The Listener

by Robert R. McCammon

  “No,” he mumbled, and instantly corrected himself with a stronger voice: “No, ma’am.”

  She gave no reply. She walked up and down the line of pots to check their progress, and then she regarded Curtis again and hooked a finger at him. “Come on back here and get a piece a’ birthday cake,” she said.

  He crossed the checkerboard-tiled floor to a little square table the woman led him to, and she motioned for him to sit at one of the cane-backed chairs. In another moment she placed before him a yellow saucer bearing a piece of snow-white cake adorned with the purple and green icing. A cup of the green-colored punch cooled with an ice cube followed it. Curtis took the fork she offered. She stood close to him, smelling of all the kitchen odors of gumbo, crawdads, fried chicken, Italian meatballs and hush-puppies her coalblack flesh had absorbed.

  “This is from the first cake we made this mornin’,” she said, to a question he had considering asking. “Thing collapsed and sat there lookin’ fatter’n a cow turd after a summer rain. In a manner of speakin’, I mean. So this one’s for the help.”

  He thanked her and began to eat, but he couldn’t taste very much other than sweet velvet on the tongue.

  “Mayhew,” the woman said. “I knew a Mayhew one time. Name of Joe.”

  “That’s my daddy.”

  “Ohhhhhh, is that right? You don’t look none like him, though. Your mama ever feed you, boy? There’s slim, skinny, and frail, and you is south of those.”

  “I take after my mama.”

  “I recall Joe was a big fella. Mighty big ’round the shoulders and had that big barn of a back. Oh yeah, I ’member him. I used to work at the Cotton Ball down near the docks on Harmony Street. Place burned down, long gone. But I recall them wild niggers comin’ in there after daylong movin’ that freight, and how they laughed and hollered and raised such a ruckus. Your daddy was one of ’em.”

  “I didn’t know him too well,” said Curtis, as he worked on turning the cake into crumbs.

  “Hm,” she said. “Bad thing that happened to him. Pitiful.”

  “This is good cake,” said Curtis. He took a long drink of the punch, which tasted like sugary lime juice with a little fizzy soda water in it. “That’s good too,” he added.

  “Yep,” said the woman, and whether she was replying to her own statement about the fate of Joe Mayhew or to Curtis’s compliments he didn’t know. She stood there for another moment, watching him eat but with eyes that had turned maybe to another time and another place. Then she said, “See yourself out when you’re done. And tell your mama to put some pole beans and corn bread in your belly ’fore a stiff wind blows you away.” With that, she was done with him and she returned to the labors of the kitchen. And Curtis figured she probably ran the house too; he could feel it poised heavily over his head, and it was not a place he wanted to linger in very much longer.

  He wheeled his bicycle out the gate when the butler, who was standing guard there, unlocked it for him. He took his suit jacket off, folded it up and returned it to the cart. He put the clips on his trouser legs. He did not glance back again at the Gordon house; he mounted his bike and pedalled off toward Marais Street, away from the sounds of laughter and merriment, a lone figure moving slowly through the night.

  Nine.

  It had always fascinated Curtis that a world could be so different in the distance of a right turn and two blocks, but so it was. As he neared Esplanade Avenue on his bicycle, his head still heavy with the confusion and disappointment of Ava Gordon’s party, the fine big houses protected by walls and gates suddenly stopped as if by order of the law, and he pedalled into the rougher territory of the eastern Treme. Here stood the row upon row of shotgun shacks. Among the tight-packed houses some had small porches and some were close up upon the street, some were garishly painted in the manner of fever dreams and some had shaken their paint off year by year to take on the colors of heat-bleached bones. An occasional vacant lot was piled with rubble where a dwelling had burned down and been left to molder over the humid days and nights, growing green and leafy as if being pulled back into the earth by its jealous hand. What there was of the street pavement had buckled and broken and the dirt ground was climbing through.

  Curtis had a ways to go yet. But as he neared the lighted little island of Prince Purdy’s barbershop—the sign in the front window among the placards for Wildroot Cream Oil, Brylcreem and Talbot’s Bay Rum Shaving Lotion read Come In And Get Purdy—he slowed his pedalling and stopped his bike, because he wasn’t yet ready to consign himself to home.

