Читать книгу Drifting South - Charles Davis, Charles Davis B. - Страница 7

Chapter 3

“What’s for dinner?”

“Your momma’s gonna be busy for a while,” Uncle Ray had said.

“How long?”

“All-nighter.”

“You eat yet?” I asked.

“Not hungry.”

Uncle Ray looked thin as the shoestring tie he wore with his city clothes, him sitting there on Ma’s sofa with his feet propped up on a heavy piece of glass that laid atop a chicken crate. Ma had at some moment the year before fancied that that particular crate would suit as a new coffee table, being me and my brothers had broken past repair the one she had before it…something she wasn’t pleased about, being that that one was actually store-made furniture. She’d made me and my brothers scrub and sand down the new one to where it was nothing but shiny dry wood and no chicken, before she stained and lacquered it and after all the fuss, it came to sit in the middle of her living room. Her decorations and lately Uncle Ray’s feet tended to take up most of the space on the glass top she was always keeping tidy for customers and company.

Uncle Ray sitting there as usual looked to me the same as he always did, pretty much. He had two suits that he’d switch wearing every so often to his preference, one brown and one black. That day must have been a black day, because that’s the suit of clothes he had on.

Both suits had wide white stripes up and down them and he’d usually wear a pair of shiny tan boots that he was so particular about when he’d step off a boardwalk. But Uncle Ray hadn’t been able to wear his boots for weeks because his feet were so swollen after the beating that had been put on him.

“She here or downstairs?” I asked quiet.

Uncle Ray didn’t take his eyes away from a straight razor in one hand that he was pushing slow and so careful against the grain of a small white stone he had resting on a leg.

“She’s in the back,” he said.

He finally looked up at me because I’d been standing there looking at him, and he pulled a flask from his coat pocket. Then he took a long swig of gin as easy as a person would take a drink of lemonade.

Uncle Ray was one of those people who drank from morning to bed, always straight gin liquor, and he never seemed the least bit drunk whether he sipped or chugged. I didn’t care if he drank or not, or was drunk or not, but it was bad news that he wasn’t hungry. I knew I had to either make dinner myself—if I could find something to make—or rustle up something for free somehow from one of the bars in Shady.

I’d never spend my own hidden stash on food, even hungry as I was, and I knew better than to ask Uncle Ray for eating money because lately he’d always said he was broke as a three-legged polecat whenever I’d asked him.

Ma never believed Uncle Ray was as poor as an honest man, either, like he was so fond of saying at other times. He made a weekly wage from the elders for the doctoring that he did in Shady, and even though Uncle Ray always tended to gamble and drink away whatever money he’d make or win, Ma thought he squirreled away a little bit. But I guess after he got all busted up, I could see where he wasn’t able to make much of a living because he had to spend so much of the day with his feet up in air.

From what folks said, the only reason Uncle Ray was back with us at all was because the Shady elders convinced him to do so. The elders were all business, and quick at convincing. Word was that every one of them was from Ol’ Luke’s bloodline and they ran everything. The head of the elders was Tobias Chambers, and that’s who you’d go to if you were having some sort of problem you couldn’t handle by yourself. Once Mr. Chambers listened and nodded, that problem got fixed. And fixed for good. But if he didn’t nod, whatever problem you had was about to get dreadful worse.

Uncle Ray couldn’t walk for weeks after he left Ma and broke the elders’ contract with him to doctor in Shady. The elders tracked him to New Jersey and sent serious men to fetch him. Uncle Ray came back with both feet busted up, which displeased and troubled Ma, but Uncle Ray did seem to like staying with us more than before he tried to run off, or at least he acted like he did around Ma while he was hobbling around.

