The buzzer rang and he folded the razor and handed it to me.
“Guard the razor,” he said and went out. I looked at it and opened it and shut it. It was just an ordinary razor. George came back and sat down beside me. He took a drink. There was no more in the bottle. He looked at it and put it back in his pocket.
“The razor, please,” he said. I handed it to him. He put it on the palm of his left hand.
“You have observed,” he said, “keenness of edge and simplicity of action. Now a greater than these two. Security of manipulation.”
He picked up the razor in his right hand, gave it a little flip and the blade came open and lay back, edge out across his knuckles. He showed me his hand; the handle of the razor was in his fist, the blade was open across the knuckles, held in place by his forefinger and his thumb. The blade was solidly in place all across his fist, the edge out.
“You observe it?” George said. “Now for that great requisite skill in the use of.”
He stood up and patted out with his right hand, his fist closed, the blade open across the knuckles. The razor blade shone in the sun coming through the window. George ducked and jabbed three times with the blade. He stepped back and flicked it twice in the air. Then holding his head down and his left arm around his neck he whipped his fist and the blade back and forth, back and forth, ducking and dodging. He slashed one, two, three, four, five, six. He straightened up. His face was sweaty and he folded the razor and put it in his pocket.
“Skill in the use of,” he said. “And in the left hand preferably a pillow.”
He sat down and wiped his face. He took off his cap and wiped the leather band inside. He went over and took a drink of water.
“The razor’s a delusion,” he said. “The razor’s no defense. Anybody can cut you with a razor. If you’re close enough to cut them they’re bound to cut you. If you could have a pillow in your left hand you’d be all right. But where you going to get a pillow when you need a razor? Who you going to cut in bed? The razor’s a delusion, Jimmy. It’s a nigger weapon. A regular nigger weapon. But now you know how they use it. Bending a razor back over the hand is the only progress the nigger ever made.
Only nigger ever knew how to defend himself was Jack Johnson and they put him in Leavenworth. And what would I do to Jack Johnson with a razor. It none of it makes any difference, Jimmy. All you get in this life is a point of view. Fellows like me and the chef got a point of view. Even if he’s got a wrong point of view he’s better off. A nigger gets delusions like old Jack or Marcus Garvey and they put him in the pen. Look where my delusion about the razor would take me. Nothing’s got any value, Jimmy. Liquor makes you feel like I’ll feel in an hour. You and me aren’t even friends.”
“Yes we are.”
“Good old Jimmy,” he said. “Look at the deal they gave this poor old Tiger Flowers. If he was white he’d have made a million dollars.”
“Who was he?”
“He was a fighter. A damn good fighter.”
“What did they do to him?”
“They just took him down the road in one way or another all the time.”
“It’s a shame,” I said.
“Jimmy, there’s nothing to the whole business. You get syphed up from women or if you’re married your wife’ll run around. In the railroad business you’re away from home nights. The kind of a girl you want is the kind of a girl that’ll jig you because she can’t help it. You want her because she can’t help it and you lose her because she can’t help it and a man’s only got so many orgasms to his whole life and what difference does it make when you feel worse after liquor.”
“Don’t you feel all right?”
“No I don’t. I feel bad. If I didn’t feel bad I wouldn’t talk that way.”
“My father feels bad sometimes too in the morning.”
“He does?”
“Sure.”
“What does he do for it?”
“He exercises.”
“Well, I got twenty-four berths to make up. Maybe that’s the solution.”
It was a long day on the train after the rain started. The rain made the windows of the train wet so you could not see outside clearly and then it made everything outside look the same anyway. We went through many towns and cities but it was raining in all of them and when we crossed the Hudson River at Albany it was raining hard.
I stood out in the vestibule and George opened the door so I could see out but there was only the wet iron of the bridge and the rain coming down into the river and the train with water dripping. It smelled good outside though. It was a fall rain and the air coming in through the open door smelled fresh and like wet wood and iron and it felt like fall up at the lake.
There were plenty of other people in the car but none of them looked very interesting. A nice looking woman asked me to sit down next to her and I did but she turned out to have a boy of her own just my age and was going to a place in New York to be superintendent of schools. I wished I could have gone back with George to the kitchen of the dining car and heard him talk with the chef. But during the regular daytime George talked just like anyone else, except even less, and very polite, but I noticed him drinking lots of ice water.
It had stopped raining outside but there were big clouds over the mountains. We were going along the river and the country was very beautiful and I had never seen anything like it before except in the illustrations of a book at Mrs. Kenwood’s where we used to go for Sunday dinner up at the lake. It was a big book and it was always on the parlor table and I would look at it while waiting for dinner.
The engravings were like this country now after the rain with the river and the mountains going up from it and the grey stone. Sometimes there would be a train across on the other side of the river. The leaves on the trees were turned by the fall and sometimes you saw the river through the branches of the trees and it did not seem old and like the illustrations but instead it seemed like a place to live in and where you could fish and eat your lunch and watch the train go by. But mostly it was dark and unreal and sad and strange and classical like the engravings.
That may have been because it was just after a rain and the sun had not come out. When the wind blows the leaves off the trees they are cheerful and good to walk through and the trees are the same, only they are without leaves. But when the leaves fall from the rain they are dead and wet and flat to the ground and the trees are changed and wet and unfriendly. It was very beautiful coming along the Hudson but it was the son of thing I did not know about and it made me wish we were back at the lake.
It gave me the same feeling that the engravings in the book did and the feeling was confused with the room where I always looked at the book and it being someone else’s house and before dinner and wet trees after the rain and the time in the north when the fall is over and it is wet and cold and the birds are gone and the woods are no more fun to walk in and it rains and you want to stay inside with a fire. I do not suppose I thought of all those things because I have never thought much and never in words but it was the feeling of all those things that the country along the Hudson River gave me. The rain can make all places strange, even places where you live.
“Black Ass at the Cross Roads,” a completed short story, was written between the end of World War II and 1961.
Black Ass at the Cross Roads
WE HAD REACHED THE CROSS ROADS before noon and had shot a French civilian by mistake. He had run across the field on our right beyond the farmhouse when he saw the first jeep come up. Claude had ordered him to halt and when he had kept on running across the field Red shot him. It was the first man he had killed that day and he was very pleased.
We had all thought he was a German who had stolen civilian clothes, but he turned out to be French. Anyway his papers were French and they said he was from Soissons.
“Sans doute c’était un Collabo,” Claude said.
“He ran, didn’t he?” Red asked. “Claude told him
