The Tilted World (7 page)

That night, as it turned out, they never needed the code words. They had plenty of entertainment in the honeymoon suite. And though she’d been a good student, she didn’t need the things she studied in the books her father gave her. Jesse was teacher enough.

D
ixie Clay was sixteen then, and it was their sixth anniversary last month when she’d found the great snowy egret, and she knew now that neither one of them would be floating away anytime soon. Well, she’d become a businesswoman, no time for nickel romances. The field guide concluded by noting that the egret’s frothy tail feathers, aigrettes, were desired for women’s hats. So she plucked it raw and sent them through Jesse to the milliner, who gave her twenty-five cents apiece.

At the Gawiwatchee today she found no exotic bird, no wagon, no mandolin. And no sign of the revenuers, no homburg hat worn by a cypress stob, no magpie nest bearing a revenuer badge like a family crest. If only she could ask Jesse what had happened and trust he’d tell the truth. Could it be she’d been mistaken, assumed the worst? Like mistaking a mandolin case for a baby coffin.

She thought of the mandolin on her front gallery and decided to head back. As she slogged out of the marshy lowlands, she found some huge, bulbous, ocher-colored toadstools that gave a satisfying powdery puff when she kicked them, which she did as far up the ridge as she could. This little game must have distracted her because she was almost at the house when she realized she smelled tobacco. Jesse didn’t smoke. He didn’t like the smell trapped in his mustache. Dear God, not more revenuers. She reached over her shoulder to grasp the Winchester. She felt weary. Scared, but also weary.

Above the blood-drumming of her heart, she heard something strange—not men yelling, or dogs barking, or guns firing, but singing:

Gee, but it’s hard to love someone

When that someone don’t love you.

Dixie Clay began to creep forward, staying low. The smell of smoke got stronger as she snuck around the side of the house. When she pulled even with the front gallery, she could see an unfamiliar roan horse tied to her postbox. She leaned her head from behind a clump of holly bushes, but the gallery was shrouded by pines and all she could see was a muddy cowboy boot propped on the rail. It was wagging with the music, which was coming from her mandolin. The tune changed, the voice deep and unafraid:

Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days.

Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days.

It seems that trouble’s gonna follow me to my grave.

If this was a lawman, it was the damnedest damn lawman she’d ever seen. But it wasn’t a customer either—a customer would know better. The boot wagged on until the last note died.

“Well,” asked the voice, “how’d you like that?”

Dixie Clay started.
He’s spotted me,
she thought. But then there was another sound: a high sliding three-note wail. She knew it for what it was. A baby. What kind of drunk brings a baby to a bootlegger’s? And why was it crying? She sprang from the bushes and aimed her rifle at the boot.

“Hands up!” she yelled. “I got my gun and I’ll shoot you dead.” She couldn’t see much as she half ran, half slid down the gulley, just knees and then a torso, arms held in the air, the mandolin between them. She scrambled up the steps, sighting down the rifle the whole time. When she reached the top, she saw the rest of him: a big man, his long right leg bent, boot on the rail, his left angled open, ankle on knee, and, in the opening, a bundle. A bundle with a spastic arm: a bundle of baby. The man’s chair was balanced on its hind legs, and as he appraised Dixie Clay he let the front legs bump down. He started to lower the instrument so she yelled, “I said, hands up.”

He straightened his arms again, a corner of his mouth curving with a quick siphoning dimple, which disappeared as she trained the gun on his heart.

“What are you doing here?”

He tilted his head beneath his brown hat as if sizing her up. “I came to bring you a baby.”

“A baby?”

“Yeah.”

“You came here to bring me a baby?”

“Yeah. I came here to bring you a baby. This here baby. A real American-style baby. Bona fide A-one cowboy, too. Likes the open road, Nehi soda. Loves the blues.” The baby gave another cry and the man shrugged. “Well, usually he does. That was Bessie Smith. Your husband play?”

She said nothing, trying to gauge what type of crazy she was up against. She glanced around to make sure he was alone. To the side of the gallery, where she’d stuck a few measly rosebushes that had since drowned, was a collage of broken glass. She’d left a Dr. Pepper bottle on the wooden crate, saving it for the refund. Why would he smash her bottle?

“You want a baby?”

She couldn’t figure out his angle. He didn’t appear to have a weapon. He had a strange way of saying his
r’
s. He wasn’t from around here. She glanced behind her: no one. “You’re . . . fixing to give your baby away?”

