Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Finished with a weak splutter, Hayes bent over, dizzy, and held to the post of the carved canopy bed. Just then someone rapped on the door and, without waiting for an invitation, bounced into his room. Mingo, of course.

  “Gregory says, could you turn down—Gollee, Raleigh, were you playing that?”

  “Gregory?”

  “Vanderhost. He says it’s kind of loud.…But, boy, Raleigh, I didn’t know you still played. I remember you used to, but I didn’t know you still—”

  Hayes sat down on the bed. “Where have you been?”

  The fat man looked like a Kansas meadow in his yellow sports jacket and green dotted tie. “Downstairs,” he said, happily, “playing bridge with Gregory and Miss Bess and Miss Jenks.” (These were apparently the names of the two white-haired ladies in the room across from Sheffield’s.) “You know what? They’ve been together for fifty-three years, ever since college, isn’t that something?” The wide face crumpled in thought. “You think they’d mind if I asked them if they were lesbianic, you know, like Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn in The Children’s Hour, except with a happy ending?”

  “That’s up to you,” said Hayes. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe I won’t. Maybe they’re shy about it.”

  “Possibly.”

  “I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  “Naturally.” Raleigh rubbed his eyes, and then his neck.

  “Raleigh, are you still worrying about Gates? You look kind of sad.”

  Hayes returned his trumpet to its frayed case. “Mingo. Mingo. I am worried about Gates. I am worried about you. I am even worried about Simon Berg, from whom we haven’t heard in three days, and who I strongly suspect is up to no good. I am worried about my father, my family, my self, my clients, and my future. I know this may all seem terribly puny to people like you and Aura who are concerned only about truly large matters like the nuclear apocalypse. But there you are. I’m a petty person who worries about everyday things every day.”

  Sheffield patted his friend. “You can’t worry so much, Raleigh.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “It’s like I always say, the Lord will provide.”

  “I realize that’s your opinion, Mingo, and if you want any further proof of what a great job He’s doing, just look at these newspapers.” Raleigh pointed at a stack of local papers on the foot of the bed. “On the other hand, at least there’s nothing about Gates’s getting murdered in here.”

  Sheffield assured Hayes once more that his brother was a man of such adventurous flair that the fat man’s own favorite star, the great Burt Reynolds himself, was scarcely his equal. “So stop worrying, really. I’ve got to get back. Miss Jenks is playing five no-trump, and she’s a little mad because I was only queen high in spades, but I figured with my diamond void—”

  “Don’t let me keep you.”

  “Well, maybe you can practice some more tomorrow. I sure wish I’d known you still played, Raleigh. The choir’s always wanted to have somebody play the trumpet with them Easters and Christmas. Bye-bye,” and Sheffield happily returned to the card table.

  So cheered had Mingo been by his wife’s surprise visit (throughout which they almost never left their blue-violets room except to eat four or five meals a day), that his effervescence had become practically unendurable. At least, unendurable to our hero. To several of the other residents of the Ambrose Inn—obviously including the elderly ladies and the proprietor himself—Sheffield had proved a welcome addition at evening cards and afternoon croquet and breakfast chitchat.

  He couldn’t even be torn away from the inn to drive with Raleigh to visit the famous plantation gardens outside Charleston, whose blaze of colors and maze of patterns had filled the Thermopylean horticulturist with awe and envy and homesickness for his little Starry Haven greenhouse. Alone, Raleigh had strolled along the paths shadowed by the tupelo trees and water ash and high old cypresses, their Spanish moss trailing down terraced lawns into the dark lakes and tangling with the lilies there. Bicyclists whirled past him, clattering over the white arched wooden bridges and through tunnels of flowers. Two black swans nosed among the bending lilies at the bank, then seeing Raleigh, glided away together. It had taken ten dozen slaves ten years to make the bricks, to lay the original oystershell paths and line them with azaleas, with lavender iris and narcissus by the thousands, to plant the herbs and cut the mazes. It had taken ten hundred more slaves slogging in vast acres of rice and indigo to pay for the gardens, for the stable, the house, the Paris sofa, the British clock. War had burnt the house, death had buried together masters and slaves, time had rotted the sofa and rusted the clock. Now all was renewed, nurtured by the fees of tourists like himself, thought Raleigh Hayes.

