Читать книгу Bum Rap - Donald E. Morrow - Страница 12

Many years ago the army engineers had built a dam outside of Senecaville, and created Senecaville Lake, for a local recreation area. I had found out about it in one of my jailhouse bullshit sessions with Buck and Charlie.

During the great depression, which I had lived through as a kid, the job created work for a lot of hungry people. Other than the water in the lake, the whole darn area was forested. Thick groves of trees all over the place so that the engineers had to cut paths down to the water for the local fishermen.

Those forests would make a great spot for my tent, and that brings up another thing about my little motor scooter. It didn’t need a road to get down to the lake. It just slipped through the trees, nice and easy. Maybe, when I got back with the carnival, I would take it with me.

There wasn’t much to do, to set up my campsite. I gathered some dead limbs out of the woods, cut a little sapling for a fishing pole, and after putting my rifle together, I hung it high in one tree with the bungee cords. I also made a lean-to, with a sheet of plastic I’d bought in one of the little hamlets, back in the southern Ohio hills. It was time to eat. I went fishing.

It only took a second to tie a popping bug on the line before I flipped it out on the surface of Seneca Lake. I only gave it a little jiggle, and a fish hit it. I brought it in and flipped it up on the bank. One more, and I would stop to clean and cook them.

As I flipped the bug out again, my thoughts turned to the old Seminole man who had taught me to fish. He’d be proud of me, but as the second fish took the popper, I remembered to thank him.

Bluegills are my favorite fish for eating, but for pleasure, I like to fish for bass. These were both fat fish, but they’d go a lot better if I’d have thought to bring some salt.

Long after I had cooked and eaten my fish, I sat gazing into the coals of my fire, brooding over my situation. After smoking three cigarettes, I felt sleep pulling at my eyes, so I stretched out and gave it up for the night. It didn’t work. I kept watching the stars through the foliage of the trees. And Abe Roster just wouldn’t stay away.

Was I justified in killing him? Oh, I’m not talking about legally justified. I didn’t give a darn about the law. If they got me, it was a prison. Just another lifestyle. The lifestyle for everyone else would not be disturbed, and after a while, no one would remember the guy that got off the boxcar.

But hey, maybe Old Charlie, and Buck, might have a cold one for me, and that brought a chuckle.

A ball bat, when used as a weapon, is a murder weapon. It takes special care not to kill a man when you hit him with a ball bat. Roster had tried to kill me, and his boss was in on it. Well, that was settled, and I just spent the rest of the night figuring how I would do it.

My Biggest problem was the fact that I knew nothing about Cambridge, and even less about Abe Roster. That was a handicap. Now an out-and-out murder, where you’re so angry that you don’t conceal your actions, is a very simple thing. Boom! The guy is dead. Now you run!But see. That wasn’t me. It’s not that I was against killing him without giving him a chance to fight back. That didn’t bother me at all. I didn’t want to get caught. I didn’t want to die in the electric chair, and I didn’t want to go to prison.

Why? Simple. I did not start this crap. Abe Roster did when he tried to rent me a barstool. He knew beyond any doubt that he was starting a fight. So my take on it all is that Abe had to die. Nuff said. In my head, he was already dead.

The croaking frogs and the crickets finally pulled the curtain down over my eyes, and dawn came with the sure knowledge that a problem had been solved.

I needed to do some scouting. Like I needed to get a feeling for the city of Cambridge, and I needed to find out where the casino was, that Marcello owned, and I needed to find a place where I could watch it. The two month’s growth in my beard would help as a disguise, so maybe a ball cap, and some glasses. Senecaville. There had to be a store there. I would go shopping.

Phil Richards, the guy that wanted me to be a bouncer in his club. Just like that, it came to me, as I stepped down from the entrance of the “Neighborhood Store” in Senecaville. Was he for real? No one had ever offered me a bouncer job before. Shoot, he hadn’t even seen me fight. He was basing his offer on what he had heard.

