by Tom Powers
Well, before we started, Mr. Wens said goodbye and told the prince he better get going as some cars full of flashbulbs and reporters to go with ’em was driving up.
Just as the steps were pulled away and the copilot was shutting the door, Mr. Wens waved a letter at me from the ground, and I punched the copilot in the back. I pointed to Mr. Wens and he reached down and got the letter for me. It was from Jeff, so I don’t remember leaving Mexico City, or even remember seeing the boys change the plane from a sitting room plane into a bedroom plane, because I was reading Jeff’s letter and then thinking about it. And while I did go to bed and get up and do all the things like brushing my hair in the small ladies’ place, which I may as well say was the gentlemen’s place for the same things also, I hardly knew what I was doing till I got to Rio, and hardly then.
The letter didn’t have a beginning, like we was taught to write ’em in school. It just started. I’d still have it, only it’s somewhere on the bottom of the Indian ocean, I guess. But I remember every word of it and why wouldn’t I, as it’s the first love letter I ever got, if you can call it that.
“If you can’t start more stuff,” that’s how it started, and it went on:
I guess there never was such a gal, since the dudes ran Calamity Jane off the ranges. All you got to do is to sell one pack of Parliaments to a foreigner, and what happens? The town turns into a mystery thriller, with you and me being chased over Chicago by Keystone comics. You dress up in a coat of many colors. You disappear from Butch’s like you had sunk through a rat hole. I go crazy and drive all the gas out of the Yellow Company’s bus looking for you, only to get pinched by an escort of motor cops, like I was Miss America. They ride herd on me, till they corral me at the airport and me swearing all the way that they’ve got the wrong murder and that whatever it is I never done it.
And we get there and, by God, if it ain’t you dressed in mourning for your lost sanity. And I say, what the hell? As who wouldn’t? And you say, excuse me please, I’ve got no time to explain, as I am just about to step into my private plane with a bunch of strangers and also with my aunt Mary who I never saw or heard of till this minute, and please, you just go to this address and explain to my poor old pop, so it won’t worry him at all, that I got to go away now with these strangers to foreign parts, because a little gang of hoodlums, that I just stole the ruby eye of the Great Spinx from, is sure to plug me full of lead if I don’t vamoos. And then you say that all of this has been engineered by the FBI—that you had forgotten to tell me you was a member of. That being the case, I agree to talk to your pop, not knowing at that time that you have just that morning gotten us into a war with Japan, and that you are probably flying off now to be a general in it.
And then, all of a sudden, there you stand on the top of those steps that are getting ready to pull away any minute and let that damn plane take you off into the sky, where I’ll never maybe see you again. You look so young and pretty and pale and sweet, and sure needing somebody to take care of you, and how you kept that way, God only knows. My poor old bow legs went like macaroni, and it took me a year to get up them steps to you and to get my arms around you, so slim and soft, and so good. And I can’t say a damn word because the tears keep choking me, till I croak like a bawling calf being branded by a tenderfoot. And oh, my darling, darling sweetheart, don’t forget me. And please be careful, because I just couldn’t stand it if anything was to happen to you before I get you back to me again safe. Your friend and well-wisher, Jefferson Davis Wade
P. S. After I go to tell your pop, I guess I better join the army, as I am an officer in the State Guard. Maybe I could be of some use, I hope. See you in Tokyo.
J.D.W.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TRAVELING IS JUST ALIKE, whether you are in a boxcar with Pop and Willie when you’re a little girl going to Springfield, or a big girl riding to Champagne with a fly drummer you never saw before.
Traveling is waiting to get there—that is if you know where you’re going. Or traveling can be getting on a train by yourself to go to Chicago, with a ticket that you’ve just bought and one dollar and sixty-five cents left, after making Pop take what you had, and both of you determined not to cry, because you can’t stay in the house now with Uncle Ulrich. Pop can because he don’t know like you do, and it’s all over anyway—nothing will bring Willie back now.
