‘In that case you won’t miss me. So goodbye.’
But after he had dressed and she still lay on the bed he stumped to the dresser with a handful of bills. She lay with eyes closed pretending she didn’t know what he was up to.
‘There’s a hundred or so under your comb and brush,’ he told her – ‘that’s one way to anywhere. See you in jail.’ And so, having salvaged his pride at the cost of his heart, he left.
‘I might just take you up on that one of these days,’ Hallie promised herself after he’d left.
Then in the damps and glooms of her little room, Hallie slept.
Schmidt’s greatest joy was Armless Charlie, a panhandler whose face was a mask of fright and whose arms ended in delicate nibs, more like fingered fins than hands, where another man’s elbows would be. What stray wind off what derelict’s row had blown him down Perdido Street nobody knew. But there he was with a dime between his teeth, placing it carefully on the bar – ‘Listen to this,’ – Schmidt would command silence. And in the silence the beggar would ask, in a boyish lisp out of some eastern preparatory school:
‘Mister Dockawee, might I have a beah pwease?’
‘Everyone watch this!’ Schmidt ordered as soon as the beer was put down.
Charlie would grip the glass with his teeth and tilt it till the beer ran over his face – he gulped frantically, catching every drop he could. Drenched and choking, yet he never unloosed the glass till it was empty. Then would set it down as carefully as he had picked it up, bow slightly and say,
‘Thank you, Mister Dockawee.’
‘My God, what a pig!’ – Schmidt would race back and forth on his platform, slapping his stumps. ‘Aint he the worst?’
A different brand of innocent was one who didn’t come into Dockery’s at all, but always chose Mama’s instead. This was an ancient Negro carrying a curtained cage more ancient than himself. He would set it down on its wrought-iron base, doff his little red monkey-cap to each woman individually and at last would pull a little string that caused the cage’s shade to rise.
Revealing a parrot that took one glassy glance around and screeched, ‘Let me out! I’m a married man! Let me out!’ Then hung upside down in a clench-beak rage while biting the bitten wood.
The old man stood a bit to one side, implying the bird was now on its own. But kept his cap extended should anyone care to drop a penny. If someone did, he would pull out a drawer at the cage’s base, where small pieces of colored paper lay folded promisingly. The parrot would snatch one and permit the purchaser to take it out of its beak. The message on each was the same:
Dummy! Don’t try to come back the way you came.
Don’t you know a tiger is trailing you? Stay
off footpaths – they have been mined just for
you. Don’t peek under that stone, fool, a
pit viper is planted there especially for you.
If you have any sense left at all you’ll stay
downwind, six blunt-nose hyenas have a good
whiff of you. Avoid open plains – buzzards have
spotted you. Pay no heed to anyone in
the trees, it is only the apes laughing their
heads off at you. Natives are beating the
brush for you. And you still call it
‘Civilization’?
Call it what you want. I call it a jungle.
Now you owe me 15¢ for a bowl of gumbo for being the only one not pursuing you.
‘I don’t believe that old man wrote all that, he aint got the sense for it,’ Finnerty decided.
‘Who did then?’ Hallie wondered.
‘The damned parrot, of course,’ Finnerty assured her.
And went off to see Kitty Twist. The new child who still had a thing or two to learn from his mouse.
Yet another wonder, neither snatch-mad nor prophesying, taxied in one narrowing twilight, made one brief scene; and no twilight brought him back again.
‘In person!’ this one announced himself – ‘Adler! King of the acrobats! Good as ever!’ Paunched and pallid, bald and tattooed: a man at least as good as ever. He came to the center of the parlor wearing seersucker so soiled and stained one wondered how many places he’d been thrown out of since the last time he’d changed.
‘Once an acrobat always an acrobat!’ he announced – ‘I invented the double high-wire back somersault.’
‘You invented it but who did it?’ Kitty Twist asked, but the king ignored all questions like that. Just stood back beaming until everyone had had a good look then asked so benignly: ‘How does it feel, now that you’ve met the king?’
