by Steve Stern
Not that you could have read much in the way of amorousness in their expressions, the same poker faces they’d worn straight from the clubs. Spitting out their plugs of Red Man, they let it be known that they were skeptical about whether the kid’s condition was naturally induced. They placed bets: Was it reefer, dreamstick, witch hazel, or Lady Snow that had rattled Michael’s cage? They put money in a kitty that would go to the one who came closest to estimating just how long the boy’s jaw would keep flapping. Some bet on which would expire first, the speaker or the speech.
Around the third day of his raving, there having been no perceptible improvement, a couple of the ladies invited their sorcerer of choice to have a look. It happened that Macedonia, a lynx-eyed octaroon, and the esteemed Dr. Washington Legba A-men arrived at approximately the same time. Briefly listening to Michael’s palaver, they made pious judgments, beginning what amounted to a competition, each attempting to outdo the other in the fancifulness of his analysis. One attributed the twin’s febrile condition to an alignment of planets nobody ever heard of, while the other named a specific demon loa and the organ it occupied. They were engaged in a full-blown contest of dueling methodologies—the one exhibiting symptoms of a divinely inspired palsy, the other chanting hermetic syllables sounding vaguely like pig Latin; the one flinging moondust, the other rattling painted bones—when Aunt Honey turned up to shoo them both away with a broom.
Still reluctant to admit that Michael’s infirmity might be serious, Aunt Honey was nevertheless fed up with the superstitious carryings-on of her girls. So in the end she called in a respectable physician. A frosty-faced little man with a genteel cough, he complained that this was not the sort of house that his idea of a house call brought to mind. He implied that the distinction would tell in his fee. Turning the dummy’s eyelids inside out, he squeezed his wrist and inquired discreetly about his bodily functions or the lack thereof. He nodded and hemmed professionally but preferred to reserve his judgment until a more thorough examination could be made. When the proprietress ventured to ask when that would be, the doctor suggested that, frankly, it might behoove her to consult a specialist.
“Speshlist in what!” boomed Aunt Honey, upon which the doctor stiffened, as if it were beneath him to have to labor a technicality, and bade her good evening.
Another doctor, this one in fact a specialist in the area of internal disorders, was brought in for a second opinion. Taking one quick baffled look at the patient, he recommended that Michael be transferred to a hospital for observation. Whether she’d lost faith in the medical profession or was balking at the expense, Aunt Honey failed to see the urgency. For one thing, the colored infirmary, built by Mr. Crump to the greater glory of his name, was reputed to be a pest-ridden hole. It was said that there were dozens of patients to each grubby ward and sometimes more than one to a bed, that they languished with undiagnosed diseases beneath pipes from which the tails of rats flicked indolently. The sick, regardless of their extremity, were generally acknowledged to be better off at home.
Anyway, since no negative prognosis had actually been pronounced, it was just as easy to assume the danger would pass. Whatever had gotten into the dummy would surely have to get out again. And that—despite the gathered momentum of his mouth and the evidence of his physical decline—was the attitude that prevailed.
When the rumors of her ward’s strange affliction had begun to attract the curious, Aunt Honey threatened to close her doors, until she realized what this would mean. So while she still reserved the right to grumble at the men who visited Michael’s bedside, she never made noises so loud as to discourage their patronage. Ultimately her practical turn of mind won the day. First she had her girls record the time their clients spent in the dummy’s aphrodisiac presence. They were instructed to add the time to the customer’s tab at the rate of a nickel a minute.
Enthused by the windfall profits, the utilitarian proprietress began to see the virtue in enhancing her ward’s notoriety. Sometimes she spoke of removing Michael to the parlor, where the air was more breathable and he could be more properly cared for. But in the end she decided against it, judging that the sight of him downstairs during business hours would disrupt the normal trade. Besides, it would be easier to regulate attendance if the twin was kept confined to the tiny room.
