That Mickey Moe, people said. Poor mite. No daddy, a half-crazed, sour old mama. Left on his own to grow like a weed in the wind. But it’s a good wind from a proper direction, Lord knows. Look at him. He could pass for any Christian boy you care to name. A very good wind, indeed.
His daddy would have been proud.
III
Guilford, Mississippi, 1944–1952
EVEN AS A CHILD, MICKEY Moe Levy didn’t remember much of his father and what there was was second-hand, formed by the stories of those who consoled him after the man was lost to time. There were photographs of a short, moon-faced man with round, innocent eyes, an improbable nose, prominent ears, and a fringe of ginger hair beating a fast retreat from the center of a shiny head. When he studied them, Mickey Moe often wondered what his daddy found so funny about cameras, since in nearly every shot his head was thrown back and his mouth was posed as if he were Santa Claus letting go with a string of ho-ho-ho’s. Once, when he was seven, he tried to spend the whole day tossing his head with his mouth shaped in an O to find out what it felt like to be Bernard Levy, happy all the time, but Mama told him to cut it out at two in the afternoon as he was giving her the heebie-jeebies. He quit without achieving insight.
Among the stories he heard, one he felt the need to corroborate by the time he was twelve and doubts, great and small, had set in, was that his daddy was immeasurably rich, a Midas of sorts, a man with a golden touch when it came to all types of business, one to whom even the princes of the Sassaport family came for advice and support if difficult, contentious decisions were to be made. When the boy was old enough, he questioned this reputation, because Mama and his sisters cried poor day in and day out. One of his peers suggested to him that chests of gold might be buried in his backyard or greenbacks stuffed in the walls. Although he could not make a proper search without the women screaming holy heck, he dug enough holes in the garden to appall Bald Horace and poked sections of wallpaper in the upstairs rooms with a three-tined fork. He hadn’t the nerve to deface the front parlor where the women received or the dining room where they sometimes entertained, deciding that if his daddy was sane, neither had he. He poked through enough flocked velvet to conclude there must have been an off-site location where the family fortune was stashed.
During his adolescence, he was preoccupied with determining likely locales. In summer, he spent as much time as his chores and paper route would allow parked in a hard chair at the public library. He figured if he studied topographical charts of all the undeveloped land between Guilford and Memphis along with maps of the populated and cultivated areas and the twists and turns of the great river as well, he might find an echo of a clue mentioned in his daddy’s letters and personal papers that Mama kept tucked away in a cardboard box in her closet, the ones he sometimes read by stealth when she left the house. Why shouldn’t there be congruities between the maps and the paperwork, places where landmarks were mentioned, Mississippi tributaries admired or feared, towns and roads visited and traveled over and over? He came up with an intuitive list grounded in the notion that blood must ever call to blood. If a particular spot of high ground near the side of a particular country road struck him as a likely spot to bury a strong box, then surely it was his own daddy’s ghost who’d whispered such directly into his heart. Next, he traced maps onto tissue paper and transposed in a prioritized color code selected locales he planned to investigate as soon as he was old enough to travel on his own.
One fall, he discovered how much he loved girls. Few gave him so much as the time of day. He made a new study to determine which boys girls gave not only the time of day but their hearts and hands as well, concluding that sportsmen seemed to be granted the best of what a young girl might offer and still go to Sunday school with her head up. Lickety-split, he joined every team he could think of in junior high. In the course of a single year, he was a wrestler, a sprinter, a right fielder, and a tight end. As he’d hoped, his feminine classmates flocked to him, every kind of girl he could desire: short ones, tall ones, fleshy ones, skinny ones, girls with breasts already, girls with wide, luscious mouths, girls with hips that moved in a way that stole his breath, Jewish girls, of course, but Christian girls, too. When he went into the town, he noticed that Negro girls gave him shy, curious glances. By this he knew, as Uncle Dr. Howard would say, he had arrived.
