by Stan Hayes
“By th’ way,” asked Flx, “any chance we could get to bed a little earlier? This late roostin’s hard on a growin’ bird.”
“You go on any time you feel like it. We don’t hafta be together absolutely all the time.”
“OK. Thanks. And if ya don’t mind, I might wanta cut out every now and then to check out a few things.”
“What things?”
“Oh, just stuff it’d do us good to know, that I might be able to find out easier than you can, since nobody sees me but you.”
“But like what? I feel better when you’re hangin’ around.”
“I know, but what about this? You know how Wahoo took us to eat barbeque that time? He likes Mom a lot, but she doesn’t like him all that much. Maybe she lets him take us out ’cause she thinks we like him, which we do, but I don’t think he’d want to take just you and me out to Tubby’s. I think he wants to stick his weenie into her, and he ain’t figured out how to get rid of us so he can.”
Jack bristled. “Don’t say that. My Mom wouldn’t let him do that.”
“Don’t be too sure. Humans are funny about gettin’ that ole weenie in a bun. I’ll see what I can find out, if ya don’t mind.”
“OK,” Jack said grudgingly. “But you know what? I think Mose would take just us to Tubby’s. We don’t know too much about him, but I like the way he is, and I think Mom does, too. Too bad he can’t stay. If Mom really wants to do any ’a that ‘weenie bun’ stuff, I hope she does it with him.”
Chapter VIII. Crawl in the Saddle
It turned out to be a lot simpler than I’d imagined. Walton had damn near no equity in the Ritz, having steadily lost money while he owned it.
“You’re buying the Ritz? Just like that?” she’d said.
“Well, I was gonna to buy a theatre sooner or later, and this one looks like a steal to me,” I replied. “Like to guess his price?”
“No thanks. That’s between you and him.”
“And our lawyers. Could you recommend someone to handle my side of it?”
“Well, I’m sure Bruce- Bruce Goode, the attorney that handles our business, could do it, but there may be a conflict.”
“You mean about the lease.”
“Oh. Yes. Then you know it’s my father’s property.”
“Sure. That was a major selling point for him. Eight years left on a ten-year lease, three hundred a month with a five percent annual increase, lessor Lawton Redding. I don’t see any problem if your lawyer doesn’t.”
“Well, I’ll call and ask him right away. Holy Toledo! You obviously don’t have any trouble making up your mind about things.”
You have no idea, I thought. “A good deal’s where you find it,” I said. “If you’ll ask him to give me an appointment as soon as he can, maybe we can get it done in a few days and make a little cinema history in this town. Has Walton ever talked to you about doing any kind of promotion with the hotel?”
“No. And to tell the truth, I can’t see that it would’ve done him that much good. Seems to me that the Ritz’s market is the people of Bisque, not those that are just passing through.”
“Oh, no. Who’d rather sit in a hotel room at night if there’s a good movie around the corner? A lot of your guests are repeaters, aren’t they? If I mail a monthly coming attractions list to them at home, they can plan to come to the Ritz while they’re here. They’d probably tell their friends and business associates about a good theaatre being close by, and you’d get some new business too.”
“I must admit that I hadn’t thought about it. Well, let me call Bruce and get you two together. No sense delaying your making us all rich.”
“Yeah, the sooner I get my ducks in a row, the better.”
“My daddy says that. I’ve always thought it was just another way of saying, at a societally acceptable level, “…as soon as I can convince the necessary number of people to abandon the pursuit of their own best interests in favor of the pursuit of mine.”
“Hm. I’m lookin’ forward to meetin’ him,” said Moses.
Bruce Goode and I met in his office, which was in a house on brick-paved Cypress Street, where it crossed Lee street a couple of blocks south of the Hotel. The firm’s name, Billcombe, Goode and Proper, was engraved in black on a silver plate fastened to the white wood-latticed screen door. The joke hadn’t occurred to me until he brought it up. He was a little older than me, and obviously well off, and I guessed his good humor had a lot to do with that. He seemed as happy to see me as if I’d been the governor. “Mr. Kubielski,” he said in a voice rubbed smooth with long use. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, and to greet the newest member of Bisque’s business community. Thanks so much for letting us handle this transaction for you. It requires a little extra trust for a newcomer to do business with a firm with a name like ours.”
