by Tom Franklin
“Boil!” came a shout down the levee. “Boil! Boil!”
Ingersoll ran with the others to the geyser, thick as a man’s arm, water shooting twenty feet into the air. They grabbed sandbags and heaved them at the base of the boil, stacking them around the bubbling sand to create equilibrium. The water bounced down to head level, then knee level, then fell with a splash. The men stood watching as if it were a tunnel to hell. “A dirty boil,” said Bill. “Punched a hole through the levee.” The others nodded grimly or dragged sleeves across their faces to wipe the water that had splashed there. After a few more moments, Bill spat on the bubbling mud and turned and they all trudged back to their poles and resumed guarding.
When it was one o’clock, the train station whistle blew for a shift change and the men bandy-legged down the slick levee, converging on the makeshift mess in the train depot. This would be a good time for eavesdropping, so Ingersoll joined them. About a quarter of them were Negroes, milling about, waiting for the whites to eat first, and they looked and sounded so much like those he’d known in Chicago that he felt oddly homesick. The carbide lamp glazed the broad forehead of a one-armed man he could have sworn used to flip burgers at BBB, and another, whose long face was bisected by a wide mustache, like a barber’s comb, could have been the brother of a harmonica player who owed him a fiver. And for all Ingersoll knew, they were brothers; many Chicago Negroes started in Mississippi before booking passage on the City of New Orleans to the City of Big Shoulders. So as Ingersoll passed the sandbaggers, he kept hearing familiar expressions—not “it’s going to rain,” but “it’s fixing to,” not “I can barely lift it,” but “I can’t hardly”—someone pulling from a lunch pail exactly what he’d expect, a drumstick wrapped in a napkin transparent with grease, someone else with a guitar under the station overhang and strumming what Ingersoll could strum better, Alberta Hunter’s “I walk the floor, wring my hands, and cry.”
Ingersoll knew enough not to linger. These Negroes didn’t meet his eye, stopped playing if he came close. And why shouldn’t they? Somewhere just out of sight was a National Guardsman with a rifle whose sole job was to make sure they didn’t join a band in Chicago.
Back when Ingersoll had been in Chicago, there was less division because the Negroes had something the white folks wanted. Music. Ingersoll had wanted it, too. He started sneaking out of St. Mary’s Foundling Home for Boys at the age of eleven, hopping the cable car to Indiana Avenue on the South Side, then going round back of a blues club, crouching in the alley beside the kitchen door propped open with a brick. It smelled like piss and stale beer, and once as he sat nibbling an apple with his legs outstretched, a rat darted right over his boots. But with the blues rolling out of the door, Ingersoll didn’t care. The joint was called the Lantern, a Negro club, but adventurous whites started showing up in giggling groups, drawn by rumor of this new music. And pretty soon young Ingersoll was such a familiar face in the alley that if the bartender needed a bucket of ice or the cigarette girl ran out of Chesterfields, he’d be sent to fetch and rewarded a penny. And after maybe six months of that, he was in the kitchen sometimes, carrying crates of lettuce from the delivery truck, taking the garbage out. Then six more months and he was busing tables, the house now full of whites. Sometimes he’d be sent to tell a wife to collect the passed-out husband who’d spent her grocery money on Irish whiskey.
Ingersoll liked best the chores that kept him at the front of the house so he could hear the music of Lizzie Looey and the Lo-Downs, five Negroes playing the blues better than anyone’d ever played the blues. In exchange for free drinks, Skinny Nellie, the guitarist, taught Ingersoll blues licks between sets. When Skinny played a solo, Ingersoll became almost hypnotized, sweeping the same emeralds of a smashed bottle back and forth as he aped Skinny’s chords on the broom handle. He liked to watch Lizzie, too, stuffed into a blue sequined dress that popped in the spotlight, an ostrich feather headband that vibrated when she hit the worried note, that flattened fifth. The crowd would slap their hands until they stung. When the clapping stopped, she might smile. It was a famously slow smile. It began in the middle like a red curtain drawing back and kept going until two bright rows were displayed, lots of red gums, and then it went in reverse, also slow, the curtains closing. That was the only time Don, the manager at the Lantern, ever got on Ingersoll—sometimes after Lizzie finished a song and the audience hooted and rose to its feet, Lizzie smiled that slow smile and Ingersoll’d forget that he’d been sent to change the toilet paper in the gents’, or fetch a box of swizzle sticks from the storeroom. He’d stand there, blocking the view of paying customers.
