The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  And there came Ham’s guffaw again, Ham not noticing that nearby diners turned at the boom of it, or not caring, if he did notice. Jesse too laughed, throwing back his head of brilliantined black hair, which shined almost blue beneath the lights. Ingersoll would find everything funnier after the steaks.

  The waitress brought glasses of water and Ingersoll nearly lunged for his and was three gulps in when he realized it wasn’t water. The muscle ringing his throat pinched, and then he was sputtering moonshine all over the menu. Ham’s thunder laugh and Jesse’s too and Ingersoll was red-faced coughing and red-faced embarrassed and even the waitress was giggling and Jesse reached to give her fanny a pat. Through his tearing eyes, Ingersoll saw that their fingers clasped briefly before she pushed Jesse’s hand away. He wondered if Jesse had a wife in some big house on Broad Street convinced her husband was at prayer meeting.

  Ingersoll held his napkin to his eyes and forced the cough to die in his throat. “Sorry,” he croaked. “I thought it was—”

  “We know what you thought,” said the waitress. “Now, let me get this out of your way”—she dangled the menu so the whiskey dripped from the corner—“before we get another display of Yankee table manners.” She pranced off, the apron bow framing her backside.

  “I like a dumper with a little motion to it,” said Ham. “Looks like a sack of puppies under that skirt.”

  Jesse laughed and Ham laughed and Ingersoll took another sip, and now that he knew what he was drinking, he drank with pleasure, the whiskey smooth as if it’d burbled out of the first spring thaw, between snowdrops and crocuses and little hopping birds. “Damn,” he said, and holding the glass up to appraise its clarity, again, softer, “damn.”

  “I’m guessing if you’da known ’bout this hooch, you’da hurried on last night,” Ham said. “Split a bottle,” he said, nodding to Jesse.

  Jesse lifted a roll from his bread plate. Ingersoll glanced around, hoping to see a waiter hustling toward him with tongs outstretched.

  Ham lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t mind knowing where a fella could get his hands on some more. Fella who’s mighty thirsty.”

  Jesse looked at Ham as he brought the roll to his lips and bit.

  Ham continued, “Mighty thirsty indeed. Thirsty enough to drink about a dozen cases.”

  Then the waitress’s arm swooped around his face with a plate of ham omelet.

  Merciful God, that was fast, thought Ingersoll.

  “Ketchup, please, Connie my pearl,” said Jesse, looking up, and Connie said, “It’s right here in my apron, gimme a sec.” Her other arm held two plates, one in her fingers and the other balanced on her forearm, and she transferred that one to her free hand and began lowering Ham’s heavy double steak.

  Jesse reached into the apron and said, “Oh, I’ll just help myself to what I want, don’t mind me,” and rummaged there as she squealed and shimmied, Ham’s eyes gleaming as he watched the frisking, Ingersoll smelling his steak just out of reach and feeling saliva channel his tongue and thinking how strange it is when something you hear about your whole life happens: his mouth was watering.

  At last Jesse got his ketchup and Ingersoll his steaks, decidedly smaller than Ham’s. “I’ll take two more,” he nearly shouted at the waitress’s back as she turned to bring more whiskey. Then he lowered his head and tucked in and didn’t say anything for a long time. Which was fine: Ham might finally have met his match in terms of loquaciousness, a word Ham had taught him. The men watched as Ingersoll sawed a giant bite and forked it in.

  Ham said, “He’s so hungry he could eat a buttered monkey.”

  Jesse said, “He’s so hungry he could eat the ass end of a rhino.”

  They clinked glasses and drained them while Ingersoll kept eating. He didn’t even look up until the first steak was gone. Then he was able to slow down, to nod and laugh—men like that craved an audience, and besides, one and a half steaks and three whiskeys in, he felt like laughing. The second plate of steaks arrived and Ingersoll remembered last night’s can of beans that he’d shared with the baby and he reckoned both of them were eating better now. He took a deep breath to clear some room in his stomach and kept eating as the men spoke of Coolidge, cars, and coochie.

  Jesse circled his glass in the air. More whiskey arrived. We’re good and drunk now, thought Ingersoll. We’re drunk and good.

