Routes

by John Okas

  On the surface, Gloria is not one to defy authority outright. Her reclusive nature would have her avoid it altogether. But, true to character, she experiences the good in everything that’s forced upon her. By no means is everything about tent life ideal and secure. When she is isolated, spirits often come that are scary, drippy-face monster men with bulging eyes and green teeth. With the slumbering giant next to her, her mouth ripping through the night like a buzz saw in a lumber yard, Gloria feels safe. Ogres cannot come near Miss Lord. But overall, left to her own devices, the young girl would rather be left alone, taking her chances with demons and mean monsters. She prefers them to rules and regulations.

  Over the summer, the distance between mother and daughter continues to increase. With Harry Swan in the picture four nights a week, and several very rewarding weekly appointments that she still keeps, Sarah is more distracted than ever by the complications in her life, the details involved in being the mistress of several men. She scarcely has time for herself and must even let some of her reading go by the bye. When she is not actually with a man, she is preparing for one, having her hair cut and set, her nails filed, getting facials, shopping for what to wear.

  She is always on the run, trying to stay ahead of the train of thought bearing the body of Corn Dog.

  Yes, for all I know, he is de—

  Don’t think it! She tells herself, sick with loss. Certainly I desperately love him, and he has rejected me.

  Corn Dog? Who is he anyway? Her puppy love or the brave buck she gave her heart to? She can’t imagine herself the way she was and now on the surface she couldn’t appear to be more distant from him. She hides her tension by putting on the mask of the busy and the beautiful. She powders her face to look like still cream, seals her lips with gloss, shadows her dark eyes darker, pencils her brows high, chilly and aloof. Every hair in place, her clothes from the most expensive shops in town, Sarah does not look like the type to go four on the floor for a mixed breed underdog. Nor is she one to visit her daughter in her “tent.”

  Gloria, on the other side of the flap, neither expects nor wants her to. But Sarah has no such positive view of the situation. She feels guilt that she is ignoring Gloria and that guilt, on her mind ahead of natural interest in the child, makes the mother ignore her daughter more.

  She tells herself about the good in the situation, that while she is working to provide the income for safe surroundings and a comfortable life for the child, Laudette is giving Gloria the love and structure she needs.

  It’s better this way, she thinks. Miss Lord is a professional, qualified to set Glory on a path a whole lot straighter than mine. Who am I really? What am I about? The business of pleasure, the love of money? Is that all there is to me?

  Self-doubt, overwork, and fear of the worst combine to make her lazy when it comes to doing anything active to find Corn Dog. The word is out, that is enough. If he came back to town he certainly has the skills to track her down. She ceases checking in with Boskind Sellars and Morton Pastor, to find out if they have seen him.

  Often when she is posing or putting on a love act, the split pea wonders what if Corn Dog came back and she were called upon to give a practical response to the question of which side of the cut she is on. Could she choose love over money, the poetry over the pose, her family over her career? And what would he think, learning what has become of her? Would he still love her the way he did two years ago? She half-dreads finding out.

  There are times, too, when she is angry with him. Where was he when she needed him? And that reminds her of where she was while he was waiting for her. She does not like to think any further than this, and looking at Gloria makes her think of all of it, her love of money, her love of Corn Dog, her fear and her anger. The more the split pea doubts herself, the more estranged from Glory she gets. It seems everything works to keep the split pea and Glory Bee apart.

  Even Harry shows more of a clear interest in the child than Sarah. He urges Sarah to bring Gloria along on some of their outings. However, Sarah, reviewing the rambunctiousness Gloria exhibits whenever she’s around Swan, decides that the little reminder of Corn Dog is just too much for her nerves. She winces every time Gloria calls Harry “Daddy-o” a pet name for “man” she learned from hanging around the swing set at the Top Hat Club with Laudette.

