Music For Chameleons Page 14

  14 September 1979: I shall always be grateful to Fred Wilson; he had made it easy for me to swallow my pride and call Jake. We spoke this morning; it was as if we had talked yesterday, and the day before. One wouldn’t believe that there had ever been an interruption in our friendship. He confirmed the news of his retirement: “Just sixteen days to go!”—and said that he planned to live with his son in Oregon. “But before that, I’m going to spend a day or two at the Prairie Motel. I’ve some unfinished chores in that town. There’s some records in the courthouse I want to steal for my files. Hey, listen! Why don’t we go together? Have a real reunion. I could meet you at Denver and drive you down.” Jake did not have to pressure me; if he hadn’t offered the invitation, I would have suggested it myself: I had often dreamed, while awake or asleep, of returning to that melancholy village, for I wanted to see Quinn again—meet and talk with him, just the two of us alone.

  IT WAS THE SECOND DAY of October.

  Jake, declining an offer to accompany me, had lent me his car, and after lunch I left the Prairie Motel to keep an appointment at the B.Q. Ranch. I remembered the last time I had traveled this territory: the full moon, the fields of snow, the cutting cold, the cattle banded together, gathered in groups, their warm breath smoking the arctic air. Now, in October, the landscape was gloriously different: the macadam highway was like a skinny black sea dividing a golden continent; on either side, the sun-bleached stubble of threshed wheat flamed, rippled with yellow colors, sable shadows under a cloudless sky. Bulls pranced about these pastures; and cows, among them mothers with new calves, grazed, dozed.

  At the entrance to the ranch, a young girl was leaning against a sign, the one with the crossed tomahawks. She smiled, and waved for me to stop.

  YOUNG GIRL: Afternoon! I’m Nancy Quinn. My dad sent me to meet you.

  TC: Well, thanks.

  NANCY QUINN (opening the car door, climbing in): He’s fishing. I’ll have to show you where he is.

  (She was a cheerful twelve-year-old snaggle-toothed tomboy. Her tawny hair was chopped short, and she was splashed with freckles from top to bottom. She was wearing only an old bathing suit. One of her knees was wrapped in a dirty bandage.)

  TC (referring to the bandage): Hurt yourself?

  NANCY QUINN: Naw. Well, I got throwed.

  TC: Throwed?

  NANCY QUINN: Bad Boy throwed me. He’s one mean horse. That’s how come they call him Bad Boy. He’s throwed every kid on the ranch. Most of the guys, too. I said well, I bet I can ride him. And I did. For ’bout two seconds flat.

  You been here before?

  TC: Once; years ago. But it was at night. I remember a wooden bridge—

  NANCY QUINN: That’s it yonder!

  (We crossed the bridge: finally I saw Blue River; but it was a glimpse as swift and flurried as a hummingbird’s flight, for overhanging trees, leafless when last seen, blazed with obscuring autumn-trimmed foliage.)

  You ever been to Appleton?

  TC: No.

  NANCY QUINN: Never? That’s funny. I never met nobody that’s never been to Appleton.

  TC: Have I missed something?

  NANCY QUINN: Oh, it’s okay. We used to live there. But I like it here better. It’s easier to get off by yourself and do the kinda stuff I like. Fish. Shoot coyotes. My dad said he’d give me a dollar for every coyote I shot down; but after he’d give me more’n two hundred dollars, he cut me down to a dime. Well, I don’t need money. I’m not like my sisters. Always got their face stuck in a mirror.

  I got three sisters, and I’ll tell you they’re not too happy here. They don’t like horses; they hate most everything. Boys. That’s all they’ve got on their mind. When we lived in Appleton, we didn’t see so much of my dad. Maybe like once a week. So they put on perfume and lipstick and had plenty of boyfriends. That was okay with my mom. She’s a lot like them, someways. She likes to fuss with herself and look pretty. But my dad is real strict. He won’t let my sisters have any boyfriends. Or wear lipstick. One time some of their old boyfriends drove over from Appleton, and my dad met them at the door with a shotgun; he told them, said the next time he saw them on his property he’d blow their heads off. Wow, did those guys scoot! The girls cried themselves sick. But the whole thing gives me the biggest laugh.

  See that fork in the road? Stop there.

  (I stopped the car; we both got out. She pointed to an opening in the trees: a dark, leafy, downward-sloping path.)

