Read Online False Entry by Hortense Calisher - Free Book Online

found the adversary at last.
    He was kneeling on my chest when he read it. I lay on my back, heaving slower, the arm that he had twisted outflung. Soft air currents in the night touched my eyelids, that all but closed in sleep. Filth from my hair trickled into my mouth, but I did not move; it had the taste of justice. It was he who bent and wiped it away.
    “Stay here,” he whispered, and went off into the dark. When he came back he had a bucket of water and a cloth. He stood me up and cleaned me off like a brother.
    “Turn around,” he said. When I had my back to him he spoke, dipping and wringing the cloth. “They been writing stuff on the windows—know what I mean?”
    I nodded, head down.
    “Pick times when I ain’t here,” he said. “Sure ’nough don’t pick times when I’m here.” The rag paused, continued its work. “Store closed early tonight. Semple has places ’round town I got to go for him. He let me take his car.” I heard the note of pride, but more than that the way he was telling me things in the present, the way he had never done before. “Runs like a dream, she does,” he said.
    He mopped the back of my jeans. “Brung it back for him, walk home slow, never thinking anybody try any that stuff tonight. Ain’t even been in the house yet—come round the corner, and I seen you.” His hand paused again, and I felt the water run down my calf to my heel. “Nobody comes here for me , see,” he said. “Took you for one of them, see what I mean?”
    I turned so that I could look down on him as he squatted there, dangling the rag. “What I meant—about the money—”
    “Forget it.” He found a spot on my sneaker.
    “What I—”
    “I said forget it.” He wet the spot down carefully. “Your maw—she in on your asking me up to your house?”
    I had forgotten her. “She’s gone off,” I muttered.
    He looked up. “For good?”
    That is the way I remember his face best—when he looked up and said that. There was all his life and what he came from—in the way he said that. And it was odd how I wanted to be able to say yes to him, the way an aggrieved child sometimes tells the neighborhood that he is the adopted son of his true parents.
    I hesitated, seeing the rising kinship in his face. When I lie, it is not as a fantasist, but to see if I can change life, to play with the protean gap between what is and what might be. And when I tell the truth, it is not for moral reasons, but because I am impelled to see what life does when it is left alone.
    “She and my uncle—they went to Memphis for a week,” I said.
    “Oh.” He flipped the bunched rag from hand to hand. He had not, then, been asked into a house after all, as the Nellises had once asked him—as shone always in his mind, like their evening light. Yet when he stood up, he put an arm on my shoulder, for what he presumed to be my trouble. “’On’t you fret,” he said. “’On’t you fret on it.”
    “I’ve no need to fret,” I said, and it was true, for the moment. We reconsider our troubles, and are helped to bear them, in proportion to their seeming like blessings to others. He had shown me the difference between us.
    “They got married today,” I said. “Down at the church, this morning. Maybe you heard.”
    “Town had bigger news this morning.” He had withdrawn his arm; he was not too dull to see what I was doing. For now that I had a piece of his mystery, how quick I had been to use it against him, to do to him what I feared from others.
    It made me bolder. “The money was to last me the week, but I’ve enough stuff to last me at home. And what I’d in mind was—you and me … we might go down to the café.” Even as I said it, it struck me—how the image had come to be. Not as I had dreamed it—never as one dreams it. But it had come to be.
    “Café’s closed,” he said, staring. “Won’t be no trade there tonight, don’t you know that? Your folks crazy, leaving you run loose