A Savage Wisdom

by Norman German

  “Where are you!”

  “Upstairs! Come on up!”

  “I’ll never step another foot in that bedroom.”

  “What?” Nevers appeared in the doorway at the head of the stairs. His face lathered, he held his arms up like a surgeon, a straight razor in one hand. “I can’t understand a word—.” Nevers looked down at Annie. “What the hell happened to you?”

  Annie’s hair was no longer white. She had tried to dye it black because she wanted the color as far away from white-blonde as she could get it.

  “Come down here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Get!-Down!-Here!” At each word, she stamped her foot in a childish tantrum.

  Nevers descended the stairs.

  Annie demanded, “What are you trying to do to me?”

  “Nothing,” Nevers pleaded. “What’s going on?”

  Annie rushed at him and began pummeling him with her fists.

  “ Don’t-lie-to-me. Don’t lie! Don’t lie! Don’t lie!”

  As she continued to strike him, he lifted the razor out of her way. Finally exhausted, she broke down crying and slid down his chest, collapsing onto the first stair step.

  “Don’t move,” Nevers said. “I’ll be right back.” He ran upstairs and returned without the shaving cream on his face. He sat next to Annie at the foot of the stairs, waiting for her sobbing to subside. She looked up at Nevers, wiping her face with the palm of her hand. A smear of diluted black dye trickled down her neck. Not wanting her eyes to meet his, she focused on the kite-shaped scar on his nose.

  “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you,” he said.

  “Liar!” she screamed. “You—.” She raised a red fist and drew it to her breast. “Liar. Nausica and Bliss. They’re—. Aren’t they? They’re prostitutes.”

  Nevers let out a growl that sounded simultaneously relieved for himself and hurt for her.

  “Ah, Annie, I thought you knew.” He put his arm on her shoulder. “Come see.”

  “Don’t touch me!” She withdrew into a compact ball. “Those pictures upstairs. What are those pictures for?”

  “So that’s it. You don’t give a damn whether your friends are call girls. You just don’t want your picture next to theirs.”

  “They’re not my girlfriends.”

  “You like them well enough when we’re out.”

  “I didn’t know them.”

  “You did know them,” Nevers said. “You just can’t stand the fact that you like a couple of tarts. Well now you know. They’re just like anybody else. Some you like, and some you don’t.”

  “They’re not like anybody else. What do you do with those pictures?”

  Nevers thought for a moment.

  “I sell them, all right? I sell them.”

  “To who?”

  “Anybody willing to pay.”

  “Why? And why me?”

  “Business. It’s just a business.”

  “You do it for money? Is that what you’re always hauling around in those big tied-up bundles?”

  “You think I do it for fun? Of course it’s for money.”

  “With my pictures?”

  “It was the first time. I give you my word.”

  “Your word?!” Annie let out a snort that was half laugh and half cry of despair.

  “Annie—.”

  “Toni Jo! My name is Toni Jo!”

  “Listen,” Nevers said. “There’s nothing wrong with those photographs. And there’s men who pay good money to look at pretty girls.” Nevers picked at a splinter on the step. “You remember at your mother’s? When I said you could make three times what you were making at the Two-Rat Cafe? I was right, wasn’t I? Haven’t I paid you well?” Pouting, Annie shrugged her shoulders like a child defeated in an argument. “And you remember I said you could earn five times that in a year? Well, here’s your chance. Let me sell your pictures, and I’ll give you twenty percent of what they make.”

  “No! “

  “Why not? Give me one good reason you shouldn’t make money off your looks.”

  She glared at him threateningly.

  “It would make me a . . . a floozy.”

  An exasperated sound bursting from his throat, Nevers said, “Goddammit, Annie, don’t you see? If you look at it that way, everything is prostitution. You work in my restaurant, and I pay you for your services. Is that prostitution?”

  “I’m not selling my body. It’s not the same. Knowing some old letch is staring at my pictures like—. I don’t know. It’s not the same.”

