The Tilted World (15 page)

“Mighty poor town to be setting up the captain in a fancy new car,” said Ham.

“Captain’s on the take.” Ingersoll turned the cane-back chair around and swung a leg over. “But we’d guessed as much.”

A pause grew as they worried about Hoover. They wouldn’t use the phone downstairs—it was a party line, with three rings to indicate the call was for the rooming house. They’d have to find a private line, maybe at the post office, and wait until Hoover could be reached at whatever train station he’d be visiting.

Ham opened the drawer of his nightstand and removed a leather grooming case that he must have purchased at the dry goods. He set it on a Bible marked “Property of Mrs. S. R. Vatterott—Do Not Steal,” and slid out small scissors and a bone comb and angled a round shaving mirror so he could see his face. He swiveled his head from side to side and trimmed a few stray hairs that were coming in white and of a coarser texture than his coarse red muttonchops. Then he set to combing the chops, and Ingersoll knew he was pondering what they should do.

“Okay,” Ham said. “We’d better ratchet things up. It’s time to confirm that the still’s on Jesse’s land, and see if we can spot who’s working it, and get them to talk. One of us needs to do that, the other phone Hoover.”

The cane-back chair was fraying and Ingersoll tried to press an errant straw back into its weave. He didn’t want any part of either.

“I’ll telephone Hoover,” Ham decided. He clicked the scissors closed and slid them into their case.

So Ingersoll had to go to Jesse’s house—her house. “No, I’ll find a telephone. You go to his house.”

“Naw,” said Ham. “I’m tired a horses. Hate the way they smoosh my gems.” Ham reached a hand into his pants to give them a shake. “I’ll be sterile as a mule, and the world devoid of little Hamsters.” He removed his hand and lifted up the mirror to admire his grooming. “You ride on out. But be careful. Somebody’s out there cooking the shine while Jesse’s goosing the coat check girl. And that somebody’s probably nervous as a pig at a barbecue.”

“Everybody’s gonna be nervous, once word of the explosives gets out.”

“After I reach Hoover, I’ll go to the levee. We better pray that there’s no fog until Hoover has time to send in more agents. Jesus, Ing, fifty pounds of dynamite. And army issue, so it’s probably old, sawdust soaked in nitroglycerin and then wrapped in wax paper. The sticks weeping all to shit, crystallized, the case never turned over once, is my guess. And now it’s here.” Ham was sitting on the bed, his gray eyes narrowed, staring at the wall as if a vision of Armageddon were projected on it. They’d seen photos of Dorena, Missouri, after the levee had collapsed. Houses on concrete blocks were simply swatted away. Houses on foundations filled with water. Folks had rushed to their attics and then axed holes through the ceilings to climb out onto their roofs, where they’d been rescued. Or some of them had. And that was Missouri. This far south, river at fifty-four feet and the flood crest bearing down, it would be much, much worse.

“You’ll have to figure out where Jesse lives,” Ham continued. “I know it’s out in the country a far piece, south of town. Place called Sugar Hill. He doesn’t sell from his house anymore, but he doesn’t know we know that, so if you happen to get caught, say you come to buy hooch.”

If Ham had been looking in the mirror instead of slipping the grooming case back into the drawer, he might have seen a struggle on Ingersoll’s face. Why he didn’t tell Ham he knew the house, knew the wife, he didn’t know, but his instinct was to hide the fact that just over a week ago he’d been there, trying not to get shot by a firecracker of a gal who didn’t come up to his shoulder. Hell, barely came up to his ribs, he thought, and remembered the two of them standing close and looking down at Junior’s face.

For something to do, he brushed Ham’s muttonchop trimmings off the bed with the back of his hand, then walked to the window. They were on the second floor with a good view of most of the square, the people below rushing to work. Outside, he saw a newspaper gust by and tent itself against the face of a suited man, who flung it aside, where it landed on the face of the man behind him.

Ingersoll rose. “See you at dinner.”

