Even in the cool night air, the smell of that room followed him. The sweaty skin, the motionless air, the bed that was musty as a snake nest, and barn-like with its reek of stale sex. He’d lain in it and rolled in it, and paid a two-fifty whore seven dollars for the privilege.
He held out his hands and looked at them. They seemed no different. He crinkled his nose, sniffing the reek of the whore, savoring it like perfume. Poverty and filth.
He began to walk more briskly. And somewhere during that walk, sensation came back into his fingers and his feet. Flooded back with a surge of real pain. When he finally reached the hotel and beckoned a taxi, he could hardly walk. His teeth were clenched and there were tears in the corners of his eyes.
“Wait,” he said to the driver. He waved to the boy who still followed him, who stood not ten feet away. “We’re going to the same place. You might as well come with me.”
Silently, the boy got in.
Oliver leaned back against the seat, tapping his fingers together, delighting in the ripples of pain.
Robert
WHEN THE OLD MAN beckoned him into the taxi in front of the St. Charles Hotel, Robert Caillet was twenty-one years old, a tall thin Cajun from Belle River. He had no father, his mother died when he was twelve. He lived with cousins, sleeping on pallets in fishing camps, working on luggers until his hands were raw and his arms striped with welts from the man-of-war slime on the nets, working on oyster boats until his back and shoulders blazed with pain from the strain of the heavy oyster tongs. One day, on Théophile Beauchamp’s boat, something hit his leg, and he looked down to see an ocean catfish wiggling against his shin, impaled by the big gig on its back. (He’d rolled up his pants to keep them dry.) The first thing he noticed was not the pain but the ridiculousness of it all. He could see himself standing there, mouth open, fish slapping against his leg.
He never went to the boats again. He hitchhiked to Baton Rouge. (Leg hurting all the way, ulcer forming, breaking, forming again. Months later it finally healed in a great flat white scar.) He worked as a shoeshine boy first, then a delivery boy. Because that drugstore was also a bootlegger’s phone, he began delivering liquor. He came to Oliver’s office in New Orleans on perfectly legitimate business. The bootlegger in Baton Rouge (whom Oliver supplied) sent down a bag of particularly fine crawfish—Robert walked into the office with a dripping thirty-pound sack of green crawfish and propped it in a corner. He spoke briefly with Maurice Lamotta and then the two of them hauled the sack downstairs again and drove it directly to the Old Man’s kitchen. Lamotta disliked crawfish, as did the Old Man, but they always received any present with extreme politeness. On the drive, trying to forget the hundreds of crawfish wriggling, fighting, eating each other in the sack, Lamotta talked to the young man. His politeness turned to real interest: did Robert Caillet want a job in New Orleans?
For who? Robert asked. Lamotta became vague: did it matter? Not so long as the money came to him, it didn’t matter at all.
THE NEXT two years Robert Caillet drove bootleg liquor for the Old Man. For two years he saw him only from a distance, his business was all with Maurice Lamotta. By chance, that morning when the Old Man fled his office, Robert Caillet was waiting for a pickup. Since he was the only man there, Lamotta sent him out to follow. “Stay with him,” Lamotta said, “just stay with him.” Robert telephoned a couple of times that day, to say where they were. Lamotta was so impressed by his careful efficiency that he sent him back again the next day. And the next. Day after day. Robert wondered how the Old Man, in his fifties, could keep up that pace. He moved through the streets as if he were a walking doll, stiff-legged and tireless. Robert cursed and followed. He’d never known anything like this, but he wasn’t going to let any old man wear him out, whatever sort of crazy energy he had. …
When the Old Man called him into a taxi, Robert was very tired. As much as the Old Man, he thought.
“You sleep at my house tonight,” the Old Man said. “In the morning I have a job for you.”
“Yes, sir.” Robert was so weary that he almost forgot to telephone Lamotta with his report. It was the last one he had to do.
