My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (4 page)

Mason's father, I'll have you know, wasn't a janitor for
anybody
—ever. Something too inconsistent in Mason's collage, back there: those shifting contradictory images. They disturb me. Chiro may have had his fingers in many pies, a thumb or two dripped (dipped in) blood, perhaps. Surely he was a peccadillo, maybe a chiseler but he was not inconsistent. It's Mason who's . . . Ellis Sir met the world bravely, without tosh. No rift in his life: nothing was rubber-stamped; everything done in the original. Why do I defend his father and damn him? (Well, you heard the phoney voice in the previous chapter!) Mason's father, for example, often walked—he did not use his, uh, wings or Cadillac to show off. I can see him now: he's walking along Peach Street in Atlanta. It's early morning. He looks distastefully at his surroundings. Yet he is unable to leave. He projects himself into another time, another place: the cobblestones beneath his uneasy feet are slick from too many years of slime, blood of bull-runs, urine. Here he's not full of the “B.V.D. Blues,” but a respected Model of Virtue, perhaps a doctor, a man of trust. All his life Mason's father has thought the word father and now it breaks down into two parts: “fat” and “her.” Is a father hiding the female
her
in himself? Another view: he's riding a bicycle high on a tightrope . . . Mason's father willed his wings to Mason. Remember the escape? They were made of mutation itself, of conviction, and of impeccable iron feathers. And here is Mason's fat-her as Red Charleston with a history of backdooring, listening to Duke Ellington in Kansas City directing his band through “Chocolate Shake.” Cats outside in the alley gambling, [a passage between buildings—not a path through a lovely garden, this alley]. Many of the lames in the turnout are talking trash; trotters angling for attention. Duke keeps on keeping on. Up there—big smile. It's Saturday night: somebody feels mellow, somebody else feels deadly. Frankie and Johnnie meet C.C. Rider. Coppers are pulling coats, police swinging billysticks. Some up on china white, others down on sneaky pete. Mason's father was a music lover who danced a trickbag step to Louis Jordan, to Benny Carter and his Chocolate Dandies ripping
through “Cadillac Slim”: splib-oh-do-be-ooop, bob-bop-ah-do-ooop . . . Chiro understood the Body by Fisher. Saturday night: the lights are still greasy from the baptized bird. All around Mason's father a hawk flapped and stabbed. He did the Cootie Crawl, too. He moved through honkytonk changes, buying drinks for unemployed dudes, hot mamas, Kants. Completely qualified, folks. Another shot of Mason's father: in buckskin. “Got my gun, got my hoss.” He takes off with Cab Calloway toward the sunrise in one of those twenty-five minute colored shorts. He told stories of genocide and mass murder around the campfire. He worked the chain-gang, helped to build Atlanta. Chiro poured the cement like sperm. The wheels of automobiles stuck to the shadows of churches. Chiro's mother was a preacher in one of those churches, his father—a jailbird, a heel grifter, a lady-killer. He was not exactly a dangerous nightwalker but he knew them all—knew which pockets concealed their knives, their smokers; knew the crooked cops, the ladies on the lookout, the secrets of them all. Chiro hung out at card parties and Saturday night fish fries. Did the Lindy. Chased chippies. Was a cherry picker. Did the Chitterlin' Strut. Could even sing Indian rain songs. (Indians were part of his heritage, too. So were the people shipped here from the prisons of England.) Cab taught him to sing “Chop Chop Charlie Chan.” Chiro strutted around in a zoot suit and quoted the scriptures better than a country preacher. Was perfectly at home in any schizophrenic city—especially Atlanta. Even his pain was sort of sweet: “Sickness and Benny Goodman's Sextet.” “Buttermilk and Fats Waller.” “Neckbones and riverbeds of garbage.” Mason's father didn't come from the Broken Hill in Australia, never walked in the tides of the Coral Sea: he was of the place where streetfights and cockfights reigned. Here is an easy early snapshot of Mason's father: fingernails neatly cut and polished; felt hat at rakish angle; no scar, no conk, no smell of Okefenokee, red dirt, not even Cadillac grease, perfume, Royal Crown. A cat rejected by the World War Two draft board, he was a sharpshooter. Some swore he had one eye, nine fingers. At least one lady called him Mack the Knife, one
other Fisheye. But they were both confused. At the point of orgasm, one lady grabbed his Saturday Night Special from its place tucked in his pants at the base of his spine and pulled the trigger—she was that excited. The bullet went through the mattress and lodged in the rattan carpet beneath the bed. He bit her neck till he got blood. Yet this witches' brew was not his thing. He could do the Twist. Had no real use for the Frenzy—untying the knot. Mason's mother wrote this historic letter to his father in March, 1941: “You are a beast. You had your son by the hand, remember, and his steps equalled one-fourth of each of yours on that hot dirt road in an uncertain place where the Cadillac broke down. You always walked too fast. And your daughter: what of her? Haven't you betrayed her, too? I'm not surprised that the woman in the passing car gave you a ride into town and
her
car broke down, too: You're just bad luck, Mister. You got the ‘Dipper Mouth Blues,’ and you look like a forkbeard two days out of water. I remember many nights when I didn't want it and you forced me: I hate you for raping me. Good-bye, Melba.” Although Chiro was a conscious dresser, he never wore gold suspenders and tap-dancing shoes (although, in
The Memoirs of Madame Rose Marie Butler Williams, Grande Queen of The Best Time in Town Bar and Hotel on Butler Street
, Chiro
did
wear shoelaces made of gold thread.) Near the end of his life, Mason's father ate regularly in the restraurant he once owned. The lady next door always tried to get him to go to church with her. He never did. So she gave him church flowers she brought from the altar. He was by now an old man bent low in his dim room. No other person ever entered it. It was crammed with the bad odor of an old man who smoked too much, whose wings were damaged and musty . . . 