  “Ham,” said Jesse. “How come you come to be called Ham? That short for anything?”

  Ingersoll gave up on the fourth steak and pushed his plate away and laid his fork down. He loved this question. Never once had he heard Ham give the same answer. Last time someone’d asked, they were in a speakeasy in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Ham had told a tale about being named after Hamlet, from Shakespeare, because his mama had married the man who’d shot his daddy and Ham’d grown up unsure if he should seek revenge and had begun opining to a skull as his only confidant.

  Now Ingersoll leaned back in his chair and stretched out, crossing his long legs under the table.

  “Well,” said Ham, catching Ingersoll’s eye, “funny you should ask. Nope, not short for anything, and not long either. Ham for Ham. Ham ’cause when I was born, I smelled so good, so good like a sweet little piggy that ate nothing but acerns and brown-eyed Susans, and the porcine smell even spurted out the top a my head, and they’d pass me around in church, all the womenfolk taking a drag off me, then falling out and fainting.”

  Ingersoll was grinning and shaking his head.

  Ham’s accent was pure Kentucky now, which happened with whiskey. “Yep,” Ham continued after a swallow, “smelled so sweet that people used to get hungry when I’d waft by on the breeze. Smelled so sweet”—Ham laid a hand on his chest and belched—“Daddy used to fret I’d convert folks to cannibalism.”

  Ingersoll was chuckling now, and Jesse.

  “Poor old Daddy, how he had to beat them dogs away. Coyotes howling outside my room all night.” Ham leaned in. “This one time? I was about eighteen months, Mama walks in my room and says it was three big rats sitting there on the rails of my baby bed, gazing down at the hammy feast lying asleep before them, rubbing they little fists together.”

  Even Ham was laughing now, and then gave up trying to finish the story, holding his shaking stomach and laughing, a sheen of sweat on his red red face.

  “Ahhhhhh.” He sighed himself out of the laugh at last.

  Connie appeared to refill their glasses. “Drink up,” she told them. “Somebody’s got your check.”

  Jesse leaned slightly out of the booth to raise a finger in the direction of the police captain’s blue hat.

  Ingersoll’s reach for his glass was a little off. Lord Jesus but I am drunk, he thought. Shouldn’t be, but I am. He was thinking of the way the baby had lounged in his upended hat by the fire last night, leaning back to watch the flames. Mellow, like a tired old cowboy soaking in hot springs after rounding up cattle. And now Ingersoll was thinking how empty his hat must feel with nothing in it but the hook.

  It had been a strange few days. When he’d ridden away from Dixie Clay’s, he’d asked himself, What is it I’m feeling? There must be a word for it.

  At least he wasn’t the only one in his cups. Ham was blinking slow, drunk blinks. But Jesse was a marvel—he couldn’t weigh as much as Ham’s thigh yet he’d matched them glass for glass.

  As if to confirm what Ingersoll was thinking, Jesse dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “Damn fine meal. I feel fitter than a butcher’s dog.” He tossed the napkin onto the table and leaned toward Ham. “Alrighty now,” he said. “What’s your real name? What Johnson?”

  “I’ll never tell,” Ham said.

  “Come on.”

  “Bigger and meaner and more famous men than you have wanted to know.”

  Jesse swished a last swash in his glass and drained it and set it down. Quietly: “Not meaner.”

>   The place had emptied of its dinner rush and now only one other table was occupied, a couple of drunk engineers scowling over their charts, the hopeless task of keeping the river at bay.

  Jesse selected a toothpick from the holder and sat back against the booth, angled toward Ingersoll, who wondered was it dawning on the man that Ingersoll hadn’t said more than a dozen words.

  “How ’bout it, Ing?” Jesse said. He was the kind of fella who’d use a nickname as soon as he could.

  “How ’bout what?”

  Pointing to Ham with the toothpick. “What’s his Christian?”

  Ingersoll shrugged. In the kitchen, someone dropped a plate and cursed.

  “I reckon it’s time,” said Ham, “to get back to bidness. Now, this whiskey is the finest I’ve had outside Kentuck, bonded or no. And I’m thinking a man like you, who makes dinner bills vanish and pretty waitresses bat their eyes like toads in a hailstorm, might know how to get some more.”

