Routes

by John Okas

  The baby bops in first, solo, with Sarah right behind her, showing some trepidation. Inside, on the right, there is a kitchen. A large woman in a plain housedress with matching kerchief is standing at the counter stuffing a turkey. She winks and shows a gold capped canine, upper right, in her otherwise bright, white, ear-to-ear smile.

  “Come on in, Sugar,” says the big woman, “don’t be afraid. Just go right in, have a seat and listen all you like. The boys have been really charged up all day.”

  The world-wary Sarah judiciously peeks into the ballroom. The music is bright and loud, the sound is clear far beyond anything she’s heard on the radio in the choirmaster’s closet. She listens as the Hot Numbers put another musical bird in the oven, Sweet Patootie Blues, one of Sarah’s favorites, and cook it until its juices run clear. She sits at one of the back tables, whistles along and taps her feet, while Gloria toddles between tables, moving chairs out of her way if she has to, until she reaches the dance floor. She makes eyes at the boys in the band and sings “gra, gra, gra” from excitement.

  When the hot seven take five, its members break for the kitchen. Gloria, since coming out of the Land of Nod has not been the least bit shy of strangers. Sarah was amazed and pleased at how quickly she took to Mrs Hayes, and feels similarly proud now that she sees Gloria mixing with the Hot Numbers. She hitches a ride with the piano man, a well-dressed yellowish brown man, wearing a suit white as the devil’s bones. He lights up a corona and takes the little girl on the cigar smoke special.

  “Earl McCoy,” he holds out a friendly hand to Sarah. “You have some sweet little angel here, Miss. And solid too, I must say.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mister McCoy. I’m Sarah Black. And yes, you’re right, when I had to carry her everywhere I swore she was as heavy as lead.”

  The hot seven and the mother and child come to congregate around the big woman in the kitchen who’s warming up for the feast in the oven by eating peanuts and drinking a glass of beer. Earl puts Gloria down and she scrambles up on the big woman’s lap and starts climbing all over her mountainous breasts.

  “Gloria!” says Sarah. “Get off this nice lady right this instant! Don’t make a nuisance of yourself. Please excuse her, ma’am, she’s never been this friendly before.”

  The big woman smiles and says, “It’s nothing, Sugar, taking care of babies is the bread in my bones. When I don’t have work I come down here and sit for these boys. Musicians need a momma more than anyone I know of.” Then she takes a thin cigarette from a cache between her breasts, and gives it to Jacques “Bones” Bonet, the sax player, who lights it and passes it around to the other boys, Teddy “Hamfat Slim” Hendersen, Sissle Johnston, Lamar Garvey, Muggles McRae, and of course Earl McCoy. Sarah knows that they are smoking marijuana. The smell of the smoke has pleasant associations, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, burning leaves on an autumn afternoon.

  “I don’t use it much myself,” the big woman says to Sarah, “but I keep it for my boys so they don’t get too low, you know what I mean? You got a name, Sugar? My name is Laudette Lord. And how can I help you? Somehow I get the feeling it’s more than reefer and jazz you’re after.”

  “My name is Sarah Black and I’m trying to find somebody.” Once more she begins to describe whom she’s looking for. But Laudette interrupts her instantly. “You mean Mister Corn Dog. He was in here all the time last summer. But in the past few months, gee, I haven’t seen a hide or a hair of him.” Laudette’s story is confirmed by each of the hot seven, and checks with Morton Pastor’s: no one has seen the underdog around the Bay area since mid-September.

  “But don’t you worry, Sugar. This is a scene where cats drop in and out all the time. If he was around once I’m sure he’ll be back again.”

  It doesn’t take Sarah long to realize that she is on her own and she hasn’t much time to waste on disappointment. Her survival instinct sets her wheels spinning on an alternative plan.

  Gloria is riding on the knees of the big woman and singing “choo choo choo!”

  “Miss Lord, this is Corn Dog’s daughter, Gloria Beatrice.”

  “I could see they look alike.”

