Hugs perspired heavily, the sweat channeling down his ears. “Fishman is an obsessive,” he said. “Facts cannot persuade him.”
“Everyone can be brought to reason.” Beatrice spoke in the reassuring tone one might use with a child freshly awoken from a nightmare. Blank, after all, had been brought to reason. Before him, the Jahncke brothers, who had competed with Hercules for the canal contract, had been brought to reason by a series of late-night meetings with androgynous figures in black masks. Even Whitney-Central Bank, which had competed with Hibernia for the city contract to issue bonds for the canal, had yielded after its office was consumed by an electrical fire. Beatrice had warned the cousins not to take senseless risks but she could not quarrel with the results.
“He’s written a letter to the editor,” said Hugs, removing a sheaf of paper from his inner pocket. “The Item will publish it.” He used the paper to swat at several circling mosquitoes before unscrolling it.
People of New Orleans, we must not allow the enemy to breach the fortification! Have we already forgotten the great storm of 1915, the fallen steeples, the ripped-up roofs, the Lake invading through the gutters? Twenty-one of our citizens lost! The excavation of the drainage canals was the first blow. But imagine the devastation should the River and the Lake be invited into our boundaries! Why, having spent two centuries defending ourselves from villainous Water, should we invite Her into the intimacy of our homes as if She were a weary traveler? It is not too late to reverse the course of this hastily-planned Industrial Canal. Stand with me—and stand with the city of New Orleans—in defeating this insensate misuse of land.
Hugs shook his head. “My uncle and I have a plan, Mrs. Vizzini.”
“I have heard your plans.”
“Ma’am? Do you need water?”
“Just a slight headache.” The last thing she needed was for Hugs to tell Mr. Denzler that the old lady was impaired. “It’s already passed.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.”
“You mentioned a plan.”
“This professor is antiprogress, anti-enterprise, and antipatriotic. It is men like him who have made New Orleans suffer by comparison with the more virile conurbations of the North and the West. He will fool nobody. We will make those points in our response to the newspapers, and he will be defeated in the palaestra of public opinion.”
A yell carried across the plain. Hugs, shielding his eyes, squinted into the sunlight. Beatrice didn’t have to look. She’d recognize that voice anywhere.
The man stumbled toward them from the swamp. As he approached, his jerky motion became more frantic, his limbs making movements like the hands of a broken watch. His shirt was soaked through with sweat. By the time he reached the oak’s canopy she could smell him—animal and woodsy and sour. She’d recognize that scent anywhere.
“Mamma!” said Giorgio, removing his homburg. “I’ve been looking all over.”
Hugs smiled tightly. With a smattering of moos the cows trotted out of the shade, into the hot meadow. The mule galloped in the opposite direction, toward Florida Walk.
“We’re almost done, Giugi,” said Beatrice. His appearance was a balm; the headache’s cruel grip began to unclench. “We can give you a ride home.”
“I was worried, I didn’t know where you went.” Giorgio regarded Hugs. “Hi, Hugh.” Hug, he pronounced it.
Hugs nodded absently.
“My,” said Giorgio. “It’s hot with all the trees gone.” He wiped his arm across his forehead and with a flinging motion cast a sleeve of perspiration onto the ground. Beatrice handed him her handkerchief.
“Slow day at the practice?”
“No, Mamma. I cleared the schedule to see you.”
It was a joke between them. He had no schedule. He had few osteopathy patients. She suspected that she was the only one.
Giorgio returned her handkerchief, now soaked through. “What are y’all talking about?”
“Just business,” said Hugs.
“Oh? I’m vice president of this business.”
“Of course,” said Hugs. “Right. A Tulane professor is holding up the final phase of the excavation, alas. But we will obtain the land soon, even if we must take him to court…” Hugs tailed off, noticing that Giorgio was not paying attention.
Giorgio stared blankly in the direction of the dig, blurry in the dazzling heat. A mosquito landed on his cheek. Its abdomen tumesced. It flew away, dizzy drunk.
“Darling?” said Beatrice. “Hugs was explaining our situation.”
Giorgio laughed. “I guess I lost focus.” He turned to Hugs. “I just don’t have a mind for business. I never could put my mind around it. But I try, don’t I, Mamma?”
“Yes, darling.” It was excruciating to watch Hugs watch her son.
