“So you’re talking about betting?”
The fella took off his derby hat and with a handkerchief wiped the sweat off the brim.
“’Course that’s what I’m talking about. If there isn’t nothing at stake, don’t got you much excitement, do you now? Might as well be playing tiddly-winks. Sometimes the stakes run up into the hundreds. That’s how come it’s a good thing to set up the games on payday, or soon’s thereafter as you can.”
The thought of gambling as a business was something I’d never thought of for myself—and yet the idea got a-hold of me right off.
“I been playing pitch and poker since I was old enough to pick up a deck of cards,” I said.
“Look, kid. I’m gonna run the games, not you. But you drive me in this rig of yours, I’ll divvy up the winnings. Twenty-five percent.”
I didn’t answer him right off. If the stakes run into the hundreds, twenty five percent’d be damn good.
“S’pose there ain’t no winnings?” I asked. “S’pose we lose?”
The man winked. “Don’t you be worrying over something silly like that. I’m an honest man, I can honestly guarantee you there’ll be winnings. Say, here we are talking about being partners, and we haven’t even traded names.”
I held out my hand and told another little lie. “Wade Russell.”
“Good to know you, Wade. Sid Jenkins, best gambler west o’ New Orleans.”
We shook.
All the time I was thinking, Old Man Mallory’s worse’n a hog. A hog’s a hog because God wanted it to be so fat, so human beings could have something for lard. But Old Man Mallory was cheating us, working us cheaper’n anybody else. He’d charged me too much for the buggy, too. As for Carrie—hell, I was bound to up my odds with Carrie if there was some silver dollars rattling in my pockets. And I wouldn’t be getting ’em following a mule’s ass or picking cotton!
What I didn’t know right then, though I suspicioned it, was that Mister Sid Jenkins had a few different names of his own. He was also Mister Harry Harrison, Mister Tom Jones, Mister Richard McDougall, Mister Roscoe Turner, and Mister Dudley Rather, depending on where he was and who he was talking to. It took me a while to find all that out. All I knowed was, on that street in Stephenville that afternoon, I’d made a business deal with Mister Sid Jenkins, a honest gambler, and I was on my way to earning something a little better’n chicken feed.
“Good to meet you, Mister Jenkins. You got you a partner and a mule named Julep.”
FOUR
I can still see it, like it was in a picture show.
That first night in the cotton-pickers’ camp with Mister Jenkins.
Cotton. Cotton. Cotton. Cotton. Piled high, like banks of snow, in the slatted wagons. Musta been a half dozen or more of them wagons parked at the edge of the field. Big sheets of canvas was stretched between ’em, like tents, to cover the long cotton sacks that the pickers slept on. But they wasn’t sleeping now. They was all in a knot at the edge of a campfire, kneeling on a stretched-out sack. And they was rolling dice on it. All the men. Maybe 20 or so of ’em. Where was the women? All over behind one of the wagons, like they didn’t wanta see what the men was doing. Besides, their work wasn’t over yet. They was washing dishes from supper, nursing babies, patching pants and raggedy cotton sacks, and doing all the other things that women had to do back then.
A young picker, no more’n sixteen or seventeen, shook up the dice. Shook ’em so hard they rattled. Like by rattling ’em he could tell ’em what to do.
“Eighter from Decatur,
County Seat o’ Wise …
Seven come eleven.…
Buy Baby some new shoes!…”
The dice flew sideways across the sack. Mister Sid Jenkins, he was in shirt sleeves with bright red suspenders, set back on his heels and watched ’em roll over and over.
Box cars.
Mister Jenkins raked in the pile of coins and bills with his long thin fingers. He pulled ’em close to him like a woman’d cuddle a baby.
“Sorry, boy,” he said. “It ain’t what you say to the dice, it’s how you say it.”
Up went the dice to his mouth.
“Now, listen, you boneheads!”
He barked at ’em, whistled at ’em, swirled ’em around in his hands, made love to ’em.
“Eighter from Decatur,
County Seat o’ Wise …
Bring me the luck o’ the wise men.…
The luck o’ the wise men!”
Down went the dice, over, and over, and over. A five, a deuce.
