The Spyglass Tree (5 page)

A
fter lights out most nights I used to talk to him about Gasoline Point and Mobile; he asked about the Gulf Coast and about the bayous and sandbars and canebrakes; he also wanted to hear what I knew about Creoles and Cajuns, and I said I knew much more about Creoles than about Cajuns, but that I did know some and I had been to Chastang and Citronelle, which Gasoline Point people always used to think of as Cajun settlements.

He wanted to know which Indians, if any, I had grown up hearing the most about, and I said, The Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Seminoles, and the Creeks, and I said, Especially the Creeks because from as long ago as I could remember, any time you saw somebody in Gasoline Point with very dark skin and coal-black straight or somewhat wiry hair, it was almost always said that whoever it was belonged to a family with blood mixed with the Creek Indians.

That was something you knew about just as you had always known about how Uncle Jo Jo the African and the people who had
originally settled on African Baptist Hill and also founded African Baptist church had come through middle passage in the old Clotilde in August of 1859.

I said, Naturally you were always used to seeing Creoles and Cajuns, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles along with Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, a few gee-chee-talking West Indians and a whole lot of others during Mardi Gras every year, not only in the parades but also on the sidewalk all along the route of the procession.

As close as Gasoline Point was to the waterfront of a seaport town like Mobile, you also grew up used to seeing ships from the seven seas flying flags of many lands. And just as you were used to knowing which downtown stores sailors and merchant seamen gathered around and also what points on which downtown side-streets were mainly Cajun or Creole or Cuban, you also knew that when you came toward the foot of Government Street and approached the area of Commerce Street and Water Street, you were always going to hear sailors and shopkeepers speaking more foreign languages than you could identify.

When I told him about Luzana Cholly, he filled me in some more about the Old Trooper. He had mustered out in 1900 and settled in California for a while, had first met Jack Johnson when Old Jack was out there building up the reputation that was to lead to the heavyweight championship of the world in the next five years.

The night club deal was a few years later in Chicago, he said, and I said, Hey, so the Old Trooper was still in during the Spanish-American War. So was his outfit in there with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders? And he said, Well, not exactly. Old Troop was in the Tenth and they were right there with the Rough Riders in that action on San Juan Hill all right. But you know something? They went up that son-of-a-bitch
on foot
, because their horses were still in the Port of Embarkation back in Florida.

That was one of the Old Trooper’s one thousand plus one tall tales for later, he said. But actually it came up again sooner than later because within a week or so, we found out that there were some of the Old Trooper’s saddle buddies from the Tenth and also from the Spanish-American War along with veterans from the Ninth and quite a few not so old doughboys from the AEF right there on the campus, not only on the dean of men’s staff and in the trades school, but also in the academic department, and also the music department.

The first time he ever mentioned anything at all about his father was when he said what he said the night that I told him that Mama and Papa had moved from the old plantation country up in Escambia County where I was born down to the shotgun house on Dodge Mill Road during the wartime shipbuilding boom. He said, when they moved from Lowndes County to Chicago, it was part of the postwar boom, and that was when he also said that his father didn’t make it back from overseas, and that was why the Old Trooper had come down and taken the family back to live with him.

I didn’t get to know my natural father, he said, because I was not quite two years old when he went to camp. And then he said, so the father whose name I bear is really only a man in a photograph. Three photographs all posed in a studio, one as a young sport, one with his bride, and one in uniform. You know, wraparound leggings, tight coat with stand-up collar, and overseas cap.

That was why I decided to tell him about Miss Tee, something I had never brought up on my own with anybody before. Not even Little Buddy Marshall. I had said what I said to him because after Miss Minnie Ridley Stovall did what she did at Mister Ike Meadow’s wake that night while everybody thought I was asleep, I knew people were going to be whispering and I didn’t want him to think that I didn’t know what was going on.