“It’s my pleasure, Mr. Goode. It came up unexpectedly. I don’t understand what you mean about the name, though.”
“You mean Serena passed up the chance to have a little fun at our expense? It’s just that our founding partners were perverse enough to stay with the alphabetic sequence of last names, and the first one was Billcombe. It’s pronounced “bilk ’em.”
“Oh. I see. Bilk ‘em...”
“Good and proper. Precisely. Well, just put it down to the eagerness of a bunch of young bucks trying to get some visibility, and some business, any way that they could. Bisque itself was wet behind the ears back then- 1895- and the joke apparently appealed to enough people to perpetuate it. In any case, they prevailed, and there’s a second and third generation of pretty fair lawyers now as evidence that they did.”
I laughed. “Well, as long as it’s just reverse psychology.”
“That’s it!” he said, happy to see that I got it. “Well, as to the Ritz. If you don’t mind my saying so, you drove a damn fine bargain. I’ve examined our copies of the documents that Frank Atkinson, Mr. Walton’s counsel, sent to me yesterday. I really don’t see much that needs changing.”
“Good. I’m sure then that I won’t either. I’ll just take them back to the hotel with me and look them over, and get back to you tomorrow. If you’re free sometime tomorrow, that is.”
“How about Wednesday? Perhaps we could discuss any questions that you might have over lunch. I’d be happy to pick you up at the hotel- say twelve-thirty? The Elks Club has a very nice lunch menu, and it’s just a short drive.”
“That would be fine,” I said. “So far, I’ve only eaten at the hotel.”
“Yes, of course. I forgot for a moment how short a time you’ve been in Bisque. If you’d like, I’d enjoy showing you a little more of the town, and the county, after lunch.”
“I’d appreciate that very much. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
I took a different route back to the hotel, thinking about lunch and a beer to go with it. Heading west on Cypress, I crossed Lee and continued for another block, hoping that I’d remembered Lee Webster’s directions to the Bisque Lunch Room. I turned north on Eighth and, seeing the railroad station in the distance, figured that I had. I slowed my pace to a saunter, integrating this part of town, which my walks with Jack hadn’t covered, into my mental map of what was to be my new home for some as-yet-to-be-determined period of time. Tree roots had heaved up some of the sidewalk slabs, letting little moss patches grow in the cracks. The houses here were both larger and older than the ones in lawyer Goode’s part of Cypress street, and less well-kept as you approached Main, where residences left off and business began. Crossing relatively wide Main, I left the rumble and screech of its truck-dominated traffic behind me, and walked on, past a wholesale grocer, miscellaneous small retailers and the ice house down the block on Jackson.
The Bisque Lunch Room slouched on the corner of Eighth street and an alley, opposite one side of the post office and just beyond what appeared to be a repair shop. Crossing over to its side of the street, I picked my way past lawnmowers, power saws and various agricultural-looking devices toward the Lunch R
oom’s swinging doors. A large olive-drab Harley-Davidson and sidecar rig was parked on the street, its back wheel resting against the curb, pointing toward the railroad station.
The Steinerbru clock on the far wall read 11:45. Remnants of the morning sun spattered through the swinging doors and grimy windows, highlighting the small cyclones of dust kicked up by the swinging doors, crawling across the sawdust-covered floor and up the front of the two-sided bar that ran most of the twenty-five-or-so foot width of the room, serving whites at the front and colored at the rear, where the floor was about three feet lower, level with a side door that opened onto the alley, than the front. A gray-haired, gray-skinned fortyish man sat at the cash register on the servers’ side of the bar, in the L created by the bar and the left-hand wall. He looked mildly at me over rimless half-glasses. “Mornin’,” he grunted. “What’ll it be?”
“Mornin’,” I replied. “I’m here for lunch, but I’ll have a beer while I look at the menu. Whaddya have on draft?”
“Schlitz, Miller and Bud. And them and a bunch of others in bottles. Steinie, CV, Blatz, Black Label, Feingold, Ballantine’s and Red Cap.”
“Red Cap?”
“Red Cap ale. Carling’s.”
“That’ll be fine. What’s for lunch?”
