Cherry (36 page)

She’s also basically without breasts and yet wears an outsize push-up bra constructed to hoist boobs to one’s throat. But since there are no breasts to hoist, the lace cup is scooped out, hollow. Where breasts should swell forth there’s a small cup of void held out for viewing. She’d seem far less bereft dancing bare-assed, you think. She swivels her narrow
hips to describe a circle first one way, then in reverse, and in that clocklike movement time as you know it begins to warp.

That’s when you know: Effie’s is not just another juke joint, only somewhat funkier than the joints on Highway 73 you visited with Little Hendrix. Effie’s is another element, one no less foreign than ocean fathoms, with physical laws as incomprehensible.

But when you reach back for the doorknob, intending to bolt, you find it’s liquefied like wax, melted into the door, which in turn has melded into the wall. There’s neither knob nor door, just a seamless expanse of what looks the wall of a steel bunker. You try not to blink at this fact, for you’re loath to signal terror to the bar’s few occupants till you’ve mastered the place’s rules of decorum. Best in such environs to lay low, move slow.

If I sit down, you think, the rush will wear off, and the door will materialize again. And behind that door will sit the car. And before that car will unroll the coiled road that led you here, and at the end of that will stand your unmoveable house, an icon of safety.

Or so you tell yourself.

Behind you, Augustus Maurice tugs back the hood of your sweatshirt. He says he has to leave. Now. He can’t stay here. He didn’t know. He has to leave. Inside his small wire-rimmed glasses, his rabbit eyes well up. His chest heaves like he’s run a great distance. He is a kid facing a roller coaster, and you settle a hand on his beefy shoulder.

You say, I need to sit down a minute. Have a Coke.

Do you say this or only think it? The membrane that separates your inner world from outer phenomena such as speech has been pierced, so that imagined and real swirl together.

Ann strokes Augustus’s back, whispers in a tone like a bronco buster might use to calm a cutting horse with a new bit in his mouth. In response, Augustus’s facial flush begins to recede like tide.

You waver for what seems a long time as if planted there at the room’s vortex, shrunken to this tiny size, a mere gnat in the bar, which is growing hollow and canyonlike. The ceiling widens and stretches
away, extending far past the dancer toward an infinite horizon. Likewise, the dark floor slopes downward seemingly forever. So you stand at the hinge of a pair of yawning jaws. Plus surfaces have become mobile. The white asbestos ceiling tiles are pockmarked, and now the black holes appear to bubble and boil, while the black linoleum floor’s faux marbling coils and eddies. At the center of all this, you feel like a perspective point from which all of it’s drawn.

From behind you, Augustus hulks against your back. When his finger pokes between your shoulder blades, it’s as if he’s pushed some button to power you up. In that instant, you become—in the phrasing stolen from your friend the ex-marine—point woman for this mission. You even think of his story about some horrible place called Khe San. How on a hill there when gore was exploding around him, the voice on the radio said the same scratchy phrases over and over, words you now repeat:
Stay strong. Hang tough. Help is on the way.

You silently repeat this refrain. Again, some unseen force, maybe what powered you earlier from car to door, suddenly whooshes you all across the room in a nanosecond. You’re placed before the stage in a chair drawn up to a black cocktail table.

Before you, the Amazon dancer with the stilt-long legs and beleaguered
Tuesday
panties continues her pelvic clockwork before a blue-sparkly drum set. She swivels herself larger and larger. (Years from now, when
Star Wars
comes out, the big hairy Wookie who follows the hero around as looming sidekick will flash her to mind.)

Augustus Maurice’s face has gone all pouty, his demeanor broodingly porcine. You can see his belly rise and fail. He’s the terrified pig in
Charlotte’s Web.
Which makes you Fern. You briefly hug his sweaty neck. Through his astringent cologne and flowery deodorant, he gives off the odor of sweat socks. He says worried things that sound like
chitter chitter chitter
, and you soothe in tones that sound like
kum-ba-ya m’Lord, kum-ba-ya…

Drinks! That’s it. You will go to the bar for drinks. Surely the barman will welcome the commerce in this bare place, and Lord, is he fat,
a soft and sloping mountain, all curvature and camber. His form hosts not a single angle, no evidence of bone. The barstool under the spillage of him seems comically tiny. He’s chewing a pickled pig’s foot and is hunkered over it in a pose almost feral.

