The Tilted World (28 page)

“Jeannette. I need to know where Willy is.”

Jeannette didn’t startle. She merely looked up and gave an indolent stretch of an arm, bangles clacking. “Why, whadd’ya know, if it isn’t Dipsie Dirt, darling little Dipsie Dirt.” Jeannette spoke slowly, long pauses between her words. She let her arm fall heavily on the mattress and turned her head to Ingersoll. Her movements seemed underwatery. “And what do we have here? My my, the back door man? The one who cuckolded Jesse?” She appraised him and stage-whispered, “Nice work, Dipsie. Didn’t know you had it in you.” She made a show of running her tongue across her teeth. “Looks like he’s running on all sixes.”

“Jeannette,” said Dixie Clay. “Where’s Willy?”

Jeannette patted the mattress by her hip and said to Ingersoll, “C’mere and give me a taste.”

Dixie Clay leaned over the cot. “Where’s Willy?”

“A wittle bitty taste.” Jeannette plucked a strand of hair from her cot and dropped it over the edge. “Don’t suppose you have any hooch on you, huh?”

“Where’s Willy?”

“Or some morphy? Some Uncle Morphy? Maybe we could make a trade.”

“Jeannette,” she said again, moving into her vision, bringing her face close. “Tell me where Willy is and I’ll get you anything you want.”

“I don’t need him anymore, you know. I’m going to have my own baby. A real baby, not some hand-me-down.”

“Okay. Where’s Willy?”

“Feel,” she said. She grabbed Dixie Clay’s hand from the cot and flattened her fingers against the cool silk slip. “Did you feel that? Did you feel it kick?”

Dixie Clay shot Ingersoll a look and Jeannette saw it and flung the hand away and pounded the mattress with a fist. Then she seemed to go in reverse. She smiled and whispered, “Wait,” and reached for the hem of her slip and drew it up her thighs, up her belly, to her breasts. She had on black lace panties with garter clips that dangled, no stockings. Her body was skinny, sallow, two greenish half-dollar bruises on her hip.

“Feel again,” she said. Dixie Clay didn’t move and Jeannette reached forward to grab her hand and flatten it on her belly, which was sunken and damp and prickled with gooseflesh.

“Do you feel?” demanded Jeannette. “Do you feel the life inside of me?”

“Yes, yes, I feel it,” said Dixie Clay.

Jeannette grinned and closed her eyes and yanked her slip back down. “Told cha. Told cha I was gonna have a real one. A boy.” She laughed and said “Told cha” again and turned her head into the pillow and repeated “Told cha, told cha, told cha,” the sound muffled. Then she rolled back, a childish cunning in her eyes. “You know, Jesse only married you because you’re shorter than he is.”

The woman was actually trying to wound her with this. “Where’s Willy?”

“Maybe I’ll name my baby Jesse. After his father.” With that Jeannette rolled her face back into the pillow and they could hear her laugh, muffled but still terrible.

From the front came the nurse’s command: “You two! You’ll have to leave now. Go to the third floor to fill out her release papers.”

Dixie Clay looked at Ingersoll, who put his hand on her back and seemed to transfer strength through it.
Okay,
she thought,
what else can I try?
She lifted a hip to perch lightly on Jeannette’s cot and slowly reached out to stroke the blond hair. She almost crooned in Jeannette’s ear, stroking the stiff locks, “Jeannette, Jeannette, that’s a good girl.”

Jeannette turned her face toward Dixie Clay and gave a small humming sigh.

“That’s a good girl.” Dixie Clay kept stroking. “You’re a good girl, Jeannette. And you’re having your own baby. Congratulations, Jeannette!”

Jeannette smiled, her eyes closed.

“You don’t need Willy. A castoff. An orphan.”

“That old thing?” Jeannette blew the air from her mouth, which fluffed her blond bangs. “That old thing. Cries all the time. Boo hoo hoo! What a crybaby. Mine’s not gonna cry.”

Again the nurse yelled from the front. “Folks! These are not visiting hours! Proceed to the third floor.”

Dixie Clay kept stroking, speaking into Jeannette’s ear. “That’s right, Jeannette, that’s right. Willy cries too much. Where is he? Is he in Greenville? Is he with somebody?”

