“Fix that broken pump?” one might ask, keeping the implied transaction unspoken.
“Sweep up for a cup of coffee and a biscuit?”
If they were turned down, they apologized for having bothered the owner. If offered work, they did the job first and ate later, then thanked their benefactor with genuine gratitude.
Terra Incognita, though, had no back door. It sat at the end of a short pier, so the homeless men waited until the walk cleared of customers, then crossed the grey boards to the entrance and knocked. It was a feeling Annie never got used to, opening the door anyone could walk through. She always found some little chore for the men, and eventually looked forward to what she called her “regulars,” men who made a circuit around the city, doing odd jobs on particular days for certain people.
One Friday morning in mid-August, Annie heard a knock.
As she approached the door, she tried to think of something the man could do to earn a square meal. She would have him run to the corner market for a few heads of lettuce and a sack of red beans. She opened the door. The man’s head was down, his hat still on. He leaned on the door jamb with one arm.
“Yes?” Annie said politely. “Can I help you?”
“You shore can, ma’am. What I need is a big kiss and a hug.” Startled, Annie didn’t know how to respond. “It’s been a powerful long time since I had either the one or t’other.”
Annie looked over her shoulder towards the kitchen, hoping Djurgis would come to her rescue.
“Boo!” the man said, taking off his hat. Annie jumped back.
It was Nevers.
As always on his sudden appearances at the restaurant, Harold helped Annie and Djurgis through lunch, then stole her for the next two days. By four o’clock, the two were struggling beneath a fan in his bedroom, trying to make up for the past two weeks. Still shy of Nevers looking at her bare body, Annie was thankful for the darkened room, which she had nicknamed The Cave. Afterwards, they lay in each other’s arms dozing.
Annie awoke a few minutes or an hour later, she didn’t know which. She heard Harold moving around downstairs. She smiled and closed her eyes. She felt the need to smoke, something she rarely did when Nevers was gone. He thought she looked sophisticated while smoking, and she did it mainly to please him.
Annie rolled over and reached inside the nightstand drawer. She felt several thick sheets of paper and pulled the top one out. Inspecting the photograph in the dark room, she made out Nevers with two other men. She stretched and turned the lamp switch. To Harold’s left was a beaming fat man Annie immediately recognized as Huey Long. On his right was Mayor Maestri, a rich man who had won the New Orleans office after Long’s assassination. When Maestri’s contenders learned that Long’s political machine was backing him, they dropped out of the race fearing for their political and personal lives.
Considerably younger than the men his arms encircled, Harold nonetheless seemed comfortable in their presence, as if they were old friends. Annie wondered whether Harold really knew them. She thought they might have had only incidental business and Huey Long, a master publicist, had the picture taken for self-promotional reasons. Whatever the occasion, Annie found something frightfully exciting about knowing a man associated with these public figures of dubious reputation. Maestri also owned the New Orleans Pelicans baseball team and, after three years as mayor, controlled a network of gambling and prostitution that snaked through the city.
Annie drew the other print from the drawer, then heard Nevers coming up the stairs. Quickly, she replaced the photos as she had found them and eased the drawer shut.
After supper at the 500 Club, Annie and Harold ambled down Bourbon Street. Two months in the city had aroused her curiosity about its darker side. When she playfully suggested they go to a burlesque show, Nevers said, “Those joints are just places where uptown people go to be properly shocked. If you’re really interested in how the other half lives, I can take you to a spot where the real thing occurs. Burlesque strippers don’t even really strip. They only make the men hungry enough to keep coming back for more of what they’ll never get. It’s an art, I’ll give them that.”
When Harold finished, an impish grin came across Annie’s face.
“I want to be properly shocked,” she said.
Annie walked down the banquette with her hand in the crook of Harold’s arm. From both sides of the street, piano notes jangled to lure customers. Nevers pointed to a balcony. With metronomic regularity, a woman sitting on a trapeze swung suggestively in and out of a window just above a wrought-iron grille. Clad in a black corset and black garters-and-hose hemmed with red lace, she waved and smiled to the men and boys leering or jeering at her from below.