“Not
my
baby,” he said. “His mama’s dead. Daddy dead. Baby shoulda been dead, too, but I found him and for some fool reason decided to carry him around till I could nab him another mama. Can I lower my mandolin now?”

“You mean
my
mandolin,” said Dixie Clay.

He grinned and lowered his arms and set the instrument gently beside his boot.

She kept the gun trained. He slid a ring from his left hand and set it down beside the mandolin—no, not a ring, the bottle neck of the Dr. Pepper, which he’d been using as a slide. But who wears a broken bottle with a baby in his lap? The man leaned forward to lift a cigar from the porch rail, gave it three quick bellows to bring it back to life. He turned it to verify that its end was aglow. Satisfied, he took a longer puff and replaced it on the rail. Then he blew out the smoke in a slow stream, his dark brown eyes looking up at Dixie Clay.

“Well?” He lifted the bundle from between his knees and turned it to face her in the lingering smoke. “You want this baby?”

She studied it as it dangled. Hard to tell girl or boy. It was still fussing, kicking its legs a bit. It was dirty. Where its diaper cloth sagged, its belly was whiter than the rest of its torso. The man’s huge hands were dirty, too, fingernails rimmed brown, covering the baby’s rib cage. The baby kicked harder, and the diaper slid an inch down its hips. The man turned the baby around and set it back in the crook of his knee and began to tug the cloth higher. “I had him in some clean duds,” he said, “but there was an accident.” To the baby he added, under his breath, “Now don’t you go wetting on me again.”

Dixie Clay studied the man now, slab shouldered and rough looking, muddy dungarees plastered halfway up his legs, red Henley shirt open at the collar, in need of a shave. And a haircut. Brown shag poked from his misshapen leather hat. He looked up then and caught her looking, and she lifted the gun, which had sagged a few inches.

“Listen,” he sighed, “you don’t want this baby, fine. Fine. I’ll find someplace better. But I gotta find it quick. The woman at the store said start with you.”

“Woman at the store? What woman at the store?”

“Big woman. Maybe fifty. Gray hair. Lots of rings.”

“Amity.”

“Whoever. She said you’re in the market for a baby.”

Dixie Clay looked and looked but didn’t say a word.

The baby gave another protest, not quite a cry, but not quite not a cry.

“Aw, hell,” the man said, and lifted the baby from beneath with one hand, reaching for his cigar with the other. “Gotta be an orphanage in Leland, or Indianola.” He stood.

“Give it,” she said, quick.

“It ain’t an it,” he said, drawing up to his full height. “He’s a boy.” He addressed the baby now: “Ain’t you, Junior?”

“Give it.” She held out one hand. “Give it here.”

He tilted his head at her again. “You want him, you put your gun down and come get him.”

She did. She leaned the gun on the rail and crossed the gallery to where he was dangling the baby toward her. She slid a hand behind his back and another beneath his diaper and lifted him out of the man’s arms. The cloth felt damp and must have been chilly. But the baby felt solid, good and solid. She guessed him about six months. He didn’t have that newborn tremory head. He looked like he might sit up okay, secured by her afghan, say. She brought him to her chest and patted his back a few times and he slowed his fussing. Then she wanted to see his face so she lowered his head to the crook of her elbow. He had a swirl of downy dark hair. His eyes were closed beneath the faintest ridge of eyebrows. His face was dusty except where tears had cleared a path. He opened his eyes and suddenly she was being pulled into them, blue-gray eddies that held her fast. She closed her own eyes to break the spell.

Her voice was breathy when it came. “What’s his name?”

“Don’t know. Don’t know he got a name. I guess it’s up to you to choose him one.”

She looked up then and saw he was standing close, looking down at her and the baby. She stepped back, toward the gun, and folded the baby into her chest. “How do I know you’re not gonna come back for him?”

“Because you’ll shoot me dead if I try?”

She allowed herself a little smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Because I’ll shoot you dead if you try.”

It was his turn to smile now, and she saw the quick flick of dimples through his unshaven cheeks. “Well,” he said. “Let me give you Junior’s gear.” He walked down the steps and crossed to the horse. He flipped open the saddlebag and pulled several cans and packages into his arms and crossed back to the gallery and stacked them beside her door.

“Okay then. I guess I’ll push off.” He touched two fingers to his hat brim, then inspected them and held them up to show smudges from the wet leather. But Dixie Clay was already turning away. She was patting the baby, walking inside, crooning him low words.

