to stand.
“Ah think I remember him,” Beau said. “He was talking ‘bout that weather girl on TV.” Beau stretched lazily, and stood when he saw the angry glitter in Noah’s eyes.
“Move it, Beau,” Noah said, waving his extended index finger under Beau’s nose.
“Is what y’all want me to do legal?” Beau looked around for his clothing. It lay in untidy heaps on the floor.
“Yes. I want you to get the statue Shu is taking care of for me.”
“What if he isn’t there?”
“Wait for him.” Noah sighed in exasperation. “Take the cable car at California and go to Wong’s Export/Import Emporium at Kearney and Washington.”
“Noah, I have a problem,” Beau said, feeling through his pants pockets.
“Here’s two dollars - that’ll get you there and back. Now scoot along; I’ve got to have that thing early as I can.” Noah stood by the door. “Remember, it’s at Wong’s Import/Export Emporium, Kearney at Washington.”
“Where shall I meet you,” Beau asked Noah as they shut the door and started down the stairs.
“In my place on Larkin. You know where the key is.” When they got down to the street, Noah turned left and pushed Beau to go right. “Meet you in about two hours.” he said. Beau nodded.
Beau shrugged his shoulders and walked to the trolley stop. The trolley came along quickly. It was not very full and he sat down gratefully. He soon fell into a reverie about those days when he used to swim in the bayous and frolic with the alligators and garfish.
Ah, those were the days, swimming and sunning in the hot, languorous afternoons. Watching the crinoline clad belles moistening under their big pink and white parasols. And the cotton fields! Blooming pink and white among the dark, glossy green leaves. And then the bolls, bursting white, even the pink blossoms. He remembered asking Mammy, dear old Mammy, one day why the pink blossoms that now and again came among the white, made white balls of cotton, too, instead of pink. Mammy, out of her infinite folk wisdom, told him that the sun bleached them white, that the sun bleached everything, excepting folks, and it just made folks, black or white, darker.
Beau started when the conductor put a heavy hand on his shoulder, said, “End of the line, buddy,” and jerked his thumb to motion Beau off. Beau got off and mingled with the crowds. The sad reality of the City in the seventies assailed him. He wept silently for tall white columns gone to decay and magnolias run riot over rotting ruins under the warm rains of Louisiana. The fat tourists and the thin tourists glanced at him and hurried past lest a weeping man contaminate them.
Beau turned to get a bus toward Chinatown. He had promised Noah he would get something for him in Chinatown, and he’d better do it before he forgot about it entirely. He remembered so poorly these days, his war wound (in the head, you know). Turned a man a mite forgetful, that Damnyankee (twelve syllables) shrapnel in the temple.
Beau had not felt capable of riding a cable car back to Chinatown. He knew that both routes went near to Kearney Street, but he was afraid he’d drift off again and miss his stop. The shock of finding himself in the City with a mission to perform instead of on recreational leave addled him. He chose to walk. His mind was not as clear as it once was, in the days before Vicksburg.
Ah, what a stirring time that was, that final siege under the gallant Pemberton withstanding the incredible pressures of Grant and Sherman (that same rascal who had burned his way from fair Atlanta to the Sea, God curse him for a Damnyankee (12 syllables) scoundrel! Beau remembered that late night call to Pemberton’s quarters, the commander’s thin drawn face, and the calendar at July 3. Beau knew then in his heart that the Confederacy was doomed.
Pemberton had handed Beau a private dispatch for Jeff Davis himself, and asked him to slip out through the Union lines and away to Virginia. The dark smell of decay in the swamps north of town, lingered in his memory. Through the cannonades overhead, despite the stray shred of shrapnel that pierced his temple, Beau had won through to Jeff Davis. That weary and kindly man, destined for defeated greatness, had thanked him personally for his effort and sent his own physician to tend Beau. Beau, proud though he was of his service, had never quite cleared up his thoughts again. He was just another veteran of that noble gray line that, for all its courage at the last, had not stopped the vicious blue flood.
And here Beau stood at a foreigner’s shop in a far Western city on a mission for a crazy artist. He saw a half-consumed cigar on the sidewalk. He picked it up. It had gone out. No matter—a gentleman always looked better with something in his hand, a julep, a cigar, a rose for a lad. Beau began the long swim up to semi-consciousness. A young Chinese man asked him what he wanted.
