They Don't Dance Much: A Novel

by James Ross

  He had some money—he was bound to have had—and it wasn’t long before he bought out the River Bend filling station. There was a murder down there. The boy that owned the place was mixed up in it and had to go to the pen. I heard Smut got it at a bargain.

  He made good from the start. During the week he didn’t have so much business, but on Saturdays and Sundays it was a live place. The loafers in Corinth told me that Smut didn’t go to bed from Saturday morning till sometime Monday. There was always a game of poker or blackjack going on in the back of the place. Smut got in those games and usually made money in them. He sold some gas and a lot of liquor.

  When we were kids in high school I was a good catcher, but Smut was the regular catcher and I didn’t get to play much. I lay out of school one year so he’d get on through and I could have the field to myself. He was a big, rough fellow and I was always afraid of him. But he seemed to like me.

  When we were kids in school most of the boys thought Lola Shaw was the prettiest girl there. Her hair was dark and she had big brown eyes. She had a sly way of looking at boys that got them down. It looked like she was trying to say, ‘Now if we were just off by ourselves couldn’t we have one hell of a time?’ She was a medium-sized girl, built with curves that were banked right. Her face was sort of oval-shaped. The boys all liked her fine, but girls didn’t.

  Her daddy was old Flake Shaw, a horse doctor. He was a good horse doctor and saved his money. When he died he left his wife some property. She stepped out socially in Corinth then. She joined a couple of book clubs and took a big part in the P.T.A. You couldn’t pick up the Enterprise without seeing where she’d just finished entertaining the Ladies’ Aid Society of the Methodist Church. She was mighty careful about who she let Lola associate with, and when Lola finished high school she sent her to Duke University.

  About the time Lola finished high school Smut Milligan noticed her. Or maybe it was her noticed him. Anyway they started running around together. That didn’t suit Lola’s mama. Smut wasn’t nice folks and she put her foot down. So Lola had to learn how to climb out of windows late at night. She might have slipped out to meet other boys, but Smut was the only one I knew about for sure.

  While Smut was away from Corinth, on the Pacific Coast or wherever it was, Lola ran around with a lot of different boys. She would go out with nice fellows that were studying the Ministry, or Law, or maybe Accounting and Business Administration. She went with them to please her mother. After she got her duty done she slipped out with other boys around town, to have some fun. Back then I used to keep up with the boys she went with, because I had a crush on her myself.

  The summer after Lola finished at Duke, Smut Milligan came back to Corinth. He had a few dates with her, out in the open, but I guess her mother commenced raising hell again and it wasn’t long before they were slipping out to meet each other. From the way she acted I thought Lola loved Smut, but she married Charles Fisher in September of that year.

  I don’t think she’d ever had a date with him until about a month before they got married.

  Charles Fisher was an only child. His daddy was Henry Fisher, the man that owned the Corinth Hosiery Mills. When Charles’s mother died she left him her property, and that amounted to around half a million dollars. He could have lived like a king off the interest on that, but he took a job in his daddy’s hosiery mill. They said the old man wanted him to keep on in the business. He worked all over the mill, at different jobs. When he married Lola Shaw he was about thirty-five years old. He was in charge of the Sales Department by then. He went to Northern towns like New York and Philadelphia and sold the hosiery they manufactured. That kept him out of Corinth a good part of the time.

  He had a good education. He finished at Duke University and then had a year at Harvard. I don’t know how come him to go to Harvard. After he left there he came back to Corinth and commenced working in the hosiery mill. He was a quiet fellow and played a lot of bridge with the best folks in Corinth. Sometimes he would hang around Baucom’s Pharmacy, or around the Élite Pool Room and try to be one of the boys. But he couldn’t quite make it.

  Off at a distance he didn’t look like much, but if you got up right close and looked at him there wasn’t anything really wrong with his looks. His hair was light and his skin was pink, like a tomato that will be ripe in a couple of days. He wore octagon-shaped glasses and he blinked his eyes a lot. I guess they were weak. But he could see good enough to notice that Lola Shaw was stacked up like a brick hotel. Then I reckon she gave him the works with those sleepy eyes of hers and it was a little more than he could stand. I doubt if he’d ever fooled with women much.

