benches, usually alone, sometimes sitting with gray-haired, matchstick men. Ladies from the big apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue, vaguely and desperately elegant, were also in the park, walking their dogs; and Negro nursemaids, turning a stony face on the grown-up world, crooned anxiously into baby carriages.

The other Villagers sat on benches, reading— Kierkegaard was the name shouting from the paper-covered volume held by a short-cropped girl in blue jeans— or talking distractedly of abstract matters, or gossiping or laughing; or sitting still, either with an immense, invisible effort which all but shattered the benches and the trees, or else with a limpness which indicated that they would never move again.

Rufus and Vivaldo— but especially Vivaldo— had known or been intimate with many of these people, so long ago, it now seemed, that it might have occurred in another life. There was something frightening about the aspect of old friends, old lovers, who had, mysteriously, come to nothing. It argued the presence of some cancer which had been operating in them, invisibly, all along and which might, now, be operating in oneself.

Many people had vanished, of course, had returned to the havens from which they had fled. But many others were still visible, had turned into lushes or junkies or had embarked on a nerve-rattling pursuit of the perfect psychiatrist; were vindictively married and progenitive and fat; were dreaming the same dreams they had dreamed ten years before, clothed these in the same arguments, quoted the same masters; and dispensed, as they hideously imagined, the same charm they had possessed before their teeth began to fail and their hair began to fall.

They were more hostile now than they had been, this was the loud, inescapable change in their tone and the only vitality left in their eyes. Then Vivaldo was stopped on the path by a large, good-natured girl, who was not sober. Rufus and Leona paused, waiting for him. I feel like we known each other for years. Villagers, both bound and free, looked them over as though where they stood were an auction block or a stud farm. The pale spring sun seemed very hot on the back of his neck and on his forehead.

Leona gleamed before him and seemed to be oblivious of everything and everyone but him. And if there had been any doubt concerning their relationship, her eyes were enough to dispel it. Then he thought, If she could take it so calmly, if she noticed nothing, what was the matter with him? Maybe he was making it all up, maybe nobody gave a damn. Then he raised his eyes and met the eyes of an Italian adolescent.

The boy was splashed by the sun falling through the trees. The boy looked at him with hatred; his glance flicked over Leona as though she were a whore; he dropped his eyes slowly and swaggered on— having registered his protest, his backside seemed to snarl, having made his point.

Then Leona surprised him. You could probably make friends with him real easy if you tried. The large girl had him by the collar and he was struggling to get away, and laughing. People, with a tolerant smile, looked up from the benches or the grass or their books, recognizing two Village characters.

Then Rufus resented all of them. He wondered if he and Leona would dare to make such a scene in public, if such a day could ever come for them. No one dared to look at Vivaldo, out with any girl whatever, the way they looked at Rufus now; nor would they ever look at the girl the way they looked at Leona. The lowest whore in Manhattan would be protected as long as she had Vivaldo on her arm. This was because Vivaldo was white. He remembered a rainy night last winter, when he had just come in from a gig in Boston, and he and Vivaldo had gone out with Jane.

He had never really understood what Vivaldo saw in Jane, who was too old for him, and combative and dirty; her gray hair was never combed, her sweaters, of which she seemed to possess thousands, were all equally raveled and shapeless; and her blue jeans were baggy and covered with paint.

His face had puckered as though someone had just cracked a rotten egg. But he had never really hated Jane until this rainy night. It had been a terrible night, with rain pouring down like great tin buckets, filling the air with a roaring, whining clatter, and making lights and streets and buildings as fluid as itself.

It was filled with shapeless, filthy women with whom Jane drank, apparently, sometimes, during the day; and pale, untidy, sullen men, who worked on the docks, and resented seeing him there. He wanted to go, but he was trying to wait for the rain to let up a little. How had the fight begun? He had always blamed it on Jane. Finally, in order not to go to sleep, he had begun to tease Jane a little; but this teasing revealed, of course, how he really felt about her, and she was not slow to realize it.

Vivaldo watched them with a faint, wary smile. You mean you just paint for this half-assed gang of painters down here? He leaned forward, grinning at Jane in a way at once lewd and sardonic.

Those people you hang out with are dead, man— at least, these people are alive. But he was also aware that they were beginning to attract attention, and he glanced at the windows where the rain streamed down, saying to himself, Okay, Rufus, behave yourself.

And he leaned back in the booth, where he sat facing Jane and Vivaldo. He had reached her, and she struck back with the only weapon she had, a shapeless instrument which might once have been fury.

