Robert Parker - Love and Glory

“Hit the cocksucker,” he said. “Two swings and it’s in. No sense tiring yourself out with ten bangs. Let the hammer do the work; let the weight of the head do it. You know how to let the head do the work, don’t you?”

He was inexhaustible. He drove nails steadily all afternoon, varying it only to cut the studs to size, driving the circular saw through the wood with a clean, sharp, single movement. When Washington and I did it the saw would bind and the smell of friction-seared wood was sharp.

By five o’clock, when we stopped, Washington and I were soaked with sweat and my arms were shaking tired. I had hit myself on the thumb four times. Henry looked exactly as he had, his thin, reddish body moving with the same tight alacrity it had when he’d picked us up in the morning.

“We start at eight,” Henry said. “Punch in at the field shed. If you’re late, the foreman will take a bite out of your fucking ass.”

We put the hammers and the aprons in the tool box in the back of Henry’s truck and got in. He drove us down to Hollywood Boulevard.

“I’m heading for West L.A.,” he said. “I’ll drop you boys here.”

Washington and I went into a bar on Hollywood near the corner of Wilton and had a beer. I was so drained and thirsty, I forgot for a moment that it was the first beer since last fall. It was cold and it filled me as I had always imagined it would.

“Where you staying?” I asked Washington.

He shrugged. “Around,” he said.

I looked at him in the mirror behind the bar. He had a wide mouth and a little mustache like Ray Robinson wore. I didn’t see any sign of damage on his face except a horizontal scar maybe two inches along the cheekbone under his right eye.

“You need a place to stay?” I said.

“Naw, man, I’m fine,” he said.

“Then how come you’re staying ‘around,’ ” I said.

“Don’t get too pushy, man,” Washington said.

“Why don’t you stay with me for a while,” I said. “I slept in too many parks to think it’s fun.”

“Where you staying?” Washington said.

“Up on Franklin Avenue,” I said. “Near Kenmore.”

His eyes were hazel, with a lot of white around the iris. “They let me in up there?”

“They let me in,” I said.

“I ain’t the same color as you,” Washington said.

“I noticed that,” I said. “Let’s integrate the fucker.”

Washington grinned. He raised his beer glass toward me. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” So we did.

Roy Washington trained in a gym on 103rd Street, near Alameda on weekends, and sometimes, if we weren’t too tired after work, I went with him and he taught me to box a little, so that when we sparred, he could get a workout. The neighborhood was black, and most of the men in the gym were black, but nobody paid me much attention, and I felt comfortable enough as long as I was with Roy. When we weren’t working out evenings, we’d drink a few beers and read. I was the first person Roy had known socially who had been to college.

“Lucky you flunked out,” he told me once, “or I’d never understand nothing you said.”

Race relations were fermenting in the early sixties, but Roy and I were okay. We did a lot of honky — nigger humor, taught each other the things we knew (Roy knew more useful things than I did), and got a chance to observe firsthand that the great issues often have little to do with the individual ones.

“I don’t want you honkies giving me what I get,” Roy told me one night. “I want to take it.” We were at the gym taking turns on the heavy bag on a hot night. The sweat glistened like oil on both our bodies. I was holding the bag, and as Roy hit it, the bag bucked and shuddered against me.

After the workout, showered and dressed, we walked to the bus stop carrying our gym bags, through a populace uniformly black. Hazel eyes looking at me without response.

“How you feel walking around Watts?” Roy said on the bus.

“I wouldn’t do it without you,” I said.

“Good idea,” he said.

“Even with you,” I said, “I feel, you know, alien. Like I don’t know the score.”

“I feel that way most of the time,” Roy said. “Laws and marches and stuff don’t seem to change that.”

“So what will change it?” I said. “So what can we do?”

“We?” Roy grinned. “Who the fuck you talking for? You white folks?”

“Aren’t you speaking for the coons?” I said.

“I’m speaking for me,” he said. “I ain’t trying to change anything. I’m trying to get a good life going. I’m trying to make money, and I’m trying to take no shit from anybody.”

I nodded. “Yeah. I understand that,” I said. “The ‘we’ was asshole.”

Roy looked at me next to him on the bus. “You already done what you can do.”

