The Bigger Light Read Online Free

and Dots, and talk to Dots as if he was talking to that distant woman.
    “Dots, do you know something?” he said one Saturday night, as they were sitting at the small round black table, which had become Boysie’s favourite place in the darkened corner of the classy bar. “I’ve been thinking of incorporating the little business.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Incorporating.”
    “What incorporating means?”
    “Incorporating. Incorporation, you know. Incorporation and incorporation taxes. You read about it in the papers every day. The big boys do it all the time. Down on Bay Street in the stock market, where I work …”
    “You only cleans offices down there, though, Boysie!”
    “Anyhow … I see this incorporation thing as the only thing that could save a man like me. The only thing to save me from paying so much taxes to the government. I see myself getting bigger and bigger. Seeing the light. Just because o’ this incorporation thing!”
    “What do you do with this incorporation thing, Boysie?”
    “
Do?
”
    “Yes, do! Yuh must be able to
do
something with a thing which you say … ”
    “I see myself buying a couple of apartment buildings. No black man in this country ever do that. Then … the stock market, and then, maybe …”
    “A castle in the air!” Dots said, and laughed from the barrel of her heaving stomach.
    “When I go to work on Bay Street, every evening …”
    “You don’t work down there, Boysie. You
cleans offices
down there.”
    He ignored her comment, and went on talking and dreaming, turning the matter over in his mind, talking not really about it to her, but as if he was already incorporated, and was trying to acquaint his wife with his new status.
    “The idea of incorporation may look like a simple thing to you, but I have the opinion that it is a more serious thing than you making out.”
    “I tired as hell. I work all week in that hospital, and I want to get home to my bed.”
    Boysie swallowed his drink, and with it went a bit of his pride.
    “Man, tek me home in this blasted old truck, do, lemme watch the Johnny Carson show!” She made him feel her full resentment by sucking inward with her breath on her teeth; and when she shut the door on her side, it was as if the truck had exploded. Boysie made a note to himself to print BOYSIE CUMBERBATCH CLEANERS, INC ., on the sides of his panel truck. That would be the first step, he thought, towards incorporation.
    Dots shifts her position in the seat, and prepares herself to get out. They turn into the street where their apartment building is, and they are blocked by taxis and cars parked all over the street, and the street is crowded with young people, boisterous and happy and some drunk, going to parties in the samebuilding. Dots notices the West Indian men with their women. And Boysie notices only the West Indian men. “I gotta get outta this area,” Dots says, while he struggles to park the truck. “I gotta get out!” Her tone and the voice of the turning tires are at the same irritating pitch.
    “How did you like that girl at the piano?” They are inside the lobby now. Boysie selects the front door key from a bunch of keys. “She’s a great singer, eh?”
    “Open the door, man,” Dots says. “It cold.”
    The elevator was climbing. Boysie asked her what she thought of the music, and of the place where they had been drinking. Dots heard only the noise of his words. She remained silent. She was far away from him. At any rate, there were other people in the elevator, and she hated to talk in strange company. She had learned how to stand beside him, or lie beside him in bed at night, and not hear one word he was saying. People would be in the elevator or in the subway car with her, and she could wipe them out of her consciousness. In the elevator with them now were five other West Indians and three Canadian women. The men were well dressed, and the women looked healthy and young and vibrant in the way Canadian