  Just follow that.

  TC (suddenly afraid to be alone): You’re not coming with me?

  NANCY QUINN: My dad don’t like anybody around when he talks business.

  TC: Well, thanks again.

  NANCY QUINN: My pleasure!

  SHE WALKED AWAY WHISTLING.

  Parts of the path were so overgrown that I had to bend branches, shield my face against brushing leaves. Briars, strange thorns caught at my trousers; high in the trees, crows cawed, screamed. I saw an owl; it’s odd to see an owl in daylight; he blinked, but did not stir. Once, I almost stumbled into a beehive—an old hollow tree-stump swarming with wild black bees. Always I could hear the river, a slow soft churning roar; then, at a curve in the path, I saw it; and saw Quinn, too.

  He was wearing a rubber suit, and holding aloft, as though it were a conductor’s baton, a supple fishing rod. He stood waist-deep, his hatless head in profile; his hair was no longer flecked with grey—it was white as the water-foam circling his hips. I wanted to turn and run, for the scene was so strongly reminiscent of that other day, that long-ago time when Quinn’s look-alike, the Reverend Billy Joe Snow, had waited for me in waist-high water. Suddenly I heard my name; Quinn was calling it, and beckoning to me as he waded toward shore.

  I thought of the young bulls I had seen parading in the golden pastures; Quinn, glistening in his rubber suit, reminded me of them—vital, powerful, dangerous; except for his whiter hair, he hadn’t aged an iota; indeed, he seemed years younger, a man of fifty in perfect health.

  Smiling, he squatted on a rock, and motioned for me to join him. He displayed some trout he’d caught. “Kinda puny. But they’ll eat good.”

  I mentioned Nancy. He grinned and said: “Nancy. Oh, yeah. She’s a good kid.” He left it at that. He didn’t refer to his wife’s death, or the fact that he had remarried: he assumed I was aware of his recent history.

  He said: “I was surprised when you called me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t know. Just surprised. Where you staying?”

  “At the Prairie Motel. Where else?”

  After a silence, and almost shyly, he asked: “Jake Pepper with you?”

  I nodded.

  “Somebody told me he was leaving the Bureau.”

  “Yes. He’s going to live in Oregon.”

  “Well, I don’t guess I’ll ever see the old bastard again. Too bad. We could’ve been real friends. If he hadn’t had all those suspicions. Damn his soul, he even thought I drowned poor Addie Mason!” He laughed; then scowled. “The way I look at it is: it was the hand of God.” He raised his own hand, and the river, viewed between his spread fingers, seemed to weave between them like a dark ribbon. “God’s work. His will.”

  PART THREE

  Conversational Portraits

  I

  A Day’s Work

  SCENE: A RAINY APRIL MORNING, 1979. I am walking along Second Avenue in New York City, carrying an oilcloth shopping satchel bulging with house-cleaning materials that belong to Mary Sanchez, who is beside me trying to keep an umbrella above the pair of us, which is not difficult as she is much taller than I am, a six-footer.

  Mary Sanchez is a professional cleaning woman who works by the hour, at five dollars an hour, six days a week. She works approximately nine hours a day, and visits on the average twenty-four different domiciles between Monday and Saturday: generally her customers require her services just once a week.

  Mary is fifty-seven years old, a native of a small South Carolina town who has “lived North”
the past forty years. Her husband, a Puerto Rican, died last summer. She has a married daughter who lives in San Diego, and three sons, one of whom is a dentist, one who is serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery, a third who is “just gone, God knows where. He called me last Christmas, he sounded far away. I asked where are you, Pete, but he wouldn’t say, so I told him his daddy was dead, and he said good, said that was the best Christmas present I could’ve given him, so I hung up the phone, slam, and I hope he never calls again. Spitting on Dad’s grave that way. Well, sure, Pedro was never good to the kids. Or me. Just boozed and rolled dice. Ran around with bad women. They found him dead on a bench in Central Park. Had a mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a paper sack propped between his legs; never drank nothing but the best, that man. Still, Pete was way out of line, saying he was glad his father was dead. He owed him the gift of life, didn’t he? And I owed Pedro something too. If it wasn’t for him, I’d still be an ignorant Baptist, lost to the Lord. But when I got married, I married in the Catholic church, and the Catholic church brought a shine to my life that has never gone out, and never will, not even when I die. I raised my children in the Faith; two of them turned out fine, and I give the church credit for that more than me.”