I walked toward the kitchen and could feel the pine planks underme moving up and down, and then I heard the muffled sound of loud music and static coming from the transistor radio in Ma’s bedroom. I looked over my left shoulder at the framed picture of Jesus that Ma had hung at the entrance of the narrow hallway. The picture of him with bright lights coming from his head was bouncing back and forth against the wall a little, and when the Jesus picture was agitated, is how me and my brothers could always tell for certain that Ma was busy working. Not just working, she was busy working. We’d learned from more than a couple of times when she’d lost business to our interruptions, that we weren’t to bother her until the Jesus picture calmed, unless one of us needed her for something of an emergency nature. She always said not to disturb her business at all over nothing serious if her door was closed and locked, because Ma never closed her door unless she was working. But we all knew as long as the Jesus picture was steady that we could peck on her locked door about this and that without too much fuss from one of her customers.

I pulled on one end of the twine that was hanging over a nail to level the picture of Jesus when Uncle Ray said, “Your momma made pork hash this morning, but your brothers wiped the kettle clean.”

“She make any bread?”

“They finished off the johnnycake, too.”

I stuck my head in the kitchen and saw the kettle and plates and forks soaking in a washtub, walked over to open the icebox, and there wasn’t a scrap of food in it except for a half-empty jar of mustard and the top stub of a pickle floating in a canning jar. Same as yesterday and the day before. Looking around in that icebox put me in a worse mood than I was in already. The thought of that hash made my mouth water.

“You been at Hoke’s this whole time?” Uncle Ray asked.

I walked back in the living room and nodded.

“Make any jingle manning the broom?”

Uncle Ray had put his straight razor, whetstone and flask away. He was staring at me with eyes set close together like a hawk while training his new wide mustache that went all the way down to his chin. Wasn’t his business whether I made anything or not so I kept quiet, but the fact was I didn’t make anything.

“Until they let you back in the poker games, that violin is what’ll earn you a living. The way you fiddle on it all the time, you should be down in the saloons making it work for you.”

I’d been thinking about trying my luck in the music business, being the gambling business had been going so poorly. Uncle Ray had told me I had an ear for making music the first day he’d gave me that fiddle after winning it in a knock-rummy game. I was playing “Cripple Creek” and “Don’t Hit Your Granny With a Big Ol’ Stick” and a bunch of other old mountain tunes before that evening was over.

Music did come easy to me, the same way Ma had always fretted that most things did to me. I wasn’t as sure about that as she was, but she feared the easy, because she believed people became lazy if they don’t end up venturing to where things are hard for them. And to Ma, there weren’t but a hair of difference between laziness and evilness. She kept all her boys busy and I guess tried her best not to raise lazy, evil sons, but I believe it was a bigger job than one woman by herself could sometimes handle.

I just figured music came easy to me because I’d always loved to listen to it so much. But what I couldn’t do was sing like good singers can, so I didn’t see profit or future in making music, and my goal in life was to make money however it could be made the quickest and the easiest and the most. I wanted to be rich because I’d seen how the rich are treated so different than folks are with nothing but holes in their pockets, and I’d never owned nothing without a hole in it somewhere.

Anyway, I was still standing there in the hall next to Ma’s kitchen and had just gotten back from Hoke’s Billiards Emporium. I’d been there all the last night and into that morning, waiting on a new shooter I’d spotted coming into town with a loud cowboy hat and fancy cue.

Hoke had rented me a broom to lean on as a prop so I might be able to hustle up a game and not look like a real player. He told me that he’d have to eyeball the shooter I was hunting before he’d assign him to me, because the hat and cue could be a ruse.

Even though Hoke knew I was one of the better poker players in Shady—so good it was rare anymore when I could get anybody to deal me a hand—he thought I needed more time watching the other shooters.

It was the same way I’d learned to play poker, by studying the players as much as the cards, and by abiding by the unwritten rules more than the written ones. Like I learned young that cheating’s always fair, an unwritten rule, but only as long as you can get away with it.

After getting too famous for my own good at poker, I was determined to not let the same thing happen shooting pool. The one poker lesson I picked up too late was not to win as often as I could. That was one hard lesson Hoke drove into me every chance he got. I’d been trying as hard as I could to beat off the nickname I’d taken on: Luck.

Nobody wanted to play a sporting game of anything against a feller nicknamed Luck.