“Mine’s gonna gimme sugar. All the time, sugar.”

“That’s right, Jeannette. You deserve a good baby. Where’d you put that bad old baby? Jeannette?”

Jeannette rolled onto her back and stiffened on the cot and drew a hand to her brow and gave a mock salute to Ingersoll. Then she launched into the soldier’s song, in a voice high but surprisingly clear: “Over there!” she sang and jerked her thumb to the side, the fox head on her chest bouncing. “Over there!” She kept singing, again with the thumb. “Send the word, send the word, over there . . . That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming . . . The drums rum-tumming, ev’rywhere!”

Dixie Clay met Ingersoll’s eyes and he half shrugged, half motioned to the door. She followed him, hoping he’d have a strategy, down the row of cots as Jeannette’s voice sailed after them, “So prepare! Say a prayer! Send the word, send the word, to beware!”

“Can’t you shut her up?” called the patient named Laura as they hustled past. “I’d like to slap her six ways to Sunday.”

They skirted the nurse, who was looking down, taking a pulse, and Ingersoll pushed open the doors and when he did, she saw the sign
PEDIATRIC WARD,
with an arrow to the right, where Jeannette’s thumb had gestured.

Now Dixie Clay was running down the hallway and around the corner and bouncing off a rolling cart that clanged with metal instruments and then she was pushing wild-eyed through swinging doors, calling “Willy!”

It was a ward like the one Jeannette had been in, but louder, layers of wailing strafing the air, with a low row of children’s cots to the left and baby beds to the right. Through the slats of the nearest one she could see a blanket and a foot and she knew Willy’s foot and she flew to the crate and looked down.

Willy. Willy! Oh my God. Willy.
He looked the same, he looked fine, he was hers. He was sleeping and she reached in and slipped her trembling hands behind his back and lifted him and his weight was so familiar, the good thunk of his heavy head on her chest. The smell of him, she could have scouted him in the dark.

“Ma’am?” A nurse appeared beside them.

Willy opened his eyes and saw Dixie Clay and seemed neither surprised nor pleased. His eyes closed again. Sleepy baby. Sleepy baby doesn’t even know what he’s been through.

“Ma’am?”

Dixie Clay smiled and inhaled his head, dizzy from it.

“Ma’am? Can I help you?”

Dixie Clay with the baby clasped under her chin turned to face the nurse.

“Who are you?” the nurse asked.

“This is my baby. I’ve been searching and fearing I wouldn’t find him but I found him.” She pulled Willy away from her chest so she could look at him. He was even more beautiful. He seemed bigger, which was crazy. How could he look bigger in just two days? She smiled and looked up, but the nurse had squinchy eyes behind her glasses.
She thinks I’m crazy,
realized Dixie Clay.

She felt Ingersoll’s arm slide around her to support her bad arm, which she couldn’t remove from the baby’s neck, though holding him hurt.

“It’s real,” she told Willy. “It’s really real. I found you.” She hugged Willy close and then pulled him away again to look at his face, but her hands were shaking so that the skin underneath his chin was vibrating. Then she needed his skin on hers again and hugged him to her chest. She smiled at Ingersoll through her tears.

The nurse stood looking from Dixie Clay to Ingersoll to the baby. “But . . . this baby’s mother is in the infirmary. She’s a . . . she’s unwell. Her name is Jeannette Lovelady. Look, it says so here.” The nurse pointed to a square of cardboard in a plastic sleeve attached to the front of the baby bed. She tapped it twice with her fingernail, as if that would clarify all.

Ingersoll said, “That woman is not the baby’s mother. This here is his mother.”

Dixie Clay was pressing kisses all over the baby’s head. Her hand cupped his skull. Her hand was a ragged dirty dried-bloody raccoon paw on the perfect baby’s perfect downy head.

“I don’t know,” said the nurse. “I don’t know about that. I—I need Nurse Strom. Y’all stay here, I’ll be right back.”

Ingersoll nodded and watched the nurse scurry out of the ward, looking back at them as she pushed through the swinging doors.

“What do we do now?” asked Dixie Clay.

“Now,” said Ingersoll, “we run.”

