Sept 1, 1939
A short one tonight, babe. No news. Sneaking into NY without me, huh? Don’t let those Harlem girls turn your head. The music you heard hasn’t reach here yet. Sound like it knocked you out. I’m kind of knocked out myself. Sleepy.
Kisses.
V
Vienna was years too young, she told herself, so it wasn’t The Change that woke her up soaking wet past the middle of the night. No. Years too young. It was her nature. Sleeping single she reckoned was at the root of it. The strain of restraint of her half-empty bed until Tate Dash and his boys were back in town and Peck was back in her arms. Peck with his jazzman gypsy-foot self, off who knows where, playing music and what all else with the rest of the fellas wild themselves as buck rabbits. The sweats got so regular she took to sleeping with towels atop the sheets and an extra nightgown laid out to change into in the night.
She went to church every Sunday, wrote Peck on Mondays, choir rehearsal Wednesdays, picture show some Thursdays, and worked her jigsaw puzzles in the winter months. She enjoyed it and it helped fill up the time left over after work and secretarial duties for Chap and Potluck, and that was her intention. Movies, though, were her favorite form of wiling away the idle hours until Peck showed up in town again full of vim and vinegar. In that way she was about the movies the way Son was about the radio. It was a means of learning about the world beyond her knowing otherwise. Like seeing what hairstyles the white stars were sporting, which she was going to be asked, through her tonsorial magic, to duplicate for her colored clientele. But her absolute favorites were the rooting tooting riding shooting westerns. It thrilled her to see evil eye to eye with a force superior to its own. Six-gun justice swift and sure.
She went every first Thursday night of the month when the pictures changed at the King Theater for Colored People, where they finally showed the feature picture that had played most likely months earlier at one of the white theaters above Dunbar. A double feature at the King usually consisted of a Hollywood offering and a B-level, often all-Negro cast second feature.
Some nights Pearl would tag along if there were a Laurel and Hardy comedy, unless she had a rush order. For Pearl work was always before pleasure, and she’d even miss a Bette Davis feature if she had a deadline. Lately she had gotten busy making custom dresses and had fallen out of the habit of accompanying Vienna.
One night at dinner Vienna had asked on a whim if anyone wanted to join her. It was Twin Collins, the Supreme Moving Pictures cowboy star, playing in Showdown at Bar X Ranch. Branch had laughed, something he seldom did, and said to everybody’s surprise that yes, thanks, he believed he would.
Branch Ottley had arrived in the summer, July, when the back and front doors of the beauty shop were kept open in the pretense that there actually was a cross draft for the clicking fans rotating to and forth to catch and offer as a few seconds of relief—but it was just a pretense amongst the flutter of hand fans, pieces of pasteboard, magazines, and folded newspapers fluttering like monarchs’ wings in a whirlwind.
The only thing hotter than the interior of the shop was the conversation about who he was, where he’d come from, and why he was in Chilton. Everyone contributed to the speculation. The most prevalent guesses were that he was an ex-cowboy who’d been in the army, or he was an ex-con, or that he was on the run from something or someone, and was only lying low until whatever it was blew over and he’d move on.
From 9:30 until closing there was a running chorus of cowboy clichés—in the saddle, bucking bronco. Some giggled about what horse-breaking tricks they dreamed about him showing them until they were lathered but “tamed.”
His hands, they said, calloused from lasso ropes and reins, looked strong and capable as the grip of a pair of pliers. They giggled about the possibilities of his long, slightly bowed legs.
Peck’s legs were short and bowed, now that Vienna thought about it, trying not to, but thinking anyway, what with the shop full of smutty-talking, rutty-smelling women chatting about her fellow border like he was Clark Gable or Twin Collins.
They’d drift off to another topic for a few beats, those being shampooed or under the dryer or being hot-combed falling silent, fanning, or absentmindedly humming to the tune of the radio, or gazing blankly at the mirrored wall, or out the window to the comings and goings on the street, and then one of them would, without warning, say “Ye-haw! Ride ’em cowboy!” And they’d all go limp with laughter, humidity rising off them like steam from the hot soapy sink.
One of them Oklahoma Negroes that every one of them, Vienna or anyone else, ever knew was of a breed apart. Appeared part Indian even if they weren’t. Had ways regular Negroes didn’t. A cowboy kind of swaggering independence like was as uncommon in your average Negro as purring was in a dog. Like they somehow hadn’t had the same experiences with white folks as everybody else. West Indians were the only ones close to expressing the same sort of public disinterest for whites that colored Oklahomans had and didn’t much care who knew it.
