Jonah Man (9 page)

My valises are chained in the luggage hole. We’re headed for the last stop on this run. I board the bus, eye the seats, walk past Jonson and his boy and on to the back. Jonson’s beside me before I’ve had a chance to close my eyes.

Comfy, Swain? he asks.

Too soon to tell, I say.

Why’d you do it? he asks.

Do what?

Get on this bus.

You know why.

There’s time, he says. The driver ain’t pulled out yet.

I’m not done.

Goddamn it, Swain, I’m trying to help you.

Don’t.

He rolls his shoulders.

Take the scenery in, Swainee, he says. Don’t miss a drop. This is your last ride.

 

Jonson falls down drunk onstage. The boy keeps on as if his father’s collapse were part of the act. Watching the boy from the wings, I think, You ought to be grateful.

That night, I sit on my valise, ear to the wall, waiting for Jonson’s boy to take his nightly walk. My body aches from what I haven’t put in it. Sometimes my vision blurs, sometimes what I’m looking at comes in so clear my head reels back.

Jonson is still drunk, or maybe drunk again. His words run on without any shape to them. I can feel the boy wanting to break away.

There’s a knocking at Jonson’s door. The boy leaves, a woman enters. I go to the window, lean my head outside, watch the boy cross the street. I feel like I might be sick, like I might vomit up not only the contents of my stomach, but the stomach itself, bringing with it intestines, esophagus, pharynx. The desert air has turned cold. I hold still at the window, let the breeze cool my skin.

I stand, pace the perimeter of the bed, bite at the inside of my cheeks to keep my teeth from quivering. The message on the call board told me to report in the morning. Jonson, no doubt, has been told to report before me.

I can hear them now, laughing, working the bedsprings.
Jonson must be feeding her liquor, or maybe something more.

There won’t be time, I think. She will leave, and the boy will be back.

I take the gun from my sock, drop it in my front left pocket, step into the hall. I stand beside Jonson’s door, listening. My body is breaking down, dissolving. My clothes are soaked through. One step more, I think. If not tonight, then never again.

I reach for the knob, turn it slow. I have one foot inside Jonson’s room.

From his window he could see the vacant plot where he’d buried her. A clearing in the weeds, three feet of copper pipe for a headstone. His son was crying behind him. Jonson glanced back, spotted thin lines of blood breaking through the hives.

You’re going to leave scars, he said.

He took a small pair of scissors from the window sill and knelt beside the basket.

Easy now, he said.

Straightening the boy’s fingers one at a time, he trimmed the nails halfway down.

He lifted his son from the basket and laid him atop a faded blanket in the claw-foot tub that took up most of the apartment’s only room. The crying bounced around the basin, spiked abruptly upward. Jonson reached for the bottle and rag he kept beneath the tub. He soaked a swatch of cloth in brandy, wrapped the fabric around his finger, coated the boy’s gums. He drank some himself, then reached the fingers of his free hand into a small container of foundation left over from his stage career. He rubbed the tan make-up evenly over his son’s hives, caked it over the cuts and scabs. The boy fussed, slapped at his father’s hand, kicked at the blanket where it caught his feet.

All right, now, Jonson said.

He leaned back, surveying his work. The welts were covered over, but the boy’s face appeared sunburned, almost brown. Jonson loosened the drawstring on the final sack of his wife’s effects, those he had not been able to sell, rummaged through until he uncovered a small jar of white powder. He dusted the boy’s cheeks, lightened the skin by a full shade.

That’ll do, he said, returning his son to the basket, packing a day bag for himself.

A succession of trolleys carried them through narrow streets lined with jerrybuilt row houses, then outsized boulevards dotted with bistros and boutiques. An old woman paused over the basket to smile and coo. Johnson turned away, squinted out at the street, tried to still the bobbing derbies with his eyes.

The final trolley let them off just shy of Ray’s building. A doorman with tassled epaulettes called upstairs, then let him pass. Jonson rode the elevator to the penthouse, rang a small ivory pushbutton, trailed a uniformed maid into a parlor done up in damask wallpaper and walnut wainscoting. She gestured to a leather Morris chair, pulled the door shut behind her.

Friendly, Jonson said.

He set his son on the floor, toured the room. There was a marble fireplace with steel doors and brass andirons, a collection of silver-plated samovars on the mantle above. A small oak desk housed a hooded typewriter with no ribbon or paper. It was a good while before Ray entered.

Tell that lady who let me in she needs to dust the insides, Jonson said, balancing a small samovar on his palm.

Please sit, Ray said.

We have something to talk about?

Sit.

They sat in matching loveseats, Jonson’s son asleep between them, his basket filling the marble coffee table. Ray leaned forward,
seemed to be counting the hives through the foundation.

That’s just shit babies get, Jonson said.

I’m not in the market.

A loan, then, Jonson said. I already got people interested in my services.

What people?

A liner out of New York. Room and board plus cash in my sock drawer.

How much are you asking?

I got that doctor after me.

How much?

A grand.

Is that all?

You being sarcastic? My wife’s dead.

You’d never pay me back.

I could say I would.

I know somebody who might be interested, Ray said. In the boy.

He took a pad and pencil from his jacket pocket, wrote out a name and address, tore the sheet free. He offered it to Jonson, then pulled it back, set it on the table beside the basket.

Are you sure this is what she would want? he asked. For you to pawn her child?

Hers? I thought he was at least part mine, Jonson said. Maybe you know something I don’t.

