Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Toutant Kingstree either lived at the city dump or had created one of his own. It was the latter, as Raleigh quickly learned when, as soon as he parked, a tall long-muscled black man leaned a rifle out a milk truck window to say that if Raleigh were the Board of Adjustment, he’d “better put it in reverse and scat.” After Raleigh earnestly denied the charge, Mr. Kingstree came out of the truck to explain his tone. His sleeveless T-shirt had blood down the front.

  “My neighbors pick on me.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Hayes, somewhat rhetorically, as he glanced nervously around the jammed lot at the four wrecked cars, the smashed milk truck, the old train caboose (from within which squeals and thuds could be heard), the tireless schoolbus, and the stack of gray warped planks as high as a house (if there were a house, which he couldn’t tell). Just above their heads, electric wires crisscrossed like a cat’s cradle to join all the vehicles. On the ground, chickens ran everywhere as if they’d just heard some disastrous news.

  “My neighbors always siccing the Board on me, saying my place is an eyesore.” The tall man asked Raleigh with a look to share his bafflement at this absurdity. “Saying I got commercial intent in a residential zone! How many times I have to tell them? Everything here is for my own personal use. I’m not selling this stuff. I’m not selling it.”

  Raleigh didn’t think he would be.

  “They think I’m selling these pigs and chickens. I’m not. I’m eating them.”

  Well, that explained all the red carcasses Raleigh could see hanging from hooks in the milk truck, as well as the blood all over Mr. Kingstree’s undershirt and arms. The explanation was reassuring.

  “People got to eat, don’t they? Don’t they?”

  “Of course.”

  For such a lean man, Mr. Kingstree must have had an impressive appetite. There looked to be about two tons of dead pork in the milk truck, and there sounded as though there were a few more tons still alive in the caboose.

  “Just plain picking on me. Just plain.”

  “Excuse me, are you Toutant Kingstree?”

  “Depends.”

  “You play the saxophone?”

  “I don’t say no.”

  “I’m looking for Jubal Rogers. I think you used to play with him, at the Bayou Lounge? This would be a while back, but I’ve come a long way, and I wonder if—”

  “You with RCA?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Atlantic!…Folkways?”

  “Well, no, I’m—”

  “Jubal was good, but I was really the one that had it, you know. It’s all in the arrangements. I was the one.” Toutant Kingstree wiped down his arms with a towel. A long-limbed, sinewy man, with balding gray hair, he had long elegant hands and very large lips that he kept in continual motion, as if he were exercising them for his saxophone. He shook hands, then asked, “Like a drink? I make it myself.” He pointed at the schoolbus. Pipes stuck out of its roof. “Just for personal use.”

  “Thank you, but not really. I’m sorry, Mr. Kingstree, but I’m not with a record company. Jubal Rogers was a friend of my father’s. This isn’t business. I’m just looking for him for my father.”

  The saxophonist slowly spluttered his lower lip. “Not in the business?”

  “No, sir, I’m sorry.”

  “Hmmmm.” He sat down on a giant truck tire, licked his fingers, and rubbed a spot of blood off his long narrow white vinyl shoe. “I don’t say Jubal wasn’t real good. We didn’t see eye to eye, him and me, but I don’t criticize him. He was good, far as the clarinet goes. I always told him, we ought to have gone to New Orleans. Chicago. Something.”

  “Is Mr. Rogers still alive?”

  “I don’t know.” He rubbed at the shoes with the towel. “He was yesterday.”

  “Here?! In Charleston?”

  “Billie and him work most afternoons doing the circle. Nights, he plays here and there. Nothing much.”

  “Pardon? The ‘circle’?”

  “Tourists, you know, carriage rides. She and him do the circle round Old Town.”

  Raleigh thanked the man, then turned back. “Is Billie his wife?”

  Kingstree laughed, showing a gold tooth. “Wife? She’s his mule! I don’t believe Jubal ever had a wife. Of his own.”

  They walked together through the scurrying chickens over to the Cadillac. The jazz man flicked at his lower lip. “I saw this car, your clothes, I was sure you was somebody big in the record business. It happens, you know. Right smack out of the blue. Happened to two or three different boys I knew. But they went to New Orleans. You play?”

  “Oh, no.” Raleigh shook his head. “Well, I used to study trumpet, but just in school. No, no.”