  By fall the mother’s contact with the daughter is reduced to after hours reports she gets from the baby-sitter, who always has cookies and milk waiting for her when she comes home from work. Sarah finds she can still take off her mask around the baby-sitter, if not the baby, and on a late September evening the women get to talking while Sarah removes her makeup. “Sugar, Baby is one of the best of all the good girls I’ve ever taken care of. I never saw any child better at playing by herself. Why, she does nothing but mind her own beeswax. And sleeps like a log, never wakes up no matter how much huffing and puffing goes on out here. And don’t worry that you’ve been out all day. Even if you were here you wouldn’t get to see her. She spends almost all day in those tents she makes talking to herself and her friends. You’ve seen that mess of chairs and extra blankets over in our room, haven’t you? The only time the little bug willingly comes out is when I mention I’m going down to Kane’s to take care of my boys. I swear she can smell the hot seven cooking a mile away. The way she dances down that hill, hopping, skipping, jumping, makes everyone stop and smile.”

  “I used to be a good girl, too, Miss Lord, but not like Gloria. I kept to myself for my parents’ sake rather than to suit myself. And what’s more, I never had any friends until, until … I met you!”

  “Aw, shucks, Sugar.”

  “But what about these friends of Gloria’s? I never see any children around here.”

  “Considering your affairs and your delicate state of mind, having a nursery school running through this apartment would never do, would it? Well don’t you worry, Sugar, that sweet little angel of yours is very obliging and considerate, isn’t she? I mean she never butts into your business, no she doesn’t, and yes, she’s got more friends than anybody I know. She’s got a barrel of monkeys in her imagination! Spirit friends in almost every corner of creation! And, she’s a natural around the Hot Numbers. It’s as if Baby had all this jazz music in her blood, as if she lived and breathed it all before and knew the old blues by heart. And when she’s not around the boys in the band, she acts as if they were right there under the blankets with her or she was transported down to the club with them. You should’ve heard her today talking up a mean mile-long blue streak to Earl and Bones, saying, ‘go, cat, go’, singing ‘skit skat, diddley-dat’.”

  “Miss Lord,” Sarah says, “my Cornie never knew who his real parents were …”

  “I used to talk to Mister Corn Dog down at Kane’s and he talked about being raised by a native brave he called ‘Pop’.”

  “But surely you could see he was not a pure-bred buck,” Sarah says, “The man you mean, the one he called ‘Pop’ was Hot Springs, more his teacher than his real father. Where Corn Dog came from nobody really knows for certain. When I was with him, close, I got the feeling there must have been some rather hard times in his past, maybe some slaves in there someplace.”

  “Well, Sugar, I’ve heard you, too, in the tub,” Laudette says, “singing and whistling those old rags. It might be a prejudice to say that Mister Corn Dog’s folks had all the natural rhythm. You’re not so bad yourself! Even we white girls get the blues! But how did this Hot Springs come by him?”

  “He got him from a half-potted medicine man somewhere down in the Land of Enchantment.” Sarah tells Laudette what Corn Dog told her, the story of his ancestors being mostly blanks and him being raised by an interracial couple of homosexual art dealers.

  Laudette is scandalized. “You mean they were fancy men? And one of them an Indigen too! I’ll be darned, I never would have thought it of one of them! But at least they must have not rubbed off on Mister Corn Dog too much. From I what saw, when he used to come into the club he wasn
’t too shy of the ladies.”

  The idea of Corn Dog with other women hits Sarah like a punch in the stomach. Her full lips tremble, her dark eyes widen. Sometimes even great Miss Lord nods. “What I meant, Sugar, is that they all flirted with him and he was a perfect gentleman.”

  But Laudette has said enough, the damage is done: a test for Sarah’s freedom of thought. She is quick to hide the burn of jealousy behind nonchalance, “Oh, you needn’t explain, Miss Lord. I’m a freethinker, modern when it comes to these matters, as I expect my Cornie to be if he ever shows up and sees what I do.”

