The stumps, Dick explained, were the remains of an ancient forest. It had been buried by the Mississippi River, which for thousands of years had flooded the forest with silt, raising the land. Buried below this forest was a second prehistoric forest, thirty feet deeper. And below that forest, a third forest. So as they dug deeper, they were also digging back in time. The thought of all those underground forests gave Isadore a sensation of falling down a bottomless well. It didn’t seem right. It was like exhuming corpses that had lain in peace for eternities. That might have explained the smell. They were excavating the land’s dead things. Dead trees, but also whatever had died and been buried in the ancient forests. Glyptodonts, say. Or people.
The prehistoric forests had made an impression on Sore Dick. At the Lee Circle library he had found a book titled The Pleistocene Megafauna of Louisiana.
“Standing on my hind legs,” said Sore Dick, “I could peer into a second-story window.”
“We keep working these hours,” said Isadore, “we won’t have time to practice for the second.”
“With my giant tongue, I lick leaves off the highest tree branches. I don’t need practice.”
“This is no honky-tonk, Dick. We have to be the best. We have to change the way people look at us. Otherwise we’re going to play for whores at least another year come we get a second chance.”
Sore Dick, leaning on the base of his trench digger, gave Isadore a sorrowful look. “I had no enemies for millions of years, until man hunted me.”
“If I don’t start pulling more jack, Orleania is going to kick me out. She’s been fed up.”
“Please. She is stupid on you. She’d never kick you out. You’re married, ain you?”
“Mm. I need to provide.”
“Provide? Really?” Sore Dick paused, turning to face Isadore. “I thought you had other avenues of income.”
Isadore felt his back stiffen. “Who said so?”
Sore Dick gave a soft whistle and returned to his labor. After a few hauls he took a deep breath and peered longingly into the sky. “I’m twenty feet tall. I can see over most trees. My eyesight is dull, however, as I have no predators.”
Isadore wondered if Dick had seen the papers reporting Bailey’s indictment for murder. Detective Bastrop, the cop who shot dead the innocent guard at the Louisiana Demolishing Company, had not been charged. “The suspect showed fight,” Bastrop had claimed, so he shot him. That reasoning, unsurprisingly, was enough for the district attorney. Bailey, on the other hand, was sure to hang.
Isadore pressed his shoulder into the stump. No amount of force would budge it.
“I am a megatherium,” said Dick.
“If Orly kicks me out, just bury me here. Bury me in the Pit.”
“A giant sloth.”
“There’s the giant sloth.” Isadore inclined his head toward the lip of the Pit. The foreman and the hose man had been joined by an unusually large, strong white man in coveralls and a dark homburg: the Vizzini son. He surveyed the action below, making playful asides to the foreman. Beside him a laborer approached, carrying a glistening metal bucket of ice. Vizzini tossed a handful of ice in his mouth, chewing pensively as he watched the laborers toil.
“He’s big enough,” said Sore Dick, raising his voice above the whirring of the Mouth, “but not too clever. A mammy boy too.”
Isadore had seen her, Beatrice Vizzini herself, patrolling the rim like a lioness surveying her pride. She looked as if she were plotting something grand—much grander than a mere canal—and the hundreds of laborers were mindless soldiers in a war with designs beyond their comprehension. He felt the old rage returning. He saw himself climbing the side of the Pit and knocking the old woman into it. He saw her tumble down the side and land, crumpled, in the mud. He saw her swallowed by the dredge and chewed up and digested.