There’s probably a word for him, Vienna thought, and an army word. Some term involving leather, or steel, or grit, or something that majors and captains use to describe the best soldiers. One that they know can be counted on when things get hot and would fight to the finish.
Branch Ottley was between sugar brown and nutmeg with a dash of cayenne, had straightish black hair and Indian cheekbones, and under his Negro nose wore a thick droopy mustache. Vienna had never seen a live rattlesnake ready to strike, but that was what he brought to mind by the smooth way he moved, and in the coiled way he stood, but with a sharp edge too, like you could shave your legs with him.
With his eyes set deep above his high cheekbones, half-hooded, he never looked like he was paying any particular attention, but like he was sitting in the sun after lunch and was about to doze off. When he spoke beyond a cordial greeting, it was mostly when spoken to. When he did look at you, you knew you were being looked at. His expression didn’t change much more than the difference between sunset at 7:00 and 7:05, but there was a difference and you could feel it.
In the meanwhile he lived at 560.
Being with him on their walk from 560 to and from the King picture show made her walk different than when she was alone, or even with Peck. Walking beside Branch Ottley she was aware men and women looked at her different. It was because she was with him and looked to be under his protection, which in turn loosened up her stride and carriage. She was almost ashamed to feel so unencumbered by the regular everyday burden of having to be proper and self-protective. More than once she thought it must be how white women felt.
There was, though, something off about him. All Negro men were crazy in some way or other, she thought. It was a form of defense forced on them by white folks. For all of their craziness, of all of them she knew she couldn’t imagine anyone more worthy of love or exciting to her soul than Peck, or more worthy of her respect than Chap, or more able to trigger snake-quick 3:30 a.m. flashes of heart-pounding tremors and trickling cold sweat than Branch Ottley.
Prior to their movie nights, Branch, when he did not go out with or on some business for Chap, tended to stay in his room reading Oscar Micheaux novels and history books.
None of the women in the shop admitted to seeing him out or about in the evening. There was speculation he might patronize the various dark delights of the gambling and girls of Mahogany Alley down in the district, but there was no confirmation of that.
For some reason that Vienna did not analyze, it was several Mondays after Branch arrived before she mentioned to Peck that Chap had somebody new doing what Sonny Bob used to do. Collecting rents from businesses and making “deliveries.”
She did not specify that what he was delivering were sealed numbered envelopes with no names to policemen, councilmen, the tax assessor, building inspectors, and various others on Chap’s under-the-counter, off-the-books payroll.
She also did not say that the reason Sonny Bob needed to be replaced was that he had disappeared with a stack of envelopes one Friday and wasn’t heard from again. There was a whole lot more to it than Vienna knew. Whatever it was, it was something to do with something she didn’t need to know.
It was a couple of weeks into their routine when Branch told her he used to be in the movies. Just as a horse wrangler and occasional stunt man in Twin Collins movies.
As surprising as his saying it was, she didn’t doubt it for a second. They had been sitting in Drake’s Drug Store, having stopped for coffee and the night’s last cigarette.
He had been raised, he told her, from age nine or ten, in the town of Malone, Oklahoma—Yeah, it’s famous as an all-colored town.
His adoptive father’s brother was a lawman, a man hunter with a badge. The man Branch called his father was a stable owner with a contract with the army at Fort Levi Thomas near Malone. His daddy saw to the breaking and breeding of horses and the training of mules for use by the Calvary.
His mother was headmistress for the Malone Orphans’ School.
How he got in the movies was, he and Twin Collins, yes, the big-named western star in Hollywood, were classmates at the orphan school. Vienna knew all about Twin Collins, his career and his world-famous horse Dakota. She knew from fan magazine columnists whose job it was know and report. Twin Collins’ life was flashed in laudatory articles in Photoplay, Movie Mirror, Modern Screen, and the other movie magazines they kept for the customers in the shop.
Collins got his start with small, independent film companies making silent westerns in Oklahoma. He caught the first wave of movie making, working both sides of the camera, as stuntman and mechanic, then writer, director, and actor, rising to be one of the two reigning western stars of talkies. Tom Mix being the other.
Feeling as if she was being let in on behind-the-scenes secrets, Vienna got the real story from Branch.
