“Goodnight, Magnolia,” he called to her.
“’Night, Mr. Furey, sir,” she said. Mistuh and Suh is how it sounded in her mouth. “Y’all have you self a good one now,” she said, without raising her head from the aisle.
The accent was completely foreign to him and at the same time there was something in her soft-vowelled drawl that reminded him of the way people spoke home in Newfoundland. An ease with words, an effortless deviation from the straight and narrow. He loved to hear her talk, even though it brought on a ragged homesickness he hadn’t felt since his first days in the camps.
“Thanks, Magnolia,” he said.
He woke in the mornings without an alarm and fixed himself tea and a breakfast of beans warmed on the hot plate, eating from the can as he stood at his window, looking down on the early traffic. If the weather was halfways decent he walked to his job at the stockyard, otherwise he took the El.
In the evenings he ate at a diner across the street from the theatre, sitting alone at the counter with a handful of newspapers he’d taken at random from a stack the waitresses piled on the shelf over the coat rack. He drank three or four cups of coffee along with a plate of steak and eggs while leafing aimlessly through the papers. There was nothing in particular he was interested in, other than distraction. He started with the sports section when he could find it and from that moved on to entertainment pieces, movie reviews, gossip columns. The front section was always a last resort and he did little more than skim the headlines or the captions when there was nothing else to read.
It was always the same waitress working the counter, a woman at least twenty years his senior. The blue nametag pinned over her breast said Ingrid. Her accent was German or Austrian and he guessed she’d arrived in the States as a teenager, sometime between the wars. She wore a wedding ring and he assumed she had hooked up with an Irishman to be working so far from Lincoln Square. But he never asked her for details and never offered so much as his name to her. She called him and many of her other regular customers Joe. She never let his cup go dry. At 6:20, he placed a twenty-five-cent tip under his plate and walked across the street to set up for the early show.
On Sundays he had one afternoon matinee to run and the rest of the day to himself. Most often he spent it lying on the cot while darkness fell, the radio tuned to a ballgame at Comiskey Park, burbling away to itself like a child left alone in its crib. He hated the dead time and smoked away the hours, lighting one cigarette off the other, counting them aloud in Japanese. He’d forgotten almost everything else of the language, but the numbers still came to him effortlessly.
Nishino caught him and Anstey smoking a few weeks after their time in the solitary cells. They were lying underneath the barracks near the still when the interpreter called them out, ordering them into the push-up position. Nishino sent a guard to find Osano and they waited there, holding themselves arm’s-length above the ground by their fingertips. When Osano arrived he was ordered to beat Wish while the interpreter went at Anstey. Bamboo canes across their backs and upper thighs, the sound like a bat striking the baseball squarely in Comiskey Park. Line drives. The civilian guard swinging with the intensity of a man who lived in fear of finding himself on the ground with the prisoners. It was the end of whatever Osano could do for Wish. That was the message the interpreter was sending.
When Nishino stepped back from the job, Osano let up as well. Wish allowed himself to relax enough to draw a full breath and the interpreter caught him with the toe of his boot, just below the ribs. He dropped to the ground, trying to breathe around the foaming knot of pain, rolled onto his side to vomit. It was a week before he was able to pass urine after that kick. A month longer before he could piss standing up.
Wish blew smoke rings at the ceiling, watching the tight circles drift and break apart. He drank beer all Sunday evening as well, keeping them cool in a bucket of water beside the cot, lining the empty bottles along the windowsill above the bed. When he finished his twenty-sixth smoke of the night he got up to turn off the radio and strip out of his pants and shirt.
He woke first thing on Monday morning without an alarm.
In the summer of 1955 Wish fell in with a woman named Jane Adams. They met at the theatre before a Friday-night showing, Jane waiting in line at the concession stand as he passed on his way to the toilet. She waved enthusiastically when she caught sight of him and then stood with her hand held awkwardly in the air, as if she had mistaken him for someone else. She was wearing a turquoise-blue dress with crinoline under the wide skirt. Dark red lipstick and mascara and her brown hair was done up in curls. It seemed overly elaborate for the place, he thought.
