For the most part, the regulars viewed Maxwell as an improvement over Salvatore, some because they could convince him to pour stronger drinks, after which the speakeasy would take on the voracious qualities of a bar before Prohibition, and others because unlike Salvatore he actually followed Salvatore’s bartending words of advice.
One of the regulars who took an instant liking to Maxwell was a legless man named Laszlo. Sometimes, he sat on a stool or rolled around the floors of the speakeasy on a platform with wheels, drinking bourbon and talking nonstop about a girl named Ana who didn’t love him or who had loved him once and then never again, and who, in any case, made the legless man so enraged that, as the night and his drunkenness progressed, he would yell, “Tear out my fucking heart, kid! Do it now before I’m dead!” and then bring his fists down on his stumps like a hammer and wince in pain too, and cry out.
Regarding his unrequited love for Ana, naturally, Laszlo had a few ideas. Either Ana’s heart was an artificial heart, like the ones the Russian commies in the papers always threatened to invent, or Ana was like his own hypothermic, opium-addicted mother, able to love, but not able to love him. It’s not true that a man lives in the shadow of his father, like everyone says, Laszlo explained to Maxwell one night, but rather in his mother’s dreams and later her nightmares.
“Don’t you agree, kid?” said Laszlo.
Maxwell, of course, said nothing, but not because of his bartender vow of silence. He sincerely didn’t know. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t remember if his mother had ever told him about any of her dreams and that troubled him greatly.
On better nights, the legless man asked Maxwell questions about his own life. What did he want to do when he grew up? What did the future look like to him? Did he ever think about temptations? Did he ever think that the world they lived in was just someone else’s dream? Did he ever think about the past, the Incas, the Mongols, the Romans, or the British, all of them civilized, all of them bloodthirsty assholes?
Of course, Maxwell never answered the legless man’s questions, at least not directly, but he did think about them before falling asleep, generally long after a white tropical moon had risen above his house on Melpomene Avenue. He didn’t know what he wanted to do when he grew up, but he already saw the future as a passageway through which people stumbled blindly.
Yes, he thought about girls, especially the ones he saw in thin blue and green summer dresses on South Rampart Street, and he thought about the sweet, hard sips of whiskey he snuck when Salvatore was gone. He thought about the letters his father sent him from places like Fort Worth, St. Louis, and Kansas City; he thought about the violent stabs of loneliness he felt when reading them and the humid, indistinguishable days between the arrival of one letter and the next. He thought about the letters he would write back to his father, letters that he never sent because they would just get lost in the mail or because he decided that they wouldn’t make any sense. Every day, he thought of leaving the city and finding his father. More than once, he thought about tearing up his father’s letters or burning them in a small blue fire.
Yes, the world they lived in was the Son of Kanada’s dream as he wandered north along the Tigris River in 590 BCE. And what he thought of the past was easy. On one hand, the past was starlight. On the other, there was no such thing as the Incas, the Mongols, the Romans, or the British. Only variations of the same bloodthirsty assholes repeated through time. The past was a cemetery, a half-buried or drowned maze, claustrophobic. None of his ancestors were buried there or, if they were, they were nameless. You got lost in it for no reason at all.
Still, Laszlo liked to talk to Maxwell about the past, especially his own. When he was much younger and had both his legs, he told Maxwell one night, he had been a circus strong man and a wrestler with the stage name Cronus. For years, he traveled the country challenging rivals with names like Horned Viper, Judas, Cyclops, Jesus “The Beast” Field, Grendel, etc. For a period of time, he was even undefeated. Then, inevitably, one night in Nashville under a black and red tent, he was defeated by a man called Djinni, an Arab who had fashioned himself after a supernatural warrior-poet and who, under his real name, Mahmoud Yaseen, had written forty dime novels about the desert, some of which he sold at matches, and all of which essentially followed the same plot: a wandering man in the desert falls in love with a woman, in order to make the woman fall in love with him he searches for and then unearths a magical artifact, the man then uses the magical artifact and the woman suffers a death or something like a death, a disappearance, imprisonment in an asylum, or a transformation into a desert breeze that carries the seeds of an iris flower.
