A Walk on the Wild Side

TWO

IN THE CHEERY old summer of ’31 New Orleans offered almost unlimited opportunities to ambitious young men of neat appearance willing to begin at the bottom and work their way up the Ladder of Success rung by rung. Those with better sense began at the top and worked their way down, that route being faster.

In the cheery old summer of ’31 some states were dry and some states were wet. Russ Columbo was singing Please. Al Capone was quoting Mark Twain and someone held women to be equal in aviation to men. A woman refused to answer the questions of a Senate committee and the American Legion claimed that state legislatures were handicapping sales of products turned out by the American working man.

A New York minister discovered that Jerusalem had had a worse administration than Jimmy Walker’s and said he’d rather live under Hoover any day than Hezekiah.

The excesses of that year were due to a backward swing of the moral pendulum, Harry Emerson Fosdick proclaimed, adding that if the saloon were still around it would be even worse. The President pressed a button in Washington that lit a fifty-two million-dollar building, highest yet raised by the hand of man, at Thirty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. Wallace Beery was saying What I Like About a Mama is Plenty of Mama and cotton prices dropped to a new low.

The Ladder of Success had been inverted, the top was the bottom, and the bottom was the top. Leaders of men still sporting gold watches were lugging baby photographs door to door with their soles flapping. Physicians were out selling skin lighteners and ship captains queued in hope of a cabin boy’s mop and pail.

Offices of great fire insurance companies went up in smoke, which seemed no more than just. When the fire department – long unpaid – cleared off, little remained but scorched files, swivel-chairs on which no one would ever swivel again, lovely heaps of frosted glass, and all that mahogany.

All that mahogany that hadn’t helped anybody but brokers after all. Then the brokers began jumping off rooftops with no greater consideration for those passing below than they’d had when their luck was running. Emperors of industry snatched all the loose cash on which they could lay hand and made one fast last run. Lawyers sued one another just to keep in practice.

And every bughouse had one little usurer hidden away in a cell all his own where he did nothing but figure percent with his fingernail on the wall, day after day after day.

In less time than it takes to say God with your mouth open, the go-getting door-to-door canvasser became the backbone of the American economy. He went to work for Realsilk Hose or Hoover Vacuum long enough to go-get himself a dozen pair of Realsilk hose or a second-hand sweeper by stealing it part by part. There was also small change, milk money and such, left lying about on shelves and sills while housewives studied one proposition or another. Change-snatching too came under the head of go-getting, for hundreds subsisted upon it week in and week out.

However, the secretary of the Federation of Labor pointed out, Business was resisting further decline.

Self-reliance for the penniless and government aid to those who already had more than they could use was the plan. But park benches were wet of a morning whether it rained or no; and it was possible to tire even of bananas.

Still and all times weren’t as hard as some people grew fond of pretending. All that had happened really was a withdrawal from abnormal prosperity with business progressing on a downward grade toward new planes of normality and increasing equalization of opportunity. In short, we were going full steam ahead. Only this time one exciting opportunity was precisely as good as the next exciting opportunity. Which was to say, simply, that nobody got paid any more.

The pimps alone didn’t seem to catch on that the country was progressing downward to new rates of normality. They had been progressing downward for some time without even knowing that they were in style. Now of a sudden they discovered themselves with more girls than beds to put them on. Scarcely-twenties looking for a daddy, any old daddy who’d tell them where to lie down. Landlords and landladies passed them on to the cabbies and the cabbies passed them on to the pimps. It was then, between prostitution and Prohibition, that the ancient color line was finally breached.

Negro bellboys had gained a virtual monopoly on the delivery of illicit alcohol and had found that white male guests either wanted a woman with the bottle or a bottle with the woman. This errand boys’ work evolved into soliciting. Immediately, he looked with scorn upon his own women. Like the Negro policeman, the Negro ponce was harder on his own people than was the white pander.

He saw now at first hand, that what his Mama had told him wasn’t true after all: that ‘good’ white folks never acted like bad black ones. For he saw men and women with the best names in town, the do-right names, howling like wolves in the Saturday stews, panties on the bedpost and pants on the floor, yet knew Do-Right Daddy would be back with his family, come Sunday morning, in the pew with the best name in town.

The Negro began losing his awe of the white women there and then. He gave her the choice of moving over or being turned in to the law. The errand boy became an informer as well as solicitor. Times weren’t as bad, he felt, as the papers made out.

Everyone was out soliciting in one commodity or another. Everyone was pecking somebody else’s door. The whole town was out pecking, nobody stayed home to buy. Either you rapped doors on commission or you organized a chance of fools even sillier than yourself into crews and took your commission out of theirs. And since theirs was purely theoretical, it followed yours must be theoretical too.

If, for example, you swindled a housewife into signing for delivery of two pounds of coffee twice a week for twelve weeks, you received two theoretical dollars for perpetrating the swindle. Actually, however, you had swindled her for nothing, because the driver accredited himself with the order – ‘that party changed her mind. You know how women are,’ he advised the door-to-door man.

The driver in turn was victimized by the device of deducting two dollars from his regular salary in lieu of that same housewife’s deuce. By the time that the deuce had found its way from wife to owner’s pocket, there wasn’t a man on the street crew who had been on it the week before.

Dove Linkhorn, now in a seersucker suit and sea-green tie, stood on the corner of Calhoun and Magnolia. That here stood a man far above the blue jean and Bull Durham class was plain to be seen, for he was smoking a Picayune. Indeed, he lacked only something to sell to start making his own way down the Ladder of Success as fast as the next ambitious boy. So when he saw men encircling someone or something down the street he hurried there as fast as his butter-colored shoes could make steps, in hope that someone was throwing a fit.

But all it was was a little round man with something glistening in his hand. Dove elbowed in to see what glistened so nicely.

Cawfee pot.

Hello, pot.

Shor a purty old pot.

‘Wreneger’s the name,’ the little round man was telling his crew, ‘but you boys call me plain old “Smiley” because that’s what all my goodbuddies call me. And you know what I tell my goodbuddies? I tell them, “Goodbuddies, if you aint sellin’ you just aint tryin’,” that’s what I tell my goodbuddies. And that’s what I’m tellin’ every one of you,’ cause you all my goodbuddies too.’

Little old red ’n green cawfee pot. Well I be dawg. Bet you make right good cawfee.

‘The idea aint to see how many doors you can rap of a morning – that aint sellin’. That aint even tryin’. If you only rap two doors a whole morning and sell both, then you’re tryin’.’

I had me a cawfee pot like you, cawfee pot, I’d know where to get the chicory for you.

‘Heed the housewife’s woes, boys. Give ear to her trials and little cares. Make her joys your joys, her tears your tears. If you listen long enough sooner or later she’s going to ask, “Young man, whatever is that contraption in your hand?”’

‘Look like a cawfee pot to me,’ Dove helped the man out.

‘Thank you, Red. You work with me. The rest of you men split up two to a block, one down one side and one down the other and meet me back here at noon. If you aint sellin’ you just aint tryin’, all you good old goodbuddy buddies.’

‘Dirt-eatin’ buggers, every one,’ Smiley assured Dove the moment they’d scattered. ‘Don’t you think I know what they’re up to? Got a pencil and a receipt book so they’re going to make out five or six phony orders with addresses of empty lots ’n then go drink derail in Lafayette Square thinkin’ Old Dominion pays off on their lousy word.’ He banged Dove’s big back good-naturedly – ‘They’ll find out better soon enough, won’t they goodbuddy?’

‘They sure will, mister,’ Dove agreed gleefully.

‘That’s why I was so careful about choosing you,’ Smiley grew serious. ‘I told myself, “There now is one face I can truly trust.”’

‘I truly trustes you too, Mister,’ Dove replied, feeling happier by the minute.

‘I want you right beside me while I pitch, Red. Because when you pitch for Old Dominion you’re pitchin’ for the red, white and blue!’

‘Mister,’ Dove stopped short to offer Smiley his hand, ‘you’re talkin’ about my team now!’

Smiley shook perfunctorily. He wasn’t used to being taken literally, it made him unsure of himself. ‘The first thing to remember, son, is our own Confederate dead. When the housewife asks you how much coffee does she have to buy before the pot is legally redeemed – some are sharper than you might expect – tell her you’re J. E. B. Stuart’s grandson and your daddy is dying in Memphis. Tell her anything except that she has to take fifty pounds before she owns the pot. If she wants to know what percent of chicory we use say something about Chancellorsville.’

‘I’LL SAY I WORK FOR OLD DOMINION!’ Dove cried with so genuine a pride that Wreneger, one of those men who like to say ‘It can’t get hot enough for me,’ felt curiously wilted.

‘Stand to one side, son, I’ll show you how it’s done,’ he invited Dove into the shade of a small unpainted porch, allowing him to guard one of the pots.

‘We aint buying no coffee pot, mister,’ the housewife assured Smiley the moment she saw the hardware in his hand.

Smiley fixed his face as if to eat mush out of a churn. ‘It’s not a pot, Madam. And it’s strictly not for sale. It’s a French Dripolator and it’s a goodwill gift, no strings attached, from Old Dominion to you. Take it. It belongs to you.’

‘I’m greatly obliged, but we already got a pot.’ The woman’s eyes shifted to the lopsided figure in the yellow-knob shoes.

‘Jeb Stuart’s grandson!’ Dove came to attention.

‘At ease,’ Smiley ordered below his breath and hurried into his pitch. ‘Madam, this here genuine French Dripolator is shortly goin’ on the market nationally for three-dolla-eighty-five cents with a national campaign behind it. What we need now is kindly folks who won’t be selfish about it when they find they got the best cup of coffee in town. The kind who’ll want to share with their neighbors and spread the word about our offer. That’s the friendly sort of thing is going to give our national campaign a headstart – I said at ease – of course if you don’t care to cooperate I’m sure the lady next door will be interested.’

She’d sooner risk the black death than have her next-door neighbor own something she didn’t. Dove watched her sign for receipt of the pot wistfully.

‘Just a mere formality,’ Smiley explained the need of her signature to the woman, ‘so’s the company won’t think I sold it to my wife.’ Even to Dove the laugh that followed sounded hollow.

The fraud consummated, Smiley handed Dove a pencil, receipt book and pot. ‘But don’t let go of that thing till you got that signature,’ was his parting warning. And off he went to lie in the shade and dream up new ways to beat Old Dominion.

Dove was relieved that his goodbuddy hadn’t asked him if he knew how to use the pencil. It was real nice to have it to carry behind his ear all the same.

He came to an intersection where one road led to town and the other away. The town road was festooned, street lamp to street lamp, with welcoming pennants; it was wide and newly paved. The other was lampless and pennantless and plainly led nowhere at all. Without hesitation Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go.

Shuffling loosely along in his proud bright shoes, occasionally tucking in his sea-colored tie, he came to an iron-wrought fence where a Negro woman was shearing a bush; and waited in hope she would look up and ask, ‘How do I get a pot like that?’

But all she did was study him, shears in hand, as if Old Dominion might have sent him out to rape and rob her and she was nicely put together at that. He shifted the pot to his other hand. It was hanging so heavy he scolded it, ‘Pot, you give me the wearies.’ And his shoes gave him such a punishing pinch, as though they were on the side of the pot.

He came to a four-story tenement built flush to the broken walk to get the last inch of space, where another Negro girl, her face still full of an easy sleep, leaned an arm against a patched and rusted screen.

Dove held up the pot to catch the sun.

‘Little ol’ cawfee pot. Git it fer free.’

She opened the door and grasped the pot’s handle, taking his word as fast as that. But Dove was a little too smart for her. He kept hold of the spout.

‘Got to sign your name for you gits it.’

‘Signs you anythin’, cawfee pot man.’ She plucked the pencil off his ear and scribbled a name on a receipt blank. Old Dominion was going to like his work, Dove knew.

‘Awntie and Mothaw might like pots too,’ the girl told Dove, and hollered up the stair.

Two older women, as if waiting for just such a call, came clumping so eagerly down the steps that they wedged in the narrow way – for a moment neither could gain an inch. Then worked themselves free and the winner came up breathlessly.

‘Whut you got now, lucky girl?’

‘Got me a goddamn pot.’

‘You write for us, Minnie-Mae, then we gits too.’

‘My own handwrite is so poorly, Miss,’ Dove confessed, ‘I’d be most obliged if you’d do just that.’

Minnie-Mae snatched his receipt book, tore out two order blanks, scribbled on both and handed them back.

‘Old Dominion thanks you, Miss,’ Dove assured her, ‘I’ll deliver both pots tomorrow.’

‘My girlfriend might like one too,’ Minnie-Mae invited Dove to step one landing up.

‘You oblige me again,’ Dove assured her as she urged him ahead, with Awntie and Mothaw following heavily. It was just one of those days when everyone is on your side.

For from window to window, lightless passage to lightless hall, the wakening whisper went – ‘Come git you a cawfee pot.’ Doorway to door, to friend to foe, Awntie and Mothaw went spreading the word. Whether it was Huey Long or Old Dominion giving things away again, nobody cared a doodle in a wood. Negroes dark or Negroes light, high-yellow, blue-black, gold-toothed or toothless, everyone liked coffee. Minnie-Mae was ripping receipts and handing them for upreaching hands to sign and return as fast as she could reach and tear.

‘Come git yo’ goddamn pot!’

Dove couldn’t make out a word of the lingo ringing about – it was that Negro-to-Negro jargon that accents English like French and French like English then slurs the rest when white ears of any nation listen.

Dove didn’t care – he was getting rich. When Minnie-Mae ran out of blanks he raced down to the street for more. Business was progressing on a downward grade to new rates of normality, opportunity was being equalized, time was money.

Wreneger, with two of the crew, were waiting for him at the corner.

‘Where you been, son?’ Without a word Dove handed him fifty orders, signed and sealed. Smiley’s aides, one a towering Florida cracker and the other a pint-sized Georgian, crowded in to see how Texas did it.

Smiley thumbed through the packet swiftly, thumbed part way back as though to make certain of something scarcely credible, then ripped it straight down the middle and fifty French Dripolators went blowing like confetti down Elysian Fields Avenue.

Dove ran one down before he understood – then let it blow after the others like watching all hope die.

‘Goodbuddy’ – a sort of soft horror had caught in Smiley’s throat – ‘Who told you we sold to Negras?’

Dove sat heavily on the curb, took off his left shoe and pressed the sockless toes. Smiley mounted post above him.

‘Git up, boy.’

Dove switched to the right-foot toes. They hurt like everything.

‘Face up to it, boy,’ the Georgian urged him.

‘Got to face up,’ the Floridan counseled him.

Dove’s glance took in all three. ‘I resign from you-all,’ he resigned from all three.

Smiley bent swiftly, scooped up Dove’s proud shoes, handed the left to the Georgian and the right to the Floridan – ‘Whut’s it going to be, boy – pot or shoes?’

Dove, risen, found his voice at last – ‘Them shoes costes more ’n any ol’ tin pot!’

‘Aint no ol’ tin pot, boy,’ the Georgian defended Old Dominion, ‘you know right well that there’s a genuine French Dripolator.’

‘Get goin’, son,’ the Floridan advised him.

Dove shuffled down the grass while Smiley padded the pavement the whole barefoot way back to the tenement.

‘Mister,’ Dove promised Smiley Wreneger at the door, ‘you wait here. I’ll git you back your sorry pot.’

Smiley snapped open his watch, gave it a glance and closed it with a decisive click. ‘Don’t like to law a man. You got five minutes.’

The moment Dove got a door between himself and Smiley he thought, ‘This might take more than five,’ and latched it. Then poked his head inside the beaded curtain Minnie-Mae called a door. Her eyes glowed upon him from a farther corner like two plums in a bowl of cream.

‘Don’t stand half in and half out, cawfee man,’ she invited him, ‘either come visit or go away.’

Dove stepped inside, apologizing, ‘Don’t mean to appear ongrateful, miss, for you’ve been pure-quill kind. But a certain party has carried me back here account of one old coffee-pot. Now aint that as sorry a circumstance as ever you heard tell?’

The girl was sitting in an old-fashioned rocker wearing only a white wisp of a slip. Somewhere in the room punk was burning. But her own scent, burning more darkly than that, cut through it.

‘Why, where your fine yellow shoes, cawfee man?’

‘The company’s holding them against that same pitiful pot. O miss,’ Dove broke with the disappointment, ‘I do try my very hardest. Other boys rise without scarcely tryin’ – Why don’t I rise like other boys?’ He covered his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Why for very shame’ – she took his hands down and caught them softly below her own along the rocker’s arms – ‘shame and double double shame on a great big cawfee man like you takin’ things so hard as this. Of course you’ll rise as high as other boys and likely even higher!’

‘I’m not as right sure of that as I once was, miss, however kind on your part to say so. You see, I got handicaps others haven’t got.’ His knees pressed her own and she let them press. ‘You don’t appear handicapped, cawfee man.’

‘In more ways than one, miss,’ he leaned as he mourned, ‘more ways than one. First, I can’t so much as read my own name. For another, there’s a man right outside your door waitin’ to law me. Now if that aint as pitiful a set of circumstances for a country boy to overcome I never heard of pitifuller.’

‘O cawfee man,’ she chided him tenderly, tucking his hands back below her own, ‘you are the biggest country fool ever to walk barefoot to town. Now tell me true – What color wuz that mizzly old pot you keep grievin’ so about?’

Dove rocked her forward to get a closer look at the pot, gleaming like a burnished treasure in the gloom on the mantel just above the girl’s head. ‘Mostly green, Miss.’ Could he get a hand loose he could reach it.

‘Cawfee man, you upsettin’ me’ – and putting her feet wide behind him and her full weight forward, forced him to grasp the rocker back of her neck to keep from being upset himself.

— ‘and a spot of red on the handle.’

‘O so you say’ – she hooked her ankles behind his and her arms about his waist to help him keep his balance – ‘So you say, but who ever heard tell of a red ’n green cawfee pot? I don’t think you’d lie, yet it’s hard for a girl to believe – a red ’n green pot.’ Yet for one in grave doubt her voice sounded curiously approving; and let him rock her forward again. ‘What I really wants to know is do it make good cawfee?’

‘Why, they tell me it cook pretty fair, miss. Yet it could be that they lied. It’s a thing I’d not take another person’s word for, were I you.’

‘I ’spects it depend some on whether I grinds my own.’

‘It’s always best do you grind your own, miss. For that way it’s much fresher.’

‘So you say. But what good is fresh if there aint enough to satisfy? Mister, if you talkin’ ’bout some little old scrawny-size pot I aint interested. What I needs is a great big pot, enough for both morning and night.’

‘So long as it make good cawfee, miss, size don’t scarcely matter.’

‘It matter a lot if it so small it boil over the minute your back is turned.’

‘This is a slow-boiler type pot, miss,’ Dove recalled, rocking her back so far that her slip slid to her navel, ‘with a spot of red on the handle.’

Minnie-Mae let her head rest on the chair’s cushioned back and looked up still unbelieving. ‘So you say. But you talks so smooth I begin to doubt you’s a country boy at all. You a city boy without shoes – Now aint you?’

Dove straightened up with a sudden pride. ‘I’m purely country, miss, head to toe, and aint nothin’ to be ashamed of in that. It weren’t town boys made our country great – when danger called it was country boys first to answer the call! And many and many a barefoot boy has rose mighty high, though I don’t recall their names at the moment. Us country boys, we give our all! – O miss, if only someone would give me a chance to rise I wouldn’t ask for pay. You don’t get rich askin’ for raises, that much I know. It’s the boys who were willing to work just for the experience got to be millionaires! Miss, if I could just get my shoes back I’m sure I’d start to rise like others.’

‘Why you just said yourself boys without shoes rise more high than them that has them. Don’t handicap yourself further by puttin’ on shoes, you comical fool.’

Someone tried the latch of the door, then padded softly off. Dove saw the pot almost within reach and felt himself gaining ground inch by inch.

‘Your belt-buckle botherin’ me, country-fool.’

The old-fashioned rocker went creakety-creak.

‘Now grind cawfee and goddamn your country shoes!’

But Dove only stood waggling his loose tooth, carefully gauging the distance to the pot with his pants around his ankles. He got his little finger around the spout when he heard a swamp mosquito taxiing in: he knew it was a swamp mosquito because it had two motors. It raced down the runway of his left buttock, rocked to a stop, then tried the flesh tentatively as if testing for density. Dove gave his rump a waggle to shake it loose and the movement cost the insect its footing. With the fury of any dignified individual shoved without warning into the street, it planted both feet to gain the greatest leverage and sank its avid proboscis so deep Dove leaped like a hare with the pang.

‘O CAWfee man! O you MIGHTY CAWfee man! O you cawfeegrinding CAWfee man! O you grind so good! O you my cawfiest cawfee man!’ The bug began drilling for bone but the girl gripped both his wrists. All Dove could do was waggle and jerk in a perfect frenzy and the harder he waggled and jerked the more resolved the bug grew to get a bit of bone.

‘I get you shoes! I get you shirts! I get you hats ’n all that! O proud-size cawfee man!’ – then her voice was drowned in a grateful animal groaning – ‘Gawd! Gawd! Gawd!’ And with every ‘Gawd’ she regained lost ground, climbing his back and forcing him further and further from the pot. By the time her ankles were locked behind his neck Dove knew he was losing territory fast. As the old-fashioned rocker went creakety-creak.

‘Out of that!’ The girl’s foot slipped around Dove’s chin and by her instep catapulted him as if he’d been kicked by a mule. He landed entangled in his pants just as Smiley crashed through the window bringing sash, screen and all with him.

Minnie-Mae met Smiley mid-room with the full momentum of the chair behind her – Dove shut his eyes at the soft solid whooosh as her fist broke Smiley’s breath and his legs flew up and he landed even harder than had Dove.

As an empty rocker went clickety-click.

‘I love a fool,’ Dove heard the girl tell, ‘but you two suits me too well.’

‘One of them must be me,’ Dove guessed, though she was looking down at Smiley with the pot in her hand. ‘Get out of here, cawfee fool,’ she added, and Dove hopped to it, kangarooing right across Smiley – in mid-air a fat hand clasped his ankle – down he came once again.

‘Miscegenation!’ Smiley sat up roaring, hauling Dove in like he was something on a line. ‘Miscegenation ’n pot theft! Dirt-eatin’ bugger! Wheah’s my pot?’

‘Heah’s my pot!’ – Minnie-Mae proved whose it was once and for all by clanging it like a bell against his skull. Dove heard the tinny wanning, felt his ankle freed, sprawled across a chest and was out the window. He landed running, gripping his belt and pursued by an illusion that Smiley was right behind him with a screen around his neck, Minnie-Mae right behind Smiley with a dented pot and the law behind all waving a billy three feet long.

Dove didn’t stop for breath till he’d rounded four corners and saw no one was following after all.

‘Reckon I do take things a mite hard,’ he thought, getting his buckle fastened at last. ‘Still, it do seem a great curiosity, how some boys rise so easy while others got to struggle so and lose their shoes in the struggle. Sometimes I almost think it’d be money in my pocket if I’d never been born.’

Back on the corner of Calhoun and Magnolia he rested on the curb and sat looking at the day. It was a mighty nice day and people looked friendly.

‘I reckon I ought to start lookin’ for work,’ he thought.

‘Don’t run, goodbuddy,’ a towering shadow advised him. Craning his neck about, Dove saw the long Floridan and the half-pint Georgian.

‘Don’t need to run, goodbuddy,’ the Georgian assured him, ‘we on your side now.’

‘Been on your side from the very start as a matter of fact.’

‘Too plumb beat to run anyhow,’ Dove abandoned hope. Then saw that each bore a yellow shoe. He eyed both shoes with distaste. ‘Them durn things have nigh to destroy me,’ he decided, ‘and they squeak like a new saddle besides.’

‘Man owns shoes as proud as these might one day try socks,’ the long Floridan commented as he shod Dove’s outsized left foot – ‘soap ’n water wouldn’t hurt none either,’ he reflected, handing the right shoe to the Georgian.

‘Caint even tell how many toes on this one,’ the smaller man marveled as he shod the right, ‘but it looks like it left six tracks in the barnyard. What part of the graveyard you sleep in last night?’

‘Tried a hotel but the air was so close I just roamed till sun-up, like a bug on a hot night.’

‘Plenty room at our place,’ the big man offered his hand while his voice rumbled like a bumblebee in a dry gourd. ‘My name is Luther but call me Fort, account Fort Myers is my home town.’

‘Mah name’s Luther too,’ the little one offered a firmer grip, ‘jest call me Luke.’

‘Like the bullet said to the trigger,’ Dove introduced himself, ‘Just tell me where to go.’

‘Did you have a little trouble back there with our friend?’ Fort asked while they crossed Canal at Tchoupitoulas.

‘If folks hadn’t pulled me off I’d have whupped him before he could of got word to God. I was just preparen to feather into him.’

‘That would have served him right, too,’ Fort agreed, ‘he’s the kind whose pappy made his way by driving his niggers and now he’s trying to make his by driving whites. He’s picked up a bit of Yankee philosophy – you don’t work you don’t eat. No true Southern man would never put a choice like that to a fellow human, black or white.’

Up a rickety backstair Fort pulled the string on a sixty-watt bulb. A room filled with a watery light, and mosquitoes buzzed in from the river. Dove saw a sink full of dirty dishes and a high brass bed precisely like another he had seen in his lost long-ago.

‘I’ll make out on the floor,’ he offered.

‘Aint needful,’ the Georgian pulled a curtain aside to disclose a cot in a sloping alcove. An empty gin-fifth rested there, uncorked, unlabeled and unclaimed: a bottle without a name. Luke tossed it at the screen, which parted politely to let it through, then closed quietly again. The bottle crashed below.

‘Who’s throwing things?’ Fort, in the other room, sounded startled.

‘Some nigger drunk pitchin’ glassware,’ Luke replied lightly.

‘Ought to be lawed,’ Fort decided firmly.

‘In my part of the country we don’t law them,’ Luke boasted.

‘We aint in your part of the country,’ Fort pointed out. ‘Got the rent up?’

‘It’s three-thirty a week for the set of us,’ Luke explained as if the question had been asked of Dove.

‘That comes to one-ten a week,’ Fort broke the figure down for everybody present.

‘Agreeable to me,’ Dove accepted the alcove and went to try out his cot. ‘I don’t suppose you fellows got a yaller yam to spare?’

‘Nary a yam, son.’

‘Wall, I just had a hankerin’.’

He heard Fort and Luke bickering about the last week’s rent, but listened only absent-mindedly. His right buttock still burned where the mosquito had gotten him. He rubbed the spot while waggling his tooth, till sleep stopped waggle, rub and hankerin’.

Fort looked like an ice-house horse mistakenly entered in a claiming race, then insulted publicly for not winning.

All his life he had been lapped by competition too fast for an ice horse. All his life he had been outclassed. Therefore no failure had been his own. How could a man who had never had a proper start be blamed for anything?

Worse, nobody would listen to Fort’s side of the story. How all the good times had passed Fort by, the love and the high living. ‘Watch out for yourselves after this,’ he warned all men, ‘I’m takin’ care of Number One.’

Yet moments of melancholy touched him when he realized that, somewhere, some deserving girl with a steady job was being deprived of him every day. He had tried, through lonely hearts columns, to help her to find him. But the columns had turned out to be taken up mostly by spongers advertising for somebody to support them.

What was the use of a world that failed to reward the deserving while heaping all manner of goodies on people who ought simply be given a kick in the teeth and sent flying? Someone just hadn’t been paying attention was how things looked to Fort.

He had ruined himself over and over for the sake of others and not one yet had said, ‘Thank you, goodbuddy.’ Forty years of selfless devotion to humanity had brought him no more than the faded cotton on his back.

Actually, those thin and rubbery lips had begun taking care of Number One with the first tug of his pinewood mother’s teat. And had lactated every available nipple since. ‘That was a real smart woman,’ Dove heard him talking in his sleep – ‘she gave me twenty dollars.’

That was how Fort had gone about making others happy. That was why, when teats ran dry and orange groves froze and shoe-soles flapped he could feel himself so terribly wronged.

And could bear his cross so mournfully, a sort of Kiwanis Christ in a Bing Crosby shirt, resigned to insult and injury, without a shred of larceny and incapable of imposing his woes on others. In fact, he told Dove so: ‘I’m not the kind to burden others with my troubles. Nobody will know from these sufferin’ lips through what Old Fort have went.’

Then play by play revealed through just what Old Fort had went.

However self-deluded, he wasn’t much deluded about New Orleans. ‘It’s just scratchin’ a pore man’s ass to try to make a living in this town,’ he informed Dove right off. ‘This town’ll starve you to death. I’m a mechanic, a cook, I can drive a truck or cab, I play the gee-tar and I can keep books for anybody. I made twenty cents yesterday and a nickel the day before and that’s doing better than a good many. A man can live on a dollar a day like Hoover tells him he got to – but where’s he to get the dollar?’

‘It’s a hard git-by,’ Little Luke cut in, ‘but what have a man got to lose by leading a Christian life? What if he don’t get rich but just poor-hogs it all his days? He still got a high place in the Kingdom comin’, aint he? Rich or poor don’t matter – Heaven apportion its awards accordin’ each man to his merit as I look at it.’

‘I guess everyone get exactly what he got comin’,’ Dove agreed, ‘but I aint old enough to vote myself and don’t think I will till I am.’

Fort had come out of the ’gator backlands to Coral Gables just as the beaches were being prepared for the boomer and the shark. Boomers and shark already lolled the palmetto sands. ‘Makin’ any money?’ they asked instead of ‘good morning.’

Fort had wandered among them looking for another Southern boy, but every face he saw wore the same obscene ‘N.Y.’

‘Makin’ any money?’

He had stood bent and sweating over oven and stove, plying the frycook’s fearsome trade, while New Yorkers got suntanned with girls half their ages a hundred yards away.

Soiled and baked by grease and sweat, still bent but beyond sweating, when waiters swung through the kitchen door, he glimpsed boomer and shark once more. Now they had changed to evening clothes and their girls to sleeveless satin. On the damask white as snow, dark wine or light looked equally cool.

One night an order had come back – ‘Not done enough,’ and had then been returned once again – ‘now it’s too well done.’ He had heard the metallic ring of laughter right out of downtown Gomorrah.

Between the dark wine and the light on damask white as snow.

Fort had that pinewood prurience that made him feel that going half-naked into the sea, even in the summer night’s sheltering dark, was ‘lewdling.’ So when he went wading into the midnight waters he wore long winter underwear. He felt safer, somehow, that way. Fort was afraid of all open waters.

He only went in far enough to let it spill through his palms and was careful not to splash. High overhead the bright windows paid for in Yonkers and the Bronx were filed one above the other. Oh, he knew what they were up to behind the shades all right.

O you smiling, treacherous girls, blouses unbuttoned and skirts unzipped, lolling up there in your bed lamps’ joy, saying ‘Maxie, play with me just right,’ while some king of the garment trade undressed her garment by garment. Hotel Sodom – that was what it ought to be called. To think of Christian girls, good Southern girls, daughters of families who remembered Shiloh and Atlanta naked up there in the arms of hairy brown thieves from Babylon. The giraffe-like man in the sea spilled Southern waters from palm to palm. In his heart burned all Atlanta.