‘It feels like hell,’ Kitty told him.
‘These young ladies are waiting for you to say hello, Mr King,’ Mama let him know no one cared a doodle in a wood how great he was. If he wanted to stay he’d have to let loose of some loot.
That didn’t disturb Adler. He knew how people loved to tease, pretending they hadn’t heard of Adler.
‘Are you with a circus or something, mister?’ Floralee inquired hopefully, and somehow that set him off.
‘Clear a space!’ He met the challenge as a motion picture director might, or at any rate so we’re told – ‘Women off the set! No crowding! Put out that cigarette!’ Then pointing right at Dove, who wasn’t even wearing cowboy boots – ‘You there! Tables end to end!’
Dove leaped to action, tumbling girls upon one another until Mama gathered them up and put them safely behind her. In rushed Finnerty to discover Dove placing two tables end to end and the king in command.
‘A little lower,’ the king instructed Dove. ‘No, a little higher. There, that’s just right.’
‘What the hell is this? a whorehouse or a circus?’ Finnerty demanded.
‘The man has signified, let him qualify, Oliver,’ Dove urged him to indulge Adler.
‘It better be good, all I got to say,’ Finnerty compromised.
The king had stripped to the waist and the hair of his chest gleamed white where it wasn’t grizzled; a chest as good as ever. Yet he dallied – ‘The king always says a few words first.’
‘Then say a few, king,’ Floralee pleaded.
‘Very few,’ Kitty suggested.
‘By God, this better be good,’ Finnerty resolved.
‘Ladies ’n gentlemen,’ Adler nodded toward Hallie, ‘I dedicate this amazing demonstration of human agility to the lady in the brown dress with the green earrings.’
‘Bust your damned neck instead and dedicate it to me,’ Kitty invited him.
Hallie didn’t acknowledge his gift lest he take it to mean her price tag was off. Ex-clown, ex-cop, ex-acrobat – ex-anything, all sought to please this indifferent dark woman in every way but by overpaying her. Money, they seemed to think, could never please her.
‘Do what you’re gonna do,’ Finnerty said.
The king turned his back to the tables, did a knee-bend and arched his back with surprising suppleness, bounded one short confident step forward, pitched himself ass over appetite, beaned himself beautifully on the table’s edge and crushed flat, shoulders shaking in noiseless laughter.
‘Why, he didn’t qualify after all!’ Dove was just simply incredulous.
‘Why don’t we sell the juke and buy beds for the money?’ Kitty asked, ‘every time I look around someone else is stretched out.’
Finnerty kicked the fellow to his feet, booted him through the door, made a bundle of his cap, coat and shirt and pitched it through the door after. Then threw a spittoon just for good measure. It clanged loud as it struck the stone, rang less loud as it bounced, then splashed faintly into the gutter. For a moment after, all was still. Then Adler’s foolish phizz popped right back in – ‘Good as ever!’ he defied everyone, and cap in hand and draggle-shirted, scurried off to seek some door where everyone would cry out on sight – ‘Champagne all around! The king is back!’
Some place where he could back-somersault all night to applause that would never cease.
‘Now d
on’t you go faultin’ me, Oliver,’ Mama told Finnerty. ‘I didn’t invite the man. And why every fool who hits New Orleans has to head right for my door is more than I can understand.’
The tables were back in place when the legless man rolled in. Immediately everyone but Floralee began trying to tell him at once what a show he’d just missed. For Floralee felt so elated by the whole thing all she wanted to do was sing—
‘Joy! Joy! Joy!
Since Jesus came to stay!’
‘Honey dear, run upstairs like a good girl,’ Mama asked her, for she knew how the girl loved to run any errand involving Hallie. ‘Tell Hallie her husband’s come.’
Floralee was so very long in coming down that at last Mama waddled up the steps herself. She found Floralee standing in the middle of Hallie’s room looking vaguely around as if Hallie were hiding from her.