Not till the next morning, when she drifted onto the rain-loud gallery with the dreaming baby in her arms, would she spot against the rail her forgotten gun. And the cowboy’s cigar, also forgotten, a half-moon singed into the rail where he’d left it smoldering when he rode away.

Chapter 5

I
t wasn’t hard to figure out the place Ham would pick to stay. The first boardinghouse Ingersoll passed was too remote, reeked of cabbage, and cobwebs tethered the single rocking chair to the wall. He rode on to the levee and saw the McLain Hotel, a broad-shouldered terra-cotta thing that would have a good view of the levee from the top floor, but there were no vacancies. He continued to the square and found the Vatterott Rooming House, three stories, valises beside the door, wet towels hanging out of the upstairs windows like tongues. Inside, the matron recognized him from Ham’s description and said his room, the Bluebird Suite, was ready. She hoped he’d appreciate it, she said, because to free it she had to kick out two Flemish engineers. Mr. Johnson, she continued, was booked in the Cardinal Suite next door. Would Mr. Ingersoll like to inspect his room? He would, he would. So he lifted his knapsack—sagging and light without the clanking jars of baby food—and followed Mrs. Vatterott as she climbed the stairs. Her nylon stockings sagged around her ankles like shedding snakeskin, and he reflected that the trend for shorter skirts was not a universal good.

Mrs. Vatterott opened the door painted with a bluebird, a room clean and simple with a chenille bedspread and a washbasin and a stack of nappy-looking towels. There was nothing Ingersoll wanted more than to topple across the bed like a giant elm, falling into slumber, waking three days later with a beard and craters in his face from the pompoms. And then a bath, a bath that would last another three days, water so hot his toes would turn crimson as soon as they hit. Then those Brillo pad towels buffing him dry, then clean clothes. Then the barber with his warm lather and beaver bristle brush while the voices of men, voices unurgent, unthreatened, and slow, threaded through his ears, his eyes closed behind the warm lemon-scented washcloth, and all this to be followed by a rack of beef ribs as long as a xylophone.

Mrs. Vatterott was still standing in the hall. “Well? Anything I can bring you?”

“I’m heading out,” he told her, the vista of pleasure scrolling closed like a schoolhouse map. “But if you could rustle me a cup of coffee, strong coffee, I’d be grateful.”

“Strong? Strong is the only kind we brew, here at Vatterotts’. I brew chicory coffee. I’m from New Orleans, you know. My granddaddy opened the ball with Lafayette.”

This was meant to impress him, so he whistled, and she smiled and turned away. What did impress him was the chicory coffee, so scalding strong he thought it almost might burn away thoughts of the baby and that feisty, curly-haired girl he’d handed him to. He’d liked her freckles, and the way her blue eyes speckled with other blues, so they matched the freckles. Dixie Clay. That’s what the shop matron had called her. Dixie Clay. What a name.

Ingersoll was looking for McMahon’s diner, where Mrs. Vatterott said Ham would be, and thank God because Ingersoll hadn’t eaten since that morning when he’d split a can of peaches with the baby. He turned right out of the boardinghouse and down one side of the square, past Collins Furniture and a shoe repair, and turned left to continue along the east side, toward a well-lit, noisy corner where cars nosed in like cows at a trough. As he passed the diner window, he saw a man’s hand resting along the high, rounded red banquette, fingers thick as roman candles and tufted with orange hair.
Ham, you son of a gun. Hope you ordered me a steak.

When Ingersoll hung his hat and coat and approached, he saw another man, a small man whose black hair didn’t clear the high banquette, smoking his cigarette and leaning into Ham, like an old friend, but Ingersoll had never seen him before and bet Ham hadn’t known him long either. Ham had a way of encouraging intimacy, of making you feel you’d known him for years, and only when you
had
known him for years, like Ingersoll, did you realize you hardly knew him at all.

Ingersoll could tell from the rhythm of Ham’s voice that he was building to a punch line, so Ingersoll slowed.

Ham was using his Jewish accent. “ ‘Oy vey, I wasn’t blessing myself, I was just making sure everything is still here’ ”—and Ham pantomimed an exaggerated sign of the cross—“ ‘spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch!’ ”

Ingersoll smiled, not at the joke, which he knew, and not at Ham’s skill, which he expected, but at Ham’s unquenchable raspy guffaw, a guffaw Ingersoll had appreciated ever since he’d met Ham in the war nine years ago, though in the trenches a laugh like that could get you shot.

Now Ham looked up and, still laughing, waved him over, and with his leg under the table he scooted a chair out for Ingersoll.

