Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

“But it’s the twenty-second. There isn’t time. And what about Sydney and Ondine?”

“You don’t think he’d go after Ondine, do you? Well, we’ll start. We’ll look like we’re going and tell Valerian why. We can call the police ourselves when we get to town. Is the boy here?” Margaret asked.

“Yes, but—”

“Jade. Come on, now. You’ve got to help. There’s nobody else.”

“Let’s see if Valerian will send him away.”

“You said they were in there laughing.”

“Let’s wait and see. Pack just in case. I’ll get reservations.”

“All right. But I’m not going to leave this room until I know something definite.”

“I’ll bring you something to eat.”

“Yes, and please hurry. I don’t want to take a Valium on an empty stomach.”

They stayed in their rooms all afternoon, and the next time they saw the stranger he was so beautiful they forgot all about their plans.

WHEN JADINE had clicked out of her bedroom in her gold-thread slippers, the man sat down in her chair and lit another cigarette. He listened to the four/four time of her clicking shoes, tapping it out on the little writing table. The seat was too small for him—like a grade school chair—even though he had lost the ship-food weight and now—after two weeks of scavenging—his body was as lean as a runner’s. He glanced around him and was surprised at how uncomfortable-looking her room was. Not at all the way it appeared at dawn when he crouched there watching her sleep and trying to change her dreams. Then it looked mysterious but welcoming. Now in the noon light it looked fragile—like a doll house for an absent doll—except for the sealskin coat sprawled on her bed which looked more alive than seals themselves. He had seen them gliding like shadows in water off the coast of Greenland, moving like supple rocks on pebbly shores, and never had they looked so alive as they did now that their insides were gone: lambs, chickens, tuna, children—he had seen them all die by the ton. There was nothing like it in the world, except the slaughter of whole families in their sleep and he had seen that, too.

He took another cigarette and walked to a table to look at the presents she’d started to wrap. Two damp spots formed on the yoke of his pajamas. Still smoking, he left off looking at the packages and walked into her bathroom. Peeping into the shower he saw a fixture exactly like the one in the bathroom down the hall. But her shower had curtains, not sliding doors. Heavy shiny curtains with pictures of old-fashioned ladies all over. Towel material was on the other side, still damp. Water glistened on the tub and wall tile. On the corner of the tub was a bottle of Neutrogena Rainbath Gel and a natural sponge, the same color as her skin. He picked up the sponge and squeezed it. Water gushed from the cavities. Careless, he thought. She should wring it out thoroughly, otherwise it would rot. The sponge was so large he wondered how her small hands held it. He squeezed it again, but lightly this time, loving the juice it gave him. Unbuttoning his pajama top he rubbed it on his chest and under his arms. Then he took the pajamas off altogether and stepped into the shower.

“Pull,” she had said. Tepid water hit him full in the face. He pushed the knob in and the water stopped. He adjusted the shower head, pulled again and water peppered his chest. After a moment he noticed that the shower head was removable and he lifted it from its clamps to let it play all over his skin. He never let go the sponge. When he was wet all over, he let the shower head dangle while he picked up the bath gel, pumping the spout above the sponge. He lathered himself generously and rinsed. The water that ran into the drain was dark—charcoal gray. As black as the sea before sunrise.

His feet were impossible. A thick crust scalloped his heels and the balls of both feet. His fingernails were long and caked with dirt. He lathered and rinsed twice before he felt as though he’d accomplished anything. The sponge felt good. He had never used one before. Always he had bathed with his own hands. Now he pumped a dollop of bath gel into his palm and soaped his beard, massaging as best he could with his nails. The beard hair tangled and crackled like lightning. He turned his soapy face up and sprayed water on it. Too hard. He stopped, wiped his eyes and fiddled with the head until he got mist instead of buckshot. He soaped his face again and misted the lather away. Some of it got into his mouth and reminded him of a flavor he could not name. He sprayed more and swallowed it. It did not taste like water; it tasted like milk. He squirted it all around in his mouth before pressing the button to shut off the water.

