The Cat's Pajamas (18 page)

“Is
that
what happened?” Mack Brown drew up beside the carnival tents. Being Monday night, the carnival was dead, unlit, the tents flapped softly in a warm wind. Somewhere a few dim blue lanterns burned, throwing ghastly lights on huge sideshow signs.

Sam Nash's hand moved before Steve's face, patting his cheeks, pinching and testing his chin, pinching the flesh on Steve's arms gently, approvingly. And for the first time, in the blue light, Steve saw the tattoos on Sam's hands, and he knew the tattoos went up the arms and all over Sam's body, he was the Carnival Tattoo Man. And as they sat there, the car silent, the trip over, all of them drenched with sweat, waiting, Sam finished the story.

“Well, Steve here made Lavinia meet him twice a week in the swamp, or else he'd turn her in, he said. She knew she was colored and wouldn't have much chance against a white man's word. And so yesterday she had the unmitigated nerve to walk down the main street of the town saying to everybody,
everybody,
mind you, this here is Steve Nolan's baby!”

“There's a woman ought to be hanged.” Mack Brown turned and looked back at the men in the rear seat.

“She
was,
Mack,” Sam assured him. “But we're ahead of our story. After she went through town saying that bad thing to everybody, she stopped right in front of Simpson's Grocery, right by the porch, you know, where all the men sit, and there was that rain barrel there. And she took her baby and pushed it down under the water, watching the bubbles come up. And she said, one last time, ‘This is Steve Nolan's child.' Then she turned and walked off, with nothing in her hands.”

That was the story.

Steve Nolan waited for them to shoot him. Cigarette smoke idled through the car.

“I—I had nothing to do with her being hung last night,” said Steve.

“
Was
she hung?” asked Mack.

Sam shrugged. “She was found this morning in her shack by the river. Some say she committed suicide. Others say somebody visited her and strung her up to make it look like suicide. Now, Steve—” Sam tapped him softly on the chest. “Which story do
you
think's the right one?”

“She hung herself!” screamed Steve.

“Shh. Not so loud. We can hear you, Steve.” Gently.

“We kind of figure, Steve,” said Bill Colum. “You got pretty mad when she had the nerve to call your name and drown your baby on Main Street. So you fixed her for good and thought nobody would ever bother you.”

“You should be ashamed.” Steve had his false bravado up now, suddenly. “You're no real southerner, Sam Nash. Let go of me, goddamn it.”

“Steve, let me tell you something.” And Sam ripped all the buttons off Steve's white shirt with one twist of his hand. “We're a damn queer kind of southerners. We don't happen to like your kind. We been watching and thinking about you a long time, Steve, and tonight we couldn't stand thinking about you no more.” He tore the rest of the shirt off Steve.

“You going to whip me?” said Steve, looking at his bare chest.

“No. Something far better than that.” Sam jerked his head. “Bring him in the tent.”

“No!” But he was yanked out and dragged into a dark tent, where a light was pulled on. Shadows swayed on all sides. They strapped him on a table and stood smiling with their thoughts. Over him, Steve saw a sign. T
ATTOOS
! A
NY DESIGN
,
ANY COLOR
! And he began to get sick.

“
Guess
what I'm going to do to you, Steve?” Sam rolled up his sleeves, showing the long red snakes printed on his hairy arms. There was a tinkle of instruments, a sound of liquid being stirred. The faces of the men looked down upon Steve with benevolent interest. Steve flickered his eyes and the T
ATTOOS
sign wavered and dissolved in midair, in the warm tent. Steve stared at that sign and did not look away. T
ATTOOS
. Any color. T
ATTOOS
. Any color.

“No!” he screamed. “No!” But they unloosened his leg straps and cut his pants off with a pair of shears. He lay naked.

“But
yes,
Steve, yes indeed.”

“You
can't
do that!”

He knew what they were going to do. He began to shriek.