  Inside the barbershop, the usual Saturday night poker game was in full swing. When Curtis went through the front door into the fog of cigar, pipe and cigarette smoke that hung above the four men at their poker table, only Prince Purdy looked up from his cards.

  “Hey there, Curtis!” he said, his big oval face with its halo of white hair breaking from rapt concentration to a quick smile of welcome. “Come on and get y’self a Co’-Cola!”

  Curtis did, taking a bottle from the bucket that held them in ice—mostly melted now—at the back of the shop. He popped the cap using the opener tied to the bucket’s handle with a length of twine, took a long drink and settled himself in one of the red vinyl chairs where the customers usually sat, the better to watch the game between Prince Purdy, Sam Rasco, Regis Mullahenny and Phillip LeSavan. In a couple of the other chairs were Gerald Gattis and Turk Tomlinson, both of them smoking their cigars and jawing over some important thing that nobody else gave a care about.

  “Raise you ten cents,” Regis announced.

  “See that raise and I will raise another ten cents,” said Sam.

  “You boys ain’t got nothin’,” Prince said, but he shifted heavily in his chair. “Curtis, why you all so dressed up tonight?” he asked, mostly to stall his decision.

  Curtis had his own decision to make. He wanted to tell somebody about what had happened but he was downright ashamed of it. Ashamed because he’d let himself—or made himself—believe that Ava Gordon maybe liked him as a beau, or maybe could get to like him in time, if she gave him that chance. He knew he should’ve known better; those rich folks who lived along Governor Nicholls Street were apart from the people in the eastern part of the Treme, across Esplanade, and it was foolish to think that things could ever be any different.

  “I just had someplace to go,” he said, lamely.

  “Where was that?”

  It seemed that Prince Purdy was inviting him to tell the story, and Curtis figured it might be a good thing to unburden himself of it. So he backed up on his decision and he said, “I thought I was invited to—”

  “All right, twenty cents!” said Prince, and he pushed two dimes forward into the center of the table with an exasperated growl. “Well, Curtis,” he added as Phillip studied his own cards, “you do look mighty nice tonight, wherever it was you went. Good thing for a young man like y’self to get out and about on a Saturday night. Phillip, you want some salt’n pepper on them cards so you can eat ’em?”

  “Eat my doggone biscuits,” Phillip replied haughtily, but his nerve had abandoned him. He slapped his cards down upon the table in momentary surrender.

  Curtis sat back and sipped at his drink, and the game went on.

  “Hey, Prince!” said Turk, who had taken the stub of his cigar out of his mouth and rested it in the ashtray at his elbow. “What color is you?”

  “What color? What kind of a fool’s question is that?”

  “You know Dinah Fontaine’s workin’ as a maid over in the Garden District. Well she told Ermine Yancey a comical thing happened couple of days ago…little boy in that family come up to her while she was makin’ a bed and asked if she was made out of chocolate.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Yessir! Oh, the lady of the house got all upset and shivery, said she hoped Dinah didn’t take offense but Dinah jus’ laughed, she didn’t mi
nd. But y’know…I started thinkin’ about color. Being called colored and such, by white folks. Gerald and me been talkin’ this over. Look in that mirror and say what color you see y’self to be.”

  “Hm,” said Prince as he peered into the big gilt-edged mirror. “Dusky, I suppose. A little red in there, too, seems to be.”

  “Dusty and rusty, more like it,” said Phillip, and everybody gave a hoot of laughter but Curtis, who was listening to this exchange but part of him was still at the party going over and over what had happened and dissecting it from every angle.

  “That’s what I’m sayin’,” Turk said.

  “Sayin’ exactly what?” Regis asked. “’Cause you ain’t makin’ a lick a’ sense.”

  “Look at me, then.” Turk leaned forward in his chair and a spring in the seat yowled, but politely. “I’m what you might call a high yella. Regis, you’re a high brown but you got some olive in you. Phillip, you got a little slate gray in you, looks to me like. Sam, you’re—”

  “Seal brown, I’ve been told,” Sam announced.