  “I’ve never seen her show more life in her life. Until lately she was pretty much of a deadhead. She seems to really like you, Miss Lord, you must be somebody very special.”

  “Special? Shucks, I don’t know about special, Sugar, I’m just an ordinary old baby sitter. You don’t know anyone who happens to need a baby sitter now, do you?”

  Wise from spending five months in Pecados Sarah knows an ace when she sees one.

  The Golden Gate

  It’s the wee wee hours of Friday morning when the party’s over. Sarah, all stuffed with gratitude, roast turkey, wine, gin, reefer and jazz, and the hearty Laudette now carrying the played-out bundled-up baby, get into the back seat of another taxi cab.

  “Driver,” says Sarah, “please take us to the Golden Gate.”

  She means the big gilt-edged hotel up the street from the New Post Gallery.

  When they cross the threshold and begin to make their way down the length of the long red carpet to reception, Laudette whistles in an undertone at the luxury, and Sarah, grinning high, joins her with a mellow hoot of her own. She could feel ashamed, nervous, coming into a place like this wearing a frayed party dress hung over from her Los Pecados days, but instead she feels a sense of exhilaration. It’s more than just the relaxing effects of the gin, turkey, and reefer; she feels support of her self-confidence coming from her companion. In the few hours they’ve spent together Sarah already sees Miss Lord as a big solid woman both inside out, a whole human being, loyal, strong, honest, with a heart big as a whale, in one piece and in the right place, someone to lean on. In her presence the cracked belle of Zion feels protected and secure and, thus, more daring. A giddy feeling of liberty that crosses the border of carelessness overtakes her. She murmurs conspiratorially in Laudette’s ear, “Actually, Miss Lord, I’m used to sweating it out in cheap flophouses. This Golden Gate is really a palace, isn’t it? A breeze, the perfect place for taking life easy. Too bad that to keep us up in this style, unless I find my man and he has some money, I’m going to have to go out tomorrow and get a job.”

  “What line of work are you in anyway, Sugar?” Laudette whispers.

  “Free lance model” says the new boss.

  Sarah has not managed to preserve much fruit from her summer jobs. She is down to the five hundred Fleet left on the bed. The modest sized suite she takes in the hotel, two rooms, each with a bath, split by a sitting room, payable in advance, costs plenty. Plus, Laudette must be paid, and for job hunting she will need some new clothes, and first and foremost they must eat. The food on the room service menu is gastronomic, rich dishes at famine prices. It all adds up to money trouble. The preserves will run dry in about three days.

  Sarah is used to the do-or-die situation. She has put her last dollar down on the future before.

  The next morning, in another wrinkled rumpled Los Pecados party dress, she is out at ten to finish her list of leads to the whereabouts of Corn Dog, going to any place he might have left a message. She rechecks the New Post Gallery and finds it open. The young man behind the desk is a pleasant sort, open, refined, who responds to the beautiful girl in the revealing frock with interest.

  “Can I help you?”

  “My name is Sarah Black, and I’m looking for a native son of Whitman Post, who once owned this gallery. A wayfarer artist named Corn Dog.”

  “Corn Dog! Heavens! You know Corn Dog?”

  She nods, her spirits soar.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you where he is, Miss Black.”

  The man with the bad news introduces himself as Boskind Sellers and continues. “A couple of months ago he came in carrying a multi-media piece he had constructed, an awkward thing made out of wood, wool, and white oil paint, sort of an artistic vision of a maypole. When I first saw him I thought he was a madman. I assumed he was coming to ask for a s
how in the gallery. We have all sorts coming in here asking if we can sell their work. As you know, the previous owners were big on taking risks. I told him before he even opened his mouth that the new owners were staying with sure-fire investments, established stuff, nothing speculative. Certainly not this. I suggested he try some modern art dealers, but pointed out to him that even these would probably find his work unsaleable. They are looking for pieces with sleek lines, and, where three dimensional surfaces come in, symmetry and industrial smoothness on the finish are all the rage, at least that’s the type of design happening in the Bay Area’s more knowing contemporary homes.

