The Tilted World (11 page)

Whether people thought Jesse was still cooking the shine, or whether they assumed he’d recruited some knowledgeable distillers, she didn’t know and didn’t care. For her the pleasure was in the process, in busy hands and rows of jelly jars purring Ball-all-all. After her first twenty-three months of marriage, the paralysis of waiting, the nights with her backside raised, waiting for Jesse to plant the baby who would make her life start, the baby who called for her once in a dream and left her hugging her stomach—she finally had something she could point to, she could build on. She was patient and she was thrifty, the same girl Bernadette Capes had taught to use egg whites for meringue and egg yolks for mayonnaise, and now when she scraped cobs, she used half the kernels for creamed corn and half for the still. She increased production by applying a bandage of bread dough to the cap arm to prevent escaping steam. She hung the green-checked curtains intended for the nursery on the wall of the still, to pretend she had a window. When she finished a batch, she lined the baseboards and shelves of the storage shed with jelly jars. Before leaving at dawn she’d open the door and look back at the work of her hands, the bottles glowing in the morning sun like the lights on the barges pushing down the Mississippi.

She hardly saw Jesse. Once, a few months into her career as a shiner, he came in as she was pouring sugar into the bowl to start the ferment. He said, “How come you’re not measuring?”

Dixie Clay shrugged. “I eyeball.”

“How many cups of sugar you reckon you just poured out?”

“Four,” she said.

“Exactly?”

“Exactly.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

So Jesse lifted the measuring cup from its nail on the wall and withdrew a knife from his boot and flicked it open. Then he dug the cup into the bowl of sugar and leveled the knife across. “One cup,” he counted as he dumped it back into the sack. Dixie Clay was holding her breath. “Two cups . . . three cups . . . four.” And the fourth was level too, and not a grain left in the bowl besides, and Jesse had clapped her on the back and said, “You’re okay, Dixie Clay.”

She grew even more okay. Her whiskey became the best in Washington County. So clear you could read a newspaper through it. About that time, Jesse stopped making the deliveries himself, instead taking on runners who’d motor the
Jeannette
up to their dock. Jesse’s specialty became “client consultations.” His was the face, his was the voice recognized by the guards through the door gratings of speakeasies. He spoke easy. He spoke highball stingers, Charleston bracers, cholera cocktails, orange whiskey sparkles, locomotives, whiskey smashes. He came home smelling like whorehouse. Strange how little Dixie Clay minded, tossing his clothes in the washing machine. Jesse’d bought her the washer. He wanted to use her time wisely. She had orders to fill. Sometimes Jesse asked if she didn’t want to take on some workers. Skipper Hays and his son Gabe, for instance. But Dixie Clay said no. That’s how bootleggers got caught—sooner or later they’d whiskey brag or skim or double-cross or rat or shoot each other’s fool heads off.

And then, for no seeming reason, it got harder to stay up all night in the still. And harder to stir the bubbling mash, to let that poison curl into her nostrils. More than once she forgot if she’d already added the yeast. Then one night she fell asleep on a stack of grain sacks in the shed and let the still overheat—not just ruining the batch but coming close to exploding the still. When she was a girl, a still in Chilton County had exploded, killing five brothers. See, she was acting odd, unlike herself. Maybe she was sick. It wasn’t the influenza because she had seen it in 1918 and knew it came on faster. But still, Jesse said the next doctor who came to buy hooch would give her an exam. And so one did. She was with child.

“Your brother. He’d have been your older brother,” she whispered the strange thought to Willy, who’d been sleeping on the thumper keg. Willy’s faint eyebrows twitched, he was waking. Good, she’d missed him. She slid her hands beneath him, warm and soft as dough risen in a bowl. She lifted him onto her shoulder and swayed and sang,
Trouble, trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days
: it was the cowboy’s song she crooned in Willy’s seashell ear, and together they waltzed around the still.

Chapter 7

T
he morning after drinking with Ham and Jesse, Ingersoll woke late into a helmet of headache. After a minute, he swung his feet to the floor and twisted his shoulders and bowed and arched his back, each movement giving its own pop or snick. The bathroom was down the hall so he gathered his towels, looking forward to the hot water but not to pulling dirty clothes over his clean body. He promised himself a new getup today. When he opened his door, he nearly tripped on a bundle, which turned out to be a new red Henley shirt and stiff dungarees, and balanced on top, a party favor—a small waxed envelope of BC Headache Powder.

