“That a church, Robideaux?” Jeremy said. Robideaux’s heart tingled. Sanctuary, the tingle said. “You taking me to church, old man?”
Robideaux, he said nothing.
“You want church?”
Robideaux said nothing.
“We’ll go church, then.”
The shadow of the place loomed then swallowed them in stone and damp ruin. The doorway was a black opening. Inside, the smell was old smoke and mold. Arched vaults let into the walls, one row atop another, flanked the narthex. The empty chambers glowed green with phosphorescent moss. White niter gathered like colonies of coral.
“Bad gothic,” Jeremy said. “Never liked the mode. Heavy, dull. Dead now, gothic. This ’bout as dead a place as you’ll find,” Jeremy whispered then let silence hover. “I do believe this was a cemetery. Am I right, Robideaux? I disbelieve old man God’s at home. Not even the dead left here. Gone with the wind. Sure this the church you want?”
Robideaux’s body chattered as it had in the chill night of Cairo. Soft stars ruled the air and the broken land surrounding. Creepers cascaded the walls. In summer sun the place would have been a torrent of goldenrod in a mist of fronds. Now, the vines were tense and dark. Small things crawled within. Dry leaves quivered with living shadow: rat, possum, snapping palmetto. Life crackled winter dry vines under starlight and in deathglow from the vaults.
“Stop in a spell? Do our Stations, be on our way? Do a murder, shall we? Shall we do worse?” Jeremy walked Robideaux into the nave. Passing, the vaults breathed old death. Glass crushed under the big man’s feet; wisteria curled his ankles. “There are things can be done, you cannot dream of doing, old man. The ways of life, the how of death. Such fun. Such fun.”
Deep inside, still air hung. Starshine sifted between roofbeams. “Chatter, chatter, chatter,” Jeremy whispered to the rustling walls and Stations of the Cross. “Chatter, chatter.”
They stood by the broken face of a blooded Christ. “Oh, God!” both shouted to the swallowing empty.
Nothing returned but the rustle of creepers and an old scent of herb and distant flame.
“I’ll have my time with you,” Jeremy whispered. “Think haunts and bugs fright me?” Jeremy whispered. “Send me off in a sniff of incense and the breath of long-gone priest?”
Robideaux cried tears.
“Maybe the devil,” Jeremy whispered. “May he be scared of saints and holy places? Maybe the devil is. I ain’t.”
Robideaux, to his knees.
“Might as well give up, br’er Robideaux,” Jeremy said. “It’s just death.”
Tears flowed warm across Robideaux’s cheeks.
“Just flesh, old man. Life letting go and you not in charge,” Jeremy whispered low. “The common tragedy. I can give you one great way to go and no mistake. Even God can’t get you for it, ’cause it’s me wearing you. You end. Then you go...” Jeremy pointed to the starry above. “Go clean to reward eternal.”
Robideaux and Jeremy sucked long breath, snuffled salt snot.
“Unless I give you,” Jeremy whispered to Robideaux, “at the very last, a taste of some dark something. Something you truly, truly want… a taste of the best sin you can think of. Now what might that one thing be, Mister Robideaux? That one thing will kill your soul forever? Hmm?”
“Two-Bit!” Robideaux called out. “Two-Bit Suze!” he called again. Past the altar, a door opened. From the dark came a flicker, a shape, a rattle of stones. “I take you to a place, Brah Jeremy,” Robideaux said deep in hard misery.
The shape croaked, “I hear you, Robideaux.” The light exhaled a power of stink. The scent caught Robideaux.
“Aw, fuck,” Jeremy said and down they fell, winked out before Robideaux hit ground with his face, splash, on the chill church floor.
Jeremy felt Robideaux’s blood pounding against the bindings.
The church lady looked inside Robideaux with milk-blind eyes. “Oh,” she said, caught a glimpse, Jeremy dodging through caves of Robideaux-meat. She crittered down Robideaux’s eyes, past the bloodshot; she jerked down his optic nerve and to the deeps. Past all flesh, there was Jeremy.
“Who you?” She padded ’round. “Who you?” she said, touching with the liberty of the blind. Robideaux, tied to the old lady’s stinking bed, the whole place foul with her body and dead church. Somewhere near, flame licked the ceiling. From its heat came bad old scents, herbs he hadn’t breathed in half a thousand years mixed with words, the dusty ashes of nuns, priests, and sinners tumbled together with words. “Who YOU?” the mama Gris-Gris shouted, shaking all of Robideaux.