Back in the windowless frycook’s quarters he froze one minute and sweated the next. He saw himself wheeling a Stutz – it was always a Stutz. And the wind that went by lifted the skirt of the slender blonde girl beside him so high he reached his big hand out – ‘Makin’ any money?’ she taunted him, and then there was no one at all on the seat beside him. Indeed, there was no seat beside him. Only a soiled pillow too hot to touch and the morning light seeping in from the hall that led one-way to the kitchen.

‘Makin’ any money?’ the chef had asked as soon as Fort had tied his apron that morning.

‘Makin’ any money?’ was the last thing Fort had heard that night.

He had learned to command the easy credit of that day and rushed, with other thousands there, to lay hand on anything of earth or steel or stone whose value would be enhanced as soon as a city would be built up about it. Though not a street had yet been cut from swamp, everyone knew the metropolis would soon rise and held stubbornly onto their pieces of earth or stone though offered fifty times their worth. Why give fortunes to strangers? Land that had sold for two dollars an acre went for three hundred. Business lots worth two thousand came to be worth a hundred thousand. Lots remote from any business district were reckoned business lots. Farmlands worth fifty dollars an acre became ‘subdivisions’ and were held for ten thousand per acre – ‘in a couple years this will be downtown.’

On the morning he made his first timid hundred dollar killing, Fort left the chops for other cooks to fry. Five hundred, eight-hundred – twelve-hundred dollars! He had never in his life been worth so much.

He developed cunning. Four thousand, eight thousand – the wind was behind him now but he was afraid to move out of his small furnished room for fear of breaking the magic. Twelve-thousand – fifteen-thousand – at eighteen he thought of actually buying a Stutz. When he’d run up eighteen thousand he resolved to pull out at twenty-five. The bottom had to fall out, he sensed. He wouldn’t be caught trying to make a million.

He made his limit in a single operation – then realized that stopping now would only be to throw away another twenty-five grand. At fifty he would surely stick. Every day he thought of that Stutz.

At forty-two thousand he bought himself the loudest swimming trunks in Coral Gables and showed himself in the sun at last, feeling suddenly half kindly toward other dollar daddies. Why hold it against a man because he was born in New York? A New Yorker could be a good American too.

He spent three days haggling over the price of a Model-T that he drove proudly back to his furnished room at last, and proudly mounted the hot dim stair for the final time. On the table a letter reported that his forty-two thousand was unnegotiable dust.

The sleeping till noon and the sherry, the port and the Stutz and the linen, all had been in his hands and all had slipped through. Now he would never give any waiter orders. Now he would never once sleep past seven.

Fort walked through the curious ruins of a future that never would be, through old never-was cities. The great million-girded metropolises fallen to decay before anybody had laid a brick. The grand hotels, the gleaming lobbies, the fountained parks, where now there was nothing but grass and cinders along the Southern Railway’s right of way.

Walked the little midnight towns, remembering the dark wine and the light; hearing his own heels ring. Thinking still how it might have been to walk at morning in a garden of his own.

And find her lying on her side in a striped hammock, in a dress so sheer the softest breeze rippled it and half-pretending sleep. He would rock her gently, there would be no need of words. Only her waking smile and her drowsy hands lazily slipping the buttons of her blouse to please him.

At midnight in the never-was towns hearing his own heels ring.

Or in the steaming New Orleans night, heard laughter faint yet still undying – dark men and fair women going at it again in the heart of downtown Gomorrah.

Then block after block the big freckled man, so stooped, spavined and drooping, wandered the lovely New Orleans night till he found an ice-cart. Then would sniff the ice in the cart’s single flickering flare, holding two pennies tightly as a child, this financial counsellor nearly six and a half feet high. Was the chocolate syrup really fresh? No syrup but chocolate could assuage his self-pity. Had it been made that very morning? At last he would venture one slow suspicious lick before finally letting his pennies go. He just wasn’t taking chances any more.

One warm night Dove went along to help him find an ice-cart with proper chocolate, and that night the first lick convinced him. He turned and beamed down on Dove – ‘Lend me two more cents, goodbuddy’ – and held out the ice to the vendor – ‘Make her a double, goodbuddy!’

That night the chocolate must have been just right.

Though himself without manners enough to carry grits to a bear, Fort was ashamed of shabby companions. Above a cup of chicory coffee he would study Dove so steadily that the boy would begin to wonder what he could have done wrong so soon in the day with the sun scarcely up over Melpomene Street.

‘Your whole family eat with their hats on?’ Fort finally asked.

Dove set his straw skimmer to one side of his plate.

‘Never heard of hat racks,’ Fort commented bitterly to the bitter window.

‘Your whole family drink out of the saucer?’ he asked.

‘I like coffee poured out in the sasser,’ Dove explained firmly. ‘Would you kindly pass me the toastes bread? I like it better with a touch of long-sweetenin’, but since there aint no long-sweetenin’ I’ll just give it a touch of the coffee in my sasser.’

Fort lived in a welter of unwashed socks, cigarette butts, icesticks, Bull Durham and strewn want-ads. What he was through with he tossed on the floor and never washed a dish.

‘Got the megrims again from eatin’ too light,’ he accused the human race in general and Dove Linkhorn in particular. ‘So dern hongry if I went out in the sun I’d be prostated like a dog.’

‘There’s a loaf of store bread on the fireboard, Fort,’ Dove told him.

‘I’d as soon let the moon shine in my mouth as to eat light bread,’ Fort spurned the baker’s common loaf.

‘Well,’ Dove thought it all over a minute, ‘light bread’s better than nothin’. I’ve tried both.’

But Fort, moved by the vision of himself prostrated like a dog with people stepping over him, rose and announced, ‘Turnin’ over a new leaf – takin’ care of Number One!’

And left in a rush to start taking care of Number One.

‘I do believe hard times is crazyin’ him,’ Dove told Little Luke later.

If Fort cast gloom wherever he went, Little Luke was a man whose life was one long yak. A go-getter with a little pug face like a rouged pekinese and a breath to cripple a kitten. ‘I’m unfinancial for the moment,’ he never blamed anyone but himself for being broke – ‘I was selling holy stones for luck and like a fool

I sold them all. Didn’t keep a single one for myself. Carelessness, carelessness.’

‘I don’t believe in nothing like that,’ Dove told him, ‘and wouldn’t buy one from a stranger if I did.’

Luke always had a commission coming in, a percentage going out and an urgent transaction in the offing.

The offing was in a shambling gin mill called Dockery’s Dollhouse, down in the district where all his strange business was done. Others said gin was a weakness with him, but Luke had a different name for it.

He called it wanderlust. Wherever he went some Miss Jane or Miss Molly pled with him to settle down with her on some fine old Southern estate. Luke would put her affairs in order, assuaging her fears by day and her lusts by night, until she’d surprise him preparing his blanket roll – they all went hysterical on him then. If he left her now she’d kill herself. Things had gotten so bad he’d taken to sneaking off in the middle of the night.

‘That part I can readily believe,’ Fort would comment.

‘Met Miss Molly at a Memphis candy-breakin’ ’n she treated me like I was somethin’ on a stick. Had this fine old home in Greenville and a restaurant chain – oh the sweet potato pie that woman put out!’ – Luke went lying blithely on – ‘the sentimental little fool. When she seen I had my mind set on leaving she give me five-dollar meal ticket good in either Memphis or Atlanta.’

‘Was that before or after she killed herself?’ Fort inquired mildly.

‘I’m plenty worried about her,’ Luke implied darkly.

And went on the nod right where he sat, his Bottled-in-the-Barn just within reach.

‘Watch out for that carnival-talkin’ jailbird,’ Fort warned Dove the moment Luke began to snore. ‘He’ll talk a country boy like you into some fool operation and you’ll be the one to take the rap, mark my word. Watch out, goodbuddy.’

Goodbuddy promised he’d watch out.

As soon as Fort slept Luke opened one glimmering eye.

‘Ssssss – Tex,’ he whispered to Dove – ‘Watch out for that piss-complected faker. He’s been in every clink between Miami and Houston. He hollered on me so he’ll holler on you. Watch out, Tex.’

Tex promised to watch out.

‘That’s what I call a couple considerate fellows,’ Dove realized, ‘watchin’ out for my interests in shifts.’

One night Luke came banging and jangling in, trailing odors of seafood and gin. ‘Srimps! He’p yorse’ves, boys!’ He bounced a greasy bag on the table, put another nameless bottle beside it, fished two Spanish onions out of his pocket and invited everyone in town.

‘Don’t taste quite fresh,’ Fort grieved, filling his face, ‘taste a mite swivelly.’

‘The scripters says it’s a sin to eat anything that parts the hoof or don’t chew cood but I like srimps all the same,’ Dove reported.

Luke began stacking quarters and halves ostentatiously. Somebody had gotten rich fairly fast.

‘I’m jest eatin’ them because I need sustenance so bad,’ Fort explained, his voice round with self-pity – ‘two orangey icesticks just aint enough to sustain a man till evening.’

‘Take this for tomorrow’s sustenance then,’ Luke sent a quarter to him with a small disdainful finger-flick. Dove tightened lest Fort return the insult with his fist.

‘They don’t know how to make hot sauce in this town,’ Fort observed, pocketing the quarter as if he’d just earned it.

Orange ice stuck to his chin. Hot sauce colored his chops. Hairs stuck out of his nose and snot hung hard to the hairs.

‘You want one too, Tex?’ Little Luke had another quarter ready to roll.

‘Thank you kindly all the same,’ Dove declined.

‘I didn’t think so,’ Luke concluded without looking at Fort.

A shrimp’s tail had lodged between Fort’s teeth and he was having the devil’s own time prying the tip of it with his tongue.

‘Mighty funny they don’t clean these things before selling them to folks,’ he protested as if he’d paid double for something. Dislodging the tail at last, he spat it on the floor.

‘I would eat one of them ing-urns,’ Dove announced.

Luke looked confused.

‘He means one of them—’ Fort indicated an onion.

It was true enough that two orangey ices wasn’t enough to sustain a man like Fort till evening. It wasn’t enough to sustain Dove either. Yet each evening he announced, ‘I got to get a soon start in the morning. Will one of you fellers holler me up?’

And lugged a sample case into the day’s first light, telling half-awake housewives, ‘A Store at Your Door.’ Past the Confederate Veterans’ Home. A Store at Your Door down Humanity Street and up Gentilly Road. Rapping the front door or rapping the back down Peoples Avenue.

Peoples to Almonaster, front doors and rear. As the forenoon heat began to heap both sides of Spain Street down to the wharves.

By noon, with his case lighter only by sale of one jar of hair-straightener, he’d be sitting on the Desire Street dock admiring a ship from Norway or Peru with a big nickel bunch of bananas beside him and one little dry Spanish ing-urn.

Dreaming and peeling, Dove would recall all the storied shores he had almost seen. Through half-closed lids his thoughts rocked down, down the great river to the almost-sea. The masted and magic almost-sea. Rocking so far out on the dangerous waves it was really too far, and so would rock himself gently back to shore: the sheltering home-harbor shore. Where friendly street lamps lit the way to some old chili parlor door. And half-dreaming heard voices of women of his little lost town

—to Dove’s own homesick shore.

He would blink the bright tears from his eyes at last. No time to be homesick anymore. Scarcely time left for a man to rise. He would pick up his sample case and lug on, rapping a front door or rapping a rear. It couldn’t be too long now before some little good looker would invite him too into a fine old Southern home, serve him sweet potato pie too and say, ‘Big Fine Daddy, please stop runnin’ wild.’

But he only came to a great lonely house where a wan redhead of twelve or thirteen cried out at sight of his little store – ‘Granny! A man with everything we need!’ She seized a bar of tar soap ‘for my nappy old hair.’ A shoehorn for her nappy old shoes and cologne for her nappy old bath; a nail file, a comb, a compact – ‘There’s things you need here too, Granny!’ It looked to Dove like the sale of the year.

Till an old, old woman’s voice recalled the girl, and she returned looking more wan than before. And, kneeling silently, replaced every item she had taken from the case.

‘It’s awright, Miss,’ Dove reassured her, ‘Lots of ladies pick out things ’n then change their minds, times bein’ hard as they are.’

‘I didn’t intend to disappoint you,’ the child told him quietly. A nickel spun into the case, the screen door slammed, that old, old house stood sick and still.

‘You would of done better to take the soap,’ Dove reproached the empty porch and shut his case.

But pocketed the nickel. It would buy a cup of Southern coffee and a paper for Fort to read out loud to him.

He walked the endless Negro blocks to home because it was still day. He was suspicious of them by night or by day. What were they forever laughing about from doorstep to door that he could never clearly hear? Their voices dropped when he came near and didn’t rise till he was past earshot. Yet their prophecies pursued him—

Fort was lying on the high brass bed when Dove climbed the Tchoupitoulas Street stair that evening, just as Dove had left him that morning. A couple of noon cups had been added to the morning saucers, a few snipes to those on the floor. ‘Haven’t been able to stir the whole day,’ Fort sighed.

Yet Dove had the momentary impression he had just come in.

Dove handed him the paper and cleared the table and sink while Fort read aloud.

Fort crumpled the want-ads. What was the use of getting out a paper that didn’t tell who needed a Financial Counsellor?

The Financial Counsellor didn’t get up till the dishes were done.

‘I s’pose I got to go shop ’n sweat over the cook stove for y’all now,’ he informed Dove by his tone just what it was like to be imposed upon by everyone day after day.

‘Won’t we wait till Luke shows up?’ Dove suggested, ‘account all I got myself is one misly little two-bitses.’

‘He’ll come in drunk as a dog but he won’t have his rent money up,’ Fort made a safe guess.

‘That’s his turn, an’ he caint help it,’ Dove defended his friend.

Fort began frying something and after a while it must have been done, because he lifted two shapeless gobs into dishes and put both dishes down.

‘I’ll eat anything that won’t eat me,’ Dove announced, and dug right in, cupping his spoon in the palm of his hand before he even made sure the stuff was dead.

Fort gave him the even look.

‘You actually like this slop?’

‘You mean if I had my druthers? Why, if I had my druthers I’d druther eat speckledly gravy,’ Dove assured him.

‘You don’t actually mind living this way?’

‘It’s better than jail.’ Dove was sure.

‘That’s jest what I thought,’ Fort’s suspicions were confirmed – ‘You actually like this life.’

‘It’s the only life I got,’ Dove felt bound to explain.

Little Luke came in grinning with good news on his face and another newspaper under his arm. ‘We’ve just done turned that corner,’ he announced. ‘Didn’t I tell you times had to get worse before they could get better?’

‘Luke,’ Fort rose to tell him, ‘if we were standin’ around wonderin’ which one of us to eat first you still wouldn’t call times hard.’ Then he left to look for something to eat.

Luke skipped to his coat and brought forth a stack of green-margined certificates ‘entitling bearer to one free finger wave and shampoo at the Madam Dewberry Beauty Shop’ – he rattled off the larger print. ‘Now tell me, what woman in N’awlins don’t want a marcel wave and shampoo for free?’

Dove couldn’t name a single one.

‘Tell you what it amounts to, Tex – you’re handing that lucky gal the equivalent of a five-dollar bill.’

‘I am?’

‘You’re workin’ with me on this, aren’t you?’

‘Would it be alright with Madam Dewberry?’

‘That’s my responsibility.’

‘Mighty obliged, Luke.’

‘All you have to do is watch out for telephone wires.’

‘Aint no plumb good at climbin’, Luke.’

‘Who said there was climbin’?’

Somebody’s step sounded on the stair and Luke ducked the certificates hastily into his coat. ‘Got a hundred more stashed under the steps,’ he lowered his voice and touched a finger to his lips – ‘Mum’s the word.’

Rapping with Luke was a lark. Instead of a heavy sample case all Dove had to carry now was a bundle of certificates, and didn’t have to climb a telephone pole after all.

‘I’ll have to wait to see what my husband says,’ his first prospect told him.

‘Reckon you’ll just miss your free wave ’n shampoo then, m’am. We aint comin’ by this way again. Fact is we’re almost out of certificates already. Only puttin’ out a hundred in the whole dern town.’

The woman studied the certificates with a married daughter beside her. ‘Seems just too good to be true,’ both frankly doubted him.

‘M’am, why don’t you just telephone Madam Dewberry and veerfy what I’m sayin’?’

Inasmuch as there was seldom more than one telephone to a block in New Orleans in ’31, the bluff was safe. She took one for herself and one for the daughter.

His second prospect had a harder head. ‘You wait here, young man – I am going to phone.’

‘Yes’m.’ Dove obeyed her.

But when she disappeared to primp for her trip to the corner grocer’s phone, Dove scurried to warn Luke off the block.

Luke took a swig from a half pint off his hip and didn’t feel the need to hurry anywhere. ‘Take your time, Tex.’

‘Here she comes now.’ Luke intercepted the hardheaded number.

‘Good morning, m’am. I’m the manager of the Madam Dewberry Beauty Parlor. My young assistant here reports you want to confirm this invitation. We like that. You’re the type of customer we’re looking for. If we can satisfy you, we can satisfy anybody. Don’t waste your nickel – I stand back of every word on this certificate.’ Luke drew one out of his pocket. ‘I’m not going to charge you even a quarter for this one, m’am.’

He put it in her hand.

‘I didn’t mean I wanted it for nothing,’ Hardhead protested.

‘If you want to pay the young man the courtesy fee of twenty-five cents, that’s purely optional.’

The woman handed Dove a quarter and returned to the house reading the smaller print.

The rest of the morning went easier. By noon twenty-five quarters jingled in Dove’s jeans and he still had twenty-five certificates for the evening.

But by evening Luke had invested his own quarters in a bottle of gin, so that before they had rapped many doors they were in no shape to rap at all. Toward midnight Dove heard horns and bells. They were helping one another down Tchoupitoulas and the whole dark city rang.

On their old stairs’ steep sad height Dove held Luke back.

‘I wonder did old Fort eat today?’

‘Let the sonofabitch starve,’ Luke pushed into the room. On the bed Fort lay with his face to the wall.

‘Shhhh,’ Dove cautioned Luke, ‘don’t wake him up.’

‘The sonofabitch been awake for hours,’ Luke decided, and shook Fort by the shoulders. ‘Hey! Good old buddy! Srimps! Fresh srimps!’

Fort turned about. Hunger kept glassing his eyes. He didn’t see shrimps. He didn’t smell shrimps.

‘Because there aint no srimps because we et ’em all, goodbuddy,’ Luke laughed with real glee and did a little taunting song and dance—

Dove remembered his own pockets and withdrew six cold shrimps wrapped in a paper napkin.

‘Here, Fort,’ and held them out over the sleeper’s face to show it wasn’t a joke after all. ‘As good-tasted a srimp as ever you et—’ Fort swung a hand and sent shrimps and napkin flying.

One ricocheted off the wall onto the bed. Dove picked it up and nibbled drunkenly at it, looking down at six and a half feet of self-pity huddled under a dirty patch quilt.

Hours later he was wakened by someone padding about. Luke was snoring in the chair. Dove saw a match’s flare. Then a kind of chewing-sucking sound. ‘I hope he finds them all,’ Dove thought and returned to sleep.

In the morning Fort had left.

‘I think he’s a mite fitified with us,’ Dove felt. ‘We hurt his feelings last night.’

‘His type feelings is hurt till they smell cookin’,’ Luke was certain. ‘Then they come runnin’.’

‘I wouldn’t fault him,’ Dove excused Fort. ‘He’s just a poor hippoed critter.’

‘Hippoed?’

‘He’s liver-growed. His liver has growed to one side, that’s plain to be seen. If he’d been held upside down when he was a young ’n ’n shook good, it could have been shuk loose. Too late now. Be there ary egg about?’

‘How do you want it? Up or over?’

‘I’m not dauncy,’ Dove answered, ‘I like an egg everwhat way.’

When both eggs were everwhatted, Luke set them down thoughtfully, though not commonly a thoughtful man.

They left the pan and the dishes for Fort to clean and made their morning run with twenty-five certificates each from Luke’s secret cache.

Upon their evening return dishes littered the table, flies fed in all the pans and an odor of meat burnt or burning hung like a promise of better times. Fort was stretched more than the length of the high brass bed, smoking a cigar looking as long as himself; like a man who had never missed a meal. It was an unsettling sight.

‘Spared half a steak for you boys,’ he recalled, blowing mosquitoes off in a T-bone shaped cloud – ‘but you didn’t show up so I said to myself, “You better knock that steak off before the flies get it.” Had to force myself, but I did. Sure would have admired to share it but it’s no use kicking myself for not waiting now.’

Sure enough. A steak’s remains had been fried right there on their own stove, and Fort didn’t spend that night in search of shrimps. Instead, he laughed at them both in sleep.

He never laughed except in sleep but Dove and Luke took their laughter waking. In the days that followed they stayed drunk, off and on, most of the summer day and often well into the summer night. They had no reason for not being drunk.

The days of peeking timidly into a backyard to check on telephone wires were past. A businessman like himself, Dove had come to feel, hadn’t time to bother with that sort of thing. He rapped fast and hard at front doors these days, and once when a housewife answered he challenged her before she had a chance to ask what he wanted – ‘Go ahead ’n call up! See who cares!’ – and with a tip of his straw floater was gone in an evening mystery, down a gently weaving street.

For some reason sales began falling off. Would times get better before they ran out of certificates? Luke was sure things were on the upgrade, the worst of the Depression was over and they would have certificates left they would have no use for. But Fort felt the Depression had just begun. Things were going to get a lot worse he foretold, and would stay that way longer than anyone believed. Then the bottom would fall out.

Nonetheless, whenever they returned, shrimpless or shrimpified, the odor of sirloin, hamburger or chops made the air of the little room muggy, and Fort would be blowing off the odor with clouds of Cuban cigar smoke. Somebody was doing all right.

‘If you boys would only let me know whether I could expect you, I’d be only too pleased to put your name in the pot,’ he would complain. ‘Had steak again.’

‘I’m not peckish, I’ll eat anything, even steak,’ Dove provided for any such future event – ‘put my name in your pot anytime, Fort.’

But the only name in Fort’s pot was spelled F-O-R-T.

To show his gratitude for the night before, Dove invited Luke to turtle soup in the Old French Market.

In the dim familiar place they had to make way for a beggar in dark glasses, poking his way through seafood odors with the help of a white cane. ‘Excuse me, girls,’ Dove heard him murmur as he passed, ‘excuse me.’

The turtles had been given a twenty-four hour reprieve. No beheading being done today. So they ordered bowls of gumbo and gumboed bowl after bowl. Then it was catfish time and they catfished till they foundered. By the time they left the heat in the street had passed and the catfish sun itself had foundered.

‘I’ve just about et myself into the creek,’ Dove decided.

He felt so full of fish and gumbo he didn’t even mind when a collie in a well-kept yard charged him the full length of her chain. A white woman, holding the brute by its collar apologized, ‘I never knowed Queenie to go after a white man before.’

Then she took a long second look at the redheaded stranger before her and added with soft suspicion, ‘She never been wrong afore, mister.’

Dove merely tipped his skimmer. ‘Thank you kindly all the same, m’am,’ – and slunk off – ‘Durned old hound smelled the catfish in me.’

Out where yards weren’t kept so well and walks were cracked like those of home, he always felt less guilty. The last door he rapped that day was on such a walk. A Negro woman with violet eyes came to the door. Dove tipped his hat, felt his heel nipped gently, and turned just in time to see a fat white mongrel whip about and dash for cover under the house as if it had done something wonderfully daring.

‘He don’t care for white folks comin’ into his yard,’ Violet Eyes smiled matter-of-factly. ‘He say he can’t go into theirs, why they come into his?’

‘Thank you kindly all the same,’ Dove told her, thinking guiltily again, ‘Durned old hound smelled the certificates on me.’

‘This walkin’ ’n talkin’ ’n rappin’ ’n tappin’ is too much like work for me,’ Luke decided, and Dove had had enough too. Though it wasn’t walkin’ ’n talkin’ Dove minded. Nor even rappin’ ’n tappin’.

It was rather that each quarter he stole weighed a bit more than the one stolen just before. The sample case was lighter after all.

‘How many them phonies you got left, Tex?’

Dove handed Luke the last of the batch. Luke took a count. Thirteen. ‘I know a place where we can get shet of these in one stop,’ he promised.

On South Rampart Dove waited out front while Luke ducked around the rear of a Negro shanty and returned with a pint of Bottled-in-the-Barn.

They drank it down to the half-pint mark. ‘That stuff is so good a feller can’t hardly bite it off,’ Dove told Luke.

‘It’s the pure quill,’ Luke agreed, ‘you can smell the feet of the boys who plowed the corn.’

Dove took another just to see if Luke were right about that.

‘It sure aint gravy,’ he reported.

‘Care to see the girls, boys?’ a little man in a flame-yellow shirt and cowboy boots asked from a doorway so wide it must once have been an entrance to a pretentious bar.

‘They givin’ it away today?’ Luke asked innocently.

The little blond man had sideburns past his cheekbones, he might have been twenty-two or forty.

‘To a couple good-looking fellows like you I wouldn’t be surprised if they did,’ he conned Luke right back.

‘Reason I suggested that,’ Luke explained, ‘is that we’re giving things away.’ He drew forth a green-margined certificate. ‘Free finger waves at Madame Dewberry’s. Reckon the little ladies might be interested?’

‘Why, this is the very deal they’ve been wondering how they can get it,’ the little man pretended, ‘they’ll take your whole load off your hands.’

By the time the two pitchmen realized they’d been out-pitched they were inside one of those high old-fashioned parlors where a ceiling fan whirrs so leisurely in a big twilit gloom that you can’t tell whether anyone else is in the room.

Gradually the forms of half a dozen men sitting as men sit in a barber shop, collars open and Sunday’s funnies on their laps, one or two with cigars in hand, emerged from the dimness.

Something brushed Dove’s hair and he touched a spider made of metal, suspended upon so slender a wire it was not discernible until a wave from the ceiling fan swung it; then a burnished glint wound right, wound left in the soundlessly woven air.

The woven air so softly spun by spiders red, by spiders green, some low-hung and some high; some gold and others rose. Spinning webs so fine on thread unseen in a long twilit gloom.

Dove picked up one magazine, pretending to read as other men did. Till suddenly wishing somehow to outdo them all, and spying a book on a divan, he picked it up boldly and returned to his chair. He flipped its pages carelessly, as though the light were too poor for a man to strain his eyes. He had flipped almost through, then gave one more flip, and his hand trembled on the page.

For there his steadfast tin soldier stood, his musket clasped under his grenadier’s hat, and behind him waited the same platoon of two-legged soldiers. The one-legged one was still the most steadfast.

In his simple-minded amazement he thought it must be Terasina’s book.

‘The girls will be down directly, boys,’ a bespectacled mulatto woman wearing black crepe chiffon, in which she had pinned velvet flowers, came bouncing to announce.

‘Ask them do they want free marcels, Lucille,’ Luke asked her.

‘It’s been many years since anyone called me “Lucille”,’ she told Luke.

‘Many years,’ Luke agreed wistfully, ‘many, many years.’

She peered at him but the years really had been too many. Faces of others had come like waves of the sea one fast upon another. Now there was no longer any recalling what shore, what summer nor what night hour their eyes had met in love or lust or simple bargaining.

‘They call me Mama now,’ she explained, ‘I’m just the housekeeper here.’

Then she caught sight of Dove clutching the parlor’s one book.

‘That’s our Hallie’s,’ she told him.

Dove looked at the name scribbled in the front. So that was how to write ‘Hallie’s.’ And kept his finger on that name though he closed the book.

An old man in a high-backed chair hoping to make the price of a pint, and the boy beside him longing for love so hard that a name in a book was already beloved. While others waited like window-dummies, anonymous men waiting to stay anonymous. They sighed, they spat, they snored now and then, but were careful not to begin idle talk that might lead to discovery of mutual friends.

A little black boy in a shirt that reached no farther than his navel studied each client in turn. Some smiled, some looked the other way. He would look till he had his fill of each, then move onto the next. If offered a penny he would pocket it yet never crack a smile.

A feminine scent, as of incense mixed with cologne, stirred the portieres. Dove gripped the book tighter.

This would be Hallie.

But it was only the fan overhead that had stirred the curtain. Now the metal spiders hung more still, now the barber shop boredom grew yet heavier. Across the street a man in a black stetson was offering a bag of something to a girl in the corner door. Dove saw her look both ways down Rampart and look both ways down Perdido. Then reached swiftly into the bag and dodged as swiftly back. A moment later she reopened the door just long enough to spit a peanut shell into the street. Any transaction, even for peanuts, made with one party still on the walk could mean a pinch for the girl.

But the risk she’d taken paid off, for the stetson girded up his loins and entered clutching his bag big enough to provide a peanut for every girl in the place and still leave two for himself.

The first street lamp came on, looked both ways down Rampart then both ways down old Perdido; then steadied itself for the long night ahead. When God alone knew what peanutless monster, what penniless stray, might come there seeking rest.

A moon-faced blonde with her hair in a bun sauntered in, her face dead-white and her brows pitch-black. Dove gave a start, then relaxed: no, this one never could be Hallie.

‘Reba, these boys got marcel waves to give away,’ Mama told her.

‘You got insurance?’ Reba demanded.

‘We got insurance to keep your hair from getting nappy,’ Luke stepped right in. Reba held out her baby hand and he clapped a certificate right in it.

‘That’ll be a quarter, miss.’

‘You said it was free.’

‘The quarter is just by way of a courtesy,’ Luke told her.

‘Keep it. I aint courteous,’ and gave him back his gift.

‘She’s from Chicago,’ Mama explained.

But a girl with a face made up to look like a death mask of Joan Crawford, a real plastic mask of a face, began to plead for one.

‘Mama sweet, give the man a quarter for one for me.’

‘For God’s sake, she don’t even know what the guy is sellin’ ’n she’s buyin’,’ Chicago shook her head in disbelief at the ways of Southern hustlers.

‘Meet Frenchy,’ Mama introduced the mask, ‘and this is my grandson, Warren Gameliel. Pledge allegiance, Warren G.’

The little black boy wasn’t pledging a thing. He wasn’t even saying hello. ‘I do it back,’ he warned everyone. No one knew what he meant by that.

‘—and this is our Fort Worth girl,’ Mama introduced a blonde twice the size of the first, with breasts that could better have hung on a cow. No, this never could be Hallie.

Mama handed Luke a quarter for Frenchy, the girl received her paper, gave it one bored glance and handed it to Fort Worth – ‘You use it, honey, I never go downtown.’

She had bought like a child, for the sake of the transaction, and like a child had made a gift of it to the nearest friend. Dove saw that there was nothing easier than selling to hustling women. Reba was the only one who wouldn’t buy just for the sake of buying.

Warren Gameliel seemed less a child than the women. Clutching a penny of his own, he watched each transfer of ownership so intently that Mama declared, ‘I swear I believe that child can add and subtract.’ And added, perhaps to put the salesmen into a mood that would get the girls their quarters back, ‘We get lots of married men down here. I’ve been married four times myself. Shod the horse all around as it were. Once to a businessman and three times to thieves, and the businessman was the only one I was unhappy with.’

‘Is Looney up yet?’ someone asked.

‘Which looney?’ Fort Worth wanted to know.

‘There’s no one in this house name of “Looney” that I know of,’ Mama defended the missing chick. ‘If you’re referring to Floralee, she’s putting on her clothes. I forbade her ever to come down again without them. You know what she told me? “I don’t see the use of all this onnin’-’n-offin’,” – that’s just what the poor thing told me.’

‘What’s so looney about that?’ Fort Worth wanted to know.