Mason and The Turtle (an Indian he picked up along the way) arrived: Times Square: glitterbugs, honks, dash, punk, chump sex, jackleg-caviar mobs, teenieboppers galore. Then downtown, The Other Side Hotel was steamy. He and Painted Turtle leaned against the piss-stained wall, outside, on Third just off Fourteenth. They checked in. She was on her period, felt sick, dizzy. Mason peeked inside at the tiny lobby. The Lower East Side hadn't changed. But being back churned up mixed feelings: filth and freedom. His aim in Amesville while on release time had been to restore himself, get the bats out of his attic, the burlesque-kickers outta his midnight show, Lady Macbeths off his trail, to redeem himself, purge himself, get the cuticle cuties out of his system, to
forgive
himself for the mess he'd made . . . On the wall of the booth was a drawing of an octopus: on its belly, this: MRF. What polpo-bullshit was . . . ? Not Mister Roy Fart—not Mad Rat Fink. Mason Ran Fast? Never mind. With a shaky finger, he dialed Ferrand. The Private Eye spoke: “I got your man: I'll have the full report typed by my gal by the time you get here with the balance.” As he walked back to The Other Side he smelled a rat. A couple of cheap fannyshakers winked at him from a cabbage-green doorway. Duchesses, dicty chicks, dukes and pantie-peelers, breezed by. This was a grimy area. Streakers and stripteasers went arm in arm. Mason had the bread in the suitcase with the books. The Turtle was writing a letter to her folks in Zuni. She seemed only mildly interested in Mason's Ferrand message. And finally: “You giving him
five hundred dollars?
” Her sigh was resignation: she groaned; her neck cracked. He felt tangled—apologetic. “I thought you
understood?
” She did, she did:
said
she did. He smelled a skunk. Maybe he'd write a novel about—this. He could just see the reviews: “This is a novel about a man who . . . the author of . . . Although The Narrator of . . . denies . . . seems sympathetic . . . his quest . . . who pretends . . . ” Giving Ferrand the loot would leave them with eight bucks. The Turtle did not say: The Lord will make a way. She went to Eighth Street and window-shopped while Mason, as light-stepping as a snipe,
returned to fetch the “infamous” report. Ferrand's office was above a Boop's Super-Duper Fast (Four-Hour) Service Cleaners. Talk about being taken to the cleaners! Ferrand looked up when our antihero walked in. Girl Friday, apparently, was out to lunch. To Mason he looked like an efficient man, with Henry Fonda-integrity, honesty, the whole bit. Even the slow speech. The droop, too. It could be raining cats and dogs and he'd get from point
a
to
b
without getting wet—and without an umbrella. Mason's confidence was informed by his, uh, savvy. “Seat.” “Thanks.” Cut the formality: long story short: the report: “After receiving a large grant from the Magnan-Rockford Foundation, the man who claims to be the author hired a bodyguard. Unsatisfied with living in fear, a month later, he dismissed the guard in favor of changing his name and thus living a clandestine existence. It was less expensive. He assumed the name of Clarence McKay. (My secretary, Mrs. Scalamaltzy, did a little research at the main branch. The author's choice may have stemmed from a quaint respect for a forgotten Jamaican writer, Claude McKay, who thought of himself as
international.
