The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  He saw Jojo in the audience when he came in, but he avoided making himself known to the house dick, taking care to sit well behind him at the back of the theatre. He wasn’t sure who it would make more uncomfortable, their meeting up under the circumstances, but experience taught Jake to generally avoid the man anywhere outside of the Litchfield Valley Hotel. Once, some months back, he’d taken lunch at the Starlight with some skirt he knew from school, a dizzy bitch called Caroline who never stopped smiling and yet always looked like she was about to cry. Halfway through his hamburger, in walked Jojo Walker, and here Jake thought he was running into a friend from work, a colleague, a pal. Well, howdy there, Jojo, what do you say? Rest your rump and sit a spell, we won’t mind. Which was the God’s honest truth, since the entire conversation thus far had come from his mouth and his only while poor, dumb Caroline just showed her crooked teeth and stared at him with wide, wet eyes. He might as well have said something awful about the man’s mother for the way he got treated, all crumpled brow and eyes like a couple of mad hornets about to launch right out of their sockets.

  All he said was no thanks before retiring to a booth by the window and chain smoking in surly silence while his coffee went cold, the lout. Couldn’t have been ruder if he tried.

  So when Jake caught a glimpse of old Scarface himself in the dead centre of the theatre, he was quick to sit and drop his head, hoping not to be recognized. The truth was he didn’t much care for Jojo, not since that day in the diner—here was a guy with no friends to speak of, an outcast, practically an exile except that he stayed in town, and Jake had tried to rise above all that with a bit of common decency, but what did he get for it?

  The hell with Jojo Walker. As far as Jake was concerned, the guy deserved what he got, and then some.

  Whether or not Jake deserved this brunette beauty’s attention, he couldn’t say. Probably not, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. Instead, he dug a quarter out of his pocket and pressed it into the woman’s waiting palm. She managed to smile with just her eyes without moving her lips at all—dangerous eyes, he thought. Like bottomless pools. He could have dived right into them.

  “Coming back for the midnight show?”

  Her voice was a whisper, almost too low to hear, which was strange given how far her mouth was from his ears. Still, he heard her, though he did not quite get her meaning.

  “I’m not . . . well, no,” he stammered. “I mean—there’s a midnight show? I thought the mixed one, you know . . .”

  This time the stunning nurse did lean in close, her breath warm on Jake’s cheek.

  “That’s just for this picture,” she said. “The one at midnight, well it’s different. Not advertised. Invite only.”

  Jake sucked in a sharp breath, unsure of what to make of the exclusive invitation, but vaguely thrilled to have received it. Vague, because she had not yet said what, precisely, the invitation was for.

  “I—I have to work,” he squeaked.

  “No you don’t,” said the nurse. “Not really. Not if you don’t want to miss the surprise.”

  She pronounced the last word slowly and seductively, stretching her plump mouth from a bright red bud to an opening almost wide enough to remind him of the awkward bit at the end of Motherhood Too Soon. And that begged the question: what sort of woman came onto a guy like this, a total stranger, after something like that?

  This one, apparently. And Jake wasn’t exactly complaining.

  But Jesus, Mr. Hibbs—and what if Jojo had seen him? He didn’t think he had, but the guy was a policeman for a hundred years, probably had eagle eyes in that cut-up mug of his. Getting out of his shift wasn’t going to be the easiest task of his life, nor the wisest, but . . .

  “It’s not like everyone gets to go, you know,” she said sullenly, her gaping mouth melting into a girlish pout. “Come, or don’t. It’s a free country, gorgeous.”

  She gave him a wink and moved on, harassing some of the other remaining men with her books and her bosom and her puzzling, impenetrable, voodoo eyes. Jake was relatively certain her nurse’s outfit was just a size too small for her build, and was careful to study the motion of the fabric as it strained against her curves to make absolutely sure.

  To hell with Jojo Walker, he thought again, and to hell with Mr. Mitchell Hibbs.

