Hot Night in the City Read online

  "Do you really want to help me?"

  "I do. Honest and truly, I do."

  "Cross your heart and hope to die?" He sighed and closed his eyes. "All right." He sat up on the edge of the bed. "You scoot over here and turn your back to me. And I'll bring myself pleasure. Is that all right?"

  She slid over to the edge of the bed, awkward and uncertain. "Will it hurt me?"

  "Yes," he told her softly. "But not for long."

  She was silent.

  "Is that all right? The hurt and all?" he asked. "I won't do it, if you don't want me to."

  She swallowed and answered in a small voice, "No, it's all right."

  He reached down and trickled his fingers up her spine to the nape of her neck and up into her hair. She hummed, and he felt her skin get goose-bumpy with thrill. His hands slipped under her hair and he stroked the sides of her neck up to the ears, then he reached around and gently cradled her throat between his hands. She swallowed, and he felt the cartilage of her windpipe ripple beneath his fingers. He bared his teeth and he closed his eyes and squeezed, and pleasure overwhelmed him.

  After covering her with the sheet carefully, tenderly, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at the distorted trapezoid of bright light on the ceiling. In her struggle, she had clawed her pillow away, revealing her snowstorm paperweight. He held it up to the light and shook it, and the snow swirled around the carrot-nosed snowman... black snow in silhouette, and a black snowman. When his breathing returned to normal, he went to the sink and washed himself off. He looked back at the bed and was overwhelmed with pity for her. She had been so trusting... so vulnerable. The gnawing within him was gone, maybe forever. Maybe he'd never again have to...

  But he knew better. It had eventually come back after each of the others, and it would come back after June Allyson.

  He dressed and tiptoed down the creaking stairs and out into the empty street where the predawn air was damp and almost cool. He walked slowly back towards downtown, hands in pockets. He would go to the public market and pick up a day's stoop labor, then he'd get his bindle from the bus station and hit the freight yards to catch a boxcar. Maybe the West Coast this time.

  Over the city, the first milky tints of dawn began to thin the sky, and the morning air already felt stale and dusty in his nostrils.

  It was going to be another scorcher.

  MINUTES OF A VILLAGE MEETING

  Ours is a small village in the Basque province of Xiberoa perched on a hillside above the sparkling Uhaitz-handia, which floods the low pastures each spring, making the earth rich again. We are neither rich nor poor; God provides enough for those who work hard and tend their flocks closely, but He protects us from the temptations of wealth by giving us land that is not excessively bountiful.

  Without meaning to brag, I can say that we celebrate three traditional Basque festivals each year, while our neighboring village of Licq celebrates only one, and that only because they want to attract people to their cheese fair run by greedy merchants in direct competition to our own cheese fair, which offers far better—but enough! This is neither the time nor the place to reveal the low greed of those grasping Licquois, nor do I intend to condemn them for letting their ancient Basque traditions wither and drop away, for I understand that the old ways are easily forgotten by those who cozy up to tourists from Paris and Bordeaux, and listen to the outlander's French-speaking radio, and end up desiring his modern machines and his comforts. But the people of my upland village are sustained by those ancient fêtes and customs that have marked the joys and tragedies of Basque life since before Roland broke the mountain with his sword not so many kilometers from this very spot. (It was we Basques, you know, who thrashed that proud Roland at Roncesvalles—ancestors of mine, perhaps.)

  We of Xiberoa are considered to be backwards and old-fashioned by those coastal Basque who live in the shadow of the outlander. Our accent is imitated to make jokes funnier, and occasionally people come from as far away as Paris to photograph our lera carts yoked to the horns of the russet oxen of Urt and piled high with the dried fern we harvest from the hillsides for animal bedding. Because we are the last people in all of France to use wooden wheels, outsiders smile on us and say that we are charming and quaint, but they shake their heads and tell us that we must inevitably change with the changing world and march to the ragtime rhythms of Paris. And perhaps this is so. Surely things are changing, even here. We are slowly becoming a village of children and old people, as our young women go to work in the espadrille manufactories of Mauléon, or go off to Paris to become maids, and our young men go to the New World to tend rich men's flocks; and they come back only at feast times, the young men riding automobiles that have radios inside of them, and the young women wearing skirts that show the bottom half of their legs.

