The Condor Passes

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Oliver nodded politely. Pérez snapped his whip at a passing dragonfly. With a little dusty rustle the insect disappeared from the air. “Mamselles like that, they eat mosquitoes all day and it don’t seem to do no good. Now what a mosquito really goes for, my friend, that is a cow. Sometimes the poor animals, they go crazy with pain and they jump in the river and kill themselves.”

  He glanced out the corner of his watery brown eye to see how Oliver took that.

  Oliver, hunched forward, arms on knees, said politely, “That’s pretty bad.”

  He wasn’t going to argue over mosquitoes. He just wanted to sit quiet and let his body lurch with the movement of the buggy. “You know where I could get something to eat and a place to sleep? That ground was plenty wet last night.”

  “You can pay for it?”

  “I can pay for it,” Oliver said.

  Pérez tapped a green fly on his horse’s back. “Now alors, I think me that the Landrys might be cooking some extra supper tonight. She’s a good cook, her.”

  “I sure don’t care.” Oliver prepared to doze again. “I’d eat tortillas and Mexican peppers, and think it was fine.”

  HE HAD supper on the back porch of the Landry house, chickens circling warily on the ground in front of him, cats rubbing against his ankles. He ate quickly, hardly chewing. It was greasy and hot, a heap of rice with pieces of shrimp and meat and fish. He’d wanted gin or whiskey but they didn’t have any, so he settled for blackberry wine. It was very sweet and if she hadn’t said it was blackberry, he would never have recognized it. But it was heavy with alcohol, and the glass was large. (“Make it usselves,” Mama Landry told him, “best blackberry wine you find on the Lower Coast.”) He felt the familiar warming behind his eyes, the familiar tingling at the tips of his fingers, the sting along his lips.

  He propped his feet up on the railing. The last of the twilight took on a yellow glow, the chinaberry tree seemed to grow taller as he looked at it. There was a hissing and a roaring in his ears, very faint, the sound of a reef. He could see the color of the water, and the movement of it. Just as clear as if it were right in front of him.

  The roaring passed, and the water became a large black-and-white cat with a torn ear and only one set of whiskers. “Fuck you,” Oliver said to the cat. “I’m tired.”

  The chickens scattered away from his feet, the cats sat on the railing and watched him walk away. He had a blanket in the woodshed—a small room, with just enough space for him to sleep next to the big wash boilers. There were no windows. He stretched himself out, shoulder touching the door. He was safe.

  HE GOT TO NEW Orleans the next day, rode in on a brewery dray, piled with empty kegs. He surveyed the narrow dusty streets, their deep drainage ditches filled with greenish water; their small wooden houses linked one to the other by wooden fences and gates. He saw a corner sign: Music Street. Nice name. He dropped off the dray immediately. Now he was conscious of his torn muddy clothing, of his matted hair. He found a small shop and bought clothes, while the owner watched him warily and nervously. He asked his way to the baths and then to the nearest barber.

  While the barber scratched away, he gossiped: there was fever in New Orleans, more than usual, even for the summertime.

  Every place had its own kind of fever, Oliver thought. On the Ohio it was breakbone fever, in Panama it was yellow jack, and in Singapore—well, he’d even forgotten that name. If he was going to die of fever, he would have been dead years ago.

  Oliver sat up, wiping the bits of soap out of his ears and nose. The barber pointed out a house in the next block. “Boy died there of the fever just last week,” he said. “And if that wasn’t bad enough … she used to take roomers, but they all left.”

  Oliver walked past the house. Like the rest of the neighborhood, it was gray-painted wood, narrow but very long— with a brick-paved side alley and three narrow wooden steps to the front door. Oliver looked up and down the street, at the passing ice wagon, at the tufts of heavy-leafed fig trees growing over board fences, at the sky filled with heavy black cumulus clouds. He saw an old woman in a black dress tottering down the sidewalk, and a man with a great beer belly walking in the opposite direction; they both held black umbrellas against the sun, moving inside their little round shade. In the distance he heard a train’s bell; close by children’s voices recited together.