“Thar she blows,” he said, raising a dessicated hand toward a sign above the bar and reprising its movable-white-plastic-letter testament. “Best ribeye steak you ever ate, on a plate or in a sandwich, hamburger, hot dog, bacon lettuce and tomater, french fries with everthang. Or baloney on liit bread, that we have mostly for the coon trade. If you’d keer for an appetizer, we got pickled eggs, pickled pig’s feet and pickled hot sausages in them jars riit’air,” indicating three gallon-size glass containers in the middle of the bar. “An’ a Moon Pie for dessert, if yer still hungry.”
“It’s early; just a sandwich. Bacon, lettuce and tomato, on toast. Even at this early in my Bisque life I knew better than to add “whole wheat.”
“Yeh-baw-ey. We’ll have to grill ’at bread fer ye; ain’t got no toaster.” It took a couple of seconds for me to realize that what he’d said was “Yeah, boy.”
“That’s all right.”
“I don’t bleeve you been in here before,” he said, setting my Red Cap down to extend a cool, damp hand. “My name’s Randall. They call me Ribeye. This here’s my place.”
We shook. “Pleased to meet you, Ribeye. Moses Kubielski.”
“Oh! You’re the one from up the country. That ’us my nephew brought you to the ho-tel with lil’ Jack. Ricky.”
I took a big swallow of Red Cap. It was plenty cold, and its strong taste promised a nice solid hit to the midsection. “Oh, sure. He told me a great story about your Indian ancestors. The Creeks.”
He rewarded me with a look of mild disgust, shaking his head. “That’s on his mama’s side; her and my wiife’re sisters, and mosta that’s Smokey’s- he’s their pappy- most of that’s his bullshit, to my way a’thinkin. He’s fulla shit as a crismus turkey. He’ll fix raddiators nobody else can, though. Yores done yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, hit’ll be riit when you git it back. “Flo! Gimme a BLT up here, an’ grill th’ bread! Hey thair, Roy!” he said, looking over my shoulder.
A tall, thin-faced, thirtyish guy in once-white coveralls slid onto the stool next to mine. “Hey, Rib.” He took the beer that Randall drew for him, drinking about half of it in the same motion before looking at me. “Howdy,” he said.
“This here’s the man with the broke-down Buick from up th’ country,” said Randall. “Smokey’s takin care of it.”
“Oh, yeah. That big Buick. Lee Webster said you was thinkin’ about buyin’ the picture show. That right?”
“Thinkin’ about it,” I said. “You go there much?”
“Every now and then,” said the thin man. “Whenever they have a Randolph Scott, or sich as that. Or a Abbott and Costeller. Them boys are sump’m else.”
“That’s Roy’s place next door,” Ribeye put in. “The motor shop.”
I waggled my empty bottle at Ribeye. “Looks like you do all kinds of business over there,” I said. “Everything from plows to motorcycles.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Seems like the bidness fines me, ’steada the other way round. Most people just don’t wanta fool with a lotta different stuff, I guess. They rather just do pretty much the same thing every day. Thatair’s what’d drive me crazy. I just like to figger stuff out. Hit’s liike havin’ puzzles to play with.”
“Is that sidecar rig broken down?”
“That ole Army Harley? Not no more. I fixed it fer the sonofabitch- jist a wore-out engine sprocket- an’ he never come back fer it. Ain’t seen ’im since June. You like ’em thangs? You kin have it fer what he owes me on it. ’Ey scare th’ shit outa me.”
“How much?”
“$48.50, plus fitty cent a day storage.”
“Be OK if I ride it first?”
“Oh hell yes. Wanta do it now?”
I laughed. “Oh hell yes.” We slid off the stools and walked out to the rig. “I’ll take it real slow,” I told him. “I’ve ridden a couple of sidecar rigs, but it’s been awhile.” Looking down to close the carburetor’s choke, I realized that it wasn’t what I’d expected; it was much larger. “This’s no forty-five,” I said.
“Naw, hit’s that seb’mty-four-inch flathead that they been makin’ since th’ thirties. I reckon the Army bought ’em jist to pull sidecars.”
