Music For Chameleons Read online

  Jake honked the car horn. At once, like a fanfare of welcoming trumpets, a blaze of floodlights swept the veranda; lamps bloomed in downstairs windows. The front door opened; a man stepped out and waited to greet us.

  My first introduction to the owner of the B.Q. Ranch failed to resolve the question of why Jake had not wanted Addie to describe him to me. Although he wasn’t a man who would pass unnoticed, his appearance was not excessively unusual; and yet the sight of him startled me: I knew Mr. Quinn. I was positive, I would have sworn on my own heartbeat that somehow, and undoubtedly long ago, I had encountered Robert Hawley Quinn, and that together we had, in fact, shared an alarming experience, an adventure so disturbing, memory had kindly submerged it.

  He sported expensive high-heel boots, but even without them the man measured over six feet, and if he had stood straight, instead of assuming a stooped, slope-shouldered posture, he would have presented a fine tall figure. He had long simianlike arms; the hands dangled to his knees, and the fingers were long, capable, oddly aristocratic. I recalled a Rachmaninoff concert; Rachmaninoff’s hands were like Quinn’s. Quinn’s face was broad but gaunt, hollow-cheeked, weather-coarsened—the face of a medieval peasant, the man behind the plow with all the woes of the world lashed to his back. But Quinn was no dumb, sadly burdened peasant. He wore thin wire-rimmed glasses, and these professorial spectacles, and the grey eyes looming behind their thick lenses, betrayed him: his eyes were alert, suspicious, intelligent, merry with malice, complacently superior. He had a hospitable, fraudulently genial laugh and voice. But he was not a fraud. He was an idealist, an achiever; he set himself tasks, and his tasks were his cross, his religion, his identity; no, not a fraud—a fanatic; and presently, while we were still gathered on the veranda, my sunken memory surfaced: I remembered where and in what form I had met Mr. Quinn before.

  He extended one of his long hands toward Jake; his other hand plowed through a rough white-and-grey mane worn pioneer-style—a length not popular with his fellow ranchers: men who looked as though they visited the barber every Saturday for a close clip and a talcum shampoo. Tufts of grey hair sprouted from his nostrils and his ears. I noticed his belt buckle; it was decorated with two crossed tomahawks made of gold and red enamel.

  QUINN: Hey, Jake. I told Juanita, I said honey, that rascal’s gonna chicken out. Account of the snow.

  JAKE: You call this snow?

  QUINN: Just pullin’ your leg, Jake. (To me) You oughta see the snow we do get! Back in 1952 we had a whole week when the only way I could get out of the house was to climb through the attic window. Lost seven hundred head of cattle, all my Santa Gertrudis. Ha ha! Oh, I tell you that was a time. Well, sir, you play chess?

  TC: Rather the way I speak French. Un peu.

  QUINN (cackling, slapping his thighs with spurious mirth): Yeah, I know. You’re the city slicker come to skin us country boys. I’ll bet you could play me and Jake at the same time and beat us blindfolded.

  (We followed him down a wide high hallway into an immense room, a cathedral stuffed with huge heavy Spanish furniture, armoires and chairs and tables and baroque mirrors commensurate with their spacious surroundings. The floor was covered with brick-red Mexican tiles and dotted with Navajo rugs. An entire wall had been composed from blocks of irregularly cut granite, and this granite cavelike wall housed a fireplace big enough to roast a brace of oxen; in consequence, the dainty fire ensconced there seemed as insignificant as a twig in a forest.

  But the person seated near the hearth was not insignificant. Quinn introduced me to her: “My wife, Juanita.” She nodded, but was not to be distracted from the television screen confronting her: the set was working with the sound turned off—she was watching the zany ditherings of muted images, some visually boisterous game show. The chair in which she sat may well have once decorated the throne room of an Iberian castle; she shared it with a shivering little Chihuahua dog and a yellow guitar, which lay across her lap.

  Jake and our host settled themselves at a table furnished with a splendid ebony-and-ivory chess set. I observed the start of a game, listened to their easygoing badinage, and it was strange: Addie was right, they seemed real buddies, two peas in a pod. But eventually I wandered back to the fireplace, determined to further explore the quiet Juanita. I sat near her on the hearth and searched for some topic to start a conversation. The guitar? The quivering Chihuahua, now jealously yapping at me?)

  JUANITA QUINN: Pepe! You stupid mosquito!