“Easy, lady. Fuck!” Jeremy said aloud.
Old Suze took back at his word. “Robideaux’s a man not used to language.” She sniffed, looked deeper, walked round the Preacher—inside and out—feeling for the limits of the traveling critter inside the man.
She smiled, toothless but for one long chopper in front. “Why, you nuffin’ down dere, you.” She leaned back and laughed. “I seen dead mans walking with spirit, but you? Hoo…” Her breasts rocked, laughing. “You hain’t got that much life in you,” fingers, a teeny way parted. “You some old thing, never lived at all.”
“I’ll show you life power!” Jeremy called. He shoved the bindings to their limit. He oozed from Robideaux’s eyes, a lightning flicker snatching at the old lady.
She dodged, slippery like a filly girl. The rush of her made Jeremy hurt with its flicker-flicker. Back into the meat of Robideaux he went…
Who flopped, whomp, on his back.
“Power?” She leaned over, showing blind white eyes. Her chuckles breathed foul down Robideaux’s nose...
Who sucked her in before Jeremy could stop him.
Mamalous’s breath hit Jeremy like desert wind. Sand and ice abraded him to the heart. The taint of her kicked, blew him sideways, whichways. “Power?” the old lady shrieked. “You got what stren’th this man’s got is all. You got what you wearing, you.”
Jeremy thrashed.
Two-Bit Suze allowed it. Finally, she looked down. “Who you be ridin’ this fine mans? Who you, wearing him down to nuffin, huh? Who you at ALL?”
“Fuck you, lady,” Jeremy said. He strained Robideaux’s tethers. He rose a bit, danced a sweated moment in the fire’s flickerlight, Robideaux’s dick flapping, balls flopping. Then, “Aw fuck you,” and he lay still. Smoke from the dark, pot steam filled Robideaux. Half offal, half like coming home to rest, it was. Half like death and half like juice and whorehouse sweat.
“Fuck you and this body, too!” he shouted at the limit of Robideaux’s fine baritone. From nearby, the old guitar buzzed in sympathy.
Nude, the old woman was not beautiful. In firelight, her parts and places danced too alive, too much; too much, flesh and sinew. Soft canyons opened, shut. Runneled flesh rolled in oiled waves. Not beautiful, but she was life—the human end of life. She leaned over Robideaux. “Oncet I was a fragrant joy.” She smiled. Her smile gave Jeremy leave to touch.
He did not.
“Oncet this was wonder, delight measured out to all who had the price.” Her smile deepened. “No longer, you old spider thing?”
Jeremy shoved Robideaux against the bonds. The bonds held. Jeremy prayed, “I’ve been alive a dozen thousand years and more. I’ve been everywhere, done everything.”
“An’ now, gots nowhere to go. Your limit’s this Robideaux.” Two-Bit Suze’s flesh rose and fell. Her breath filled Robideaux. She stared deep, blind, no care Jeremy rode there, below Robideaux’s eyeballs, ready to spring.
“Robideaux,” she whispered in the man’s ear. “Gone to cut you, now, open a vein. In a little bit you bleed to death, you hear?”
Despite Jeremy, Robideaux nodded. His voice came through tears. “Hear.”
“Life’ll flow ’way, Robideaux. When it does, you be daid and so that old spider thing inside. You hear me, now?”
He nodded.
She held a razor to the firelight. “It just be a nick and won’t even hurt. T
here.”
He felt the chill cut. He felt the warm as blood flowed. He heard a soft pour running from Robideaux, caught in a bowl by Suze. Suze’s blind eyes pressed down, her scouring breath.
“Want me, critter? Come for me.”
He could not. Couldn’t find his way into her blindness, into her herbs and the words of knowledge.
“Cain’t catch me, y’old daid thing,” Suze whispered, “you got nuffin left.” Then to the man, “Still here, Robideaux?” she called.
“Hyere,” he whispered.
“Spider? Of life, you empty. You nothin’ at the bone. You hunger for somewhere else, wanna be someone other. Thas what lets you grab and go walking ’round. All you gots leff is the empty. Now we waits,” she said. She settled squat astride Robideaux. “We waits your death.”
Jeremy flickered in the cold wind of forever. Darkness waited in the hole, below, in Robideaux’s mortal guts. It opened like a drain and spinning there, the universe, big, dark and always.