  “He shook his head and said he’d heard it all before. He introduced himself to me, and told me of his relationship to the former proprietors. I apologized and told him still there was nothing I could do. He told me to hold my horses, he had no intention of playing on the consideration the present owners might have for the past, his native son status. Nor did he care about style or the customer’s idea of lines and surfaces. He said he could only work from some inner need and nothing else, that patronage would spoil his art. Its unsaleability was a part of it. We chatted for quite a while, philosophical chap for all his wild looks. He went on to explain that the piece was not the physical matter but the idea behind it. And even that eluded him. In this case he was thinking about a white elephant with thirteen trunks and it just came out, sort of, as a maypole, a microcosmic representation of a skyscraping totem. But it didn’t stop there. He said the piece led him to me, and his giving the piece to me was part of the piece. ‘I’m not bringing it here for you to sell,’ he said, ‘but to bury. It’s my way of saying to hell with art. I’d much rather be a seal, than the poor man who tries to symbolize one.’

  “He seemed so intense about his work that I kept the thing. You never know, someday it might be worth something.”

  Sellers takes out his key and leads Sarah into the gallery basement and there it is, shaman work, a four foot long wood stick, with strips of rags and long thin wool swatches wired to the top, all white. Miniature maypole, white baby elephant, whatever it is it is meant to challenge the viewer from the neck up. But it wrenches Sarah’s heart. “He didn’t say anything about me? No message to relay for Sarah.”

  “No, but he did mention that he had a girl friend somewhere. Shall I presume you are she?”

  “Yes, what did he say? He must have said something.”

  “I’m sorry, he didn’t, nothing directly. He did say something about how he thought being an artist didn’t mix well with family life. Romantic notion. He talked a lot about seals, said he had spent some time up the coast on the rocks with them. Who knows,” Sellers speculates, “maybe he went back.”

  He offers Sarah the piece out of respect for her sentiment for its maker. The split pea thanks him but no thanks him. Unsure of long term living arrangements, she does not think it wise to burden herself with the heavy and unmanageable post and streamers. She tells Sellers where she is staying currently, and promises to keep in touch. Should he see Corn Dog again, would he tell him she’s in town? She revisits Morton Pastor and does the same. She will have Miss Lord tell her boys down at Kane’s to keep an eye out for him too. With nothing more than this she can do, she goes back to the hotel to figure. She sadly regrets her own lateness, the detour that wised her up as a woman of the world, her need to let her hair down in revenge against her father, and she spends an hour on the bed crying remorsefully. How she loves that buck! Does he know how hard she’s thinking about him?

  If he’s thinking about me the same way, why isn’t he here? She wonders, and begins to brood about Corn Dog’s need to be alone in the conceptual ivory tower of his art. Her self-pity is singed by passion. Her sobbing tapers off and the split pea finds herself in a pique. She is furious with Corn Dog for not being there after she came all this way to see him. Everything that happens now is all his fault.

  I should have known, she says to herself, there would be a real man behind the myth. This buck boy of mine is like too many idealists, prone to purify himself when others don’t live up to his high expectations of them. I guess his daughter and I don’t measure up to his talking animals friends. Maybe he needs nothing more than pure form for his dinner, but we girls need some meat on our table!

  Sugar Daddy

  It doesn’t take the Sarah long to decide what to do next. By noon she is figuring in the possibility of love for sale. The peaches and cream must have the sugar of a daddy to preserve her.

  She says to Laudette, “Miss Lord, I hope you understand that I plan to run my business in this suite. I will expect you to keep Gloria occupied, in her room or out of here entirely, whenever I have a booking. Artists are very tempermental when their creative juices are flowing, you know, and they do not like to be interrupted.”

  “So these model sessions you do are private?”

  “Yes, do you understand?”

  “I sure do, Sugar. You’re what they call a lady of the hour.”

  “You could say that. Does it offend you?”

