Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (8 page)

Joe started to play the piano in the middle of Mandy’s story. “In the morning,” he said, “three bottles of liquor and a half dozen glasses were missing. That doesn’t sound like a burglary to me. It sounds like a party. And the only thing that annoys me about it is we weren’t invited.”

Joe’s smile indicated that the matter was closed, at least as far as he was concerned. “Anyway, as I was saying, I originally left the door unlocked as a matter of convenience. But pretty soon I realized that whenever the doorbell
did
ring, it was someone I didn’t know. So the bell became a signal that a stranger was at the door. I’ve learned never to answer it myself when that happens, because it’s likely to be a deputy sheriff wanting to serve me with some kind of paper, and of course I don’t need to be home for that.”

“Or for little old ladies with hammers in their hands,” I said.

“Hammers? I don’t believe I know any old ladies who carry hammers.”

“The one who punched out your windows certainly had a hammer.”

“A little old lady did that?” Joe looked surprised. “I was wondering how that happened. We thought somebody slammed the door too hard. You mean you saw her do it?”

“I did.”

“Well, we’ve got our share of little old ladies here in Savannah,” said Joe, “and it looks like one of them’s unhappy with me.” He did not seem the least bit concerned. “Well, now you know something about us,” he said. “Tell us about yourself.”

I said I was a writer from New York.

“Ah, then you must be the new Yankee I’ve been hearing about. Nothing escapes our notice, you know. Savannah’s a real small town. It’s so small everybody knows everybody else’s business, which can be a pain, but it also means we know who all the undercover cops are, which can be a plus. Now, as for you, I should tell you that you’ve already aroused a fair amount of curiosity. People think you’re writing an exposé about Savannah, so they’re a little wary of you. You don’t need to fret about that, though. Secretly they all hope you’ll put them in your book.” Joe laughed and winked.

“Savannah’s a peculiar place, but if you just listen to your Cousin Joe you’ll get along fine. You need to know about a few basic rules though.

“Rule number one:
Always stick around for one more drink.
That’s when things happen. That’s when you find out everything you want to know.”

“I think I can live with that one,” I said.

“Rule number two:
Never go south of Gaston Street.
A true Savannahian is a NOG. NOG means ‘north of Gaston.’ We stay in the old part of town. We don’t do the Mall. We don’t do the southside unless we’re invited to a party for rich people out at The Landings. Everything south of Gaston Street is North Jacksonville to us, and ordinarily we leave it alone.

“Rule number three:
Observe the high holidays—Saint Patrick’s Day and the day of the Georgia-Florida football game.
Savannah has the third-biggest Saint Patrick’s Day parade in America. People come from all over the South to see it. Businesses close for the day, except for restaurants and bars, and the drinking starts at about six
A.M.
Liquor is a major feature of the Georgia-Florida game, too, but the similarity ends there. The game is nothing less than a war between the gentlemen of Georgia and the Florida barbarians. We get all keyed up for it a week
ahead of time, and then afterwards it takes a week to ten days to deal with the emotional strain of having won or lost. Georgia men grow up understanding the seriousness of that one game.”

“Georgia women grow up understanding it too,” said Mandy. “Ask any girl in south Georgia. She’ll tell you flat out: You don’t start wearing panty hose until
after
the Georgia-Florida game.” I felt myself becoming a fast friend of Joe and Mandy.

“So, look here,” Joe said. “Now that you’ve come under our protective custody, we’ll be unhappy with you if you need anything and don’t ask for it, or if you get into trouble and don’t holler.”

Mandy climbed into Joe’s lap and nuzzled his ear.

“Just make sure you put us in your book,” he said. “You understand, of course, that we’ll want to play ourselves in the movie version. Won’t we, Mandy?”

“Mm-hmmm,” she said.

Joe played a few bars of “Hooray for Hollywood” (another Johnny Mercer tune).

“In that book of yours,” he said, “you can use my real name if you want to. Or you can just call me the ‘Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia,’ because that’s pretty much who I am.

Joe sang with such winsome charm, I had to remind myself that he was the same person who had tapped into the electricity of the house next door and who was, by his own admission,
dodging process servers for financial transgressions of God-knew-what proportion. His ingratiating manner made everything he did seem like good-natured fun. Later, as he saw me to the door, he joked and bantered with such easy grace that I did not fully realize until I got home that in the course of saying goodbye he had borrowed twenty dollars from me.

Having made what I took to be a promising, if unorthodox, start on a social life, I set about arranging my apartment so I could live and work in it comfortably. For essential things like bookshelves, file cabinets, and reading lamps, I visited a junk shop on the edge of town. It was a cluttered, barnlike warehouse that extended back into a series of rooms filled with Formica dinette sets, sofas, office furniture, and all manner of machinery from washer-dryers to apple corers. The owner sat like a Buddha behind a desk, barking hellos to customers and instructions to his salesman.

The salesman was an expressionless man in his mid-thirties. He had mousy brown hair parted at the center, and his arms hung loosely at his sides. His clothes were clean but faded, like the suits and shirts on a rack in one corner of the store. I was immediately impressed by the man’s instant recall of the store’s vast inventory. “We have seven of that type item,” he would say. “One’s like new, four work pretty good, one’s broke but could be fixed, and the other’s on lay-away.” In addition to having a mental catalog of the place, the salesman was a virtuoso on the strengths and weaknesses of practically any brand of appliance, particularly brands no longer in existence. “Kelvinator made a
good one in the early fifties,” he’d say. “It had five speeds. It was real easy to clean, and you could get replacement parts right quick.”

