The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  It was a relief when a crack of light caned beneath the door. Dixie Clay stood and stretched. “Well,” she said. “Time to hit the hay.”

  He went to the wall where she’d hung two brooms, the old corn broom and a new plastic one that had a dustpan suctioned to its handle. He lifted down the corn broom and the battered tin pan.

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  He stood, looking down.

  “You must be tired.”

  But he simply set to sweeping. She watched his broom puff its small clouds, and then she turned and walked into the dawn.

  That evening, when Dixie Clay was putting up the baked ham studded with apricots, Jesse said, “Fix a plate for your uncle Mookey. He’s staying in the still now.”

  “Jesse,” she said, “please let’s not. He gives me the heebie-jeebies. I like working alone. Please, Jesse, I—”

  “Goddamn it, Dixie Clay. The man’s family.”

  If he is such family, she wanted to say, why make him sleep in the still? Instead, she pulled in a breath and said, “I’ve been thinking of how to make more money for less whiskey. If we—”

  “You make more money by cooking more whiskey. Besides, you’re the one who said you didn’t want a partner because he’d start blabbing. Well, I found you one who can’t blab.” Jesse plucked an apple out of the bowl and backed through the swinging kitchen door taking a bite and called back from the parlor, “Now fix that man a goddamn plate.” She sawed off a hunk of ham and loaded the plate with the apricots on toothpicks and deviled eggs and potato salad.

  At the still door, Dixie Clay thrust the laden plate at Mookey, who took it and slid down the wall and squatted on his heels and ate it—like a dog, Dixie Clay was about to think—but in truth he ate delicately, using his bandanna for a napkin, as she’d neglected to provide one. She waited with her arms crossed and when nothing but a picket fence of toothpicks remained she thrust her hand for the plate, but he rose and walked through the blinking fireflies to the stream where he washed and dried it before returning it to Dixie Clay.

  That night was the same—no talking, as if muteness were contagious. Of course Dixie Clay normally shined in silence, but with him there the silence felt awkward. If she spoke, how much could he understand? While she pondered, they worked efficiently, shoulder to shoulder, as the corn planting moon rolled over the tin rooftop. Though Mookey was huge and the shack was small, he somehow never got in her way. He moved lightly on his feet, like a boxer, or a dancer.

  Jesse made another rare visit to the still around dawn. He’d just gotten home, was Dixie Clay’s guess. He opened the door and stood blinking at the lantern-lit, tidy industry. There was nothing of Mookey’s in the still except a tight bedroll in the corner and a toothbrush in a mason jar.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “Like little shoemakers, you two. I mean, like the elves who made the shoes while the shoemaker slept. Or whatever.” Dixie Clay watched him counting the full boxes, two and a half rows stacked to the ceiling. He smiled. “C’mon, Dix,” he said. “You can knock off now. I’ll walk you in.” He angled his elbow out for her to slide her hand in.

  The swish of the corn broom began as they walked away. It was a nicer sound than the plastic broom, she thought, the wooden handle comfortably sunken, bearing the indentation of her fingers.

  The third night was the same. Shining shining shining in silence.

  The fourth—when she opened the door with one hand, Mookey’s dinner in the other, the lanterns weren’t lit and from the waning moon’s low blue light over her shoulder she saw Mookey rise from a squat where he’d been pouring himself a jar. He left the spigot running and stumbled toward her, tears on his face. They surprised her so much that she didn’t step back until she realized he was coming for her. She dropped his plate and turned to run but too quickly his hands were about her waist, sliding around her back. He thrust his face into her neck and she felt the wetness from his tears and his hot squeezing breath and he shuddered his thick lips against her skin. She screamed and he lifted his face and she threw her elbow into his jaw. He dropped his arms then, and she whirled and ran to the house.

  She arrived panting, and when Jesse asked what happened, she told him.

