Tishomingo Blues

by Elmore Leonard

  Billy Darwin, finally raising his gaze from the half dollar shining in the sun, gave Dennis a nod and said, “Why not.”

  Nearly two months went by before Dennis got back and had his show set up.

  He had to finish the gig in Florida. He had to take the ladder and tank apart, load all the equipment just right to fit in the truck. He had to stop off in Birmingham, Alabama, to pick up another eighteen hundred feet of soft wire. And when the goddamn truck broke down as he was getting on the Interstate, Dennis had to wait there over a week while they special-ordered parts and finally did the job. He said to Billy Darwin the last time he called him from the road, “You know it’s major work when they have to pull the head off the engine.”

  Darwin didn’t ask what was wrong with it. All he said was, “So the life of a daredevil isn’t all cute girls and getting laid.”

  Sounding like a nice guy while putting you in your place, looking down at what you did for a living.

  Dennis had never said anything about getting laid. What he should do, ask Billy Darwin if he’d like to climb the ladder. See if he had the nerve to look down from up there.

  2

  THE TANK, PAINTED A LIGHT blue with curvy white lines on it to look like waves—Billy Darwin’s idea but okay with Dennis—was in place out on the sweep of lawn. Dennis changed his mind about using that river water full of silt. He spoke to Darwin about it and Darwin got the Tunica Fire Department to fill the tank from a hydrant by the hotel, giving each of the firefighters a hundred-dollar chip they could play with or cash in. Dennis would bet they played and hoped they won.

  It was the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino’s celebrity host, Charlie Hoke, the ex-ballplayer, who got Dennis a place to stay, a room in a private home for a hundred a week. No meals, but he could cook if he cleaned up after.

  “Vernice,” Charlie said, “is on a diet and hardly cooks anymore, goddamn it.” Vernice, a nice-looking redhead if a bit plump—which was okay with Dennis, he liked redheads—owned the house, a three-bedroom bungalow with a screened porch on School Street in Tunica, the school at one end, two bail bond offices at the other. Vernice was a waitress at Isle of Capri. Charlie Hoke was supposed to be her live-in boyfriend, but had his own room so Dennis couldn’t tell how much time he spent with Vernice. They acted like they’d been married twenty-five years. After Dennis looked at his room and agreed to take it, Vernice said, “I never met a high diver before. Is it scary?” Dennis believed he could get next to Vernice without breaking Charlie’s heart.

  It was Charlie, also, who got Dennis a rigger.

  This was a man by the name of Floyd Showers from Biloxi, a skinny guy in his fifties with a sunken mouth and skidrow ways about him. He always had a pint of Maker’s Mark and cigarette butts in the pockets of the threadbare suitcoat he wore with his overalls, wore it even during the heat of day. Floyd had worked county fairs on the Gulf Coast and showed he knew how to stake down and tie off guy wires, adjusting the block and tackle to pull forty to sixty pounds of pressure. Charlie mentioned Floyd had done time on a burglary conviction, but said don’t worry about it, Floyd wasn’t apt to get in any trouble.

  This final day of setting up they were working late to finish. Dennis in red trunks stood on the top perch—there was another perch below at forty feet—looking down at Floyd tying off the last of the wires. Dennis pressed down on his end and felt it taut.

  It was early evening, the sun going down over Arkansas across the river. No one sitting by the pool, the patio in shade now. About an hour ago Dennis had spotted Vernice in her pink Isle of Capri waitress uniform with Charlie out on the lawn talking. It surprised Dennis to see her here at Tishomingo. She had looked this way to give him a wave as she walked back to the hotel. Charlie had returned to the weird attraction he worked and was still there: a wire-fence enclosure that looked like half a tennis court and a sign on it that read:

  CHICKASAW CHARLIE’S PITCHING CAGE

  LET’S SEE YOUR ARM!

  What Charlie had there, inside the enclosure, was a pitching rubber at one end and a tarp with a strike zone painted on it hanging sixty feet six inches away. You made your throw and a radar gun timed the speed of the baseball getting to the tarp and flashed it on a screen mounted in there on the fence. Five bucks a throw. Get three in a row in the strike zone, you got three more chances free. Hum one in ninety-nine miles an hour or better, you won ten thousand dollars. Or you could challenge Chickasaw Charlie. If this big ex-ballplayer with the beer gut, fifty-six years of age, failed to beat your throw, you won a hundred bucks.