He raked in the money again. Them pickers was dirty and sweaty and dog-tired from ten hours in the field. They just looked at each other, and I could hear the grumbling. They didn’t like it, this dudey stranger who come into their camp at night with his dice and cards and his luck of the wise men. Who took two games outa three.
“Lemme see them dice,” somebody says. He was a mule of a man, big-chested, with hands that could break a mesquite log in two.
I’m setting in the circle with the pickers and all they know about me is that I’m the one that drove him up in a buggy at sunset. Me and Mister Jenkins showed up just as they was finishing work for the day.
A dice game? Poker? Blackjack? Hell yes!
They was happy about it at the time. They was tired to death of nothing but cotton, dawn to dusk. Anything, anything, that wasn’t picking cotton sounded good. From the moment we got there you could see ’em loosening up, straightening up, the blood in ’em flowing faster, a chance t’ win as well as lose. HELL, YES!!!
I was beginning to squirm. Was them dice loaded? If they was, and the pickers found out about it, we was goners. They’d tear us apart, piece by piece, like hound dogs’ll grab a rabbit and shake it and tear off a leg, then another leg, and then the head.
The big man rolled the dice around in the palm of his hand and throwed ’em down.
A six, a four.
He picked ’em up and throwed ’em down again.
Two fours.
“Satisfied?”
“I dunno. They seem all right.”
“Then how about a game of poker? Use your cards. Anybody here got a deck o’ cards?”
Who in a bunch of sun-black cotton pickers’d have a deck of cards? They used his, but only after he made ’em look the cards over up close, front and back, this way and that, to make sure they wasn’t marked.
It was after midnight, the big old yellow moon had circled halfway around the sky, before we drove off. They was mad, cussing a blue streak. But they said to come back the next night, that maybe their luck’d change.
“See,” Mister Jenkins said, “they got their money’s worth, else why’d they tell us to come back? We get back to the hotel, we’ll count it up, you’ll get your share. Bet we got sixty dollars. Maybe more.”
I couldn’t see that stack of bills no more, they was setting in Mister Jenkin’s oak-wood cash box. Only I knowed they was there. It was hard to believe it, a stack of bills that high outa only one night’s work. Them pickers’d lost buckets of sweat to get that money, and all Mister Jenkins done was to flick his wrist.
I wanted to know: “Was them dice loaded?”
His shoulders tensed up. Now there was a scowl on his face. For a minute or two, even the air in the buggy seemed froze. The only sound was the clop-clop, clop-clop of Julep’s hooves on the gravel. Louder’n I ever heard ’em before.
“So what?” He spit the words out, when they finally come. “They don’t work for nothing, we don’t either. And they’re gonna be awful let down if we don’t come back.”
He was right there. They wanted us back. I could see it in their faces when we drove off. It was something they could look forward to the whole next day, sunup to sundown.
“Listen to me, kid. Half them pickers, they load their sacks with rocks. Cheating the farmers. I’ve seen ’em doing it, over and over. So what’s this, huh? Just one cheat cheating another cheat.”
That was true. So
me of ’em did.
“Shut up,” Mister Jenkins said, “and take the money.”
I took it.
I took it, camp after camp, while we worked our way across Erath County, and then across Hood County, and Palo Pinto County, and Callahan County.
I took it until the cotton-picking season was over and the picking camps was gone. Then I took it while we worked the railroad section gangs, I took it at the cowboy outfits up in the Panhandle, and I took it at the roughneck camps around the wildcat wells.
As it come out, I never did square my debt with Old Man Mallory. Way I seen it, I’d already paid off that buggy in sweat. And, somehow, Carrie Sikes lost her tug on me in the middle of all that, when I was away from all that kissing ’n hugging ’n flopping in the grass. It works that way a lotta times, you know. Skirt-ties—the ones that ain’t too sturdy to start off with—snap plumb in two when you stretch ’em a little.
’Course, family ties ’r different.
Before I knowed it, it was nineteen and oh-eight, three years since I run off with Eddie Munson. And I was feeling a pull to see my family. Not only just Ma, but Jess and Dock and Joe and all the others. Even a little bit, Pa. I’d heard they was back in Eastland County, near Rising Star. And so I talked to Mister Sid Jenkins, alias Mister Harry Harrison, alias Mister Tom Jones, alias Mister Roscoe Turner, about going to Rising Star. It was early September then, high time for cotton picking.
