They Don't Dance Much: A Novel

by James Ross

  ‘Probably that’s it,’ Smut said. He yawned and put his hand over his mouth.

  I stared at the new pin-ball machine over in the corner beside the front door. I tried to look like a fellow that wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.

  11

  IT WAS ABOUT MIDNIGHT when we closed up. Smut and I went to our cabin, and when we got there Smut put on his boots and then his raincoat. I knew he was up to something, but I didn’t ask him what.

  Smut took his hat off the nail on the wall and sort of pushed the crown into shape.

  ‘I won’t be gone so long,’ he said. ‘I’m going to take a look at that beer myself.’

  ‘You going to walk?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. It ain’t over two miles.’

  ‘Why don’t you take his gun and throw that away?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve already made way with that,’ Smut said. He commenced buttoning his raincoat, from the bottom.

  ‘Did you hide the money?’

  ‘It’s safe,’ Smut said. He buttoned the collar of the raincoat and turned it up around his neck. He snapped off the light when he went out.

  I had to lie there and worry about Bert Ford awhile before I went to sleep. After I finally dozed off I kept waking up all night, but I don’t know when Smut came in. I got up pretty early the next morning, but he slept on for a couple of hours.

  When he finally got to the roadhouse the beer man was there and then the Coca-Cola man. Every time I started to talk to Smut somebody would come in. It was Saturday and everybody had to drop by that day and see if we needed anything. The cigar man, the wholesale grocery man, the bread truck, the truck from Wheeler Wilkinson’s Market in Corinth, and all the other distributors were out that morning. It was noon before Smut got through with them, and about that time a couple of fellows came to see about the slot machines.

  The regular slot-machine man was a rough-looking, tow-headed bird, and he usually came around once a month. But this time there was another fellow with him. This other fellow was the Big Shot. The Big Shot was a Greek and his name was Kintoulas, or something that sounded like that. He was a short, heavy-set fellow that was always smoking a little cigar about the size of a willow twig. The Big Shot leased the slot machines to Smut and he owned all the slot machines in that part of the country. He lived in Raleigh and didn’t get around very often. Smut went with them and they checked the machines. When they finished they all came back to the counter, and the regular slot-machine man opened his briefcase and took out some ledger sheets. He put them down on the counter and began working on them. Badeye was in the kitchen, eating, and Smut motioned to me.

  ‘Bring us three beers, Jack,’ he said. ‘What’ll you have?’ Smut asked the Big Shot.

  ‘Gimme a Red Top Ale,’ the Big Shot said, and shifted the stick cigar to the other side of his mouth.

  ‘Gimme a Budweiser,’ the other fellow said, and turned over one of the ledger sheets and started marking on the next one.

  ‘Two Buds and one Red Top Ale,’ Smut called to me.

  ‘Two Buds and one Red Top,’ I said, and got them.

  When I brought them up and set them on the counter the Big Shot dropped his cigar on the floor and drank his ale without taking the bottle down from his mouth. Then he shoved the empty bottle down the counter and got out another little cigar.

  ‘You slacked off a little, Milligan,’ the Big Shot said.

  ‘December’s a slow month,’ Smut said, ‘and it’s been pretty cold here lately.’

  ‘Everybody slacked off,’ the Big Shot said.

  Smut finished his beer and pushed the bottle down the counter. ‘I see where the legislature is talking about outlawing slot machines the next session,’ he said.

  The Big Shot spat out a little stem of tobacco. He shrugged his shoulders, and raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘They all the time talk like that,’ he said, ‘but I got a fella there wukkin for me. He’s—What’s it you call?’

  ‘Lobbying?’ Smut said.

  ‘Is right. Lobbing. Hesa cost me plenty money. He better look out for me. But I don’t worry.’ The Big Shot sort of hissed when he talked, like he might have a sore throat.

  The tow-headed man put his papers in the briefcase and stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I got the data on all the machines you got out here. You slacked off a little this time, Milligan, but not so bad as some other places.’

  ‘I’ll pick up from now on,’ Smut told him.

  The Big Shot stood up then. He took his gloves out of his overcoat pocket and put them on.