You filthy bitch. He relaxed, not wanting to seem to struggle with her. Now she was being Joan Fontaine. They stared at each other for a moment and then the man spit in his face. He heard Jane scream, but he was already far away.

He struck, or thought he struck; a fist slammed into his face and something hit him at the back of the head. The world, the air, went red and black, then roared in at him with faces and fists. The small of his back slammed against something cold, hard, and straight; he supposed it was the end of the bar, and he wondered how he had got there.

He had not known there were so many men in the bar. He struck a face, he felt bone beneath the bone of his fist, and weak green eyes, glaring into his like headlights at the moment of collision, shuttered in distress. Someone had reached him in the belly, someone else in the head. He was being spun about and he could no longer strike, he could only defend. He kept his head down, bobbing and shifting, pushed and pulled, and he crouched, trying to protect his private parts.

He heard the crash of glass. For an instant he saw Vivaldo, at the far end of the bar, blood streaming down from his nose and his forehead, surrounded by three or four men, and he saw the back of a hand send Jane spinning half across the room. Her face was white and terrified. Good, he thought, and felt himself in the air, going over the bar.

Glass crashed again, and wood was splintered. There was a foot on his shoulder and a foot on one ankle. He pressed his buttocks against the floor and drew his free leg in as far as he could; and with one arm he tried to hold back the fist which crashed down again and again into his face. Far behind the fist was the face of the Irishman, with the green eyes ablaze. Then he saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing.

Then he heard running feet. He was on his back behind the bar. There was no one near him. He pulled himself up and half-crawled out. The bartender was at the door, shooing his customers out; an old woman sat at the bar, tranquilly sipping gin; Vivaldo lay on his face in a pool of blood. Jane stood helplessly over him. And the sound of the rain came back.

He looked at her, hating her with all his heart. He leaned down and helped Vivaldo to rise. Half-leaning on, half-supporting each other, they made it to the door. Jane came behind them. They leaned, half-in, half-out of the door. The bartender watched them.

Vivaldo looked at the bartender, then at Jane. He and Rufus stumbled together into the blinding rain. Vivaldo pulled away from her touch, and slipped and almost fell. Get away from me. Drop dead, get lost, go fuck yourself.

Both his eyes were closing and the blood poured down from some wound in his scalp. And he was crying. What a way to talk to my buddy! For the doctors and nurses were, first of all, upright, clean-living white citizens.

And he was not really afraid for himself, but for Vivaldo, who knew so little about his countrymen. He carried Vivaldo into the bathroom and sat him down. He looked in the mirror. His face looked like jam, but the scars would probably heal, and only one eye was closed; but when he began washing Vivaldo, he found a great gash in his skull, and this frightened him.

All right. You dig? Vivaldo remained in the hospital for ten days and had three stitches taken in his scalp. In the morning Rufus went uptown to see a doctor and stayed in bed for a week. He and Vivaldo never spoke of this night, and though he knew that Vivaldo had finally begun seeing her again, they never spoke of Jane.

But from that time on, Rufus had depended on and trusted Vivaldo— depended on him even now, as he bitterly watched him horsing around with the large girl on the path. He did not know why this was so; he scarcely knew that it was so. Vivaldo was unlike everyone else that he knew in that they, all the others, could only astonish him by kindness or fidelity; it was only Vivaldo who had the power to astonish him by treachery. Even his affair with Jane was evidence in his favor, for if he were really likely to betray his friend for a woman, as most white men seemed to do, especially if the friend were black, then he would have found himself a smoother chick, with the manners of a lady and the soul of a whore.

But Jane seemed to be exactly what she was, a monstrous slut, and she thus, without knowing it, kept Rufus and Vivaldo equal to one another. At last Vivaldo was free and hurried toward them on the path still grinning, and now waving to someone behind them.

For him, she was thoroughly mysterious. He could never quite place her in the white world to which she seemed to belong. She came from New England, of plain old American stock— so she put it; she was very fond of remembering that one of her ancestors had been burned as a witch. She had married Richard, who was Polish, and they had two children. They had known him as a brat, they said— not that he had changed much; they were his oldest friends.

With Leona between them, Rufus and Vivaldo crossed the road. Cass looked up at them with that smile which was at once chilling and warm. It was warm because it was affectionate; it chilled Rufus because it was amused. Richard has crossed you off his list. Cass looked more amused than ever, and at the same time more affectionate. They sat down on the stone rim of the fountain, in the center of which a little water played, enough for small children to wade in.