  TC: Don’t bother. I like dogs.

  (She looked at me. Her hair, center-parted and too black to be true, was slicked to her narrow skull. Her face was like a fist: tiny features tightly bunched together. Her head was too big for her body—she wasn’t fat, but she weighed more than she should, and most of the overweight was distributed between her bosom and her belly. But she had slender, nicely shaped legs, and she was wearing a pair of very prettily beaded Indian moccasins. The mosquito yap-yapped, but now she ignored him. The television regained her attention.)

  I was just wondering: why do you watch without the sound?

  (Her bored onyx eyes returned to me. I repeated the question.)

  JUANITA QUINN: Do you drink tequila?

  TC: Well, there’s a little dump in Palm Springs where they make fantastic Margaritas.

  JUANITA QUINN: A man drinks tequila straight. No lime. No salt. Straight. Would you like some?

  TC: Sure.

  JUANITA QUINN: So would I. Alas, we have none. We can’t keep it in the house. If we did, I would drink it; my liver would dry up …

  (She snapped her fingers, signifying disaster. Then she touched the yellow guitar, strummed the strings, developed a tune, a tricky, unfamiliar melody that for a moment she happily hummed and played. When she stopped, her face retied itself into a knot.)

  I used to drink every night. Every night I drank a bottle of tequila and went to bed and slept like a baby. I was never sick a day; I looked good, I felt good, I slept well. No more. Now I have one cold after the other, headaches, arthritis; and I can’t sleep a wink. All because the doctor said I had to stop drinking tequila. But don’t jump to conclusions. I’m not a drunk. You can take all the wine and whiskey in the world and dump it down the Grand Canyon. It’s only that I like tequila. The dark yellow kind. I like that best. (She pointed at the television set) You asked why I have the sound off. The only time I have the sound on is to hear the weather report. Otherwise, I just watch and imagine what’s being said. If I actually listen, it puts me right to sleep. But just imagining keeps me awake. And I have to stay awake—at least till midnight. Otherwise, I’d never get any sleep at all. Where do you live?

  TC: New York, mostly.

  JUANITA QUINN: We used to go to New York every year or two. The Rainbow Room: now there’s a view. But it wouldn’t be any fun now. Nothing is. My husband says you’re an old friend of Jake Pepper’s.

  TC: I’ve known him ten years.

  JUANITA QUINN: Why does he suppose my husband has any connection with this thing?

  TC: Thing?

  JUANITA QUINN (amazed): You must have heard about it. Well, why does Jake Pepper think my husband’s involved?

  TC: Does Jake think your husband’s involved?

  JUANITA QUINN: That’s what some people say. My sister told me—

  TC: But what do you think?

  JUANITA QUINN (lifting her Chihuahua and cuddling him against her bosom): I feel sorry for Jake. He must be lonely. And he’s mistaken; there’s nothing here. It all ought to be forgotten. He ought to go home. (Eyes closed; utterly weary) Ah well, who knows? Or cares? Not I. Not I, said the Spider to the Fly. Not I.

  BEYOND US, THERE WAS A commotion at the chess table. Quinn, celebrating a victory over Jake, vociferously congratulated himself: “Sonofagun! Thought you had me trapped there. But the moment you moved your queen—it’s hot beer and horse piss for the Great Pepper!” His hoarse baritone rang through the vaulted room with the brio of an opera star. “Now you, young man,” he sho
uted at me. “I need a game. A bona-fide challenge. Old Pepper here ain’t fit to lick my boots.” I started to excuse myself, for the prospect of a chess game with Quinn was both intimidating and tiresome; I might have felt differently if I’d thought I could beat him, triumphantly invade that citadel of conceit. I had once won a prep-school chess championship, but that was eons ago; my knowledge of the game had long been stored in a mental attic. However, when Jake beckoned, stood up, and offered me his chair, I acquiesced, and leaving Juanita Quinn to the silent flickerings of her television screen, seated myself opposite her husband; Jake stood behind my chair, an encouraging presence. But Quinn, assessing my faltering manner, the indecision of my first moves, dismissed me as a walkover, and resumed a conversation he’d been having with Jake, apparently concerning cameras and photography.

  QUINN: The Krauts are good. I’ve always used Kraut cameras. Leica. Rolliflex. But the Japs are whippin’ their ass. I bought a new Jap number, no bigger than a deck of cards, that will take five hundred pictures on a single roll of film.