‘After last night I don’t see how that broad can get downstairs with or without clothes,’ Frenchy marveled from behind Joan Crawford’s eyebrows, ‘I don’t even see how she can rise.’

‘She’ll rise and she’ll get down here and eat grits and ham enough for six, too, you’ll see if she don’t,’ Fort Worth promised. ‘She don’t even know she got a stomach, that one.’

‘Any broad that’ll make love back to her tricks,’ Reba reflected sadly, ‘—no wonder she got a appetite.’

‘Don’t begrudge the child her food,’ Mama reproved them all, ‘she got her ways and you got yours.’

‘If that pimp of hers had a saltspoon of sense in his head,’ Frenchy decided, ‘he’d wise her up. What’s a pimp for?’

‘You tell me,’ Fort Worth put Frenchy down fast, ‘you work for one.’

The door was swung wide and a legless giant, buckled onto a sort of street-going raft built over roller skates, wheeled in like one who came here every day, making a hollow thunder across the planking as he came. Dove watched him unbuckle his straps and leap, in a single bound, onto a low divan.

The little black boy came up to this enormous torso without fear, to study him comparatively. The great cripple gave him a coin, but the boy remained unsmiling before him. Suddenly he asked, ‘What they done to you?’

‘Such a serious child,’ Mama marveled. ‘Will you boys stay to party?’

‘We got a little work to finish,’ Luke decided to save them both money, ‘We’ll be back later.’

As they left, the man no higher than five feet in cowboy boots opened the door for them.

‘Come back by yourself,’ Dove was almost sure he heard the little man whisper; yet it had been said so low that they were a full block away before the whisper began to draw him back.

‘Sure would of admired to tarry there,’ he sighed heavily, ‘a little ying-yang never hurt a man.’

‘Terrible waste of hard-earned money, son,’ Luke counseled him like a father.

‘Just speaking for yourself, I deem,’ Dove corrected him like a friend.

‘Too much of that thing and they’ll be carrying you away, boy.’

‘Nothin’ wrong with that,’ Dove reflected, ‘inasmuch as it was that thing that brought me here. I’ll tell you just what, Luke,’ he stopped right where he stood: ‘I’m just urnin’ for ying-yang.’

‘See you back home, boy,’ Luke dismissed him. ‘Just don’t bring anything home with you.’

Dove hurried back up the street, afraid the little man might have left. It didn’t seem to him that he could regain entrance without being authorized by a friend.

‘My name is Finnerty,’ he told Dove, ‘follow me.’

And led Dove downhill toward the docks. Halfway downhill he turned into a tiled doorway that still held rusted hinges of a time when the place had had swinging doors. A one-story building built on its incline toward the river.

Although Prohibition was good as done, habits it had formed in those who had had their living off it for years could not be changed overnight. Every self-respecting speak-easy devised its own secret knock, peep-hole and password. Buyers wanted more than to walk through an open door, they wished to be admitted to a mystery. More, they wished to belong to a mystery.

After Finnerty had given the buzzer three quick shots, he waited a moment and added a fourth; then both stood in silence before a silent door.

‘Maybe aint nobody home,’ Dove ventured.

‘He’s squirrel-eyeing us this minute from behind the curtain,’ Finnerty confided without glancing at the window, ‘to see if we’re the type that demands service. If we buzz him again, we don’t get in. Doc just won’t be bossed.’

At last the door opened enough to let a white bug of a nose materialize before them. ‘Password?’ the nose demanded.

‘Respect is the key,’ Finnerty replied, and got past the old man. So Dove said it too and both were inside.

Where along the back bar’s thousand bottles, Old Doc Dockery’s hundred dolls remembered the twisted twenties.

Dark-eyed, dressy little town dolls and dutch-bobbed blondies from windmilled countrysides, redhaired colleens and gypsy dolls, a cowgirl cutie in a fringed buckskin and a Broadway baby in a fur boa, a geisha whose eyes were quarter-moons and another who had bobbed her hair and gone all out in Babylon; for her eyes were dollar-signs.

A penny-eyed doll and a button-eyed doll whose buttons said ‘Vote for Cox’; a cross-eyed doll no longer comical, and a doll wearing a bird of paradise. And one little down-and-out bum of a Raggedy Ann with patches on her skirt and wrinkles in her neck; right in the middle where the bar lights could make a small halo about her.

Yet birds of paradise or Raggedy Anns, though one pretended to be Dutch, one Irish and one Japanese, all had seen the headlines on St Valentine’s Day and had dated Harry Greb. Some had had good luck and some had had bad, but all had been born to the twenties and had died when the twenties were done.

Some of broken hearts when Wallace Reid had died. Some had gone on the nod waiting for Dempsey to fight Harry Wills. Others had grown weary after Starr Faithful had passed. One by one they had nodded off, taking their good luck and taking their bad.

(Raggedy Ann’s, of course, had been worse than the others, that was plain enough by her patches. And perhaps was the reason she had the place of honor right in the middle.)

‘There’s no price on them,’ Dockery warned everyone, ‘They’re not for sale and neither am I. Respect gets you in here and disrespect gets you out. Respect, respect is the key.’ No one was allowed to dicker for his dolls, no hand but his own could touch them.

Respect for the dead of a dead decade – that was the key.

The old man preferred the kind of drinker who asked that his glass be washed after every drink. As some men wish to be always drunken, as some women wish to be always in love, Doc Dockery wished to be always clean. To be clean and cleaning.

People, of course, could not be made clean. What kind of filth the old man had waded in neck-deep, of which he still fought to free himself in his lonely white-haired age, or what deep disease was concealed by this passion for hygiene was not clear. Yet it was plain that it had at last turned all his women to dolls.

Respect, that was the key. Respect for his women, and for his music too. His music that was Stardust, Stormy Weather, Bye Bye Blackbird, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, My Bill, Paper Doll, Red Sails in the Sunset and Tie Me To Your Apron Strings Again.

To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but had died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.

By and large they were theater people who had lost their theater: ingénues, leading men, stagehands, ticket brokers, managers of road shows, starlets and prima donnas. Albeit that, just for the time being of course, they were ‘hostesses,’ con artists, sneak thieves, con-men, procurers, cardsharps, pennymatchers; and a few honest just plain bums.

The first thing Dove saw when he entered the cave was the lion-headed amputee they had left at the brothel. By what alley-route he had beat them here only someone who lived on ball-bearings could know.

Finnerty drank with his back to the half-man, indicating to Dove that was the wisest way. So Dove felt somehow relieved when he heard the skated platform wheel down the floor, out the door and onto the open street.

Then, ready to let the murmuring hours spin, he put a nickel in the juke to help them begin.

the machine began

‘Now I’ll come to the point,’ Finnerty informed Dove when the bubbles all were blown, ‘I need the help of a healthy boy. I take it your health is as good as it appears.’

‘A might better, mister,’ Dove made a conservative guess, ‘and I’m always ready to make an honest dollar.’

‘You can call me Oliver, for that’s my name.’

‘You can call me Tex. For that’s where I’m from.’

‘My line of work, as you may have guessed, Tex, is women. Do you know anything about them?’

‘I know that if God made anything better I aint come across it yet, but that’s as far as my knowledge goes.’

‘In that case it don’t go far,’ Oliver decided, ‘but the question is whether you’re interested in going to bed with a young woman who has never been to bed with a man before.’

‘Mister, I’m a Southern boy and wouldn’t disadvantage no young girl that way.’

‘Southern don’t enter into this, Tex,’ Finnerty assured him, ‘The young woman is bound and determined to hustle. It’s all settled but the bother and inconvenience of breaking her in.’

‘Your field being women,’ Dove pointed out, ‘I reckon that’s your job, mister.’

‘Why, that’s precisely the reason I can’t, don’t you see?’ Finnerty tried patience. ‘If I did it she could come back a year from now and law me on the white slave act, for I’ve a record in that line I don’t mind admitting. I’ve already been busted on that charge once, and I don’t cherish being busted again. But someone like yourself that she’ll never see again – Oh, don’t be afraid of having to use force, for you shant. You won’t even have to undress this child.’

‘That don’t sound like no virgin girl to me,’ Dove told the pander.

‘That’s her claim, so I take her at her word,’ Finnerty told Dove. ‘The point is that, if you did me this one small favor, she couldn’t make that claim in the future. Do you follow me?’

‘I follow you to a certain point,’ Dove decided, ‘after that it’s a mite unclear.’

‘Maybe this will clear things up.’

Dove put his hands stiffly behind his back. ‘Mister, I can’t read my own name if it was writ on the side of a barn, but I know a hundred dollar bill when I see one. And I think you’d best put that one away.’

Finnerty tucked it into Dove’s breast pocket.

‘Mister, I can’t take that,’ Dove told him firmly without making a move to give it back.

‘Don’t worry,’ Finnerty promised, ‘You’re not taking it, country boy. You’re carrying it for me, that’s all. You’re carrying it across the street and up the stairs to a room where this young lady is waiting for you. When you come in the room you’ll hand it to her without a word – if I know her greedy little heart she’ll put it in her slipper and you take it from there.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘She’ll tell you that herself, country boy.’

They were at the back entrance of the house which they’d entered by the front before Dove hesitated.

‘Just one thing I’d like to ask, mister.’

‘What’s that?’ Finnerty was too close behind him.

‘I’d rather you call me Tex ’stead of country boy.’

‘Right-o, Tex,’ Finnerty agreed, and shook Dove’s hand to seal the deal.

Dove shook, and stepped through the door Oliver held wide.

A girl with the pallor of one who lives indoors, one low of flesh but high of bone, in red shorts and red halter. Dove heard the door lock behind him.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Floralee,’ she told him, ‘and I sing like a damned bird. But how did I fly here?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know, country girl,’ Dove told her, ‘but I’m to give you this.’

He took his last ten dollar bill and handed it to her. Just as Finnerty had said, she had a greedy little heart, for she stuffed it down her slipper right away without even bothering to glance at it and snapped the button that held up her shorts.

If Dove, in the minutes that followed, heard murmured laughter from behind a wall, he didn’t let that divert him from the sums he had now to do in his head.

‘It costes me ten dollars to make a hundred,’ he figured, ‘at that rate I don’t see how I can lose.’

On a morning so damp the salt wouldn’t dust Dove wakened feeling like something chewed up and spat out. His seersucker, hung on a nail on the wall, looked like something fished out of the river. Everything his eyes fell upon looked fished-out or spat-out. He had a big bad head and held it hard, mourning ‘Oh, it drinked dandy but Lord the afterwards. The way the world is going I don’t think it’ll last.’

But the Financial Counsellor was whistling cheerfully as he buttoned himself into a freshly pressed financial-looking suit.

‘Happened on a most curious certificate,’ he announced as soon as he saw Dove get one sick eye wide, and drew it forth like a document. ‘What do you reckon happen when one of them girls trots all the way downtown for a free marcel?’

‘Reckon she gets herself fixed up right pretty,’ Dove took a hazy guess.

‘Reckon she do if she got three-fifty. Which you know very well she don’t. Did you read this thing you’re selling?’

For once Dove was glad he couldn’t.

Fort touched a prong of his sunglasses to the fatal figures. ‘I warned you to stay clear of that Georgia hand,’ he reminded Dove, ‘now my advice is that you stay indoors. There must be a chance of husbands on the lookout for a country-lookin’ gin-head by now.’

‘I was only tryin’ to make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way,’ Dove explained.

For reply Fort fastened his face one moment to the mirror and must have been pleased by what he saw. For he left with a confident, executive stride, a man who’d be rich in six weeks if not in five.

Dove went to the window. Street to sky, New Orleans looked shrouded. He saw its fearful loneliness. He felt its dreadful heat. ‘It’s a misling day,’ he thought, ‘I reckon I don’t deserve to rise, doin’ that innocent country girl the way I done. What’s to become of her now?’

Fort was back in the doorway. ‘Was two blocks down afore I missed ’em,’ he explained, picking up his blue sunglasses.

‘Sun aint bright,’ Dove observed, ‘fact is it look like we might have a little weather.’

Fort snapped his glasses on and left.

‘Weak eyes,’ Dove concluded as the first drums of the rain began. Began, and paused, and began again to a slow and funerary beat.

‘I would most likely be married and well-fixed by now, keepin’ my clothes in a sweetwood chest and taking the paper in the baseball season if I could but make words out of letters,’ Dove dressed himself in his daydream now wearing terribly thin, ‘with a girl who could read ’n write too.’ N little kids – I’d learn them how to do it my own self.’ Anything could happen to a man who could make words from letters.

The smells of coffee-and-banana dock, warehouse and orange-wharfed shore were borne into the room on the wash of a rain that had no shore at all. Beneath it banana boats were moving out to sea. Trailer and truck were bringing peanuts and grapefruit to town below it. Endless freights moved east, moved west, by plane, by boat, by passenger train. By highways dry and highways wet everyone but himself was getting to be a captain of something or other.

Everyone but one forgotten Linkhorn bogged down in a room where the blues came on and the old rain rapped this door then, like somebody’s grandmother seeking forever her long lost first born.

And it seemed to Dove that the sun had gone down the same morning that Terasina’s arms had last locked in love behind his neck, that her good thighs in love had last drawn him down and her good mouth had last loved his.

‘You were my onliest,’ he admitted at last, ‘but we only got to B. These days when I don’t get to see you are plumb squandered like the rest of all them letters. My whole enduren life you were the only human to try to see could I live up to the alphabet. Then I would of had a chance to rise like others.’

Luke came in on a skip and a grin and stood in the middle of the room drenched, drunk, hatless, the laces out of his shoes, the shirt out of his pants, the pants half-buttoned; the picture of a contented man.

‘Take off your jacket, Luke,’ Dove invited him, for the jacket was clinging to the skin.

Luke slapped his thigh and did his little joy-jig. ‘It’s all in people’s minds, boy – business is better than ever if you only let yourself think it is.’ And shook himself like a duck.

‘You’re soaking,’ Dove pointed out.

Luke turned stern. ‘What the hell is the matter with you, son? Opportunity is knocking the door down and you’re beefing about a little rain.’

‘You looked kind of damp is all I meant.’

‘Son, you been alone too much, brooding here by yourself. Smile, damn you, smile. Let a smile be your umbrella, boy.’

‘Reckon I am a mite fevery at that,’ Dove conceded. ‘Havin’ no breakfastes ’n thinkin’ of bygones give me the morning-wearies.’

Luke brought the flat of his palm down on the table so hard he almost lost his balance. ‘Why didn’t you say so, son?’ He began turning dirty plates over looking for something. ‘Where’s my check? I have a small check somewhere around here.’

‘Must be so small it’s not to be seen with the naked eye. Fact is, the landlady came up but she didn’t bring no check. She come up for to tell she wants three-thirty a week for the set of us.’

Luke stared at Dove unseeing while his brain, like a pinball machine, toted an unexpected score. His face lit triumphantly. ‘Chargin’ us for a place where the roof leaks so bad a man gets his bedclothes soaked in his sleep!’ He leaped on Fort’s bed, stabbed the ceiling with a jackknife and down he jumped again. Dove rushed the dishpan to the bed in time to catch the first raindrop.

The second drop preened its muscles a moment in preparation for the death-defying dive, then dropped dead center with a tiny pingg.

‘Man would be a fool to pay rent for a room where he’s like to catch his death by dew and damp,’ Luke sounded ready to sue. ‘Borrow me a half buck till Monday, Red?’

‘Ef ’n I had money I’d buy flour ’n shortenin’ for us to have a pan of poor-do gravy,’ Dove told him.

‘You like poor-do gravy, son?’

‘Mister, I like any kind gravy: red-eye gravy, pink-eye gravy, black-eye gravy, speckledly gravy and streakedy gravy, piedy gravy, calico gravy, brindle gravy, spotted gravy, white gravy ’n grease gravy,’ n skewball gravy. I can eat lavin’s ’n lashin’s of gravy. Ef ’n we had us flour ’n shortenin’ now I’d pour a little coffee in the pan too. Yes sir, I do like gravy.’

Luke slapped him cheerfully on the back. ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, son. Smile, darn you, smile. Laugh and the world laughs with you, Boy. Look at this – in six weeks we’ll both be rich!’

He was dangling some sort of purple-feathered rubber in front of Dove’s eyes. ‘Whatever is it, boy?’

‘Look like a little kid’s balloon but for the feather,’ Dove guessed and inspected the device more closely, ‘only it can’t be no balloon because it’s hollow and couldn’t hold no air. I’m sure I never saw nothin’ to compare, Luke.’

Luke waved it like a purple flag. ‘It’s a contraceptive, son! Combines protection with pleasure,’ he flicked the foolish-looking feather on its obscene tip, gave it a joyous swing and twist and flung away the certificates in his other hand. ‘No more knockin’ ourselves out rappin’ doors for two bits. A buck apiece boy! One buck apiece!’

Dove shook his head mournfully. ‘I wouldn’t have the common brass to knock on no lady’s door and show her one of them unnatural-lookin’ things, Luke.’ Dove told him, ‘I’d go plumb through the floor if she knew what it was – and if she didn’t know how could I sell it?’

Luke grew serious. ‘Distribution is my department, Red. But there’s room for a good man in plain condom mechanics. Later you advance to fancy work.’

‘How much do plain condom mechanics make?’ Dove asked with only mild interest.

‘Twenty cents a dozen – that would be about four dollars a day if you just take your own time, Red. And Gross buys your meals besides.’

‘Who’s Gross?’

‘Gross’ – Luke would have taken off his hat in reverence had he owned a hat – ‘Gross is the father of the O-Daddy.’

‘Never heard tell of that either,’ Dove admitted, ‘but four dollar a day is mighty good pay.’

Luke scribbled an address on a slip of paper, then recalled something and tore it up. ‘Ask a policeman,’ he suggested – ‘but never mention “Gross” to anything in uniform. Get it, boy?’

‘I get it, Luke. And I’m mightily grateful.’

‘Let a smile be your umbrella, Son. We’re finally around that corner. Business was never better. Weep and you weep alone.’

And left Dove to weep or laugh as he chose. ‘Always downhill and always merry,’ Dove thought as the little gin-head’s demented skip-and-hop step was lost in the brainless titter of the rain. And felt as if he’d not be hearing that foolish step in any weather again.

He never learned how the little man had come upon the address he handed Dove that day.

The room began to fill with a gray-green river light, the very color of sleep. Raindrips pinged faster into the pan. Dove slept with his head in his hands.

To dream of a room where buckets stood about to catch raindrops and men and women encircled a bed to watch a woman and a man. Above the girl’s head the gloom was smeared by light like a yellowing streak of shame and Dove saw she had one toenail painted green. And heard Fort’s voice toll and toll from some chapel below sleep – ‘Hasteth! Hasteth!’

In a robe once red and now faded to rose Terasina came toward him wearing dark glasses and extending her arms to find her blind way.

Then one raindrop pinged into a bucket, another and another. It saddened Dove to hear them fall because each time one dropped he lost a friend and he could not leave till the last of all fell. ‘Boy! Wheah’s mah pot?’ A big hand began shaking him.

Under the light the real Fort stood looking down.

‘Who poked the holes in my ceiling, Son?’

Dove looked at the dishpan. Its bottom was barely covered.

‘Luke thought if the rain leaked in we wouldn’t be held for the rent.’

‘A mighty weak thought,’ Fort decided.

‘I got a little inkle, Fort.’

‘You got a little what?’

‘I got a little inkle Luke is fixin’ to move on.’

‘I couldn’t be more unconcerned, son. Made my rent this afternoon. Picked up six dollar in the rain ’n could of made eight with a mite of help.’

‘What line of work you followin’ now, Fort?’

Fort stood up and extended his right arm. Dove reached to shake it but Fort wouldn’t shake. ‘Can’t you see my sad condition?’ he asked softly.

Dove studied him carefully. ‘Your eyes look shut sort of,’ he decided.

‘Why, then lead me, goodbuddy,’ Fort asked without opening a lid. ‘Lead me.’

Dove rose dutifully and led the big man once about the room.

‘Now that’s all there is to it,’ Fort took off his glasses and opened his eyes. ‘Now wasn’t that easy?’

‘We had a blind Indian home name of Chicken-Eye Riley,’ Dove recalled, ‘Wore a tuckin’-comb. But he never went around with his eyes shut. Didn’t have to. He’d been gouged.’

‘Indians don’t have to fake it,’ Fort revealed resentfully, ‘all you got to be to get sent to a reservation these days is be some damned kind of Indian. The government’ll be given out pensions for bein’ Hebrew next. A white man don’t stand a chance no more if he’s poor.’ Fort suddenly left off complaining and used his executive-type voice – ‘You understand this is merely a temporary expedient until we get up a stake to get us into the oil business, goodbuddy?’

‘I don’t follow you, Fort.’

‘In Cameron County between Harlingen and Rio Hondo. Half a day’s hike from your own hometown. All we need to get it is to give the Sinclair man twenty dollar for a tankful of gas. He’ll furnish us cots and blankets out of his own attic. One of us takes care of the pump and the other buys up produce from the Mex farmers round about and wholesales it in the valley stores. The Sinclair man don’t have to know about the produce. So long as one of us is at the pumps when he calls is all that matters. You dig as good as you sell coffee to Negras, Red?’

Dove rolled up his eyes like a doll’s. ‘I can dig real good for I’m bedcord strong – what do I have to dig?’

‘Gas tanks, son – one on each side of the station! You dig one and I dig the other!’

‘To be part owner of a gas station,’ Dove offered dreamily, ‘I’d start to work before good day. I’ll dig ’em both sides.’

‘There’s a deal, goodbuddy.’

‘When do we start, Fort?’

‘Soon as you lead me around a couple days. Then I’ll lead you.’

‘What do I do when the policeman comes up ’n sees I’m not really blind?’

‘Never said you was,’ Fort explained, ‘all your sign says is “Help Me.”’

‘Don’t hardly seem fair after we whupped them so bad,’ it struck Dove.

‘Whupped policemen?’

‘No. Indians.’

‘Stop worrying about Indians. What you got to realize is the blind eye don’t reflect the light but yours do. That’s why you got to keep them shut. If you’re really blind you can go around with them open, people take one look and slip you a buck or two. Over and above that you get a state pension.’

‘I do?’

‘Not you. Really blind people.’

‘So do Indians. That’s why I figure to be a blind Indian must be the best deal a person could have. Still, this fellow back home didn’t have it none too good. In fact he spent all his weekends in jail.’

‘They’re strong for that firewater, or so I’ve heard,’ Fort agreed impatiently.

‘Weren’t firewater. It was a sow Riley was so strong for. He’d find his way to her guided solely by the sense of smell and his wife would come home and find him missing. She’d go down to the sty and put the flashlight on and there they’d be. That woman got so jealous of that beast she had Riley locked up every Friday night.’

‘I allow there was hell to pay in the pigsty when Riley got loose Monday morning,’ Fort conceded.

‘He never bothered her weekdays,’ Dove reported, ‘just when his wife weren’t well. He spent day after day in the domino parlor and seldom lost. He could tell every piece by running his fingers over it once.’

Fort sighed.

‘Either that or he couldn’t find her during the week. As I say, he was guided entirely by a sense of smell.’

Fort got him back on the main highway, ‘Don’t you go gawking. Just look straight ahead and keep saying “Who is it? Who is it? Who’s there? Who is it?”’

‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

‘That’s right. You’re learning.’

‘Who’s there? Who is it?’

‘You can open them now. I’m going to let you lead me until you get the hang of the thing,’ Fort promised. ‘Sunday morning in front of a Catholic church is worth from ten to fifteen dollars.’

‘That leak’ll be wide by morning if this rain keeps up,’ Dove judged. And blinked up to where the next drop clung, lost its grip and plunged, to become one with the eternal waters.

‘How would you like to eat at the best restaurant in town tonight, Tex? Set down at a white tablecloth right amongst the people who got this thing whipped and tell a waiter what to bring you?’

‘Thank you kindly all the same, but I lack the means to return the favor.’

‘Tell you what, Tex,’ Fort persisted, ‘you go on the blink with me and I give you my word of honor here and now, the day we get a stake we throw away the glasses. Think it over, son.’

Dove thought it over as long as it took for two more drops to ping into the dishpan.

‘My stated intent is to rise in the world,’ he decided at last, ‘but playing blind man on Canal Street just don’t seem the proper way. In fact I’d rather see my box a-comin’ than to be led by another as though I were helpless, when all the while I can just about see through that wall.’

‘Opportunity has knocked,’ Fort announced like an undertaker. ‘Opportunity is now going through that door. Opportunity aint coming back.’

And left like a man who would search all day, and half the night if need be, for the right flavor of chocolate ice.

To leave Dove alone to tote up the chances a single day had offered.

‘I could of took a position as a leader of the blind but I turned it down. That’s one. I could be a plain condom mechanic with a chance to do fancy work should I qualify. That’s two and I aint yet turned down the second. The way things are coming my way today it must be hard times are over.’

He went to the window to see the city. There were lights in the haze but no sun was out. He was about to turn away from the window when he caught a brief glimpse of a sun he had never seen before. It was hiding behind the corner of an eave like a chicken thief at dusk. Dove stood quietly to see what its next move would be, thinking itself unseen. Sure enough, it edged softly off, showed a bit more of itself – a sneak thief sun, a sun with a hooded look. A sun of the alley stalls ready to do anything for a fiver.

Dove didn’t want to see what a sun like that was up to. He opened his Bull Durham sack and sure enough, folded neatly quartered so as to let him read the ‘100’ without unfolding it, Finnerty’s c-note still waited to be spent.

‘As long as I done it, it was just as well I got paid,’ he philosophized his guilt away.

Out in the lake-palmed suburbs, far from the dong and the glare, in a house that had once been human, Dove climbed a soundless stair.

The stilly stair to O-Daddyland in a pale hygienic glow. Feeling some sign he could not read must say ZONE OF QUIET. For the weather in the streets, and the seasons there, are no more permitted in O-Daddyland than in a surgeon’s washroom. Rainwinds washing children’s voices have nothing to do with O-Daddies. Step up in an airless quarantine, go down a passionless hall. Stand before a door without knocker or bell.

Till an anesthetic odor, as of gas or seeping ether, trails from below; as though abortions might be performed here.

Stranger on a strange-lit stair, you have come to a strange frontier.

The frontier of a principality whose only law is Rhino Gross and Gross’s many moods. A totalitarian state whose single industry is a curious craft in Goodrich rubber, worked out in forms sufficiently fanciful. Rhino Gross is his state’s sole industrial designer and Gross is a fanciful man. Indeed, abortions are aborted here.

(At night in the deep and dead time, old Gross hears again the soft scraaap of his curette against the uterus wall in a room that holds no other sound. Scraaap scraaap scraaap.)

Now the daylight man, ex-physician, ex-abortionist, ex-quack, ex-con, ex-man, ex-everything, enfolded and armored by layer across layer of swart encrusted fat, clasping his distended gut to keep it from slipping down over his rusted truss, is an aging animal come to the jungle’s rim whose hearing is excellent but whose sight is waterish, ready to turn at a tiny twig’s crack and lumber back to his forest’s protecting gloom. Yet stands one moment snout upturned and quivering, to sniff the dangerous air: now he is wondering whether it would be perfectly safe to try a little mock-charge on whoever that was across the room.

Dove caught a good strong whiff of the sniffer at the jungle’s rim without knowing that what he whiffed was actually burning rubber. When you work with guano you live with guano till you smell of guano. Gross’s hide was impregnated with it clear down to his money that stank of it.

(Who else but a disbarred gynecologist could have devised that technicolor fantasy so long before technicolor, of liverish yellow dipped at its obscene head in firehouse red and tipped by a delicate rainbow silken as baby’s first down? An improvement in style, function and line worthy of its proud name O-Daddy, The Condom of Tomorrow.)

‘First you learn your craft,’ Gross told Dove. ‘How else do I tell what you’re worth?’ Then deciding to show Whoever-It-Was that he really was a furious charger at heart, lowered his snout and trumpeted terribly – ‘Welma! Welma!’

A swift light step and there materialized a woman whose life had been consumed. She may have been thirty-five or sixty but wasn’t quite through burning yet. She was wearing a rubber apron over a gum-colored dress and pigtails bound by a big pink bow that bounced as if the very hair were rubberized. Apparently her sight wasn’t much better than Gross’s, for she stood dangling one glove, specs in hand, looking about for some way to clean them of particles of reddish dust. At length she stooped, brought up a corner of her slip far enough to serve as a lens-cleaner.

‘Look the bow ribbon!’ Gross squeaked with mocking glee – ‘Welma the wulcanized woomin! Aint a wife! Aint a mother!’ – his voice turned stern with shame for her – ‘What are you? You think a bow ribbon makes a woomin?’

The woman snapped her specs on and beamed upon Dove through them as benignly as if Rhino’s derision had been praise. ‘He’ll mouse on me and he’ll mouse on you,’ she explained without heat. ‘He’s a forty-faced pigeon straight from Rat Row, quack from head to toe. Rather steal from his mother than ride a passenger train and I give him eighty percent the best of it at that. Now if you want to see how we get these things out come back here and I’ll show you how.’

The kitchen, so commodious it might once have served as a slave quarter, was now largely given over to half a dozen small molds of individualized design. About the molds stood cans of liquid rubber, open paint-tins and brushes soaking in solutions. Above a wide white oven a line of O-Daddies hung like sausages to dry.

This was also the place where Cupid’s Arrows came warm off the forge and Ticklish Tessies lounged about. The craze in Laughing Maggies had almost died but Ding-Dong Darlings had a promising future. Happy Hannahs roomed here; Barney Googles were having their noses pinched by clothespins on a wire line. Here Gross moved Love’s Fancies by the gross; and a reddish dust lay over everything. For the O-Daddy was not the only creation of the hand and heart and brain of this dishonored genius. It was only his masterpiece.

Yet through the air made thick by gum, by paint, by turpentine, Dove smelled something better than any of these – something was doing inside that oven for sure. When Velma peered in he caught a glimpse of a chicken roasting on a bed of yams.

‘Don’t mind Gross,’ she reassured him, ‘all it means when he hollers is he’s scared. I’m sure I don’t know what he’s scared of because there’s nobody here but me. The creature is ill of bad conscience and don’t have long to go.’

‘I didn’t pay him particular heed,’ Dove told her, ‘but your ribbon bow strikes me as mighty purty, m’am.’

‘Thank you, son.’ She seemed genuinely flattered. ‘Now let me show you how to turn out a condom you can trust.’

Painting a skin with a film of liquid gum, she nodded her head to indicate that Gross was listening at the kitchen door and deliberately spoke loudly enough for the old man to overhear. ‘He’ll give it out that his only trouble is that Broomface wants a word with him, but that aint his real worry. He’s a man with a double-W on his forehead and Broomface is the least of it. Those other parties who would like a word with him won’t bother to give warning.’

Gross’s big head came through the door: ‘Old-time shoplifter stealing all her life!’ he announced like a station caller. ‘Wanted by everyone but the church! One hand over her heart and the other in your pocket!’ He slammed the door before she could insult him in turn.

Velma the Vulcanized Woman, Dove saw, retained a faint copperish tint to her ash-blond hair and her face bore traces of Saxon beauty. She was humanized as well as vulcanized, he perceived.

‘Every bare window in this town reminds me of Arkansas,’ she admitted to Dove. ‘I might as well be in jails as the way I am.’

Sitting at the window she looked out upon a world of rogues with innocence and wonder, and both her cheekbones smashed. Her ash-blond bangs, streaked broadly now with gray, belied the fact that there wasn’t much on the books Velma hadn’t tried and a few deals she’d thought up by herself.

