Once he’d been wrestled away from the levee, and the royal entourage was finally out of view, Michael ceased to put up a fight. All his energy, it seemed, had been enlisted in the making of language, and toward that end he continued to struggle while his brother continued to shut him up.
Thus, mumbling and sputtering against the gag of his brother’s hand, the dummy was brought to Gayoso Street. He was hauled up three flights and hustled down a stuffy passage into what Lucifer called their crib. He always pronounced the word with a fondness that put you in mind of freshly scrubbed children, tucked in by a fawning watchdog who sat vigil at the foot of their bed. It was an unlikely association, given the airless oppression of their little closet, its water-stained ceiling with the peeled paper streamers glinting with crystals of sap, its solitary window more cardboard than frame.
“Now go ahead on and squawk all you wants, devilment!” said Lucifer upon releasing his brother, thrusting him onto the cheeping springs of a hobbled bedstead.
Although he lay there quite passively, words tore out of Michael’s mouth like bats from a cave. There was a sensation of words crashing into the walls and ruffling the funny papers that covered the cracks in the plaster where the laths showed through. They spilled a drawerful of policy stubs and fluttered a pile of already ruined books under the bed. They spun on its thumbtack the photograph that Lucifer claimed was of their father (though the taped-together jigsaw, which included such features as a cleft chin and hair like Cab Calloway’s, could have been a composite of several men). While nothing really stirred in that stifling space, least of all the delirious twin himself, still, you had the impression that their flyblown wreck of a room was a casualty of Michael’s ferociously broken silence.
“She got to be mine!” he wailed, his limbs spread in limp surrender to the eruption of his mouth. “I’m be struck the dias-ticus side a dumb! I’m be snakebit. Cut a hex in my heart with yo razor, suck the pison, taste like sweet muscatel! 0 get back y’all railhead and heap-a-meat and split-foots ain’t got a nose, I be studyin beauty here! Her am the one and only puredee supreme, the realest gospel dove. Done made up by a opostle on a bootleg still, then sprankle her on a cypress knee which it is whittle into a honey gal by sweet Jesus hisself. How we meet up is I strum ol Prospero’s starvation box, or do I bust me a jack bottle fresh off a bottle bush, and out she pop. She give me a wish and I wusht I’se a sportin man. I wusht I have win her in a wile craps shoot: thow them bone down Pappy Haddon horn what he got it from a ol-timey knight, and she roll out the other end. Her ain’t no bigger’n a minute, bone shakers sayin thow it back, but she fit nice longside the piece in my bull-fiddle case. Ain’t two step down the road though, when she start in a ruction: ‘Lemme out this here coffin, I ain’t begin!’ I open her up in my sankshum round back a Mambo’s cause she still ain’t have a stitch on. I drown them nits in her wig and rinse her feets, then feeds her on a mess a magnolia in whiskey sauce till she get her growth. I give her a housedress done belong to Hester Prine, rake her hair like you drag a river with serpent toof tine, get back. She light up like a punkin. Be radiatin like a buckshot bucket a moonlight, which I kotch it up in a abalone cistern fo her bath. And she say, ‘Mistah Mighty Fine, y’all have done tickle my mind.’ Ain’t nobody harm her. Is she conjure by a wootch, be a ivory figgerhead on a glory packet makin downstream fo No Return, I kotch her up on my flyin fish name Bad Lazrus. Is she abduck by the debil, I flag a ride on the damnation train nonstop fo perdition, ride free cause I knows the conductor name a Shine. Get to blazes, I fetch her off a coolin board, raise her up with my juice harp rangement a ‘Ramrod Daddy’ and a cordial a ‘Easy Life Numbah Nine.’ She sit up and pitch a boogie, hair comin down like the sorghum been tump off the table, say, ‘Mus be Michael, my hot chocolate man.’ Do some white folks giant look at her sideways, I’m a mash his ding-dong, poke his eye out with a ugly stick, which it a get me sent up Siberya fo life and the dark day. See me tote round my shaddah like a towsack bout a hundred year. It like to bust my back till Daddy Mention, he have learn me to swang the diamond. I have learn from ol Doc Fustus how to signify a man, make his bowel turn aloose to the tune a ‘No Ways Tired.’ He have learn me also to frail a medicine tree, flap them leaves up a chokecherry sermon till I scapes the workhouse in a whirly wind. Be crazeh now, wear a horsetail didee, run with them lawless nigger in the piney wood, till the day come she be waitin on me in the shade. She ain’t wear nothin but skivvy, got a halo a candlefly look like Loma Doom, say, ‘I’m a want you is you ain’t already spoke for.’ She say, ‘Michael, my jelly boy, come squeeze my soul. Squeeze ri-cheer,’ she say, ‘through my peekaboo shift,’ which I done it till it have get me back on my balance mind. But the nex thing you know I be kotched again, put on a guilloteem, do a chitlin strut when the ax have fall. She colleck my hade in her apron, wear it round her goosy neck tween her dinners like a asafetida bag. Plant it in her yard till it come up a chinkapin, branch be hang with a pair a travelin shoes. Meantime death, it don’t take but jes a touch, see, so bimeby I come back from hereafter. I follows a road map give me by the Holy Ghost, wear a suit a flame tuck up in the seat by Herkules. Whoa boy, be magic now, who need a hade? Have a owl wang, a rooster spur, a monkey tail I have win playin coon can with Natty Bumpo in pa’dise. Got High Johnny’s sangin lodestone and lightnin in a jar. Y’all have hear them song bout how the rascal Michael, he done rassle a walkin windmill. He have bushwack a posse a Ku Kluxers, make em pull off they sheet say uncle, he say don’t call me uncle. Make em pull off they sheet, they turn out to be angel, say, ‘That honey gal done belong to you.’ Then I swear, can I find her, she sho nuff gon have my chile. Cept it ain’t be no yard chile, got Jane Airs fo a midwive and Jesus’ mama too, so the chile a be golden…”
He raved this way without a pause into the evening, swallowing air with every sentence like a preacher. Watching over him, Lucifer had begun to show conspicuous signs of gloating. He kept tugging at his suspenders and grinning his grin, apparently bursting with pride that the dummy had finally shot off his mouth. Here at last was proof of what the wise guy had always contended, that his brother had been able to speak all along. Feast or famine, that’s how it seemed to go with these people: one minute you’re as dumb as a post, and the next you couldn’t shut up to save your life.
Of course, I hadn’t been deaf to the occasional scraps of familiar stories, albeit in mongrel disguise, that kept turning up in Michael’s rant. Could it be that there was some connection between this delirious narrishkeit and the glut of books on which he had supposedly stuffed himself? If so, if he had indeed been reading the books, then perhaps their provocative contents had been quietly seething away in his system, taking their time to build to a boil. And now he was letting off steam!
If this was the case, then I was as responsible as anyone for Michael’s verbal coming out. The queen of the Cotton Carnival had only been a sort of coincidental catalyst. I was the engineer. So now when Lucifer grinned, I grinned hugely back at him. We were exchanging smiles like scientists congratulating each other on the successful conclusion of a bold experiment.
But just when I’d begun to enjoy taking credit for my part in Michael’s relentless shpiel, Lucifer started to look a little troubled. In fact, I thought I detected more than a trace of the panic that I’d seen on his face for the first time down at the levee. It made me wish that he would for God’s sake make up his mind how he felt about his brother’s talkiness.
“Hesh now, fool,” he cautioned gently at first, repeating the phrase until the pitch of his voice began to rival his brother’s. He’d begun to rub Michael’s hands so vigorously between his own that you’d have thought he was trying to start a fire. When this had no effect, he took to issuing stern warnings of grave consequences; he promised lammings upside the head at the hands of Aunt Honey if he didn’t pipe down. All else having failed, Lucifer sank to his knees and proceeded to bang his forehead against the bedframe.
I didn’t see why he should get so excited. All of a sudden he was acting like Michael was in some kind of danger. He was behaving as if the reformed dummy’s incessant nattering was as good as a wound that wouldn’t be stanched. It was true that Michael could have looked a little rosier. It was disturbing, for instance, that the cords of his neck seemed to tug at his jaw like taut reins, that his eyes showed only their whites as if he’d been clobbered. His body, bathed in sweat, looked completely bereft of bones, tossed willy-nilly into the sack of his overalls, and his voice in its maiden rant had already begun to grow hoarse. Granted, he didn’t make a pretty picture, but was this any reason for Lucifer to get so upset?
