“I’ve noticed,” I said.
Luther blushed at the thought that his eating habits had been observed, and he started to eat. “I have a deficiency of stomach acid,” he said. “It’s not serious. It’s called hypochlorhydria. I’m told Rasputin had the same condition, but I wouldn’t know about that. All I know is that at times of stress, my gastric juices just quit on me and I can’t digest food. But it passes.”
“About these gastric juices,” I said. “Have you been under a lot of tension lately?”
“Well, sort of,” Luther said. “I’m working on something new. It’s something that could make a lot of money, if it works. The problem is, I haven’t got it to work yet.” Luther paused for a moment, considering whether to let me into his confidence.
“Do you know what black lights are?” he asked. “Those purple fluorescent lights that make things glow in the dark? Well, you know, a lot of bars have fish tanks illuminated with black lights. The Purple Tree down on Johnson Square does. I got to thinking what a shame it was that goldfish didn’t glow in the dark. So I’m trying to find a way to make them glow. If they did glow, they’d look as if they were floating in air like giant fireflies—just the kind of weird vision a guy getting drunk in a bar could spend hours looking at. I know I would. Every bar in America would have to have them. That’s why I want to find a way to make them glow.”
“Do you think you can?”
“I’m experimenting with fluorescent dye,” he said. “The first thing I did was dip the goldfish directly into the dye, and it killed them. Then I took a slower approach and poured a teaspoon of dye into the fish tank and waited. After a week, a faint glow appeared on the gills and the tips of the fins, but it wasn’t enough to make much of an impact in a bar. Little by little, I poured more dye into the water, but the fish didn’t glow any brighter and the glow didn’t spread to any other parts of the fish. All that happened was the pH factor of the water increased, and in a couple of days the fish were dead. That’s where I’m at right now.”
The fly had alighted on Luther’s eyebrow. The green thread dangled down his cheek as if it were attached to a monocle.
Driggers’s Golden Glowfish. Sure, why not? Fortunes had been built on less. “I like it,” I said. “I hope you can make it happen.”
“I’ll let you know,” said Luther.
Our conversations over the next few days were brief. Several times Luther just waved and gave me the thumbs-up sign. On one occasion, I thought I saw a small horsefly hovering over him. I could not tell whether it was attached by a thread, but it followed him up to the cash register, and when he left the premises he appeared to hold the door open for it.
One morning, when I came into Clary’s, he waved me over. “I’m trying a new approach,” he said. “I’m mixing the fluorescent dye with fish food, and I’m beginning to see results. The gills and the fin tips are glowing pretty good, and there’s even some fluorescence in the eyes and around the mouth.”
Luther told me he planned to go to the Purple Tree later that evening for the first public tryout. I was welcome to join him if I liked. I could meet him at the home of Serena Dawes at ten o’clock, and the three of us would proceed to the Purple Tree together.
At ten o’clock sharp, Serena Dawes’s maid, Maggie, came to the door of her townhouse. She showed me into a front parlor, which was furnished in the grand manner—French Empire furniture, heavy swag curtains, and plenty of gold leaf. Then she disappeared to the rear of the house to attend her mistress. Judging from the sounds coming from that direction, Serena’s appearance would be some time off. I could hear the high-pitched strains of a one-way conversation: “Put it back! Put it back!” she screeched. “It doesn’t match, goddammit! Now hand me that other one. No, dammit, that one! I can’t wear these shoes. Maggie, you’re hurting me! Well, be more careful next time, and listen to what I say. Did you call the police like I told you to? Did they catch those nasty little redneck bastards? Did they? They oughta shoot ’em! Kill ’em! They nearly blew the goddamn house down. Luther, darling, hold the mirror higher so I can see. That’s better. Lulu, come to Mama. Come to Mama, Lulu! Oooo! Mama’s little love, Mama’s little kissy-woo! Maggie, do something to my drink. Well, can’t you see the ice is melted!”
