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But when the police came to stop the raiders, which a single dorm mother with a Coke bottle had already done, and to stop the girls hanging out the second-story windows who were waving lace-fringed encouragement, they arrested everyone in sight, including the irate dorm mother who had assaulted an officer of the law on his way upstairs to stop those silly girls, and including i
"Man, I'm not doing anything," he said to the cop who tried to pull him off the car. "I been sitting here all the time."
"Oh, sorry, boy; thought you was a girl-child, sitting there with all that hair," the cop drawled as he stepped back. "Let's go."
"Fuck off, peckerwood. I haven't done a thing."
"You just did," the cop said as Morning tried to jerk away. He skillfully stabbed him in the stomach with his billy, slid him off the hood, twisted an arm behind, and guided him to the wagon. At the steps Morning struggled slightly, more to get his breath than to resist, and in the scuffle was jabbed again, but managed to vomit in the cop's red fat face. The cop laid Morning out with the billy against his neck, then stood over him, thumping his ribs until another cop stopped him.
Morning awoke face down on a thin mattress on a cement floor, his hands painfully cuffed behind him, his feet shackled and tied to an iron ring in the wall, and his ribs blue, bruised, and aching. The tiny cell was hardly wider than the mattress, and a solid steel door with a small sliding plate over a barred window protected the world from this i
Morning, of course, couldn't hold his bladder, though he tried, so spent the rest of the night laying in his own waste and stink, cursing the world for that waste and stink. Damn, it had always been this way. Expelled from school for someone else's smoke in the John; whipped by his mother for the kid next door's lies; punished at random for the sins of others, he took to sins of his own, smoking, lying to his mother, and he was never caught.
The next day he found himself charged with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and, yes, defacing city property. Morning pleaded not guilty and asked for a lawyer, but the justice of the peace said guilty without looking up, dismissed the resisting charge, sentenced him to two hundred dollars or two months in jail. Morning shouted appeal, but the justice of the peace told him no appeal was allowed for misdemeanors in that state.
Morning settled himself for two months, though he had the money in the bank, but the city called his mother. It seemed they'd rather have the money than Mrs. Morning's son. She paid the fine that afternoon, and as she walked out to the street with him, she asked, "Joe, Joe, what are you going to do next? What are you going to do?" He walked away without speaking.
Back in his room he found a note from the assistant dean of men, asking him to leave school. Morning ran still stinking and dirty to the dean's office up the quiet, pleasant, shaded hill, but the dean refused to see him, saying, in a precise Tidewater voice, You're not one of our students; our students are Southern gentlemen; please leave my office.
"Southern gentlemen suck cock," he said, and left the office.
He drank the rest of the afternoon in the cool basement. The chapter president sent a pledge to tell Mr. Morning to please move out of the room, but Mr. Morning sent the pledge back up to tell Mr. President to come down to try to make him do anything. Mr. President didn't come, but the vice-president did: Jack, Morning's high school buddy buggered by the two farmers that night after they had lost the state championship. He stood in the open door, his face composed, ready for the pitch, acting as if he had forgotten the hate of that night, acting as if he were big enough, as he had said, to forgive and forget, stood there in loafers, gray slacks, a crew-neck sweater, for the winter chill still clung in Morning's basement though spring had come two weeks before.
"Joe, boy, what's the matter with you? Where did you go wrong?" He had been taking business psychology. "You came down here a football star, a stable, straight, clean guy. Then you quit football, the thing you do best of all, calling it stupid, throwing away all those hours of intense preparation. Boy, you better believe, if I could have played as well as you, I would have never quit. But you quit, threw all that God-given talent away. Then you moved down in this dirty basement, down to this damp dirty room with all your fine library of books stinking with mold, and this place stinks like a… a… a nigger whorehouse," he said as Morning tossed a pair of stained panties at his feet. "You bring girls down here, and to the parties, you wouldn't want your mother to meet. And you haven't had a hair cut, till now, since God knows when. And you sit down in Mickey's with those damned pinkos. Joe, I don't know, I just don't know. I know you're good inside, but the things the brothers say about you. Sometimes it hurts me real bad to hear them." While he talked, Jack had been carefully removing mildewed books and dirty clothes from a chair. He sat down, clasped his hands in front of a knee, and said, "And this hurts me most of all, Joe. The chapter voted you out this morning. Mind you, we can't vote you out of the national body. I mean once you are a member of this fraternity, you are a member for life, just like when you joined the church. But they can vote you out of the house. I talked for you, but in a case like this an officer just has one vote, too. It really hurts me, Joe. We been together a long time. I just don't know."
"Morning out in the morning," he chanted. "Tell my brethren I'll be come 'fore daylight charms their ruddy cheeks. You're go
"Joe, boy, what's gone wrong?" Jack asked again, his voice and face soft in professional concern. He fooled a drunk Morning.
So Morning tried to answer him as he lay back among the twisted, dirty sheets, looking vacantly up at the poster of an intent Lenin pasted on the low ceiling, but after a moment when he looked over at Jack's bored, dumb face, he snorted, then said with a smile, "Jack, baby, let's talk about you. I mean what's wrong with you, son? I know how you acted when them farm boys corn-holed you, I remember that, but they told me you loved it, and wouldn't let them stop. And your roommate been looking kinda peaked lately…"
"You son of a bitch," Jack said, standing up. "You bastard, I should have killed you that night."
"That's right, bugger, 'cause you sure as hell can't do it now. They fucked the guts out of you that night."
Jack sought the dirtiest curse he could think of: "You damned Communist."
Morning laughed and laughed, wild, happy roars that drove Jack from the room, across the basement, and up the stairs, and might still drive him wherever he may be. "Better Commie than queer, Jackshit." He laughed until in that quickly, for him, vanishing point between pleasure and pain, he found tears falling on his dirty hands, sobs raw in his throat, and a great lonely hole growing inside, the hole he drank into all the night long.