“I was fucked over twice,” said the legless man, “first, by Djinni, or rather by Mahmoud Yaseen’s novels, which taught me the true cost of love. And then by Ana, who I love more than myself, but who’s dead to me.”
Of course, upon hearing about Mahmoud Yaseen’s novels, Maxwell broke his bartending vow of silence and asked Laszlo if he had any copies he could borrow. He said he used to have a few, but he sold them all to replace cracked wheels for his platform. Sometime later, the legless man stopped coming to the Three Junipers and Maxwell never heard from him or saw him again.
* * *
In October a letter arrived from a ranch outside of Fort Worth. In the letter, his father described his new job. He repaired farm equipment, put up fences, and took care of horses, but occasionally there were other things which involved driving to the city. He wrote that Texas was very different from Louisiana. The sunsets in Texas were endless, but during the day the sky was empty, and this produced a sense of abandonment and plunder.
In February, another letter arrived from the ranch. The letter was short and uneventful, but the envelope included a money order worth two months’ wages and a photograph of his father saddled on a horse. The horse was sinewy and stiff, its hooves firmly planted in the dry earth, the opposite of manning a boat, thought Maxwell, which explained his father’s apparent unease.
Three months later, Maxwell received a letter, unexpectedly, from St. Louis. His father described an uncertain scene in which the owner of the ranch had refused to pay his black and Mexican ranch hands, followed by a brawl which left one ranch hand with a broken arm and another with a bullet wound in his right leg. There were no jobs in St. Louis. The pirate wandered the city from day to night. Occasionally, he took refuge at a damp and run-down hotel where guitarists from Kansas City played until dawn.
In July, a postcard from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, arrived, but nothing was written on it. On the front of the postcard was an illustration of a green tractor, framed by a blue sky and a yellow field of corn. In October, a money order arrived with thirty-five dollars, a fortune to the old mad pirate and Maxwell. Shortly afterward, a letter arrived from Dubuque. In this letter, his father wrote about long lines outside a factory, frostbite, the terrible drone of machinery, his wages, and his nostalgia for the sea. But nostalgia, he advised near the end of the letter, is a terrible form of amnesia.
In February, Maxwell received a two-page letter postmarked from a hotel in Chicago called the Jonava. The city was immense, awe-inspiring, and lonely, especially in the winter. Toward the end of the letter, as a way of explanation, he wrote, I miss your mother, mijo.
In April, a few days before his thirteenth birthday, Maxwell received a large manila envelope containing a letter and a crisp star map of the northern constellations. His father wrote that he was going to take a good job with a shipping company and that he should have enough money saved up by July for Maxwell to come live with him in Chicago. After he finished reading the letter, Maxwell imagined, at the speed of light, his father and himself living in an apartment in Chicago, going to the market and then an enormous library on an enormous street. He imagined riding a crowded subway, standing side by side, and nights together, eating in diners, then reading the northern sky and its starlight as it led them home with infinite joy. No other letters arrive
d at the house on Melpomene Avenue.
* * *
In late June, Maxwell quit his job at the Three Junipers. When he told Salvatore, he looked at the boy for a few seconds, rubbed his tattooed neck, and said, “You sure, kid? You got a good gig here.” Maxwell nodded and said he had to leave the city, after which Salvatore dug into his trouser pockets, handed him three extra days’ worth of wages, and said, “It’s probably for the best. Nine states already ratified the 21st. Prohibition is as good as dead anyways.”
After his final shift, the old mad pirate met Maxwell in front of the Three Junipers. Maxwell gave him his extra wages and then they went on a long walk through the city. They walked first along Perdido Street and then along Carondelet Street, as blithely and happily as they had walked those same streets together when Maxwell was a little kid, which, to Maxwell, was a long time ago, an entirely different life altogether, but which to the old mad pirate was only yesterday, and this wasn’t due to the fact that he was mad, he explained as they walked, but due to his old age.
