Читать книгу Murder on the Red River - Marcie R. Rendon - Страница 7

Fargo, the North Dakota side of the Red River

Sun-drenched wheat fields. The refrain ran through Cash’s mind as she pulled open the Casbah’s screen door. She stood still. Momentarily blinded, she waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkened barroom. Outside, the sun rested on the western horizon. Inside the Casbah it was always night. The wooden screen door thunked shut behind her. The bar smells—stale beer, cigarette smoke, sawdust and billiard chalk—welcomed her to her evening home.

Sun-drenched wheat fields, healing rays of god’s love wash gently over me. Cash didn’t like the word god. Even in her own mind it was written in small letters. What had he ever done for her? Sun-drenched wheat fields, healing rays of sun’s love…nah, didn’t work. Healing rays of god’s love—now that worked.

Her mind was always composing songs or stories. The long days in the field gave her plenty of time to think of things to write. If she ever found the time to put words to paper, that would be a different story. Words in her head didn’t pay the rent. Or buy a beer. Maybe with her next paycheck, she would get a guitar. She could sing in the cab of the truck and wouldn’t need to write things down. Maybe.

Ole Johnson sat on a stool at the twelve-foot-long mahogany bar. The Hamm’s Beer Bear danced on cool sparkling waters over his head. Ole slid fifty cents to his brother Carl, seated at his right. They had a nightly bet on whether Cash’s hair, which just grazed the bottom of her butt, would get caught in the screen door. On the nights when that happened, she would kick back at the door with her right foot and jerk her hair into the bar after her.

Tonight, her hair escaped the trap.

Like every evening since she first walked into the Casbah a year ago, Cash put a couple quarters on the pool table before going up to the bar and ordering two Budweisers.

Without a word exchanged, Shorty Nelson, the Casbah’s bartender, popped the top on a Bud and slid it across the wooden bar towards her. She rolled the cool sweaty bottle across her forehead. A cold jolt shot through her skin to the bone of her skull. It reminded Cash of the ice cream headaches she used to get as a kid.

She took a drink and felt the coolness soothe her parched throat until the fizz hit her empty belly. Ahhhh. She picked up the other bottle and held it against her left collarbone as she walked to an empty booth by the pool tables, her cue stick case slung over her shoulder. It was a leather cue holder, one she had made herself sitting in the cab of a beet truck waiting to unload at Crystal Sugar a couple summers ago. It had leather fringe that swung with her walk.

She could smell wheat coming off her cotton blouse. She had changed clothes before coming to the Casbah, but she supposed even her Ranchero, which sat at the end of the field all day, smelled like wheat too. Her whole world was wheat and chaff and stubble and the drone of combines and Ford trucks with clutches that stretched her short frame to the max. Sometimes, if she was lucky, the truck would have a radio she could tune in to some country music.

Gol’ dang, if ol’ man Willie wasn’t already passed out in one of the booths. He was wearing field clothes. His stubby German mustache, cut in the same style as the salt and pepper bangs that hung over his forehead, drooped over slack lips. Cash fought off an involuntary shudder. The Hamm’s Beer clock behind the bar said 9:35.

Willie must have left the fields early. That is, if he ever went to the fields anymore. Cash figured his son did all the farming for him these days. Old drunk. She couldn’t help but glance to see if the front of his pants were still dry. They were. She shook off the shudder again. Pitiful ol’ man. Every time she came into the Casbah, which was dang near every night, ol’ Willie already had a jump on her.

She leaned against a booth to watch a couple farm boys shoot pool, playing at being hustlers. There were four quarters ahead of her. She had never left the Red River Valley, but she knew these two didn’t know jack about hustling. Once, a couple of guys had come in on leave from working the Montana ranches. They wore big silver belt buckles and Stetson hats to match, putting the farmers’ duckbills to shame. All the blond farm girls in the bar had been atwitter for the week those boys were in Fargo.

Those two knew how to hustle. And another guy, home on leave from ’Nam, he had known how to shoot pool. But most nights, the only competition Cash faced was drunk luck.

“You up, Cash?” one of farm boys asked her. She nodded, took a quick drag of her cigarette and gulped more beer.

For the next two hours, against a background of quiet farm talk at the bar and and the occasional canned laughter from the TV set on the back counter, all that was heard was the click-clack of billiard balls and the clunk as one sank into a pocket and rolled down to the front gate with another clack-clunk against balls already in place.

Cash held the table, drinking free the whole time. When she did lose, it was because Jim Jenson, a lanky farmer from Hendrum, came up behind her as she stood plotting the next run of five balls. He wrapped his arms around her waist and breathed into her ear. “Take me home, Cash.”

