Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Raleigh stared at him, then blushed. “…Well, all right, I’m sorry. I suppose I did jump to conclusions. But frankly—”

  “So, you got the word? Our kid’s in town.”

  “Gates? No! Where is he? When? No.”

  “I checked by the Ambrose. He’d just made the call and Faggy Sheffield gave him my message.”

  Eager as Hayes was to know what Berg was talking about, he was compelled to interject, “Simon, please stop calling Mingo, ‘Faggy.’ He is not, ah, gay. If you knew how extremely, in fact, nauseatingly, uxorious he is, you’d realize—”

  “I don’t know this ‘uxorious.’ ”

  “Wife-loving.”

  “Good word.” Berg raised his tiny hands. “No offense intended. Just a tag. Anywise I left word with…Fatty Sheffield that Gates should take the truck out to this guy Kingstree’s place.” He gestured at the musician up on the platform. “If you’d clued me you had the acquaintance of the sax player, I coulda saved walking my dogs off, which, believe me, are none of the best. I’m an old man.”

  Gradually, Raleigh translated the convict’s narration: despite Toutant Kingstree’s contention that everything on his property was intended for his own personal use, he somehow had acquired the reputation of a man of business—and not only the poultry and pork business, but the automotive junk business; his more specific reputation was that of a man of such civility and discretion, he never inquired too closely into the transformations of color, shape, and origins which vehicles underwent on his premises—as if there were, unknown to him, a modern Circe living there who had not only filled his milk truck with swine, but amused herself by changing red Mazdas from South Carolina into gray ones from Missouri. Kingstree’s reputation (however undeserved) had this evening come to Weeper Berg’s attention and he had therefore left a message with Mingo at the Ambrose Inn that when Gates called, he should drive to Kingstree’s place on the outskirts of town the tractor-trailer truck (once the livelihood of Fred Zane). For Berg (though not Raleigh) had assumed, as soon as he heard the request for truck plates and a good body man, that Gates would be bringing this truck to Charleston. And Gates had called, according to Mingo, an hour ago, and gotten Berg’s message.

  And so the travelers left the Cakewalk Club to go meet the former French filmmaker. That is, they stood up to leave, but Raleigh was stopped at the door by an incredible ululant wail of music. Up on the platform, and to the surprise of the rest of the band, desultorily strumming through “People Who Love People Are the Luckiest People in the World,” Toutant Kingstree had bounded out of his chair, leaned almost over in a backbend, lifted the curved saxophone to the ceiling, and launched into a cantata of syncopated blues so astonishing that the white middle-aged singer (also a waitress, and not very professional at either occupation) slid off the note on which she had in any case not been too securely seated, and closed her mouth. So too, soon, did many of the noisily chatting patrons as they couldn’t hear what they were saying, much less—and perhaps less interestingly—what was being said to them. So, too, and not pleasantly, did the Cakewalk’s owner, who paid this informal band less than he did his dishwasher and expected from them the same unobtrusive service to his guests.

  The deep loose-throated saxophone talked on alone for some time in a soliloquy of such emotional virtuosity that grief chased joy and pleasure pushed anger tumbling out of the horn’s mouth. Now, Jubal Rogers shoved back his chair, moved over beside Kingstree, and somehow slid a melody into the saxophone’s monologue, turning it into a conversation. It was a tune Raleigh vaguely recalled. The black glow of the clarinet and the glistening brass horn swayed and leaped and darted in and out of the song like moths at a light. Then Toutant slung the saxophone to his side, and in a graveled voice started singing, while Jubal Rogers’s slender black clarinet sang with him.

  And if you were mine,

  I could do such wonderful things. And they finished singing together as Raleigh and Weeper stood in the doorway listening. Some people clapped; some people looked annoyed. Rogers sat back down, and the waitress started singing, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”

  “With you,” said Berg, as they got into the Cadillac, “I won’t mince words. That was music. This much I’ll tell you, if those shitkicking Glory Bound Boys coulda played like that, I woulda had a serious problem as regards to skipping.”

  Raleigh tapped Jimmy Clay’s little bowling ball key chain. “Yes. That was music…” He thought with a blush of his spluttering attempt back at the Ambrose Inn to push noise, much less notes, through his trumpet.

  “So Gates always claimed how you guys come from yourself a serious musical family, am I right?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I’d call them serious. But, yes, most of my father’s family played some sort of instrument, or sang, or something.” Back in time, he was again on the Hayes porch that wrapped around the huge white house. His father was on the swing again, between Little Em and Uncle Bassie (himself still a boy). The glistening trumpet leaned out to Raleigh, song without effort rolling from the circle of gold. Near him, Hackney’s fat fingers leaped up and down the ukulele’s neck. “My father, well, yes, he was musical. After he, ah, retired from the ministry, he taught in a small college and coached their, well, their band. But I guess he’d always played the trumpet informally.”

  “Likewise yourself?” asked Berg.

  Hayes shook his head.

  “No? Fatty Sheffield tells me otherwise tonight. Puts yah on the trumpet.”

  “Not really.” Hayes kept tapping the little globe that spun from the key chain.

  “Says meanwhile he plays the piano himself.” Berg snorted. “So, listen, we got a lousy road show here.”

  “That’s for certain.” Raleigh turned on the ignition. “Listen, Simon, I apologize again for what I said about the church painting. But, you know, Newport’s one thing, but a painting that’s a part of a church…”

  Berg wiped his eyes. “So the Vatican’s a shack? So somebody gave them the Apollo Belvederes and the Pharaoh’s gold coffins? Raleigh, Raleigh, my pal, yah wanna be such a cynic, yah gotta acclimate yourself to the crummy world, which, believe me, has screwed over bigger and sharper boys than you, not to mention the entirely innocent by the trainload. This particular painting to which you have reference was donated to this tax-free church, see, on an April fourteen years back by a bimbo who needed the write-off, and it was given to bimbos who woulda rather had more real estate any day, but they hundred-percent insure it for what they figure it is, and stick it on the wall and give it the go-by for two score. Which I figure, if the blind rubes didn’t know what they had, then such is the price of bimbodom, if you catch my drift. A Clouet, I still can’t believe yet!”

  Raleigh turned off the motor, and buried his head in his arms on the steering wheel. “Simon, did you steal that painting?”

  “I’m a Jew. What do I want with some old picture of the Virgin Mary kissing her cousin? Jews like Chagall. Jews like Picasso. Jews, read your Bible, like abstractions. But it’s a beauty, Raleigh. Chagall should learn to paint like that when he got to Heaven, may he rest in peace.”

  It was a beauty, as Hayes had the opportunity to observe for himself when, jostled in the van of a huge truck on the road to Atlanta, he opened his great-grandmother Tiny Hackney’s trunk and saw, swaddled in the old Confederate uniform, the pregnant mother of John the Baptist embracing the pregnant Mother of Christ, and both of them smiling up at Raleigh, happy as larks, innocent of their sons’ futures, luckily unable to see the head on Herod’s platter, the body on Pilate’s cross.

  It was not however until very late Saturday night that Hayes glimpsed the painting, for (while he’d seen his brother Friday evening, and again the next morning—when Gates had announced he was working on a little surprise before they “rolled out”) it was not until eleven that night that Gates finally invited him back to Toutant Kingstree’s domain, threw out his arm like a ringmaster at the giant truck gleaming with wet red paint,
and said, “TA DA! Step right up, Ladies and Gents, and let’s move ass!”

  Our hero therefore had all day Saturday to prepare himself to assimilate Gates’s insane traveling plans. It was not enough time. Particularly as Raleigh was so busy impatiently listening to Betty Hemans telling him in one word how his life insurance business was doing (“Fine”), and in several thousand more words, long distance, how she planned to send Lady Evelyn alone in a motor launch across the English Channel to rescue her first love off the beach at Dunkirk. Raleigh had no idea how much gas Lady Evelyn might need for two crossings, nor any idea why in the real world the janitor Kaiser Bill Jenkins might have run moaning from the office when Bonnie Ellen Dellwood walked into it, or locked himself in the supplies closet and refused to come out, despite Mrs. Hemans’s assuring him there were no ghosts in the Forbes Building.

  Raleigh was also busy checking by the carriage company to see if in fact Jubal Rogers had picked up the bank key. He had. On the other hand, he had still not come back to work. This, however, was nothing new; he periodically disappeared, and seemed to have little interest in whether they rehired him or not. “Tell him, if you see him,” Raleigh said to the young cashier, “we’re leaving tonight from Kingstree’s place, and he’s…” He cleared his throat to force out the words, “he’s welcome to come along.”

  The cashier was puzzled. “Come along? Well, okay, but I wouldn’t count on it. He’s a funny guy.”

  “Not really,” replied Hayes.

  Most of all, Raleigh was busy trying to track down Mingo Sheffield to tell him to start packing; in his case, an elaborate undertaking. For Sheffield had suddenly decided he’d better go sightseeing before he missed out on everything and never got another chance. Consequently, he’d risen early to escort Miss Bess and Miss Jenks on the “General Beauregard” boat tour to Fort Sumter, then on the oldfashioned trolley tour, then through as much of the “Festival of Houses”—“the loveliest homes in Charleston”—that Miss Bess’s arches could bear, then on a quick trip out to Magnolia Plantation, where the fat man had nobly declined a mini-stagecoach ride for fear of straining the miniature pony who pulled the coach around the lawn. Mingo lost all track of time, he was having such fun.

  Meanwhile, unable to locate him, Raleigh had settled his bill with Gregory Vanderhost, who politely never glanced at his check. The hotelier, seated at a Hepplewhite inlaid tea table, was at that moment copying out on monogrammed cards for his friendly Thermopylean acquaintance, the recipes for his calico scallops and his crab purloo, apparently in exchange for Mingo’s Carolina squab and his secret barbecue sauce. Vanderhost gave Raleigh several leads for tracing his friend, so our hero set forth again for Market Hall. The guide at this replica of the Temple of Wingless Victory, used by the Daughters of the Confederacy to house relics of the War of Northern Aggression, remembered the huge man in the green sports coat vividly, not only because he’d arrived with a grandmother on each arm, but because he’d burst into tears at the sight of Robert E. Lee’s silver camp cup. Next, at the Old Alps Rathskellar, the waitress in Bavarian apron, white knee socks, and red cap remembered Sheffield very well as two Bratwurst, double Low Country oysters, three steins of beer, and a strudel. And finally, Raleigh found the fat man himself in front of the Old Slave Mart Museum and Gift Shop. He stood by a blue rack, painted to match the blue shutters on the building, where handwoven sweetgrass and pine-needle baskets hung. He was talking to a black woman who sat on a folding chair beside her finished work. In her hands twisted the long palmetto fronds she was weaving into a mat.

  “Excuse me,” said Hayes. “I’ve been looking all over for you, Mingo! We’re going, you’ve got to pack! Where are your lady friends?”

  “Poor things, their feet gave out.” Sheffield held up to the black woman a shallow flower basket, then a square picnic box. “Nancy, I guess I can’t make up my mind.”

  The woman, who’d assumed she’d lost another sale to a claim of indecision, nodded tolerantly, but then Sheffield announced that he was ready to take both if she would accept Visa or a check. As she would accept neither, Raleigh had to “lend” Mingo “a little more cash,” which Mingo promised to repay as “soon as things picked up.”

  “What things?” Hayes raised an eyebrow. “Before you worry about the Lord providing for me, you better ask Him to start providing for you.”

  “I have a feeling Vera’s lingerie business is going to just take right off.”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t decide. You think we should call it ‘Naughty but Nice’ or ‘Sweet and Sassy’?”

  “Neither,” said Hayes, hurrying ahead to his parking garage. “I think you should call it ‘Vera’s of Thermopylae.’ ”

  “Gollee, that’s a great idea! You always did have great ideas. Hey, Raleigh, wait up.”

  The garage attendant’s bloodshot eyes pleaded with Hayes for sympathy. Hand-painted green letters two feet high announced all the way along the concrete wall, “HE IS COMING!” “I’m about to the point where I wish He would, and take me out of my misery,” the attendant groaned, his cheek twitching. “I can’t take too much more. I’m losing my best customers. I just nipped out for a sausage sub, that’s all. Don’t I have a right to eat? Don’t I have a right to sleep once in a while?”

  “Just call the police!” Raleigh said.

  “Sure, sure, would you? On your mother? And your son? Eleven years old?” He threw a bucket of water at the wall.

  By the time Mingo had finished hugging Miss Bess, Miss Jenks, and Gregory Vanderhost, Gates had called again to tell the Thermopyleans to shake a tail feather. “It’s ten twenty-seven, Ace, so says this heavy metal watch my, awwwh!, big brother gave me. Oh, few changes in the game plan.”

  “Gates, frankly I’d like to see a lot of changes in the game plan. What now?”