  “Yeah, all right, I’ll agree with that, whatever that is. Gerald is near tan as a nice Sunday suit and Curtis over there looks like a strong cup a’ mornin’ coffee. Not one of us is exactly the same color, and the differences can be mighty much, too.” Turk paused to draw on his cigar and blow smoke toward the light fixture above. “Not one of us here is really black, what I’m sayin’. Yet we all know folks like Weston Weaver, and he’s so black you can see blue in him when the sun’s hittin’ him right. Same with Stovepipe, and he has got to be the inkiest fella I ever did see. So I was thinkin’…just consider how many colors we got in us, all us coloreds. Every brown you can think of, from cream-and-coffee to sable, and light brown to high brown, and all the yellas and the olives and the reds, and then you get into the real solid blacks, and the glossy shades and the dull shades, and it jus’ goes on and on.”

  “Like your mouth,” said Regis, but not in an ugly way. “What’re you drivin’ at?”

  Turk sat back in his chair and smoked his cigar with leisure, as if he’d decided to keep a secret to himself. Then he smiled slyly at the group and he said, “Describe to me a white skin.”

  There was a moment of silence. Regis scratched his head and Sam scratched his graying beard. Curtis drank some more of his Coca-Cola and watched the group. Prince at last cleared his throat and spoke up. “They can be kinda pink, I reckon.”

  “Seen some so white they make you go blind for awhile,” said Phillip.

  “Seen some near red,” Sam offered. “Those who’ve been in the sun too long. Oh, that must be a sufferin’!”

  “That’s what I’m gettin’ at,” Turk said.

  “Excuse my ignorance, then,” Prince answered. “What are you gettin’ at?”

  Turk grinned widely. “How pretty we is,” he said. “All them colors to speak of, and what’s to speak of ’bout white skin? Can you imagine lookin’ down at your own arms and seein’ that blood flowin’ through your veins like some can, they so white? Give me the shivers thinkin’ ’bout that. And some got to flee the sun and cling to the shade, ’cause they can’t take it? Naw, naw…have to be feel sorry for ’em sometimes.”

  “I’ll cry tomorrow,” said Regis. “Listen, I’m down seventy cents. Can we go on with this game, if you please?”

  “All I’m sayin’,” Turk continued, with another pull from his cigar, “is thank the Lord for all them colors in that word colored.”

  There was a pause as Prince shuffled the cards for the next hand. Then he said quietly, “Thank the Lord for all the chocolate ladies, too.”

  “Yessir!” Sam’s voice had been a little too fervent. He seemed to slink down in his chair a few inches. “Jude’ll hear me say that and there’ll be one seal-brown skin nailed up on the wall.”

  The others laughed and their attention returned to the cards. Curtis had come to the bottom of the Coca-Cola bottle, and it was time to move on. He stood up and replaced the empty bottle among the others in their wooden case just past the ice bucket. “Gotta go home,” he said. “Thank you, Mr. Purdy.”

  “Sure thing. Get that chin up off the ground now, Curtis. Can’t be so bad as all that.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Say hello to your mama for me.”

  “I will.”

  “Hope everythin’ else is good with you,” said Gerald, with just a quick but meaningful glance at Curtis, who knew that Gerald didn’t want it to be common knowledge that Curtis had gotten him off the hook last week with Miles Wilson, who owned a fix-it shop further up Esplanade. Miles made a habit of sending very large men out to visit those who did not pay back in time for using the loan service in the back of the shop. He’d worked with Curtis’s daddy at one point on the docks, years ago, and so had agreed on Curtis’s word to give Gerald one more week to pay back the five dollars.

  “Hope you’re not burnin’ up too many ten-cent cigars,” Curtis said pointedly, and added, “Good night, gentlemen.” He walked out before anyone could comment on what might have sounded to be a rude remark, but just so Gerald remembered that by Sunday afternoon he had to pony up five George Washingtons or get his fingers burned not by a cigar stub but by the kiss of a hot iron.