  ‘Thanks for the beer. See you some more,’ he told Smut.

  When they were gone Smut shook his head. ‘Now, there’s a guy that really rakes in the dough,’ he said to me. ‘I hear he come to Raleigh about ten years ago without nothing. He used to run a nigger cafe in Raleigh.’

  Smut ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Course I got plenty money now, myself,’ he said and looked at me.

  ‘Did you look in the beer last night?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yeah,’ Smut said. ‘I warmed it up a little. I built a little fire in the furnace and got the beer sort of lukewarm.’

  ‘Will that work it off any quicker?’

  ‘If you don’t get it too hot it’s the very thing. If you got a small still you can heat bricks or rocks and throw them in the beer. That wouldn’t work with one as big as Catfish’s, though.’

  ‘If you heat water that just makes it freeze that much quicker,’ I said.

  ‘Beer won’t freeze, it’s got too much alcohol in it,’ Smut said. ‘Then there’s a crust of meal on top of this batch now and that keeps it warm. And when you get a big lot of beer warm, why, it takes it a long time to cool off. I bet that beer’s working off good today.’

  ‘Ought to be ready when?’

  ‘Might be ready tomorrow night. It’s turned a lot warmer today. When we close up tomorrow night we’ll go down there and see about it.’

  ‘We don’t get much sleep these nights,’ I said.

  Smut stood up and stretched his arms above his head. ‘Maybe we can sleep later on,’ he said.

  We were pretty busy that afternoon, but Smut took the pick-up and went off somewhere. He stayed most of the afternoon, and when he came back his shoes were muddy.

  Sunday was so much warmer that it seemed almost like spring. We had plenty of trade that day. That night it kept four of us busy: Matt and Sam, Badeye and myself. Dick Pittman had caught Sam’s cold then, and was in bed.

  We did a good business that night, but most of the customers left early. Baxter Yonce and Wheeler Wilkinson were out that night, and Wilbur Brannon was there too. They asked me about Bert Ford. I told them I hadn’t seen him. Wilbur said he guessed he’d have to go out and see if Bert was sick or anything. We closed up the roadhouse at a quarter-past eleven that night, and Smut and I started out for the still.

  We walked fast through the woods and it didn’t take us more than thirty minutes to get there. Smut had his flashlight, but other than that we didn’t carry anything special with us.

  Catfish had some wood piled up against the side of the gulch. It was stuck back in the honeysuckle vines and nobody would ever notice it, but we knew where it was. Most of it was charcoal wood that wouldn’t show any smoke and would make a hot fire, but there was some pine wood too, for kindling.

  We brought the wood up to the furnace and I held the flashlight while Smut got the fire started. ‘Look how I got it fixed up in here,’ Smut said.

  Inside the furnace he had piled up rocks on each side, and on top of the rock columns he had several old car springs. They were up about two feet from the bottom of the furnace and lying close together.

  ‘Where’d that stuff come from?’ I asked.

  ‘I got it yesterday from the junk pile the other side of Corinth,’ he said.

  ‘What’s it for?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t get excited,’ Smut said.

  Smut finally got a little fire started in the furnace. Then he t
ook out his knife and handed it to me. ‘Hold that a minute,’ he said, and commenced unbuttoning his raincoat.

  The raincoat was the first thing he took off. After that he took off every stitch he had on, and piled his clothes in front of the furnace.

  ‘God, I dread this job!’ he said. ‘Gimme my knife.’

  We went around the side of the beer-container and I shoved Smut up. Then he caught my arms and helped me climb up there beside him. Smut took the barrel off the opening to the beer. I reckon the hole was two feet across, but it looked small. Smut knelt down by the hole and stuck his fingers in the beer. Then he slid down into it.

  I stood there and waited till I thought he must be drowned; then I saw his head at the opening. His hair was dripping. He stood up straight and spat.

  ‘I found him, all right,’ Smut said. ‘But it’s a hell of a close place in here. Catfish has got this thing too damned full. I can’t hardly breathe when I raise up in here.’

