Mr. Vertigo Read Free Page A

her gums, and from the way her dark eyes glittered, I concluded that she was a Gypsy. She was Mother Sue, the Queen of the Gypsies, and Master Yehudi was her son, the Prince of Blackness. They were abducting me to the Castle of No Return, and if they didn’t eat me for dinner that night, they were going to turn me into a slavey boy, a groveling eunuch with an earring in my ear and a silk bandanna wrapped around my head.
    “Hop in, sonny,” Mother Sue said. Her voice was so deep and mannish, I would have been scared to death if I hadn’t known she could smile, “You’ll see some blankets in the back. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll use ‘em. We got a long cold ride ahead of us, and you don’t want to get there with no frozen fanny.”
    “His name is Walt,” the master said as he climbed up beside her. “A pus-brained ragamuffin from honky-tonk row. If my hunch is correct, he’s the one I’ve been looking for all theseyears.” Then, turning in my direction, he said brusquely, “This is Mother Sue, kid. Treat her nice, and she’ll give you only goodness in return. Cross her, and you’ll regret the day you were born. She might be fat and toothless, but she’s the closest thing to a mother you’ll ever have.”
    I don’t know how long it took us to get to the house. It was out in the country somewhere, sixteen or seventeen miles from town, but I didn’t learn that until later, for once I climbed in under the blankets and the wagon started down the road, I fell fast asleep. When I opened my eyes again, we were already there, and if the master hadn’t roused me with a slap across the face, I probably would have slept until morning.
    He led me into the house as Mother Sue unhitched the nag, and the first room we entered was the kitchen: a bare, dimly lit space with a wood stove in one corner and a kerosene lamp flickering in another. A black boy of about fifteen was sitting at the table reading a book. He wasn’t brown like most of the colored folks I’d run across back home, he was the color of pitch, a black so black it was almost blue. He was a full-fledged Ethiopian, a pickaninny from the jungles of darkest Africa, and my heart just about stopped beating when I caught sight of him. He was a frail, scrawny fellow with bulging eyes and those enormous lips, and as soon as he stood up from his chair to greet us, I saw that his bones were all twisted and askew, that he had the jagged, hunchbacked body of a cripple.
    “This is Aesop,” the master said to me, “the finest boy who ever lived. Say hello to him, Walt, and shake his hand. He’s going to be your new brother.”
    “I ain’t shaking hands with no nigger,” I said. “You’ve got to be crazy if you’d think I’d do a thing like that.”
    Master Yehudi let out a loud, prolonged sigh. It wasn’t an expression of disgust so much as of sorrow, a monumental shudderfrom the depths of his soul. Then, with utmost deliberation and calm, he curled the index finger of his right hand into a frozen, beckoning hook and placed the tip of that hook directly under my chin, at the precise spot where the flesh meets the bone. Then he began to press, and all at once a horrific pain shot around the back of my neck and up into my skull. I had never felt pain like that before. I struggled to cry out, but my throat was blocked, and I could do no more than produce a sick gagging noise. The master continued to press with his finger, and presently I felt my feet lift off the ground. I was traveling upward, rising into the air like a feather, and the master seemed to be accomplishing this without the slightest effort, as if I were of no more consequence to him than a ladybug. Eventually, he had me up to where my face was on a level with his and I was looking directly into his eyes.
    “We don’t talk like that around here, boy,” he said. “All men are brothers, and in this family everyone gets treated with respect. That’s the law. If you don’t like it,