  I heard in Corinth that Smut thought she was just playing around with Fisher to please her mother. But he was a fool if he thought that. She meant business. Her mother had run through with most of the money the old horse doctor left them, and I doubt if Lola liked the prospects of teaching school for her living. It took her just a little over a month to hook the richest young man in town. A horse doctor’s daughter that can do that is bound to have more on the ball than just a loose grip.

  Old Henry Fisher wasn’t crazy about Charles marrying her. Still I don’t think he said much against it.

  They had a simple and quiet wedding. Anyway that’s what Fletch Monroe said in the Enterprise a couple of months after the honeymoon was over. Charles built a new house on Pee Dee Avenue, at the other end of the street from where his daddy’s house was. Lola blossomed out in a new sports roadster. Nile green, I think they said, was the name of the color.

  If Smut Milligan was cut up about the way things turned out, he never let on. He didn’t even pitch a drunk when they went to New York and Canada on their honeymoon. That was always Smut: stand up and take it.

  3

  IT WAS ON A WEDNESDAY night that Smut Milligan offered me a job working at his place. The rest of that week I was busy settling up my own affairs. I wrote the Land Bank at Columbia, South Carolina, and told them that I was giving up the farm. Then I went to Corinth and told Jasper Yonce to send a man out to get the cow. I talked to the sheriff and he agreed to take the mule and what farming tools I had for the back taxes and the interest. He had a farm and could use the stuff. Saturday afternoon I sold my hens to Wash Davis, a nigger hen-trader that drove all around the country in a top buggy, buying hens, eggs, dogs, possums, rabbits, and mighty near anything else you wanted to sell cheap, or swap.

  I left a sort of crop there, but it couldn’t be helped. The cotton didn’t look like it would be worth picking. I figured I could sell the corn in the field to some farmer and let him gather it.

  Sunday I got Smut Milligan’s pick-up and hauled what furniture I had, and my trunk, to his place. I stored the furniture in his car shed till I could find a sale for it.

  I left a few things at the house. They were mostly things that I couldn’t use away from there, and things that I knew I couldn’t sell. I left a spinning-wheel that was busted, and some wobbly old chairs, and some leaky pots and pans. I left a grandfather’s clock there too, but it wouldn’t run.

  In a way I hated to leave and give up the place. I had been hard up there and lonesome too, but it was a place I could always go to. When I was a kid and out bumming around I always knew I could go back there if I got too hungry and too discouraged. I was going to Smut Milligan’s place, but that wasn’t any home of mine. Unless he made a profit out of me I knew Milligan wouldn’t waste any time about booting me out of there. He was a man that valued a dollar.

  I slept on a mattress on the floor in the back of Smut’s place that first Sunday night. Smut had a cot back there, but he filled that up. It was a pretty crowded place that we lived in, but we got by. The front of the place was a big room, about fifty feet by twenty feet. It was full of merchandise, counters, Coca-Cola crates, and things like that. There was a stove in the front too, and an icebox to keep the drinks in. There were two slot machines, one on each side of the front door. Behind the front part there was another room, the sa
me width as the front part, but shorter. There was more merchandise in that, for a sort of reserve. Smut had a good trade with the niggers and farmers that lived down there on the river. Back of this second room, on the right, there was an annex that was divided into two rooms. Smut had built the first room to sleep in, and later on had another room added for a kitchen. They played poker in the kitchen a lot in the winter, Smut told me. Most of the liquor was hidden in the second room. The kitchen looked like a better place, but it was a lot of trouble to walk that far to get it.

  I was green as a stalk of corn, and the first two days Smut had to show me my way around. He showed me where the different things were, how much they cost, and how to work the cash register. He showed me where he kept an extra supply of liquor, in case we happened to run out sometime when he wasn’t there. It was in the little cellar under the car shed.