With whetted ambitions, Aunt Honey took to her front stoop. Posting herself spraddle-legged in a wicker lawn chair, she barked at the passers-by, “Lady an gemmun, step up see a dumbo got the gift a gab!” As her pitch only served to promote general bewilderment, she then got hold of a sandwich board, intending to paint a slogan that would describe for the potential customer exactly what awaited him inside. Unfortunately, she hadn’t the knack of inventing a neat turn of phrase, and as Lucifer was still sunk in his torpor, she began to pick the brains of hotel guests. This was when I came forward. Wanting to demonstrate my usefulness, I’d come up with an advertisement that I thought was both catchy and to the point.
“It’s Alive! It’s Alive!” I submitted. “The Love-Struck Loquacious Wonder of the Negro Underworld!” But Aunt Honey only asked me whether I was lost or what.
Nevertheless the gawkers got wind of the phenomenon, and in the days that followed they filed endlessly in and out of the fetid little room. Amid the Jubilee crowds, which were dense to the point of congealing with flood refugees, Michael became another sideshow attraction. Purely on the basis of hearsay, people forked over the price of admission, expecting I don’t know what—maybe a nickel’s worth (then a dime’s, the price increasing along with the dummy’s popularity) of some shady thrill. Once admitted, it took them a moment or two to adjust to the frenzied outpouring of language, which was sometimes garbled or inaudible, sometimes stupefyingly eldritch. Then they would wonder what kind of thing it was they’d paid their good money to see. But before they could demand a refund, some wild declaration of careless love would draw them in, and they were hooked.
Viewing the prodigy was now limited to one minute per ticket holder, though more than one ticket (or poker chip) could be purchased at a time. To institute this policy, Aunt Honey had stationed Oraldine at Michael’s bedside with a stopwatch. Still, the spectators lingered past their turn. Often the proprietress would be called upon to remove them forcibly, to make room for the next in line.
Not just the Baby Doll regulars but all kinds trooped in to bear witness—field, house, and freshwater shvartzers, cotton-patch types who swayed and bore up as if they were at a camp meeting. Upstanding citizens, who publicly decried Aunt Honey’s establishment, were told that until they’d seen Michael their education remained incomplete. Thoroughly edified, they would go away and return with their wives, women who wore hats like setting hens. As they listened, these ladies no longer remembered to feel compromised by their surroundings; they sighed over rampant bosoms and fluttered their fans with the speed of hummingbird wings. Then there were the young girls sidling close to their escorts, who in turn tried to make light of it all. They would waver between pugnacity and embarrassment while their girlfriends squirmed, looking in their disheveled garments—blouses come off the shoulder, buttons sprung—like they’d been roughhoused by unholy ghosts. There were the elderly who acknowledged “Tha’s right” in pensive surprise, as if reminded of something they’d forgotten long ago.
Occasionally some vagabond musician would stand in the doorway and strum a whole convulsive spectrum of chords. It was anyone’s guess whether he thought he was backing up the lunatic twin or egging him on.
Eventually the local churchpeople, convinced that events at the Baby Doll needed their special stewardship, sent around a delegation of elders to save the day. They brushed past Aunt Honey in her lawn chair without a by-your-leave and disdainfully ignored the file of spectators that stretched to the foot of the stairs. Marching up to the topmost floor, they demanded to see the saint—as one legend of recent vintage had it—who dwelled in the house of iniquity. They were met in the narrow passage by Oraldine and some of
the others, barricading the door.
“Get back, y’all fallen daughter a easy vir-choo!” admonished one of the elders. “Us here on a solemn crusade.” As none of this helped endear them to the ladies, they made room for their spokesman, a deacon whose hair was processed to the sleekness of sealskin. Mincing forward to clarify their position, he explained with humility, “We has come prepare to deliver up the boy to a mo sanctify enviromen.”
At this point, half in and half out of the room, I saw Lucifer begin to stir. He rose from his baseboard slump and slid slowly up the wall from the corner where his dejection had kept him in silence these several days. While everyone was well aware that Michael’s bushwa had placed his health in jeopardy, nobody but me seemed to have noticed the toll it took on his brother, though the wise guy had already proved himself impervious to any amount of wheedling from Mistah Harry. So I’d backed off but couldn’t help noticing how, banished from the sickbed that the twins ordinarily shared, Lucifer looked like he could use a rest.
