The Kind One

by Tom Epperson

  “Well, if it ain’t Earl and Shirley,” said the Negro.

  “Hello, Otis,” said Darla.

  The Negro’s face was split by a big grin and two gold teeth gleamed at us.

  “Darla,” he said, and opened the door.

  We stepped inside. It was nearly as dark inside as out. By the light of a lone candle, I saw that Otis looked like a character out of The Thief of Baghdad. He was wearing a turban, a loose silk blouse, and baggy silk pants, and had a wide curving sword hanging from his side. He was about six and a half feet tall.

  “Little Brother told me you was coming,” he said.

  “How have you been?” said Darla.

  “The same. Everything been zackly the same round here cepting you ain’t been here but now you back here everything zackly the same.”

  We walked into a cavernous room lit only by a few candles, the ceiling barely visible in the darkness. The floor was covered in colorful Persian rugs, and all the windows were hidden behind heavy purple drapes. There were several low sofas and low tables, and plush pillows were scattered about on the rugs and people sat or reclined on the sofas and among the pillows. The air was thick with the smoke of cigarettes and reefers.

  A handsome young colored man, wearing a white dinner jacket, a red shirt, and a black bowtie, sat at a baby grand playing a lazy jazzy tune. He gave Darla a wink and a wave.

  We sat down on one of the sofas. Three waiters, all colored and all dressed like Otis, were moving among the customers with trays of drinks. Darla ordered a cherry bomb, and I asked for the same, whatever it was.

  I looked over the clientele. Several Negro men were cuddled up with white women, one hefty Negro woman was sitting on a portly white man’s lap, and two white women were passionately smooching. Darla was enjoying my obvious amazement.

  “You ever seen a joint like this before?” she said.

  “Nope. Looks like you and me and Earl and Shirley are about the only regular couples here.”

  “Take a look at Earl and Shirley and tell me what they’re doing.”

  They were sitting on another sofa. Earl was lighting Shirley’s cigarette; now he applied the flame to a big cigar sticking out of his mouth.

  “Earl’s lighting a cigar.”

  “Unh unh. That’s Shirley. Earl’s the one in the dress.”

  I looked again. I could see it now. A guy dressed up like a broad and vice versa. I laughed.

  The waiter came back with our cherry bombs, which turned out to be glasses of champagne with cherries in them. Darla ate her cherry, then asked for mine. As I handed it over, Little Brother, the proprietor of the place, appeared. He was a short, light-skinned colored guy dressed like his waiters and doorman except he wasn’t wearing a turban. His head was shaved and he had a gold earring in his right ear. He hugged Darla and kissed her on the cheek then presented me with a very limp hand to shake as Darla introduced us.

  “Oh, he’s cute, sugar,” he said to Darla. “If I was you I’d go out and find a judge and get married right now.”

  “Marriage just means three things,” said Darla. “Diapers, dirty dishes, and dinner.”

  Little Brother laughed extravagantly, then sort of twirled away, at the same time clapping his hands above his head.

  “Ladies? Gentlemen? Look who we got here with us tonight! Darla! Yeah, Darla’s back! And if we ask her real nice, she might sing us a song or two! With her sweet, bird-like voice!”

  The candle-lit couples applauded softly for Darla. She finished off her cherry bomb and handed me the glass and walked over to the piano. She talked briefly with the piano player, then started singing “One Night of Love”—

  “When at the break of dawn

  I find my lover gone

  I’ll whisper with a smile

  I’ve lived a little while—

  I’ve known one night of love.”

  She seemed in her white gown to be a perfect creature of the smoke and the flickering light. I looked around the room, and saw people looking lost and dreamy as they listened, as if she was a witch casting a wonderful spell. Earl and Shirley got up and started dancing, with Shirley’s face buried in Earl’s false bosom. The two white women seemed unaware of everything else as they continued to kiss and caress each other; one of them had a cool, aloof beauty that seemed very familiar.

  Little Brother came over and gave me a glass filled with a clear green liquid.

  “Try this.”

  I took a sip. It tasted like liquid licorice.

  “Not bad. What is it?”

  “Absinthe.”

