Читать книгу Judas Journey - Lee Roberts - Страница 7

IN OCTOBER Ramsey and Pete Davos quit their jobs in a Pennsylvania coal mine and drifted west to the oil fields of the Texas gulf coast. Ramsey went to work as a rigger and Pete landed a job as a driller’s helper. They took a room at the Gulf Hotel, a small clean establishment close to the waterfront, and started work on a Monday morning. Monday evening they were drinking beer in a small night club not far from the hotel. It was called the Jungle Tavern. The decorations consisted of fake palm trees, bamboo furniture and south sea murals. The waiters wore white mess jackets and the cigarette girls swished about in brief grass skirts and little else.

It was in the Jungle Tavern that Ramsey met Sara Colvin.

She glided out onto the floor under a blue spotlight and began to sway to the savage beat of drums. Her long black hair hung over her naked shoulders and her costume consisted of a feathered headdress and a scanty two-piece arrangement of bright beads. For ten minutes her small white body writhed slowly in a dance that had been old at the time of the Aztecs. When it was over, she ran lightly from the floor. The lights came on and the six-piece orchestra began to play a rumba. The small dance floor filled with couples.

Thinking of the dancer, Ramsey said, “That’s for me.” He was a big man, with blond hair cropped short and a jutting ledge of brow over deep-set gray eyes. His face was still pale from the coal mine and his nose was slightly crooked, the result of a bar room brawl in Akron, Ohio. Beneath a gray tweed jacket his shoulders were thick and wide.

Pete Davos grinned across the table at him. “See if she’s got a girl friend, Rack.” Light glinted on Pete’s heavy dark features and short curly black hair. The two men had met in the army, and after their discharge they had stuck together, drifting, following the sun, working on construction jobs, in steel mills and coal mines, in factories, wherever they could find work where they happened to be. Ramsey had been a derrick rigger before his enlistment, and this had prompted their trip to Texas. Perhaps in a month they would be in California or Florida. It didn’t matter to them. They were rootless, with no particular ambitions and no interest in political, moral or civic matters. Both were single, with no family, ties, except Pete Davos, who had a married sister in Saginaw. Ramsey was thirty-two years old: Pete was two years younger.

Ramsey beckoned to a hovering waiter. “What’s her name? The dancer?”

“Sara Colvin, sir.”

“Miss Colvin?”

“I believe so, sir.”

“Miss or Missus,” Pete muttered. “Since when did you care?”

Ramsey ignored him, borrowed a pencil from the waiter and wrote on a corner of a menu: I enjoyed your dance. May I buy you a drink? Please? Rackwell Ramsey. He grinned up at the waiter, handed him the menu and a dollar. “Will you please give this to her—and bring us two more beers?”

The waiter nodded, his face impassive, and moved away.

Pete said eagerly, “Did you mention a girl for me?”

“I will,” Ramsey said. “Everything in proper order.”

One hour and three beers later it was midnight. Sara Colvin danced again, this time in an off-shoulder peasant blouse and a swirling red skirt. Once she looked directly at Ramsey. He grinned and lifted a hand. She glanced quickly away and did not look toward him again. Her hair was now coiled in two thick braids around her small delicately shaped head. Ramsey saw that her eyes were brown and tilted slightly at the outer corners. Part Mex, he thought, or maybe Chinese, and a slow excitement stirred within him.

When the dance was over, she smiled, half shyly, blew a kiss at the crowd, and was gone with a flash of slim white legs beneath the red skirt.

Ramsey finished his beer, put some money on the table and stood up. “Come on,” he said to Pete. Out on the sidewalk Ramsey hesitated and then said to Pete. “I’ll go around in back. You wait here—so we don’t miss her.”

“All right,” Pete said, “but I’m sleepy—and don’t forget we gotta be on the job at seven.”

“Sure,” Ramsey said. “It’s only a little after one. Don’t you want me to ask her if she’s got a girl friend?”

Pete said sullenly, “You ain’t interested in no girl friend.”

“Why, sure I am, Pete, boy. I’ll ask her the first thing.”

“I’ll bet,” Pete sneered. “I can see you got my interests at heart. I’ll stay here for ten minutes. If she don’t show by then, I’m hitting the sack.”

