Читать книгу Reno Rendezvous - Leslie Ford - Страница 7

I’d never realized until that night what a restricted and completely mousey life I’d led. And I never realized until I got home again how utterly blissful a quiet private meal can be. On the other hand, I never ate better food, or drank better wine, or heard more amusing—and shocking—songs, or saw more diverting and totally cockeyed people, than I did at Reno’s River House. It’s one of the so-called divorce dens, I imagine. It’s certainly a den, with its painted Moorish pillars, and lights so dim and pink that the most ageing customer looks rosy-cheeked and dewy-eyed.

Through all the extraordinary and tragic things that were lying in wait for me, and that broke with the suddenness of a Washoe Zephyr—sardonically so called by the early miners because it sprang up at the drop of a hat and was likely to level every building, church or saloon, that they managed to erect in that barren and bitter wilderness—the River House of Reno remained a haven. The five days following my arrival seem now the most harrowing I’ve ever spent. I would have left Reno, my hair turned white in a single night, if it hadn’t been that, ghastly and unbelievable as everything was, it was still, in spots, grotesquely and unbelievably funny. As—for instance—when my old friend Sergeant Buck got himself locked in the ancient plumed and flambeaued hearse out at the race track, or the early morning when my new friend Whitey ran amok in the Washoe Bar, threatening to kick the devil out of the big butter-and-sheep man who accused him of stacking the blackjack deck, which, as a matter of fact, he had done. Or—above all—the night at the Town House in First Street when the woman at the next table pointed to her drunk and enormously owlish companion completely absorbed in a Lobster Thermidor, and said proudly to her friends, “Do you know what he’s done?—He’s re-read Anthony Adverse!”

That first night, however, was not so amusing as it was just simply difficult. It began when Judy refused to wear a jacket, and then had to send Dex Cromwell back up to her room to get it, while she introduced me as her sister out for a divorce to an old dragon in a cowboy hat who wrote gossip for some Eastern paper.

“You can sue them for libel, dear, and buy yourself a new mink coat,” she explained airily.

That mood didn’t last. The three of us—Dex Cromwell having returned—were sitting at a round table in a corner, eating luscious strips of Persian melon sprinkled with lime juice and white Bacardi, when I saw the muscles of Judy’s throat contract sharply.

She put down her spoon and turned to Dex. “If your friend Kaye is dining with us,” she said, very quietly, “I’m going home.”

Dex looked over his shoulder, a curious little flicker livening in his dark eyes. I followed his glance. Kaye Gorman, in a black chiffon evening gown that was positively French eighteenth century from the waist up, clinging around her elegant figure and swirling like a ballet skirt from the knees to the floor, a fox cape over her arm, stood at the arched door of the dining room, in sharp relief against the brilliantly lighted gaming tables and curving mahogany bar outside. Her bleached blonde hair and scarlet lips, the diamond bracelets on her white arm, the diamond clip at her dress against her milky white bosom, the scene behind her, made her seem quite suddenly symbolic of the whole picture . . . in the past when it was part of the richest mining spot in the world, in the present when the values were the same but the pattern so different.

The man at her side, in cowboy clothes, might have been a miner in the old days . . . only then their positions would have been reversed; he would have had the money, she would have been the one on the make. I glanced at Judy. In her riding shirt open at the neck, with her sun-tanned skin and scarlet lips and high proud little head, she was the present only. The past had no part in her.

“I tell you, if she comes here, I’m going,” she repeated calmly. Only a person who knew the depths behind those moss-gray eyes could have heard the passion under her voice.

Dex Cromwell lifted her hand and gave it a quick playful kiss. She winced almost as if he had struck her.

“Oh, don’t be stupid, darling!” he said lightly. “Don’t let everybody see you’re jealous! What do you care if she’s marrying your husband! You’re getting a divorce—be a sport!—Hi, Kaye. Hello, cowboy!”

“Hello!” Kaye Gorman said. “Hello, Judy. Is there room for a rival and friend?”

She laughed shortly.

“You know Joe, don’t you, Dex—and Judy? And this is Mrs. Latham. This is Joe Lucas. He’s a real cowboy. Never’s been east of Denver.”

“Or is it west of Chicago?” Dex said.

Joe Lucas, who looked well-polished and shy and rather nice, grinned boyishly.

“Ah never bin no’th of Salt Lake, anyhow,” he said, in as Georgia a drawl as I ever hope to hear. “How’re you, Mis’ Judy? Howdy, Miz’ Latham.”