Cash first met Jim at a pool tournament over at the Flame, a few blocks from the Casbah. She was shooting in their monthly singles’ tournament, women’s division, when the barmaid pointed out the tall, skinny farm guy who had sent a Budweiser her way. After she sank the 8-ball in the game she was playing, he ambled over and asked if she would be his partner in the couples’ tournament. Said his name was Jim and figured as partners they ought to have a chance at the tournament money. He wasn’t that much older than Cash and he didn’t seem to mind the fact that she wasn’t blond and blue-eyed. He did say he liked the way she cut that last 8-ball into the corner pocket.

That night they placed third and took home fifty bucks each with the kitty and sidebets. Standing outside in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette, he asked where she usually played and when she said the Casbah, he laughed and made some comment about the high-class part of town. She slowly looked up at the neon-lit stripper winding her leg around a pole that graced the doorway above the Flame. He chuckled again. Said he might drop by the Casbah and shoot a few. Keep in practice for next month’s tourney. But now he had to get home to the wife and kids.

Cash didn’t think any more about him until he showed up at the Casbah a couple weeks later, cue case in hand. He became a regular there and they became partners at the Flame tournaments. The pool, the beer, the winning—one thing led to another. Right back to Cash’s apartment, in fact, where Cash had asked, “What about your wife and kids?” and Jim had answered, “Don’t worry about it.” So she didn’t.

She had a lifetime of not worrying about it.

Tonight his breath moved her neckline hairs, goose bumps popped up along her arms. She shook him off, bent over the table and made a five-ball run. She missed her last pocket call. The guy she was playing hooted, “I knew I’d beat you, girl. Your lucky streak is at an end.”

He ran his last four balls but couldn’t sink the 8-ball in the side pocket. Cash missed her shot.

He missed his.

Only Carl and Ole saw the slight shrug of Cash’s shoulder to Jim, a shrug asking, “What you want me to do?”

Jim wrapped his arm around her waist and nuzzled her neck again. She brushed him off and bent over the table, shot the 8-ball straight into her pocket, followed immediately by the cue ball.

“Buy me a Hamm’s, girl, “her opponent crowed. “Rack ’em up.”

Cash broke down her cue instead, went to the bar and bought her opponent a Hamm’s. She finished her Bud.

Jim wrapped his arm around her. She tapped Carl and Ole on the shoulder as they walked out. “Drinking free again, huh?” said Carl.

“Look,” said Ole, pointing at the TV with his bottle. “More of our boys are dead.”

Jim and Cash stopped to look at the grainy black and white images of Hueys landing in rice paddies. The newscaster finished up with the Viet Nam body count for the day and then images switched to the local news. Cash couldn’t hear the announcer as a loud whoop surrounded the pool table. By the time the noise died down, the newscaster was heading into the nightly weather.

Cash leaned into Jim to get him moving back out the door. The night had cooled down. Crickets chirped. Frogs down by the Red River, which ran through town just a few blocks over, were calling to other frogs.

Cash and Jim walked the two blocks to her apartment over the Maytag Appliance store. A makeshift set of wooden stairs crisscrossed the alley side of the building up to the second story. The wooden door opened into a grimy kitchen. A stove plate rested on a cracked linoleum counter. Dirty dishes filled the sink. Moths and mosquitoes batted against the screens of the open windows.

Cash pulled open the round-top refrigerator and grabbed two longneck Budweisers from the top shelf. She pushed the door shut with her hip and walked into the living room that served double purpose as her bedroom. Dust-covered jeans were thrown over the back of a wooden chair.

She sat on the end of the bed and took a drink before kicking off her shoes into the corner of the room. Another drink before she stood up, unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them, leaving them in a heap at the end of the bed. She walked around to the other end of the bed and sat cross-legged, pillow across her lap, back against the metal headboard, before taking another drink.

Jim undressed down to his white underwear and crawled into bed between the rumpled sheets. He put an arm around her waist and tried to pull her down to him. She said, “Lemmee finish this.”

After the last drink, she set the bottle on the floor and lay full length into him.

Fifteen minutes later, she pulled her tangled hair out from under his back, pushed against his chest and brought herself to a seated position. “Time for you to leave, Farmer Jim.” She lit a cigarette. “Your wife and kids are waiting.”

Jim groaned and covered his head with a pillow. Cash pulled the pillow off and said, “Come on, get up. I gotta work early.” She went into the kitchen and pulled out another Bud. She took a long drink as she walked back to the bedroom. Half the beer was gone when she set it on the worn end table. She crawled into bed, pulling the covers off Jim and wrapping them around herself. She faced away from him, “Go on now. Lock the door on your way out.” She finished her cigarette, swallowed the last of her beer and was out cold.

Jim rolled to a sitting position on the edge of the mattress, pulling his socks and jeans on. He fumbled in the dark for his shoes. As he buttoned his shirt, he leaned over Cash and kissed her forehead. She swatted, without waking, as if a mosquito had landed and she was brushing it off.

He clicked the lock before pulling the door shut behind him.