“I try,” Giorgio said, with a smile made of plaster, “but each time I fit my mind around the top of it, the bottom pops out. Or I cram in the top and the bottom but the middle spills out sideways.”
“Mr. Vizzini?” said Hugs. “You seem to be bleeding. From your scalp.”
“It’s an old injury,” said Beatrice. “Giorgio, take the handkerchief.” She felt for it in her pocket and realized it was already waterlogged. A thin trail of blood, mixed with sweat, descended the rim of Giorgio’s ear and fell in thin droplets to the dirt. She looked helplessly at Hugs.
“Here,” he said halfheartedly. “Take mine.”
“Thanks, Hug.” Giorgio snagged the handkerchief, pressed it to the wound.
“Is he all right?”
“He got it in the service,” said Beatrice. “Never properly healed. Bad stitching. It comes apart when he is physically active. But it doesn’t hurt.” She raised her voice. “Does it, Giorgio?”
“No, Mamma. It don’t hurt at all.” He laughed too loudly. “The only thing that hurts is when people give you a hard time.” He stopped smiling. “That hurts.”
Giorgio held out the bloodied handkerchief to Hugs. Hugs waved him away.
“Better?” said Beatrice.
“Better,” said Giorgio, replacing the homburg on his head. “Mr. Davenport?”
Hugs looked up abruptly. His eyes looked tiny and fearful, the eyes of a young boy. “Yes?”
“Thanks for helping my mother with this job. It sure means a lot.”
“No need to thank me. If anything, I should thank her. Your mother is an excellent businesswoman.”
Beatrice announced that it was time to go. She could not take it anymore. Besides, she had a business meeting to attend. If they hurried, she could drop Giorgio at home and still have time before supper for an impromptu visit to Tulane.
JUNE 26, 1918—THE INDUSTRIAL CANAL
“I have a large appetite,” said Sore Dick.
“No shit.” Isadore raised his trench digger. “We’ve been seven hours without a break.”
“I consume eight hundred pounds of vegetation every day.”
“Here we go.”
“I eat conifers. I eat sagebrush. I eat bodark.”
“I’m so hungry I would eat sagebrush. I’d eat conifers. I don’t know what it is, but I would eat bodark. I would eat bodark.”
“I am the length of a streetcar. I am the height of a high ceiling.” Sore Dick gave Isadore a meaningful look. “My tusks extend fifteen feet.”
“You are a woolly mammoth.”
Sore Dick winced. “I am a Columbian elephant.”
Isadore’s falling shovel connected with wood. A shiver of pain vibrated from his wrists to his shoulders.
“Duckboard?” muttered Sore Dick.
“Stump,” said Isadore. “Definitely stump.”
“Stump!” hollered Sore Dick.
“Stump!” yelled the foreman at the rim of the Pit, pointing at Sore Dick until several other diggers hastened to help them unearth the mammoth petrified tree.
Isadore shook his head involuntarily. Another day in the Pit. But it hadn’t always been the Pit. In the beginning it was the Plot. The Plot, after being dynami
ted in a series of explosions that boomed, as the Item put it, “like guns along the western front,” became the Ditch, and later the Crater. But for the last three days it had been, unmistakably, the Pit. What was next—the Hole? The Hole and then, perhaps, the Abyss. Ultimately it would become the Canal, though that was hard to imagine. It was hard enough to imagine another day grinding at the bottom of the Pit.
Already the Pit was beginning to yawn like the mouth of a drowsy dog. It had a radius of about a city block, sloping to a depth of nearly ten feet at the lowest point, though the slope was hardly uniform. They had hit mud after four feet and now stood in a slurry that was more water than soil. The work became more grueling the deeper they dug. And then there was the smell.