  Now it was Jesse’s turn for muteness. He yanked the napkin from his collar and marched to the gun rack and lifted the Winchester and set off down the path. Dixie Clay, suddenly scared, danced about him, begging him to stop, think, be reasonable, the man was family, he was simple, he was drunk. When they were in sight of the still, she pulled on his elbow and he whirled and lifted the Winchester and crashed the butt down on her shoulder. She crumpled backward, landing hard on her tailbone. He yanked open the door and the shack was empty. Mookey had run. Jesse crossed the floor and lifted something off the thumper keg.

  “See this?” he asked.

  She looked up from where she was crawling to her knees. Jesse held a mason jar crammed with roses, pink-veined damasks from her bushes by the gallery. “This is why we called him Kooky Mookey, back in Concordia Parish,” said Jesse. He lifted the jar and then pivoted like a pitcher catching someone stealing home and threw the vase against the wall. It exploded, and the thick glass bottom, like a crazed monocle, came spinning by and he kicked it away. Then he turned and marched past Dixie Clay, who was climbing slowly to her feet, pulling on an ash tree. Jesse’s voice scaled the ridge. “Courting a goddamn married woman with her own goddamn roses.”

  What was there for Dixie Clay to do but lift the corn broom from its nail and sweep the dinner plate and meatloaf and green beans and mason jar and roses into a pile of ruination. Then she wedged the corn broom against the wall and kicked it in the middle, and then she fed both halves to the fire.

  She returned to the house and Jesse was gone. She poured herself into bed. She stayed there all the next day, lying on her side, as her tailbone and shoulder purpled. She counted herself lucky that her collarbone didn’t appear broken, then smiled grimly at what she counted as luck. Jesse kept away and she hoped Mookey had evaded him, had faded into those woods that Jesse said he’d crawled from or found his way back to Camp Beauregard.

  The following day she doubled a blanket on the saddle and gingerly sat down and rode Chester into town, gritting her teeth when he jostled her over the railroad ties. At the stationer’s, the clerk tried to talk her into something flashier, but Dixie Clay held firm, much to his displeasure. She rode back on Friday (she still had not seen Jesse) and picked up the labels. They were gray with a black border and, in the center, a small black lightning bolt. She also went to the dry-goods store and picked up the high-shouldered bottles she’d ordered, eight cases. She paid with money from an oatmeal canister filled with tens and twenties she’d found in the pantry. If her plan worked, she’d repay it. If not, well, she’d figure that out later.

  She rode home and mixed a paste with flour and water and dredged a label through, like dredging a chicken breast through bread crumbs, and smoothed the label across the bottle, pressing out the air bubbles, until she ran out of bottles. She filled the bottles and stoppered them, and then she waited for a customer. When one came—it was Ron Shap, a state representative—she showed him the bottle and shook it so the bead could prove its strength, the bubbles small in size and slow to disappear. She opened it and poured a fingerful in an etched glass. She watched him toss it back without a grimace and catch the drop running down his gray whiskers and suck that drop off his finger. “I tell you what,” he said, and leaned back in his chair to run his thumbs beneath his red suspenders. “Got reelection coming up. I’ll take as much as you got.”

  “You can’t afford as much as I’ve got,” she said.

  He laughed and looked at her over his spectacles and said, “Try me.”

  “Four-fifty a bottle.”

  “Four-fifty!”

  “Too low?” She cocked her head and tapped a finger on her cheek. “Sh
ould I charge five?”

  “Don’t you know I can buy it off Skipper Hays down the road for a dollar?”

  “I do. And don’t you know—Hays uses denatured alcohol, cut with embalming fluid, mixed in a bathtub that hasn’t been scrubbed since God invented soap. Could blind you or kill you or both, and all for just a dollar.”

  “Come now, missy.”

  Dixie Clay stoppered her lips and the bottle.

  He softened his voice. “Did Jesse tell you to charge so much? Surely we can meet in the middle, just you and me? How about I give you two dollars. You can go to the picture show all week on that. Buy yourself a hair bob for those pretty curls.”

  “Four-fifty a bottle, and if you won’t buy it, maybe Wright Thomas”—the other candidate—“will.”

  Ron Shap hesitated and Dixie Clay popped the bottle back in the box and stood. “Good luck with the reelection.”

