The Meq

by Steve Cash

  Whatever the reasons, I was being delayed and in my mind the fear kept growing that I might be too late, but too late for what, I didn’t know. I only knew that up ahead, upriver, there was danger, and the closer we got, the more I felt its presence.

  After stops in Natchez and Memphis, we docked in St. Louis late at night. I collected some of the wages due me and said I’d be back in an hour. I never returned. I made my way through an unfamiliar St. Louis to the south side, walking hills and streets I knew from memory, but feeling like a stranger.

  I rounded the corner where I had met Ray and saw the boardinghouse. I walked toward it. The sun was just rising. I saw the sign out front and it still read “Mrs. Bennings’s House.” I walked around the back to the kitchen door. It was unlocked and I opened it.

  She was in the kitchen, in the dark, but I saw her in the half-light that shone through the windows. She was standing by the stove putting water on to boil. Her blond hair was piled on top of her head. She tried to tuck a strand of it behind her ear. I watched her in silence. She was in her mid-twenties and beautiful, even in a worn old cotton robe and unlaced boots. She was at least six inches taller than I was. She watched the stove. I watched her.

  “You know it won’t work like that, don’t you?” I said.

  She jumped back, kicking over a chair and landing against the table. She regained her balance and looked over toward the door. “Who’s there?” she yelled.

  I said, “You can’t boil water and watch it too. You know that.”

  She didn’t make a sound for several moments, then she got on her knees and sort of half crawled toward me and the light from the open door. She stopped and looked at me, started to rise, then sat back down on the floor and crossed her legs, never taking her eyes from mine.

  “Hello, Carolina,” I said.

  “God, Z, I knew it. I knew you would come back just like this, just this way. I didn’t know when, but I knew how.”

  I stared at her. I had seen the gold flecks in her eyes before, but now those eyes were in the face of a grown woman, a beautiful woman. Suddenly we both laughed, not a nervous laugh, but a real out loud laugh. It felt so good to see her.

  “How’s Georgia?”

  “She’s fine, she’s fine.”

  She reached up and put her hand on my cheek. It was a woman’s touch. It was my mama’s touch. This was crazy. Inside, I was a man who had traveled fifty thousand miles at sea for twelve years; outside, I was a child being touched by the fingers of a beautiful woman.

  “Should we talk about this?” I asked.

  “This? What do you mean—this?” She put her hands in her lap and rubbed them together. She nodded at the door. “Why don’t you shut the door . . . it’s cold.”

  I shut the door. “But what about—”

  “Come on,” she said, cutting me off and taking my hand. “I’ve got something for you.”

  I wouldn’t quit. “But what about—”

  “This?” she said, cutting me off again. “I told you a long time ago, Z, ‘this’ doesn’t make any difference.”

  She took me out of the kitchen and through what had once been the front room. Walls had been knocked out and the whole space was one big parlor with velvet couches and chairs, a full bar at one end, a card table, and an upright piano between two windows hung with thick, blue velvet. There was one gas lamp lit, next to one of the couches where a woman in a full-length red gown was sleeping, snoring heavily.

  “What the—”

  “Shhh,” she said, covering my mouth.

  She took me up the stairs and down the hall, which now had a runner of rich blue carpeting down the center and tiny gas lamps over every door. She pulled me into her room.

  “Carolina,” I said, “you want to tell me what I just walked through?”

  “A lot has changed, Z.” She knelt down by a chest in front of her bed. She opened it carefully and brought something out. She stood up and hid it from me behind her back. “I’ve got something for you,” she said, “something I think you forgot.”

  She smiled and held out Mama’s baseball glove. I took it from her and put it on my hand, smiling myself. I pounded the pocket with my other hand and rubbed it as I’d done a thousand times before. “I didn’t forget it. I left it so you wouldn’t forget.”

  She sat down on the bed and looked directly in my eyes. “That would be impossible,” she whispered.