You know Richard. I hardly ever see him. The children no longer have a father, I no longer have a husband. But I really know nothing about it. Rufus watched the pigeons strutting along the walks and the gangs of adolescents roaming up and down. He wanted to get away from this place and this danger. Leona put her hand on his. He grabbed one of her fingers and held it. Cass turned to Rufus.

You promised to come and hear me. Cass and Leona looked briefly at each other and smiled. In it, I mean. Nobody wants to hear my story. Rufus looked out over the sun-filled park. He reached up and took her hand away. There was a silence. Then Cass rose. Make Rufus bring you by to see us one day. I been meeting some real nice people lately. Glad to have met you. Be seeing you real soon. The bright-red, setting sun burned their silhouettes against the air and crowned the dark head and the golden one.

Rufus and Leona stood and watched them; when they were under the arch, they turned and waved. I can tell by the way they talk to you, the way they treat you. He squeezed her thin hand between his elbow and his side. You know what that means? Near him, just beyond the plate glass, stood the sandwich man behind his counter, the meat arrayed on the steam table beneath him.

Bread and rolls, mustard, relish, salt and pepper, stood at the level of his chest. He was a big man, wearing white, with a blank, red, brutal face. From time to time he expertly knifed off a sandwich for one of the derelicts within. The old seemed reconciled to being there, to having no teeth, no hair, having no life. Some laughed together, the young, with dead eyes set in yellow faces, the slackness of their bodies making vivid the history of their degradation.

They were the prey that was no longer hunted, though they were scarcely aware of this new condition and could not bear to leave the place where they had first been spoiled. And the hunters were there, far more assured and patient than the prey. Rufus shivered, his hands in his pockets, looking through the window and wondering what to do.

He thought of walking to Harlem but he was afraid of the police he would encounter in his passage through the city; and he did not see how he could face his parents or his sister. When he had last seen Ida, he had told her that he and Leona were about to make it to Mexico, where, he said, people would leave them alone.

But no one had heard from him since then. Now a big, rough-looking man, well dressed, white, with black-and-gray hair, came out of the bar. He paused next to Rufus, looking up and down the street. Rufus did not move, though he wanted to; his mind began to race, painfully, and his empty stomach turned over.

Once again, sweat broke out on his forehead. They entered the bar and grill. The man paid and Rufus took his sandwich over to the bar. He felt that everyone in the place knew what was going on, knew that Rufus was peddling his ass. But nobody seemed to care. Nobody looked at them. The noise at the bar continued, the radio continued to blare. The bartender served up a beer for Rufus and a whiskey for the man and rang up the money on the cash register.

Rufus tried to turn his mind away from what was happening to him. He wolfed down his sandwich. But the heavy bread, the tepid meat, made him begin to feel nauseous; everything wavered before his eyes for a moment; he sipped his beer, trying to hold the sandwich down.

Just get out of here. The bar stank of stale beer and piss and stale meat and unwashed bodies. Suddenly he felt that he was going to cry. He pulled away. Hey, Mac, give the kid a drink. Give him a drink.

Then you can come on over to my place and get some sleep. He straightened up. Forty-sixth Street. He did not answer right away.

Let me go— to my friends. Rufus stared at the sidewalk and, very slowly, the tears filled his eyes and began trickling down his nose. The man took his arm. The man dropped his arm. Rufus moved away. Rufus watched him walk away. Then he, too, turned and began walking downtown. He thought of Eric for the first time in years, and wondered if he were prowling foreign streets tonight.

Eric had always been very nice to Rufus. Rufus had despised him because he came from Alabama; perhaps he had allowed Eric to make love to him in order to despise him more completely. Eric had finally understood this, and had fled from Rufus, all the way to Paris. But his stormy blue eyes, his bright red hair, his halting drawl, all returned very painfully to Rufus now. Go ahead and tell me. He moved to the center of his room. To please you.

He felt a flood of affection for Eric. And he felt his own power. He did not know what he was going to say or do. And when Eric was gone, Rufus forgot their battles and the unspeakable physical awkwardness, and the ways in which he had made Eric pay for such pleasure as Eric gave, or got. He remembered only that Eric had loved him; as he now remembered that Leona had loved him.

But Leona had not been a deformity. And he had used against her the very epithets he had used against Eric, and in the very same way, with the same roaring in his head and the same intolerable pressure in his chest.

Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, classics lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, Another Country pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone.

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