Ham could do that. Could surprise you.

After showering and dressing, Ingersoll walked downstairs, and he found Ham standing before the hall tree in clean clothes as well, with a new oyster-colored nutria hat that he blocked in his fingertips and then pressed on his springy red hair. They met eyes in the mirror and Ham grinned.

“I know you’re too fond of that old brown derby to part with it,” he said.

“Can’t say I fancy a new hat, but after bacon and eggs we could buy us some new boots.” Ingersoll raised a bare foot. He’d left his wet boots steaming on his radiator, beside the long, limp tongues of socks.

“No bacon and eggs for us, dewdrop.” Ham gestured to the door of the dining room where a sign read
BREAKFAST 6 A.M. TO 8 A.M., SHARP!
and beneath that, in cursive,
Mrs. Stanley Vatterott.

“Ah, hell.”

Ham shrugged. “Banana?” He lifted a large bowl from the sideboard and set it on the coffee table, and Ingersoll snapped a banana from the bunch, peeled it, and ate it in three bites, then another. The boardinghouse was quiet, just the ticking of the Mora clock standing in the corner, all the engineers already on the levee.

“Catch me up,” said Ingersoll.

Between bites of banana, Ham told him about arriving and taking his supper with the other roomers, eight men around an oblong table, Mrs. Vatterott at the head ordering a poor Irish housegirl thither and yon. A few of the boarders were newspapermen, a few government men, and a pair of Atlanta engineers. It was these on whom Ham eavesdropped discussing the flood level, now a record fifty-three feet. They were overseeing the building of mud boxes—planks nailed together and propped up by sandbags—to fight the wave wash. But they didn’t think the levees would hold, despite the fact the levee commission had halted the car ferry. The engineer on the right said his wife had asked him to return home, and he was going. “The flood of 1922 only reached fifty-one feet,” he said, “and we saw what happened there.”

The engineers were discussing the weakest spots on the levee, and the best location to have dynamited the meander bend,
if
the deal had gone through and the town accepted the bid from New Orleans. Ham saw one of the engineers tip up a battered flask so when the
Times Pic
reporter on the left excused himself, Ham slid into the empty chair. They chatted for a bit about the Braves, and before long the flask was passed his way, just a spit-sip left but delicious. Where can I get more a that, Ham had asked. The one who was heading home said, Try Club 23. Who should I speak with, Ham pressed. “Local man named Jesse is in charge,” said the engineer. “But he won’t sell it to you directly. Ask for Mo, the manager, an Arab.”

So Ham had gone scouting, turning down a brick alley by Freeland’s law firm and knowing he was getting closer when he found a red high heel in a puddle. Beside a high stack of wooden crates, a reinforced door opened just enough when he knocked for a password to thread through. In place of a password, Ham found a twenty worked fine.

He didn’t have to work to figure out who was Jesse. The whole joint seemed centered around him, the piano player angling his mouth to croon in Jesse’s direction, the bartender polishing a glass and holding it to the light, Ham was saying, as if for Jesse to admire his crystal-clear face. “Strange how a small man can command a room,” said Ham, peeling another banana.

Ingersoll grunted. He was recalling the restaurant the night before, how Jesse had sent a round of drinks to a table where the police captain’s high-crowned navy hat was propped on the corner of the banquette. A single finger was raised in acknowledgment of the whiskey, a single finger raised in acknowledgment of the acknowledgment, like Pat Collins ordering up fastballs from Herb Pennock.

“What happened then?” asked Ingersoll.

Ham said that he started drinking with some engineers and made like he engineered, too, not a difficult bluff after their bridge detail in the war. Jesse made rounds like a politician, and Ham offered him a drink, and Jesse said, “No, I’m buying
you
a drink,” and before long they were round for round and agreed to have dinner the next night. Ham didn’t get anything much out of him but knew, sure as a cat has a climbing gear, that Jesse was their ticket to the moonshining.

By now Ingersoll had eaten three speckled bananas, and Ham had eaten three speckled bananas, and they’d each eaten a green one and regretted it. The Irish housemaid pushed through the swinging door from the kitchen and saw the men and the peels, like a ball of winter snakes, and gave a squeak and flapped back through the door.