He was learning more at the Lantern than at school, so he quit. Sister Mary Eunice heard and she found him out back of St. Mary’s hanging the nuns’ wet habits on the line, giant black ovals, as if they’d peeled away their shadows. Laundry was his favorite chore because he’d lug the old Grafonola outside and wind it up and listen to records of Ma Rainey, only fourteen when she made her debut, one year younger than he. Sister Mary Eunice stood beside him and reached into the basket and they worked together in silence for a while. When all the habits were hung, she turned and put a hand on his shoulder. “Would you pray on it, Teddy?” He loved her too well to lie and lowered his head and pushed his hand into his pocket and withdrew the money he’d made since quitting school. She looked down at his hand, her wimple rippling folds of flesh at her neck, sighed and accepted the money and walked slowly inside.
Monday through Friday he earned $1.50 a day working in the sausage department of Swift’s Packing Company. He hated the slaughterhouse reek that wrapped him like a scarf as he stood at the ‘L’ stop, stamping his feet against the cold. But after work he’d take the Stock Yards ‘L’ from Packingtown to Indiana Avenue, the club now filled to bursting with rich white customers who thronged to hear Lizzie Looey’s ragged, wrenching voice.
And then came the night when Skinny fell off the stage drunk and broke his wrist. The band was about finished with their last set so they wrapped things up but stood arguing at the door as they’d promised to play a rent party at 2 A.M.
“Ain’t nothing we can play without a guitar,” said the drummer. He took a last drag on his cigarette and then flicked it toward Ingersoll. “Ask the white boy.”
No one did exactly, but he got his coat and stepped outside and they were waiting for him by the cable car and he climbed on. They talked and passed a bottle and he listened and drank from the bottle, and then they were at an apartment building in a Negro neighborhood. “He’s with Lizzie,” the drummer told the doorman collecting dimes. “White boy can play.”
Inside the sweat-sharp apartment, furniture stacked against the wall and the rugs rolled up, a buffet of pig’s feet and biscuits in the kitchen, Negroes were dancing to the radio. The band set up in the living room and Lizzie began by giving him the notes but soon saw he didn’t need them; he could play any song he’d heard them play. He played with his eyes closed and forgot he didn’t belong. His fingers belonged. The band passed the hat at break and paid the host’s rent and split the rest, and at dawn when the milkman opened the gate of St. Mary’s, Ingersoll was right behind him, possessor of four dollars and a note asking him to meet a girl named Denise at a diner on Wabash.
There were eight nights with Skinny gone that Ingersoll played with the band at the Lantern and two more rent parties, as it was the end of the month. While he played he stood beside Lizzie, just out of the spotlight that lit up her dress and the smoke like drifts of Chicago snow. He studied her red lips bending the notes because, he told himself, she was the blues, the way she sighed, a bridge of sighing between lines, every line like something she was tearing off and throwing away, almost chewing her words, or moaning them, nothing precious, coming in late, so loose, changing her own lyrics for no other reason than she wished to, so loose, so loose. He was missing that part, the part where you sang like you had nothing better to do. He was precise, nimble, pitch-p
erfect, maybe too perfect, and sometimes on the ‘L’ home he’d open his jaw wide and it would pop because he played with clenched teeth.
On the eighth night, after the show, he bent down to pick something up, not a dime, which might be what it looked like from the audience, but one of the beads that had leaped to its death from the blue spangled hips of Lizzie Looey, and when he stood light-headed, he realized he was in love with her. He glanced at the door where her skirt was swishing through and he knew she knew.
On the ninth night, Ingersoll came determined to announce himself. Lizzie, I love you. You are thirty-two and I am sixteen, but when we’re eighty-six and seventy, it won’t matter. He couldn’t imagine ever being seventy or Lizzie ever being anything but what she was, soft brown arms with the vaccination scar high on the left shoulder, a divot he wished to stroke with his guitar-callused finger.