  It looked easy.

  The first time Dennis left his work and wandered over there to see what was going on, Charlie said to him, “Watch ’em. These young hotshots and farm boys come here thinking they have an arm. Watch this kid with the shoulders.” Wearing his John Deere cap backwards. “He throws harder’n sixty mile an hour I’ll kiss him on the mouth.” The kid went into his stretch, brought the ball up to his chest with both hands and threw it, Dennis believed, as hard as he could. The radar screen flashed 54. Charlie said, “See?” and to the kid, “Boy, my older sister can throw harder’n that. You ever see a knuckleball? I’m gonna show you a knuckler. Look here, how you hold it with the tips of your fingers.” Charlie stepped on the rubber, went into his stretch and threw a ball that seemed to float toward the tarp before it dipped into the dirt and the radar screen registered 66. Charlie said to Dennis, “They throw with their arm, you notice? ‘Stead of using their whole body. You play any ball?”

  “Not once I climbed up on a diving board. I follow the American League,” Dennis said. “Now and then I’ll bet the Yankees, except if they’re playing Detroit.”

  “You’re smart, you know it? How ‘bout the ’84 Series?”

  “Who was in it?”

  “De-troit won it off the Padres. You remember it?” No, but it didn’t matter, Charlie kept talking. “I was up with the Tigers and pitched in what became the final game. Went in in the fifth and struck out the side. I got Brown and Salazar on called third strikes. I hit Wiggins by mistake, put him on, and got the mighty Tony Gwynn to go down swinging at sixty-mile-an-hour knucklers. I went two and a third innings, threw twenty-six pitches and only five of ’em were balls. I hit Wiggins on a nothing-and-two count, so you know I wasn’t throwing at him. I come inside on him a speck too close. See, I was never afraid to come inside. I’ve struck out Al Oliver, Gorman Thomas and Jim Rice. Darrell Evans, Mike Schmidt, Bill Madlock, Willie McGee, Don Mattingly, and I fanned Wade Boggs twice in the same game—if those names mean anything to you.”

  Later on that day Billy Darwin had come out to see how Dennis was doing. By then he and Floyd Showers had put up four sections of ladder and the metal scaffolding that supported a diving board three meters above the rear side of the tank. Dennis told the boss they’d finish tomorrow and then started talking about Charlie Hoke, amazed that a man his age was still able to throw as hard as he did.

  Darwin said, “He tell you about all the big hitters he’s struck out, and what he threw them?”

  “I can’t believe I’ve never heard of him,” Dennis said, and saw that hint of a superior grin Darwin used.

  “He tell you where he struck them out?”

  “Where? I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Ask him,” Darwin said.

  Dennis thought of it now looking down from his perch. Have a beer with Charlie and listen to baseball stories. He believed Charlie was still over at his pitching cage across the lawn. He hadn’t seen him leave, though it was hard to tell, the wire fence dark green against a stand of trees over there. He could yell for Charlie to come out and when he appeared show him a flying reverse somersault.

  Dennis’ gaze lifted from the pitching cage and the trees to a view of empty farmland reaching to hotels that seemed to have no business being there. The hotel next door invited its patrons to enjoy “Caribbean Splendor” but was called Isle of Capri. Like the Tishomingo’s patio bar looked more South Seas than Indian.<
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  Two guys in shirtsleeves, one wearing a hat, were by the bar. Dennis hadn’t noticed them before. It looked like a cowboy hat.

  When the hotel did try for Indian atmosphere—like the mural in the office reception area: Plains Indians in war bonnets hunting buffalo—they got it wrong. Charlie said Chief Tishomingo and his Chickasaws might’ve seen buffalo in Oklahoma, after they got shipped there, but they sure never saw any in Mississippi. Tishomingo himself never even got to Oklahoma. Charlie said he was a direct descendant of the old chief, born in Corinth over east of here, fifteen miles from the Tishomingo County line.

  The two guys were out at the edge of the patio now, this side of the swimming pool. Yeah, it was a cowboy hat, light-colored.

