But the closet was empty, the shoe holder hung shoeless, the dresser was swept of brush, compact and comb.
Everyone was so stunned by the news that no one even thought to ask where Big Stingaree had gone, leaving his cowboy boots under his bed.
Achilles Schmidt had had his sniff of fame – a scent that prevails against all perfumes. Born on the outskirts of Mobile in a carnie show, he had grown into a shrewd wild boy who had learned reading and writing by working the bingo tents. He could still guess a woman’s weight to the ounce by running his hands once down her clothes.
He had begun boxing professionally at seventeen and had lasted two rounds of his first bout – he’d never make a boxer. At seventeen he was already too heavily muscled for that.
He had billed himself as ACHILLES THE BIRMINGHAM STRONG BOY and country girls came to stand at the feet of a boy with an IBM brain in the body of a honeyfed bear. To bring the yokels crowding, he could scale a house and threaten the local sheriff, and give the wink to the girls all at once.
Yet it wasn’t until he’d gone on the road as a professional wrestler in a coast-to-coast tour, stooging for a claimant to the world’s championship, that he had found his own trade.
A trade that soon taught him such physical superiority over other men that he began, like the honeyfed bear, to protect others against his strength. For it wasn’t just in the biceps and chest that he was greater than others, he saw without arrogance, but in the mind and the heart as well. That he was incapable of the meannesses he observed in others the boy did not consider a virtue in himself so much as an advantage, like the breadth of his chest, and was grateful. Who had put him together so generously he did not know, and yet wished to honor the wonderful luck of it. Leaning on the ropes in a great red cape, looking across row upon row in the smoky coliseums and tents, he saw how surely the wealth of all earth’s tents, the women within them, the fame as well, would come to him. There was time, and more than time for everything to come to Schmidt.
‘When are you going to stop growing, Achilles?’ a town girl once had waited outside his tent to ask.
‘When I win the undisputed title,’ he told her jokingly, for his awareness of his powers had come to him so swiftly he had not yet had time to realize fully that there was actually nothing in the way of his winning that disputed title. Yet he could take the hand of a girl like that like any nineteen-year-old brother and say, ‘I don’t want to grow bigger. I don’t like to scare people.’
‘You’re big enough now to scare the champion,’ she told him that night, ‘but you’re not big enough to scare me,’ and turned her face to his own for the taking.
A face forgotten these twenty years. Yet the hand that had lain so light in his lay there lightly yet.
She had been right. He had been big enough for anything that night. On the road with the Strangler, he had had to hold himself back to keep his job. By the time they had reached the eastern mining towns he knew that no one in the world could beat the shrewd wild boy with the heart of a honeyfed bear.
But the Strangler had only a few years left, he himself had a lifetime. And he liked the Strangler, poor brute.
An old-time promoter, one of Dockery’s hangers-on, admired The Birmingham Strong Boy yet – ‘He could hit you in the ass so hard you’d break your leg. And still I’ve seen him suffering the agonies of the damned, letting some country athlete haul him from one side of the ring to the other while he scaled the house, though nobody who was unarmed could really hurt him. Once some brave guy pitched him into the folding chairs before he’d finished counting the balcony. Achilles picked up two sets of them chairs, stretched the brave guy cold with one set and his manager with the other and held off the house till the cops arrived. Neither man nor box office could whip him. If you ask me, he could hold off the cops today.’
Yet in the time it takes for a second-hand to move from twelve to six he had been beaten for keeps and his glowing manhood beginning so luckily, so clean, was smashed into something half man and half-platform. Santa Fe freight wheels had proved even shrewder than he.
What had been extricated, after hours of extremest pain in which he had not once permitted himself to faint, was no longer Achilles The Birmingham Strong Boy, but only Legless Schmidt. One-At-The-Hip-And-One-At-The-Knee Schmidt to whom every two-legger might be the one who had rolled him beneath the wheels.
Sure he’d been drunk but what of that? He’d been on the drunk before and gotten a bit of sleep with one leg locked in a box-car’s spine between one county fair and the next.
If it had been his own doing, no one’s fault but his own, it would be easier to accept even now. Yet, moving behind his memory there lurked forever the suspicion that he had been deliberately shoved over. At moments he could almost feel the hands at his shoulder, the knee in his back.
Two years in a dusty desert hospital where the power that once had moved dead Achilles’s thighs began to flow with a wilder pride through crippled Schmidt.
All he now recalled of the hospital was the bitter blowing of alkali dust all day against the pane. And the face of some intern’s wife who had cut a turtle-neck jersey for him from his red cape.
Where in letters once gilt now long washed to gray all that remained of his brief fame kept fading—
Young Achilles
Lost lost, all lost, swift as the desert dust that taps once and never is blown again.
Blown, blown, the fame and the gathering strength, the girls, the money, the power. Profession and pride gone in one night’s passage – and gone so uselessly.
After that he had let himself be billed briefly as The Living Half. He had sat his home-made platform in the freakish sun, looking down at farmers in town to see the freaks. And the honeyfed bear, that once had drawn in his claws, wished as he sat that he could be no more than one great claw.
The sideshow billing had been his greatest humiliation, one upon which he had drawn a shade. He never spoke of it himself and felt his secret was safe enough among the lost and the damned of Perdido Street.
Yet in his heart had never evened up for The Living Half – a thing like that.
Once while he chatted with several girls crowding behind a Perdido Street screen, a man with a metal support compensating for one short leg came hurrying down the street. He carried a briefcase under one arm and pens and pencils in his coat. Late for some business appointment, that was plain.
Schmidt flared at sight of him, and wheeling after on noiseless bearings, sent the rival cripple spinning so hard that, had he not caught himself against a wall, he would have ended flat on his face. Then swerved with one deft twist of the wheels and faced his man, head lowered in challenge.
But all his man wanted was to be allowed to go his own way. He clubfooted it, hippety-hop, off the curb and around and went free.
Schmidt wheeled in triumph back to his girls. ‘Well, why give him a chance?’ he asked. ‘What chance would he have given me?’
And the mascaraed, Maybellined eye-shadowed girls agreed with a cold vindictive glee—
‘Why give him a chance? What chance would he have give you?’
Hallie and Dove lived behind a wrought-iron rail a long winding way from old Perdido. The rail enclosed a tiny balcony two stories above Royal Street. Across the way someone long ago had painted a white tin moon against a blue tin sky. A sky of midnight blue. A moon of Christmas snow. Long ago.
Now rust and rain had run the colors, sun had flaked the midnight snow. Nothing remained but a ruined moon in a sky that had fallen through.