“My love ain’t never go to glory!” declared the dummy in one of his more fervent outbursts, training his nostrils left and right like a loose double-barrel. “Do she die, I be haint by her still! She my bride!”
“You crazeh!” Lucifer attempted, a little feebly, to shout him down. Then, making a face like he was forced to swallow a bitter pill, he stated the obvious, “She a white woman,” wearily adding that the pale-faced lady in question already had a king.
Seeing the wise guy this downhearted, I thought I should maybe try and make an effort to take up where he had left off. “Shah!” I said once or twice to Michael, and “Allaloo,” which was what my mother used to croon when I had tantrums. When these failed to quiet him, I took off the gloves. “Hold your tongue, blackguard!” I shouted, thinking that a literary approach might be the thing. “Belay that! Enough already! Shoyn genug!” But Michael apparently meant to persist in his folly until he’d done himself an injury. And my considered opinion was that we might as well let him.
Besides, I had become kind of interested in his monologue. I kept trying to identify bits and pieces of old stories as they were tossed up in the stream of Michael’s babel. Here you might recognize Crusoe’s blunderbuss, there Ayesha’s veil, before they were muddled and modified to the dummy’s own ends. It was a dizzying exercise, a bit like trying to rescue articles from a raging torrent: you could drown in the attempt.
But I was intrigued by the screwball turns of the defective twin’s fantasies. Take, for example, the many incarnations of the Carnival queen. Sometimes she might be an unspoiled bird-girl, treed by high water in branches otherwise reserved for carrion crows. Another time she might be an orphan held captive by a usurer, held as collateral on a loan. She escapes with a troupe of minstrels in a traveling medicine show, only to be apprehended by authorities for possession of a talking goat. Taking asylum in one of the unidentical twin steeples of the Beale Street Baptist Church, she has to be rescued—rescue figuring throughout the shpiel as a cardinal motif. First she’s rescued from the charity ward of the colored infirmary, where she’s been stricken while nursing the blue balls of untouchables. Then she’s rescued from a gibbet at a Delta crossroads, where she’s been hauled up for the crime of wearing a dress too red. She’s provided safe passage in a hollowed-out watermelon with a periscope. Disguised in burnt cork and Jemima calicoes, she performs a hucklebuck for the swamp-dwelling fugitives from the road gang, among whom Michael has placed himself. When her makeup runs, revealing her as her lily-white majesty, Michael bends a knee to thank her for the manumission of his tongue. He pledges that he and his men will fetch her an apple from the mouth of Boss Crump’s prize spitted hog.
Somewhere in the midst of all this I had to return to North Main Street to put in my nightly appearance. I told Lucifer that I’d be back a little later, though he never bothered to lift his head from his hands. I went home, opened my schoolbooks, and made educated noises, invoking such watchwords as Teapot Dome Scandal and Manifest Destiny. I recited aloud the internal organs of the crayfish. Confident that I’d been largely ignored, I looked around the living room and had the giddy sensation that I’d entered the wrong apartment. When it passed, I yawned and waived my usual practice of waiting for my grandfather to come back from his public prophesying and for my mother to get off the telephone. I went into my alcove, lay down for the couple of minutes I could stand it, and was back at the Baby Doll before ten p.m.
Michael’s marathon gibbering had not petered out during my absence. Drawn by his ballyhoo (apparently much to Lucifer’s acute dismay), several of the ladies had drifted into the cramped little room. If they’d been shocked upon learning that the silent twin could talk, they didn’t show it any longer, which isn’t to say that they weren’t expressing genuine interest. In fact, the ladies of the Baby Doll appeared to be all ears. Draped over the bars at the head of the decrepit bedstead, reclining at the foot of the mattress, they’d composed themselves as if attending a serenade. Now and again you might hear them utter some whispered comment: “The boy be ride by a talkin blues wootch,” or “He be sho nuff cookin with natchl gas,” but for the most part they kept a respectful silence.