“Take it off!” a drunken man yelled. The effort momentarily upset his balance.
The woman spoke at intervals as she was visible: “Come on inside . . . if you want to see more.”
Through the crowd of legs on the sidewalk came the sound of a trolley. It was Wendel, paddling towards them on his roller-skate board. A few feet away, he leaned back and scraped to a halt.
“Miss Annie! You want me to protect you from this lecherous old man?” He pointed at Nevers with his stick.
“No, I think I’m fine,” she chuckled.
“They say,” he continued, “there’s sin lurking behind every curtain and door in these parts of our fair city, ready to ensnare the innocent.”
“I don’t think there’s any harm in just looking,” Annie responded.
Wendel squinted up at her.
“Well, now,” he said, “some say there is and some say no. Myself, I wouldn’t know. I was born bad.” He winked at Annie and shoved off down the banquette.
In a stuffy, smoke-filled room, Annie balanced herself on a tall barstool before a small round table. Its top barely accommodated the two required and exorbitantly priced highballs. Onstage, under a subdued spotlight, a man in a tuxedo said something no one could hear. He walked offstage and the lights dimmed. A drumroll was followed by a rimshot. From behind Annie, a beam of light trained on the right side of the proscenium. A red-stockinged leg split the heavy black curtains. Several men whistled. The leg tantalized them too long and they blurted impatient catcalls.
Finally, the dancer slunk to center stage in long strides, sliding her high heels along the floor. She peered teasingly at the crowd with gauchely painted eyes. She wore a short, tight skirt, a bodice, and elbow-length gloves, all red. Her fine black hair was pulled back extremely tight, giving her a severe look. Her full lips contrasted with an aquiline nose. Annie thought that somewhere beneath the makeup and circus trappings was concealed a beautiful woman.
Suddenly, the woman’s entire body snapped, and she stood on tiptoes, right hand on hip, left hand on her head, derrière thrust out at the men. Those near the stage pounded it with their fists, begging her to disrobe. Everyone was laughing and having a good time including, it appeared, the woman.
After a few more maneuvers designed to torment the men, she pranced offstage. Next came a woman in white, followed by one in green, then yellow, then blue. The entire number took about twenty minutes. When the last dancer disappeared through the thick drapery, a drumroll signaled the finale. From stage right, the women filed to the center of the platform. The men screamed uncontrollably as the dancers grabbed their upper garments as if to rip them off. Finally delivering, they all tore the lingerie down a seam of snaps to reveal their breasts. The audience gasped. Annie could not believe her eyes. All of the alluring, lithe women were men.
“No!” Annie said, turning to Nevers.
“I told you,” Harold laughed as she clutched his arm, “that this is where people go to be properly shocked.”
Feeling both amused and slightly nauseous, Annie took a large gulp from her highball as the audience derided the entertainers.
—“Queers!”
—“Go home to mommy!”
—“She-boy!”
—“Campy bastards, I catch one of y’a
ll out back, I’ll beat the living hell outa ya!”
As the impersonators exited under a hail of wadded napkins and a couple of shoes, Annie lit a cigarette with trembling hands.
The next act was unmistakably comprised of women. Their ample breasts spilled over the tight tops of beige bodysuits made of crushed velvet. Each sported a fan and the tail of an animal: a rabbit, peacock, cat, and horse. After the routine, Nevers spoke to Annie. “Want to stay? It’s just more of this kind of stuff, over and over.”
Annie was glad to breathe the fresher air. The temperature had dropped, and a breeze greeted them at each intersection as they strolled towards Canal. Passing a dark alley, Annie heard something between a scream and a shout.
“What’s that?”
“Sounds like someone calling for help,” Harold said casually as they continued walking. Annie strained to see down the alley.
“Shouldn’t you try to help them?”
“Why?” Nevers said indifferently. “Listen. Suppose I run down there. What do you think I’ll find?”
“I don’t know,” Annie said.