Hoke always got his forty percent share from the takings in his place. The bad thing for me was if I didn’t make nothing, I’d have to pay him a quarter just to lean on his broom, it being part of my role as the floor sweeper who’d just like to shoot a game for a cold bottle of pop while on break. He controlled the whole place while watching eight tables at once from the window of his small upstairs office. Hoke was as round as he was tall, and he smoked two cigarettes at a time by the way he always had one lit, and he reminded me of those puppet masters who would float into Shady now and then with all of those strings dangling from their fingers. Everybody who worked for Hoke were his puppets. And the ones who came through the door just looking to shoot an hour away became his puppets, too, if they weren’t mindful. One game or one drink too many, and Hoke would own them and everything they had.

But my mark never showed. I suspected he got sidetracked early by the whores and now probably didn’t have a penny left on him, and that’s why I was in a surly mood that late Sunday morning when I got back to Ma’s apartment.

I turned my eyes away from Uncle Ray to a pair of muddy trousers stuffed with straw hanging over the kitchen door. They looked like they’d been run over by the tire tracks on them. I’d seen odder things in Ma’s apartment, but couldn’t figure why half of a scarecrow would be dangling in her kitchen. I figured it was a charm Ma had hung up to ward off some sort of evil.

“Want a lesson?” Uncle Ray asked. He didn’t say it too loud because he only taught things when Ma was away or working. Ma frowned on the lessons he taught, except for the times he’d tried to teach me to read and write, which I never had any interest in.

“I got to find something to eat,” I said, studying on those burlap pants.

“I’m about to teach you something about being able to keep a full belly. But if you think tending to your empty belly at this particular moment is more important, then we’ll forget about it.”

Ma always said Uncle Ray was half angel and half outlaw. He had to be the most educated man in Shady because he’d went to college and was the only person who knew what to do with all the things in a doctor bag. And he always liked to talk up a storm in his half Southern and half Yankee accent about things in the world nobody else knew much about or cared much about. I feared he was going to preach book learning to me again and pull out a pen and pad of paper like he’d do from time to time.

“Teach what?”

“You can’t scare up a game of cards, aren’t having much luck at the tables and you don’t want to fiddle for your breakfast, so I thought you might want to learn how to use this.”

Uncle Ray stood from Ma’s couch and turned a half step. He pulled his straight razor from a sheath he carried in the small of his back. He put it up to the window light where it caught a glare and then he stared at me. I’d just seen him honing on it but he made a pretty big deal out of flashing it around.

He walked into the kitchen and over the next hour I soon forgot about my empty stomach as he made me practice over and over how to pull a razor and hold it. Then he had me walk up to that pair of pants a hundred times practicing how to cut the side of a back pocket without cutting in too far but far enough.

“Pair of pants like this, you don’t cut the bottom, you cut the side. Not too far and it has to be done quick,” he said.

Before I started the actual cutting, he took his razor from me and he cut both pockets so fast that I missed how he did it, even thought I was watching with wide eyes. I never even saw the razor in his hand.

“Goddamn, Uncle Ray,” I said.

“Sew them up,” he said.

After I sewed those pockets up, which he showed me how to do, too, he gave me back the razor and then he moved my fingers around to the right position.

“Keep the handle against your wrist, and your thumb and middle knuckle of your pointing finger way down on the blade. That way no one will know what you’re carrying and you’ll cut only as deep as necessary. You slash a man’s backside wide-open with a razor and I can assure you he’ll be prone to kill you over it.”

“You ever done that?”

“I never got the lesson you’re getting right now, let’s put it that way.”

I practiced and practiced with him telling me how to approach those stuffed pants like I was just walking normal, and then go in fast with that blade until the pocket got cut without the pants moving any, and I didn’t cut anything under it. When I started getting good, he gave me one of his old razors and a smooth whetstone to keep for my own, but that’s when we both heard Ma’s radio turn off and she walked in from the back bedroom. Uncle Ray fought the pants into an empty pantry cupboard and both of us tucked our razors away.

Ma was wearing her red shiny robe, and wrapped herself up in it tight when she saw me. She kept looking back and forth at me and Uncle Ray, but then stopped at me.

“Didn’t hear you come in, sugar. You make any money last night?” she asked.