In the end, however, they weren’t so spellbound that they couldn’t recognize cause for concern. They took turns holding the dummy’s limp hands and coaxing him to sip sassafras tea, which they spiked with alum and grain alcohol. They sponged his face and massaged his potholed noggin with fingers that seemed to search for irregularities beneath the skull. They applied hot compresses to his forehead and passed hankies sprinkled with sneeze powder under his nose. Sometimes during these processes they grazed one another with inadvertently tender touches, with a solicitude that seemed more than sisterly.
What this put me in mind of was one of Naomi’s stories, the one about the sailor who has himself strapped to the mast so he can listen to the mermaids sing without jumping overboard. But Michael had turned the tables on the mermaids; he’d lured them out of their grotto so they could listen to his cockamamy song. That’s when it hit me what he’d done. The blithering eight ball had gone and found his muse, and his knocked-out word slinging had woken up a terrible longing in me, never mind the effect he was having on the ladies. As they swabbed his flickering eyelids, Michael looked, in his exquisite agony, almost what you might have to call handsome.
The close little room was generating a terrific heat. My T-shirt was pasted to my chest with perspiration and my shorts kept riding up between my cheeks. To make matters worse, Aunt Honey appeared in the doorway, sealing the exit with her girth. Huffing like a boiler about to blow from the effort of her ascent, she demanded to know what the ruction was about. Why weren’t the ladies taking care of their clients below? But her first sight of Michael in the grip of his misguided infatuation brought her up short. She cocked her head to one side, causing her hairpiece to slide dangerously, and peered with interest through the slits of her flesh-sunken eyes. She cupped an ear, though the kid was still railing at the top of his ragged voice.
“Lawd hep us,” she exhaled with a thoughtful regard devoid of her typical bemusement. “Debil done got aholt a that boy’s tongue.” She leaned back for a better appraisal, hands on her prodigious hips, her expression a struggle between consternation and disgust. Then up went her eyebrows, signaling a draw, as she asked ingenuously, “What it all is that he yappin about?”
Here Lucifer forced himself out of his slump and stepped forward to represent his brother. Hangdog though he was, he still managed to work up a little pantomime. First he aped Aunt Honey’s hard-of-hearing, then flapped his arms one time in a show of befuddlement. It was his turn, it seemed, to play dumb.
“Sound to me like some kinda gal misry” was what he finally said. This struck me as a sort of tribute to Michael’s new fluency: under its spell his fast-talking brother couldn’t even manufacture the whole of a lie.
Despite the stuffiness of the room, I could hardly stand to tear myself away just before dawn. Still dopey with fascination, I wondered where was the harm if I stayed a little longer. Such unbridled diarrhea of the mouth couldn’t be kept up indefinitely, and I thought I should see the thing through to its bitter end. Certainly nobody at the Baby Doll would mind my lingering. Wasn’t I almost one of the family, so to speak? Chances were, my absence from the breakfast table on North Main Street would never even be noticed, and the same went for my attendance at the Market Square School.
A shudder passed through me, as if invisible fingers had given my shoulders a jerk, and I wondered what on earth I was thinking. I was thinking of breaking the ties to my old life for once and all, but it suddenly seemed a crime that it should be such an easy thing to do.
Late the next afternoon, before returning to the hotel, I stopped off at Mambo’s Tonsoral just in case. Last night’s mishegoss had probably passed with a little sleep—Michael would have had finally to sleep—and I would find the twins at work as usual. That’s what I told myself, if only for the sake of my conscience, because the right thing was of course to wish for the dummy’s speedy recovery. A speaking disorder like his could have debilitating results, and was nothing to fool around with. But when the chief barber told me I would most likely find Lucifer over at the Baby Doll, where his brother had taken ill, I practically rejoiced. I tore through the back yards to save the few seconds that the street route would have cost.
Michael still lay sprawled in his unchanged overalls, his back against the bars of the swayback bed, his arms and legs disposed like a discarded rag doll. His face was the color of charcoal and his voice, born yesterday, had already aged to a reedy bray. But his raving now seemed somehow less hysterical, more confined to the palpable particulars of his obsession. Having cast and recast his queen in such a variety of improbable roles, with himself alternating between savior and saved, he’d begun today to sharpen the focus. When I came in, he was extolling the various parcels of his beloved’s anatomy like an auctioneer.
