Mr. Vertigo (2 page)

We got off the train and started walking down the platform, wending our way through the crowd. “I’m hungry,” I said, tugging on Master Yehudi’s coat. “If you don’t feed me now, I’m going to turn you in to the first flatfoot I see.”

“What’s the matter with the apple I gave you?” he said.

“I chucked it out the window of the train.”

“Oh, not too keen on apples, are we? And what about the ham sandwich? Not to speak of the fried chicken leg and the bag of doughnuts.”

“I chucked it all. You don’t expect me to eat the grub you give me, do you?”

“And why not, little man? If you don’t eat, you’ll shrivel up and die. Everybody knows that.”

“At least you die slow that way. You bite into something filled with poison, and you croak on the spot.”

For the first time since I’d met him, Master Yehudi broke into a smile. If I’m not mistaken, I believe he even went so far as to laugh. “You’re saying you don’t trust me, is that it?”

“You’re damn straight. I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw a dead mule.”

“Lighten up, squirt,” the master said, patting me affectionately on the shoulder. “You’re my meal ticket, remember? I wouldn’t hurt a hair on your head.”

Those were just words as far as I was concerned, and I wasn’t so dumb as to swallow that kind of sugary talk. But then Master Yehudi reached into his pocket, pulled out a stiff new dollar bill, and slapped it into my palm. “See that restaurant over there?” he said, pointing to a hash house in the middle of the station. “Go in and order yourself the biggest lunch you can stuff inside that belly of yours, I’ll wait for you out here.”

“And what about you? You got something against eating?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Master Yehudi replied. “My stomach can take care of itself.” Then, just as I was turning to go, he added: “One word of advice, pipsqueak. In case you’re planning to run away, this is the time to do it. And don’t worry about the dollar. You can keep it for your trouble.”

I walked on into the restaurant by myself, feeling somewhat mollified by those parting words. If he had some sinister purpose, then why would he offer me a chance to escape? I sat down at the counter and asked for the blue-plate special and a bottle of sarsaparilla. Before I could blink, the waiter shoved a mountain
of corned beef and cabbage in front of me. It was the largest meal I had ever encountered, a meal as large as Sportsman’s Park in Saint Louis, and I wolfed down every morsel of it, along with two slices of bread and a second bottle of sarsaparilla. Nothing can compare to the sense of well-being that washed through me at that filthy lunch counter. Once my belly was full, I felt invincible, as if nothing could harm me again. The crowning touch came when I extracted the dollar bill from my pocket to settle the tab. The whole thing toted up to just forty-five cents, and even after I threw in a nickel tip for the waiter, that left me with four bits in change. It doesn’t sound like much today, but two quarters represented a fortune to me back then. This is my chance to run, I told myself, giving the joint the once-over as I stood up from my stool. I can slip out the side door, and the man in black will never know what hit him. But I didn’t do it, and in that choice hung the entire story of my life. I went back to where the master was waiting because he’d promised to turn me into a millionaire. On the strength of those fifty cents, I figured it might be worth it to see if there was any truth to the boast.

We took another train after that, and then a third train near the end of the journey which brought us to the town of Cibola at seven o’clock that night. Silent as he had been all morning, Master Yehudi rarely stopped talking for the rest of the day. I was already learning not to make any assumptions about what he might or might not do. Just when you thought you had him pegged, he would turn around and do the precise contrary of what you were expecting.

“You can call me Master Yehudi,” he said, announcing his name to me for the first time. “If you like, you can call me Master for short. But never, under any circumstances, are you to call me Yehudi. Is that clear?”

“Is that your God-given name,” I said, “or did you choose that moniker yourself?”

“There’s no need for you to know my real name. Master Yehudi will be sufficient.”

“Well, I’m Walter. Walter Claireborne Rawley. But you can call me Walt.”

“I’ll call you anything I like. If I want to call you Worm, I’ll call you Worm. If I want to call you Pig, I’ll call you Pig. Is that understood?”

“Hell, mister, I don’t understand a thing you’re talking about.”

“Nor will I tolerate any lying or duplicity. No excuses, no complaints, no back talk. Once you catch on, you’re going to be the happiest boy on earth.”

“Sure. And if a legless man had legs, he could piss standing up.”