  Oliver climbed the three wooden steps and knocked at the door. Rooms in this house would be cheaper than any other place in town. Much cheaper. And he wasn’t about to waste his money.

  THE NEXT day Oliver found his way to Storeyville. He’d heard about it for years, about its saloons and brothels; now he was very disappointed. It didn’t look half as good as San Francisco, not one-tenth as good as Singapore. But good enough for him. … He tried one place after the other until he found a job. A madam named Julia Chaffee hired him because she was fond of husky blond men, and because blonds were rare in New Orleans. He helped the bartender, he ran errands, he took regular customers safely home when they’d passed out. And at Julia Chaffee’s six weeks later he met Alonzo Manzini. He was a produce merchant with a fat sagging body and a thin shrewd yellow-tinged face. He came one day to talk to Julia and have a pot of coffee in the parlor. Afterward, they both stopped by the storeroom where Oliver had just finished stacking the week’s supply of champagne bottles.

  “I hear,” Manzini said, “that Julia thinks you are a treasure.”

  Oliver smiled and began putting the collar back on his shirt. He had taken it off to work more easily.

  “I knew Julia years ago, when she was still working; what a piece of ass that was. …”

  Julia smiled her best professional smile. “We are both old, my friend.”

  The next day Manzini was back, bringing with him the police precinct captain. Instead of coffee, they had champagne in the large parlor; the bartender himself served them. After a few minutes Manzini came downstairs alone.

  “Vichy,” he said to Oliver, who was tending bar. “Vichy for my liver.”

  Oliver asked: “Why didn’t one of the girls bring the champagne up?” That was the usual way.

  “He don’t like girls,” Manzini said. “You got to know your customers, boy. He could give Julia a lot of trouble, that one, but they will come to an understanding, my friend Julia will work out something.”

  Oliver said, “I didn’t know.”

  Manzini’s little bright brown eyes flicked over him, gleaming, appraising. “I seen boys like you come along before; soon as you get a little money together, you’ll be in business yourself.”

  Oliver shook his head and began polishing glasses. Julia wanted all her glasses shining.

  Manzini went on, “When you get ready, you come have a talk with me; maybe I can help you.”

  “Maybe,” Oliver said.

  “My wife and my son, they can run the produce business. I can find something else to do, something profitable.”

  “There are problems.”

  “Not so many. And that gentleman upstairs, he is my cousin.”

  EVENTUALLY OLIVER wrote to his mother asking her to sell one of the small farms. Six months later he was in business for himself, with Manzini as his partner. Not in Storeyville where competition was stiff and protection rates high. Their house was on Conti Street; back of town, people called it. It was a quiet respectable place, and very profitable.

  Oliver was the bartender and the bouncer—the bully, people said. Manzini managed the girls and the madam and the police payoffs. “You are too young,” he told Oliver, “and you look too young. I will take care of all troubles that can be solved by money and a few words and maybe a laugh and a pat on the behind—the girls are like terriers, they yap all the time. I do this. You see to the bar and the staying up all night, all the things a young man can do, the ones that take muscle and a hard head and a fist. And we make ourselves fine partners.”

  They did. Oliver checked on him regularly, but never found him unfair in anything. Manzini watched hi
m too, carefully, respectfully, closely. Neither could find fault in the other.

  With his first profits Oliver bought two small houses in the same block of Conti Street and rented them to respectable families. “How do you have so much money?” Manzini sighed. “My wife wants to take her grandmother to Lourdes when the old lady won’t live through the trip. They expect a miracle and I have to pay for it.”

  “I don’t have any expenses,” Oliver said.

  He still lived in the same house on Music Street, and he paid the same rent regularly on the first of every week.

  His landlady, who had six children besides the one dead of fever, called him a joy from heaven. He was so quiet and so hard-working. She’d see him come home in the early morning, she’d see him leave in the afternoon. He was always quiet and soft-spoken, with his crisp Yankee speech. He never drank, he never brought girls home, he didn’t even seem to know anyone in the neighborhood. She always intended to ask him where he worked but somehow she never did. He was young enough to be one of her children, but he was not the sort of man you asked questions.