Goin’ to town Mama, what’ll I bring you back? she invited herself, and answered—

Just a great big bag of candy and a J. C. Stetson hat

She came of a long line of country thieves that had grown shrewd in the mountains. Velma had grown yet shrewder in town. And at last, too shrewd to trust on the common highway, had become the shrewdest inmate at the Women’s Reformatory at Aldington. Not yet twenty when she’d been first sent up, she had immediately distinguished herself by saying to a colored matron – ‘Hold this for me’ – and had shoved a tableknife with a friction-taped handle into the woman’s abdomen.

‘Will you spread a clean cloth for dinner?’ she asked Dove, ‘You’ll find one in that bureau.’

Velma spread the clean cloth with Southern variety – okra, clobber, cornbread, yams, rice, chicken, onion gravy and sweet potato pie.

But Dove had never seen anyone eat like Gross. Velma didn’t even bother to lay a knife, fork and spoon for him. He went at everything with forefinger and thumb, being particularly careful, every time he dropped a fried egg, to get every bit of it on his pants.

‘Mighty fine chicken, m’am,’ Dove congratulated her. The chicken was fine, the yams were dandy, the gravy was great and the clobber was super. Unluckily the small reddish dust had gotten into the food as into everything, so it all came to a single dish: rubber. Gross liked the taste of rubber. When you work with rubber you not only eat rubber, but your very dreams arrive in rubberized folds. Within twenty-four hours Dove looked and smelled like Velma the Vulcanized Woman herself. Those weren’t dead ants between his toes but only particles fallen from the Flap-Happy mold that had worked their way down his socks.

They poured the rubber and heated the glue, forged the forms and painted the skins, glued the feathers and hung the O-Daddies and sorted the seconds and burned the culls and filled the orders; and never went dancing down below.

Velma taught Dove never to put a Cupid’s Arrow on a King Tut rack nor to let an O-Daddy wander among the Happy Hannahs. When the sun beat steadily they risked hanging a line to dry against an outside wall; when it rained or was overcast the big room was full of skins hanging in rainbowed rows above the dark gas range’s flame.

In the evening the three outcasts sat in the dark of their old strange house, hearing human voices rise and fall. There was an amusement park at the end of the wide-palmed street, letting laughter come to them from a place where human life was lived out on rollercoasters; while they endured the rubberish dark of O-Daddyland like three ghosts yet to be born.

‘Son,’ Gross always began his nightly lecture with the same phrase, ‘Son, not all the O-Daddies are hanging on a line. There’s one sitting right here in this rocker. Would you mind either turning the lamp down a bit or else not look directly at me? I have a little aversion to being examined. Thank you.’ Dove turned a bit to one side.

‘Son, you look to me like a man of two great weaknesses, either one of which may ruin you. Women and whiskey, in that order. Take my advice, if you don’t want to wind up being one more Barney Google like me. First thing you ought to do is throw away that shirt. Never wear light colors. They catch the sun. Blue is best – mailman blue. The whole secret of not ending up an O-Daddy on a line is to look as much like a mailman as possible – who knows what the mailman looks like? Who’d recognize him if he changed suits? Get a cap with a peak that shadows the eyes. Wear glasses that throw back the light. Grow a mustache but don’t go into bars. If you must drink, lock the door and drink by yourself. Conviviality leads to fist-fighting, fist-fighting leads to rage. Look out for rage, son. People never forget a man they’ve seen in a rage.

‘My own appearance was always such that I didn’t have to lose my temper to catch attention. I always fitted into the by-stander’s memory, so that five minutes after a rumble, my description, complete to hat-size, would be at headquarters.

‘Watch out for the inclination to trust, particularly toward women. It leads to giving. Look out for that one, it’s the worst of a bad lot.

‘Watch out for flowers, watch out for trust, watch out for women, watch out for giving. In short, don’t give flowers to a woman you trust.’

‘He’ll come to the point in time. Just have patience,’ Velma assured Dove.

‘No woman since the world began,’ the old man kept trying to say what he meant, ‘ever accepted a flower as no more than a token of affection. Does she seem pleased at a gift so humble? “What, a daisy for me?” Why shouldn’t she be pleased? it’s a down payment on your hand, your heart and your brain and she knows that even though you don’t. If you owe her a daisy you owe a box of candy, and how long do you think you’re going to get by just on candy and flowers? Where’s the perfume? Progress, that’s what women want in a man. What is more natural than the step from perfume to wristwatch – now let’s see how long you can keep from mentioning engagement rings. Your very silence betrays that you’re considering marriage and are only trying to get up the courage to ask. Son, you’re good as done. You’re in hock to a house, a car, children, maid – you give up your freedom and there still hasn’t been a word said about what does she owe you?

‘Why, that goes without saying – she’s giving you her virginal white body, isn’t she? Don’t throw it up to her that you’re giving her your little pink body, that’s cad’s work – no, son, you’ll never get your daisy back. But you’ll find that appeasing that little white body is a job like any job except that you don’t get three weeks off with pay. If you try, your friends will fill in for you. Why do you think they pay me two dollars for a contraceptive that tickles if it isn’t because they’re afraid that the cat is starting to slip?

‘“Look for the woman” they tell us – but I take it one step farther than that. “Look at them sperms” is what I advise. Son, did you know that under a microscope every sperm looks exactly like his old man when the old man has a jag on? There he is, the old man all over again, with no particular place to go or if he has, he’s forgotten it. Just staggering from pole to pole, up one street and down the next, can hardly tell one door from the next, just hoping somebody he knows will let him in. Really not doing anybody any harm. All of a sudden a lady sperm – looks exactly like the old lady opens a door off the alley ’n whispers – “in here, Jack.” Pulls him in and latches it. Now you know where all our troubles start?

‘Look out for love, look out for trust, look out for giving. Look out for wine, look out for daisies and people who laugh readily. Be especially wary of friendship, Son, it can only lead to trouble. And it isn’t your enemies who’ll get you deepest into the soup, it’s your friends.

‘You might keep that in mind if you’re ever called upon to point the finger of accusation and say “that’s the very man.” Remember that you have to be absolutely certain, son. If you have the leastest leastest doubt it’s your highest highest duty to say you’re not absolutely absolutely sure. Do you realize that if you sent a man to prison on a wrong identification you’re a criminal yourself, little better than a hardened murderer?’

‘He’s cutting in a little closer now,’ Velma observed.

‘Why,’ for once Gross spoke directly to her, ‘doesn’t an old man have the right to die in his own bed?’

The vulcanized woman made no reply. Her chair was vacant. She had tiptoed out just to make the old man sweat in anxiety – ‘Where’d she go? How long she been gone? Why didn’t you speak up?’

‘I think she’s in the bedroom, mister,’ Dove told him, and waited dutifully for the rest of the speech while Gross went to listen at the bedroom door. Satisfied that she hadn’t yet crossed the frontier, he returned to his rocking chair; but had no more to say that evening.

(In the deep dark and dead time the old man hears the soft scraaap scraaap and feels the sudden sinking through the uterus wall and the blood running over his hand again. The uterus wall that, once pierced, bleeds till no blood remains. O, Old Gross remembers a thing or two in the deep dark and dead time.)

Gross lived in an unendurable twilight land, a land of in between, with a woman whom he had married in order to make her his prisoner. Now the prisoner was the jailer, he the captive. Velma not only had enough on him to send him to the pen for keeps, but also those inside-the-walls connections that Gross feared more than the uniformed law. He knew that she could have him disposed of without the bother of having him carried through federal gates. In any one day she had only to pick up a telephone and he wouldn’t see his rocking chair that night.

Dove’s function, he soon saw, was simply to perform errands that Velma would otherwise have had to do. The only ease the old man knew was when she was at work right under his nose. Whatever he had coming, it seemed, he wanted to see it come.

Yet Gross went on little errands of his own that didn’t bother Velma at all. Every morning she wrapped a small package in gift paper, tied it with colored string, put it under the old man’s arm and sent him off with it. He would be back in less than an hour without the package. It was some days before Dove saw that all the paper contained was garbage.

‘He leaves it on a street car or a newsstand for someone to find, thinking they’ve found something of value and hurry home to undo it, and there it is. What else can an old man do for fun?’

It seemed to Dove there must be something else even for an old man.

How she had found him out, here in the lake-palmed suburb where the rise and dying fall of a rollercoaster and bonfires on the beach of Lake Pontchartrain made summer sweet, Gross didn’t want to know. He had married her in a last despairing hope of winning her loyalty legally.

The woman had wanted a home of her own all her life. She knew a good thing when she found it. Marriage had turned out to be no more than a down payment from Gross. Now she had a legal grip on everything he owned and didn’t have to bother arguing with him except to indulge him.

It was his table manners she found most difficult to indulge.

‘I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee,’ she commented across the table to Dove.

Yet Gross went on dipping placidly. The whole front of his shirt was greased with droppings from his fingers.

‘It could be they never seen a oyster cracker in Arkansas,’ he goaded her a bit by tipping the coffee into the saucer so that most of it spilled onto the cloth. ‘What was it you said you got run out of Arkansas for? I always forget.’

‘The point isn’t who got run out,’ Velma corrected him, ‘the point is who they wouldn’t let in. I swear I never before did see a man dip oyster crackers in coffee.’

‘Talk to my ass,’ Gross told her, ‘my head is hard.’

She went back to the sink to finish washing the dishes that Dove was drying, and Dove saw her dab furtively at her eyes. ‘I’ve taken all the insults I’m going to off that cliff-ape,’ she warned Gross aloud, ‘it’s more than natural flesh can bear.’

Dove patted her gently. ‘He don’t mean harm, ma’am. It’s his way of showing affection is all.’

Velma would have none of such affection. ‘That man would be rode out of town on a rail where I come from.’

‘Look!’ the old man commanded her triumphantly from across the kitchen, ‘Look! I’m sopping up!’

Velma was a kind of cross between a gadfly and a ferret, but like many people streaked by violence, usually maintained a deep serenity. In which she sang not unpleasantly,

and went serenely on molding skins and painting them, clamping, drying, sorting, glueing, counting, counting days till the old man died. For Dove sensed she preferred that he die in his bed rather than by violence.

She would not give the old man the peace that such knowledge would have afforded him. Perhaps she feared that, once allowed to relax, he might just live on and on. After all, she had had a hard enough time and didn’t have too far to go herself. She could no longer afford pity.

So all night long the old man was up and down in his flannel nightshirt, hiding his money in one place or another. He would unscrew the top of a bedpost, drop a couple twenties down the hollow of it, then forget to screw the top-piece down. He had as many stashes as a squirrel in October and one of his favorites was the water box above the old-fashioned plumbing. He would bind a bankroll into a condom, fasten it tightly and tie it to the waterworks. But when he heard it flushing, and Velma would issue forth, he would race in there to stand on the seat to see if she had found him out. Thus giving himself completely away.

Actually she had found him out in everything so thoroughly she had no need of following him around. When she needed money she picked his pocket, that was all there was to it. If the pocket was bare she went to his bookshelf and leafed through a few volumes until a bill or two floated out. The old man had no way of banking without betraying his whereabouts.

Season of heat when skins dry fast below the copper blaze of noon or flashflood spring when pipes back up and colored clothespins clamp the skins in rainbowed rows above the dark gas-range’s flames, they pour the rubber and heat the glue, clean the molds and forge the forms and never go dancing down below.

‘When you start hitting toward sixty,’ Gross complained, ‘you feel some days like you want to take a cab to the graveyard and wait for your maker beside your stone. Yet when you’ve not had an hour’s true contentment out of all those sixty years, you don’t want to lay down till you’ve had your hour. You want something for all your pain.’

‘Maybe if you’d give more to others, like our Lord said to do,’ Velma reminded him, ‘you’d of got more. Maybe if you’d change your ways you’d still have your hour.’

‘If that advice came from anyone else I might heed it,’ Gross admitted. ‘Coming from you it makes no sense. How do I change old bones for new? It wasn’t give to me to live so I could give to others. With me it was a matter of take or die.’

‘You didn’t have to try to take it all to keep from dying,’ Velma pointed out.

‘I took all I could, that’s true,’ Gross admitted, ‘now you take all from me. Here.’ He crooked his little finger toward her. ‘Pull.’

One night Dove woke to hear the old man shouting, ‘Old-time shoplifter! Stealing all her life!’ He was at the bathroom door in his nightshirt and pounding the wood with both fists. ‘Give me a hand, boy! We got her trapped in the act!’ Between his shouts the plumbing kept flushing – the moment the waters had rushed once and risen, down they rushed like a thundering falls again. A light shown from under the door. It sounded like Velma might be drowning in the waterworks.

But when they yanked the door open, the place was empty. How she had contrived to start the fixture flushing automatically Dove never discovered. Yet there she lay, feigning sleep in her own virgin-white bed all the while, her country-grocer shoes at the foot of it and her cotton stockings hung neatly over a chair.

Dove got the plumbing quieted first, then quieted the old man. When he heard him fall back into a restless sleep he rose softly and dressed. He had had enough of rubber.

He stood at the old man’s bedside until he was sure it was safe, then carefully unscrewed one of the bedposts. He had the top of it in his hand when he heard Velma’s voice so close behind him he stiffened right where he stood.

‘That one is empty, son,’ he heard her say, ‘look under the hallway rug.’

From under the hall rug he pulled out a flattened parcel of bills and a minute later was losing himself in the shadows of that wide-palmed street.

And when he thought, later, of that strange-lit stair and the rubberish nights and days he had spent there he remembered it like a dream dreamt by somebody else.

Once he went back, out of curiosity, but could no longer find it. And began to wonder whether there ever really had been a place where O-Daddies hung on a wire line above a low-burning flame.

And a reddish dust hung over everything.

That was no town for the aged or the aging. There was love behind the curtains and love behind the doors. Love in the squares and circles and love along the curbs.

Particularly along those curbs west of the Southern Railway Station. Where every window framed some love bird lamed in flight. Where every screen door was a cage. What had been Storyville was now an aviary.

‘Come on in, daddy, we don’t bite,’ they invited the strolling voyeur, or pretended to vie with one another as he passed on. ‘I’ll take him.’

From wheatland and tenement, hotel and harbor, girls and women of a hundred feathers had come to nest both sides of South Basin. Girls downy as chicks who have just lost their mammas and chorus-line dolls who had long lost their down. Girls who came scolding like winter jays, ruffing their tail feathers and ready for battle. But some like little wrens of summer, seeking hollows to hide in forever.

At evening they watched the stricken street from their windows like sea-birds seeing a sunless sea darken and recede.

‘Daddy, if you don’t come ’n get me I’ll just throw myself away!’

‘Daddy, come in, we’ll have great fun’ – but it wasn’t great fun for a woman accustomed to Northern comforts to wake up on Perdido Street with the kerosene lamp burned out in the night, feeling drained and doomed in a stall whose floor looked as if customers might start coming up through the planks. The bedbugs that clung in grape-like clusters to the springs, the cracked enamel basin, the old-fashioned bureau, the greasy portiere that served as a door; the drawling in the hallway and the mosquitoes wanting out, all agreed – ‘Baby, you’ve been had. Baby, you’ve been had.’

Droning all night long.

You’ve been had, you’ve been paid for, you’ve been rented by the minute. Now anything goes no matter how wild so long as it keeps off the Storyville Blues. It was cocaine, it was whiskey – who wouldn’t get the blues? It was brawling in the alleys, it was falling on the floor. It was everything to give and not a thing to lose. It was men, it was gin, it was all night long. It was have a ball and spend it all – ‘Daddy, buy me one more drink and do just what you want with me.’ That was what they called fun on old Perdido Street.

Who wouldn’t get the blues?

Big-town girls found the anything-goes life of the cribs tougher going than the girls from orchards and barns. Farm girls could come on rough as cobs. But the coaltown and cotton-mill kids took to it easiest of all. Hard times didn’t mean a thing to them – they had never known another kind. They weren’t afraid of law, jail or even, seemingly, of infection. The anthractite had entered their hearts.

Every time an operator padlocked a mine or a mill in West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Pennsylvania or Southern Illinois, a fresh flock of chicks would hit town and start turning tricks for the price of a poor-boy sandwich and a bottle of Dr Pepper’s.

They were thin, big-boned girls, and when they fought they didn’t go for the hair or eyes. They went for belly or jaw, with fists. They fought like men. Out-fought, out-drank and out-hollered the farm and city chicks. To name only a few things they did with the greater will.

‘Give us your money – you’re drunk,’ with last night’s gin still crippling their tongues they taunted the teetotaling boys in tortoise-shell specs from Loyola and Tulane. Boys working on sociological theses who’d been told there was fun down on Perdido Street.

‘Professor! Let me talk to you! Did you come down for what I think you come? You just came to look? Girls! Specs came just to look! Okay Professor – look at what brought you here! Same thing that’ll take you away!’ – the women’s shrieks would deride the looking-man down the street and into the winding avenues of all his voyeur’s dreams: curious streets where he walked as the last of earth’s bachelors, hearing window-women snicker as he passed. In those dreams it was always the women’s turn to stare.

Hard lines, hard times, when soft girls grew hard and hard girls grew soft. Wise hands at the trade would invite with a whisper, ‘Daddy, you name it, I’m on my last legs.’ For men sometimes came down there looking for someone to push over the brink or someone to save – it was all the same. Play Christ or play Devil but pay your damned dollar. For two you could play both. For the lion that roars loudest at the bleat of the sheep there was lots of fun on Perdido Street. The sibilant hiss from the narrow dark was for a specialized clientele.

Not-Yet-Twenties bold or humble. Lost or captured, luckless or loose. The dark and the fair from everywhere who would have been safely married in Minneapolis or Seattle, Kennebunkport or San Francisco had Old Guard economics not demanded more Coca Cola love and less housekeeping.

Minnesota girls with hair heaped like ripe wheat: a Northern sun shone yet in hair like that. In the eyes of the girls from San Francisco big slow soundless ocean fogs rolled to their final shore.

Behind the eyes of the Oregon girls it was raining again in Portland. Somehow it was always raining behind the eyes of Oregon girls.

Girls with Western turnings in their talk and girls with the midland twanging. Who wore their hair long like Anna Q. Nillson or braided like Ann Harding’s. Bobbed or banged or flowing to the shoulders, rose-red girls or sallow, they wore their hair in all the styles, they softened their mouths in all the wiles that good girls did.

Sick or silly, maimed or strayed, fresh-fallen leaf or sear, the Storyville hustler chattered as cheerfully about husbands and wives, washday and landlords, lost chances and chances left as the good girls did. And kept souvenirs of their luckier hours, lockets and albums, letters and rings, exactly as good girls did. If she had married a ponce now doing a stretch, the girls who had married legitimate men felt a twist of envy toward her – but isn’t that what good girls often did?

She borrowed from one boyfriend to give to another, betrayed those who had helped her in order to do a stranger a gratuitous favor, let some pander debauch her as though she were something that ran on all fours and all the while had some mark completely convinced that she wouldn’t go to bed with a man to whom she wasn’t legally wed though he hung jellybeans on pineapple trees. Now wasn’t that just how good girls occasionally did?

Good girls and bad carried on so much alike, in the cheery old summer of 1931, a Yankee might well have been deceived.

The Southern boy was a bit harder to fool. The moment he saw a girl behind a door screen naked to her navel and lifting her breasts, he sensed something was up. When she did a slow spread-legged grind and threw in a blinding bump for good measure, he suspected it wasn’t free. When she opened the door and said, ‘Step in, I don’t bite,’ he went in, of course, out of simple courtesy. But he wasn’t fooled: she was after his money, that was all. No, it wasn’t easy to fool a Southern boy any summer.

When the white rain ran with the red-lit rain and Perdido Street doors stood wide. Where here and there, between dance hall and dive, some nightingale stood with the weight of her shame so fresh upon her that she couldn’t as yet invite someone even though she hadn’t that day bitten food.

(Nobody knew where these silent girls came from. Nor whether their eyes, searching inward, saw a disheveled and bloodstained bed or a new cash register. Whether they were eaten alive by regret as they stood or merely counted in indifference to everything: one dollar, two dollars, three and four, when I get eight I’ll get me a dress of tropical pink. When I get twenty-two I’ll get pink slippers too.)

Birds of a hundred varied feathers, hooters, hissers, howlers, quackers – it was a new kind of zoo wherein the captured foraged for themselves.

Some were feebs and some were loonies, some were tattoed girls. There were peep shows and side shows, fat girls and gawks and a dwarf who called herself the Princess.

There weren’t enough keepers to handle the stock. Panders who had never had more than two women tapping, found themselves without enough windows to go around. Five or six all yammering at once for her turn at door or pane, vying with one another to be top broad for daddy.

It was a daddy’s market, but daddy had to take care all the same.

Oliver Finnerty, ex-exercise boy and currently proprietor of six peepholes on the second floor of Spider-Boy Court, once having incurred a debt of ninety days to the parish jail, had turned over a girl to a friend in the trade for safekeeping. Oliver had expended a great deal of time and thought on this child, for he’d seen her promise early. He had told her, ‘Baby you go with this man, and when he says, “Walk pretty,” you walk pretty all the way.’ And to the friend: ‘Don’t whip her where it’ll leave her marked, or she’ll use it as an excuse for laying off work. Now good luck and God bless the both of you.’

Ninety days later, his debt paid in full, Finnerty had returned to reclaim his property only to find her wearing a long black dress and a pince-nez, and his colleague out digging ditches. Something had gone wrong. Finnerty had had to spend that whole day talking the girl back into her lounging pajamas. By the time the friend returned from work, a black lunch bucket under his arm, Finnerty’s patience had been exhausted.

‘Just look what you done to his girl,’ he berated the Benedict Arnold of Panderdom. ‘You took a nice sweet kid and twisted her all up. You undone all my good work.’ Then he raised the girl’s hair off her neck and began cracking her patiently, without hatred or heat, but mechanically, with contentment in a job he was the right man for. And like a good little whore she stood and took it, for she knew very well she had it coming. And that, once done, she had a chance for full pardon.

But Benedict Arnold would never be pardoned: when this sort of thing happened it wasn’t the girl’s fault. Now he could only sit mute and miserable, knowing he’d never be allowed to drink among honest pimps again. But would instead drink in crumb-dump taverns where working men play dominoes for nickels and envy those who get to work on Saturday too. Oh, if only Oliver would give him one more chance!

Oliver wouldn’t violate his principles. When the whipping was done, the pince-nez crushed and the long black dress in the garbage can, he turned to his ex-colleague and finished him crisply. ‘You. Pick up your lunch bucket and get back in your ditch.’

Dishonored, disbarred, a disgrace to right-thinking procurors, the Man-Who-Would-Be-A-Pander shuffled wearily, without a word of goodbye, out onto a street that other lunch buckets had laid long ago.

And was never seen in respectable circles again.

Finnerty, who looked like one of those little Australian foxes with ears half the length of its body, claimed to be five foot but had to be wearing his cowboy boots to make good the boast.

‘Aching Chopper’s giving me trouble again,’ he would complain of the girl who had been with him longest, the moon-faced Chicago blonde. ‘I know she been faithful as a broad can be but her teeth give me trouble. It’s a new plate now near every month. I’m supporting half the dentists in town.’

‘If you’d stop busting her in the mouth you wouldn’t have to support that many,’ the mulatto woman once called Lucille suggested.

Oliver owned five women, a single-motored plane and a captive mouse. He claimed to be the first pander in the entire South to transport women by plane. A claim making every single one of the five proud of their five-foot daddy.

He’d crowd all five into the single motor, deposit one on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, two near Hammond (where a fast track was operating at the time) and take the other two to Gulfport. To the women he pretended that his motive was to save time, but to his brothel brothers he readily admitted that the idea was really to save listening to all that yakking – ‘I can’t bear to be with one broad a whole half day, not to mention five.’

He had the identical weakness, as a pilot, that he had had as an apprentice jockey. He’d get so high on Panama pot that he couldn’t make up his mind. On a horse he had never known whether to go for the whip or tighten rein so that sometimes he had done both at once. In a plane, with five silly women high as himself and every one giving him orders, he wouldn’t be able to decide whether to land on roadway or grass. The road burned up the plane’s tires so badly it would mean a new set – but the risk of flipping over on the grass, inviting loss of his working principal, was even greater.

The second the women saw that Daddy was in the switches, they fought to be first to help. One would decide for the roadway and grab for the stick simply to have her own way. But one of more economical habits, wishing to say later she had saved him a whole set of tires, would scream right in his ear, ‘Idiot! On the grass! The grass!’ At the very last possible second he would holler, ‘I can’t please everybody,’ fling out both fists and make earth in a shrieking, careening lurch like a chute-the-chutes hitting water. Road or grass, the women loved it. It was a kind of thrill not another pimp living could provide. Small wonder that to say ‘Finnerty swings her’ afforded a girl real distinction among the women of Perdido Street.

The mouse was one that had barely gotten away from Hallie’s lame brindle cat. The cat, that belonged to one woman who would have nothing to do with Finnerty, had been going on three legs so long that it no longer killed, it crippled. After she had crippled it, the mouse had dragged itself into a corner behind the juke. Finnerty had fished it out and given it a home in a little box with a cellophane window that had once held face powder. When he had to induct a new girl, or to straighten up an old one growing recalcitrant, he took her to watch the mouse. His own face would be expressionless as he and the girl saw it trying for freedom in spite of all pain. He said nothing while it hauled its wrecked hindquarters around and around. Just as it seemed the animal had made good its escape at last, he would plop it back in its box and say to the girl, ‘When you get as much sense as this mouse we’ll get along better, little baby,’ and close the box. It was a warning that she ought to try to do better by her little daddy, lest he had to put his mittens on.

‘Daddy dear,’ his Chicago blonde once complained, ‘take me to the hospital, I got to get a little something or other took out.’ And leaned her head on her hands.

‘I can’t afford to be carting you in and out of operating rooms twice a month,’ her pander told her, ‘every time you go you’re out of action for days. One more visit and by God you get everything took out. Make up your mind to that, Aching Choppers – I said everything. This piddling around with part of a gut at a time disgusts me.’

‘But Little Daddy, why get disgusted?’ the girl wanted to know, ‘if you went to a doctor about a little prostate trouble, say, you wouldn’t want the man to cut off your balls, would you? A woman got things she don’t want to lose neither, Little Daddy.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ her little daddy closed the discussion, ‘you can get along without all that crazy stuff.’

‘That’s no way to talk to a girl, not even a pimp ought to be that hard,’ Mama scolded the pander in front of everyone. ‘The good book tells us “A woman is as a precious fruits in a garden shut up.”’

‘Shut up is correct,’ Finnerty commanded, ‘and anyone who says I ever hit any woman with anything bigger than a small housebrick is a coon-assed liar.’

He was as heavy in the shoulders and arms as a well-grown six-footer and the right arm bore a strange tattoo: A narrow cigarette whose smoke formed a burning boast: KING WEED-HEAD.

How much good this would do him in event of a pinch he never explained, and modestly disowned the implication of the tattoo. ‘It don’t really mean I’m the king of the weedheads, or course,’ he pointed out, ‘it just means that as a weedhead I’m a king.’ His distinctions were sometimes too fine to follow, and actually weren’t worth the bother of following anyhow. He’d been known to trade off a woman no older than thirty-five for a twenty dollar bill and a spring-blade knife, but explained he had reason to think she had been unfaithful to him. Faithful or not, if you threw in half a can of greenish tea with the twenty, he was ready to let loose of almost any one of his women. Except, of course, Reba, for to her Finnerty had been true: hadn’t he once been offered a cartload of green bananas plus a full can of potoguaya for her and turned the whole deal down?

But before letting that offer go he had taken a look at the tea, that had been of a light greenish cast. ‘If it had been the real boge,’ he admitted later, ‘I couldn’t have answered for my actions.’

Meaning, by boge, the deep-purple plant that only grows on Mount Popocatepetl.

He went in for broad stripes and coats almost to his knees, sometimes draped out and sometimes semi-clad – a man a full ten years ahead of his time with eyes as pale as the whiskey in his glass.

‘Oh, how I wish I could get off this killing kick,’ he’d complain. ‘Why do I do it?’

‘You might throw away that thirty-eight,’ Lucille advised him again.

‘Why, then I’d be without help,’ Finnerty told her in mild surprise. She was his housekeeper and was half-fond of him.

Yet when asked by a stranger, half-amused at the outrageous little sport in cowboy boots and smelling of cologne, ‘How tall are you, Shorty?’ Finnerty had replied, ‘About ass-high to a tall Indian. You figure you’re higher?’

The stranger answered softly, ‘I figure we’re about the same height, mister.’

‘That aint good enough.’

‘Could be you’re a little higher.’

Yet if he really liked you he’d warm right up. ‘I’ve decided not to bury you,’ he’d congratulate you then, ‘I’ve made up my mind I’m on your side against everybody. I’m not even going to drop you. It’s time I got off this killing kick and I’m going to start with you.’

Once Oliver was on your side he’d stay right at your side. He knew you needed him. And who could deny so close a friend certain small favors, such as buying him drinks all afternoon? What would be left of a friendship that couldn’t stand up under a few whiskies?

Of women he asked no favor. They had no more side for a man to be on than so many fishes in a stream. Indeed, there were so many fishes. And the bait with which he hooked them hardly varied. It was the immemorial chicken farm story procurers have used since procuring began:

‘We don’t spend our money foolish like other couples, little baby,’ the story went. ‘They won’t catch us wasting it on strong drink and folly. After all, you and I both know you’re no more a whore at heart than I’m a pimp. We’re just a lover and his little sweetheart up against it for the moment. You listen to me, little baby, and everything will be perfect. So much in the bank every week come rain or come shine. I didn’t want to tell you this, sweetheart, I wanted to save it as a surprise, but I’ve had my eye on a little chicken farm upstate for you and me for some time now. We get that for ourselves, just you and me, little baby, and in five years we’re on Easy Street. The day we move in we stop by the justice of the peace, little sweetheart. Because if you take care of me in the little things I’m going to take care of you in the big ones.’

What kind of a little sweetheart would it be who wouldn’t take care of Lover in little things till he got on his feet again?

But the weeks stretched into three and the three into a month. The months to six and a year passed by, and she took care of Lover in the little things and he took care of her in the big: he kept her out of jail or visited her there when he couldn’t. He saw that she always had enough tricks and never let them come on too strong. He saved her from drunks, thieves, pederasts and fiends, and once or twice a year took her fishing with him.

But nothing was said about chicken farming any more. Once, long after it was too late for farming, he might catch her crying and pet her a bit. ‘What’s the matter, little baby? You got a fever? You want to take the night off?’ She might murmur something then about candling eggs, but he wouldn’t be able to understand what she meant. And after a while she cried on without knowing what she meant either, as a girl cries over a bad dream long after the dream is forgotten.

In time the tears dried. She could no longer cry over anything. All the tears had been shed, all the laughs had been had; all the love long spent. Leaving nothing to do but to sit stupefied, night after night, under lights made soft beside music with a beat, to rise automatically when someone wearing pants pointed a finger and said ‘that one there.’

Then just like an animal trained to sit up at sound of a little bell she found her way to the bed assigned her.

Where lay all she had claim to in the world: a towel, a tube of jelly, an enamel basin, a bar of Lifebuoy and a bottle of coke, half to be spilled in the basin and the other half for a douche.