At eleven o’clock, I looked up to see a pair of pale and shapely legs supporting a tumult of pink marabou surmounted by a picture hat. Serena’s fingernails were a greenish black. Her face was thrown into shadow by the wide-brimmed hat, but it still showed evidence of the vision it had once been. She smiled, and an even row of perfectly white teeth gleamed between two brilliant red lips.
“I am so des-per-ate-ly sorry to have kept you waiting,” she purred in a soft, coquettish drawl. “I do hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me, but I regret to say I have simply had no sleep. The dreadful little children from across the square threw a bomb under my bedroom window in the dead of night. My nerves are still unsettled. My life is in constant danger.”
“Why, Miz Dawes,” said Maggie, “it wutt’n them chirrin at all. It was on’y Jim Williams shootin’ off a cap pistol. You know how he likes to get your goat. An’ it wutt’n no death a night neither. It was noontime.”
“Decent people were still resting!” said Serena. “And it was not a toy pistol! You don’t understand these things, Maggie. It was a fuckin’ bomb! It nearly tore the goddamn side off the house. I am quite sure my bedroom is structurally unsound as a result. And as for Jim Williams—that no-good, low-rent middle Georgia redneck—I will fix his wagon. You wait and see.”
Luther appeared, carrying a Chinese food take-out carton. “Well, I’ve got the goldfish ready. Let’s go.”
Serena insisted on making the circuit of local nightspots rather than going directly to the Purple Tree. The effort of getting dressed warranted nothing less than a Grand Tour, she felt. We went first to the bar of the 1790 restaurant, then to the Pink House, then to the DeSoto Hilton. At each stop, Serena’s friends gathered around. She paid attention only to the men among them, flattering and bullying them by turns and fanning herself with her cocktail napkin. “Oh, darlin’, you look so handsome. Dear me, I left my cigarettes in the car. Now, be a love and go get them for me—here, take my keys. Goddamn, it’s hot as a bitch in here. I swear I’ll pass out unless somebody turns up the air. Oh, goodness, look at that, my drink’s all gone! I simply must have another! Why, thaaaank yewwww. My nerves are still shattered from that bomb attack last night. Haven’t you heard? A disappointed lover blew a hole in my bedroom wall. I’m still too upset to talk about it.”
As the evening wore on, Luther became concerned that the fluorescence might wear off his goldfish and that they might begin to fade. “We need to get to the Purple Tree before it’s too late,” he said.
“We’ll get there, darling,” Serena trilled. “After we peek in at the pirates’ Cove.” Luther opened the carton and sprinkled a little more fish food into it. After the pirates’ Cove, Serena insisted on a stop at Pinkie Master’s. Luther added more fish food. At Pinkie Master’s, several people peered into the carton.
“Goldfish,” they said. “So what?”
“Come with us to the Purple Tree,” said Luther. “You’ll see.” He put another dose of fish food into the carton. When we finally reached the Purple Tree, it was two-thirty, and our party of three had grown into a small crowd with Serena at the center of it. Luther was content to look after his goldfish and become quietly drunk. In the black-lit darkness of the Purple Tree, Serena’s face was all but invisible under her hat, except for her teeth, which were all aglow. “If it wasn’t a jealous lover,” she said, “then it could have been the Mafia. They use explosives too, don’t they? They’d give anything to get their hands on the magnificent jewels my late husband left me. He was one of the richest men in the world as you all know. After the attack last night I consider myself lucky to be alive.”
Luther, none too steady on his feet by this time, stepped behind the bar. “Well, here goes,”
he said, and without further ceremony he poured the goldfish into the tank. They plunged into the water in a burst of bright green bubbles. Luther held his breath as the bubbles rose and the water cleared. There, swimming around the tank—brighter than the gills or the mouths or the eyes or the fins—were the glowing intestines of his six goldfish. Looping, coiled, knotty cores of light at the center of each of his fish. Luther could not believe it. Months of work had come to this. Glowing goldfish guts. He had overfed the fish.
A silence came over the patrons at the bar.
“Darling,” said Serena, “what the hell is that?”
Others were quick to add their two cents.
“That’s repulsive.”
“It looks like X-ray fish.”