“I’d probably run into a knife or a gun. These things happen all the time. You get a couple of punks who need a few easy bucks and they set you up like this, prey on your good nature.” Annie looked at him and admitted to herself that he could be right. “That back there,” Nevers said, tossing his head. “You know who that is? That’s shoeshine boy—old Darnell—in ten years. In New Orleans, you either hustle or get lost in the shuffle. It’s a depression.”
* * *
Back in The Cave, after washing the smoky residue from her body, Annie lay alone in Harold’s bed, listening to him talking on the phone downstairs. It was two in the morning. She had left the bathroom light on with the door ajar, the way Nevers liked it. She glanced at the drawer of the nightstand and wondered if she had time to pull out the photos. She decided against it and fell into a light sleep punctured occasionally by Harold’s laughter.
Then she felt him nudge her gently. Speaking softly, he asked her to move over. She smelled cologne as his weight pushed onto the bed. He draped his arm over her hip and pulled her towards him. His low, husky voice penetrated her ear. “Want to make the beast with two backs?”
Annie wondered if it were a type of lovemaking she had not yet experienced.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Shakespeare.” Nevers held his hands up in the wedge of light coming from the bathroom. He put them together, palm to palm, and made a short, clapping motion. “It’s what he thought two people look like making love.” Annie watched his hands working up and down. She smiled. Nevers put his hand behind Annie’s head and whispered in her ear, “Are you my little beastie?”
The sound of his voice, the meaning of his words, the feel of his stubble on her face gave her chills. She reached around his neck with both hands.
“Yes. Are you my big lion?”
“I’m anything you want me to be,” he said. “Beastie.” Annie felt a sexual urgency rush through her hips as Nevers parted her legs with his knee and braced himself over her. He reached down and moved her chin up with his. He kissed her roughly on the neck and licked the flesh all the way to her ear. Gruffly, he demanded, “Give it to me, Beastie.”
Annie felt like she was about to cry.
“Take it, big lion.”
As he started moving inside her, she looked. They had made love many times, but each time she had to see him to believe he could be that big and fit inside her. She put her hands on his chest above her and looked between them into the piercing brown eyes of the angel.
An hour later, Annie awoke with the gentle pang that indicated it was time to relieve herself. Leaving the bathroom, she saw Nevers lying facedown on the bed. From the doorway, she discerned the unmistakable colors of a tattoo on his back. She moved out of the frame to let the light reach across the room. Annie stepped quietly so as not to awaken him. Her throat constricted as it did when she was frightened or saw something very beautiful.
It was a dragon. Of some sort. More beautiful and dangerous than any creature she had ever seen. A hybrid of sphinx and basilisk, of hippogriff and gargoyle and manticore, it was evil in design yet somehow holy in effect, a beast selected from the draconian population slurking in a guttered Chinaman’s opium-induced nightmare. Rising out of a sulfurous fog, it was covered with diamond-shaped scales of green and blue. The monster’s incandescent white eyes were embossed with black pupils; its mouth vomited red and yellow flames. At significant jointures, the skeletal structure of its batlike wings protruded daggerstyle—living icicles dripping with the gore of its latest victim. The quartz shards of its stegosaurean spine tapered into a segmented scorpion tail that serpentined down to the hills of his buttocks where it disappeared into the subterranean aperture of its cave-home. Every aspect of the illuminated dragon seemed to possess hieroglyphic meaning, as if the tattoo were a medieval manuscript indited by a slavering but skillful madman.
Mesmerized by the horror and beauty of the thing, Annie reached out to touch it.
* * *
The next morning, Nevers read his newspaper and sipped coffee while Annie moved around the kitchen fixing breakfast, at each turn sneaking inquisitive looks at him.
Finally, he dropped the paper with a rustle. “Good God,” he laughed. “What is it?” He looked at his lap. “Is my fly open, or what?”
“Nothing,” Annie said.
“Oh, no,” he said, rising and tossing his paper on the table. “You’re not getting away with looks like that in my house.” He slapped her on the backside. “I’ll throw my beastie down the steps on her cute little fanny if she doesn’t tell me.” He put his arms around her waist and peered over her shoulder. The spatula lapped grease onto a pair of eggs staring at him out of the skillet.
