Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

I tried to talk him out of it.

You should have saved your breath.

Don’t hold it against him.

Shutters, lattices, and doors are all flung open to the rare breeze on this hot day, the room flushed with light as if the ceiling has been lifted away. Tabbs suffers a miserable feeling of inner and outer lightness. He watches Ruggles lift his teacup with those glove-dark hands, slurp it empty, and return it to the saucer.

It was getting cold, Ruggles says.

Ruggles was never one to let anything go to waste, finding use for stale bread and flat beer and wormy meat. The hard impact of his presence, his fierce determined eyes, sharp chin, flat weak nose, and scrotum-shaped head, turns Tabbs’s mind to the Pygmy inside his bell-shaped cage, Tabbs a boy of Seven or eight and the Pygmy no taller than him, a grown man withstanding with silent grim impersonality the food pelted at him. Each day Tabbs would sneak inside the Ape House and quietly make his way to the Pygmy cage. Succeed in eliciting (aggravating?) the patrons’ disgust with made-up facts and chronicles about the Pygmy. As if by unspoken agreement with Tabbs, the Pygmy would act out with brazen savagery the peculiar traits of his species, gnashing his teeth, flailing his arms, gyrating his loin-clothed pelvis, and massaging his bare chest. Heedless of the bread, candy, cookies, apples, oranges, bananas, pears, and peanuts thrown into his cage until he took the offensive, his spit and piss driving patrons away. Tabbs would eat or pocket much of what had fallen short of the cage, what the Pygmy’s short arms couldn’t reach through the bars. One afternoon like so many before, Tabbs found himself in the company of a misshapen man who it would seem had not fled with the others. The Pygmy was aware of him too. The Pygmy began the first assault of many on the man, but the man only lowered his face, taking spit on the lapels of his jacket and the crown of his stovepipe hat, and urine wherever the directed streams found their mark. In this way the man endured fluids for a good quarter hour or more. The Pygmy ceased his attack for reasons only he knew and for several moments stood there in his cage gazing out at the spit-speckled man dripping from chest to shoes with piss. Then he turned away and sat down in a back area of his cage, relishing the first of his bananas. The man who had stood his ground calmly invited Tabbs to join him at his home for a well-cooked meal. Tabbs accepted without hesitation, and sometime later that night, after the man had taken a bath and changed his clothing, after both he and Tabbs had enjoyed a long rambling dinner, both belly-full, sometime during the course of that night — most of the details now are lost in Tabbs’s memory — the man offered Tabbs employment. The following evening Tabbs went to work for Ruggles — that was the man’s name — finding customers for Ruggles’s black box, Tabbs quickly realizing an easy competence in the arts of procuring and persuading so that the line of entry to the black box on average would stretch twenty men deep. Get them in, get them out. The black box a place of pleasure but hardly a place of comfort, barely long and wide enough for one person to stretch out in, let alone two, the ceiling so low that you had to stoop at all times, and completely cut off from light. Still, men came one after the next, spilling in and out from opening to closing. Seeing how well Tabbs conducted this enterprise, Ruggles brought Tabbs along with him some years later when he went into lending.

I didn’t think you wanted the tea. Ruggles imbibes his own cup of tea.

Of course I wanted it, Tabbs says. And I want it still. It is not the smallness of his beginnings he fears. Who he is now is whom he has chosen to become.

I’ll have her bring another cup.

I was not. Now I am. Watching his own changing selves, malleable shapes lacking advantage of birth and education; resourceful and limitless and fearless. Beating the odds. Tabbs wondering whether there are any others like him and the Pygmy and Tom who have escaped the cages of their keepers and refused the roles held out to them. He sees the darkness inside his head filling with bananas and pears and apples. Hears peanuts clinking against the sides of his skull. Looks and sees a fresh steaming cup on the table. Takes it up with violent speed, sips forcefully, and returns it so loudly to the saucer he fears he has broken it.

Ruggles looks embarrassed, embarrassed for Tabbs. Ruggles has sunk back into the chair, into the softness of the cushions, his legs crossed easily in front of him. You might need still another, he says. And a fish. Smiling the words.

Hot fluid rushing inside him, Tabbs feels an ambiguous comfort. I need your influence with a certain matter.

Okay, Ruggles says. What?

It’s the mother.

Tabbs observes the friendly uncertainty scattered across Ruggles’s face. On second thought, Ruggles does not really look entirely like the Pygmy.

What about her?

I need you to send her away. Off the island. Just for a few days. Tabbs tries to say it as lightly as possible.

Ruggles continues to look at him. So now it comes out.

She commands his attention. I have to put an end to it, just long enough. I’ve tried talking to her. But how can I stop her from coming when he begs for her?

You can’t.

No.

So put an end to it, all of it, for good.

What?

You’ve milked it for all you can.

And gotten what, Ruggles? You found the boy.

And you think that’s enough? Tabbs shakes his head. Can’t believe I’m hearing you say that, Ruggles. Not you.

That’s the experience, homeskillet. I tried to warn you. Hard head, soft behind.

Hell, I’m soft all over. But that ain’t telling me much.

Dripping light, several swimmers outside seem to (semblance) climb in through the windows. Towel themselves dry with shadow.

You listening?

I’m listening.

Ruggles makes a gesture as if to say that anything he might add would be useless. He is displeased with the turn the conversation has taken and remains silent for a while staring at the floor. Tabbs hates feeling that Ruggles knows his mind, assumptions rooted in the certainties of their long history, Ruggles filling in the blanks about all that lay between Tabbs’s first efforts before the war to free the boy from General Bethune to the freeing itself that leaf-strewn day last fall when Tabbs found Mr. David at the Home shortly after he and the mother had arrived together here on Edgemere. Knows too that correlated moment several weeks later when Tabbs returned from the city carrying the weightless boy in his arms.

I can’t chance a week to see this through?

So see it through. You don’t need me. You brought her here. You brought them both.

No, Ruggles. It must come from you. She will listen to you.

Ruggles looks up from the floor into Tabbs’s face. He looks as if he wants to erase Tabbs with his gaze. Then I better leap to it, he says.

Tabbs says nothing in response. In a moment’s concentrated rush, he realizes that he has insulted Ruggles, never his intention.

Where must I send her for your week? Say it and I’ll obey.

Tabbs accepts the remark with good grace and continues to meet Ruggles’s gaze, every tendon in his body throbbing, prepared for flight. The small room feels too full with them both, with them and the swimmers and the vases. Now the difficult task of restoring the equilibrium, but no apology is likely to impose its will on Ruggles. Strong-headed. Stubborn. A reconciliation best left for another day. Tabbs looks about the room with the sensuous approval of someone who knows it well. Draws up a name— Wire —that pinches his tongue.

Of course. Throw him in this too.

Tabbs lets the comment drip away, him here, Ruggles there, the separate curves of a parenthesis, space between them. She can help Wire settle in, he says.