  I sat down on the bed next to her. Everything felt strange, yet familiar. I looked around her room. A few pictures were new, and perfume bottles, and clothes, lots of clothes, but many things were the same. The bed we were on was the same one we had sat on as children . . . when we were both children. A lot of things were the same, but now I was the only child in the room. I stood up and walked over to one of her pictures and turned around.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ve been around a little bit and this place—downstairs I mean—it looks like, well . . . uh . . . a whorehouse.”

  “Yes. It is,” she said.

  Just then, Georgia burst into the room. At first, she didn’t see me. She ran over to Carolina, picked up both of Carolina’s hands, and spread them apart. Then, she waved them back and forth, one at a time, in front of her own face, acting as if Carolina were slapping her. Carolina nodded and took her hands back, then she smiled and pointed to me. Georgia turned and saw me. She cupped her hand over her mouth to stop a scream that never came, never had. She sat down on the bed next to Carolina and stared at me, her eyes welling up with tears.

  “How are you, Georgia?”

  She didn’t answer, but she looked over at Carolina.

  “She can’t hear you,” Carolina said. “She started going deaf about three years ago. Now, she can’t hear a sound. It’s funny, though. It seems the more she gets cut off from the world, the more she gives back. She plays the piano now, real well, and she never did before she went deaf. And she’s the only good thing Mrs. Bennings has got left.”

  I looked at Carolina and Georgia. So alike, so different. They were Giza, “the other people,” Mama had said, and I was Meq. But it was like that among us too. So alike, so different. I cleared a place on the floor and sat down. I motioned for them to do the same, like we used to, and they did. I looked at Carolina’s face and thought of my dream.

  “Tell me what has happened,” I said.

  Carolina glanced at Georgia and Georgia slowly closed and opened her eyes, then nodded her head once. Carolina could still “read” her.

  “It happened by degrees,” she said. “After you left, Mrs. Bennings seemed to unravel. I don’t know whether it was you leaving or you taking with you the last reminder of that man you told me about, Solomon. But, either way, she started drinking heavily; drinking to get drunk, and going around more and more with Corsair Bogy.”

  I looked at her with alarm and straightened up, unconsciously reaching for the Stones beneath my shirt.

  “No, no,” she said, “he hasn’t done anything to us. Yet. But I am scared of him, Z. He’s not a good man and I think he’s hired someone—”

  “Wait, Carolina,” I interrupted, “you’re way ahead of me. Tell me the rest . . . from the beginning.”

  She went on. “Mrs. Bennings got worse and worse. Corsair was with her all the time, and for a while, I guess he was good for her. At least he paid attention to her, but in time he sort of took control of her; told her what to do, what to wear, who to see, and who not to see. Georgia and I were in school most of the time and it was during the day, during that time, that I think Mrs. Bennings was finally worn down and let him have complete control of her and this place. Within a year, he had turned it into a house of prostitution and Mrs. Bennings into a madam. A madam with good manners. That was the only thing she insisted on, that all the girls have good manners.

  “Corsair is from an old Creole family that lost its money decades ago, but he still has connections and a whole slew of ‘cousins’ in New Orleans. For years, all the girls came from New Orleans. Now, almost all
the girls are from here in St. Louis, trained by me.”

  I stopped her right there. “You mean, you and Georgia . . . work here?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “We run it.”

  I looked in her eyes. She stared back at me. I didn’t know what to say, but I knew there, in her eyes, she hadn’t changed.

  “I am not ashamed of what I do, Z. It is a good business and I learned . . . we learned,” she said, nodding at Georgia, “how to do it well. We are not deprived or made to do anything we don’t want to do. We take good care of our girls and we take good care of our ‘visitors,’ as Mrs. Bennings likes to call them. I like everything about it except for Corsair. He’s got out of hand, Z. Two months ago, he finally talked Mrs. Bennings into marrying him and now he wants control of everything. He’s dangerous. I know he hates me and my influence and lately he’s been slapping Mrs. Bennings for no reason at all.”

  “Is that what Georgia was trying to say?”

  “Yes.” Carolina stopped talking and gave me a strange look. She pointed her finger at me and made a circling motion. “Z,” she said, “why did you come back now?”