The shameful secret was he didn’t really like sports. He’d rather sit in the library pouring over maps or work in the garden or tag along after Bald Horace while he tended that ornery tribe of goats he kept in a rented patch of rocks and grass next to the village where the Negro folk lived. He much preferred the quiet study of river currents, the cheering sight of a tiny green shoot peeping out of the dirt to the crunch of bones on the thirty-yard line or the way his back hurt when he spent hours hunched over slapping a fist into his mitt, endlessly waiting for a ball to fly his way. He especially preferred pastoral occupations to the sharp jab of Bird Dog MacKenzie’s evil-minded elbow in his privates when they twisted on the mat. Since Mama always said it was a man’s job to make sacrifices for the women in his life, he considered his involvement with sports as well as the odd jobs he performed after school to help out at home his primary forfeitures in service to the fair gender.
All of this had the effect of basting an adult patina over the whole of Mickey Moe’s boyish being. Weaker and younger boys looked to him for advice and protection. No Southern lad can resist the glamour of the heroic. He rose to the occasion every time.
Mickey Moe, a cousin or classmate might ask, I got a cranky chain on my bike ruinin’ my every effort to beat my brother home after school. You help me straighten it out?
He’d spit and roll up his sleeves and crouch over the bike getting his clothes and hands smeared with grease as he carefully removed the chain, laid it flat on the ground to correct any kinks, and with any luck got it back on again. Such was his reputation among his peers, if he could not fix something, it was declared dead broke and tossed away. If the stubborn object was a bicycle, it might resurrect, reappearing on the streets under the conspicuous bottom of a Negro boy who’d scavenged and coaxed it back to use. Out of respect for Mickey Moe, the original owner would refuse to recognize it, at least in public.
Such deference was a burden to him. He felt it based on his participation in sports he did not like and a mechanical competence he only half possessed. He often felt a fraud, and yet he performed his role of good old boy in training with increasing prowess throughout his high school years, because it was what Mama wanted and what the boys at school wanted and heck, what the girls at school wanted, too. Sometimes, he needed to blow off steam when the frustration of what he was, which he could not define, and what he must be got too hot under his skin or when he was generally confused and dismayed by the people around him. On those occasions, he went to the village.
The first time he went to the village without being taken there by Bald Horace on one learning experience or another was toward the middle of the ninth grade. Ricky Baker, who should have known better, asked Mickey Moe to go with him and his boys over to Sassaport Hardware to help him pick out a new pocketknife. His old one had rusted up tight. It was his own fault. Ricky kept his knife dangling from his belt loop whether a heavy rain came upon him or not. He approached Mickey Moe for help because they were classmates and friends more or less. They shared a sandwich at recess or a game of catch once in a while. There weren’t an abundance of happy times between them, but neither had there ever been any bad blood. Ricky Baker also knew Mickey Moe was a relation of the Sassaport family, and he figured maybe old man Sassaport would take down the box of long, flat blades reserved for older boys and grown men from its high shelf if he was in the company of kin. On the Thursday in question, after school was out but long before supper, Ricky Baker and four of his boys biked over to Mickey Moe’s to ask what he thought of that old knife of his, aiming to rope him into a trip to the hardware store.
Well, lemme see that sticker of yours, Mick
ey Moe said. Maybe it’s not beyond repair. Ricky showed it to him, making a joke of the struggle it took to get the knife open to demonstrate its ruination.
Mickey Moe ran his thumb lightly against the cutting edge. Now that ain’t bad at all, Ricky, he said. We can fix that up with a little sandpaper and oil, maybe sharpen it up a bit on a stone or it might just need some work on a strap.
But Ricky had his heart set on the new one he’d dreamt up, one with a mother-of-pearl handle that would make him feel as dashing as if he sported a Derringer out of Zane Grey. He bristled at the idea that he would not get what he wanted. Get out, Mick. It’s ruint, he said, his head down and his cheeks hot and red.
Mickey Moe, still intently studying the knife, did not notice the boy’s reaction. No it ain’t, Ricky, no it ain’t. We can fix it up. Why spend good money on somethin’ you don’t need?
