‘If you want to pay the young man the courtesy fee of twenty-five cents, that’s purely optional.’
The woman handed Dove a quarter and returned to the house reading the smaller print.
The rest of the morning went easier. By noon twenty-five quarters jingled in Dove’s jeans and he still had twenty-five certificates for the evening.
But by evening Luke had invested his own quarters in a bottle of gin, so that before they had rapped many doors they were in no shape to rap at all. Toward midnight Dove heard horns and bells. They were helping one another down Tchoupitoulas and the whole dark city rang.
On their old stairs’ steep sad height Dove held Luke back.
‘I wonder did old Fort eat today?’
‘Let the sonofabitch starve,’ Luke pushed into the room. On the bed Fort lay with his face to the wall.
‘Shhhh,’ Dove cautioned Luke, ‘don’t wake him up.’
‘The sonofabitch been awake for hours,’ Luke decided, and shook Fort by the shoulders. ‘Hey! Good old buddy! Srimps! Fresh srimps!’
Fort turned about. Hunger kept glassing his eyes. He didn’t see shrimps. He didn’t smell shrimps.
‘Because there aint no srimps because we et ’em all, goodbuddy,’ Luke laughed with real glee and did a little taunting song and dance—
Dove remembered his own pockets and withdrew six cold shrimps wrapped in a paper napkin.
‘Here, Fort,’ and held them out over the sleeper’s face to show it wasn’t a joke after all. ‘As good-tasted a srimp as ever you et—’ Fort swung a hand and sent shrimps and napkin flying.
One ricocheted off the wall onto the bed. Dove picked it up and nibbled drunkenly at it, looking down at six and a half feet of self-pity huddled under a dirty patch quilt.
Hours later he was wakened by someone padding about. Luke was snoring in the chair. Dove saw a match’s flare. Then a kind of chewing-sucking sound. ‘I hope he finds them all,’ Dove thought and returned to sleep.
In the morning Fort had left.
‘I think he’s a mite fitified with us,’ Dove felt. ‘We hurt his feelings last night.’
‘His type feelings is hurt till they smell cookin’,’ Luke was certain. ‘Then they come runnin’.’
‘I wouldn’t fault him,’ Dove excused Fort. ‘He’s just a poor hippoed critter.’
‘Hippoed?’
‘He’s liver-growed. His liver has growed to one side, that’s plain to be seen. If he’d been held upside down when he was a young ’n ’n shook good, it could have been shuk loose. Too late now. Be there ary egg about?’
‘How do you want it? Up or over?’
‘I’m not dauncy,’ Dove answered, ‘I like an egg everwhat way.’
When both eggs were everwhatted, Luke set them down thoughtfully, though not commonly a thoughtful man.
They left the pan and the dishes for Fort to clean and made their morning run with twenty-five certificates each from Luke’s secret cache.
Upon their evening return dishes littered the table, flies fed in all the pans and an odor of meat burnt or burning hung like a promise of better times. Fort was stretched more than the length of the high brass bed, smoking a cigar looking as long as himself; like a man who had never missed a meal. It was an unsettling sight.
‘Spared half a steak for you boys,’ he recalled, blowing mosquitoes off in a T-bone shaped cloud – ‘but you didn’t show up so I said to myself, “You better knock that steak off before the flies get it.” Had to force myself, but I did. Sure would have admired to share it but it’s no use kicking myself for not waiting now.’
Sure enough. A steak’s remains had been fried right there on their own stove, and Fort didn’t spend that night in search of shrimps. Instead, he laughed at them both in sleep.
He never laughed except in sleep but Dove and Luke took their laughter waking. In the days that followed they stayed drunk, off and on, most of the summer day and often well into the summer night. They had no reason for not being drunk.
The days of peeking timidly into a backyard to check on telephone wires were past. A businessman like himself, Dove had come to feel, hadn’t time to bother with that sort of thing. He rapped fast and hard at front doors these days, and once when a housewife answered he challenged her before she had a chance to ask what he wanted – ‘Go ahead ’n call up! See who cares!’ – and with a tip of his straw floater was gone in an evening mystery, down a gently weaving street.
For some reason sales began falling off. Would times get better before they ran out of certificates? Luke was sure things were on the upgrade, the worst of the Depression was over and they would have certificates left they would have no use for. But Fort felt the Depression had just begun. Things were going to get a lot worse he foretold, and would stay that way longer than anyone believed. Then the bottom would fall out.
Nonetheless, whenever they returned, shrimpless or shrimpified, the odor of sirloin, hamburger or chops made the air of the little room muggy, and Fort would be blowing off the odor with clouds of Cuban cigar smoke. Somebody was doing all right.
‘If you boys would only let me know whether I could expect you, I’d be only too pleased to put your name in the pot,’ he would complain. ‘Had steak again.’
‘I’m not peckish, I’ll eat anything, even steak,’ Dove provided for any such future event – ‘put my name in your pot anytime, Fort.’
But the only name in Fort’s pot was spelled F-O-R-T.
To show his gratitude for the night before, Dove invited Luke to turtle soup in the Old French Market.
In the dim familiar place they had to make way for a beggar in dark glasses, poking his way through seafood odors with the help of a white cane. ‘Excuse me, girls,’ Dove heard him murmur as he passed, ‘excuse me.’
The turtles had been given a twenty-four hour reprieve. No beheading being done today. So they ordered bowls of gumbo and gumboed bowl after bowl. Then it was catfish time and they catfished till they foundered. By the time they left the heat in the street had passed and the catfish sun itself had foundered.
‘I’ve just about et myself into the creek,’ Dove decided.
He felt so full of fish and gumbo he didn’t even mind when a collie in a well-kept yard charged him the full length of her chain. A white woman, holding the brute by its collar apologized, ‘I never knowed Queenie to go after a white man before.’
Then she took a long second look at the redheaded stranger before her and added with soft suspicion, ‘She never been wrong afore, mister.’
Dove merely tipped his skimmer. ‘Thank you kindly all the same, m’am,’ – and slunk off – ‘Durned old hound smelled the catfish in me.’
Out where yards weren’t kept so well and walks were cracked like those of home, he always felt less guilty. The last door he rapped that day was on such a walk. A Negro woman with violet eyes came to the door. Dove tipped his hat, felt his heel nipped gently, and turned just in time to see a fat white mongrel whip about and dash for cover under the house as if it had done something wonderfully daring.
‘He don’t care for white folks comin’ into his yard,’ Violet Eyes smiled matter-of-factly. ‘He say he can’t go into theirs, why they come into his?’
‘Thank you kindly all the same,’ Dove told her, thinking guiltily again, ‘Durned old hound smelled the certificates on me.’
‘This walkin’ ’n talkin’ ’n rappin’ ’n tappin’ is too much like work for me,’ Luke decided, and Dove had had enough too. Though it wasn’t walkin’ ’n talkin’ Dove minded. Nor even rappin’ ’n tappin’.