‘One of them must be me,’ Dove guessed, though she was looking down at Smiley with the pot in her hand. ‘Get out of here, cawfee fool,’ she added, and Dove hopped to it, kangarooing right across Smiley – in mid-air a fat hand clasped his ankle – down he came once again.
‘Miscegenation!’ Smiley sat up roaring, hauling Dove in like he was something on a line. ‘Miscegenation ’n pot theft! Dirt-eatin’ bugger! Wheah’s my pot?’
‘Heah’s my pot!’ – Minnie-Mae proved whose it was once and for all by clanging it like a bell against his skull. Dove heard the tinny wanning, felt his ankle freed, sprawled across a chest and was out the window. He landed running, gripping his belt and pursued by an illusion that Smiley was right behind him with a screen around his neck, Minnie-Mae right behind Smiley with a dented pot and the law behind all waving a billy three feet long.
Dove didn’t stop for breath till he’d rounded four corners and saw no one was following after all.
‘Reckon I do take things a mite hard,’ he thought, getting his buckle fastened at last. ‘Still, it do seem a great curiosity, how some boys rise so easy while others got to struggle so and lose their shoes in the struggle. Sometimes I almost think it’d be money in my pocket if I’d never been born.’
Back on the corner of Calhoun and Magnolia he rested on the curb and sat looking at the day. It was a mighty nice day and people looked friendly.
‘I reckon I ought to start lookin’ for work,’ he thought.
‘Don’t run, goodbuddy,’ a towering shadow advised him. Craning his neck about, Dove saw the long Floridan and the half-pint Georgian.
‘Don’t need to run, goodbuddy,’ the Georgian assured him, ‘we on your side now.’
‘Been on your side from the very start as a matter of fact.’
‘Too plumb beat to run anyhow,’ Dove abandoned hope. Then saw that each bore a yellow shoe. He eyed both shoes with distaste. ‘Them durn things have nigh to destroy me,’ he decided, ‘and they squeak like a new saddle besides.’
‘Man owns shoes as proud as these might one day try socks,’ the long Floridan commented as he shod Dove’s outsized left foot – ‘soap ’n water wouldn’t hurt none either,’ he reflected, handing the right shoe to the Georgian.
‘Caint even tell how many toes on this one,’ the smaller man marveled as he shod the right, ‘but it looks like it left six tracks in the barnyard. What part of the graveyard you sleep in last night?’
‘Tried a hotel but the air was so close I just roamed till sun-up, like a bug on a hot night.’
‘Plenty room at our place,’ the big man offered his hand while his voice rumbled like a bumblebee in a dry gourd. ‘My name is Luther but call me Fort, account Fort Myers is my home town.’
‘Mah name’s Luther too,’ the little one offered a firmer grip, ‘jest call me Luke.’
‘Like the bullet said to the trigger,’ Dove introduced himself, ‘Just tell me where to go.’
‘Did you have a little trouble back there with our friend?’ Fort asked while they crossed Canal at Tchoupitoulas.
‘If folks hadn’t pulled me off I’d have whupped him before he could of got word to God. I was just preparen to feather into him.’
‘That would have served him right, too,’ Fort agreed, ‘he’s the kind whose pappy made his way by driving his niggers and now he’s trying to make his by driving whites. He’s picked up a bit of Yankee philosophy – you don’t work you don’t eat. No true Southern man would never put a choice like that to a fellow human, black or white.’
Up a rickety backstair Fort pulled the string on a sixty-watt bulb. A room filled with a watery light, and mosquitoes buzzed in from the river. Dove saw a sink full of dirty dishes and a high brass bed precisely like another he had seen in his lost long-ago.
‘I’ll make out on the floor,’ he offered.
‘Aint needful,’ the Georgian pulled a curtain aside to disclose a cot in a sloping alcove. An empty gin-fifth rested there, uncorked, unlabeled and unclaimed: a bottle without a name. Luke tossed it at the screen, which parted politely to let it through, then closed quietly again. The bottle crashed below.
‘Who’s throwing things?’ Fort, in the other room, sounded startled.
‘Some nigger drunk pitchin’ glassware,’ Luke replied lightly.
‘Ought to be lawed,’ Fort decided firmly.
‘In my part of the country we don’t law them,’ Luke boasted.
‘We aint in your part of the country,’ Fort pointed out. ‘Got the rent up?’
‘It’s three-thirty a week for the set of us,’ Luke explained as if the question had been asked of Dove.
‘That comes to one-ten a week,’ Fort broke the figure down for everybody present.
‘Agreeable to me,’ Dove accepted the alcove and went to try out his cot. ‘I don’t suppose you fellows got a yaller yam to spare?’
‘Nary a yam, son.’
‘Wall, I just had a hankerin’.’
He heard Fort and Luke bickering about the last week’s rent, but listened only absent-mindedly. His right buttock still burned where the mosquito had gotten him. He rubbed the spot while waggling his tooth, till sleep stopped waggle, rub and hankerin’.
Fort looked like an ice-house horse mistakenly entered in a claiming race, then insulted publicly for not winning.
All his life he had been lapped by competition too fast for an ice horse. All his life he had been outclassed. Therefore no failure had been his own. How could a man who had never had a proper start be blamed for anything?
Worse, nobody would listen to Fort’s side of the story. How all the good times had passed Fort by, the love and the high living. ‘Watch out for yourselves after this,’ he warned all men, ‘I’m takin’ care of Number One.’
Yet moments of melancholy touched him when he realized that, somewhere, some deserving girl with a steady job was being deprived of him every day. He had tried, through lonely hearts columns, to help her to find him. But the columns had turned out to be taken up mostly by spongers advertising for somebody to support them.
What was the use of a world that failed to reward the deserving while heaping all manner of goodies on people who ought simply be given a kick in the teeth and sent flying? Someone just hadn’t been paying attention was how things looked to Fort.
He had ruined himself over and over for the sake of others and not one yet had said, ‘Thank you, goodbuddy.’ Forty years of selfless devotion to humanity had brought him no more than the faded cotton on his back.
Actually, those thin and rubbery lips had begun taking care of Number One with the first tug of his pinewood mother’s teat. And had lactated every available nipple since. ‘That was a real smart woman,’ Dove heard him talking in his sleep – ‘she gave me twenty dollars.’
That was how Fort had gone about making others happy. That was why, when teats ran dry and orange groves froze and shoe-soles flapped he could feel himself so terribly wronged.
And could bear his cross so mournfully, a sort of Kiwanis Christ in a Bing Crosby shirt, resigned to insult and injury, without a shred of larceny and incapable of imposing his woes on others. In fact, he told Dove so: ‘I’m not the kind to burden others with my troubles. Nobody will know from these sufferin’ lips through what Old Fort have went.’
Then play by play revealed through just what Old Fort had went.
However self-deluded, he wasn’t much deluded about New Orleans. ‘It’s just scratchin’ a pore man’s ass to try to make a living in this town,’ he informed Dove right off. ‘This town’ll starve you to death. I’m a mechanic, a cook, I can drive a truck or cab, I play the gee-tar and I can keep books for anybody. I made twenty cents yesterday and a nickel the day before and that’s doing better than a good many. A man can live on a dollar a day like Hoover tells him he got to – but where’s he to get the dollar?’