Quietly, mildly, Sam applied some adhesive tape over Steve's lips just after Steve screamed, “Help!”

Steve saw the bright silver tattooing needle in Sam's hand.

Sam bent over him, intimately. He spoke earnestly and quietly, as if telling a secret to a small child. “Steve, here's what I'm going to do to you. First, I'm going to color your hands and arms, black. And then I'm going to color your body, black. And then I'll color your legs black. And then, finally, I'm going to tattoo your face, Steve, my friend. Black. The blackest black there ever was, Steve. Black as ink. Black as night.”

“Mmmm.” Steve shrieked inside the adhesive. The scream came out his nostrils, muffled. His lungs pumped the scream, his heart pumped it.

“And when we're done with you tonight,” said Sam, “you can just go home and pack your clothes and move on out of your apartment. Nobody'll want a black man living there. Regardless of how you got that way, Steve. Now, now, don't shake; it won't hurt much. I can just see you, Steve, moving over to nigger town, maybe. Living by yourself. Your landlord won't keep you on; his new tenants might think you were a nigger, lying about your skin. Landlord can't afford to risk tenants, so out you go. Maybe you can go north. Get a job. Not a job like you got now: ticket agent at the railway, no. But maybe a redcap job or a shoe-shine boy job, right, Steve?”

The scream again. Vomit erupted in two jets from Steve's nostrils. “Rip off the tape!” said Sam, “or he'll drown himself.”

The adhesive came off, biting.

When Steve was through being sick, they replaced the tape.

“It's late.” Sam glanced at his watch. “We'd better start if we want to finish with this.”

The men leaned in over the table, their faces wet. There was a humming electric sound of the needle purring.

“Wouldn't it be a joke,” said Sam, high up over Steve, pressing the needle onto Steve's naked chest, sewing it with black ink, “if Steve got shot for rape someday?” He waved his hand at Steve. “So long, Steve. See you in the back section of a streetcar!”

The voices faded. Deep inside, as Steve closed his eyes, he was wailing. And he heard the voices murmuring in the summer night, he saw Lavinia Walters walking down a street somewhere in the past, a child in her arms, he saw bubbles rising, and something hanging from a rafter, and he felt the needle gnawing and gnawing at his skin, forever and forever. He squeezed his eyes tight to fight his panic, and suddenly he knew only two very clear, certain things: tomorrow he must buy a pair of new white gloves to cover his hands. And then? Then he would break every mirror in his apartment.

He lay on the table, crying all night long.

I'
M GOING TO TELL YOU
a story and you're not going to believe it, but nevertheless I'm going to tell you. It's kind of a murder mystery. On the other hand, maybe it's a time-travel story, and come to think of it, it's also a story of vengeance, and then throw in a couple of ghosts and there you have it.

What I am is a motorcycle officer with the Oklahoma police on what used to be called Route 66, somewhere between Kansas and Oklahoma City. During the last month a series of very strange discoveries has been made along the route from Kansas City to Oklahoma.

I discovered the bodies of a man, a woman, a younger man, and two children in fields along the way in early October. The bodies were widely distributed over an area of more than a hundred miles, and yet the way they were dressed indicated to me that, somehow, they were all related. Each of the bodies appeared to have died from some sort of strangulation, but that has not been definitively ascertained. There are no marks on the bodies, but all indications were that they were slain and left not far from the road.

The clothes they wore did not belong to this day in this month, in this year. Indeed, the clothing was not at all like what you'd buy at shops today.

The man appeared to be a farmer, dressed in work clothes: denims, a ragged shirt and battered hat.

The woman resembled a timeworn scarecrow, starved by life.

The younger man was dressed as a farmer also, but with clothes that looked like they had traveled five hundred miles in a dust storm.

The two children, a boy and a girl around twelve, also looked as if they had wandered the roads in heavy rains and blistering sun and then fallen by the way.

