The Spyglass Tree

by Albert Murray

  Aw right, Gile, Will Spradley said then. But I’m telling you, man. I’m talking about Dud Philpot.

  So when Giles Cunningham looked out from where he was sitting at the desk in the office he shared with Wiley Peyton at the Pit and saw the dull gray Plymouth come crunching onto the gravel driveway and saw Dudley Philpot hop out, not even pausing to slam the door, and come fuming into the dining room, he was not surprised because Will Spradley had already been there with a message from him.

  Through the door to the dining area you could see several people sitting on stools eating at the counter and there were several more at a table near the jukebox. Wiley Peyton sat at the cash register because it was that part of the late afternoon when business was always very light and someone had to relieve the regular cashier so that she could always have three hours off before the dinner rush began.

  Without really looking up from what he was doing, Giles Cunningham could see Dud Philpot go over to Wiley Peyton, and Wiley Peyton pointing him toward the office and then there he was, just standing with his hands on his hips, trying to look his white boss-man look but also trying to get his breath back without seeming to, and at first Giles Cunningham went on doing what he was doing and then he looked up as if he had just seen him. But he didn’t say anything.

  Wasn’t Will Spradley in here?

  I was under the impression that he left out of here some time ago, but I don’t know which way he went.

  Well, didn’t he tell you what I said?

  He didn’t say nothing that made any sense at all to me, and I didn’t have time to be bothered with him today anyway.

  You didn’t have time to be bothered with Will Spradley? It was me that sent Will Spradley in here. Me.

  Well, what he said didn’t make no sense.

  He was standing up then, and he picked up some papers and moved over to the filing cabinet by the window, dropped them into the wire basket on top and stood for a moment, not as if he were listening and waiting, but as if trying to decide what office routine detail had to be taken care of next.

  So what the hell you think I came all the way out here for?

  I figured you were trying to catch up with Will Spradley and I told you he ain’t out here. He was in here all right, but that was a while ago.

  I came out here to see you, Giles Cunningham, and you damn well know it, and you damn well know why, so cut out the horseshit.

  Man, I sure must have missed something somewhere along the line, because I sure in hell can’t remember ever having any dealings with you in my life. So I don’t know what you talking about.

  I’m talking about that check.

  Well, there sure ain’t nothing I can do about that because I already deposited it. I told Will Spradley that and I thought for sure that he had told you by now.

  Now listen here, Giles Cunningham, Will tells me he begged you not to cash that check in the first place. Is that right?

  It sure is. He didn’t tell you no lie about that.

  And that’s what you got to answer to me for.

  Man, you can’t be saying that Will Spradley told you something to make you believe I took more out of that check than I had coming to me. I don’t know what he did with the rest of his cash after he left me, but he sure in the hell can’t blame it on me. Hell, I didn’t even take out all I had coming.

  But he knew very well that nobody was accusing him of any such thing. He was cross-talking Dudley Philpot and they both knew it because they both also knew what very old and very grim down-home game Dudley Philpot was turning the matter of Will Spradley’s paycheck into, although Dudley Philpot would never have called it a game, because to him games were something you played for fun and what he had on his hands was the very urgent obligation to keep things in proper order.

  But to Giles Cunningham it was no less a game for being as serious and dangerous as it was. The very way that Dudley Philpot was standing there just inside the door with his hands on his hips was an unmistakable part of the game, and so was the way he himself was pretending not to notice how much more upset Dudley Philpot was becoming.

  Outside the window there was the highway of black rubbery-looking asphalt in the afternoon mist, with the cars and trucks splitting by, buzzing and rumbling as if in a passing parade in a newsreel world apart, and he remembered the trip back from Chattanooga in the rain and wondered when he was going to find time to have that Tennessee and northern Alabama red-clay hillbilly mud washed off his white sidewalls.

  Then he realized that Dudley Philpot was swearing at him and he was not surprised because that was a part of the game, too, but at first it was as if all Dudley Philpot was saying was nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger, and that didn’t surprise him either, and then what he heard was answer me nigger answer me answer me and he said, I don’t answer to no name like that.

  You could tell that Dudley Philpot didn’t really know what to do next, because then he just stood there clenching his fists and fuming and saying nigger nigger nigger, you nigger you nigger nigger nigger, you nigger, you nigger. Nigger! Then all at once it was as if he realized that he was acting and sounding like a daddy fyce puppy dog in a small-town neighborhood running along inside the fence line yap-yap-yapping at a passerby who was annoyed and alert but was also trying to keep himself from busting out laughing. So that’s when he said what he said next.

  Nigger, I’m beginning to get the notion that you think you smart or something, but meddling in my business is getting too smart. And when all Giles Cunningham did was just shrug his shoulders at that, he said, Nigger I got a good mind to kick your black ass till your nose bleeds shit right here and now.

  But he didn’t move from where he was, so Giles Cunningham didn’t have to say I know you know better than that. Even so, he couldn’t keep himself from giving him his old AEF fixed bayonets eyeball to eyeball you-got-to-bring-ass-to-kick-ass look, and that was more than enough.

