by James Ross
‘ “Another way to hook a recalcitrant male is to quietly assume that you are his betrothed. Ask him if he prefers the wedding in June, or earlier. If you are bold enough to do this you are the same as a married woman.” ’ Badeye scowled when Smut read that.
‘I’d like to see a frock try to pull something like that on me,’ Badeye said. ‘I’d just like to see one of them try to assume something with me!’
‘Don’t start worrying about it, Badeye,’ Smut said. He threw his cigarette on the floor and I stepped on it.
‘ “If you take the matter into your hands and propose and the man of your dreams meets you with an evasive, hesitant attitude, turn on the tears. After you cry on his watch chain for awhile he will feel that he has been a cruel brute and you will be engaged to him. In such cases, however, it is imperative to hasten the wedding.” ’
Smut threw the paper back on the counter. ‘Well, boys, she’s in good shape this morning.’ He looked at Old Man Joshua.
‘Don’t let any of these modern girls rope you in, Mr. Joshua,’ Smut said. ‘You been a bachelor a long time. It’d go pretty hard with you if you was married.’
Old Man Joshua sucked on his pipe. ‘Oh, I’m too old to inter-rest the gals,’ he said. ‘But I’m a confound sight better man right now than a lot of these here cigarette-suckin, Coca-Cola-drinkin young sprouts. It run in my family to be a good man for a long time. My daddy was seventy-two year old when my baby brother was born.’
‘He must have had some damn good neighbors,’ Badeye said.
Old Man Joshua cupped his hand to his ear. ‘What say?’ he asked.
‘I said I thought that was pretty damn good,’ Badeye said.
Sam Hall leaned back against the wall and stuck his feet over the side of the booth. ‘That ain’t all Lucia Locket says this time,’ Sam said.
Smut looked at the newspaper again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But the other one is a regular feature of hers. She runs it several times a month. It’s the Heart-Broken Stenographer. “Dear Lucia Locket: I have done wrong. I spent the week-end with the boss at the beach. We stayed at the hotel together. I loved him and he said he loved me. I thought we loved each other. I thought he was going to divorce his wife. But now he says it’s his duty to stay with her. What can I do?” ’ Smut turned around again. ‘Lucia says to her: “Well, you little goose, you can’t do nothing! What do you hope? Work a man for all you can get out of him. But don’t never go to the hotel with him. All is lost when you do that.” It seems like it makes Lucia mad for a girl to get generous like that. Lucia believes in swapping it for a house and lot.’
‘She’s got one other regular letter,’ Sam said. ‘The one about where the girl has slept with another fellow, or maybe several fellows, but now she’s fell in love with a fine, hard-working boy that’s got a good job, and she asks Lucia if she ought to tell the last boy about it, or not.’
‘I remember that one,’ Smut said. ‘And Lucia always says: “Don’t be a fool! What he don’t know won’t hurt him. Marry him and bang him around till he ain’t got the spirit to ask you any sort of question, let alone a question about who all you been in bed with.” ’
Old Man Joshua shook his head. ‘She’s a hard woman. I alius read her piece when I git hold of a paper. I read it just to see how low things is a-comin to.’
‘I bet she wasn’t ever married,’ Badeye said. ‘Sometimes I think it must be a man that writes the column.’
‘No, it ain’t a man that writes it,’ Smut said.
‘How you know it ain’t?’ Badeye asked.
‘Because men don’t generally run whorehouses,’ Smut Milligan said. ‘You can tell from the advice Lucia hands out that she’s run a whorehouse some time or another.’
Old Man Joshua Lingerfelt hung around that morning and drank up most of his due bill. He drank eight ten-cent beers and two fifteen-cent ones and got pretty high, but not sick or anything. He got Smut to give him some nickels for part of the due bill and he put the nickels in the nickelodeon. After the third bottle he had us tote his beer into the dance hall. He was busy with the nickelodeon and didn’t have time to walk over to the counter.
About three o’clock his due bill was used up and he was broke. He came over to the cash register where Smut was sitting. I was polishing off the wine bottles and Matt Rush was mopping the floor.
‘That due bill done used up, ain’t it, Milligan?’ the old man asked.
