Crowded Lives, page 8
“I was one of those young girls with stars in her eyes who went out to California to get into the movies. Or TV. Or modeling. Anything, you know, except the nine-to-five office bit. Took me a while to realize that I wasn’t the only one with big ideas. There were hundreds of others just like me. We were all pilgrims who made it to Mecca—only Mecca turned out to be Hustle City. I was lucky; I ended up waiting tables at a Hamburger Hamlet. A lot of others weren’t lucky: they ended up on drugs, or selling themselves on Hollywood Boulevard for some pimp, or even worse. That’s why when the two sports in the Cadillac asked if I wanted a ride east, I took it.”
“No modeling job at Marshall Field’s?”
Vi shook her head. “Most I’ve got to look forward to is a monotonous job in some dull office.”
“That’s more than some people have got,” Tree commented darkly.
Again she started to question him. And again she changed her mind.
That night, her third night at the cabin, Tree let her cook for him. She made breaded pork chops from his freezer, and managed to whip up some decent mashed potatoes from his dehydrated food stock.
“Not bad,” he said. “Where’d you learn to cook?”
“Marshall High School, on the west side of Chicago. Home Ec was required. Where’d you go to school?”
“A reservation in Idaho.”
“What was it like, living on a reservation?”
“Poor,” he said quietly. “Cold poor. Hungry poor. Hard-knock poor.”
“How’d you get away from it?”
“Joined the army.” He realized the slip at once.
“You told me you came up here to evade the draft,” she reminded him.
Tree looked down at the table for a long silent moment. Finally he met her eyes. “That was a lie. But I can’t tell you the truth. Let’s just leave it alone for the rest of the time you’re here, okay?”
They resumed eating, with no further conversation for several minutes. Finally Vi put her fork down and rose.
“I told you the truth about me,” she said. It was clearly an accusation. She left the table and went outside.
Tree finished his supper, cleared off the table, and washed the dishes. Then he got an apple out of the food locker for Elk and went outside. Vi was sitting on the porch looking up at a sky full of stars that looked close enough to touch.
“Want to feed this apple to Elk?” Tree asked.
“Elk doesn’t like me,” Vi said.
“She’s just not used to you. Come on, you can feed her.” Vi did not move. Tree coaxed her. “Come on. I’ll show you how. It’s easy. Come on.”
Finally Vi got up and went with him around to the lean-to. Tree cut the apple into sixths and showed Vi how to hold her hand out straight, palm up, so that the horse could take the food with its lips and not hurt Vi’s hand with its powerful teeth. Vi was nervous, but Elk, whose affections could always be bought with fresh apples, played the perfect lady and ate properly.
“Go ahead, scratch her neck,” Tree said. “She likes that.”
“Don’t we all,” Vi replied, mostly to herself.
Vi petted the Appaloosa for awhile, then Tree closed the stall and they returned to the porch.
“I’ll let you help me feed the wild things in the morning if you like,” he offered.
“You don’t have to.”
“I don’t want you to be mad.”
“I’m not. I don’t blame you for not trusting me.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just something I don’t talk about. Not to anybody.”
She was sitting in a shaft of light from the window and Tree saw her shrug. “Okay,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
Another shrug. “Sure.”
They sat without speaking for ten minutes, listening to the night sounds of the cool, high-mountain evening. Finally Vi stood up.
“I think I’ll go to bed. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Tree remained on the porch for a long time, thinking about things: the vivid, dangerous past; the nebulous, unsure future; and the clear, demanding present. He admitted to himself that he wanted the woman, then told himself in definite, forceful language—silently, in his head—that he could not have her. Alone is safest, he reminded himself. Alone is smartest. Alone is best.
He grunted softly. Alone was also loneliest.
It was midnight when he finally went inside, stripped down, and slid into his sleeping bag. But he could not sleep. It was as if he were waiting for something.
He was still awake when she came to him in the darkness.
