They Don't Dance Much: A Novel

by James Ross

  Smut was trying to work out the crossword puzzle in the evening paper. He generally had a hard time with a crossword puzzle, and when he was working on one he didn’t like to be bothered.

  ‘Gosh, you’re a big fellow!’ the little girl said to Smut.

  ‘Lady, I ain’t this big really,’ Smut said. ‘I et a big supper tonight and drunk a lot of beer. I got on all my clothes too.’

  ‘It’s not so cold now,’ the little school-teacher said.

  ‘I’m expecting a cold snap any minute,’ Smut said, and went on trying to figure out the crossword puzzle.

  ‘I like to dance with big men,’ the tall girl said to the other one. ‘I despise to try to dance with these little runts.’

  ‘Oh, I’m crazy about big men,’ the little one said. ‘I bet you’re a good dancer,’ she said to Smut Milligan.

  ‘No,’ Smut said, ‘I don’t dance. Then I got arthritis so bad that it’d be a torture to me even if I knowed how.’

  ‘Don’t tease me,’ the little school-teacher said. She smiled up at Smut, but he wasn’t looking at her. ‘What’re you doing?’ she asked him.

  ‘Trying to work out a crossword puzzle,’ Smut said, and chewed on the end of his pencil. ‘But I’m stuck now on a seven-letter word that means the same thing as love.’

  ‘Why, I’d think you’d know all about love,’ the little girl said.

  ‘I don’t, though,’ Smut said. ‘It’s a thing that don’t mean nothing to me.’

  The little one pouted. ‘You oughtn’t to talk like that,’ she said.

  The two boys that were with them came into the room. One of them was Harvey Wood and he still had on his boots. The other was Gyp Ward, a man that worked in the cotton mill office in Corinth.

  ‘Aha, you thought you’d shaken us off,’ Gyp Ward said, and wiggled his finger at the long girl. Gyp Ward was a thin fellow that had a sallow complexion. He looked a little like a gypsy.

  ‘Well, you all went off and left us. You went in that little room that says private, so we thought we oughtn’t to go in and bother you,’ the little school-teacher said. She stuck out her tongue at Harvey Wood. ‘I’m mad with you,’ she said.

  ‘We just went in there to play the slot machine a minute,’ Harvey Wood said.

  ‘Oh,’ the tall girl said. ‘I thought maybe it was the rest room and you all had got hung up in the plumbing.’

  Smut Milligan took his pencil and the newspaper the crossword puzzle was in and went back to the kitchen, where he could have some peace and not have to listen to such conversations. But in a minute the four of them went back to the dance hall and it was all right again.

  About nine o’clock Wilbur Brannon came back. He looked like he was worried about something. He walked over to the cash register. ‘Give me a pack of Chesterfields, Jack,’ he said to me.

  I handed the cigarettes to him and he said: ‘You know, Jack, it’s a little strange about Bert. He’s not there.’

  ‘He’s not?’

  ‘No. I knocked on the front door and called him, but nobody came to the door. Then I went to the back porch and knocked on the doorsteps and called, but still nobody. It’s a little strange, because I went out to his garage and his car was there.’

  ‘That is strange,’ I said.

  Smut came back in the front then and walked up to the cash register where we were standing.

  ‘Smut, he’s not there,’ Wilbur said.

  Smut was eating a hamburger. He caught up a piece of onion that was about to fall off on the floor. ‘He’s not?’ Smut said.

  ‘No, I was just telling Jack that I couldn’t find anybody there, but his car’s in the garage. Another thing, I went to his barn. He doesn’t have a cow, but he’s got one mule. The mule got to pawing in the stable and braying while I was at the garage and I went down to the barn to see about it.’

  ‘Mule hadn’t been fed?’ Smut asked, and stuck the rest of the hamburger in his mouth.

  ‘I don’t think so. He acted hungry and I gave him a couple bundles of fodder out of the feed room. There was a barrel of mill feed down on the floor of the feed room. I think the mule had managed to get his front feet up from the stable into the feed room and had turned the barrel over so he could get into the feed. But it rolled away from him and all the mill feed was poured on the other side from him. I turned it back up and put some of it out where he could get to it. I guess I ought to have watered the mule.’