Chapter 19

T
hey ran. Ingersoll with Willy on his shoulder and Dixie Clay’s hand in his. They ran through the Pediatric Ward and along the crowded hallway and over the legs of patients sitting against the plaster wall and past the crowded nurses’ station and a medicine locker where Ingersoll doubled back to snatch some medical tape and aspirin while Dixie Clay kept a lookout for Nurse Strom. They ran around buckets catching leaks and then around the janitor pushing a few inches of water across the floor with a long broom like a mustache and down the stairs into the lobby still flooded knee-high and seething with the injured then past the nurse in the waders who was lifting a bloody towel off the face of a man on a stretcher and to the door where they saw the same receptionist, still holding the front door open with her backside and still bailing. Ingersoll tugged Dixie Clay to a splashless stroll. When the nurse managed to straighten up, Dixie Clay was walking stiffly past, close to Ingersoll to block the baby that he held against his stomach.

“Well, that was quick!” chirped the nurse. “All better, are we?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am, all better now,” Dixie Clay sang back.

They waded to their boat, which was blocked in, and Ingersoll settled Dixie Clay and Willy and then grabbed the line and pulled the boat clear, past the grizzled woman fanning her fat husband who was still swearing he wouldn’t go in. At the end of the flooded lawn Ingersoll hauled himself into the boat and pulled the cord and the motor caught and then they were chugging away from King’s Daughters, Dixie Clay resolutely, rigidly forward like a carved Egyptian idol though she confessed when they were around the corner and onto Arnold Avenue that she had been expecting Nurse Strom to throw open the window of King’s Daughters and order all the king’s men to seize them.

By the time they hit Main Street, one side lined with the scaffolding boardwalk, they’d slowed because of the boat traffic. No one seemed to be following them—Dixie Clay whipped her head around to check. Her pain, which had receded in the rush of finding Willy, now seemed to be reclaiming her. In a store window, Ingersoll caught her wan reflection, eyes like two chestnuts in a pail of buttermilk.

“Dixie Clay, we should take a break.”

“Don’t you think we should get clear of Greenville first?”

“I do not. We need to rest, and eat, and get supplies. And I gotta find Ham. But first things first. And—look here.”

It was a store, Neilson’s Apparel for Men, Women, and Children.The water came up to the fourth of the five steps, so it was open. They tied the boat to the scaffolding and hopped from the boardwalk onto the top step and walked to the racks and quickly selected some basics, which were totaled up and wrapped in paper, and Ingersoll paid with four of the eight wet dollars that the fake preacher had scoffed at. They asked for dressing rooms and a clerk with pince-nez dangling on a chain led them back and showed Dixie Clay the women’s and walked Ingersoll to the men’s. As soon as Ingersoll saw, beneath the saloon door of his stall, the loafers of the clerk walk away, he scooted across the hall to the women’s side.

“Hey,” he said, and knuckle-knocked. “Can I come in?”

“I reckon so,” said Dixie Clay. “Can’t get this blouse off anyway.”

Ingersoll hooked an arm over the door and unlatched it. She’d nestled Willy, asleep, in a terrycloth robe on the settee. Ingersoll tried to help her with the buttons but the torn shirt caught on her splint so in the end he ripped it off, Dixie Clay giggling when it summoned the clerk, who then hurried away, muttering, “Oh my stars, oh my stars.”

When she turned, he saw the bruise on her chest in the shape of a boot. He could barely stand to look, but he had to, gently prodded and verified it was just a bruise. Her arm was still purple and puffy but seemed to be setting fine.

Now for the ribs. He asked her to breathe in and out and the uneven rippling of her chest confirmed it, two broken ribs. He took from his pocket the packet of aspirin he’d lifted from the hospital, a paltry thing but better than nothing, and tore it open into her palm and watched her swallow, then yanked out an arm’s length of medical tape—another sharp sound to entertain the clerk—and ripped it off with his teeth.

“Is this going to hurt?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Hold here,” he ordered, tapping the top of the stall. When she did, he said, “Exhale all the air from your lungs.” Then he pressed the tape on her sternum and wrapped it around her ribs all the way to her spine, Dixie Clay not making a sound but her knuckles like white marbles under her skin. Another strip of tape laid parallel, then two more and it was done. She let her breath out shakily.

