Music for Chameleons (9 page)

Softly, she said: “You got something on your mind?”

“Yes.”

“Something you want done? A favor?”

I nodded; she nodded, but her eyes shifted nervously: she didn’t want to be seen talking to me.

She said: “My boy will come. He will tell you.”

“When?”

But she said hush, and hurried out of the garden. I watched her waddle off into the dusk. It dried my mouth to think of having all my hopes pinned on this stupid woman. I couldn’t eat supper that night; I didn’t sleep until dawn. Aside from the thing that was worrying me, now I had a whole lot of new worries. If Mrs. Ferguson did what I wanted her to do, then what about my clothes, what about my name, where would I go, who would I be? Holy smoke, it was enough to drive you crazy! Or was I already crazy? That was part of the problem: I must be crazy to want Mrs. Ferguson to do this thing I wanted her to do. That was one reason why I couldn’t tell anybody: they would think I was crazy. Or something worse. I didn’t know what that something worse could be, but instinctively I felt that people saying I was crazy, my family and their friends and the other kids, might be the least of it.

Because of fear and superstition combined with greed, the
servants of the Garden District, some of the snobbiest mammies and haughtiest housemen who ever tread a parquet floor, spoke of Mrs. Ferguson with respect. They also spoke of her in quiet tones, and not only because of her peculiar gifts, but because of her equally peculiar private life, various details of which I had gradually collected by eavesdropping on the tattletale of these elegant blacks and mulattoes and Creoles, who considered themselves the real royalty of New Orleans, and certainly superior to any of their employers. As for Mrs. Ferguson—she was not a madame, merely a mamselle: an unmarried woman with a raft of children, at least six, who came from East Texas, one of those redneck hamlets across the border from Shreveport. At the age of fifteen she had been tied to a hitching post in front of the town post office and publicly flogged with a horsewhip by her own father. The reason for this terrible punishment was a child she had borne, a boy with green eyes but unmistakably the product of a black father. With the baby, who was called Skeeter and was now fourteen and said to be a devil himself, she came to New Orleans and found work as a housekeeper for an Irish Catholic priest, whom she seduced, had a second baby by, abandoned for another man, and went on from there, living with a succession of handsome lovers, men she could only have succeeded in acquiring through potions poured into their wine, for after all, without her particular powers, who was she? White trash from East Texas who carried on with black men, the mother of six bastards, a laundress, a servant herself. And yet they respected her; even Mme. Jouet, the head mammy of the Vaccaro family, who owned the United Fruit Company, always addressed her civilly.

Two days after my conversation with Mrs. Ferguson, a Sunday, I accompanied my grandmother to church, and as we were walking home, a matter of a few blocks, I noticed that someone was following us: a well-built boy with tobacco-colored skin
and green eyes. I knew at once that it was the infamous Skeeter, the boy whose birth had caused his mother to be flogged, and I knew that he was bringing me a message. I felt nauseated, but also elated, almost tipsy, enough so to make me laugh.

Merrily, my grandmother asked: “Ah, you know a joke?”

I thought: No, but I know a secret. However, I only said: “It was just something the minister said.”

“Really? I’m glad you found some humor. It struck me as a very dry sermon. But the choir was good.”

I refrained from making the following comment: “Well, if they’re just going to talk about sinners and hell, when they don’t know what hell is, they ought to ask me to preach the sermon. I could tell them a thing or two.”

“Are you happy here?” my grandmother asked, as if it were a question she had been considering ever since her arrival. “I know it’s been difficult. The divorce. Living here, living there. I want to help; I don’t know how.”

“I’m fine. Everything’s hunky-dory.”

But I wished she’d shut up. She did, with a frown. So at least I’d got one wish. One down and one to go.

When we reached home my grandmother, saying she felt the start of a migraine and might try to ward it off with a pill and a nap, kissed me and went inside the house. I raced through the garden toward the old wisteria arbor and hid myself inside it, like a bandit in a bandit’s cave waiting for a confederate.

