Read Atlantis: Three Tales for Free Online

all, we’ve been here longer than most of these crackers!” It was practically an echo of Mama, down on the campus. “And that’s why you will not hear me split my infinitives!” “Or hear her say, even jokingly,” Hubert added, “a girl like I.’ ” That made Clarice laugh too. Still, those unified verbs sounded even stranger than her clipped, northern accent.) In the damp night, Clarice said, “That’s the city at its best—
Eshu!”
A second time she sneezed.
    Hubert moved toward her. “We better get you home.”
    Distant in the night-haze, the lights burned with soft, pearl-like fires—so different from what burned in Sam.
    On their way down, wrapped ’round in shadow, Sam tried to remember Clarice’s body beneath the dress, beneath the coat she pulled even more tightly to her throat. That body had all sorts of lines, gentle, pleasant, that became clear under the fall of her skirt or sleeve when she’d leaned to pass this, sat back with an embarrassed smile, turned in her seat to hear what Hubert said. (Did Hubert ever kiss her? he wondered.) Under a park lamp, he saw her raise a lace-edged handkerchief, pulled over one knuckle, to her nose. Over Hubert’s arm around her shoulder, her breath added its own lace to the fog already wreathing her dark hair. Completing the thought begun minutes ago, she added: “Over the bridge—
Eshu!
That’s what I’d want to do.”
    Sam’s first job in the city was washing walls for three guys who knew Hubert and were painters. He was fired loudly and ignominiously after a week. He just wasn’t fast enough. Perez—the loud, bony one—said, consolingly afterwards, that Sam was a smart boy and shouldn’t be doing stuff like that anyway. And Louis, the fat fellow (who spelled his name completely differently from Lewy down home), said Sam damned well ought to
learn
how to do stuff like that; smart or not, it didn’t hurt nobody to know how to wash a damned wall! The third one, the one he really liked—whose name was Prince, followed by something Caribbean, Marquez? Cinquez?—had said nothing to him at all, but had smiled at him a few times while they’d worked and had looked on seriously while Louis and Perez bawled him out.
    There really wasn’t enough work anyway, Hubert explained that evening back at home—trying to make it easier for sulky Sam. People wanted their houses painted in spring and summer, when they could keep the place open and air it out. Not in winter. That’s why the fellows had been so touchy, because they weren’t making any money themselves.
    Three days later Sam got another job as stockboy in Mr. Harris’smen’s haberdashery over on a Hundred-seventeenth Street—mostly packing things down in, and getting things up from, the cellar. The wreath on the door and the tinsel strung in front of the counter surprised him. And the heavy black girl who worked there and who looked like Milly Potts down home—though she had none of Milly’s sense of humor—wore a Christmas pin on her blouse. But then, Christmas was less than two weeks away.
    When Sam came in, Clarice was sitting in the wing chair, in her purple blouse, reading aloud:
    â€œ ‘Evidently the author’s implication is that there must be a welding into one personality of Kabnis and Lewis: the great emotionalism of the race guided and directed by a great purpose and a super-intelligence.’ ”
    Chin still prickling from the cold, Sam could hear, in the other room, Hubert thumping books on his desk. Clarice looked up, smiled, then went back to her peroration:
    â€œ ‘ . . . In the south we have a “powerful underground” race with a marvelous emotional power which like Niagara before it was harnessed is wasting itself. Release it into proper channels, direct its course intelligently, and you have possibilities