  “That woman over there? The one in the brown skirt? Is that Greta Garbo?”

  Little Brother took a look. “Maybe. Maybe not. When people come in here, they check their names at the door. I’m glad you like the absinthe. It makes the heart grow fonder.”

  Darla sang more songs, and I drank more glasses of absinthe. I began to see things I wasn’t sure were actually there. A gigantic blue and red and green parrot appeared on the arm of the sofa, squawked “So long!” eleven times, then flapped away and disappeared up a staircase. Greta Garbo gave me a sinister smile, then stuck out her unnaturally long tongue at me. A colored guy in a three-piece chesterfield suit was on a sofa with his hand up the dress of a writhing white girl. A big dark dick began to lift up out of his lap like a cobra out of a basket. Bats crawled across the purple curtains.

  A waiter approached with still another glass of absinthe, and I raised my arms like a man who was being beaten. “No! No more.”

  Little Brother sat down beside me. “How you doing, sugar?”

  My tongue felt like a dead slab of meat as I mumbled some stuff that even I didn’t understand.

  Little Brother laughed and said: “I didn’t know you spoke Chinese.”

  I laughed too, a weak, wheezing, old man’s laugh. My head started tipping over, it was like it bore no relationship to my shoulders. I felt spit gathering in the corner of my mouth, getting ready to turn into drool.

  Little Brother moved very close to my face; he seemed to have the overlarge predatory eyes of an owl. “That girl over there? Singing by the piano? She’s very near and dear to me. You understand what I’m saying?”

  My head lolled around loosely at the end of my stalk-like neck as I tried to nod.

  “She seems to trust you, for some reason. So you take good care of her. You don’t, and Little Brother’s gonna come looking for you.”

  He kept talking, but I couldn’t hear him anymore because an enormous roaring filled my ears, and then all went black as though I was swept into a railroad tunnel.

  Chapter 8

  CLACKETY CLACK.

  Next thing I knew I was outside the mansion of Little Brother throwing up lavishly and greenly on the lawn.

  “Ha ha!” I heard. “Har har!”

  I looked up from my bent-over hands-on-knees position, and saw Darla a few feet away, watching me with concern; near her was the white man who’d had the colored woman on his lap. He was an older guy, with a bushy white walrus moustache. He had his hands on his hips and was laughing at me. He said, with an English accent: “Your friend’s giving it a bit of the old heave-ho, what?”

  “You gonna be okay, Danny?” asked Darla.

  I nodded. I noticed it was dawn. I took my handkerchief out and wiped off my mouth. The guy handed Darla something.

  “My card, my dear.”

  “‘Anthony Goodall,’” read Darla. “‘Motion picture producer.’”

  “I am not one of those fly-by-night soi-disant producers, ask anyone in the city about Tony Goodall and I am confident they will tell that I am, as you Americans call it, the real McCoy.”

  “I know the real real McCoy,” I said.

  Tony Goodall laughed again. “Yes, you poor fellow, I’m sure you do.” He turned back to Darla. “By dint of long practice, my eyes have become, for all practical purposes, motion picture cameras, and as I gazed upon you tonight I thought I detected that elusive sidereal quality t
hat we are all in quest of. My next film and the next of Ronald Coleman happen to be one and the same. While fox hunting, the Prince of Wales takes a nasty spill from his horse, suffers a knock on his noggin, and develops amnesia. He wanders off on his own. The entire country’s looking for him, of course, but somehow, the script’s still a bit weak on this point, he winds up in America. He finds work as a common laborer, and falls in love with a very beautiful girl who works as a maid. Inevitably, one morning he awakes and remembers who he is. His dilemma is this: He knows his responsibility is to return to England to be who he was born to be. But if he does so, he’ll have to give up the girl, since obviously a mere maid is unfit to be the wife of the future king. It is an impossible choice between duty and beauty.”

  “So what does he do?” said Darla.

  “Oh, I don’t know, love, the writers, such as they are, are still hashing all that out. At any rate, that vile horrible witch Joan Crawford wants the role of the girl but over my dead body. Ronnie and I are looking for a fresh face. Perhaps you are she.”

