Other Voices, Other Rooms (7 page)

“I ain’t deaf, honey,” said Zoo, sounding sincerely concerned. “Have the backache and stomach jitters, but I ain’t deaf.”

“Then why does everybody act so queer? Gee whiz, every time I mention Mister Sansom you’d think . . . you’d think . . . and in the town . . .” He rubbed his eyes and peeked at Zoo. “Like just now, when I asked if he was really ill . . .”

Zoo glanced worriedly at the window where fig leaves pressed against the glass like green listening ears. “Miss Amy done tol you he ain’t the healthiest man.”

The flies buzzed back to the sugar jar, and the ticktuck of the defective clock was loud. “Is he going to die?” said Joel.

The scrape of a chair. Zoo was up and rinsing pans in a tub with water from a well-bucket. “We friends, that’s fine,” she said, talking over her shoulder. “Only don’t never ax me nothin bout Mister Sansom. Miss Amy the one take care of him. Ax her. Ax Mister Randolph. I ain’t in noways messed up with Mister Sansom; don’t even fix him his vittels. Me and Papadaddy, us got our own troubles.”

Joel snapped shut the snuff compact, and revolved it in his hands, examining the unique design. It was round and the silver was cut like a turtle’s shell; a real butterfly, arranged under a film of lime glass, figured the lid; the butterfly wings were the luminously misty orange of a full moon. So elegant a case, he reasoned, was never meant for ordinary snuff, but rare golden powders, precious witch potions, love sand.

“Yessir, us got our own troubles.”

“Zoo,” he said, “where’d you get this?”

She was kneeling on the floor cursing quietly as she shoveled ashes out of the stove. The firelight rippled over her black face and danced a yellow light in her foxgrape eyes which now cut sideways questioningly. “My box?” she said. “Mister Randolph gimme it one Christmas way long ago. He make it hisself, makes lotsa pretty dodads long that line.”

Joel studied the compact with awed respect; he would’ve sworn it was store-bought. Distastefully he recalled his own attempts at hand-made gifts: necktie racks, tool kits, and the like; they were mighty sorry by comparison. He comforted himself with the thought that Cousin Randolph must be older than he’d supposed.

“I usta been usin it for cheek-red,” said Zoo, advancing to claim her treasure. She dipped more snuff before redepositing it down her dress-front. “But seein as I don’t go over to Noon City no more (ain’t been in two years), I reckoned it’d do to keep my Happy Dip good ’n dry. Sides, no sense paintin up less there’s mens round a lady is innerested in . . . which there ain’t.” A mean expression pinched her face as she gazed at the sunspots freckling the linoleum. “That Keg Brown, the one what landed on the chain gang cause he did me a bad turn, I hope they got him out swingin a ninety-pound pick under this hot sun.” And, as if it were sore, she touched her long neck lightly. “Well,” she sighed, “spec I best get to tendin Papadaddy: I’m gonna take him some hoecake and molasses: he must be powerful hungry.”

Joel watched apathetically while she broke off a cold slab of cornbread, and poured a preserve jar half-full of thick molasses. “How come you don’t fix yourself a sling-shot, and go out and kill a mess of birds?” she suggested.

“Dad will probably want me in a minute,” he told her. “Miss Amy said she’d see, so I guess I’d better stick around here.”

“Mister Randolph likes the dead birds, the kinds with pretty feathers. Won’t do you no good squattin in this dark ol kitchen.” Her naked feet were soundless as she moved away. “You be at the Service, you hear?”

The fire had waned to ashes, and, while the old broken clock ticked like an invalid heart, the sunspots on the floor spread and darkened; the shadows of the fig leaves trellising the walls swelled to an enormous quivering shape, like the crystal flesh of a jellyfish. Flies skittered along the table, rubbing their restless hair-feet, and zoomed and sang round Joel’s ears. When, two hours later, two that seemed five, he raised the clock off its battered face it promptly stopped beating and all sense of life faded from the kitchen; three-twenty its bent hands recorded: three, the empty, middle hour of an endless afternoon. She was not coming. Joel plowed his fingers through his hair. She was not coming, and it was all some crazy trick.

His leg had gone numb from resting so long in one position, and it tingled bloodlessly as he got up and limped out of the kitchen, and down the hall, calling plaintively: “Miss Amy. Miss Amy.”

