Waiting for Bojangles

by Olivier Bourdeaut

  “When? Why, tonight of course, my darlings! Why wait, since everything’s ready? Did you think that party was happenstance? Oh no, that was my farewell, it didn’t happen by chance!”

  Back at the apartment that evening, Dad and I rehearsed the whole mission several times, with a nervous feeling in the pit of our stomachs. Even though we were scared, we couldn’t help giggling for no reason. Dad looked totally ridiculous with a stocking on his head: his nose was squished to one side and his lips were even more contorted than usual. My face was all distorted, too; I looked like a baby gorilla. Mademoiselle Superfluous was on edge, her head swinging from me to him, trying to understand what was going on. She craned her neck trying for a better angle, but you could see it was making her nerves jangle. Before we headed out, Dad gave me a cigarette and a gin & tonic. He said that that was what gangsters did before a real kidnapping. So he smoked his pipe, and I, my cigarette, as we sat on the couch, sipping our libations. Neither one of us said a word, or even caught the other’s eye, so as not to lose our concentration.

  I was two sheets to the wind by the time I got into the car. My mouth was dry, my throat tasted like vomit and my eyes were stinging, but I felt stronger, too, and I finally understood why Dad used to drink G & Ts during his workouts. When we were close to the clinic, we parked away from the streetlights, turned off the engine, and smiled at each other before pulling the stockings over our heads. Even through the stocking, I could see Dad’s eyes glowing with a wonderful, veiled light.

  Just as we stepped into the clinic, Dad got a run in his stocking, over his nose. He tried to twist it around, but then his ear was sticking out. He kept turning it, laughing quietly and nervously, but the stocking kept running all over his face. Eventually, he just put one hand on the back of his head to hold it in place. We skipped quietly past the night watchman’s empty station, then tiptoed quickly to the corner. Before going around it, we pressed our backs to the wall. Dad bent his head around just enough to see if the coast was clear. His chest was bobbing up and down, and he was craning his neck every which way. With all his hocus-pocus, it was pretty hard to focus on the matter at hand. Our trembling shadows loomed before us, like a scary reprimand.

  Just as we got to the stairwell, I thought we would have to kiss the whole scheme farewell, when I saw the beam of a flashlight sweeping across the wall, and heard the sound of the guard’s footfall. I was paralyzed with fear, my feet glued to the floor, but Dad jerked me up by my collar and tossed me into a nook in the hall. Hidden by the darkness, we watched the watchman walk right past us without noticing a thing. By that point, my throat didn’t just taste like vomit, it was filled with it, too. I held it in so the noise wouldn’t give us away and also because I knew that if I threw up, it would all get stuck in my stocking. After the sound of the footsteps faded away, we charged back to the stairwell like lunatics, dashing up the stairs so quickly that between the G & T and the heebie-jeebies, I thought I really was flying. I had even passed Dad by the second floor.

  All we had to do when we got to the third was to storm through the door across the hall. We found Mom sitting patiently on her bloodied bed in the middle of her ransacked room. She had put a stocking over her face, too, but with her masses of hair, it made her head look like a big cauliflower covered in gossamer. “Ah, my sweet captors, my favorite kidnappers, here you are!” she said, speaking low and standing tall. But when she saw Dad’s stocking in pieces, she bombarded him with whispers: “Good Lord, George, what did you do to your stocking? You look like a leper! If anyone sees you like that, it will scuttle the whole plan!”

  “My nose betrayed me, my Cherie! Come and kiss your knight in shining armor. Show me some ardor, instead of scolding me coldly!” he replied, clasping Mom’s hand and drawing her to his side.

  As for me, I could barely see. I had the hiccups, sweat was dripping into my eyes, and the stocking was making my cheeks itch. “Our son is drunk!” Mom announced, a bit taken aback to see me staggering. Then she hugged me to her. “Look at this magnificent little hoodlum who swallowed some liquid courage to come and kidnap his mom. Isn’t that just the sweetest thing!” she said, as she commenced her nibbling.

  “He was perfect,” Dad said. “A real gentleman-thief, on the way in, at least. I think he may need some guidance on the way out, though. I do believe that the G & T that I poured so liberally has gone to the poor young man’s head.”