  “Funny you should mention Joan Crawford,” said Darla as she gave her gown a pluck.

  “Yes, isn’t it? Well, I must toddle. I do hope you call. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Ha ha!” And then to me: “I once knew a man whose liver was rotting out who produced vomitus of precisely that color. I’d go to a doctor if I were you.”

  Goodall doffed his hat to Darla and walked off toward his car. Darla stuck out her arms and closed her eyes and gave a mewing half yawn as she stretched luxuriously.

  “What a night. You ready to go, Danny?”

  We got in the Packard and drove away from Little Brother’s. The days had been hot, but now it was cool. A bit of morning mist hung in the air. We had Los Angeles largely but not completely to ourselves. Plenty of birds were out. A kid in knickers on a ramshackle bike was expertly flinging newspapers at the front steps of houses. A milkman dressed in white was carrying white bottles of milk away from a white milk truck.

  Darla was scrutinizing herself with a frown in her compact mirror. “Well, my face doesn’t look very fresh right now. Matter of fact, it looks like hell.” She snapped shut the compact and returned it to her purse. Then she looked at Tony Goodall’s card, tore it in half, and threw it out the window.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Oh, he just wants to screw me.”

  “Maybe he was on the level.”

  “What if he was? I was in a movie once. A guy a lot like Tony Goodall got me the role. I had one line in one scene. This mean little kid let loose a bunch of white mice at a fancy party. I had to jump up on a table and say: ‘Take me home at once, Alfred!’ Then I fell backward into a bowl of punch.

  “They shot the scene again and again. And all these white mice were supposed to be dropping down the fronts of women’s dresses and getting in their hair and crawling up guys’ trouser legs, and these stuck-up people were running around and screaming and going nuts and it’s supposed to be hilarious. And usually I’m scared of mice, but these mice were just so cute. Little pink ears and eyes and feet and tails. And they were getting stepped on, and thrown against walls, and I saw one dragging itself along the floor leaving a trail of blood, and I found another one drowned in the punchbowl. And the director just kept screaming: ‘More mice, more mice!’ I was nearly hysterical by the time it was all over.

  “I know, they were just mice. But it wasn’t right, what happened. Nobody cared about the mice. Somebody should’ve looked out for them.”

  “So ’cause you had one bad experience, you don’t wanna be in the movies?”

  She shrugged, and lit up a cigarette. We drove along in silence awhile. My head was killing me. Since I didn’t have any water I just chewed up two aspirin and swallowed them. Which tickled my throat, which made me start coughing, which made me feel sick again.

  I pulled the car over and jumped out and ran over to the side of the street and threw up in some brownish, patchy grass. We were in a neighborhood of shabby warehouses and machine shops; I saw chalked on the side of one building: “END POVERTY IN CALIFORNIA. VOTE FOR SINCLAIR.”

  As I walked back, I saw a car about a block and a half behind us, stopped in the street with the engine running, dark smoke drifting up from the tailpipe. It was a red Buick. Two guys were in the front seat, but they were too far away for me to see what they looked like.

  I got in my car and drove on. In the rearview mirror I could see the Buick driving on too. I made a left. In a few moments I saw the Buick making the left behind us.

  “Don’t turn around,” I said. “Just look in the mirror. I think we’re being followed.”

  Darla took a look. “Jesus. Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “You got your gun, right?”

  Wrong. The Mexicans had my gun, and I hadn’t got around to getting a new one.

  “Right.”

  “Who do you think they are?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I turned right at the next block, and the Buick obligingly followed.

  “Shouldn’t we go fast?” said Darla. “Try and lose ’em?”

  “Maybe it’s better if we don’t let ’em know we know they’re there.”

  “But Danny, what if they’re about to kill us, or kidnap us?”

  “I think they’ve been following us since last night. I’m pretty sure I saw the same car when we stopped at the gas station to get cigarettes. So if they wanted to hurt us, they probably would’ve already done it. I think they’re just watching us. They wanna see where we go, what we’re up to.”

  “It’s Bud. They’re reporting back to Bud.”

  “Most likely.”

  “Bastard.”

  She started puffing away furiously at her cigarette, like the cigarette was Bud and she was trying to smoke him up.