  I must be putting her off, Oliver thought, I must be scaring her somehow. I don’t scowl or curse, but I must be very formidable to look at.

  In his small shaving mirror, he studied his square-jawed face with its blond mustache and close-set eyes. He didn’t see anything there.

  Still, Oliver thought, looking from his mirror and his shaving basin to the dusty narrow stretch of Music Street, it was pleasant not to be asked endless questions. Whatever he was doing, he liked the result.

  In those early years in New Orleans—when for the first time in his life he wasn’t traveling and seeing different sights each day—he had time to think about Thomas Henry Oliver. Every night before he fell asleep, he made plans—abstract, detailed plans for the rest of his life. He decided what he must do in each succeeding year, in his personal life, in his business. He had schedules for both, and he intended to keep them.

  In the meantime he worked. He collected his money every week from his two rented houses; each time he inspected them carefully, his hulking presence keeping his tenants neat and careful. He was considering buying a small bar and restaurant. It was just around the corner, it was completely legitimate, no girls at all; he could manage it easily. Still, the price was high … he would think about it.

  Manzini came every morning at seven and stayed until Oliver returned at five. Together they went over the day’s accounts, talked briefly, and Manzini went home.

  Oliver stayed the evening and the night. There was never any real trouble, only an occasional squabble among the girls or a drunken customer to be quietly removed. The nights were filled with men’s drunken laughter and the metallic tinkle of girls’ voices. And the steady never-ending piano playing of a tiny old Negro named Joseph.

  Oliver hated that jazz piano. He could never tell one tune from another, they were all trills and banging bass. Once, early on a rainy evening when the house was empty, he asked Joseph to play something else. So Joseph played a soft gentle version of “The Rosewood Spinet” and then “Juanita.” In all the years he worked in the house on Conti Street, those were the only tunes Oliver ever recognized.

  Mornings he walked the two miles home. In summer it was daylight, people were out of their houses, the street vendors were yelling from their high wagons. In winter the sky overhead was still perfectly black, the houses were pulled in tight against the night, the streets were shadowed and very cold. He passed only a few old women, scuttling their way to early Mass, hunched in their black coats and shawls. Oliver took deep breaths of the peat-smelling air, felt it brush his cheeks like feathers as he strode along. He’d spent so many hours pacing back and forth in rooms and halls and parlors that he had to get the closeness out of his muscles.

  AND ALL this time, he had no women. He owned a house, but he would not sleep with whores. He’d had his fill of them; the woman in Bahia was the last. His girls teased him now and then; one, whose name was Juliette, was very pretty, but Oliver ignored her.

  Finally he decided to allow his body the use of a woman. He had a particular one in mind, had marked her down in his memory weeks before. He’d seen her sweeping the front steps of a small bakery on LePage Square. She would do, he thought. She would do very nicely. The next morning he stopped: the bread was not quite ready, would he wait? She was cleaning the shelves and the cases carefully with soapy water, head bent to her work. “I see you sweeping the steps, every morning,” he said, as if that gave him a claim on her.

  She looked up. “I see you pass too, every morning.”

  She was not pretty, he thought, her face was too pinched and thin, but she was a nice girl, in her striped blue-and-white dress and her big white apron. Yes, she would do.

  Her name was Edna and she lived with her parents in the house behind the bakery. And she met Oliver in the little shadowy park across the street whenever he asked her to.

  He did not see her very often; she did not really seem to expect it. Her thin buttocks and angular body seemed only vaguely female to him, and the few panting minutes standing against the dark oaks in the park inspired in him no great erotic longings. Which was exactly what he wanted. He had to humor his body occasionally so that the rest of the time it obeyed his will.