  He snapped his suspenders and stomped to his feet and out to his truck, where his driver was waiting with the tailgate down. From the front window she saw Shap kick his tire and get into the passenger seat and slam the door, and then get out and slam the door and kick the tire again and raise his fists to the sky and bellow, “Wright Fucking Thomas!” Then he marched up the gallery stairs and bought all eight cases.

  And was reelected.

  From that day forward, Dixie Clay made smaller batches and charged as much as she liked, no amount too much, and Jesse never again badgered her to change her recipe or take a partner, and Black Lightning became so famous that sometimes the very invitation to a wedding or convention or Klan rally would bear a zigzag bolt to brag that no expense had been spared.

  As for Uncle Mookey, he was never seen, never mentioned again, though Dixie Clay often thought of him. And over these past three years, she began to view his behavior, her behavior, differently. She wasn’t the same proud girl she’d been, prettiest in all the piney woods, or so folks said, engaged to the prettiest fellow. She saw now that she’d married Jesse while knowing only the pretty part of him. She’d read so many books she’d simply filled in the rest.

  She’d paid for it, though, would spend the rest of her life paying for it, and her loneliness had schooled her, scored her a little. So now, when she thought of Mookey, she wished she’d found a way to look beyond his oddness and be his friend. Wished she’d been less frightened, wished she’d been older, wiser, kinder. Wished she’d said, Thank you, thank you for the roses.

  Chapter 9

  Waiting for Ham to come out of the shower, Ingersoll was on his knees picking up the dried mud Ham had tracked across Mrs. Vatterott’s carpet runner the previous night. When Ingersoll had finally returned after his shift and his run-in with Jesse, Ham hadn’t come back yet. A note taped to the door announced: There will be no bananas whatsoever in tomorrow’s fruit salad! Mrs. Stanley R. Vatterott. If she hadn’t guessed who’d eaten the bananas that first morning, and who’d cleaned out the bowl yesterday when again they’d missed breakfast, she’d certainly guess who’d laid the boot prints because they led, the right slightly smaller than the left, to Ham’s door.

  As Ingersoll gathered the clods, he recalled Jesse beside the doughnut cart saying “my wife.” Christ, had he missed it the night at the restaurant, had there actually been a point when Jesse had referred to her by name? No, Ingersoll would have heard those words, Dixie Clay. Had Jesse mentioned having a wife at all? Ingersoll couldn’t recall. Too goddamn drunk. And he’d gotten too goddamn drunk because he was trying to forget the woman who just happened to share the bed of the man he’d been sitting across from. Christ, he felt sick about it. He did recall that when he’d first come to town with Junior and stopped at the store and asked where he could find a family that might take in a baby, the woman had referred to Dixie Clay as a married woman. That the man she’d married was a lounge beetle and a high-pillow sharper and most likely a bootlegger and perhaps a murderer must have slipped her mind. Christ, Christ, Christ, and Christ.

  Ingersoll had done some things he wasn’t proud of, but he’d never messed with a man’s wife and wasn’t about to start.

  Ham came down the hallway now with the towel clutched around his waist, his great hogshead chest pink from scrubbing and squiggled with hair. “Good man, Ing,” he said, stepping around him. “Saw that mud this morning and thought, Shit, it’s about as clear as cat turds on a marble floor.” He chuckled and went into his room, calling back, “In a minute let’s talk.”

  Ingersoll wasn’t looking forward to telling Ham how little he’d accomplished on levee patrol. He’d learned a new song:

  I works on the levee, Mama, both night and day.

  I works so hard to keep the water away.

  It’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan.

  Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home.

  He’d sampled a lovely sarsaparilla-flavored whiskey from Jesse’s still, and earned a sore tailbone on Horace, and about renewed his acquaintance with trench foot, but that was it.