  All right, you uppity black son-of-a-bitch, you’re lucky. You don’t know how lucky you are. I’m going to give you one night to get your black ass out of this county, and I don’t want to ever set eyes on you again. You got that?

  He said that screaming at the top of his voice so that everybody out in the cafe and also back in the kitchen could hear him, and then those in the cafe saw him stomping out, glaring at nothing in particular, and saw him hop back into the Plymouth and slam the door. Then they heard the motor stall and start and stall and then start and hold and saw him throw it into reverse and cut the front end around as if he were riding a saddle horse and head back toward town.

  XX

  When I came out of the library on my way to the dining hall through the late March twilight of that damp, green Thursday evening, I was thinking about my freshman and sophomore year roommate again who would have gone into his old mock penny-dreadful palm-rubbing and mustache-twirling heh-heh-hey routine as soon as he looked up and saw how many books on the commedia dell’arte I had just checked out.

  Then he would have reached for his pad of 8½ʺ x 11ʺ grid paper and sketched several examples of the makeshift all-purpose stage platforms that the old traveling troupes of actors, musicians, and jugglers used to set up on the streets and in the squares of town after town back in sixteenth-century Italy and France, and you had to make the connection with minstrels, medicine shows, and vaudeville acts, after which he would come up with some fact about the famous drawings and sketches of Jacques Callot that you had either missed or hadn’t yet come across.

  And then for the next several days you could count on him taking time out from his own current works-in-progress to play around, dashing off sketches and watercolor illustrations and maybe even a few woodcuts of masks, costumes for most of the stock characters and standard scenarios, beginning with Harlequin (wearing diamond patterns based on Picasso’s blue and rose period Harlequin), Brighella (who was as foxy as Reynaud), and including old Pantalone, II Dottore, II Capitano, Pulcinella, Scaramouche, and so on to Columbine and Pierrot (w
hich he would make sure that you knew was the French version of the Italian Pedrolino or Pierotto).

  Nor would he be able to stop here. The next step would be a desktop stage model or a puppet show for which we would have to improvise our own skits for a week or so just as an exercise for the two of us, and only the two of us, because if you as much as even mentioned it to anybody else you would be accused of trying to impress them. As if you didn’t know better than that. Anyway, the only part of it that anybody else would see would probably be two or three leftover sketches or watercolors that he would have tacked up on his side of the room where they would be mistaken for examples of class exercises in design.

  That was the way he always was about things like that, and that is the way I knew it would have been if he had still been there, and it was also why he was not somebody you tried to compete with. He was somebody to try to keep up with to be sure, but not because you didn’t want to be left behind, outstripped, but because it was as if he were there to keep you reminded of what Miss Lexine Metcalf’s windows on the world bulletin board was really all about.

  But he was no longer there on that early spring evening, because he had decided to take the Old Trooper up on his option and had transferred to an Ivy League college for his junior and senior years. That was the very first thing he told me as soon as he came back from Chicago that second September. But it was not until that following spring that he finally got around to saying what he said about the farewell caper he owed it to himself to pull off a few times before cutting out for good.

  The main thing he wanted to talk about as he sat unpacking as a sophomore was what had happened during the summer, especially the trip he had made with the Old Trooper that July. The two of them had driven from Chicago to New York, stopping long enough in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia to visit the art museums as well as the architectural and engineering landmarks he had wanted to find. In New York he had been given free time on his own to spend in the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History and had also made the rounds with the Old Trooper to see the Yankees in Yankee Stadium, the Giants at the Polo Grounds, and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, and naturally went along to watch the boxers working out in Stillman’s Gym and to Madison Square Garden which was on Eighth Avenue between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets in those days.

  What he was mainly curious to know about my summer on the campus as a working student was how much reading I had gotten in, and when I told him that along with everything else I had checked off my list I had made it all the way through both volumes of Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization, he wanted to know if I had also looked into Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, and he also asked about Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Theory of Business Enterprise, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History, and that was what led to all of the reading and talking about social contracts and political structures and procedures (including socialism and fascism) during the months that followed.

  When he saw that I had also checked out the new editions of Louis Untermeyer’s Modem American Poetry and Modem British Poetry on extended loans, he said I also had to get Axel’s Castle by Edmund Wilson and Exile’s Return by Malcolm Cowley, which I did as soon as the library opened the next day, and that was what got me going on James Joyce and Marcel Proust (but not Hemingway whom I had already discovered in Scribner’s magazine and the first issues of Esquire magazine back at Mobile County Training School), and not Faulkner who was already there along with and head and shoulders above such other Southern writers as T. S. Stribling, Erskine Caldwell, and Margaret Mitchell whose Gone With the Wind had been a best-seller for about a year.

  As for his own summer reading, he had knocked off about his usual quota of detective stories featuring Hercule Poirot, Bulldog Drummond, Ellery Queen, Sam Spade, and Nero Wolfe, and he had also read John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, and Kenneth Roberts’s Northwest Passage. But the two books he had stuck with all summer and had taken along on the trip east were Sheldon Cheney’s Primer of Modem Art and Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, and what he had read on the train coming down this time was Man’s Fate by André Malraux, so his first two checkouts from the library were going to be The Conquerors and The Royal Way.