  Nor when Hayes set out again in the evening, could Mingo be persuaded to break up his bridge set in order to go to the Cakewalk Club, the bar where, Raleigh had learned from Toutant Kingstree, Jubal Rogers played on Friday nights. And so at ten, our hero arrived alone at the parking garage to take out his Cadillac; for the bar was some distance away, and by no means in the best part of town. He found that since his last visit to the garage the middle-aged attendant there had developed a nervous twitch that squeezed one whole side of his face shut. “I’m getting spooked,” this man confessed. Raleigh could see why. All the finest cars in Charleston still had on their left bumpers, green “READY OR NOT, JESUS IS COMING” stickers, and now, as well, on their right bumpers, red “HONK IF YOU n JESUS” stickers.

  “I’m calling the police. This is a direct personal assault on private property. It could be the Mormons. I’m gonna get a shotgun and some coffee and catch this guy. I don’t care if it’s a woman or what it is. I’m gonna make them take a razor and scrape every one of these things off.” The man’s frazzled, lumpish face sagged with distress. “Some of my clients don’t believe in this shit, and even if they did, they’ve got taste, you know. This is tacky. I honestly think I oughta call the police.”

  Raleigh said, “What I don’t understand is why you haven’t already done so.”

  The attendant kept picking at the word “HONK” on the back of a Lincoln Continental. “I’m a little bit afraid,” he groaned, “that it could be maybe my mother. She used to be a Latter-Day Saint and now she’s a Second Adventist.” He returned to his frenzied scraping.

  Hayes had not sat for long in the Cakewalk Club when he was joined by the tall lanky saxophone player, Toutant Kingstree, who stressed at some length the handicaps under which he was performing tonight. As he talked, he stared hard and hopefully at Raleigh Hayes. “You wasn’t joking me about the record business? I know sometimes you guys don’t let on that you’re scouting. Because that last set didn’t really show what I can do. Most of these birds I’m playing with are nothing but weekend birds, and they throw me off. ’Sides, no need telling a man like you, this is a nowhere place and a no-pay place. But you stick around for the next number. You stay put.”

  “Mr. Kingstree, I assure you I have nothing to do with the record business. If I could, if you’d just excuse me so I could catch Jubal Rogers there on his break.”

  “Jubal’s good on the stick, I don’t say no. But it was mostly me did the arrangements.”

  Raleigh slid out from behind his rickety table, where Kingstree was leaning over him, his fingers thrumming the wood corner, and inched his way through the noisy drinkers of the Cakewalk Club, which was actually just a low-ceilinged basement cheaply turned into a bar, jammed with a motley assortment of different-colored chairs and tables. The clientele was just as various, and ranged this Friday from slap-happy teenaged couples to serious drinking blue-collar men with bunched muscles and sad fretful eyes to suburban sightseers who laughed too loudly.

  Raleigh caught up with Jubal Rogers as the man (cigarette and beer in one hand, clarinet in the other) climbed back up on the small concrete platform in whose corner the drummer looked to be halfheartedly swatting flies on his snare drums. Rogers still wore his white shirt and black
trousers, but now had added a red leather vest and black silk tie. On one of the beautiful long-fingered hands was a gold bracelet, thickly woven.

  “Mr. Rogers? I’ve been unable to locate you at the carriage company for two days.” As the man made no reply (in fact, without a look in Raleigh’s direction, set his beer bottle down on top of the piano, and began changing the reed in the mouthpiece of his very old-looking ebony clarinet), Raleigh went on: “I spoke to my father…By the way, did you receive the envelope Wednesday? With the safety deposit box key in it?”

  Rogers tested the reed and (perhaps) nodded. He did not, however, indicate whether he’d gone to the bank and looked into the box, or, for that matter, whether he ever planned to do so. Raleigh could not bring himself to ask directly if he had or not, since, if Rogers could be indifferent to thousands of dollars, so could he; therefore, lips pinched and arms tightly crossed, he said, “I’m supposed to tell you, one, that money is not to repay a loan; my father wants you to know he had no intention of attempting to do that, and knows it can’t be done. Two. He very much hopes you will change your mind about New Orleans. Three. Excuse me, Mr. Rogers, it is difficult enough to be put in my position of passing cryptic messages back and forth without a clue to their meaning, but you could at least do me the courtesy of not making me talk to your goddamn back!”