There was a reverberation between the violation of the ancient buried forests and the violation of his nature that came about from working this job. It’s true that most bandmen had jobs. Old Bob Lyons shined shoes. Bunk Johnson drove trucks. Even Kid Ory worked at the Poland Avenue shipyard five days a week. All right: and Isadore had highway robbing. But Isadore wasn’t like them. Slim Izzy—Isadore Pinkett Peyroux Zeno—was better. He could do things with the cornet that nobody else knew to try. He could make it sing, but he could also make it squawk, caper, weep, chatter, and groan. He could make it speak English. The other jassists just didn’t know it. Nobody knew it, not even Orly. He hadn’t revealed it yet because no one would understand. He had to prepare the audience. He had to prove that he could play the regular hot music before he broke the rules, or they’d dismiss him as a madman. Once he had built up an audience and primed them to the right point, he’d bring it out, and their exuberance would be a hard panic. The old stuff would go out entirely. Everyone would want only to hear his song. That’s what real music did: it made a distinction. It did not improve the old forms. It destroyed them.
“What the hell is going on down there?”
Isadore glanced up and saw the foreman staring back. Beside him the Vizzini oaf made a face like a grizzly bear that had just caught a salmon. No doubt it was Vizzini who’d seen that Isadore had slowed down and alerted the foreman. It was unlike the foreman to call anyone out. He knew how miserable the work was, how putrid.
“Stump’s buried deep,” Sore Dick called back. “We’re going our hardest.”
“It’s buried deep,” said Isadore lamely.
“You better not get us fired,” said Dick, under his breath. “You think you’re the only one with an old lady? I got three.”
Vizzini murmured in the foreman’s ear. The foreman nodded. “Maybe the mud is too thick,” he called out.
“That’s not the problem,” said Isadore. “If anything—”
“Hose!” said the foreman.
“Hose!”
“Hose!”
The hose man wheeled the cart to the lip of the Pit. The diggers wedged their shovels into the ground.
The foreman waved them off. “Get back to work,” he said. “This ain a break.”
Sore Dick cursed under his breath.
“What’s happening?” said Isadore.
Vizzini relieved the hose man and held the nozzle aloft. A grin crawled across his face. He yelped like a man urging his steed.
There sputtered a spray of water, a clearing of the throat, followed by a torrent, the pressure of Bayou Bienvenue forced through an orifice smaller than a man’s clenched fist. But Vizzini did not aim the hose toward the sky. He aimed it like a gun at the men. The jet blasted into Isadore’s shoulder, spinning him backward, pummeling him to his knees. Sore Dick yelled and then was on the ground beside him, writhing like an electrocution victim. They had brief reprieves as Vizzini alternated the jet between the two men, but never enough to escape. The ground was the consistency of simmering bean soup. And Isadore was drinking it. He couldn’t help it. He was facedown in the filth, drowning, and when he opened his mouth to suck air he took another gulp of black slime. Something gave way beneath him and he began to slide, feetfirst toward the center of the Pit, and though it couldn’t have been possible—the jet in his ears was too loud, almost as loud as the whirring Mouth, which grew louder by the second—he was certain he heard fat, babyish Giorgio Vizzini on the rim, giggling.
Isadore reached blindly and latched on to the stump. Vizzini trained the jet on his knuckles and he skidded away, half submerged, his eyes stinging. He felt the Mouth at his feet. Its small rotating knives scraped at his boot. Then he knew the tip of the boot was gone because he could wiggle his toes freely. He screamed, swallowed a fresh gulp of mud, gagged, and plunged his arms elbow deep into the mud, hoping to find something to grab. He crawled and reached but it was like trying to climb a waterfall.
The hose had, however, accomplished what the men and their shovels could not—it exposed the base of the stump and the crown of its root system. Isadore’s flailing hands grasped its ancient arthritic fingers. He pulle
d himself up, coughing and spitting. The hose blasted the mud off his face but he held on. Finally the hose turned off.
Sore Dick was wrapped around the trunk like a pair of pants blown off a laundry line. He was speaking though Isadore couldn’t hear the words. The other laborers gathered around Isadore. Their faces looked ashen and dark, but maybe it was just the mud. They grabbed his wrists and pulled, hard. The mud released his legs with a loud smack.