) McKay's address: Eight-sixty-four East Eleventh Street, third floor, Apartment Ten. At this address he pretends to be poor: wears sandals and jeans around the neighborhood, has a white girlfriend, etc. In actuality he is relatively wealthy: he just purchased a country estate in South Hadley Falls, Mass., near Mount Holyoke. I spoke on the phone yesterday with a Mister Shabbi in Zurich—where the author has an account at Swiss Bank Corporation International, Limited. Shabbi told me he'd just been contacted by real estate brokers in the South of France who were about to sell the author a piece of old French property with a view of the sea. The brokers were checking credit. The author also has accounts with Chemical Bank New York, Saudi International Bank, Banque Nationale de Paris. His other investments are managed through banks in Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Dusseldorf—exact nature: unclear. His broker in New York is Mister Stephen Gracio, Morgan Grenfell and Company, Limited. He has “friends” at Baker International Corporation,
and, according to unconfirmed reports, is seeking information about ways to exploit the rubber business in Liberia, the gold in Ghana. His telephone number: Five-five-eight, eight-seven-three-four.” Mason scratched his bloody mudfrog till the itch turned to pain. He found Painted Turtle in McDonald's on Sixth and Eighth eating a Big Mac and absent-mindedly dragging the crisp tails of one frenchfry after another through a bloodbath of ketchup. He gave her the scoop, while checking out the screwballs and seedy, the schlemiels and sheiks, “gracing” the counter in disdainful sluggishness. He ordered the Filet-O-Fish, and bit into the trust-company of its crust. The Turtle was reading the report. When she finished she handed it back without a word.

Mason shot through The Impostor's apartment: desperately, hastily overturning chairs, books, pillows, lamps; dumping the pathetic contents of dresser drawers; raking out the tacky, broken, random things in the dark, turn-of-the-century closet. With Jesus' help he overturned the ratty mattress in the tiny bedroom. One smudgy small window imprisoned in its dirty, battleship gray wall. They moved like charged sentences—with that old infamous thrust: wrenching, tearing, kicking, stabbing, bursting through things with the spikes of their fists. Secrets were sought? What else? Hide and seek? Whose hide—? What could McKay (
they
called him this) have . . . ? Would they find Truth skewered into The Impostor's messy belongings—his dirty jeans, pots, plants on the window-ledge? This guy: McKay—a social climber? Ha! a member of the international jet set, with chic Parisian girlfriends, ah—No. No way. Barking up the wrong double entendres. No place could be farther from the charmed beau monde glitter than this dump in the Lower East. It stank of rotten chicken heads, rabbit guts, piss, dog shit, eighty years of
grime, not of satin linings, pink mink, sugared café au lait. No Flauntleroy here, yall. But I will restrain myself: no point in talking about absurdity. Mason and company had the stylistic verve of a polar bear. Brad was guarding McKay—tied to a white wooden kitchen chair, by the bathtub. At the same time he was going through the wallet again, checking the checkbook: everything, yup, said
Clarence McKay
. No question. McKay, handsome devil, was babbling like crazy—clearly not sure of their intentions. He kept saying he had no money, nothing valuable. Mason went over and slapped him. “You stole my manuscript, while I was in the joint—” “What?” “From Zimmerman—Don't try to deny it!”
Whack! “Think hard, motherfucker!”
McKay's wrists worked hard against the expertly knotted rope. (Big blond Brad had been a piss-poor bluejacket in Hawaii with flatfoot blues, a blue-eyed rover boy with gambling problems who fist-fought other belly mates, but he had a talent for dogging a rope; and this old hot-headed Joe Gish threw a pretty good hook, too—could answer, marry, and take in the washing.) McKay's naked crusty feet strained against the old flowered linoleum. The popping muscles in his neck gave reality to the vertical thrust of his anger—humiliation, fear.
Whock!
“I don't know
nobody
named Zinnerman.” Whimpering now. Say the secret word and . . . Mason grabbed the guy's shirt front, shook him vigorously, shouting,
“Think!”
in his face, spittle flying onto McKay's eyelids. (The loudness of Mason's voice brought to his memory a time in prison when a loud shout like that saved his ass from being raped by a gorilla with a scar down the center of his left cheek, his hair in pin-curlers, pumps on his thick feet, who ate rusty razor-blades, tin cans, ship screws, mine cables, Boy Scouts and mousetraps for breakfast—and never got a tummy ache.) A button came off in his grip. “ . . . thief, rotten sonofabitch, low-down pig . . . snake-in-the-grass, yellowbelly, bullshitting mother—” McKay was now crying, sobbing. This fella
did
look enough like the picture on the book jackets . . . but, then, the earlier books had carried pictures so different from each other. It was hard to tell, for sure. And then, who could trust those damn bookjacket shots? The phone rang six times.