On Wednesday morning he let her help him feed the wild things. At first they were skittish about her, made nervous by the sight and scent of her so close. But because they trusted Tree so completely, they gradually eased their way up to her. Soon she was kneeling in their midst just as Tree did, and they were nuzzling her hands, putting front paws up on her legs, making their individual little noises to get her attention. She learned that the mule deer and the pronghorn would nibble at her ears with their lips if she paid too much attention to the ground animals and not enough to them. Feeding the wild things was a decided thrill for Vi; she could not wait for the next day to feed them again.
“I want to feed them every morning!” she said with delight. Tree looked curiously at her and Vi’s smile faded. “Oh, I forgot,” she said. “I’ve only got two more mornings, haven’t I? The bus comes over the mountain on Friday.”
Tree nodded. “Yes. On Friday.”
They went swimming that afternoon, in the same stream in which they had fished the previous day. Vi thought she was going to freeze.
“It’s like ice water!” she shrieked.
“It is ice water,” Tree said, laughing. “It’s melted snow from’way up. Move around; you’ll get warm.”
She did move around, but she did not warm up. After five minutes she had to get out. Tree wrapped her in a blanket and left her on the bank while he swam for another quarter-hour. When he came out, his tan body shone like the coats of the wild things who were his friends.
After their swim, they walked arm-in-arm back to the cabin and Tree built a fire. They stretched out on a Navajo blanket in front of the fireplace, chewed some peyote, slept, woke up and made love, and slept again.
That night, Tree said, “You don’t want to leave, do you?”
Vi shrugged. “I don’t want to mess with your life, Tree. You’ve got everything you want up here. The one thing you haven’t got—well, it’s available down on the Salmon River Reservation when you want it, and you don’t have to bring it home with you.” She looked away from him. “I think it would be bad for both of us if I stayed.”
They did not discuss it any further that night, each retreating into silence.
On Thursday morning, Tree was sick.
“My cooking,” Vi said lightly. “Now you know why I’ve never married.”
“Probably the peyote,” he told her. “It gives you a great feeling, but sometimes it raises hell with the digestive system. How’s your stomach?”
“Fine. Let me mix you some cold powdered milk; that’ll probably settle it.”
The milk helped some, but later in the day he had severe nausea and a bad headache.
“Do you have any medicine up here at all?” Vi asked. He directed her to a cabinet in the kitchen where he had aspirin, codeine, and Valium tablets. She gave him two of each and made him take a nap in the bedroom.
While he was sleeping, she went to the bookcase and took down the scrapbook he had hidden on top of it. She had watched through the window the night he had put it there. Opening it on the table she read the newspaper clippings he had saved. The stories they told were different, but they all had common headlines:
LABOR LEADER SLAIN, one read.
GANGLAND BOSS FOUND DEAD, read another.
WITNESS MURDERED IN HOTEL.
RACKETS INFORMER EXECUTED.
GAMBLER KILLED IN MIAMI.
The clippings had datelines covering a five-year period—the last one was dated six years earlier.
Tree came out of the bedroom while she still had the scrapbook open in front of her. He was very pale, but his eyes were still dark and dangerous. He was fully dressed and Vi could not tell whether he had his gun or not. He sat down heavily across from her.
“You enjoy my press notices?” he asked.
Vi closed the scrapbook. “They ended six years ago. That was when you came to live up here. What happened?”
“They wanted me to hit a woman,” he said. “A young woman with a brace on one leg, who was going into a convent of handicapped nuns, who taught handicapped children. She was heir to a lot of money, but she was going to take a vow of poverty and give it all to the order she was joining. A cousin who was her only living relative bought the hit. Prior to then, I had never hit anybody but gangsters and punks, a stoolie now and then, a gambler who welshed on somebody. Now they wanted me to do a crippled young woman who never hurt nobody. They wanted me to run her down in the street so it’d look like a hit-and-run, an accident.” Tree shook his head. “I couldn’t do it. So I took off.”
“And now there’s a contract on you,” Vi concluded.