Her ears heard the pants inquire her name, and her answer to that too was assigned. (‘This week you’re Pepper, little baby.’ If you let her pick her own she’d come up with something like Jane or Mary.)

So she fixed her mouth to smile in reply, washed him in water a little warm, lay down and shut her eyes; felt his hands roll her breasts and a long weight upon her, turned her head to avoid his breath, sensed some little convulsive jerk of his backside and opened her eyes: time was up again, time to begin again. By the time she returned to the light made soft beside the music that had a beat, another finger would be pointing ‘That one there.’

‘Now you finally got her where you can trust her,’ was Finnerty’s view. ‘So long as she wants to pick her own name you still aint got good conditions.’

Until a girl had relinquished every claim but those to basin, bed and towel, you couldn’t trust her. You couldn’t trust her until she had forgotten it was money she was working for. It took a man years of dedication to bring a girl to that. Only when he had madams sending him cash – no money orders – from half a dozen parts of the country might it be truly said of a man that he was a good pimp.

Finnerty’s talent lay in his limitless contempt for all things female. He treated women as though they were mindless. And in time they began to act mindlessly.

At the moment he actually had two hooked on the chicken farm story working under the same roof, and both well on their way to becoming ‘that one there.’

Frenchy and Reba worked side by side, each satisfied that it was the other whom Oliver would betray when the Judas hour struck. Meanwhile they competed, week in and week out, to show Oliver his faith wasn’t misplaced. If one week Reba was top broad, Frenchy was moping all the next, feeling so useless and so untrue that Oliver had to buck her up a bit – ‘Don’t feel so bad, honey, you done your best. That week she had was just lucky breaks. You got the looks all over her, you know that. I’m laying the odds on you this week.’

Inspired by the knowledge that her owner was still betting on her, Frenchy went all out, getting tricks to finish their business almost before they had their pants down, hustling them out the door to make room for the next, clucking at them like an enraged hen if they didn’t hurry and – lo! At the end of that week she had made half again Reba’s take.

‘I never been so proud of anyone in my life,’ Oliver congratulated her that Saturday in front of everyone. ‘Don’t bother me, you,’ he turned on Reba – ‘buy your own drinks, bum.’ But bought Frenchy drinks all night, paraded her about, asked her what she wanted for her birthday, where she wanted to go New Year’s Night (this was July) and told her the chicken farm was now actually within reach. ‘Only two more weeks like this one, little baby, and we got it made for life.’

But for the next two weeks Reba topped the whole house, they had to hold her back from pulling tricks in off the street – and so it went, week in, week out, playing the one against the other till it was a standing joke at Dockery’s Bar to ask who was Finnerty’s top broad now.

A joke which only the two butts failed to understand.

‘You must despise women something terrible,’ Mama once grew bold enough to challenge him.

‘I believe, whatever you are, be a stompdown good one,’ was all Finnerty replied.

And no one could deny that, at his trade, Oliver was anything but a stompdown good one. In fact, he was a perfect little dilly. For he never came on cheap and loud, such as ‘Meet the Stinger from St Louis, have a piece of skin. Got six broads in Miami, six in Kansas City,’ and all of that.

Yet why should any right-minded girl ruin her health just to keep some unfinshed product in sideburns looking sharp? What right-minded girl could let any forenoon lush bounce himself off her fine pink hide to wear off his hangover before going home to his wife, in order that some Finnerty could bet the daily double? Why wind up, scarred from ankles to breast, in some panel house in Trinidad?

It was something Mama pretended not to understand, but understood better than she let on. The fact was that an unprotected girl got into all manner of mischief, such as getting drunk on the job and ripping off her joint togs and trying to catch a Greyhound for home. It took a good pimp to keep a girl honest, Mama knew.

Mama Lucille abhorred violence; yet hardly a week passed but she was forced to say, ‘Honey, don’t make me get Finnerty here with his mittens.’

Yet when he put his mittens on, Finnerty always said, ‘Baby, this is going to be a wonderful lesson to you. Some day you’ll thank me for it.’

More than one innocent, deciding she’d rather keep her earnings than give them away, would shake some half-breed ponce in Omaha and go into business for herself in New Orleans.

But sooner or later, wherever she rented, rooming house or hotel, desk clerk or landlady would make certain arrangements with or without her consent. The line the landlady used might be, ‘Honey, I’d like you to meet a nephew of mine in the sporting goods line. He’s a sweet boy, good-looking and lots of fun, just in New Orleans for a weekend. Would you let him show you a good time?’

Desk clerks didn’t bother with that. There was a knock and there he was, checkered vest and one hand in his belt.

‘I’m not hard to get along with,’ he’d assure her after he told her the score. ‘Whether you want to come along easy or come along hard, that’s just up to you, baby. I’ve got us a nice little flat above a bar in the class part of town. There’s a smart girl.’

Mama boarded only one girl who had never been pandered and never would be. Hallie Breedlove had found her way to Perdido Street when small-town gossip had gone around that a certain schoolteacher wasn’t really white. Hallie had succeeded in passing as white half her life, and had married a white man who would not have married her had he had the faintest doubt of it. When the gossip had forced them to move to New Orleans, she had kept him believing it was no more than gossip. Then their baby was born and the secret was out. She had not seen him since.

She held herself higher, and took greater care of her health and earned more money, than any of the other women. If any of them actually wound up with a chicken farm, it would be Hallie.

Yet when Finnerty propositioned her, he made no allowances for the fact that he wasn’t, for once, talking to a demented child. He went at her exactly as though she were as mindless as the others.

‘Why, that sounds almost too good to be true, Little Daddy,’ Hallie tried not to appear too excited at his offer. ‘Only I’m mad—’ she stood half a head higher than him, but she baby-pouted.

‘Mad at your Little Daddy?’ Finnerty couldn’t believe it. ‘Why?’

‘Because you promised Reba she’d never have to pull feathers and you promised Frenchy all she’d have to do was candle – but me you got stepping over droppings, carrying feed and slapping new coops together. Little Daddy, it just don’t seem fair.’

‘Them two fools,’ Finnerty scoffed merrily, ‘you don’t think I’d let a couple city clowns like them on my chicken farm, do you? You and I know what hard work is, we know what chicken farming is. Now wouldn’t I look good trying to tell a smart country girl like yourself that all she had to do is candle? That’s why with you I’m sincere. A country girl and a country boy. We know you don’t get nowheres without hard work. Don’t we, little baby?’

‘What country exactly is that, Little Daddy?’

Not until then did Finnerty see he’d been had.

‘Go on turning tricks till you’re sixty,’ he gave up on Hallie. ‘Just don’t come running to me for help, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t.’ Hallie kept a baitless string bobbing.

Yet when Frenchy would shake her head and say sadly, ‘Reba, poor thing. I really don’t dislike her, I just feel so sorry for her, the fool Oliver is making of her,’ Hallie would be noncommittal.

For Reba was equally concerned about poor Frenchy, and worried what would happen to the girl when she and Oliver left for the farm.

Hallie pitied both, and Floralee as well, and nearly everyone.

Everyone, that is, but Oliver Finnerty. There was no place in her heart, inside or out, that did not freeze over at sight of him gnawing his little nail. And while Finnerty could respect her lack of interest in his farm, he could never forgive her indifference to his physical charms. He was hurt.

‘The broad carries herself mighty high for one I got reason to think aint even got the right to be working the doors of a white house.’ He had tried and she had mocked him. There was only one answer now: force.

So he caught her alone petting her lame cat, the very one that had crippled his mouse, and came right to the point:

‘Baby, you got all that education working for you, let’s see you walk to that bureau drawer, take out every penny and come back here and hand it to me. If you hold out so much as a nickel it’s as bad as trying to hold out the whole roll and that’s plain stealing. Move, you.’

Hallie stopped petting the cat long enough to give the pander a gray, grave look. Then bundling the cat comfortably in the crook of her arm so as not to jog it, went to the bureau and put her back solidly up against it. In the bathrobe once red now faded to rose, her hand dropped casually to her pocket.

Finnerty closed the door behind him and dropped the key into his pocket. ‘You know I’m not without help, little baby,’ he warned her.

‘I don’t plan to cut you,’ Hallie told him quietly. ‘I got cut once myself. I won’t scratch you because I don’t like to see a man walking around with scratches on his face. I won’t throw acid in your eyes because it makes me sorry to see a blind person. All I’ll do is kill you where you stand. If you get through the door I’ll kill you on the stair. If you make the stair I’ll kill you in the parlor. If you make the street I’ll kill you on the curb. I’ll kill you in the alley. I’ll kill you in God’s House. I’ll kill you anywhere.’

Finnerty stood with his head slightly bent, his brow lined by doubt.

‘Did you lose something, Oliver?’

‘My key,’ he told her, ‘I lost my key.’

‘My key I take it you mean.’

‘Your key.’

‘It’s laying in your cuff. You got a hole in your pocket. Bring your pants up later and I’ll make you a new pocket.’

Had he actually appeared with the pants she would have sewed both pockets to the seat, but he gave her no such chance.

It was Mama upon whom he conferred that opportunity, Hallie was later mildly surprised to discover. There she was, the bespectacled mulatto housekeeper-informer with gray in her poll, a rosary around her throat and Finnerty’s boy-size trousers across her knees, plying needle and thread as though she were his mother. ‘I’m putting in a new pocket for Oliver,’ she explained, chattering on as the needle plied. ‘Oh, I know people say a pimp is the most pitiful shame, but little they know what such a man has to go through for his hustler’s sake. What if she’s sick or in jail? Who else has the poor thing to stand by her side?

‘Oliver didn’t invent his trade no more than we invented ours. I never heard of a pimp being elected mayor nor even of one who bothered to vote, so why blame them for the way things are? They weren’t the ones who made the laws that let the trade go on. If nobody wanted there to be pimps, honey, there wouldn’t be no pimps. Isn’t it strange that it’s the very ones who say we’re a public disgrace who pay us best? You know yourself that it’s the ones from the Department who come down early on Saturdays to holler, “Bring us two women and a bottle!”’

‘What’s wrong about two women and a bottle?’ Hallie asked, just to find out.

‘Honey, there’s nothing wrong with two women and a bottle, or three or four women and a whole case, so long as you don’t sneak it and preach against it the next day.’ Mama wetted the thread and pointed it through the needle. ‘If there was another craft open to Oliver he’d try it, and make quite a success.’

Sometimes Hallie wondered a bit about Mama.

For how disapproving Mama looked later, in the kitchen, while Reba and Finnerty were having a bite together.

‘Are you having coffee, baby?’ she heard Finnerty invite Reba.

‘Yes, daddy.’

‘Then make enough for two and bring mine here.’

‘Alright, daddy,’ Old Faithful agreed, ‘but butter me a little piece bread. After all, I work for you.’

Reba had been brought up in a Chicago orphanage although both her parents were living. They had taken turns visiting her on alternate Sundays – but one Sunday neither had come. ‘See,’ one of the other girls had told her then, ‘your father’s no good,’ – and had shoved Reba’s head against a flathead nail. The accident had caused a permanent squint in the girl’s right eye.

Now she had found a sort of father, one who was surely no good at all, but at least he came to visit her every day and sometimes twice. It was ‘My Oliver this, my Oliver that’ and ‘My Oliver is just so tickled with them raw silk lounging pajamas I bought him he been lounging two whole days so I’m going to get him cowboy boots to go with them. Won’t that be cute?’

‘Not the way I heard it it aint cute,’ the big girl from Fort Worth needled her. ‘How I heard it, you’ve been hiding them pants to keep him from loading up a sheeny wagon of green bananas and making hisself a nice profit by the time he got to Chicago.’

‘If my Oliver ever worked a sheeny wagon I’ll kiss your ass before God!’ Reba came swiftly to the defense of her household honor. ‘His whole life he aint worked one single mothering day! Never rolled up his sleeves except to exercise horses a little. Even then he was just settin’ up there, takin’ his own good time. Why, he won’t even take off his own shoes to climb in bed!’

That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street.

‘Any pimp whose broad don’t take off his shoes for him,’ Finnerty backed up Reba, ‘I defy him to claim he got good conditions.’

‘Oh, who cares what conditions you and your old lady got?’ the Fort Worth blonde dismissed them both. ‘Why, I got a daddy friend don’t take a dime off me. He buys me things. He’s going to buy me a Cadillac so long I’ll have to back up to turn a corner.’ Whatever Fort Worth’s real name was, no one ever called her anything but Five, to honor a navel formed to that figure. When asked to show her wonderful navel she would show it, sweetly and simply, just like that. Men pinched her bottom, yet she did not hold herself proudly just because of that.

No chicken farm story was likely to catch Five. She had been brought up on one, and had had enough of that. Yet she was wide open to the Cadillac story, which was nothing more than the chicken farm story on wheels.

Oh, that long easy rider with the real careful driver. When promises would buy Cadillacs, Five would own a whole fleet.

Until that time Five would go on her feet.

The courts were against them, the police were against them, businessmen, wives, churches, press, politicians and their own panders were against these cork-heeled puppets. Now the missions were sending out sandwich men to advertise that Christ Himself was against them.

‘If it weren’t for Mama who’d take our side?’ Frenchy demanded to know, and stick up for them Mama did. She took their side against Oliver, ordered him out of her house, and told him not to come back till he could show respect to ladies and forced him to apologize to one or the other at least once a week.

A cruel game, tricking children. For one word from Finnerty would be enough to send the woman back to the alley stalls from which she’d risen. Colored women were not legally permitted to manage houses employing white prostitutes. But every house was required to keep a maid on the premises during working hours. To the police therefore Mama was a maid. This was Finnerty’s arrangement, and he didn’t let her forget it for a day.

Leaving Mama troubled by the part she played. At times she tried to justify herself by remembering that she had been deceived by many white men; therefore it was only fair that she should now deceive their daughters. Yet disappointment wide as the world would surprise her out of her sleep: When had she ceased to belong to herself? Some mornings she would have to go for the cognac before she could go downstairs and say, ‘How is my chick today?’ to each and every one.

Between forenoon and evening her chicks descended the stairwell like separate blessings, one by one.

Hallie came down first, with a cup of tea steaming in her hand and the brindle cat limping at her side. It was a cat that took offense at nothing simply to have some sort of life. It walked beside her down the stone, but when it felt dew beneath its paws it drew back. Then Hallie would point her foot, the cat would leap, hobble and claw its way clear to her shoulder. Then they went together to say good morning to the jonquils growing between the cobbles. Though between the cobbles of Hallie’s heart no jonquil would grow again.

A heart like a lonesome gravestone, winter weeds covered it now. Below the weeds the child lay buried who had been but three when he’d died. One who had surprised his mother that sad and sudden fall by asking ‘Mother, are my mittens ready for winter? Are my earlaps ready? Will my coat be warm?’

His last Christmas he had put a hand behind a glowing ornament, passing it about his face, dreamily taking up the heat until she had made him stop.

Now nine shuttered Christmases later she walked powdered, Maybellined and gowned in the mascaraed evening light and something swollen in a mushroom’s shape, boredom like a living growth, bore down on her heart and brain.

Morning was not the hardest time, for the lame cat needed her, and the other women were not yet about to smile a little to themselves when they talked to her: ‘How you doin’, philosopher?’ they would ask, though she could not recall who, nor why, anyone had first called her that. But she had once been a country schoolteacher, so it must have something to do with that.

‘I got no philosophy but I topped you last night,’ Frenchy especially liked to tease her.

So she and the cat went visiting jonquils, and had a bit of fur-to-ear chatter in the ancestral understanding of woman and cat. Sometimes she read, in the quiet forenoon, out of books she still loved. But when the morning was past and the cat lay stretched on the window ledge through the sweltering afternoon, then she was left alone in this strange house, and ennui came down like a foe on her mind and she shaded her eyes with her hand.

To hope she might spend her yet unspent hours bedside to bed in some common ward, under some final quarantine, some ward where go all those whose lives are untouchable, from streets for whom nobody prays. Where it is one where evening falls and one the sad return of day.

Till the violet evening had mercy at last. Then she stood in the portiere and chose what guests she would.

The other women regarded her with a strange mixture of admiration and pity. They felt she held herself apart because she had once taught school – yet at other times they perceived she was somehow defenseless against all of them. Then it was that, hearing the low grinding of metal on stone, they looked the other way to spare her, while Finnerty held the big doors wide.

They did not look, yet sensed as if the lights had gone up a bit, that at the sound of little wheels, life was beginning again in Hallie.

Her lover was the legless man.

‘I’m a philosopher, too,’ Reba challenged Hallie – ‘because I got my own goddamn philosophy. For instance. You take a woman married to a good man and she cheats on him. Their baby is born dead. Well she had it coming to her, didn’t she? Everyone gets what’s coming to them, that’s my philosophy. I picked it up working for loryers. They said they never heard anything like it.’

‘I can believe that,’ Hallie was inclined to agree with loryers.

‘I had to run down two flights and up one across the street to get a coke,’ Reba recalled, ‘because across the street is a whorehouse with a coke machine. Why wear myself out running stairways? A job is a job. One with cokes is better. That’s my philosophy too.’

‘Say you don’t go for cokes, you’re on hard liquor. Okay, be a B-broad and get drunk every night. Say you’re a heavy eater, a regular fat glutton, get a job as a waitress ’n stuff yourself. Say you’re rapping doors with a box of silk stockings under your arm and you start freezing. So what? Get a job as a dance-hostess and work up a sweat.

‘I got half my choppers out and no ovalries. So what? I can still be a practical nurse, can’t I? My people come from that part of Europe where they say “fis” for “fish.” I don’t know where it’s at exactly but when my mother sent me to the store she’d always say “Honey, bring back a nice piece fis.” Hey! How’d you like all the cigarettes you could smoke? Just go down to American Tobacco and give my name, they’ll give you all you can haul in one trip.’

‘Baby, I don’t know what you’re on,’ Five marveled, ‘but I never heard nothing like it neither.’

Reba read all the papers, and always shook her head when she’d finished one. Someone in South Carolina had received two boxes of poisoned candy by mail, signed merely ‘B’rer Rabbit, R.F.D.’ Now what did anyone hope to get out of poisoning somebody else by mail? ‘If you got a grudge like that hire somebody to bust his damn legs, don’t go sneaking around signing yourself a damn rabbit.’

Postal delivery poisoners were among the few who fell out of the range of her sympathy. It troubled her to read that a tenant farmer had drowned his three daughters in a well because ‘Jesus says we got to go.’ ‘If Jesus said that why don’t he jump in the well hisself and let Jesus decide for the babies?’ Nor was she satisfied with the explanation of the brakeman who killed his wife with a hammer. ‘Grace aint fitten to raise a dog. This is the only way I know to make a lady of her.’

‘I don’t know what people are coming to, they act like a bunch of damned pistols,’ was Reba’s reaction. When she read of a widow woman who fell and broke her leg on a downtown street and someone stole forty-eight dollars out of her purse while she lay helpless, Reba was helpless too. ‘That’s too much’ was all she had to say for that day, and threw the paper away.

One evening an actor stumbled in. ‘I’ve had too much to drink,’ he told the women as though otherwise they’d never catch on.

‘Sweetie, I seen your picture in the paper but why don’t you just go home?’ Reba asked. The next morning the actor had his picture in the paper again, having been picked up for drunk and disorderly down the street. ‘I had too much to drink’ he had repeated his explanation to reporters once more. Reba’s patience gave out.

‘“I had too much to drink.” “I had too much to drink.” What did I tell him when he was here? “Sweetie, you’ve had too much to drink” is just what I told him. Honest to God, when a man knows he’s had too much and goes on drinking more all the same, that’s just too much. I refuse to adjust to peasants of a environment like this, that’s all.’

The excuse of the dunce who drowned his infant daughter because his wife had run off with another man didn’t get him off the hook with Reba. ‘Something snapped in my head’ he had told the police, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing.’

‘“I had too much to drink,”’ she mocked all erring mankind. ‘“Something snapped in my head,” “I didn’t know what I was doing” – of all the bum excuses. Give me animals, at least they know what they’re doing.’

Especially elephants. Elephants always knew what they were doing.

‘Do you know about elephants, how they come on?’ she asked anxiously of some sport adjusting a black wool tie in a cracked mirror while she was preoccupied with the ritual of the douche, shaking the bottle madly to make it foam.

‘If you’d stop sizzling maybe I could hear what you’re saying,’ the wool-tie sport suggested.

‘Well,’ the girl explained, ‘I read about how the old man elephant whips up a big pit in the ground with his trunk ’n then whips the old lady into it. Otherwise they could never make it and there wouldn’t be no elephants.’

‘So what?’

‘Well, it just goes to show you, animals do know what they’re doing.’

‘I’m in theatrical work,’ the girl called Frenchy explained to a date. ‘See—’ she stretched her pale hands before his eyes – ‘I’m double-jointed too. Double-jointed hips, but I lost my partner.’

‘Can’t you find another?’ the date asked.

‘You don’t understand. I probably couldn’t find another partner in the entire country. Not everyone’s double-jointed you know.’ She was a high-cheekboned girl with consumptive coloring. ‘We’d swing down the coast and come back west – Philly, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Chattanooga – that’s where my folks are, they spent thousands on my education.’

Out on the walk, up and down in the rain, the man with a cap that shaded his eyes carried a sign that said BEWARE THE WRATH TO COME.

If the pale lost blonde wasn’t down the stairs by the time that street lamps came on, somebody went up and fetched her down. Should lamps be lit or no lamp burn, all was one to the pale lost blonde.

Nobody had counted, for nobody cared, how many lamps had come up and gone down since the night she had stood where Loew’s marquee lights flickered in an uncertain rain, when a cabbie had held a door wide for her and she’d told him, as though she were awake and not in deep dream, ‘Lake Pontchartrain.’

Nobody was home at Lake Pontchartrain. She had spoken a name overheard, nothing more, and offered him a pressed flower out of her purse for her fare. He preferred coming into the back seat with her to collect instead. Then had turned her over to Finnerty to satisfy the meter.

‘I’d rather not be whupped,’ she’d told Oliver – ‘if I got my rathers.’

‘I’d rather not whup you,’ Finnerty reasoned with her, ‘all I’m asking is that you let me take care of you in the big things so that you can take care of me in the little ones. Or am I asking too much?’

‘Little ones, big ones,’ the girl repeated, offering him a smile itself a pressed flower.

‘Do you remember your name, little baby?’ he asked her.

‘Floralee’ – and that was all she remembered.

First he had made her his pleasure, then he had made her his trade. But the ease with which he’d accomplished this troubled him. He had Mama spy on her. Mama reported back.

‘Haven’t you any pride at all?’ he asked Floralee in his injured tone, ‘coming on with a trick like it was love, love, love? Do you realize you spent the better part of an hour with that bum for a lousy four dollars?’

‘Daddy, I lost track of the time,’ the demented girl replied.

‘I’m here to take care of your needs,’ he reminded her. ‘Try to remember that.’

But a few days later he heard a great thump and crash overhead while she was entertaining.

‘What was that?’ he asked her half an hour after.

‘Why, daddy, we fell off the bed and kept right on going, that was all,’ she told him so innocently he hardly had the heart to give her the beating she now so richly deserved. But it had to be done to protect the fool from herself. He hung his coat over the back of a chair.

‘If you’d just as soon,’ she had seen what was coming, ‘I’d as soon not be whupped – if I got my sooners.’

‘I’d sooner not,’ Oliver told her, but put on his mittens, lifted her ponytail off the back of her head to get at the nape where bruises don’t show: A few rabbit-punches, enough to make her head spin, and that satisfied him.

‘But next time when you chippy with a date daddy won’t put his mittens on,’ he promised her.

She never committed the sin of chippying again.

Although Oliver’s other two faithfuls, Reba and Frenchy, were at needle’s points day and night, somehow neither was jealous of the wandering blonde. ‘Nobody home at Lake Pontchartrain is right,’ was all Frenchy had to remark. For Floralee’s life was too remote for envy. She lived enwrapped in some private cloud through which the light of the outer world filtered sometimes dimly and sometimes bright; but never like the light of the world in which the other women lived and bargained.

The girl had days when she seemed so sensible no one could have guessed there was anything amiss. But before night she would be ecstatic, singing upstairs or down—

And the next morning would be utterly cast down. Once Oliver went to fetch her and found her lying naked on her side, eyes shut tight, knees drawn to her chin and the sheet over her head. There was no sound in the hot little room save the incessant hum of an electric fan.

‘There are little people a-prayin’ and a-singin’ in there,’ she told him and he understood she was hearing the voices of her people at their old spirituals in the hypnotic hum of the fan. He shut it off, returned with a small radio and tuned in a Sunday morning choir—

Floralee opened her eyes to see her little daddy standing on a chair, pretending to lead a congregation—

Who best can drink his cup of woe triumphant over pain? ‘—it takes your little daddy to get them real good programs,’ he told her, and jumped down. She listened closer, growing proud of the way her little daddy made them real good programs come in. By noon she was downstairs singing with faith restored—

‘That just won’t get it, honey,’ Mama finally had to put a stop to it – ‘I’m a church-going woman bound to die blessed, but there’s a time and a place for everything and that song just isn’t right for a place like this. If you just have to sing when men are around, try something like “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” – something to put them in the mood, not take them out of it.’

‘I won’t sing brashy tunes with vulgary words,’ Floralee suddenly grew stubborn. ‘I sung one once ’n that same night God said He couldn’t bear me.’

‘God wouldn’t say a thing like that, sweetheart,’ Mama promised.

‘He said it all the same. He was standing right outside my door, I heard him plain as day. He said, “I’ve took all I can off that girl. I can’t bear the sight of her.”’

‘What makes you think God would talk like that, sweetheart?’

Floralee’s face clouded as she struggled to remember, then her eyes cleared. ‘Because, whoever He was talking to, He kept saying “No. By no means. No. No. No.” That must have been God. If it had been the Devil he would have been saying “Yes, oh, yes, by all means, by all means and don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”’ And in her anxiety that God bear her, applied to Him right there and then despite Mama’s instruction—

The only solution was to play the juke with the volume turned up.

‘To hear that looney holler,’ Reba shuddered after things had quieted down a bit, ‘you’d think all they did in them hills was bury their dead.’

‘Let us not begrudge the child,’ Mama reproved Reba, ‘she got the innocence God protects.’

While God protected her innocence, Finnerty figured her finances. He supplied her clothes, her meals, her amusements and what in all seriousness he called her education. The grift on joint-togs, such as parade panties, ran to a hundred percent and higher.

Small wonder He had forgotten entirely about the escapee from O-Daddyland.

The escapee came down Perdido Street with a sample case in his hand. He wasn’t offering coffee pots nor finger waves any more. Now He was the Watkins Man.

Of course being a Watkins Man in 1931 wasn’t what it had been before the wilderness had been pushed back. Then it had been something more than a matter of taking orders for lotions and salves. The Watkins Man had once been the bringer of news of the world outside to the Louisiana back-brush; and he’d been more than a news bearer. He could tell the farmer what ailed his horse and could cure the brute as well. More than a horse doctor, he had cured people too. He could preach the Word, act as midwife, and recite Evangeline.

In Dove Linkhorn, unhappily, these arts had declined. Indeed, they had vanished altogether. And by his clothes one had to wonder whether this particular Watkins Man might not even have the notion that his true trade was lovemaking rather than salesmanship.

Dove had spent every last cent of his O-Daddy gold on a suit of O-Daddy clothes. It was tropical white, over a shirt with narrow pink stripes. His hat had a yellow feather that matched his shoes of yellow suede. He had come a long way, that was plain to be seen, from the boy who had come to town barefoot in blue jeans.

As he came down the street for whom nobody prays, in the evening hour.

It was that slander-colored evening hour before the true traffic begins, when once again sheets have been changed, again Lifebuoy and permanganate have been rationed; and once again for blocks about, pouting or powdering or dusting their navels, each girl wonders idly what manner of man – mutt, mouse, or moose – the oncoming night will bring her.

Perdido Street, in the steaming heat, felt like a basement valet shop with both irons working. The girls in the crib doors plucked at their blouses to peel them off their breasts. In the round of their armpits sweat crept in the down. Sweat molded their pajamas to their thighs. The whole street felt molded, pit to thigh. It was even too hot to solicit. For normal men don’t so much as glance at the girls in heat like that lest the watery navels stick.

Yet the very heat that enervates men infects women with restlessness and the city was full of lonesome monsters. Side-street solitaries who couldn’t get drunk, seeking to lose their loneliness without sacrificing their solitude. Dull boys whose whole joy expired in one piggish grunt. Anything could happen to a woman available to anyone. Boredom of their beds and terror of their street divided each.

They had died of uselessness one by one, yet lived on behind veritable prairie fires of wishes, hoping for something to happen that had never happened before: the siren screaming toward the crossing smashup, the gasp of the man with the knife in his side, the suicide leap for no reason at all. Yet behind such fires sat working cross words while prying salt-water taffy from between their teeth: passion and boredom divided each.

In Spider-Boy Court the blinds, drawn low, left the room in a dappled gloom where dimly fell the shadows, darker yet, of bars. For little windows lined the side that paralleled Perdido Street. And a ceiling fan, cutting the restless light, caused shadows to tremble along wall and floor.

In this moted dusk a juke played on and so long as it played the women sat content. But the moment the music stopped, a creaking, regular and slow, began right overhead and they began shifting uneasily from divan to doorway and back to the divans, opening another coke or lighting a fresh cigarette at each new post – they never finished anything.

Dissatisfaction was a disease with them. Reba was sure the fan was giving her a chill, Floralee needed something to warm her up, Frenchy wanted someone to tell her why she couldn’t spike a coke with gin and Kitty said she was simply suffocating.

Wherever they powdered, wherever they paced, envy and ennui divided each.

‘A light drizzle would be good for trade,’ Mama took a guess, ‘but a heavy fall would ruin it.’ At that moment a cab honked from the curb.

Though someone was always watching the street, no one had seen it drive up. A cab that appeared out of nowhere, like a cab in a misting dream. Mama simply scuttled to the curb and the girls crowded forward in their watery gloom, shading their eyes against the street.

And saw step forth in the greenish light a naval lieutenant in full regalia, a sea-going executive in rimless glasses, a hero of sea fights yet unfought. Bearing like a rainbow across his sky-blue breast all the ribboned honors a peacetime navy could pin. From the gold-braided cap to the gold-braid sleeves, there were not many such sights above deck in 1931. Mama had never captured a sight so glorious just to behold.

Yet the sight seemed reluctant of capture. He held Mama in some earnest discussion speaking low to keep his driver from hearing.

‘Mammy-freak,’ Mama thought she heard him say, ‘stick out so fah behind she hahdly got time make a child behave.’

Mama stepped closer. ‘I don’t quite catch what you’re saying, officer.’ He leaned toward her cupping his lips – ‘Made a lemon pie. Me a little pie. What do you know? A little lemon pie all my own.’

Mama took one step back. ‘Lemon? All your own?’

‘The very day after I broke the churn.’

‘Then I have just the girl for you,’ Mama decided. For whatever the rascal had in mind she couldn’t afford to lose any prospect so prosperous. ‘Every man likes a little change now and then. I know exactly how you feel.’

He drew himself up. ‘Nobody knows how a mammy-freak feels,’ he informed her point blank. ‘How could anyone but another mammy-freak know how a mammy-freak feels?’

If it was an organization he was the president. Mama simply turned to go but he held her back with a wheedling touch. ‘You know yourself,’ he cajoled her, ‘how they stick out in back.’

‘Who stick out in back?’