  Jesse lifted the knife beside his plate and tilted it, smiled to inspect his white teeth. He flicked his thumb beneath the right wing of his mustache to curl it, then flicked the left. “Love to oblige you, boys,” he said, lowering the knife to the table. “But I don’t know nothing about nothing.”

  “That so,” said Ham.

  “That so. And even if I did, why would I trust a fella won’t tell me his real name?”

  “All sorts of reasons to trust a fella.”

  “Such as?”

  “A taste of the take.”

  “Thought you fellas were engineers.”

  “Engineers is what we be. But with expensive tastes.”

  “That right?”

  “Got me a blue-book octoroon named Sappho in a house of ill repute in Storyville. Smokes moota with her coochie.”

  Jesse leaned forward, eyes boyish and bright. “Liar.”

  “No lie. She opens her whorehouse window and lowers a basket and the banana vendor packs up a big bunch of those Chiquitas, and a little moota in the bottom, rolled up to smoke. My gal Sappho can French inhale, blows smoke rings with her coochie lips. It kills me, every time. Can’t stay away. Even if her room always smells like rotting bananas.” Ham shrugged philosophically. “But such talent don’t come cheap. Costs me ten dollars. Wanna do her in the mirrored parlor? Costs extry. Wanna see her with her friend, Miss Carmen Brazilia of the Mule Skinner’s Whips? Costs extry. So you see even a distinguished engineer got to have some extry extry.”

  Jesse nodded, removing the toothpick from between his lips and dropping it into the ashtray. “You have a point. Ten dollars is a lot.”

  “Yeah, well”—here Ham jutted his jaw out and scratched his sideburns—“she charges by the inch.”

  All three laughed, Ham the hardest.

  “So if you find out the distiller of this here whiskey,” Ham continued, “wants a partner with ties to vast engineered metropoli scattered across this great nation, you tell him to come find us.”

  “Oh, will do, will do.” Jesse gave them a keen look with those queer eyes of his. “Gentlemen,” he said, and pushed his chair back and stood, “this has been a most enlightening meal. We’ll see each other soon, I trust.” He reached and shook hands with Ham.

  When Ingersoll extended his hand to shake, he bumped his whiskey glass, upsetting it. He snatched for it and the whiskey flung in the air and splattered down on his hand.

  “Well, will you look at that,” said Jesse. “Man’s getting his date drunk.”

  Silence while the joke touched ground. And then Ham’s huge guffaw, table shaking as he pounded it with his fist, and Jesse too throwing his head back and hooting. Ingersoll mopped his hand with a balled-up napkin and waited for the laughter to die. It took a good while. At last Jesse, still chuckling, made his way to the door, passing the table Connie was wiping down. He leaned close and whispered something that made her laugh too. She straightened, and all three of them watched Jesse proceed to the coatrack and slip into the camel hair and place his hat on his black hair and flick the brim. He withdrew his umbrella from the stand and opened the door, the bells ringing. Under the awning, he dipped his head to open the umbrella, then pushed off into the blustery night.

  Ingersoll was exhausted. It hit him just that fast. “Let’s go,” he said, thinking of the rooming-house bed, and Ham nodded.

  Then Ingersoll leaned over and picked up Jesse’s glass, a half inch of whiskey left, and he drained it. “Huh.”

  “Water?”

  Ingersoll nodded.

  Chapter 6

  The whole first day, she was skittish with the baby. She didn’t even realize she was expecting someone to whisk him away—the dead mother, risen from her grave, or even the cowboy who brought him—until she decided to trim the baby’s fingernails, bendy but so sharp they’d scratched his cheeks. She put her curved scissors to his inch-long finger and had to make herself squeeze. Holding her breath. One, two, three, four nails done, then his pinkie twitched and she pinched it and a tiny smile of blood appeared and immediately she glanced at the door. But no one came to take him, leave her orphaned. The child was squalling so she picked him up and sucked his little finger and shushed him, holding him against her shoulder and patting him as she executed her loose-legged bouncy walk, the one that had worked on Jacob.

  The bouncy walk came right back. The baby calmed. Later, to trim the rest of his nails, she put his fingers one by one in her mouth and nibbled them smooth.