  It was right at nine o’clock now, and even if he ran he’d be at least a few minutes late. But he had a paperback in his back pocket and enough money for a slice of pie at the Starlight, so why the hell not? They had a phone in the back there, he’d call and complain of a sour stomach, and who were they to make a stink about it?

  Jake felt like the master of his own destiny. And destiny was wiggling through the aisles, selling cheap sex books and, he thought, casting the occasional surreptitious glance his way. He stood, edged his way into the aisle, and marched out to the lobby like he owned the place. Like he owned the whole damn town. By the time he was halfway through Seven Steps to Satan and mostly finished with the peach pie on the table in front of him, Jake’s ego had swelled to majestic proportions. She had chosen him, hadn’t she? He certainly hadn’t seen her spend that much time—nor get so close—with any other swinging dick in the joint.

  And speaking of dicks and swelling . . .

  Whoa there, Tex, he warned himself, there’s plenty of time for that.

  He sipped his coffee and jabbed a forkful of pie into his mouth, and as he chewed, Jake closed his eyes and smiled, thinking of all the things he would do to that broad.

  Whatever her name was.

  The cage was empty. Jojo wandered over to it, peered inside like a kid looking for a sleeping tiger at the zoo. No tiger, and no Jake, either.

  He’d been at the Palace, though Jojo was sure he didn’t know he’d been spotted. For the next fifteen minutes or so, Jojo guessed Jake would be along any minute now. Then Hibbs came into the lobby, his face drawn and hollow, his bald head gleaming with sweat. Charles all but leapt out of the boss man’s way when he came through. Jojo leaned up against the front desk and waited to be addressed.

  “Sick,” Hibbs grunted, jabbing a thumb toward the vacant cashier’s cage.

  “So?” Jojo did not so much as consider giving the kid away. Even when he was a deputy he hated a stoolie, any kind of man who could turn over on an ally like he was combing his hair.

  “So, no one to sit in the cage, ’less you care to do it.”

  “Can’t say as I do.”

  “I didn’t much reckon you would.”

  “Have I got a choice?”

  “’Course you have. You’re white and over twenty-one. You can march right through them doors over there if you’ve got a mind to.”

  “And if I like having a job?”

  “Then you’ll sit in the goddamned cage.”

  Jojo glanced over at the cashier’s cage, and then back at Hibbs. He grinned.

  “Just so long as nobody throws the switch that makes me fall in the water.”

  “Throws the—? Oh, I see. Carny humour.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, this ain’t no carnival, it’s a respectable hotel, so I expect you’re on double duty tonight.”

  “I can’t man the cage and patrol the floors at the same time.”

  “Since when do you ever patrol the floors? Just sit still and keep your eyes and ears open. That really isn’t so tough, is it Walker?”

  “And if something should happen?”

  Hibbs frowned and cocked his head to one side. Jojo never thought of it before, but his boss kind of looked like a giant baby when he assumed that expression of his.

  “Take care of it. That’s what you’re paid to do.”

  “Check,” Jojo said.

  “Thatta boy,” Hibbs said patronizingly, patting Jojo on the shoulder. “Got a group coming in from Little Rock tomorrow—something to do with the Daughters of the C
onfederacy. I think they’re putting on a barn dance or some such thing. War bonds, I guess. I don’t reckon they’ll arrive before you leave—er, turn in—at seven, but just so you know . . .”

  “Double check.”

  “Right. Good. Anything else?”

  “I dunno,” Jojo said, shrugging his shoulders. “Is there?”

  “Charles holding up all right? Doing his job?”

  “Sure. Charles is niftic.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Hibbs agreed.

  Jojo said, “He’s thirty-seven.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  Hibbs looked nonplussed, but recovered quickly enough. He turned and started off, then paused and looked back to Jojo.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he added. “Those movie people came through last night—keep a close eye on ’em, would you? I’m not suggesting they’re trouble, necessarily. . . .”

  “I understand,” Jojo said.

  “. . . and I’m sure they checked out, that they’re not, you know, doing anything wrong or anything like that . . .”