I shook my head, but I would have shook my head whether I made anything or not, because Ma was more likely to give me money when I wasn’t making money.

“You lose any?” She looked at me hard and long when she asked that.

“Just the quarter.”

“You eat?”

“Had a few peanuts last night is all.”

Ma shook her head, dug in her robe pocket and then stuck out her hand. She gave me several bills folded in half.

“In a couple hours, bring back a steak dinner from Merle’s, make sure it’s hot, and with whatever’s left, get yourself something but bring back a sack of biscuits and gravy and a pot of brown beans for you and your brothers. And collards, too, if they have them. I won’t be doing no cooking tonight.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re fishing down at the falls. And they better be home before dark. If they ain’t, you fetch them and tell them to hightail it back here.”

I nodded and then thought about the steak dinner. I knew it wasn’t for her and it wasn’t for me and it wasn’t for Uncle Ray. “You want anything?”

“I’ll eat in the morning,” she said.

Ma never ate while she was working, even if she had to work all day and all night with one customer. But she looked hungry so I figured I’d ask. She never looked at Uncle Ray and he never looked at her, he just kept looking out the window. Ma gave me a quick hug and yawned before she went to the icebox and fetched a bucket of beer, the only thing in it besides that jar of mustard, the pickle stub and a crock of spring water.

She then went back to her business and kept that bucket steady as she walked down the hall wearing a pair of shoes with black high heels, and didn’t spill a drop. When she opened her bedroom door to go back inside, I heard a man snoring.

After she locked the door, Uncle Ray pulled his razor back out and wiped it down with an oiled cloth he kept wrapped in wax paper in his front pocket.

“A man who keeps a keen razor and knows how to use it will never starve,” he said. “Good thing to know if times get bad, especially if the day comes that you have kids to feed and real jobs are scarce, or you need money to get out of somewhere fast and there isn’t time to hustle what you need. You’re getting at the age where you need to ponder such things. It’s misfortune you’ve passed on the real education I’ve tried to teach so you could make the way of an honest man, if you ever needed to or wanted to, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about such things—you’re not listening to a damn thing I’m saying, are you?”

I realized I wasn’t, looked at him and lied, “Yeah, I am,” I said.

He took a step closer. “Listen to me. Going through life ignorant is so far your choosing. You’re going to have to take and not give in this world to get, and sometime, someday, you may need to take with more than just your wit and that grin and good luck of yours that follows you around. One day you’ll grin at the world and it isn’t going to grin back. Mean is going to stare you dead in the face. Understand?”

I nodded.

“You will one day, I assure you. And good luck’s always too fickle to bank a future on whether you think so or not right now. You’re not always going to have a woman cooking your supper, providing a roof for you and doing your wash like your momma does, tending to you hand and foot. What I’m trying to tell you is this—you don’t know anything about pain.

“Real pain. Suffering kind of pain. Hard times.

“You’re about to become a man, and from that day on the called side of the coin will land upside only about half the time, and that’s only if you stay lucky. You don’t know anything about that kind of business, yet, and there isn’t a way for you to even understand such serious business. You don’t know anything about being a man, is what I’m telling you. Not yet. You think you do, but you don’t.”

I looked at Uncle Ray to study his face because of what he’d said toward the end of his rambling about having a woman doing stuff for you. Ma was doing those exact same things for him, but I decided to let it pass because it seemed to have passed him. That’s about all I got out of all whatever he’d just said.

He finished oiling down his razor, put it away and then he rummaged through the pantry. He wrestled those pants back out and hung them back up, then he got started again with his lesson and after each turn I made at the pants, he’d make me stitch up those britches so I could practice again.

“We’ll practice on different pockets tomorrow,” he said.

I got real good at cutting and stitching. He told me the two skills went together like cold buttermilk and cornbread.

He went on while I was slashing that if I cut a pocket right and kept walking behind a man, soon that wallet would poke out far enough to grab or plain fall out for the lazy taking. And you always took a wallet you know has something in it or you were just picking empty leather.