To the child of a widow forced by fate into parsimonious habit, this was the bottom line. “Waste not, want not” was the lullaby of his childhood, the words that tucked him in at night. He had no idea how adult this made him sound, how utterly foreign to a boy with his mouth watering for something that such mature consideration could snatch away from him fast and furious. So Ricky, red as rust, sputtering frustration said, Ah, you cheap kike. My daddy’s right. You all alike. Why’d I think you’d understand? And he took off with his pals, all of them yelling, Kike! Kike! Kike! laughing uproariously as they steered their bikes in the general direction of Sassaport Hardware, as if the slur had stuck in their throats all their lives and letting it loose was a relief, a celebration, a cause for joy.
Mickey Moe stood there, in the middle of his mama’s front yard, pop-eyed, stunned stock-still that boys he thought his friends had just gleefully insulted him over a rusted-up hunk of cold metal. He’d been lucky in the past, he knew that, the Jew haters had pretty much left him alone, no doubt because of his swanky address. Mama always said it didn’t matter what people said behind your back as long as they were civil in public, but now things were squirming out there in the open where no one would ever be able to ignore them again. He felt a spike of anger stab him at the heart then a deep sadness, deeper than he knew possible, and he bolted like a startled colt, ran wild to nowhere to escape weeping in the street for all to see. He had no conscious destination until he stopped outside Bald Horace’s rented patch of crabby ground next to the village, crept under its post-and-wire fence, and lay down on some rocks. Panting with exhaustion, the shock, anger, and hurt beat out of him for at least as long as it took to catch his breath, he watched the goats.
There were seven of them. A year or two before, he’d given them the names of Snow White’s seven dwarfs. When he told Bald Horace, the man laughed because the goats were does and their kids. He borrowed a buck when he wanted to breed. It struck him as quite comical for his high-steppin’ little ladies to have names like Grumpy, Sleepy, Doc, and Dopey although Sneezy and Happy fit, he had to admit that, and maybe Bashful, which was what Mickey Moe named the runt of the crew.
That Thursday, Grumpy lived up to her name. For no reason Mickey Moe could discern, she ran up to poor Dopey and butted her in her side so hard she nearly fell over. Staggering off, Dopey tried to keep her distance, hiding behind the stump of the herd’s climbing tree. Grumpy saw where she hid herself and signaled with a flap of lip, a twitch of ear to Sleepy, Sneezy, and Doc. In a bunch, as if they’d been planning it all afternoon, the four of them charged poor old Dopey. They rammed her into the fence, and she bounced off bloody where wire cut into her. Mickey Moe could not endure the look in her pained little goat’s eyes. Her predicament drove all thoughts of his own problems aside. Jumping into the fray, he rushed to stand between Dopey and the others to save her, poor thing, and they butted him just as they’d butted her, as if he were not human, supreme over them, the almighty author of food and shelter and milking, as if he were just another goat who did not know his place, a foolish goat protecting the eldest of the herd, the one who required driving out as nature herself commanded. If Bald Horace had not chanced to arrive just then and rescue him, they might have done him serious damage. As it was, he was scraped bloody. When Mickey Moe tried to walk, he limped, so Bald Horace took him home to clean him up. He made him sit in the three-wheeled cart he pushed with old Dopey tethered to a handle, skittering along behind them. Can’t leave her with those bullies no more, he explained. I’ll have to leave her in the yard no matter what Aurora Mae has to say.
Mickey Moe wondered who Aurora Mae was. He figured she must be Bald Horace’s wife. It struck him then that he’d never heard anything about Bald Horace’s family, which was curious, because Mama knew all the Negro folk around for three generations. She gossiped with Sara Kate about their goings on and spoke of their dead, too. Surely this Aurora Mae would have been mentioned some time or other. He would have asked Bald Horace directly who she was, but the man was preoccupied instructing him in the habits of goats and the proper manner of managing them without getting stuck in the middle of a losing battle. It felt rude to interrupt. Mickey Moe only followed some of it anyway. He hurt too much to pay considerable attention as his ride was hardly smooth and each bump in the dirt road sent fresh jolts of pain through his hip and into his ribs, which, he suspected, were cracked.