  Mary Sanchez is muscular, but she has a pale round smooth pleasant face with a tiny upturned nose and a beauty mole high on her left cheek. She dislikes the term “black,” racially applied. “I’m not black. I’m brown. A light-brown colored woman. And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t know many other colored people that like being called blacks. Maybe some of the young people. And those radicals. But not folks my age, or even half as old. Even people who really are black, they don’t like it. What’s wrong with Negroes? I’m a Negro, and a Catholic, and proud to say it.”

  I’ve known Mary Sanchez since 1968, and she has worked for me, periodically, all these years. She is conscientious, and takes far more than a casual interest in her clients, many of whom she has scarcely met, or not met at all, for many of them are unmarried working men and women who are not at home when she arrives to clean their apartments; she communicates with them, and they with her, via notes: “Mary, please water the geraniums and feed the cat. Hope this finds you well. Gloria Scotto.”

  Once I suggested to her that I would like to follow her around during the course of a day’s work, and she said well, she didn’t see anything wrong with that, and in fact, would enjoy the company: “This can be kind of lonely work sometimes.”

  Which is how we happen to be walking along together on this showery April morning. We’re off to her first job: a Mr. Andrew Trask, who lives on East Seventy-third Street.

  TC: What the hell have you got in this sack?

  MARY: Here, give it to me. I can’t have you cursing.

  TC: No. Sorry. But it’s heavy.

  MARY: Maybe it’s the iron.

  TC: You iron their clothes? You never iron any of mine.

  MARY: Some of these people just have no equipment. That’s why I have to carry so much. I leave notes: get this, get that. But they forget. Seems like all my people are bound up in their troubles. Like this Mr. Trask, where we’re going. I’ve had him seven, eight months, and I’ve never seen him yet. But he drinks too much, and his wife left him on account of it, and he owes bills everywhere, and if ever I answered his phone, it’s somebody trying to collect. Only now they’ve turned off his phone.

  (We arrive at the address, and she produces from a shoulder-satchel a massive metal ring jangling with dozens of keys. The building is a four-story brownstone with a midget elevator.)

  TC (after entering and glancing around the Trask establishment—one fair-sized room with greenish arsenic-colored walls, a kitchenette, and a bathroom with a broken, constantly flowing toilet): Hmm. I see what you mean. This guy has problems.

  MARY (opening a closet crammed and clammy with sweat-sour laundry): Not a clean sheet in the house! And look at that bed! Mayonnaise! Chocolate! Crumbs, crumbs, chewing gum, cigarette butts. Lipstick! What kind of woman would subject herself to a bed like that? I haven’t been able to change the sheets for weeks. Months.

  (She turns on several lamps with awry shades; and while she labors to organize the surrounding disorder, I take more careful note of the premises. Really, it looks as though a burglar had been plundering there, one who had left some drawers of a bureau open, others closed. There’s a leather-framed photograph on the bureau of a stocky swarthy macho man and a blond hoity-toity Junior League woman and three tow-headed grinning snaggle-toothed suntanned boys, the eldest about fourteen. There is another unframed picture stuck in a blurry mirror: another blonde, but definitely not Junior League—perhaps a pickup from Maxwell’s Plum; I imagine it is her lipstick on the bed sheets. A copy of the December issue of True Detective magazine is lying on the floor, and in the bathroom, stacked by the ceaselessly churning toilet, stands a pile of girlie literature—Penthouse, Hustler, Oui; otherwise, there seems to be a total absence of cultural possessions. But there are hundreds of empty vodka bottles everywhere—the miniature kind served by airlines.)

  TC: Why do you suppose he drinks only these miniatures?

  MARY: Maybe he can’t afford nothing bigger. Just buys what he can. He has a good job, if he can hold on to it, but I guess his family keeps him broke.

  TC: What does he do?

  MARY: Airplanes.

  TC: That explains it. He gets these little bottles free.

  MARY: Yeah? How come? He’s not a steward. He’s a pilot.

  TC: Oh, my God.

  (A telephone rings, a subdued noise, for the instrument is submerged under a rumpled blanket. Scowling, her hands soapy with dishwater, Mary unearths it with the finesse of an archeologist.)