Ham watched the freeze-frames of her skinny backside hurrying away. “I’d like to fatten her up. Feed her a potato.”

“Ham, everything you say sounds nasty.”

“You arse licker. Not everything.” Ham grinned. “Now, to business. Let’s hit the town.”

“Don’t you wanna hear what happened with the baby?”

“You got rid of it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what’s to hear? Come on.”

I
n Ginsberg & Levine Dry-Goods, they each bought a Coca-Cola and a bag of Planters Peanuts and shook them into the bottles and sipped as they examined the footwear. Ingersoll favored cowboy boots but needed something watertight and lifted a leather lace-up from its display.

“Floodproof ?” Ingersoll asked the clerk, who was pulling up a trapezoidal wooden box, a stool he used while fitting the customer.

“Not entirely,” said the clerk. “But that one is.” He gestured with his chin toward the highest platform of the display, lumberman’s boots with vulcanized rubber bottoms. Ingersoll upended the boot and whistled to read $4.25.

“I hope you got some of your Hoover dollars left,” Ham said, “and didn’t spend ’em all on baby duds.”

Ingersoll bought the pair and then returned to where he’d been sitting to pull them on. Ham, having tried and rejected the other three models already, stretched his legs and wiggled his toes in his socks.

“I’ll take the same,” he said to the clerk. “And they better be waterproof as a frog’s ass. Size 11 right foot, size 12 left.”

The clerk, stacking the boxes Ham had heeled away, looked up. “I can’t sell them like that, sir,” he said. “Unless you wanted to buy both pairs.”

“Now, why would I want to do that?”

“But, sir—”

“I got different-size dogs. You gonna discriminate against me? Got different-size balls, too, for that matter. Hey,” he called brightly to Ingersoll, “you think that’s related?”

Ingersoll, wearing his new boots, walked to the door but not before he heard Ham’s next gambit: “Why, sure you can sell the mismatched pair. Bet you have a whole posse of one-legged veterans hopping around. Unless . . . this is a town of dodgers?”

Ingersoll crossed the gallery to the barrel, lifted his old cowboy boots in the air, soles flapping good-bye, and dropped them in. He knew Ham would emerge shod and shitgrinning. Meanwhile, he lit a cigar and leaned against the post and gazed at the sky the color of old dimes sliced by a levee that banked around the river’s curve, higher than the two-story buildings the next street over, and he thought of living next to such a structure, a massive mound of earth walling out the mightiest of rivers. Until it couldn’t anymore. The river took a turn much like this below New Orleans, at a place called Poydras. In the flood of ’22, the levee had collapsed at the Poydras bend and a wall of water 115 feet tall exploded onto the land, flooding Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes. It was what saved New Orleans that time around. But what would save New Orleans—what would save any of them—now? The river had already exceeded the ’22 record levels, and “water in sight”—the upriver tributaries—showed the crest was still about a week away.

Ham stepped out in his new boots, pants tucked inside, and roostered down the gallery to Ingersoll. They mounted the horses and snugged their hats on, Ham his new and Ingersoll his old. It felt heavy, and he wondered if it would ever dry out. Or if he would. He should have bought another BC Powder.

They rode along Broad Street, past the McLain Hotel, along a row of parked cars, to the bottom of the levee, where two white men in yellow slickers stood beside a third sitting in the cab of his truck, a rifle propped on his knees.

“Who’re y’all?” asked the guard with the rifle.

“Engineers,” Ham said.

The guard nodded, so they nudged their horses up the incline behind another pair of men who were using a bullwhip to drive a soggy mule, a pallet roped behind it and piled with sandbags.

At the top, Ham pointed. “You head right, and I’ll head this way. Make friends and listen sharp.” They’d already decided not to search for the still, reckoning it was on Jesse’s land, and searching might alert him. Better to see if they could sidle into the operation sideways, probably by befriending some of the distributors. Over the years they’d found this worked best. They’d come to a new town, taste the shine, and say, “Shit, you call this whiskey?” And then, because they knew their stuff, “This run was allowed to boil.” Or “Look how fat these bubbles are—might as well be drinking ginger ale for all the alcohol in it.” And soon enough, the shiners would approach them.