Impressed as I was by all of that, I was struck even more by something else—a carefully applied arc of purple eye shadow that blazed like a lurid sunset on his left eyelid.

At first I found it difficult to listen to what he was saying, distracted as I was by the eye shadow. I wondered what nocturnal transformation was built around this painted eye. I envisioned a tiara and a strapless gown, a fluttering ostrich fan at the end of a long white glove. Or was this something quite different? Was it, perhaps, the war paint of punk? Did this mild-mannered man spend his secret hours in jackboots, ripped T-shirts, and spiked hair?

Eventually, my attention wandered back to what the man was saying, and I bought what it was he was showing me. The next week, I dropped in at the shop again, and this time I tried very hard not to stare at the purple eye shadow on the man’s left eye.

From time to time, while he was waiting on me, the boss would shout questions from his desk about whether such-and-such an item was in stock. The salesman would cock an ear and call out the answer over his shoulder without looking directly at his boss. After one such exchange, the salesman said in a low voice, “What the boss don’t know won’t hurt him.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“He didn’t like this,” the salesman said, pointing to his left eye. “I don’t do drag or anything sick like that. I just do my eyes. I used to do my other eye the same way too. The boss told me to stop, and I was all set to walk out the door and never come back. But then I figured, ‘Wait a minute. He never gets out of that chair, see, and my desk is over by his left side. If I only do the eye away from him, maybe he’ll never notice.’ That was two years ago and he ain’t said nothin’ about it since.”

On my next visit to the shop, the salesman was out to lunch but due back soon. The boss and I chatted. “Jack’s a good man,” he said, speaking of his salesman. “Best I’ve ever seen.
He’s a strange one, though. He’s a loner. This shop and everything in it is his whole life. I call him ‘Jack the One-eyed Jill’—not to his face, of course. He used to put that eye makeup on both eyes, you know. God, it looked awful. I told him,
‘I can’t have this in my shop! No more or you’re out!’
So what did he do? Came in the next day not wearin’ any eye makeup at all as far as I could tell. But he was walkin’ sideways around the store like a damned crab, twistin’ this way and that. Then he went past a mirrored wardrobe, and I saw it plain as day: He’d put the makeup on the other eye.

“I was ready to kick his butt clear out the door, then and there. But he’s good at what he does, and it doesn’t seem to bother the customers. So I kept my mouth shut. And from that day to this, he’s kept that eye turned away from me. He must take me for blind or some kind of idiot, but that’s okay with me. He pretends he’s not wearing makeup, and I pretend I don’t know he’s ignored my wishes. Meanwhile, he keeps walkin’ sideways, twistin’ around, speakin’ outta the corner of his mouth, and hopin’ I won’t notice. And I make out like I don’t. I don’t know who’s crazier, Jack the One-eyed Jill or me. But we get along just fine.”

Before long, I found myself settling into a pattern of daily routines: an early-morning jog around Forsyth Park, breakfast at Clary’s drugstore, a late-afternoon walk along Bull Street. I discovered that my activities coincided with the daily rituals of certain other people. No matter how widely our paths may have diverged for the rest of the day, we overlapped again and again at our appointed hour and place. The black man who jogged around Forsyth Park at the same hour I did was one such person.

He was lean, very dark, and a little over six feet tall. When I fell in behind him the first time, I noticed he was carrying a short blue leather strap. Most of it was wound around his hand; eight or ten inches of it protruded. He snapped the free end against his
thigh every other step, producing a rhythmic
whap
that forced me to run in step or very much out of step. I ran in step; it was easier. As he turned the corner at the south end of the park that first day, he looked back in my direction but not quite at me, a little behind me. I looked over my shoulder. About fifty yards back, there was a blond woman jogging with a little terrier romping beside her.

The next time I started my run, the blond woman and her dog were running ahead of me. The dog would dart into the park and then double back to join her. As I drew near, she turned her head to look across the park toward Drayton Street on the other side. The black man was jogging along Drayton, having already made both turns at the far end. He looked back at her.

After this, I never saw one of them without also seeing the other. He always carried the little blue leather strap. She always had her dog with her. Sometimes he was in the lead; sometimes she was. They were always separated by at least a hundred yards.

One day I saw the man at the M&M supermarket pushing a shopping cart. Another time I caught sight of him getting into a late-model green Lincoln on Wright Square. But no blue strap and no blond woman. A few days later, I saw the blond woman coming out of a bank. She was unaccompanied except for her terrier, who trotted along beside her. He was straining at the end of a blue leather leash.

“We don’t do black-on-white in Savannah,” Joe Odom told me when I mentioned having seen this couple. “Especially black male on white female. A lot may have changed here in the last twenty years, but not that. Badness is the only woman I know of who had a black lover and got away with it. Badness was the wife of an influential Savannah businessman, and she had lovers during most of their marriage. That was all perfectly acceptable. Savannah will put up with public infidelity no matter how flagrant it is. Savannah loves it. Can’t get enough of it. But even Badness knew enough to leave Savannah and go to Atlanta when she felt the urge to have an affair with a black man.”