Twisting the left grip to retard the ignition, I opened the throttle just a crack and flipped the bicycle-pedal starter out to kicking position. Pulling up on the bars, I kicked down on it once with the ignition off, thrusting the full weight of my body against the engine’s compression. It started on the third or fourth kick, just as the lever hit the bottom of its stroke, turning over a hair above idle speed, with the unmistakable thumpa-dump-thumpa-dump Clydesdale-lope of a v-twin. “Hop in!” I shouted to Roy, who looked at me as if I’d asked him to kiss a rattlesnake. He shook his head slowly, turning down the corners of his mouth for emphasis. “I can’t ride this thing without some weight in the car,” I protested.
“I don’t even like to ride it, let alone set in that goddam bathtub while you ride it,” he said. I was about to shut the engine down when Ziggy, the grocery boy with the Ruptured Duck shirt, rode his bike around the corner of the building, one hand on the handlebars and one clutching a half-eaten sandwich. I waved him over.
“Ziggy! Want a ride?” I said, pointing at the sidecar.
Chewing, he looked first at the sidecar, then down the street, then at me. “Sho! Iffen Mister Roy don’ mind watchin’ after mah bike.”
“Go awn, bawey,” Roy shouted, fearing a lost sale. “I’ll putcher biike inside. Y’all have a niice ride; take yer time and be keerful, heeunh?”
By now the Lunch Room crowd was on the street, ready to witness the unlikely launch of infernal machine, yankee, three hastily-ordered Red Caps and pickaninny down the street to god-knew-what. Blipping the throttle, I pushed the gearshift lever into low gear, waiting for Ziggy to get his lanky frame situated in the car, the bag of Red Caps between his legs. Still chewing, he answered my “Ready?” with the briefest of nods, his eyes bigger than any I’d ever seen. Letting a couple of cars go by, I rolled on a handful of throttle and toed the clutch pedal forward. We leaped from the curb, missing a car parked across the street by an inch or two and giving Ziggy a closeup look at his reflection in its shiny gas filler cap, as I remembered how much handlebar-rowing a sidecar rig takes to change direction.
Easing off the throttle, I slipped the gearbox into neutral and coasted up to the traffic light at the intersection, opposite the railroad station. We sat there, waiting in a cloud of Harley-Davidson smells, sounds and vibrations, for a break in the traffic. With what I hoped would pass for nonchalance, I asked Ziggy, “Anyplace special you’d like to go?”
His eyes had returned to normal size; he looked a lot more comfor
table than he had a few seconds ago. Looking around at the gaping faces of the throng of blacks and whites eagerly anticipating the contraption’s next move, Ziggy leaned grandly back against the sidecar’s threadbare cushion. “Allanna!” he said, with the grin of a Zulu holding a fresh kill. Old Ziggy was a player.
“Can’t spare the time today,” I told him, “but let’s head that way for a while.” As the traffic opened up, I slipped it into low, sawed the bars over to the left and got us moving west on Isaac Street, past the still-gaping onlookers and headed out of town toward Atlanta. I ran it hard through first and second gear, loving the power surge of an engine that had obviously had the benefit of Roy’s attention. By the time I pulled it down into third, Ziggy and I were flying along at what the big speedometer on the gas tank said was between sixty-five and seventy, down a section of Isaac that ran through houses, repair shops, warehouses and groceries that had all seen better days. I slowed up going past the textile mills that were, I would learn, the heart of Bisque’s economy, and followed Isaac as it turned north to join the main highway. With Ziggy’s assurance that no one was expecting him to be anywhere for awhile, I drank a couple of the Red Caps and enjoyed scooting the rig over the blacktop roads that ran through the generally flat countryside of cotton fields bounded by ditches of incredibly red clay. We rode the rural area north of Bisque for an hour, waving back at the people who waved at us, and grinning at those that didn’t, as we passed by. We stopped once for gas, and at a couple of places that looked interesting in one way or another. I was surprised to find that Ziggy knew little more about where we were than I did. “Iownno” was his regular response to my questions about the people, farms and settlements that we rode by. He was, it turned out, more curious about me than about rural Bisque. The last stop we made was under a giant oak tree, on the crest of a hill that overlooked white fields of cotton that looked ready for picking. Sitting on the sidecar’s nose, he asked me, “Where you from?” His brown-eyed gaze ranged out over the pasture across the two-lane macadam road.