The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray Read Free Book Online Page A

whatever else came up. It started with two baskets of ferns he brought in from the greenhouse out on the ag side and hung above the books on the ledge that he also used as an extension of his work corner. Then a few days later he filled in the rest of the space with two shelves of terra-cotta pots, and before the end of November a fine growth of English ivy, tiger aloe, gold dusk, and silver dollar jade was underway, and by the time that first winter settled in, there were red geraniums and yellow nasturtiums, and deep purple African violets in blossom.
    Each plant specimen was tagged with its Latin label, but when he got around to adding orchids he called them his Nero Wolf project. So the day I came in and he looked around from what he was probing wearing a pawnbroker’s eye piece, I started laughing and I said, Hey man, goddamn. Don’t tell me you’re a jewel thief, too, and he said, Touché, old pardner, and laughed alongwith me. Then he said, But what about Sherlock and his magnifying glass and what about Benvenuto Cellini the goldsmith and his loupe? Not that the cat burglar doesn’t have his challenges for the likes of the old Snake. Hey hey haay, roommate. It’s a thought. Good thinking, roommate. Good thinking.

VIII
    T here was a time when everybody in Gasoline Point had expected Creola Calloway to go out on the circuit and become a world famous entertainer. Even before she was thirteen years old, people were already talking about how every vaudeville company that came to play in Mobile in those days always tried to hire her, always promising to make her a headliner in no time at all.
    Nobody doubted it. Her endowments were all too obvious. She was so good-looking that she made you catch your breath, and when it came to doing the shimmie-she-wobble, the Charleston, the mess-around, or any other dance step, including ones made up on the spot, she always took the cake without even seeming to try, and also without making anything special of it afterward.
    By her fifteenth birthday most people seemed to have decided that her fame and fortune were only a matter of time and choice, which they took for granted would be any day now. Not that anybody ever tried to rush things. After all, along with all of the fun they had enjoyed speculating about her possibilities, therewas also the fact that Gasoline Point would not be the same without her.
    As for myself, once I became old enough to begin to realize what they were talking about, I couldn’t ever think about her leaving without also thinking of her coming back, and what I always saw was her rearriving with her own road company and own chauffeur-driven touring-style limousine wearing a hot-mama boa and carrying a lap dog. There would be placards about her in Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s barbershop, on the porch of Stranahan’s store, and on telegraph poles all around town. Then her name would be up in a crown of bright twinkling lights above the main entrance to the Saenger Theatre which was the premier showcase in downtown Mobile in those days.
    Actually by that time the way most people in Gasoline Point had begun to act whenever she came around you would have thought that she had already been away and had come back famous. Even when people were standing right next to her on the sidewalk or in a yard somewhere, it was as if they were looking at her satin smooth caramel brown skin and croquignole-frizzy hair and her diamond ring and twenty-four-carat ankle chain on stage with their eyes still glazed by the footlights.
    Sometimes even when people were talking directly to her they sounded as if she were no longer a living and breathing person in the flesh anymore. It was as if to men and women alike she was a dazzlingly beautiful woman-child beyond everything else, and as such not only mysterious but also unsettling if not downright disturbing. No wonder pretty girls so often seem to be smiling, either as if in response to applause or as if in self-defense.
    But