Anyway, traveling is pretty much the same, even when you don’t know where you’re going. You just sit there until you stop, eating nice lunches and breakfasts with flowers on ’em. And not worrying about getting there, because Aunt Mary seems comfortable and the places you stop in are all foreign anyway.
In school my geography book was just too big to carry, so I used to hide it in the Girls’ washroom, back of the john. Maybe that’s where I got the idea for a place to hide the cigarette tray and the cash box at Butch’s. I often wondered whether it would be there when I got back, and if somebody found it, whether Butch would think I’d stolen the cash box. But he wouldn’t think that, not after what happened last Thanksgiving night—or rather the next night when the mother of the drunk society girl came in to ask if she couldn’t maybe pay for any damage that her daughter might have done. I took her aside into the Ladies’ and gave her back the big fat wad of bills her daughter had given to me just before she passed out. But Butch listened at the door so he knew I had had it since last night and hadn’t said a word to anybody. And Butch said he thought I was sure nuts. But I noticed, after that, whenever there was trouble and the lights were snapped off, I’d feel Butch’s roll pressed into my hand.
Traveling is fun, too, when you come to see that people that sure looked strange at first, because they maybe was a different color from other people, are just like the other people, only of a different color maybe, or of a different religion.
I learned that traveling. Like that time I was laughing with one of the boys (that I called Bill) at the other boy (that I called Coo) because Coo slipped on something slippery and fell right down on his fanny holding a big bowl of soup in both of his hands that he couldn’t let go of. So Bill couldn’t help laughing, which he does in a kind of a squeal. Through silly little things like that, we all seemed to get to be better friends than before.
Traveling to Rio was nice, even if I couldn’t be sure whether this was where I got out and wave goodbye, or whether I go on to wherever the prince and his sweet and Bill and Coo were going to.
But Aunt Mary was with me, and Aunt Mary is somebody I just love because somehow she makes me feel safe and comfortable. And when I say I wish I knew about a lot of things that I don’t know, she says they are not as important as being “pure in heart.” Even though I didn’t know exactly what Aunt Mary meant, it made me feel good.
Aunt Mary was always saying things like, “No, I don’t believe I’d wear that suit to dinner in the Panama Hotel because it will maybe be a big party and maybe it’s a good time to wear the ivory satin dinner dress.” And I knew she thought they’d all be in their formals for dinner, and they were, so I was glad I wore my formals because I sure wouldn’t have if Aunt Mary hadn’t given me the courage to dress up quite so much.
And Aunt Mary was always somewhere else, or just starting to go somewhere or do something else if the prince wanted to sit down and talk. She nearly always had some shopping to do, mostly for me, when it was time to start out for a drive in the two-horse carriage that we had all planned to take together. So he and I went alone, and he bought white flowers for me and the whole sweet began to treat me with respect.
The prince talked quite a lot to me now about his pop and his brother, and I talked quite a lot about mine—that’s how you get to be friends. He told me something about why he was flying around the world like this; it was to sell a lot of stuff that had been laying around in their cellar, under his papa’s house. He had sold a lot of this stuff in America and was going to sell the biggest one of all to a kind of king in a place that he called the Soodan. Then he was going home to take the mon
ey to his brother and to settle something between them. A blood brotherhood was the best he could say it, and he showed me a little scar on his wrist. He said the little lotus button was a sign of it, too.
I laughed and said, “Well, I guess I’m pretty near a sister to the two of you,” and he said “Why?” and I said, “Because when I was getting you out of Butch’s place—draggin’ you with my hands around you, under the arms—I scratched my wrist on that little lotus button, just where your wrist is cut. “And it bled a little, too, so I guess I kind of belong to this blood brotherhood, along with you and him.” I showed him the place on my wrist.
Well, you would have thought I had told him that my grandpop was the king of India. He kissed the place to make it well, and he looked at me till I had to look somewhere else.
“Now you understand,” he said. “What my brother do, I must do.”
