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:
Dummy! Don’t try to come back the way you came. Don’t you know a tiger is trailing you? Stay off footpaths – they have been mined just for you. Don’t peek under that stone, fool, a pit viper is planted there especially for you.
If you have any sense left at all you’ll stay downwind, six blunt-nose hyenas have a good whiff of you. Avoid open plains – buzzards have spotted you. Pay no heed to anyone in the trees, it is only the apes laughing their heads off at you. Natives are beating the brush for you. And you still call it ‘Civilization’?
Call it what you want. I call it a jungle.
Now you owe me 15¢ for a bowl of gumbo for being the only one not pursuing you.
‘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—
‘Joy! Joy! Joy!
Since Jesus came to stay!’
‘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.