[Part Opener] Birdie
Chapter 29
In 1812, the seemingly impossible happened: The Mississippi River, one of the longest and
strongest rivers in the world, suddenly began to run backward. This was the one and only story
my father told at parties, how an earthquake along the river shook the ground so hard that church
bells rang in Boston some 1,300 miles away, the rumbling woke up Dolley Madison in the White
House, and the mighty Mississippi began running in the unfathomable direction of north. I
figured if a river as hell-bent as the Mississippi could change its mind, then, evidently, so could
I.
It wasn’t quite an earthquake, but it did feel like I was on some sort of wild, unreasonable
ride. The argument with Charlie had left me very angry, which climbed to a state of red-hot fury
before dropping into a spiral of terrifying disappointment, leaving me plain ole sick to my
stomach—for my family, for Mrs. Tartt and Frances, for Charlie, for Meg. The list of lives
wrecked was long.
Yesterday, before I’d run into Garnett at the post office, I’d come across Charlie’s ledger.
Still furious, I’d thumbed through it, not able to stop myself. The numbers had practically
sparkled on the page. The biggest earnings came from what she called Tricks, and while I didn’t
have to wonder what those were, I saw they ranged from four dollars and fifty cents up to fifteen
dollars apiece. What in the world did a woman have to do to earn that? After Tricks, there was
also the income from the Upfronts; then came Room & Board, Liquor Drinks, Admission, like it
471
was a show of some kind, and before I could cringe over a show of what, I realized she wanted to
bring in a band to play in Mrs. Tartt’s backyard. Last came Cold Drinks, Cigarettes, and finally
Dime Dances, which were hardly a pittance, but when I looked at what it all added up to, I
couldn’t help but be impressed. Charlie’d managed to come up with eight different ways to make
money here at Mrs. Tartt’s, which by her tabulations, could make us thousands of dollars. It was
such a rotten, terrible, good, ingenious idea, I felt something close to lust. But the business was
as crooked as that scuffed-up old dance platform they’d set up out in the yard, which looked even
worse now in the daylight.
Who could say what might change a person’s mind about something as degenerate as
this, in the time it took to get from the post office to the back porch? Garnett Pittman, that’s
what. Charlie had been right all along about Garnett’s intentions—she was trying to get Meg
back to the orphanage so she could ship her off to the cannery work program. From one hell
straight to another.
Sunday morning, I was staring out at the crooked dance floor, stewing over how to even
begin this conversation when the screen door whined open. Charlie eased it closed softly so it
didn’t pop. Her eyes were flat and black like somebody’d unhooked her wires. It was unnerving
to see her move so slow; she was usually such a force. To make things even worse, she had on
the stained yellow dress again.
“What’re you wearing that old dress for?” I asked. She had plenty of Mrs. Tartt’s dresses,
plus the weather had turned hot again, the cooler weather blown away to some other place.
Charlie turned away and simply said, “We’re leaving.”
Seconds later, Flossy came clomping out onto the porch. Deep lines ran down the sides of
her mouth. “Bag’s all packed, Charles.” She had on a pink dress, similar to the last though
472
somehow different. It hit just above her bluish knees like it was from a decade ago, and two of
the buttons running down the front hung by a thread, not unlike herself.
“I see that look,” Flossy said, narrowing her eyes on me. “Don’t you look at me different
now you know what I do for a living. I ain’t no different than the gal you was nice to when I
arrived and you asked do I like my eggs fried or scrambled.”
“Where you going?” I asked.
“Where you think? Back to the Sicko. With a stop in Byhalia.”
I turned to Charlie. “Charlie, what are you planning to do?”
Charlie’s mouth was tied tight and stubborn. “I’m just going to ask Meg’s—the woman
who’s raising her if I can speak to my daughter. That’s all.” She looked down at the haggard
dress and said in a small voice, “I just want to make sure Meg recognizes me.”
Out front a car horn bleated twice. “Come on, Charles,” Flossy said. “Priscilla’s ain’t
getting any closer.”
