An Agent of Utopia Read online

  As she gave her skirt a straightening tug across her hips, I said, “Hold still a sec, ma’am.” As the Prisoner held still, eyes big and smile tentative, I reached up and plucked three feathers from the side of the headdress. They came off easy. “Thank you, ma’am. Good evening to you. Gentlemen.”

  I carried my trade goods back to where Al stood, solemnly waiting. I wrapped the blanket several times around his narrow shoulders, fastened the bead necklace around his neck, smeared greasepaint from my chest and cheeks onto his face, and planted the feathers in his pomaded hair. Still kneeling, I turned my back to him and said, “Hop on.”

  “Drop me and I’ll bust you one,” he grumbled, but he did what I said. I was surprised how little he weighed.

  I attracted barely a glance from the scattered smokers and loungers and hat-check girls as I walked through the Colony Theater lobby with an unlikely papoose on my back. I pushed through the auditorium doors and carried the next generation into the dark, into 1875.

  I guess it was pretty good, as pictures go. Hoot Gibson jumped on and off his horse a lot, and whenever he did, everyone cheered. Anne Cornwall was good-looking but didn’t have much to do. I wondered if the real General Custer had a mustache as big as Dustin Farnum’s. It didn’t look regulation.

  The picture explained that Custer was a friend of the Indians, until they got tricked, by some sharp traders, into going on the warpath. Now, I didn’t know much about the West, but I knew better than that. I knew the Indians were fighting because the white people kept taking their land. I knew that Custer, like a lot of other Cavalry officers, probably General Godfrey too, had killed a lot of Indian women and children. I knew that at the Little Bighorn, Custer and his men pretty much got what was coming to them.

  None of this was in the picture.

  Frankly, I got fidgety in the middle. I work a day on my feet, no problem, but I had been standing for hours, and standing isn’t working.

  Plus, something about the big black-and-white figures on the screen, fighting and falling and dying, got me to thinking of Joe Diabo, and Joe Diabo wasn’t so good to think about at that time, in that place. I mean, what would he have thought of me right then, in my silly outfit, hailing the Great Fathers of Broadway?

  So that was my mood when a man slowly came huffing and puffing up the auditorium steps, clanked past me, and pushed open the door. In the light from the lobby I saw it was the old general. The clanking had been his sword and medals.

  I had an impulse then, and I glanced at Al, who was standing on the base of a column next to me, so that he could see over the heads of everyone in the back row. He had eyes only for the frantic giants on the screen. So I slipped away, followed the old man into the lobby.

  He hadn’t made it far. He stood about a yard away from me, his reflection shiny in the marble floor. The lobby looked much bigger empty. Only two other people were in sight. The hat-check girl was leaning against her counter, wearing an abbreviated Pocahontas outfit. She had her arms folded and was shivering a little, like she was cold, and no wonder. Another employee, a guy, was lounging in the ticket booth, reading a racing form. His only concession to the theme was a big gray Cavalry hat that rode his ears.

  “Excuse me,” the general called out. “Can you direct me to the facilities?”

  The ticket guy squinted at him. “The what?”

  “The facilities!” the general repeated. “For God’s sake, man. The latrine. The privy.”

  “Oh,” the ticket guy said. “The Gents is down the stairs on the left. The Indian will take you.”

  The hell I will, I nearly said, but the ticket guy was buried in his racing form again, and the general already was hobbling downstairs. He held on to the bannister with both hands and swung his right leg wide on each step, as if his knee no longer bent so well.

  I don’t know why I followed him, but I did. I waited until he was out of sight, though. My moccasins were quiet on the stairs, and I felt like some treacherous movie Indian, following the hero, and up to no good. I reached the foot of the stairs just in time to see the general shouldering through a swinging door marked GENTS. I padded across a checkerboard tile floor, past armchairs, potted plants, and spittoons, and into the washroom.

  The general stood before a urinal, fumbling with his many buttons and his multiple belts. A colored attendant, a bald man in a red jacket, was trying to help. It was taking a while.