“… See them eyes she got, mo bluer than Silk the Sport sapphire cufflank such as he steal from out the belly button a Delilah. See that hair—hunnerd proof straight evenin sun pour through lace britches. She got them titty like sand dune, and I’se a teenintsy A-rab ringmassah, lead my flea circus ca’van through the valley a they shaddah, cross her middle while she giggle the conniption, make fo the waysis fo winter set in…”
Crowded into the corner by the ministrations of the ladies, some of whom had spelled the nurses of the previous night, Lucifer hunkered disconsolately. His turned-around cap gave the impression that he was wearing his long face on the wrong side of his head. How else account for such an unheard-of show of grief? In some respects, you could have said that the wise guy looked as much the worse for wear as his blabbering brother. When I squatted beside him, I had to strain to hear him mutter what may or may not have been intended for my ears.
“Brothah Michael, he ain’t eat nothin, don’t know nobody. Just woofin—tongue be steady flap like I don’t know what. Like a whip done whale his trouble mind to jelly. Go to sleep runnin his mouf, talk in his sleep, wake up his mouf still run…” Here, while I still wasn’t sure that he knew I was next to him, he surprised me by speaking my name. “Mistah Harry,” he said in that tone he reserved for asking the dummy’s advice, “what we gon do?”
I was stunned that his desperation had reduced him to the point of deferring to me. “But I thought you wanted him to talk” was all I could think to reply.
“This ain’t talk,” he explained with a patience that I was clearly trying. “This woofin.”
“So why’d you have me bring him all those books?” I wanted to know. Just what had he expected would come of putting literature in the hands of such a feeb?
The wise guy was looking at me like what did my question have to do with the price of eggs. “Cause he like to read,” he said simply. That’s when I saw in his eyes that I understood something he didn’t. With his street wisdom of a ragged-trousers Daniel, Lucifer had yet to get it. He still hadn’t made the connection between Michael’s insatiable reading and his current unhinged state.
He hung his head, crumpling in his corner as if somebody had wadded him up and tossed him there. “Jus seem like my lil brothah have done splode,” I heard him say.
I was disappointed that the ordinarily unsinkable Lucifer should give in to such shameless sulking, and I suspected that he was feeling as sorry for himself as for his brother. He was mourning the loss of his shadow, who’d taken the spotlight away from him. He even looked physically smaller to me, as if he were shrinking in direct proportion to the unchecked swell of his brother’s delirium. Never before had I been inclined to take Lucifer to task, but I thought he was fair game for it now.
“Shape up, why dontcha,” I exhorted him, the way Dr. Watson might cajole Sherlock Holmes out of a cocaine funk. “Get hold of yourself, man! You’re Lucifer, named after angels and all that.”
He gave a snort like a nasal full stop. “Name after evil angel,” he brooded. “Name ain’t nothin but my daddy’s joke, do I even got a daddy.”
This was the limit. “Ye gods,” I sighed in exasperation, “sometimes I think I just don’t know you at all.”
At that, Lucifer cut his eyes back toward me again, though only for the instant it took him to declare, “Mistah Harry, you ain’t never know me.”
The ladies, meanwhile, continued their doting on Michael. They dabbed his parched lips with cheesecloth soaked in Essence of Van Van and Royal Crown soda, then circled him with sheets to hoist him over an enamel thunder mug. They hummed to him as they massaged his neck—though if you didn’t know better, you might have mistaken their humming for encouragement instead of an effort to calm him down. They administered the odd home remedy, trying in vain to get into him a little crow’s meat in sardine oil, or a julep of mashed snakewort and tuckahoe mold, renowned for its sedative properties. They placed a knife under the bed to cut the cord between the boy and whatever jimjams had taken over his tongue.
Under Sister Pacify’s direction, they poured his specimens into a bowl of egg whites and topsoil. They brushed the mixture in weird ideographs on the wall over his head, then covered the bowl with a page of Scripture, which they put at his feet. But mostly they debated the virtues of this or that, of jimweed paste and saltpeter poultices versus horse leeches or cupping glasses or mustard and Jack of War enemas. (I seconded enemas as having been good enough for Harry Kaplan in his grandmother’s day, though nobody took much note.) They argued so much among themselves that you might reasonably have accused them of trying to stall Michael’s recovery.