‘It’s all gone,’ Smut told him, ‘but I’ll lend you some nickels if that’s what you want.’
The old man scratched the crown of his hat. ‘I would like to hear a couple more chunes,’ he said, ‘but I got to git on home and slop the hog. I reckin he’s raisin Cain because it must be past feedin time.’ He looked up at the big wall clock. ‘Good Lord! After three o’clock! I swear I got to git home. I’m supposed to git my check, my vetrun’s check, in the mail today. If it’s there I’ll be back about night. I’m in a notion to pitch a big one.’
‘Don’t you want something to eat before you go?’ Smut asked him.
‘No. Much oblige.’ He grabbed up his walking-stick and weaved out of the room.
Smut shook his head after the old man. ‘God, but he loves music!’ Smut said.
Badeye Honeycutt stretched his arms above his head and stuck out his chest. A button popped off his shirt when he reared back, and he stooped to the floor to pick it up.
‘Just like a child,’ Badeye said. ‘Old Man Josh’s gettin right childish. Why, when I took a bottle of beer over to him this mornin he ast me how much a nickelodeon cost. Said he was thinkin about buyin one for home use.’
Old Man Joshua wasn’t the only one that liked a nickelodeon. Everybody around Corinth was just about as bad as he was. White folks called it a nickelodeon, or just a phonograph, but the niggers all called it a piccolo. We had a lot of records for ours. Mostly we kept dance music for the young folks to dance by, but there were a lot of other things that the old sots and screwballs wanted to hear. Once in a while Fletch Monroe would hook a ride out in the afternoon and sit an hour at a time playing ‘The Ship That Never Returned.’ It was his favorite piece. When Buck Wilhoyt drove out in Wheeler Wilkinson’s truck to deliver the meat he would take time out to play a tune on the nickelodeon. He was nuts about ‘My Pretty Quadroon.’ Buck would sit by the nickelodeon and sing so loud that he drowned out most of the music. Sometimes when Old Man Joshua got drunk enough he would play a nigger song that some music salesman gave Smut one day. The name of it was ‘Strange Fruit.’ It started off like this: ‘Southern trees bear a strange fruit, blood on the leaves, blood on the root,’ and this nigger woman with a husky, mournful voice sung it. It was all about lynching, and the nigger woman could go to town on it. Old Man Joshua helped hang a nigger one time when he was a young man. Somebody got it out that a white girl claimed the nigger had raped her. Now when the old man took on about a dozen beers he would sit and listen to this thing. Toward the last he would cry sometimes, but when the music stopped, he stopped crying too. ‘I can feel his God-damn eyes borin through me right now,’ Old Man Joshua would say; then he would belch and get all right. It was just when he was pretty full that he was like that. When he was sober he’d as soon lynch a nigger as to blow his nose.
Baxter Yonce had a favorite record too. It was about the strangest of them all: ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ Baxter didn’t go to church much, and he drank plenty of liquor; I couldn’t see why he was so crazy about a hymn. We had a hard time finding it in the music stores, but he raised so much hell about it that Smut finally ordered it from Chicago to pacify him.
Baxter would come in late at night, about three sheets to the wind, and sit in a booth over on the dance-hall side. He’d watch his chance and slip his record on the nickelodeon. Then he’d beat it back to his booth and go back to drinking his beer, or whatever it was he was drinking that night. In a minute the nickelodeon would commence rolling out ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’
Sometimes some of the customer
s would look like they thought it was out of place for a hymn like that to be played on a nickelodeon in a roadhouse. That never worried Baxter Yonce. He would sit there with his eyes shut, swaying his big head from side to side and humming the song to himself.
One night I had told Smut about it. I told him that some of the customers looked a little strange when that hymn began playing. But Smut was making good money then and he was pretty independent about it. He said if the customers didn’t like ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ they could go to hell.
16
SMUT SPENT MOST OF the next afternoon sleeping in the cabin. When he came back to the roadhouse about seven o’clock that night he seemed restless. I decided it was his night out.
Business was pretty slow at first. Just a few loafers from Corinth and Wilbur Brannon and Baxter Yonce. Wilbur hadn’t been out much since Bert Ford vanished, but I don’t think it was because he thought we had anything to do with it.