  He didn’t mention anything at all about any kind of special farewell caper until it was wisteria time again that next spring and he was ready to get started on it, and at first I missed the point and said what I said about Floorboard McKenzie, who was the local limousine with the best connections across the line in those days, and that was when he spelled it out, saying that he wasn’t dismissing anybody for using Floorboard because that way was no less a matter of life and death in his neck of the woods.

  But what he had in mind for his own personal derring-do response to that particular down-home taboo was something else, and he said, Don’t let anybody tell you that the one in question whoever she may be is not worth risking your life for, because the woman is not what really counts. It’s the taboo. Because once they put that life and death price on the taboo that makes them all worth it, because they have to feel as violated and outraged when it is a cathouse slut as when it is Miss All-City Belle.

  So there is no way around it for us either, he said. If you’re one of us, you have to commit a deliberate violation of that particular taboo before you can really call yourself a man. No matter what else you ever do, that’s something you have to answer to yourself for, and you’re either game or you’re not, he said; and then he also said, Hey, but maybe all of this is all knee-high-to-a-duck stuff to you, and I said, Not really because I had never thought about it as being a matter of the kind of taboo and derring-do he was talking about.

  What Mama had always been saying about keeping out of trouble with girls and about not letting friendly white ones grin your neck into a noose was as much a part of my conception of the everyday facts of life in Gasoline Point as everything else I was always being warned about. But the way Trudie Tolliver said what she finally said that day when I met her coming along Dodge Mill Road from the landing where the skiffs and putt-putts tied up in Three Mill Bottom made the actual here-and-nowness of it sound like something you had to be very, very careful about, to be sure, but not at all like anything that you always had to avoid by all means. After all, doing something like that was always supposed to be a matter of privacy if not secrecy whoever the female partner was.

  So the main thing I remember about how I felt about that first time with Trudie Tolliver with her storybook blue eyes and cornsilk golden lashes, lip fuzz, and dog-fennel meadow and her piney woods voice and sweet gum twig breath and tomboy toes is how lucky I was being let in on one more secret, and with Miss Evelyn Kirkwood I remember feeling even luckier because I was still only an early-teen boy then and she was thirty something maybe going on forty.

  At first I had just thought that Trudie Tolliver was a girl who wanted to go everywhere her brother went, so she was always around whenever she could be only because Dudie Tolliver (as in Dude) was the one who used to take me duck hunting and boat fishing and trout-line setting and also swimming and bridge diving, beginning shortly after his family moved into the back of the Last Chance store his father was managing at the end of Old Buckshaw Mill Road and U.S. 90 near the new drawbridge, and he kept it up until his father got a job managing another store and moved on into Mobile.

  It was from Duane Dundee, better known as Dude and Old Dudie, Tolliver that I learned to do the American crawl that the Tarzan movies and the newsreels of the Olympics were to make so much more popular than the fancy overhand stroke and scissors kick a few years later, and he also taught me a lot of other things that I was to continue to find out more about by reading Field and Stream magazine later on. So until that afternoon, as friendly as she always was, she was only somebody you had to put up with unless her brother could convince her that it was not one of the times she could come along.


  But that afternoon in the bottom, it was as if she and I had been very close friends all along and I knew that she was going to start teasing me even before she said what she said. She said, I bet you wish you knew the secret I know, and when I said, Why, she said, Because it’s about you, and I said, How you going to know if it’s true if you don’t tell me so I can tell if it’s so, and she said, Because I saw it all for myself, and I said, That’s what you say but it doesn’t count if I don’t know what it is because anybody can just come up and say something like that. So she said, Well maybe I will if you promise not to tell Dudie, and I knew I didn’t have to, because all you had to do was look at how her eyes were mocking you and there was no doubt that she couldn’t wait to tell you anyway. But I did promise, and she said, I saw your trigger, and I said, My what? as if I didn’t know and she said, I spied on you and Dudie swimming naked down there around the bend from One Mile Bridge. And I tried to get my hand in my pocket, and she said, I see you, Scooter boy, so now you want to root me right this minute and you know it and I know it. And I couldn’t deny it because I couldn’t even take my hand back out of my pocket.

  She said, Keep on going until you get all the way around the curve then turn on around and come on back halfway up the hill and turn off to the trail to the right, and this is my signal, and she whistled one of the bird songs that old Dudie had probably already taught her before they came to Gasoline Point and he started teaching me.

  There was a different bird-song signal for every time between that summer afternoon in the L & N thickets and twilight of the last autumn night before her family moved on into the city limits of Mobile. As for the risk I was running for that many months, it was as if once it all got started all of Mamas terrifying warnings about a gang of rednecks tying you up and shucking your life seeds like two raw oysters no longer applied to you if you were always careful enough. You didn’t even have to mention anything at all about that part of it, and the closest we ever came to doing so was the time she said what she said about having something on old Dudie because she knew that he gave something from the store to a certain notorious dark brown-skin Gasoline Point party to get her to go into the bushes with him, and then she said, He ain’t got nothing on me and he not going to get nothing. Unless you tell him, she said.