  I looked down at the floor, then up at her and Georgia. “I had a dream,” I said. “The rest is a little complicated.”

  We sat in silence. I stared in wonder at these two young women, these Giza, sitting on the floor talking like this with a Meq, a child.

  “Have you found Sailor?” Carolina asked.

  “No,” I said. She turned to Georgia and shook her head, saying no, as if they had talked of this before. “Why did you say Corsair had hired someone?” I asked.

  “I said I think he has hired someone. I can’t prove it.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m afraid for Mrs. Bennings.”

  I thought about my dream again. I was much more afraid for Carolina. I knew that Corsair Bogy was the source of my fear. Everywhere around me I felt an invisible, prickly net descending. It was a heightened sense of danger; an awareness of it that I was learning, as Geaxi said I would. But it felt like waking up. “Don’t tell Mrs. Bennings I’m back,” I said. “I have a plan.”

  It was a simple plan. Corsair Bogy had to be watched; all the time, everywhere he went, inside the house or on the town. But Mrs. Bennings couldn’t be told. Carolina agreed—if I wasn’t here, he wouldn’t see me. We could not alert him. Corsair Bogy was a snake, but he wasn’t stupid; whatever he had in mind for Mrs. Bennings or Carolina, he would not do it himself.

  I stood up to leave. I wanted to be gone before anyone in the house saw me. Carolina handed me Mama’s glove. “Don’t forget this,” she said.

  “I never have.” They both walked me back through the house to the kitchen door. “Be careful and watch him like a hawk,” I said. “I won’t be far away.”

  It was a cold morning, but spring was in the air and I walked into it, glancing back once at the two women I had known so long ago as girls. They were holding hands.

  I got a room in the Italian neighborhood known as “the hill,” just off Hampton Avenue. It was a place where I could easily blend in and live cheaply. No one noticed another dark-haired boy on “the hill.”

  Every day, I followed Corsair Bogy wherever he went. Most of his time was spent in the saloons or at Sportsman’s Park. The baseball season had started and Bogy had box seats, three rows up on the first base side. I hadn’t seen a baseball game in years, except for a few crude games in the Caribbean, and it was exciting to smell the smells, hear the sounds, and watch the players. Sneaking in was no problem; under Captain Woodget, I had learned to sneak into any place. The Browns were terrible. They had a great slugger at first base, though. His name was Roger Conner and he held the record for most home runs until Babe Ruth broke it. I thought about being a bat boy again, at least for a game or two, but that would make me too visible. Instead, I hung back in the shadows and watched Bogy.

  At night, I stayed outside the boardinghouse and spied on those who came and went. I had seen whorehouses before, almost everywhere around two oceans, but never one like Mrs. Bennings’s House. There was no red light over the door or girls leaning out of the windows. From the outside, it looked the same as it always had.

  Carriages pulled up and left, dropping off gentlemen in fine dress and top hats. I suppose that not all were gentlemen, but they looked the part. Every once in a while I thought I heard Georgia playing the piano. She was good. I could tell that Carolina and Georgia ran a genteel business, and except for the traffic, it could still have been a boardinghouse.

  Each night I met Carolina somewhere outside and asked her if she had seen anything or anyone unusual around Bogy. For three weeks, she didn’t. Then, on May 1, she told me something that sent a chill through me. I was on the corner and she ran to meet me.

  “I just heard him talking to someone,” she said, out of breath. “It was out back, just beyond the kitchen door. I don’t know who it was, it was too dark to see, but whoever it was said that Bogy had to come up with more money. Bogy said, ‘A deal is a deal,’ and the other voice said, ‘Not if there is more than one body to do.’ Those were his exact words—’more than one body to do.’ And, Z, here’s what scared me. When he turned to leave, I got a glimpse of him. He was a boy, Z, a boy like you, only with green eyes.”