The way the man had talked, he was having a bad time. People busting up his club, and running away his customers, but the man didn’t mention why Roster was giving him a bad time. Well, truth is, I didn’t really want the job. I liked my carnival job. I’d been around Carneys all my life. That’s where I was comfortable, and that would be hard for someone that’s not with it to understand.

We stick together. We look out for each other. Just imagine how it would be if you moved your house and your business every week. Every week for ten months, you do business in another town. But now comes the good part. All your neighbors move with you, and you’d have to see a midway being set up to understand. People are all over the place and rides are being set up, joints being set up, and the food concessions are getting ready for inspection. Yeah, who would believe it? The whole show gets inspected by the state inspectors before it can open. A show which breaks down on a Sunday night will be open for business in another town on Monday.

The only advantage I could see about going to work for Mr. Phil Richards was that his place would give me a base to operate from. I would meet people I could talk to, some of them already enemies of Abe Roster. Well, I still had a problem. Richards hadn’t told me where his nightclub was located, so I’d need to think about that for a while.

After a bit of looking, I found that there were only two roads in the area that had nightclubs. Route 21, was the first I visited, and Also where I first saw the casino which was set back off the road. Bulldozers had cut the hell out of the hills to make a giant place to set the casino and park the cars. The second road was route 40 going east, and that’s where I found the Grotto along with another called the Hi-Lite. The Hi-Lite was the fancy one. The Grotto was just ho-hum.

It was a small building―for a nightclub that is―built of wood, maybe sixty feet long, by thirty feet deep, and the most interesting thing of all, it had a privy. Yeah, an outside shit house, with a sagging door and wasps’ nests hanging from the ceiling. It was old, and that meant the building was also old.

Nobody was home. At least there were no cars in the parking lot, but that meant nothing. It was a nite club. People would come after dark, so I had some time on my hands. I just sat there on the seat of my bike thinking for a few minutes, and then I turned the machine out of the parking lot onto the highway. I drove east, just sort of poking along because I knew that soon I would come to a town. That’s the way it was in Ohio. I don’t think you could go anywhere in the state without running into a town within ten miles, and I was soon proved correct. Old Washington.

At first, it looked like just the one main street, but later I saw side streets and houses, and then the graveyard. The one that would have the monument commemorating the passing of General Hunt Morgan. I had to see it, so I turned off into the entrance of the cemetery, and there it was right up front. I pulled by motor scooter right up in front of it, and just sat there letting the whole story of this man run through my head. And then I had the thought he most likely didn’t think of the fact that history would remember him, or that a town where he was considered an enemy, would erect a monument to him. I was glad he wasn’t buried here. It would be some kind of hell to be buried in enemy territory.

Feeling kind of low, I rode back to Phil Richard’s place. I rode my bike around the back of the building and found a place in the grass where I could lie down. It only took two minutes before I was asleep.

I went in the back door. The back partition of a booth was right beside me as I walked in the door, and the first thing that met my eyes was the most beautiful set of blue eyes I had ever seen. They locked with mine, but although it seemed like a long time, I knew it was only for a second. There was another girl beside her and across the table were two more. But what really surprised me was the actual interior of the club itself.

It was a cave. A man-made cave, with artificially controlled lighting. The whole damn ceiling was covered with stalactites, dripping down like so many creepy icicles, and the booths were all like carved out of stone, and in the middle of the booth was a rock table coming out of the wall, and the seats were also rocks. Out in the middle of the floor were tables made of either rock, or tree stumps and the same with the seats, and there were people everywhere.

A three-piece combo was off to my left, so I turned to my right, and began walking toward the bar. There were maybe a half dozen guys at the bar drinking, so finding a seat I sat down on a tree stump, and ordered a beer. Maybe I wouldn’t have to pay any rent on it. My beer came, and I took a swallow. Good. Real good.

I guess I must have been thirsty, and it was about then that Phil Richards came out of a cave-like door beside the bar and spotted me. He might have tried not to show it, but I could see a small curve to his lips, and there might have been a twinkle in his eyes, as he walked over to where I was sitting. He was casually dressed, and one lock of his grey hair was hanging down over his forehead.