  But irrational devils are pitchforking around in Sarah’s guts stirring up a mess of reasons why she doesn’t mean it. Hot Springs was right, Sarah thinks, Cornie should have canned this shaman baloney, and melted into the pot head first. The way he spoke, with the right clothes and make-up he could have passed for white, should have. Yes, she thinks, he should have been here waiting for me in a little house with plenty of bookshelves, and be spending his time lining up contracts for weaving instead of talking to girls in night clubs and going off like some wild Indigen on a sea mammal grope. After all I’m not unfaithful for the fun of of it, it’s the way I keep a roof over our daughter’s head.

  Indeed those devils in her bowels are so jealous that they muddy her thoughts and make her see only Corn Dog at Kane’s, nothing of where she was at the same time, detoured with Judge Fleet in Los Pecados.

  ‘Such a Beautiful Audience’

  Laudette is Glory’s guardian angel, the mother of jazz and jazz-musicians, and a faithful attendant to Sarah when she needs one.

  Sarah considers her a friend indeed. She has never seen herself in another a woman. The closest she came was discovering the striking match her body made for the young Countess Anna’s. But she has a great personal affection for the big sitter, and identifies with her, or wants to, even though the two couldn’t look more unalike on the outside. The talks the two women have at night are the only real relaxation she has all day. Even when she sleeps she is tense, unstable, bothered by dreams of animals biting her, but she doesn’t have to be on guard in front of Laudette, or be anybody special. Certainly she is never in the least self-conscious about the way she looks. Laudette’s excellence is in a different area from her own. Sarah tells her the whole truth about where she came from and what her childhood was like. “I always felt dirty in the presence of the Lord. I hated the feeling, but it had some power over me I couldn’t shake.”

  Of course, right from the beginning, Miss Lord’s X-ray eyes have seen behind Sarah’s mask: her hopeless desire to please a stern father figure, the worries, the fears, the guilt, the squirming, the worming, the little girl behind the marble facade. But she thinks it’s a good sign and a healthy thing that the younger woman can speak openly about it, and encourages further sharing by being open about herself.

  “It must have been lonely being an only child, Sugar. I came from a big family. I was the oldest of nine. I guess that makes me a natural baby-sitter. My folks were from Chernier Parish near Louisport …”

  As a girl, Laudette too was exposed to fundamentalist rays. But not all fundamentalism reads the abc’s of Emanual X’s faith the same way. Her parents were devout Dunkers, a sect a considerable distance further than a stone’s throw away from Shibbolites. Dunkers hold as basic that all people are the children of God.

  “My family belonged to one of the few integrated churches on the Freeway.” Laudette explains. “Our congregation was lead by the Dipster ‘Jambalaya’ Jackson who preached how everyone of whatever color was clean in the sight of God and practiced bathing men and women of all races in the same tub together. As kids we had a high old time, dunking and scrubbing one another, while the Dipster begged the Heavenly Father, Son and Holy Ghost to cleanse us of sin. We’d come out of Sunday Church feeling happy and spotless. The whole world looked immaculate in our eyes.”

  “That must have been wonderful.” Sarah says.

  “Oh, it was, until one night some cuckoo clucks put a bomb in the church. It blew the lid off the place.”

  “Those white supremacists really take the cake, desecrating a house of God like that!”

  “Oh, don’t they though, as if we all weren’t Freewayfarers under the skin. Well, nobody was hurt. We were thankful for that. The roof was gone but the tub was still intact. The Dipster decided to bring it north and a good part of his congregation, including us Lords, went with him. He picked Kingsburg, a borough of the Empire City, as his Promised Land, because he read something about it being the core of the melting pot. So all along our family had as many black and brown friends as white. As a matter of fact, my godmother and namesake, Laudette Gilbert, had pitch black skin.” She says the name Gilbert “Jill Bear,” the way the folks in Chernier Parish might, and tells Sarah that the middle name on her dunking certificate is spelled to leave no doubts, “Laudette Jill Bear Lord.”

  “Sounds part Indigen, too.”

  “Yes, indeed. My mommy and daddy meant it too.”

  “Well, I told Harry all about you and he assumed from your name and everything that you were dark as the lady on the molasses bottle.”

  “He what?”