But the closet was empty, the shoe holder hung shoeless, the dresser was swept of brush, compact and comb.
Everyone was so stunned by the news that no one even thought to ask where Big Stingaree had gone, leaving his cowboy boots under his bed.
Achilles Schmidt had had his sniff of fame – a scent that prevails against all perfumes. Born on the outskirts of Mobile in a carnie show, he had grown into a shrewd wild boy who had learned reading and writing by working the bingo tents. He could still guess a woman’s weight to the ounce by running his hands once down her clothes.
He had begun boxing professionally at seventeen and had lasted two rounds of his first bout – he’d never make a boxer. At seventeen he was already too heavily muscled for that.
He had billed himself as ACHILLES THE BIRMINGHAM STRONG BOY and country girls came to stand at the feet of a boy with an IBM brain in the body of a honeyfed bear. To bring the yokels crowding, he could scale a house and threaten the local sheriff, and give the wink to the girls all at once.
Yet it wasn’t until he’d gone on the road as a professional wrestler in a coast-to-coast tour, stooging for a claimant to the world’s championship, that he had found his own trade.
A trade that soon taught him such physical superiority over other men that he began, like the honeyfed bear, to protect others against his strength. For it wasn’t just in the biceps and chest that he was greater than others, he saw without arrogance, but in the mind and the heart as well. That he was incapable of the meannesses he observed in others the boy did not consider a virtue in himself so much as an advantage, like the breadth of his chest, and was grateful. Who had put him together so generously he did not know, and yet wished to honor the wonderful luck of it. Leaning on the ropes in a great red cape, looking across row upon row in the smoky coliseums and tents, he saw how surely the wealth of all earth’s tents, the women within them, the fame as well, would come to him. There was time, and more than time for everything to come to Schmidt.
‘When are you going to stop growing, Achilles?’ a town girl once had waited outside his tent to ask.
‘When I win the undisputed title,’ he told her jokingly, for his awareness of his powers had come to him so swiftly he had not yet had time to realize fully that there was actually nothing in the way of his winning that disputed title. Yet he could take the hand of a girl like that like any nineteen-year-old brother and say, ‘I don’t want to grow bigger. I don’t like to scare people.’
‘You’re big enough now to scare the champion,’ she told him that night, ‘but you’re not big enough to scare me,’ and turned her face to his own for the taking.
A face forgotten these twenty years. Yet the hand that had lain so light in his lay there lightly yet.
She had been right. He had been big enough for anything that night. On the road with the Strangler, he had had to hold himself back to keep his job. By the time they had reached the eastern mining towns he knew that no one in the world could beat the shrewd wild boy with the heart of a honeyfed bear.
But the Strangler had only a few years left, he himself had a lifetime. And he liked the Strangler, poor brute.
An old-time promoter, one of Dockery’s hangers-on, admired The Birmingham Strong Boy yet – ‘He could hit you in the ass so hard you’d break your leg. And still I’ve seen him suffering the agonies of the damned, letting some country athlete haul him from one side of the ring to the other while he scaled the house, though nobody who was unarmed could really hurt him. Once some brave guy pitched him into the folding chairs before he’d finished counting the balcony. Achilles picked up two sets of them chairs, stretched the brave guy cold with one set and his manager with the other and held off the house till the cops arrived. Neither man nor box office could whip him. If you ask me, he could hold off the cops today.’
Yet in the time it takes for a second-hand to move from twelve to six he had been beaten for keeps and his glowing manhood beginning so luckily, so clean, was smashed into something half man and half-platform. Santa Fe freight wheels had proved even shrewder than he.
What had been extricated, after hours of extremest pain in which he had not once permitted himself to faint, was no longer Achilles The Birmingham Strong Boy, but only Legless Schmidt. One-At-The-Hip-And-One-At-The-Knee Schmidt to whom every two-legger might be the one who had rolled him beneath the wheels.
Sure he’d been drunk but what of that? He’d been on the drunk before and gotten a bit of sleep with one leg locked in a box-car’s spine between one county fair and the next.