  Well, enough about the village. Perhaps it is old-fashioned, as they say, but any chance for rapid change is ruled out by our cumbersome old Basque style of government: village meetings in which every person may say his piece before he votes, even those who have only a light vote. Not all people have the same vote in our village meetings: some have heavier votes and some lighter; it depends on how much land you have inherited and how well you have done with it. We are told that in the lowlands all people are equal under the law. This seems very foolish, for any man with eyes in his head can see that men are not equal. The role of the law should be to assure equality amongst equals, and to make it possible for someone to become more equal if he works hard and has God's luck with him. Perhaps our way of seeing things is flawed, but we like it because it is our own way and, as the old saying has it, txori bak-hoitzari eder bere ohantzea.* And as the wise old Basque saying tells us: Old sayings are wise.

  *Each bird finds his own nest beautiful.

  We don't exactly 'make laws' at our village meetings; what we do is come to understandings that are written up in the minutes. And these minutes are sometimes very complicated, because we take every consideration into account and leave no loopholes that might tempt men to do things for which the village would have to ostracize them. Ostracism is a powerful penalty here, for it extends to the offender's wife, who will not be allowed to share the succulent bits of gossip that are exchanged every Tuesday down at the village lavoir where the women laugh and chat to the rhythmic splat of their wooden paddles spanking the laundry clean. A wife thus deprived of the sauce and spice of village life will make a many-faceted hell of the life of the offending husband. In this way, the wife becomes the stick for beating the man; but ancient Basque justice does not allow the ostracism to be extended to the children, for that would be unfair. Wives select their husbands, but children do not choose their parents.

  What I want to tell you about is the minutes of a village meeting we held a few years ago, just before the Great War took seven of our young men away to the army, three of whom went on to God, while one came back strange in his head from the gas, and one who left as Zabala-the-Handsome came back as Zabala-One-Leg. I want to show you how careful and clever is our thinking about things—not from pride, which is a sin, but to make a record of ourselves, because I am beginning to accept that the old way of things must pass and, without a record, our grandchildren are doomed to slip into the world of the outlander where, as you know, all people are exactly alike.

  But you could not understand the minutes of this meeting unless you knew something about the Widow Jaureguiberry, now gone to God, but at that time still amongst us. So first I will tell you about the Widow Jaureguiberry.

  Each day the Widow Jaureguiberry would drive her small flock of sheep from our village to Etchebar, the next village up. And each evening she would drive them back. Now, tradition requires that the shepherd lead the flock so that the beasts will not stray into other people's fields. He is not permitted to follow the flock and allow it to blunder into other people's fields and fatten on their grass. Exception is made in the case of a sudden storm catching the shepherd out, and obliging him to drive his sheep into a field to
keep them from wandering. This exception is not easily abused, for everyone knows if the bad weather could have been anticipated by looking for the signs in the sky. All mountain Basques are born with the ability to read the sky, although some are beginning to lose it by listening to forecasts on the radio.

  The Widow Jaureguiberry always followed her flock, and her sheep were forever straying into the fields of others and eating their grass, while the widow limped after them shouting and seeming to be at her wits' end, as she managed to scatter the sheep from one pasture to the next. And she would visit each house in turn to chant her prolonged, whining apologies to the owner of the field, complaining about how hard it was to have her house in our village but to have to drive her sheep back and forth each day, because her pasture was up in Etchebar. And all the time the old woman was explaining this, her sheep were eating your grass!