  “Thought you weren’t white! I was worried that he would be surprised by Gloria’s color when he met her, but just recently we were talking about it and he told me you took him more by surprise. He hadn’t expected that you had white skin.”

  “It’s happened before, Sugar. I worked out of a domestic help agency for a while. I can’t tell you how many times I showed up for a job interview and the people said, ‘but you’re not colored?’ People assume too much; they let what they’ve heard and seen, the ways they’ve been bent growing up, influence their thinking.”

  The righteous chapters and verses that the Dipster Jackson shouted out from the pulpit every Sunday stick in the back of Laudette’s mind forever. “The Reverend Jackson taught us never to be fooled by appearances. He said if Emanual X walked the streets of Chernier Parish, or even some places in Kingsburg today, he would no doubt still stand a good chance of winding up strange fruit, hanging from a tree, or a street light.”

  Of course Laudette doesn’t need X-ray eyes to see the explicit details of her employer’s activities, the sins that pay her wages. Sarah makes no attempt to conceal them from her but, fortunately, Laudette, brought up to be broad-minded where other peoples’ private lives are concerned, is not about to judge too harshly. She can see that Sarah figures herself damned and thinks those books and humanist essays she reads with all their elegant talk about the perfectibility of humanity do nothing to instill a sense of wholeness and wonder in her heart and peace in her mind, a feeling of belonging in the world. Still, she’d be the last one to go throwing stones. Besides, Lord knows, good baby-sitting jobs are hard to come by these depression days.

  Laudette, she tells herself, you’ve got to be in the world where you can do the most good. Now Sugaree, she may not be the best of girls, but I know a large part of it is circumstances, some bad luck in her upbringing. But for fortune I’d be as sweet looking as she. Men would be crazy over me, then who knows what I’d do, if I had the chance. The Dipster always said the reason most people don’t sin is that they never get the opportunity!

  Sarah doesn’t mind admitting her liking for jazz to Laudette, and talks to her about her father’s rage and hatred of it. As in the Prophet’s temple, music played a big role in Jackson’s church. But again, the fundamentalism was fundamentally different. “The Dipster saw nothing unsuitable about jazz,” says Laudette. “Up from Louisport he was a dyed-in-the-wool rag fan, and, in fact the music provided a basis, a bottom not only for our faith but for the Sunday service. While the members of his fold took turns going splish-splash all the live-long Sabbath day, he encouraged music and singing and clapping, spontaneous eruptions. Things often got out of hand, and he banged the Good Books and said the livelier, the better. There’s nothing to be ashamed about liking jazz. I have complete faith that Emanual
danced when the holy spirit moved him, and maybe even to the popular tunes of his day, if there were such things.”

  Sarah smiles thinly. She wishes she could believe it. She is confused by her class act. How is it that out on her own, free of all external restraint, she finds herself in the same position she grew up in: having to pretend to like music she has no taste for.

  In this, mother and daughter couldn’t be more unalike: Gloria loves jazz and shows it. Her second birthday comes and the young glow worm feels fortunate that her mother is too busy modelling to show an interest in her. It leaves the baby free to sway under the influence of her sitter. There is a little afternoon party for her at Kane’s. The band always comes in for an hour to work on new material. Gloria is the sweetheart of all the Hot Numbers. Her favorite is Earl McCoy, the Earl of Swing, the Real Thing, the legend, but he is just plain old brother Earl to Laudette, Uncle Early to Gloria. Her second favorite is Earl’s friend “Bones,” Jacques Bonet, the saxophone player.

  The shadow of Liberty Star does indeed come to light early in Glory, especially when she’s around McCoy. After the cake, during the afternoon rehearsal, he lets her sit on his lap, eye-high to the keys, in the catbird seat between his pear-shaped gut and the piano and she gets an inside look at playing in the band. Mound City Stomp he calls and the Hot Numbers go to town, like an engine pumping all around her. The rhythm causes a spreading joy. She closes her starry peepers and dives in with delight, inside and out. She’s got depth perception where sound comes in, she sees the music down to its source, the sound pouring in waves, one, two, three, four, from nothingness, the hole of creation.