  He could only hope that Ham had proven more effective. Often, when Ingersoll struck out, Ham came through, or vice versa, and that was why they were effective partners. Ham could tease out a man’s secret through cunning, buffoonery, or charm. Ingersoll could learn it by disappearing, an oak of a man blending into the forest until you forgot the oak had ears. Together, separately but together, they could always find the rotten apple, the rotten worm in the rotten apple. And then they’d be on to a new job. By the time the newspapermen ran up with their cameras and flash-lamps, they’d be eating miles in a Pullman while some local prohi got his mug in the paper, axe biting into the barrel stave. Ham would grumble about missing the finale, studying his profile ghosting over the corduroy cornfields. “Always hustling me outta town before the reporters come”—and here Ham would take a pouty pull of their souvenir bottle from the smashed still. “Why, they’re just jealous, that’s all, not only of our bloodhound noses for whiskey, but of my fine coiffure and matching muttonchops, which be the color, says Miss Tulsa, of an August sunrise.”

  Ingersoll, head back on the doilied seat rest with his hat over his face, would murmur, “Sure, Ham, whatever. Let’s get some shut-eye.”

  “Burns me up, just thinking about all them grateful antisaloon suffragettes dying to rub their emancipations all over me.”

  “That don’t even make sense, Ham. Shut up, now. Okay? Just shut up, and let’s sleep.”

  And on to another place, different but the same. A shame, really, ruining fine whiskey. Just meant someone else needed to cook it up all over again. And revenuers deserved their reputation for being as crooked as the men they jailed. He’d never seen one yet turn down a bribe—except for Ham, that is. Ingersoll knew they were proud of being unbribable. God, they could be rich, had they chosen that route. So what, though; they barely had time to spend the money they did make.

  Revenue work seemed about the only thing he was suited for after the war. Armistice came and he was sent home on the RMS Carpathia, the ship that had rescued the survivors of the Titanic. He spent the passage playing blackjack with the crew, some of whom had been on board in 1912 and told stories of the rescue. Ingersoll wondered where to go after his rescue—he’d land in Hoboken in a few days. Back to the orphanage? No can do. Back to school with know-it-all bespectacled milkshake-slurping boys still warm from their mother’s laps? Not hardly. Back to the stinking meatpacking factory? No, it smelled almost as bad as the trenches, and besides, newspaper said the meatpackers were talking of striking. Well, what were his skills?

  Let’s see. He could duplicate any blues song after hearing it but once, don a gas mask in less than five seconds, and score nine bull’s-eyes at rapid fire on an eight-inch target at three hundred yards in a minute’s time, which included reloading the rifle with its clip of five cartridges. What else? In the trenches, guarding no-man’s-land, they’d run out of water, thirsty like they’d guzzled
beakers of sand. That was when his mate, Christopher Tuffo, sprinted with the platoon’s canteens all the way to the river to fill them. He was sprinting back, the canteens bouncing against his thighs, when one of the canteens, French issued and shiny, caught the sun and therefore a sniper’s eye and therefore Chris was shot two hundred yards away, dancing like a scarecrow before snagging on barbed wire and hanging like a scarecrow, and what Ingersoll knew was how to wait until dark, wait through the hours with Chris calling, “Come get me, boys, I got your water, got it right here,” and then Ingersoll knew how to dash to him and unhook his skin and lash him to his back with his belt and carry him and the canteens back to the foxhole where Chris could bleed to death on Ingersoll’s knees while drinking clean rivers of water. Ingersoll knew that, all right. It was a thing he knew and knew.

  So when he landed in New York, he hung around the blues clubs waiting for something to happen, and that’s when Ham happened. And somehow they’d been revenuing the better part of a decade. They’d managed to keep themselves out of the newspapers, though they’d risked their identities once last year when they came across the worst criminal yet, Pastor Bobby Gate, a Protestant minister and a Kleagle, and, though the Klan was staunchly Prohibitionist, the biggest bootlegger in Indiana. This trinity was impressive even to Ham and Ingersoll, who figured they’d seen everything. Gate was grooming his two converts, he thought, to his church, and to his Klavern, when he learned about their service in the war. He bragged to them of lynching a colored doughboy, still in his uniform. Can you beat that! the pastor cackled. Still in his uniform! With all his fancy medals! Nigger in the uniform of a U.S. soldier, refused to give up his gun!