Ramsey grinned at him, lit a cigarette and walked through a dark alley to a small court at the rear of the Jungle Tavern. There were cement steps and a small stoop, with a light burning over a door. There was no signs, but Ramsey was familiar with such things, and he was certain that Sara Colvin would leave by this door. He leaned against the wall in shadow and drew on his cigarette. A light fog was coming in off the gulf and the air was soft and cool. Presently the door opened. The dancer came out and stood for a moment under the dim light. Then she went down the steps and walked swiftly across the court toward the street, her heels making swift clicking sounds on the cement. She was wearing a simple black dress, but no hat, and she carried a light coat and a small purse.

Ramsey snapped his cigarette away and stepped out of the shadow. “Miss Colvin,” he called softly.

She paused, turned her head, and waited uncertainly as he moved up to her. She was smaller than he had thought; the top of her head was a full six inches below his chin. He smiled down at her. “You got my note?”

“I get many notes,” she said coolly, with just the faintest whisper of an accent.

“Ramsey is the name,” he said easily. “Maybe you remember?”

A faint smile touched her lips. “Rackwell,” she said. “I remember it because it is such an odd name.” The smile went away and she asked gravely, “What do you want?”

“The note said I’d like to buy you a drink.”

“No, thank you.”

He smiled and nodded. “All right. But you won’t mind if I tell you that I admired your dancing?”

“I do not object to that,” she said in the same grave voice. “Thank you.”

“May I take you home?”

She shook her head, gazing up at him soberly.

“Why not?” It was an old game with him. Her nearness excited him, and he warned himself to go slow. He knew already that she was not just another night club dancer, not just another pick-up. The quality of her voice, the faint accent and her quiet bearing told him that. She was something a little special, he thought; in fact, her cool poise disturbed him. It was not going to be as easy as he had anticipated. “Please,” he said.

“I am afraid not,” she said shortly. “Good night.” She turned and moved away.

He caught her arm, not roughly; he was careful about it. There was a time for roughness, and a time for gentleness. “Please,” he said again. “I am very lonely tonight. I liked your dancing and I thought it would be nice to meet you, to talk with you a little . . .” He dropped his hand from her arm and stood smiling.

She gazed up at him, her eyes troubled. “Loneliness—it is a bad thing.”

He nodded, watching her.

“You have no family, no—wife?”

He shook his head. “No wife. Not anybody for a long time. My parents died when I was in the army—both of them, in a train wreck, while they were coming to see me in camp, before I shipped out.”

As he spoke, he thought suddenly and with sadness that this was true. It seemed a long time ago. They had given him a special pass to go home to the funeral, and he remembered the chill rain in the cemetery and the mud from the new double grave which had clung to his polished dress oxfords, the embarrassed expressions of sympathy from old family friends and a few distant relatives—all scattered to hell and gone now, with nobody remembering or caring about Rackwell Ramsey, the only son of Maude and Gilbert Ramsey who had been killed in that train wreck that time so long ago. He thought of his father, a big quiet man who for the most part of his adult life had been a meter reader for the power company in Toledo, Ohio, and of his mother, plump and pretty.

“I am sorry.” Sara Colvin’s voice seemed to come to him from out of the past.

Ramsey peered at her in the gloom and smiled. He hadn’t meant to arouse her sympathy in the way he had, but he was pleased with his luck. He touched her arm. “Where shall we go?”

“I—I would like some coffee. There is a little place around the corner . . .”

“Coffee?” he scoffed.

“Yes,” she said firmly.

“Sure. Whatever you want.” He guided her around the corner to the entrance of the Jungle Tavern. Pete Davos was standing there looking sleepy and bored.

As they approached, Sara Colvin said, “Is not that your friend? The one who was with you inside?”

“Yes.” Ramsey stopped in front of Pete. “Miss Colvin, this is my friend Pete Davos.”

She held out her hand and smiled.

Pete took her hand, moved his feet awkwardly, and gave Ramsey a dark look.

Ramsey said politely, “Pete, would you care to join us in a cup of coffee?”

“Naw—I’m going back to the hotel.” He moved away.

“Goodbye, Pete,” the girl said.

“Goodbye,” Pete mumbled. “Glad to have met you.” He disappeared around the corner.

As Ramsey and the girl walked along the sidewalk, she said. “He seems nice.”

“He’s my buddy. We’ve been together a long time.”