“Yuck!”
Luther would not be consoled. “I don’t care,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I just don’t care.” He kept repeating “I don’t care,” over and over. In response to any question—Do you want another drink? What should we do with the goldfish? Are they radioactive?—he gave the same answer. “I don’t care.”
Luther was in no condition to drive. So, after we left Serena calling out “Nighty-night!” on her doorstep, I got behind the wheel of his car, drove him home, and deposited him in the living room of his carriage house—the living room that looked out on the Dumpster instead of the garden. The night air seemed to revive him a little.
“I don’t know why I ever fooled around with goldfish,” he said. “I should have stuck to what I know best. Insects. It doesn’t pay to try to change. I’ve often thought of changing my life completely, but it never works. I moved to Florida once, but I came back. I’ve got too much Savannah in me, I guess. My family’s been here seven generations, and after that long a time I suppose it gets into your genes. It’s like the control insects at the laboratory. Did I ever tell you about them? Well, we keep a lot of insect colonies in big glass jars out there. Some of them have been breeding for twenty-five years. That’s a thousand generations. All they know about life is what goes on inside their jar. They haven’t been exposed to pesticides or pollution, so they haven’t developed immunities or evolved in any way. They stay the same, generation after generation. If we released them into the outside world, they’d die. I think something like that happens after seven generations in Savannah. Savannah gets to be the only place you can live. We’re like bugs in a jar.”
Luther excused himself and asked me to wait in the living room. He walked upstairs unsteadily but with exaggerated care, negotiating the false step without mishap. I could hear him cross the floor overhead. A dresser drawer opened and closed. When he returned, he was carrying a brown bottle with a black screw cap. The bottle was filled with a white powder.
“This is one way out,” he said. “Sodium fluoroacetate. It’s a poison. Five hundred times more lethal than arsenic.” Luther held the bottle up to the light. It had a handwritten label that read: “Monsanto 3039.”
“This is the same stuff the Finns dumped down their wells when the Russians invaded in 1939. The water in those wells is still undrinkable. I could kill damn near everybody in Savannah with this bottle. Tens of thousands of people anyway.” A smile played across Luther’s lips as he gazed at the bottle. “I was in charge of burying a lot of this stuff out on Oatland Island where we closed down a laboratory years ago. I kept some of it for myself, though. More than enough.”
“Ever thought of using it?” I asked.
“Sure. I’ve always said I’d use it if niggers moved into the house next door. Then niggers did move in next door and made a liar out of me.”
“Isn’t it illegal to have it?”
“Highly.”
“Then why do you keep it?”
“I just like the idea of it.” Luther spoke in a taunting way, like a boy with an extra-powerful slingshot. “Every so often I hold it in my hand and think … poof!”
Luther handed me the bottle. As I looked at it, I held my breath for fear that the slightest leaking fumes would be lethal. I wondered what went through Luther’s mind when he held this bottle and thought “poof!” Then I thought I knew. He probably saw the people of Savannah dropping dead one by one: businessmen sitting on benches in Johnson Square, young revelers carousing on River Street, slow-moving black women holding umbrellas aloft against the hot summer sun, butlers carrying silver trays in the Oglethorpe Club, whores in hotpants on Montgomery Street, tourists lined up in front of Mrs. Wilkes’s boarding house.
He took the bottle back. “It’s an odorless, tasteless poison,” he said. “It kills without leaving a trace—just a slight residue of fluoride but no more than you could attribute to the use of fluoride toothpaste. The victim dies of a heart attack. It’s the perfect murder weapon.”
Luther went to the front door and opened it. I took this as a sign that the evening was over. But as I stood up, he grabbed hold of the door and pulled it sharply upward. The door lifted completely off its hinges. Luther laid it down flat on the living-room floor. “This is more than just an ordinary door,” he said. “It’s what’s called a ‘cooling board.’ Cooling boards are for laying out corpses and preparing them for burial. It’s a typical feature of old houses. The front door doubles as a cooling board. My family’s houses have always had them, so I had one made for myself. When I go, they’ll carry me out on this.”