He lifted her stiff new brassiere while she guided her arms in and then he went behind to fasten the difficult contraption. Their eyes met in the mirror and he thought,
What a range, what a fullness, she brings out of me. She could be a sister for all the passion in this gesture yet that is a nice thing, too; I wouldn’t have guessed it, never having had a sister, but it is.

By now Willy had woken so they shucked his gray hospital gown in favor of his new blue-checked creeper over a poplin shirt. They agreed there had never been a prettier babe on God’s green earth and that the creeper was worth every cent of the eighty-five they’d paid for it. Then Ingersoll dressed in a red Henley and dungarees identical to the ones he took off and left in the dressing room save for the fact they weren’t wet and shredded, and he placed on his head a new hat, exactly like the one he’d lost in the flood, and yanked on some stiff new cowboy boots, exactly like the ones he’d tumped into the barrel in Hobnob. He swung open the door and the three of them sashayed past the clerk without looking his way, Dixie Clay turning into Ingersoll’s shoulder to muffle a giggle.

Outside they crossed onto the scaffolding and this time when Ingersoll caught their reflection in the storefront glass, he thought—
We look almost respectable,
followed by,
We look like a family.

The reflection also showed a hanging sign with an arrow, four letters naming no less of a miracle than the burning bush:
RIBS.
It hung beside another taped to the window, 2
ND FLOOR OPEN!!!

He took Dixie Clay by the shoulders and steered her to a door propped ajar with a plank that led from the boardwalk onto a set of rickety pull-down stairs. They crossed the plank and ascended, the noise and heat growing as they reached the top, and then they popped through the opening, at the same level of the ankles of dozens of diners, and the smell of, God let it be so, charred pig. They emerged into what had probably been the attic of the restaurant, now jammed with mismatched tables and chairs of different heights and waitresses with large oval platters on their shoulders, each platter holding five racks of ribs. Ingersoll would eat the five racks of ribs and have the platter for dessert.

A waitress swiveled by and addressed him over the tray on her shoulder. “Y’all look like you been rode hard and put up wet.”

Even with the new clothes. “That’s about the truth,” he conceded.

“Got a table just about to finish up. Gimme a sec and I’ll bus it.”

When it was ready, he led Dixie Clay there and they saw where the ribs were coming from—a busboy was leaning out the window, pulling the racks of ribs off meat hooks attached to a pulley. Ingersoll waited until the boy left and stuck his head out and by God if the barbecue pit wasn’t an old train engine. “You gotta see this,” he told Dixie Clay, and she and Willy joined him at the window and they marveled at the red wheels and cowcatcher and brass bell, the grillers shoveling wood into the engine, all wearing waders because they were up to their thighs in water. Ingersoll got Dixie Clay seated again and thought how this was a thing he loved about people—trouble brought out their grit, their creativity. Ribs on pulleys in Greenville, Mississippi; music from a wire in Paris, France; the world held wonders. And now he had these two to share wonders with, he thought, watching Dixie Clay lick her napkin to wipe Willy’s face.

The waitress brought them coffee. “We got ribs,” she said, “or we got ribs.”

Ingersoll nodded and after she admired Willy with a “Well, couldn’t you just sop him up with a biscuit,” she was off, and Ingersoll told Dixie Clay he had to do the same. He’d hurry but he had to go to the sheriff’s to ask after Ham. He wanted her and the baby to stay and rest and eat.

She nodded but looked worried.

“It’s not far,” he told her.

“How do you know?”

“That’s where I took Willy after his parents were shot. I was looking for someone to take him. I tried to give him away there.” He shook his head. “What’s strange? Seems like forever ago. But it was just two weeks.”

“Two weeks,” she said, her turn to shake her head. “Who was I then?” She answered her question quietly. “Just a girl whose life was about to begin.”

He stood and put his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll be back directly. You can report whether Willy likes sucking on a rib bone. Whether he favors hot or mild.”

She laid her hand atop his hand, and then he slid his away and walked down the stairs.

Ingersoll dreaded going to the sheriff’s, and as he boated there he played out what would transpire. Reporting at the desk, announcing his name—he didn’t even want to do that—and explaining who he was, how there’d be phone calls to Hoover and the Prohibition commissioner and the Revenue Agency, how he’d answer questions and then more questions. How very very much he’d have to answer for, how very very few answers he possessed. Usually, Ham did the talking. And now Ham could be dead. Ingersoll didn’t think so, he thought he’d be able to
feel
it, if that were the case—surely a world would feel different, impoverished, without Ham Johnson in it—but he wouldn’t leave this place without knowing.