It was a suspicion I’d had ever since the gentlemen callers had started checking up on the twin. The word was out on the prodigy of the Baby Doll, and the word was that Michael’s babbling had certain benefits. As I’d heard more than one of the ladies mention, it helped prime their clients for the act of love.
Not that you could have read much in the way of amorousness in their expressions, the same poker faces they’d worn straight from the clubs. Spitting out their plugs of Red Man, they let it be known that they were skeptical about whether the kid’s condition was naturally induced. They placed bets: Was it reefer, dreamstick, witch hazel, or Lady Snow that had rattled Michael’s cage? They put money in a kitty that would go to the one who came closest to estimating just how long the boy’s jaw would keep flapping. Some bet on which would expire first, the speaker or the speech.
Around the third day of his raving, there having been no perceptible improvement, a couple of the ladies invited their sorcerer of choice to have a look. It happened that Macedonia, a lynx-eyed octaroon, and the esteemed Dr. Washington Legba A-men arrived at approximately the same time. Briefly listening to Michael’s palaver, they made pious judgments, beginning what amounted to a competition, each attempting to outdo the other in the fancifulness of his analysis. One attributed the twin’s febrile condition to an alignment of planets nobody ever heard of, while the other named a specific demon loa and the organ it occupied. They were engaged in a full-blown contest of dueling methodologies—the one exhibiting symptoms of a divinely inspired palsy, the other chanting hermetic syllables sounding vaguely like pig Latin; the one flinging moondust, the other rattling painted bones—when Aunt Honey turned up to shoo them both away with a broom.
Still reluctant to admit that Michael’s infirmity might be serious, Aunt Honey was nevertheless fed up with the superstitious carryings-on of her girls. So in the end she called in a respectable physician. A frosty-faced little man with a genteel cough, he complained that this was not the sort of house that his idea of a house call brought to mind. He implied that the distinction would tell in his fee. Turning the dummy’s eyelids inside out, he squeezed his wrist and inquired discreetly about his bodily functions or the lack thereof. He nodded and hemmed professionally but preferred to reserve his judgment until a more thorough examination could be made. When the proprietress ventured to ask when that would be, the doctor suggested that, frankly, it might behoove her to consult a specialist.
“Speshlist in what!” boomed Aunt Honey, upon which the doctor stiffened, as if it were beneath him to have to labor a technicality, and bade her good evening.
Another doctor, this one in fact a specialist in the area of internal disorders, was brought in for a second opinion. Taking one quick baffled look at the patient, he recommended that Michael be transferred to a hospital for observation. Whether she’d lost faith in the medical profession or was balking at the expense, Aunt Honey failed to see the urgency. For one thing, the colored infirmary, built by Mr. Crump to the greater glory of his name, was reputed to be a pest-ridden hole. It was said that there were dozens of patients to each grubby ward and sometimes more than one to a bed, that they languished with undiagnosed diseases beneath pipes from which the tails of rats flicked indolently. The sick, regardless of their extremity, were generally acknowledged to be better off at home.
Anyway, since no negative prognosis had actually been pronounced, it was just as easy to assume the danger would pass. Whatever had gotten into the dummy would surely have to get out again. And that—despite the gathered momentum of his mouth and the evidence of his physical decline—was the attitude that prevailed.
When the rumors of her ward’s strange affliction had begun to attract the curious, Aunt Honey threatened to close her doors, until she realized what this would mean. So while she still reserved the right to grumble at the men who visited Michael’s bedside, she never made noises so loud as to discourage their patronage. Ultimately her practical turn of mind won the day. First she had her girls record the time their clients spent in the dummy’s aphrodisiac presence. They were instructed to add the time to the customer’s tab at the rate of a nickel a minute.
Enthused by the windfall profits, the utilitarian proprietress began to see the virtue in enhancing her ward’s notoriety. Sometimes she spoke of removing Michael to the parlor, where the air was more breathable and he could be more properly cared for. But in the end she decided against it, judging that the sight of him downstairs during business hours would disrupt the normal trade. Besides, it would be easier to regulate attendance if the twin was kept confined to the tiny room.