  I just stood there, not even watching the ordeal, with the strangest thought in my head. What I wanted to do was walk up to the general, cock my index finger like it was a gun, touch my barrel finger to his temple and say, “Bang,” the way you do when you’re young, and playing cowboys.

  The attendant glanced up and saw me.

  “Sir,” he called, “can you please help us? We can’t unfasten his sword belt, and the general is in need.”

  “Oh, Jesus, hurry!” the general groaned, his eyes screwed shut. “I can’t stand it!”

  The attendant looked at me again. “Sir, did you hear me? Please, give us a hand here.”

  “No,” I said, loudly and distinctly. I turned my back on them, left the washroom. Halfway across the checkerboard, I could hear behind me, through the closed door, the two of them loudly moaning together, probably in dismay. I ignored them, and walked calmly up the stairs.

  What a thing to tell people. Am I ashamed? Yeah, probably. But am I sorry? No, I am not sorry. There’s a difference.

  As I reached the landing, the muffled orchestra music got suddenly louder, lots of bass drums and cymbals, and I heard the cry of a thousand people reacting to something exciting and spectacular. As my head crested the top of the stairs, I saw the street doors had been propped open, letting in the honk and hiss of traffic, the wail of an approaching siren. Now I was standing in the lobby. From the auditorium came another burst of applause, and a blare of trumpets. The auditorium doors flung open, were doorstopped by ushers in buckskin, and a dozen Indians emerged to repopulate the Indian village. Then hundreds of fresh survivors of the Little Bighorn streamed into the lobby, lighted cigarettes, rushed past me to the washrooms. A lot of them were loud and drunk. I thought I’d be trampled, but they just flowed past me, like I wasn’t there. One of the teepees crumpled sideways, as someone stumbled into it. Outside, a dozen policemen on motorcycles roared past, sirens screaming. Out of the melee, Al trotted over to me, his face blue with cotton candy.

  “You missed the end!” Al cried.

  “I know how it ends,” I told him.

  After the crowd finally left, and Millie gave me the number of her boardinghouse, we Indians helped break down the teepees and push the buffalo to the loading dock, which wasn’t part of the deal, but we were show folk by then and up for anything. We swapped our costumes for street clothes and pocketed our pay. Then we left the theater by the stage door and wandered up the alley to the sidewalk and stood beneath the extinguished marquee, locked out of the shadowed lobby where our village used to stand. The sun was just beginning to rise, but the big hole a half-block north on Broadway, where Hammerstein’s theater was going up, made the whole block seem unusually dark. Not many cars passed us, and not many people, either. On the opposite sidewalk was some local oddball, a gaunt old man in a black suit who as he walked was coaxing pigeons out of their roosts by strewing seed corn from a sack. He had skeleton hands, and was cooing something like, “Tica, tica, tica.”

  “Nasty birds,” said the Indian next to me. He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Shit gets in your lungs, you can’t breathe.” The handkerchief came away red, leaving dark-brown streaks above his eyebrows where the makeup had been. He smiled at me as he swiped his darkening cheeks, and I realized he was a Negro. “The girls did a better job on you,” he said.

  “I’m Indian already,” I said. I scrubbed my fingers back and forth across my chin and held them out for inspection.

  “Ah, so I see,” t
he Negro said. “Too bad for you. Those makeup girls were cute.”

  “I’ll ask for a touch-up next time,” I said.

  He laughed and offered me his hand. “Asa’s my name.”

  “I’m Eddie.”

  He didn’t try to break my fingers in his grip like some big men do, but I could tell I was shaking a strong hand.

  “You work steel?” I asked.

  “Trains,” he said. “Day shift at the BMT yard.” He held his palms a foot apart, made the space wider and then closed it. “We pull the cars apart, we fix ’em, we push ’em together again. How about you? You work steel?”

  As we talked, a few other Indians stepped from the shadow beneath the dark marquee.

  “Yeah,” I told Asa, “up there,” and pointed.

  He shook his big head. “God bless you for it, buddy, but you can have that mess. Aunt Hagar’s children staying on the ground till God lets down a ladder. How you doing, Jacob?”