Branch’s mother had also taught Twin, who worked for a while for his father, Haskell, right alongside Branch. A Hollywood crew’d come to Malone scouting locations and stuntmen to shoot one-reel silent movies, back in around 1919, 19-20. Branch and Twin’d been among the company wranglers who taught horses to take tumbles during Indian chases, cattle stampedes, and the like. It was fun, Branch said. Twin had found his calling and caught several breaks and ended up in a mansion on the side of a Hollywood hill and was known all over the world, so flamboyantly rich and famous that his multitude of fans assumed unconsciously and without contradiction that everything they could ever hope to know about their symbol of common decency and champion of underdog redemptive justice and the American dream was true.
“No, he was good,” Branch said.
“But I bet you were better,” she insisted.
After he told of the time Twin cracked a rib near the end of a picture, they had put Branch in makeup, and he did the final stunts for Twin, all she could think to say was, Twin Collins makes $15,000 a week. It was in Photoplay.
He smiled at her nit-witty fan response. He had an investment in Twin, was his response, and, we still stay in touch some.
That, she thought, explained the envelopes Branch received at the beginning of the month postmarked from Los Angeles, California.
A week later, coming from the show after attending their regular Thursday night double feature, Vienna paused in the shadows on the side porch, which was their habit, it being the least obtrusive and closest to each of their rooms at the rear of 560. Nervous as a cat passing the dog pound, eyes on his, she turned to him. She could smell him, the Lava soap. “You tired?” she asked, her hand touching him, letting him know she wasn’t.
He eased her against him. Strong. Sure. Full contact from chest to hips. Before he answered she felt him tense slightly and he gripped her shoulders, his hands hot, strong. He made a quick soft Ssh sound. It was a moment before she heard what he had. They stood pressed against each other. There was a line of perspiration napping her hair at the scalp line and nape, and ice snakes of it, trickling down, down the middle of her chest and the insides of her thighs. His right hand left her shoulder and eased his jacket back, giving him easier access to his pistol off his right hip toward the middle of his back.
What they heard was Arthur. Nobody but Arthur coming up the same path they had just used. Walking with the overcompensated posture and stride of a practiced drunk.
She knew Branch was probably armed as he usually was, whether alone or when he accompanied Chap to one of his business meetings in ‘lo’ Dunbar. Whether he was officially Chap’s bodyguard, or if officially Chap needed a bodyguard, she wasn’t sure.
Arthur mounted the steps like a sleepwalker. He reeked of Old Spice and the reason for his semiconscious state. With a gruff grunt he softly cursed his phantom companion or something behind him, as he either did not notice them or did not acknowledge their presence. He expertly inserted his key in the lock and opened the door and entered, closing it quietly behind him.
They stood for a moment still pressed together but silent, as if wondering if Arthur had really just passed them.
“Listen, girl,” he whispered at last, “I’m trouble.”
Who was he telling? She knew he could feel there was a trembling on her, like the spirit creeping in on one of the old sisters during Sunday sermon.
“More than you know,” he said, “So it sure isn’t you. But if we do what nature tells us, Peck will find out about it. I wouldn’t tell him and you might or might not, but he’d know. That would hurt him, and put him in the position of whether or not to confront me. That’s not a position he, or you, or I want him to be in. Do you understand?”
Hearing Branch say Peck’s name made her wish that at that moment Peck was with some fan-tailed heifer, her hose rolled down and her hem hiked up. That was all that could forgive her for what she was thinking regarding the lean Lava soap-smelling man with his body against hers, her shoulders in his hands.
Even in the faint light she could see him make the decision to say in a flat, controlled voice, “I don’t know how much Luck or Chap might’ve told you—”
“Nothing,” she said before he was finished, hearing the tremble in her whisper.
“I was in a hospital mental ward. They say I had a breakdown.”
She wanted to stop him, but she knew shaking her head wasn’t enough.
“They give me treatments for the better part of a year.”
Wanted to put her hand over her ears, or over his mouth.
“You know about me and horses. There was a white man who’d mistreated a bunch and I called him on it. He came at me with bad intentions.”
Vienna wanted to ask, Oh god, did you kill him, but she knew he had.
“But because of my father and my uncle and Twin Collins’ prominence in the area I got off with self-defense. But you know how it is, they had to give me some time so they sent me to an asylum.
“I say my father and uncle, but they weren’t really. I was adopted from the orphan school, where my uncle took me. Mother was the headmistress. I was eleven. Pa ran the stable. That’s where I learned horses.”
He’s just talking to let me cool down, she thought, not yet cool.
“Twin Collins worked for Pa there.”
She nodded, connecting it all.
“So, see,” he said, “I was released, but I’m easily provoked, and prone to violence when I am.” It was a confession, not easily or proudly admitted, and she wished he had just pushed her away. Told her to go. She wanted to cover his mouth with her trembling hand, apologize to him for having heard it, and assure him that if she could she would sear the words from her memory. He said, “I don’t know if trouble follows me, or I look for it. But sooner or later something will happen. And I do not want you to be a part of it.”
