The Listener

by Robert McCammon

  Either the reference to the current heavyweight boxing champ or the mild manner in which Pearly had spoken the last part of that—and the businesslike way that said he meant it—seemed to cool Donnie’s flames. As Ginger took Donnie’s arm to both restrain him and lead him out of the terminal station under guard, the blood of anger began to drain from the boy’s face.

  Heinz, she’d called him, Pearly thought as he lit up. Heinz ketchup. Suits him. Likely she’d seen this thing happen way too many times. He blew smoke toward the ceiling. As he followed along behind them he said with a little laugh in his voice, “Hope you know what you’re doin’, Ginger baby.”

  “Shut up,” she said tersely, and they went out of the station into the blinding light.

  TWO.

  The Son of Orchid

  and Ironhead Joe

  Seven.

  Here came Ol’ Crab, just as Curtis had known he would come.

  Curtis heard the clacking of Ol’ Crab’s polished shoes upon the marble and then Ol’ Crab got beside him, nearly elbow-to-elbow, and Curtis kept pushing his cart and walking but he knew it wouldn’t be a few more seconds before—

  “Stop y’self right there, young man,” said Ol’ Crab, and that hard old voice from the grave of time that was still strong enough to stop the ticking of a pocket watch could sure enough stop the progress of Curtis Waterford Mayhew. “Now look at me,” said Ol’ Crab, and when Curtis did the wizened face that might have been formed under pressure from the blackest earth of the Dark Continent loomed huge even though Ol’ Crab was even leaner than Curtis and stood two inches shorter. “You run into that gent over there,” he said. “Hell of a commotion you done.”

  “Suh, I was jus’—”

  “You run into that gent,” Ol’ Crab interrupted, and Curtis saw the ancient eyes with their yellow whites tick slightly upward and to the left, up toward the office on the second floor where the bossman behind his green-tinted glass was surely watching the floor with his hands on his broad hips and his bald head cocked to one side as if catching every whisper in the realm below.

  “Caused distress,” Ol’ Crab went on, his voice quiet but as severe as his expression. “Don’t like no distress in my house.”

  Curtis knew he had no out but to say, “No suh.”

  “Say you’re sorry.”

  “I’m—”

  “Not to me,” said Ol’ Crab. “To my house.”

  Curtis lifted his face toward the ceiling fans. “I’m sorry,” he apologized to the great and grand Union Railroad Station.

  Ol’ Crab nodded. He put a wrinkled paw behind one ear. “Hear her? She say, ‘Watch your step so no heedless white man run into you again and make you look like a dancin’ fool’.” The eyes ticked upward once more and Curtis saw the face relax; the bossman was no longer at his window, satisfied that a stern warning had been doled out by the head Redcap to one of his charges, and life could go on.

  “Laughin’ my ass off,” said Brightboy, as he strode past lugging two suitcases for a man in a blue-striped seersucker suit.

  Ol’ Crab motioned for Curtis to walk alongside him again, and they crossed the marble tiles under the fans that cooled the passengers waiting on their trains. “How you did today?” Ol’ Crab asked.

  “Dollar and twenty cents. One fella tipped me thirty.”

  “Well, that’s a nice pickup. Don’t be spendin’ it all tonight in them juke joints.”

  “No suh.” It was Ol’ Crab—Mr. Wendell Crable—who had taught Curtis the ropes of being a good Redcap, and of softening the “sir” to “suh” so no white traveller could mistake the word for anything but agreement and respect. Always speak soft, Ol’ Crab had told him. Be quick and mind your business, and anybody throws bad words at you, let ’em roll off your back, hear?

  Yes suh, yes suh, I hear.

  “Don’t mind what happen’,” Ol’ Crab said as they walked. He looked up to the right at the big clock on the wall over the ticket desk. Next Illinois Central train wasn’t due in for another hour and forty-seven minutes, but both he and Curtis knew that without having to look at clocks or pocket watches. After two years of working here, Curtis knew the schedules by heart and since Ol’ Crab had started out first as a janitor here in March of 1911, to him was known every grain in every oak panel, every crack in the concrete platforms and every gray piece of gravel the rails ran over between the station and where the tracks intersected South Rampart. The white managers came and went, janitors and ticket sellers and Redcaps were hired and dismissed or passed away, but Ol’ Crab seemed eternal and if anyone could claim the station as his “house” it was surely Mister Crable.