  “I’m on it, boss.”

  Hibbs smiled and clasped his hands together.

  “I knew I could count on you, Walker. Yessir, folks might say—”

  He cut himself off.

  “Yeah? What do folks say?”

  “Well, you know how people are. All I mean to say is that you do all right by me, regardless. I guess a man ought to mind his own business. . . .”

  “Yeah,” Jojo said through clenched teeth. “I guess he ought to.”

  “That’s right,” Hibbs said. “That’s all I mean.”

  The two men exchanged an awkward glance, and then Hibbs smacked his lips and rubbed his hands together.

  “If there’s nothing else . . .”

  “I think I’ve got it covered.”

  “There’s a good fellow.”

  Jojo retired to the cage and within minutes decided he knew exactly how the tigers felt. He scanned the tight area for any reading material Jake might have left behind, but there was none to be found apart from a tattered brochure denoting some of the northwestern part of the state’s natural wonders. It was a long time since they’d stopped handing those out, not since a pair of newlywed campers decided to take their honeymoon in the Ozarks and never came back out. Jojo wondered if whatever moon-shining hillbillies who no doubt killed them first trapped them in a cage like this.

  But then hadn’t he been trapped all along, for the last year and some change, in a cage of his own making? He could have left, gone elsewhere, to another town or another state or, hell, to Mexico for all it mattered. A fresh start, maybe even a new name to go along with it. Anything that couldn’t be perverted into Jojo or any other carny freak moniker. Start scrimping and saving until he could afford electrolysis from some quack doctor in some shifty little border town with a skyline made of giant radio towers instead of skyscrapers. No more Jojo the Dog-Faced Boy. No more goddamned Ambras Syndrome. No more George Walker at all.

  Then again, maybe he was the cage—his own self, his skull. His mind: nothing corporeal, but a cage all the same, and one of his own making. Cheat on your old lady one too many times . . . but it wasn’t the quantity, it was the quality, in this case being the quality of black, which counted as miscegenation in the minds of everyone within a five hundred mile radius if not strictly according to law. And then you lose your old lady and your job and what little standing you ever had in the community, and even though no one really knows that you’re a freak, that you’re a real live fucking werewolf, it doesn’t much matter because now you’re something much worse and that’s prison for you, George Walker, life sentence with no option for parole, in the impregnable cage you built with your own two furry hands.

  Mexico, Jojo silently mused.

  Wouldn’t that be nice.

  Jojo grimaced, kicked his feet up on the counter, and waited for the time to pass. It did, but slowly.

  z

  He sat in the booth long enough to watch tables turn over as much as eight times, but the night seemed to speed on as though the clock on the wall was busted. He finished his pie, finished his book, and went through enough cups of mud to kill a small horse, and all the while Jake had only one thing on his mind—that fabulous nurse and her unbelievable figure.

  It was half past eleven before he knew it. Time to stop fantasizing and get real. He left a dollar on the table, left the paperback too, and got out of the Starlight like the place was on fire.

  She knew something was wrong, something so ambiguous she couldn’t name it, but it hung heavy in the air like fog. A substantial part of it was her own sustained sorrow, this much she knew, for she had cried for a long time and the world always seemed denser and more difficult to navigate after a deep, mournful cry. That, however, was far from a mystery to an old hand like Theodora, who spent more lonely nights in tears than not, and she knew the heaviness was something else, something more than humidity and regret. Perhaps her husband’s cold distance was a part of it—though Russ was never a warm man, and his attitude toward married life went largely unchanged since day one—or, more specifically, the strange doings at his theatre.

  The strange man at the theatre.

  She’d only seen him once, and in passing, like a ghost. Entirely unremarkable in every manner, from his perfectly average height to his ordinary seersucker suit to the face he wore like a mask of every American male between the ages of forty and fifty she’d ever seen in her life. His hair was oiled and parted in the middle, a bowtie at his throat, the colour of which she could not recall. His voice was a trifle high, perhaps even on the effeminate side, but by no means gentle—he spoke too loudly and much too quickly, a northerner if she’d ever heard one. Theodora had nothing against Yankees, despite her father and grandfather’s harsh contempt for them (her great-grandfather was one of only five Confederates to die at the Battle of Lynchburg), but they were as much a mystery to her as any Chinaman.