  John Morrison, Inc., a contractor from Blytheville, was the company that Smut had contracted with to build the place. They started work on Wednesday of that week. Smut certainly had things planned out. He told me that he borrowed a couple of thousand dollars by giving a mortgage on the place and half a dozen notes. He had some money of his own to start with. He had been to Charlotte and had an architect to draw up a blueprint of the roadhouse. It cost him plenty of money, but he said he was determined to do it right while he was about it. ‘Things done by halves are never done well,’ Smut said.

  The carpenters and the masons started putting up a new building right beside the filling station. While they were working we kept on doing business at the old stand. When they finished the new building Smut aimed to have them remodel the filling station into a dance hall and connect it with the new part.

  Smut stayed in a sweat then, hurrying up the carpenters and then cussing them out and telling them they’d better do a good job. He went to Corinth a lot, and sometimes to Charlotte. When he was gone I ran the joint. In the week there wasn’t much to it. After I cleaned up the kitchen and swept out the store I would spend the rest of the morning reading the paper, or talking to the men working on the building. Sometimes somebody would come in for gas, or a Coca-Cola, or a package of cigarettes. In the afternoon I usually took a nap, but I always woke up in time to listen to the baseball game. It was always the Washington Senators and as a rule they got the tar whipped out of them, but sometimes they’d slip in and win a game. About five o’clock business would pick up a little. Several boys from the river farms worked in the cotton mill in Corinth, and they’d stop by in the evening on their way home from work. Usually they didn’t trade much. Just drank Coca-Colas and played the slot machines. Sometimes somebody from Corinth would drive out for a pint of government liquor. There was plenty of corn in Corinth, but we were the only ones that always had government liquor.

  There were a couple of fellows that hung out at our place a lot. One of them was Bert Ford.

  He was about fifty years old, I judge, and was a tall, stooped man. He was a drinking man, but he took his drinking by spells. He’d drink a quart a day for a couple of weeks. Then he’d quit for a month or so.

  About twenty-five years ago Bert was courting a girl in the mill section of Corinth. She got in the family way. I guess Bert thought he was the guilty party, for he left town. But the girl laid it on another boy and the other boy married her.

  In 1932 Bert’s daddy died and willed Bert his farm. He came back to Corinth then and lived in the big two-story house on the farm he inherited. He lived by himself and didn’t even have a dog there with him. He was the last of the line and didn’t have any folks around Corinth.

  I’d always heard that Bert was in Texas most of the time he was gone from Corinth. But later on I found out that he was in the Middle West during that time. It was talked around that he brought a lot of money in here with him when he came back. First he put it in the bank in Corinth, then moved it to the Depositors’ Trust Company in Charlotte. When that bank got shaky he went over there and managed to get it out. I didn’t find out what he did with it after that. Anyway, I always thought that was just nigger talk. If a man lives by himself and doesn’t marry, the niggers all think he’s bound to be a millionaire.

  I never saw Bert Ford dressed up. He always wore striped overalls and blue chambray shirts, and most always a black hat, with a high crown. His face was long, like a hound dog’s, and there were seams running down his cheeks. His skin was about the same color as a ripe winter pear. I reckon his eyes had been green to start with, but drinking so much liquor had made them bloodshot. He had a gold tooth right in the middle of his lower teeth. Sometimes when the sun was shining, and he opened his mouth, the sun would glint on that tooth and it lit up his face. But I never saw him smile.

  He wasn’t married, but he would take a spell of chasing after women now and then. Always when he was on a drunk. He went with women that worked in the cotton mill. Some folks said he had a nigger woman in Shantytown.

  Bert Ford was a strange man to me. His pal, Wilbur Brannon, was just as strange. He turned night into day. I never could figure out what it was that made Wilbur and Bert friends. They were from different classes. Wilbur’s folks used to be big landowners before the Civil War; there’s still a lot of niggers around Corinth named Brannon. But Wilbur’s daddy ran through with the property like fire running through a straw field on a windy day. When he died there was just enough left to send Wilbur through medical school. Wilbur finished his medical course and was a doctor in some town in South Carolina. But they caught him selling morphine and put him in the pen at Atlanta. He went from the pen to the war, and when that was over he came back to Corinth and settled down at the Keystone Hotel. He never practiced medicine in Corinth.