I didn’t say anything about that part of it, but I did tell him
that I had never been able to bring myself to ask Miss Tee anything whatsoever about how it all had happened. I had to pick up as much as I could without letting anybody know that I was even curious, and in due time I found out that she had had to leave boarding school and she couldn’t face her family and neighbors back in her hometown, so that was why I happened to be born in Escambia County. She had an older cousin who had finished the same boarding school several years earlier and was teaching down there. It was this cousin who was the one who took her in and also arranged for Mama and Papa to adopt me.

But I never did find out anything at all about who my father was, I said, because she was the only one in Gasoline Point who knew. And man, I just have never been able to say anything to her about any of it. And that’s when he said, Man, fathers. Just wait until you hear some of the riffs and hot licks I’ve been grooving and running on fathers all these years. And uncles, too, he said. Not to mention mothers, aunts, godmothers, and some others
.

W
hen I stopped off in the lounge on my way back alone from the dining hall one night about three weeks into that first September, there were three freshmen and four upperclassmen with their chairs pulled up in a semicircle around the radio console. But they were not really listening to the program of recorded music that filled in the thirty minutes before the news and sports broadcasts. They were listening to each other, with the music which I call downtown department store pop songs—“Smoke Rings,” “Isn’t It a Lovely Day?” “The Little Things You Used to Do,” or “I Only Have Eyes for You”—and instrumentais, in the background like the wall furnishings.

It was a session about what your roommate was really like, and they were mostly just joking, and I found a spot for my chair; and when my turn came, I said what I said and that was how I became the one who was actually responsible for the nickname my roommate was to be known by, although I didn’t have that name or notion or any other nickname in mind at all.

Later on I would have said he was by way of becoming a polymath, but I don’t think that word was current then. But I had just read the captions to the illustrations of Christopher Marlowe’s play
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
in my anthology of English literature, so I said, Doctor Faustus, and when somebody said Doctor Whostus, I said, You know about that guy that made the big deal to swap his immortal soul with the Devil, and one of the upperclassmen said, Oh yeah, him. Oh yeah, goddamn, hey yeah, that’s a good one. And before anybody else could open his mouth, I realized that they were all thinking about the magicians we had all seen come on stage wearing a top hat and a frock coat and also a black cape with a red lining and carrying a cane and begin by announcing themselves as diabolical craftsmen and technicians who had sacrificed their souls to the devil in exchange for knowledge of forbidden secrets of the universe.

Which made him a witch doctor in a top hat. So somebody said, Snake doctor. Which in a day or so had been reduced to snake as in snake-oil salesman to be sure, but also, and indeed precisely, as in snake in the grass. Because in a week or so even those who were in on the session in the lounge that Thursday night and so had to know that my main point about Doctor Faustus was that my roommate wanted to study and master the entire curriculum seemed nevertheless to have come to take it for granted that a sneaky snakiness was what his sidelong smile and chuckle and his ever-so-casual and offhand manner were really about.

Nor according to some could anything be a sneakier game of one-upmanship than his classroom deportment. He always sat in the back row with his chair tilted against the wall as if he were totally preoccupied with something other than the discussion under way, and when he was called on to recite he always looked up from whatever he was reading, writing, or sketching as if surprised, but he always answered as if he had heard what everybody else had said from the outset. Not only that, but with his
quietly conversational responses he not only upstaged everybody else, but also began a brief dialogue with the instructor. Then he would tilt his chair back again as if nothing had happened.

Faust, Faustus, or Snake Doctor, it was all the same to him, he said when I told him about how it all had gotten started in the lounge that Thursday night. But you could tell that he was very pleased at the way it had turned out, so I asked him what he thought a name like that would do for his reputation among the coeds, and he rubbed his palms and knuckles and went into his mock penny-dreadful heh-heh-heh.

They may be academic chuckleheads who are here only to acquire a means for more bread and circuses, he said, but this matter of sobriquets does have pragmatic implications which in this case shall be assayed anon.