H
e was a staid horse, Horace, without a levee trembling beneath him. He plodded along under Ingersoll, splashing through gutters that were like small streams, breaking stride only to jump the whirlpool over the sewer grate by City Hall where a turtle circled helplessly. Ingersoll hated to see it and raised his head to the loud crows on the telephone wire, looking like notes on a music score. Christ, he missed his guitar. After a few years as partners, he and Ham had acquired a Ford. They’d confiscated it from bootleggers, who’d installed an extra gas tank to hide whiskey, and Ingersoll reconverted it so they could drive twice as far without gassing up. There’d been nights, plenty of nights, when he and Ham had driven through strange country. Usually Ham rode shotgun but sometimes they’d switch so Ingersoll could reach an arm through the window and pull his guitar from the rope on the roof. He’d taught himself to play left-handed, the neck out the window, belting the blues into the air frisking him at fifty miles an hour. He’d like to be holding it now, that lovely Slingerland May-Bell acoustic, style number 5.

Might as well add it to the list of things he’d like to be holding.

The pavement ended and the telephone line, too, and patches of woods alternated with cornfields where the wind gusted stronger, tugging a tear from Horace’s eye. Ingersoll gave up trying to light his dime cigar. This Natchez tobacco wasn’t for shit. Best thing about it was the box, which featured Alcazar—now that was a beautiful horse. “Nothing against you, Horace,” he said and patted his mount’s neck. He should have kept that box and built himself a throwaway guitar.

The rhythm of the horse took him into reverie, and he found himself picturing his return to Dixie Clay’s, in his new clothes, riding down the drive and her running with Junior in her arms to thank him. Ingersoll would say—

A horn spooked him, and he shook his head as a Ford swerved around Horace.
Don’t matter if you have a new shirt, that gal’s married, even if it’s to a husband that doesn’t deserve her or Junior. Hell, Junior’s probably not even Junior anymore.
What would they name him?

Ingersoll himself had once been a celebrated namer of babies. This began when he was about six, and he came upon Sister Mary Eunice doing intake on a newborn. The baby had been left the previous night on the stoop in a black leather doctor’s satchel. Beside Mary Eunice was a novitiate she was training. Ingersoll was too short to see what they were doing on the examining table, but he stood beside Sister’s elbow.

“Six pounds, six ounces,” the head sister told the novitiate, who scratched her pencil in the ledger. He heard, too, the snap of the measuring tape. “Length, twenty inches.” More scratches, another snap. “Head, thirteen inches. And as for name . . .”

Now there was a pause as the sister whisked the yellow measuring tape from the table and began to coil it. She leaned farther over the table. “Peter?”

Sister Mary Eunice held the baby up now and faced it toward the nun-in-training, who tapped her pencil on her pooched lips.

“Yes, I think so,” said the novitiate.

“Well, then. Peter.”

And the pencil scratched again.

The next day at recess Ingersoll was chasing the kickball when he ran smack into the kneecap of Sister Mary Eunice, connecting solidly through her immense black gown and ending once and for all the discussion among the boys about whether she had legs under there or just wheels. She rubbed her knee as he rubbed his and tried not to cry.

“Come sit,” she said.

He did. It was brisk, but the slats of the bench were warm on the back of his legs. They watched a few dried leaves crabbing across the asphalt and the sister stopped rubbing and rested her arm on Ingersoll’s shoulders.

“Companionable, isn’t it?”

But he was thinking about something else. “Sister? Yesterday, with that doctor-bag baby? How did you know its name?”

“Well, I didn’t at first. But if I give a quick prayer, it seems the right name comes to me.”

“And Peter was the right name?”

“Did you see that baby, Teddy?”

He nodded. He’d seen the baby later in its bed.

“Did he look like a Peter to you?”

“Yes, Sister.”

She smiled. They watched the kickball game for a few rounds.

“Sister?”

“What is it, Teddy?”

“Is that how you came up with my name? How come I’m a Teddy?”

“Yes, that’s so.”

The rubber ball bounced to his feet and he caught it and threw it back into the game. “Sister, can anyone do that? I mean, could I?”

“Name a baby?”

He nodded.

“Certainly. You’ll name the next one.”

He waited, but it took almost three weeks before another baby arrived. He’d already been considering names but chased them out as soon as they sidled in, because he knew it was important to match the name to the baby. So when one came, that’s what he did. He studied its wrinkly face, one of those babies who looks like an old man, dark downy hair along the edges of his face like sideburns. Ingersoll closed his eyes and said a little prayer that went, “God, please tell me his name.”

And God said, “Brendan.”

And Ingersoll said, “Brendan.”

And Sister Mary Eunice confirmed it. “Brendan,” she said with a nod. “It’s a powerful name, Teddy. It’s a voyager’s name. St. Brendan traveled for seven years, don’t you know, sailed the seas and discovered North America.”