  He was as tall as Bert Ford, but straighter. He was about the same age as Bert was, too, and his hair was white as snow. They said it ran in his family to get white-headed early. His eyes were gray and cold. When he got interested in something they’d sparkle like stars in the winter-time. If it hadn’t been for half his face and forehead being covered with a purple birthmark, he would have been a handsome man.

  Wilbur had a bunch of nigger houses in Charlotte and he lived off the rent he got out of them. He might have had other ways of making money. He always wore clothes that looked like they cost a lot, and he traded cars every fall. Sometimes he’d leave Corinth and stay gone for a couple of months. Nobody ever knew where he went.

  He would stay out at Smut’s till midnight if he could get anybody to sit up that late with him. He bought a pint of liquor from Smut sometimes, but as a general rule he brought a pint along with him. He’d drink that in a couple of hours, then quit for the night. I never saw him drunk.

  Once in a while he’d play one of the slot machines. Now and then he would play me a game of checkers, but he always beat me, and he could beat anybody else around there except sometimes Bert Ford. When there was a poker game going on he got in that. Most of the games they had out there weren’t for any big piles of money, but if anybody wanted to play for high stakes that was all right with Wilbur. His I.O.U. was the same as money in the bank.

  In Corinth the folks of his own class mostly shunned Wilbur Brannon. They hadn’t forgotten him going to the penitentiary. Then he never went to church and never pretended to work. A lot of folks thought it was going against Nature to sit up all night too, and sleep in the daytime. But Wilbur went his own way and let other folks go theirs.

  Bert Ford and Wilbur Brannon were our steady customers. Sometimes Astor LeGrand would drive out and sit on a nail keg, with his hat pulled down almost to the sun glasses he wore. Usually Catfish was there too, if he wasn’t busy making liquor. During the week farmers would drop in sometimes and chat awhile. But beginning with Friday night, after the mill paid off, there was a mob out there. It was risky to gamble in Corinth back then, even in Shantytown. But down at Smut’s place it was all right. The cotton-mill hands spent the week-end down there. They bought some liquor and a little gas. But the way Smut cashed in on them was to wait till most of them
had been cleaned out in the poker games and then take on the main winners.

  These fellows played poker mostly, but sometimes they played blackjack. Smut liked blackjack better because it was faster and he could get their money without staying away from the business so long. He could cheat at poker, but it was simpler and faster when they were playing blackjack. All the cards he had down there were shaved decks. He always got decks of cards that had rows of diamonds on the back. He’d shave off the edges of the cards so he could tell what they were. He trimmed aces so there would be half a diamond showing on both ends and sides. The low cards were shaved off so there was a full diamond on both ends and sides. A medium card was fixed so there was half a diamond left on the sides and a full diamond left on the ends. With a full diamond on the sides and half a diamond on the end the card was a ten-spot. I caught him shaving a deck of new cards the Thursday after I went to work for him. He told why he was doing it.

  It looked to me like the mill hands would have caught on after a while, for Smut always took in fifty to sixty dollars a week off them. But they kept on laying for him. They always used the cards he furnished.

  Of course the mill hands weren’t the only fellows that came out over the week-ends. A lot of farmers and country boys hung out there because they could drink with a lot of other fellows there. A number of young sprouts from Corinth would be out there Friday and Saturday nights. They ought to have been home and in bed. They thought it would make them looked up to if it got out that they hung out at Smut Milligan’s joint. On Saturdays we generally sold as much as fifty pints of liquor, corn and government together. Smut took in a lot from the two slot machines—especially from the one that was busted and wouldn’t pay off. He sold some heavy groceries, and tobacco, and odds and ends to the farmers. I could see he was making good money. What I couldn’t see was how he’d managed to run the place before without any help. He said he did it by not sleeping much and having eyes in the back of his head. When Friday night came he toted a gun the same as he would a pocket handkerchief.