  MARY: He must have got connected again. Hello? (Silence) Hello?

  A WOMAN’S VOICE: Who is this?

  MARY: This is Mr. Trask’s residence.

  WOMAN’S VOICE: Mr. Trask’s residence? (Laughter; then, hoity-toity) To whom am I speaking?

  MARY: This is Mr. Trask’s maid.

  WOMAN’S VOICE: So Mr. Trask has a maid, has he? Well, that’s more than Mrs. Trask has. Will Mr. Trask’s maid please tell Mr. Trask that Mrs. Trask would like to speak to him?

  MARY: He’s not home.

  MRS. TRASK: Don’t give me that. Put him on.

  MARY: I’m sorry, Mrs. Trask. I guess he’s out flying.

  MRS. TRASK (bitter mirth): Out flying? He’s always flying, dear. Always.

  MARY: What I mean is, he’s at work.

  MRS. TRASK: Tell him to call me at my sister’s in New Jersey. Call the instant he comes in, if he knows what’s good for him.

  MARY: Yes, ma’am. I’ll leave that message. (She hangs up) Mean woman. No wonder he’s in the condition he’s in. And now he’s out of a job. I wonder if he left me my money. Uh-huh. That’s it. On top of the fridge.

  (Amazingly, an hour or so afterward she has managed to somewhat camouflage the chaos and has the room looking not altogether shipshape but reasonably respectable. With a pencil, she scribbles a note and props it against the bureau mirror: “Dear Mr. Trask yr. wive want you fone her at her sistar place sinsirly Mary Sanchez.” Then she sighs and perches on the edge of the bed and from her satchel takes out a small tin box containing an assortment of roaches; selecting one, she fits it into a roach-holder and lights up, dragging deeply, holding the smoke down in her lungs and closing her eyes. She offers me a toke.)

  TC: Thanks. It’s too early.

  MARY: It’s never too early. Anyway, you ought to try this stuff. Mucho cojones. I get it from a customer, a real fine Catholic lady; she’s married to a fellow from Peru. His family sends it to them. Sends it right through the mail. I never use it so’s to get high. Just enough to lift the uglies a little. That heaviness. (She sucks on the roach until it all but burns her lips) Andrew Trask. Poor scared devil. He could end up like Pedro. Dead on a park bench, nobody caring. Not that I didn’t care none for that man. Lately, I find myself rememberin
g the good times with Pedro, and I guess that’s what happens to most people if ever they’ve once loved somebody and lose them; the bad slips away, and you linger on the nice things about them, what made you like them in the first place. Pedro, the young man I fell in love with, he was a beautiful dancer, oh he could tango, oh he could rumba, he taught me to dance and danced me off my feet. We were regulars at the old Savoy Ballroom. He was clean, neat—even when the drink got to him his fingernails were always trimmed and polished. And he could cook up a storm. That’s how he made a living, as a short-order cook. I said he never did anything good for the children; well, he fixed their lunch-boxes to take to school. All kinds of sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Ham, peanut butter and jelly, egg salad, tuna fish, and fruit, apples, bananas, pears, and a thermos filled with warm milk mixed with honey. It hurts now to think of him there in the park, and how I didn’t cry when the police came to tell me about it; how I never did cry. I ought to have. I owed him that. I owed him a sock in the jaw, too.

  I’m going to leave the lights on for Mr. Trask. No sense letting him come home to a dark room.

  (When we emerged from the brownstone the rain had stopped, but the sky was sloppy and a wind had risen that whipped trash along the gutters and caused passers-by to clutch their hats. Our destination was four blocks away, a modest but modern apartment house with a uniformed doorman, the address of Miss Edith Shaw, a young woman in her mid-twenties who was on the editorial staff of a magazine. “Some kind of news magazine. She must have a thousand books. But she doesn’t look like no bookworm. She’s a very healthy kind of girl, and she has lots of boyfriends. Too many—just can’t seem to stay very long with one fellow. We got to be close because … Well, one time I came to her place and she was sick as a cat. She’d come from having a baby murdered. Normally I don’t hold with that; it’s against my beliefs. And I said why didn’t you marry this man? The truth was, she didn’t know who to marry; she didn’t know who the dad was. And anyway, the last thing she wanted was a husband or a baby.”)