A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

them down. Rosalie was Clara's best friend, but Carleton didn't like her quick clever eyes. They all liked to laugh. Carleton didn't mind hearing them, but he was different and thought of himself as different: he was better than these people, whose parents had traveled on the season too, because his family owned land and were farmers and he was about ready to go back there himself. The problem was that in 1933 everyone had it bad.
    “I sure do like New Jersey. We're in it now,” Nancy said. She was talking with Bert and his wife. “I s'pose you been up here too?”
    “Look, I been all over,” Bert said.
    They laughed at this or at some comical twitching of his face. Bert always made everyone laugh, especially women. Carleton stared out the window at his leaping figures and saw that they jumped and twisted with a freedom that was almost desperate—there he was himself, free, able to glide along inches above the ground, easily outdistancing this old bus. A young Carleton, running along, letting his arms swing— The Texas couple started talking about something that had happened back home, a hurricane, and Carleton tried to shut his mind off since he'd heard this four or five times already. He concentrated on his running figures but Bert's voice kept coming through.
    Bert was a thin, earnest man of about forty, with a meek bald head shining through his hair. But his earnestness and his meekness kept giving way to big mocking good-natured grins; he couldn't stop grinning. His wife had no face that Carleton could remember. It was just a woman's face.
    “Somebody with no head?” Nancy shrieked.
    “It was a nigger. We all seen it ourselves,” Bert said.
    Nancy giggled. “You're kiddin me!”
    “Honey, I ain't kiddin you. Why for would I kid you?”
    “Seen worse things than that,” his wife said, pushing forward. “Don't you believe me? That was one real hard storm in Galveston.”
    “What's Galveston?” said Nancy.
    “Yeah, we seen some sights,” said the woman enthusiastically. Her voice slowed as she raked through debris and peeked into darkened ruins of houses. “A funnel come right down out of the sky—”
    Carleton squirmed in his seat. The harder he stared at the figures the less clear they became, as if they were afraid of a funnel sweeping down out of the sky and destroying them. It was like a dream: when you tried to keep it going, it faded away. He heard the Texas couple's friendly drawling voices beating against him and felt a sudden violent hatred for them, even for Nancy: they were stupid, they didn't understand! They belonged in this life because their families hadn't been any better. They could see that Carleton was different and when they talked to him they were serious; they didn't fool around with him. But he didn't care about what they thought. It was other people he wanted to take him seriously, men who hired day labor on the roads or for digging trenches and pole holes. Those men had different, shrewd faces. They talked faster and didn't bother to joke and laugh apologetically during every pause. They always said to Carleton, “There's men of our own that ain't got work.… Nobody's building right now.… My brother wants a job too, but.… You're from the camp outside town, huh … ?”
    Carleton still tried to stand straight and tall before witnesses. For always witnesses are judging you. Conscious of his muscled arms, shoulders, legs. But Christ, it was getting to be hard work keeping his shoulders straight when they were wanting all the time to bend like a bow, from stooping over in the fields. And Carleton's face— now he was missing front teeth, and his damn nose more crooked-seeming for some reason God only knew, gave him a cockeyed look sometimes like a mental case, lines in his forehead like cuts made by a knife, he had to practice making his face like the faces of men outside. Outside the farmworkers' camps. Bastards eyed you likeexpecting you to steal from their pockets or stink