  “How am I?” asked a short Indian with a limp. He clapped Asa on the back. “Hoping Miriam didn’t wait up for me, that’s how I am. Already she’s mad I broke the Sabbath, and now I got such a cramp, she’ll say, ‘You see? You forsake your people, your own leg should turn against you.’” He turned to me. “You got a wife?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. I take girls to a show sometimes.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, that’s just how it starts,” said Jacob the Indian, slicing the air with his hand. “At least for her I got Jolson’s autograph, maybe when I get home she’ll take me to a show.” He winked.

  The other Indians who had gathered around picked up the theme of women, at least the ones who knew English. One guy I now sort of recognized: He worked at the Chinese laundry on Mulberry. He nodded at me, and I nodded back, and my stomach growled, wanting breakfast.

  The good thing about New York City in those days, though, was that if you stood in one place for fifteen minutes, the food would come to you. In fact, the pushcarts weren’t allowed to stand still, not in the theater district anyway. So the next vendor to round the corner, a stooped old lady in a babushka pushing a kettle-wagon the size of my forge, found herself surrounded by a band of foraging Indians.

  “What have you got, Tia?” the Indians asked. “What’s cooking, Babka?”

  “Two bits,” she said. She held out her cupped right hand as her left hand yanked off the lid, enveloping us in a puff of saltwater steam. The roast-chickpea smell was so good it almost knocked me down. My mouth watered.

  “Two bits,” said the old lady. She held out a paper cone swollen with roasted peas. “Chi-chi beans. Two bits!”

  So I paid her and took hold of the narrow end of the beans. I fisted the cone too hard, and a few chickpeas rained onto the sidewalk. I held it more gently then. I tipped a handful of hot chickpeas into my palm, bounced them around a little, then popped them into my mouth. They were salty and just firm enough as I crushed them into paste between my eyeteeth.

  A half-dozen of us were munching happily, those who had beans shaking their cones into the cupped hands of those who had none. The old lady already was trundling away southward toward Bryant Park.

  “Damn, these are good,” Asa said. “What did she call these?”

  “Chi-chis.”

  “What chi-chis?” Jacob asked. “Arbis, we call this. Whenever a baby is born, we have a dinner, and this is always part of it. After every Shalom Zachar, we’re picking peas up off the floor for weeks.” He carefully selected a single bean and munched it. “No paper cones, though,” he added, rattling his. “If the Weinbergs, that’s Miriam’s people, if they thought we couldn’t afford plates, she would die of embarrassment and take me with her.”

  Another Indian said: “When I was a boy in Livorno, we made a pie of these. Torta di ceci. But we mashed ’em up first.”

  “Mashed?” repeated a mustached Indian, stretching out the “A.” “What is this maaashed?”

  In reply, the Italian Indian, his mouth full, thumped the air downward three times with the heel of his free hand, then spread his fingers, palm up, and repeatedly clenched them.

  “Ah, you crush them!” said the mustache. “We crush them, maaash them, as well. But not for pastry. For dipping.” He pinched the air between his fingers and made scooping motions. “Dip bread into the hummus. A little garlic and oil, very good.”

  Asa laughed. “I don’t need ’em mashed. I still got my teeth.”

  Our shadows ran together between the streetlights, and I thought, this won’t last, Eddie. We’ll all go back to our own neighborhoods, our own jobs, our lives. If we cross paths after tonight, we won’t even recognize each other. We’ll just see a Negro, or a Greek, or a Jew, and that’s all we’ll see.

  “Why babies?” I asked Jacob.

  Jacob was taking longer to eat than the rest of us, plucking out chi-chis one at a time, blowing on each, then chewing methodically. “I don’t get you,” he said.

  “Why, when babies are born, do you eat these peas? I mean, what’s the connection?”

  “Oh,” he said. He looked at nothing, chewed another solitary pea. “Hang on,” he said. More chewing. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.” More chewing. “OK, I got it. I had to think back to what Tateh used to say. Because they’re round, and they got no openings. That’s what you want at the Shalom Zachar table.”

  “Like a meatball,” said one Indian.

