An Agent of Utopia

by Andy Duncan

  Still, as Aunt Ruth said, there’s no problem invented that a root somewhere won’t cure, or help with, or at least distract from a little.

  The next afternoon in the prison yard, Daddy Mention checked with the four-on-four players that it wasn’t Monday and then paced the west chain fence and stared at the swamp. He stared through the links until they blurred and thinned and flew apart, and the sound of the game behind got farther away until it was just the basketball bouncing thump, thump, thump, into a wad of cotton, and then just Daddy Mention’s heartbeat in rhythm with the bullfrogs. On the five hundredth beat, a rippling V appeared out in the green water. It was like a current around a stick where there was neither, just the V point heading for Daddy Mention. When the point reached the edge of the reeds on the other side of the fence a moss-covered snout lifted streaming, and way down at the far end of it a slitted yellow eye gazed at Daddy Mention. The other socket was a scarred knot like a cypress knee. The gator’s head was so wide that Daddy Mention had to move his head, like watching horseshoes, to look from eyeball to eyesocket, which was left to right today. It was to this scaly hole that Daddy Mention spoke, knowing the good eye was only for appearances.

  “Hello, Uncle Monday,” said Daddy Mention, though no man chained to his ankle could have heard him.

  “Hello, Daddy Mention,” said a voice like the final suck of quicksand as the head disappears. That chained man would have heard and seen nothing but a swollen green bubble peck the surface. “I’m sorry,” the voice went on, “that I can’t rise from this water and shake your hand like a man, Daddy Mention, cause you done called me on the wrong day of o’clock. You know you ought to call on a Monday, if you want me at my best.”

  With the sliver of his mind not holding on and holding off, Daddy Mention vowed he’d sit in Cell A till Judgment before he’d call up Uncle Monday of the second day of a week. But Daddy Mention knew better any day than to flap gums with Uncle Monday, because that just gave him more time to work at you like the Sewanee working its bank. With most of his mind Daddy Mention stuck with the program, and said:

  Sunday’s dying

  And Saturday’s dead

  Friday’s crawling

  Into Thursday’s bed

  Wednesday’s drunk

  And Tuesday’s fled

  And Monday’s bound

  With a piece of—

  The vast scaly thing in the water thrashed in place as if speared, roaring and slamming up sheets of water with its railroad-tie tail (and even the guard in the corner tower thought maybe he heard a beaver slide into the shallows, then forgot it before he could turn his head), but it was too late for Uncle Monday, for Daddy Mention already had flung down a three-inch piece of thread, which stretched taut as barbed wire when it hit the ground. Uncle Monday writhed and puked and snarled horrible things, but he finally settled down, his white belly heaving in the murked-up water. He blew a long blubbery breath and said: “Name it, then.”

  “Make me sing,” said Daddy Mention.

  “You’ll sing,” said Uncle Monday, grinding his many teeth, “when I gnaw off your generations.”

  “Make me sing,” said Daddy Mention, sticking to the program. “Make me sing like a mockingbird’s mama, like a saint, like a baby, like the springs on a twenty-dollar bed.”

  “Huh,” said Uncle Monday, and the hard-packed dirt at Daddy Mention’s feet boiled like an antbed. By the time he jumped back, the dirt had stopped moving around a moss-covered, snaggle-toothed, hang-jawed human skull.

  “What devilment is that?” blurted Daddy Mention, and Uncle Monday nearly got his mind. Wrestling it back was a near thing, and Daddy Mention had to bite his own tongue bloody to do it.

  “Old bullets well up in my hide,” said Uncle Monday, pleasant and dreamy as if crosslegged on a veranda, as Daddy Mention gagged and choked and reeled, “and work their way out as the months pass, and leave a scar. This skull is one of the Earth’s old bullets. Rub it, Daddy Mention, and it will smile at you, and while it smiles at you with favor, you will sing.”