But when he reached the Lantern, he heard a bassoon like a man’s baritone, though there was no bassoon in Lizzie’s band. He pushed inside and the bassoonist was talking to a tall yellow Negro running a brush against the reeds of his harmonica. Ingersoll ran past them and found Don in the storeroom, counting cases of gin.
“Where’s Lizzie? Where’s the Lo-Downs?” Ingersoll asked, aware his chest was heaving.
Don took a pencil from behind his ear and wrote on one of the cases. “Got a new band now. Skinny’s wrist ain’t better, and Lizzie and the rest of them lit out for St. Louis on tour.”
“No—”
“Yeah. Thanks for helping out. You’re bar back again, kiddo. If you could grab a case of—”
But Ingersoll was through the door and leaping onto the steps of the cable car he’d ridden to that last rent party, which he knew was in Lizzie’s neighborhood. Off at the stop and running down the street past faces that turned to watch him then turned back to see who was chasing him. He expected to hear her voice coming from a saloon, but instead he glimpsed a flash of her coffee-colored legs crossed in a coffee shop window and skidded and ran back and yanked open the door. Lizzie.
She sat with a friend in a booth and didn’t seem surprised to see him. He stood over them panting and finally blurted, “You are thirty-two, and I am sixteen, but when we’re eighty-six and seventy, it won’t matter.”
It sounded all wrong. He was going to lead up to that.
Neither of the women looked up.
The friend snapped a quarter against the Formica beside her cup and peeled her legs off the vinyl and scooted down the bench. “Tell Sam and Jake ten o’clock,” she said, and then was gone.
Lizzie lifted her face, the skin beneath her eyes plum colored and tired. She looked different, older, in a tan dress and jacket, wearing a little tan hat. He waited for her to say something, but she just looked down again and tapped her fingernail against the handle of her mug.
Should he sit down? He stayed standing.
Finally she said, “You could live a hundred years and I could freeze at thirty-two and you’d never catch up to the years I done lived.”
“I’m a fast learner, you said that yourself. Remember, the Chippie Hill song?”
She didn’t answer, so Ingersoll continued. “Take me to St. Louis.”
“No.”
“Please. I want—I want to play with the band.” That seemed the most he should say now.
“It’s no offense. But you can’t play with the band. You ain’t got the right style.”
“It’s ’cause I’m white.”
“Naw. But I noticed that.”
“It’s ’cause I’m young.”
“Naw. But you’re pretty young.”
“It’s ’cause I don’t like being looked at.”
“Naw. Though that doesn’t help.”
“What is it, then? What’s wrong with me?”
She picked up a crumpled straw wrapper and began straightening it between her fingers, zzzzzt, zzzzzt, zzzzzt. Finally she said, “You ain’t got the blues.”
“Lizzie,” he said. She kept drawing the paper between her index and middle finger. “Lizzie,” he said more loudly, and now she looked up. “I’m an orphan. I got nobody and nothing that won’t fit in a guitar case. If I disappeared, hardly a soul would notice.”
“Huh,” she said, not unkindly. “And you still ain’t got the blues.” Then the curtain of that slow, slow smile opened.
“What’s it take?” Frustrated now. He caught his reflection in the mirror above the booth, his face red.
“Oh,” she said, the curtain closing, slow slow. “I guess you gotta lose somebody you love. But first, you gotta love.”
“Lizzie—”
“Go home, son. Go home now. Just . . . go on home.”
When he descended the ‘L’ stairs by St. Mary’s, he faced a door with a poster on it of Uncle Sam jabbing a finger at him, a poster he’d seen and not seen dozens of times. He crossed to the door and pulled it. It opened only a few inches before it got stuck on its doormat. With a mighty yank, Ingersoll wrenched it open and walked inside. He was too young, of course, but being an orphan meant there was no paperwork to prove it. When he walked out, he was Private T. Ingersoll of the United States Army.
And somewhere, probably in a battlefield in Flanders, lay the blue spangled bead wrapped in the handkerchief that he’d carried his first two weeks in the war, the war he’d imagined he’d return from with medals pinned to his broadened chest, a chest he’d clasp a swooning Lizzie Looey to, at which time he’d present her with the bead, holy relic of his holy war.