  “Catch you later, Big Bro.”

  And so it was nearly eleven when, by the light bulbs hanging from crisscrossed wires, Raleigh saw, among the wrecked cars and smashed buses, like a Renaissance cardinal surrounded by crippled beggars, the freshly painted, shiny bright red eighteen-wheel tractortrailer truck. Beside it, smeared with red paint, proudly stood Toutant Kingstree, Weeper Berg, Wade (the thin, dirty-haired pianist from the Cakewalk Club), and (stripped to his black silky bikini jockey shorts) the gorgeous Gates Hayes, who kept shouting, “TA DA!” and flinging out both arms. Finally he stopped. “Well, shit, Raleigh, aren’t you going to say something?”

  “It’s pretty,” Mingo said.

  “Listen, man,” Gates put his hands indignantly on his bare hip bones. “We had to do a whole engine overhaul, new tires, you name it. Right, fine. I drove this babe here with bobby pins! And four fucking tires missing. So let’s hear a few cheers for the kid. We’ve been working like madmen for twenty-four hours.”

  “Like madmen is right,” Hayes muttered. “I just frankly can’t make myself understand why we have to take this damn eighty-foot truck to Atlanta in the first place!”

  The red-splotched Gates (who looked, according to Mingo, like Tyrone Power in a South Seas epic, after a fight with the natives) crossed his arms with remarkable ease for a man wearing in public only bikini underpants and a wristwatch. “Raleigh, don’t hassle me now, I can’t handle it. I already explained.”

  “You did not explain. You announced. There’s a difference.”

  “Fine. Right. My bike won’t fit in the Cadillac. Right? Right. I do not have seventy-five hundred dollars to pay back Calhoun. I do not even have seventy-five dollars. I am planning to trade the semi, which is worth, what, Toutant? Twenty?”

  “I don’t say no,” nodded the black man. “Depends on the heat.”

  “Not to worry,” Weeper Berg assured him, “It’s strictly kosher. A bequest from the maternal.”

  Gates was rubbing with a rag at the chrome side mirror. “So, Raleigh, comprendo? I throw myself prostrate, right?, at this Mrs. Parisi’s feet and I say, ‘Buon giorno, bella bella mamma mia, come sta? You wanna you doug
h? I no gotta you dough. You takea dis truck instead, si?’” He turned and grinned. “See?”

  Raleigh reminded himself to breathe. “What the hell does Calhoun’s grandmother want with a tractor-trailer truck?”

  “Shuffleboard court?…Morgue?…How should I know? Everybody can use a truck.”

  Berg poked at Mingo with a tiny red finger. “So, Sheffield, let us take a hike from these two; it’s getting acrimonious. You can help Kingstree and his pal here lock up the pig farm. I’m adverse to associating with an acre of pork. My brother Nate is down in his coffin getting sick to his stomach.”

  “I eat those pigs. They’re just for my personal use,” Kingstree reminded them.

  Berg said, “From Sheffield, this I would believe. From you? My uncle Saul walked with not one lousy kopek to his name out of crummy Russia, seven hundred miles on his own two dogs, carrying my cousin Tettie in his arms, and when he got off the boat at Ellis Island, he had more fat on his bones than you do, Kingstree. So don’t tell me what you eat. I know what you eat. You eat nothing.” The voices faded back to the cemetery of dead cars.

  Raleigh had not calmed down. “All right, all right. Now if you’d just explain why you don’t drive the truck and I’ll drive the Cadillac by myself? If you’ll just explain why I have to put the Cadillac inside the goddamn truck!”

  “Save gas?” grinned Gates. He gave a brisk polish to the RollsRoyce ornament now fixed to the front grille. “Awwwh, come on, one big happy family. Stick together, thick and thin. Besides”—he swatted a leaf off the grille with his rag—“besides, the Caddy’s been spotted.”

  “So what? Simon has very, ah, considerately arranged it so you don’t have to worry about that. All you have to worry about is not getting killed in your duel. Ha ha.” Yes, what could he do but admit that within two weeks Life had shoved him on the stage of a play so preposterous he could actually say such lines with a straight face.

  “Che sera, sera, Raleigh. But about the car, it’s a little more complicated. Later for that. Just keep the faith.” Gates stepped back, muscles glowing, to admire his vehicle. “I don’t want Weep to worry. He’s a worrier.”