When I hear the phrase “Dust Bowl,” memories come back that are not mine. My mother and father were born in the early 1920s and were alive during the Great Depression, which I heard about all my life. We people here in the center of America suffered that nightmare, which we've all seen in motion pictures—dust blowing in great billowing gusts across the land, destroying the barns and leveling the crops.

I've heard the story and seen it so often that I feel I lived through it. That is one of the reasons why my finding the bodies of these people was so strange.

I woke some nights ago around three in the morning and found that I had been crying and I didn't know why. I sat up in bed and realized I'd been dreaming about those bodies found all along the road, from Kansas City to the Oklahoma border.

It was then that I got up and rifled through some old books left to me by my parents and found pictures of the Okies: people who had gone west and who had been memorialized in Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath
. The more I looked at the pictures, the more I felt the need to weep. I had to put the books away and go back to bed, but I lay there for a long time with tears streaming down my face and only slept when the sun rose in the morning.

I've taken the long way to tell you about this because it has been so hurtful to my soul.

I found the body of the older man in an empty cornfield, strewn in a ditch, his clothes burnt by the sun and parched as in a dry harvest. I called in the county coroner and continued searching; I had an uneasy sense that there were more bodies to be found. Why I should think this still remains an immense mystery to me.

I found the woman thirty miles farther on, under a culvert, and she, in turn, bore no marks of violence but seemed dead as if from an invisible bolt of lightning having struck her in the night.

Fifty miles still farther on lay the bodies of the children and the young man.

When they were all assembled, like a jigsaw puzzle, in the county coroner's office, we surveyed them with a terrible sense of loss, though we did not know these people. Somehow we felt we had seen them before and known them well, and we mourned their deaths.

This entire case might have remained a terrible mystery forever. Many weeks later, as I waited for a haircut in a barbershop one afternoon, I leafed through a pile of magazines. Opening an issue of an old magazine, I came to a page of photographs that caused me to jump up, throw the magazine against the wall, then pick it up again, shouting to nobody, “Damn! Oh, Jesus! Damn!”

I clenched the magazine in my hand and stormed out.

Because, my God, the pictures of the Okies in the magazine were the same people I'd found along the road!

But, looking closer, I read that these pictures were taken weeks ago in New York, of folks dressed up to look like Okies.

The clothes they wore were new but made to look dusty and worn, and if you wanted to have them you could go to a department store and buy these old clothes at new prices and think yourself back sixty years.

I don't know what happened next. I kind of went redhot bloodshot blind. I heard someone yelling, and it was me. “Damn! Oh God!”

Crushing the magazine, I stared at my motorcycle.

The night was cold, and somehow I knew I had to ride my cycle somewhere. I rode off in the autumn weather for a long while and stopped every once in a while. I didn't know where I was, and I didn't care.

Now I'll tell you another thing that you won't believe, but when I'm done, maybe you will.

Have you ever been in a really big windstorm? The kind of storm that came through Kansas and blew over Oklahoma all those years of the Dust Bowl. When you see the photos and hear the name there is hardly any way for you to imagine how it was when the people inside the great wind couldn't see the horizon, didn't even know what time it was. The wind blew so hard it flattened farms, tore off roofs, knocked over windmills. It ruined a lot of poor roads, which were already nothing more than red mud.

Anyway, you get lost in the middle of a storm like that, when the dust burns your eyes and fills your ears, and you forget what day it is or what year and you wonder if something awful is going to happen and then maybe it's not awful, but it does happen and it's there.

This big wind roared up and I was on the road on my motorbike when it hit. I had to stop my bike I was so blind. I stood there with the sun going down beyond the storm and the wind howling and I was afraid for the first time. I didn't know what I was afraid of, but I waited with my motorbike and after a long while the wind sort of died, and coming along Route 66 from the eastern horizon, going real slow, was an old jalopy; an open car with bundles in the back and a water bag on the side, and steam coming out of the radiator and dirt crusted over the windshield so whoever was driving had to half stand to look over to see the road.