  Where the cantankerous gent had collided with Curtis—a suitcase to the ribcage on the lower left side—felt like it had left a bruise that might bother him later on, but on this Saturday afternoon he thought that all was right with the world, and he was happy when Ol’ Crab asked:

  “Got plans tonight?”

  “Oh, yes suh I do!”

  “Excited, sound like.”

  Curtis was amazed. Usually Ol’ Crab showed no desire to know anything about his charges outside the station except telling them to stay out of juke joints and to go to church on Sunday morning, and here he was opening the door to hear what Curtis was excited about. It was a relief too, because all day Curtis had been wanting to tell the other Redcaps—Brightboy, Cricket, Rainy and Prentiss, the new man who had not yet earned a nickname—but it had been busy and no one had had the time or, it seemed, the interest to listen. And now that the door was open, Curtis jumped right through it.

  “Goin’ to a birthday party as soon as I get off,” he said. “Ava Gordon’s turnin’ eighteen.”

  “Oh, Curtis has got hisself a girl?”

  “Not exactly, but…I’ve been tryin’.” He smiled, which lit his face up like two dozen candles. “See, she’s awful pretty, and I think she kinda—”

  “That’s good to know,” said Ol’ Crab. He laid a firm hand upon Curtis’s shoulder, and with that touch Curtis realized the door quickly opened was just as quickly shut. “You mind these white bucks with dangerous satchels now, hear?” Then Ol’ Crab’s gaze shifted toward the station’s street entrance and Curtis saw him grimace. The eyes that had seen so much narrowed. “Oh, oh…here comes trouble. Friend of yours, I believe.”

  Curtis turned around. Who had just entered the station but Rowdy Patterson, in his tan-colored pegged trousers and his orange-striped shirt, his thin black necktie and on his feet his two-toned shoes with toes that looked so sharp they could slice the hot pavement as if it were made of soft butter. Rowdy saw he’d been spotted, and instantly he smiled broadly and took off his straw fedora that had a dyed-orange feather sticking up from the hatband. He came on with his loping gait and his bright grin and his eyes were on Curtis and Curtis thought oh no, not again because there was only one reason Rowdy would come here and it was not for a train trip.

  “Fella’s reputation walks ten paces in front of him,” said Ol’ Crab, with a distasteful twist of his mouth. “Tryin’ to shake him loose, I reckon.”

  “Howdy there, Longlegs,” Rowdy said to Curtis. And then, in a quieter voice, “’lo, Mr. Crable. Can I have a few minutes with your boy?”

  “The young man’s druthers, not mine.” Ol’ Crab stared at the two-tones. “Lordy, nigger,” he said. “What pimp you chase down to grab them blades?”

  “Everythin’ old,” said Rowdy with a touch of injured pride in the lift of his dimpled chin, “is just plain old. I’m the new breed, don’cha see?”

  “I hear breedin’ is what you do best. You start workin’ for a livin’ you won’t have so much time to get y’self and so many girlies in trouble.”

  “Takes two to tango, Mr. Crable.”

  “Get y’self shot on that dance floor one of these nights, and mark I said it.” Ol’ Crab realized he had come to the end of his usefulness here, because Rowdy Patterson’s business with Curtis was not something he wanted to overhear. “Fi
ve minutes,” he said to Rowdy, and he stuck five fingers up and wriggled them before Rowdy’s amber-colored eyes. “We’re runnin’ a train station, not no tango hall. Mind y’self, Curtis…and ’member to go to church tomorrow mornin’, you might need a li’l extra Bible verse.” He fired a final look of utter disdain at the playboy of the Treme District, and then he seemed to spin on his heel and move away not at a walk but at a stately glide suitable to the commander of the American Army.

  “Won’t stain his soul too much!” Rowdy announced with wicked glee, but Ol’ Crab was done with him and that was that. Then as Rowdy turned the full focus of his considerable presence upon Curtis, his handsome face became warped and stricken and his eyes seemed about to bleed tears. “Longlegs,” he said in a raspy whisper, “I have got myself in one hell of a hole this time.”

  “One of many,” said Curtis, with a quiet sigh. “Both hells and holes.”

