The Foreign Student, page 23
“Tell me quickly,” she said, turning back to him. The color in her cheeks stood out as if she’d been slapped. “I’ve put it off and put it off. I want to see you, too. I think about you. But I don’t have anything, I don’t know anything.” Past her shoulder he could see Addison growing larger, striding easily over the grass. “Could you imagine loving me?”
“Then what?”
“I could break it.”
“Don’t do nothing like this for me.”
“But there’s something,” she said angrily. “Isn’t there?”
“No.”
“Don’t look over there. Don’t look at him, just tell me.”
“Congratulation,” he said evenly.
“Damn you!”
He put out his hand and Katherine wheeled away from him, covering her mouth. He was gone when the other man reached her.
ten
He went to Bower and told him he wanted his summer to be a continuation of his education, not an interruption, and to that end he wanted to spend it somewhere else. A visitor’s eagerness to see more than he has already seen is always pleasing, and Bower thought it was a wonderful idea. It was evidence of initiative, and offset his concern that Chuck had turned out to be somewhat withdrawn. Before ratifying the plan he interrogated Chuck very thoroughly, not only to clarify things for himself but to clarify things for the boy, as he always thought of him. “You will be on your own. Things are very easy for you here. I hope you realize that. You are surrounded by your friends. If you go off somewhere for the summer you’ll have to watch out for yourself and keep your wits about you, and I’ll expect you to be a credit to Sewanee wherever you are.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Do you think you can get along all right? I’ll take your word.”
“Yes.”
Bower propped his fingertips together and tilted his head, awaiting some elaboration to this answer, and when none came he was momentarily thrown. Then he decided to be impressed by Chuck’s concision. “Well,” he said grandly. “I’ll start sniffing around, then. I’m sure I can come up with something.”
A few days later, Bower called him back. “A great patron of Sewanee’s, and an old classmate of mine, in fact. Tippett House ’25.” This man owned a publishing concern in Chicago, “complicated work,” Bower said kindly, but there was also a bindery, which was always shorthanded. How did that sound? Chicago?
The Greyhound bus stopped in Monteagle on its way north from Chattanooga, Atlanta, Savannah, or on its way south to those places. Monteagle was a three-mile walk from Sewanee, all downhill, and as the road descended the trees thinned so that there was more and more tramped, dusty grass, and the sky opened wide. The town was small and straightforward: a gas station, a grocery store, and a small collection of houses he could see the beginning of, to the south, before the road took a turn. The grocery store’s windows were crowded with advertisements for small sums. Only 10 cents! Only 25 cents! The houses came right to the road. He had always been southbound, heading for Chattanooga and a transfer that would take him to Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia, to whatever small church was awaiting him. The bus would slide around the bend and barely pause, and then as he weaved down the aisle he would lean to watch out the window as the front edge of Monteagle that he had gazed at exhaustingly, until it was no longer an impoverished sliver but the whole, intricate, unexpandable thing, suddenly rejoined the rest of itself. The entire town would flash by before he saw anything more than its tail as it slipped out of sight. The bus would pause only once more, in Jasper, before arriving at the Chattanooga station, where the noncommittal prelude was brought to an end and everyone leaped up and changed buses with new, narrow determination. Chattanooga was the aperture that seemed to give onto the whole of the South, and soon he would think of Evansville, Indiana, this way, as a gate to the North.
The northbound and southbound stops faced each other across the road, but he had never seen another person there. Now there was a man on the southbound side. Chuck perched self-consciously on his upended suitcase, which he had placed in the dust, where the heat wouldn’t bounce off the stones back at him. The unprecedented traveler on the other side of the road had done the same thing. At first they only watched each other clandestinely, but after it was clear there was nowhere else to look they examined each other with obvious interest. The other man might have been older than him by ten or fifteen years. He was wearing a lopsided, curl-brimmed leather hat and a white cotton T-shirt, and his jacket hung over his knee. The road was too wide to speak across, but narrow enough that he could see the man’s calm smile, and his eyes set in the shadow from his hat.