“I know your story, son. So you don’t have to invent any tall tales for me. I know how your pa got gassed over in Belgium in ‘seventeen. And I know about your ma, too, and how she used to turn tricks over in East Saint Louis for a buck a tumble, and what happened to her four and a half years ago when that crazy cop turned his revolver on her and blew off her face. Don’t think I don’t pity you, boy, but you’ll never get anywhere if you dodge the truth when you’re dealing with me.”

“Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants. If you’ve got all the answers, why waste your breath telling me things you already know?”

“Because you still don’t believe a word I’ve said. You think this stuff about flying is a lot of hot air. You’re going to work hard, Walt, harder than you’ve ever worked before, and you’re going to want to quit on me almost every day, but if you stick with it and trust what I tell you, at the end of a few years you’ll be able to fly. I swear it. You’ll be able to lift yourself off the ground and fly through the air like a bird.”

“I’m from Missouri, remember? They don’t call it the Show-Me State for nothing.”

“Well, we’re not in Missouri anymore, my little friend. We’re in Kansas. And a flatter, more desolate place you’ve never seen in your life. When Coronado and his men marched through here in 1540 looking for the Cities of Gold, they got so lost that half of them went insane. There’s nothing to tell you where you are. No mountains, no trees, no bumps in the road. It’s flat as death out here, and once you’ve been around for a while, you’ll understand there’s nowhere to go but up—that the sky is the only friend you have.”

It was dark by the time we pulled into the station, so there was no way to vouch for the master’s description of my new home. As far as I could tell, the town was no different from what you’d expect to see in a little town. A trifle colder, perhaps, and more than a trifle darker than what I was used to, but given that I had never been in a little town before, I had no idea what to expect. Everything was new to me: every smell was strange, every star in the sky seemed unfamiliar. If someone had told me I’d just entered the Land of Oz, I don’t think I would have known the difference.

We walked through the station house and stood outside the door for a moment scanning the dark village. It was only seven o’clock in the evening, but the whole place was locked up, and except for a few lamps burning in the houses beyond, there was no sign of life anywhere. “Don’t worry,” Master Yehudi said, “our ride will be along any minute.” He reached out and tried to take hold of my hand, but I yanked my arm away before he could get a firm grip. “Keep your paws to yourself, Mr. Master,” I said. “You might think you own me now, but you don’t own squat.”

About nine seconds after I uttered those words, a big gray horse appeared at the end of the street pulling a buckboard
wagon. It looked like something from the Tom Mix western I’d seen that summer at the Picture Palace, but this was 1924, for Christ’s sake, and when I caught sight of that antiquated vehicle rumbling down the street, I thought it was an apparition. But lo and behold, Master Yehudi waved when he saw it coming, and then that old gray horse stopped right in front of us, sidling up to the curb as gusts of steam poured from its nostrils. The driver was a round, chunky figure in a wide-brimmed hat whose body was wrapped in blankets, and at first I couldn’t tell if it was a man, a woman, or a bear.

“Hello, Mother Sue,” the master said. “Take a look at what I found.”

The woman gazed at me for a couple of seconds with blank, stone-cold eyes, and then, out of nowhere, flashed one of the warmest, friendliest smiles I’ve ever had the pleasure to receive. There couldn’t have been more than two or three teeth jutting from her gums, and from the way her dark eyes glittered, I concluded that she was a Gypsy. She was Mother Sue, the Queen of the Gypsies, and Master Yehudi was her son, the Prince of Blackness. They were abducting me to the Castle of No Return, and if they didn’t eat me for dinner that night, they were going to turn me into a slavey boy, a groveling eunuch with an earring in my ear and a silk bandanna wrapped around my head.

“Hop in, sonny,” Mother Sue said. Her voice was so deep and mannish, I would have been scared to death if I hadn’t known she could smile, “You’ll see some blankets in the back. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll use ‘em. We got a long cold ride ahead of us, and you don’t want to get there with no frozen fanny.”

“His name is Walt,” the master said as he climbed up beside her. “A pus-brained ragamuffin from honky-tonk row. If my hunch is correct, he’s the one I’ve been looking for all these
years.” Then, turning in my direction, he said brusquely, “This is Mother Sue, kid. Treat her nice, and she’ll give you only goodness in return. Cross her, and you’ll regret the day you were born. She might be fat and toothless, but she’s the closest thing to a mother you’ll ever have.”

