Free Red Grass River by James Carlos Blake

join in the girls’ laughter.
    Wiser heads might have warned him that ever-ready pleasures cannot long endure, that sexual indulgence requires respite and even occasional lack in order that its enjoyment not jade. He was young and did not know these things and would anyway not have believed them had he been told and so was obliged to discover their truth for himself. By the end of his first year in Galveston he was beyond surfeit with pleasures of the flesh. He took to waking in the forenoon before the girls arose and slipping out of the house and staying away until early evening and the hour of his employ. At supper the girls began to look at him askance but they held their tongues. Not until he’d kept his distance from them for more than two weeks did a roanhaired inmate named Sally make bold to inquire: “Dont you like us no more, Johnny?”
    He heard the injury in her voice and saw in her face and in thefaces of the others that a man’s failure of desire for them was the harshest of rebuffs. He felt mean for making them feel unwanted.
    “ Hey now, girls,” he said, turning up his palms, “I just need a little rest from you all or like Aunt July says I’ll sure enough go loony from way too much of a good thing.”
    They smiled with ready acceptance of this explanation and winked at each other with relief and fell to their suppers with a happy clatter of dishware.
    He did resume his visits with the girls but now dallied only twice or thrice a week—often enough to avoid giving further offense but not so often as to glut himself again. He spent the larger portion of his days walking the city and at last acquainting himself with it. He bought a white suit and wore it everywhere against a light blue shirt and black tie and all under a widebrimmed white Panama. He went to the bayside docks and watched the loading and unloading of cargoes of every sort and heard seamen speaking in the tongues of nations whose names he did not know. He daily joined the crowd that gathered every afternoon to see what the fishing boats brought in and one day marveled with them all at a fourteen-foot tiger shark with a girth twice his own as the beast was hung up by its tail and the captain dissected its belly and among the contents to issue onto the dock were a rum bottle and a horseshoe and most of a woman’s bare arm as yet hardly digested and whose finger bore a gold wedding band. The sight reminded him of a time he’d cut open the stomach of a bull gator he’d shot at the south rim of Lake Okeechobee and therein found a boot containing a pale hairy foot.
    He ambled along the Strand and admired its ornate Victorian architecture and several times attended matinee theater performances and once and only once a matinee at the opera house. He liked walking in the drizzling rain after dark in the misty glow of the streetlamps. He took long noonday strolls along the seawall so recently completed after the hurricane of 1900 that killed 6,000. In the saloons they yet told stories of workgangs impressed at gunpoint and given whiskey rations through the day and night that they might stay halfdrunk and abide the labor of heaving corpses into the towering bonefires on the beach. The fires blazed for weeks and hung the island with a dread and hazy stench. Now the city streets rattled and honked with more than 200 motorcars and pedestrians scurried aside with hardly a glance at them and only the most nervous horses still stamped and kicked at their passing. The speed limit in town was ten miles per hour but there were daring motorists who raced each other on the beach all the wayto San Luis at the west end of the island. In the parks he watched baseball games and boxing matches and bicyclists and schoolchildren at their gymnastics. He put on a bathing suit in a beach bathhouse and went for long swims in the mirrorsmooth morning sea. And yet, in this his second year of exile in a modern city whose pleasures he could not refute, he could not deny