  And so she grew to know him through her mouth. Through her nose and ears and fingers. He dirtied his diddie and the mess got all up his back and she bathed him, worked her wet cloth into his wrinkles and crevices, lifted up his chin to suds out the grimy beads. He didn’t like the bath, she could tell the sensation was new, and he fastened desperate eyes on her, so she sang to him about arms as she swirled the washrag over his arms, sang to him about toes as she flossed between his toes. He fell asleep afterward and she had the strange experience of missing him, though he was right there. She hovered over the nest of blankets she’d made on her bed, and at one point he was so still she held a finger beneath his nose to make sure he was breathing. She wanted to study him from every angle. When have I had this feeling before? Oh yes—falling in love . . . She didn’t mind the rain, which she wore like a cloak pulled tight around them both.

  She named him Willy, for her father; Jacob had been named Julius Jacob Holliver, for Jesse’s father. She wished her father could meet Willy soon, though Jesse had never allowed her to go home to visit. She didn’t want to think about Jesse now, worried he wouldn’t like her having a baby. But she couldn’t give him back. Wouldn’t even know how to. It was too late.

  Each hour brought her discoveries. The first was that he was happiest on the move. He’d woken squalling from his nap and kept squalling and she knew he was hungry. The strange-talking cowboy (where do you come from if you talk like that? Not Alabama or Mississippi, that’s for sure) had given her some strained peas and oatmeal, and she offered them, but he didn’t seem interested. She thought maybe he was thirsty. The cowboy had also said the baby liked Nehi soda, but that was crazy, and besides, she didn’t have any. She made him a bottle of Pet milk with a bit of sorghum molasses, but he wouldn’t take it. He cried when she held him and cried when she pinned on a fresh diddie and cried when she put him down on a pallet. She picked him up and he paused to burp then resumed crying. As the wind outside deepened from a whimper to a howl, he met it and raised it, opening his mouth impossibly wide (Dixie Clay thought of a snake she and Lucius had once surprised in the corncrib, disengaging its jaw to swallow a rat). The baby was good and angry by then, his eyes squinched, face a red fist, arms flailing, his tongue vibrating like the clapper of a bell. Dixie Clay decided to fetch him some cow’s milk from the nearest neighbor, Old Man Marvin, so loyal a customer that his teeth had about rotted. Marvin could be counted on not to gossip, and her instinct w
as to preserve the secret of Willy for a while. Certainly Jesse should learn about the baby from her.

  But first she had to check the still, so she bundled Willy against the rain and ran with him pressed against her chest. She tried not to jostle him. He stopped crying, though the way was rough and rooty.

  When she got to the still, the mash was bubbling and she needed both hands free, to lift the heavy lid and stir the wooden paddle. She rested the baby on the thumper keg while deciding what to do. She didn’t want to lay Willy on the floor because she’d seen a coachwhip there a few weeks ago. Her feeling was that if snakes got in her house, well, she had no choice but to kill them, but when she was in the woods, she was in their home, and she let them be. But now she was uneasy about the coachwhip, its black body tapering off into gray and then creamy white at the tail. She remembered stories from her girlhood about the coachwhip chasing children by putting its tail in its mouth and rolling like a hoop. It would loop their feet, trip them, and then whip them bloody with its tail. She knew all this was hogwash then and knew it more so now, but still she hesitated. And that’s when she realized Willy’d been lulled to sleep on the rumbling, hiccuping thumper keg.

  Which was how William Clay Lucius Holliver became a moonshiner. A moonshiner, six months old on that day of April 19 (she had declared this to be the case when she realized he couldn’t have a birthday if she didn’t choose one).

  Dixie Clay did buy milk from Old Man Marvin and then on second thought rode back and bought the cow outright. Her name was Millie, and Dixie Clay put her in the stall next to Chester and he sniffed at the partition and pawed his hoof. Four years back, when she’d begun to shine, she’d let all the farm animals go, first the cow, then the sheep and chickens, no time to tend them, no need for what they could give. But Chester—this she’d never tell Jesse, he’d laugh at her, but was true nevertheless—had grown melancholy. She scratched his withers and then leaned her forehead on his shoulder. “We both have some company now, Chet,” she whispered.