  Daddy Mention spat in the dirt, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, gulped air, and—focused on Uncle Monday all the while—leaned down and rubbed the skull. It was hot and wet and grainy and barked his fingers like an emery board. He stepped back. The skull sat in the dirt, a vacant, crusty hunk of bone with a kick-sized crack in the temple. Daddy Mention stared and stared, and then, before his disbelieving eyes, the skull . . . just kept lying there, deader than dead. It kept on doing that for a long while. And then, just as Daddy Mention was about to lose patience and give that old skull a matching dent with his foot, just as he realized Uncle Monday had made a fool out of him again from age-old habit and cruelty and contempt for all who go two-legged daily, just as he could taste the bitter burn of years climbing his throat to be swallowed again, why, at that precise moment, the old skull that had shown no previous sign of life . . . did not do one goddamn thing. Daddy Mention kicked it across the yard. It rolled nearly to the feet of two blurred prisoners pitching horseshoes in real time, one gray U drifting through the air like a milkweed.

  “Damn your evil soul,” Daddy Mention said. “You told me this skull would smile on me with favor, and make me sing.”

  “And so it will,” said Uncle Monday, subsiding like an eroded sandbar or a rotten log. “And so it will . . . on Mondays.” A smoke curl rose from the string, burnt out like a fuse, and then Uncle Monday was gone.

  When they blew the coming-in, Daddy Mention, in real time again, walked back inside with all the others. No one noticed that beneath his shirt, under his arm, Daddy Mention cradled something. No one noticed, either, because Daddy Mention already looked twice as old as Methuselah, that in the exercise yard that afternoon, from going-out to coming-in, he had aged exactly three years, one per minute of Monday’s time, one per inch of thread.

  The next Monday, an hour before lights-out, Daddy Mention wrinkled his nose, rubbed the nasty skull, hid it beneath the cot behind the bucket, and began to sing.

  He had given no thought to material. He’d just sing any of the many songs he picked up in turpentine camps and sawmills and boatyards and boxcars and prison after prison after prison. He decided to start with “Gotta Make a Hundred.” He cleared his throat and hummed, Hmmm, as preachers sometimes did to launch a song, as if tuning themselves. Then he took a deep breath and began:

  Lord, I’m running, trying to make a hundred

  Ninety-nine and a half won’t do . . .

  Except it didn’t come out. He thought the words, but his mouth and tongue and lungs and gut didn’t cooperate. What came out instead was one of those happy, bouncy, dumbass songs on Narvel’s radio all week, a song Daddy Mention didn’t know he knew. What came out of his mouth was “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake.”

  Uncle Monday was having some fun.

  Daddy Mention sat dumbfounded. It was his voice, all right, and not the gal’s on the radio, but it sounded too damn good to be him. Held a tune and everything. His mouth and equipment were a bellows being worked by other hands, something Daddy Mention sat above and apart from, the balcony looking down on the band. He was about two words ahead of his mouth in knowing the song, as if someone were dictating into his ear.

  “What the hell?”

  “Pipe down!”

  “It’s him. It’s Daddy Mention.”

  “Get out.”

  “Yeah! Look!”

