The Spyglass Tree (6 page)

Which is why you never knew what his side of the room was going to look like when you came back at the end of the day. Or, for that matter, sometimes when you woke up in the morning. As often as not, the drafting board would be flattened out into a work table and rigged up with whatever equipment he’d have come by
for whatever exercise he had underway. One day it might be a makeshift chemistry laboratory. The next day it might be set up for a problem in physics or biology, and when he was reviewing some historical period, he sketched his own maps, and he always got a special kick out of making his own war room mock-ups and outlining the strategies and retracing the maneuvers of the crucial battles of the great army and naval commanders.

During the second week of classes he had picked up the footlocker now under his bed from a senior in the building trades and that is where he stashed his special equipment, including not only his drafting kit and surveying and mapping instruments, but also his 16-mm camera, binoculars, and the parts he was already accumulating by mail order for the amateur radio set and the model airplane he was to build and operate from time to time that next spring.

Meanwhile, by the middle of October he had begun a window greenhouse project that he always found time to keep going full swing no matter whatever else came up. It started with two baskets of ferns he brought in from the greenhouse out on the ag side and hung above the books on the ledge that he also used as an extension of his work corner. Then a few days later he filled in the rest of the space with two shelves of terra-cotta pots, and before the end of November a fine growth of English ivy, tiger aloe, gold dusk, and silver dollar jade was underway, and by the time that first winter settled in, there were red geraniums and yellow nasturtiums, and deep purple African violets in blossom.

Each plant specimen was tagged with its Latin label, but when he got around to adding orchids he called them his Nero Wolf project. So the day I came in and he looked around from what he was probing wearing a pawnbroker’s eye piece, I started laughing and I said, Hey man, goddamn. Don’t tell me you’re a jewel thief, too, and he said, Touché, old pardner, and laughed along
with me. Then he said, But what about Sherlock and his magnifying glass and what about Benvenuto Cellini the goldsmith and his loupe? Not that the cat burglar doesn’t have his challenges for the likes of the old Snake. Hey hey haay, roommate. It’s a thought. Good thinking, roommate. Good thinking.

T
here was a time when everybody in Gasoline Point had expected Creola Calloway to go out on the circuit and become a world famous entertainer. Even before she was thirteen years old, people were already talking about how every vaudeville company that came to play in Mobile in those days always tried to hire her, always promising to make her a headliner in no time at all.

Nobody doubted it. Her endowments were all too obvious. She was so good-looking that she made you catch your breath, and when it came to doing the shimmie-she-wobble, the Charleston, the mess-around, or any other dance step, including ones made up on the spot, she always took the cake without even seeming to try, and also without making anything special of it afterward.

By her fifteenth birthday most people seemed to have decided that her fame and fortune were only a matter of time and choice, which they took for granted would be any day now. Not that anybody ever tried to rush things. After all, along with all of the fun they had enjoyed speculating about her possibilities, there
was also the fact that Gasoline Point would not be the same without her.

As for myself, once I became old enough to begin to realize what they were talking about, I couldn’t ever think about her leaving without also thinking of her coming back, and what I always saw was her rearriving with her own road company and own chauffeur-driven touring-style limousine wearing a hot-mama boa and carrying a lap dog. There would be placards about her in Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s barbershop, on the porch of Stranahan’s store, and on telegraph poles all around town. Then her name would be up in a crown of bright twinkling lights above the main entrance to the Saenger Theatre which was the premier showcase in downtown Mobile in those days.

Actually by that time the way most people in Gasoline Point had begun to act whenever she came around you would have thought that she had already been away and had come back famous. Even when people were standing right next to her on the sidewalk or in a yard somewhere, it was as if they were looking at her satin smooth caramel brown skin and croquignole-frizzy hair and her diamond ring and twenty-four-carat ankle chain on stage with their eyes still glazed by the footlights.

Sometimes even when people were talking directly to her they sounded as if she were no longer a living and breathing person in the flesh anymore. It was as if to men and women alike she was a dazzlingly beautiful woman-child beyond everything else, and as such not only mysterious but also unsettling if not downright disturbing. No wonder pretty girls so often seem to be smiling, either as if in response to applause or as if in self-defense.

But Creola Calloway was never to go anywhere with any road show. It turned out that in spite of all the speculation and predictions that everybody else had been making over the years, by the time she was almost nineteen she had decided that she didn’t want to leave Gasoline Point. All she wanted to do was go
on having a good time, making the rounds from one jook joint and honky-tonk to the next as she had begun doing not long after she dropped out of school (truant officers or no truant officers) even before she finished the ninth grade.

Some people said that she just stayed on in Gasoline Point because she hadn’t ever been able to figure out what she was supposed to do about being so good-looking except to act as if it didn’t really matter. But most others realized that talk like that had more to do with bewilderment if not exasperation than with insight, because all that anybody could actually quote her as saying was that she did not want to go on the road because she did not want to leave Gasoline Point.

And that was that. She didn’t even insist that what she chose to do with her own life was her own private business, because she had already made that point once and for all by dropping out of school when she did. But even so, most of the people who had always concerned themselves about her future all along went right on reacting as if her beautiful face and body were really sacred community commonwealth property and that she therefore had an inviolable obligation to turn into some sort of national credit not only to Gasoline Point and Mobile but also to the greater glory of our folks everywhere.

Nobody ever either accused her of or excused her for not having enough nerve, gall, guts, and get-up to take a chance out on the circuit and up North. Self-confidence was not the problem. Not for Creola Calloway. The problem was her lack of any interest in what, in the slogan of Mobile County Training School (and most church auxiliaries as well), was, A commitment to betterment. Given her God-given assets, that was not just disappointing and exasperating, it made her somebody even more reprehensible than a backslider. it was a betrayal of a divine trust.