Judy sat there, her slim body rigid, her face perfectly expressionless, except for her eyes, black as coal.

Just then, behind us, in a blue lace evening dress, appeared the dark-haired lush-looking girl I’d seen in white riding breeches and black boots at the twenty-one table in the Washoe Bar that afternoon.

“Take your hat, cowboy?” she said. A smile dimpled in the corners of her red mouth.

Joe Lucas reddened painfully as he gave up his hat. The girl reached for Kaye Gorman’s fox cape.

“I’ll just keep that, Vicki,” Kaye said. “It looks cold around here.”

The hat check girl winked at Dex Cromwell.

“Not having trouble being too popular, are you, Mr. Cromwell?”

I didn’t quite see how she managed to lean so close to him as she did. I hoped Judy didn’t see the neat little pinch he gave her leg, or the slow sidelong smile she returned for it. Or maybe I hoped she did.

Kaye Gorman did.

“Up to your old tricks, darling?” she inquired coolly. “Keep your head, Vicki. It takes money to keep Dex. You couldn’t do it on what you make.”

Dex Cromwell grinned engagingly at her. His strong white teeth in his sun-bronzed face made him look like a toothpaste ad. As far as that went, I thought suddenly, his light wavy hair made him look like a shampoo ad, and his cigarette and white wool jacket and colored scarf (Bond Street, not Rodeo) made him look like a tobacco ad. In fact he looked like the complete answer to nearly any manufacturer’s prayer . . . as well as any lady’s.

“She’s trying to get Judy into a scene,” I thought . . . with some apprehension. But Judy smiled serenely. “What’ll you have, Joe?”

“Rye an’ coke for me, Mis’ Judy,” Joe said soberly. “Doin’ any ridin’ lately?” he added, with lovely tact. He turned to me. “She’s sure got a sweet seat on a horse, Miz’ Latham. You goin’ to ride while you’re here?”

“Probably,” I said.

Dex Cromwell had pushed back his chair.

“Shall we dance, Judy?”

“No thanks,” Judy said sweetly. “I must have sprained my ankle today.”

Kaye Gorman flashed out of her chair. “Oh, this is more than I deserve!”

She laughed her short laugh as she took Dex’s arm. I looked at Judy. She watched them float off with a queer twisted little smile. Then she put her napkin beside her plate.

“How about a dance, Joe?” she said. “My ankle seems to be a lot better.”

Joe grinned. “Ah could give him a horse that’ll break his neck, easy, Mis’ Judy,” he said. He got up clumsily. “Excuse us, Miz’ Latham?”

I nodded. His big red hand looked strange on Judy’s white-shirted little back. I watched them a moment. They were amazingly good, she in her jodhpur boots and he in high-heeled Westerns. I turned back to my cocktail of small sweet Olympia oysters and ate a couple, glad of a moment’s peace, until suddenly I received a slap on the back that surprised me so much I was very glad it wasn’t a Lynnhaven I had in my mouth.

It was my friend Whitey. He pulled a chair up to the table and flopped into it.

“Gee, did I get a big boot out of that!” he exclaimed. His white eyelashes batted with enthusiasm.

“Out of what?” I asked.

He put his head in his hands and rocked crazily back and forth, in silent mirth, until I thought he’d lost his mind.

“Out of Kaye dragging Joe over here with you folks,” he said at last. “She’s been out of it so long she don’t know Joe’s the guy which would like nothing better’n to slit Dexter’s gullet for him.”

“Oh,” I said. “Why?”

He winked at the hat check girl, Vicki, dancing with a loud, rather intoxicated and definitely apoplectic man in his early seventies, I’d say, and who’d already, so Whitey whispered to me a little later, lost four hundred dollars at the twenty-one table.

“Vicki was Joe’s girl, till Dexter chiseled in.”

“Who is Vicki,” I asked. “I mean, does she live here?”

She looked rather more metropolitan to me, some way.

Whitey shook his head.

“She came for her divorce and went broke, so Frenchy, which is the fellow owns the joint, gave her a job. She makes enough, but she gambles, and what she don’t lose that way she sops up at the bar. So as she can’t get enough ahead to get out.”

“I see,” I said.

He took the drink the waiter had brought for Joe, and sat there, suddenly and inexplicably in a state of complete dejection, staring moodily down into it, turning the glass round and round.

“Jeez, I got to get out of this hole,” he said suddenly. “It’s getting me down. I’m getting to be nothing but a goddam gigolo like the rest of ’em.”