  The clarinetist turned slowly around, his arrogant chin raised, smoke from his cigarette curling past the strange gold eyes. “Get the rod out of your ass, man.”

  “Me? You’re the one making this hard!”

  The icy smile lifted the cigarette to a tilt. “This was hard a long time before you were born.”

  “Yes,” snapped Raleigh. “So I gather. Therefore, your attitude to me seems a little gratuitous. If you will just listen a minute.…Just a moment.” Hayes took out the small spiral notebook, which, like his aunt Victoria, he always carried to keep his life neat. “I’m to remind you, he’ll be waiting in Jackson Square, the thirty-first, noon to six, and…” Raleigh flipped pages, looking for the names. “…I’m to tell you he found, or, I’m not sure what he meant, perhaps, has information concerning, someone called Leda Carpenter.”

  A young glassy-eyed white man with dirty hair leaped up on the platform and started to sit on the piano stool. “How ’bout beating it, Wade,” Rogers told him flatly, gesturing with his chin, and the pianist spun in a circle on the stool, mumbled, “Hey listen, no problem,” and hurried off.

  Rogers lit a new cigarette from the one he had in his mouth. “Yeah? What information? The bitch is dead. I got that news.”

  “Ah…” Raleigh was still watching the alacrity with which the young pianist was backing away from Jubal Rogers, whose capacity to inspire fear was no surprise. “I don’t know what information. The other thing he wanted to tell you was he has someone called ‘Billie’ with him. Josh’s child? I presume, in New Orleans, or going to New Orleans. Josh’s daughter? My understanding is that the child’s name is Billie because—my father wanted you to know—because the name was taken from, ah, a record album. The child…” Raleigh stopped. It was only as he said this that, with a rush of adrenaline, he realized the import of his father’s statement (for, as usually happened in conversations with Earley Hayes, he’d been too angry to pay close attention to anything except his own indignation). His father had said that he had this young person with him, not that he’d located her, or heard news of her, but had her with him. It simultaneously struck Hayes that his original assumption that “Josh’s daughter” was a small child might have been wrong. It struck him sharply in the chest that as this person was obviously somehow involved with Jubal Rogers, and as Jubal Rogers was black, and as his father had abducted from the hospital, or escaped with, a young black female, that this girl—merciless logic suggested—the girl in the yellow Cadillac at the bank window and “Josh’s child” were the same person. And Raleigh could now see his father’s blue eyes laughing at Ned Ware’s nosy inquiries about his companion, and blithely saying he planned to marry the girl. Earley had never liked the slanderously candid Ware, and was no doubt teasing him. No doubt. At least, it was possible.

  So caught up in these sudden reflections had Raleigh been that he hadn’t observed Jubal Rogers’s response to his message. Now, he noticed that the man had walked all the way to the other side of the platform and that he was breathing so deeply his whole upper torso lifted and fell. Finally, he turned around again and walked back, his hands tight in his pockets, his cigarette tight in his mouth. When he took it out to speak, it seemed to Raleigh that the gold-braceleted hand was trembling. But all he said was, “Repeat it.”

  So Raleigh told him again everything his father had said, adding that he knew no more than what he had already conveyed, except, and unless, a report that his father had abruptly and ill-advisedly left the Thermopylae hospital with a young woman meant that she was the person in question. “My aunt discovered that Daddy had left with a young female, ah, vagrant brought there for observation. And then the manager at my bank saw them together, but this fool, instead of having the sense and the decency to call me, allowed a man in my father’s condition to withdraw huge sums of money and take off all over the country in a convertible. Which is why, Mr. Rogers, I agreed to try to locate you. Daddy is, frankly, a little bit deranged, and he’s obsessed with the notion of going to New Orleans for some reason, and of your coming too.”