“Ahhhh,” Ham said, the laugh winding down, thumping his barrel chest twice, “ahh. Ing, this here’s my man Jesse, whose father fought in the Third, at Argonne. Jesse, meet Ingersoll.”

The man half rose from the table and plucked his napkin from his shirt, which was the color of an egg cream, a color Ingersoll’d never seen a man wear. He guessed that the long camel hair coat on the rack had been removed from this man’s shoulders. Ingersoll had endeavored not to brush it with his own sodden coat, noticing as he shrugged it off something like cottage cheese on the lapel—the baby’s spit-up, clotted in the seams. Jesse’s handsome coat most certainly had never worn epaulets of vomit.

“Glad to know you,” Jesse said, gesturing toward the chair. He was a few years younger than Ingersoll, midtwenties, but the thing you noticed was that his eyes were two different colors.

Ingersoll nodded and sat down and opened a menu. The two men looked at him, but he was too hungry to say hello, much less tell a joke.

Ham must have sensed this because he put a finger up and a pretty waitress appeared almost immediately, pitcher in hand.

“We’re ready to order, darling.”

“Shoot.”

“I’ll have a ham omelet,” said Jesse.

She nodded. “And for you gentlemen?”

“Two steaks, well done,” Ham said.

The waitress nodded and turned.

“Ma’am?” said Ingersoll. “You didn’t take my order.”

The waitress slowly turned back, glancing at the three to see if there was a joke. “The gentleman said two steaks.”

“He did. That’s his order. I want two steaks, too.”

As the waitress walked away, Jesse said, “They got fine boiled okry, too. But it’s so slippery I’m scared that when I get up, I’ll leave it in the chair.”

And there came Ham’s guffaw again, Ham not noticing that nearby diners turned at the boom of it, or not caring, if he did notice. Jesse too laughed, throwing back his head of brilliantined black hair, which shined almost blue beneath the lights. Ingersoll would find everything funnier after the steaks.

The waitress brought glasses of water and Ingersoll nearly lunged for his and was three gulps in when he realized it wasn’t water. The muscle ringing his throat pinched, and then he was sputtering moonshine all over the menu. Ham’s thunder laugh and Jesse’s too and Ingersoll was red-faced coughing and red-faced embarrassed and even the waitress was giggling and Jesse reached to give her fanny a pat. Through his tearing eyes, Ingersoll saw that their fingers clasped briefly before she pushed Jesse’s hand away. He wondered if Jesse had a wife in some big house on Broad Street convinced her husband was at prayer meeting.

Ingersoll held his napkin to his eyes and forced the cough to die in his throat. “Sorry,” he croaked. “I thought it was—”

“We know what you thought,” said the waitress. “Now, let me get this out of your way”—she dangled the menu so the whiskey dripped from the corner—“before we get another display of Yankee table manners.” She pranced off, the apron bow framing her backside.

“I like a dumper with a little motion to it,” said Ham. “Looks like a sack of puppies under that skirt.”

Jesse laughed and Ham laughed and Ingersoll took another sip, and now that he knew what he was drinking, he drank with pleasure, the whiskey smooth as if it’d burbled out of the first spring thaw, between snowdrops and crocuses and little hopping birds. “Damn,” he said, and holding the glass up to appraise its clarity, again, softer, “damn.”

“I’m guessing if you’da known ’bout this hooch, you’da hurried on last night,” Ham said. “Split a bottle,” he said, nodding to Jesse.

Jesse lifted a roll from his bread plate. Ingersoll glanced around, hoping to see a waiter hustling toward him with tongs outstretched.

Ham lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t mind knowing where a fella could get his hands on some more. Fella who’s mighty thirsty.”

Jesse looked at Ham as he brought the roll to his lips and bit.

Ham continued, “Mighty thirsty indeed. Thirsty enough to drink about a dozen cases.”

Then the waitress’s arm swooped around his face with a plate of ham omelet.

Merciful God, that was fast,
thought Ingersoll.

“Ketchup, please, Connie my pearl,” said Jesse, looking up, and Connie said, “It’s right here in my apron, gimme a sec.” Her other arm held two plates, one in her fingers and the other balanced on her forearm, and she transferred that one to her free hand and began lowering Ham’s heavy double steak.

Jesse reached into the apron and said, “Oh, I’ll just help myself to what I want, don’t mind me,” and rummaged there as she squealed and shimmied, Ham’s eyes gleaming as he watched the frisking, Ingersoll smelling his steak just out of reach and feeling saliva channel his tongue and thinking how strange it is when something you hear about your whole life happens: his mouth was watering.