Ingersoll and Horace picked their way along the muddy road that topped the levee, with its line of poles where lanterns would illuminate the rain come evening. To Ingersoll’s right, the commerce of Hobnob, its dock and railroad station and town hall and smokestacks. To his left, kicking up spray, the waves of the Mississippi, looking more like an angry ocean than any river. It was unsettling to have it so close when one got used to seeing the levee slope down at a forty-degree angle to a giant ditch, and beyond the ditch, a flat, cracked, red soil floodplain, an acre or two across, scrub trees wrapped with detritus from last spring’s rising, broken bottles and rags of burlap and rotted wooden crates. Now the river actually topped the levee and only the sandbags held it back, and still it was lapping, lapping, lapping in, like the sea at high tide, closer to your feet with each wave.
Sea of Mississippi,
he thought. Was that a song? Should be. He wondered if his guitar was warping, coffined up in that locker in Memphis. He thought of that taterbug mandolin he’d discovered on Dixie Clay’s porch while waiting for her to return. He’d tuned it a step and a half below standard so he could play the blues keys.

Ingersoll slid off to take a piss, leaning back on his heels for purchase where the grass was slicked down like the hair of a balding man, and he could feel the levee wavering like a struck tuning fork. Horace felt it too and flicked his ears as a big wave slapped the levee just ahead of them and sent a flange of spray over their legs. Horace danced sideways and nickered. Back in the saddle, Ingersoll laid a palm on the horse’s neck where a thick vein pulsed. He allowed Horace to turn them and trot forward, which felt better. Not that they could outrun the river if the levee blew.

He thought of Dixie Clay and the baby. How safe were they? That house was plenty close to the river. Still, he recalled her with that gun braced at her shoulder and figured they’d be okay somehow.

Ham still thought he’d dumped the baby in an orphanage in Greenville and he felt uneasy about that. But Ham didn’t seem to want any details.

“Shh, now, it’s okay,” he said, to himself or Horace he wasn’t sure.

He rode along, each post propping up a guard. Often he slid down, especially where men were gathered, discussing the closing of the bridges at Flannery and Wyatt. What he was listening for he didn’t exactly know. He perked up when the first guard offered him the same whiskey he’d drunk with Jesse, but later he realized all the guards had that whiskey. And they were all on edge. “Hope one a these foggy nights some Arkansas bastards make it across and try the part
I’m
guarding,” said Bill Griffith, the former shoeshine, now a sandbagger as the whole town had pretty much decided to hell with shined shoes. Bill rattled the cartridges in his pocket and rocked back on his heels. “Damn right,” said another.

“Boil!” came a shout down the levee. “Boil! Boil!”

Ingersoll ran with the others to the geyser, thick as a man’s arm, water shooting twenty feet into the air. They grabbed sandbags and heaved them at the base of the boil, stacking them around the bubbling sand to create equilibrium. The water bounced down to head level, then knee level, then fell with a splash. The men stood watching as if it were a tunnel to hell. “A dirty boil,” said Bill. “Punched a hole through the levee.” The others nodded grimly or dragged sleeves across their faces to wipe the water that had splashed there. After a few more moments, Bill spat on the bubbling mud and turned and they all trudged back to their poles and resumed guarding.

When it was one o’clock, the train station whistle blew for a shift change and the men bandy-legged down the slick levee, converging on the makeshift mess in the train depot. This would be a good time for eavesdropping, so Ingersoll joined them. About a quarter of them were Negroes, milling about, waiting for the whites to eat first, and they looked and sounded so much like those he’d known in Chicago that he felt oddly homesick. The carbide lamp glazed the broad forehead of a one-armed man he could have sworn used to flip burgers at BBB, and another, whose long face was bisected by a wide mustache, like a barber’s comb, could have been the brother of a harmonica player who owed him a fiver. And for all Ingersoll knew, they
were
brothers; many Chicago Negroes started in Mississippi before booking passage on the
City of New Orleans
to the City of Big Shoulders. So as Ingersoll passed the sandbaggers, he kept hearing familiar expressions—not “it’s going to rain,” but “it’s fixing to,” not “I can barely lift it,” but “I can’t hardly”—someone pulling from a lunch pail exactly what he’d expect, a drumstick wrapped in a napkin transparent with grease, someone else with a guitar under the station overhang and strumming what Ingersoll could strum better, Alberta Hunter’s “I walk the floor, wring my hands, and cry.”