The Salt Eaters (24 page)

“Where you staying?”

He rolled the notebook up and jammed it into his pocket. “Nadir’s.”

“Who?” They both stopped, and he was now far enough ahead to consider making a run for it. But he hadn’t got past their stoop yet and there was a man sitting there breaking open a six-pack. And who knew, maybe the raging dog up ahead would jump the fence and come at him.

“You mean M’Dear? As in Maa Deeear, everybody’s good ole boardinghouse grandma?”

He felt himself redden and they had caught up enough to see it. So they laughed at that too. He was sure the woman in the floral hat, the woman who ran a boardinghouse, had been introduced by Doc Serge as “Nadir.” He’d thought it country-classic.

“You somp’n.” The one in the suit slung an arm around his shoulder and was wagging his head. “Callin people out of their name. Didn’t yo mama teach you nuthin? I won’t embarrass you by asking you our names. My name’s Thurston, as in need for a beer. This is Hull as in Walnut, called M1 as in rifle. Come on, my man, let’s have a beer. Wish we could extend an invitation to grit, but the cupboard’s Mother Hubbard’s.”

“The larder is lean.”

“The refrig renigged.”

“The bones are picked clean.”

“And the breadbox is the private preserve of the roaches.”

They slapped five in front of him and he smacked their hands recklessly. And they laughed again. And Meadows wondered if he would get off LaSalle street alive. He was a yaller
nigger in costly cothes with an Omega watch. An out-of-town cornball who’d stepped on somebody named M1 and called him in earshot of kith and kin a motherfucking dumb bastard. Friends had been killed for less. He’d seen a man impaled on a cue stick for questioning the rack up. He’d seen a woman drowned in a bucket of Kool-Aid for broiling the steak medium well instead of medium rare. On Saturday nights he’d seen life-long friends dragging each other in all cut up, seen shot-up buddies who’d picked up the tip laid down for the barmaid or had said Richard Pryor wasn’t funny, or had dropped a deck of cards on the table with the seal split. He’d seen men who’d survived Korea or Vietnam together hauling each other into emergency apologizing to each other, a boot the only thing holding the foot and leg together, a starched collar holding a lopsided head on. Meadows exhaled and poked a fist right through his pocket. What the hell, he thought, squatting on the steps between them, a beer’s a beer. Whatever happened, he wasn’t stumbling aimlessly around the streets anymore, at loose ends, alone.

“What’s the good word, Short Cakes?”

“Pussy. And another good one is—”

“Never mind.” Ruby walked her elbows across the tiny café table. “That kid’s mouth’s getting to be an ecological disaster area,” she moaned, dropping her head down into the crook of Jan’s elbow.

The rest of the kids, tottering on skateboards or leaning their bikes against the railing, went right on talking to Jan while Short Cakes, balancing his skateboard to a standstill, took the opportunity to pinch from Ruby’s plate what he took to be a crab apple.

“Yawl going to the park tonight?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world,” Jan answered, searching the table for something suitable to offer the kids.

“Then you won’t be firing the ashtrays tonight?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Do what?” Ruby looked up in time to see the kid bite into the hot cherry tomato.

“Fire. Bake. Harden. Cure.”

“Oh, clay.”

The women clamped their mouths shut, waiting for the hot pepper to register. The kids in on the joke hunched the others.

“Mighty powerful pickling to get past all that foul sewerage.” Ruby laughed as the kid reached over the café railing to take a swipe at her, his face contorted. Speeding away, he meant to fling the hot tomato back over the railing but his aim was off. The kids ducked and it landed splat on the arm of the tall man in the bow tie, leaning against the railing by the entrance step, talking with the crowd of young people who wanted to know how come Muslims weren’t around like before. The paper boy leaned over and took the napkin from Jan and in passing it, got drawn in by Bow Tie, who was very interested in his paper route. The skateboard kids took off down the street on the ninth wave. The bikers, front tires high like a circus act, sailed into the street on the back tires only, slapping the metallic behinds of their thoroughbreds.

“That’s Velma’s boy. The one with the papers.”

“You mean the one with the feet. I know. And ain’t that Tommy Jeeter’s boy?” Ruby was waving a tattered napkin at the back of the speed demon with his mouth on fire.

“Gail says yes. Jeeter says no.”