  TC: I know that camera. I’ve worked with a lot of photographers and I’ve seen some of them use it. Richard Avedon has one. He says it’s no good.

  QUINN: To tell the truth, I haven’t tried mine yet. I hope your friend’s wrong. I could’ve bought a prize bull for what that doodad set me back.

  (I suddenly felt Jake’s fingers urgently squeezing my shoulder, which I interpreted as a message that he wished me to pursue the subject.)

  TC: Is that your hobby—photography?

  QUINN: Oh, it comes and goes. Fits and starts. How I started was, I got tired of paying so-called professionals to take pictures of my prize cattle. Pictures I need to send round to different breeders and buyers. I figured I could do just as good, and save myself a nickel to boot.

  (Jake’s fingers goaded me again.)

  TC: Do you make many portraits?

  QUINN: Portraits?

  TC: Of people.

  QUINN (scoffingly): I wouldn’t call them portraits. Snapshots, maybe. Aside from cattle, mostly I do nature pictures. Landscapes. Thunderstorms. The seasons here on the ranch. The wheat when it’s green and then when it’s gold. My river—I’ve got some dandy pictures of my river in full flood.

  (The river. I tensed as I heard Jake clear his throat, as though he were about to speak; instead, his fingers prodded me even more firmly. I toyed with a pawn, stalling.)

  TC: Then you must shoot a lot of color.

  QUINN (nodding): That’s why I do my own developing. When you send your stuff off to those laboratories, you never know what the hell you’re gonna get back.

  TC: Oh, you have a darkroom?

  QUINN: If you want to call it that. Nothing fancy.

  (Once more Jake’s throat rumbled, this time with serious intent.)

  JAKE: Bob? You remember the pictures I told you about? The coffin pictures. They were made with a fast-action camera.

  QUINN: (Silence)

  JAKE: A Leica.

  QUINN: Well, it wasn’t mine. My old Leica got lost in darkest Africa. Some nigger stole it. (Staring at the chessboard, his face suffused with a look of amused dismay) Why, you little rascal! Damn your hide. Look here, Jake. Your friend almost has me checkmated. Almost …

  IT WAS TRUE; WITH A skill subconsciously resurrected, I had been marching my ebony army with considerable, though unwitting, competence, and had indeed managed to maneuver Quinn’s king into a perilous position. In one sense I regretted my success, for Quinn was using it to divert the angle of Jake’s inquiry, to revert from the suddenly sensitive topic of photography back to chess; on the other hand, I was elated—by playing flawlessly, I might now very well win. Quinn scratched his chin, his grey eyes dedicated to the religious task of rescuing his king. But for me the chessboard had blurred: my mind was snared in a time warp, numbed by memories dormant almost half a century.

  It was summer, and I was five years old, living with relatives in a small Alabama town. There was a river attached to this town, too; a sluggish muddy river that repelled me, for it was full of water moccasins and whiskered catfish. However, much as I disliked their ferocious snouts, I was fond of captured catfish, fried and dripping with ketchup; we had a cook who served them often. Her name was Lucy Joy, though I’ve seldom known a less joyous human. She was a hefty black woman, reserved, very serious; she seemed to live from Sunday to Sunday, when she sang in the choir of some pineywoods church. But one day a remarkable change came over Lucy Joy. While I was alone with her in the kitchen she began talking to me about a certain Reverend Bobby Joe Snow, describing him with an excitement that kindled my own imagination: he was a miracle-maker, a famous evangelist, and he was traveling soon to this very town; the Reverend Snow was due here next week, come to preach, to baptize and save souls! I pleaded with Lucy to take me to see him, and she smiled and promised she would. The fact was, it was necessary that I accompany her. For the Reverend Snow was a white man, his audiences were segregated, and Lucy had figured it out that the only way she would be welcome was if she brought along a little white boy to be baptized. Naturally, Lucy did not let on that such an event was in store for me. The following week, when we set off to attend the Reverend’s camp meeting, I only envisioned the drama of watching a holy man sent from heaven to help the blind see and the lame walk. But I began to feel uneasy when I realized we were headed toward the river; when we got there and I saw hundreds of people gathered along the bank, country people, backwoods white trash stomping and hollering, I hesitated. Lucy was furious—she pulled me into the sweltering mob. Jingling bells, cavorting bodies; I could hear one voice above the others, a chanting booming baritone. Lucy chanted, too; moaned, shook. Magically, a stranger hoisted me onto his shoulder and I got a quick view of the man with the dominant voice. He was planted in the river with water up to his white-robed waist; his hair was grey and white, a drenched tangled mass, and his long hands, stretched skyward, implored the humid noon sun. I tried to see his face, for I knew this must be the Reverend Bobby Joe Snow, but before I could, my benefactor dropped me back into the disgusting confusion of ecstatic feet, undulating arms, trembling tambourines. I begged to go home: but Lucy, drunk with glory, held me close. The sun churned. I tasted vomit in my throat. But I didn’t throw up; instead, I started to yell and punch and scream: Lucy was pulling me toward the river, and the crowd parted to create a path for us. I struggled until we reached the river’s bank; then stopped, silenced by the scene. The white-robed man standing in the river was holding a reclining young girl; he recited biblical scripture before rapidly immersing her underwater, then swooping her up again: shrieking, weeping, she stumbled to shore. Now the Reverend’s simian arms reached for me. I bit Lucy’s hand, fought free of her grip. But a redneck boy grabbed me and dragged me into the water. I shut my eyes; I smelled the Jesus hair, felt the Reverend’s arms carrying me downward into drowning blackness, then hours later lifting me into sunlight. My eyes, opening, looked into his grey, manic eyes. His face, broad but gaunt, moved closer, and he kissed my lips. I heard a loud laugh, an eruption like gunfire: “Checkmate!”

