This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven Read online

  THIS THING DON’T LEAD

  TO HEAVEN

  A novel

  HARRY CREWS

  1970

  To the memory of my boy

  PATRICK SCOTT CREWS

  1960-1964

  Chapter One

  CARLITA ROJAS MUNDEZ walked out of the men’s restroom of the Gulf Oil station in Cumseh, Georgia, and saw the Greyhound Bus leaving her. She did not shout for the bus to stop, or even wave, but simply stood watching until it was gone. Then she walked around to the door of the station and told J. L. Gates that the bus had just left her and she was not sure what she was going to do now. But J. L., who had been looking at a comic strip from the Albany Herald, didn’t understand her because she told him in Spanish. And J. L. had never heard any Spanish in his life, didn’t even know anybody spoke it.

  “How’s at?” he said.

  She told him again, and while she spoke she walked over and sat down in a chair in front of the fan that J. L. had humming on top of a bulk oil drum. She was a large woman, taller than J. L. She carried a black cloth bag about the size and shape of a bowling ball and closed by a drawstring that she had looped about her wrist. The bright yellow dress she was wearing made her dark skin appear even darker. But J. L. knew right away that she was not a Cumseh Negro, not only because he could not understand what she said, but also because of the way she had plopped herself down in front of his fan. She was not even looking at him now. The dark hair stood out from her neck in the stream of air. She had gold rings in the lobes of her large flat ears.

  “You caint set there,” J. L. said.

  He did not want to think about the way her voice had sounded when she had spoken to him. His mind was dulled from wondering over the static images of the comic strip. He had just drunk an RC Cola and he could taste it in his mouth. She still had not moved. J. L. got up and went to the door and looked out into the street. The hard bright sunlight hurt his eyes. It was Sunday and he had not pumped a single gallon of gas. Nothing had stopped at the Gulf station but the Greyhound, and J. L. could smell the burnt oil still lying on the air where the bus had left it. The driver had stopped the bus by the pump island and come inside because J. L.’s station was also the bus depot in Cumseh, Georgia. The driver had picked up a package that was going by Greyhound freight to Macon. He stayed long enough to drink an RC Cola with J. L. because the air conditioning was not working right on the bus and he was not stopping for lunch until he got to Cordele, which was still an hour and a half up the road.

  J. L. stood in the door sweating, not wanting to turn around and look at the nigger who was obviously not a nigger, who had opened her mouth and said something that nobody could have said whether she was a nigger or just looked like one. The blue oil smoke from the bus still wavered in thin layers in front of the gas island. J. L. could feel the heat rising, cracking the sidewalks, melting the macadam highway, and distorting the whole world through the plate-glass window of the Gulf Oil station. He wanted to get back into his comic strip in front of the fan on the bulk oil drum. But he couldn’t with that nigger still sitting in there. She might be crazy. The thought had occurred to him, but he didn’t want to think about it.

  “You caint set there,” J. L. said, turning to look at her.

  He was sorry he spoke, because for the first time he saw the doll in her lap. It was small, not much bigger than a man’s thumb. It had a straight pin sticking in its eye. One of her hands held the doll, the other held the pin. Directly, J. L. turned around and went outside to the grease rack where a Negro was asleep on a croker sack, a felt hat pulled forward covering half his face. J. L. kicked the Negro lightly on the bottom of the shoe.

  “Lummy,” he said, “wake up.”

  Lummy half raised the felt hat and opened one eye. But he was not looking at J. L. Lummy was looking at the grease rack. It was empty. He was dreaming. J. L. never woke him up except to grease cars. He had looked at the rack to see what kind of car was on it. But it was empty. He was dreaming. He let the felt hat down again and was instantly asleep.

  J. L. kickcd him again, this time not so lightly. “Lummy, goddammit git up.”

  Now Lummy resisted. He held tightly to what he thought was sleep to keep from waking to what he thought was a dream. But then J. L. reached down and lifted the felt hat. The awful sun smashed right through Lummy’s closed eyelids. He had gone to sleep in the shade, but his head had crept slowly into the rising sun and he could feel his eyeballs cracking in the glare. He clamped his hand over his eyes and squinted out through his fingers, again at the grease rack.