  “No, I’m meanin’ it this time! Ellie has thrown me out good and proper, changed the lock on the door, everythin’ she can do to toss me away, Curtis…and I swear to God I love that girl and I cain’t do nothin’ without her!”

  “You should’ve thought of that before…who is it, anyway?”

  “Sadie Monette at the Ten Spot…but that don’t make no matter, Curtis. Ellie knows me. She knows I cat around. Hell’s bells, everybody’s cattin’!”

  “No,” said Curtis. “They’re not. You just want to believe they are for your own sake, like that gives you the sayso to do it.”

  Rowdy made a little noise that sounded somewhere between a grunt and a sniffle. He put a hand over his mouth as if to stifle any further emotional sounds, and the silver rings on his fingers glittered in the smoky light that streamed from the upper windows. “Swear to the Lord Almighty,” he said when he’d lowered the muzzle, “I want to marry Ellie and make everythin’ right. But it’s my nature, Curtis. Hell, when the women come after me, prancin’ and smilin’…what am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to be faithful to one woman. Maybe you haven’t found her yet.”

  “Oh yes I have, and it’s Ellie! That girl makes me glow and I know I make her shine too. Never found one like her and I know I never will again, but…but…I’m in some deep trouble, friend Curtis. That damn Bayard told tales on me and got me in the shithouse. Please…please, and I’m beggin’ like I never have before…please go talk to Ellie and smooth it out. Won’t you do it for your ol’ friend?”

  Old friend of about three months since Rowdy had sauntered down here from St. Louis, Curtis thought. And in those three months he had been tasked twice already to get Rowdy out of his hells and holes with Eleanor Caldwell, who lived a few houses away from Curtis in the Treme District. “She won’t listen to me this time,” Curtis said.

  “Ohhhhh, that’s where you’re mighty wrong about y’self.” Rowdy began to straighten Curtis’s necktie, though it already hung straight down the front of his crisp white shirt with help of the small metal tieclip shaped in the profile of a steam engine, the same one all the Redcaps wore. “Folks pay heed to you, Curtis. They just naturally do. Somethin’ about you…somethin’ I ain’t got, but you got plenty of. Able to turn that sour water into sweet wine. Take that old mud nobody thinks is worth nothin’ and make gold bricks out of it.”

  “That’s goin’ a little far, better back your wagon up.”

  “You know what I’m sayin’. Look what you done for me already—”

  “Twice already,” Curtis said.

  “All right, twice already. Look what you done, goin’ in there and smoothin’ things over with Ellie like it was all Chinese silk. And you know, when she’s got her dander up she is hard to handle. But you…” Rowdy smiled and shook his head with either pure or pretend admiration; he was so good at puffery that Curtis wasn’t sure which was true. “You can have her chewin’ on rocks and thinkin’ it’s rock candy. And she ain’t the only one either! I know what you do for folks in need, it’s all over the Treme.”

  “I don’t do anything.”

  “Like you didn’t do nothin’ for them Watters brothers last month, when they had that fallin’ out over the hardware store? And their mama come runnin’ to you to patch it up? That’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

  Curtis shrugged. “I just help when I can, that’s all.”

  “You got a talent in that way, boy. People come to you for help ’cause they know you got that talent, to fix up quarrels and misunderstandin’s ’fore they turn into worse. See, it’s just so natural to you that you don’t think nothin’ of it.”

  “You can drop me in the skillet now,” Curtis said.

  “Huh?”

  “I’ve been rolled in enough butter to soak a dozen crawdads, so go ahead and cook me up.”

  Rowdy laughed; the explosive sound of it was nearly as loud as a gunshot and the noise echoed back and forth between the station’s walls, which caused several of the waiting passengers to look askance at the Redcap and his friend. Curtis figured the bossman might be peering through the green-tinted glass again, and he expected Ol’ Crab to come scuttling over any second now to lecture them both about distress in his house.

  “I’ll go talk to Ellie,” he said, if only to get Rowdy out of his way. “How do you want me to plead you this time?”

  “Innocent, a victim of Jip Bayard’s lyin’ mouth.”

  “She’ll know there’s truth in it. Best admit to the worst and go from there.”

  Rowdy’s laugh had gone and his smile along with it. When he frowned, two deep lines surfaced where the bridge of his nose met his forehead; the party boy didn’t like what he’d just heard.