It grew more pungent as they descended, passing imperceptibly from a rich humus to a stench that Isadore could only compare to human feces. Gas bubbles rose through the black lava and burst in the air in sick little gasps. At first when the mosquitoes and chiggers bit his face, he avoided slapping at them, lest he splash himself with mud, but soon he realized that a coating of mud was the best prophylactic against insect bites, and besides, it was only a matter of time before every square centimeter of flesh was mud lacquered. The mud was alive, not only breathing but also wiggling into every bodily crevice, matting his hair, oozing down his spine, and he couldn’t pretend anymore that it wasn’t getting into his mouth. The previous week Sore Dick had retched and there had been nothing to do but shovel mud on top of it, which was effective, since the reek of the mud was stronger. Soon they didn’t notice the stench anymore, but the not noticing was even worse than the smell itself. Orly and her mother noticed when he got home, though—they made him enter through the back, where in the tub he scrubbed his boots, work clothes, and his body twice over with the yellow laundry soap. Still Miss Daisy complained that it was like sleeping beside a decaying corpse. “It’s an honest job,” Orly would say, but usually while pinching her nose. The pay was eight dollars a week. It almost made him nostalgic for his hunting trips with Bailey. He had to remind himself that he could gig with the Quartet whenever he liked—provided he and Sore Dick could stand upright after a day at the Pit. He had to remind himself how terrified he had been the night of the arrest and in the alley with the watchman and how much more terrified he had been in the days that followed.
Yet a month had passed and Bailey had not given him up. Bailey was not only a better criminal than Isadore. He was a better friend. Still there was plenty of time for him to flip. The trial hadn’t even begun. Isadore wondered if anyone in prison read Bailey the headlines, such as the one in that morning’s Item: “Superintendent Mooney: Frank Bailey, Negro, Will Hang.” In equal measures Isadore felt remorse for his deathwishing and continued to wish on Bailey a quick, painless death.
“What are we even doing this for?” Sore Dick spit out a mosquito. “Why do they need to connect the lake to the river?”
“Commercial shipping. War boats.” That was the official line, but nobody, including Isadore, believed it. The canal was just another way to make money on the hides of workers. Exactly how they would make the money was obscure, but there was no doubt about it, they were digging a fortune out of the ground for some powerful people. Starting with Hercules Construction and Hibernia Bank.
“Slave work.” Dick blew at a cloud of mosquitoes hovering near his head. They shifted away, then shifted back. “Slave rates too.”
“The slave rate is zero.”
“Close enough.”
They had it worse than most—of the two hundred diggers, he and Sore Dick were among those stationed closest to the bottom of the Pit, where the mud was thickest. They had planked it with duckboards but the boards were soon swallowed and the men resigned themselves to sinking. With each swing of the trench digger, Isadore subsided deeper; if he didn’t step out of the mud before it grabbed his knees, another man had to pull him out. Sore Dick was usually that man and he was ungentle.
But there was an even greater problem with working near the center of the Pit, one worse than the smell and the slipperiness of the mud: the Mouth.
“Hose!” shouted the foreman.
“Hose!”
“Hose!”
“Fuck my head,” said Sore Dick.
The hose man at the lip of the Pit wheeled the cart to the edge. He aimed the nozzle, squared his stance, and dug his boots into the turf, bracing himself. The diggers planted their shovels in the ground and trudged across the Pit toward him. Muddy shoulders pressed flush against muddy shoulders, forming a human wall. The foreman made a gesture to somebody out of view. The hose spurted several times, splashing the men below, and burst into a geyser. The hose man pointed the nozzle toward the sky so that the powerful jet didn’t hit the men directly, but fell like an extremely localized rainstorm. The men looked upward with their eyes closed and their mouths open to drink as much as they could swallow. The hose couldn’t be run long or the Pit would become even more treacherous, so the foreman gave a signal and, with a final spurt, the flow ceased. Somewhere beneath them, the Mouth slurped.
Isadore reminded himself: the cornet and the Dig went together. The cornet did not go with the highway jobs. Cornet and Dig was the only combination that held open the possibility of a future, escape, glory, eternal life.
“My body is protected by a shell five feet high,” said Sore Dick, as they treaded back to their stump. Mud trickled down the sides of his face like tears. “I have a snout. My tail resembles a morning star.”