He said maybe. “They got enough pickers ’round there to make it worth our while, Willis?”
“More’n enough, Sid.”
By that time, the gambler knowed that my real name was Willis Newton, not Wade Russell. But he didn’t care. He said names was like clothes; you wore whichever one was right for what you’re doing that day. By then, too, I’d worked my way up to fifty-fifty partners with that old boy, and I’d got to calling him “Sid.” It hadn’t took me no time a’tall to learn his tricks, like how to use a little looking glass, hid in a coat sleeve, so you could see what ever’body’s cards was.
Anyhow, most of the farmers around Rising Star was like Pa, tenant farmers or sharecroppers. They didn’t hire pickers, their families did the work. Or neighbors helped each other. They didn’t have money for gambling even if they wanted to. Their whole life was one big gamble: the sun and the rain and hail and bad seed and good seed and pink bollworms and Mex’kin boll weevils and army worms and root rot and bull nettle and four-feet-high Johnson grass. And whatever the prices was at the gin.
But there was a few big farmers around there, too, the kind that had buggies and carriages and was starting to get automobiles, and they hired hands that lived in camps at cotton-picking time, like at Stephenville. And when I told Sid about ’em, he said, “They got a hotel at Rising Star?” and when I said there was one, the Lone Star, he said, “Okay, then, we’ll headquarter there a few days while we do the camps.”
We drove into Rising Star at three o’clock on a Wednesday—me and Sid and a bay named Wally. I’d just got shed of Julep the mule and paid down on Wally, even though I hated horses; a horse just looked better pulling a buggy, and was faster. But Wally was winded, we’d been on the road since early that morning. Still, when we come up on the edge of Rising Star, I pulled his head up and I give him a coupla whacks with the whip and what a picture we made cutting down Main Street!
I seen a number of people I knowed, though they wouldn’t a-knowed me back, all dressed up in a slick checkered suit like I had on, and with a brown mustache on my face I’d learned to oil and point. I didn’t wave at them folks, or nothing like that, just set straight up and looked dead ahead, like I was in a hurry to get somewheres and had my mind on other things than waving at people.
Which is how it was.
First thing I done, I dropped Sid off at the Lone Star to get us our rooms, and then me and Wally hit on over to Mister Sullivan’s Livery Stable & Funeral Service, down at the end of Main Street. Mister Sullivan was a chubby old boy with a tongue that moved twice as fast as the rest of him, and being that he did business with both the living and the dead, he knowed most of the town news and all of its gossip.
Well, Mister Sullivan didn’t know me at first, but when I said who I was, and he seen it was me, behind that mustache, he “by golly’ed” me all over the map. He called me by my old nickname, “Little Snakes,” which is what folks around Rising Star and Cisco’d called me from way on back. (They give me that name for snatching eggs outa hen-houses; they called my brother Jess “Big Snakes,” same reason.)
“Byyyyy golly, by golly, by golly!” Mister Sullivan said. “You rascal! What a fine rig you got here, Little Snakes. You in the money?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Say, Little Snakes, you in the money, you’re sure gonna be a sight to your folks. And this horse here, oh boy! Weren’t a hour ago, I’d say, maybe hour ’n a quarter, Dock come in here looking to borrow one of mine. But Old Lady Pallen passed on Monday, some kind of cancer ate her up, and the service is today, and I told Dock, ‘Dock, you gotta come back later, but dunno if I c’n spare you a horse, son, even then.’”
That wasn’t good news about the family. I’d had my mind set on driving out to the house the next day, since me and Sid wasn’t gonna work the camps ’til the next night. But the thought of Pa mooning over Wally, and maybe grabbing for some of my money, made my stomach turn.
At the hotel, I found Sid in the dining room ordering supper. There was two women setting at the table with him, and they didn’t look like the kind of women that lived around Rising Star. They was all painted up in the face, and they smelled like strong perfume.
“Willis, meet Flora and Iris. They’re stopping at the hotel tonight, way to San Angelo.”
“Hoddy,” I said, and they nodded like they could take me or leave me.