He told me how important it was to look for the man with a full wallet. He said it wasn’t hard because men who wore fancy hats or boots or had some gold or silver showing on them generally had something worth taking. He said it didn’t take much thinking or education to find where the money is, I just had to pay attention.

And he said money didn’t belong to any man who isn’t smart enough to keep it. The bigger wad they had on them, the more they showed it on them like decorations because most men with money like to let folks know that they have more than others do.

He said it wasn’t nothing more than human nature.

“You choose your mark by watching what a man orders for a meal and how much he leaves on his plate, how much he’ll bet at a gaming table, how much he tips the tavern help because the rich don’t tip as much as the poor, generally. And especially take note if women are interested in him, because women can smell green on a man and they attract to it like bees to wildflowers. Always watch the women,” he said.

While I’d stitch those pants up, Uncle Ray would tell me all kinds of ways to get another man’s money without them knowing it and without harming him too much.

He went on to say that sometimes a razor wasn’t the proper tool to rob a man with. He said if a man I’d marked for robbing had a wallet in a hard to reach place like a front pocket or breast pocket tight to him, it was best to have two people helping to make easy payday even though I’d have to split the loot three ways.

If I did it by myself, he said I’d generally have to hurt the feller too bad to get his money or worse, I might be the one getting hurt.

There were all kinds of ways to do the robbing, but the easiest and smartest was for one man to hit the feller in the nose hard and unexpected, another to help the feller hit get off the ground, and the third to carry on like crazy and chase the rascal who’d hit him and both would run out of sight.

“The man helping the mark up is always the best thief of the bunch,” Uncle Ray said. “He’s the one who takes the money, rings, watch, whatever he can grab without the mark knowing, as he’s just acting to be helping him up.”

Uncle Ray went on that after it was all over, the mark would get off the ground, find his hat and go about his way light in the pockets and jewelry but quick in step. He wouldn’t know he’d been lightened of his load yet.

Uncle Ray said the most important thing was, “If you have to hit a man, hit him hard. Hard enough so that his first thought is that he’d better just get to somewhere else from wherever he’s at to get his brains together before he decides to check his belongings.”

I knew that already from a couple dozen fistfights and practiced that myself whenever I had to hit somebody, but he said there was a code among professional thieves like him that you never hurt anyone too bad unless it was by accident, and you always left a little. It wasn’t just being charitable, he said, it was the proper way to do business.

A place like Shady Hollow needed people to mend up fairly easy with a dollar or two still left in their pockets, because we’d all want them to come back one day, and we needed them to come back without too many hard feelings. They’d just be more protective of their valuables next time, so all in all we were just teaching them an important lesson so they wouldn’t get robbed again so easy by nobody else, he said.

He kept going on but at some point my hands were tired from all the slashing and stitching and I couldn’t stand my empty stomach any longer, so I thanked him for the razor and whetstone, stuck both in my back pocket and the robbing lesson ended.

I took Ma’s money and headed down to Merle’s Diner, where I placed her order and counted what change was left. It wasn’t much, so I told Miss Paulene to forget the collards and instead bring me a bowl of catfish chowder.

I could have turned up the bottle of ketchup in front of me waiting on that chowder. I was wishing they’d go ahead and bring me some soda crackers to munch on when Herbert Mullins walked in, all out of breath.

Me and Herbert were good pards and had gotten in and out of all kinds of trouble for as long as I could remember. He was two years older than me, but I’d always been bigger than him. I’d always been pretty sure that I was by a far sight the smarter one between us, but Herbert would fight anybody or anything. Ma always said I was tough as a pine knot, but Herbert was a lot tougher. He loved to fistfight like some people love to gamble or fish or be lazy. Loved it. Herbert wasn’t a bully, though.

He always stood up for the runts in Shady and those who just got picked on for one peculiar reason or another, and that made him popular with those who got picked on all the time when he wasn’t around. I never saw Herbert ever pick a fight with somebody smaller than him, and that’s how we got to be friends because he loved to pick fights with boys bigger than him.

