had fooled around with when there was absolutely nothing else to do. Blackmail was practiced in New
Orleans only after sunset, inasmuch as daylight could be fatal for a player, the idea being to approach a
strange house and peer invisibly through its windows. On these dangerous evening patrols, Joel had
witnessed many peculiar spectacles, like the night he’d watched a young girl waltzing stark naked to
victrola music; and again, an old lady drop dead while puffing at a fairyland of candles burning on a
birthday cake; and most puzzling of all, two grown men standing in an ugly little room kissing each other.
The parlor of Skully’s Landing ran the ground-floor’s length; gold draperies tied with satin tassels
obscured the greater part of its dusky, deserted interior, but Joel, his nose mashed against a pane, could
make out a group of heavy chairs clustered like fat dowagers round a tea-table. And a gilded loveseat of
lilac velvet, an Empire sofa next to a marble fireplace, and a cabinet, one of three, the others of which
were indistinct, gleaming with china figurines and ivory fans and curios. On top of a table directly before
him were a Japanese pagoda, and an ornate shepherd lamp, chandelier prisms dangling from its geranium
globe like jeweled icicles.
He slipped away from the window and crossed the garden to the slanting shade of a willow. The
diamond glitter of the afternoon hurt his eyes, and he was as slippery with sweat as a greased wrestler; it
stood to reason such weather would have to break. A rooster crowed beyond the garden, and it had for
him the same sad, woebegone sound as a train whistle wailing late at night. A train. He sure wished he
were aboard one headed far from here. If he could get to see his father! Miss Amy, she was a mean old
bitch. Stepmothers always were. Well, just let her try and lay a hand on him. He’d tell her off soon as
look at her, by God. He was pretty brave. Who was it licked Sammy Silverstein to a frazzle a year ago
come next October? But gee, Sammy was a good kid, kind of. And he wondered what devilment old
Sammy was up to right this minute. Probably sitting in the Nemo Theatre stuffing his belly with popcorn;
yeah, that’s where you’d find him, because this was the matinee they were going to show that spook
picture about a batty scientist changing Lucky Rogers into a murderous gorilla. Of all the pictures he
would have to miss that one. Hell! Now supposing he did suddenly decide to make dust tracks on the
road? Maybe it would be fun to own a barrel organ and a monkey. And there was always the
soda-jerking business: anybody that liked ice-cream sodas as much as he did ought to be able to make
one. Hell!
«Ra ta ta ta,» went his machine gun as he charged toward the five broken porch columns. And
then, midway between the pillars and a clump of goldenrod, he discovered the bell. It was a bell like
those used in slavedays to summon field-hands from work; the metal had turned a mildewed green, and
the platform on which it rested was rotten. Fascinated, Joel squatted Indian-style and poked his head
inside the bell’s flared mouth; the lint of withered spider webs hung everywhere, and a delicate green
lizard, racing liquidly round the rusty hollow, swerved, flicked its tongue, and nailed its pinpoint eyes on
Joel, who withdrew in disordered haste.
Rising, he glanced up at the yellow wall of the house, and speculated as to which of the top-floor
windows belonged to him, his father, Cousin Randolph. It was at this point that he saw the queer lady.
She was holding aside the curtains of the left corner window, and smiling and nodding at him, as if in
greeting or approval; but she was no one Joel had ever known: the hazy substance of her face, the
suffused marshmallow features, brought to mind his own vaporish reflection in the wavy chamber mirror.
And her white hair was like the wig of a character from history: a towering pale pompadour with fat
dribbling curls. Whoever she was, and Joel could not imagine, her sudden appearance seemed to throw a
trance across the garden: a butterfly, poised on a dahlia stem, ceased winking its wings, and the rasping F
of the bumblebees droned into nothing.
When the curtain fell abruptly closed, and the window was again empty, Joel, reawakening, took
a backward step and stumbled against the bell: one raucous, cracked note rang out, shattering the hot
stillness.
3
«HEY, Lord!» STAMP. «Hey, Lord!» STAMP. «Don’t wanna ride on the devil’s side. . . jus
wanna ride with You!»
Zoo squeezed the music from a toylike accordion, and pounded her flat foot on the rickety
cabin-porch floor. «Oh devil done weep, devil done cried, cause he gonna miss me on my last lonesome
ride.» A prolonged shout: the fillet of gold glistened in the frightening volcano of her mouth, and the little
mail-order accordion, shoved in, shoved out, was like a lung of pleated paper and pearl shell. «Gonna
miss me. . .»