“Why?” I says. “I don’t see that.”
“The bond,” he says, “the oath. You must not be bound as we are bound, you must be free. As I am not free. But the English will never understand these things.”
“Listen,” I says, “you don’t have to do anything you don’t think is right. If you’ve made a bargain with your brother, you can get out of it the same way you got in. If you made an oath or a prayer about it you just go to the same place with your brother and unmake it,” I says. “Will you promise?” I says.
“I will never make another promise,” he says. “I made one with my brother and that one will break my father’s heart.”
He didn’t ever ask me not to, but somehow I felt like maybe he would rather I didn’t tell anybody about things he said when we talked like this, and as Aunt Mary was all I had, I didn’t, not a word.
I asked him about Rio, and he said we was going to stop there for a minute to pick up a friend. This was on our way back from wherever we’d been, as we drove slow in the sunset with the ocean on the other side from where it was on the way out. What he had told me about picking up a friend seemed like more or less a confidence, but anyway for some reason I never told Aunt Mary.
The next place we stopped Aunt Mary went with us to see some old ruins of a place as big as the Stevens Hotel, but it wasn’t there anymore. It was all mostly nothing but stones that had fallen down off of each other and got run over by a lot of vines and stuff. But there was one place like a church with stone seats around the sides and Aunt Mary said she wanted to draw a picture of a kind of an idol or a statue of a very ugly woman that sure needed a brassiere, so she sat down and drew it. I didn’t know she could but she could, and she didn’t leave anything out.
Me and the prince went up some steps that wasn’t going anywhere anymore. We sat down in the sun and he smoked a cigarette.
I didn’t ask questions and only talked when he wanted to talk about things, but now he did again, so we did.
I felt sorry for him, having to go all over the world selling stuff to get him and his brother out of trouble. I told him that I hoped he wouldn’t go haywire just because they was in trouble and sell this Soodan king anything his pop wouldn’t want to part with.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean, I hope you ain’t figuring to get rid of Hankah,” I says, “because your father wouldn’t think that was right, and neither would I…Listen,” I says, “jumping around over the face of the earth selling second-hand jewelry is all right—and collecting the money must be fun—but suppose we was to crash down into some of these jungles, then what would happen? I mean with us and all the money dead and lost, wouldn’t your brother have to take the rap for whatever it is you and him have been doing together? That ought to make you scared to collect all of this and go all over Mexico just to pick up friends.”
He laughed louder than I thought he could. Then he told me there was a little old lady that lives on a funny sounding street in England, and he said she kept the money by telegraph, and when I asked him if she might not get bombed out, he laughed again and he said she was a pretty strong old lady. And he said something I couldn’t understand about her being a bank, or maybe he said she had a bank.
I asked Aunt Mary where she learned to draw and she said in the map school, but I didn’t know where that was at.
We talked like that a lot of times, at places we got to, him and me. But then finally we got to a place in the sky, up over a beautiful harbor that Aunt Mary said was the most beautiful harbor in the world, and there was Christ on a mountain, and we were in Rio.
By this time I was use to living with the sweet and shopping on Mr. Hoover’s money—as I thought it was at the time, but when I found out whose it really was, was pretty peculiar.
So, in Rio, Aunt Mary said why didn’t I buy some presents for Bill and Coo, for by this time they even called themselves that. So I did. I also got a nice fat book for myself to write down things I didn’t want my mind to forget but to remember—and I was so glad I did for if I hadn’t of I wouldn’t of.
I thought that Rio was a Mexican city where everybody spoke like they did in Mexico City, except the tune is different. But then I learned we were in a different country—they sure seemed to pinch and pat more than they did in Mexico, but it didn’t mean anything more than whistling at a girl does in Chicago. The people in Rio wear wide black hats and they are called Brazilians.