Soon Mrs. Ferguson’s son arrived. He was tall for his age, just shy of six feet, and muscular as a dockworker. He resembled his mother in no respect. It wasn’t only his dark coloring; his features were nicely defined, the bone structure quite precise—his father must have been a handsome man. And unlike Mrs. Ferguson, his emerald eyes were not dumb comic-strip dots, but narrow and mean, weapons, bullets threateningly aimed and primed to explode. I wasn’t surprised when, not many years
later, I heard he’d committed a double murder in Houston and died in the electric chair at Texas State Prison.

He was natty, dressed like the adult sharp-guy hoodlums who lounged around the waterfront hangouts: Panama hat, two-toned shoes, a tight stained white linen suit that some much slighter man must have given him. An impressive cigar jutted from his handkerchief pocket: a Havana Castle Morro, the connoisseur’s cigar Garden District gentlemen served along with their after-dinner absinthe and framboise. Skeeter Ferguson lit his cigar with movie-gangster showmanship, constructed an impeccable smoke ring, blew it straight into my face, and said: “I’ve come to get you.”

“Now?”

“Just as soon as you bring me the old lady’s necklace.”

It was useless to stall, but I tried: “What necklace?”

“Save your breath. Go get it and then we’ll head somewhere. Or else we won’t. And you’ll never have another chance.”

“But she’s wearing it!”

Another smoke ring, professionally manufactured, effortlessly projected. “How you get it ain’t none of my beeswax. I’ll just be right here. Waiting.”

“But it may take a long time. And suppose I can’t do it?”

“You will. I’ll wait till you do.”

The house sounded empty when I entered through the kitchen door, and except for my grandmother, it was; everyone else had driven off to visit a newly married cousin who lived across the river. After calling my grandmother’s name, and hearing silence, I tiptoed upstairs and listened at her bedroom door. She must be asleep. Accepting the risk, I inched the door open.

The curtains were drawn and the room dark except for the hot shine of coal burning inside a porcelain stove. My grandmother was lying in bed with covers drawn up to her chin; she must have taken the headache pill, for her breathing was
deep and even. Still, I drew back the quilt covering her with the meticulous stealth of a robber tumbling the dials of a bank safe. Her throat was naked; she was wearing only an undergarment, a pink slip. I found the necklace on a bureau; it was lying in front of a photograph of her three sons, one of them my father. I hadn’t seen him for so long that I’d forgotten what he looked like—and after today, I’d probably never see him again. Or if I did, he wouldn’t know who I was. But I had no time to think about that. Skeeter Ferguson was waiting for me, standing inside the wisteria arbor tapping his foot and sucking on his millionaire’s cigar. Nevertheless, I hesitated.

I had never stolen anything before; well, some Hershey bars from the candy counter at the movies, and a few books I’d not returned to the public library. But this was so important. My grandmother would forgive me if she knew why I had to steal the necklace. No, she wouldn’t forgive me; nobody would forgive me if they knew
exactly
why. But I had no choice. It was like Skeeter said: if I didn’t do it now, his mother would never give me another chance. And the thing that was worrying me would go on and on, maybe forever and forever. So I took it. I stuffed it in my pocket and fled the room without even closing the door. When I rejoined Skeeter, I didn’t show him the necklace, I just told him I had it, and his green eyes grew greener, turned nastier, as he issued one of his big-shot smoke rings and said: “Sure you do. You’re just a born rascal. Like me.”

First we walked, then we took a trolley car down Canal Street, usually so crowded and cheerful but spooky now with the stores closed and a Sabbath stillness hovering over it like a funeral cloud. At Canal and Royal we changed trolleys and rode all the way across the French Quarter, a familiar neighborhood where many of the longer-established families lived, some with purer lineage than any names the Garden District could offer. Eventually we started walking again; we walked miles.
The stiff churchgoing shoes I was still wearing hurt, and now I didn’t know where we were, but wherever it was I didn’t like it. It was no use questioning Skeeter Ferguson, for if you did, he smiled and whistled, or spit and smiled and whistled. I wonder if he whistled on his way to the electric chair.

I really had no idea where we were; it was a section of the city I’d not seen before. And yet there was nothing unusual about it, except that there were fewer white faces around than one was accustomed to, and the farther we walked the scarcer they became: an occasional white resident surrounded by blacks and Creoles. Otherwise it was an ordinary collection of humble wooden structures, rooming houses with peeling paint, modest family homes, mostly poorly kept but with some exceptions. Mrs. Ferguson’s house, when at last we reached it, was one of the exceptions.