He tried to imagine where this man was going. When he pored over maps at the library he always strayed toward the coasts, analyzing the clues in the shape of an edge. The Louisiana coast looked like a splatter of ink. It had scattered islands everywhere. On the map New Orleans and everything near it was scored with blue lines, to indicate swampland. He imagined a lake of bright grass, the flash low in the stalks when the wind parted them and the sun struck the water. He missed the water, he thought, although beneath this thought his mind idly sorted the Louisiana names he had memorized, on the principle that memorization was always helpful in a general way—10 cents! 25 cents! was helpful, even if he had no more particular interest in these exclamations than he had in the names that fanned out from the hub of New Orleans. Barataria, Lafitte, Meraux. Out of nowhere the southbound bus slid around the bend and paused, and he saw the man reappear in its windows, moving down the aisle. As the bus pulled away the man bent down and waved to him, grinning. His own arm flew up and they waved energetically to each other for those few seconds as the bus plunged through Monteagle and left it behind.
His own bus came more than thirty minutes later, after his hair felt like hot metal to the touch and his vision was swimming with splotches. He had no hat. He climbed on board, unsteadily, and fell asleep. When he woke again he realized he’d been dreaming of being at sea. His heart beat quickly. But the bus swayed and pitched less like a ship than an ungainly, sturdy animal. The afternoon had grown long. Outside the bus windows the hills cast great, round shadows onto themselves, and beyond the reach of the shadows their color was a green-steeped gold, like a block of sun trapped in pondwater. All the trees were in full leaf now and the hillsides so densely forested that their substance seemed to be the leaves, unbroken but varying in color and texture from particle to particle. He saw a hawk wheeling over the road and strained his neck until it drifted out of sight. The land was so lush and the color of the light so palpable that at first he forgot that this was the same road he had driven up and down with Katherine, in the dark, the night she took him to dinner. When he remembered that he closed his eyes again. The sun was a bloated red ball as the bus pulled into Nashville, and he rose automatically, because Nashville was not so unlike Chattanooga. It was only a juncture, containing no significance. Des Allemandes, Point à la Hache, Belle Chasse. He had the thought, brief and irritating, that he was traveling in the wrong direction. He wanted to be going toward the ocean. The bus to Chicago was already crowded when he found it; he took a window seat and watched it fill completely. A ten- or twelve-year-old boy with thin blond hair cropped so short it looked pink climbed on board and, after a brief hesitation, took the seat beside him. “Where you from?” he asked, as the bus pulled away. It was dark now; he saw the bright dome of the capitol building as the bus turned onto the highway.
“Seoul, Korea.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You know it?” In his surprise he sounded more eager than he’d meant to. He didn’t want to talk to this boy.
“Oh, yeah. Seoul Poo-san Pyong-yang.” He hit each consonant with relish. “My brother went in the war.”
“He comes back all right?”
“Oh, yeah. You want some gum? My brother says gooks are nuts about gum.”
He took the gum and they both chewed meditatively until the boy wondered whether he wanted the comic that came in the wrapper, and when he had surrendered it the boy asked with sudden, pouncing insight, “You going to Chi?”
“Chi?” he repeated.
“Chi-cago.”
“Yes.”
“Oh!” the boy said, as if he’d been whacked in the stomach. “I thought so! There’s a big old Chinaman town in Chi where they’ve got a place where they’ve got sharks and giant snakes and monkeys hung in the windows to eat and you can go and they take the head off with an ax and cook it and then you can go and there’s a wizard where he has lizards in jars and eyeballs, and there’s a big assortment,” he said with incongruous maturity, “of throwing knives and they’ve also got kung fu stuff and airplanes.”
“You’ve been here?” he asked, when the boy paused.
“No,” the boy said with unmistakable bitterness. “My brother goes and brings me stuff once in a while.”