  “What do you think models do?” Nevers argued. “The Chesterfield girl, you think she’s a prostitute?” Annie expelled a short laugh at the comparison. “If you’re not a prostitute in your heart, Annie, you’ll never be a prostitute—not if you sell your body a dozen times a night. Nobody can make you something you’re not already. You plant a bean, you get beans. You’ll never plant a rose and grow a weed.”

  Annie felt helpless under his words. Everything he said seemed both reasonable and repulsive to her. She exploded up the stairs. “Come here!” she shouted.

  In his room, she held the yellowed envelope. Pulling out the newspaper clipping, she said, “What’s this?” Harold’s response was not what she expected.

  He slapped her.

  “What are you doing in my private things?” He grabbed her and shook her. “Never! You hear me? Never dig in my private things. Just because you sleep in my bed doesn’t mean you shouldn’t act like a guest in my house.” He shook her again. “You understand?”

  Annie nodded, broken but still defiant.

  “I should know,” she began weakly. “Don’t I have the right to know who you are?”

  Nevers pushed her and she fell on the mattress. He sat on the bed and ran his fingers through his hair. For the first time since Annie had known him, he seemed to be struggling with himself.

  “All right,” he said at last, looking at her. “You want to know who I am? I’ll tell you. My real name is Harry Nilson. I wasn’t any goddamned super sports star, either. I guess you figured that out. I worked my ass off. I worked harder than anybody else, and I was only average. Can you beat that?” Nevers looked at her challengingly. “Well, I didn’t like that and I didn’t accept it. If I couldn’t be a winner one way, I’d figure out another way. A couple of times a quarter, I replaced Streak Fordham so he could get a breather, and I did all right. I wasn’t a bum, it’s just that Streak was born with some kind of inhuman panther blood in him. Streak and I got to be buddies, and he told me around mid­season how we could make some extra money working together.”

  Nevers stooped down and picked the clipping off the floor. He looked at it and shook his head.

  “I thought he meant at a regular job, so I was shocked when he told me he’d been collecting ten to fifty bucks a game, shaving points to get a certain spread for a bookie. Don’t get me wrong. This wasn’t big time gambling, just local yokels, businessmen, and riff-raff trying to make a dime on someone else’s talent. Sometimes in the middle of a game, the bets would change and Streak would have to play harder or goldbrick to adjust the new spread.”

  Nevers took the envelope from Annie and slipped the clipping inside.

  “At that, game,” Nevers said, slapping the envelope on the nightstand, “the opposing team was better than the oddsmakers predicted. Before the game, the bookie told Streak to keep the score within three points either way. You see, winning and losing get turned around sometimes when you gamble. You can bet a certain team will lose by two or three or five points, and if they do, you win. So you can win by losing. You following me?”

  Annie twitched her head to the side, indicating she understood him but was still mad.

  “All right. That particular afternoon, winning meant staying within three points of the other team. Whether we beat them or were beaten by them, Streak was in thick clover as long as the difference wasn’t more than three points. Then he hurt his ankle, some quick bets were t
aken in the stands, and the bookie sent a runner down on the field. I was standing on the sideline when I felt someone shove a slip of paper in my hand. It was my new orders. It read, ‘SCORE $50.”‘

  Nevers looked at Annie.

  “All I had to do was score, and I could earn two weeks’ wages. Everything about that last possession was just like I told you at your mother’s that night. Whatever direction I faked first, that’s where I went last. In the huddle, I told the quarterback if he dialed my number for a pass, I could run that son-of-a-bitch to the state line. Remember me telling you that part?”

  Annie nodded.

  “Everything was perfect until we lined up. I scanned the stands for my girlfriend. She was older than me, twenty or twenty-one, best looking thing in three counties. I thought I was really something taking her around. Then a couple of guys said they’d seen her with an older man in Tyler. They were doing some roughnecking that summer and came back to Kilgore one weekend. I didn’t believe them because she wasn’t that type, so I told them it must have been a girl who looked like her.