He swished the lavender curtains apart, and moved into the bleak light filling the barren, polished chamber towards his image floating on the watery-surfaced lookingglass; his formless reflected face was wide-lipped and one-eyed, as if it were a heat-softened wax effigy; the lips were a gauzy line, the eyes a glaring bubble. “Miss Amy . . . anybody!”

Somewhere in a school textbook of Joel’s was a statement contending that the earth at one time was probably a white hot sphere, like the sun; now, standing in the scorched garden, he remembered it. He had reached the garden by following a path which led round from the front of the house through the rampart of interlacing trees. And here, in the overgrown confusion, were some plants taller than his head, and others razor-sharp with thorns; brittle sun-curled leaves crackled under his cautious step. The dry, tangled weeds grew waist high. The sultry smells of summer and sweet shrub and dark earth were heavy, and the itchy whirr of bumblebees stung the silence. He could hardly raise his eyes upward, for the sky was pure blue fire. The wall of the house rising above the garden was like a great yellow cliff, and patches of Virginia creeper greenly framed all its eight overlooking windows.

Joel trampled down the tough undergrowth till he came up flat against the house. He was bored, and figured he might as well play Blackmail, a kind of peeping-tom game members of the Secret Nine had fooled around with when there was absolutely nothing else to do. Blackmail was practiced in New Orleans only after sunset, inasmuch as daylight could be fatal for a player, the idea being to approach a strange house and peer invisibly through its windows. On these dangerous evening patrols, Joel had witnessed many peculiar spectacles, like the night he’d watched a young girl waltzing stark naked to victrola music; and again, an old lady drop dead while puffing at a fairyland of candles burning on a birthday cake; and most puzzling of all, two grown men standing in an ugly little room kissing each other.

The parlor of Skully’s Landing ran the ground-floor’s length; gold draperies tied with satin tassels obscured the greater part of its dusky, deserted interior, but Joel, his nose mashed against a pane, could make out a group of heavy chairs clustered like fat dowagers round a tea-table. And a gilded loveseat of lilac velvet, an Empire sofa next to a marble fireplace, and a cabinet, one of three, the others of which were indistinct, gleaming with china figurines and ivory fans and curios. On top of a table directly before him were a Japanese pagoda, and an ornate shepherd lamp, chandelier prisms dangling from its geranium globe like jeweled icicles.

He slipped away from the window and crossed the garden to the slanting shade of a willow. The diamond glitter of the afternoon hurt his eyes, and he was as slippery with sweat as a greased wrestler; it stood to reason such weather would have to break. A rooster crowed beyond the garden, and it had for him the same sad, woebegone sound as a train whistle wailing late at night. A train. He sure wished he were aboard one headed far from here. If he could get to see his father! Miss Amy, she was a mean old bitch. Step-mothers always were. Well, just let her try and lay a hand on him. He’d tell her off soon as look at her, by God. He was pretty brave. Who was it licked Sammy Silverstein to a frazzle a year ago come next October? But gee, Sammy was a good kid, kind of. And he wondered what devilment old Sammy was up to right this minute. Probably sitting in the Nemo Theatre stuffing his belly with popcorn; yeah, that’s where you’d find him, because this was the matinee they were going to show that spook picture about a batty scientist changing Lucky Rogers into a murderous gorilla. Of all the pictures he would have to miss that one. Hell! Now supposing he did suddenly decide to make dust tracks on the road? Maybe it would be fun to own a barrel organ and a monkey. And there was always the soda-jerking business: anybody that liked ice-cream sodas as much as he did ought to be able to make one. Hell!

“Ra ta ta ta,” went his machine gun as he charged toward the five broken porch columns. And then, midway between the pillars and a clump of goldenrod, he discovered the bell. It was a bell like those used in slave-days to summon fieldhands from work; the metal had turned a mildewed green, and the platform on which it rested was rotten. Fascinated, Joel squatted Indian-style and poked his head inside the bell’s flared mouth; the lint of withered spider-webs hung everywhere, and a delicate green lizard, racing liquidly round the rusty hollow, swerved, flicked its tongue, and nailed its pinpoint eyes on Joel, who withdrew in disordered haste.

