kingdom city to cairo

One wet December forenoon fifteen years ago I was leaning against a signpost that read WELCOME TO KINGDOM CITY, waiting for a lift. A whitish fog lay on the highway and overhead the big wet sky of Missouri moved, unseen, across the unplanted land. A Ford truck with one cracked headlight glowing dimly limped past, followed now and then by salesmen trying to make time into Cairo. Then a Chevvie coupé went by fast, screeched abruptly to a stop twenty yards up the road, and slammed into reverse. “He makes his decisions fast,” I thought as I scrambled into the seat, and he had the speedometer back to sixty before I got the door closed behind me.

A scratchy, big-nosed man with a hospital complexion, in a potato-colored collar and a dark clerical suit; he held the wheel as though unaware of the fog and looked as full of starch as his collar.

“I’m not a minister any more,” he explained. “I’m getting into a new racket. I was ordained by the Seventh-Day Adventists but they threw me out before the week was up. You see, I have a weakness. What time is it now?” He sized me up in chickenlike jerks of his neck; the knuckles on the wheel were bony, the fingers yellowed by nicotine. “What time is it?” he demanded impatiently, ignoring a sign that read: SCHOOL—SLOW.

“Do you have Standard Time? New York Time? Postal Telegraph Synchronous Time or just plain good old Daylight Saving? Are you from Babylon, brother? I have to be in the post office at Sodom before dark. What time is it, brother?”

I surmised that it must be almost noon and nodded suggestively to a yellow-and-black warning: DANGER—CURVE AHEAD. He smiled smugly, as though he had planted the sign there himself just for a prank on others, and swung around the rear of a truck on the sheerest assumption that nothing might be coming from the other direction, swerving back to the right side of the road directly below the peak of the grade. His shadow-rimmed eyes fixed on me. I grinned weakly, and he patted my shoulder paternally.

I didn’t like his shoulder-patting.

“You know why I stopped when you flagged me? I need advice is why. Maybe everything’ll be all right now after all. You see, I have a weakness—you don’t mind listening?”

“Just don’t forget the wheel, Reverend. That’s all I ask.”

“Reverend. Yes, Reverend. That’s just it. I’m not a Reverend. When my flock in Kingdom City found out I was running the tourists’ concession in Hotel Ulysses they told me I’d either have to give it up or get out of their pulpit. That concession got a bad name hereabouts, but it’s a little gold mine. I can’t figure out what to do. If I didn’t have such a weakness. Don’t you think our meeting means something?”

“It probably means we’ll end up with our little toes turned up in a ditch if you don’t hold onto that wheel while you’re preaching.”

“No offense,” he grinned, “no offense. I’m just a Seventh-Day Adventist off on a six-day binge. But you can’t buy a snort in Kingdom City for love or money. Do you drink, brother? Smoke? Chew? Swear? You should, you know. I can quote you chapter and verse for anything you want to do, including arson, rape, incest, gluttony, breach of promise, or tapping a gas main. It’s all right there in the good book and no fee for the service—now isn’t that wonderful?”

“I don’t know. The way you drive is, though.”

He patted my shoulder again.

“The wheel, Reverend, the wheel.”

“I could be like a father to you.”

“I don’t miss the old man that much.”

“I’ll be a brother to you.”

“Okay. You be a brother: brother that wheel awhile.”

He put his eyes on the road once more and we drove on in an uneasy silence, while I brooded over my peculiar luck in meeting the wrong people. The fog lifted as high as the telephone wires. This was Illinois country now, rutted and seedless and tough as its own scrub oak, laced only by Sears, Roebuck fences and U.S. 66.

“Don’t worry about my driving, brother,” he assured me. “I always drive like this. I believe in fate is why: when it’s my time to go I’ll go.”

“That’s all right,” I reminded him, “but I might not want to come along right yet.”

“Look at that life line.” He showed me his palm. “I’ll live to be a hundred and eight.”

“You won’t live twenty minutes if you don’t put that life line back on the wheel.” I looked at the long Illinois fields and thought nostalgically of coffee.

“I just had an operation,” he said, as though explaining his recklessness. “Can’t seem to go anywhere slow any more. Always in such a hurry. Thyroid trouble. I’ve only got one kidney. I have a weakness, but I can’t stop now. Oh my, what I’ve been through. What time is it?”

For some reason he smiled quite gaily and added flippantly: “Aren’t things getting terrible? Isn’t everything just awful? Aren’t things bad enough without everybody making them worse by talking about them? And aren’t they getting worse all the time?”