I don’t know how long it took us to get to the house. It was out in the country somewhere, sixteen or seventeen miles from town, but I didn’t learn that until later, for once I climbed in under the blankets and the wagon started down the road, I fell fast asleep. When I opened my eyes again, we were already there, and if the master hadn’t roused me with a slap across the face, I probably would have slept until morning.

He led me into the house as Mother Sue unhitched the nag, and the first room we entered was the kitchen: a bare, dimly lit space with a wood stove in one corner and a kerosene lamp flickering in another. A black boy of about fifteen was sitting at the table reading a book. He wasn’t brown like most of the colored folks I’d run across back home, he was the color of pitch, a black so black it was almost blue. He was a full-fledged Ethiopian, a pickaninny from the jungles of darkest Africa, and my heart just about stopped beating when I caught sight of him. He was a frail, scrawny fellow with bulging eyes and those enormous lips, and as soon as he stood up from his chair to greet us, I saw that his bones were all twisted and askew, that he had the jagged, hunchbacked body of a cripple.

“This is Aesop,” the master said to me, “the finest boy who ever lived. Say hello to him, Walt, and shake his hand. He’s going to be your new brother.”

“I ain’t shaking hands with no nigger,” I said. “You’ve got to be crazy if you’d think I’d do a thing like that.”

Master Yehudi let out a loud, prolonged sigh. It wasn’t an expression of disgust so much as of sorrow, a monumental shudder
from the depths of his soul. Then, with utmost deliberation and calm, he curled the index finger of his right hand into a frozen, beckoning hook and placed the tip of that hook directly under my chin, at the precise spot where the flesh meets the bone. Then he began to press, and all at once a horrific pain shot around the back of my neck and up into my skull. I had never felt pain like that before. I struggled to cry out, but my throat was blocked, and I could do no more than produce a sick gagging noise. The master continued to press with his finger, and presently I felt my feet lift off the ground. I was traveling upward, rising into the air like a feather, and the master seemed to be accomplishing this without the slightest effort, as if I were of no more consequence to him than a ladybug. Eventually, he had me up to where my face was on a level with his and I was looking directly into his eyes.

“We don’t talk like that around here, boy,” he said. “All men are brothers, and in this family everyone gets treated with respect. That’s the law. If you don’t like it, lump it. The law is the law, and whoever goes against it is turned into a slug and wallows in the earth for the rest of his days.”

T
hey fed me and clothed me and gave me a room of my own. I wasn’t spanked or paddled, I wasn’t kicked around or punched or boxed on the ears, and yet tolerable as things were for me, I had never been more down at the mouth, more filled with bitterness and pent-up fury. For the first six months, I thought only about running away. I was a city boy who had grown up with jazz in his blood, a street kid with his eye on the main chance, and I loved the hurly-burly of crowds, the screech of trolley cars and the throb of neon, the stink of bootleg whiskey trickling in the gutters. I was a boogie-toed prankster, a midget scatman with a quick tongue and a hundred angles, and there I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, living under a sky that brought only weather—nearly all of it bad.

Master Yehudi’s property consisted of thirty-seven acres of dirt, a two-story farmhouse, a chicken coop, a pigpen, and a barn. There were a dozen chickens in the coop, two cows and the gray horse in the bam, and six or seven pigs in the pen. There was no electricity, no plumbing, no telephone, no wireless, no phonograph, no nothing. The only source of entertainment was the piano in the parlor, but Aesop was the only one who could play it, and he made such a botch of even the simplest songs that I always left the room the moment he sat down and touched his fingers to the keys. The joint was a shit hole, the world capital of boredom, and I was already fed up with it after one day. They
didn’t even know about baseball in that house, and I had no one to talk to about my beloved Cardinals, which was about the only subject that interested me back then. I felt as if I’d fallen through a crack in time and landed in the stone age, a country where dinosaurs still roamed the earth. According to Mother Sue, Master Yehudi had won the farm on a bet with some fellow in Chicago about seven years earlier. That must have been some bet, I said. The loser turns out to be the winner, and the winner’s a chump who gets to rot away his future in Bungholeville, U.S.A.