Rising, he glanced up at the yellow wall of the house, and speculated as to which of the top-floor windows belonged to him, his father, Cousin Randolph. It was at this point that he saw the queer lady. She was holding aside the curtains of the left corner window, and smiling and nodding at him, as if in greeting or approval; but she was no one Joel had ever known: the hazy substance of her face, the suffused marshmallow features, brought to mind his own vaporish reflection in the wavy chamber mirror. And her white hair was like the wig of a character from history: a towering pale pompadour with fat dribbling curls. Whoever she was, and Joel could not imagine, her sudden appearance seemed to throw a trance across the garden: a butterfly, poised on a dahlia stem, ceased winking its wings, and the rasping F of the bumblebees droned into nothing.

When the curtain fell abruptly closed, and the window was again empty, Joel, reawakening, took a backward step and stumbled against the bell: one raucous, cracked note rang out, shattering the hot stillness.

THREE

“Hey, Lord!” STAMP. “Hey, Lord!” STAMP. “Don’t wanna ride on the devil’s side . . . jus wanna ride with You!”

Zoo squeezed the music from a toylike accordion, and pounded her flat foot on the rickety cabin-porch floor. “Oh devil done weep, devil done cried, cause he gonna miss me on my last lonesome ride.” A prolonged shout: the fillet of gold glistened in the frightening volcano of her mouth, and the little mail-order accordion, shoved in, shoved out, was like a lung of pleated paper and pearl shell. “Gonna miss me . . .”

For some time the rainbird had shrilled its cool promise from an elderberry lair, and the sun was locked in a tomb of clouds, tropical clouds that nosed across the low sky, massing into a mammoth grey mountain.

Jesus Fever sat surrounded by a mound of beautiful scrapquilt pillows in a rocker fashioned out of old barrel-staves; his reverent falsetto quavered like a broken ocarina-note, and occasionally he raised his hands to give a feeble, soundless clap.

“. . . on my ride!”

Perched on a toadstool-covered stump growing level with the porch, Joel alternated his interest between Zoo’s highjinks and the changing weather; the instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame. A damp breeze, tuning in the boles of waterbays, carried the fresh mixed scent of rain, of pine and June flowers blooming in far-off fields. The cabin door swung open, banged closed, and there came the muffled rattle of the Landing’s window-shutters being drawn.

Zoo mashed out a final gaudy chord, and put the accordion aside. She had varnished her upended hair with brilliantine, and exchanged the polka-dot neckerchief for a frayed red ribbon. Different colored threads darned her white dress in a dozen spots, and she’d jeweled her ears with a pair of rhinestone earrings.

“If you gotta thirst, and the water done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.” Outstretching her arms, balanced like a tightrope walker, she stepped into the yard, and strutted round Joel’s tree stump. “If you gotta lover, and the lover done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.”

High in chinaberry towers the wind moved swift as a river, the frenzied leaves, caught in its current, frothed like surf on the sky’s shore. And slowly the land came to seem as though it were submerged in dark deep water. The fern undulated like sea-floor plants, the cabin loomed mysterious as a sunken galleon hulk, and Zoo, with her fluid, insinuating grace, could only be, Joel thought, the mermaid bride of an old drowned pirate.

“If you gotta hunger, and the food done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.”

A yellow tabby loped across the yard, and sprang nimbly into Jesus Fever’s lap; it was the cat Joel had seen skulking in the garden lilac. Clambering to the old man’s shoulder, it smooched its crafty mug next to the puny cheek, its tawny astonished eyes blazing at Joel. It rumbled as the little Negro stroked the striped belly. Minus his derby hat, Jesus Fever’s skull, except for sparse sprouts of motheaten wool, was like a ball of burnished metal; a black suit double his size sagged dilapidatedly on his delicate frame, and he wore tiny high-button shoes of orange leather. The spirit of the service was rousing him mightily, and, from time to time, he honked his nose between his fingers, tossing the discharge into the fern.

The rhythmic chain of Zoo’s half-sung, half-shouted phrases rose and fell like her pounding foot, and her earrings, dangling with the sway of her head, shot flecks of sparkle. “Listen oh Lord when us pray, kindly hear what us has to say. . . .”