IN THE years that followed, Robert did all sorts of jobs for the Old Man. He sold piece goods over the counter in the downstairs department store, sweating in the thick summer heat. He stood behind the desk in the Old Man’s hotel being a proper night clerk, correct and polite because it was an expensive hotel. He made the rounds of the speakeasies and clubs that the Old Man supplied, doing nothing at all but watch, letting his presence be felt, as the Old Man had instructed him. He made small payoffs, particularly to the policemen on the beat. The Old Man always paid directly. “These precinct captains,” he’d say, “you can’t trust them to hand out any money.” So Robert passed out the tens and twenties with a friendly smile.
And of course he still drove liquor. Once or twice a week, he took out a big touring car specially constructed to hold case after case of liquor on its extra-heavy springs. He liked driving, he liked being in the open, but he was always a little nervous. Other drivers laughed about their runs—good money for doing nothing, they said—but he never talked at all. Putting his mouth on it would have been bad luck, he thought.
One night all the Old Man’s drivers had trouble; two were even arrested. Robert himself was stopped, but his car was empty. He lit a cigarette to cover his stomach’s shaking and adjusted the crease of his hat to be careless and unconcerned. He had come very close—he had almost made his pickup, only some instinct had told him to circle the block.
He went directly to the Old Man.
“Money isn’t worth anything any more,” the Old Man said. “That area was supposed to be taken care of, those people were supposed to be all right.”
“It was the railroad tracks,” Robert said.
Oliver snorted at the telephone he held in his hand. “Any damn fool can tell a loaded car crossing a railroad track. … For years I’ve been paying them not to see. Now everybody gets greedy. Well, let me get those boys fixed up.”
Robert knew the Old Man’s reputation. None of his boys ever stayed in jail, none of them were ever convicted. Sometimes his information was so good—people called him with news of an arrest, a favor that was always worth a reward —that his lawyer would be waiting with the bondsman at the police station by the time the arrested driver was brought in. Sometimes a driver shook hands with the lawyer and the bondsman and went off directly to pick up another load. The Old Man could always fix things.
That morning, phone in hand, the Old Man said, half in explanation to Robert, half to himself, “It gets very expensive this way and maybe I’ll have to raise prices. But I still have the only good liquor in the city and I’ll still make money.”
Robert knew that was true. The imported Scotch and gin and rum were exactly what the labels said. His unlabeled whiskey, sold mostly to clubs, was good alcohol from small distillers scattered all over the area. (Sometimes Robert thought that every clump of trees in the hills and marshes must cover a small still.) They were all permanent stills, the Old Man knew the operators; there’d be no death or blindness from their products. Robert was often sent to check on them, and to be sure that the operators took a good stiff drink of the stuff they were selling.
“Now I have to get the boys out of trouble.” The Old Man waved Robert away so he could telephone with only the thin gray shadow of Lamotta standing beside him.
Robert saw the gesture and knew he should leave. But he wanted to stretch his time, to stay in the dim brown office where dust motes swam in light streams under the dirty windows, where rusty file cases lined the walls. So he said (knowing the Old Man already would know), “I’ve got some more news. I know he’s not one of your boys, but I heard Burt Phillips was killed around Napoleonville last night.”
“Yesterday morning,” the Old Man corrected him.
“Phillips had a shotgun,” Lamotta snickered at the foolishness of it all. The Old Man’s drivers never carried
guns. They relied on nearly perfect secrecy, a constant change of routes, their own wild driving, and the Old Man’s heavy bribery. If something went wrong—if they were stopped either by the police or by hijackers—they never resisted. They smiled and repeated what everybody in the business already knew: that the Old Man stood ready to buy back the earful of liquor.
The system worked well. In all his years of operation, the Old Man had had only two drivers killed, on the same night on the same road by three ambitious young men from a small town called Braithwaite. Robert remembered that— he’d just come to work for the Old Man. Within a week, these three men were thrown from a car directly in front of the Braithwaite Post Office. They had been slashed to death by razors, then neatly wrapped to lessen the bleeding. Lamotta urged the Old Man to send flowers to their funeral: “It would make the connection. It would look nice.” “Sentimental,” the Old Man said firmly. “People will know.”