  He tossed his knife out beside my feet, on the top of the container, and went under again. In a minute I heard him hissing, ‘Grab him!’

  He had Bert Ford’s feet up to the top of the container. He had cut the rope off Bert’s chest and arms, but the rope around his feet was still there. I took hold of the rope and pulled on it as hard as I could. Smut ducked under him then and shoved up. Bert’s legs came up a little higher, but he was hard to get out. When we finally got him out on the top of the container, Smut climbed out. He took the rope and dragged Bert to the side and threw him off onto the ground. We toted him to the furnace door, and put him on the rack above the fire. We kept his face down all the time. I was glad of that.

  Smut began putting his clothes on. ‘The rock had slipped just about off him,’ he said. ‘He was practically standing up in the northeast corner.’

  The fire wasn’t doing very well. While Smut was putting on his clothes I got to work on it, and it wasn’t long before I had the pine kindling blazing underneath the logs of charcoal wood. It took the charcoal some time to catch up and we stood in front of the furnace and warmed. Smut’s teeth chattered and he was shivering.

  ‘God, I’m cold!’ he said.

  ‘You sure this beer’s ready to run?’ I said. ‘If it’s not, then we won’t get much liquor out of it.’

  ‘It’s ready,’ he said. ‘This beer’s got plenty alcohol in it. I just now swallowed enough to find out.’

  ‘You got anything to put it in?’

  ‘I brought three kegs down yesterday afternoon, and two five-gallon jugs,’ Smut said.

  ‘How much will the kegs hold?’

  ‘Ten gallons.’

  ‘That won’t take care of but forty gallons in all. This beer ought to run off sixty gallons if it’s run right,’ I said.

  ‘There’s some half-gallon fruit jars over there in the honeysuckle vines,’ Smut said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I always make arrangements.’

  I thought about something else then. ‘What if some Revenuers were to come down here tonight and catch us?’ I asked him. ‘You made arrangements for that too?’

  Smut looked around back of him, into the black woods. I thought I saw him shiver a little. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘shut up! You give me the creeps.’

  The fire was burning pretty good by then and the flames were beginning to jump up around the rack. Smut took a piece of tin that was lying there on the ground and covered the opening to the furnace, and we went to the honeysuckle vines and rolled out the kegs.

  I didn’t know until that night that Smut could really make liquor, but he must have been an old hand. We put the cap over the container and got the cooling stand rigged up. Smut looked after the fire and the beer and I looked after changing the water in the cooling stand and catching the liquor. It took us most of the night. When we finished there was about fifty gallons of it and it looked like good liquor, but neither one of us had the stomach to taste it.

  After we finished hiding the liquor in a gulley that ran down into the main gulch, Smut took another look inside the furnace. He took a stick and pushed the piece of tin off the front. I didn’t look in there myself. I guess there must have been a little left on the rack, for Smut put another charcoal log on the fire. We sat there feeding the fire for another hour, or longer, then Smut looked inside again.

  He got down on his hands and knees and looked all inside the furnace. He sniffed around like a terrier, then stood up.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing left?’

  ‘He’s a part of the air now,’ Smut said. ‘We got rid of him now.’

  We got some water out of the little branch that ran down through the gulch and threw it on the fire and on the pieces of steel that Bert had been on. When everything got cooled off, we took the rack out of the furnace and toted the pieces back up to the creek and threw them in it. When we finished that, we tore down the rock columns that were inside the furnace, and scattered the rocks and bricks up and down the gulch. After that we took down the still and hid the stuff in the honeysuckle vines. It was getting light when we got back to our cabin.

  We slept until about ten o’clock, then went up to the road-house. As soon as we ate breakfast we went into the front. Badeye was in there, standing behind the counter and drinking a bottle of beer. Smut got the morning paper and began reading that. I took a rag and started polishing around the booths.

  I looked over at Badeye and he was looking at Smut. ‘Where in the hell was you two last night?’ Badeye said to Smut.

  It scared the daylights out of me when he said that. But Smut took it like he’d just been asked if he thought it might rain.