This night Wilbur brought his liquor with him and drank it with Baxter Yonce. Smut took a drink with them, in the kitchen, and they offered me one, but I didn’t take it. I had to be sober in case Smut took off.
After they all took a drink they came back out and Wilbur and Baxter sat down at the counter. Baxter ordered a barbecue sandwich and Wilbur commenced reading The Sporting News that Smut had left on the counter. After a minute the buzzer from the kitchen rang and Smut went back and got the sandwich. He brought it up and set it before Baxter Yonce, who grabbed it and started biting into it like he hadn’t had anything to eat all day. Smut leaned back against the shelf where the wine bottles were stacked. He made an easy target for Baxter Yonce’s salesmanship practice.
‘Smut, you been doing a land-sale business out here, ain’t you?’ Baxter asked.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Smut said. He was a little cautious about answering questions like that.
‘What I mean is, you been making good,’ Baxter said. ‘Why don’t you trade in that pick-up you’ve got and let me fix you up with a new one? I got some new Dodge pick-ups. I got the very thing you need.’
‘I ain’t in a position to trade right now,’ Smut said. He walked around the counter and sat down beside Baxter Yonce.
‘I’ll give you a good trade-in,’ Baxter said and took another bite out of his barbecue sandwich. ‘That’s a thirty-six Ford you got, ain’t it?’
‘A late thirty-six,’ Smut said.
‘How many miles on it?’
Smut shut one eye and rolled his tongue over in his cheek. ‘I think it’s got a little under forty thousand on it,’ Smut said. It had forty-six thousand miles on it then, but I guess Smut figured he could run the speedometer back to forty thousand.
‘If it’s got good tires I’ll give you a liberal allowance in a trade,’ Baxter said.
Smut shook his head. ‘I wish I could afford to trade,’ he said, ‘but I just ain’t in shape to do it. This Ford will have to do my business for a while yet.’
‘Why don’t you let me sell you a Dodge demonstrator I got in the show room? You could keep your pick-up for business purposes and then use this demonstrator for a gal wagon. A pick-up simply don’t have the tone a passenger car has. This demonstrator’s a last year’s model, but the same as a new car.’
‘A sedan?’ Smut asked.
‘No, it’s a coupé,’ Baxter said. ‘I’ll really sell it right.’
‘I’d like to have it,’ Smut said.
Baxter reached down the counter and took a paper napkin out of the napkin box. He wiped the grease off his mouth.
‘Sometime when you’re up town, drop by and let me show you this car. I want you to drive it fifteen minutes. If you drive it fifteen minutes and ain’t sold on it, I’ll just give you five gallons of gas for your pick-up.’
Smut Milligan smothered a light belch. ‘I’ve got plenty of gas now,’ he said.
About eight o’clock Baxter and Wilbur got in a four-handed casino game with Buck Wilhoyt and another pool-room product from Corinth. They played in the crap-shooting gallery, and it looked like a quiet night until the ballplayers from Corinth came out.
There were two baseball clubs from the North training in Corinth that spring. That is, they had two different names and were supposed to represent two different towns, but the Cincinatti Reds owned them both. One of them was a club from Illinois that was in the Three Eye League. The other was a club from Canada and was in the International. The ballplayers from both clubs stayed at the Keystone Hotel and practiced in the Corinth ball park.
Ten of them came out that night. Some of them looked like college boys, but others looked like they might not be able to speak English. It was the first time any of them had ever been out to the roadhouse, but they made themselves at home. They stayed over in the dance hall and played the nickelodeon and drank plenty of beer. A couple of them started playing the slot machines and sent Sam Hall over to the cash register to get them some nickels. After a while one of the ballplayers—he was a dumpy fellow—stuck his head into the door that opened from the dance hall.
‘Where’s the girls? Ain’t there no girls around here?’ he said.
Smut Milligan looked around at this fellow.
‘No, you can get grub and liquor out here, and a little gambling, but you got to furnish your own girl,’ he said.
‘That’s a hell of a note,’ the fellow said, and went back to one of the booths.