“There is no need for violence.” The Old Man again waved Robert away. “When there is nothing you cannot smooth with money … Now, out, I am busy. …”
So, having nothing else to do, Robert Caillet stood at the front door of the department store under the small shabby marquee, with its row of burnt-out light bulbs like broken teeth along the edge. He looked up and down the tree-lined greenness of Esplanade Avenue and heard boats blowing on the river and smelled the slightly sour wind that came from its surface. He bowed to the few early customers, greeting them properly as he was supposed to do. An occasional young woman smiled at him warmly. This morning he was too upset to notice.
IT WAS the Old Man who noticed Robert Caillet begin to grow. “You must be getting enough to eat, boy. Even a Cajun like you will grow if you feed him. …” Robert slouched and was ashamed of his added inches. He even tried to stop eating, but after a few days he got lightheaded and silly, and would burst into high-pitched giggles for no reason at all. Desperately, he went back to food. He never remembered being hungry like this before. But then there wouldn’t have been as much good food in a whole week in his cousins’ houses as he now ate in a single day.
Funny, he thought. All that time, when he was a child, there were people eating like this and he hadn’t known about it. And because he hadn’t, he hadn’t believed it possible. …
And another thing. He noticed that he had begun to think. To puzzle about things. He hadn’t done that before, but then he hadn’t had anything to think about before. …
It was almost, he thought, as if he hadn’t existed before he started to work for the Old Man. He’d just been scurrying around, like a dog, maybe, or a chicken, looking for food, scratching and grubbing for food. He hadn’t really been alive in those years. He hadn’t been anywhere at all.
One of the Old Man’s amusements was to take Robert to lunch and then afterward to the tailor for a suit. “That sleeve’s got to be an inch longer, how’d you manage that?” While the Old Man laughed, Robert comforted himself with the thought that he could probably have eaten twice as much as he actually did.
NIGHTS ROBERT did not work, he spent at his girl’s house. Her name was Nella Beauchardrais; he’d met her when she came into the store with her mother six months before. Though Robert spent most of his free time at her house, he rarely saw her alone, and he never took her out alone. She was almost twenty, a respectable girl, and her family was extremely proper. Sometimes they went to the movies with her sister and her mother and a friend or two; sometimes they went on picnics; but mostly they sat on the porch or under the grape arbor in the back yard and played cards. Her mother drifted in and out, or watched from the back screen porch. Now and then her father appeared, a short bald man with a fringe of black hair over his ears and a starched white coat that rattled when he walked. He was a dentist, and his office at the side of the house was always open in the evenings. Some people, he said, liked to come after work and he had nothing better to do. He would have a few puffs of his cigar and go back to his work.
Robert was always bored. Nella was not particularly pretty, with her brown hair and brown eyes and thin figure. He did not like movies and he hated cards. He thought her mother silly and her sister stupid. He wondered why he found himself coming back and back.
This particular evening, Nella asked him: “Do you like my hair this way?”
“Yes,” he said, “I do. Is it longer or shorter?”
“Oh, a lot shorter,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t notice.”
“I know it looks pretty.”
She smiled and tapped her cards against her open palm. (He saw the Old Man tapping the phone into his open palm, annoyed at the world’s stupidity.) “Robert, don’t you ever think of your future?”
“No,” he said. “No, I guess I don’t.”
“Couldn’t you get a better job?”
He stared at the green grapes overhead. “The Old Man, Mr. Oliver, needs me to stay.”
“You’re related to him?” she asked.
He saw in her eyes that the Old Man was now known around town as a wealthy man. “No,” he said firmly. “He’s no kin of mine. But he’s been kind to me.”
“Later on,” Nella said, “you can swing and pick grapes; they just hang down waiting for you. That’s in the fall, when they’re ripe.”
“How nice,” he said politely.