The boy was a resource of information on organized vice and Chicago’s other miscellaneous depravities, Al Capone and restaurants where girls wore only feathers and other girls wore, as he said, “just a string”—which interested him solely as an example of the bizarre—and dull-looking places with hidden back rooms, perhaps behind a swinging wall, where there was gambling. Chi was his dream city. “I dream of going there,” he said, very simply. “I sure envy you. I would make you take me with you if you swore you was going to go straight to the Chinaman town.”
“I’m not a Chinese.”
“That’s okay,” the boy told him kindly.
They lapsed into silence. The boy fell asleep for several hours, slumped crookedly in his seat, and woke up startled. He stared at Chuck in shock, and for a moment Chuck was afraid he would leap up and stand in the aisle, panting unhappily. “Where are we?” the boy whispered. He leaned carelessly across Chuck’s seat and they peered into the darkness together. They were on an express bus. It had tunneled ceaselessly since they left Nashville. The boy sat back and sighed. They shared a weak, yellow pool of light. Everywhere else the bus lay in blackness, with the quiet roar of the engine and the outside air shearing past, like the sound of the ocean, and within this the shifting, sighing, breathing sounds of people. In the hours while the boy was asleep he had sat with his head turned toward the window, and the featureless night outside, dusted over with the reflection of his weak reading light, had eased its way behind his eyes and filled him with nothing but staring. He didn’t know how much time had gone by. He hadn’t thought of anything. The boy had also altered, with the hush inside the bus. “I have a comic, but I get motion sick reading,” he said. “On a bus, I mean. Would you like to read it?”
At first he misunderstood. “Thank you, no,” he said.
“It’s a good one,” the boy said hopefully.
He read the comic to the boy in a conspiratorial whisper. He had to describe the pictures, too, because even looking at them made the boy queasy. The boy put his head near Chuck and closed his eyes with pleasure as Chuck spoke. “The two guys now duck down, and third guy’s feet we see coming to us, over their head. This third guy is a Chinese, jumping over the trench—”
“I know, I know,” the boy whispered.
“American guy’s eyes fill up the whole picture, stretched out big.” The boy’s eyes flew open briefly, in imitation. “‘Ahhh!’” Chuck went on, in an undertone. “‘They are coming too fast!’ he says. Now we see Chinese coming, like a wall of them. They have bayonets raised up. ‘Aieee!’”
They came to Evansville, Indiana, at midnight. The premature night, that had put the bus to sleep at nine o’clock, was suspended. Passengers woke, twisted in their seats, peered out the window. The bus bounced over a steel-girder bridge and its hum rose an octave. “Ohio River,” the boy announced. They had left Kentucky, unseen and unthought-of. The great skeleton of the bridge poured past the windows and even there, hundreds of miles away from it, he felt the approach of a huge city and could never think of Evansville again—thrown there on the mud bank in the middle of flat land with one or two pale orange lights in the streets as the bus found the station—without it seeming continuous with that powerful center. There were people awake at the small station, alert and intelligent, with their bags in their hands. “Chi!” the boy said avidly, as they plunged into darkness again. Now the bus seemed to fly more quickly over the level land. He could pick out the horizon, where the wildly star-covered sky rose straight out of the ground. No one slept anymore, and the boy was reminded, with a fresh sense of urgency, of the rest of his brother’s teachings. There were stuffed elephants! There was an aquarium with a tank as big as a lake, sitting in the middle of a room. His brother said if you went to a hotel they gave you anything, food and booze and dames, the boy noted emphatically. And the stuff they had in Chinatown, devil idols and a chicken that danced on a plate. The bus rumbled with conversation, and the tiny lights blinked on over the seats. “I don’t want to go home!” said the boy with disgust. The bus was full of itinerants, people who slid through the night as a matter of course. “Where is your home?” he asked the boy, who seemed to feel compromised by the fact that he had one.
“Terre Haute,” he spat. When asked to spell it he did so with convulsions and eye-rolling.
Terre Haute. He was startled, to think of such a name here. He had seen that word before. Grand Terre Isle.
“It means ‘high land,’” said the boy, smirking. “Ha!”