  Kingstree stuck his head through the window to look into the Cadillac. “I’ve been studying tenor sax more than fifty years now.”

  “You must be very good.”

  “I am.”

  The first time Hayes dropped by the Battery Carriage Co., he was told that Jubal Rogers (and the company’s mule) were out on a ride. The second time he came, he was pointed toward a black-fringed red leather buggy in whose traces stood a white mule with a gardenia looped around the base of one tall ear. The animal’s hindquarters were covered with the “horse diapers” that all the carriage companies were obliged by city law to provide in order to keep the beautiful cobbled streets of Charleston clean. There was no driver, so Raleigh climbed in back to wait. Finally he saw a man in a white dress shirt and black trousers unhurriedly approach, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette in his mouth. He stopped, looked hard at Raleigh as if he were appraising his clothes, then walked over to the buggy. He was not a large man, but perfectly proportioned, and a color between chestnut and cinnamon. His hair, cut close, almost shaved, was a silvered black, and he held his head with the chin slightly raised. Raleigh’s first thought was that in his youth Jubal Rogers must have been amazingly, even alarmingly good-looking. (What had Kaiser Bill been rambling on about? The women thought he was Christmas candy?) Even now he had the most handsome face and the most extraordinary eyes Raleigh had ever seen. The eyes were shaped like almonds, and deep-set, and between the pupil and the dark rim was a circle of gold. Raleigh bizarrely found himself thinking that the man looked like something out of the Song of Songs. As soon as Rogers spoke, Raleigh’s second thought was that this was the haughtiest, most arrogant, and most obnoxious man he’d ever met. He revealed so contemptuously hostile a disposition that the Thermopylean was taken aback; how in the world could someone in the tourist business afford to take this attitude?

  “Excuse me. Jubal Rogers?”

  “Where’s the rest of your party?” His acerbic voice had none of the languorously long vowels of the Charlestonians, whose As drawled endlessly out of their throats and who made the word house sound like the long slow whoosh of a wave. Rogers had a deep knife of a voice, and his questions were accusations. “How many in it?”

  Raleigh said, “I’m not really interested in a tour. If you’re Jubal Rogers, I have a message for you.”

  “I’m not interested in your message.” Rogers leaned against the mule’s flank and gazed straight ahead, past Raleigh’s ear, as if there were no point in bothering to turn his head the extra inch it would have required to see him.

  “Are you Jubal Rogers?”

  The perfectly shaped head nodded once. “You want this ride? Twenty-five dollars.”

  Raleigh had already decided that he didn’t like Jubal Rogers, but he hadn’t decided yet what to do about it.

  “All right, fine,” he snapped, and leaned back into the dry leather seat. “But all I really wanted to tell you was my father would like to see you.”

  Rogers pushed the brake forward, and flicked the reins; the carriage lurched into motion. He didn’t turn around to say, “Am I supposed to guess who he is? I don’t like guessing games.”

  Raleigh’s voice echoed the sarcasm. “My father’s name is Earley Hayes. Does that sound familiar?”

  Rogers not o
nly still didn’t turn around, he didn’t even answer. Instead, he pointed with his stick whip at a beautiful brick house they were now rattling past. “Nathaniel Russell House. Eighteen-onine. Adams architecture. Rare example of a free-flying staircase. Rich New England slave trader.”

  Hayes, reddening, said, “Look. I’ve gone to a considerable amount of trouble as well as expense in order to find you. And make you a frankly advantageous offer. Are you the Jubal Rogers from Thermopylae, North Carolina, or not?”

  With Raleigh fuming in the back, the carriage jostled for several more blocks over the cobbled streets before Rogers’s head swung slowly around on his long handsome neck. The gold-flecked eyes were as cold as the metal they resembled. They were so cold that Raleigh’s blush turned icy white while the two men stared at each other. Then Rogers slapped the reins to lead his mule Billie past a chartered bus of tourists gawking at Cabbage Row. He pointed his whip at the alley and said, “So-called Catfish Row. Setting of the novel Porgy by DuBose Heyward. Turned to music by George Gershwin.” He then directed the whip at an eighteenth-century building next door. “Heyward-Washington House. Home of Thomas Heyward, signer of the Declaration of Independence. Original decor and furnishings built by slave craftsmen belonging to the estate. Survived the hurricane of eighteen eighty-six.”