With whetted ambitions, Aunt Honey took to her front stoop. Posting herself spraddle-legged in a wicker lawn chair, she barked at the passers-by, “Lady an gemmun, step up see a dumbo got the gift a gab!” As her pitch only served to promote general bewilderment, she then got hold of a sandwich board, intending to paint a slogan that would describe for the potential customer exactly what awaited him inside. Unfortunately, she hadn’t the knack of inventing a neat turn of phrase, and as Lucifer was still sunk in his torpor, she began to pick the brains of hotel guests. This was when I came forward. Wanting to demonstrate my usefulness, I’d come up with an advertisement that I thought was both catchy and to the point.
“It’s Alive! It’s Alive!” I submitted. “The Love-Struck Loquacious Wonder of the Negro Underworld!” But Aunt Honey only asked me whether I was lost or what.
Nevertheless the gawkers got wind of the phenomenon, and in the days that followed they filed endlessly in and out of the fetid little room. Amid the Jubilee crowds, which were dense to the point of congealing with flood refugees, Michael became another sideshow attraction. Purely on the basis of hearsay, people forked over the price of admission, expecting I don’t know what—maybe a nickel’s worth (then a dime’s, the price increasing along with the dummy’s popularity) of some shady thrill. Once admitted, it took them a moment or two to adjust to the frenzied outpouring of language, which was sometimes garbled or inaudible, sometimes stupefyingly eldritch. Then they would wonder what kind of thing it was they’d paid their good money to see. But before they could demand a refund, some wild declaration of careless love would draw them in, and they were hooked.
Viewing the prodigy was now limited to one minute per ticket holder, though more than one ticket (or poker chip) could be purchased at a time. To institute this policy, Aunt Honey had stationed Oraldine at Michael’s bedside with a stopwatch. Still, the spectators lingered past their turn. Often the proprietress would be called upon to remove them forcibly, to make room for the next in line.
Not just the Baby Doll regulars but all kinds trooped in to bear witness—field, house, and freshwater shvartzers, cotton-patch types who swayed and bore up as if they were at a camp meeting. Upstanding citizens, who publicly decried Aunt Honey’s establishment, were told that until they’d seen Michael their education remained incomplete. Thoroughly edified, they would go away and return with their wives, women who wore hats like setting hens. As they listened, these ladies no longer remembered to feel compromised by their surroundings; they sighed over rampant bosoms and fluttered their fans with the speed of hummingbird wings. Then there were the young girls sidling close to their escorts, who in turn tried to make light of it all. They would waver between pugnacity and embarrassment while their girlfriends squirmed, looking in their disheveled garments—blouses come off the shoulder, buttons sprung—like they’d been roughhoused by unholy ghosts. There were the elderly who acknowledged “Tha’s right” in pensive surprise, as if reminded of something they’d forgotten long ago.
Occasionally some vagabond musician would stand in the doorway and strum a whole convulsive spectrum of chords. It was anyone’s guess whether he thought he was backing up the lunatic twin or egging him on.
Eventually the local churchpeople, convinced that events at the Baby Doll needed their special stewardship, sent around a delegation of elders to save the day. They brushed past Aunt Honey in her lawn chair without a by-your-leave and disdainfully ignored the file of spectators that stretched to the foot of the stairs. Marching up to the topmost floor, they demanded to see the saint—as one legend of recent vintage had it—who dwelled in the house of iniquity. They were met in the narrow passage by Oraldine and some of the others, barricading the door.
“Get back, y’all fallen daughter a easy vir-choo!” admonished one of the elders. “Us here on a solemn crusade.” As none of this helped endear them to the ladies, they made room for their spokesman, a deacon whose hair was processed to the sleekness of sealskin. Mincing forward to clarify their position, he explained with humility, “We has come prepare to deliver up the boy to a mo sanctify enviromen.”
At this point, half in and half out of the room, I saw Lucifer begin to stir. He rose from his baseboard slump and slid slowly up the wall from the corner where his dejection had kept him in silence these several days. While everyone was well aware that Michael’s bushwa had placed his health in jeopardy, nobody but me seemed to have noticed the toll it took on his brother, though the wise guy had already proved himself impervious to any amount of wheedling from Mistah Harry. So I’d backed off but couldn’t help noticing how, banished from the sickbed that the twins ordinarily shared, Lucifer looked like he could use a rest.