  ‘Hell, Bert just stepped out to some neighbors’,’ Smut said. ‘Mules act hungry all the time.’

  ‘This mule was hungry,’ Wilbur said. ‘He’d been trying to tear his stable down. Then I drove by to see some of Bert’s neighbors. All of his close neighbors.’

  ‘What’d they say?’

  ‘John Weyler said he hadn’t seen Bert in two weeks. Said he passed there Saturday and the mule was braying and pawing on the stable door. But he figured it wasn’t any of his business. I don’t think he gets along so well with Bert. Then I went to see Enos Sellers, and Jack Bennet, and Tom Wall, and Mitch McLeod. Hadn’t any of them seen him in over a week.’

  ‘I’ll swear!’ Smut said.

  ‘I’m going to Corinth and tell the sheriff. It may not be anything out of the way, nor any of my business. But Bert usually comes out here when he’s in this neck of the woods. And if he was going to take a trip looks like he’d take his car, and have somebody look after his stock while he was gone. There could be foul play, you know. It looks pretty fishy to me.’

  ‘I don’t know what to think about it,’ Smut Milligan said.

  12

  WE DIDN’T SEE ANY MORE of Wilbur Brannon that week I guess he was busy trying to find Bert Ford. The folks that came to the roadhouse began to talk about the disappearance. It got to be the main thing they talked about, but Smut and myself steered away from the subject when we could.

  Toward the end of that week Smut went to Corinth to get the note renewed at the bank. But J. V. Kirk wouldn’t renew it. He said it was too much of a risk for the bank to take. He sent Smut to Astor LeGrand and Astor took over the note. It was changed and made out to him. He charged Smut fifty dollars to do it, and that brought the total amount of the note to more than five hundred dollars. When Smut told me about it I said I thought it looked bad for Astor LeGrand to have it, but Smut said it was all right. He had money now and would fix Astor when the time was ripe. He could have taken some of the money we got from Bert Ford and paid the note with that, but we agreed that the best thing for us do to was to put up a poor mouth for a while. If we got prosperous too fast it might start somebody thinking.

  Saturday afternoon Sheriff Pemberton came out to see us. There was a big poker game going on in one of the cabins, and when Smut saw the sheriff drive up he sent Dick Pittman down to the cabins to tell the boys to fade away. The sheriff got out of his car and came inside where Smut and I were sitting at the counter, checking up on a batch of invoices that came in that day.

  The sheriff was a short, thick fellow, and so bow-legged that he couldn’t hem up a pig in a ditch. He always wore a blue serge suit and a gray cowboy hat. His belt had little slots in it for cartridges and he wore a holster on his hip. The sheriff was chewing tobacco. He aimed at the spittoon and I heard it go ‘ping’ when the tobacco juice hit it. Sheriff R. L. Pemberton looked like a moon-faced fool, but that was just the way he looked.

  ‘Good evening, boys,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘Why, hello, sheriff,’ Smut said. He got up and shook hands with Sheriff Pemberton. ‘Glad to see you, sheriff. How’s things going?’

  ‘Moderate. Moderate,’ the sheriff said. He sat down on one of the stools with his back to the counter. He looked at the picture of the women taking a bath that was over on the other wall. ‘Nice place you got out here, Milligan,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ Smut said. ‘This the first time you been out since I remodeled the joint?’ Smut moved over and sat on the stool next to the one the sheriff was sitting on.

  ‘First time.
I never had a call to come out,’ the sheriff said. He looked straight at Smut.

  Smut laughed. ‘I operate a nice, quiet place out here,’ he said. ‘There ain’t anything boisterous goes on out here.’

  ‘That so?’ The sheriff spat straight into the spittoon again. ‘Well, I won’t bother you long this time. I reckon you heard that Bert Ford was missing?’

  I knew that was what he was there for, but when he said it I got a feeling in the bottom of my stomach like I hadn’t had anything to eat for a month.

  Smut took the pencil from behind his ear and put it on the counter. ‘That’s what they tell me,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ the sheriff said. ‘Nobody’s seen him in over a week now. He don’t get much mail, but Dolph Jeans that carries the mail said Bert took the Southern Cultivator, and when I went out there yesterday it was still in the mailbox. Dolph said he put the paper there a week ago Thursday.’

