The Last of the Savages

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Book: Read The Last of the Savages for Free Online
Authors: Jay McInerney
the next. When I later tried to explain this feeling to Will he nodded approvingly, holding his hair back from his face as he did so: “You segue from one hit to the next, without commercial interruption.”
    I was straining to hear Lester’s bass player above the din: “I use to play spiritual,” he shouted, “but I had to quit. You can’t play the blues on Saturday night and go to church Sunday and sing God’s music. You gots tobe pure. Your heart gots to be pure. The preacher he say to me—‘I know what you was doing last night and it ain’ right. You got to do one or t’other.’ So now I jes’ play these nasty old blues.”
    The new venue was not nearly large enough to contain all of us, though it did, as if its plywood and tar-paper skin were infinitely elastic. Everyone danced to the music from the record player, including several small children and a white-haired relic with gold teeth. The floor throbbed beneath our feet, rough planks showing between odd sheets of brown speckled linoleum. If anyone thought I looked ridiculous they were polite enough to keep it to themselves.
    The women made a show of fighting one another to dance with us. Will graciously declined these invitations. He did not dance, he just swayed. For all his apparent ease, and his intoxication, he maintained a habitual remoteness. Spending much of his life among black people, he preserved his dignity and possibly his life by never pretending to be anything but a white man. He seemed to belong, but not by virtue of aping the behavior of the local populace, nor of a moist heartiness. I was just the opposite, slapping backs and attempting to reproduce the moves of those around me. A few hours before I’d been sucking up to the plantation owner and studying his manners; now I wanted to have soul. Set me down on the street with a one-legged man, Will once said of me, and I’ll be limping inside of a block.
    Under the benign influence of cannabis, I felt I could do no wrong, and the funky, foreign smell of all those bodies packed together seemed a powerful intoxicant in itself. I’d been dancing with a girl named Belinda, who kept ignoring the tall interloper with a keloid scar across his chin who tried to claim her after the first dance. Refusing to look at me, he tugged on her shoulder and hissed until she finally slapped his hand away and told him to leave her alone. When the tempo dropped with the opening notes of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” I reached out to embrace my partner for a slow dance. She grabbed me and pressed me into the soft wilderness of her breasts while thrusting the hard ridge of her pelvis into mine.
    When I was suddenly, violently dislodged from this refuge, I could not understand by what agency, until I saw the skinny, shiny-faced manwith one hand wrapped around Belindas neck and the other pointing a knife at me. He said, “How you like to get stuck, white boy?”
    Even before I had time to be afraid Lester Holmes had grabbed him from behind and shaken the knife from his hand. “This boy’s a guest in my house,” he said, cuffing the attacker with an open hand. “He don’t know nothing. Just a dumb little shit. If you can’t hold on to your woman, that ain’t no doing of his.”
    “I ain’t his woman,” shouted Belinda, who had retreated out of reach. Returning to the fray, she reached over and punched the captive in the face.
    Lester escorted the man out and the music resumed, but without me. If I’d felt like a dreamily detached spectator at my own near evisceration a moment before, I was now scared straight. I saw Will standing in the corner, conferring languidly with Ronald, Lester’s bass player. As I approached, Will tipped his beer bottle illustratively at me. “These Yankees come down here, Ronald, don’t know how to behave themselves, messing around with some other cat’s woman, getting in knife fights and all.”
    The bass player smiled broadly, nodding his head up and down. And I

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