  It was apparent to Raleigh that his message had stabbed a crack in the ice that enveloped Jubal Rogers. The black man had lit still another cigarette from the one burning in his mouth. His face was curtained in smoke, but through it Raleigh could see thoughts hurry across the tense eyes; it made him eager to leave the man to his privacy. “Well,” he cleared his throat, “Mr. Rogers, I regret it if I’ve unwittingly brought you bad news. I won’t trouble you any further. Good-bye.” But the gold-flecked eyes had not dismissed him and he couldn’t move.

  Rogers removed the cigarette to rub one knuckle over his lips. “You said Flonnie told you. She still alive?” The voice, no less hostile, was slightly tentative, almost imperceptibly so, but Raleigh was now listening so intensely that he could hear the difference, and it confused him.

  “Yes. She’s, naturally, not very well. She’s over a hundred now. She’s in a nursing home near Goldsboro. I went there to ask about you.”

  “Who’s your aunt?”

  “Pardon? I have several aunts. You mean the one I mentioned? Aunt Victoria?”

  Rogers picked up his clarinet. “She alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Back in the country?”

  “Back? Oh. Oh, yes. Of course. In Thermopylae. Well, she’s fairly elderly. She’s retired. More or less…Did you—”

  “You keep up with her?”

  Raleigh leaned back from the smoke. “Aunt Vicky? Well, yes. She and I are…I gather you knew my family?”

  “…Yeah.” Jubal Rogers’s fingers were now moving rapidly over the stops of the clarinet. “Yeah, I knew your family. My aunt kept their house clean.” Ice sealed the haughtiness of his face back into a handsome mask. “Tell Earley, it’s the wrong time, and the wrong et cetera. Tell him I don’t believe him. Tell him we’ve all been dead a long long time. Tell him anything you feel like, mister.” He dropped the cigarette onto the concrete floor, put the clarinet to his lips, and, without preamble, blew a remarkably intricate run of notes, rolling up quickly from the soft mellow bass to sharp thin high triplets. This was apparently a signal, for the drummer slapped hard at his snare drum, and the pianist sneaked back onto the stool.

  Turning away, Raleigh saw the elongated shadow of Toutant Kingstree rise against a corner wall. The musician leaned over to shake someone’s hand, then strolled toward the band. He nodded as he stretched one long leg up on the platform, and whispered, “Okay, catch my riff now, you’ll see what I mean.”

  But Raleigh was too preoccupied to do more than nod; preoccupied not merely by his disquietening conversation with Jubal Rogers, nor by his s
hock at having that amazing burst of melody thrust in his face. For the man with whom Kingstree had been huddled was none other than Weeper Berg (now back in Lady Wetherell’s tuxedo). Hurrying over to the smoky corner, Hayes crossed his arms and said, “What are you doing in here, Simon? And where have you been?” Not only had he not heard from the convict since their talk in Battery Park, his concern had intensified after reading in the Charleston newspaper that a small oil painting of Saint Elizabeth greeting the Virgin Mary (long the property of an affluent Catholic church nearby) had miraculously disappeared during the dedication of the new parish hall.

  “I’m a jazz lover.” Berg sipped coffee and neatly tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. “You?”

  “I’m here on business.”

  “Likewise myself.”

  As Raleigh pulled out the wobbly chair to sit, a woman, on the arm of a portly, overdressed man, paused at their table. She brushed aside enough of her long auburn hair to say, “Raleigh! Surprise, surprise. Guess you do love music, okay. How goes it? See you around. Take it easy.”

  Her hostile companion muttered, “Come on, Rusty, let’s go,” and pulled her past them.

  “Not the conjugal,” Berg said with a shake of his head. “Concubinal, in my opinion. But a tomato, I grant you.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Raleigh sat down. “Look here, what were you talking to Toutant Kingstree about?”

  “You’re familiar with the man? Correct my apprehension, Raleigh. Didn’t you say you’d never been in this town?”

  “I just met him. And that woman was a piano player…”

  “Like she said, you’re a music lover.”

  “And, listen to me,” Hayes lowered his voice. “Did you steal that goddamn painting in the newspaper, out of a church, for God’s sake? Is that why you were in that cassock?!”

  Berg straightened his slipping black mustache with finger and thumb. “You’re an incredulous man, Hayes. A crummy agnostic is what you are.”