A GI on the first floor caught me by the forearm. “Where you goin, Dumbo?” He’d thought up this nickname for me all by himself.
Burley barreled up and knocked the dogface loopy with a pudgy elbow. “Thanks, Mac.” He took my neck tie in his fist. “ Moron ’s in my custiddy now. You can toodle-oo.”
Phoebe’d hate me forever. I’d never make curfew. Hell, my life could peter out in a trash-filled alley. Burley began to drag me towards the rear. Folks waved bye-bye as he hauled me past, a guy putting the come-along on a scared terrier.
“Please be so kind as to unhand my friend.”
Burley and I turned around. Jumbo stood in the middle of the place in his Abraham Lincoln frock coat and a pair of black trousers large enough to outfit three or four regulation-size groomsmen. His face would’ve stopped Big Ben. It blanched the lip rouge of a half dozen females and sucked in the cheeks of a whole platoon of doughboys.
“Who the hell’re you?” Burley didn’t quail-I’ll give him that-but his voice pitched itself oddly high.
“Henry,” Jumbo said. “Henry Clerval.”
“Henry,” Burley said. “Oh, Henry.”
“Careful, fella,” a GI told Burley. “S Hank Clerval, the best first baseman in the CVL.” He said this with such respect that CVL almost seemed a vowelless code for Clerval, like YHWH is for Jehovah.
“I don’t watch it,” Burley said. “Baseball.”
“Well, he could crack you like an aigg,” the GI said. “He inhales pickaninnies for breakfuss.”
“That last is a damnable lie,” Jumbo said.
“Sorry,” the GI said. “Swear to God, sir, I’m sorry.”
“Henry,” Burley mused. “A simpering Henry.”
“Let go of Daniel,” Jumbo said, but Burley kept his grip on my tie, which snaked over my shoulder, pulling my head towards him on a hurtful cant. “What has he done to incur your anger or to warrant punishment?”
The question stumped Burley for a moment. All I’d tried to do was take what Curriden’d paid for (now, though, the memory of my attack on Miss Loveburn filled me with self-shudders) and then flee The Wing & Thigh upon learning the time: attempted rape and a missed dinner engagement.
“He… he broke a fish tank,” Burley said.
“You were taking him back upstairs to mend it?”
“No, I was hauling him out back to kick his scrawny ass,” Burley said. “Does the peckerwood look like a tank mender?”
“I would think your boss happier with financial restitution than with an injured customer, a lawsuit, and a court order closing this establishment as a leach upon both the pocketbook and the morality of the American soldier.”
Burley had a brain. He let go of my tie, and I walked with as much dignity as I could muster to Jumbo’s side.
“Henry is an honorable name,” he said. “Men of the stature of Adams, Longfellow, and Ford have worn it. Another Clerval, an altogether admirable gentleman, gave it to me. Don’t mock or disparage the name Henry.”
“Nosir,” Burley said seriously. “I won’t.”
Jumbo-no, Henry-took his wallet from his coat and counted out ten bills. He handed them to me. I gave them to Burley.
“Is the sum sufficient to replace your broken tank and to restock it with fish?” Henry asked.
“Yessir. You want a receipt?”
“No, thank you. These people here”-he gestured at the crowd around us-“will attest to the mutual acceptability of Daniel’s payment. I may assume that, mayn’t I?”
“Shore,” several chippies and GIs chorused: “You bet.”
Jumbo-no, Henry!-guided me outside, where Highbridge’s nightly ripoff of Mardi Gras partied past, soldiers on the prowl, hookers come-hithering, con artists flim-flamming, and MPs (the dogfaces called them Miserable Pricks) strutting like tinpot dictators.