  When that song finished, the next one started, then the next. Not work-camp songs. Popular songs. Hit-record songs. White songs. They poured from his gullet like he had taken syrup of Ipecac and couldn’t empty himself fast enough. They left a taste like Ipecac, too. The second song was “Rag Mop,” then “The Cry of the Wild Goose,” then “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” and Daddy Mention knew them all just in time to sing them, and knew their titles, too. In front of his cell stood the guards of the block,
gray-faced, jawstrings popped. The prisoners in their cells whooped and hollered. Daddy Mention sang “April in Portugal” and “A Guy Is a Guy” and “The Little White Cloud That Cried.” He had no control over what came up. He was like a nickel jukebox. The whole corridor was full of guards, coming from the four corners to stare like Daddy Mention was an after-hours sideshow. Daddy Mention’s face hurt from being worked in strange ways, but still the songs and the guards kept coming. He sang “Glow Worm” and “Tennessee Waltz” and “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” Some of the guards barked along, Woof! Woof! He sang “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Sweet Violets” and “How High the Moon” and “Harbor Lights.” The guards laughed, whistled, snapped their fingers, danced, cut shines. The guards got louder, the prisoners quieter. Too many guards meant trouble, and so did an obvious hoodoo job. Now the warden was on tiptoe behind the guards like Zacchaeus, come down in his flannels to see for himself that the whole goddamn Hit Parade was indeed venting from the coils and recesses of Daddy Mention—who was now taking requests, things that weren’t even English: “Vaya Con Dios” and “Eh Cumpari” and “C’Est Si Bon” and “Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart” and “Abba Dabba Honeymoon.” He had no more control over the singing than a cow the milking, but he had possession of the rest of his body, and so he started to work the crowd a little, add dance steps, hand gestures, a wiggle of the hips, some flash. He high-kicked his way through “Music Music Music,” and that was the show-stopper. As the warden led the cheers of “Encore!” Daddy Mention tensed, mouth open, for a next outburst that didn’t come. He swallowed; his throat was dry and sore. He waited.

  Nothing.

  “Show’s over,” Daddy Mention said, all energy gone.

  And he now realized, as the guards and the warden hollered for more, that for quite some time, while playing Mister Bones for the white folks and getting beyond himself, he had not been alone in his mind. That second barely-there presence now ebbed, not before Daddy Mention clearly heard, more as an inner-ear tingle than a sound, someone—something—chuckle.

  The trusties had moved three rows of cafeteria benches into the exercise yard, with folding chairs up front for the warden and the governor and the yes-men. All the prisoners were locked up tight for Daddy Mention’s semi-public debut, but the benches were full of invitees—School Board members, Rotarians, preachers, city councilmen, Junior Leaguers, Daughters of the Confederacy, Sons of Confederate Veterans, White Citizen’s Council officers, turpentine magnates, all the quality for miles, eating Woolworth’s popcorn and drinking pink punch and murmuring in expectation of helping (as the warden had put it) a wayward Negro boy rehabilitate himself through song. Several had shiny pennies to give the performer after the show, if the warden would allow it. Stapled to the benches, leftover Christmas bunting flapped red and green in the rising breeze. The atmosphere was as festive as it gets with a prison in front and a swamp behind.

  Up front, the warden, his bald head beginning to sunburn, chatted with the governor, who sat crosslegged and fidgety, wiggling his right foot, exposing a length of shiny new sock with clocks on it. He was technically only the acting governor, because the real governor lay on his deathbed in Tallahassee, watched always by rotating shifts of the acting governor’s yes-men. He had lain there for ten months. The governor had hundreds of infant constituents named for him who were not even conceived when he began to die. Month after month the minions of the acting governor sat at the governor’s bedside, keen for cessation of breathing. More than one lifted a pillow and punched it and hefted it and checked the door and was tempted, but set it down again because he was a Democrat and had standards.

  “Tell me again, Warden,” the acting governor said, “why your caged mockingbird sings only on Monday?”

  The acting governor encouraged everyone to call him simply “Governor,” as a time-saver. “Well, Governor,” the warden began, then faltered. His head began to hurt whenever he was asked this question. Daddy Mention had explained this peculiarity at great length—it was something about a family gopher, no, wait, that would be silly, a family goopher, a hex on all his kinfolk that enabled singing only one month per decade, and that on Mondays—but the warden couldn’t remember the half of it. And whenever he tried to reconstruct the conversation, which had seemed convincing at the time, he had an unsettling trace memory of Daddy Mention leaning across his desk blotter and blowing dust into his face, but that couldn’t have happened. Could it? He tried to tell some of this to the acting governor, who waved him off.

  “No, no, never mind, I’m sorry I asked. Do I care what day I’m summoned to take part in a penitentiary minstrel show? It’s not as if I have any other claims on my time. I only have a state to run, that’s all. Why, I am at the disposal, the utter beck and call of your Grandpa Mumbly, or whatever his name is. Why, he can’t even vote. Even if he wasn’t in jail.”