“Wait,” I said. It took me a second to say it, another second to believe I was saying it. It
came out in starts and stops. “I’m willing to . . . discuss working the front—meaning the dance
club only. But I want nothing to do with the . . . the upstairs business, alright?” I’d convinced my
conscience that I’d just have to do what every other normal woman did and not see what I didn’t
want to see. I was pretty sure I hadn’t been able to accomplish this even once in my life, but I
would just have to learn.
Even as I said this, I was praying, Please say no, say it won’t work.
Charlie glanced out at the backyard, considering it, and finally she said, “Fine.” As if she
was the one having to settle here. She didn’t seem sufficiently surprised by my change of heart
either, which irked me even more.
473
“But I need two things from you, Charlie. First of all, you have to promise not to lie to
me again. You got that?”
“Alright. I promise,” she said. I waited, thinking there might be a thank you or some sort
of gratitude coming. There was not. The taxi honked its horn again.
“And you have to promise me you won’t go to Byhalia . . . not yet. I’ll find another way
to get in touch with Meg’s parents, but you need to promise me that.” It’d been less than a week
since I’d written them, just before Frances and Mrs. Tartt left. They hadn’t had enough time to
write back.
Charlie dug her nails into her thigh, through the yellow dress. This one was harder for her
to give up. I didn’t know what was the right thing to do, but Charlie showing up there and
wrecking Meg’s world was not it.
“Charlie, it’ll only confuse Meg, and it’s too risky—what if they tell Garnett that Meg’s
real mother came to see her?” That would put in motion a whole ’nother set of problems I
couldn’t even fathom. And I did not dare tell Charlie that Garnett wanted to take Meg back,
because I knew when I did, she would be in that taxicab ordering him to make tracks, and she
would try to snatch Meg from the Heidelbergs and get charged with kidnapping and never set
another free foot in those blood-stained heels again. I needed to be the rational one here.
“You promise me? You’ll talk to those people?” Her voice had gone high.
“You bet I will.”
“Alright,” she whispered, clutching her scarred wrist. “But you have to promise me you’ll
let me run the business my way.”
474
“Fine. Just tell me how it works so I know how it works, but then I don’t want to know
how it’s working, alright?” Against my better bookkeeper’s judgment, I added, “I’ll take my
share of the dime dances and selling legal cold drinks and cigarettes, but that is it.”
Charlie shook her head. “If you’re in this, you’re taking your whole share. It’s what we
agreed.”
“We agreed we were starting a dance club.”
“I can’t trust somebody who’s not in all the way,” Charlie said. Chin up, she crossed her
arms, looking just like Meg did when she had an opinion.
“You want to talk about trust—” But I squeezed my eyes shut and held my tongue and
just said, “Fine.” Much as I wanted to make other demands, I left it at this for the time being.
***
“School starts in a week—we’ve got to start hiring now.” Charlie’s lights were fully lit again. In
fifteen minutes, she’d gone from pitch-dark to electrified. I, however, was terrified and still
angry about what was about to happen, and planted myself behind the sink, while she and Flossy
sat six feet away at the kitchen table.
We were down to, more or less, potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions, hoop cheese, a can of
anchovies, and potted ham. I started turning the noisy crank on the flour sifter to make a crust for
some sort of deranged pot pie. All while trying to work out the mechanics of running a front for a
brothel while turning my back on one. It felt like trying to swim without getting wet.
“What if you sent a telegram to the girls at Priscilla’s,” Charlie said, “and told them it’s a
good house?”
“A good house?” Flossy said, looking around her. “Please, give me the address of such a
place. Look, it ain’t so easy getting outta Priscilla’s. I was lucky, or I thought I was. Which
475
brings me to mention, all I eaten since I got here is hard-boiled eggs and pickles. I want real
food. I demand a hot dish.”
“I’m working on it,” I said and kept turning the crank. With the humidity this high, I had
to bang the side of the flour sifter after every third turn so the flour would drop—turn, turn, turn,
bang. I just wanted to learn the basic information I needed to run my side of things and not a
speck else.
“This ain’t 1920 no more, ya know,” Flossy said. “You want half-decent girls, you need
to have the amenities—radio, a telephone, actual furn-i-ture.” She picked a cigarette out of a box
of Luckies with her fingernails. She’d painted just the center of each nail dark pink, like I’d seen
in the magazines.
“They’re hooking us up on a party line tomorrow,” I said. “And don’t smoke in here,
please.”