  Despite Roger’s inflectionless voice, every word he uttered sounded to Raleigh as if the man held him personally responsible for the American enslavement of Negroes. And after a few more silent blocks, Hayes said, “Look here. Just do me the courtesy of a simple answer and I’ll get out.”

  Rogers pulled Billie to a halt, lit a cigarette, and turned toward his passenger. “All right. How’d you find me? What does Earley want?” Having put these terse questions, the driver rested one beautiful hand on the dry leather seat back so that his smoke curled into Raleigh’s eyes.

  “Flonnie Rogers told me you worked in Charleston at the Bayou Lounge. A Mr. Kingstree told me where to find you.” He swatted at smoke. “I’m Raleigh Hayes, and frankly I don’t know what your problem is.”

  “What does Earley want?”

  “He wants you to meet him in New Orleans on March thirty-first.”

  Rogers’s laugh was not a warm sound. “Why?”

  “I have no idea.” Raleigh moved away from the cigarette. “I gather he has some news for you. Mr. Rogers, all I’m doing, trying to do, is convey a message. My father is not at all well and he’s behaving a little erratically. Which, if you know him, is probably no surprise. I am forced myself to go to New Orleans in order to get him back into a hospital, and he’d like me to bring you.” God, thought Hayes, what a hideous thought, to have to sit in a car with this hateful and contemptuous man. In comparison the company of gluttonizing Sheffield, of hypochondriacal Berg, of even Gates, would be a relief.

  Rogers’s smile was acidic. “Tell him, no,” he said. “Tell him if he needs to see me, he can hire my carriage for twenty-five dollars.…To your right is the Old Slave Mart Museum, featuring arts and crafts and slave-trade artifacts. Closes at four-thirty. Tell your father, I said I’m not interested in going to New Orleans.”

  Now, perhaps Hayes should have been more sympathetic to Jubal Rogers’s response to this invitation to travel to New Orleans, since it precisely echoed his own original reaction. Instead, however, he was so annoyed by the man’s arrogant nastiness that he climbed out of the buggy, took off his glasses, and glared defiantly at the strange supercilious eyes. “I’m also instructed,” he said, “to tell you that if you deign to appear at the appointed time, he wants you to have some money.” This remark troubled Raleigh a little. First, he would have preferred not to mention the money at all; surely his father could have no idea of what Jubal Rogers clearly thought of him, and would not care to throw his kindness away on such a man. Second, Raleigh (who was unlikely to forget until his dying day one word of that tape recording which had played havoc with his own life) knew perfectly well that Earley Hayes had said, “Give Jubal five thousand dollars and bring him with you to New Orleans.” Not, “Give him five thousand dollars if he comes with you.” But Raleigh, despite his respect for the letter of the law, and his suspicion that the bequest had been unconditional, simply could not bring himself to hand over all that money (his own money) to a man who, by his withering refusal, was not only going to stop him from succeeding at the final task left him on that tape, stop him here (after his, yes, Herculean, efforts along the way), but was possibly going to keep him from earning the inheritance he’d been told was conditional upon his successfully carrying out all of these absurd tasks, of which Jubal had been the first mentioned. For one thing was certain: Raleigh was not about to plead with Rogers to come along, not even about to explain by a single further word why his father had to be found and returned to the hospital. No, Hayes was certainly not going to give this insufferable man the satisfaction of knowing that he needed him in any way.

  “How much money?” said Rogers.

  “Five thousand dollars,” said Hayes, for while he wished to name half that amount, if not less, he couldn’t make himself do so.

  Rogers gave a flinty smile, looking at his hand where the cigarette had burnt so low it was odd that the heat wasn’t painful. “He doesn’t owe me five thousand dollars.”

  “I didn’t assume this was a repayment of a loan.”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you assume, mister.”

  “Now, just a minute!”

  “He owes me five hundred dollars.”

  Raleigh was surprised, but recovered his sarcastic tone. “Maybe the rest is interest.”

  “Two blocks down to your left is—”

  Raleigh lost his temper. “All right. There’s no sense in continuing with this, I assume you agree. Here’s your five hundred.” And he put five of the hundred-dollar bills down on the seat beside the driver. “I’m staying at the Ambrose Inn for a few more days if you care to reconsider. Frankly, five thousand, or even forty-five hundred dollars, strikes me as a rather generous fee for taking a short trip to New Orleans, and I should suspect it’s considerably more than you can earn in a few days trotting this mule around town insulting your passengers. Now, I hope to hear from my father this evening. Is there anything you want me to say to him?”