He got out dripping and looking around for shampoo. He was about to give up, not seeing any medicine cabinets, when he accidentally touched a mirror that gave way to reveal shelf upon shelf of bottles among which were several of shampoo boasting placenta protein among their ingredients. The man chose one and stood before the mirror looking at his hair. It spread like layer upon layer of wings from his head, more alive than the sealskin. It made him doubt that hair was in fact dead cells. Black people’s hair, in any case, was definitely alive. Left alone and untended it was like foliage and from a distance it looked like nothing less than the crown of a deciduous tree. He knew perfectly well what it was that had frightened her, paralyzed her for a moment. He could still see those minky eyes frozen wide in the mirror. Now he stuck his head under the shower and wet the hair till it fell like a pelt over his ears and temples. Then he soaped and rinsed, soaped and rinsed until it was as metallic and springy as new wire. After he dried it, he found a toothbrush and brushed his teeth furiously. Rinsing his mouth he noticed blood. He was bleeding from the gums of his perfect teeth. He unscrewed the cap from a bottle of Listerine with instructions in French on the label and gargled. Finally he wrapped a white towel around his waist. He noticed another door in the bathroom and opened it with the easy familiarity of someone who has been there before. It led to a dressing room within an alcove in which stood a table and a mirror circled by lights. Farther along were dresses, shelves of shoe boxes, luggage, and a narrow lingerie chest. On a tiny chair lay shorts and a white tennis visor. The smell of perfume nauseated him—he had not eaten since the gobbling of cold soufflé and peaches the night before. He picked a robe, returned to the bathroom and urinated. Then he stooped to pick up the pajamas, damp and bunched on the floor, but changed his mind, left them there and walked back through the bedroom. The breeze from the open window was sweet and he went to it and stood looking out.

They are frightened, he thought. All but the old man. The old man knows that whatever I jumped ship for it wasn’t because I wanted to rape a woman. Women were not on his mind and however strange it looked, he had not followed the women. He didn’t even see them properly. When the boat docked, he stayed in the closet. Their voices were as light as their feet pattering on the dock and when he went, at last, to look, all he saw were two slim-backed women floating behind the beam of a flashlight toward what looked like a jeep. They got in, turned on the lights, then the engine (in that order, just like women would) and were gone. It amused him that these tiny women had handled that big boat. Which one had thrown the rope? Who jumped onto the dock and secured the line? He had not seen them clearly at all: just the hand and left side of one as she picked a bottle off the deck, and now their slim backs disappearing into the darkness toward a jeep. He had not followed them. He didn’t even know where they were off to. He waited until the sea, the fish, the waves all shut up and the only sound came from the island. When he had eaten mustard, flat bread and the last of the bottled water he too disembarked but not before he looked up at the sky holy with stars and inhaled the land smell sailors always swear they love. Behind him to his right the dim lights of Queen of France. Before him a dark shore. Ahead, under the stars and above the black of the beach he could barely see the hilly outline of the island against the sky.

He walked along the dock and then over forty feet of sand past the shadow of something that looked like a gasoline pump to the road the jeep had taken. He stayed on it and hoped he wouldn’t meet anybody, for, having lost his shoes, he was not willing to cut through the bush, fat and tangled, by the side of the road. At every step clouds of mosquitoes surrounded him biting through his shirt and on the back of his neck. An old dread of mines chilled him—stopped him dead and he had to remind himself several times that this was the Caribbean—there were no beautiful pygmies in the trees or spring mines in the road.

He had not followed the women. He didn’t even know what they looked like or where they were going. He just walked for an hour on the only road there was and saw nothing to make him stop; nothing that appeared to offer rest. At some point during that hour a foul smell rose about him. But the mosquitoes left him and he supposed it was the fumes coming from a marsh or swamp that he imagined he was passing through. When he emerged from it he saw above him a house with lights in its upper and lower stories. He stopped and rested one hand against a tree. How cool and civilized the house looked. After that hot solitary walk through darkness lined by trees muttering in their sleep, how cool, clean and civilized it looked. They are drinking clear water in there, he thought, with ice cubes in it. He should have stayed on the boat for the night. But he’d been shipbound so long and the land smell was so good, so good. “I’d better go back,” he told himself. “Back to the boat where there is a refrigerator and ice cubes and a bunk.” He drew his tongue across his lips and felt the cracks. Moving his hand an inch or two up the tree in preparation to go his fingers grazed a breast, the tight-to-breaking breast of a pubescent girl three months pregnant. He snatched his hand away and turned to look. Then he let his breath out in a snort that was more relief than laughter. An avocado was hanging from the tree right at his fingertips and near his cheek. He parted the leaves and stroked it. Saved, he thought. It smelled like an avocado, felt like an avocado. But suppose it wasn’t. Suppose it was a variety of ake, the fruit that contained both a pulp that was edible and a poison that killed. No, he thought, ake trees are bigger, taller and their fruit would not grow so close to the trunk. He strained to see the color, but could not. He decided not to chance it and looked again at the house lights—the home lights—beaming like a safe port in front of him. Just then the wind, or perhaps it was the tree herself, lifted the leaves and, precisely as he had done a moment ago, parted wide the leaves. The avocado swung forward and touched his cheek. Why not? he thought, and placed three fingers on either side of the fruit and bit it where it hung. Under the tough bitter skin was the completely tasteless, wholly satisfying meat and it made him thirstier than he was before.

He had not followed the women. He had not even seen them clearly, only their slim backs. What he went toward the house for was a drink of water. To find an outside spigot; a well, a fountain, anything to quench a thirst brought on by mosquitoes, the hot night and the meat of a teenaged avocado.