“Damn you,” said Isadore. “And damn your snout.” Sore Dick’s ramblings were another kind of mud laid thickly over the mud they already had to wade through. Their show at the Funky Butt Hall was a week away. Isadore had played Savocca’s, he’d played Mussachia’s, he’d played Mix’s Pelican Club. He had played every whorehouse in the District, but none of the tonks were in the same hemisphere as the Funky Butt. King Oliver and Buddy Bolden played the Butt. Kid Ory, whose band Isadore had first seen as a kid at National Park, playing after a ball game, the closest thing to an immortal walking the streets of New Orleans—Kid Ory’s Brown Skin Band played the Butt. The uptown Negroes and the downtown Creoles came to the Butt. Even a few white adventurists came to the Funky Butt, once in a while, after some drinks. Drag “Nasty” Wilson, the Quartet’s bassist, had heard the downtown hotels wanted to book jass acts and sent advance men to the Butt to scout. The abracadabra of the hotels’ names—the Roosevelt, the Grunewald, and, holiest of holies, the Cosmopolitan—rang of immortality. Isadore wanted that golden ring. But first he’d have to get within grabbing reach.
“We need to talk about the second,” said Isadore.
“A morning star is like a mace, with spikes.”
“I appreciate your learning, Dick. Don’t get me wrong.”
“You going to pretend that a tail like a mace, with spikes, is not Spanish?”
Isadore exhaled. “It is pretty Spanish.”
“So?”
“I don’t know, Dick. A giant turtle?”
Sore Dick shook his head. “Closer kin to an armadillo.”
“I haven’t even seen Sidney since we booked the show.”
“I am a glyptodont,” said Sore Dick.
“I don’t give a shit what you are,” interrupted one of the other men, “so long as you dig your portion.”
The trunk began to reveal its shape. It was an oak, about the circumference of a barrel, jagged at the top like the neck of a broken beer bottle.
“Gentlemen,” said Isadore, tossing a shovelful of black slop over his head, “I hereby invite you to see New Orleans’s greatest piano player, Sore Dick, together with Big Nose Sidney on drums, Nasty Wilson on bass, and yours truly on cornet, when we debut as the Slim Izzy Quartet next Tuesday at the Funky Butt Hall.”
“Who’s Sore Dick?” said someone. “Never heard of him.”
“This man right here’s Sore Dick!” said Isadore, rallying to his friend’s defense.
“That ain Sore Dick,” said an
other man, without looking up. “That’s a glyptodont.”
“And who the hell is Slim Izzy?”
But the men had exhausted what energy they had for talking. There was only enough left for grunting, which they did repeatedly as they attacked the stump. Dig the shovel into the mud, pull up a reeking patty, toss it over the shoulder. Dig—pull—toss, over and over and over. As they excavated the mud, more oozed up to replace it. They still hadn’t reached the root. One of the men leaned into the stump with his shoulder but it refused to budge.
“When this oak stood,” said Sore Dick, “a glyptodont might have used it for shade. A Columbian elephant would have used it to scratch his back.”
“Stump!” someone yelled, about fifteen yards away.
“Stump!”
“Stump!” yelled the foreman from above. “Zeno and Dick, you stay there. The rest of y’all help out the other’ns.”
“Guess they don’t like jass,” said Isadore, when they were alone again. Dig—pull—toss.
“People will come.” Dig—pull—toss. “The way you play? People will notice.”
The deeper they dug, the heavier the mud, the more offensive the odor, the louder the noise of the Mouth. A pneumatic tube connected the Mouth to the Texas, a monster suction dredge that stood at the edge of the Pit. The Texas had dug the Panama Canal four years earlier. It worked loudly but invisibly. It was, Sore Dick explained, like an eating man. At one end the Mouth swallowed the earth and masticated it with metal teeth into a fine slurry. The slurry was sucked down the long esophagus of the pneumatic tube, through the Texas’s stomach (the storage tank) and lower intestine (the conveyance pipe) before being sprayed into an ever-growing pile of mud beyond the rim of the Pit. Aboveground laborers armed with trenching shovels flattened the slurry into a levee. Though not as grueling as work in the Pit, the construction of the levee was relentless because the Texas never stopped shitting. And the Mouth never stopped eating.
The Mouth was a picky eater, however. It did not like stumps. The duckboards it could handle—it splintered the cheap flat wood into sawdust, a sound like a man chewing a fistful of almonds. But on the larger stumps the Texas choked and asphyxiated; they had to shut off the engine while doctors—the machinists—were called to resuscitate the beast. To avoid this fate, the dredge had tunneled three feet below the Pit’s deepest point. With the soil undermined, the stumps could be more easily excavated by the diggers. This made the Pit resemble the upper half of an hourglass, the mud sloping from the sides down to the middle where the Mouth ate.
King Zeno Page 7