Robideaux spoke. “On the tow, Jeremy,” he said, “flashing threads? Spiders they was. Bitty spiders and that wide river to cross. What they done, they done. Climbed a tree, each and ever one. Spun theyselves a thread, let it fly like a sail. And when the wind was right and persistent, they lets go their perch. You take you text there, brah’ Jeremy. Find you that persistent wind, brah’ Jeremy, an leggo. Let go.”
Jeremy felt the man’s soul widen to the size of the big bright river in the gold old sun and blue, blue sky. The two of them, Two-Bit Suze and Robideaux, were singing a storm and weather blew and blew. Oh, Jeremy hung, hung on for life, for dear eternal life he knew was his, he hung tight, looking, not finding, a home anywhere round.
Then he did. Saw a place. The place. He picked his place, then, remembering the spiders on the river air and hoping they knew what-the-fuck, Jeremy let go.
Not alive, not exactly. Wasn’t warm, it wasn’t cold. Tight it was and there was something. Familiar. A sound, but without ears he felt the sound everywhere that was he. Jeremy recognized the sound. It was his sound, his voice, a hollow buzz. It hummed a hundred years and more. The life here all around him was the life, the lives, he’d given this worn wood and varnish, glue and steel. All around a billion cells, old, dry, once living cells, the hollow wood of an old, old tree, cut, shaped, formed and carried. Played. Played and maybe loved…
Old Father Goddamn, still traveling Daddy Boil, leaned at the glass. The big man stared, then laughed.
Robideaux stood next to him, fine again, alive.
“Tole you, Daddy,” Robideaux said. “Told you dere he was.”
“You told me and dar he is,” Daddy said. “Dar he is.”
Jeremy heard. Not with ears. Vibration washed, made him quiver like pond-ripple. The laugh lapped Jeremy, warm and chill. Jeremy buzzed in Goddamn’s laugh. He conjured it in his heart, the Jeremy heart, translated it to: “Haw, Haw, HAW.”
Jeremy tasted dust, light and…
Daddy Boil lifted, turned him ’round by the neck. His strings sang dissonant with Father Goddamn’s touch.
Daddy’s face peered down the big old hole in Jeremy’s belly. “An I thinkin’ you was gone from de oith.” Daddy’s voice rang him. “Well, you mebbe loin sum’in from dis all, Jeremy Fuck Face?” Daddy’s voice touched Jeremy’s body, Jeremy hummed with it.
The face was gone.
“Want to play him, Robideaux?”
“No sir, Daddy, I pure do not.”
“Aw, go ’head. He played you right fine. He sure can’t hurt you now, locked in wood…”
“No sir, Daddy, please. I want no more to do.”
Daddy again: “Well, mebbe I should buy dis my own damn self,” Daddy said to the clerk. “Buy and keep it locked somewhere, someplace, a long time.”
Daddy turned the old guitar around, ran his hands over the grain. “Naw,” he said, handing it, gentle, back to the clerk. “Onliest mans I know can play such a fine thing as this here old piece of woik, ain’t in a strumming state right now. You keep it. Some soul bound to come ’long and ’preciate what ’tis.”
Daddy watched the clerk return the old guitar to the high glass closet where dust lay settled.
“Fine instrument,” the clerk said. “A hundred-thirty, hundred-fifty years old.”
“You keep him safe,” Daddy told the clerk. “I pay you and you don’t show him to nobody. Nobody but what loves the music can be made on such a wonder. Someone who loves, y’heah dat?”
“Yes, sir. Someone who loves.”
Daddy peeled money bills from a roll. “Yes sir. This old man guitar be oining his traveling, next time.” He said that to the clerk. To Jeremy, he said, “Yes, sir. You woik for your traveling, next time, y’heah?”
CORDWELL’S BOOK
What I write of my experiences I swear is the truth. The rest? I don’t know. John Cordwell loved a story and, “A story,” he always said, “is best told tinkered, sar. Yes sar. Tinkered.”
I write that and I hear John in his “Seventh Earl of Muffington” voice. John was not an Earl and there is no Muffington except in a foul tale or two, but being both very British and not-an-earl-of-anything was also part of the Book of Cordwell, that special creation, his life. His tale, a thing he tinkered all the time. Not lying, you understand, simply enhancing the experience of being John Cordwell for the credulous unenlightened.