“Jeeter must be crazy. Could’ve spit that kid right out of his mouth. Looks more like Jeeter than Jeeter. He better claim that boy. This is a small town and Jeeter got lots of daughters growing up all over Claybourne. But what he care, what a man care about—”

“I hear where this conversation is headed, Ruby. And I do not want to hear no niggerman shit this afternoon. Can it.”

“That kiln big enough for Short Cakes
and
his daddy?”
Ruby mumbled it, dropping her head down on her arms.

“What’s the matter with you here lately, Ruby?”

“Nate’s on the road,” she muttered into her arms, trying to pull herself up. “Or maybe it’s something in the air. Maybe it’s Velma. She’s a for real drag lately. I think we need to ask her to step down, she’s wearing everybody to a frazzle and taking on more work than she or anyone else can handle. Driven. Compulsive. Or maybe …” She flopped back in the chair and stared out at the gray, purple clouds. “I dunno. Malcolm gone, King gone, Fanni Lou gone, Angela quiet, the movement splintered, enclaves unconnected. Everybody off into the Maharaji This and the Right Reverend That. If it isn’t some far-off religious nuttery, it’s some otherworldly stuff. And check that out.”

Jan turned, trying to follow Ruby’s gaze. Past the microwave oven and the espresso machine was the makeshift stage where the musicians were climbing down for a break. The one brother in the band was wearing a Blues Brothers T-shirt.

“And Nate and the guys can’t find a gig in town. It’s enough to make you scream, ain’t it? Next thing you know, some white boy in top hat and tails, or maybe a dreads wig, will come along and pied pipe all the folks to the lobotomy wards.”

“Don’t start, Ruby. You always wind up getting things all mixed up and maudlin too.” Jan picked among the remains of the salad they’d shared for one last shred of red cabbage. Ruby had asked her a serious question a moment ago but then their favorite waitress had stopped by their table to say goodbye, stuffing her apron in her bag, and Jan hadn’t answered. Who, Ruby wanted to know, who could effectively pull together the folks—the campus forces, the street forces, the prison forces, workers, women, the aged, the gay. And Jan had thought Doc Serge but didn’t get to say it, even after the waitress left. The thundering of ball bearings had interrupted them. And just as
well, for she’d been idly shuffling the Tarot deck, forgetting how scathing Ruby could get about “that stuff,” and The Magician had slipped from the pack. Lately each time the team had sat down—Daisy Moultrie on the Ouida board, Mrs. Heywood’s protégé on the energy maps, Bertha with the cowries, La Vita with the charts—The Magician had fallen from the deck. She wished to discuss her misgivings about Doc but in her own terms, wanted to discuss how a people turned around might not read the difference between the figure straight up and the figure reversed. Ruby was looking at her sideways and Jan wanted a peaceful lunch. She plopped the deck in the top of her bag, the cards immediately spilling between her eyeglass case and her cosmetic sack. She snapped her bag shut.

The two women leaned back while the waiter cleared away the salad plate, noted their clean forks and missing napkins, and offered each a corner of his apron to wipe their hands.

“Those your kids?”

“Some of them used to be in my class.” Jan looked up. “Some take classes with me at the—”

“Academy,” Campbell said. He couldn’t help it. Had been meaning to make some contact with the woman for weeks. She was always on the run and rarely ate on his shift. “I’ll get you a damp towel.”

“Ya know,” Ruby leaned forward. “I don’t want to press anything on you, but getting back to this leadership question. You and Serge are the only—”

“Ruby?”

“Okay, Jan, but the truth is, I’m glad you got fired. I mean it. Murder-mouthed in the yard, jumped on the stairs, ripped open at recess and still you wanted to go right on trying to teach hardened crap shooters the beauty of train A leaving the station two hours before train B, traveling at X minus miles per foot.”

“Ruby?”

“And I know, Jan, things are great for you at the Academy, but it’s a waste of your talent. The Academy’s nonfunctional in the broad sense, too inbred. You can’t leave the heavy business of running this city to the fools like Jay Patterson and the like. Now, you know I don’t believe in all this ‘fate’ stuff you characters be into up there in your little study group, but doesn’t it occur to you that you were relieved of duty, so to speak, so that you’d be freed up to take on some serious work?”

“Ruby, do me a favor?”

“I know, I know. I’m being a drag.”

“Is anyone on the grill? I don’t trust that microwave.”