  “He’s completely nuts. I’d leave today, but I know he’d come after me. Betty, the cigarette girl? He had her killed just ’cause she took another job. And there was this other girl, this Mexican girl. She was his girlfriend for a while, but finally she’d had enough, and she took off and went back to Mexico. He sent his creeps after her, and they brought her back. She was on her knees, begging for her life. And he shot her. Right in the Peacock Club.”

  “Was her name Emperatriz?”

  “Yeah. So you know about her.”

  “I didn’t know she was dead.”

  “I know the same thing would happen to me if I ever tried to leave him.” Now she gave a long sigh. “Look, I don’t wanna drag you into my mess. It’s all my fault, and now I’m paying for it. Forget I said anything.”

  The Buick continued to hang back at a discreet distance all the way to Bud’s house. I stopped in front of the gate and beeped. Willie the Coon peered out, unkempt and unshaven; he was peeling a banana, and, through the bars of the gate, looked like he lived in a zoo.

  The gate slid open, and I drove up to the house. Anatoly was out by the swimming pool, at the artificial beach. He was barefoot and wearing an undershirt. He was feeding the seagull. He tossed up scraps of food and the gull, flapping around on its ten-foot tether, snapped up the scraps in mid-air. Anatoly seemed to be talking to the gull, while the gull was making screechy cries. Both man and gull seemed happy.

  Darla and I went in the house. I could hear somebody snoring somewhere. I walked with Darla to the stairs.

  “Thanks for taking me out, Danny. I had a great time.”

  “Yeah, me too. But I think next time I’ll lay off the absinthe.”

  She smiled. She pulled her pearl earrings off.

  “I can’t wait to crawl into bed.”

  She was standing on the second stair, so her head was a little higher than mine. And now she bent down a little and put her hand on the side of my face and kissed me on the mouth for about three seconds. Then she turned, and I watched her hips in the Joan Crawford gown sway their way up the stairs.

  I wandered off in search of the snoring. I found T
eddy and Tommy asleep in the room where we’d had the party. Tommy was slumped in an armchair, and Teddy was sprawled on his back on a couch. Teddy was the snorer.

  I stood above him and looked down at him. His mouth was wide-open. I ripped off one of his fake eyebrows and dropped it in his mouth and walked swiftly toward the door. I heard choking and gagging noises behind me, and then I was outside where the sun was just coming up over the barbwired wall.

  Chapter 9

  “I USED TO doubt the existence of fairies too,” said Dulwich to me and Sophie—this in response to Sophie’s declaration that she didn’t believe in God, ghosts, Santa Claus, fairies, or anything else. “But a summer I spent in Ireland when I was eleven caused me to doubt my doubt.

  “I was staying with my uncle and aunt, who lived a few miles outside the little town of Foxford. There was a girl that worked there as a maid, her name was Kitty. A wide, freckled face, a bit on the podgy side, very warm, always laughing and filled with garrulous stories. She was a firm believer in the fairy folk, and she told me about a phenomenon known as the ‘lone sod.’ That occurs when a place is particularly precious to the fairies, and they cast a spell on the unwary trespassing traveler which makes him completely befuddled and lost and unable to find his way out of the place, until the fairies choose to let him go. She said the only way to break the spell is to take off your coat and turn it inside out and put it back on, but such a maneuver works less than half the time. There was a field just a short distance down the road that had a huge gnarled thorn tree growing in the middle, and Kitty said it was a fairy tree and that I should avoid the field lest I fall victim to the ‘lone sod.’

  “Well, of course I just considered Kitty to be an ignorant superstitious Irish girl and thought no more about it. Then a few days later came a day of great heat.”

  “Like today,” said Sophie. We were walking back from a drugstore on Melrose, with ice cream cones we were hurrying to consume before they dripped onto the baking street.

  “Like today. My uncle was a very quiet chap who had lost a leg to an infection caused by a Zulu spear at the Battle of Isandhlwana, and he seemed forever to be brooding on its loss. The only time his spirits seemed to brighten a bit was when he talked about his boyhood, which he obviously saw as some cloudless prelapsarian paradise.”