When they got to Bald Horace’s home, a tar-paper shack not much bigger than Mickey Moe’s bedroom in the big house, there was no Aurora Mae to be seen or heard. After checking Dopey’s wounds and determining they could wait, Bald Horace took the boy in, rolled his pants up, and washed his cuts with warm water heated on the stove and mixed with Epsom salts. Next, he bandaged him with rags from a wicker basket that sat next to the stove as if waiting for that very purpose. All the while, Bald Horace talked nonstop in words that only meant something important later on.
You see, son, you can’t give them goats the chance to gang up on you, which they surely will if you let ’em. And it ain’t always the smartest thing to get in there and think you can best a whole herd. You gotta bribe ’em. Sometimes you gotta outthink ’em, because, let’s face it, they may be smart, but they ain’t as smart as people, no, no, no, not by a long shot. You might not have noticed today, but I had feed ready for them critters, and that’s the only reason, I swear, the only reason on God’s good earth they left you alone long enough for me to dump it and get in there and take you and Dopey out unmolested. You understandin’ me?
I think so.
Bald Horace shook his head from side to side while he tied a bandage in a snug knot just under Mickey Moe’s knee. He was thinking his own thoughts. He came to a decision that had little to do with the goats and everything to do with life as he knew it. He decided to impart some wisdom to this poor, fatherless white child, who obviously, if he’d chosen of his own free will to spend time with a mess of hardscrabble goats on a fine April afternoon, was in need of guidance.
Listen to me, son. Listen to me good. I knew your daddy. I knew him well. And this is somethin’ I know he’d tell you if he could.
The boy’s head jerked up. Daddy had been invoked. He must take heed.
Confrontin’ somethin’ head-on isn’t always the best way. Sometimes you need to run around things to fool ’em, to distract ’em. You get what I’m sayin’?
Mickey Moe considered his experience that afternoon on the street in front of his house. It was an opening salvo, he knew that much. There would be more torment from Ricky Baker and his boys, if only to justify their prior cruelty. And miracle of miracles, here was his dear, dead daddy speaking through Bald Horace in order to tell him how to handle the situation. He shook his head with all the grown-up gravitas he possessed.
Yessir, he said, aware his mama would be appalled if she heard him address the man with an honorific reserved for white men. But Bald Horace had just rescued him from a brute tribe, patched him up, and given him a great and powerful gift to boot. The boy thought he deserved the respect due a white man. Yessir, he repeated for emphasis, Yessir, I do.
Bal
d Horace smiled wide enough for Mickey Moe to count the spaces in his teeth.
Well alright, then. Alright.
They nearly embraced, so powerful was their moment of man-to-man intimacy achieved amid an abandonment of class and race and age when another entered the house in a bustle of sound and fragrance. Mickey Moe looked away from Bald Horace’s melting eyes toward the front door and beheld for the first time the woman known as Aurora Mae.
Aurora Mae was, without a doubt, the most imposing, blackest woman Mickey Moe had ever seen, and that covered quite a lot of human territory. When she entered the room, she had to stoop a little to make it through the door. She carried half a dozen grocery bags, and once she was inside, she seemed to fill the place up. Her head near brushed the ceiling. It would take arms twice the length of his own—or Bald Horace’s for that matter, as he was a spindly type, shrunken with age and hardship, more on a child’s scale of being—to hug her all the way around. Her chest could feed nations, her nostrils suck up all the sweet air of a spring day, and her deep brown eyes with their brilliant flecks of yellow reminded him of the great river itself and the way golden stones glittered up from its bottom in places near the shore. Every inch of her was doused in Sassaport Five and Ten’s violet toilet water, a scent his second sister favored. He’d only got such a strong dose of it up his nose once before, the time he’d knocked over a bottle she’d left on the edge of the bathroom sink and the contents entire spilled out.
One More River Page 4