Silent lightning zigzagged miles away, then another bolt, this a dragon of crackling white, now not too distant, was followed by a crawling thunder-roll. A bantam rooster raced for the safety of a well-shed, and the triangular shadow of a crow flock cut the sky.

“I cold,” complained Jesus petulantly. “Leg all swole up with rain. I cold. . . .” The cat curled in his lap, its head flopped over his knee like a wilted dahlia.

The off-on flash of Zoo’s gold tooth made Joel’s heart suddenly like a rock rattling in his chest, for it suggested to him a certain winking neon sign:
R. R. Oliver’s Funeral Estb.
Darkness.
R. R. Oliver’s Funeral Estb.
Darkness. “Downright tacky, but they don’t charge too outlandish,” that’s what Ellen had said, standing before the plate window where a fan of gladiolas blushed livid under the electric letters publicizing a cheap but decent berth en route to the kingdom and the glory. Now here again he’d locked the door and thrown away the key: there was conspiracy abroad, even his father had a grudge against him, even God. Somewhere along the line he’d been played a mean trick. Only he didn’t know who or what to blame. He felt separated, without identity, a stone-boy mounted on the rotted stump: there was no connection linking himself and the waterfall of elderberry leaves cascading on the ground, or, rising beyond, the Landing’s steep, intricate roof.

“I cold. I wants to wrap up in the bed. It gonna storm.”

“Hold your tater, Papadaddy.”

Then an unusual thing occurred: as if following the directions of a treasure map, Zoo took three measured paces toward a dingy little rose bush, and, frowning up at the sky, discarded the red ribbon binding her throat. A narrow scar circled her neck like a necklace of purple wire; she traced a finger over it lightly.

“When the time come for that Keg Brown to go, Lord, just you send him back in a hound dog’s nasty shape, ol hound ain’t nobody wants to trifle with: a haunted dog.”

It was as though a brutal hawk had soared down and clawed away Joel’s eyelids, forcing him to gape at her throat. Zoo. Maybe she was like him, and the world had a grudge against her, too. But christamighty he didn’t want to end up with a scar like that. Except what chance have you got when there is always trickery in one hand, and danger in the other. No chance whatsoever. None. A coldness went along his spine. Thunder boomed overhead. The earth shook. He leaped off the stump, and made for the house, his loosened shirt-tail flying behind; run, run, run, his heart told him, and wham! he’d pitched headlong into a briar patch. This was a kind of freak accident. He’d seen the patch, known it for an obstacle, and yet, as though deliberately, he’d thrown himself upon it. But the stinging briar scratches seemed to cleanse him of bewilderment and misery, just as the devil, in fanatic cults, is supposedly, through self-imposed pain, driven from the soul. Realizing the tender concern in Zoo’s face as she helped him to his feet, he felt a fool: she was, after all, his friend, and there was no need to be afraid. “Here, little old bad boy,” she said kindly, plucking briar needles off his breeches, “how come you act so ugly? Huh, hurt me and Papadaddy’s feelins.” She took his hand, and led him to the porch.

“Hee hee hee,” cackled Jesus, “I tumble thataway, I bust every bone.”

Zoo picked up her accordion and, reclining against a porch-pole, presently, with careless effort, produced a hesitant, discordant melody. And her grandfather, in a disappointed child’s wheedling singsong, reiterated his grievances: he was about to perish of chill, but what matter; who gave a goldarn whether he lived or died? and why didn’t Zoo, inasmuch as he’d performed his Sabbath duty, tuck him in his good warm bed and leave him in peace? oh there were cruel folk in this world, and heartless ways.

“Hush up and bow that head, Papadaddy,” said Zoo. “We gonna end this meetin proper-like. We gonna tell Him our prayers. Joel, honey, bow that head.”

The trio on the porch were figures in a woodcut engraving; the Ancient on his throne of splendid pillows, a yellow pet relaxed in his lap gazing gravely in the drowning light at the small servant bowed at its master’s feet, and the arms of the black arrow-like daughter lifted above them all, as if in benediction.

But there was no prayer in Joel’s mind; rather, nothing a net of words could capture, for, with one exception, all his prayers of the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

“Amen,” whispered Zoo.

And in this moment, like a swift intake of breath, the rain came.