And assay he did before the end of the next week and he found out that the Snake had already achieved such notoriety in the girls’ dormitories and that getting dates was not going to be a problem. Not that either one of us was ready to take on a regular girlfriend yet. I had decided that all of that would have to come later, and I couldn’t afford it anyway. After all, I was not even sure that I was going to be able to come up with the minimum amount of cash you needed for academic incidentals. So money for date favors and treats definitely was out of the question for me.

He could spare the spending change but for the time being he was even less willing to put in the hours you had to spend shucking and stuffing and jiving in the dining hall and on the promenade mall than I was. As a matter of fact, we both decided that we didn’t even want to be
invited
to escort anybody to a dance or any other social function, not even entertainment series movies, concerts, and plays, to which admission was by Student Privilege card.

You couldn’t be too careful about things like that. Or so they used to say in those days. And he had also been warned by his
mother and the Old Trooper among others in Chicago as I had been told time and again by Mister B. Franklin Fisher and Miss Lexine Metcalf among other well-wishers down Mobile way, including the one and only Miss Slick McGinnis, that some coeds came to college to earn a degree but that the certificate that some others were out to get just might be one with
your
name on it.

So Snake was just the name for the game we both had in mind for the time being, and he made the most of it, and so did I. Because it faked quite a few of the more adventurous coeds into taking him on as a city slicker from the big up-north city of Chicago, and as his roommate I was automatically credited with, or accused of, being his buddy from the down-home city of Mobile.

I heard about you, a sophomore whom I will not name but who was from Birmingham and was taking Elementary French Review No. I, said as we were coming out of class one day. I heard all about you, you and that roommate of yours, the Snake. And I said, You can’t go by what you hear, and before she could say anything, I also said, The best way is to find out things for yourself, and she said, Aw—you go on now, boy. But when she gave me a playful shove, I caught her hand and she said, What you think you doing, freshman? And I said, Being very fresh and very, very mannish, and she said, See there, what I heard was true. I was still holding her hand and I said, I hope so the way you signifying.

There was also the one who was a junior, no less, from Pittsburgh. She worked in the library and sometimes she was the one at the main circulation desk and after several weeks I could tell she was curious about me and I thought it was because of all the time I was spending at the table in the corner by the rubber plant. So as good-looking as she was, I pretended that I didn’t really see her even when she was the one stamping the checkouts. But then one day she said what she said and that was the beginning of that.

You sure had me fooled, she said, and I said, Who me? How? and she said, Here I was thinking that you were kinda cute to be
such a bookworm and come to find out you’re rooming with the Snake of all people, and I said, What’s wrong with that, and she said, He’s so stuck on himself he goes around acting like he’s God’s gift to women, and I said, I’ll settle for being God’s gift to you, and she said, Well if you aren’t the freshest freshman yet. So when her regular boyfriend went on trips with the football team and then the basketball team, she was the one.

That was the kind of on-campus action my roommate and I had going for us that first year, and I still don’t know how I got away with it all without ever being called Little Snake or Snake Two or Snake Number Two or the Lizard or the Eel or something like that. Somebody was forever saying that we were two of a kind, but I was known as but not addressed as the Other One.

So much for Doctor Faustus as far as just about everybody else was concerned. But as pre-sophomoric as it probably sounded to an upperclassman coming as it did from a newly arrived freshman, I still think it was a pretty good analogy because what I really meant was the fact that my roommate was the first student I ever met who really believed that everything you studied in a classroom should become just as much a part of what you did everyday as everything else. To him, nothing was just academic stuff, so as far as he was concerned, there was no reason whatsoever why you shouldn’t know just as much about the fundamentals of any course in the curriculum as any student who had checked it as the major for a degree. After all, as he had already said as he unpacked his books, the very best undergraduate courses were only a very brief introduction to some aspect of the plain old everyday facts of life that were just as important to you as to anybody else.