“A big one,” Tree confirmed. “And it keeps getting bigger every year.” Suddenly he buried his face in his hands. “I’m sick, Vi—” he said weakly.
She helped him back to bed, mixed him some more powdered milk, and made him eat a few soda crackers to see if that would help calm his stomach. Sitting on the bed beside him, she felt his forehead. “No fever,” she reported.
“Maybe it’s the flu,” he said. “My muscles and joints ache like hell.”
After he ate, she massaged him where he hurt and gave him more aspirin and Valium. Then she tucked him in and stroked his cheek.
“How’d you get to be a—you know,” she asked curiously.
“A paid killer?” Tree smiled wanly. “In the army. I was a POW. Did time with a Ranger captain who had mob connections. When we were exchanged and sent home, he asked me to work for him. It sounded better than going back to the reservation.” He reached up and touched her hand. “You won’t go tomorrow, will you?”
“No. I won’t leave you while you’re sick.”
He had a miserable night. Between bouts of diarrhea and vomiting, he was left weak and shaky. She helped him to and from bed, gave him more medication, more milk, more crackers. His muscle and joint aches agonized him all through the night; even codeine tablets failed to curb the pain. Toward morning he still had no fever, but his pulse had become very weak and his eyes no longer looked threatening. When Vi took the gun from under his pillow, where she had noticed it, he did not complain; he knew he did not have the strength to fire it anyway. Still, he was relieved to see her merely lay it on the nearby bureau and leave it there.
Two hours after sun-up, he was breathing very lightly and was extremely pale. She was holding his head up, feeding him a little warm oatmeal.
“Feed—the—wild things—” he said feebly.
“I will,” she assured him. “After I feed you. You’re sick, they’re not. Come on, open—”
When he had eaten as much as she thought he could, she let his head back down and wiped his face with a damp cloth. She opened a window for him to get some fresh air, and cleaned up the dishes they had used during the night. When she came back in to check on him, he was barely awake. Just enough to say faintly, “The—wild—things—”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll do it right now.”
He gave her a faint smile. She bent and kissed him lightly on the lips.
Out back, Vi got a bucket of pellet food from the storage locker and went over to where the wild things waited. She held out her hand to them, but they would not come. They merely stared at her. She tossed a handful of food to them, but they did not touch it. Maybe they smell the arsenic on my hands, she thought.
Vi shrugged, poured the bucket of food on the ground, and went back inside to see if Tree was in a coma yet.
The scene here is New Orleans, and one of the main characters is a troubled Dixieland jazz musician, much like the one in HORN MAN, the first New Orleans story I wrote, which was honored with the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1981. Dixieland jazz, like boxing, is another thing in life that I learned to love when I was young, in Memphis, near the little town where I was born.
The musician in this story, Lew McCulla, has, like boxer Dave Handley in HIT AND RUN, a hard choice to make: do what he does best, the only thing he knows how to do, in the face of dangerous odds against him, and possible dire consequences if he is successful.
Plus, he has one other worry: his kid, a street-wise young boy whose name we never learn …
McCulla’s Kid
Old Rainey found McCulla’s kid in a drugstore on Royal Street, buying brown polish to restock his shoeshine box.
“Whar’ yo’ daddy at?” Rainey asked him.
“Sleeping,” McCulla’s kid said.
“I done knocked on the door,” Rainey said. “Didn’t get no answer.”
The kid glanced away. “Sometimes he sleeps pretty sound.”
I’ll bet he do, Rainey thought. ’Specially when he’s drunk. Rainey bent his old black face next to the white boy’s ear. He didn’t have to bend far—he’d been walking with a stoop since he was seventy. “I wants you to come unlock the door for me,” he told the boy, “so’s I can wake him up. Mr. Gaston wants to talk to him over at the Hall right away.”
The “Hall” was Tradition Hall, the most famous jazz club in the Vieux Carre, the French Quarter of New Orleans. Mr. Gaston was its owner. McCulla’s kid knew that if Mr. Gaston was sending for his dad, it must be important.
