Warren Gameliel seemed less a child than the women. Clutching a penny of his own, he watched each transfer of ownership so intently that Mama declared, ‘I swear I believe that child can add and subtract.’ And added, perhaps to put the salesmen into a mood that would get the girls their quarters back, ‘We get lots of married men down here. I’ve been married four times myself. Shod the horse all around as it were. Once to a businessman and three times to thieves, and the businessman was the only one I was unhappy with.’
‘Is Looney up yet?’ someone asked.
‘Which looney?’ Fort Worth wanted to know.
‘There’s no one in this house name of “Looney” that I know of,’ Mama defended the missing chick. ‘If you’re referring to Floralee, she’s putting on her clothes. I forbade her ever to come down again without them. You know what she told me? “I don’t see the use of all this onnin’-’n-offin’,” – that’s just what the poor thing told me.’
‘What’s so looney about that?’ Fort Worth wanted to know.
‘After last night I don’t see how that broad can get downstairs with or without clothes,’ Frenchy marveled from behind Joan Crawford’s eyebrows, ‘I don’t even see how she can rise.’
‘She’ll rise and she’ll get down here and eat grits and ham enough for six, too, you’ll see if she don’t,’ Fort Worth promised. ‘She don’t even know she got a stomach, that one.’
‘Any broad that’ll make love back to her tricks,’ Reba reflected sadly, ‘—no wonder she got a appetite.’
‘Don’t begrudge the child her food,’ Mama reproved them all, ‘she got her ways and you got yours.’
‘If that pimp of hers had a saltspoon of sense in his head,’ Frenchy decided, ‘he’d wise her up. What’s a pimp for?’
‘You tell me,’ Fort Worth put Frenchy down fast, ‘you work for one.’
The door was swung wide and a legless giant, buckled onto a sort of street-going raft built over roller skates, wheeled in like one who came here every day, making a hollow thunder across the planking as he came. Dove watched him unbuckle his straps and leap, in a single bound, onto a low divan.
The little black boy came up to this enormous torso without fear, to study him comparatively. The great cripple gave him a coin, but the boy remained unsmiling before him. Suddenly he asked, ‘What they done to you?’
‘Such a serious child,’ Mama marveled. ‘Will you boys stay to party?’
‘We got a little work to finish,’ Luke decided to save them both money, ‘We’ll be back later.’
As they left, the man no higher than five feet in cowboy boots opened the door for them.
‘Come back by yourself,’ Dove was almost sure he heard the little man whisper; yet it had been said so low that they were a full block away before the whisper began to draw him back.
‘Sure would of admired to tarry there,’ he sighed heavily, ‘a little ying-yang never hurt a man.’
‘Terrible waste of hard-earned money, son,’ Luke counseled him like a father.
‘Just speaking for yourself, I deem,’ Dove corrected him like a friend.
‘Too much of that thing and they’ll be carrying you away, boy.’
‘Nothin’ wrong with that,’ Dove reflected, ‘inasmuch as it was that thing that brought me here. I’ll tell you just what, Luke,’ he stopped right where he stood: ‘I’m just urnin’ for ying-yang.’
‘See you back home, boy,’ Luke dismissed him. ‘Just don’t bring anything home with you.’
Dove hurried back up the street, afraid the little man might have left. It didn’t seem to him that he could regain entrance without being authorized by a friend.
‘My name is Finnerty,’ he told Dove, ‘follow me.’
And led Dove downhill toward the docks. Halfway downhill he turned into a tiled doorway that still held rusted hinges of a time when the place had had swinging doors. A one-story building built on its incline toward the river.
Although Prohibition was good as done, habits it had formed in those who had had their living off it for years could not be changed overnight. Every self-respecting speak-easy devised its own secret knock, peep-hole and password. Buyers wanted more than to walk through an open door, they wished to be admitted to a mystery. More, they wished to belong to a mystery.
After Finnerty had given the buzzer three quick shots, he waited a moment and added a fourth; then both stood in silence before a silent door.
‘Maybe aint nobody home,’ Dove ventured.
‘He’s squirrel-eyeing us this minute from behind the curtain,’ Finnerty confided without glancing at the window, ‘to see if we’re the type that demands service. If we buzz him again, we don’t get in. Doc just won’t be bossed.’
At last the door opened enough to let a white bug of a nose materialize before them. ‘Password?’ the nose demanded.
‘Respect is the key,’ Finnerty replied, and got past the old man. So Dove said it too and both were inside.
Where along the back bar’s thousand bottles, Old Doc Dockery’s hundred dolls remembered the twisted twenties.
Dark-eyed, dressy little town dolls and dutch-bobbed blondies from windmilled countrysides, redhaired colleens and gypsy dolls, a cowgirl cutie in a fringed buckskin and a Broadway baby in a fur boa, a geisha whose eyes were quarter-moons and another who had bobbed her hair and gone all out in Babylon; for her eyes were dollar-signs.
A penny-eyed doll and a button-eyed doll whose buttons said ‘Vote for Cox’; a cross-eyed doll no longer comical, and a doll wearing a bird of paradise. And one little down-and-out bum of a Raggedy Ann with patches on her skirt and wrinkles in her neck; right in the middle where the bar lights could make a small halo about her.
Yet birds of paradise or Raggedy Anns, though one pretended to be Dutch, one Irish and one Japanese, all had seen the headlines on St Valentine’s Day and had dated Harry Greb. Some had had good luck and some had had bad, but all had been born to the twenties and had died when the twenties were done.
Some of broken hearts when Wallace Reid had died. Some had gone on the nod waiting for Dempsey to fight Harry Wills. Others had grown weary after Starr Faithful had passed. One by one they had nodded off, taking their good luck and taking their bad.
(Raggedy Ann’s, of course, had been worse than the others, that was plain enough by her patches. And perhaps was the reason she had the place of honor right in the middle.)
‘There’s no price on them,’ Dockery warned everyone, ‘They’re not for sale and neither am I. Respect gets you in here and disrespect gets you out. Respect, respect is the key.’ No one was allowed to dicker for his dolls, no hand but his own could touch them.
Respect for the dead of a dead decade – that was the key.
The old man preferred the kind of drinker who asked that his glass be washed after every drink. As some men wish to be always drunken, as some women wish to be always in love, Doc Dockery wished to be always clean. To be clean and cleaning.
People, of course, could not be made clean. What kind of filth the old man had waded in neck-deep, of which he still fought to free himself in his lonely white-haired age, or what deep disease was concealed by this passion for hygiene was not clear. Yet it was plain that it had at last turned all his women to dolls.
Respect, that was the key. Respect for his women, and for his music too. His music that was Stardust, Stormy Weather, Bye Bye Blackbird, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, My Bill, Paper Doll, Red Sails in the Sunset and Tie Me To Your Apron Strings Again.