‘Why, all of them, when they get in a hurry. Now admit it.’

Mama shook off his hand. ‘Who stick out? Who get in a hurry? Admit what?’ Mama was getting angry but she didn’t know at what.

‘Why, old black mammies of course,’ he told her as though everyone knew old black mammies were the coming thing.

‘Maybe you ought to come inside before it rains,’ Mama invited him, feeling they’d both be safer in the parlor.

‘It isn’t going to rain,’ Navy sounded certain as God, and began unfolding a little apron from under his coat. He bowed to tie it about her waist. It was striped green and white like peppermint and as he tied it Mama wondered how she had become the prospect. Her fingers plucked without strength at the apron’s price tag. He picked the tag off himself and the cab dusted off in disgust.

‘A good many black mammy-freaks visit you I presume?’ he presumed confidently.

‘It’s been several days since one called,’ Mama played it straight, ‘and he didn’t leave his name. Would you care to offer yours?’

‘My men call me Commander,’ he informed her stiffly.

‘That,’ Mama thought, ‘isn’t what my chicks will call you.’ And led him inside like leading him home.

Just as the first drops began.

Inside the parlor the five-year-old boy with the mind of a forty-year-old pimp, the one his grandmother called Warren Gameliel and the women called the King of the Indoor Thieves, stood on a divan ready for anything.

In a shirt that never reached past his navel and a tight little hide not exactly high-yellow, Warren Gameliel was actually closer to being high-brown. He was even closer to dark-brown. As a matter of fact he was black as a kettle in hell. He was so black you’d have had to put a milk bottle on his head to find him in the dark. He looked a cross between a black Angus calf and something fished out of the Mississippi on a moonless night. One tint darker and he would have disappeared altogether.

Turning his head proudly upon his iron-colored throat, he fluttered his beautiful lashes modestly at the women’s flattery.

‘Meet my grandson,’ Mama always introduced her menfolks first – ‘Aint he fine?’

‘Five year old ’n weighs sixty-nine pound ’n she asks is he fine,’ the woman called Hallie Dear mocked Mama fondly as the big overdressed man saluted the small naked one.

‘Pledge allegiance, boy baby,’ Mama encouraged Warren G. to his single legitimate accomplishment. But Warren G. just planted his black toes the wider, as if to say he’d have to know more about this gold-braid deal before he’d pledge so much as a teething ring.

Reba honked with hollow glee: the boy was growing up so fast.

‘Aint you shamed?’ Mama reproved him in a voice that simply donged with pride.

Warren Gameliel felt no shame. That belonged, Hallie Dear saw in a single shocked glance, to the hero beside her. For the ghost of a smile that strayed down his lips belonged to a beggar-ghost, a penniless pleader hunting a handout – then it was gone. Leaving him cowering within himself in some cave of no knowing save his own.

Hallie hooked her arm in his to let him know he really wasn’t as alone as all that, and he peered out slowly, warily. Feeling her support, he began coming out of it.

Slowly, warily.

‘In Shicawgo I worked in a office for loryers,’ Reba hurried to keep the man from confusing her with certain common whores trying to crowd him – ‘I specialized in tort ’n see-zure—’ but Floralee elbowed her aside. Floralee was fond of gold braid too.

‘I can sing just ever so purty, mister,’ she offered in a voice strung on little silver bells ‘—only modesty songs of course, for I don’t know vulgary words—’ and did him as pretty a little curtsy as ever he’d seen.

Warren G. tried to regain the spotlight, but Mama yanked the cap, that he had taken off the officer’s head, far down over the boy’s eyes, as if shutting off his vision might improve his manners. Somebody got the juke going just then and someone else called for gin. Someone said, ‘Make mine a double’ just as the juke began—

‘I can sing purtier far than that,’ Floralee insisted amid pleas, claims, threats and tiny squeals, for now all vied for Navy’s attention.

‘Why do people down here all talk so Southern?’ Chicago Kitty complained. ‘Why do they have to talk like the niggers? Why can’t they talk like their selves?’

‘We do talk like ourselves, honey,’ Hallie assured her, ‘the Negras learned to talk that way from us.’

‘May I recite now?’ Floralee begged.

‘As soon as the juke is through, sweetheart,’ Mama promised, and turning to the guest, ‘This girl is a regular angel.’

‘She’s a whore like everyone else,’ Kitty put in – ‘anyone can be a whore. I feel rotten about everyone but myself.’

‘Is that true?’ Navy asked Mama curiously. ‘Can any woman become a whore? Any woman at all?’

‘Anyone at all,’ Mama was optimistic. ‘Aren’t we all created free and equal?’

‘Tell me one thing, sailor boy,’ Chicago Kitty demanded. ‘Where do you keep your submarines?’

‘Why ask me a thing like that?’ The lieutenant looked embarrassed.

‘I have to know. I’m a spy on the side.’

‘I don’t want anyone calling our guest sailor boy,’ Mama scolded Kitty and everyone. ‘Look up to this man! He’s honoring us! Hear this! Commander! Report all insults directly to me! Warren Gameliel you little black fool, get that fool hat off your head and pledge allegiance in-stan-taneously!’

‘Mama!’ Hallie scolded in turn, ‘stop giving orders as though we were in battle formation! This man didn’t come here to have you pin a medal on him. Can’t you see you’re spoiling his fun?’ And brushing everyone aside, she framed his face in her palms to make him return the look she gave. ‘Navy, don’t mind Mama,’ she told him, ‘she’s just impressed by your uniform.’

‘Don’t dare call our Guest of Honor Navy like that!’ – Mama was getting worse by the minute – ‘This man represents the entire Atlantic fleet!’

‘I represented two loryers,’ Reba remembered wistfully.

‘I represent a tube of K-Y jelly ’n a leaky douche bag,’ Kitty commented bitterly.

‘I can sing like a damned bird,’ Floralee marveled aloud, ‘only how did I fly here?’

Outside the drunks were coming out of the country’s last speak-easies and the street lamps began to move like the breasts of a young girl under the hands of a man who has bought too many. Warren Gameliel reached out blindly and secured a black strangehold on the officer’s neck.

‘If you don’t behave I’ll send you to the nigger school,’ Mama threatened him.

And in an odd little silence a girl’s voice said, ‘I was drunk, the juke box was playing, I began to cry.’ And all the air felt troubled by cologne.

‘I think our guest wants to see me,’ Hallie guessed, and pulled Navy’s head right against her breast. He nodded strengthless assent.

She helped him to rise, and he rose more like a sick man than one drunk.

‘Send two double gins to my room,’ Hallie ordered Mama, ‘the rest of you drink whatever you want.’

The door shut behind them and a lamp lit a room that might have served a whore of old Babylon: a narrow bed in hope of bread, a basin in hope of purity. A beaded portiere to keep mosquitoes out and let a little music in. A scent of punk from an incense stick to burn off odors of whiskey or tobacco, a calendar from the year before and an image above it of something or other in hope of forgiveness for this or that. A whole world to millions since the first girl sold and a world to millions yet.

The lamp’s brown glow on her amber gown made of Hallie a golden woman. For her eyes were gray, her skin was olive and about her throat she wore a yellow band.

Her gown, unfastened at one shoulder, was kept from falling only by the rise of her unbound breast. Still she said, ‘No matter how often I trick, as soon as I’m with a man I get shaky.’

‘You don’t have to bother to get shaky with me,’ the seagoing executive assured her, ‘don’t even bother taking off your clothes.’

So he had found some fault in her. ‘What’s the matter, don’t you like dark girls?’

‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ he reassured her, ‘I’m of no use, that’s all. But I’ll gladly pay you for your time.’

‘I don’t need charity.’ Hallie was hurt nonetheless.

‘It isn’t charity. You’ve already helped me in a way that can’t be bought.’

‘Then I’ll take the money all the same,’ Hallie recovered herself and sat beside him on her dishonored bed, letting the gown drape loosely over her breast in event he should prove not so useless as he thought.

‘I’m from Virginia, of course,’ he announced as though that were more important than a woman’s flesh.

‘I’m from Louisiana myself,’ Hallie went along. ‘Of course.’

‘What I mean is’ – he felt it time to be kind – ‘I’m a gentleman.’

‘I’m certain you are,’ Hallie told him he really was. ‘When you’re a lady yourself that’s something you can tell about a man right off.’

‘What I’m trying to say,’ he tried afresh, ‘I’m a Virginia gentleman.’

‘I don’t mean to be sarcastic, mister,’ Hallie promised him, ‘but so what?’

‘Why,’ he had never thought that being a Virginia gentleman might not be self-sufficing, ‘well, it means I can teach at Washington and Lee!’

‘It’s nice to have two jobs,’ Hallie was sure, ‘and in times like these amounts to a real curiosity.’

‘I’ll tell you what is a yet mightier curiosity,’ he got down to business at last, ‘and that’s the way old black mammies stick out in back—’ his voice took on a secret excitement – ‘the way she come by with a broom ’n most knocks you down – “Boy! – stay outa mah way when ah’m cleanin’, Boy” –’ n here she comes by again with bucket ’n mop – “Boy, when you gonna learn to behave? Didn’t ah tell you stay outa mah way? Boy!” –’ n you just about turn around ’n here comes Mammy back again – “Boy! You got nawthin’ to do all day but stand in mah path? You fixin’ to get y’se’f soaked?”’ He composed himself only with an effort.

‘Mister,’ Hallie asked gently, ‘how long you been in this condition?’

‘Since the day I broke the churn of course. Black Mammy’s been dead nineteen years – otherwise why would I feel this way? Hand and foot she waited on us and when that day come when all she could do was just to set in her old cane chair, there wasn’t a soul but myself to fetch her a glass of water.

‘“Mammy,” I told her, “you waited on me, I’m goin’ to wait on you. I’m takin’ care of my old black mammy.”

‘I slept by her chair, for she couldn’t lie down. When I woke at night I could reach out and touch the back of her skinny black hand and know if she was asleep or awake just by the touch. Mostly she’d be awake. You know what I’d ask her then?’

Hallie felt his hand on her own. ‘What you ask her then?’

‘I’d ask her, “You want anything, Black Mammy?” That’s just what I’d ask her.’

‘She must have been grateful for your care.’

He looked at Hallie so evenly. ‘More than I knew. For the very day she died she raised her weary old arm and give me a back-handed slap.’

‘You broke another churn on her?’

‘It was her way of letting me know that she had understood all along what her first back-handed slap, when I was ten years old, had done.’

‘She forgive you at last for breakin’ the churn?’ Hallie kept trying.

‘We were too grateful to one another for forgiving,’ he explained – ‘Don’t you think I know it was Black Mammy’s hand made a mammy-freak out of me? That I might have had a wife and family now if it hadn’t been for her hand? Yet I’m grateful to her still. Who else ever thought I was worth human care? I’m glad the porch was slippery.’

Hallie was lost.

‘Mister,’ she shook her head sadly, ‘I just don’t take your meaning.’

‘The water from the churn made the porch all wet. When its handle snapped she saw what I’d done and aimed her hand. I slipped and fell so she paddled me face down. I lay hollering, pretending she was half killing me. Black Mammy had a good strong hand. That was the first time I was made to behave.’

Hallie saw light faintly.

‘What happened exactly?’

‘Why, what happens when a man is having a girl, that’s what happened. And I’ve never been able to make it happen any other way since.’ He laughed in the watery light yet his face looked stricken.

‘I’m terribly tired, I don’t know why,’ he said and put his face in his hands.

It came to Hallie then that this wasn’t at all some monster of the nastier sort, but only some sort of lonely suckling boy playing Commander with his nose still running.

‘Mister,’ she told him quietly, ‘you don’t need a girl. You need a doctor.’

‘There aren’t any doctors for black-mammy freaks,’ he explained dryly, as though he’d tried looking one up in the city directory.

‘Then just try to rest,’ Hallie told him.

Fast as she could pin, Hallie was preparing Mama for the great impersonation.

‘You don’t think he stole his ship’s money, do you?’ Mama had to know. ‘He isn’t going to get us all in trouble, is he?’

‘You never made an easier dollar your whole enduring life,’ Hallie reassured her, ‘he’s just a green boy been kept on black titty too long. All you got to remember is this rapscallion keeps getting in your way. Just don’t hit him too hard – just hard enough to make it look good.’

‘You wont catch me hitting no member of our armed forces,’ and Mama stuck right there.

‘Getting whupped by his old black mammy is what he come here for – turn around so I can pin you.’ She began stuffing a small pillow into Mama’s bosom. ‘The more you stick out in front the more you stick out behind. I’ll have you sticking out so far you’ll look like Madame Queen.’

‘Girl, I was born in this country.’

It was plain Mama hadn’t caught the play even yet.

‘Mama,’ Hallie pleaded, ‘forget the man’s uniform. I’m trying to tell you he isn’t like other men.’

Mama stiffened like a retriever. ‘Honey, he aint one of them O-verts?’ – She was ready to rip off her handkerchief-head masquerade and run the whole O-vert navy out of town ‘I wont cater to them. Not for no amount.’

‘If he were he’d be better off,’ Hallie reassured her. ‘Now turn around,’ and pinned skirt over skirt till Mama, weighted down, sank heavily into a chair.

‘Honey, I’m starting to sweat,’ she complained.

‘Sweat till you shine,’ Hallie encouraged her, ‘but don’t show your face till I give you the sign.’ And stepped through the portiere.

Beneath the ruin of the gold-braid hat the King of the Indoor Thieves had collapsed at last, his undershirt tangled about his throat as if someone had tried to improve his manners by finishing him off altogether. He snored till his toes were spread, he stretched till he creaked in dreams of some final assault for an earth about to be his for keeps.

‘All of you stop talking out of the corners of your mouth like you were Edgar G. Robinson and everybody was in the can,’ Hallie quieted the woman – ‘You’ve got a guest tonight that means gold from way back, so try to show manners.’

For down the stair with an admiral’s tread came the hero of sea fights as good as won, looking like the dogs had had him under the house; with a gin glass latched to his hand.

Hallie crooked one finger toward the portiere.

Mama came forth with forehead shining, bandanna and broom, all sweat and Aunt Jemima, in the peppermint apron that hung like candy.

The second he saw her Navy dropped his glass. ‘I didn’t mean to do that,’ he apologized immediately, and began trying to clean the floor with his sleeve, glass, splinters, and all, making a worse mess than before.

Mama seated herself across from him, in all her preposterous gear. Hallie put a warning finger to her lips. The girls exchanged looks part fear and part wonder.

‘I’m a Protestant by birth but a Catholic by descent,’ Mama felt it was time to explain the curious no-man’s land of her faith, ‘I’ve shod the horse all around.’ Meaning she had had four husbands. ‘So I’m not acceptable to the Church. But if I can’t die sanctified I hope to die blessed.’

His elbow touched Floralee’s glass. It tottered, he reached as if to keep it from tipping and knocked it over, of course, instead. The girl pushed back her chair and he began mopping it up with a silk handkerchief, although all he was doing actually was swishing the handkerchief around in it. ‘Go on with your story,’ he told Mama, ‘I’m sorry to be so clumsy.’

Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she had four husbands.

‘Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man – I’d never marry another legit man. Did you know that a prize fighter is more gentle than other men, outside the ring? That’s because he knows what a man’s fists can do. Do you know that you’re safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That’s because one knows what killing is. The other don’t.’

‘Why,’ Navy remarked, ‘in that case ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.’

Again that odd little silence fell. Nobody knew what to say to that.

‘Navy, I think that’s the nicest thing I’ve heard anyone say since I’ve been in the trade,’ Hallie said – and his elbow tipped Mama’s glass into her lap.

‘Now don’t tell me that “just happen,”’ Mama scolded in real earnest now – ‘Don’t tell me any man is that clumsy. Mister, my frank opinion is you done that a-purpose.’

‘Honest, I didn’t, Mammy,’ he lied patiently.

‘Don’t whup him, Mama,’ Floralee pleaded for him.

‘I’m sure he wont do it again,’ Hallie defended him too.

‘Give me one more chance, Mama,’ he whimpered.

‘Only out of respect for your uniform,’ Mama issued final warning, ‘and one more is all you gets.’ She turned to shake out her skirts, somebody tittered and somebody honked and she whirled just in time to catch him with two fingers to his nose. Now Mama scarcely knew what to feel.

‘Why, that isn’t the least bit nice, a man of your background to have such manners—’

‘He didn’t mean anything, Mama,’ Hallie was sure.

‘Don’t whup him,’ Floralee begged.

‘Cross my heart I didn’t mean anything,’ Navy swore in that same unbearable small-boy whine that in itself entitled him to a thrashing.

‘O he meant it all right,’ Kitty informed, ‘I saw him with my naked eye – and I have a very naked eye.’

‘I will try to do better, please mum,’ he promised so humbly, ‘I will try to behave and be a good boy—’ and standing to cross his promise, yanked tablecloth, bottle, glasses, trays, cokes, decanters and four bottles of beer crashing to the floor.

‘O you fool’s fool,’ now Mama roared right at him, black with rage as he turned white with fright, neither pretending in the least – right under the table the two-hundred pound hero ducked. And cowering there all could hear him plea – ‘Don’t whup me, Mama, please don’t whup me.’

Unable to reach him with her fist, Mama seized his black silk ankles and hauled him forth floundering on his back, his eyes closed and covered by his arm to ward off anticipated blows.

‘I don’t like the looks of this,’ Mama told Hallie, ‘he aint got no right to be so loose without being drunk or sick, neither.’

‘He’s sick enough for twenty,’ Hallie informed her. ‘Somebody get some water.’

‘Wouldn’t beer do as well?’ Floralee inquired, and emptied a full pitcher right in his face. Then, looking into her pitcher, grew sad. ‘Why, it’s empty, fun’s all done.’ She looked ready to cry.

‘Use cokes,’ Hallie ordered.

Now who but Hallie could have thought of that? Floralee leaped for the half-finished bottles standing like small sentries on ledge and divan, and in no time at all had her pitcher full again. This time she poured it down the front of his shirt.

‘That was fun,’ she told Hallie then.

‘The fun is done,’ Hallie told her.

‘Fun done,’ the girl accepted matters.

But on the floor the fun had only begun. There he lay licking his big ox-tongue, a coke-licking Lazarus too languid to rise.

‘I’ve been everywhere God got land,’ Mama announced, ‘but this is the most disgusting sight yet seen.’

‘You can drop his legs now,’ Hallie pointed out, and Mama released the ankles, that dropped like a dead man’s legs.

Both women stood looking down. Hallie herself didn’t know what to do with the fellow.

As Navy finally opened his eyes.

His eyes so blue, so commanding.

‘That was the nicest party I’ve had in twelve years,’ he congratulated everyone.

Mama lowered herself in all her finery, onto a divan and sighed, just sighed.

‘Bring me the evening paper,’ she asked after a while, ‘I want to see what the white folks are up to.’

The figure, the face and the gleaming braid of the madman who had spent a month’s pay in a night dimmed swiftly. His money long spent, nobody cared what had become of the Lieutenant-in-Command.

‘I wonder,’ Mama grew suspicious later, ‘whether that officer told us the entire truth.’

‘So far as he knew it,’ Hallie took a guess.

‘You figure he left out a little something or other?’

‘Black Mammy wasn’t as simple as he likes to think. I think she had lapped the field.’

‘I don’t follow your meaning.’

‘Why, I think from the day she paddled that little boy, she knew what kind of material she was working with. I think whether that little boy became a man or stayed a little boy was entirely up to her. She had a choice between herself and the boy, and she chose against the boy. That was the only way she had of not one day losing him to a white girl.’

‘I’d purely hate to believe that a common field darky could be that evil,’ Mama turned Hallie’s theory down cold.

‘She wasn’t a field darky. She was a house darky with scores to settle in that same house. Everything she had the white folks had taken. She saw her chance to get something back. I’ll take my oath she was getting even on somebody.’

‘No,’ Mama still declined to believe, ‘everybody got to love somebody and that woman wasn’t give nobody but a little white boy to love, and he wasn’t give nobody but an old black mammy. When things are like that color and age even don’t matter. In love, not even price matter. Yes, Black Mammy genuinely love that child.’

‘It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along,’ Hallie agreed. ‘In love price don’t matter nor which lover pays. It’s why he can’t hate her even to this day though he knows now what she did to him.’

Though the languid lieutenant was far to sea – gone without trace never to return, his visits began a slow sea change. He had spent so freely Finnerty had been encouraged to believe there must be other such fools about, in uniform or out. Finnerty was right.

‘It’s the age of specialization is what it is,’ he began preaching a new faith, ‘Do you go to a eye doc to get a tooth yanked? Do you go to the ice cream parlor for stamps? New fields is opening and one is the bug field. Hundreds of bugs loaded with gold, the Depression aint even touched them, willing to pay somebody to make them happy. It don’t make a bug happy to come into a joint, point out a girl and go to bed. Nowadays he wants the bit spiced up. He wants the girl to tell him, “Do what you want with me.”’

Perhaps too it was Finnerty’s new girl, a spare and bitter child just out of a Houston jail who had encouraged him, for she seemed not to care in the least what became of her. ‘My name is Kitty Twist,’ she had told him, ‘and I do everything.’

Her breastless, sexless personality was no matter, Finnerty knew. For this was the kind of girl upon whom a man might recover something of which a wife or mistress had robbed him. The city was full of hatless Harrys seeking not so much love but vengeance for wrongs, real or fancied, forever imposed by women: wife, nurse, sister, daughter, mistress or aunt. Woman, there was the cause of it all.

A traffic founded on self-pity that paid off better than the old-fashioned traffic in love. Love’s dividends came in single bills; but hatred’s comes by twenties.

‘It’s the new way of doing things,’ Finnerty approved.

And the men who came buzzing in the lieutenant’s wake had the twenties. Apparently they didn’t read the papers, for they gave no sign of knowing that the country was in the very depths of an economic disaster. They were men who had been sheltered all their lives and were sheltered yet. Their world was the world of their own needs alone, and if they looked out of a window at the street below, nothing they saw, or nobody down there, had any relationship to their own safe halls.

Brokers and buyers, efficiency experts with private means, personnel managers from banking families, men who had been born to ownership of ships or banks or mines or wells – the whole contented clan of white-collar foxes whose hearts were in their collars and their love locked in their files, who yet wanted to know of life – ‘What’s the answer?’ Without pausing once to wonder what was the question.

‘These are class people,’ Finnerty tried to impress his girls. ‘If one tells you to swing from the chandelier, baby, you swing.’

‘Why not just sell the beds and buy trapezes for the money?’ the new child wanted to know right off.

‘You’re always in there with the wise answer, aint you?’ Oliver warned her.

‘Because you’re always there with the right question, Little Daddy,’ Kitty tried quickly to soften her new daddy.

Against the collar clan the lunch bucket brigadiers – boiler-makers, janitors, construction workers, merchant mariners, grease-monkeys, slaughter house bullies, plasterers and bricklayers didn’t stand a chance. The collars had fancied love up until the best looking and youngest of the women were out of range of the bucket boys. Why tie up a piece of merchandise for half an hour with a date smelling of fish or tar, when one smelling of nothing but after-shave lotion would pay five times as much and perhaps not even soil a towel?

‘Mama,’ Oliver gave out the news, ‘we’re going to forget these workin’-ass bums who don’t even know a girl has a soul. I know one pimp willing to stand on the corner waiting for a broad to turn a three-dollar trick so he can get a haircut, but I don’t call that a pimp. I got every one of my broads insured and I got a plane to keep up too. What the workin’-ass man wants he can get elsewhere. From here on out we cater strictly to the bug who wants something he’s afraid to ask his wife for – or what he’d rather not have her give. Or what she can’t give.’

‘I’m not sure I’m following, Oliver.’

‘You’re following all right,’ Finnerty assured her.

‘Well, I don’t care for where I think you’re leading. What can any girl of ours give a man that his wife can’t?’

‘Virginity, woman,’ the pander almost spat the word – virginity. Else how is it that when I say to some clown – “Would you like to see the girls, mister?” he just dogeyes me and keeps on walking. But when I say, “Mister, are you interested in a girl who’s never been had?” it’s just too much for him. He slows down, thinking it over, turns the corner, comes back on the other side of the street and all I have to do is wait. He comes to me then. “What did you mean by that?” he wants to know and by the way he says it I know whether he’s the law or a bug. “I meant are you interested in witnessing a girl giving in for the first time?” Mama, you’d be astonished how almost every one will come up with a ten-spot just on a promise like that. Honest to God, some days I feel rotten about everyone but myself.’

‘Some days I feel rotten about you too, Oliver,’ Mama admitted.

The little man sat clasping his stomach as though in pain. ‘What kind of a sport wouldn’t hop to a chance like we’re offering? Why, it’s like having a girl’s very soul. Love he can get at home – but the soul, the soul – Did his mother neglect him? Did his auntie seduce him? Did his mother-in-law rob him? Did his wife desert him? Did his mistress betray him – Here’s a chance to get even with them all.’

‘Calm yourself, Oliver,’ Mama urged him, ‘because no man is coming for no such purpose to any house of mine,’ Mama found her voice at last, ‘I’ve been an underworld woman all my days. I have faith my Lord will forgive me for that. For I’ve been straight with Him and straight with myself—’

‘—and straight with your girls too, of course,’ Finnerty stopped her. His very tone stopped her. ‘Sit down, old woman. There’s something I’ve been meaning to have out with you and this is as good a time as any.’

Mama sat down.

‘It’s a little matter of a bill that went into your hand a C note and came back to me as a ten-spot. If it had been any broad but the Looney I’d think maybe it was her and not you. But it’s true that the girl never actually looked at that bill – I’ve watched her take money time and again and she never looks at it, just puts it away until she sees me, then hands over the lot. So I know she gave it to you as she got it – old woman, it was you pulled the gypsy switch on your best, your only friend. Do you call that being straight for the Christian-killing Moses’s sake, old woman?’

‘Oliver, if I know what you’re talking about I’ll kiss your behind before God.’

Finnerty cocked his head a bit at that. ‘You know what you just said is as strong a statement I’ve heard a Louisiana nigger make to a white man for some time?’

‘Oliver, it’s the truth. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Look,’ he began losing patience. ‘I whupped the broad and she said “No.” I whupped her harder and she still said “No.” Finally I took my mittens off, ready to give her the real thing. She still said “No.” Mama, I don’t want to whup you. But I know it wasn’t the broad. I know it was you.’

Mama could scarcely bear the injustice of this. ‘For God’s sake, boy. What makes you so sure it wasn’t the mark who switched on you?’

Finnerty smiled thinly. ‘I was wondering how long it was going to take you to come up with that. It don’t go, old woman. I never took eye off that bill from the moment I put it in the mark’s pocket.’

‘Were you in the room when he gave it to the girl?’

‘As good as. I had my eye to the hole.’

‘How could you see the number on the bill through a keyhole?’

The shadow of a doubt passed across the pander’s mind – but he recalled the sheer simplicity of Dove’s face and the shadow passed. It just couldn’t be. For that redheaded country boy hadn’t been just an ordinary mark. He had been a mark’s mark, the kind a man might wait a lifetime to meet, so simple it was pathetic.

‘Anyone but him, Mama,’ he told her – then suddenly realizing how very near she had come to throwing him off the track he made up his mind twice as firmly as before – ‘Mama, I’m going to hear from your own lips that it was you who switched on me and nobody but you.’

Mama knew that tone and could only sit shaking her head miserably, ‘No. No. Let me die the worst death there is if I took it.’

Finnerty rose.

‘Oliver, I know what you’re going to do. But I just can’t fix my mouth to say what you want me to.’

Finnerty pulled on a single mitten. He drew the cloth down tight over each separate finger. When every wrinkle had been smoothed he turned his wrist slowly to test its hinge. Then he drew on the other glove.

‘Yes,’ Mama told him. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’

‘I knew you done it all the time,’ Finnerty said, ‘and I’m not billing you for it. But never let me hear you say again that you play it straight. Not to me you don’t say it. Here.’

He poured her a cognac and offered it full to the brim without a spilling a drop. But Mama’s hand shook so when she took it he had to help her to bring it to her lips. When it was empty she held it out for more. He filled it again. This time she drank more steadily. And still she wanted more.

‘If I can save one sparrow a single misstep,’ she began.

‘That’ll do for now, old woman,’ Finnerty told her, ‘I’ve got work to do and so have you.’

And left to study his mouse.

What passed for the Wrath To Come on the walk and what passed for the Wrath inside the parlor were hells an earth apart. Though that amateur savior warned the women of the middle-pits of Hell, the women themselves felt sure that the pits were reserved exclusively for finks. Certainly no reasonable God would hold a grudge against a girl for earning her bread by the sweat of the sex with which He had blessed her. But to save one’s own skin by crying off on a sister – no God worth the name would overlook as lousy a trick as that.

Beside, God must be on their side because He was on Mama’s. And wasn’t Mama forever bringing home moulting canaries or bargain goldfish because she felt sorry for them? Didn’t she say almost every day, ‘If I can save one sparrow a single misstep it makes my own missteps worthwhile?’

Long after midnight old lonely trains called up to Mama like lovers forever arriving too late for love. Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving. But the windows were darkened, the doors were locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust.

Mama would rise from her bed so wide, the Woman The Pope Didn’t Want, so fierce to defend the weak and the motherless, so watchful of the sparrow’s fall until a dollar was involved. And saw some too-late lover come to stand below a lamp that made the whole night look hired.

Down on the corner she heard some woman jangling around for a straight four dollar trick. Then her husband, down the block, signaling with a set of keys of his own – ‘I got a trick here, Baby, so come on home.’ And the empty night came down again.

From somewhere upstairs or somewhere down, a mountain girl’s voice began telling the dark—

And knew, Mama knew that soon or late the hour would come when the hurry-up wagon would haul girls with pride and girls with none, those who had saved and those without Penny One, to that cellar below the cells where one door leads to freedom and another door leads to jail. One back to the street and one to a tier. That some would buy out then and some would bail out and some would cry off on their sisters.

‘If I can’t die sanctified,’ Mama crossed herself where she stood, ‘at least let me die blessed.’

Because the air was so close, the whiskey so bad, the prices so high and the place so hard to climb up to, everyone came to Dockery’s Dollhouse night after night while other bars stayed empty.

Everyone came, that is, but the law. To this lopsided shambles, where the floor slanted slightly, no police ever came. When the big hush fell that meant trouble was starting, the old man drew the shutters until the trouble was done.

The old man had himself never fought another man in his life – yet he took a senile pleasure in watching others go at it. He pretended that it was the manly thing, to ‘let them fight it out’ – but the titillating joy he took when the first blood flowed was a womanish delight.

And though there were frequent brawls, he took care that none attracted the attention of strangers on the street outside. Only the steady thud of the fans overhead and a desperate scuffle of shoes and breath would be heard when two panders fought up and down the floor.

Suddenly as it began it would be done. Doc would be letting in the light, victor and vanquished would be having a shot on the house, the babble of voices would rise once more, the juke would start Dream Train or It’s Only a Paper Moon – and everyone would feel something real had been accomplished at last.

‘Let’s see what them damn mackers are up to,’ hustlers would suggest to each other on afternoons off – ‘I’d rather see a fight tonight than ride the New York Central—’

If a man were hurt so seriously that he could not rise to drink, old Doc poured a shot down his throat personally, and friends hoisted him and deposited him behind some less lucky dive.