  Curtis got on his bicycle, pedalled the short length of Marais Street to Esplanade Avenue and turned to the left, going deeper into the Treme.

  Under the old oaks that lined Esplanade he passed Mandy’s Kitchen Cafe, still open at this time of night and a few customers sitting at the tables within. Further along he heard the brassy blare of hot jazz music and he came upon the small stretch of real estate that his mama warned him not to dawdle in and so did every mama in the Treme give the same warning to their sons. On the left side of the avenue stood The Fancy Acre, though the blue bulb-lit club was more rough than fancy and it didn’t take up anywhere near an acre even counting the oyster shell parking lot; on the right side, almost directly across, was the Ten Spot lit up with red bulbs and sporting a similar arrogance, and from its open doorway came the sound of a woman singing to the howl of a fiery saxophone. Past a shoe repair shop and a used-clothing store on Curtis’s side of the street was the third club in this section of Esplanade, the Done Didit, and as Curtis pedalled toward the low, blocky brick structure with its glare of yellow and green lights that seemed to throb with the music and bass drumbeat barely contained within, the front door burst open and out spilled a knot of people who looked like they’d been tossed around in a cement mixer. The dishevelled and staggery group came out hollering and laughing and holding each other up against the force of gravity. As Curtis swerved around them to avoid collision he caught sight of Rowdy Patterson at the center of the throng with Geneva Barracone hanging onto him and giving him the gaze of love, and Rowdy was grinning with drunken glee and shouting at heaven as he lifted a flask of rotgut toward the unforgiving oaks.

  Curtis pedaled on, but he had decided that Eleanor Caldwell was through being played by Rowdy Patterson. He meant to tell her—and make her understand, before he was done—that she could do a whole lot better and both her time and heart were being wasted on a man who slinked from woman to woman in the heat of the night. Of course he knew that some people never wanted to see the truth even when it was written on their foreheads, backwards, for them to read in the mirror, but he felt he had to give it a try. That trust me he’d said to Rowdy cut both ways.

  He made his left turn onto North Derbigny Street from Esplanade, leaving the noise of the jukejoints behind, and entered the quiet familiarity of the shotgun shacks pressed close together, where an occasional lantern glowed on a front porch, candlelight flickered in some of the windows and those who could pay for electricity enjoyed a little brighter and more steady light. He veered his bicycle up toward a cream-colored house with dark brown trim that stood about at the center of the block between Dumaine and St. Ann. He was home. The meager glow of a single
electric lamp peeked between the curtains of a front window. Curtis pulled his bike and the cart up onto the narrow porch and chained and locked his vehicle to the brown-painted railing. He took his suit jacket out of the cart and folded it over his arm, then he started to use another key to open the front door but the handle turned in his grip and he knew his mama was waiting up for him.

  “There he is,” she said from her soft corduroy chair, as if she were speaking with a sigh of relief to someone else in the room.

  Curtis closed the door behind him and pushed the latch home.

  “You look so nice,” she said. “That tie and all.”

  He nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Been waitin’ to hear.”

  He answered with a shrug of his thin shoulders. The lampshade was dark green and seemed to trap light rather than let it free; what light that escaped was scrawled upon the flower-and-vines garden print of the wallpaper.

  “I don’t think it must’ve gone too well,” she said, in her tired and fluttery voice that made her sound as if she were perpetually out of breath. “I see it in your face.”

  “It was all right,” he said.

  Orchid Mayhew was quiet for awhile, just watching him. Though a boxfan gave a muted rumble from the other side of the room, the heat was just being pushed around. Even so, Orchid was wrapped up in the threadbare blanket that was her favorite, only her oval brown face and her thin hands showing, her hair covered with a gray scarf, her feet hidden beneath the folds of the blanket but Curtis knew she would be wearing the scuffed and well-worn leather slippers, the same as always.

  “I told you not to give her anythin’ with a pin on it,” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “A pin,” she repeated. Then she gave a small gasp for air as if speaking the word had depleted her lungs. “Bad luck to give a girl anythin’ with a pin on it. I told you so.”

  “No, mama,” Curtis said. “You didn’t.”