Native Son - Richard Wright [18]
“Who’s asking you to take orders?” Bigger said. “I never want to give orders to a piss-sop like you!”
“You boys cut out that racket back there!” Doc called.
They stood silently about the pool table. Bigger’s eyes followed Gus as Gus put his cue stick in the rack and brushed chalk dust from his trousers and walked a little distance away. Bigger’s stomach burned and a hazy black cloud hovered a moment before his eyes, and left. Mixed images of violence ran like sand through his mind, dry and fast, vanishing. He could stab Gus with his knife; he could slap him; he could kick him; he could trip him up and send him sprawling on his face. He could do a lot of things to Gus for making him feel this way.
“Come on, G.H.,” Gus said.
“Where we going?”
“Let’s walk.”
“O.K.”
“What we gonna do?” Jack asked. “Meet here at three?”
“Sure,” Bigger said. “Didn’t we just decide?”
“I’ll be here,” Gus said, with his back turned.
When Gus and G.H. had gone Bigger sat down and felt cold sweat on his skin. It was planned now and he would have to go through with it. His teeth gritted and the last image he had seen of Gus going through the door lingered in his mind. He could have taken one of the cue sticks and gripped it hard and swung it at the back of Gus’s head, feeling the impact of the hard wood cracking against the bottom of the skull. The tight feeling was still in him and he knew that it would remain until they were actually doing the job, until they were in the store taking the money.
“You and Gus sure don’t get along none,” Jack said, shaking his head.
Bigger turned and looked at Jack; he had forgotten that Jack was still there.
“Aw, that yellow black bastard,” Bigger said.
“He’s all right,” Jack said.
“He’s scared,” Bigger said. “To make him ready for a job, you have to make him scared two ways. You have to make him more scared of what’ll happen to him if he don’t do the job than of what’ll happen to him if he pulls the job.”
“If we going to Blum’s today, we oughtn’t fuss like this,” Jack said. “We got a job on our hands, a real job.”
“Sure. Sure, I know,” Bigger said.
Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it. He longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and drain off his energies. He wanted to run. Or listen to some swing music. Or laugh or joke. Or read a Real Detective Story Magazine. Or go to a movie. Or visit Bessie. All that morning he had lurked behind his curtain of indifference and looked at things, snapping and glaring at whatever had tried to make him come out into the open. But now he was out; the thought of the job at Blum’s and the tilt he had had with Gus had snared him into things and his self-trust was gone. Confidence could only come again now through action so violent that it would make him forget. These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger—like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force. Being this way was a need of his as deep as eating. He was like a strange plant blooming in the day and wilting at night; but the sun that made it bloom and the cold darkness that made it wilt were never seen. It was his own sun and darkness, a private and personal sun and darkness. He was bitterly proud of his swiftly changing moods and boasted when he had to suffer the results of them. It was the way he was, he would say; he could not help it, he would say, and his head would wag. And it was his sullen stare and the violent action that followed that made Gus and Jack and G.H. hate and fear him as much as he hated and feared himself.
“Where you want to go?” Jack asked. “I’m tired of setting.”
“Let’s walk,” Bigger said.
They went to the front door. Bigger paused and looked round the poolroom with a wild and exasperated expression, his lips tightening with resolution.
“Goin’?” Doc asked, not moving his head.
“Yeah,” Bigger said.