  Jubal Rogers flicked his burning cigarette straight at Raleigh so that it missed his ear by only inches. He said, one hand releasing the carriage brake, the other slapping the reins, “Tell him he can kiss my black ass.”

  Raleigh stood there, in a motionless rage, in front of the Slave Mart Museum so long that finally a young man took his arm and asked him if he was okay. Slowly nodding, Hayes said he was from out of town and needed a bank. The young man, who was black and wore a three-piece suit, said that as it was five o’clock, the banks were closed, otherwise he’d be at work, for he was the assistant manager of a bank just around the corner. Hayes arranged to meet this man there tomorrow to rent a safety deposit box, for he’d decided to leave Jubal the money at a bank, and to leave the key with a note at the carriage company. He certainly never expected, nor hoped, to lay eyes on the man again.

  Was Rogers universally misanthropic, or was this hostility particular? If so, what could have ever happened between his father and Flonnie Rogers’s nephew? For while Raleigh had his own serious reservations about his parent, to give Earley Hayes his due, he had never been a cold or cruel-hearted man, nor vengeful, nor wrathful, nor avaricious, nor unforgiving; he was not really, Raleigh had to admit, in any way, evil. His vices were not to be dismissed, of course, but they were rather the excesses of immoderation—improvidence, carnality, frivolity, disorder; they were the result of unreason, not hate. They were, come to think of it, the vices Sister Joe had so annoyingly (and wrongly) dismissed as “dog poop.” Of course his father had behaved unforgivably to Raleigh himself, and to his mother, but to give the man his due, nobody else seemed to hate him—even those who disapproved; even Aunt Victoria, who clearly had very mixed feelings about her brother, had neve
r hated him. And therefore it was difficult to see how an acquaintance like Rogers could feel, for heaven knows how many years, so deep a hatred, over what? An unpaid loan of five hundred dollars? How right Flonnie had been to advise him (falsely assuming he was Earley) to “leave it lie.” How right, for that matter, had Kaiser Bill Jenkins been to advise him to “keep away from Jubal Rogers’s kind.” Well, in future, he most assuredly would.

  Muttering to himself in this way, our hero strode angrily back through the streets of Charleston, sidestepping a group of Japanese businessmen who for some reason had felt compelled to climb out of their touring carriage in order to take photographs of what their pleasantly drawling driver was describing as “Hibernian Hall, the lovely home of our St. Cecilia Society Ball, the most elite and exclusive and sought-after social event in the state of South Carolina, and I dare say the whole South.” The Oriental businessmen bowed and snapped away.

  It was not far from this hall that Raleigh had a terrible shock, jolting enough to erase Jubal Rogers from his mind. He saw something that he never expected to see, any more than he expected to see himself dance naked through the streets (the image by which he habitually conveyed the high improbability of his performing some action requested of him: “No, Aura, I will not wear a goddamn Greek tunic to this costume party; I’d as soon dance naked in the streets.”). Glancing absentmindedly in the window of The Charlestonian, a women’s dress shop so exclusive there was nothing in its window but a single silk blouse, Hayes saw, or thought he saw, standing by the counter, the Thermopylae merchant Pierce Jimson stroking a blue peignoir that was draped over his arm. As this visual signal made no sense, Raleigh walked on for twenty feet before deciding that he in fact had seen Pierce Jimson, whose twitching anteater lip was fairly unmistakable. He backed up. Yes, he was right. Raleigh had his hand on the doorknob and the words ready, “Why, what brings you down here, Pierce?” when his question was answered in the most unexpected way. A young woman appeared behind Jimson, kissed the back of his neck, then twirled around him in a white cocktail dress that had almost no back and scarcely much more front. It took no second look to prove that this woman was not Mrs. Jimson; she was half the size and half the age. This woman was Boyd Joyner’s wife, Lizzie. Pierce Jimson was nodding enthusiastically at her, and she was twirling again and kissing his neck again. Hayes tried his best: could the fifty-year-old merchant somehow have a daughter he’d somehow neglected ever to mention, and somehow she looked exactly like Lizzie Joyner? But there was no use in mental legerdemain. Hayes knew perfectly well there was only one conclusion to be drawn.