  The circumstances of the acting governor’s quasi-administration had left him with an unbecoming streak of self-pity.

  “Warden, do you know how many miles of coastline alone I am responsible for, de facto if not de jure? Do you? Oh, come on, guess. You know you want to guess. Total miles.”

  The warden squirmed. “. . . A thousand?”

  “A thousand, hmm? A thousand. Nice, round figure. Wholly inadequate, but even. Try four, try six, try eight thousand four hundred and twenty-six, hah? Hah, Rand McNally?”

  “Here he is!” cried the warden, vastly relieved.

  They had come for him at two, Narvel trundling back the cell door.

  “Let’s go, Daddy Mention,” Narvel said.

  “Go where?” He glanced at his cot, where the skull lay amid a jumble of sheets, covered by his pillow. “Thought the governor was coming.”

  “You don’t think the governor’s coming all the way in here, do you?” Narvel said. “He’s waiting in the yard. Come on.”

  In the yard meant in reach of the swamp, and today was Monday.

  Daddy Mention grabbed the bars. “Hold on, now. I got to think about this.”

  Narvel laughed. “What fool talk is that? Daddy Mention wants to stay inside the prison.” The others laughed as they took hold of his elbows. “Come on, I said.”

  Daddy Mention hung onto the bars still, with surprising strength for an old man. He looked at his bedclothes again, for longer this time. “No, Mister Narvel, please,” Daddy Mention said, his voice quavering. Those in neighboring cells caught this new note in his voice, and those who could, exchanged glances across the corridor. “Bring the governor in here,” Daddy Mention went on, “I’ll sing for him just as pretty. Oh, please, Mister Narvel, please don’t make me go outside.”

  “Come forth, Daddy Mention,” Narvel said, jaw set. The strong hands on Daddy Mention’s arms redoubled their efforts, and a fourth guard grabbed around his waist, pulled backward till he was off his feet, still hanging on. Narvel worked to pry loose Daddy Mention’s fingers. “Come forth, Daddy Mention, come forth,” Narvel repeated, in a voice not his own, a voice like a cottonmouth gliding into a pool.

  “Come forth, Daddy Mention, come forth,” said the other guards, sounding not like three men but one using three mouths. Narvel, eyes shining faintly yellow, whipped out his pigsticker and went for Daddy Mention’s fingers with the blade. Daddy Mention let go of the bars, and the guard at his waist stumbled backward. The skin of the guard’s hands looked pebbled-up and scaly. “Come forth, Daddy Mention, come forth.”

  Daddy Mention looked long and hard over his shoulder at the cot as they hauled him out. What did he have to do, hit these crackers on the head?

  “Hey, Narvel!” cried Creflo the bootlegger in Cell B.

  Narvel jerked, startled, and blinked the yellow out of his eyes. He shook his head as if to clear it. “What is it, Creflo?”

  “I think Daddy Mention’s got something hid in there,” Creflo said, S-sounds whistling through the gap in his top teeth.
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br />   “Is that right?” Narvel was himself again. “Check it out, Dell.”

  Daddy Mention scowled at Creflo and thought, Thank you, brother. Creflo, who lacked the gift for sending, just nodded and grinned. You’re welcome, that meant, clear to anybody, gift or no gift.

  Dell jumped back with a cry, bedclothes in hand. “Damn, Narvel, look at this! Daddy Mention’s a body snatcher!”

  There sat the skull, the sheet around it stained brown like tobacco juice.

  Narvel snatched Daddy Mention close by the collar. “What the hell you up to, boy? Trying to lure the governor down here, work some hoodoo on him?”

  “No, sir,” Daddy Mention said. He cringed and teared up and trembled, proud and disgusted at pulling the mushmouth so well when he had to. “I don’t know where that skeery thing come from. It’s hainted, I swears it is. Oh, please, sir, leave it be. I don’t want nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh, no? Dell, bring Daddy Mention’s play-pretty with us. We’ll have a talk with the warden later about your witchy ways.”