Yet all the fights were strangely unnecessary, and not one of them ever solved anything. The mackers never fought over anything real, like money or love. Had High Daddy really told Easy Rider’s woman that she didn’t dress her man with class? Had Easy Rider actually said that Spanish Max would stool on his own mother? They fought for their honor, that must have been it.

Not because they had too much whiskey in them, but because they hadn’t enough. Their lives went dry as their glasses; lack of love parched their throats. They wished to be drunken, forever drunken.

‘Too much salt on the potato chips,’ someone was always complaining to Dockery.

‘Them chips is what gives people a thirst,’ Doc explained, ‘it’s why the mustard bowls is always full and plenty of good old salty pretzels too.’

To be drunken, forever drunken.

Yet Dove came there at noon, long before the drinkers’ hour, only to put his sample case below the table and his book above it, to order a poor-boy sandwich and a bottle of beer.

Then the book before him, the beer forgotten, at last he saw for himself how different an A was from a B.

He was studying M and N one noon when a shadow fell across the page and Finnerty’s finger shut the book like shutting it forever.

‘What kind of con is this – Fairy Tales – you connin’ little kids or something now, country boy?’

Dove took his book and pocketed it. ‘Hello, Oliver,’ he said.

Finnerty shook his head incredulously. ‘To think I took you for the simplest fool in town. To think that I thought that W on your forehead stood for Watkins.’

‘I’m in the field for Watkins, Mister,’ Dove reminded the pander with understandable pride.

‘Man, you are great. Simply great. And the sample case tops it. Just tops it. Lugging that thing with your country look, who could ever have guessed what your real line of goods was?’

He pulled a chair beside Dove’s, and sat so near and talked so low, his mouth right at Dove’s ear and his little finger hooked to Dove’s, that Dove felt trapped between him and the wall.

‘Buddy, as your buddy,’ Oliver whispered wetly, ‘it’s now my duty to tell you that my new child got one terrible hard edge out for you. It’s all I can do to keep her from coming in on you. No, I don’t mean that real hard swindle where she took the rap and you went south with the bundle. I doubt Texas will extradite you for that. But how’s your conscience resting, buddy? Did you know the broad done a hundred days without commissary? You and I both know what it is to be busted without a pack, Jack. Of course if that’s how you expect your broads to do time that’s your business. But I wouldn’t treat a yellow dog like that.’

‘Mister,’ Dove tried to get his little finger unhooked, ‘Mister, that old gal quoted you a mistruth.’

‘I hope you aren’t thinking I’d take a hustler’s word against that of my own sample case buddy? The very buddy who broke in my top-earning broad for me?’ Oliver was hurt that Dove should even suspect him of forgetting a favor like that – ‘Naturally she lied. Who ever heard of a hustling woman who wouldn’t rather lie than ride a passenger train? Buddy, what I’m telling you is I’m going to get you out of this. Man, I been to Hurtsville, I know what it is. They made me regret the day I was born there but they aint going to make my sample case buddy regret the day he was born. What if she does claim she was underage when you transported her across a state line in a moving vehicle? That don’t cut ice with Oliver Finnerty.’

‘Mister,’ Dove got in a word at last – ‘I never transported nobody. We just rode a old freight train a ways together, that was all. You’d scarcely call that “a moving vehicle” I don’t reckon.’

Finnerty unlocked his little finger as though that had been Dove’s idea – ‘What would you call it, Mr Bigass? A possum up a telegraph pole?’

‘Well, it weren’t no passinger train.’

‘Brother,’ Finnerty put a hand on Dove’s shoulder, ‘Brother, it don’t matter was that a box car or on roller skates, that broad can swear out a hold order for you in any district station in town—’

‘I pulled her out from under the wheels!’ Dove remembered in a shout – ‘I treated her good!’

Finnerty shook his head solemnly. ‘You can always treat one too good,’ he reminded Dove, ‘but you can never treat one too bad.’

‘I saved her dirty fool life,’ Dove added, yet felt his courage sliding down all drains.

‘I’m sure you did,’ Finnerty agreed sympathetically, ‘but still it don’t cut ice.’

‘She were willin’,’ Dove recalled desperately. ‘Fact is, she were more willin’ than me. She got more willin’ all the time. Fact is I took to sleepin’ on my stomach, she were that willin’.’

‘Willin’ don’t matter. Under-age is statutory rape though she put a gun at your head.’

‘She didn’t have no gun,’ Dove conceded, ‘but I sure didn’t sexutory-rape nobody, mister—’ yet strangely flushed with guilt.

‘We’ve all done crazy things from time to time,’ Oliver lowered his voice for he read that flush aright – ‘What I always say is if you’re not champeenship material, you might as well let the women get you now. Buddy, a broad is only a broad but a pal is a pal, so put your mind at rest. I’m not letting Texas get no holder on you because some broad wants to cry off. It’d be as good as her life and I’ve told her as much. “Baby,” I told her, “when you held out on me that was one thing, but crying off on my pal is another.” Now do you want me to see you through this sorry situation you got yourself into or don’t you?’

Dove was beginning to feel scared in a way he had never been scared before.

‘I’d be mighty grateful for your help, mister.’

‘One good turn deserves another. But I’ll expect your complete cooperation from here on out. I’m the general. You’re the private – when I give an order I expect to see it carried out. For I’m not without help,’ he added softly.

‘You’re my captain,’ Dove agreed, ‘I’m your hand. But there just one little favor I’d like to ask.’

‘What’s that, old buddy?’

‘Don’t call me Mr Bigass.’

‘Shake – Tex.’ Finnerty extended his hand.

Dove shook it with gratitude.

‘I’ve kept my part of the bargain, mister,’ Dove told Finnerty in Mama’s parlor half an hour after.

‘That you did, and I’m that proud of you I’ll brag you up all over town,’ he promised – ‘Come and get it.’

He held out a five dollar bill.

Dove turned it over as though the number on the other side might be different, then passed it to Frenchy.

‘Tell ’em where you got it and how easy it was,’ he told her, and walked indolently toward the door.

A huge disbelief dawned in Finnerty’s brain. He caught up with Dove at Dockery’s door. He was a little out of breath and waited till they were inside to offer Dove a drink.

‘Give this man what he wants to drink,’ he told Dockery breathlessly, ‘any time he wants it.’

‘Any time this man wants a drink,’ Dove assured Dockery, ‘he’ll pay for it hisself,’ and laid a C note on the bar before the pander’s eyes.

Finnerty started to reach for it. Dove put his hand gently down.

‘I understand the price is ten bucks per peeper, Oliver,’ he told Finnerty. ‘You had a full house. I’ll take my thirty now.’

Finnerty went for his wallet. Slowly. Yet he went.

‘I’d never of believed it,’ he admitted, laying three tens on top of the C note, ‘I wouldn’t of give you the credit for the having the cold nerve.’

‘You provide the virgins, mister,’ Dove promised, ‘I’ll provide the nerve.’

‘I guess you know I had to give a poor broad a ninety dollar whupping account of you?’ Finnerty reproved Dove as he watched a hundred and thirty dollars disappear in Dove’s wallet.

‘It’s what I always say,’ Dove told him cheerfully, ‘you can always treat one too good. But you never can treat one too bad.’

Airless days when panties of purple and braes of black, silver G-strings and dappled halters hung on the clothes lines in a kind of joint-tog jungle still as all Brazil. A jungle whose foliage was such garments of bright shame as were washable, whose cries were those of the pepper pot man—

Odors, and cries, a chemise stained by mascara, the spill of water into a basin before the long day’s first-risen lover locked with the last girl left awake. They went at it like foes, navel to navel, till his two dollars of passion was spent. Then just as he stood with one sock drawn on and the other foot bare, he was touched by a perfumed disgust.

Disgust like a perfume pervading a forenoon that felt perpetual; till noon mixed with evening and evening with night.

Then a reddish scent as of soap or blood and the voices of women and an air of haste began somewhere upstairs or somewhere down. Then cigar-smoke mixed with eau-de-cologne and incense with whiskey and whiskey with gin. Then sometimes upstairs and sometimes down Dove Linkhorn could always be found.

Sometimes in a red shirt, sometimes in a yellow, wearing cowboy boots and a black silk bandanna, one foot on Dockery’s bar-rail or leaning on Dockery’s juke, he wasted no time in letting strangers know who he was.

‘Shake hands with Big Stingaree! Just up from the Rio Grande! See these boots? They cost forty dollars. See this hat? Cost thirty-five. I do most of the drinking here ’n all the buying. Anything you want, just point. I take care of my friends. You want to say hello to a girl, just say which one. They’re most of ’em mine but I’m not the jealous kind, I pass ’em around ’cause I know they’ll come back. They always come back to their Daddy-O. It’s what they call me, their Daddy-O, but you can call me Tex. Any time you drop by and I aint here just tell that old man behind the bar you’re waitin’ for Tex. Tell him what you want to drink – he works for me – and sooner or later I’ll be by with one on one arm and one on the other and most like a new shirt one of ’em’s just bought me. See this belt? A girl give me that.’

The whiskey brown, the rum so black, the beer so dark, the gin so pale.

‘Couldn’t read my name were it wrote a foot high on the side of a barn but I make more in a single day than some educated fools earn in a month. Drink up.’

Whiskey, corn liquor, gin or rye, Big Stingaree drank it down. Big Stingaree drank whatever was poured, till drops dribbled down his shirt red or yellow and beer stood in his boots. Once he stood up in a puddle of urine or wine, and his face looked lopsided with its load of rum. He waved his arms till somebody shut off the juke. Big Stingaree had something to tell all panderdom.

‘Burn down your cities!’ he demanded; and wove a moment to remember what else had to be done. ‘Burn down your cities ’n save our farms,’ he concluded lamely.

‘Well, go on, go on.’

But whatever it was he was trying to recall, that was all Dove could remember.

For sometimes once a day, sometimes twice, Finnerty’s gentlemen stood with eyes fixed to a wall to achieve vicariously that ancestral lust: the deflowering of a virgin.

Finnerty was right: it was a fantasy that had pursued them, every one, all their lives; they had not pursued it. They had only made of it a secret mystery that never could come true.

A mystery as false as it was secret. Yet Finnerty made it whirl with fiery colors, like a pinwheel in the dark; that becomes, when it is not spun, no more than a piece of painted wood. He instructed the girls not to yield their chastity easily, but only with tears, after a bit of a struggle.

At this game Floralee was no hand at all, for she couldn’t understand that the old game now had a new twist. Nor did she wish to understand. As soon as Dove entered and hung up his stetson she threw off every stitch and in a voice like little bells on a silver string began play-partying—

she invited Dove to clap hands with her—

Nobody could make her understand that that wasn’t at all how lovely reluctant virgins carried on.

Reba, on the other hand, played her part too well. Racing from one corner to another, she would shrink like a wild trapped thing, burying her face in her hands and crying ‘Never!’ to the walls, ‘Never! Never! Never!’

Beating Dove’s chest with both her fists, again her plate slipped as she pled for her honor. Yet that in no wise dismayed her. Good trouper that she was, she kept right on beating her gums in time to her fists, ‘Never! Never! Never!’

Considering the abortions she had survived, she was surprisingly fleet. Feinting Dove out of position, she would leave him breathless there in nothing but red garters and boots. At length he was forced to complain to Finnerty.

‘I admire talent in a woman,’ he protested, ‘and I don’t expect one to make things easy for me – but chasing that one up and down and around is simply wearing me out. She’s a fine little broad and all of that, but she’s just too zeelious.’

Sometimes the virgin was Frenchy. Kitty clamored to get into the act but the amateurish tattooing on her arms and legs, that she had inflicted upon herself as a child, disbarred her.

‘Who ever heard of a tattooed virgin?’ Finnerty dismissed her.

‘I’ll keep my clothes on,’ she offered.

‘They’d want their money back,’ Finnerty told her, ‘get down to the door where you’re supposed to be and don’t let me catch you off your post again.’

She did not perceive that had she only acted reluctant about performing, he would have appointed her to be deflowered upstairs instead of merely to stand guard below, hour upon dull hour.

It was never Hallie. It never could be Hallie. Yet what Finnerty would have given to get that one in there! There was no way of debauching her. She had been in a thousand corners with a thousand men and had come away with herself untouched.

It gnawed at him, just as it gnawed him that every time one of these Never! Never! innocents was deprived of her maidenhood he had to divide sixty dollars with Dove – admittedly a generous wage for that type of work.

‘There are those who’d be happy to give me a hand for nothing,’ he told Dove.

‘Fly-by-nighties,’ Dove reminded him, ‘here today and gone tomorrow.’

It was true, and Finnerty knew it, that Dove could not be replaced. Every time Finnerty put an eye to the wood to check on him, he was giving an honest day’s work for an honest wage. Reliable to the bone. And, nothing, it seemed, impeded his tidelike powers.

Like the sea, he came and went.

Indeed, Finnerty could not contain his secret enthusiasm for Dove’s prowess. ‘You never seen nothing like it,’ he invited Legless Schmidt to see, ‘God has put His arms around that ungodly clown.’

‘Why would God put His arms around something like that? You can leave God out of it, for I won’t pay a nickel.’

‘I wouldn’t think of asking you to pay,’ Finnerty employed his injured air. ‘I just thought you’d get a laugh out of the thing.’

‘It’s nothing to laugh about,’ the big half told the pander.

‘How can you tell till you’ve seen it?’ Finnerty insisted – ‘How this mad stud comes on! Man, it’s educational.’

‘Thank you, I’ll stay ignorant,’ the cripple decided firmly.

‘Think it over, friend,’ Finnerty suggested, ‘the offer is good any time.’

Why he wanted to involve Schmidt, Finnerty himself wasn’t clear in his own mind. He resented the crippled man’s air of independence as unbecoming when able-bodied men were out begging, but that wasn’t all of it. It was Hallie’s dismissal of his own charms, made so lightly, that was at the bottom of it. How could a woman prefer a man without legs to a little beauty like himself?

If you couldn’t get at somebody yourself, Finnerty knew, your next best bet is to get at somebody who has already gotten to her.

And whether for laughs or whether for lust, his mathematics of the soul began to add up nicely. Some white collar bug would wander in pretending to look for a friend; then another friend-seeker and another, till there were five or six. One by one Finnerty would take them out for a little private talk, and then his voice could be heard, confident, promising, reassuring from behind a half-open door. Till the bargain was sealed and a ten dollar bill changed hands.

When the buyer put his eye to the peep-hole for which he had paid, he saw only a pale, demented girl, blonde braids bound tightly about her head, wearing a simple cotton frock and her pale hands folded in her lap.

Then in strode some kind of redheaded hayseed in a sheriff ’s hat with a flashy cord and boots that were all but spurred – the hiders could almost smell the whiskey on him. When the hayseed took off his hat the pale girl loosened her frock. What a dunce the fellow looked after that! The only sound in the room was his heavy breathing and the whirr-whirr-whirr of the ceiling fan slicing the obscene heat. What a clown! He was going about his job in there as though it were hero’s work, a thing no one else could possibly do.

Some felt contempt of the shameless dunce, but not all. Each watcher was affected differently.

One paled slowly as he looked and, after a minute, left for good thinking how sad such things were so.

Another laughed smugly deep as his liver, to see proven at last what he had long suspected: a man was a two-legged animal and a woman a four-legged one, nothing more. And left thinking how lucky it was, such things being so, that he had been there to see.

Yet a third looked thoughtful, as at a demonstration in carpet weaving: see, there was still money to be made in small enterprise.

Another felt stale lusts grow swift and bit his lip for lack of cash: had he every dollar in town tonight, all would be spent by morning.

But the great cripple neither laughed nor paled. Only the lines of his heavy head hardened and he swung his torso on its tiny wheels and wheeled off down the hall, making a rolling thunder to hide his indignation.

No, Schmidt didn’t believe in this sort of thing at all.

The other peepers would be sitting in the parlor once more when Dove returned downstairs – that was when the fun really began. The sight of the fellow combing his hair or playing the juke, seemingly innocent that he had performed publicly, sent such glances of cold glee back and forth that soon every one had their money’s worth. That the joke, after all, was on themselves, was a bit of knowledge Finnerty took pains not to divulge. Had they understood that the dunce in the stetson was not only aware that he was watched, but was secretly proud to display his powers, they might have mobbed both Dove and Finnerty.

Schmidt, of course, knew the story, and didn’t share the amusement others felt. From a corner where the light hardly fell he studied Dove. Big Stingaree’s shirt was open at the throat and his throat was flushed to the chin, for he had thirty dollars to spend once again. And was spending it the way he’d found it went fastest, by buying drinks for everyone.

‘He don’t know the show is over,’ Schmidt realized, just as the juke began to sing—

Dove began mugging silently with the singer, pretending it was his own voice mourning Caruso. ‘I wish I could sing truly,’ he would lament when Caruso was done, ‘but I lost my voice hollerin’ for gravy.’

This legless man was an old carnie hand who had lived among human skeletons, 500-pound women, dog-faced boys, spider men, living heads, geeks, half-men-half-women and dwarfs in the maimed world of sideshow exhibitions; but it seemed to him he had never seen anyone who filled him with such disgust as this grinning pimpified country braggart pretending he was Enrico Caruso.

When the song was done Dove spotted Hallie. He came up beside her, raised her glass, drained it and called – ‘Bartender! This lady needs a drink!’

Hallie covered her glass with her hand.

‘What you settin’ at the bar for if you don’t want to drink?’ Dove demanded.

‘I’d rather buy my own.’

‘What’s the matter, Hallie?’ his bravado began to crumble, ‘I done nothing against you.’

‘I just don’t like to drink on someone who don’t know what he’s doing, that’s all.’

For reply he took a whole tumbler of gin and gulped it down in a single breath, then set it back on the bar with a sigh.

‘What did it prove that time?’ she asked him.

‘It prove I can drink gin,’ Dove informed her.

‘That you’ve already proved. I haven’t seen you sober in a week.’

‘Whose money is it, mine or yours?’

‘Yours,’ she assured him, and turning away, left him weaving.

Schmidt was waiting for her at the door.

‘What were you two whispering about?’ the cripple barred her way.

‘I told him I think he’s killing himself.’

‘Then let him. The sooner the better.’

Yet once it was morning when she came down to the parlor carrying her lamed cat. After the long night of riot the spiders, that at midnight had twisted and swung on their metal wires, now hung motionless. The night was done and the early light lay scattered about like broken glass, as if people had picnicked in a mausoleum here. And as in mausoleum the air felt exhausted. So close, so very still, that a sun mote in its silent play seemed like a sick-ward child told be quiet while its nurse sleeps on.

Hallie saw the pale mote searching a floor where the dead lay against the dead: a whole platoon of cokes had been wiped out at the foot of the juke, and the juke itself looked like it might never play again.

A single gin-fifth, the last of its line, lay face down where it had fallen, surrounded by dead butts and snipes that had burned themselves out on the floor. Bobbie pins, kleenex wads, beer caps, wine corks, a deck ripped savagely in two and tossed across the carpet in despair, made the whole place look like a field on which no quarter had been given.

Yet from somewhere heard a murmurous breathing, regular and slow. She followed the mote that searched, like herself, for the sole survivor too.

Hunched in a corner so deeply bent she thought he was sleeping, sat the boy with the face too young yet too old.

‘Wake up,’ she told him. He rose and stood trying to pull the various parts of the Big Stingaree together while hiding something behind his back.

‘Now what are you up to?’

‘I’m sober,’ was his curious reply.

‘But you’ll be drunk by noon.’

‘It’s my money.’

‘You told me that yesterday.’

‘I made sixty dollars yesterday. How much did you make?’ He had Big Stingaree’s parts almost together.

‘If that’s how you feel, give me back my book.’

He brought it from behind his back. ‘I don’t know how it happen to come my way,’ he pretended. ‘Of course it must be yours because you got all the knowance of books and I got nary knowance at all. Yet I don’t see how that give you the right to mock others for ignorance.’

‘I never mocked you, Dove. You can have the book.’

‘It don’t do me no good, for I can’t read as you well know and you’re mocking me in offering it.’

‘If you can stay sober till noon for a week, I’ll teach you to read.’

He took her up so quickly she grew suspicious and touched the book to take it back. ‘If you’re sober at noon you can have it back.’

He wouldn’t let her have it.

‘If I’m not sober I’ll bring it back myself. That’s a promise.’

‘You’ll be too tight to remember any promise.’

He was sober at noon. He was still sober at four. At five Finnerty’s show went on. At five-thirty he came to her, still sober, and without a word handed her the book.

‘Bartender!’ he shouted to Dockery, and his knuckles were white on the bar – ‘Gin! Gin! Gin!’

That night Dove dreamed he was alone in a hotel in Houston. Somewhere in the room a cat was trying to throw up – it had something in its throat it couldn’t swallow. He looked under a divan for it and behind a juke and then below a cot bed but everything was swathed in a mist, he could see nothing plain. Then a shadow moved in the mist and Hallie’s cat made a dash for it right across the floor and disappeared into somebody’s room. She was hiding something there she didn’t want anyone else to see; she’d been up to something for some time now. Something was wrong with the animal but nobody dared to say what.

Behind a radiator it had hidden the baretoothed carcass of a kitten dead for weeks, and was suckling it. The kitten’s teeth were bared to the bone of the jaw but the brindle put her mouth to the wasted belly and pushed against the death-stretched hide. Dove began beating it to make it quit but it felt no blows; though he beat it a long time. At last it looked around at him.

Along its whiskers fresh milk gleamed, and the dream went out slowly, like a twenty-watt light bulb saying goodnight.

Nobody on Perdido Street considered the legless man a freak. No one told that once, for a few brief weeks, he had once let himself be billed as one. For no one who knew that lion-browed gaze could doubt his profound naturalness. Below the heavy brows his eyes, set wide, burned even as candles in a room with no wind. Schmidt never blinked. He sat his platform like a saint of the amputees and gave you gaze for gaze. When at last you turned your eyes away he touched his little brown beard as much as to say, ‘I’ve seen enough of you too, friend.’

He sold his wares and made his bets and drank his beer both dark and light and never forgot his dignity; nor permitted others to forget it. Once a girl had told him, ‘Keep your money, you need it worse than me,’ and had meant it kindly. But the man waiting like a mutilated statue on the low bed’s edge, had paled below his tan.

‘You should never have said that, sis,’ he told her and lowered himself and left.

Yet, the very next afternoon, the same girl had handed him a five dollar bill for a twenty-five cent bottle of perfumed water and he’d pocketed the five without even the pretense of making change.

Some saint. When you gave, he felt, you gave it all. When you took you took it all.

Now, nearing forty, having rebuilt his whole life on the rock of sheer courage, he felt the rock shift and could not believe it. Surely a man who has been once destroyed and fought back to the land of the living would not be picked for destruction twice. God would not permit it.

He was Schmidt who needed nobody, he was Schmidt who could never lose. And yet when he thought of Hallie, surely the rock slipped. How had his life, that he’d held so hard, come to be cupped lightly in a woman’s palm, and the woman herself to be held in any nameless stranger’s arms?

The thought sent him kneewalking about his small room, pounding his stumps in a blood-colored tantrum; for the neon traffic light beside his window flashed from red to dull gold and back to the hue of blood again. The stumps! The stumps were to blame for everything!

‘One at the hip and one at the knee’ – he punished both at once with his hands like hammers, sending a wire of white pain zig-zagging through his breast to his brain.

The stumps! The dirty stumps! He gasped like a great seal for air, air. Not again. Not twice.

Then composing himself began to wheel slowly, for wheeling was therapy for his rage. And as he wheeled remembered, and remembering, loved again. Saw her standing in a bead-curtain doorway as though even now she were waiting only for him; and how she would turn her head slowly when he rolled in, and how she would not look at him with pity, and how her mouth would say ‘darling’ just to him.

‘I’ll get this out of my system tonight once and for all,’ Schmidt promised himself.

But before he’d go to Mama’s he’d have a taste of Dockery’s booze, to numb the pain in the stumps before making love. And a bit of talk with other cripples to numb the pain in his breast.

Dockery catered to cripples, and one that was almost sure to be on hand was Kneewalking Johnson; whose handicaps were greater even than Schmidt’s own. Johnson was a Negro, and owned no platform. He had padded his stumps with leather and reinforced the pads with tin. To Schmidt there was something so backward about stumping up and down the city’s walks on tin plates that he felt it his duty to modernize Johnson.

‘Get on this thing,’ he ordered. Johnson didn’t want any part of the platform, yet didn’t wish to offend the Big Half.

‘I get along alright, Mister ’chilles,’ he reported without looking at the raft, ‘I got my own way.’

‘Can you back?’ Schmidt demanded. ‘Can you swivel? Can you move sidewise? Can you make good time?’ And to show just what he meant he wheeled straight toward the juke, made an airbrake stop – ‘back!’ he backed, ‘swivel!’ he swiveled, ‘sidewise!’ his hands on the wheels seemed mechanically driven, pimps and cripples and their girls scattered while cool heads got chairs in front of them – it was like being in a swimming pool with a rudderless motorboat.

Dockery stayed in the dark of his bar so that none might see his narrow smile. He loved seeing men and women in panic and flight, did old Doc Dockery, closed in with all their sins. Whatever ran over them only served them right, that smile revealed.

‘Now let’s see you try it,’ Schmidt paused at last.

Johnson had no choice. Hands lifted him and other hands buckled him fast, then everyone stood back.

‘Give the man room,’ Schmidt commanded, ‘give the man a chance.’

So the old man with kinked hair gone white, and nothing beneath his chest but a pair of short pants that small boys wear, put his hands, that were only half the breath of Schmidt’s and yet a full inch longer, to the wheels. And rolled himself gently back and forth, forth and back. Only a timid roll forward, only a shy roll back. As though he had not a room as big as a dance floor to move in but just a tiny cell.

It was no use. Nobody could get Johnson to be more daring. It grew tiresome watching him roll those few feet up and back till someone put a coin in the juke thinking that music might liven the old man up.

But when the music began all that happened was that the old man sang along with it and rolled no faster than before.

he made a strange, sorrowing cripple’s dance—

‘Now you see how much better it is my way?’ Schmidt told him when he’d performed as best he could and had been allowed to unbuckle himself and kneewalk to the bar for the beer that was his reward. ‘Once you get used to it,’ Schmidt assured him, ‘you’ll be ashamed that you ever went around in that old-fashioned way. I’ll get you the wood, I’ll get you the skates and straps, I’ll even put it together for you. Man, you’ll be proud to be on skates.’

‘Mister ’Chilles,’ the Negro felt obliged to assert himself at last, ‘what you don’t keep in mind is I caint work main-town routes like you. I aint allowed on Canal, I aint allowed in white neighborhoods. They tells me to get my livin’ off my own people ’n the walks is all bust and cracked out there. Lots of places aint no walks at all, just old rutty wagon roads. I come to a broke walk or a mud-hole after rain, what I’m gonna do with a big old board like that? I got to unstrop myself, haul that old board through the mud or down a drop, then strop me up again. So you see, Mister ’Chilles, I wouldn’t be savin’ time, I’d be losin’ it.’

But Schmidt had suddenly lost interest. Turned to a total stranger at the bar and asked, ‘Jack, what’s your frank opinion of a woman who’ll go to bed with a man she don’t even know his name?’

He’d torture himself like that, as lovers always have.

For what would begin when he’d wheel into Mama’s was one of those mysteries born only in brothels – a relationship with a deep river’s surpassing strength: that had swept two unready people into its current and now carried them past dumb faces on the shore. Faces awe-struck or compassionate at sight of so strong a woman and so strong a man suddenly made more weak than those still safe on shore.

Finnerty was holding the big door wide when Schmidt rolled in.

Like a statue of serenity calmly smiling.

‘Hallie! At last your husband’s come!’ Mama called at once.

He had a greeting and a smile for every girl in the place but Hallie. Floralee kissed his big hand, Frenchy stroked his hair dark yet silvered, the one half-out-of-her-mind child and the other with no mind to be out of, letting the pair of them compete to see which could get his straps unbuckled first. When each stepped back with a captured strap it was as though his stumps had springs – he leaped right into the center of the divan, tottered, regained his balance and glanced all around with triumphant pride.

Yet had not so much as noticed Hallie. Instead he shoved his hands down his pockets and came up with his palms filled with nickels, dimes, even half dollars – ‘Count it, girls! Count it!’ – and slung every cent into the mildly astonished air – ‘Count it! Count it all!’

Frenchy and Floralee went down on all fours, diving under divans, hopping like rabbits, scurrying like mice. In a moment Kitty Twist followed, crawling, creeping, elbowing the others.

But the sallow woman in the portiere standing so silently never moved, though a coin rolled right to her feet.

‘The most generous man I’ve ever known,’ Mama decided right there.

‘Just buying like everyone else as far as I can see,’ Kitty Twist perceived.

‘I notice when he’s “buying” you’re right in there with your elbow in everybody’s eye getting your full share,’ Hallie reminded the new child.

‘You get yours,’ Kitty told Hallie quickly – ‘You stoop like everyone else.’

‘Why, I make my living here, honey, if that’s what you mean,’ Hallie replied without heat, ‘what line of work are you in?’

Kitty grew more careful after that, for as much as the women heckled one another about their dates, they spared Hallie’s relationship to Schmidt.

‘You in the brown dress,’ he called to her as though he had not noticed her till now, ‘step out here where we can see what you got.’

Hallie was obliged to stand alone in the parlor’s center between Schmidt and the juke’s unblinking eye. Like a sultan, he gripped the point of his little brown beard as he studied her manner of walking. And like a sultan swung his hand, to indicate he was now ready to view her from behind.

‘Is this one healthy?’ he asked Mama after a moment. ‘I hold you responsible.’

But Mama was counting her beads, the others were looking out window or door – it was plain they felt their big daddy was overdoing things tonight.

Big Dad didn’t feel he was overdoing a thing. He slid down off the divan and kneewalked around his selection.

And turning her head on her olive throat to follow the torso as it stumped, she thought, ‘What a man he must have been!’ For even on stumps Schmidt moved with grace.

‘I’ll have a go at this one,’ he decided aloud, and swung himself after her through the portiere, his head just barely higher than her waist, with the satisfied pride of a man who has driven a cunning bargain.

But the moment the door shut behind them both pride and satisfaction fled – he seized her hand, kissed each separate finger, pressed his head hard right under her heart and clasped her as though she were the life he had lost. It was the stumps made him act like he had, he told her. It was all the fault of the stumps.

Hallie stood quite still, pitying the power that could not be contained. And after a while smiled down, stroked his hair and agreed as with a child: yes, it was all the fault of his stumps.

To such tenderness he reacted like an enormous cat. And rolled within his massive arms, pressed to the great cave of his chest, his lion’s breath against her breast, she felt his passion relentlessly driving. And then it was as though no man till Legless Schmidt had possessed her.

Many had rented her, none had possessed her. Not for one moment, not even to the man she had married, had Hallie been subjugated as this shattered athlete subjugated her. To be reduced to a thing for the use of lust was her trade, and to that trade she was long resigned. But to feel, below his lust, love running like a river in flood terrified her; for she abandoned herself to it, she lost herself in it, she could not help herself against it. And then was ashamed – not that she had given herself to a cripple, but that she had violated the first rule of her craft.

There were moments with him when she cried weakly and begged his flesh, as if it were something apart from him, to let her be. And at the same moment drawing his flesh so tight and deep toward her heart, so fierce not to let him escape her, that the man himself was brought close to tears as he lay back limp and done.

Schmidt had never felt a woman like that before. With him it was as if he had never had a woman completely till Hallie. Only with her, not until her, never at any moment except those with her was he a man, able, loved, possessing and possessed – his own true man again.