With an animal groan, he stormed out of the room and broke through the cordon of ladies, on his way to assaulting the churchmen. It took all the women, plus a couple of gawkers and myself—closing my eyes against his flailing fists—to restrain him. Otherwise, I don’t know, he might have torn the deacon’s Adam’s apple from his throat and munched it with relish before the reverend gent’s expiring eyes. It was yet another side of Lucifer I thought I could do without.
At length the fracas was squelched by the appearance of Aunt Honey, who’d clunked up the stairs, broom in hand. “What all this is?” she bellowed.
There was a hush before everybody started to talk at once. Again room was made for the oily deacon to pad forward and state his case. Making multiple chins, Aunt Honey looked as if she might be about to second Lucifer’s notion of having the deacon for lunch. “Now lemme get this here straight,” she began, rising to her full alpine stature. She puffed herself up even more imposingly before the accusation that her house might be less than a haven of godliness. Reinvigorated by her show of resistance, Lucifer was again at the point of breaking free, so that Aunt Honey had to turn and wallop him with the business end of her broom.
Then she calmed down a bit herself. She allowed that she was sometimes too hasty in jumping to conclusions, though she had never been one to rule out the possibility of negotiation. Now if the churchmen could offer her some tangible guarantee of their good intentions …
The deacon put a finger to his lips, listening with an attentiveness that caused everyone else in that crowded hallway to listen as well. Michael was still at it, of course. He was describing a trip through what he billed as tunnels of love measureless to man. If you’d heard enough of this stuff, you understood that the voyage was his vision of his true love’s internal geography. Returned from one of his numerous deaths as a hookworm, the dummy was aswim in her juices; he was looped in the loops of her vitals and lights. En route he admired the architecture of her dream-secreting organs, her toilet-water gland, her lungs like a pair of Mercury’s new shoes. He called the roll of her tender innards like a conductor calling stops on the City of New Orleans.
When the deacon had gotten an earful, he swapped his humble demeanor for indignation. “The chile ain’t no saint,” he called upon his brethren to witness. “He done belong to the debil!” Which consensus was pretty much old hat by now. Prevailed upon by their spokesman to clap their hands over their ears, the church elders retreated the premises forthwith.
When the scene was dispersed, I discovered that Lucifer, whose arm I’d been holding, now had a deathly grip on my own. I had to pry loose his fingers, which left a row of red welts, before he came to himself a bit. Talking to me, he kept his head lowered, so that he could just as well have been speaking to the wavy floorboards.
“My sweet Michael, he be alia time upchuck his sorry soul,” he said in a voice as distinctive for its flatness as his brother’s was for its mad expression. “Putty soon he have been heave dry. Be choke an pass over in front the whole popeye street lookin on.”
I’d been thinking that Michael might never run out of words. The wasted ground of his fleshless body would somehow indefinitely sustain the babbling fountain of his mouth. He would remain forever the Baby Doll’s own continuous novelty act, a bigger draw than the amateur nights at the Palace. He was a fixture now, permanent and abiding, the perpetual main attraction of Beale Street. So why did Lucifer have to be such a killjoy? Why did he have to spoil a pleasant picture by speaking the simple truth: that in pining aloud for his impossible love, his brother was talking himself to death.
Of course this wasn’t my problem. You couldn’t say that Michael and I had ever been close. Who could blame me for having had no fellow feeling for a dummy who, until recently, seemed to have no feelings at all? Besides, with all of these obliging chocolate ladies around—who would surely be willing, despite his defects, to give one of their own a tumble—why did he have to go and fall for a marshmallow frail? Then there was the matter of Michael’s talkiness itself, which I was not alone in having developed a taste for. So you had to wonder was it worth it to save the kid’s life if it meant that his farcockte lovesong would come to an end.
But if I wanted to stay in the wise guy’s good graces, I would have to agree that something must be done. Suddenly Beale Street wasn’t fun and games anymore.
“Okay,” I said for the sake of keeping up the conversation, as Lucifer’s silence was even scarier than his brother’s terminal logorrhea, “what have you got in mind?”