  “Or a dumpling,” said another.

  “Or a hardboiled egg.”

  “Exactly,” said Jacob, but he looked unsure.

  “But why?” I asked again. “Why, on that occasion, do you need round food with no openings?”

  Jacob laughed. “What am I, a rabbi? That’s just what we do. You don’t ask questions about things like that. You just do ’em, because your parents did ’em, and your grandparents, on back. That’s family.”

  Asa turned to me. “You got any family stories, Eddie?”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, and there I was, committed. Everyone was looking at me.

  “Here’s one my grandfather used to tell,” I said. “Long, long ago, people didn’t live on the Earth. Everyone lived in the sky. They never even looked down here, because, why would they? There was nothing to see, and they were doing just fine in the sky. But parts of the sky were thinner than the rest. These places, they looked just like the rest of the sky, but they had worn thin over time. The Sky People didn’t know it, but whoever next put weight there, look out!

  “So the Great Chief of the Sky People came walking along, making sure everything was good, because it was his lookout, and he walked right past the thin place on the left, without realizing it. And he said, ‘I am content, for the sky is as it should be, and at peace.’

  “And later, the medicine man of the Sky People came walking along, looking for signs from the spirit world, and hoping he wouldn’t find any, and he just missed that thin place, too, on the right side. And he said, ‘I am content, for the spirits are pleased with us.’

  “And then later, here came the Great Chief’s oldest son, checking up on the things he figured the old man had wrong, and like most young men, he thought his balls were so big, you know, that he had to walk bowlegged, like this. And so he walked right past that thin place on both sides, it was amazing how it happened, and he said, ‘I am content, for I will be the next Great Chief of my people, and I will be able to fix this.’

  “And finally, along came the only daughter of the Great Chief, and she was the only one of the Sky People who looked down a lot, because she thought the world below was beautiful, and she stepped right on that thin place, and broke through, and fell, and as she fell she said nothing but instead sang a song like no one had ever heard, and the birds of the air below, and the beasts of the land below, and the fish of the water below, everybody heard this song, and when Sky Woman landed feet first at the top of the highest hill, the creature
s were there to welcome her, except the fish, I guess. And Sky Woman said, ‘I am content, for this is a place of beauty, and above me is the sky, always.’ And that’s how my people say the first person came to live on the Earth.”

  Nobody said anything. They all just looked at me.

  “Huh,” Asa said.

  “My grandfather told that story so many times,” I said, “we kids used to think he was standing there when Sky Woman landed.”

  A few of them chuckled, not very loudly. Then they all started to move, shuffling from foot to foot or wadding up their empty paper cones or looking at their watches.

  “Getting late, fellas.”

  “Yep, getting late.”

  None of them seemed impressed by my story. I was plenty impressed, myself, because I had made up the whole thing, on the spot, right there on Broadway under the Colony marquee. My grandfather’s actual favorite story was about how he finagled his way into being the last man hired to work steel on the Flatiron Building. I never knew I was so good at lying.

  So we all walked away from the Colony. I never saw any of them again, not that I know of, anyway. I walked home, and looked up the whole way at the buildings I had worked, touched by the morning sun, and above me was the sky, always.

  Years later, I went by the Museum of Modern Art, where they show the old pictures, including the silents, to see if they were going to show The Flaming Frontier anytime soon—since I saw it only the once, and went in late, and left before it was over. I don’t think the picture played the Colony long, and Millie had other plans for the next Saturday night, and the next, and the next twenty years. The museum woman had never heard of it but was nice enough to look it up in her big catalogs on the shelves in her office, and she said That’s interesting, and she told me The Flaming Frontier not only wasn’t in the museum’s collection, it wasn’t in anyone’s collection, or any distributor’s list either. A lot of old movies, she told me, just plain don’t exist anymore. The film stock back then was easy to catch fire, or just dissolve, and a lot of studios, when they went bust, threw everything away. But maybe this one will turn up one day, Mister DeLisle. They do turn up, sometimes. That’s OK, I told her. The Fred F. French Building is gone, too. But I know it was there.