“Mas sabe el Diablo por viejo que por Diablo,” he said and then he laughed like a madman. Maxwell knew that this was something people from his mother’s island (and the surrounding islands) said about growing old.
* * *
When the time came for him to go, he left alone. In an old Army canvas backpack, he carried a few items of clothes, his father’s letters, a flashlight, the star map of the northern constellations, a pocketknife, a few sandwiches, and two books: The Imaginary Life of the Son of Kanada and one of the three remaining copies of Lost City in the house on Melpomene Avenue. He took the ferry to the Algiers rail yards and found a train marked with the Illinois Central logo, IC. A few bullmen patrolled the tracks and held rifles, but Maxwell was careful not to be seen. When the train jerked alive, he ran alongside an empty boxcar and then hopped on by grabbing a low handle. Once in the boxcar, he jammed the door open by bashing a rail spike into its track. Then he smiled and wiped his face, which was covered in coal dust, and watched the scenery pass by slowly. Later, the wheels of the train spun still faster, hitting their joints, and he heard the train’s whistle, like a song, he thought, a train song, familiar, relentless.
* * *
Outside of Natchez, the train changed conductors, and a large group of transients hopped on. Most were boys a few years older than Maxwell. Some looked as if they had marched through a malarial jungle, while others looked like they had been living in a cave. One transient, a Choctaw boy with dirty-brown hair and a sallow face, told Maxwell that he should get off the train. In a nearby town, it was rumored that a young white girl had been raped and the town’s patrolmen were looking for a Negro from New Orleans. Rumor was he was riding boxcars. Maxwell told the boy he was only thirteen and just heading north, toward Chicago, but he immediately regretted telling the boy anything at all.
“Doesn’t matter,” the boy said, his expression impassive, “you’re tall, like you’re sixteen or something, and they’re all looking for a tall Negro, any tall Negro to lay blame and hang, and you sure as shit look like one. If I were you, I’d hop off.”
It wasn’t until hours later, as he walked on a path leading through a cypress-tree forest, which eventually opened onto the countryside and a solitary road in the distance with men carrying torches, that he realized the Choctaw boy with dirty-brown hair and a sallow face had probably saved his life.
* * *
In Natchez the next morning, Maxwell hopped a train with Morell’s Pride—Ham—Bacon—Canned Meats stamped across its boxcars. The train passed through Louisiana and parts of Arkansas. At a stop in El Dorado, two boys joined him. The smaller one kept his back to Maxwell, watching the stark green pine forests and yellow farmlands as they passed by, coughing for minutes at a time. Sometimes, when he coughed, he clenched his torn, bloodstained shirt, which was much too big, thought Maxwell, and looked like an insult to him.
“My younger brother, Thomas,” explained the other boy, who had an ash-colored scar along his right temple and who spoke with a thin German accent. “He’s just sick.” He then told Maxwell that his name was Adel and they were heading toward Colorado and then California, where they could ride out the fruit-picking season and hopefully make a little money. Maxwell didn’t know anything about Colorado or California, so he didn’t say anything. “Where you headed?” the boy asked.
“Chicago,” said Maxwell.
The brothers looked at each other and laughed.
“You’re on the wrong train, comrade,” said Adel.