Your legs struggle toward the bar as if through thigh-high mud. He’s finished the vinegary knuckle, tosses it into some unseen receptacle, and dabs at his mouth with the bar towel tucked into his shirt front like a bib. Behind him three massive specimen jars hold hot pickles and boiled eggs, cured pig’s feet. The very sight of them makes a gland in your throat contract, and suddenly you smell formaldehyde, a long silver vein of it, and the giant jars hold not regular bar snacks but fetal forms you flinch away from—images you refuse to acknowledge for fear of giving them life.

You ask for sodas. He wipes each finger daintily with the towel-bib then scoops ice into three highball glasses. Grabs a jointed silver bar hose. But in his hand the spout instantly transforms into a hooded serpent’s head—eyes glowing amber. He squeezes on the flared hood so its gums retract to show bared fangs, then he lowers those fangs into each glass—one, two, three. In each is hissed out a full measure of black and steamy venom.

Meanwhile, the Wookie dancer has taken a post at the end of the bar. You halfway consider her an ally, for she’s a girl after all, and the kind of loose-limbed dancer you and Clarice watching
Soul Train
always aspired to be. But something in her manner makes her unapproachable—some regality in her profile, short hair burnt straight and combed back in a frazzled shock not unlike Nefertiti’s headdress. The barman moves away from you to get jukebox change for her. When she turns, you can see under the amphibian glasses for the first time. How the left eye is encrusted with sores, runny as an egg, the flesh eaten by some awful infection. Surely you don’t really see inside that putrefying mess to the white surface of bone, but you think you do.

In Meredith’s parlance, She has suffered. Or as another saying goes: You’re thinking the blues; she’s living the blues.

The barman’s squeezing limes in your snake venom when, to distract him from your creeping unease with your own hallucinations, you start to jabber about music. Tones exit your mouth. You sense your jaw working. Good. Your stunning insights on Albert King, Howling Wolf, Lightning.

When his eyes link with yours, you feel a flint strike of recognition you’d like to capitalize on. Connection is comfort, and you hold the instant. You order Fritos and slim jims to prove your largesse. He announces himself as Effie, and says with gruff pride, This my place.

Effie holds out change, and your hand opens to receive it. But rather than drop the coins, he clamps hold to your wrist, which feels small as a pencil in his rusty hand. Then with one finger, he lightly strokes the line that divides your palm—heart line? life line? You try to maintain your disaffected pose inside the barefaced intimacy of a light touch, but retrieving the hand would seem rude. It’s become some unit of barter you’re gauging the worth of when his mouth plants a moist kiss at the hand’s center. Only then do the few coins fall.

In a flash, you’re back at the table, lowering a drink before Augustus, who sits lumpish and still, though his face is riven with undried tears. You feel too indicted by Effie’s kiss to tell of it.
(She was asking for it.)
Augustus sobs out how he needs to go to the bathroom. Bad. But he’s too scared, even if you go along. He keeps saying, I know I won’t come back. I know it. I won’t come back.

Ann has an arm around his soft shoulder, stroking one side of his head as you would a cat’s. He takes off his wire-rims, soaks two napkins in his foamy glass of venom, and places the damp wads on his eyes, pressing them into the hollows like a blind man seeking cure.

Once the drinks are settled, you remember the snacks back at the bar, paid for with the kiss that still sears your palm. To leave the snacks uncollected virtually announces your fear to Effie, your revulsion. Your mind is seesawing between the alternatives—going back for snacks or not—when you feel some new gaze graze your back. You turn back.
Slow. For in these districts, quick movement might draw some lunging attack.

But there at the bar is a lividly red-haired man in a crisp white sailor suit with bell bottoms that button around the front. So overjoyed are you at his whiteness and the sparkling state of his uniform (which in normal environs would label him a filthy imperialist swine) that you cross back to the bar right away, gather Fritos and slim jims, tell him your name and lead him back to your table.

Ann tears into the Fritos and says, Hey I’m Ann.

Augustus removes the Coke-soaked compresses from his eyes and—also perking up at the sight of the sailor—waves his beringed hand like a Mouseketeer. The sailor bends to say quite lucidly, My name’s Cook. You nod, and he expands it: Robert Cook.