  “Trust me,” said Curtis, and he realized that if he had a nickel for every time he’d repeated that to calm someone who came to him for help or advice he would no longer need to be a Redcap.

  Rowdy’s frown faded. “Sure thing. ’Course I will. Always do.”

  “I’ll go see her tomorrow. Got plans for tonight.”

  “Oh, you do? Woman plans?”

  “Well…I’m goin’ to Ava Gordon’s birthday party. She invited me when I saw her on Wednesday. I’m tickled pink to go, I didn’t think she—”

  “You have yourself a good ol’ time, Longlegs,” said Rowdy, and he clapped Curtis on the shoulder. Then he was already moving toward the exit. “Don’t do nothin’ I wouldn’t do!” He stopped and gave a sly grin. “Or maybe you shouldn’t do anythin’ I would do! Thanks for listenin’!” With that, Rowdy Patterson put on his fedora with the orange feather flying high and he walked out of Union Station as if the train he needed to catch were gathering steam at the Rampart Street curb.

  “Bags waitin’ outside, boy,” said a young man who’d strode up so quickly that Curtis feared he was going to be run over beneath his two-toned oxfords. The man wore a blue suit that looked to Curtis like the coolest pond of water this side of Eden. The slinky woman who’d followed him into the station gazed around languidly, her cigarette fixed to a mother-of-pearl holder.

  “Yes suh, right away,” said the listener, and he pushed his cart toward the work.

  Eight.

  Trust me.

  Astride his silver-painted bicycle with black rubber grips on the handlebars, Curtis Mayhew pedalled steadily through the deepening twilight toward the birthday party. He had tried to let the excitement of the event fully take him over, but he could not and the fault was his own.

  Trust me. Those two words he’d spoken to Rowdy Patterson at the station that afternoon.

  How was it, he asked himself, that he could offer trust to Rowdy but none to Ellie Caldwell? After all, he’d known Miss Eleanor far longer than he’d known Rowdy, and he knew also that she was a fine and upright young woman…so why was it that he had talked himself into convincing her to give Rowdy another chance when he knew full well that…well, Rowdy might be right for some other lady, but he was not right for Miss Eleanor and no words out of anybody’s mouth was going to change that fact of life.

  So…wha
t to do?

  He pedaled east along Rampart Street, not going too fast but not dawdling either. The Saturday evening carnival of cars was building up to its usual stop-and-go parade. Because some people still drove horse-drawn carts or rode on bicycles like himself, the thoroughfare was not the easiest to negotiate, but this was his usual route and he was sticking to it until he crossed Canal Street, after which he would skirt above the Vieux Carre and take a left at the corner of North Rampart and Governor Nicholls Street into the Faubourg Treme. The city’s streetlights were coming on, the bigger buildings of midtown held lights in their multitudes of square eyes, and here and there the liquid fire of red, blue and green neon had begun to flame against the falling dusk. The air was sultry, and in the breeze that swept past Curtis he smelled the mélange of aromas that he knew so well to be the perfumed breath of New Orleans: the odor of roses and other fragrant flowers from Simonetti’s open-air florist shop near the corner of Rampart and Gravier; a little further on the sweet warm smells of the cookies, frosted cakes and sugared beignets from Mrs. Delafosse’s bakery where he often stopped on the way home to get his mama something (though today there was certainly no time); the aroma of strong coffee being roasted and served at the Central Cafe where he crossed Canal Street and the thump-thump eight times across the four streetcar tracks; then the dusty bittersweet incense of the Vieux Carre and all the spices of life that went into it, and mingled within all these the metal-and-exhaust smells of the cars and the few buses that rumbled about, and as finishing notes the more earthy aromas of the horse manure that was a natural part of transportation and a workaday chore for the cleanup crews and lastly from the river a muddy, swampy smell which in the heat of August seemed to bloat itself up into a yellow cloud and drift into the hundred-year oaks where it hung like the glistening threads of gilded spiderwebs.

  That was his city and his world, and Curtis knew and appreciated every block between the Union Station on South Rampart and his house on North Debigny Street because he had a sense of all the life and history that had built them, and how he fit into it. He considered himself an important part of N’awlins, just as the other Redcaps were; he helped people travel from here to there and back again, he kept the baggage moving and in a way the wheels of the trains rolling, and what could be a higher calling than to be of service in such a way as that?