But all the while we was eating, Iris kept looking at me and then first thing I knowed her hand come sliding on down my leg. Well, I wasn’t no cowboy, but all I could think of doing when I felt them fingers a-sliding down my thigh was to hop on up, right there in that hotel dining room, and let loose with a Yippy-ti-yi-yo, git along little dogies!
“What’sa matter, Willis, you ticklish?”
No question about it, they was whores. But Iris was just as pretty and fresh-looking as that Carrie Sikes, and her hand on my leg had got me all worked up, no question about that. Before long she leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You could come over to my room tonight.”
She put her lips right up against my ear and I was a goner.
“What’ll it cost me?”
“Ten dollars. And I guarantee you it’ll be worth it, and a lot more.”
I reached over under the table and put my hand on her leg. Then I near swallowed my tongue.
There was my brother Dock, standing in the doorway, filling up the whole frame, watching ever’ move I made. Dock had a crazy way of knowing things; I felt like a burglar caught in the act. But then, seeing my brother standing there in his beat-up farm clothes, looking ’bout as hangdog as them clothes, maybe thinking to hisself that nothing’d ever happened to him in his life, other’n getting bit on the head by a mad coyote, and maybe nothing more was ever gonna happen to him, other’n hard luck … and there I was, all slicked up, my hand on a lady’s leg … well, I felt bad for Dock.
I quick left Iris and walked over to my brother.
“For God’s sake, Willis. For God’s sake!” Dock was besides hisself. He slapped me on the back so hard it shook my whole body. “What’s-it with these dude clothes? An’ a mustache? Oh, boy-a. That mustache!”
“I’m in a business now,” I said. “Got a partner, too, one over there at the table.”
“Them two heifers your partners too?” Dock let out a kind of slow, smirky horse laugh. “What you in, some kinda queer business?”
“It’s a good ’un. I’ll tell you that. Wouldn’t be staying here if we wasn’t making us some money.”
“Naw, you ain’t staying at the Lone Star.” He didn’t
believe a word of it.
“Damn right I am. And soon’s I’m done eating here, we’ll go up and I’ll show you my room right quick.”
“Thanks ’n all, Willis, only I ain’t got the time to go up to no hotel room. Pa’s ragging on me to bring in a remnant, says I can keep what I get at the gin for it, but we ain’t got nothing to pull the wagon. The old man got hisself a new horse last week, but she’s lame and ain’t worth the bullet to shoot her.”
“How much cotton you talking ’bout?”
“Ain’t but five or six hundred.”
I looked over at Iris. She was shoveling the food away, not interested in us a’tall. “Take my horse. But he better be tied to that post over there by morning.”
“Oh, you don’t gotta worry ’bout me, ’cause I do what I say I do.” He slapped me on the back again. “Say, you wanta do it with me? I’ll give you halves.”
“I’m gonna be busy.” I throwed another eye over at Iris.
Dock give another smirky horse laugh. “Well, if you get done with that ‘busy’ early …”
“I won’t. Dock, listen, don’t tell Pa it’s my horse. I’ll never get it back. Lemme ask you …” I held off a second, ’cause I didn’t know if I wanted to ask, or not. “Pa sore about my running off?”
“Phhfew … sore ain’t the word. Some of them words that come outa his mouth … I never knowed words like that. Only Pa’s got other troubles now ’n all.”
“Maybe I better not go by.”
Dock shook his head. “You oughta see Ma, somehow, iffen you can. She gets your letters ’n all, only she’s always saying you’re gonna come down sick, or maybe you’re kilt somewheres. Then if she don’t go on! You know how she went on ’bout Brother Henry.”
God, yeah.
That was the worst thing, by far, that’d ever come down on our family. Before my older brother Henry, we had three others in the family that passed on. But they was babies. Always another one come and took its place. With Henry, it was diff’rent. He was sixteen, four years ahead of me, and the sharpest of all us kids. I looked up to him, he was more like a Pa than a brother. Then he got some kind of fever that made his heart swell up like a cow udder. He was setting out on the porch one day when he just plopped over, dead. And when he passed on, with Ma it was like the whole world’d passed on with him. For months she kept her head buried in the Bible and didn’t pick up a outlaw story one time. It was bad enough, having to see Henry up and die like that. It was even worse having to watch Ma grieve for him like she done.
All Honest Men Page 4