  One name flashed in my mind and one name only—Ray Ytuarte. It didn’t make sense, but he was the only one of us I knew who might think like that. He had made his living from violence, I knew that too, but an assassin? It just didn’t make sense. I felt that prickly net descending again; the danger. If it was Ray, what could I do about it? Ray had shown me to the Stones and told me about them, but would they have any effect on him? On us? On the Meq? I looked at Carolina and knew it made no difference. Whatever I had to do, I would.

  “Who is he?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But Corsair will have to see him again, about the money. Then I’ll know. You stay with Georgia. Go to Mrs. Bennings’s room. Lock the door if you have to. Just stay together.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I’ll be here, close, unless Bogy leaves.”

  “All night?”

  “Yes.”

  She was still upset and anxious. I could see the band of freckles across her face standing out in the faint light. She turned and started back, then stopped.

  “Do you still get scared, Z? Or is it different for you?”

  “I turn twelve again this week,” I said. “What’s so scary about that?”

  The night passed and Corsair Bogy never left the boardinghouse. I saw nothing unusual and the sun rose in a cloudless blue sky. All over south St. Louis the dogwoods and redbuds were in full bloom. I was tired, but edgy and alert, and for some reason the image of Captain Woodget came to mind. I could see him holding on to the weather rigging in his yellow oilskins and long leather sea boots, watching aloft and hanging on until the last minute. I had to keep that same resolve. I had to find the will of Geaxi and the silent strength of Unai and Usoa. I had to bury fear and wait . . . something I knew the Meq could do very well.

  Corsair Bogy appeared around noon and headed straight for the saloons adjacent to Sportsman’s Park. Before I left to follow him, I saw Carolina standing in the window of Mrs. Bennings’s room. She put two fingers to her lips and pressed them against the glass. I nodded once and went off after Bogy.

  He visited three saloons, the first two for only minutes and the third for over an hour. He played cards with his cronies and I only lost sight of him once, for a few minutes, while he was in the men’s room. After that, he and two men walked the short distance to Sportsman’s Park to watch the Browns play Cincinnati. The sky was still blue, but the temperature was dropping.

  I stayed close to him in the park, closer than I had before, so I could hear him talk. Mostly, he drank beer and yelled at the manager of the Browns, Harry Diddlebock. He was loud and the drunker he got the more he yelled and bragged to his cronie
s about women and money; but that was Corsair Bogy all over and such behavior was nothing unusual.

  About the seventh inning, a low bank of clouds appeared to the southwest. Gusts of wind blew loose paper and debris around the stands. I felt something else—a presence. I glanced around quickly through the crowd and thought I caught a glimpse of something or someone familiar. I wasn’t sure.

  I made my way to one of the exits, where I could scan the whole crowd, and turned in a slow, full circle. Nothing.

  Suddenly I heard Carolina’s voice. “Z!” I heard her scream. She came running toward me, through the crowd. “He’s here,” she said. “He came to the house, the one with green eyes, and he wanted to know where you were.”

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked and looked her up and down.

  “No, no. It was strange. He just wanted to know where you were. I didn’t say a word and he took off running—fast.”

  It was Ray all right. That proved it. “Why did you come here?” I said. “You should stay with Georgia and Mrs. Bennings.”

  “I had to do something. I had to warn you.”

  Then a thought struck me. If Ray was hired by Corsair and Corsair didn’t know I was around, why would Ray ask about me and show himself at the same time? It didn’t make sense.

  The wind was blowing harder and fat drops of rain began to fall. I could hear Corsair’s voice yelling over the crowd at an umpire. Then I heard something else—a haunting, bitter laugh I hadn’t heard in years. I turned and saw him, standing with his legs spread in baggy black trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a black bowler hat, staring at me.

  “You’re lookin’ the same, Z,” he said and laughed again. “Ain’t that odd?”

  I stared back at him. If he was running one of his games on me, I couldn’t tell. “How are you, Ray?”

  “About the same. How ’bout you?”

  He took a step toward me, holding on to his bowler hat. The wind was blowing much harder and hail was starting to fall. Carolina came closer, never taking her eyes off Ray.