  “It ain’t nothing on the rack,” said Lummy.

  “It’s in my office, Lummy. Git up.”

  It had to be a dream, but Lummy unwound his legs and got to his feet. If J. L. had a goddam car in his office, he’d grease it. He wouldn’t say the first thing about it; he’d just act like it happened every Sunday morning. But Lummy slouched into the Gulf Oil station and found Carlita instead. She had a doll in her hands. The doll had a pin in each eye.

  “She come in here and set down like that,” J. L. said.

  “Say she did,” said Lummy. He had pushed the felt hat onto the back of his head and was now examining the yellow palms of his hands. He had drunk moonshine whiskey until midnight and then had come over to the station and gone to sleep on the croker sack beside the grease rack because his wife threatened to cut him with a razor if he got drunk again. And Lummy was in no shape to look at a doll with pins in its eyes. He was trembly inside from the whiskey and waking up early and the bright sun.

  “Tell her she caint set there,” said J. L.

  “You caint set there,” Lummy said to the palms of his hands.

  “The bus left me. I must wait,” said Carlita in Spanish.

  “What did she say?” demanded J. L., going red in the face.

  “She say habla habla habla,” said Lummy trying to reproduce the sound he had heard from Carlita. Lummy knew it was a dream now, knew it in the hopeless and desperate way of all dreams, and knew also that he was caught in it and that he would never understand it. It was the moonshine. He never should have drunk it. All he could do was hope to wake up.

  “She’s afflicted,” said J. L.

  “Say she is?” Lummy said. He was ready to believe anything, anxious as he was that he and J. L. agree on something.

  “But she looks all right,” said J. L.

  That was really what bothered J. L., the way she looked. She was bigger than he or Lummy either one. And she looked stronger than both of them put together. He would have liked for something to be wrong with her. Obviously wrong, like a deformed hand or crossed eyes. But nothing was. She shined, sparkled almost—her hair, her burnished skin, the whites of her eyes. She glanced at J. L. and he could tell by the way she immediately looked away that she had simply dismissed the fact that he was there at all. It offended him that she was not afraid. Anybody that came in and sat down in his filling station like that on a Sunday morning—not to mention the way she talked—anybody like that should have been afraid.

  “You better watch out,” said J. L.

  Lummy jumped back. “Whoa,” he said, holding up his hands.

  “Not you goddammit, Lummy,” J. L. said. “Her. She better just watch the hell out.”

  “Say she had?” said Lummy. He wanted to agree. But not where she could hear. He didn’t like the way she was pushing those pins in the doll’s eyes.

  Carlita put the doll down and opened the drawstrings to the round cloth bag. She took out a handful of hair and put it on the bulk oil drum behind the fan. It was heavy, coarse hair and the edges of it fluttered in the suction of the fan. Then she took out strips of cloth and several bones about an
inch long.

  “Godamighty! Hair and bones!” cried J. L.

  Lummy hugged himself. “Say it is!” He had cut his eyes away as soon as he saw the hair coming out of the bag. And he was now afraid to look back. If he could have convinced himself that he was awake, he would have run out the door. But since he was convinced it was a dream, he knew that if he ran through the door he’d only find an elephant or something standing out there beside the gas pump.

  “You watch her, Lummy,” said J. L. “I got to call Axel.”

  J. L. took the phone off the hook on the wall and started dialing. Lummy crept closer to the fist of coarse, fluttering hair and short yellow bones. He looked into the open mouth of the cloth bag and saw five little round heads on five little stick bodies peering up at him, diminutive people with pins in their necks.

  Carlita reached out and took a piece of hair and two of the bones. It was more than Lummy could bear. He leaned closer, so close she had to look at him.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What is it?”