I agreed that they were. “Your driving isn’t getting any better either,” I felt compelled to add.

He slowed a little at last, seemed to collect his thoughts, and managed finally to give his hard-luck story without watching me instead of the road.

“It’s like this. I’m in love. But that’s only part of it. I’m married and so is she, but not to each other. That’s why I have to run a rat race to the post office in Cairo like this. That’s where she writes me. I’m always afraid her husband is going to pick up one of her letters there. It wouldn’t be hard for him to do. He’s my brother. We have the same mailbox there. I always have to beat him there on account he’s deputy sheriff.” He paused to catch his breath. “What do you think?”

“In that case you better step on the gas.”

He got that idiotically happy grin on him again, as if the whole affair was the funniest thing ever. “That ain’t all. I bought this concession off a Jew from Chicago, a disbarred attorney. Sunk my last dime in it. Now they want me to give it up. I don’t give a holy damn for the pulpit, but it’ll mean not seeing her. I’ll be living in Cairo and she’ll be in Kingdom City. As long as I had the pulpit we could cover up—I had business there. But now I don’t, and the brother’ll catch on as sure as hell’s on fire if I start chasing back into Missouri twice a week.

“Of course she could leave him and come to Cairo. That’d be just fine and dandy, like sugar candy. Just about the time my wife’d be putting a hole through the girl friend’s head the brother’d arrive with a posse looking for me. A nice kettle of fish, I will say. But it does me good to talk to someone about it, someone I won’t see again, who won’t see me, that I don’t know from Adam and who don’t know me.”

“If I ever get out of this car I guarantee you won’t see me again,” I decided to myself.

“Leaving my flock is the least part. They’re just a bunch of tarts and rumpots anyhow. Rams and ewes, brother, rams and ewes. I’m no better and no worse—but my ewe is the sweetest ewe of all. If I thought I had to give her up I’d run this car into the ditch around the next curve. Only why should the blind lead the blind? Beside, I got a good thing in this concession—— You got a place to stay tonight, brother?”

I’d been nodding, and shook my head, no, I hadn’t. I hadn’t slept in a bed in four nights.

“You can stay at the hotel if you want. Don’t thank me. No trouble at all.”

It wouldn’t have been much trouble. But I was too tired to care where I slept. I dozed while he chattered on.

“The slut is bleeding me white. She knows I can’t give her up. I should’ve had that draft sent to Alton. Got to be back for love meeting in the tent by ten.” He nudged me. “There’s a half pint in the side pocket. If you fall asleep I’m likely to do the same thing. Help yourself. Take a slug ’n think real hard ’n tell me what I should do. Take a slug and then say the first thing that comes into your head. It’ll be a sign for me, a pillar of cloud. Go ahead, brother, in the side pocket.”

I drank and put the bottle back without passing it to him. I figured we were just staying alive by luck anyhow, so why press one’s luck? He watched me drinking, waited a long moment, and then said, “Well, brother?”

“Brush the ewe off, Deacon,” I told him confidently, “before you get the brush yourself. Even if she don’t brush you, sooner or later your brother will. Quit while you’re still even. Strikes me you must make love like you drive. Step on the brake before you smash up.”

Without acknowledging this opinion, he said abruptly, “Do you have a good home, brother? What are you chasing yourself around Little Egypt for? A good home, stay in it. Or is your life a shambles too?”

“My life’s all right,” I told him curtly. “What’ll this hotel deal cost me? I don’t have much money.”

“Not a crying dime!” he cried happily, almost jumping out of the seat. “Not a Confederate penny! Not a Mexican nickel. Stay as long as you like, just like Adam in the garden.” His voice leered slightly. “We may even find a loose Eve or two wandering around the concession.”

I didn’t say a word. We were coming into the outskirts of Cairo.

The hotel was down by the levee. You could see Kentucky from the front windows. Upstairs, I was told, was the bedroom in which Grant had slept before Fort Defiance. I remember the boarded windows and the broken panes by the river, and the abandoned feed stores facing the moving Ohio. Long freights passed in the woods in Kentucky. Their shadows, as any army’s shadows, moved south on the moving waters. I remember their engine boilers lighting fragments, of floodtime in old December, strewn on Kentucky’s shore.

