Night Song by John A. Williams

Author:John A. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504025720
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER 10

Keel sat patiently while Hillary stumbled around, first in the bathroom, then in the closet looking for a pair of Eagle’s pants. The small flat seemed somehow vast without Eagle in it. Then Keel thought how empty almost everything would be without him.

Hillary had found a pair of pants. They were striped; Eagle favored stripes and plaids, the louder the better. The pants sagged at the waist and at the seat and Hillary, as he approached to take a seat near Keel, smiled down at them ruefully. “Kind of big,” he said.

“Yeah, he’s bigger than he looks sometimes,” Keel commented.

There was a silence while they both lit cigarettes.

“Where do we go from here?” Keel asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You were in pretty bad shape tonight.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“A real running drunk.”

Hillary looked at him.

Keel was rubbing his face. “I can’t put you out, you know.”

Hillary didn’t answer.

“Did you know that?”

“I figured you could anytime you wanted to.”

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“I guess I was pretty stoned.”

“Anything happen today?” Keel’s eyes revealed nothing, but Hillary sensed that deep within them there stood a veil.

Hillary was the first to mash out his cigarette. “No.”

“I was surprised,” Keel said. “You’d been doing pretty well. I figured something had to get you off.”

“I’ve never lived like this before,” Hillary confessed. “Sometimes it throws me—the people, the things that happen, the hatred, the desperation—the love. I haven’t quite got it into focus.”

“You see,” Keel said, “you don’t belong here. What’s there to focus? You live, you don’t try to figure out why.”

Hillary thought: Why is he trying to frighten me?

Keel thought himself: I’m trying to scare this cat. Why?

Then a slow fright worked loose inside him and he had the answer. He sensed something between Hillary and Della which had somehow gotten out of his control, something which passed—Damn it! Why was he thinking like that?—only between whites.

Hillary said, “Funny, your saying that, because I’ve had mixed feelings. First that I don’t belong here,” (And maybe you’re thinking, Keel thought, that Della doesn’t either.) “and second, that only by being here can I learn to begin to live again.”

“Like an immersion,” Keel said, “a baptism.”

“Of fire.”

“Life,” Keel retorted.

Hillary lit a second cigarette and stared at the floor. “I had a long talk with Della today,” he said, without looking up.

“She told me,” Keel said, without looking at him.

“Oh,” Hillary said. The disclosure startled him. So, he was not making any headway with her. If he had been, she would not have told Keel. Of course, she could not have told Keel everything. Or had she? But no man could be that tolerant if he were in love.

Actually, Keel only knew that they had talked; he had not asked Della the subject of their conversation, nor would he ever. If she wished to tell him, all right, if not, all right. But he did, at the moment, want to know something of what they’d discussed. Not all. He had a fear of knowing all of it; he was

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