“I’m here,” he said in his thickest drawl, “to get an item for our mutual friend, Noah.” Beau was a believer in the dictum that it was necessary to speak very slowly and distinctly so that foreigners could understand one. The slower he spoke, the deeper his south got and the muddier his meaning. Shu, however, was accustomed to dealing with peanut merchants and other southern dignitaries who had the same opinions and Shu had learned their language. He thought it a little more difficult than transferring from the Taiwanese dialect he spoke to the Cantonese so common in the City, but not much.
“Yes, just a moment,” Shu said. He went to the Kuanyin part of the shelf. He carefully moved aside the various ceramic Kuanyins. Noah’s Kuanyin was gone. Shu closed his eyes, bowed his head, leaned on the shelf and pondered.
Shu Wong explained to Beau that the item he had come to get for Noah was missing. Shu repeated the strict injunctions Noah had laid down about this particular clay statue. Beau was remembering the last time Noah got angry with him.
“Beau,” Shu said, “where is Noah waiting for us?”
“He said he’d be at his place on Larkin,” Beau looked pleadingly at Shu, “will you come too, and tell him what happened?”
“Yes,” Shu said, “as much of it as I know. He said he had taken the Kuanyin as a pledge that was to be redeemed tonight. He seemed to think it was important to return it.”
“I’m so glad y’all are coming with me,” Beau said. “Noah scares me when he gets angry, and his eyes flash fire, like the pickets shooting rabbits at Anita.”
Shu shook his head. “Stay in the twentieth century for a while, man,” he said.
Bad News
Beau LeSieupe and Wong Shu stiffened as they heard Noah’s key turn in the lock. Beau had just gone through Pickett’s charge up Missionary Ridge at Gettysburg again, and that always left him shaken. He drifted into Georgia, still burning from Sherman’s march to the sea.
Shu was afraid that Noah would call the police or display some anger that they were in his apartment unasked. Despite Beau’s having the key, Shu felt like a housebreaker when they entered the apartment unbidden, and hid in the afternoon shadows.
Noah surprised them both. He came in and did not turn on the light for several seconds. They heard scrabbling sounds. Beau thought Noah was trying to light a match. Shu thought a rat was trying to climb the wall, and felt like following it. The scrabbling on the wall continued. It was Noah fumbling for the light switch.
“Damn,” Noah drawled, “where’s the light?”
“Up a couple of inches,” Beau said.
“Thanks,” Noah said, and turned on the light. Then he stood facing the door with his head bowed and his shoulders slumped. Then he shook his head slowly, one might say he wagged it from side to side like an elephant testing the jungle floor for herbaceous dainties. He had smoked a joint from his latest purchase. It was stronger than anything he could remember ingesting for a long time.
“Before I turn around and find out that no one’s here, who’s here?” he said, and grinned into the bright shining brass of the doorknob.
“It’s Beau, Beau LeSieupe,” Beau said.
“And Shu.” Noah looked so comic staring at the doorknob that Shu was fast losing his fear
of his temper.
“Oh Wow!” Noah said, and put his hand to the side of his face, in the process brushing his hand against the pictures on the wall over the light switch, thereby straightening some that his earlier fumbling had disarranged. “That stuff is powerful.” He turned around and waved at them with his left hand weakly flopping at the wrist. “Cheerio,” he said. “Wish I’d bought more,” he said to the wall.
“Noah, “Beau said, “are you all right, or have you finally fried your brains?”
Noah was swaying on his way across the room. He had stumbled on the edge of the carpet. Then he had brushed a table lamp that stood on the floor and almost knocked it over. For a moment it swayed in rhythm with him. Surreptitiously Shu looked up at the draperies; he sighed with relief when he saw they were not swaying. City folk often thus checked for earthquakes.
“Noah,” Beau said, “what’s wrong?”
Noah mumbled into his shadowy apartment. He collapsed into the overstuffed armchair by his ashtray. He picked up the half-smoked herb cigarette and contemplated it, raising his eyebrows alternately. “Strong little so and so,” he said, “You’ve knocked me for kayo, that’s for sure-o.”
“Noah,” Shu said, “you high?” He peered at Noah. Noah had the reputation of being less affected than any other human in the City by the various and sundry chemicals folk smoked, drank,