This bird hadn’t more than finished asking about the girl situation before a carload of high-school kids came into the place. After that, boys from the hosiery mill, with their girls, began coming in. The ballplayers waited until the natives began dancing; then they would break in on the boys and dance with their girls. They managed to keep the high-school girls most of the time, but it was more trouble getting a girl away from one of the hosiery-mill fellows.
The ballplayers kept up that sort of stuff for awhile, and finally I reckon most of them got sleepy. Anyway, they all went back to Corinth except for three of them. The three that were left came over to the counter and ordered a round of beer. They sat side by side at the counter, and the fellow in the middle was bigger than the other two. This fellow had on a gray leather jacket that had ‘NY’ on the front of it. I reckon he’d once been with a New York club and forgot to turn the jacket in when they released him. He was a big, sandy-haired man and had hands big enough to pick up half a dozen baseballs at one time. There was a scar on his face that ran from the side of his mouth clean across to his left ear. The boys with him called him Ox. On the left of Ox was a fellow that was long and thin and had a big Adam’s apple. He was left-handed and kept playing with the salt cellar. The other fellow was the little dumpy guy that had asked Smut about the girls. His name was Thurlow.
Badeye brought the beer up to the counter and set the bottles in front of the three ballplayers. Then Badeye folded his arms across his chest and stood back of the counter, in the Mussolini pose. Smut was sitting down the counter, making up a list of the supplies he had to order the next day.
The fellow named Thurlow took a drink of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’m beginning to hit that rock now,’ he said. ‘They was a hitch in my swing till yesterday, but I feel easy up at the plate now.’
‘Hell, wait till us pitchers start hooking them,’ Ox said. ‘You ain’t looked at nothing yet.’
‘If I wait till you learn how to throw a hook I won’t never look at nothing,’ Thurlow said, and took out his package of cigarettes.
‘Hell,’ Ox said, ‘I don’t need no hook. That fast one I got and my brains is all I need in the International League.’
‘You ought to quit fretting about your brains and learn how to throw a hook,’ Lefty said. ‘If you could of throwed a hook when you first went up, you’d of been with them Giants today.’
Ox took a drink of beer. He started to put the beer bottle in his lumberjack, then remembered and set it back on the counter.
‘No, it was politics kept me off the Giants,’ Ox
said. ‘Terry don’t give nobody a place on his club unless they’re from the South.’
‘Baseball’s got so it’s like everything else,’ Thurlow said. ‘Ability ain’t nothing these days. It’s got so you got to have a grandstand personality, or you got to be a Greek, or a Indian, or a Chinaman, to make the grade. If you’re a Wop, you’ll pull out the Greeks, or the Eyetalians, or the Rumanians, or whatever kind of Wops you happen to be kin to. A true-born American ain’t got a chance no more.’
‘That ought not to hold you back none,’ Lefty said. ‘You’re a Portugese, ain’t you?’
‘It’s a lie. I was born in Joplin, Missouri,’ Thurlow said.
Ox grunted and finished drinking his beer. ‘I ain’t old,’ he said. ‘I’ll be up there yet. Probably about August. I ain’t but twenty-six.’
‘You ought not to run your age back but one year at the time, Ox,’ Lefty said. ‘Last year you was twenty-eight. You ought to take it easy and just be twenty-seven this year. Next year you can be twenty-six.’
‘Oh, I ain’t no spring chicken neither,’ Thurlow said. ‘They ain’t liable to sign me up on account of my boyishness. But it stands to reason that a old head can play a better game of ball. It’s brains rather than brawn that gets you there.’
‘Is that the reason you’re with a Class B club?’ Lefty asked.
‘Don’t get snotty,’ Thurlow said. ‘If you don’t hurry up and get enough control so you can hit a bull in the tail you’re liable to wind up pitching for Twin Falls in the Idaho-Utah League.’
‘Oh, I ain’t worrying about my control,’ Lefty said. ‘You got to be a little wild to keep them from crowding the plate. You got to make the hitter respect your fast ball.’
‘You ought to buy you a rifle if you want to make anybody respect yours,’ Thurlow said.
About that time a boy and a girl passed by the door that opened into the dance hall. The girl was the little bow-legged school-teacher that had been out before, with Harvey Wood. This time she was with Hubert Parkerson.