“You make a appointment on a party line, you’ll be making your next appointment with
the judge,” Flossy said.
“We’ll get a private line after we collect the upfront fees from the rest of the girls,”
Charlie said. “But we can’t collect until we actually hire some.”
“Speaking of,” Flossy said, the unlit cigarette bobbing in her mouth, “lotsa girls ain’t
gonna pay a five-dollar upfront. Nowadays, it’s two and a half bucks to start, two and a half after
the wallets show up—” She nodded up at me. “That’s customers to you, greeny, and be sure and
get us a proper premiere girl,” she told Charlie. Back to me: “That’s the real good-looking one.”
She raised her palm in the air. “Thank you, I must decline, but if you can land us a fox, it’ll
really drive the biz.”
476
“I’m not worried about a premiere girl, first we need bodies. What about Jojo’s in
Memphis?”
“Busted, and mosta Jojo’s girls got a fondness for the needle.”
I sifted faster—turn, turn, turn, bang. I wasn’t exactly sure what the needle meant except
probably something awful and very worthy of changing my mind about this.
“What about Zelda’s?”
Flossy made a slice across her neck. “Kaput. I’m telling ya, there ain’t so many cribs left
anymore, the Anti-Fun League’s shut most of ’em down. Girls is having to hang around street
corners now. Boy, that’s a sad living. And they ain’t run by madams neither, it’s getting to be
men. Call themselves pimps. Jesus, I hear Chicago’s sheer crawling with pimps.” All this was
said with the unlit cigarette stuck between her lips.
It took a beat for it to register what she’d said. “When you say the Anti-Fun League, do
you mean the Anti-Vice?”
“That’s the one,” Flossy said.
I looked at Charlie. She knew Garnett was running for president of the Anti-Vice League
because it’d been in that newspaper article she’d shaken in my face, and I’d bet she’d read the
thing more than once. “Is Flossy saying they’re the ones who shut down places like—” I nearly
said ours. “This?”
“That’s why we’re going to all the trouble for a good front,” Charlie said and frowned at
me for bringing this up.
With Garnett’s name contaminating my head, this whole thing felt doomed. “And you’re
really only planning on keeping this thing open for—”
“Less than a month, I hope,” Charlie said. “Well before the mortgage is due.”
477
Flossy didn’t look surprised by this. They must’ve discussed it over the last few days.
“And which rooms do you think you’ll be . . . using?” I asked.
“Keys, rooms is called. Keys,” Flossy said.
“All of them,” Charlie said.
“Mrs. Tartt’s room too?” I whined. “Could you try to keep hers out of it?”
“I’ll try, but I can’t promise.”
I added another cup of flour to the sifter. This was going to be a gigantic pie crust.
“What about a doctor?” Flossy asked. “You said you’re gonna get us tested, ain’tcha?”
“I did. And I will,” Charlie said.
“The house paying, or you gonna charge us a kidney for it?”
“The house,” Charlie said and sighed. “Who’d Priscilla use?”
“Kleinkamp, the old Jew doc. He’s blind as a fence post and practically mistook my ear
for my twat but he’s the only one who’ll even sniff in our direction,” Flossy said. “Gotta test,
though. One case a syph and fft. Doors closed.”
I pictured one of the old posters from the World War, You, with Uncle Sam pointing his
finger under that snaky word, syphilis. I knew I’d said I’d stay out of this, but, “What happens if
you catch it?” I asked.
“Mm, occasionally nothing,” Flossy said. “Sometimes it’s just a cold. And sometimes it
eats your face off.”
I looked at Charlie, asking her with my eyes, Can I catch that?
“I’ll get all the girls checked before we open and then some,” Charlie said, “but first
we’ve got to hire. What about New Orleans? Who do you know?”
478
“Nobody’s leaving the Big Easy to work in this dinky town, Charles. Most houses put out
a cat call, but it’ll take a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute.”
Flossy turned a page in the newspaper on the table, shaking her head. “All these poor
suckers outta work, too bad you can’t just print it in the situations.” She looked up and slid her
hand through the air like a headline. “I can see it: ‘Extra! Extra! Cat Call in the Fancy House
District. No Furniture but All the Pickles and Eggs You Can Eat.’”