“Armour and Company, right?” she said to him.
She worked on the line at the stockyard, packaging lard and smoked meats, one of the few jobs in the entire process reserved for women. She had seen him on the El several times and they had gotten off at the same stop.
“Do you come to the shows often?” she asked him.
“No,” he said, and then smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I work up in the projection booth. I haven’t seen you here before, have I?”
“I was going up to the Aragon Ballroom. Supposed to meet some of the girls on the line.”
He watched the colour coming into her face.
“First time in years for me,” she said. “Since before the war. When I got up there I was a nickel short the admission. Too late to get all the way down here on the El and back. But I was all dressed up.” She lifted her arms away from her body. “Didn’t want to waste the effort.”
“Well,” Wish said. He was dying for a piss, shifting back and forth on his feet. “Enjoy the show.”
He saw her on the El twice in the next few weeks, her brown hair straight and hauled back into a severe ponytail. She was widowed by the war, a mother of two boys. Her husband had been killed in Italy, she said. She asked him if he liked to dance.
“I don’t mind a scuff,” he said, and she looked at him blankly. “Yes,” he said. “I likes a dance.”
They went to the Ballroom on a Sunday evening. She wore the same turquoise-blue dress, her hair done up in the same curls. The Tiny Bradshaw Orchestra was on stage, playing swing and big band tunes rooted to a heavy backbeat that packed the dance floor. Wish knew only jigs and square dances and he felt lost in the anthill of motion. Jane took him off into a corner, away from the busyness, to teach him how to jitterbug, how to do the Lindy Hop. It was the grip of her hand in his as she swung away, it was how she caught his eye over her shoulder before looping back like a fishing line between casts. It was the sway of her breasts beneath the fabric of the dress. It was her hand at the small of his back turning him this way or that.
They went back to his single room and Jane waltzed him across the tiny space toward the army cot. They’d both been sneaking nips from his flask through the evening and they nearly tipped into the table as they went. Jane reached behind her back to unhook the dress without taking her mouth from his, letting it drop to the floor around her feet. The room was illuminated by the streetlight outside the window and he leaned back to look her up and down as she stepped out of the ring of material, turning away from him to drape it over the back of the chair.
Jane looked over her shoulder. “You all right, Wish?” she asked.
He nodded as she came across the room to him and slipped her arms around his back. She put one leg through his and lifted her thigh into his crotch as she kissed him.
She caught her breath when he pushed inside her the first time, as if she’d been cut, and he raised his head to look at her.
“Did I hurt you?”
“I want it to hurt a little,” she whispered, rocking her hips to urge him on.
Before he came she reached down to his ass, slid a wet finger inside him, and the unexpected burn of it set him off. The afterglow simmering all the way to his toes.
He lay awake a long time afterwards, trying to understand what could possibly have kept him from this sweetness f
or so long. And he could hear the voice in his head warning him off it even now, repeating its single word of advice: Run, run, run.
In September, something happened to Magnolia Cooksey. When she came to the theatre she was grim and withdrawn. She didn’t sing to herself as she worked through the aisles and when Wish stopped in to say goodnight she only said, “Yes sir,” curtly. She seemed angry with him personally, although he couldn’t imagine what might have prompted it.
One evening he said, “Is everything all right, Magnolia?”
She was halfway down the aisle and stood upright, one hand on the back of a chair. “Mr. Furey,” she said. “Do you know where I’m from? Where I belong?”
“Down south, is it?”
“I am from Mississippi,” she told him. “From the Delta.”
“Did I do something?” he asked her.
She bent back to the aisle to say she was through talking.
Wish mentioned Magnolia to Jane on the El the next morning as they rode into the stockyard, thinking maybe it was a woman’s problem of some sort that plagued her, something another woman would be able to explain to him.
