“Brighton.”

“What school?”

“No. I just got here.”

“From where?”

“Brighton!”

“That’s not so far,” I said.

“England,” she said. She looked very bored. Claude Sheats looked at me.

“How did you find Washington Square so fast?”

“I got friends.”

She was very superior about it all and seemed to look at us with the same slightly patient irritation of a professional theater critic waiting for a late performance to begin. The little one sat on the chair, her legs crossed, looking up at the ceiling. Her white pants were dirty too. They looked as though they would have been very relieved if we had taken off our clothes and danced for them around the room and across the bed, and made hungry sounds in our throats with our mouths slightly opened.

I said that I had to go out to the drugstore and would be back very soon; but once outside, I walked a whole hour in one direction and then I walked back. I passed them a block away from our apartment. They were walking fast and did not slow down or speak when I passed them.

Claude Sheats was drinking heavily when I came into the apartment.

“What the hell are you trying to pull?” he said.

“I couldn’t find a drugstore open.”

He got up from the living room table and walked toward me. “You should have asked me,” he said. “I got more than enough.”

“I wanted some mouthwash too,” I said.

He fumed a while longer, and then told me how I had ruined his evening because the amazon would not leave the room to wait for me and the little one would not do anything with the amazon around. He suddenly thought about going down and bringing them back; and he went out for a while. But he came back without them, saying that they had been picked up again.

“When a man looks out for you, you got to look out for him,” he warned me.

“I’m sorry.”

“A hell of a lot of good that does. And that’s the last time I look out for you, baby,” he said. “From now on it’s me all the way.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“If she was too much for you I could of taken the amazon.”

“It didn’t matter that much,” I said.

“You could of had Doris if you couldn’t handle the amazon.”

“They were both too much,” I told him.

But Claude Sheats did not answer. He just looked at me.

II

AFTER TWO MONTHS of living with him I concluded that Claude hated whites as much as he loved them. And he hated himself with the very same passion. He hated the country and his place in it and he loved the country and his place in it. He loved the Brotherhood and all that being in it had taught him and he still believed in what he had been taught, even after he had left it and did not have to believe in anything.