  II

  A MAN appeared in the door of the Gulf Oil station. But J. L. did not see him because J. L. had his back to the door now, yelling into the phone about a nigger that might be crazy—habla, habla, habla. Lummy saw the man but did not believe him. He was part of the dream, part of the elephant act that Lummy knew was pumping gas on the melting macadam driveway outside. Lummy had never seen such a man, even in a dream. He was dressed entirely in green, even to his shoes—dark green trousers, a lighter green coat, and a shirt of yet paler green. He stood glowing in the doorway, sucking his teeth and doing complicated tricks with a toothpick he had caught between his lips.

  Carlita stopped what she was doing with the hair and bones. She gave Lummy a comforting smile. Lummy’s eyes were swollen. Bright drops of sweat hung in his tight cap of hair like bits of broken glass. She could smell his fear.

  “It’s only goat hair and chicken bones,” she said in Spanish. “Don’t worry. I’m not making you.”

  “Why, that’s Spanish,” said the man in the green suit whose name was Junior Bledsoe and who was not the slightest bit interested in whether it was Spanish or Arabic. He would not have crossed the street for that.

  Lummy kept his back to the speaking dream and whistled “The world is not my home, I’m just passing through.” It was a nervous gesture, the same tune he whistled in the same breathless way when his wife threatened to cut him with a razor.

  “Spanish?” said J. L. who had put the telephone down in time to catch the last word.

  “Spanish,” said Junior Bledsoe.

  “I never known a nigger to speak it,” J. L. said. He’d never known anybody to speak it, but he did not want to appear ignorant.

  “I’m Junior Bledsoe,” said the man in green, holding out his hand.

  “Name J. L. Gates.” The two men shook hands. “This my place of business,” said J. L. “And she come in here and set down like that and I ain’t been able to git her to talk. Looks like I’m gone have to take her by the head and drag her if I want her out of here.”

  As he spoke, J. L. saw Carlita ease a pin—carefully and with frightening gentleness—into the ear of the doll she had just made out of the hair and bones. She did not stop until the pin came out the other side of the doll’s head. Then she spun the doll on the axis of the pin like a top.

  “Course I don’t want to do that,” J. L. added quickly, “because I like to treat a nigger right.”

  “Bus left her,” said Junior Bledsoe.

  “You mean the Greyhound?”

  “I saw the whole thing from across the street where I was eating breakfast in the cafe. Bus pulled up, driver got out, left the door open, she got out, he got in, bus left.”

  Lummy had eased away from the cloth bag with the dolls in it and was now squatting on his heels against the cool cement wall behind Carlita. He slipped the felt hat down over his eyes. He wondered whether or not you could sleep in a dream. He’d never tried it.

  “You ever seen anything like that?” asked J. L., pointing to Carlita where she was working with the bones and hair and strips of cloth.

  “No,” Junior Bledsoe said.

  But he was lying. He was an expert on dolls because he was an expert on age, and he had seen men dying of senility who carried dolls about with them all day long.

  “Well,” said J. L. “Axel’ll know what to do with her.”

  “Axel?” said Junior Bledsoe.

  J. L. took him by the arm and turned him to the brilliant plate-glass window. On the far side of town, the horizon lifted on a gently rising hill, a wooded hill full of pine trees and scrub oak at the top of which was a huge, three-storied house.

  J. L. pointed. “Axel’s Senior Club. Her daddy called it a Old Folk’s Home, but Axel calls it a Senior Club. You got to keep up with the times in the business world. She’s clever like that. I called her, she’s coming.”

  Junior Bledsoe shot the toothpick out of his mouth like a dart and smiled. His heart lifted. That explained the store he had seen as he zoomed into Cumseh on his way back to the home office from St. Petersburg, Florida, where he had just set a new Coronation Casket record. He had seen the brick store front and the glittery letters embossed across its face: when nature denies, call flyy’s. Chrome wheelchairs and shiny braces winked at him from the dark recesses of the store. Hernia belts and artificial breasts hung in the window. He was two miles on the other side of Cumseh before he could get the big Lincoln slowed and turned around. He cruised back into Cumseh and parked across the street from the store. Herman Flyy’s Store of Human Accessories, he read the name with satisfaction. Of course, it was Sunday and he couldn’t go in and browse. He sat very still in the car and tried to keep calm. Such a store meant old people. Old dying people in need of him, Junior Bledsoe. But where? He craned his neck and looked out the side windows. A small town, very small. But a big store of human accessories. He tried to keep himself in hand. It was no use though. He could feel the blood swelling his eyes, his heart fluttering.

