Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (12 page)

Luther sat cross-legged on top of the cooling-board door on the living-room floor with the bottle of poison in his hand. Yes, I thought, and when you go, how many others will you take with you? Luther closed his eyes. A smile spread across his face.

“You know,” I said, “some people in Savannah, or at least some people in Clary’s, are afraid you might dump that poison into the water supply someday.”

“I know,” he said.

“What if I were to grab that bottle out of your hands and run away with it?”

“I’d go back to Oatland Island and dig up some more, probably,” said Luther. Whatever his intentions, Luther clearly relished the speculation about his sinister power.

“When you were a kid,” I said, “were you the type who pulled the wings off flies?”

“No,” he said, “but I caught June bugs and tied balloons to them.”

The next morning at Clary’s drugstore, Ruth set Luther’s breakfast in front of him—his eggs, his bacon, his Bayer aspirin, and
his glass of ammonia and Coca-Cola. Then she went back to the end of the soda fountain and took a drag on her cigarette.

“Ruth?” Luther asked. “Do you think you can live without glowing goldfish?”

“I can if you can, Luther,” she answered.

Luther ate a mouthful of eggs and then some bacon. He took a swallow of Coke and proceeded to finish his entire breakfast. He had a mournful but peaceful air. Luther ate, he slept, and the demons within him were still. His deadly bottle of poison would remain a harmless curiosity. At least for now.

The stream of people going in and out of Joe Odom’s house seemed to pick up tempo in the weeks after I met him. That might have been because I had joined the flow myself and was now viewing the phenomenon from midstream, so to speak. I often dropped in after breakfast, by which time the aroma of fresh coffee would be gaining the upper hand over the smell of stale cigarettes from the night before. Joe would be clean-shaven and well rested on three or four hours’ sleep, and among the assorted company (bartenders, socialites, truck drivers, accountants) there would generally be at least one person who had spent the night on the sofa. Currents of activity swirled about the house even at this early hour. People entered and exited rooms, crisscrossing one’s field of vision like characters in
La Dolce Vita.

One morning, Joe sat at the grand piano in the living room having coffee, playing the piano, and talking to me. A fat man and a girl with braided hair walked through, completely engrossed in their own conversation.

“She tore up her mother’s car yesterday,” the girl said.

“I thought it was the TV.”

“No, the TV was last week….”

They continued out into the hall, whereupon a bald man in a business suit poked his head in.

“The meeting’s at two,” he said to Joe. “I’ll call you when it’s over. Wish me luck.” Then he disappeared. At that point, Mandy came in from the kitchen, wrapped in a white sheet and looking like a voluptuous goddess. She plucked a cigarette from the pack in Joe’s shirt pocket, kissed him on the forehead, whispered, “Draw up the damn divorce papers!” and then skipped back into the kitchen, where Jerry resumed cutting her hair. In the dining room, a young man hooted with laughter as he read Lewis Grizzard’s column aloud to a white-haired woman who was not finding it at all funny. Overhead, the sound of high-heeled shoes clicked across the floor.

“Well, it’s nine-thirty
A.M.,”
said Joe, “and I ain’t bored yet.”

Joe was talking not just to me, but to a person at the other end of the telephone, which was tucked under his chin. Joe often engaged in split conversations of this sort. Sometimes you knew who the other party was, sometimes you did not.

“I woke up this morning at seven,” he was saying, “and there was this big lump next to me under the covers, which I thought was strange because I had gone to bed alone. Mandy was in Waycross for the night and not due back here for an hour or so. So I lay there just looking at the lump, trying to figure out who or what it was. It was very big, bigger than anybody I knew…. What? … I was sure it was a human being and not a pile of laundry, because it was breathing. Then I noticed something strange about the breathing pattern: It was coming from two different parts of the lump. Finally, it dawned on me that the lump was two people, which meant I was odd man out, so I yanked the covers back, and sure enough, it was a boy and a girl. I had never seen either one of them before. They were both completely naked.”

Joe paused for a moment to listen to the person at the other end of the telephone. “Heh-heh, you know me better than that, Cora Bett,” he said. Then, speaking to both of us again, he continued: “Anyhow, before I had a chance to say anything, the boy asked me, ‘Who are you?’ Now, I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that question in my own bed. So I said,
‘I happen to be the social director here, and I don’t believe we’ve met.’ I wasn’t sure what to do next, but just then the telephone rang, and I learned that I had a busload of tourists coming at noon—forty people—and that I’d have to make lunch for them because the caterer is sick…. Yup, lunch for forty! … They’re all members of a polka-dancing social club from Cleveland. Heh-heh.” Joe smiled as he listened to the voice on the other end.

“Anyhow,” he went on, “my two newest naked friends got dressed. The boy had tattoos on his arms—a Confederate flag on one arm and a marijuana plant on the other. He put on a really swell T-shirt. It had ‘Fuck You’ printed on it. At this very moment, both he and the girl are in the kitchen helping make shrimp salad for forty polka dancers. Jerry’s in there too, cutting Mandy’s hair, and that’s why I say I ain’t bored yet.”