  “So there we were, lining up for the last play of the game. I was about to be the hero and win fifty bucks to boot. I looked into the stands for my girl, and what do you suppose I saw?” Annie shrugged her shoulders. “My girl kissing the bookie. That greasy son-of-a-bitch wasn’t good enough to kiss my dog and here was my girl smooching on him. Suddenly, it all fell into place. She played for money just like I was playing for money. Winning and losing had nothing to do with it.”

  “She was a . . . ?”

  Nevers nodded.

  “Hell, and I really liked the girl. Now, try to imagine a young kid seeing that. I was furious and hurt. Finally, I composed myself and let the quarterback know I was ready. I’d fix that punk bookie. I came off the line like a madman. I faked right, feinted left, and stayed left. At the goal line, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the football coming down big as a watermelon. A spastic could have caught that ball. And I did. I held it for a split second, just long enough for that bookie to know what I had done. Then I dropped it.”

  Annie thought about the story.

  “Your name. That doesn’t explain why you changed your name.”

  Nevers chuckled.

  “I changed my name for the same reason I left town. I said these were small-time gamblers. But that doesn’t mean they were any less serious than the big boys. Getting lost wasn’t enough. I changed my name because—. You never know. A year, five years. You see someone asking about you and the next thing you know, bam! You wake up rubbing your head with all your money gone. It happens.”

  “You left your parents just like that?” Annie snapped her fingers. “How could you do that?”

  Nevers sighed.

  “It’s all like a big chess game. To explain one move, you have to go back twenty or thirty moves, on both sides. I created an entire new life. The preacher taught me that. T. Van Mahorn, puh! At least one of the things he said was true, though. You can be born again and again. The bad news is that when you recreate yourself, you have to destroy something. Each new birth is also a suicide.” He shook his head. “Creation and destruction are like Siamese twins. There’s no getting around it.”

  Annie looked at Nevers with tears in her eyes. She felt like holding him and relieving his pain. In a way, even with parents, he was still an orphan. Then she thought of the photographs, of Bliss and Nausica, his shady friends and secret trips, Huey Long and all the rest of his schemes.

  “Harold, I want to believe you. Believe me, I do. But after all those . . .” She almost said lies. “How do I know what you’re telling me now is the truth?”

  Nevers became irritated at the endless questions.

  “It’s the truth because I said it’s the truth,” he snapped.

  Annie almost hated herself for making him angry. She looked at his face: the kite-scar, one of his cheeks smooth, the other dark with stubble, a pat of shaving cream on his left earlobe.

  “Why didn’t you tell me the real story in the first place?”

  “I told you what you needed to hear. Don’t think about who you are now. Picture yourself back then. You wanted me to be your rescuer. You think you would have left your old life to follow a loser? You needed a sure thing, Annie, someone to change your life. I was doing you a favor by spicing up the story. If you ask ten people who know me to tell you who I am, each one will tell you something different. I’m whatever they want me to be. Look at yourself. You’re an entirely different person from the girl who got out of my car four months ago.”

  Annie knew that what he said was true. She had thought many times about her life back home and wondered how she had survived the boredom.

  “And about those pictures,” Nevers said. “There’s no reason to be ashamed of making your life more comfortable by taking advantage of your beauty. You give somebody pleasure, and they’ll pay you well for it. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Nevers looked at her. Annie reached up and pinched the foam off his ear.

  “So,” he continued, “whether you like it or not, I’m using those shots and I’m going to pay you for them. It could mean an extra two hundred dollars a month. And once your face gets around—. Let me put it this way. Certain men are willing to pay extra to see just a little more. And there’s nothing wrong—.”

  “Never,” Annie said. “Not even if I have to eat garbage to stay alive.”

