Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“There aint no subject, boy,” Mr. O said and laughed his wheezy, pressurized laugh.

They stood a moment looking up at the fuzzy January stars. Orion’s lantern, the Sisters’ broken stroke aimed at the distant iron mountains.

Delvin went ahead with his note plan, writing in florid ink strokes a message first worked out on a scrap of butcher paper. I was most grateful to be of service. . Would you care to share a cup of tea at the Little Hummingbird cafe over on Jefferson street? If so, please. . by return. . yours. . Delvin wanted to make sure Mr. O would have to go. Of course he’d be angry but he’d get over that.

Delvin decided to write another set of letters detailing Mr. Oliver’s good qualities. I tell interesting stories, am not stingy with the pocket money, have never been a finicky eater, relish sitting out on the side porch reading good books, am a devotee of worksaving appliances, take no more than a ceremonial sip of wine (no spirits) and act gentlemanly at all times — and I have good table manners and can be counted on in a pinch. .

“That is a fine piece of work,” Delvin said to himself as he folded the prepared sheets into envelopes he’d lifted from the bunch tucked in one of the cubbyholes in Mr. O’s big secretary desk.

Replies to the invites came quickly. Both ladies said they would be delighted to join Mr. Oliver for tea. Delvin was able to determine the exact moment when the funeral director received the first answer. This by way of the loudly exclaimed cry, “What the goddamn hell!”

He also heard Mr. O tell Polly to go fetch him.

He ran out the kitchen door, through the back gate and out into the alley where Willie Burt was washing the old Crane & Breed glass-sided hearse they kept for those few who still preferred the departed to be carried to the cemetery by horse pull. The horses were in a little four-stall barn down the alley. Delvin liked to go out there and sit near their stalls. He didn’t particularly like horses but he liked the smell of the hay. He went down there now and pulled himself up on a pile of stacked bales. He pulled the little green volume of Othello out of his jacket pocket, leaned back against a bale and began to read. Iago was busy with his underhanded ways. They were nothing to what he, Delvin Walker, former child pretender to the throne of France, was up to. But maybe he shouldn’t have done what he did. Lord, I got to slow down. He had already been in one fight that morning. With a high school boy who had caught him the other day whistling at his little plump girlfriend over on Stockton street. Roscoe Blake his name was, a portly fellow with an incipient hump. Roscoe had slapped him in the face. Delvin had fallen back into the manure pile — right behind this barn. He’d got up and hit Roscoe with two chunks of crumbly manure. Roscoe came at him windmilling both fists. Delvin was amazed at how silly he looked. He ducked and poked him tentatively in the belly. Roscoe went down as if he had hit him with a bat. He rolled over three times — like he was going to roll on down the alley, Delvin thought — but then he got up. He shook his fist at Delvin and shouted that he had better leave Preeny alone or worse was coming. “Hadn’t seemed too bad so far,” Delvin said. Roscoe had walked off stiff-legged like a dog down the alley toward the bicycle he rode everywhere. He was a pretty boy and always had money.

But this episode wasn’t troubling him at the moment. I feel burdened by life, Delvin thought. He missed his mother. These days he only thought of her when he said his prayers at night. “Bless Mama,” he said as he knelt beside the bed, as he had been taught at the foundling home and required to do. Those two words were all he said. Each night they floated away on a puff of breath to where he didn’t know. No one, as far as he knew, had heard news of her. He’d better go over to the Emporium again to check if anybody over there had received word from her, or about her.

Just then, Elmer, resettling the brimless cap he never took off, arrived to say he was wanted back at the house.

“Did you tell em you saw me?”

“I didn’t see no harm in it.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Elmer, who had disliked Delvin on sight, laughed.

“You go on,” Delvin said.

“Some’s got real work to do.”

“When you run across one you might ask him for a few pointers.” Elmer blew air through his fat lips, turned and sloped out of the barn. Delvin waited until he was fully out of sight and sound and then he waited a few minutes longer before he started to the house.

One day he took a walk across town to the house where he was born, the canted little shabby place where an old woman whose name he could never keep straight until she spelled it — B-e-a-u-c-h-a-m-p, pronounced Beecham — told him the story of that day, his birth day. (He had already heard it from old Mr. Heberson down at the store.) As the woman spoke he pulled a new penny notebook from his pocket and began to take notes. She said fresh out in the air he’d made sounds like he was talking to himself in an unknown language. Said the day was hot and still, all the leaves in the big poplar tree hanging straight down. Said the big old black rooster over at Hemley’s crowed and wouldn’t stop. Said, “You could smell the birth from out de alley.” She looked hard at him. “You not going to put that in the paper is you?”

“No mam, I just want to keep up with my story.”

The house — shanty, owned by Mr. Odel Dupee, an oldtime Red Row colored landlord, with rusty broken windowsills hanging like a drunkard’s lip and leaning shiplap walls — was temporarily empty due to the flight of its most recent occupants after a homebrewed liquor bust two days before. Delvin thought of moving back in himself, but he enjoyed living at the funeral home. He thought it would probably be too hard on his feelings if he did. On the porch floor were little cone-shaped piles of sawdust from where the boring bugs had been at the wood. The shabbiness of the place bothered him, humiliated him a little; he didn’t want to have to try to fix up the house. The smell he remembered of it (and occasionally ran into out in the world) made him recall the wood as oiled-down, smooth and dark, but in life that wasn’t so. The floors, walls — every part — were scabby and dry and smelled of faded and stalled living. He shied from the place.

He walked the neighborhood, stopping at various spots to ask questions about his mother. She had never been apprehended, never heard from again after her flight. Many thought she was dead. At the Emporium she was remembered by a few — forgotten by most — as a quick-spirited woman without guile but fast to anger — if he really wanted to know, real hotheaded. A fat woman in yellow stockings remembered that she liked to tear cloth into strips and try to weave something out of it but was unable to come up with anything much. She had tried to read books, too, but she couldn’t do it well enough to make it fun. Tried to play the ukulele, but couldn’t master that either.

“She was good at talking to men,” the woman said, pursing her large mouth and making a puffing sound, “good at telling funny stories.”

The room they sat in that afternoon had yellow-and-purple-striped wallpaper.

“You looking for a tryout?” she asked Delvin and he wasn’t sure what she meant and said, no, he didn’t think so.

A man in a checked yellow suit came in through a door to the right and he had a pistol butt poking out of his coat pocket. The pistol gave Delvin an exhilarated feeling and he had to press himself not to jump up and run. The man grinned at him. Bunny Boy Williams — everybody knew he lived there. He had two large steel teeth in front. He rubbed the teeth with the side of his left forefinger and grinned again at Delvin and propped himself against the striped wall.