  HIS SKIN lost its sea-tanned look, and turned first yellow, and then pink-white. Because he rarely slept enough, his eyes were swollen and circled with dark. He drank beer steadily while he worked, glass after glass to take the edge off his weariness. He was getting fat, a belly began to bulge through his suspenders, and his shirt collars wouldn’t stay closed.

  Manzini noticed. “You take a day off,” he said. “Go out to the lake or take the air someplace; people are always going to Abita Springs, you want to go there?”

  Oliver shook his head. “I’m not going to spend money for air.”

  “Take tomorrow off,” Manzini insisted. “You get consumption and what happens to this place? I have to close up.”

  So Oliver took two days off. The first one he slept completely around the clock, only now and then taking the cover off his slop jar. He probably would have slept through the second one too, but his landlady pounded on the door. “I was afraid you’d died.”

  His watch had stopped. He yelled for the time. “Ten-thirty,” she said. He shaved and dressed, feeling strange and aimless. He walked slowly uptown, passing the big wholesale markets, picking his way through the tangle of wagons and mules, of baskets and sacks. He stared at the mounds of fish and shrimp, decided that the day must be Friday. He stopped for a beer, his English voice startling in the chatter of Italian all around him. A short dark man shook his hand, offered him another drink: Saia—what was his first name?—sold liquor to the house on Conti Street, delivering most of it himself. Oliver had another beer with him, listened to talk of the different markets, shook more hands.

  After an hour, he left and walked toward the docks, stopping only once to read a black-bordered death notice tacked to a post: thirty-seven. He hadn’t had much time, Oliver thought; poor bastard.

  For the first time since he’d jumped ship, he saw the river. The wide yellow expanse shimmered under the noon sun, little winds blew off it in swirling uncertain eddies. On the other side the trees were vague and indistinct behind a light fog. Two pigeons strutted along the rough wooden dock, ignoring him so completely that he almost stumbled over them. With a long fluttering hop they turned their backs to him. Oliver strolled along, heels echoing on the wood. Somewhere, not far off, someone was chipping paint. Steadily. Oliver recognized that sound. Just the way he recognized the smell that hung around the battered hulks of the ships, the wet wood of the docks.

  He walked away from the river, not stopping until he reached the Canal Street business district. For a few moments he sat on the stone steps of a monument to Henry Clay, staring down the length of Canal Street, admiring the new electric streetcars. After a bit, when the blurry beer feeling was gone, he sauntered slowly along
the street, on the shady side, watching the buggies and the carriages move up and down slowly. Watching ladies come in and out of the shops, parasols in hand, skirts swishing tops of ankles. He kept walking until the commercial district ended and the street was lined by big houses and tall trees and gardens with Negro nurses tending children at play. He paused in front of a Presbyterian church, figured he’d walked enough, and turned back the way he had come. The Negro nurses stared after him suspiciously and called the children closer to the houses.

  He liked the strange smell of the electric cars, the faint pungent odor that filtered from their boxes. He followed their tracks up St. Charles Avenue, stopping finally for another beer and, as he drank it, staring through the open door at the steady flow of people on the sidewalk. That night, he dreamed of buildings and banks and streets of cobblestones and sidewalks of brick and ladies with hats and parasols and fine boots and uniformed doormen opening store doors.

  After that, he regularly took off two days a month. Manzini beamed his approval. “It’s good for you.”

  Oliver did exactly the same thing every time. He walked through the business district, listening to snatches of talk, marching step for step with men who were busy and hurried. He imagined the offices he passed: filled with hundreds of heavy bound account books, and bookkeepers with eyeshades and shirt-cuff clips. As he moved along the dusty streets, cleaned by an occasional afternoon thunderstorm, he thought slowly and carefully and languorously about money. Sometimes he found himself holding his breath.

  He began going for lunch to a little restaurant called Galatin’s. After a few times the proprietor recognized him. Someday, he promised himself—in his rented room on Music Street—someday everybody will know who I am; they will see me walk along the street and they will say: There goes Mr. Oliver. …

  He had a picture taken for his mother in Ohio. He looked at the man who stared out of the black-and-white print and was not too unhappy at what he saw.