The bead had fallen on the battlefield. But he hadn’t fallen. Many of his friends had. Those friends had true sweethearts, some of them, loving mothers, some of them; a few even had children. But it was unloved, orphaned Ingersoll who made it through, losing nothing but the bead.
And his illusions. When he got back from the war, he didn’t even try to find Lizzie. Or anyone, really. Sister Mary Eunice had died of a stroke when he was fighting. Even St. Mary’s Foundling Home for Boys had shuttered its doors, which he learned only when his letter had been returned, a letter with a five-dollar bill asking the nuns to buy instruments for the boys. He’d moved on, partnered up with Ham, from place to place picking up new assignments and new gear, everything expendable, even themselves.
The train station whistle blew, signaling the end of break. The sandbaggers passed their plates down and the person at the end scraped what few scraps remained, and the men pushed away and muttered to each other as they stood and stretched and huddled back up the levee, leaning into the wind, one man slipping and another grabbing his elbow and righting him.
Ingersoll rode Horace up the levee behind them. At the crest, he peered out at the seething water, which seemed to have risen even since he’d last laid eyes on it. He remembered standing beside Lizzie’s booth and telling her that if he disappeared, hardly a soul would notice. And not much had changed. If I were to fall into this river and be swept away, I don’t know who would care.
Well, Ham would care. He’d have to train a new partner.
The thought of Ham training someone reminded Ingersoll of the missing agents, Little and Wilkinson, and he shook his head as if to fling any distractions out of his ears. He hadn’t recalled Lizzie Looey and that foolishness in a coon’s age. Why was he thinking of her now? He wished he understood better how the pieces of his life fit together. Would another man with these same pieces see the whole picture? In the army he’d taken the Stanford-Binet exam. His high score, and his marksmanship, had distinguished him somewhat. But having certain kinds of smarts didn’t necessarily make him smart, he’d come to figure. He seemed to have blind spots. His heart was one.
“Okay, now, Horace,” he said, and turned the horse’s nose into the wind to push forward along the levee. “Let’s catch this revenuer killer and move on. I’m about ready to get clear of Hobnob, Mississippi.”
He never heard anything
interesting that day, nothing to indicate a large distillery was functioning nearby, no whispers about two missing revenuers, nothing he could report to Ham. He slept for a few hours after dinner and rose at 11 P.M. to the knock that he’d requested, the knock followed by the footsteps of the Irish housemaid fleeing down the hall. He bathed and then rode Horace to the levee for the shift he’d volunteered for, midnight to dawn.
Ham often teased him about being a creature of habit, and it was true that whenever Ingersoll arrived in a new place, he followed a pattern. First he’d get a shave, and he’d stroll around the town. The ritual seemed to make strange places less strange, him less of a stranger.
So when his shift ended at dawn, he rode Horace down the levee to the livery, which now serviced automobiles as well. He tipped the Negro a quarter to be extra nice to the horse and then dragged himself to the barbershop and sat in the last chair along the wall to wait with the other men, the Democrat-Gazette spread over his face, resting his tired eyes while the fellows talked of the flood, now at fifty-three feet, six inches, and talked of the failed buyout, sometimes bitterly, and joked about Ingersoll, “the sleeping Yankee,” who wasn’t sleeping of course but listening. The barber was a big Dutchman named Kamps. He’d been a Flooder and all his customers were, too. One street over, the other barbers, Fisher and Wirth, were Stickers.
With his newly shaved, lime-scented cheeks tingling in the brisk wind, Ingersoll surveyed the town square, centered by a courthouse with a broken clock. A druggist on one corner, a department store on another, a bookstore and a hardware store on the third, and McMahon’s diner on the last. The people tried as people do for normalcy, old men still on the benches with canes leaning on their inner thighs, their pipes and applesmoke, and shopkeepers sweeping in front of their stores, trying not to look at the sky again. But the music store advertised a flood sale, and the bowling alley marquee read BOWLED OVER BY LEAKS GALORE. CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. And what else was wrong? No young voices. No boys shooting marbles in a chalk circle on the sidewalk, no mothers pushing prams.