  Death had been good to Junior Bledsoe. It had led him to the top of a competitive profession. He was, at thirty-three, the head of Coronation Casket Works’ Memorial Garden Division. He sold nothing now but Garden Plots. No more caskets or vaults or formfitting-corpsewear-for-final-sleep or even last-memorials-of-pure-cast-plaster-for-the-loved-ones, although all of it still held a special place in his heart and always would. But Garden Plots were the thing now, the last step in a well-planned death.

  In dwelling upon them, he had come to have the same kind of instinctive feel for open graves that he had (at an earlier time) developed for open caskets. Just by looking at a Prospect he could tell nearly every time whether he would prefer a Garden Plot in flat ground or on a hill. (Does one want one’s head or one’s feet elevated?) Or near a tree? (We only plant trees with shallow root systems in our Memorial Gardens and one does not have to worry about a thing.) On dry land or near a stream? (Thin silver streams of fresh water, artificially pumped through concrete beds. No drainage problem can ever develop. You can set your mind at rest. Coronation leaves nothing to chance.)

  “Just eating breakfast,” said Junior in answer to a question, “over there in the cafe. And I saw her get out and then saw her get left.”

  J. L. Gates squinted against the bright sheet of glass. And there across the street was a Lincoln car parked in front of the Southern Gentleman, Cumseh’s only cafe. It was open on Sunday to catch the tourists, but since the superhighway, I-75, had been completed they did not get many tourists any more. Occasionally, though, one or two got lost and wandered down into Cumseh.

  “You a tourist?” asked J. L.

  “Well, you might say that,” Junior Bledsoe said. “I was on vacation, but I managed to get in a little business. I handle Memorial Garden Plots.”

  J. L. did not have a clear idea of what a Memorial Garden Plot was—he thought it might be some form of truck farming—but he was intimidated by Junior Bledsoe’s green cloth
es and his big car and he did not want to appear ignorant in front of such a man. So instead of asking what a Memorial Garden Plot was, he went over and kicked Lummy.

  “Wake up, Lummy, goddammit.” But it was a half hearted kick on the side of the shoe, and Lummy, who was now in a deep dreamless sleep, did not wake up.

  “There’s something around her neck,” Junior Bledsoe said.

  “It is?” said J. L., backing away from Lummy and looking where Junior pointed.

  “It’s a card of some sort with typing on it,” said Junior.

  The two men moved in on Carlita to get a closer look. She ignored them and slowly bent the legs of the doll up behind its back.

  “It’s strung from a string,” said J. L. “Can you read it?” He was so close to her he could smell the hair.

  “Cuban Relocation Center,” said Junior Bledsoe. “Miami, Florida. Says she’s to be a cook for a Spanish teacher at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Finder please return. Postage guaranteed.”

  “Why, she’s a cook,” said J. L. as though that somehow explained everything.

  “That’s what it says on the card,” said Junior Bledsoe.

  J. L. turned on his heel, went to the telephone, snatched it off the hook, and dialed a number. “She’s a cook,” he shouted into the telephone. “Yeah, it’s around her nake. A cook.”

  “I’ll just step next door a minute,” said Junior Bledsoe to the back of J. L.’s head, and ducked out the door.

  Junior wanted to look at Herman Flyy’s store, to get close to it. He walked quickly across the black macadam drive from which heat rose in wavy lines, distorting everything, causing the taffy-colored curbstone to wiggle and the street to undulate like water. Herman Flyy’s Store of Human Accessories was next door to J. L.’s Gulf Oil station. Junior Bledsoe pressed his nose against the plate-glass window. Then, after a long look, he jerked back and turned his face up toward Axel’s Senior Club, then finally to his Lincoln car where it waved in the rising sun in front of the Southern Gentleman Cafe. On the shelf at the rear window of the Lincoln lay a ring of red flowers, now yellowed and wilted.