Herbert picked a fight with me for no good reason at all on the first day he showed up in Shady Hollow, except he wanted to rile me up to see if he could whup me. He knocked a pear out of my hand that I was eating and then grinned. We soon fought for two or twenty minutes until we were both so covered in mud and dust and plumb worn out, that neither one of us could swing anymore.

After that, we both stood and he tried to shake my hand wearing a big bloody smile, and he told me what his name was. I told him I’d shake his hand if he got my pear off the ground, cleaned it off and gave it back to me. And he did.

Anyway, Herbert was standing there all wild-eyed like he’d get over the smallest things, and he grabbed me by the arm out of breath. “Been looking all over for you. Come here.”

He tried to pull me off my stool, but I jerked my arm away and told him I wasn’t going anywhere until I ate my dinner. He grabbed me again but harder the second time. I saw how agitated he was and I knew if I was gonna eat in peace, I had to get up from that stool.

“You see that blue Ford parked up the street?”

I stood and nodded. You noticed cars in Shady, especially new, shiny ones. It had North Carolina plates and I wondered if it was that new pool shooter’s car. But I didn’t recollect seeing it the night before.

“A girl drove it in fifteen minutes ago. She’s the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen and I mean she’s the best-looking thing I’ve ever seen. She’s been asking around…for you.”

“For me?”

Herbert grinned.

I pulled my arm away again.

“I ain’t lying, Ben.”

“How old is she?”

“About our age, I’d reckon.”

“Where’s she now?” I asked.

“She’s checking in at the Alton House. Had three leather bags. I carried them in for her and she tipped me three dollars before ol’ Mr. Alton saw me and started running me off.”

“Three dollars? Shit.”

Herbert showed me the money and I couldn’t figure what a good-looking rich girl with three dollars to blow was doing looking for me. It had to be for a bad reason because I couldn’t come up with a good one.

“What’s she look like?”

“Just wait till you see her.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“You know that blond dancer that came through here a while back performing at Barton’s Opry Show? Me and you kept sneaking in and—”

“Yeah.”

“She looks like her, but even prettier. She sorta don’t belong here though like that dancer did, know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“When she first pulled up and asked me where the best place to stay is, I told her, and then I asked if she needed help with the bags because she looked so rich and everything. She looked scared, too.”

“What’d you do?”

“No, I was kind to her. She was just scared looking, I don’t know.”

“You sure she asked for me?”

“I’m sure. She asked me if I knew Benjamin Purdue.”

“You swear it.”

“I swear, Ben.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told her I knew you and that me and you were pals.”

“What’d she say then?”

“She wanted to know where you lived but I didn’t tell her. I didn’t know if you’d want me saying you lived overtop a saloon to a girl like her, so I just said that I’d find you and tell you to meet her at the Alton House.”

“She with anybody else?”

“I didn’t see nobody.”

“Get her name?”

“She told me, but I ain’t sure if it’s right, because she told me when she was digging in her purse handing me those bills, and I saw a lot of other bills in there, but I think she said her name is Anna or Amanda, Annie, something like that.”

I felt nervous all of a sudden when he said Amanda.

I thought as hard as I could. I’d known a few gals named Ann but only one Amanda. None of the Anns would come close to the description of this girl Herbert had just given me. Not even Anna Jean Davis. But Amanda Lynn would.

But it couldn’t be Amanda Lynn. Couldn’t be. She lived in Durham County, North Carolina, on a plantation a thousand times the size of Shady Hollow, with tended gardens and pastures, and tobacco and soybeans and field corn growing as far as you could see. It was then that I recalled the new Ford up the street had North Carolina plates.

“Amanda Lynn Jennings?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Herbert said. “Amanda Jennings.”

I drew back and couldn’t say another word as Miss Paulene brought me my fish chowder. She always gave me a local’s portion with big chunks of catfish and set it down in front of my stool with buttered crackers and the free side of barbeque slaw, but I looked at all of it, and then at Herbert, and then flew out the double doors. I didn’t even think to pick up the four cents change she’d left on the napkin.

“Who is she?” Herbert yelled, as I took off out of Merle’s like the place was burning down around me. I didn’t know right then that it may as well have been.

I’d never see that place or any of those folks ever again.