  Dennis was wearing sneakers, no shirt or socks with his red trunks. He looked down to see Floyd Showers hunched over lighting one of his cigarette butts. A couple of times Dennis had found him under the scaffolding behind the tank smoking a joint. Dennis didn’t say anything and neither did Floyd, didn’t even offer a hit. Which didn’t bother Dennis, not sure he’d toke after it’d touched Floyd’s mouth. Floyd hardly ever spoke unless asked a question; he’d answer and that would be it. Dennis looked down at his sneakers, stepped to the edge of the perch and was looking at the lower perch halfway down, the diving board below that and the tank you aimed for, the tiny circle of water so still the tank could be empty. For the night dive he’d light the water. He’d need a dive caller, a cute girl in a bathing suit, one with the nerve to stand on the narrow walk that rested on the rim of the tank. Announce the dives and splash the water if he had trouble telling the surface from the bottom. He was thinking it would be good if you could dive wearing sneakers, and raised his eyes.

  The two guys were out on the lawn now, coming by the tank.

  The cowboy hat was that shade between white and tan, the brim rolled where he’d take hold of it. This one walked tall in what looked like cowboy boots, long legs in slim-cut black jeans, his starched-looking white shirt buttoned up and tucked in tight. His bearing, along with the sunglasses under the hat brim, gave him a straight-up military look. Or a state trooper on his day off. The other one had a smaller frame, wore his clothes loose, his shirt hanging out and what hair he had slicked back hard.

  Dennis kept waiting for them to look up; he’d give them a wave. They didn’t though, they walked past the tank toward Floyd Showers, Floyd pinching his cigarette butt, looking up as the one with his hair slicked back called to him, “Floyd . . .?” and Dennis heard it the way he might hear a voice, a word, when he was at the top of his dive, bringing his legs up to go into a reverse pike . . .

  “Floyd . . .?”

  And Floyd had that look as if caught in headlights and turned to stone, the poor guy hunched inside that suitcoat too big for him, now reaching up to hang on to a guy wire.

  It was never in Dennis’ mind these guys were friends. If anything he thought the straight-shooter in the cowboy hat might produce a pair of handcuffs. It was the other one doing the talking, words Dennis couldn’t make out. He watched Floyd seem to stand taller as he shook his head back and forth in denial. Now the slick-haired one drew a pistol from under his sportshirt hanging out. A long thin barrel—it looked to Dennis like a .22 target pistol called the Sportsman, or something like that. The one in the cowboy hat and trooper shades stood looking out at the grounds like this was none of his business. But then he followed once the slick-haired one took Floyd by the coat collar and brought him around back of the tank, out of view from the hotel.

  Now they were under the scaffolding, eighty feet directly below Dennis.

  He turned on the perch to face the ladder and was looking at the Mississippi River and Arkansas and a wash of color way off at the bottom of the sky losing its light. He wanted to look down but didn’t want to stick his head over the top rung of the ladder and see them looking up at him. He wanted to believe they’d come all the way across the lawn from the hotel without noticing him. He wanted to dive, enter the water ten feet from them in a rip so perfect it wouldn’t make a sound and then slip out of the tank and run, run like hell. He heard Floyd’s voice. He heard the words “Swear to God,” and heard a sound like pop from down there, a gunshot or somebody driving a nail with one blow of the hammer, a hard sound that reached him and was gone. Dennis waited, looking at Arkansas. He heard three more pops then, one after another in quick succession. There was a silence, Dennis thinking it was done, and the sound reached him again, that hard pop. A minute or so passed. He saw them come around to the side of the tank, moving away from it.

  Now they were looking up at him.

  Dennis turned enough to watch them, the two talking to each other, having a conversation Dennis couldn’t make out until their words began to reach him, talking as they held their gaze on him.

  “You think I cain’t hit him?”

  “You fire enough rounds maybe.”

  This coming from the hat and sunglasses looking up at him in the gloom.

  “Shit, I bet I can hit him on the fly.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten dollars. Hey, boy”—the one with his hair slicked back raising his voice—“let’s see you dive.”

  “Would you dive offa there?”

  Talking to each other again.

  “I’d jump.”