Campbell had quickly slid a plate of steamed washcloths onto the table and now glanced around toward the service-counter window to the kitchen. She would want toasted banana nut bread, he knew that. First break in traffic and he would do it himself. He nodded. She smiled. She was a serious sister and good-looking too in an offbeat sort of way—a pointy Dick Tracy face, plucked eyebrows, braids piled high and held in place by a tie-dye scarf, always a tie dye of brilliant colors, so that it looked like she carried a basket of snakes on her head. Did the books at the Academy and taught sculpture at night and ceramics in the afternoon. Odd combination. He hoped she’d be around when he got off. Maybe he could ply her with toasted cake for the next two hours.

“Leave it to me,” he said, just in case she hadn’t read him. “Banana nut bread, toasted.” He set down the cups, a larger pot of Red Zinger tea than they’d ordered, two plates of spinach quiche, and a plastic bear with a yellow hat where the honey came out of. The women looked at the bear, looked at each other, looked at him. “I just work here, yawl,” he shrugged.

A reeling drunk was doing the rope-a-dope number against
the railing for the benefit of Bow Tie and the youth, but they were engrossed in a discussion of the Honorable Elijah’s heir: Wallace, Farrakhan, a yet-to-be-known? Campbell stepped away from the table to urge the drunk on his way.

“I wanna talk to teacher lady. Hey.” He was hailing Jan, who did not recognize him. “Ain’t you the schoolteacher from up the way?” His finger pointed toward a VW station wagon parked at the curb, toward the chemical-plant smokestacks in the distance, toward the sidewalk he stood on as he fell along the railing again. He approached their table as if he too were on a skateboard. “I support education,” he announced to diners looking away from him or through him. He pulled a pint bottle from one of his uniform’s many pockets and examined it carefully for damage. “I pay my taxes. See.” It was show-and-tell time, the seal ragged and dirty. “See how much taxes I pay each hour on the hour to educate the children? Such dedication deserves applause, don’t it?” Six men at the round table under the awning toasted him and he bowed and drank. Bow Tie bowed too and continued talking about messengers.

“Who are you?” She stared at him as at a long-forgotten object of historical importance, heard about, finally encountered. An ancient piece of pottery. The Rosetta Stone. A scroll from a pharaoh’s tomb. She held her breath. He seemed to be holding his too, pulling himself up out of the fumes to stand before her steady, revealed at last. She tried to memorize the lines, the planes, the puffiness here, the broken capillaries there, as though instructed she’d have but one chance to bone up for the exam, one chance in a lifetime to know it. He was somebody. That was as far as she could get. She might get Bertha to throw the cowries on it; she might spread the Tarot on it. He was no Fool, and not the Joker—a Fool who’s been around—either. But he was somebody in her kin and she would know it. “What’s your name?” She asked it quietly, the way
you would a child suddenly appearing out of nowhere on your front stoop in the middle of the night half dressed and scared, or an alley cat who insists its presence on you and will not drop its stare and gets you hypnotized into believing it’s come straight from Egypt with the word.

“They call me one thing or another.” He had grabbed hold of the railing just below Ruby’s elbow and was teetering back and forth. “Good luck, teacher lady,” bowing deeply from the waist. “Take care.” He strolled off.

“What was that about?” Ruby shivered.

“I dunno. Eerie. I get the feeling …” But she hadn’t isolated any of the feelings well enough to put a name to. She shrugged, troubled.

Ruby tipped her chair back to get a good look at the drunk crossing now between a mail truck and a milk truck. He seemed to be heading toward the lot that swings down toward the park. “He’s made a remarkable recovery, seems to me. Not so much reeling and rocking as bopping and strutting. Isn’t he one of Doc Serge’s cut buddies?” Her chair was dangerously tipping now and but for a disturbed diner at the next table, she would have fallen backward. “A regular Scarlet Pimpernel, he’s disappeared. Change that to the Green Hornet. Was that a hospital orderly outfit or garage attendant uniform or green beret or what? I get my greens mixed.”

Green. Jan strained to recall a conversation half heard. She’d been loading the kiln with the masks Obie had asked for for the Parade and trying to meet Ruby on time. Behind the utility rack, on the other side of the wall, a meeting was going on. The Brotherhood most likely. Several had come into the hall, stood behind her door, almost closed it locking her in, and then appeared to be suspicious at finding her there. Something about a man in green giving the signal for things to start.

“Velma coming? Or can I gobble up everything?”