Mr. Vertigo (3 page)

I was a fiery little dunce back then, I’ll admit it, but I’m not going to make any apologies for myself. I was who I was, a product of the people and places I’d come from, and there’s no point in whining about that now. What impresses me most about those early months is how patient they were, how well they seemed to understand me and tolerate my antics. I ran away four times that first winter, once getting as far as Wichita, and each time they took me back, no questions asked. I was scarcely a hair’s breadth greater than nothing, a molecule or two above the vanishing point of what constitutes a human being, and since the master reckoned that my soul was no loftier than an animal’s, that’s where he started me out: in the barn with the animals.

Much as I detested taking care of those chickens and pigs, I preferred their company to the people. It was difficult for me to decide which one I hated most, and every day I would reshuffle the order of my animosities. Mother Sue and Aesop came in for their fair share of inner scorn, but in the end it was the master who provoked my greatest ire and resentment. He was the scoundrel who had tricked me into going there, and if anyone was to blame for the fix I was in, he was the chief culprit. What galled me most was his sarcasm, the cracks and insults he hurled constantly in my direction, the way he would ride me and hound me for no reason but to prove how worthless I was. With the other
two he was always polite, a model of decorum, but he rarely wasted an opportunity to say something mean-spirited on my account. It started the very first morning, and after that he never let up. Before long, I realized that he was no better than Uncle Slim. He might not have thrashed me the way Slim did, but the master’s words had power, and they hurt just as much as any blow to the head.

“Well, my fine-feathered rascal,” he said to me that first morning, “give me the lowdown on what you know about the three R’s.”

“Three?” I said, going for the quick, wise-guy retort. “I ain’t got but one arse, and I use it every time I sit down. Same as everybody else.”

“I mean school, you twerp. Have you ever set foot in a classroom—and if so, what did you learn there?”

“I don’t need no school to teach me things. I’ve got better ways of spending my time than that.”

“Excellent. Spoken like a true scholar. But be more specific. What about the alphabet? Can you write the letters of the alphabet or not?”

“Some of them. The ones that serve my purpose. The others don’t matter. They just give me a pain, so I don’t worry about them.”

“And which ones serve your purpose?”

“Well, let’s see. There’s the
A
, I like that one, and the
W.
Then there’s the whatchamacallit, the
L
, and the
E
, and the
R
, and the one that looks like a cross. The
T.
As in T-bone steak. Those letters are my buddies, and the rest can go fry in hell for all I care.”

“So you know how to write your name.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, boss. I can write my name, I can count to kingdom come, and I know that the sun is a star in the
sky. I also know that books are for girls and sissies, and if you’re planning to teach me anything out of books, we can call off our arrangement right now.”

“Don’t fret, kid. What you’ve just told me is music to my ears. The dumber you are, the better it is for both of us. There’s less to undo that way, and that’s going to save us a lot of time.”

“And what about the flying lessons? When do we start with them?”

“We’ve already started. From now on, everything we do is connected to your training. That won’t always be apparent to you, so try to keep it in mind. If you don’t forget, you’ll be able to hang in there when the going gets rough. We’re embarking on a long journey, son, and the first thing I have to do is break your spirit. I wish it could be some other way, but it can’t. Considering the muck you spring from, that shouldn’t be too hard a task.”