Don’t be an ass.

Maybe he’s yours all along?

If you want something, you’re going about it the wrong way.

I want back onstage. Get me on a circuit and I’ll keep him.

I can’t.

Why?

You’re not solo talent.

Jonson plucked at the stitching of the arm rests with his fingernails and stared across the table. Ray was tallow-faced, sloe-eyed. Creases cut through his forehead like runnels. Jonson hesitated, then took up the sheet of paper.

I hope you ain’t waiting on a commission, he said.

He walked the thirty blocks to save on fare. The streets, empty at first, began to fill with vendors and school kids, then stock brokers, realtors, lawyers—bloated men in tailored suits who didn’t know what to make of him or the baby he was carrying. He set his son down at the center of a busy sidewalk, straddled the basket and shook out his wrists. People parted around him, seemed to quicken their pace.

The skyscrapers gave way to row houses; the sidewalks began again to empty. The air was cold for late October but his undershirt clung to the small of his back and his forehead was damp. He set the basket on the concrete stoop, wiped sleep from his son’s eyes, stood studying the boy’s new home. The windows, set close together, appeared just wide enough to fit a child’s torso; the beige bricks were packed in around slight lines of mortar.

He rang the bell, waited. An undersized boy of five or maybe six let him in, then turned and ran up the stairs. Jonson followed. Already he could hear a piano poorly played, a host of young voices blotting one another out. The woman Ray had mentioned stood sideways in a doorway off the third-floor landing.

Mr. Jonson? she said. Ray sent word you’d be coming. I’m sorry to hear about your wife.

She spoke like a singer. Like a woman who’d swallowed a lot of air.

Thank you, ma’am, he said.

Inside, there were children clinging to battered sofas and
chairs, sitting cross legged on rugs, pressing against walls. Some were dressed in costumes, others in their bed clothes. A girl in pigtails failed at handstand after handstand; two small boys helped a kid in his teens balance himself atop a unicycle. There were pancakes grilling in the adjoining kitchenette, dirty dishes stacked on a straw mat in the far corner. The woman clapped her hands, scattered the children to a back room.

Leona, she said to the girl at the piano, keep an eye on those hot cakes. To Jonson she said, This is no place for a kid to get lonely.

I can see that.

Now, where’s your boy?

Right here.

She glanced at the basket.

Him?

Yes ma’am.

Oh son, she said. Ray should’ve known better. Managers pay by the head. That ain’t a head yet.

He comes from show stock.

Bring him back in four or five years. I need kids who can sing, dance. At least talk and walk. Ray should’ve known better.

Yes ma’am, he should have, Jonson said.

Outside, he set the basket atop a garbage can, spit on his thumb and wiped the boy’s cheeks clean.

Go on, he said. You can fuss all you want now.

He stopped at a diner across from the doctor’s office, the restaurant where he’d eaten with Ginny after each of her visits. It was patronized by staff from the nearby hospital, decorated with finger paintings from the children’s ward. The waitresses’ uniforms looked to be made from the same material as a surgeon’s mask. Ginny would order breakfast food, even in the late afternoon—eggs sunny-side up, toast burnt. She’d break the
yolks with the desiccated bread, leave the whites on her plate.

Jonson took a seat by the window, ordered coffee and asked for a pen. He quieted his son with a sugar cube, sat watching the passersby, wondering how many of them would have done better than he had done, if there were some key he’d missed, something that appeared obvious to everyone but him.

He opened his napkin on the table, started to write.

He left money pinned under his empty coffee cup, walked as far as the door, then returned to the table and took back the tip. He stuffed the change in his sock, started across the street with his son.

The doctor would be at the hospital all morning, interviewing patients, waking them to ask how they’d slept, pressing on their injured parts to make sure it hurt in all the right places. Jonson entered the lobby, set the basket against the office door, draped the napkin, writing-side up, over the handle. He crouched down, laid an open hand across the boy’s stomach.

Sorry, he said. It just ain’t in me.

He started for the train station with his wrist throbbing from the absent weight. He’d be in New York by next morning, would be sailing for Europe in two days time. He walked a half-dozen blocks, sat on the curb, told himself he had nothing to regret: he’d done what he could, hurt nobody. He tried and failed to push his mind forward.

He stood, headed back.

The baby was laughing, slapping his hands together as though applauding whatever he’d found funny. Jonson transferred him from basket to basin, took a shoebox from under the tub, removed a razor blade, a small jar of peach puree, a tube of soporifics left over from the early stages of Ginny’s illness. The pills were dwindling: a week at most and they would be gone. He slid one out, set a spoonful of puree on the floor, held the pill between thumb and forefinger and scraped at its edge with the razor blade until a fine blue dust coated the puree. He returned the remainder of the pill to the tube, stirred the puree with the tip of his little finger, then offered the spoon to his son. Once the boy was asleep, Jonson dug what money he had out of his socks, set aside a ten-dollar bill and spread the rest between his back pockets. He shut the light, locked the door behind him.

The pool hall was empty save for two men playing at a far table—brothers, their features near identical, separated by a half-dozen years or more. There were stickered valises and a damaged guitar case propped against the wall behind them; their clothes were crumpled, their shirttails untucked, their hair uncombed. The older wore a fedora hat with a string running brim to brim beneath his chin; the younger wore glasses made of two different colored frames soldered together at the nose. The older
amused himself with trick shots he couldn’t execute, made fake bets, blamed the younger for every miss. The younger powdered his cue, took careful aim.