Eleven
Soon Lucifer was back to his old tricks. He began to look a little less chapfallen, actually going so far as to change his socks and rake the lint out of his rough-dried hair. He readjusted the tilt of his cap, smoothed the crease at its bill, and put some hip-slung strut back into his walk. I even saw him pick at a plate of head cheese to keep up his strength. But his face remained sere, the skin stretched too tight over a skull too large. Startlingly haggard, he looked, oddly enough, more unlike his twin brother than ever, whose cadaverousness was somehow becoming. What’s more, the wise guy’s schemes for retrieving his brother from the brink of a Gadarene rapture lacked something of his trademark pizazz. They were measures that seemed more suited to curing the kid of hiccups than saving him from a fever that threatened to burn him alive.
Still, I went along with his shenanigans, while the ticket holders mistook us for a part of the act. Rather than discourage this, we found it more convenient to play a little to the crowd. Holding fast Michael’s jaws, for instance, I would ham it up a bit, like a man wrestling an alligator. Lucifer, meanwhile, would probe his brother’s throat with a number of devices, not the least implausible of which was a feather. This he withdrew and examined with a clinical intensity, as if he expected words to cling to it the way doodlebugs cling to spit on a weed. He filled a syringe with a vinegar and chili powder solution, and squirted it up the dummy’s nose, then pinched his nostrils till he sputtered like a backfiring engine. But this only resulted in momentarily redirecting Michael’s verbal discharge, sharpening the taint in the already noxious air.
Abandoning the idea of physical insult as a remedy, Lucifer turned to psychological terror. We rolled newspapers into dunce caps and draped ourselves in sheets with eye holes. Then we made a cross out of the broomstick that Aunt Honey had broken over the head of a defaulting customer, and set fire to it at the foot of the dummy’s bed. While this created quite a stir among the spectators, it made no particular impression on Michael at all. Nor did the noose that we hung from the light cord, though its sinister shadow alerted Lucifer to the possibilities of shadow play. So we turned the sheets into a screen, behind which we projected—with the help of gnarled fingers and a predatory-looking phonograph arm—what we hoped would appear to be monsters. The monsters turned up in Michael’s driven soliloquy, where they were vanquished one by one. Instead of shocking him out of his obsession, we seemed only to be giving him more food for thought.
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br /> We then embarked on a course of comic distraction, Lucifer having scrounged a pair of Aunt Honey’s pajamas. Helping me into one leg, he climbed into the other. Unable to coordinate our effort, however, we couldn’t even manage to stumble bilaterally, and splitting our mutual crotch, we fell apart. While the audience was nonetheless amused, our performance was entirely lost on Michael, who had never been known for his sense of humor.
But Lucifer was still sold on the idea of a theatrical solution. The problem was that the entertainments he suggested involved absurdly elaborate staging. They required effects—cloud-borne galleons, the interiors of twisters, blind leaps from casement windows—as impossible as the dummy’s own sick fancies. In fact, they were the dummy’s own sick fancies. Where Michael was taking some of his cues from our antics, Lucifer had now begun to borrow inspiration from Michael’s flights. A kind of brotherly cross-pollination was at work, the theory being that, by performing the figments of his mind before the dummy’s eyes, you could exorcise his festering brain. You could turn out its contents like pockets, and afterwards, with Michael’s head empty again, peace would be restored.
I couldn’t help wondering where the wise guy got off thinking amateur theatrics would work when his brother had already swallowed such gruesome home remedies with scarcely a burp. Still, it wasn’t for me to sound the note of discouragement, though in the end I didn’t have to. In the middle of concocting one of his unstageable charades (“Mistah Harry, y’all can play like you done catch a mighty fish, splits him open an it’s Snowpea up inside, play like a queen”) Lucifer seemed to hear himself talking. He came down with a clunk and was dismal once more.
I was confused when I returned the next evening to find him all fired up again, and with a vengeance. Intercepting me on the stairs, he was rattling on about something he’d read in the papers. Since when did the wise guy read the papers? His professed expertise in most areas notwithstanding, I was no longer so sure that Lucifer could read at all. But here he was, citing a certain item that made urgent claims on his attention, something to do with a high-society banquet.