At last Jesse got his ketchup and Ingersoll his steaks, decidedly smaller than Ham’s. “I’ll take two more,” he nearly shouted at the waitress’s back as she turned to bring more whiskey. Then he lowered his head and tucked in and didn’t say anything for a long time. Which was fine: Ham might finally have met his match in terms of loquaciousness, a word Ham had taught him. The men watched as Ingersoll sawed a giant bite and forked it in.

Ham said, “He’s so hungry he could eat a buttered monkey.”

Jesse said, “He’s so hungry he could eat the ass end of a rhino.”

They clinked glasses and drained them while Ingersoll kept eating. He didn’t even look up until the first steak was gone. Then he was able to slow down, to nod and laugh—men like that craved an audience, and besides, one and a half steaks and three whiskeys in, he felt like laughing. The second plate of steaks arrived and Ingersoll remembered last night’s can of beans that he’d shared with the baby and he reckoned both of them were eating better now. He took a deep breath to clear some room in his stomach and kept eating as the men spoke of Coolidge, cars, and coochie.

Jesse circled his glass in the air. More whiskey arrived.
We’re good and drunk now,
thought Ingersoll.
We’re drunk and good.

“Ham,” said Jesse. “How come you come to be called Ham? That short for anything?”

Ingersoll gave up on the fourth steak and pushed his plate away and laid his fork down. He loved this question. Never once had he heard Ham give the same answer. Last time someone’d asked, they were in a speakeasy in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Ham had told a tale about being named after Hamlet, from Shakespeare, because his mama had married the man who’d shot his daddy and Ham’d grown up unsure if he should seek revenge and had begun opining to a skull as his only confidant.

Now Ingersoll leaned back in his chair and stretched out, crossing his long legs under the table.

“Well,” said Ham, catching Ingersoll’s eye, “funny you should ask. Nope, not short for anything, and not long either. Ham for Ham. Ham ’cause when I was born, I smelled so good, so good like a sweet little piggy that ate nothing but acerns and brown-eyed Susans, and the porcine smell even spurted out the top a my head, and they’d pass me around in church, all the womenfolk taking a drag off me, then falling out and fainting.”

Ingersoll was grinning and shaking his head.

Ham’s accent was pure Kentucky now, which happened with whiskey. “Yep,” Ham continued after a swallow, “smelled so sweet that people used to get hungry when I’d waft by on the breeze. Smelled so sweet”—Ham laid a hand on his chest and belched—“Daddy used to fret I’d convert folks to cannibalism.”

Ingersoll was chuckling now, and Jesse.

“Poor old Daddy, how he had to beat them dogs away. Coyotes howling outside my room all night.” Ham leaned in. “This one time? I was about eighteen months, Mama walks in my room and says it was three big rats sitting there on the rails of my baby bed, gazing down at the hammy feast lying asleep before them, rubbing they little fists together.”

Even Ham was laughing now, and then gave up trying to finish the story, holding his shaking stomach and laughing, a sheen of sweat on his red red face.

“Ahhhhhh.” He sighed himself out of the laugh at last.

Connie appeared to refill their glasses. “Drink up,” she told them. “Somebody’s got your check.”

Jesse leaned slightly out of the booth to raise a finger in the direction of the police captain’s blue hat.

Ingersoll’s reach for his glass was a little off.
Lord Jesus but I am drunk,
he thought.
Shouldn’t be, but I am.
He was thinking of the way the baby had lounged in his upended hat by the fire last night, leaning back to watch the flames. Mellow, like a tired old cowboy soaking in hot springs after rounding up cattle. And now Ingersoll was thinking how empty his hat must feel with nothing in it but the hook.

It had been a strange few days. When he’d ridden away from Dixie Clay’s, he’d asked himself,
What is it I’m feeling? There must be a word for it.

At least he wasn’t the only one in his cups. Ham was blinking slow, drunk blinks. But Jesse was a marvel—he couldn’t weigh as much as Ham’s thigh yet he’d matched them glass for glass.

As if to confirm what Ingersoll was thinking, Jesse dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “Damn fine meal. I feel fitter than a butcher’s dog.” He tossed the napkin onto the table and leaned toward Ham. “Alrighty now,” he said. “What’s your real name?
What
Johnson?”

“I’ll never tell,” Ham said.

“Come on.”