  “Like hell.”

  “I was a kid we’d jump off a bridge on the Coosa River.”

  “How high was it, twenty feet?”

  “It wasn’t high as this’n, but we’d jump off’er.” He called out again, “Hey, boy, come on, dive.”

  “Tell him do a somersault.”

  The same thing Dennis was telling himself, a triple in a tuck, as small a target as he could make himself, hit the water and stay there. It was his only move and he had to go right now, before the one started shooting. Dennis turned to face the tank, raised his arms . . . and the lights came on in the pitching cage across the way.

  First the lights and now he saw Charlie Hoke coming out on the lawn, Charlie in his white T-shirt that said LET’S SEE YOUR ARM across the front, Charlie yelling at the two guys, “The hell you bums doing here?”

  Sounding like he was calling to a couple of friends.

  They saw him. They’d turned and were walking toward him, Charlie saying, “Goddamn it—you trying to mess up my deal?”

  That was all Dennis heard.

  The three were walking toward the pitching cage now, Charlie paying attention to the one in the cowboy hat who seemed to be doing the talking. While Dennis, watching—wound tight and rooted to the perch—tried to make sense of two guys Charlie knew shooting the guy Charlie had brought to work here. They stood talking by the cage a couple more minutes. Now the two walked off toward the hotel and Charlie was coming out on the lawn again.

  About halfway to the tank he called out to Dennis, “You gonna dive or what?”

  3

  HE DOVE, DYING TO GET off that perch, showed Charlie a flying reverse pike and ripped his entry without seeing the water, came up with his face raised to smooth his hair back and could hear Charlie out there clapping his hands. Dennis pulled himself up to the walk that circled the rim of the tank, rolled his body over it, hung and dropped to the ground.

  Charlie stood waiting for him in the early dark.

  “That was pretty, what I could see of it. We got to get you a spotlight.”

  “Charlie, they shot Floyd.” Dennis saying it and wiping his hands over his face. “They took him back there and shot him five times. The little guy. He had what looked like a twenty-two, like a target pistol.” All Charlie did was nod his head and Dennis said, “Maybe he’s still alive.”

  That got him shaking his head. “They want him dead, that’s what he is.”

  “Charlie, you know those guys? Who are they?”

  Now he looked busy thinking and didn’t answer.

  “The one in the cowboy hat,” Dennis said, “I thought at first he was a sheriff’s deputy or a state trooper.” />
  Charlie said, “You ought to see him with his sword. When they dress up as Confederates and refight the Civil War. But listen to me. You don’t know nothing about this.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “Floyd. What you saw. You weren’t here, so you didn’t see nothing. I’m the one found the body.”

  “You want to protect those guys?”

  “I’m keeping it simple, so neither one of us sticks our neck out.”

  “What if somebody was looking out the window? They see me up on the ladder, and the two guys?” Dennis glanced toward the hotel saying it.

  “People come here to gamble,” Charlie said, “not look out the window. Anybody happened to, what would they see? Nothing. It was dark.”

  “It wasn’t that dark.”

  Charlie put his hand on Dennis’ shoulder. “Come on, let’s move away from here.” They walked toward the hotel, Charlie saying, “You ever see anybody in the swimming pool? Hell no, they’re inside there trying to get rich. I mean it, you got nothing to worry about.”

  Not sounding worried himself, talking Southern in his way. It didn’t help Dennis. “But you know those guys. They kill Floyd and you say to them, ‘You trying to mess up my deal?’”

  “I meant their hanging around here. I know ’em as the kind you don’t want to be associated with. Understand, I did not know they shot Floyd till they told me. I come out, I thought they mighta stopped by to scare him, remind Floyd to keep his mouth shut is all.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Hell, I don’t know.” Charlie let his breath out sounding tired of this.

  Dennis kept after him. “You said Floyd had been to prison but don’t worry about it.”

  They stopped at the edge of the patio.

  “I was talking about the kind of person Floyd is, or was. I told you he went to Parchman on a burglary charge. Floyd sucked up to some cons there, but they had no use for him, beat him up when they felt like it. I thought, well, since you didn’t know anything about that, the kind of people he tried to associate with, there’s nothing to worry about.”