So I spent my days shoveling manure in the barn, freezing my eyebrows off as the others sat snug and cozy in the house. Mother Sue took care of the cooking and domestic chores, Aesop lounged around on the sofa reading books, and Master Yehudi did nothing at all. His principal occupation seemed to be sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair from sunrise to sundown and looking out the window. Except for his conversations with Aesop, that was the only thing I saw him do until spring. I sometimes listened in when the two of them talked, but I could never make sense of what they were saying. They used so many complicated words, it was as if they were communicating in their own private gibberish. Later on, when I settled into the swing of things a bit more, I learned that they were studying. Master Yehudi had taken it upon himself to educate Aesop in the liberal arts, and the books they read concerned any number of different subjects: history, science, literature, mathematics, Latin, French, and so on. He had his project of teaching me to fly, but he was also
engaged in turning Aesop into a scholar, and as far as I could tell that second project meant a lot more to him than mine did. As the master put it to me one morning not long after my arrival: “He was even worse off than you were, runt. When I found him twelve years ago, he was crawling through a cotton field in Georgia dressed in rags. He hadn’t eaten in two days, and his mama, who was no more than a child herself, lay dead from TB in their shack fourteen miles down the road. That’s how far the kid had wandered from home. He was delirious with hunger by then, and if I hadn’t chanced upon him at that particular moment, there’s no telling what would have happened. His body might be contorted into a tragic shape, but his mind is a glorious instrument, and he’s already surpassed me in most fields. My plan is to send him to college in three years. He can continue his studies there, and once he graduates and goes out into the world, he’ll become a leader of his race, a shining example to all the downtrodden black folks of this violent, hypocritical country.” I couldn’t make head or tail of what the master was talking about, but the love in his voice burned through to me and impressed itself on my mind. For all my stupidity, I was able to understand that much. He loved Aesop as if he were his own son, and I was no better than a mutt, a mongrel beast to be spat on and left out in the rain.

Mother Sue was my companion in ignorance, my fellow illiterate and sluggard, and while that might have helped to create a bond between us, it did nothing of the sort. There was no overt hostility in her, but at the same time she gave me the willies, and I think it took me longer to adjust to her oddnesses than it did with the two others—who could hardly be called normal themselves. Even with the blankets removed from her body and the hat gone from her head, I had trouble determining which sex she belonged to. I found that distressing somehow, and even after
I glimpsed her naked through the keyhole of her door and saw with my own eyes that she possessed a pair of titties and had no member dangling from her bush, I still wasn’t entirely convinced. Her hands were tough like a man’s, she had broad shoulders and muscles that bulged in her upper arms, and except when she flashed me one of her rare and beautiful smiles, her face was as remote and ungiving as a block of wood. That’s closer to what unsettled me, perhaps: her silence, the way she seemed to look through me as if I wasn’t there. In the pecking order of the household, I stood directly below her, which meant that I had more dealings with Mother Sue than with anyone else. She was the one who doled out my chores and checked up on me, who made sure I washed my face and brushed my teeth before going to bed, and yet for all the hours I spent in her company, she made me feel lonelier than if I had been truly alone. A hollowed-out sensation crept into my belly whenever she was around, as if just being near her would start to make me shrink. It didn’t matter how I behaved. I could jump up and down or stand still, I could holler my head off or hold my tongue, and the results never varied. Mother Sue was a wall, and every time I approached that wall I was turned into a puff of smoke, a tiny cloud of ashes scattering in the wind.

The only one who showed me any genuine kindness was Aesop, but I was against him from the start, and there was nothing he could say or do that would ever change that. I couldn’t help myself. It was in my blood to feel contempt for him, and given that he was the ugliest specimen of his kind I’d ever had the misfortune to see, it struck me as preposterous that we were living under the same roof. It went against the laws of nature, it transgressed everything that was holy and proper, and I wouldn’t allow myself to accept it. When you threw in the fact that Aesop talked like no other colored boy on the face of the earth—more
like an English lord than an American—and then threw in the additional fact that he was the master’s favorite, I couldn’t even think about him without succumbing to an onslaught of nerves. To make matters worse, I had to keep my mouth shut whenever he was around. A few choice remarks would have blown off some of my rage, I think, but I remembered the master’s finger thrusting under my chin, and I was in no mood to submit to that torture again.

The worst part of it was that Aesop didn’t seem to care that I despised him so much. I perfected a whole repertoire of scowls and grimaces to use in his company, but whenever I shot one of those looks in his direction, he would just shake his head and smile to himself. It made me feel like an idiot. No matter how hard I tried to hurt him, he never let me get under his skin, never gave me the satisfaction of scoring a point against him. He wasn’t simply winning the war between us, he was winning every damned battle of that war, and I figured that if I couldn’t even best a black devil in a fair exchange of insults, then the whole of that Kansas prairie must have been bewitched. I’d been shanghaied to a land of bad dreams, and the more I struggled to wake up, the scarier the nightmare became.