  * * *

  After Annie calmed down, Nevers suggested she take Monday off so they could get away from New Orleans and relax. He had told her several times of Waveland, near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. She made him promise it wouldn’t be like their other trips. Annie said she never saw anybody who could turn play into work like he did. Nevers agreed.

  In an hour, they were parked on the gravel lot of the White Kitchen in Slidell. Nevers ordered fried chicken, Jax beer, and a Coke and had them delivered on a tray that fit on the driver’s window. It made Annie feel they were just like regular folks.

  They arrived at Waveland by six that evening and settled into their hotel room. Nevers said he was going fishing and she could come along and crab off the seawall if she wanted. Annie said she was plenty happy where she was.

  Nevers came in after dark. He said he kept two redfish and five speckled trout, but had given them to an old colored man who had fished all afternoon and caught only one croaker. Nevers said he knew that wasn’t true because three tails were sticking out the top of his bucket, but he gave him the fish anyway.

  The next day, Nevers woke Annie at ten with a Coke and plate lunch of cornbeef sandwiches, chips, and kosher pickle. That afternoon, while sitting in a lounge chair by the ocean, she read all of the hotel’s Look and Collier’s magazines while Nevers ran around visiting. No matter where they went, people knew him. She remembered at one time being impressed by his popularity. Now, watching him scurry from one gathering to the next only made her tired.

  That evening, Annie stood in the lobby idly looking around while Nevers checked out at the front desk. When she glanced down, Nevers was signing the check. She noticed it was October 30, the day before Halloween. As he wrote his last name, she inspected his first. It looked like he spelled the word “Herald.” She checked the hotel register, which lay open in front of her. There, too, was the name “Herald.”

  The discovery gave Annie a sinking feeling in her stomach. This was the man who adjusted his past according to his needs, yet even his fictitious name was not spelled the way she had thought. It made her feel again that she didn’t really know the man she had spent a year with. She walked outside and waited in the car for the next surprise.

  * * *

  At the restaurant on Tuesday, Annie heard people talking about it all day long. On the eve of Halloween, a clever young man named Orson Welles presented a new rendition of the old H. G. Wells fantasy The War of the Worlds. Over the CBS band, Welles and his Mercury Theatre group broadcast the radio play as a series of realistic news bulletins that in
terrupted a weather forecast. A university astronomer in Chicago reported seeing a series of explosions on the planet Mars and speculated about their origin.

  Listeners were then returned to “a tune that never loses favor, the popular Star Dust.”

  Several news flashes came in, then an interview with a Princeton professor. Eyewitness reports flooded in. Martians had landed at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, in large silver cylinders. More spacecraft joined them. Soon a legion of aliens attacked and defeated the New Jersey State Militia. New York City was being destroyed by heat-rays.

  As word spread that the Martians had launched a general assault on the nation, people fleeing metropolitan centers caused huge traffic jams. Some without radio saw the panic and thought the country was being invaded by Hitler’s Nazis. Normal power outages convinced local citizens of their doom. In the aftermath of the realistic account, newspapers reported several suicides of people who left notes saying they would rather die by their own gun than by a Martian death-ray.

  Throughout the day, Annie marveled that such disastrous results could ensue from a story someone had made up for entertainment. To Annie, it seemed like the whole world was going crazy.

  Chapter 12

  November–December 1938

  Herald was as kind to Annie as ever, and she felt defenseless in her love for him. He had good looks and money and class. He was intriguing and mysterious and cast a spell over everyone he met. There was a kind of power about him that made her forgive his faults both large and small.

  “There’s nothing to it,” he told her. “All you have to do is go out with the man.”

  “Don’t you even care about me?” Annie countered for the third time. They sat in Herald’s front room discussing the transaction.

  “Of course, I care. This doesn’t change a thing between you and me, Annie. I’m trying to give you a freedom very few people have, especially in these times. Contrary to what you think, money doesn’t put a curse on everything it touches.”

  “So I go out with him and . . .”

  “Have a good time.”