‘It’s a hard git-by,’ Little Luke cut in, ‘but what have a man got to lose by leading a Christian life? What if he don’t get rich but just poor-hogs it all his days? He still got a high place in the Kingdom comin’, aint he? Rich or poor don’t matter – Heaven apportion its awards accordin’ each man to his merit as I look at it.’
‘I guess everyone get exactly what he got comin’,’ Dove agreed, ‘but I aint old enough to vote myself and don’t think I will till I am.’
Fort had come out of the ’gator backlands to Coral Gables just as the beaches were being prepared for the boomer and the shark. Boomers and shark already lolled the palmetto sands. ‘Makin’ any money?’ they asked instead of ‘good morning.’
Fort had wandered among them looking for another Southern boy, but every face he saw wore the same obscene ‘N.Y.’
‘Makin’ any money?’
He had stood bent and sweating over oven and stove, plying the frycook’s fearsome trade, while New Yorkers got suntanned with girls half their ages a hundred yards away.
Soiled and baked by grease and sweat, still bent but beyond sweating, when waiters swung through the kitchen door, he glimpsed boomer and shark once more. Now they had changed to evening clothes and their girls to sleeveless satin. On the damask white as snow, dark wine or light looked equally cool.
One night an order had come back – ‘Not done enough,’ and had then been returned once again – ‘now it’s too well done.’ He had heard the metallic ring of laughter right out of downtown Gomorrah.
Between the dark wine and the light on damask white as snow.
Fort had that pinewood prurience that made him feel that going half-naked into the sea, even in the summer night’s sheltering dark, was ‘lewdling.’ So when he went wading into the midnight waters he wore long winter underwear. He felt safer, somehow, that way. Fort was afraid of all open waters.
He only went in far enough to let it spill through his palms and was careful not to splash. High overhead the bright windows paid for in Yonkers and the Bronx were filed one above the other. Oh, he knew what they were up to behind the shades all right.
O you smiling, treacherous girls, blouses unbuttoned and skirts unzipped, lolling up there in your bed lamps’ joy, saying ‘Maxie, play with me just right,’ while some king of the garment trade undressed her garment by garment. Hotel Sodom – that was what it ought to be called. To think of Christian girls, good Southern girls, daughters of families who remembered Shiloh and Atlanta naked up there in the arms of hairy brown thieves from Babylon. The giraffe-like man in the sea spilled Southern waters from palm to palm. In his heart burned all Atlanta.
Back in the windowless frycook’s quarters he froze one minute and sweated the next. He saw himself wheeling a Stutz – it was always a Stutz. And the wind that went by lifted the skirt of the slender blonde girl beside him so high he reached his big hand out – ‘Makin’ any money?’ she taunted him, and then there was no one at all on the seat beside him. Indeed, there was no seat beside him. Only a soiled pillow too hot to touch and the morning light seeping in from the hall that led one-way to the kitchen.
‘Makin’ any money?’ the chef had asked as soon as Fort had tied his apron that morning.
‘Makin’ any money?’ was the last thing Fort had heard that night.
He had learned to command the easy credit of that day and rushed, with other thousands there, to lay hand on anything of earth or steel or stone whose value would be enhanced as soon as a city would be built up about it. Though not a street had yet been cut from swamp, everyone knew the metropolis would soon rise and held stubbornly onto their pieces of earth or stone though offered fifty times their worth. Why give fortunes to strangers? Land that had sold for two dollars an acre went for three hundred. Business lots worth two thousand came to be worth a hundred thousand. Lots remote from any business district were reckoned business lots. Farmlands worth fifty dollars an acre became ‘subdivisions’ and were held for ten thousand per acre – ‘in a couple years this will be downtown.’
On the morning he made his first timid hundred dollar killing, Fort left the chops for other cooks to fry. Five hundred, eight-hundred – twelve-hundred dollars! He had never in his life been worth so much.
He developed cunning. Four thousand, eight thousand – the wind was behind him now but he was afraid to move out of his small furnished room for fear of breaking the magic. Twelve-thousand – fifteen-thousand – at eighteen he thought of actually buying a Stutz. When he’d run up eighteen thousand he resolved to pull out at twenty-five. The bottom had to fall out, he sensed. He wouldn’t be caught trying to make a million.
He made his limit in a single operation – then realized that stopping now would only be to throw away another twenty-five grand. At fifty he would surely stick. Every day he thought of that Stutz.
At forty-two thousand he bought himself the loudest swimming trunks in Coral Gables and showed himself in the sun at last, feeling suddenly half kindly toward other dollar daddies. Why hold it against a man because he was born in New York? A New Yorker could be a good American too.
He spent three days haggling over the price of a Model-T that he drove proudly back to his furnished room at last, and proudly mounted the hot dim stair for the final time. On the table a letter reported that his forty-two thousand was unnegotiable dust.
The sleeping till noon and the sherry, the port and the Stutz and the linen, all had been in his hands and all had slipped through. Now he would never give any waiter orders. Now he would never once sleep past seven.
Fort walked through the curious ruins of a future that never would be, through old never-was cities. The great million-girded metropolises fallen to decay before anybody had laid a brick. The grand hotels, the gleaming lobbies, the fountained parks, where now there was nothing but grass and cinders along the Southern Railway’s right of way.
Walked the little midnight towns, remembering the dark wine and the light; hearing his own heels ring. Thinking still how it might have been to walk at morning in a garden of his own.
And find her lying on her side in a striped hammock, in a dress so sheer the softest breeze rippled it and half-pretending sleep. He would rock her gently, there would be no need of words. Only her waking smile and her drowsy hands lazily slipping the buttons of her blouse to please him.
At midnight in the never-was towns hearing his own heels ring.
Or in the steaming New Orleans night, heard laughter faint yet still undying – dark men and fair women going at it again in the heart of downtown Gomorrah.
Then block after block the big freckled man, so stooped, spavined and drooping, wandered the lovely New Orleans night till he found an ice-cart. Then would sniff the ice in the cart’s single flickering flare, holding two pennies tightly as a child, this financial counsellor nearly six and a half feet high. Was the chocolate syrup really fresh? No syrup but chocolate could assuage his self-pity. Had it been made that very morning? At last he would venture one slow suspicious lick before finally letting his pennies go. He just wasn’t taking chances any more.
One warm night Dove went along to help him find an ice-cart with proper chocolate, and that night the first lick convinced him. He turned and beamed down on Dove – ‘Lend me two more cents, goodbuddy’ – and held out the ice to the vendor – ‘Make her a double, goodbuddy!’