  QUINN: Checkmate!

  JAKE: Hell, Bob. He was just being polite. He let you win.

  (The kiss dissolved; the Reverend’s face, receding, was replaced by a face virtually identical. So it was in Alabama, some fifty years earlier, that I had first seen Mr. Quinn. At any rate, his counterpart: Bobby Joe Snow, evangelist.)

  QUINN: How about it, Jake? You ready to lose another dollar?

  JAKE: Not tonight. We’re driving to Denver in the morning. My friend here has to catch a plane.

  QUINN (to me): Shucks. That wasn’t much of a visit. Come again soon. Come in the summer and I’ll take you trout fishing. Not that it’s like what it was. Used to be I could count on landing a six-pound rainbow with the first cast. Back before they ruined my river.

  (We departed without saying goodnight to Juanita Quinn; she was sound asleep, snoring. Quinn walked with us to the car: “Be careful
!” he warned, as he waved and waited until our taillights vanished.)

  JAKE: Well, I learned one thing, thanks to you. Now I know he developed those pictures himself.

  TC: So—why wouldn’t you let Addie tell me what he looked like?

  JAKE: It might have influenced your first impression. I wanted you to see him with a clear eye, and tell me what you saw.

  TC: I saw a man I’d seen before.

  JAKE: Quinn?

  TC: No, not Quinn. But someone like him. His twin.

  JAKE: Speak English.

  (I described that summer day, my baptism—it was so clear to me, the similarities between Quinn and the Reverend Snow, the linking fibers; but I spoke too emotionally, metaphysically, to communicate what I felt, and I could sense Jake’s disappointment: he had expected from me a series of sensible perceptions, pristine, pragmatic insights that would help clarify his own concept of Quinn’s character, the man’s motivations.

  I fell silent, chagrined to have failed Jake. But as we arrived at the highway, and steered toward town, Jake let me know that, garbled, confused as my memoir must have seemed, he had partially deciphered what I had so poorly expressed.)

  Well, Bob Quinn does think he’s the Lord Almighty.

  TC: Not think. Knows.

  JAKE: Any doubts?

  TC: No, no doubts. Quinn’s the man who whittles coffins.

  JAKE: And some day soon he’ll whittle his own. Or my name ain’t Jake Pepper.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW MONTHS I called Jake at least once a week, usually on Sundays when he was at Addie’s house, which gave me a chance to talk with them both. Jake usually opened our conversations by saying: “Sorry, pardner. Nothing new to report.” But one Sunday, Jake told me that he and Addie had settled on a wedding date: August 10. And Addie said: “We hope you can come.” I promised I would, though the day conflicted with a planned three-week trip to Europe; well, I’d juggle my dates. However, in the end it was the bride and groom who had to alter schedules, for the Bureau agent who was supposed to replace Jake while he was on his honeymoon (“We’re going to Honolulu!”) had a hepatitis attack, and the wedding was postponed until the first of September. “That’s rotten luck,” I told Addie. “But I’ll be back by then; I’ll be there.”