You nod again in understanding. Augustus asks across the blaring juke box if Mr. Cook is familiar with the men’s room here, and Cook leans closer to your ear—maybe because he’d have to stand and bend across the table to reach Augustus. He utters the following: Cook, Cook. Robert Cook, Robert Cook, Robert Cook. My name’s Cook Cook. Robert Cook. Robert Cook’s my name.…

Robert Cook withdraws from your ear and beams forth a sedate and blue-eyed pleasure with the introduction. How well it went by his standards.

Ann grins her fairy godmother grin.

It occurs to you maybe you fancied the repeated name, so you try again, shouting to Robert-Cook-Robert-Cook, How do you like the music?

He replies, It’s a little jivey, but it’s all right. A little jivey. It’s a little jivey. All right. All right! All right! It’s a little jivey.…

His words corkscrew into your ear through cranial matter till you grasp his words and sink back into fret. You haven’t yet plumbed the depths of the dangers here. You don’t know who the bad guys are, and who the allies. In your untouched glass, a lime is skewered on a small
red sword. You slide the fruit off and think grandiloquently, If I have to do battle with this, so be it.

Robert Cook slides his chair close to yours, and you sense the nightmare quality of his brain—a structure with no lit exit signs, with sliding bookcases and trapdoors, hidden passages you instinctively know burrow into the boiling tarpits of hell.

You are so far from being able to metabolize this dosage of freakishness that you take inventory like a stock clerk. Let’s see. You are boarded and barred in with a lunatic disguised as a friendly sailor, a whore whose flesh is rotting off her face, an inflated barman whose interest in you has a carnivorous edge. Augustus has digressed into a shocking state. But his fluttery panic has begun to seem less scary than Miss Ann’s glib smile, which is what—after all—got you through Effie’s door in the first place.

Augustus goes back to pressing soppy napkins to his stung-looking eyes, and with Ann grinning like she’s won a raffle (maybe she is high after all), Robert Cook reintroduces himself all around.

The nature of your thoughts then undergoes a massive shift—an upheaval so profound as to seem volcanic. Psychically speaking, sub-continental rivers move. Your whole cosmological fundament is reshaped. Time ceases to follow normal rules of progression. Instead it blinks on and off like a strobe light. Moments actually vanish while you occupy them, as if some switch on your cranium is suddenly flipped to pause, then mysteriously restarted.

During these gaps, you are picked up like a dollhouse figurine and lowered into different places on the game board that is Effie’s. So one instant you feel yourself spiraling into darkness; the next, light streams down on a whole new stage set, with characters whose faces display the comfort of having been at your table a while.

In the first of these, you snap to beside a gray-headed black man who wears green suspenders and a derby hat like a honky-tonk pianist. Robert Cook’s on his other side talking into the man’s ear, which is cupped to better take in Cook’s jack-hammered repetitions. The man’s brow under his hat brim strikes a deep furrow. Augustus and Ann are
absent from their chairs. (Where are they? gone how long?) A tower of shot glasses a foot high sits at the table center, and the coppery taste in your mouth doesn’t reveal whether you imbibed any of those shots, or who paid for them, or if you’re owing.

There are people in the bar and at tables around you. The stage is occupied not by the Wookie dancer, but by an athletic woman maybe five feet tall in flowery blue bikini panties and matching bra. She’s muscled up like a gymnast with a mismatched wig of coarse streaming hair you can see the plug-holes of, like doll hair. She possesses the hypnotizing ability to shimmy every inch of her body at once, as if the skin were some casing she could detach from and vibrate independent of muscle.

Robert Cook continues to meet and greet phantoms approaching your table while the old man says to you, What wrong with him?

You say, I don’t know. Honestly. He didn’t come with us.

He says, I never seen nothing like it. Say the same thang over and over like a record with a scratch.

I know, you say. He seems pretty messed up. Maybe he’s on something.

He got a screw loose. Done drop the cheese off his cracker.

Can’t imagine what made him like that.

The old man rears his head back, says, What you call me?

You say, I didn’t call you anything. I just said, we don’t know him.

He draws back further still, affronted, puts both hands on his shirt front. Beside him Robert Cook’s trapped voice rises and falls in cadence. The derby man says, You don’t like black folks do you?