It was an old house but a
real
house, with seven or eight rooms; it didn’t look as though the first strong breeze from the Gulf would blow it away. It was painted an ugly brown, but at least the paint was not sun-blistered and flaking. And it stood inside a well-tended yard that contained a big shade tree—a chinaberry tree with old rubber tires, several of them, suspended on ropes from its branches: swings for children. And there were other playthings scattered around the yard: a tricycle, buckets, and little shovels for making mud pies—evidence of Mrs. Ferguson’s fatherless brood. A mongrel puppy held captive by a chain attached to a stake began bouncing about and yapping the second he glimpsed Skeeter.

Skeeter said: “Here we are. Just open the door and walk in.”

“Alone?”

“She’s expectin’ you. Do what I tell you. Walk right in. And if you catch her in the middle of a hump, keep your eyes open: that’s how I got to be a champion humper.”

The last remark, meaningless to me, ended with a chuckle,
but I followed his instructions, and as I started toward the front door, glanced back at him. It didn’t seem possible, but he was already gone, and I never saw him again—or if I did, I don’t remember it.

The door opened directly into Mrs. Ferguson’s parlor. At least it was furnished as a parlor (a couch, easy chairs, two wicker rocking chairs, maplewood side tables), though the floor was covered with a brown kitchen linoleum that perhaps was meant to match the color of the house. When I came into the room Mrs. Ferguson was tilting to and fro in one of the rocking chairs, while a good-looking young man, a Creole not many years older than Skeeter, rocked away in the other. A bottle of rum rested on a table between them, and they were both drinking from glasses filled with the stuff. The young man, who was not introduced to me, was wearing only an undershirt and somewhat unbuttoned bell-bottom sailor’s trousers. Without a word he stopped rocking, stood up, and swaggered down a hall, taking the rum bottle with him. Mrs. Ferguson listened until she heard a door close.

Then all she said was: “Where is it?”

I was sweating. My heart was acting funny. I felt as though I had run a hundred miles and lived a thousand years in just the last few hours.

Mrs. Ferguson stilled her chair, and repeated herself: “Where is it?”

“Here. In my pocket.”

She held out a thick red hand, palm up, and I dropped the necklace into it. Rum had already done something to alter the usual dullness of her eyes; the dazzling yellow stone did more. She turned it this way and that, staring at it; I tried not to, I tried to think of other things, and found myself wondering if she had scars on her back, lash marks.

“Am I expected to guess?” she asked, never removing her
gaze from the bijou dangling from its fragile gold chain. “Well? Am I supposed to tell you why you are here? What it is you want?”

She didn’t know, she couldn’t, and suddenly I didn’t want her to. I said: “I like to tap-dance.”

For an instant her attention was diverted from the sparkling new toy.

“I want to be a tap dancer. I want to run away. I want to go to Hollywood and be in the movies.” There was some truth in this; running away to Hollywood was high on my list of escape-fantasies. But that wasn’t what I’d decided not to tell her, after all.

“Well,” she drawled. “You sure are pretty enough to be in picture shows. Prettier than any boy ought to be.”

So she
did
know. I heard myself shouting: “Yes! Yes! That’s it!”

“That’s what? And stop hollering. I’m not deaf.”

“I don’t want to be a boy. I want to be a girl.”

It began as a peculiar noise, a strangled gurgling far back in her throat that bubbled into laughter. Her tiny lips stretched and widened; drunken laughter spilled out of her mouth like vomit, and it seemed to be spurting all over me—laughter that sounded like vomit smells.

“Please, please. Mrs. Ferguson, you don’t understand. I’m very worried. I’m worried all the time. There’s something wrong. Please. You’ve got to understand.”

She went on rocking with laughter and her rocking chair rocked with her.

Then I said: “You
are
stupid. Dumb and stupid.” And I tried to grab the necklace away from her.

The laughter stopped as though she had been struck by lightning; a storm overtook her face, total fury. Yet when she spoke her voice was soft and hissing and serpentine: “You don’t know
what you want, boy. I’ll show you what you want. Look at me, boy. Look here. I’ll show you what you want.”