  “Let’s soar, freedom is just two flights from that door!” Mom murmured, grabbing my hand in one of hers, and the doorknob in the other. But when she turned it, Sven was standing right outside, making signs of the cross at breakneck speed. So Dad put a finger to his lips, and Sven imitated him, nodding excitedly. Mom deposited a kiss on Sven’s forehead, and he kept his index finger on his tooth as he watched us leave.

  We raced down those stairs as fast as we could. At the corner, we pressed our backs to the wall once again, and Dad recommenced his bobbing and craning until Mom whispered, “George, please stop your clowning around! I already need to pee as it is, and if you don’t stop that St. Vitus’s dance, I’ll laugh so hard I’ll wet my pants!” So Dad made one last grand sweep with his arm, to indicate that there was no cause for alarm. Scurrying down the hall, my parents each took one of my hands, and my feet hardly touched the ground as we helped Mom go AWOL.

  The atmosphere in the car on the way home was crazy and electric. Dad was making a racket with the horn and singing off-key, Mom clapped and laughed, and I watched it all and rubbed my temples, which were pounding mercilessly. Once we had put some distance between us and the clinic, Dad zigzagged all over the road, leaning on the horn as he whizzed around and around traffic circles like they were merry-go-rounds. I slid all over the backseat like a sack of potatoes. When we got home, Dad took champagne out of the fridge, shook it up and sprayed it all over the place. Mom said the new apartment was almost as depressing as the clinic, although it did have more charm. Then she started petting Mademoiselle’s head, and as the crane’s neck puffed with pleasure, Mom laid out the rest of her plan, gulping champagne to quench her thirst. “I’m going to stay in a hotel until things blow over. It wouldn’t look good for anyone to see someone who’s been kidnapped swanning out of her own home, as pretty as you please. While I’m gone, you’ll be cooking up lovely little lies for the police, the clinic and anybody else who asks after me,” she explained earnestly, with her glass stretched out like a chalice toward the sacred bottle.

  “When it comes to lying, you can count on us, ma’am, we find it quite satisfying. But when the investigation is over, what are we going to do then?” Dad asked, tipping the rest of the bottle into Mom’s glass.

  “What then? Adventure, my darling little men! The abduction isn’t over. But soon we’ll be back in the clover. In a few days, when they haven’t found me—at least I hope not—we’ll go hide out in our Spanish castle in the air. You’ll have to rent a car, since I can’t fly under the circumstances. We’ll take the scenic route to the border, and then we’ll drive hell-for-leather to our hideout in the hills. And I’ll get back my old life, as your doting mom and wife,” she said, struggling to stand up and clink glasses with us.

  “You really have thought of everything, you’re certainly not lazy. How could they ever have thought you were crazy?” Dad wondered, drawing her in for a hug. Catapulted toward sleep by the champagne and the emotions of the evening, I nodded off on the couch watching them do a slow dance with feeling.

  While the search for Mom and her abductors was going on, in between our trips to the police station and the clinic to get her things and show off our sad and bewildered faces, we paid her quick visits in a disgusting little hotel where most of the guests paid by the hour. The whores laughed and screamed a lot, often at the same time. Mom had rented her room under an assumed name. “ ‘Liberty Bojangles’ is pretty conspicuous for somebody on the run!” Dad observed drily, a teasing smile on his cheeks.

  “Au contraire, monsieur, that just shows you do
n’t know a thing about it! Nothing’s more discreet in a whorish hotel than an American name. Had you been hiding under a rock until you met me?” she quipped, sashaying around, one hand on her hip, and a finger from the other between her teeth.

  “Liberty, with you, I’m a new man every day!” he replied, pulling wads of bills from his pocket. He handed me a few so I could go out for a bit, and asked Mom, “How much?”

  The morning of our departure, Mom and I were chatting with the whores and their clients as we waited for Dad to arrive with the rental car. He pulled up in a huge limousine, polished to a mirror sheen, with a silver statuette of a winged goddess on the hood. He parked the car, and when he got out, he was looking good: garbed in gray from head to toe, like a proper British chauffeur. “If Miss Bojangles would care to take her seat,” my father said, in an absolutely awful British accent, as he opened the back door with an elegant bow.