They came into Terre Haute after two o’clock in the morning, an eerie hour for a boy to be arriving at home. “You got somebody who meets you?” he asked the boy, who had turned around backwards in his seat and now knelt on it, with his cheek flat against the seat’s back, fixing Chuck with a steady gaze.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “My brother says you can’t tell the difference between gooks and chinks so I’m getting a good look at you and when he takes me to Chinatown with him I’ll bet I can tell. Can you tell?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“There’s the river.” The road ran next to it, hugging a hillside. The ground dropped away sharply to their right. The moon had risen and they could see the tops of trees and beyond them, far below, the silver sheet of the river reaching toward the opposite bank. “Wa-bash River,” the boy said, and then the bus had swung into the Terre Haute station and he was gone, yelling, “I shouldn’t even get off, I should just go right on up to Chi with you,” and the bus was much quieter. He kept looking at the strangely empty seat beside him.
Terre Haute might have been named by a traveler on his way from the south to Chicago. That hill that rose up from the river was the last high land, or land of any shape at all, that he saw. After they left the town the land was level in every direction and the horizon made a vast circle with the bus at its center. For an hour or more the river remained alongside, although when the land had spread out the river slid a certain distance, sometimes as much as a mile, from the road, where it lay like a glittering stripe. Then it turned east, and stretched away. His eye could see it all the way to the horizon. The bus kept plowing north, and the whole eastern sky stood unobstructed. When the stars first began to seem weak he checked his watch. The dawn came by increments, always slightly outstripping his ability to notice it, and then all at once the stars were gone and the first unbelievably distinct ray of the sunrise had emerged. Farmland as perfectly flat as an ocean surrounded them. In the distance he saw an occasional tree, black and solitary. The combed fields turned past like the spokes of a wheel. When the sun was high a railroad line came to join the road, and filling stations and truck stops gave way to flat-topped brick houses and grain elevators and smokestacks and storefronts and traffic lights strung overhead, and then too many buildings to see anything but a flash in the distance, as if from the actual ocean.
He came out of the bus station into an early May morning just reaching the sidewalks on the west sides of the streets. The light was city light, stretching over the sides of buildings, blazing in windows. Businessmen still wearing their winter fedoras were walking to work. He had studied his map of downtown Chicago and memorized the way from the station to the bindery so that he wouldn’t be seen standing helplessly on the street with a map in his hand: four blocks east and then fourteen blocks south along Michigan Avenue. But once on the street he didn’t know which way was east. He stood there a moment, outwardly calm, feeling the cool that hadn’t yet been evaporated by the concrete, seeing every particle of every building teem with color and roughness the way the hills outside Sewanee had teemed, because he hadn’t slept at all. He stepped off the curb and looked down the canyon of buildings straight into a blinding glare. Sitting at the end of the crevice was a neat square of blue. He walked that way, east, toward the lake.
When he reached Michigan Avenue everything fell away between there and the water. Across the expanse of the park he could see the marina, with its forest of unrigged masts. Michigan Avenue was four lanes wide, and the sidewalks broad and level. He passed the red carpets and taut awnings of luxury hotels; the colonnade of the library; gilty, scrolled theater-fronts. Then Michigan Avenue lost the park and, without changing direction, shifted inland, as the coastline of the lake curved away. The buildings diminished and cropped up on both sides of the narrower street. He found a cafeteria a block shy of his destination and ordered fried eggs at the counter, suddenly apprehensive. Yet when he presented himself at the bindery, a huge brick building on the lake side of the street, it was just nine o’clock in the morning, and he wasn’t expected. The manager nodded at him and showed him the letter from Bower, lifting it briefly off a pile on his desk. “I expected you next week. Summer work, your guy said. We lay most people off in the summer. It’s a bad time for bookbinding. The glue melts and the pages curl up. Not a lot of people want to work here in the summer anyway. But you’ll have plenty to do. There’s always backlog in the morgue.” He looked up at Chuck for the first time. “So you’re a Korean. We’ve got a lot of Chinese in this city and a lot of Japs but I don’t know that we have much Koreans. How did you people like that war we had for you?”