They entered a small restaurant and found a booth in a corner. The hot black coffee tasted good to Ramsey after the beer. In the bright light he saw that the girl was younger than he’d first guessed. Her skin held a soft smooth quality and her brown eyes were bright and clear. At first she seemed shy and kept watching him in an odd way. He touched her hand and smiled. “Don’t be afraid. I’m just an ordinary guy.

“I’m not afraid,” she said seriously. “It’s just that it seems strange, being with you like this. I do not go out very much.”

“We’ll fix that. What’re you doing tomorrow night?”

She smiled. Her teeth were small and even and very white. “You do not know yet if you like me.”

“I liked you the minute I saw you.” He began to talk to her, and gradually he saw that the shyness was leaving her. Twice she laughed at his accounts of amusing incidents involving him and Pete. They ordered more coffee and eventually he learned that she had been born in Mexico City, that her father had been an American mining engineer, her mother Mexican. When she was ten years old her mother had run away with a bull fighter from Taxco, and her father, after a time, had quietly hung himself from a cottonwood tree.

She told it calmly. “It seems long ago. I do not feel anything any more, except that my father, he—he was nice.”

“Yes,” Ramsey said, thinking of his own father.

After her father’s death, she told him, an aunt, a sister of her mother, had taken her to live in Mazatlan with her uncle and seven little Mexican cousins. The aunt had taught her to dance. When she was eighteen, her father’s insurance money was gone and she had decided to come to the States. Through a New York agency she had found work right away and for the past three years had been dancing in night clubs and hotels in various parts of the country. Once she’d had a chorus spot in a musical that folded in Boston, and had made several minor television appearances. She had been at the Jungle Tavern for over a month, and hoped to eventually work her way to California and maybe get some movie jobs.

“I am not a very good dancer,” she said, “but it is all I know how to do.”

“You’re a wonderful dancer,” he said, and added, “What about your love life?” It was time the subject was mentioned, he thought. “Any boy friends? I mean, anyone special?”

She shook her head quickly. “I have met many men, but I have not stayed in one place long enough to really get acquainted with them.”

“Good,” he said, smiling, and touching her hand. She didn’t draw her hand away. He suggested leaving then, and she agreed.

The fog was thicker and the street lights glowed yellowly through it, making a glistening dampness on the pavement. A taxi rolled along the curb toward them. Ramsey took the girl’s arm and started for it.

“No,” she said. “Let us walk. I live only a few blocks from here.”

Ramsey waved the taxi on. Ten minutes later they came to a small neat brick apartment building on a quiet side street. There was a clipped hedge and a small tiled stoop flanked by a wrought-iron railing. Ramsey followed the girl into a small dimly-lighted foyer containing a single telephone booth, a row of mail boxes, a door labeled Office and an automatic elevator. She turned to face him.

“It has been nice,” she said. “Thank you very much for bringing me home.”

He was surprised. “Aren’t you going to ask me up?”

She gazed at him gravely. “Did you expect me to?”

“I had hoped you would.”

“Why?”

He was a little disconcerted, but he said easily, “Maybe have a nightcap, talk—the usual reasons.”

Her eyes hardened a little. “I’m afraid you have been wasting your time.”

He moved close, placed an arm around her small waist and tilted her chin with a finger. “Please,” he said softly.

She stood stiffly within his arm. “Let me go,” she said in a low voice.

He forced her against him and kissed her. She didn’t resist, but her lips were cold. The time for gentleness is past, he thought, and he looked beyond her at the mail boxes on the wall. A white card on one of them read: Sara Colvin—3-D. He pushed her into the elevator and pressed a button numbered 3. As the door closed and they began to move upward, he looked down at her. There were tears on her cheeks and her eyes were tightly closed. He was surprised and a little shocked. He let her go, aware that the elevator had stopped and that the door had slid open. Blindly she moved past him into a green-carpeted hall. He started to follow her. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry. I—”

She turned a corner of the hall and disappeared. He stood still. There was the sound of a key turning in a lock, and a door opened and closed firmly with a final click. He stood in the silence, bewildered. Hell, he’d picked her up, a part Mex gal who danced almost naked in a sucker trap—what did she expect?

He hesitated a moment, then decided against knocking on her door. She had made it clear that she did not want him. He sighed, shook his head and entered the elevator.