With an animal groan, he stormed out of the room and broke through the cordon of ladies, on his way to assaulting the churchmen. It took all the women, plus a couple of gawkers and myself—closing my eyes against his flailing fists—to restrain him. Otherwise, I don’t know, he might have torn the deacon’s Adam’s apple from his throat and munched it with relish before the reverend gent’s expiring eyes. It was yet another side of Lucifer I thought I could do without.
At length the fracas was squelched by the appearance of Aunt Honey, who’d clunked up the stairs, broom in hand. “What all this is?” she bellowed.
There was a hush before everybody started to talk at once. Again room was made for the oily deacon to pad forward and state his case. Making multiple chins, Aunt Honey looked as if she might be about to second Lucifer’s notion of having the deacon for lunch. “Now lemme get this here straight,” she began, rising to her full alpine stature. She puffed herself up even more imposingly before the accusation that her house might be less than a haven of godliness. Reinvigorated by her show of resistance, Lucifer was again at the point of breaking free, so that Aunt Honey had to turn and wallop him with the business end of her broom.
Then she calmed down a bit herself. She allowed that she was sometimes too hasty in jumping to conclusions, though she had never been one to rule out the possibility of negotiation. Now if the churchmen could offer her some tangible guarantee of their good intentions …
The deacon put a finger to his lips, listening with an attentiveness that caused everyone else in that crowded hallway to listen as well. Michael was still at it, of course. He was describing a trip through what he billed as tunnels of love measureless to man. If you’d heard enough of this stuff, you understood that the voyage was his vision of his true love’s internal geography. Returned from one of his numerous deaths as a hookworm, the dummy was aswim in her juices; he was looped in the loops of her vitals and lights. En route he admired the architecture of her dream-secreting organs, her toilet-water gland, her lungs like a pair of Mercury’s new shoes. He called the roll of her tender innards like a conductor calling stops on the City of New Orleans.
When the deacon had gotten an earful, he swapped his humble demeanor for indignation. “The chile ain’t no saint,” he called upon his brethren to witness. “He done belong to the debil!” Which consensus was pretty much old hat by now. Prevailed upon by their spokesman to clap their hands over their ears, the church elders retreated the premises forthwith.
When the scene was dispersed, I discovered that Lucifer, whose arm I’d been holding, now had a deathly grip on my own. I had to pry loose his fingers, which left a row of red welts, before he came to himself a bit. Talking to me, he kept his head lowered, so that he could just as well have been speaking to the wavy floorboards.
“My sweet Michael, he be alia time upchuck his sorry soul,” he said in a voice as distinctive for its flatness as his brother’s was for its mad expression. “Putty soon he have been heave dry. Be choke an pass over in front the whole popeye street lookin on.”
I’d been thinking that Michael might never run out of words. The wasted ground of his fleshless body would somehow indefinitely sustain the babbling fountain of his mouth. He would remain forever the Baby Doll’s own continuous novelty act, a bigger draw than the amateur nights at the Palace. He was a fixture now, permanent and abiding, the perpetual main attraction of Beale Street. So why did Lucifer have to be such a killjoy? Why did he have to spoil a pleasant picture by speaking the simple truth: that in pining aloud for his impossible love, his brother was talking himself to death.
Of course this wasn’t my problem. You couldn’t say that Michael and I had ever been close. Who could blame me for having had no fellow feeling for a dummy who, until recently, seemed to have no feelings at all? Besides, with all of these obliging chocolate ladies around—who would surely be willing, despite his defects, to give one of their own a tumble—why did he have to go and fall for a marshmallow frail? Then there was the matter of Michael’s talkiness itself, which I was not alone in having developed a taste for. So you had to wonder was it worth it to save the kid’s life if it meant that his farcockte lovesong would come to an end.
But if I wanted to stay in the wise guy’s good graces, I would have to agree that something must be done. Suddenly Beale Street wasn’t fun and games anymore.
“Okay,” I said for the sake of keeping up the conversation, as Lucifer’s silence was even scarier than his brother’s terminal logorrhea, “what have you got in mind?”