A taxi stood at the curb. Henry put me into it and told the driver, “McKissic House.” We rode. “How did I find you?” he asked as the neon tide of Penticuff Strip lapped the cab’s windshield. “Well, Mr Curriden and his friends arrived back at the boardinghouse without you, after I’d heard that you’d left the stadium in their company. Phoebe telephoned to say you hadn’t yet arrived at her house. One by one, I accosted all three gentlemen last seen with you. Mr Curriden laughed. Mr Parris said you’d slipped away from them early in the evening. Mr Mariani confessed the ulterior motive behind your expedition and told me where they had abandoned you.”
Abandoned me? Curriden and his pals had deliberately run out on me?
Henry put a hand on my knee. “So how does it feel to have shed your innocence?” His fingers dug into my knee, nearly to the point of making me scream, then let go.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Others plotted your filthy quest. They victimized you, Daniel, denying you your humanity and also your autonomy as a sentient creature.” About when I thought he’d let me off the hook, he grabbed my leg again. “But you-at length, Daniel, you-took part in your own abasement. What does autonomy mean if not self-sponsorship in the moral arena?”
I deserved the scolding. Sort of. For a few raw seconds up there in The Wing & Thigh, I’d become an animal; not so much for wanting my libido scratched-hell, that was natural-as for using force to bully my chosen scratcher. I’d put the screws on Sabrina Loveburn to get her to put the screw on me.
Funny thing. Sitting in that cab and listening to Henry’s harangue, I knew I’d sinned against Miss Loveburn and deserved my ashtray braining. But I resented her for trying to make me talk and then reneging on her contract with Curriden. (You pays your money, you gets your goods.) Shame and bitterness, warring tides.
“Young Miss Pharram says you stood her up,” Henry went on. “As you might well anticipate, she is wounded, confused, and resentful.” (That made two of us, but Phoebe wasn’t to blame for my state of mind, as I was for hers.) “How do you suppose Miss LaRaina, given Phoebe’s wretchedness, must feel? Equally wretched, of course. Equally ill-used.”
Away from Penticuff Strip, our cab bumped over the tracks dividing Highbridge. The smell of decaying horse and mule droppings swirled around us, along with the stink of a faraway paper mill and the floating scorch of peanuts from the Goober Pride factory. The streets beyond the tracks wore their late-night shadows like tank camouflage, and the folks creeping among the dapples-no matter their race-reminded me of enemy snipers.
“Discomfiting Miss LaRaina was Mr Curriden’s principal goal,” Henry told me, his eyes straight ahead. “He harbors no ill will towards you. He may’ve actually supposed a paid visit to The Wing and Thigh would reward you tangibly for your play for the Hellbenders. On the other hand, he felt no compunction about using you as a pawn in his scheme to hurt Miss LaRaina by hurting her daughter. That the enterprise might injure you and colossally grieve Miss Phoebe meant nothing to him, beyond the turmoil it would inflict on Miss LaRaina. I liked Mr Curriden before this. Tonight, however, his name fills the rift in my heart with salt and ashes.”
Henry sat mute until our cab turned onto Angus Road.
“The joke on Mr Curriden is that his spitefulness ranks him in my estimation below such louts as Messieurs Hoey, Sloan, Sosebee, Sudikoff, and Evans. For all their bigotry, they attack directly those who shame or offend them, not blameless third parties with whom they have no quarrel.” A moment later, he said, “The shameless louse.”
Our cabby drove us right up to the columned front porch of McKissic House. Lights shone in windows upstairs and down, but you still got the feeling that, because we’d arrived a little after Mister JayMac’s official curfew, the house would devour us as soon as we entered.
Henry paid the taxi fare and tipped the cabby. He more or less frog-marched me up the steps. At the door into the foyer, he stopped and stared down at me.
“You owe me a sawbuck for that fish tank, Daniel-one debt I don’t intend to forgive.”
I had no trouble with that. I had the money. Besides, my mind had flown back to a moment in The Wing & Thigh. The face of the man with the Popeye-the-Sailor lipstick cartoon on his keister was a face I knew. What the hell! What the fuckin’ hell! Even the guy’s jangly voice had a familiar edge to it. But where had I met him, and why would he want Popeye’s homely mug scribbled on his butt?