“Sure, I’ll let you in,” the boy told old Rainey. He paid for his tin of polish, slung his shine box over one shoulder, and he and Rainey left. They walked up Royal to Pirate’s Alley, then cut past the cathedral to Jackson Square. Though early, the morning already promised a mugginess that would drive everyone, even the tourists, indoors by three o’clock. As they walked, they had little to say, this old black man and the young white boy, who was twelve. They didn’t know each other well, the boy and his father having returned to the Quarter from Kansas City less than a month earlier after a long absence.
Rainey and the boy made an odd pair as they moved along: the old man bent and white-haired with age, shuffling as he walked, pursing his lips and occasionally muttering some complaint against the world in general; the boy tanned, his hair bleached yellow by the sun, blue eyes bright but not young, mouth set. They walked through Jackson Square, where several artists were already setting up their easels, and turned down Decatur.
“What you get for a shoeshine, boy?” old Rainey asked.
“Half a dollar,” the kid answered.
“Half a dollar!” Rainey said indignantly. “Why, when I was a boy shining on this here very street, we didn’t get but a nickel. And that was for mostly boots too. A nickel. That was all.”
McCulla’s kid shrugged his shoulders. “Half a dollar,” he repeated. He wouldn’t spit for a nickel.
In the middle of the first block on Decatur, the kid and Rainey turned into a narrow passageway between the two front buildings and went through to a rear building separated by a garden—or what had once been a garden. When the rear building had been the three-story townhouse of a wealthy upriver plantation family, the plot between the two buildings had been outrageous with crape myrtles, magnolias, camellias, redbuds, and a dozen other species of cultivated flowers that flourished in the moist semitropical air. In the cool of the evening, it had been a place to sit and take in fragrances and count blessings. But since the townhouse had become a collection of sleeping rooms and kitchenettes, and its tenants the kind to whom the garden was just something through which to pass to get to the street, it had, like the townhouse, fallen on hard times and been reduced to a state of dismal neglect. Where once had bloomed vibrantly hued flowers, there was now displayed only empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and an occasional item even more gross.
The kid and old Rainey went up a flight of outside stairs and along a balcony to a door with 2-C painted on it by an amateur hand. The kid unlocked the door and Rainey followed him inside. It was a bare, seedy little place with no signs of pride. The wooden table and three straight chairs were scratched beyond refinishing, the two-burner hotplate dangerously greasy, chintz curtains heavy with dust, floor linoleum patchy with age. On one of two folding cots in a tiny sleeping alcove, the kid’s father, Lew McCulla, slept an open-mouthed, alcoholic sleep. On the floor next to his cot were an open bottle of Old Crow and a closed clarinet case.
Old Rainey started for the sleeping man, but the kid cut him off. “I’ll do it,” he said, and Rainey could tell by his eyes that it was not open for discussion. Unslinging the shine box, the kid dropped to his knees next to the cot and began shaking his sleeping father. “Lew,” he said. “Come on, Lew, wake up—”
Lew McCulla came out of it slowly and reluctantly, struggling for focus, fighting the taste in his mouth, testing his limbs one at a time for response. When the groping man got up as far as one elbow, the kid took the bottle and went over to the hotplate. Lighting the burner, he set a dented coffeepot over the spurts of blue flame and washed out a cup. Rainey watched all this with great, frowning interest, still fascinated after three-quarters of a century by some of the white man’s mores.
“Give me a drink, kid,” Lew McCulla said raspily from the cot.
“Only with some coffee,” the kid said.
“Goddamnit, bring me that bottle!”
“With some coffee,” the kid repeated firmly. Glancing over at his father, he decided how strong the coffee had to be. Some days were light—just hot, black coffee. Some were medium, with a spoonful of chicory. Some were heavy, after a real binge: two spoonfuls of chicory. Today Lew McCulla looked like medium would put him on his feet. The kid got down the jar of ground chicory and measured one spoonful.
“What’s he doing here?” McCulla asked the kid when he realized Rainey was in the room.