If it had been his own doing, no one’s fault but his own, it would be easier to accept even now. Yet, moving behind his memory there lurked forever the suspicion that he had been deliberately shoved over. At moments he could almost feel the hands at his shoulder, the knee in his back.
Two years in a dusty desert hospital where the power that once had moved dead Achilles’s thighs began to flow with a wilder pride through crippled Schmidt.
All he now recalled of the hospital was the bitter blowing of alkali dust all day against the pane. And the face of some intern’s wife who had cut a turtle-neck jersey for him from his red cape.
Where in letters once gilt now long washed to gray all that remained of his brief fame kept fading—
Young Achilles
Lost lost, all lost, swift as the desert dust that taps once and never is blown again.
Blown, blown, the fame and the gathering strength, the girls, the money, the power. Profession and pride gone in one night’s passage – and gone so uselessly.
After that he had let himself be billed briefly as The Living Half. He had sat his home-made platform in the freakish sun, looking down at farmers in town to see the freaks. And the honeyfed bear, that once had drawn in his claws, wished as he sat that he could be no more than one great claw.
The sideshow billing had been his greatest humiliation, one upon which he had drawn a shade. He never spoke of it himself and felt his secret was safe enough among the lost and the damned of Perdido Street.
Yet in his heart had never evened up for The Living Half – a thing like that.
Once while he chatted with several girls crowding behind a Perdido Street screen, a man with a metal support compensating for one short leg came hurrying down the street. He carried a briefcase under one arm and pens and pencils in his coat. Late for some business appointment, that was plain.
Schmidt flared at sight of him, and wheeling after on noiseless bearings, sent the rival cripple spinning so hard that, had he not caught himself against a wall, he would have ended flat on his face. Then swerved with one deft twist of the wheels and faced his man, head lowered in challenge.
But all his man wanted was to be allowed to go his own way. He clubfooted it, hippety-hop, off the curb and around and went free.
Schmidt wheeled in triumph back to his girls. ‘Well, why give him a chance?’ he asked. ‘What chance would he have given me?’
And the mascaraed, Maybellined eye-shadowed girls agreed with a cold vindictive glee—
‘Why give him a chance? What chance would he have give you?’
Hallie
and Dove lived behind a wrought-iron rail a long winding way from old Perdido. The rail enclosed a tiny balcony two stories above Royal Street. Across the way someone long ago had painted a white tin moon against a blue tin sky. A sky of midnight blue. A moon of Christmas snow. Long ago.
Now rust and rain had run the colors, sun had flaked the midnight snow. Nothing remained but a ruined moon in a sky that had fallen through.
Here in the hour of the firefly, while he and Hallie watched the lights of the Old Quarter flicker, the happy time came at last to Dove. The one happy time. From an unseen court or honkytonk, now far, now near, a piano invited them to join the dancers. Each night they heard the same piano and knew the dancing had begun once more.
Behind them a room, no bigger than a beer bottle turned upside down, held little more than a bed where the pupil slept with his fingers spread on his teacher’s breast; and as she slept pressed to his side.
Till morning woke them with vendors’ cries—
Here comes your skin-man!
Bring out your dishpan!
Cracklin’s at five cents a pound!
Once he wakened to see she had been smiling at him. When he asked her why the smile she told him it was because he made her sad ‘being such as you are and still not seeming to mind.’
Along a bureau stood a set of morocco-bound books, all that was left of Miss Hallie Breedlove’s schoolroom hours. Sometimes it was his turn for reading from them, sometimes Miss Hallie Breedlove’s. For in that first swift rush of their days together he had learned, by the making of wonderful o-shaped mouths, to read unaided—
Water now is turned to stone
Nurse and I can walk upon;
Still we find the flowing brooks
In the picture-story books
We may see how all things are,
Seas and cities, near and far
And the flying fairies’ looks
In the picture-story books
How am I to sing your praise
Happy chimney-corner days