Poor Sister, she didn’t know about Columbus. But he was glad she liked the name. And it stuck. Everyone in the orphanage used it and he was proud each time he heard it and the baby was chosen by new parents within three days. Good-bye, Brendan, tiny voyager.

They let him name another. Emboldened, he pronounced the next baby Ivanhoe the Third. The nuns loved it; he heard them saying the name wherever he went. “This boy has a great imagination,” one nun said to a couple wearing matching tweed coats who had come for a baby. The nun smoothed his hair with her palm and nudged him toward them. “A bright boy,” she continued. “He named our newest baby ‘Ivanhoe the Third.’ ”

“A baby? You have a baby?” said the tweedy woman. The nun sighed and led them down the hallway.

Ingersoll didn’t care. He was the namer. It was his responsibility. It was a big job for a big boy. Someone’s name mattered in who they grew up to be.

The next baby he named “Felix Xanadu.” Sister Mary Eunice paused and looked up over the log to say, “That’s a mouthful, Teddy.”

“Yes,” he said soberly. “It’s meant to be. But he also has a nickname. XX.”

“XX, that’s his nickname, is it? Well, that will be easy to write in his gowns.”

And before too long, the nickname had a nickname, for they started calling the baby “Twenty.”

Until Monsignor O’Shaughnessy visited and got wind of Baby Twenty and said to Sister Mary Eunice, “Do you really believe it proper to treat these poor abandoned children as jokes?”

It put an end to Ingersoll’s name game and stung a bit, too. Naming was no joke, Ingersoll understood that.

He thought on the names as he grew. At eight he realized the names he’d chosen at six were silly, and he felt a bit ashamed, sending out into the world a boy who’d forever be tethered to “Ivanhoe the Third,” when “the Third” is supposed to mean your pop had that name, and his pop, too. At ten he realized no one had been tethered to the names he’d chosen; the parents who adopted the babies would rename them, the nuns had known that all along, so his responsibility, his grand task, was nothing that amounted to anything, just a label to call a baby for three days, and a way to distract a small boy from the fact that no one wanted to adopt him, and he felt shame all over again. As a man of twenty-eight he thought of those names still, and the babies he’d hung them on. He wondered where they were and who they’d become and if they knew they’d once worn a different name, a God-given name whispered straight into Ingersoll’s unwashed ear. And though he’d never admit it to anyone, certainly not Ham, he still kind of liked the name Felix Xanadu.

Now the road had gotten hilly and he recalled this stretch from when he rode out with Junior, knew he was close. Ingersoll was at the fourth hill when a squat yellow dog with a peg for a tail appeared. It had a long fish, a mullet, looked like, in its jaws. Ingersoll whistled but it veered wide and kept going, purposeful, its coat wet and tail aimed down, the fish like a handlebar mustache.

The much-missed sun came out as they climbed the fifth hill and Ingersoll decided he should take the rest on foot. He gigged Horace into a copse of cottonwoods, tied him to a foxgrape vine, the kind a boy likes to swing on, next to a ditch swarming with crawfish, small clear ones, shrimplike. Ham had jawed to Ingersoll about these creatures, mud-bugs he called them, claiming they ate them in Louisiana, luring them with string and a lump of bacon from the holes where they blew bubbles. Just another story that might be only a story—you never knew with Ham.

Ingersoll looked around to get his bearings and grabbed his Winchester and set off to find that yellow dog’s fish market, a stream called the Gou-ga-something, an Indian name. He’d find the dock and see what kind of boat Jesse had, then trace the stream to find the still. He wondered if Dixie Clay had any inkling her husband was a bootlegger. Sometimes the wives truly didn’t know.

He didn’t fear making noise, the pine needles beneath his feet damp and springy, and soon he could hear the stream and smell it too, fresh-crisp yet woodsy, like the cool dim icehouse with its block of ice packed in sawdust. The sun felt good warming the back of his neck, and it prismed through the beads of water standing up on the green moss.

The stream must usually have banks but was so fat now it just ran up into the marshy grass. He had to step high to make progress, and with this strange thing called a sun shining down, he was getting hot and stopped behind a sweet gum to unbutton his coat, watching a robin tug a long shoelace of a worm from the ground, and that was when he heard her.