Jane turned her head away from him slightly and blew air through her lips. She had been hinting broadly at marriage since their first night together and was becoming increasingly frustrated that Wish ignored her on the matter. When Jane said she loved him, he nodded into her hair or squeezed her hand, incapable of returning the sentiment. It was just a matter of time, he told himself. She had the two boys to think about and wasn’t about to wait around forever.
Jane said, “Who’s to say what goes on in a nigger’s mind.” There was almost a wistful tone in her voice. She looked across at him. “I got more important things to worry about,” she said.
He fell asleep over the table in the projection booth after the show ended that Friday night and for the first time in years he dreamt of the wake for Willard Slade’s boy, Mercedes walking into the room where the corpse sat up in the coffin, leaning in to kiss the empty space that had been a mouth.
Magnolia Cooksey woke him as she came in to sweep and empty the trash can. She started to back out of the room as soon as she saw him there. “Sorry, Mr. Furey, sir,” she said. “Thought you was gone for the night.”
“It’s all right, Magnolia,” he said. His head felt sluggish, he could almost hear the liquid rock to one side as he looked up. He got to his feet and grabbed the edge of the table to steady himself. She had interrupted the dream before Mercedes turned to him to speak but he heard the words in his head, like a line of dialogue he’d snipped from a reel of film. Don’t make a whore of me.
Magnolia said, “I’ll come back when you finish up in here.” He-ah.
“Come in, come in, my love,” he said, looking around for his coat. “Come in, I’m just on my way home out of it.”
She was partially hidden behind the door. He looked up to see the whites of her eyes huge in the blackness of her face.
“What is it, Magnolia?”
She said, “Where you all from, Mr. Furey, sir?”
He said, “My name is Wish, Magnolia.”
“You Irish, Mr. Wish, sir? You sounds about Irish.”
“No,” he said.
“You’re not from nowheres around here.”
“Nowheres. No, I’m not.”
“I’ll come back when you finish up,” she said again.
“Magnolia.”
She had almost closed the door completely and peered in through the crack. She didn’t trust him, he realized. Had never trusted him, a drunken white man, the theatre all but empty.
“It’s a nice name,” he said. “Magnolia. I had a friend from home,” he told her. “Mercedes, her name was. You ever hear tell of someone else with that name?”
“No, sir. Not as I can recall.” And then she said, “I’ll come back when y’all finished up here.”
On Monday he sat flipping through newspapers, waiting for Ingrid to bring him a slice of pecan pie. He’d grabbed a handful of dailies, and near the bottom of the pile was a week-old copy of the Chicago Defender, a Negro paper he’d never seen in the diner before. He shook it out and laid it across the counter, scanning the headlines. The entire front page dedicated to the story of Emmett Till, a teenager from the South Side who had gone missing while visiting an uncle in Mississippi that summer. Wish had heard talk about it around the stockyards but hadn’t paid much attention. A photo of the crowds from the Black Belt who gathered to file past the boy’s open casket after his body was shipped home to Chicago dominated the page. Hundreds upon hundreds of them on the sidewalk and spilling out onto the street.
Another photograph showed the dead boy in his coffin. Wish stared at the image, just to the left of his coffee cup. He traced the black-and-white square, his hand shaking. The corpse had been found in the Tallahatchie River three days after the disappearance, a gin fan tied to the boy’s neck with a loop of barbed wire to weight him down. The fourteen-year-old had whistled at a white woman, the paper said, and the woman’s husband and brother-in-law had taken him from his uncle’s house at gunpoint. He turned back to the photo of the crowd. He knew Magnolia Cooksey was in that mass of people, waiting her turn to see the boy.
“They got off,” Ingrid said. She was standing opposite him, looking down at the paper.
“Who?”
“The men they say killed that boy. It was on the radio today.”
“They got off?”
“Not guilty.”