  It was not just his foreignness that perturbed her, though. It was the peculiar glint in his eye and the almost immediate sway he seemed to hold over her normally fiercely independent husband. It was the strangeness of this whole “roadshow” business and the cruel manner with which Russ discussed Reverend Shannon on the telephone the other night. And it was the chilling smile that man flashed her in the brief moment she saw him, his head whipping to the side to catch her as if she was sneaking about, his small, thick-lipped mouth spreading open to reveal flat, white teeth in a grin that could just as easily have been described as a snarl.

  So what was wrong, exactly? Theodora couldn’t say. This “Barker” Davis certainly was wrong—what sort of first name was Barker, anyway?—and his sordid little picture show that was sure to scandalize the whole town if it hadn’t already. He reminded her of the old medicine showmen; that, or the carny people who usually dragged along in the circus’ wake like vultures after a dying animal. He reminded her of the sideshow her father took her to, a lifetime ago, which Anne didn’t like at all and would have forbidden her from going if she had been in any position to forbid anything.

  It was, of course, the Devil’s business.

  And if Anne had overreacted to every other thing that ever earned that designation in her view, Theodora came to learn that in this case, she had not. Not in the least.

  Snatches of remembered images—faces and lights and the sawdust-and-vomit smell of the carnival—overcame her senses as she rose to finally switch on the light and try to make sense of the connection her mind wanted to make between that long ago time and the anxiety that presently gnawed at her. The shouting men and crying babies and the sad, strange people she couldn’t feel right about staring at. . . .

  She’s just fat, Papa, it isn’t so nice. . . .

  Theodora knitted her brow and focused on the present, on the room and the
house and all the picking up that needed doing. She arranged the magazines on the coffee table into a neat stack and wiped down the little bar with a dust rag. Next, she moved into the kitchen to eradicate all evidence of the earlier disaster, and she even found herself humming a little tune before she was done with it. It was “Nine Little Miles From Ten-Ten-Tennessee,” but she only knew the refrain, which was what she part-hummed, part-whistled over and over again. It reminded her of infrequent visits to Memphis in her childhood, passing over the Mississippi on a rickety bridge and marvelling at the possibility of a town larger than Little Rock. Heck, lil’ miss (said her father in a rare moment of warmth), there’s towns ten times bigger’n’ this’un. Theodora couldn’t imagine. Anymore, she did not care to. Litchfield was quite big enough, thank you very kindly, and what’s more, if you can’t get it in Litchfield, then you don’t really need it. She greatly doubted she would ever lay eyes on Ten-Ten-Tennessee again as long as she lived, and that was just fine and Jim Dandy with Theodora Cavanaugh.

  She was fine right here.

  Finishing with the kitchen, Theodora moved back through the front room to the foyer—such as it was—where she found Russ’ coat and hat hanging haphazardly on the doorknob of the coat closet door. She couldn’t begin to guess why the coat was out at all, this being the heart of July, but she deigned to open up the closet and return the smoky old thing to its hook in there, when something shifted in one of the outer pockets, poked out, fell to the floor.

  Theodora bent at the waist and paused to examine the object before picking it up. It looked like a small purse of some sort, at least upon first glance, just faded blue cloth stitched up the sides. But it did not take the simple, rectangular shape of a purse, but rather the crude form of a man. Torso, arms and legs, and a round little head that jutted out on top. Buttons—small, opalescent—for eyes. No yarn for hair, as she might have considered adding, nor extra stitches to represent a mouth. No tiny garments for the doll (for that was what it was, surely—a doll). As crude and simplistic as it could possibly be, Theodora decided the thing must be some poor child’s dolly. Probably she made it herself from whatever abandoned materials she could find and collect. A regular little Frankenstein.