“You’re the beastie,” Annie said.
Harold backed away as she transferred the eggs to his plate, between a slice of ham and a puddle of grits. Smiling, he took his seat at the table and waited for elaboration. Annie situated a fork and knife on the napkin beside his plate. Arms akimbo, she glared at the eggs. She reminded Nevers of a petulant child and he laughed. In a quick movement, Annie picked up the knife and stabbed the egg yolks maliciously several times.
“Hey! Hey!” Nevers held his hands up and leaned away from the knife. He looked at his plate. The bright yellow ooze was bleeding into his grits. “You know I don’t like to mix my grits and eggs.”
“Good. Serves you right for keeping secrets.”
“Secrets? Will you tell me what the hell’s bugging you?”
“That thing,” she pointed with the knife. “That dragon on your back.”
“Oh, that. I didn’t know if you’d like it.” He grinned up at her standing over him. “I got it in a drunken stupor right after the angel.”
Nevers turned to his plate and began stemming the yolk-tide with a triangle of toast.
Annie turned to prepare her own breakfast. As she puttered about the chore, Nevers realized he would have no peace until he offered details.
“All right, sweet beastie,” he said. Annie settled into her place. “The WPA guy who did the angel, he’d been to Burma. Learned how to make dragons from a tufuga tatau.” Nevers laughed at the words. “Basically, that’s a slant-eyed tattoo master. While working on the angel, he showed me a book of samples and I liked the dragons. I was drinking against the pain of the needle and told him to fix me up a good one when he was done with the angel. The next morning, I had a complete angel and a stenciled dragon. Now, how do you think I’d look with only the outline of a dragon? Hell, I had to follow through with the thing.”
“Why’d you want it?”
“Oh, who knows why young punks do things like that? I guess I thought it would make me look tough. I haven’t even seen it in over a year. Does it still look good?”
Annie pushed her eggs around with a fork, her smile spreading.
“Makes you look tough,” she said to the eggs
.
“Ah, so you like it.”
“I never said I didn’t like it.”
“Then what was all the fuss about?”
“You didn’t tell me,” she said, looking at him challengingly. “You don’t play fair. If I had a secret, I’d tell you.”
“Then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore.”
Annie hated it when Nevers cornered her with his tricky logic. Her mouth closed, she let out a guttural squeal. She picked up her knife.
“Sometimes I could just kill you.”
* * *
That afternoon, Annie and Harold picnicked at their favorite spot in City Park, a sunny expanse of grass surrounded by shady oaks near a small lagoon. While Nevers held the branches, Annie stepped into the small gap between an azalea bush and a gardenia shrub, smelling the rich fragrance of the waxy white flowers. She always smiled as she walked into the clearing that was protected from the view across the pond by willow trees and the broad leaves of chest-high elephant ears at the water’s edge.
Nevers had brought his new camera and had already spent a roll, taking pictures of everything from the time Annie made the potato salad to the moment she popped the checkered cloth beneath the trees. Then he took some photographs of Annie in traditional movie-star poses.
Nevers had recently talked her into wearing shorts on their picnics. “If they’re good enough for Garbo and Harlow, they’re good enough for you.” Too modest to wear shorts in public, Annie compromised by putting them on beneath a skirt and dropping the skirt in their secluded spot. Today, Annie wore powder-blue shorts with cuffs and a pink, close-fitting knit top with spaghetti straps. She felt very sensual as Nevers observed her through the camera, directing her into the positions he wanted.
“Straighten your left leg and point your foot. Now, raise your other leg. Lean on your left arm.” When she misunderstood his directions and fell into an ungainly posture, Harold set the camera down and, with mock impatience, rearranged her limbs.
After half a dozen frames, Nevers said, “Pull one of those straps off your shoulder.” The camera clicked. “Lean towards me. Put your arms closer together. Cleavage.”
A Savage Wisdom Page 12
