‘In where?’
‘A book. Picture-book.’
‘I mean where was the place you just said?’
‘N’wawlins.’
Kitty thought everything over. Even then she didn’t sound too sure. ‘You wouldn’t by chance be talking about New Orleans, would you?’
‘It’s what I said. N’wawlins.’
‘I see. And when you get there you’ll walk into the steward’s office without a shirt, barefoot, needing a haircut ’n ask him if he needs a captain?’
‘I weren’t intended to be no captain,’ Dove told her. ‘I weren’t meant to be more than a private. But I don’t figure to try even for private without I first look genteel.’
‘What size shoes you wear, Red?’
‘Haint wearin’ none. Walkin’ barefooty.’
She studied the feet he kept throwing from one side of the walk to the other.
‘Thirteen and a half,’ she judged.
‘That’s pretty close,’ Dove agreed.
‘Close to what?’
‘Close to fourteen.’
‘You can stop putting on the weakminded act for me any time now,’ Kitty Twist advised him. ‘I’m on.’
Down in Houston’s Mexican slum there stood, that June of ’31, a three-story firetrap with a name:
That’s alclass="underline" Hotel Hotel.
‘Never did try sleepin’ in a skyscraper afore,’ Dove looked up – ‘Whut do it costes here?’
‘Thirty-five cents apiece,’ Kitty informed him, ‘and some places go yet higher.’
‘In that case,’ Dove decided, ‘we’ll have to find an inexpensive place.’
‘We get breakfast throwed in here though.’
‘What gits throwed?’
‘Mission donuts ’n coffee black.’
‘Then we’re too far north.’
Kitty tried to let it go but the temptation was too strong.
‘How do you figure that, Red?’
‘When folks stop puttin’ out liverpuddin’ for breakfast, everyone’s too far north.’
‘And I’m not in the least surprised,’ Kitty agreed. And supporting herself on his arm she slipped her sneaker off a moment, slipped it back on and released his arm.
‘Well what do you know? Just look here what I found in my shoe, Red.’
A five dollar bill lay folded in her palm.
‘That’s purely luck, sis. How it git there?’
She gave him a knowing nudge. ‘Didn’t I tell you colored folks are the friendliest? Why does everyone think that their kitchen matchbox is the First National?’
‘I never would of pecked that door if I’d knowed that that was what you were up to,’ Dove told her.
‘That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
‘It aint right to steal off folks while they’re doin’ you a kindness, Kitty. Do unto others as you would be done by.’
‘I’ll try to remember that too—’ she swung him about. ‘Why, Red, do you know what a pair of three-dollar shoes and a two-dollar shirt would do for you? People would be calling you Preacher, that’s what.’ She took his arm and hurried him into the lobby. ‘And you wouldn’t be the first country boy to turn into a town pimp neither,’ she added to herself.
‘My pappy was a preacher of sorts,’ he told her. ‘The sort to make you throw your Bible away.’
He stood on one side while she conferred with the desk clerk, and eyed himself sidelong in the long lobby mirror. She was right at that: if anything could improve him it was clothes.
‘The only bedtime story my old lady ever told me began and ended with “You leave me cold,”’ Kitty Twist recalled. ‘That’s what she’d say when she’d sober up. When they took me away from her and put me in Juvenile I was a real little terror there. I was mad ’cause I hadn’t stole things like the other kids. I wetted the bed and a matron snitched so I had to sleep in the Skunk Room. That’s the dorm with rubber mattresses for bed-wetters. I was eight. They were afraid by the time I was ten I’d flood them out.
‘That was when Mama went on the wagon to show them she meant it when she said she wanted me back. Got a crowd of ex-alkies to back her so I had to go. “All for my baby” was how she’d put it.
‘“If that’s the case you can step down any time,” I finally told her, “Because now you leave me cold.” Mama couldn’t stand a tie – in her book somebody had to win and somebody had to lose. When she fell off the wagon you could heard the crash for miles.
‘But if I was going to do another stretch I was going to do it for something I done, not on somebody else’s account. They caught me crossing some bridge. If I’d made that bridge I would of been alright. I would of been out of Illinois.
‘By the time I was fourteen I was back with kids a full head shorter than me. I wetted the bed the first night. Imagine – fourteen years old and right back where I’d been at eight! I realized then I wasn’t getting ahead.’
She pulled up the sleeve of her right arm. It was tattooed from shoulder to wrist.
‘Got ’em on my legs too. Done ’em myself with plain needles ’n plain ink. I had thirty-two days wrestling with the bear so I worked on myself to keep from getting even crazier. I wanted to do something they could never undo. That nobody could undo. Now I’d give anything to be rid of the damn things. But at least it showed the others I wasn’t no rat.
‘Did you ever see four big men hold a girl down on a table while the fifth does the whipping? It was how they done me with a leather belt four feet long. It had a silver buckle I can’t forget yet. And how they did drag it out! I could count up to ten between wallops. One hundred licks – I took the most they were allowed to give. And didn’t cry Tear One. That showed I wasn’t a crybaby.
‘Why’d they do it? I flooded the toilet with cotton, that’s why. Why’d I do that? Search me. I’m always doing things I don’t know why. Maybe I just wanted to be a character. You know how you get to be a character? You sit in your room like the living dead, that’s how. They take everything away. There’s nothing to read – not even a candy wrapper. You can’t write letters neither. You get half a cup of dry cereal for breakfeast, two slices of stale bread and a piece of bologna for lunch and half a cup of sloppy stew for supper. That’s how you get to be a character.
‘I found a friend. A skunkie just like me. A little deaf-and-dumb Spade chick, used to lay there on the floor shagging and counting on her fingers. I stuck around, even when I had a chance to run, on her account. She was my friend. When they put her in some sort of hospital I had no reason for sticking any longer. Next time I came to that bridge I took the trolley. How long you been on the run, Red?’
‘Things did get a mite hot around home,’ Dove acknowledged, ‘so I just tuck with the leavin’s.’
She misunderstood. ‘Stealing is kicks alright. I like to get in there and do the job myself. There’s something about going through an empty joint when it’s dark and empty and you can take what you please that’s got kicks like crazy. It’s so much fun you want to do it all the time. You know what the best kick of all is, Red? It’s when you put a gun on grownups and watch them go all to pieces and blubber right before your eyes. That’s the best. How long you say you been on the run?’
Dove didn’t answer but he was on the run all the same. Making good time down Dream Boulevard. She watched him curiously. In sleep his mouth looked as if he’d just been insulted. She couldn’t know that he was standing on the courthouse steps in Fitz’s split-tail coat, leading the singing—