Only then did Isadore get a clear look at Giorgio Vizzini. He stood on the edge of the Pit, the flaccid hose dripping in his hand. His forehead was slick with some other liquid—dark red, like blood, but that made no sense; it must have been mud. He stared down with a ghastly cheerfulness at the black men writhing in the Pit, falling over each other as they tried to scurry away from the feeding Mouth. Isadore had the idea that the Mouth was really Vizzini’s mouth, that it was Vizzini who was hungrily trying to chew him, to crunch up his bones. This lummox, this man-child, was the devil behind all his suffering. Vizzini was eating him alive.
In the sudden quiet Isadore could finally hear what Sore Dick was saying. He repeated the same words, a pathetic incantation, a prayer to nobody.
“I’m a mastodon,” came Dick’s battered voice. “I’m a teratorn,” he said. “I’m a mammoth.”
JUNE 27, 1918—THE IRISH CHANNEL
It was his favorite time of the day—of all creation, maybe—but he only experienced it as a memory. It occurred in that bluish moment between sleep and consciousness, when he was not quite awake, and Maze was not quite awake, but the brass of the rising sun, parting the dimity curtains, called them home from the distant dimensions in which they had traveled. Maze would push her hips into Bill’s lap or absently reach for his arm, placing it around her, his hand cupping her breast. Or his head would find the crook of her neck. They would rest like that for a short time—ten minutes? Ten seconds?—before consciousness broke like a cold ocean wave and they remembered who they were. Then one of them, usually Maze, would recoil, as if having awoken beside a viper.
But this morning, for no reason that he could immediately perceive, the bluish moment dilated into a bubble, which inflated, growing large enough to enclose them both, sealing them from their past and their doubt. They lay very close—a necessity on the narrow straw mattress—but unusually, they faced each other, their noses nearly touching. Bill’s leg wedged between Maze’s thighs and her arm reached around his back. Her light exhalations tickled his cheek. When Bill opened his eyes, Maze’s, large and olive, looked back. To his surprise she did not jerk away or flip over in frustration. She held his stare. And in their bubble they floated away, rising to the moon. He wondered if this was what immortality would feel like, forever floating.
“Hello,” he whispered at last, and instantly regretted it because his voice pricked the balloon, which began to deflate.
“Hi,” she said softly, and that plugged the hole. Their lips met. Bill pressed his leg more firmly between her thighs. Maze accommodated him. He kissed her neck. She sighed. How many months had it been since he’d heard that particular sigh? It was the sound of an undertow, the gentle recession of the tide.
“Wait.” Her voice was high and silky. “Wait.”
He grabbed her thigh. He bit her neck.
“Cher.” Insistent now. “Tell me how it happened.”
He froze.
“In France,” she said.
He released her thigh. His jaws went slack.
“Tell me, baby,” she said. “Tell about the battle. The bad battle.”
There was in his head the sound of sucking air. They began to sink. The moon shrank to a pinpoint and they plunged through the lower atmosphere. She kissed him, kissed his cheeks and his eyes, but it made no difference. No air remained in the bubble, not even enough for a breath.
“Later.” It’s what he always said.
“Now.”
“I’ve told you.” He tried to keep his voice steady.
“Yes, you told me. In different ways and different words. And you paint it every night, in reds and blacks.”
He could tell that she’d been saving this up. It was coming out fast, all at once.
“I almost didn’t make it,” he said, hoping that would end it.
“Men died. You were lucky to make it out. I know that bit.”
The bubble collapsed around them and he became conscious of the lumpiness of the pillow, the starch of the pillowcase, the thin brown hairs that gathered on the cushion, and the crease of his neck, grimy with sweat. He felt the heat—the sour, tedious June heat—and smelled the dankness of their linens, which during the summer Maze had to wash every day. And he remembered the shame he felt, the previous evening, when he returned from his beat and saw hanging on the line the sheets with their faded crimson stains, like impressions of wilted roses, made by Maze’s spotting. The entire neighborhood was witness to the barrenness of their intimate life.
“It’s inverting you.” Maze’s voice was so quiet that he could barely make it out, though his ear was inches from her mouth. “The secrecy. The furtiveness. It’s making you act crazy. Running after murderers—”
“That’s my job.”