I swallowed another oyster too rapidly and stared at him. He faced me abruptly.

“Look at me!” he said. “Do I look like a come-on man for a gambling joint?”

(He included another ancient occupation.)

“Look at me—what do you think my mother would say if she saw me now? Doing Mr. Cromwell’s dirty work! And what for? I ask you, what for?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know!” I said hastily.

“To keep body and soul together!” he said. “And does he give a damn, I ask you? Does he care what happens to me? No!”

He downed Joe’s drink at a gulp—and if anybody thinks a drink cannot be downed in a gulp, then he has never had a Reno drink.

“I’m clearing out. I’m going to get some sleep, and tomorrow I’m going to Cromwell, and I’m going to tell him to get someone else to do his dirty work! It burns me up!”

He got unsteadily to his feet.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Latham—but it ain’t often a little punk like me meets a girl like Judy. And I’m clearing out!”

“Oh dear!” I thought.

Just then the woman with the handsome aquiline face and red hair whom I’d seen playing the dime slot maching came in the door, and the next thing I knew Whitey was dancing with her. And the next thing he was bringing her over to my table.

“Mrs. Latham,” he said, beaming cheerfully, “I want you to meet Mrs. de Courcey.”

“How do you do!” Mrs. de Courcey said. She sat down.

“You’re Judy’s aunt, aren’t you. She’s a terribly nice girl. I can’t for the life of me see what she sees in Cromwell. All the Cromwells from the Protector down have been hounds. You must have lunch with me, my dear—I must tell you about Dexter Cromwell. I met him last year in the Islands. Tried to pretend I didn’t recognize him, here. It just shows nobody ever learns, especially a woman of my age. We must have lunch, my dear. So nice seeing somebody civilized in this hellhole. It’s simply awful—I adore it!—Oh, hello, Frenchy! I’d love to dance!”

I watched her go off. In a moment Joe and Judy came back. She looked tired and deflated, some way, as if she’d been going on her nerve and that was gone too.

“I’m going home, Grace,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Go ahead, darling,” I said. “I’ll finish my dinner. I’m starving.”

“You can get back all right?”

“I’ll try,” I said. “It’s all of a block and a half, isn’t it?”

She bent down and gave me a quick kiss on the top of my head. “Good-bye, darling.”

I looked out at the dance floor. Dex Cromwell and the glamorous Kaye were nowhere in sight. And I’d finished my coffee before they showed again.

“Where’s Judy?” Dex asked. He seemed rather surprised, which convinced me he was stupider than he looked.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

“She’s taken Cowboy Joe,” Kaye Gorman said with her short laugh. “You’ll have to put up with me for the rest of the evening . . . darling.”

For an instant that was electric in intensity, their eyes met and held. Dex Cromwell shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

“My luck’s still holding, I guess,” he said lightly.

“I’ll see you later,” I said. “Good-night.”

As I went out the grilled door that reminded me of the speakeasy days, the hat check girl got up from a rounding deep-cushioned recess behind a little screen of palms and followed me out into the cool night. The door closed behind us before she spoke.

“You’ll probably think I’m drunk, Mrs. Latham,” she said, rather diffidently, which surprised me. “But I’m not—not very. Listen—you’ve got to keep Mrs. Bonner from being a damn fool.”

I looked at her. Even under the slightly magenta glow of the River House sign of palm trees with well—signifying an oasis in the desert, I suppose—she looked desperately unhappy. I doubt if she was a day over twenty-three, but she looked just then almost as old as time.

“He’s nothing but a first-class bastard,” she said, in a dull toneless voice. “She’s too decent to be chasing around with him. You got to stop her. She’ll do something she’ll be sorry for, first thing you know—and he’s not worth it!”

A sudden passionate intensity emphasized the last words.

I stood staring at her stupidly, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t be disloyal to Judy, or too old-fashioned and naïve. I was saved the trouble. A couple of men coming out of Center Street spotted her, and she them.

“Hi, Vicki! How’s the girl!” one of them shouted. I heard her rippling silvery laugh against the clink of glasses and clack of chips as the grilled door opened, and the sudden silence as it closed behind them.

When I got to the Washoe virtually the same crowd was milling about. It appeared that in Reno nobody ever went to bed. Whitey, playing blackjack with the night clerk, disengaged himself for a moment. “Judy’s gone out to Truckee with Joe,” he said. I nodded and went on up to my room.