We hardly stayed in Rio at all, just long enough for Aunt Mary and me to buy some funny hats and leather things with silver nails on ’em for Bill and Coo. They sure looked funny when they put the hats on top of their white head things, which do come off, I suppose, not that I ever saw ’em off, but of course they do.
Like everywhere else we’d been, men swarmed over the plane and did things to it—but not enough, apparently, or we wouldn’t have hit the water like we did when half of the engines quit being engines somewhere between Natal and Africa, but of course we didn’t know it then.
Well, they had got us all ready and just as we were about to start, I was telling Aunt Mary how black-and-blue I was from all that patting and pinching, when the prince’s sweet came up in a big dark blue car. He always seemed to get something like it to come to meet him wherever we got to.
Well, up they came in the big blue car—the sweet, then two motorcycle cops and then another big car with the prince and his friend, and then two more motorcycle cops with brown faces. And we watched ’em as they got out, and when I saw ’em I sure took in my breath and so did Aunt Mary. I don’t know much about people that are foreigners to us, but when I saw the friend of the prince I saw he was a friend from Japan—the country we were at war with.
CHAPTER NINE
THE SWEET STOOD KIND OF at attention, two on each side. One of the boys brought in a teeny little bag that was scratched and scuffed and about to fall to pieces. The other one brought on a paper sack that sure looked tacky. In they came and we got introduced and the friend’s name was Mr. Something that sounded like Mr. Bosco. But I knew it wasn’t Mr. Bosco because Mr. Bosco was the name of a man at the Elk’s carnival and street fair in Mattoon that ate snakes and everybody said was wild.
Only he wasn’t very wild, I guess, because the next day he came into Uncle Ulrich’s butcher shop and bought a porterhouse steak. He wasn’t a wild man at all; just a nice man that was only wild when he was in the Elk’s carnival. But this friend of the prince’s wasn’t the same man and his name wasn’t the same name, but it sounded like Mr. Bosco, so that’s what I’ll have to call him.
Well, it certainly gave me something to think about. I hadn’t been where anybody talked much English lately but I had seen those Chicago newspaper articles about those two Japanese that hadn’t gone home soon enough, and now we were at war with their country. And so I had to think about how I ought to feel, sitting in a plane with a little old man that maybe Jeff was getting ready to be a soldier to shoot because he was our enemy. I couldn’t seem to see what I ought to do, and so I didn’t do anything. After all, it was the prince’s plane, and the prince didn’t even pretend to be an Ame
rican. I’d never heard of his country being at any war with Japan.
And the more I saw of Mr. Bosco the more I didn’t want anybody to kill him, because he was the nicest little man you could imagine, smiling all the time when he wasn’t laughing out loud. And he spoke American a lot better than a lot of people who live right in it.
Mr. Bosco was a friend, but a poor friend, anybody could see that. His little black suit was shiny at the elbows and across the shoulders and on the behind, and had a little line of fringe on the back of the bottoms of his pant legs. And his hat was so old it had two greasy spots under the brim where it sat on his ears.
He took off his hat when we was all introduced, and he took off his hat every time he started to talk to you, but he always put it right back on again.
Some people can say a thing and it’s too intimate, and you so want to tell ’em they better mind their own business. But Mr. Bosco, he could ask you anything and it seemed like you couldn’t feel that way.
The first time I felt this way was when we were on our way to Natal. Aunt Mary had said we might as well go that far with the prince because it was on the way back to Chicago, which I didn’t know quite what that meant. Well, when we was on our way and dinner was over, there was Mr. Bosco taking his little hat off and smiling and sitting down next to me.
And he said: “You are going to be princess, yes?” he says.
“What give you that idea, Mr. Bosco?” I says.
“You gave me the idea,” says Mr. Bosco, and he laughed like a little bell ringing.
“How did I?” I says.
“You are pretty,” he says. “You don’t wear paint on your lips, you travel with Prince Halla Bandah and you got a pretty old lady to go along, too, so nobody thinks you are going to be princess, so nobody thinks nothing at all,” he said.