  “George, you must be out of your mind! This is so conspicuous!” my mother exclaimed, slipping her celebrity sunglasses on and rearranging her fugitive scarf.

  “Au contraire, Miss Liberty, that just shows you don’t know a thing about it! Going on the run is like lying: the more outrageous the better!” he replied, with a tip of his hat and a click of his heels.

  “If you say so, George, if you say so! But I would have loved to cross the border hidden in the trunk of the car. No matter, you may be right, it will be entertaining like this, too,” she conceded, once she was seated. Then she waved in response to the admiring whistling and clapping of the whores who had gathered around the car.

  Once we were inside, Dad tossed me a child’s sailor suit, complete with a silly hat with a pompom on top. Since I refused to put it on at first, he told me that it was what rich American boys wore, that he was in disguise, too, and that if I didn’t play along, we would get caught. So I put the awful thing on, and my parents had a good laugh at my expense. Dad was grinning at me like a happy fool in the rearview mirror, and Mom pinched my pompom and crowed, “What an exciting life you lead, my boy! Yesterday you were a gangster, today you’re an able seaman! So don’t make that face, sweetie, you should be beaming! Just think of your old classmates. Wouldn’t they rather be in your place, in a chauffeured limousine? Wherever they are, I’ll bet they’re not sitting with a Hollywood movie star!”

  We took the main road south, because Dad said that with disguises like ours, we didn’t need to take the scenic routes anymore. All the cars and trucks honked as they sped by, people waved out the window, and kids massed on the backseats to stare. Three cop cars even passed us, giving us the thumbs-up as they went by. Dad really was the Getaway King. He was right—the more outrageous, the better. Mom was smoking cigarettes and drinking champagne, batting her eyes at admirers as they drove by. “What a career, my boys, what fans! You’d think I’d been doing this since I was a babe. I must be the most famous nobody in the world! George, would you be so kind as to accelerate, the people in the car in front of us didn’t have time to wave at me!”

  After seven hours of being regally on the run, we stopped at a hotel to spend the night. Dad had booked a suite with a dramatic view over the Atlantic Ocean. “Isn’t that sweet! I do hope that you remembered to get two rooms: one for my son and I, and one for yourself, my charming chauffeur,” Mom announced, thrilled to have the door held open for her, like a real star.

  “Of course, Miss Bojangles, a star like you doesn’t share a room with the help,” Dad replied, leaning into the trunk to extricate our baggage.

  In the lobby, all the guests were peeking at us, while trying to look nonchalant, and I was annoyed to note that the staff clearly hadn’t seen any rich American boys in sailor suits for a very long time. “A suite for Miss Bojangles and her son, and a room for the chauffeur,” Dad requested, having sensibly decided to drop the awful accent. When the elevator door opened, revealing a real American couple, I leapt at the chance to get back at Dad for the sailor suit. Looking down my nose at him, I scolded, “Come, come, George, you can see very well that the elevator’s full, please take our luggage up the stairs, so that it won’t be in anyone’s way.” The doors closed on Dad’s startled-looking face. The Americans were impressed by so much natural authority in such a young man, and Mom added, “You’re right, darling. The help takes such liberties nowadays. Servants are why God—with his keen sense of decorum—invented stairs. It wouldn’t do for them to be getting ideas above their station.”

  The Americans couldn’t have understood a word of our haughty nonsense, but they still nodded their agreement. We were laughing our heads off as we waited for Dad, who arrived out of breath and drenched in sweat. With an exhausted grin, he told me, “You’re going to pay for that, you little punk. For three flights with that trunk, I’m going to make you wear that monkey suit until you’re in a funk!” But I knew he wouldn’t do it. He never held a grudge.

  That night, at the fancy restaurant’s fancy hotel, I pointed out that this place was more comfortable but less entertaining than the last; things had been a lot livelier with the whores around. Dad explained that there were whores here, too, but they were quieter and more discreet, to fit in. For the rest of dinner, I stared around, trying to unmask the hidden whores, but I wasn’t able to. Unlike us, they were quite good at managing not to attract attention.