Vienna had long ago decided she was less afraid of Negro men than she was afraid for them, for they were all capable of some degree of white-hot-as-a-poker-in-a-forge violence at their constant provocation. She wanted then to hold him, wanted to assure him that he had her solemn word that she would never breathe a word of what he had told her to a living soul. Hold less like a lover, then, and more like a sister would, a brother or a friend would. But all she could do was touch the side of his face as gently as she could. It was all she could do. It was what she did.
Without saying goodnight he kissed her forehead and moved down the steps and off into the darkness.
She stood in the quiet for a few moments thinking about Branch and Arthur, Chap and Son and Peck, before going up wacky-kneed to her own room, wondering where Branch was heading. To Mahoney Alley most likely. Where else was there to go in Chilton at that time of night? See one of them Mahoney Alley heifers?
When she closed her bedroom door behind her all she wanted was to get that girdle off and get over in her lonely bed and not think about cowboys or galloping stallions, burning beds, walking time bombs, trust, jazz band-stalking heifers, orphans, or hurt, but just to dream about Peck with his roving self.
Vienna wondered, if it wasn’t for Peck, if she would be fool enough to take on the task of jumping down in that volcano in the heart of Branch Ottley, and leading him out, like a fireman rescuing a victim from a burning building.
That burning building was what Reverend Leonard talked and shouted about in his sermons. What it was was a burning place for 99 and 44/100% of the colored men she knew anything ’bout. Need for redemption, or self-forgiveness for something that wasn’t their fault, was as close in words as a woman could get trying to describe what it was to be one of their men. Most men couldn’t say it in words either. But it was on them.
Peck, with his trumpet-blowing self, didn’t know just what a lucky, bowlegged, cleft-chinned, brown-skinned Negro he was. If he did he’d be on his knees somewhere at that minute thanking something on High, instead of where he probably was, on his knees trying to make his point on a pair of spotted bones, bless him. But he had freed himself from it, and his expression of it he put in notes squeezed nightly through his little brass horn. That was what made him so able to give love, and why it was such a joy to give it back to him.
Branch Ottley hadn’t found his way of expressing, have mercy on him. Unless it was through dispensing pain when he was provoked. And if that was it and he didn’t find a way to temper it, there would be a heap of Old Testament suffering before it was done.
And it was going to take more than just him alone looking to find it.
Then, her mind skipping around like a pinball, she thought about the bond between Pearl and Son. For the entire time she had known them, she had never been less than fascinated by them, separately or together. She was also amazed by how much of what the world was to him was shaped by his mother’s view of it, and yet how independent he was. Was that because of how Pearl didn’t encourage him to cling to her, or because of his personality?
Vienna wondered again what kind of mother—or even wife—would she be, what would she give? It made her admire Pearl all the more and think what it must be like to be her. And laying there in the dark, a wave of love for Peck lit her up like sunshine. She realized again that what Pearl had been telling Son on that first day and every day since was what he needed to know if he was to ever have to do without her.
It was into the early a.m. before she quit her tossing, her pulse settled, her mind regulated again into its normal reliability of the milkman’s horse, and with the first rays of the morning sun, alone in her bed, she thought to herself with a smile that it was a good thing at least one of them had come to their senses. And after a fitful half hour or forty-five minutes of sleep, she rose, bathed, ate, and straightened her usual number of heads of hair.
Peck was steady as the insurance man coming to collect, she told herself, and she wasn’t going to let herself forget it.
After that night she and Branch still went to the pictures on Thursday evenings and didn’t change their seats at Potluck’s table. They partnered at bid whist for match sticks, but they avoided being alone otherwise and they never spoke of that moment on the side porch, though it followed Vienna, whining on the back stoop of her nerves like a not yet weaned pup.
But it was many a day standing, doing a head of hair, that her mind wandered to what kind of woman he needed, biblical-big as his burden was. It sure wasn’t some young girl who’d come directly into and up in the church from her mama and daddy’s house. He needed somebody who’d traveled some of the by-ways, even a few back alleys on her journey before she’d settled her hips into a regular routine of every Sunday morning in the same pew. At best that heavy lifting job would be undertaken, if he was lucky—and why would that be assumed—by some woman, a woman who had Job’s patience and Solomon’s wisdom. Any woman short of that he’d melt down and scorch like a marshmallow charred by a blowtorch.
Heaven help them both.