  ‘Maybe he got scared about something and just checked out,’ Smut said.

  Sheriff Pemberton shook his head. ‘Haven’t found out anything about him being in trouble. Just looks to me like he’s disappeared into thin air.’

  Smut Milligan ran his hand across his face. ‘You think he’s been murdered?’ he asked.

  The sheriff pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said. ‘They tell me he used to hang around here a lot. When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘It’s been over a week,’ Smut said. ‘I was talking to Wilbur about it the other night, I think it was a week ago Sunday when I saw him last.’

  The sheriff looked at Smut. ‘Did he ever talk to you much, Milligan?’

  Smut shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands. ‘Did he ever talk much to anybody, sheriff?’

  ‘No. He was pretty close-mouthed,’ Sheriff Pemberton said. ‘You don’t know of anybody that might be his enemy, do you?’

  ‘He wasn’t a man that had friends nor enemies,’ Smut said.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother you like this,’ the sheriff said, ‘but you know how it is. I got to check everything. I got to see if I can get a lead anywhere.’

  ‘I’d like to help you, sheriff,’ Smut said, ‘but I doubt if I can do it.’

  ‘What was your opinion of him, Milligan?’ the sheriff asked.

  Smut took a cigarette out of his shirt-pocket and stuck it in his mouth, but forgot to light it. ‘Well, I don’t know, sheriff. He never bothered me, but I can’t say I liked him. He was kind of grouchy and moody. I never had much to do with him if I could help it.’

  The sheriff looked hard at Smut. ‘You used to play poker with him, didn’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Some,’ Smut said. ‘I play with anybody that’s got the money.’

  ‘Were many of these games out here for big money?’ the sheriff asked.

  ‘What do you mean, “big money”?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Sheriff Pemberton said. ‘Where a fellow could lose a hundred dollars or so in a night.’

  ‘Sometimes there was more than that in the pot during a night,’ Smut said. ‘But things evened up in the long run. I don’t know that Bert was a big winner from anybody over a period of time. You can ask Wilbur Brannon about that. He played poker with Bert more than anybody else.’

  ‘I’ve talked with Wilbur,’ Sheriff Pemberton said. He stood up and shifted his cartridge belt. ‘Well, I got to get along, Milligan. I just came by to see if you could put me on to anything.’

  ‘Wait a minute, sheriff,’ Smut said. He got up and went to the kitchen. In a minute he was back with a paper parcel that he handed to the sheriff. The sheriff unfolded the top of the parcel, shut one eye, and looked inside. He nodded his head.

  ‘Much obliged, Milligan,’ the sheriff said. ‘Don’t work too hard.’

  ‘Come back again,’ Smut said.

  When the sheriff got outside I took out my handkerchief and wiped the sweat off my forehead. Smut saw me do it and laughed.

  ‘What you sweating about?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘but it’s a little hot in here, don’t you think?’

  ‘No,’ Smut said.

  ‘What was that you gave him in the paper sack?’ I asked.

  ‘A quart of my own private Scotch. Confound his time, he ought to appreciate that. I paid four bucks a quart for that stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t know the sheriff drank,’ I said.

  ‘He don’t drink much. Just takes a little for medicine when he has a cold.’

  ‘You think he’s got a cold now?’ I asked.

  ‘I understand he keeps a little cold all the time,’ Smut said.

  Catfish came back from South Carolina the next day. He told us that his daddy was dead when he got there. He took two sacks of sugar out of the kitchen and carried them down to his still to make up another batch of beer.

  For a couple of weeks longer everybody talked about Bert Ford; all the folks that came to the roadhouse, except the tourists, would ask us about him, and sometimes I got pretty nervous. Most of them agreed that he’d been robbed of his money and then carried off and killed. It was thought that some outsiders had done the job and had carried Bert a long way from Corinth and made away with him. The sheriff started trying to find out if Bert had any relatives to claim his farm. But that didn’t mean that he had given up on the case. By the middle of February folks had quit talking so much about it and had started discussing the two baseball clubs that were coming to Corinth to take spring training. Still, the sheriff let it be known that he hadn’t pigeonholed the case. The voters might forget it temporarily, but about primary time they would be reminded of it plenty by the other fellows that wanted the sheriff’s job. Sheriff Pemberton had already let two murders go unsolved during his term.