“Welcome to the Grotto.” He started out. “We all thought you were long gone.”

“Couldn’t go,” I said.

“Oh,”

“I have some local commitments.”

“Oh, well, I understand. A man can’t leave town and just leave things hanging,” and he said it with a knowing smile. Like, well, like we both had a secret, and we were the only ones who knew about it.

“I’ve become your employee. The job still open?”

“Yes. C’mon over here to a table and let’s talk for a minute,” and we’d no sooner sat down than he started.

“This is a weeknight and I don’t expect any trouble, but still, I want you and the other boys here every night. Now you’ll have three other guys to help you, and they’re here right now. In just a minute, I’ll call them over. First, I want to tell you how I run the place.”

“Fights are always outside. Some local guys get into it, just take them outside and let them go to it. But I want you or one of the other guys to stick around and watch it. Sometimes guys get carried away and might kill each other. When you think a guy has taken enough punishment, you stop the fight.”

“Next. No guns, no knives. I got a sign outside the door, so if you see somebody packing, you take the weapon away from them, and return it when they’re ready to leave.”

“Next. We have a lot of young girls coming out here. We’re outside the city limits, and the sheriff don’t bother us. So, these girls are under your care,” and he saw my instant grin.”Yeah, some as young as seventeen, and if you see an older guy hitting on them, usually a kind word is enough. That’s it. You’re all set.”

He must have given a signal that I hadn’t noticed because like that quick, three guys pulled out chairs and sat down, I looked askance at Phil, so he began the introductions.

This big fella on your right is called Del, which is short for Delano. He says that he has never had a fight in his life but he was on the high school wrestling team so I figure he qualifies. The guy beside him is Lenny, and the third guy is Mark. Now mark is just a wee bit undersized, but he’s fairly clever about handling himself. You might teach them some of that stuff they had you in jail for. I looked around at the three men. They were all smiling, and none of them looked tough.

Phil wasn’t done talking. Now the way these boys have been working is to just scatter themselves around and act like customers. You can even talk to those young girls, just don’t diddle them. Don’t tell anyone you work here, but when trouble starts, just be ready. Jake here will tell you how he wants you to work. All the guys got up and left the table. The big guy, Del, stuck his hand out for me to shake. I smiled.

“So, what do you think?”

“Well,” I said, and I was hedging, “the guys look all right, and the club was a shock. It’s terrific. Makes me want to build one just like it. I have been in a lot of bars, and this is sure as hell a first.”

“It just came to me one night while I was doing some night fishing, out at Seneca Lake. I was just sitting there thinking about how some people are afraid of the dark, and then I thought about a guy in a jailhouse cell. He’s not afraid of the dark because he knows nobody can get him, and then I did a giant leap of logic and thought about redesigning my club, and piece by piece I got down to what you see.

“Everything is stucco or plastic. Tables and chairs, all plastic, but the rock formations are painted stucco.

“Nobody here in Guernsey County, has ever seen anything like it.”

“More like the whole world,” I put in.

“Well, I don’t mind telling you, I’m damn proud of it. You know some guys design buildings or bridges, or even paint pictures. I designed a nightclub. My club, my design.”

“I got to tell you, Phil. It’s some kind of wonderful,” and I meant every bit of it. I would enjoy working here. One thing for sure. In the event of a real barroom brawl, there were no chairs to throw or smash over someone’s head.

The way I was sitting, I could see the dance floor, but the figures were all dim, like ghosts, and that was because of the subdued lighting. But I thought I saw the face that went with those pretty eyes, dim? Yeah, but still pretty. I needed to caution myself. Keep my mind on business.

“Let me have the boys send you over another beer and you can just sit here and watch for a while, so you can just get the feel of the place.” I watched him walk back toward the bar, and that’s when I noticed the waitresses. They were wearing fur covered shorts and some kind of thing that came up to cover their boobies, but it only went over one shoulder, and then I had to smile as I remembered the comic strips. Caveman outfit. That Phil didn’t miss a trick.