  Of course, God makes fools only in the Béarn, and everybody in our village knew that the Widow Jaureguiberry had no fields of her own, neither in our commune nor up in Etchebar. Her husband had not been a good peasant; he had been a dreamer and a drinker, and he had lost all his land before God invited him into His fold by letting a thunderbolt hit him during a storm in the high mountain pastures. His childless wife was left with nothing but the good will of old Aramburu, the wine merchant who had taken their land, one glassful at a time. And so it came to pass that the Widow Jaureguiberry was obliged to sustain herself by allowing her few sheep to feed on the grass of others. But she was fair about it; she let her sheep stray longer into the pastures of the richer peasants, and controlled them so that they bypassed the land of the poor. (Which proves that, in reality, she was as good a shepherd as you or I.)

  You see, the Widow Jaureguiberry was a proud Basque woman who could not humble herself to request assistance from the commune. To do so would be to admit that her husband had not been a good provider—which, of course, he had not, but that was her own business, and not the world's. Also there was the matter of shaming her dead father, who had made the unfortunate match for her. She had found a way to live off the commune without appearing to do so. We all knew what she was doing, and everyone was a little proud of her Basque ingenuity. Everybody, that is, except the Colonel, who had fought the Prussians in '70, and who was the richest man in our village and therefore the stingiest, for God punishes the stingy by exposing them to the temptations of wealth, just as He protects the generous by keeping them in the safe haven of poverty—as the ancient Basque saying assures us.

  All right then, that is all you need to know about Widow Jaureguiberry to understand the minutes of our village meeting. More would be prying.

  The men of the village met at old Aramburu's, the wine merchant, who received us because wine is drunk at these affairs, to strengthen the wit and liberate the tongue. The problem before us was this: it was necessary to put a new roof on the infant-school, for the rain leaked through, and the teacher who came up from Licq three days each week said she would no longer come if the roof was not repaired. Of course, the men of the village would do the work themselves. We would make a fête of it and have a good time. But the tiles must be bought with money, so we decided to levy a small tax on ourselves for the purpose. It would be so many francs per hectare of land owned.

  Fine. It would not cost too much, and we could never have lived down the shame of losing our infant-school, particularly as we had recently witnessed the humiliation of the people of Etchebar, who had been forced to close down their church because the priest said he could no longer come and say an additional mass every week for a mere handful of communicants. It was a sad day when two of their young men scaled the church tower to take the hands off the clock that would no longer be running. But this was necessary. They could not allow God's clock to deceive by giving the wrong time.

  After this, the pious of Etchebar were obliged to trudge all the way down to our church each Sunday, and over little glasses after mass, some of us tended to commiserate with them rather more than was necessary about how humiliating it must be to live in a village so pitiable and insignificant that it didn't even have a church. So the closure of our school would mean a painful loss of face for us and a cheap laugh for them, for their infant-school, although sparsely attended, was at least watertight.

  So the agreement to do the work ourselves and to purchase the tiles by levying a small tax on our land was easily arrived at... perhaps three glasses around, with old Aramburu keeping tab on his slate. Of course there were complaints from the Colonel, who was rich and stingy and who had no children and was unlikely ever to have, as he was no longer strong with women. And there was some grumbling about the Ibar family, which had very little land to tax, but which nevertheless gave God a baby every year, and the village had to school them. But such complications are to be expected. As the old saying has it: Nothing is completely fair but the Last Judgement... so much the worse for us.

  It all seemed sufficiently clear-cut that we could draw up the ruling minutes in just a few hours of close reasoning and arguing.

  But then someone thought of the Widow Jaureguiberry! "But wait! The widow will either have to pay her share, or she will have to admit publicly that she has no land of her own. And that would shame her!"

  "But she is too poor to pay! She lives on nothing but cheese and prayer!"

  "Bof!" said the Colonel. "What shame will there be? She knows that we know that she has no land!" The Colonel was bitter about the Widow Jaureguiberry because she always allowed her sheep to linger longest in his fields, as he was the richest of us all.