  “No, I can’t say it does. I wish I had the figure for it myself. I dream of being a pretty lady like you, petite. I guess I’ve got to settle for you doing it for me.”

  “You don’t think I’m being bad?”

  “Well it was good enough for Emanual’s girlfriend …”

  The Shibbolites never dwelt on Emanual’s earthy nature. “Go on, you’re teasing me, Miss Lord, Emanual wouldn’t go with sinners.”

  “Oh no, Sugar, all his friends were sinners.”

  “You really think so?”

  “The Master didn’t turn his back on sinners, and he was always talking about wine. Doing miracles making it. Probably even got himself tipsy on occasion. You can look it up!”

  Sarah is not about to.

  “Your soul is your business, Sugaree. I won’t judge you unless I see you doing some harm to Baby. You hired me to look out for her and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “You are a darling, Miss Lord. Thanks a million. None of this is easy.” She sighs, swooping down in a nosedive through her low feelings about the missing buck, she cries in Laudette’s fat arms. But she knows too well how to put sloppy feelings out of sight. She comes up for air and gets a grip on herself. Appearances count for everything in modelling. Frowns, her cosmetological sixth sense tells her, can destroy a woman’s beauty, leaving lines on the mouth and brow long before their time. She summons every bit of strength she has to put her feelings on ice and keep them there. She’ll really be damned, out with her baby in the street, if she sacrifices her money-maker looks for what she feels inside. On the surface her composure becomes smooth. The sad look on her mouth turns to an arrogant smirk, her eyes become as clear as black diamonds, as she gets down to business. “Why, if I don’t stop this crying right this instant come this evening I’ll be a puffy red-eyed mess. And I don’t expect many men around here want to look at a model who has no eye for her own appearances. These dresses I bought in Los Pecados have no look at all by Bay City standards. They’re chintzy and much too showy, don’t you think?”

  “You’ve got that right, Sugar,” says Laudette. “In any business there must be a sign, one that your customer can read. Those floozy things give the impression that you’re nothing but a small town woodchick who made some change at a crap table. Oh yes, it’s an easy choice not to be a slave to fashion when your bucks are running on empty, but to get in with the fancy folks around here who go for such things as ‘models’, you’re going to have to doll yourself up more than a little. Now I just so happen to know the place where you can suit youself to look like the world and any of its charms …,” The baby sitter tells Sarah about Besty Rosen’s, a shop where fine odds and ends of days gone by are available at a fraction of their original cost.

  Sarah follows the sitter’s direction and finds second hand Besty’s. The first-time-arounder takes a look through the racks of party dresses there. The red velvet, white satin and black lace costu
mes of yesterday’s cream cakes still say the same thing the second time around. “A real four alarmer” says Besty when Sarah holds up a siren red cocktail dress that cracks with fire. “Or this, this’ll grab his attention.” She shows Sarah a silver sequined sarong of easy white silk, cut off one shoulder, slit up and buckled at the thigh.

  The split personality knows reverse psychology. A woman alone who appears out for fun, with a desperate need to be some man’s armpiece, is cheap. On the contrary, one who dresses to make some separation between herself and the world is a classic, an expensive and therefore desirable piece of property.

  “No, no, I think I want something less hussy, more substantial, something to make me look older.”

  “If it’s dignified you want, you’ve come to the right place.” Rosen shows her a whole chest of treasures, a trunk full of ensembles that have a feudal look, perfect to help her strike the pose herdesign calls for. Heavy gauge silk the way worms don’t spin it anymore, quilted, rich brocades and weighty ermine hems to trail along the floor, fur capes, and one-of-a-kind personal effects—hats, gloves, shoes, cigarette holders, fans, riding costumes, monocles and opera glasses, a sophisticated assortment of fine accessories that put distance between the world and its wearer. The apparel is well-worn, but in the way of old money, always acceptable here, there, and everywhere. Subdued, yet dominating, the trappings of a special someone who grew up surrounded by the arts and leisure, the type men find hard to take advantage of.