“You try too hard,” Aesop said to me one afternoon. “You’re so consumed with your own righteousness, it’s made you blind to the things around you. And if you can’t see what’s in front of your nose, you’ll never be able to look at yourself and know who you are.”

“I know who I am,” I said. “There ain’t nobody can steal that from me.”

“The master isn’t stealing anything from you. He’s giving you the gift of greatness.”

“Look, do me a favor, will you? Don’t mention that buzzard’s name when I’m around. He gives me the creeps, that master of
yours, and the less I have to think about him, the better off I’m going to be.”

“He loves you, Walt. He believes in you with every ounce of his soul.”

“The hell he does. That faker don’t give a rat’s ass about nothing. He’s the king of the gypsies is what he is, and if he’s got any soul at all—which I’m not saying he does—then it’s packed with evil through and through.”

“King of the gypsies?” Aesop’s eyes bugged out in amazement. “Is that what you think?” The idea must have bopped him on the funny bone, for a moment later he grabbed his stomach and started shaking in a fit of laughter. “You sure know how to come up with some good ones,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “What on earth ever put that notion in your head?”

“Well,” I said, feeling my cheeks blush with embarrassment, “if he ain’t no gypsy, what the hell is he, then?”

“A Hungarian.”

“A what?” I stammered. It was the first time I’d ever heard anyone use that word, and I was so flummoxed by it that I momentarily lost the power of speech.

“A Hungarian. He was born in Budapest and came to America as a young boy. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and both his father and grandfather were rabbis.”

“And what’s that, some lesser form of rodent?”

“It’s a Jewish teacher. Sort of like a minister or priest, only for Jews.”

“Well now,” I said, “there you go. That explains everything, don’t it? He’s worse than a gypsy, old Doctor Dark Brows—he’s a kike. There ain’t nothing worse than that on the whole miserable planet.”

“You’d better not let him hear you talking like that,” Aesop said.

“I know m rights,” I said. “And no Jew man is going to shove me around, I swear it.”

“Easy does it, Walt. You’re only asking for trouble.”

“And what about that witch, Mother Sue? Is she another one of them Hebes?”

Aesop shook his head and stared down at the ground. My voice was seething with such anger, he couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eyes. “No,” he said. “She’s an Oglala Sioux. Her grandfather was Sitting Bull’s brother, and when she was young, she was the top bareback rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. What I’m telling you is the pure, unvarnished truth. You’re living in the same house with a Jew, a black man, and an Indian, and the sooner you accept the facts, the happier your life is going to be.”

I’d held on for three weeks until then, but after that conversation with Aesop I knew I couldn’t stand it anymore. I lit out of there that same night—waiting until everyone was asleep and then crawling out of the covers, sneaking down the stairs, and tiptoeing into the frigid December darkness. There was no moon overhead, not even a star to shine down on me, and the moment I crossed the threshold, I was struck by a wind so fierce that it blew me straight back against the side of the house. My bones were no stronger than cotton in that wind. The night was aroar with clamor, and the air rushed and boomed as if it carried the voice of God, howling down its wrath on any creature foolish enough to rise against it. I became that fool, and time and again I picked myself off the ground and fought my way into the teeth of the maelstrom, spinning around like a pinwheel as I inched my body into the yard. After ten or twelve tries, I was all worn out, a spent and battered hulk. I had made it as far as the pigpen,
and just as I was about to scramble to my knees once more, my eyes shut on me and I lost consciousness. Hours passed. I woke at the crack of dawn and found myself encircled by four slumbering pigs. If I hadn’t landed among those swine, there’s a good chance I would have frozen to death during the night. Thinking about it now, I suppose it was a miracle, but when I opened my eyes that morning and saw where I was, the first thing I did was jump to my feet and spit, cursing my rotten luck.