“Why can’t we? Only a hooker would know what it meant,” Charlie said.
“Excuse you, don’t call me a hooker. I do not hook,” Flossy said. “I am a prostitute, thank
you very muchly.”
Charlie leaned forward to Flossy. “But could we? Just put an ad in the paper?”
“No.” Flossy said what I was thinking.
Charlie took a different newspaper off the stack by the hearth and, licking her thumb,
leafed through it to the page she was looking for. “One cent a word, choose newspapers in three
counties, Quitman, Lafayette, Yalobusha, Tate . . .” She looked up. “We could do all of them
except Lafayette County so it wouldn’t be so risky. What do you think?”
“I think you’re the worst madam I ever met,” Flossy said.
Charlie twiddled a pencil between her fingers. She seemed excited. “If we got it in
Monday morning, ran it for two days, girls could make it here by Thursday to interview and we
could open by Saturday night.” I saw her write in a back page in the ledger: CAT CALL. 11:00
A.M. EXPERIENCE RQD. The rest I couldn’t see.
“Prostitutes ain’t really reading the situations, Charles,” Flossy said. “You’re gonna get
some strange types coming around . . .”
479
“Everyone’s reading the situations,” Charlie said. “And I’d bet money there’s a desperate
woman out there who’ll see our ad and think, This”—she tapped the paper—“is just what I’ve
been praying for.”
“Well, we’re gonna need about a half dozen a those,” Flossy said.
“One of us needs to run this up to the paper tomorrow morning,” Charlie said.
“Not you,” I said, since we both knew who might see her.
Flossy caught the look between us. “You ’fraid a seeing somebody in town, Charles?”
She looked worried.
If Flossy was gonna stay here, and do this, she needed to know the name. “Garnett
Pittman. She’s running for Anti-Vice League president.” I saw a faint tick in Charlie’s jaw, and I
could tell, she hadn’t wanted me bringing this up the first time and definitely not again.
“Who is this broad? What’s she want with you?”
“Nothing. She doesn’t even know I’m here,” Charlie said.
But Flossy looked at me to see if there was something Charlie wasn’t telling her. “You
got something to say about this?”
How to put it? “She’s somebody who takes whatever she wants and nobody has the guts
to stop her,” I said.
“Who knows, maybe we’ll be the first,” Flossy said and took the piece of paper from
Charlie.
***
The next morning, after milking the cow and feeding the chickens, I was frowning down at the
watery excuse for a cup of coffee I’d made. I was rationing it so we wouldn’t run out, when of all
luxuries, a telephone showed up at the house. I watched the man from Southern Bell wire it up in
480
the hallway and then he explained that two short rings and a long meant the call was for us, and
any other ring meant it was for somebody else. “Careful what you say on a party line,” he said
with a wink. What this meant was that a bored neighbor could pick it up and listen in on calls as
pedestrian as a grocery store order or as noteworthy as, for example, the Tartts taking
appointments for their new brothel.
Still, I tried to see it as a sign that things were looking up. If Mrs. Tartt was here, she’d
say getting the telephone back was like the first wild blue phlox blooming in the flower garden, a
sign that spring had come.
When Flossy’d gone to town to place the advertisement and Charlie was outside hanging
wash on the line, I went in the hall and picked up the receiver.
“Silva, can you please connect me to a Mr. Thomas Heidelberg III up in Byhalia?” The
letter I’d sent a week ago had merely asked if we could start a correspondence to monitor Meg’s
welfare. But after my conversation with Garnett at the post office, I needed to know what, if
anything, she had said to them about Meg’s return and I didn’t want Charlie to hear.
“Welcome back to Southern Bell and Tel,” Silva said. “Lemme see here . . . I got two
Thomas Heidelbergs listed in Byhalia . . . but it doesn’t list one as the third.”
“Well. Try either,” I said. “They must be related.”
After a windstorm of static and waiting, I heard a ring and a woman answered,
“Heidelberg res-a-dence.”
I cleared my throat. “Hello, this is Birdie Calhoun speaking, with the Lafayette County
Orphan Asylum, and I’m calling to inquire about a little girl, Meg, who was adopted by the
Heidelberg family?”
481