  "Of course she knows that we know. That is not the point! The point is that no one has ever said it aloud! The shame of such things comes with admitting them, as any fool would know, if he were not so stingy that he pisses vinegar—no offence intended to anyone here, ex-army officer or otherwise."

  "Oh my, oh my, oh my," said old Aramburu, rubbing his palms together. "I'm afraid this is a puzzle that will have to be untangled over several little glasses, if we are to get the wording of the minutes just right."

  And so, for the next three hours, there was sharp and probing debate in the home of the wine merchant. Although as a creator of pastorales I am known to have a great fondness for words, and perhaps even a certain gift in that direction (I do not brag of this, lest God numb my tongue and dry up my mind), it was the oldest man of the village who was chosen to take down the minutes. It made my hands itch to see how he constantly wet the lead of his stubby pencil with his tongue as he labored clumsily over his smudged sheet, his body hunched over the table, his face not twenty centimeters from the paper, scratching out and rephrasing, scratching out and rephrasing, while the rest of us took turns speaking our minds and offering new and more precise wording.

  And this is how the minutes finally read:

  MINUTES OF THE MEETING ABOUT THE NEW ROOF ON THE ECOLE MATERNELLE

  It is resolved and agreed that from each farm—or from each man if there are two or more adult men living on one farm (and by 'adult' is meant over eighteen years of age, or already married, or both) but exception is made for anyone who is hoping to be admitted to study medicine at the university next year and who needs every centime his family can save for that purpose—but not excepting him if it turns out that he is not received at the university because sometimes he plays pelote against the church wall when he should be cudgeling his brains over his books—and also excepting any man who became one of God's 'innocents' when he was struck in the head by a ball in 1881, after crushing all opposition for eight straight years at the annual jai alai competitions in Mauléon, bringing great glory to our village (should there be such a person); and also excepting any old tramp who lives in the loft of someone's barn and eats only bread and onions, and who wanders about the roads in all weather, muttering to himself (and this is definitely not a reference to anyone named Beñat, no matter how much it might seem to be)—but each and every other farm will contribute twenty-three francs per hectare (or part thereof). And th
e number of hectares owned by a person will not be based on what he or she claims for the purpose of his or her taxes, but rather upon his or her estimate of his land the last time he or she tried to borrow against it, and in one case upon how much land he told the potential father-in-law he had when he was trying to marry off his daughter to this trusting man's son—if any such person there be. (Note: it is understood that the Eliçabe family takes exception to this last part because they consider it to be dangerously close to slander and will fight anyone who intended it to be so, particularly Bernard Irouleguy, who proposed the phrasing in the first place.)

  However, if any person happens to own fields in some other village (such as Etchebar, to cite but one example), then that person (or these persons, whoever they might be) will not have to pay the general levy, because this council cannot find a way to make them (or her) pay without incurring the shame of seeming to ask Etchebar to contribute to our infant-school. And anyway, such persons probably do not have any children in school because of her (or his) age.

  But if any person (ex-officer or other) decides to buy a bit of land in Etchebar to escape paying his share, then this exception does not apply to him, so he might as well forget it.

  Signed by the Undersigned 11th day of March, 1911

  SNATCH OFF YOUR CAP, KID!

  When did I get started with the carnivals?

  Well, it was the summer of 1934, and down in the Kansas/Oklahoma dust bowl it was hotter than a Methodist's vision of hell, almost as dry as one of their sermons. The dust rising off those dirt farm roads would make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth till you couldn't work up enough mouth water to swallow, let alone spit.

  The Great Depression had America by the throat and it was squeezing. Everywhere up and down this blessed republic you could see men plodding along dirt farm roads, the heel-chewed cuffs of their overalls dragging up little dust eddies. It sometimes seemed that the whole country was on the move. Some were looking for work—any kind of work—but most had been on the road for months and no longer hoped to find work; they were just looking for a new place to be miserable in. Sort of like the way you toss and turn on a hot mattress.