For some time the rainbird had shrilled its cool promise from an elderberry lair, and the sun was
locked in a tomb of clouds, tropical clouds that nosed across the low sky, massing into a mammoth grey
mountain.
Jesus Fever sat surrounded by a mound of beautiful scrap-quilt pillows in a rocker fashioned out
of old barrel-staves; his reverent falsetto quavered like a broken ocarina-note, and occasionally he raised
his hands to give a feeble, soundless clap.
«. . .on my ride!»
Perched on a toadstool-covered stump growing level with the porch, Joel alternated his interest
between Zoo’s highjinks and the changing weather; the instant of petrified violence that sometimes
foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of
trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green
inward flame. A damp breeze, tuning in the boles of waterbays, carried the fresh mixed scent of rain, of
pine and June flowers blooming in far-off fields. The cabin door swung open, banged closed, and there
came the muffled rattle of the Landing’s window-shutters being drawn.
Zoo mashed out a final gaudy chord, and put the accordion aside. She had varnished her
upended hair with brilliantine, and exchanged the polka-dot neckerchief for a frayed red ribbon. Different
colored threads darned her white dress in a dozen spots, and she’d jeweled her ears with a pair of
rhinestone earrings.
«If you gotta thirst, and the water done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.» Outstretching
her arms, balanced like a tightrope walker, she stepped into the yard, and strutted round Joel’s tree
stump. «If you gotta lover, and the lover done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.»
High in chinaberry towers the wind moved swift as a river, the frenzied leaves, caught in its
current, frothed like surf on the sky’s shore. And slowly the land came to seem as though it were
submerged in dark deep water. The fern undulated like sea-floor plants, the cabin loomed mysterious as
a sunken galleon hulk, and Zoo, with her fluid, insinuating grace, could only be, Joel thought, the mermaid
bride of an old drowned pirate.
«If you gotta hunger, and the food done gone, PRAY to the Lord, pray on and on.»
A yellow tabby loped across the yard, and sprang nimbly into Jesus Fever’s lap; it was the cat
Joel had seen skulking in the garden lilac. Clambering to the old man’s shoulder, it smooched its crafty
mug next to the puny cheek, its tawny astonished eyes blazing at Joel. It rumbled as the little Negro
stroked the striped belly. Minus his derby hat, Jesus Fever’s skull, except for sparse sprouts of
motheaten wool, was like a ball of burnished metal; a black suit double his size sagged dilapidatedly on
his delicate frame, and he wore tiny high-button shoes of orange leather. The spirit of the service was
rousing him mightily, and, from time to time, he honked his nose between his fingers, tossing the discharge
into the fern.
The rhythmic chain of Zoo’s half-sung, half-shouted phrases rose and fell like her pounding foot,
and her earrings, dangling with the sway of her head, shot flecks of sparkle. «Listen oh Lord when us
pray, kindly hear what us has to say. . .»
Silent lightning zigzagged miles away, then another bolt, this a dragon of crackling white, now not
too distant, was followed by a crawling thunder-roll. A bantam rooster raced for the safety of a
well-shed, and the triangular shadow of a crow flock cut the sky.
«I cold,» complained Jesus petulantly. «Leg all swole up with rain. I cold. . .» The cat curled in his
lap, its head flopped over his knee like a wilted dahlia.
The off-on flash of Zoo’s gold tooth made Joel’s heart suddenly like a rock rattling in his chest,
for it suggested to him a certain winking neon sign:R. R. Oliver’s Funeral Estb. Darkness.R. R. Oliver’s
Funeral Estb. Darkness. «Downright tacky, but they don’t charge too outlandish,» that’s what Ellen had
said, standing before the plate window where a fan of gladiolas blushed livid under the electric letters
publicizing a cheap but decent berth en route to the kingdom and the glory. Now here again he’d locked
the door and thrown away the key: there was conspiracy abroad, even his father had a grudge against
him, even God. Somewhere along the line he’d been played a mean trick. Only he didn’t know who or
what to blame. He felt separated, without identity, a stone-boy mounted on the rotted stump; there was
no connection linking himself and the waterfall of elderberry leaves cascading on the ground, or, rising
beyond, the Landing’s steep, intricate roof.
«I cold. I wants to wrap up in the bed. It gonna storm.»
«Hold your tater, Papadaddy.»
Then an unusual thing occurred:
