Chapter Five LESSONS IN
“Spring in the bayou is the dawn of the year; new life in every corner, on every leaf, behind every tree trunk or wide swath of marsh grass. The whole region, dormant from quiet and mild winter months begins to stretch, grow and blossom. The air warms and thickens, the streets begin to fill and music and revelry are not too far behind. The whistling of the dragonflies punctuates the morning, the fireflies announce the dusk. There’s poetry in the horizon line, where the trees reflect double on the water, where the moon and its twin race away from one another. The stillness in the water speaks to the end of slumber; of a turning of the season, of the page, of the chapter. Where one voice falls silent, another roars behind it.”
– Teller S. Kent, “A Once Veritable Menagerie” 1922
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Hollis Cottley Pennington wore fine linen suits on spring days like this. He’d been tending to errands that morning and was heading down Decatur to find his daughter, Abigail. As he reached the corner at St. Ann, he saw her through the crowd from blocks away, hand in hand with her nanny, Maeve. She appeared as if the picture reel had stalled on a frame filled with the first splash of color in a black and white world. His breath was regularly stolen from his chest when she made a face or gesture that reminded him of her mother, his beloved Clara. Each day Abigail grew, each day her smile broadened, and each day Hollis was reminded he was both blessed and cursed. On good days choosing blessed kept Hollis at bay, kept harmony on his shoulders like the weight of an overcoat. On bad ones, when the balance seemed least fair, the voices of his better angels became a whisper beneath the clap and echo of his M1911 Colt pistol.
“My darling!” Hollis shouted when Abigail recognized him across the crowded cobblestone street. She ran into his arms, squeezing his shoulders with all her might.
“Daddy, you’re too hot!” Abigail made a sour face at her father. “You’re going to need a lemonade!” the child said.
“Oh I am? Shall we both get one?” Hollis laughed.
“No lemonade for me, please,” Abigail said. She slid from her father’s embrace and straightened her dress like a proper lady might. “Nanny Maeve said we could walk through the street market for lemon ice with strawberries. She said she used to have that when she was a young lady, like me.”
“Oh she did? Well, Nanny Maeve is usually right,
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let’s see what we can find!” Hollis extended his hand, and Abigail took hold. There was enough breeze in the day to entertain a short walk through the Desiré Street Market before the heat settled all the way in. They’d been on the rail for over a month now. Spending a full week in one place was good for Abigail – and good for Hollis too, to be honest. On long rides like this, Hollis spent much of each day reading in the library car of his train. He and his daughter Abigail were expecting about eight weeks on the open rail, and he was determined to teach her a little bit of geography every stop they made. He had business first in northern California, then through a few mining towns in Nevada –Silver City, Lucky Boy, Bullfrog and Bristol. He’d stopped
in on his business partners on the border of Arizona where they’d started construction on the biggest concrete dam he’d ever seen. Pennington had supplied Kaiser and Kaufman with as much steel as he could spare, and while he was often known to shake his head at the size and scope of it, no one’s checks cashed faster than the U.S. Government.
In preparation for the long ride, he’d cleared two dusty shelves from Clara’s section in the Pennington Estate’s library and moved them into their own section on the train. He missed her every day - hourly, even, if not more often - and lately he’d taken to reading some of her favorites. Poetry from Rainer Maria Rilke. Short stories from F. Scott Fitzgerald. And, if he’d had a martini or two, he’d crack the binding on Brave New World. Dystopian science fiction amused Hollis so completely. With Huxley, however, he feared the gentleman might know something the rest of the world doesn’t . . . two martinis in, he could forget the alarming parallels to the current industrial complex and just enjoy the yarn as it spun and spun. Hollis had recently started reading Clara’s journals, but he saved reading them for the mornings when strong co ee was in his hands. He’d page carefully through them as if turning ancient pages, delicate texts from history. Her handwriting was of an impeccable script – an art, nearly - her humor and grace falling from her written words on the page. In September it would be a year. In September he could stop saying the number of days out loud like a child counting down to Christmas. In September he would consider removing the ring from his left hand. Maybe he’d move it to his right hand for a while.
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He wasn’t certain yet.
He and his daughter Abigail, now almost seven years old (“Six and half!” she would often exclaim) would rumble along in the library car, listening to Fletcher Henderson on the Victrola, Abigail playing with her dolls. Today she had chosen the curly haired porcelain doll with long brown hair and a dress that matched Abigail’s. The young girl would often press her nose to the window to watch the landscape speed past and then press the doll’s alabaster face next her own.
“You see that, Delores?” Abigail said aloud to her doll. “That’s Kansas!”
“Abby, dear?” Hollis called from his wing-back chair. “Don’t you teach Delores false geography, now. What was the last state we were in?”
“Is it the other Kansas? Our Kansas?” the young girl shouted.
“No dear. That’s two weeks ago. Let’s pull down the map again, shall we?”
At the end of the library car was a blackboard with tracings of handprints crudely colored in dusty white chalk. Above it on a press roller was a map of the railway lines of the whole United States. Abigail stood on the padded bench, on the tips of her toes, and pulled it down, allowing it to click into place.
“Yesterday we started in St. Louis, remember?” Hollis called to her. “Where all the lines cross and the Midland meets the Mississippi? And do you remember where we’re going?”
“We’re going to New Orleans, daddy. I can find it –don’t tell me!” Abigail pinched her dolly with the matching
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dress under her right arm and started scouring the map for words that were shaped like New Orleans.
Hollis could hear her slowly reading every city North to South to the alabaster doll with the matching dress. He reopened his wife’s copy of Rilke’s Book of Hours. Slowly, he turned the page. On the next page, a short passage had been circled twice:
Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name.
Next to this passage his wife Clara Belle had written: That’s my Hollis and scrawled a lopsided heart, filling it in with the black ink from her fountain pen. Hollis closed his eyes and inhaled slowly through his nose. The train rumbled beneath him. Rail markers, lodge pine with whitewashed tops, made whooshing sounds outside the window.
“Daddy?” Abigail shouted from the other end of the train.
“Yes, dear?” Hollis said, his eyes still closed.
“I have decided that I think we’re in Tennessee,” she ran back to the window to verify her hypothesis.
“Very good,” Hollis said. He put the book of poetry on the windowsill and walked toward his daughter.
“You see that, Delores?” Abigail said to her dolly with the matching dress. “That’s Tennessee!”
The small apothecary shop near the corner of Toulouse
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and Royal, The Grey Hen Rx, had been a mysterious little gem in New Orleans for as long as Hollis could remember. He’d befriended its newest proprietor, Emilie Grey, for the procurement of rare spices and herbs that weren’t often permitted on the open market. It was also a place where, if you knew to ask, you could acquire “medicinal drams” that very closely resembled island rum from Barbados or even Swiss Absinthe.
“Monsieur Pennington,” the woman behind the glass counter said and dipped her knees into a polite curtsy. “Et aussi, the jeune fille ici, Mademoiselle Abigail, how do you do?”
Hollis whispered into Abigail’s ear and she giggled.
“I am tray-bee-ehn today, Miss Grey,” Abigail said, nodding her head on each syllable.
“Oh la,” Emilie said. “A natural speaker, beautiful face, beautiful accent, oh la la!”
Hollis lowered Abigail from his arms and kissed her forehead. Young Abigail put her arms behind her back and walked to the shelves where the apothecary cat, a silky Siamese named Li Shou, slept in front of a stack of books on the occult.
“Abby dear,” Hollis said. “Let the kitten sleep, sweetheart.”
“Kitten,” Emilie said and laughed. “Shou Shou would love to still be a kitten, Monsieur. La jeune fille can play with that lazy old cat. I will get her for the Mademoiselle.” Emile scooped Li Shou from the shelf and put the still sleeping cat into Abigail’s arms. One yawn and a brief bit of eye contact later, Li Shou was asleep again.
Hollis slid a short hand-written list across the countertop. Emilie pulled a small bottle from under the counter and poured an ounce of it into two ornate glasses. Hollis swore his eyes were playing tricks on him as the liquid seemed to fold over on itself, and then change from a deep brown color to nearly crimson.
“You should try this, Monsieur,” she said. “I’ll add a case for your order, this is my most precious cargo, Monsieur Hollis. You are bringing me such a great gift for our shop, I would only feel justified returning the favor. The Crocodile is an ancient symbol of power and strength, and having one to keep watch over our little shop is ah, comment dit-on – une présage? Omen, I think the word is omen.”
“As always, I’m grateful for your help, Ms. Emilie, you are too kind,” Hollis said.
“Et aussi, with the crocodile here in the shop, he will leave your dreams and you will find rest, Monsieur Hollis.
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For you. And for Madame Clara, too.” Emilie said and disappeared into the dark corners behind the shelves of bottles and books. Hollis stared into the dark doorway, listening to Abigail speak her Midwest French to the Siamese cat. He couldn’t count the number of times he said Clara’s name to himself each day, but he was certain the number of times he’d mentioned her to Emilie Grey was zero.
“What did you think would happen, exactly?” Hollis asked Max Bernandt. The two sat in the garden in the afternoon, the Sweetbay Magnolia wrestling the sunlight away from their table. “We can’t write a check to fund six countries through a war and then expect them to be on
time with the rent, can we? And when Wall Street makes trading floor accessible to shoe-smiths and haberdashers, their money still sweaty from their pockets – the writing was on the wall, Max,” Hollis said and took a sip of his lemonade.
Max Bernandt was overheating. His mustache was a sponge. His linen suit wore him. His Boston blood didn’t understand the bayou; he was four degrees away from steam escaping his from his pores. Rivulets of sweat had saturated the brow of his hat which now sat propped on the crown of his head.
“Shipping, Hollis, it’s still viable. Luxury liners with holds the size of avenues underneath them, everyone needs something!”
“Industry, my damp friend, industry is next,” Hollis said. “Stop wasting your time throwing money after hints and allegations! You’re angry you missed the boat on the boom, and I don’t blame you. Blame the Dutch! Blame the sun-washed sailors that ran silk for forty years without so much as an address to their name – their benefactors slept on entire beds made of rare bird feathers, my friend. But that time is passed. I won’t sink so much as a bu alo nickel into anything that can gently settle on the ocean floor next to the HMS Titanic.”
“Not passed, Hollis, please,” Max pleaded. “Come to London with me, come see these gorgeous ocean liners,” Max wiped the sweat from his eyes. “We rode here on the Lurline. Better than the Opera House in Paris, Hollis. Better than the Wellington Arms! Airplane travel is forty years out, Hollis, the world is still screaming all aboard, I swear they are.”
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“Max, my chap,” Hollis leaned forward. “I’m supplying steel to Pan Am, they’re three years out, not forty. They’re already running mail and supplies from Key West to Havana, Max. And the reason I’ll skip the floating hotels and the death traps of the sky is simple. Very simple, actually.”
“It can be a loan, Hollis,” Max said.
Hollis smiled broadly, “I’m not sure you’ll find me on anything but a train or a fine automobile. It’s the damndest thing, the train breaks down – I can still step o without getting my shoes wet or too much wind in my hair. The same just isn’t true of your luxury liners or Juan’s airplanes. My money will stay on the ground, Max.”
“Hollis,” Max adjusted his hat.
“Max,” Hollis leaned forward. “I can get you a meeting tomorrow morning with Charles Aldridge Sr. He and his idiot son are down here somewhere, importing a matched pair of Duesenbergs direct from Germany. They say imitation is flattery, but I’m not sure those two could cobble original thought if you gave them the first six letters,” Hollis laughed. “Either way, they’ll be at the platform tomorrow. I have a feeling they’ll be on the platform for a good long while, actually. Why don’t you stop by at eight, we’ll have a cup of co ee on my train before we pull out of town. Beautiful co ee, twice as strong as Du Monde, half the chicory! Wake you up like kissing a Pennington branding iron!”
“Oh Hollis,” Max wiped his brow. “What do you need a branding iron for?”
“You know I’m never sure until I need it, Max.” Hollis said. “But I’d prefer that to be the last word on the
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subject. Is there anything else that needs my attention?” Hollis shifted in his seat.
His Colt M1911 had been digging into his hip since he sat down with Max. He removed it and set it on the table. A gun like that fits in nicely into the palm of your hand, and can still somehow take up the whole table. Max watched it as if expecting it to move.
“I’ve crossed that wide blue ocean twice,” Hollis said. “Once without this pistol as a boy, and once with it as a man; a man who knew that American dirt would always be where I needed it to be – beneath my feet where gravity and I can find it anytime we need it.”
C.S. Aldridge was the only one of his three brothers named in their father’s last will and testament. It read, To My Only Son, despite the fact that C.S. had both an older and a younger brother. The younger, a gambler and polo player, was going for a hard-fought personal record twelfth year of non-sobriety, beating his previous record of eleven. The oldest brother was a quiet recluse who painted small images of squirrels on sections of satin bedsheets. He could often be found wandering the forest of the Aldridge estate shoeless, while whistling.
“Some hands you get a pair of aces, Charlie,” their father had been known to say. “And sometimes you just get one face-card and you have to blu your way through. Your idiot brothers are a three and a four o -suit. You ditch ‘em before they sink you, you hear me?”
Eventually his father passed and his mother soon after. Charles Sycamore Aldridge sat in the drawing room of their country house and looked at his own children.
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One word echoed over and over between his ears in a tone just above a whisper: Blu . Blu . Blu .
His oldest, Charlie Jane, stood next to him on the train platform, the morning Louisiana breeze bouncing the lapels of his shirt. Charlie Jane had gotten his watch chain tangled in his tie again, and was having a hell of a time sorting that matter out. C.S. adjusted his cu s and gazed down the platform. He saw what looked to be a crocodile floating through the air. He blinked twice, the image remained. He cleaned his glasses and looked again.
The crocodile, nearly forty feet tip to tail, swung slowly through the air from the thick braided ropes under its long belly and sti arms. With every movement the giant beast tilted gently as if filled with molasses, nose down – nose up, tail down – tail up. It was, of course, not filled with molasses. This taxidermized swamp trophy was filled to its eyeballs with Rangley’s finest London Dry Gin.
“It’ll hold!” Hollis Cottley Pennington yelled to the teenage stevedores pulling at their lead lines and angling the arm of the crane away from the barge and towards Hollis’ train car. “It held yesterday and the day before that! Hold him steady boys, he’s the biggest one yet!”
Hollis stood on the pavement, guiding the giant animal through the air as if by sorcery, his arms outstretched, his sleeves rolled to the elbow. The riverbanks of the Mississippi provided a quiet breeze right up until midday when even the breeze turned to steam and disappeared.
Angel Luis Rascon, called “Bolsillos” by the other stevedores, stood in a triangle of nearby shade, smiled and crossed his arms. At twenty-three he was the oldest of the small herd of young men working the docks from
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sun-up to sun-down each day. His parents had arrived from Seville forty years earlier with the fourth wave of the Spanish expats. He’d been on these docks since the first day he could lift a crate and take two steps – in fact he received his nickname Bolsillos, meaning pockets in Castilian Spanish, on the same day.
Ten years of hot Louisiana sunshine and countless hours of hauling cargo from steam ship to train car, Bolsillos looked like a middle-aged boxer – covered from his shoulders to his toes in useful muscle, skin tanned like a leather hide, and smile as broad as any ship that passed through his port.
The stevedores had finally centered the giant crocodile over the top of Hollis’ custom Pullman train and began lowering it onto the third storage car. Hollis stepped into the shade next to Bolsillos.
“Mr. Hollis, sir,” Bolsillos said quietly. “You think any of these boys actually think this one is bigger than the two yesterday? Considering it’s the same animal each time, sir?”
“Oh, Sillos,” Hollis smiled. “It’s part of the ruse. If you can’t bootleg twelve hundred gallons of London Gin and have fun while doing it, you might as well just quit living. You know what I mean, son?”
“Yes, sir. I do, sir. When you say it like that, I can’t help but agree,” Bolsillos said.
“Well today is the last of it,” Hollis said, dabbing sweat from his temple with a fold of blue kerchief he kept in his pocket. “I hate to ask again, but I’d love for you to join me on the trip back, talk about your future, taste in the spoils of this Crocodile War.”
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“Generous again, and always, sir,” said Bolsillos. “But my place is here with my family.”
“Fair enough,” Hollis said.
“Besides,” Bolsillos said, dabbing sweat from under his lip with the sleeve of his shirt. “You need someone here anyway, do you not, sir?”
“That I do, young man,” Hollis said. He removed an envelope from his back pocket and put it in Bolsillos’ hand. “That I do. You’ll take care of the gents, I assume?”
“You assume right, sir. We’ve been mighty pleased to help you the last few days. Two ships down the way are unloading uncut marble all the way from Italy – spinning crocodiles onto your train was as much easy fun as we’ve had all summer, sir.”
“And we’re all set for tomorrow?” Hollis winked at the young man. “Once Aldridge’s car has been loaded and we’re edging out of sight, that’s when you hand Aldridge the suitcase.”
“Clear as can be, Mr. Hollis, sir.”
Hollis put his left hand on Bolsillos’ shoulder, and shook the boy’s open hand. The air was beginning to warm, even in the shade, and the two men said nothing for a moment.
Hollis looked up at the crocodile grinning back at him from atop the train. Known to only a few on the docks, a small valve on the beast’s back left foot could be fitted with a fill hose that then drained slowly into the twenty hogshead barrels in the Pullman’s cargo cabin below. At nightfall, Bolsillos had been loading the empty crocodile into a crate marked Live Crocodile and sending it on a small
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fishing vessel out past the twelve-mile line to a shipping vessel waiting in the dawn-kissed sound to fill it up again.
“When it’s all the way empty,” Hollis said. “The little apothecary shop down the way will be its home, Sillos. I stopped by earlier and made all the appropriate arrangements. I wish I could see you wheeling him down these cobblestones, but my imagination will have to su ce,” Hollis smiled.
The long flat cargo car that C.S. and Charlie Jane Aldridge had been waiting for was simply nowhere to be found. The telegram had said ten a.m. sharp, and it was nearly two and both men were becoming irritated. By now they were supposed to be on the open roads of Southern Alabama in a brand new Duesenberg convertible, aiming for the Atlantic coastline and then heading north to New York City. Instead they stood in the shade, the air heavy, hot and thick, watching as the stillness swallowed their hours.
In the distance, C.S. saw the broad shoulders and broad smile of Hollis Cottley Pennington approaching them on the platform. He carried a small leather satchel that looked to be leaking.
“Charles and Charlie Jane, I thought that might be you two. You look like you could use a cold drink, gents!” Hollis shouted as he approached.
“Mr. Hollis, sir,” Charlie Jane stammered. “Nice to see you again, sir.”
Hollis opened the satchel and pulled two cold bottles of beer from inside. He handed one to each of the men, and then grabbed and opened one for himself using the
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back edge of his buck knife.
“I’ve got this friend of mine in Colorado, his names Adolph Jr. – which is a tough thing to be named these days but he’s a lineage guy and you don’t get much say in your name with that kind of thing going on, do you Charlie Jane?” Hollis said. Hollis cracked the crown cap from Charlie Jane’s beer and next from C.S.’s as well. “Now then, old Adolph and his family saw prohibition putting its boots on and they started making all kinds of things to stay open. They made malted milk and sold it to Mars, they made porcelain and concrete and started working this new kind of fancy lightweight steel, said it’s going to revolutionize everything.”
The familiar whistle of the Pennington train sounded and echoed up and down the platform. Hollis turned and waved to the conductor, showed him his bottle of beer, and motioned he’d be there soon.
“While we were talking about this and that, old Adolph o ers me one of these cold delicious beers they make there in the small Colorado town. And being that ole Volstead’s still kicking around, I think I’m taking a long luxurious sip of their alcohol-free version, Manna, they call it. Sure as you’re born, it’s the real McCoy – cold, delicious beer. Well I managed to grab a couple dozen cases and I keep them on my train there for just such an occasion. You two looked like you could use a cold beer, was I right?”
“Yessir,” Charlie Jane said. He took a sip and closed his eyes like a free man might.
“Anyhow,” Hollis said. “I best be running along. Train’s starting to leave without me. You two enjoy those cold
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beers. I hope they help you with the rest of this here afternoon.”
Hollis handed the leather satchel to Charlie Jane and smiled. He hopped down onto the tracks and ran briskly alongside the Pullman train car. In one e ortless move, he grabbed onto one of the handrails and swung himself up onto the gangway. Hollis opened the door and disappeared inside where the music was already at full volume and everyone had a cocktail in hand.
C.S. Aldridge took a sip from his cold bottle of beer. It was in fact delicious. He wasn’t certain which was the prevailing cause of the scowl on his face, whether it was a sharp and continuing jealousy of Pennington or a furious response to being stranded in New Orleans without his new automobile.
“Well there it is, Daddy,” Charlie Jane said, coughing beer out onto the platform. Sure enough, latched just before the caboose was the flat car with the Aldridge’s brand new Duesenberg convertible. The whitewall tires were jet black and angel white – absolutely pristine. The chrome hubcaps reflected the sun like mirrors. A truly gorgeous automobile.
C.S. and Charlie Jane watched it roll past, sweat on their brows, a cold beer in their hands.
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