That night Maxwell dreamed about his mother. She was standing in front of a library in New Orleans with a man dressed like a 17th century cartographer. His mother scolded him for losing her son in the dry folds of a map the exact same size as the Earth. At some point, Maxwell woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. He was hungry and sensed that the dream had made him melancholy and homesick. What happens to you as you travel farther and farther away from home? he thought. Where does one life begin and the other end? At the same time, he wasn’t unhappy as a traveler, wandering great distances in a matter of days. He gazed northeast, toward where he imagined Chicago to be, but he didn’t see anything, just a moonless black landscape evaporating into the horizon as the train sped west. Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the darkness and then he saw farmhouses, short and boxy, and monotonous fields. In one of those fields, he saw a camp full of half-starved drifters, some men, a few families, all sitting around a small fire. He saw red and blue trucks on distant roads. He saw small towns and lines of trees and rivers. He saw other trains like enormous black millipedes. Overhead, the sky was full of burning stars and he could immediately recognize two or three constellations from his star map. This felt inevitable to him, like finding his father waiting for him at the Jonava or a math problem stretching into eternity. Later, although Maxwell couldn’t tell how much later, dawn crept into the sky from the far side of the Earth, and he saw dead yellow fields, as yellow as anything he had ever seen before, and red dust clouds aflame in the light of the sun. At some point, the brothers joined him. They both stood on the edge of the boxcar, like sentinels in some distant war.
“Kansas is dying,” said Adel. Then his brother sighed deeply, without coughing for once, lit a cigarette, and handed it over to Maxwell. “Take it,” said Adel, “it helps when you’re hungry.”
* * *
Some hours later, the train slowed near a remote stop in Great Bend and the brothers told Maxwell they were going to get off and head into town to look for food and shelter for a night or two. Maxwell’s plan was to get off as well, but then wait for a train heading east or north. Still, when they asked him to go with them he said yes.
As they crossed an empty dirt field, Adel told Maxwell that they were from a small town in Pennsylvania, but that they had both been born in Cologne, Germany, a great fortress city on the Rhine River that he could still see with his eyes open or closed, even if his poor brother remembered very little.
In town, just off the main road in a one-story redbrick building, there was a Salvation Army where a small woman with small blue eyes told the boys that they could stay for three meals and one night as long as they attended a sermon. In a crude chapel in the back of the Salvation Army, the boys sat on a long pew and listened to a stocky man with charcoal hair and a croaky voice as he preached about buffalos and oil and savage Indians who had been sacrificed at the foot of something called the Altar of Fate. Afterward, in the adjoining room, where the boys ate potato soup and bread, Adel said that the sermon had been confusing.
“What the fuck is the Altar of Fate anyway?” he said.
Then he asked Maxwell if he was religious. At first, Maxwell made a gesture with his left hand that could have meant anything. Then he said:
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”
Then, after a long interval, he added: “No.”
“Me either,” said Thomas and he smiled a little, first
at his older brother, and then at Maxwell. Only then did Maxwell realize it was the first time he had heard him talk.
Later that day, Thomas developed a fever and he lay on an Army cot in a cramped dark room of the Salvation Army, coughing blood and soot for minutes at a time, until he fell asleep. His brother sat on the cot with him, his eyes full of tears, while Maxwell sat silently on the next cot over, thinking about his mother and the abyss of sickness, both listening to Thomas as he said incomprehensible things in German during a type of fever dream, things, Adel later confessed to Maxwell, about their baby sister, an uncertain trip west, and Germany, an invented Germany from 1926 or 1927 his brother couldn’t possibly remember, but one which still stole into his brother’s fever dreams, sometimes taking the form of a shitting crow perched atop the twin-spired Cathedral of Cologne and other times taking the form of a black rock, disintegrating little by little into black pebbles, at the bottom of the Rhine River.
* * *
Maxwell had a light meal at the Salvation Army and then went to a small pharmacy down the street. He greeted the pharmacist and then described Thomas’ symptoms. The pharmacist, who at first thought Maxwell was an errand boy, asked him a few questions about Thomas, most of which sounded contradictory and vague to Maxwell. Still, he answered them the best he could. In the end, the pharmacist suggested aspirin for the fever, painkillers, and Vaseline, which should be generously rubbed on the boy’s chest. When it came time to pay, Maxwell said he didn’t have any money.
The pharmacist let out a long sigh and said, “Well, what do you have then?”
Maxwell opened his old Army canvas backpack and took out his flashlight, his pocketknife, and The Imaginary Life of the Son of Kanada.
“I can’t take any of this,” he said to Maxwell, slowly.
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Page 11