  The weather got warmer and it looked like an early spring. The plum trees started budding out and the red bud trees blossomed a little. The old-timers shook their heads and said that the plum trees blooming didn’t mean anything; that winter wasn’t broken by a long shot. Old Man Joshua Lingerfelt said he looked for a knee-deep snow about the first of March. He said the groundhog hadn’t come out in the open to stay yet, and spring was bound to be a long ways off.

  But Smut Milligan decided the winter was over. Business got rushing. The tourists began going back north from Florida and it happened that a lot of them were hungry by the time they got to the roadhouse. They ate a lot of stuff, and Smut wasn’t giving out any free meals.

  When the weather got milder like that there would always be a good-sized crowd out from Corinth too, and by then the roadhouse had got to be well known and folks would drive out from other towns besides Corinth. Rufus and Johnny were as hard-working as you could expect two niggers to be, but they started complaining to Smut that they had to have some help in the kitchen. Smut told them he would see about it.

  I kept a close watch on how things were going then, and I could see that Smut was making enough money to be able to pay off that note when it came due again, without having to take any of the twelve thousand dollars we got from Bert Ford. But I remembered what he’d said about Astor LeGrand’s finding some way to run him off later, even if he did get the note paid. I wanted to be in shape to take off when that happened. One morning about the first of March we were by ourselves in the front and I asked him about my share of the twelve thousand dollars.

  ‘When are we going to divide the money?’ I asked him.

  He was sitting at the counter, with a toothpick stuck in the center of his mouth. He half-turned and faced me.

  ‘You don’t need any money right now, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘I always need money,’ I said.

  ‘Everybody does. But you don’t specially have to have some right now, do you?’

  ‘Well, no more than usual,’ I said. ‘But I’m ready to take my share any time now.’

  He chewed on the toothpick for a minute before he answered me. ‘I could give you some money now,’ he said. ‘But let’s not divide the big
pile right at this time. We got to wait. We got to be careful.’

  ‘How much am I going to get, anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘I been thinking about that. How would a thousand dollars strike you?’

  ‘Not worth a damn,’ I said. ‘We got twelve thousand in all. If we got caught and tried for it I’d go to the electric chair the same as you.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to the chair,’ Smut said, ‘but don’t talk so loud. You remember I planned this thing out. I done the dirty work.’

  ‘I helped you with it,’ I said. ‘Then you pulled me into this business without any warning. You didn’t want to tackle it by yourself.’

  ‘How about fifteen hundred, then?’

  ‘I think I ought to have four thousand,’ I said.

  Smut threw the toothpick on the floor and stomped it with his foot like he thought it was a cigarette he was throwing away.

  ‘You’re crazy. I can’t spare four thousand,’ he said. He didn’t sound sore, or anything, when he said it, but I could tell that he didn’t have any idea of giving me that much.

  ‘What would you do with the money if you had it?’ he asked me.

  ‘I’d go off somewhere and put up a roadhouse,’ I said.

  ‘If you didn’t know the folks and the location you might lose all your money in a short time,’ Smut said.

  ‘I’d pick me out a spot and stay there awhile before I tried it,’ I said.

  ‘Tell you what I’ll do, Jack,’ Smut said. ‘You stay on here and I’ll raise your wages starting the first of this month. I’ll double your wages. That’ll be fifty dollars a month and your room and board and cigarettes and liquor. We’ll split up the money later on. About next fall. But we got to be mighty careful about spending this money.’

  ‘That’s not telling me how much I get,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll give you fifteen hundred,’ Smut said. ‘That’s my last offer. If you don’t like it you can go turn us both up and fry along with me. Without any money I’d as soon fry as not.’

  ‘Then give me my fifteen hundred now and let me keep it,’ I said.

  ‘There ain’t any use of that. I got it safe now, and it might as well stay where it is for awhile.’