That is why by the time she was twenty so many people had
given her up as a lost ball in the high weeds and no longer called her old Creola Calloway (with a passive smile) but that old Creola Calloway (with their eyes rolling). Nor did the outrage have anything to do with the fact that she spent so much time hanging out in jook joints and honky-tonks. There were many church folks who condemned that outright to be sure, but the chances are that if she had gone north and become a famous entertainer like, say, Bessie Smith or Ethel Waters, she would have had their blessing along with everybody else’s.

But she stayed right on in the old Calloway house on Front Street by the trolley line even after Miss Cute (also known as Q for Queenie and as Q T.), who had always been more like a very good-looking older sister than a mother anyway, had gone up North and decided to get married again and settle down in Pittsburgh.

She did pay Miss Cute a visit from time to time and she also used to take the L & N up to Cincinnati and continue on up to Detroit to spend time with her brother every once in a while. His name was Alvin Calloway, Jr., but everybody always called him Brother Calloway, not as in church brother but as if you were saying Buddy Calloway or Bubber Calloway or even Big Brother or Little Brother Calloway. He must have been about three or four years older than his sister and there wasn’t a better automobile mechanic in Gasoline Point before he left to go and get a job in an automobile factory.

One time he came down for Easter in a brand-new Cadillac and she drove back with him and was gone for ten days, and another time she was away for a month because she also spent some time visiting cousins in Cleveland and Chicago. Everybody knew about those trips and also about the time she went out to California to spend six weeks with her father, whose name was Alvin Calloway (Senior) but who was called Cal Calloway and
who had gone out to Los Angeles not long after he came back from France with the AEF. He had a job as a carpenter in a moving picture studio.

I remember knowing that she took the southbound L & N Pan American Express from Mobile to New Orleans and changed to the Sunset Limited, which I can still see pulling out of the Canal Street Station as if with the departure bell dingdonging a piano vamp against the crash cymbal sound of the piston exhaust steam and as if with the whistle shouting California here I come like a solo above the up-tempo two-beat of the drivers driving westbound toward Texas and across the cactus country and the mountains en route to the Pacific Coast which was two whole time zones and three days and nights away
.

You couldn’t say that she stayed on in Gasoline Point because she hadn’t even been anywhere and seen anything else. She went everywhere she wanted to go whenever she wanted to go, especially after Miss Cute left town. But she never went anywhere without a return ticket, and she always came back not only as if on a strict schedule but also almost always before most people who didn’t happen to know when she left had a chance to miss her.

That was why even those who knew better used to talk as if she were always in and around town. But then she, which is to say her stunning good looks, always had been and always would be a source of confusion and anxiety. So much so sometimes that people used to accuse her of causing outbreaks of trouble that she had absolutely nothing to do with, as if she caused trouble just by being in town. As if Gasoline Point which had also come to be known and shunned as the L & N Bottoms long before Creola Calloway’s parents were born had not been a hideout hammock for bayou-jettisoned African captives and runaway slaves before that and a buccaneer’s hole even before that.

When she got married to Scott Henderson, whose family owned the Henderson Tailor Shop and Pressing Club, nobody expected her to settle down, and she didn’t. She was going on
twenty-two that summer and the whole thing was over in less than a year. Scott Henderson had left town to start his own dry cleaning business down in Miami, Florida. So when Eddie Ray Meadows, who worked in a drugstore downtown and was one of the best tap dancers around and also a pretty good shortstop and base runner, took her to the justice of the peace, people didn’t give him but six months and he barely made it. Then there was Felton Edmonds from the Edmonds family of the Edmonds and McKinny Funeral Home downtown. He and his silk suits and two-tone shoes and fancy panama hats and Willys-Knight sports roadster made it through one high rolling summer.

I don’t know which ones were annulled and which were divorced, but by the time she was thirty she had gotten rid of four husbands, because Willie York, better known as Memphis Willie the gambler and bootlegger who was sent to the penitentiary sometime later, was also with her for about a year.

People didn’t know what to make of all of that, but they had to wag their heads and say something so the word was that she just really didn’t care any more about having married than she cared about anything else, and they also decided that she didn’t make things happen. She just let things happen. Not anything and everything, to be sure, just the things she became involved with. In other words, she didn’t get married any of those times because she had picked out a husband for herself on her own. She just let one man like her for a while and then there would be somebody else.

One thing was always clear. She didn’t have to marry or become a common-law wife to get somebody to earn a living for her. Everybody knew that as an heiress to the old Calloway place she not only had a home for herself and her own family if any for the rest of her life, but she also had Miss Sister Mattie May Billings there to run the part she rented out to long-term roomers. Everybody knew that and most people also knew that her share of the boarding house once known as River Queen Inn, which her grandfather
had built on Buckshaw Mill Road back during the days of William McKinley and which was being managed for her and Miss Cute by Brother Buford Larkin, came to more than enough for her to live well on, even without the old homeplace.

People used to forget about all of that when they got started on Creola Calloway, or so it seemed to me. But even so, what all the botheration always came down to was not whether she could or would earn and pay her own way as expected or would even let somebody else look out for her. No matter what folks said, everybody knew better than that. The problem was that people felt let down because she didn’t do enough with herself and the extra special God-given blessing she was born with.

Not that anybody ever really expected to reap any personal profit in dollars and cents from her success. All most expected was that she would come back through town every now and then. It was not that folks had put their hopes on her coming back and changing anything around town. Others were expected to do that. All they wanted her to do was go out and become Gasoline Point’s contribution to the world of show business.