Luther sat cross-legged on top of the cooling-board door on the living-room floor with the bottle of poison in his hand. Yes, I thought, and when you go, how many others will you take with you? Luther closed his eyes. A smile spread across his face.
“You know,” I said, “some people in Savannah, or at least some people in Clary’s, are afraid you might dump that poison into the water supply someday.”
“I know,” he said.
“What if I were to grab that bottle out of your hands and run away with it?”
“I’d go back to Oatland Island and dig up some more, probably,” said Luther. Whatever his intentions, Luther clearly relished the speculation about his sinister power.
“When you were a kid,” I said, “were you the type who pulled the wings off flies?”
“No,” he said, “but I caught June bugs and tied balloons to them.”
The next morning at Clary’s drugstore, Ruth set Luther’s breakfast in front of him—his eggs, his bacon, his Bayer aspirin, and his glass of ammonia and Coca-Cola. Then she went back to the end of the soda fountain and took a drag on her cigarette.
“Ruth?” Luther asked. “Do you think you can live without glowing goldfish?”
“I can if you can, Luther,” she answered.
Luther ate a mouthful of eggs and then some bacon. He took a swallow of Coke and proceeded to finish his entire breakfast. He had a mournful but peaceful air. Luther ate, he slept, and the demons within him were still. His deadly bottle of poison would remain a harmless curiosity. At least for now.
Chapter 6
THE LADY OF SIX THOUSAND SONGS
The stream of people going in and out of Joe Odom’s house seemed to pick up tempo in the weeks after I met him. That might have been because I had joined the flow myself and was now viewing the phenomenon from midstream, so to speak. I often dropped in after breakfast, by which time the aroma of fresh coffee would be gaining the upper hand over the smell of stale cigarettes from the night before. Joe would be clean-shaven and well rested on three or four hours’ sleep, and among the assorted company (bartenders, socialites, truck drivers, accountants) there would generally be at least one person who had spent the night on the sofa. Currents of activity swirled about the house even at this early hour. People entered and exited rooms, crisscrossing one’s field of vision like characters in La Dolce Vita.
One morning, Joe sat at the grand piano in the living room having coffee, playing the piano, and talking to me. A fat man and a girl with braided hair walked through, completely engrossed in their own conversation.
“She tore up her mother’s car yesterday,” the girl said.
“I thought it was the TV.”
“No, the TV was last week….”
They continued out into the hall, whereupon a bald man in a business suit poked his head in.
“The meeting’s at two,” he said to Joe. “I’ll call you when it’s over. Wish me luck.” Then he disappeared. At that point, Mandy came in from the kitchen, wrapped in a white sheet and looking like a voluptuous goddess. She plucked a cigarette from the pack in Joe’s shirt pocket, kissed him on the forehead, whispered, “Draw up the damn divorce papers!” and then skipped back into the kitchen, where Jerry resumed cutting her hair. In the dining room, a young man hooted with laughter as he read Lewis Grizzard’s column aloud to a white-haired woman who was not finding it at all funny. Overhead, the sound of high-heeled shoes clicked across the floor.
“Well, it’s nine-thirty A.M.,” said Joe, “and I ain’t bored yet.”
Joe was talking not just to me, but to a person at the other end of the telephone, which was tucked under his chin. Joe often engaged in split conversations of this sort. Sometimes you knew who the other party was, sometimes you did not.
“I woke up this morning at seven,” he was saying, “and there was this big lump next to me under the covers, which I thought was strange because I had gone to bed alone. Mandy was in Waycross for the night and not due back here for an hour or so. So I lay there just looking at the lump, trying to figure out who or what it was. It was very big, bigger than anybody I knew…. What? … I was sure it was a human being and not a pile of laundry, because it was breathing. Then I noticed something strange about the breathing pattern: It was coming from two different parts of the lump. Finally, it dawned on me that the lump was two people, which meant I was odd man out, so I yanked the covers back, and sure enough, it was a boy and a girl. I had never seen either one of them before. They were both completely naked.”