Wish glanced back down at the paper. The face in the picture was not a face. It had been beaten so severely that there was only a blank, featureless pulp above the shirt and tie. The nose was missing. A dark spot above the ear where a bullet had entered the skull. Wish wouldn’t have been able to say even that the dead child was a Negro if the caption hadn’t named him. A sheet of glass had been fitted over the corpse to shield mourners from the worst of the smell.
“I bet we won’t ever hear the end of this one,” Ingrid said. She had one hand on her hip and the pie in the other. She dropped the plate in front of him with a disgusted shrug.
Wish folded the paper and stood up. He took two dollars from his pocket and set them beside his plate.
“You want this pie?” Ingrid called as he went to the door.
He walked out into the evening air, gulping it in, trying to settle his stomach. He looked up and down the street and then started back to his room.
He took his one suitcase from under the army cot and packed as much of his clothes as would fit, leaving the rest in the tiny closet. He took the back off the radio and pulled out a small envelope and Mercedes’ picture and a roll of bills he’d been adding to since his arrival. Twos and fives and tens mostly, a few twenties. He slipped a fiver from the roll and set it on the table with his key and a note to say he wouldn’t be needing the room any longer. He put fifty dollars in each of his shoes and pocketed the rest of the money. He filled his flask and stuffed a full bottle of whisky into the suitcase. He opened the small envelope and shook out the Military Medal into his hand. He stood holding it a moment, testing the weight. He considered leaving it behind but put it back in its envelope, stuffed it into his coat pocket. He set his copy of the Chicago Defender on top of his clothes, the faceless face staring up at him before he closed the lid and fastened the snaps. He flicked off the lights on his way out the door.
He took a train out of Chicago to Madison, travelling north across Wisconsin through Sauk City and Baraboo, Black River Falls and Wisconsin Rapids before stopping at Eau Claire in the Chippewa Valley. He stayed a couple of months there, renting a room by the week on Runway Avenue, living off his savings and casual work with a trucking and moving company.
He walked down to the railway station every Sunday morning and asked the agent where the day’s trains were headed. The station agent came to know his face. “East or west?”
“Don’t matter,” Wish said. “West.”
“Listen here,” the agent said one Sunday, “I
told you last week and the week before. Train headed west today goes into St. Paul, Minnesota. From there you can go on just about anywhere you like. Are you travelling or not?”
“I’m just curious,” Wish said. “Where I’d wind up if I went.”
The agent was a tall, sallow man who in Wish’s mind was the very picture of a mortician. Lank black hair combed flat and perfectly manicured hands. He was wearing a striped shirt and wire cuffs above the biceps. “You want a for instance?” he asked.
“All right.”
He brought out a map. “Look here,” he said. He used a pen to point to towns and cities along the rail line. “You can take the 57 out of St. Paul to Monticello, Albany and Glenwood. Past Glenwood, you run through Wahpeton and Detroit Lakes and then on into North Dakota.”
“North Dakota?”
“That’s right.”
Wish studied the map a few minutes. “You got Sherwood on there somewhere?”
The agent glanced up at him. “You want to get to Sherwood?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Take a train north out of West Fargo on the Burlington Northern Line. Take that as far as Great Falls and head west from there.” He dotted the map with his pen. “Devil’s Lake. Rugby. Granville. In Granville the BN line turns north and that’ll take you all the way. You can sleep until they kick you off the train, if you like. Sherwood’s the end of the line.”
The last time he’d crossed the prairies by train was with Harris on their way to the Atlantic coast from San Francisco after the war. Mile after mile the same placid surface of turf sectioned and squared. He saw something of the ocean on its most serene days in the landscape that made him lonesome for home at first. But it began to feel surreal soon enough, artificial, like the scenes painted as movie backdrops. It was almost as if the prairies had been scraped flat by hand, a carpet of greens and browns and ochre rolled across it. North Dakota reminded him of a hospital for some reason, the acres of farmland scoured smooth, the endless antiseptic blue of the sky. It filled him with the same vague sense of panic.
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