  ‘We went off,’ he told Badeye. He looked up from the paper. ‘What’s it to you, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, don’t get horsy, Milligan,’ Badeye said. ‘You ain’t paying me such high wages that I got to stay out here. I can get jobs plenty of other places.’

  ‘Don’t let me stand in your way!’ Smut said, and went back to reading his newspaper.

  Badeye put the beer bottle under the counter and took his towel off his shoulder. ‘The reason I asked,’ he said, ‘was that I tried to rouse you all about half the night.’

  Smut looked up again. ‘You did? What for?’

  ‘I was sick,’ Badeye said. ‘I had the indigestion and I tried to wake you all up.’

  ‘Hell, ain’t neither one of us a doctor,’ Smut said. ‘Whyn’t you come up to the kitchen and get some soda?’

  ‘That was what I was tryin to do. But the niggers had done gone then and the door was locked. I wanted to get your key to the kitchen.’

  ‘You ought to keep a box of soda in your cabin,’ Smut said. He took a toothpick and stuck it in the side of his mouth.

  Badeye commenced rubbing his towel up and down the counter. ‘I just wondered if you all was that hard to rouse,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Smut told him, ‘we had to go make a run of liquor last night. Catfish’s old man got bad off and Catfish had to go to South Carolina to see him. The beer got ready to run off yesterday and me and Jack run it off last night.’

  ‘How come you didn’t ast me to help you run it off?’ Badeye said. ‘I’m a good liquor-maker. I used to make liquor all the time.’

  ‘Well, you’d of had indigestion about the time we got started good,’ Smut told him.

  ‘Yeah, but you didn’t know that when you left here. My stomach wasn’t hurting when we closed up the joint,’ Badeye said.

  ‘Oh, hell!’ Smut said. He spat the toothpick out on the floor and stuck his head inside the newspaper.

  That morning Sam and Matt and Dick made a fire in the back yard and burned rubbish. After a while Badeye went out there to advise them how to do it and left Smut and myself alone in the front.

  ‘That Badeye makes me nervous with all his curiosity,’ I told Smut.

  ‘Aw, he don’t know nothing,’ Smut said. ‘Anyway, what I told him was the truth, except that I left out one or two little details.’

  ‘I’
ll be glad when somebody misses Bert Ford and all that’s over with,’ I said.

  ‘I’m resting easy now since he disappeared last night,’ Smut said.

  It rained that night and all the next day and business was pretty slow, but on Wednesday it cleared up and Wilbur Bran-non drove out about sundown.

  He came inside and took a drink of liquor with Smut. They drank it at the counter and offered me one, but I didn’t want it. After Wilbur finished his drink he lit a cigarette and said: ‘I thought maybe Bert’d be here tonight and we could run a few hands. Haven’t seen him, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Smut said, ‘haven’t seen him lately.’

  Wilbur shut one eye and looked at Smut. ‘It’s been more than a week since I last saw Bert,’ he said. ‘He must be sick. I’ve got a good notion to drive out to his place and see if anything’s wrong with him. Let’s run out there,’ he said to Smut.

  ‘I’d like to go, Wilbur,’ Smut said, ‘but fact is I can’t hardly sit down on something stationary like one of these counter stools. It would kill me to bounce up and down over them country roads out to Bert’s. I got a boil back there.’

  ‘It’s a bad place to have one, all right,’ Wilbur said. ‘I think I’ll drive out by myself, then. He might be down sick and not able to get out.’ Wilbur went outside to his car then, and drove off.

  That night some of the Corinth school-teachers came out again with their true loves. I guess they had a good time that other night they were out. They sat over in the booths in the dance hall and drank some beer and a little port wine. Matt and Sam were over there to wait on them, and Smut and I stayed over on our side.

  I think a couple of the boys must have got to playing the slot machines and left their dates. Anyway a couple of the girls came over to the counter and began drinking beer. One of the girls was rather tall, with a good figure. She had a pretty face, but her mouth looked like she was either sore about something or had had her feelings hurt. The other girl was short and bow-legged. She had on a leather jacket and a steady smile. I don’t know whether everything pleased her, or if she was just trying to look on the bright side of things. The girls made a few passes at Smut Milligan.