Tinkering.
All right. The Red Lion is a bar. A pub on Lincoln Avenue, Chicago. A red pin in the map of my life. I’ve gone steady with the place since I moved here from the east in the ’70s of the last century, already a theater-head, a director, looking for work. In those years, Lincoln Avenue was a respectably seedy diagonal slant of Northside real estate, bars, booksellers, coffee shops, folk joints and blues clubs, edgy record shops, the places that gathered the shuffling, the sweaty, the hip, and the giggly, the black-eyed pop-girls with shy smiles and belly button bangles and those who fed on them all.
And theaters. Lincoln Avenue cut through what then was America’s theater wonderland: Steppenwolf, the Organic, St. Nicholas, Body Politic, Victory Garden. That was the heyday, the high-water mark and Holy Golden Age of brash theatrical life and blood that was Chicago, alas. Alas, Chicago.
The area also had a reputation for the weird.
Across from the Lion is the Biograph Theater. In 1934, Gentleman Johnny—John Dillinger—spent the last two of his earthly hours-given watching Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph. Then he and his Lady in Red walked onto Lincoln, into Chicago night, and was blown into history by G-Man Melvin Purvis. It is said when the wind swirls from the west to make the shadows moan, Dillinger still loiters on the Avenue by the brick wall at the alley where he fell, a scent of the Indiana fields on which he grew up, rising, drifting.
Well, I don’t believe in ghosts. Didn’t.
Then, the Red Lion Pub was bright white and rose red, two-and-a-half stories and a peaked roof. Built a few years after the Great Fire, the Lion is flammable as a soul. Defiantly wooden, the place droops. It would sag southward or lean to the north if not flanked by a pair of solidly respectable redbrick businesses. A new generation has recently painted the Lion an indefensible black and white at which John might have snorted and called the design “a damn Nelsonian checkerboard.”
The year I came to town, the Lion was a natural watering hole for theater creatures such as I whom, you see, require large quantities of nightly beer and daily approval. The Lion offered both.
Inside, it’s two floors of nooks, small rooms, and shadowy coves where smoke hangs and dreams are smelted, shaped, and blessedly forgotten. It is a place of low ceilings where narrow footpaths between stools and tables breeds cautious intimacy—and requires social agility and grace to match.
The publican, John Cordwell, was…
No. The temptation is strong, but I’ll not say he was Falstaffian—though John Cordwell had charms in common with that other John, Sir John. Cordwell was a big man, stood well above 5-foot-4 and almost
as much across. Like Sir John of the Henrys, Cordwell had been, in his time, a warrior—a pain in the ass to those he fought and those he served—an artisan, a lover, a teacher, a wise man, a rogue. He loved big things and beautiful women. He loved to shape lives and bring people together. He loved drink and art and words and buildings.
Buildings, yes. He’d been involved in what he called the “last formal unpleasantry with the Hun.” As a prisoner of war, he escaped frequently and was captured frequently. As a result, he’d made a grand tour of Europe, trucked from one Nazi chateau to another, one escape-proof camp to the next. One of these Boche-sponsored road trips took him through Dresden. Though he saw it between the slats of a cattle lorry, Cordwell fell in love with the Rococo marvel and stone filigrees of that magical city, thought it quite the most beautiful manmade place on earth.
A few hours after his departure the place was pounded to rubble—his chaps, the RAF, at night and the American 8th Air Force by daylight.
Like most British families, the Cordwells had been touched by war throughout the century. His grandfather was wounded at Gallipoli in the first round of incivility with the Hun. Two great uncles were killed at Paschendale during one of the battles of the Somme.
John’s brother was a London cab driver during the Blitz.
“The Blitz. The Blitz.” John stared somewhere between the ceiling and his top-shelf Irish. “What we found of him was a metal button from his jacket.”
In those days, to fly, to be given a plane and command, one had to be an officer. To become an officer, one had to be a gentleman. At least one had to be passed for a gentleman by an RAF Board of Review. Other officers. Gentlemen all. Cordwell, you understand, was not a gentleman, not to the manor born. But Cordwell was also determined to fly.
At his interview, he out-fustianed the board. When asked what he might like to fly—if he were allowed to fly—Cordwell replied without hesitation, mustache aquiver, “Oh, bombers, sir, no question of it, heavy bombers! Hit the Hun where it hurts. Get the bally war over quick as that, what?”
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