  For our family-reunion dinner, my parents ordered everything on the menu. The table was overflowing with steaming plates of lobster, oysters and scallops served flambé; our glasses were filled with chilled white wine, champagne opened with a sword, red wine and rosé. The waiters hovered around us like hummingbirds, anticipating our every desire. No one in the room had ever seen a meal like that. They even brought in some Russian musicians just to entertain our table. Mom stood on her chair to greet her friends, the stars in the sky, and to dance, swaying to the rhythm of the violins and the shots of vodka.

  Dad, on the other hand, sat straight-backed and stiff-upper-lipped, like a true British chauffeur. My stomach swelled up like the Creep’s. I didn’t even know where to poke my fork anymore, nor how to stop craning my neck this way and that. By the end of the meal, I was seeing stars and whores everywhere. I was tipsy with happiness, and our chauffeur said I was as drunk as a real sailor. For fugitives, we sure did make one heck of a spectacle of ourselves.

  Upstairs in the hallway, Mom kicked her stiletto heels so high that they touched the sky—or the ceiling, anyway—and stole my sailor hat. Then she asked me to waltz with her. Her silk scarf caressed my face, and her hands were soft and warm. I couldn’t hear anything but her breathing and Dad clapping the beat as he followed us around, dead on his feet, but with a huge grin on his face. Mom had never been so beautiful in her life, and I would have given anything in the world for that song to go on forever. Back in our suite, as I was swallowed up by the down comforter, I felt their arms around me, and knew that they were taking advantage of my tipsy tiredness to move me to the other room.

  In the morning, I woke up alone in the chauffeur’s bed, and found my parents in the suite, staring at their breakfast with crumpled faces. It was clear that at night, employer and employee had let their guard down and mixed things up, and their relationship had gone all topsy-turvy.

  After we checked out at the front desk—where Dad had a coughing fit when Mom paid the bill, leaving fabulous tips for everyone—we drove through the rain on a long straight road lined with tall pine trees that, as Dad said, were nothing to sneeze at. After the party the night before, Mom didn’t want to be a star anymore. Every car we passed made her whimper, her head in her hands, “George, please make them stop beeping, or I’ll soon be weeping; tell them I’m no star, and to please ignore our car!” But there was nothing Dad could do. If he sped up to leave the cars behind us in the dust, all it did was bring us closer to the ones in front of us.

  It was a problem with no solution that was pushing Mom to the brink of an occlusion. I tried not to focus on anything but the road ahead, as through the trees we fled, but it wa
sn’t easy. We were driving forward to get back to our old life, which we were also leaving behind . . . It was hard to picture, but it was also hard to get out of my mind.

  Once we left the pine forest, we started climbing into the mountains on roads that twisted and turned all the time. I was focusing on trying not to retch, but I didn’t manage that either. Seeing me puke made Mom nauseous, too, and between us we made a terrible mess on my sailor suit and her fancy dress.

  As we arrived at the border, the backseat of the car was in total disorder, and up front Dad was as gray as his uniform. The tinted windows were closed, in an attempt to be discreet, even though the car smelled awful, like stale fish and dirty feet. Luckily, there were neither cops, nor customs officers, nor even a gatekeeper or a street sweeper to hamper our passage. Dad said that if nobody bothered us it was thanks to some accord or other, and to the Common Market, but I didn’t see what a market, however common, had to do with anything. Even as a chauffeur, Dad could be hard to understand sometimes.

  We left our fear at the customs office, and the rainclouds clinging to the French side of the mountains. Heading down toward the sea beaches, Spain greeted us with bright sun and cool breezes. We opened the windows to get some fresh air, and the mood in the car soon went from fearful to cheerful.

  “Wanting to clear out the funk from my drunken sailor and my leading lady, I’m afraid we . . . simply stopped along the way to gather rosemary and thyme. Biding my time, I watched as they sat, sun-dappled beneath an olive tree, laughing and chatting happily. There and then I knew, I would never repent my folly. In my head, a small voice said this was wholly right, I should not get upset, such beauty could not result from poor choice or error. For such wondrous light, there could be no regret. Not ever.”