One bulky carpet, though, proved to be heavier than the rest. Finding it too difficult to hoist onto his shoulder, Muni dragged it instead out through the rear of the premises and tugged it bumping down the wooden steps. In the yard he used his foot to kick it into a trundling rotation, and as the carpet began to unroll, it released from its dwindling cylinder a hidden girl. It was Jenny Bashrig, who spilled out of the rug as from the curl of a wave, hugging the cane to her chest like a scepter as she continued rolling over and over across the beaten earth. She fetched up against the fence where she lay motionless in her peacoat, while Muni held his breath until she opened her eyes. Then she got a bit stiffly to her feet and stood there, leaning on her cane with one hand, brushing herself off with the other, and all the while laughing fit to burst. The wind discomposed her pitchy hair, strands of which lashed her cheeks until she peeled them away still laughing.
Muni was stunned: of all the marvels he’d witnessed since coming to the Pinch, this one seemed the least credible.
Jenny tried to swallow her laughter with an unladylike snort. She pulled a knit cap from her pocket and tugged it purposefully over her head, then let go of another mutinous guffaw. After which she wiped her nose on her sleeve. “You don’t got to be scared of me,” she said.
He began automatically to deny the charge, then realized that it was true. “I’m sorry what happened to your leg,” he offered finally.
“I can tell you’re sorry,” she replied, admitting a smile he feared might break into hilarity again, “because of how sorry you look.”
He was aware that she was teasing him, and while it made him no less uncomfortable, her tone suggested she had forgiven him his part in her injury. He didn’t deserve to be forgiven, and for a moment Muni thought of handing her the bat, which still lay at his feet, that he might receive his just punishment. But nothing in the girl’s rosy demeanor suggested she was in a punishing mood. Muni wished he could respond to her banter with some lighthearted riposte of his own; the situation seemed to call for it, but frivolity was never his strong suit. He made a stab at it anyway, offering a random tidbit he recalled from some newspaper item that Pinchas had offhandedly related.
“Did you know that they’re putting now in the Cracker Jack box a prize?” His blush at the sheer insipidness of the remark inflamed his ears.
Jenny looked at him with a patient expression that bordered on pity, which made Muni squirm. “And this has what to do with the price of lox in Zhitomir?” she asked. But his nervousness seemed to have infected her as well, both of them struck dumb by the realization that, despite their familiarity, they were still perfect strangers. Jenny ultimately broke the silence: “I had to bribe Mr. Dlugach with a half dozen of Mrs. Rosen’s boolkies,” she volunteered, though her voice had lost its prior self-possession. “Clever, no?” Muni conceded that she was clever, after which he was speechless again. The bashfulness that had overtaken them both might have held them there till petrifaction set in, had not Jenny summoned the temerity to propose that they take a walk. Muni opened his mouth to make his apologies; he had work to do — but found that he was already following her.
“Is painful for you, the walking?” he managed, but she assured him that movement was always beneficial; then she set a pace, bobbing in her rhythmic limp, that Muni found hard to keep up with. They crossed Front Street, both still taciturn, and strolled down the rutted drive that led out along the river bluff, at the foot of which was the packet boat landing. So far during his tenure in Memphis Muni had paid little attention to the fact that the meandering Father of Waters flowed just below the Pinch; but on that brisk afternoon he was roused by the sight of a pair of low-lying steamers, their smokestacks puffing salt-and-pepper clouds as they took on goods and passengers. Docked beside them a showboat like a two-tiered wedding cake, a paddle the size of a carnival wheel at its stern, was piping minstrel tunes on its calliope. Barrels, potato sacks, and produce crates were piled in pyramids all about the levee, its stones pocked — as Jenny pointed out somewhat formally — with minié ball holes from Yankee gunboats.
“What kind holes?” inquired Muni, but the girl had already moved on.
Colored roustabouts, perspiring despite the bitter wind, heaved bales of cotton end over end up the groaning gangplanks, filling the lower and upper decks until the boats themselves became giant floating cotton bales. Old lady vendors hawked fish from trick buckets warmed by live coals; huddled stevedores sucked whiskey from jugs bristling with straws. Tin lizzies, driven by cotton and hardwood factors in fur-collared ulsters, joggled and backfired over the cobbles on tours of inspection, spooking the horses pulling baggage drays. Across the narrow channel the lanterns were being lit in the squatters’ shanties tethered to the bank of Mud Island on pontoons—“So they can ride out the floods,” Jenny had Muni to know, still dispensing information by the stingy morsel. As if she sensed that her companion had a delicate constitution that could only tolerate spoon-feeding. Despite the paucity of her conversation, however, Muni, who’d scarcely uttered a word, had the impression that the girl was mistress of all she surveyed.
Beyond the island a burnt-orange sun was beginning to set, as the pilot lights came on along the Arkansas shore. Such were the sights that lay at the doorstep of the Pinch, and while Muni had viewed them before on solitary walks, he thought he’d never seen them till he glimpsed them today through Jenny’s wide-awake eyes; though she wasn’t necessarily thrilled by what she saw.
“Did you know there’s a curse on this city?” she said, tying tight the strings of her cap under her chin.
“In curses I don’t believe,” said Muni, adding a “kaynehoreh” against the evil eye.
Jenny sniffed. “Asbestos told me,” she said, as if that settled all arguments, and Muni could have sworn he heard strains of the Negro’s strident fiddle in the air.
The girl began speaking more freely, either from a release of nervous energy or an increasing comfort in the greenhorn’s company. She recounted something of the city’s history, breezily compressing centuries into the space of a paragraph: a Spanish conquistador had once passed through on a quest for gold, butchering Red Indians along the way, and later settlers had bilked the selfsame Indians out of their land. In departing their hallowed bluffs the Indians had flung a curse on the heads of the white men who’d displaced them. There was debate over the nature of that curse, and some said the yellow fever epidemics of the last century were retribution enough—“but I think,” pronounced Jenny with blithe confidence (she was again the mischievous maidl who’d engineered their encounter), “the worst is yet to come.”
Then pensively pointing north with her index finger: “It’s six hours by train to St. Louis,” and south — beyond the railroad bridge recently broadened to accommodate motorcars — with her thumb: “Eight hours to New Orleans. In between is nowhere at all. I would like,” stated Jenny, with that vestige of Yiddish syntax that still sometimes invaded her speech, “to kick from my heels the dust of this town.” Then she voiced her intention to join the circus.