In her he spent a lifetime’s wrath. In him she too lived once more. Nine Christmases she had been buried, and twice that many for him. And with each time together, each lived a little while again.

Once, waking from sleep she became aware again of how the Santa Fe wheels had rolled back his thighs, one at the hip and one at the knee, into raw volcanic folds. She threw the sheet across him to conceal, at once, his deformity and her own disgust.

‘I’m afraid you’ll catch cold,’ she pretended.

‘Don’t worry’ – she hadn’t fooled him for a moment – ‘you don’t look no better to me than I do to you.’

It always ended like that. And she never tried directly to answer his insults, as bitter now that he’d had her as before.

‘I don’t want to go through this anymore,’ she told him what she had told him often. ‘I’m clearing out.’

‘Sister, if you think I’m going to say “Please don’t go,” you’re barking up the wrong tree. When I get a bit of the booze in me it don’t make no difference what girl I pick. All you tramps look alike to me.’

‘In that case you won’t miss me. So goodbye.’

But after he had dressed and she still lay on the bed he stumped to the dresser with a handful of bills. She lay with eyes closed pretending she didn’t know what he was up to.

‘There’s a hundred or so under your comb and brush,’ he told her – ‘that’s one way to anywhere. See you in jail.’ And so, having salvaged his pride at the cost of his heart, he left.

‘I might just take you up on that one of these days,’ Hallie promised herself after he’d left.

Then in the damps and glooms of her little room, Hallie slept.

Schmidt’s greatest joy was Armless Charlie, a panhandler whose face was a mask of fright and whose arms ended in delicate nibs, more like fingered fins than hands, where another man’s elbows would be. What stray wind off what derelict’s row had blown him down Perdido Street nobody knew. But there he was with a dime between his teeth, placing it carefully on the bar – ‘Listen to this,’ – Schmidt would command silence. And in the silence the beggar would ask, in a boyish lisp out of some eastern preparatory school:

‘Mister Dockawee, might I have a beah pwease?’

‘Everyone watch this!’ Schmidt ordered as soon as the beer was put down.

Charlie would grip the glass with his teeth and tilt it till the beer ran over his face – he gulped frantically, catching every drop he could. Drenched and choking, yet he never unloosed the glass till it was empty. Then would set it down as carefully as he had picked it up, bow slightly and say,

‘Thank you, Mister Dockawee.’

‘My God, what a pig!’ – Schmidt would race back and forth on his platform, slapping his stumps. ‘Aint he the worst?’

A different brand of innocent was one who didn’t come into Dockery’s at all, but always chose Mama’s instead. This was an ancient Negro carrying a curtained cage more ancient than himself. He would set it down on its wrought-iron base, doff his little red monkey-cap to each woman individually and at last would pull a little string that caused the cage’s shade to rise.

Revealing a parrot that took one glassy glance around and screeched, ‘Let me out! I’m a married man! Let me out!’ Then hung upside down in a clench-beak rage while biting the bitten wood.

The old man stood a bit to one side, implying the bird was now on its own. But kept his cap extended should anyone care to drop a penny. If someone did, he would pull out a drawer at the cage’s base, where small pieces of colored paper lay folded promisingly. The parrot would snatch one and permit the purchaser to take it out of its beak. The message on each was the same:

‘I don’t believe that old man wrote all that, he aint got the sense for it,’ Finnerty decided.

‘Who did then?’ Hallie wondered.

‘The damned parrot, of course,’ Finnerty assured her.

And went off to see Kitty Twist. The new child who still had a thing or two to learn from his mouse.

Yet another wonder, neither snatch-mad nor prophesying, taxied in one narrowing twilight, made one brief scene; and no twilight brought him back again.

‘In person!’ this one announced himself – ‘Adler! King of the acrobats! Good as ever!’ Paunched and pallid, bald and tattooed: a man at least as good as ever. He came to the center of the parlor wearing seersucker so soiled and stained one wondered how many places he’d been thrown out of since the last time he’d changed.

‘Once an acrobat always an acrobat!’ he announced – ‘I invented the double high-wire back somersault.’

‘You invented it but who did it?’ Kitty Twist asked, but the king ignored all questions like that. Just stood back beaming until everyone had had a good look then asked so benignly: ‘How does it feel, now that you’ve met the king?’

‘It feels like hell,’ Kitty told him.

‘These young ladies are waiting for you to say hello, Mr King,’ Mama let him know no one cared a doodle in a wood how great he was. If he wanted to stay he’d have to let loose of some loot.

That didn’t disturb Adler. He knew how people loved to tease, pretending they hadn’t heard of Adler.

‘Are you with a circus or something, mister?’ Floralee inquired hopefully, and somehow that set him off.

‘Clear a space!’ He met the challenge as a motion picture director might, or at any rate so we’re told – ‘Women off the set! No crowding! Put out that cigarette!’ Then pointing right at Dove, who wasn’t even wearing cowboy boots – ‘You there! Tables end to end!’

Dove leaped to action, tumbling girls upon one another until Mama gathered them up and put them safely behind her. In rushed Finnerty to discover Dove placing two tables end to end and the king in command.

‘A little lower,’ the king instructed Dove. ‘No, a little higher. There, that’s just right.’

‘What the hell is this? a whorehouse or a circus?’ Finnerty demanded.

‘The man has signified, let him qualify, Oliver,’ Dove urged him to indulge Adler.

‘It better be good, all I got to say,’ Finnerty compromised.

The king had stripped to the waist and the hair of his chest gleamed white where it wasn’t grizzled; a chest as good as ever. Yet he dallied – ‘The king always says a few words first.’

‘Then say a few, king,’ Floralee pleaded.

‘Very few,’ Kitty suggested.

‘By God, this better be good,’ Finnerty resolved.

‘Ladies ’n gentlemen,’ Adler nodded toward Hallie, ‘I dedicate this amazing demonstration of human agility to the lady in the brown dress with the green earrings.’

‘Bust your damned neck instead and dedicate it to me,’ Kitty invited him.

Hallie didn’t acknowledge his gift lest he take it to mean her price tag was off. Ex-clown, ex-cop, ex-acrobat – ex-anything, all sought to please this indifferent dark woman in every way but by overpaying her. Money, they seemed to think, could never please her.

‘Do what you’re gonna do,’ Finnerty said.

The king turned his back to the tables, did a knee-bend and arched his back with surprising suppleness, bounded one short confident step forward, pitched himself ass over appetite, beaned himself beautifully on the table’s edge and crushed flat, shoulders shaking in noiseless laughter.

‘Why, he didn’t qualify after all!’ Dove was just simply incredulous.

‘Why don’t we sell the juke and buy beds for the money?’ Kitty asked, ‘every time I look around someone else is stretched out.’

Finnerty kicked the fellow to his feet, booted him through the door, made a bundle of his cap, coat and shirt and pitched it through the door after. Then threw a spittoon just for good measure. It clanged loud as it struck the stone, rang less loud as it bounced, then splashed faintly into the gutter. For a moment after, all was still. Then Adler’s foolish phizz popped right back in – ‘Good as ever!’ he defied everyone, and cap in hand and draggle-shirted, scurried off to seek some door where everyone would cry out on sight – ‘Champagne all around! The king is back!’

Some place where he could back-somersault all night to applause that would never cease.

‘Now don’t you go faultin’ me, Oliver,’ Mama told Finnerty. ‘I didn’t invite the man. And why every fool who hits New Orleans has to head right for my door is more than I can understand.’

The tables were back in place when the legless man rolled in. Immediately everyone but Floralee began trying to tell him at once what a show he’d just missed. For Floralee felt so elated by the whole thing all she wanted to do was sing—

‘Honey dear, run upstairs like a good girl,’ Mama asked her, for she knew how the girl loved to run any errand involving Hallie. ‘Tell Hallie her husband’s come.’

Floralee was so very long in coming down that at last Mama waddled up the steps herself. She found Floralee standing in the middle of Hallie’s room looking vaguely around as if Hallie were hiding from her.

But the closet was empty, the shoe holder hung shoeless, the dresser was swept of brush, compact and comb.

Everyone was so stunned by the news that no one even thought to ask where Big Stingaree had gone, leaving his cowboy boots under his bed.

Achilles Schmidt had had his sniff of fame – a scent that prevails against all perfumes. Born on the outskirts of Mobile in a carnie show, he had grown into a shrewd wild boy who had learned reading and writing by working the bingo tents. He could still guess a woman’s weight to the ounce by running his hands once down her clothes.

He had begun boxing professionally at seventeen and had lasted two rounds of his first bout – he’d never make a boxer. At seventeen he was already too heavily muscled for that.

He had billed himself as ACHILLES THE BIRMINGHAM STRONG BOY and country girls came to stand at the feet of a boy with an IBM brain in the body of a honeyfed bear. To bring the yokels crowding, he could scale a house and threaten the local sheriff, and give the wink to the girls all at once.

Yet it wasn’t until he’d gone on the road as a professional wrestler in a coast-to-coast tour, stooging for a claimant to the world’s championship, that he had found his own trade.

A trade that soon taught him such physical superiority over other men that he began, like the honeyfed bear, to protect others against his strength. For it wasn’t just in the biceps and chest that he was greater than others, he saw without arrogance, but in the mind and the heart as well. That he was incapable of the meannesses he observed in others the boy did not consider a virtue in himself so much as an advantage, like the breadth of his chest, and was grateful. Who had put him together so generously he did not know, and yet wished to honor the wonderful luck of it. Leaning on the ropes in a great red cape, looking across row upon row in the smoky coliseums and tents, he saw how surely the wealth of all earth’s tents, the women within them, the fame as well, would come to him. There was time, and more than time for everything to come to Schmidt.

‘When are you going to stop growing, Achilles?’ a town girl once had waited outside his tent to ask.

‘When I win the undisputed title,’ he told her jokingly, for his awareness of his powers had come to him so swiftly he had not yet had time to realize fully that there was actually nothing in the way of his winning that disputed title. Yet he could take the hand of a girl like that like any nineteen-year-old brother and say, ‘I don’t want to grow bigger. I don’t like to scare people.’

‘You’re big enough now to scare the champion,’ she told him that night, ‘but you’re not big enough to scare me,’ and turned her face to his own for the taking.

A face forgotten these twenty years. Yet the hand that had lain so light in his lay there lightly yet.

She had been right. He had been big enough for anything that night. On the road with the Strangler, he had had to hold himself back to keep his job. By the time they had reached the eastern mining towns he knew that no one in the world could beat the shrewd wild boy with the heart of a honeyfed bear.

But the Strangler had only a few years left, he himself had a lifetime. And he liked the Strangler, poor brute.

An old-time promoter, one of Dockery’s hangers-on, admired The Birmingham Strong Boy yet – ‘He could hit you in the ass so hard you’d break your leg. And still I’ve seen him suffering the agonies of the damned, letting some country athlete haul him from one side of the ring to the other while he scaled the house, though nobody who was unarmed could really hurt him. Once some brave guy pitched him into the folding chairs before he’d finished counting the balcony. Achilles picked up two sets of them chairs, stretched the brave guy cold with one set and his manager with the other and held off the house till the cops arrived. Neither man nor box office could whip him. If you ask me, he could hold off the cops today.’

Yet in the time it takes for a second-hand to move from twelve to six he had been beaten for keeps and his glowing manhood beginning so luckily, so clean, was smashed into something half man and half-platform. Santa Fe freight wheels had proved even shrewder than he.

What had been extricated, after hours of extremest pain in which he had not once permitted himself to faint, was no longer Achilles The Birmingham Strong Boy, but only Legless Schmidt. One-At-The-Hip-And-One-At-The-Knee Schmidt to whom every two-legger might be the one who had rolled him beneath the wheels.

Sure he’d been drunk but what of that? He’d been on the drunk before and gotten a bit of sleep with one leg locked in a box-car’s spine between one county fair and the next.

If it had been his own doing, no one’s fault but his own, it would be easier to accept even now. Yet, moving behind his memory there lurked forever the suspicion that he had been deliberately shoved over. At moments he could almost feel the hands at his shoulder, the knee in his back.

Two years in a dusty desert hospital where the power that once had moved dead Achilles’s thighs began to flow with a wilder pride through crippled Schmidt.

All he now recalled of the hospital was the bitter blowing of alkali dust all day against the pane. And the face of some intern’s wife who had cut a turtle-neck jersey for him from his red cape.

Where in letters once gilt now long washed to gray all that remained of his brief fame kept fading—

Lost lost, all lost, swift as the desert dust that taps once and never is blown again.

Blown, blown, the fame and the gathering strength, the girls, the money, the power. Profession and pride gone in one night’s passage – and gone so uselessly.

After that he had let himself be billed briefly as The Living Half. He had sat his home-made platform in the freakish sun, looking down at farmers in town to see the freaks. And the honeyfed bear, that once had drawn in his claws, wished as he sat that he could be no more than one great claw.

The sideshow billing had been his greatest humiliation, one upon which he had drawn a shade. He never spoke of it himself and felt his secret was safe enough among the lost and the damned of Perdido Street.

Yet in his heart had never evened up for The Living Half – a thing like that.

Once while he chatted with several girls crowding behind a Perdido Street screen, a man with a metal support compensating for one short leg came hurrying down the street. He carried a briefcase under one arm and pens and pencils in his coat. Late for some business appointment, that was plain.

Schmidt flared at sight of him, and wheeling after on noiseless bearings, sent the rival cripple spinning so hard that, had he not caught himself against a wall, he would have ended flat on his face. Then swerved with one deft twist of the wheels and faced his man, head lowered in challenge.

But all his man wanted was to be allowed to go his own way. He clubfooted it, hippety-hop, off the curb and around and went free.

Schmidt wheeled in triumph back to his girls. ‘Well, why give him a chance?’ he asked. ‘What chance would he have given me?’

And the mascaraed, Maybellined eye-shadowed girls agreed with a cold vindictive glee—

‘Why give him a chance? What chance would he have give you?’

Hallie and Dove lived behind a wrought-iron rail a long winding way from old Perdido. The rail enclosed a tiny balcony two stories above Royal Street. Across the way someone long ago had painted a white tin moon against a blue tin sky. A sky of midnight blue. A moon of Christmas snow. Long ago.

Now rust and rain had run the colors, sun had flaked the midnight snow. Nothing remained but a ruined moon in a sky that had fallen through.

Here in the hour of the firefly, while he and Hallie watched the lights of the Old Quarter flicker, the happy time came at last to Dove. The one happy time. From an unseen court or honkytonk, now far, now near, a piano invited them to join the dancers. Each night they heard the same piano and knew the dancing had begun once more.

Behind them a room, no bigger than a beer bottle turned upside down, held little more than a bed where the pupil slept with his fingers spread on his teacher’s breast; and as she slept pressed to his side.

Till morning woke them with vendors’ cries—

Once he wakened to see she had been smiling at him. When he asked her why the smile she told him it was because he made her sad ‘being such as you are and still not seeming to mind.’

Along a bureau stood a set of morocco-bound books, all that was left of Miss Hallie Breedlove’s schoolroom hours. Sometimes it was his turn for reading from them, sometimes Miss Hallie Breedlove’s. For in that first swift rush of their days together he had learned, by the making of wonderful o-shaped mouths, to read unaided—

And when he had finished the last round sound, would flatten his lips in a grin so contented she would protest, ‘You look like a cat eating hot mush on a frosty morning,’ and would snatch back the book. ‘You haven’t done anything a six-year-old couldn’t to look that pleased,’ she reminded him to make the fat cat-grin go. ‘Here’ – and gave him a passage wherein he immediately mired himself in such tongue-thudding woe that she took pity and began it from the start—

‘Now what do you think of that?’

‘I don’t think purely nothin’ of that,’ Dove decided – ‘it remind me too near of my poor crazy pappy. Teacher dear, read me that one where somebody’s pappy got entirely drownded.’

‘That’s the good part,’ he assured her.

‘Didn’t take much changin’ to make Pappy strange,’ he reflected. ‘He were a little on the odd side, from the life he led.’

‘We’re all a little on the odd side,’ Hallie guessed, ‘from the life we’ve led. The life we’ve all led.’ And taking his hand led him to the bed.

‘I don’t mean for you to love me,’ she had to tell him a minute after, ‘just hold me. Hold.’

Dove held her, sensing only dimly that in holding her he was saving her.

For around the margins of her mind, as about a slowly tilting floor, a tyrant torso wheeled and reeled.

someone shouted up from the street below—

The last metallic cries of day rang in the tootle and low moan of the earliest evening ferry. Then in the big blue dusk she told him of battles lost at sea and cities half as old as time. Together they read:

‘Fishee! Fishee!’ yet another peddler called – ‘Mullet! Mullet! Flounder! Blackfish! Shark steaks for dem what likes ’em! Swordfish for dem what fights ’em! Fishee! Fishee!’

Toward midnight they went, by backstreets, to the ferry. As the lights of the eastern shore swung toward them he suddenly made up his mind – ‘Pack of fools! To keep right on livin’ smack at the foot of the mountain ’n that volcano gettin’ ready to pop any minute! Didn’t they care if they lived or died?’

‘Why did you keep on living in a place where nobody cared whether you lived or died?’

‘I got out, didn’t I?’

‘And you’re going back, aren’t you?’

‘Reckon so,’ he admitted, ‘some day. It’s home.’

‘Well, the foot of the mountain was home to the people of Pompeii. Fact of the matter is they’d been there lots longer than your people been in Arroyo.’

They walked through Gretna to Algiers, to a tiny bar where they could drink red wine or white and a Negro piano-man played and sang—

yet by docklight or ferry, by white wine or red, the lessons went on hand in hand.

‘I wouldn’t of marched on Moscow,’ he leaned earnestly toward her, having examined the issue from every angle.

‘Listen to the music, Dove.’

‘—I would of waited till the ice bust up, so’s the horses would of had spring grass.’

‘Drink your wine, Dove.’

‘For you see, I’d be willing to eat horse-meat a few weeks to be the king of a whole darn city.’

By boatbell, by bed lamp, by love song or star, the lessons went on hand in hand, back through the narrow European streets of home and up two flights till they were safe above their firefly street again.

‘If we had such good good generals and all of that, how come we got whupped, Hallie?’

‘North had more guns. Go to sleep, Dove.’

But in the big blue middle of the night she felt a nudge.

‘Why, in that case it weren’t a question or right makin’ might after all. It was more a matter of might makin’ right.’

‘Might makes might,’ she murmured sleepily.

‘Yes, but how I look at it,’ he made one more ageless decision, ‘the reason the North got most guns was because they had the right to start. What I fail to understand is how come it taken them four years to whup a bunch with such a sorry cause as ourn.’

He knew how to wake her up all right. Hallie was unreconstructed with a vengeance. She came awake as though he’d fired on Sumter.

‘To your people, hiding out in the Cookson Hills, any cause but that of making corn likker was sorry.’

‘It was for your people to drink.’

‘My people? My people. What do you mean by that? – My people?’

‘You know darn well what I mean alright,’ for he was touched to the quick himself, ‘just because you have nappy hair—’

‘I’m French and Spanish and one-sixteenth Indian.’

He had her going now and wanted to keep her going. ‘Now about that one-sixteenth—’

‘I’ve had enough.’ She was out of bed, the light was lit, she was pulling clothes out of closet and drawer.

‘Where you goin’, Hallie?’ Dove was frightened.

For reply she upended a handbag, one she had not carried for weeks, and the contents rolled on the bed – all the tools of her ancient trade.

He scattered them to the floor with a kick and pulled her to him, and found her mouth with the red wine still on it. She yielded wearily, a woman who had had enough of love to last a lifetime of red wine.

Later in sleep she accused someone unseen – ‘If you had accepted the child he wouldn’t have died.’

She wore a hat of white straw that day at the zoo when the season of sun met the season of rain. That day when they were happy enough together to make it all one, rain or sun. Dove, in a blue serge suit out of a second-hand store, let her pin a little green feather into his black-and-white checked cap and felt more the sporty-O than ever. And as she pinned it, love lightened his looks a little. Love, and pride that he could read the Times-Picayune or the Item, either one.

Love, and pride. And the sense of a certain C-note yet unspent.

Merry-go-round music drew them – around and around great stallions raced, some white as snow, some black as night, but all with manes that furled and curled as the music beat, and he wanted to ride, but was ashamed to speak. Beside him Hallie smiled to herself, it wasn’t hard to tell what he wanted to do. She drew him away from temptation.

When they came to the monkey house he stopped dead. In one cage a hairy little character was banging his knuckles on his girlfriend’s skull to make her climb a tree for some special purpose all his own.

‘Why! There’s Oliver and Reba!’ Dove called to Hallie in real glee, and pitched popcorn at Finnerty. Then of a sudden it didn’t seem so funny after all, and they moved on.

A single iron-colored owl waited in the shadows of noon like a dream waiting only for nightfall to be dreamt. And a scent of decay blew off him, as though he were rotting under his feathers.

To watch where the elephant, crowned with children, swayed as he walked to excite the children. He looked like a great fool of a child himself. Yet he bore the weak upon his back.

Dove bought two boxes of crackerjack. Hallie’s prize was a tiny red and blue clown made of tin; she pinned it on Dove’s lapel. His own prize was a toy tin whistle that he blew at the candyland sun.

Crackerjack whistles and children’s voices, pony rides and merry-go-rounds, everything Dove heard and saw that day at the zoo lived within a new city innocent and bright.

Belonging just to himself and Hallie.

In the snake house the bended serpent writhed. One attendant held its tail neck and tail, another pried its jaws apart to let a third man bottle-feed it.

When the lion roared Dove backed up a step. ‘He must be hungry too,’ he told Hallie.

‘More likely homesick,’ was Hallie Dear’s guess.

The great gray wolves of the snowplain wilderness lay stretched waiting for December. But in the cages beside them the small restless foxes raced and raced as though summer never could be done.

Dove marveled at the way the changeful light followed rain across the littered grass: he had never noticed how light fell before. In his mind a hurdy-gurdy played autumnal tunes he had never heard before.

In her hay-smelling dark the quick gazelle tiptoed about in the delicate gloom, practicing a ballet of which she would certainly be the queen.

And like a sidewalk drunk careless of wet weather or dry, the great bear lay with his paws in the air while his brood toddled and wrestled about him. Slowly from out the primeval stone came forth the ancient mother of bears, all brown. A working mother wed to a useless hulk, sole support of himself and a growing family.

Came forth bowlegged, honest paws inward; as she had come toward the earliest man. Dove tossed her a peanut and just this once she decided to settle for that.

In mid-afternoon the rain came again, sprinkling walk and cavern and cage. They ducked, newspapers over their heads, into a latticed pavilion. A place for October lovers. They had just ordered soft drinks and two poor-boy sandwiches when an old woman in gray stockings came up to them with a wet newspaper in her hand.

‘Forty years a good life,’ she assured them, ‘forty years married to a good man. It is damp, so you may have it for only a penny,’ and offered them her paper.

‘It’s also yesterday’s,’ Hallie told her; and gave her a nickel. ‘Keep it.’

‘I cannot accept charity,’ the old woman replied with injured pride. And would have left. Dove made her stay.

‘I’ll buy your paper,’ he offered, ‘something happened yesterday I want to read about, so you can charge yesterday’s price.’ The woman understood. She handed over the paper. Dove handed her a dollar bill and waited for his change.

‘Must I give back money?’ she pleaded.

There was no change.

As they ate the sun came out though rain still fell. ‘The Devil is beating his daughter,’ Hallie explained such changeful weather.

‘Is that who it was just beat me out of a dollar?’ Dove asked a little bitterly.

For some reason Hallie began telling him how she had become a prostitute. For a long time after her baby’s death and her husband’s desertion she had been unwell, and a friend of her husband had become her only white friend. She would waken and he would be standing at the foot of her bed, watching her sleep. When she grew better he brought her a pair of shoes, just the right size, with French heels. Then he took her to a beach.

He had lain in the sun watching the small waves wash the heels as she walked up and down at the water’s edge. Then he had taken her home. That was how easy it had been.

‘But I’d still rather have a man sleeping beside me than standing at the foot of my bed without my knowing he’s there,’ she told Dove, ‘it makes me afraid of what goes on in the mind of a man like that.’

Now the Devil’s daughter was back, begging for her damp newspaper as though she had never seen either Dove or Hallie before. ‘May I have your newspaper? I’ve had a good life, forty years of marriage, forty years a good life. Thank you. I don’t know how to thank you – perhaps I’ll come by another day and you’ll give me another paper.’

It felt like a lucky day for everybody.

Toward evening a small breeze came up and began blowing the minutes away until it was time to go.

As they left they passed once again the prisons where the wolves lay sentenced, though now their fur had been damped by winter’s first rain. Where still the summer foxes paced made even more restless by the changeful weather.

And still the obedient elephant went bearing children on its back, swinging its trunk like an orchestra leader conducting an old-fashioned waltz.

Where the white-maned merry-go-round stallions raced, one a nose ahead, then the other, then coasted when the music-box stopped.

The homesick lion roared for home. The iron-feathered owl waited only for night to wing soundlessly into people’s dreams and be back in his tree by morning.

Finnerty’s girlfriend, trapped out on a limb too fragile for him to follow, whimpered between fear of falling and fear of Finnerty.

In the haysmelling dark the quick gazelle tiptoed, rehearsing forever some animal’s ballet in which she was sure to be the leading lady.

Deep in the primeval stone the ancient bear had curled, and this time would not be seduced outside for peanuts or people, Devil or daughter.

So they turned back at last to those streets whereon the wildest beast of all roamed free.

At the foot of Canal Street they saw a great white excursion steamer that had come down the river from Baton Rouge that day. With a brave invitation at the foot of the gangplank—

Hallie had not seen a play since her schoolroom days. Dove had never seen one. ‘It’s your day, and that’s all there is to it,’ she decided.

She herself was too heavy with the long day’s sun to wish to do more now than sit on the lower deck and watch the big old river bearing broken box lunches to the sea.

Every ten minutes he returned to her with news: the boat would pull out at eight-thirty and the play would begin at nine! He had been below and was sure the engines were ready to start. Now they were testing the lights in the ballroom. He had seen a tall young fellow and a young woman drinking beer at the bar and had been told they were O-Thello and Dessie-Mona.

Just then they felt the ship tremble and the big wheel began its first slow sure turn – heading for the open sea! He turned and lumbered off to see whether the captain needed his help.

As the lights of the eastern shore swung out, Hallie heard singing down below out of years she barely remembered—

and felt an air of joy and a water-born courting, then a stirring within herself she had felt all day but to which she had paid no heed.

She saw the fore and aft lights of a freight barge being towed downriver. And men and beds and odors, the whole monstrous nightmare of her years since the baby had died seemed to be towed downriver with the barge. And, in the place her heart had been, again felt the faint deep stirring.

The boat rocked in the passing barge’s wake, she shut her eyes, for she felt a pleasant nausea. And in her mind saw, around and around, the white-maned merry-go-round horses race once again. ‘One-sixteenth,’ she thought for no reason she understood, and wanted to laugh but didn’t know at what, unless it was the redheaded boy coming toward her as though bearing news.

She listened but hardly heard. It was only when he took her hand that she understood that a play was about to begin.

In the middle of the first act the boat was caught in a wash and the whole stage tilted a bit. It was by this time obvious to the front rows that Othello, with a bad job of makeup, was tilting slightly on his own. But retained sufficient presence of mind, when he needed to lean against the air, to bear against the tilt of the stage rather than with it. By this instinctive device Othello held the front rows breathless, wondering which way he’d fall should he guess wrong.

But the boat could have turned on its side and Dove wouldn’t have noticed. He had been captured by the roll and trump of lines so honored by old time they justified all mankind:

‘One-sixteenth,’ Hallie’s mind insisted as the stage tilted back and heard herself making a curious prayer all her own: ‘Lord, make it a woman or make it a man, make it black as midnight but let it be mine. This time let it be mine.’ And her heart closed fast on the very thought that any white man might share this child. And in her mind began to toss her French and Spanish forebears like emptied box lunches over the rail.

She wished, and realized she had wished it for some days now, to return to the mulatto village in which she had been born. And there put her hair in pigtails in her people’s ancestral way until the baby came. Things would have to be done quickly before this white man could guess.

But a languid ease arose in her, bringing an irrational contentment that there was plenty of time for everything.

When they left the boat, wearied out with the long day, Dove heard a tiny tinkling and saw a little ice cart at the curb. The night was hot, and ice was what he wanted.

‘What flavor you want, Hallie?’ he asked her.

‘Orange.’

With the orange in his hand and three cents in debt to the vendor, he stood trying to decide between raspberry and pineapple, when a voice behind him said ‘chocolate,’ and a long shadow fell across curb and cart.

Dove didn’t wait to decide, he would do without ice tonight.

‘Someone you know?’ Hallie wondered.

‘Used to.’

‘Why you afraid? He after you?’

‘I don’t know.’

At the corner he dared one glance back. Fort was bent so far over, to make sure the vendor didn’t slip one over by giving him maple instead of chocolate, that Dove realized how hard it must be to tell colors at night behind dark glasses.

In the days that followed Hallie wearied a bit of hearing ‘I kissed thee are I killed thee: no way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.’

‘If I only thought you knew what you were talking about I’d feel better about it,’ she told him.

She could never be certain that he didn’t know what he was talking about. One evening she heard him read aloud—

and when she asked him what he thought it all meant he replied as if he had known all his life, ‘Oh, somethin’ ’bout old-timey kings ’n other folks there too. There’s goin’ to be a war ’n it looks like our side might get whipped. You want me to go down and bring some srimps?’

Later, when the shrimp question had been settled and the shrimps eaten, she read—

‘Why, that’s as good as anything,’ he assured her. And never suspected how, across behind the words she spoke, a tyrant torso wheeled and reeled.

The Southern nights grew cooler. The rain came every day.

Long after Hallie had gone to bed one night Dove sat alone on their balcony. Every time a breeze from the river passed, another of the lights below went out, till it seemed the breeze was blowing them out. When the windows both sides of the streets were darkened he turned up the lamp in the small room where she slept.

Across her face a shadow lay, leaving her mouth defenseless to the light. She slept on not knowing how the river breeze had just blown out the last of the lights. Nor how the rainwind was making their room cooler than before.

Nor yet how softly now the night traffic moved two stories down. And how all the anguish he had felt for his ignorance was gone for the first time in his life. And nothing mattered, it seemed in that moment, but that this woman should sleep on, and never know that the wind was blowing out the lights.

Somewhere in the court below someone began playing a piano softly, as though fearing to waken her. Sitting on the side of the bed, hearing the music now near now far, he remembered the first time she had made words out of letters for him—

When he turned down the lamp and lay beside her, she half turned on her side away from him.

He must have fallen asleep almost at once, because it seemed only a few seconds to him when he wakened and saw that the lamp was burning.

He stared into it a moment, dully wondering if he had forgotten to turn it off. The air outside was all mixed up and noises on the street went stamping.

Along the dresser he saw her lipstick, compact and comb. It wasn’t till that moment he realized he was alone in the bed.

She was neither in the bathroom nor down the hall. He dressed, feeling sure, for no reason except that he could think of no other, that she had gone back to Mama’s.

The last Dove saw of the little room above Royal Street was a broken comb lying in a pool of light.

He left in a ceaseless rain, the saddest that ever fell. He went by streets both steep and narrow and the rain fell all the way.

In that hour when tugboats call and call, like lovers who have lost their way.