Joe said good-bye and hung up the telephone, and as he did a large blue caftan floated into the room. The caftan was topped by the round, smiling face of a woman of about seventy. She had powder-white skin set off by bright red lipstick, rouge, and mascara. Her jet-black hair was wound into a huge bun that sat on top of her head like a turban. “I’m off to Statesboro to play for the Kiwanis Club,” she said, waving a set of car keys, “and then I have a beauty pageant in Hinesville at six. I should be back in Savannah by nine. But in case I’m late, can you get to the bar early and cover for me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Joe, and with that the woman floated away in a rustle of silk and a jangle of keys.

Joe nodded at the spot where she had been standing. “That,” he said, “was one of Georgia’s greatest ladies. Emma Kelly. Come with us tonight and you’ll see her in action. Around these parts she’s known as ‘The Lady of Six Thousand Songs.’”

For the past forty years, Emma Kelly had spent the better part of her waking hours driving across the landscape of south Georgia to play piano wherever she was needed. She played at graduations, weddings, reunions, and church socials. All anyone had
to do was ask, and she would be there—in Waynesboro, Swainsboro, Ellabell, Hazlehurst, Newington, Jesup, and Jimps. She had played at senior proms for every high school within a hundred miles of Savannah. On a given day, she might drive to Metter to play for a ladies’ fashion show, then on to Sylvania for a retired teachers’ convention, and then to Wrens for a birthday party. Toward evening she would usually drive to Savannah to play piano at one of several nightspots. But no matter where her engagements took her, she would always be back home in Statesboro—an hour west of Savannah—to play at the Rotary Club lunch on Monday, the Lions on Tuesday, the Kiwanis on Thursday, and the First Baptist Church on Sunday. Emma played old standards and show tunes, blues and waltzes. She was a familiar sight with her flowing caftans and happy coats and that towering turban of black hair held in place by two lacquered chopsticks.

Emma was descended from the earliest English settlers in Georgia and South Carolina. She had met George Kelly when she was four and married him when she was seventeen. He was a sign painter, and by the time he died Emma had borne ten children, “not counting five miscarriages,” as she would always say.

Being a devout Baptist, Emma never drank. But once, after playing at the Fort Stewart officers’ club, she was stopped on suspicion of drunk driving. The M.P. who shined his light through the window told her she had been weaving all over the road for the last three miles. That was true, but the fact of the matter was that Emma had been trying to undo her corset and slip out of it at the time. She squinted into the glare of the flashlight, clutching her unfastened clothes about her and wondering how on earth she was going to step out of the car in this condition and convince the young man she was sober. It was Emma’s good fortune that she had played piano at the M.P.’s senior prom years before. He recognized her and knew she never touched a drop, and in a moment she was on her way.

In fact, most of the highway patrolmen knew Emma’s car, and when it zoomed past them late at night doing eighty or ninety,
they generally let it go. Emma had the greatest compassion for the occasional rookie cop who would unknowingly pull her over, siren blaring, blue lights flashing. She would roll down the window and say softly, “You must be new.” She’d be thinking ahead to the browbeating the young man was about to receive from a groggy sheriff. It would go something along the lines of: “What in blazes you think you doin’, boy, draggin’ Emma Kelly off the road! Tell you what you gone do now! You gone escort this fine lady all the way to Statesboro! See she gets home safe! A million pardons, Miss Emma. It won’t happen again.”

In Savannah, Emma’s fans followed her from nightspot to nightspot like a cheerful caravan—from Whispers to the Pink House to the Fountain to the Live Oak Bowling Alley to the Quality Inn out by the airport. She was good business. Bar receipts always picked up sharply for the duration of her stay and fell off when it was over. For years, Emma’s children had pleaded with her to open her own piano bar and cut down on the driving. After she killed her ninth deer on the highway, they stopped pleading and just plain insisted. “It breaks my heart,” said Emma, “because I love animals so much, not to mention the damage it’s done to the car.” About opening a piano bar, she promised she would think it over.

Joe Odom, who had known Emma all his life, often came to hear her wherever she happened to be performing. At some point after his arrival, Emma would play “Sentimental Journey,” which was the signal for Joe to come up and take over at the piano so she could rest a few minutes. Joe would happily oblige.

The night Emma collided with her tenth deer, she drove to Whispers and played “Sentimental Journey” as soon as Joe set foot in the door. “Go out and see how bad the car is, Joe, will you?” she said. “I can’t bear to look at it myself.” Six months later, she and Joe opened a piano bar in an old cotton warehouse overlooking the river. They called it Emma’s.

Emma’s was a long, narrow room, cozy as a book-filled den. Its tiny dance floor was nestled in the curve of a baby grand piano. A picture window looked out on the river and an occasional
containership gliding by. Dozens of framed photographs of family and friends lined the shelves along one wall, and an alcove by the entrance was decorated with memorabilia of Johnny Mercer. It was Mercer, in fact, who had nicknamed Emma “The Lady of Six Thousand Songs.” That was how many songs she knew, according to Mercer’s calculations. He and Emma had paged through a pile of songbooks, Mercer checking off the songs Emma could sing from start to finish. After three years of checking off songs, Mercer made an educated guess as to the store of lyrics in Emma’s head. He put it at six thousand.