He arrived at the steps too soon and tied the boat and climbed slowly as men rushed up and down. Inside, the same pretty dark-haired receptionist, on the phone, waved and then held up a finger to him. “Uh-huh,” she said into the receiver. “Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes for his benefit and tucked her fingers into her cleavage to tug out a lace handkerchief, which she used to cover the mouthpiece. Leaning forward, she whispered to Ingersoll, “Says there’s five hundred darkies in the courthouse that can’t be fed and the place smells like a slaughter pen.” She removed the handkerchief and enunciated into the receiver, “Get them to the levee how, sir?” Ingersoll removed his hat and crossed his arms to wait but was too impatient to sit in the chair she gestured to. The receptionist was enjoying the drama. In fact, the whole station buzzed with importance, men rushing by, shouting. The receptionist lifted her hankie to the mouthpiece again and whispered to Ingersoll, “Someone came looking for you.” Then she directed her attention back to the phone call again. “Well, how deep is the water between the courthouse and the levee?”

Meanwhile Ingersoll had started at her words and leaned on her desk, willing her to tell him, let it be Ham.

“That deep, huh? Well, can they swim?” she shrugged for Ingersoll’s benefit. She held up her index finger again, but he couldn’t wait.

“Who? Who came looking?”

Again with the index finger.

“Ma’am? Please?”

Not bothering with the handkerchief, she lifted her mouth away from the receiver to whisper, “He said you’d come. I remembered you ’cause of the baby.”

“Who? What was his name?”

Into the receiver she said, “There’s not room on the levee for five hundred more darkies.”

“Please—”

The index finger. He’d snap it off if she stuck it in the air one more time. Then the finger was lowered to the underside of her desk drawer, which she slid forward. “He left this,” she said.

It was a piece of lined notebook paper folded into a fat rectangle. There was no name on the outside. He unfolded it. Ham’s blocky handwriting:

Meet me in the joint selling ribs, you peckerwood.

Ingersoll crushed the paper to his chest and was out of the office and down the steps three at a time and into the boat and through the water and across the boardwalk and up the restaurant stairs three at a time and poking his head into the room and turning past the legs of diners and there they were, beside Dixie Clay’s, Ham’s irrepressible size 11 and 12 boots.

And then he and Ham were embracing, a thing he’d think about later and realize it was the first time they’d done that, they’d never done that in all those years. Slapping each other’s backs, they were, and then hugging again, Ham’s huge laugh and the diners nearby not even glancing up, too jaded by the sights and shouts of the last few days to be flummoxed.

A
n hour later the pile of bleached bones in the center of the table was as clean as fossils a paleontologist would assemble. Ham was red and sweating and fanning himself with his new high-domed white cowboy hat, which he had blocked porkpie style. Dixie Clay had been a little hesitant with Ham at first, which was natural, Ingersoll figured, given what happened when they met outside the funeral home, but by and by she seemed to be warming.

Now Dixie Clay had Willy faceup, on her gently swaying knees. He’d been fussy and she hadn’t had a bottle for him but the waitress had brought her some milk in a glass with a paper straw and Dixie Clay had held the strange instrument to his mouth and at first he’d gummed it but then he’d sucked and they’d all leaned forward to watch the liquid being drawn up and when it was almost at his lips he quit sucking and dismayed they watched it fall like mercury. She’d held the straw to his lips once more and Willy had sucked again and the cold milk had hit his tongue and his eyes widened and all three cheered and Willy’d drunk until he was sated and calm. Ingersoll had knifed apart some of the ribs for Dixie Clay so she could eat one-handed, and she’d nibbled her fill, and the men, too, were full as ticks on a fat dog, and now had toothpicks, Ham narrating his quest to dislodge a meaty morsel—“Almost got you, you son of a bitch”—looking up and grinning, “Sorry, ma’am,” to Dixie Clay—and then, “Ahh,” and smacking his lips, “Tastes even better after marinating between my chompers for a while.”