“But, Robert, seriously, wouldn’t you feel better if you had a profession?”
“Me?” he said. “I feel fine.”
“Like my cousin Noël Delachaise, he’s an optometrist. Or like Daddy.”
“Well,” he said, “well, well, well, well.”
He left early that night, he felt he was falling asleep. “Let’s go to Milnebourg next Saturday.”
She pouted. “You know Mama wouldn’t let me go to any place like that.”
“How about Spanish Fort? I’ll borrow the Old Man’s big car for Saturday.”
She was still not happy. “Saturday is shoe clerk’s night out.”
He finally laughed out loud. “That’s about where I belong.”
They went on Saturday, her sister, her mother, and Nella. In the Old Man’s big fancy new Packard they bumped along the New Basin Canal in the evening dusk. From the very moment he picked up the three women, Robert could feel boredom settling around like fog. It thickened in the jabbering vagueness of their talk until it was like a blanket wrapped around him. Dutifully he sat with them under the trees in the small lakeside park and listened to a military band pump away, tune hidden behind thumps of horn and drum. He walked with them—slowly back and forth in the cool lake breezes. He giggled with them as they stumbled over the old bricks and peered over the crumbling fort walls.
“Robert,” Nella said, “let’s go home. I’ve got a real treat for you.”
“You have?” And what could that be, he thought dully, lulled by the evening.
“I made the most marvelous ice cream; do you know I spent all afternoon on the back porch turning that crank, just hours?”
“What else did you have to do?”
“Silly. The ice cream is marvelous and you’ll love it. It’s lemon-flavored.”
They went home, obedient to her wish. While they sat on the front-porch swing—the grape arbor was infested with summer mosquitoes—he had a sudden thought. It horrified him, but he spoke it anyway.
“Nella,” he said, “what do you think about getting married?”
From the smooth bland expression on her face he knew that she had been waiting and was satisfied with the words when they came.
“Well,” she said, “anything as important as that, well, I will have to think about that.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Slang sounds terrible, doesn’t it?” She made a little face. “I’ll think it over for a week.”
Another memorized line—she really was well prepared.
“You know how important so many things are when you are considering spending your life together.”
He smiled at her formal phrase: “Like what?”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Robert, but if we had children and they wanted to know what you did, how could I tell them you were a bootlegger?”
“Tell them I work in a department store. How about that?”
“How could I tell them you’re just a clerk?”
“Then tell them I’m a bootlegger.”
She sighed. “Maybe,” she said, “you could get a promotion in the store.”
“Okay,” he said, grinning. “Where’s the great ice cream?”
He stayed late that night, sitting in a corner of the screen porch with her, half hidden behind a wicker plant filled with ferns. Robert noticed that her mother seemed to have disappeared—once he had proposed. Was it because he was now admitted? Or because they felt they had trapped him and he was harmless. … Either way it was funny. It was the sort of story the Old Man would like too; he would tell him in the morning.
He sat rocking gently in a swing, in a soft summer night, eating lemon ice cream with his intended bride, and thinking of what the Old Man would find amusing.
He laughed out loud.
“What’s funny?” Nella had snuggled very close.
“It’s a kind of private joke.”
“Well, I wish you’d think about me sometimes.”
“You’d never guess the things I think about you.”
Like: how had she and her mother communicated? How had her mother known? What was the signal, how was it done? Or was her mother hidden somewhere nearby, listening?
Yes, he thought, the Old Man was going to be very very amused at that.
THE NEXT two nights Robert had pickups to make. Then he took the train to Houston, his suitcase filled with neat stacks of twenty-dollar bills. The Old Man was paying off a debt. Robert delivered the suitcase to the man whose name and address he carried in his pocket, had lunch, and caught the next train back to New Orleans. Not once during the entire trip had he thought of Nella, but now, with the first swamps and shanties of the city outskirts, he could think of nothing else. Her thin figure drifted across the window shade, her face reflected in the glass.
The Condor Passes Page 10