He approached the house from its northern side, away from the gravel of the driveway and over where the grass was wet and silky under his feet. Through the first window he looked into he saw not the women (for he was not following the women) but the piano. Nothing like Miss Tyler’s, but still a piano. It made him tired, weak and tired, as though he had swum seven seas for seven years only to arrive at the place he had started from: thirsty, barefoot and alone. No water, no shipboard bunk, no ice cubes could fight the fatigue that overwhelmed him at the sight of the piano. He backed away, away from the light and the window into the protection of the trees that were still muttering in their sleep. He would have sunk where he stood and slept under the dreaming trees and the holy sky except for the part of him that never slept and which told him now what it always told him: to hide, to look for cover. So he obeyed the self that never blinked or yawned, and moved farther from the house looking for anything: a hutch, a toolshed, a cloister of shrubbery—and found a gazebo. He crawled under the circular bench where he could sleep safely. But sleep did not join him there at once. What came, what entered the gazebo, what floated through the screen, were the boys who laughed at first when he used to go to Miss Tyler’s and teased him about fucking Andrew’s auntie when all he was doing was playing her piano, because there wasn’t another one in town except behind the altars of the A.M.E. Zion and Good Shepherd Baptist Church. Two churches for fewer than three hundred people. Drake, Soldier and Ernie Paul laughed and pointed their fingers. How it feel? Is she good? But he went anyway because she let him and because nothing else mattered. And after a while she said she would give him lessons if he would weed for her. And a year later Drake, Soldier and Ernie Paul weren’t laughing; they were sitting on Miss Tyler’s porch steps listening and waiting for him to come out. Cheyenne too listened while he played and waited out front for him. But that was much later and thank God she did not come into the gazebo with Drake, Soldier and Ernie Paul. They kept him up all night, practically, so he thought they were probably alive somewhere. Each of them had been afraid for something different: his balls, eyes, spine. He had been afraid for his hands. All through the war he thought of sitting in a dark and smoky joint—a small place that couldn’t pack a hundred and could make it with a steady crowd of thirty—and him hidden behind the piano, surrounded and protected by the bass the drum the brass—taking eight once in a while but mostly letting his hands get to the crowd softly pleasantly. His hands would be doing something nice and human for a change. After he was busted—discharged without honor or humor—he had done it but so badly only the pity of the owner and the absence of a rival kept him there, playing at night while Cheyenne slept at home—waiting.

He had not followed the women. He came to get a drink of water, tarried to bite an avocado, stayed because of the piano, slept all through the next day because Drake, Soldier and Ernie Paul kept him awake in the night. That’s how he came to sleep in the day and wander the property at night contrary to common sense and all notions of self-preservation. And he stayed tired. Even at night when he walked around looking for food and trying to think of what his next step should be. To go back to the boat and wait for one of them to sail it again. To examine the island and maybe find a rowboat—something anonymous—and make it to town at night. Get a little work, enough to fly to Miami and then work his way back home? To knock on the door, ask for help and take the risk of being turned in. Each possibility seemed fine and each seemed stupid. But he was so tired in the day and so hungry at night, nothing was clear for days on end. Then he woke up, in a manner of speaking. The first night he entered the house was by accident. The broken pantry window where he was accustomed to look for food and bottled water was boarded up. He tried the door and found it unlocked. He walked in. There in the moonlight was a basket of pineapples, one of which he rammed into his shirt mindless of its prickers. He listened a moment before opening the refrigerator door a crack. Its light cut into the kitchen like a wand. He shielded the opening as best he could while he reached inside. Three chicken wings were wrapped in wax paper. He took them all and closed the door. The silence was startling compared to the noisy night outside. He pushed the swinging doors and looked into a moonlit room with a big table in the middle and a chandelier overhead. It led to a hall which he entered and which led to the front door which he opened and he stepped back outside. The chicken was incredible. He hadn’t tasted flesh since the day he went crazy with homesickness and jumped into the sea. He ate the bones even, and had to restrain himself from going right back and raiding the refrigerator again. Later. Wait till tomorrow night, he told himself. And he did. Each tomorrow night he entered the house and it was a week before he ventured upstairs and then it was out of curiosity as well as a sense of familiarity. The door of the first bedroom at the head of the stairs was open, the room itself, empty. The one to the left was not empty. A woman was sleeping in it. He meant to look but not to watch and not to stay because he had not followed the women. Had not even seen them clearly. So the first time he entered her room he stayed only a few seconds, watching her sleep. Anybody could have told him it was only the beginning. Considering the piano and Cheyenne and this sleeping woman he was bound to extend his stay until he was literally spending the night with her gratified beyond belief to be sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, his shirt full of fruit (and meat if he could find any), in the company of a woman asleep. His appetite for her so gargantuan it lost its focus and spread to his eyes, the oranges in his shirt, the curtains, the moonlight. Spread to everything everywhere around her, and let her be.