And thought of the big rivers of the Republic, running the unplanted land and the littered shores of Kentucky. Saw, as always in those years, the big wet sky of the Republic over the big wet land. On that long-ago evening, from the musty lobby of that decaying Civil War hotel, I saw the cottonwoods crowd for warmth behind an abandoned filling station: a thousand nameless weeds thronged the prairie water front. They say, in summer, these grew rankly by day and stank by night.

The Hotel Ulysses squatted like a blind red ox, squat as Grant himself, staring blindly toward Vicksburg at midnight. At the barricades built against floodtime, above the blockaded river. Above an endless army’s shadows, moving south through the woods through Kentucky.

I believed in the bedroom where Grant had slept, but doubted the storeroom in the basement which the disbarred attorney had decided had been a prison. He had charged tourists fifteen cents to see the dungeon where the Rebs had been kept. The Reverend had knocked a few more bricks out of the wall and raised the ante to a quarter. When I assured him that it looked moldy enough to charge a half dollar he grew a little prim and explained that that wouldn’t be right as some of his own people, on his mother’s side, had been Rebs. He was quite frank about it all, however, and seemed to enjoy taking me up and downstairs, not even omitting the rope fire escape with which Grant’s room was still provided.

He had a colored bellhop who ran the elevator and conducted the tours. The boy got a nickel out of every quarter which the tourists invested in the place; the hotel got a dime and the Reverend got a dime.

What the Reverend omitted in his description was that he had two country girls, sisters, rooming together on the third floor, who were available to tired tourists. Their room was across the hall from the one in which Grant had slept; when I glanced in at Grant’s bed it looked as rumpled as though the general had just risen from it after a bad night with the bottle.

“This may not be Gomorrah,” the Reverend told me slyly, “but we give them hell here all the same.”

He said something to the desk clerk, nodding in my direction, and then came over to tell me that any time I wanted to hit the hay just to go on up to room 39. I trudged up to the third floor, hunted down the uncarpeted hall awhile, and then pushed into room 39.

There was a woman, fully clothed, on the bed, and a man shaving at the dresser mirror. The women looked at me leisurely over the cover of a movie magazine while I stood trying to apologize. “It’s all right,” the women said, “try another door.” Just like that. I backed out feeling confused.

And saw then, on either side of the hall, that none of the doors had locks. Some stood open and some a little ajar; not one was fully closed. Some hotel, I thought. Some concession. I hesitated in front of a room from which no light showed, poked my head in, and asked politely. “Anyone in here?”

There was no answer. Nor was there any light, save a dry kerosene lamp. I lit matches and discerned a bed, a chair, and a mirror. That was all I needed. I backed the chair against the doorknob and threw myself across the bed.

I was in the very depths of sleep, dreaming that I wanted to waken; every time I nearly attained wakefulness I’d slip back into the abyss of sleep. It was like being drowned in some gigantic aquarium, for I could feel, like one awake, the whole weight of sleep, like the weight of deep waters upon me. Then something woke me sharply and I was sitting on the edge of the bed and the whole room was moving. The walls, and the floor, as though carpeted, stirred restlessly. Down from the mirror, across the floor, along my arms a living carpet moved. Then they began biting.

A civilization of bedbugs had come out of the walls, from between the wallpaper, from the bedposts, from the mattress and the ceiling. I brushed them off my arms in a panic of disgust and they surged back up my legs. I yanked the chair away from the door and fled down the stairs half covered with a dark and rippling sheet.

No one was at the desk as I ran past: only a small night bulb, which, it seemed to me, was shaded by them.

All that night I walked the darkened, rutted roads of southern Illinois, too sick with horror and fatigue to find the highway. I crushed them between my palms as I walked, I stopped and burned them until I ran out of matches; stood, shivering in the December chill, crushing them between my palms. And with every step I took they bit, as though resenting movement. They bit my back, hips, and neck, and all I knew to do was to keep moving, in a kind of desperate hope of shaking them off.

In the whitish fog of morning I came on a railroad spur where a boxcar, its floor covered with straw, stood waiting to be switched. I crawled in and found, in one corner, a sleeping hobo. I wakened him and he gave me matches. By the time the train began moving I’d gotten rid of them, although I’d had to throw away my shirt out of simple revulsion, in spite of the cold.

Late that night, going through Joplin, Missouri, I stole a shirt off a clothesline at a water stop, and three days later, in New Orleans, I found a Salvation Army Home with a shower.

Tonight, a decade and a half after, I’m still wondering whether the Reverend’s weakness was women, whisky, his single kidney, or practical joking.