“It’s not how you used to do your job.”
He flushed.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said. “It’s just—it’s growing deeper inside of you.”
“I should get dressed. Charlie will be here.”
“Like a horrible fungus.”
“Christ, Maze.”
“You don’t have to carry it by yourself.” Her mouth curled the way it did before she wept. “Talk to me. Just once, really talk to me.”
The scratching heat of the bed was overwhelming. He thrust off the sheets and, with them, Maze’s arm and leg. She whimpered, her hand flying over her face as if to contain some eruption there. Was she afraid? He couldn’t blame her. He was afraid too. He had seen this coming, knew it was only a matter of time before the asking became begging, insisting, demanding. He looked into Maze’s face—open, vulnerable, freckles—
“The front was southeast of Nancy,” he said tentatively, almost an interrogative. “Between the villages of Lunéville and Baccarat.”
She touched his side, gentle but firm. “Where’s that again?”
“France.”
“C’mon, Billy.”
He inhaled. “Imagine France is a fat man standing with his stumpy arms extended, like he’s about to hug you. Paris is his mouth. Nancy is on his left hand. Almost touching Germany.”
Maze smiled. Creases pleasantly disfigured her face. Freckles hopped and resettled.
“Our regiment was to join the French in the trenches, get some battle experience. But when we got to Lunéville in February, it was too cold. So they sent us to the castle.”
“Tell about the castle. Was it like a fairy tale?”
It was more like a drunken orgy. The village’s young widows supplemented their pensions by hiring themselves out to American soldiers.
“It was a lot of men drinking,” he said. “Their beer tastes like chestnuts. It was nice not to have to drink red wine for once. We were there not five days.”
Maze was smiling at him, her ethereal, mildly demented smile.
“We marched into the Forest of Purroy in our hobnailed boots. Our socks froze. It was like walking in cement blocks.”
“Good. Details are essential. What was the forest like?”
“There was barely any snow on the ground because the trees were so close together. It was dark. No underbrush. No leaves on the trees. The wood was red, brown. Like rust. Or blood. We got to the camp—”
“This is wonderful.”
“What?”
“You’ve already told me more than ever before. Doesn’t it feel nice?”
He wanted to ask her how she felt, speaking with such high emotion. It was like being reunited with an old childhood friend.
“Sorry,” she said. “Pretend I didn’t interrupt.”
“
The castle.”
“No—you were in the camp.”
Camp New York. It wasn’t much of a camp. It was a man-made forest clearing. So it was muddy. They were covered in mud morning to night. It got in their mouths and under their shirts. They grew bored: they wanted to get into the trenches. That’s why they were there, after all. To fight.
She rubbed his arm tenderly. A slight breeze lifted the curtains and cooled his skin. Her touch was soothing. So, incredibly, was the talking.
Each battalion had ten days on the line. They’d take orders from French Command, shoot and be shot at, and acclimate themselves to life as a rodent. If they proved themselves capable, they would be invited to join the French on a raid across no-man’s-land. That was the idea, at least.
Bill’s battalion, the Second, was second up. When the First Battalion returned to Camp New York from the front, they were hollering, triumphant. They’d seen light fire, no serious casualties. The Second all but skipped to the trenches to replace them. On the way, as they walked through the woods, they passed summer cottages, garden benches, plaster gnomes. In stretches it could have passed for City Park. There was no sign of the enemy. They entered a browned pasture and Bill had an infantile urge to run free, to roll in the matted grass. Only when a French commander started screaming did the men realize they’d stumbled into no-man’s-land. But nobody shot at them. If only the Germans had shot at them then.
“Did you think of me?” asked Maze.
“I thought of you constantly.” His voice rose sharply, and he could tell from her reaction that she knew he was telling the truth.
She rubbed his chest, her nails drawing patterns. Though not especially long, they were sharpened to points. “The trenches.”
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