I got to be a good framer that summer, and a decent all-purpose carpenter. I learned enough about fist fighting to go three rounds with Roy without getting badly hurt. Though I always wore the headgear and Roy never really aired it out. I was able to drink three or four beers a night and stop. I was able to do it and not smoke. When I could, I still lifted some weights at the Y. Roy and I ran in Griffith Park some mornings before work. I had a book on nutrition from the library. I worked on eating right and every night I tried to read at least a couple of chapters in something worth reading. Roy did most of those things with me.

In early June I met a girl, a librarian that I got talking to as I checked out The Portable Faulkner. I was on my way home from work wearing work shoes and jeans, a sweaty T-shirt and a Dodgers baseball cap. The hammer holster was still attached to my belt.

“Have you read Faulkner before?” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve read Sartoris, Intruder in the Dust,” I said. “And Knight’s Gambit, and Pylon and ‘The Bear.’ ”

She had longish honey-colored hair and a slim figure. She wore a frilly white shirt with a round collar and a black bow tie, sort of. Her fingernails were short and pointed and done in a neutral polish.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

“Can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said.

She smiled. “Let that be a lesson to me,” she said.

After that we used to joke about her assumption every time I went in, and one night near closing, I said, “Would you care to get something to eat, or a drink, after work?”

She said she would and we did. Her name was Patti Wyman. After that I saw her at least two nights a week. Sometimes Roy would get a date and we’d go to a Dodger game. Sunday afternoons Patti and I would go to the L.A. County Art Museum and then we’d walk up Fairfax afterward and snack at the Farmers Market.

On the Fourth of July Patti borrowed her father’s car and we drove over Mulholland Drive into Griffith Park. We found a place with no one around and spread out our blanket and took out our cooler and our portable radio and the big picnic basket that belonged to Patti’s mother that Patti and her mother had packed. There was a shrimp and avocado salad, assorted finger sandwiches, cheese and fruit, and sangria and Mexican beer in the cooler. We listened to the radio and ate and drank and washed up with little scented towelettes packed in foil that Patti’s mother saved from whenever she went to restaurants that gave them out.

The Dodgers were playing a doubleheader and we listened to three innings of it lying quietly under a tree when Patti said, “We’ve gone out about twelve times now and you haven’t even kissed me.”

“I’m shy with girls,” I said. “Should I do it now?”

“Yes.”

Her breath smelled of wine as I leaned over her and her mouth was open as I kissed her. The kiss got longer and her body arched up toward me a little. I heard myself groan a little. Not pain, not joy either. Relief almost, a knot being loosened. I slid my hand under her blouse and she pulled away from me. I took my hand away quickly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice was hoarse. “I shouldn’t have put my hand on you.”

“No,” she said. Her face was serious. “That’s all right. I just think we ought to undress.”

“Here?”

She nodded.

“What if someone sees us?”

“Boonie,” she smiled, “it’s nineteen sixty-two. People do make love.”

I was startled at her body. Naked, it was much more than I had expected. She was as slim as she looked clothed, but her breasts seemed bigger, and her buttocks rounder. As we lay together she traced the muscle line in my chest. “You’re very strong-looking,” she said. “Are you?”

“I’m getting stronger,” I said. We moved our hands gently over each other. There was passion, but there was an air of investigation too.

“Have you done this very often, Boonie?”

“No, not very often,” I said. “I’m almost thirty and I haven’t had much sex for that age. Whores and stuff in the army mostly.”

“I’ve only done it with one other person before,” Patti said.

“Often?”

“Nearly every day for maybe six months,” she said. With her arms around me, she rubbed my lower back gently with both hands. “Then we broke up.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right. It happens. There will be someone else.”

I kissed her right breast. “I am not him, Patti,” I said.

“I know. That’s okay too. This is fun. It doesn’t have to be more.”

“You should know that,” I said. My voice was getting hoarser. “This doesn’t lead anywhere. It can’t. It means nothing but what it means now.”

“Yes,” she said, and kissed me quietly. “I have always known that. It’s okay.” She leaned back and her thighs relaxed and her mouth opened slightly. She slid her hands up my back and pulled my head down toward her.