But most of them “Streetcar Sallies” was just silly, giggly girls. They had more hair than they had brains, even the ones with them new short “bobs.”
It was when I was stopping at the Loyal Hotel in Omaha that I met Louise.
She was the cigar gal in the lobby. She was real pretty, dark complected. Only it wasn’t just that. It was something about how she moved, like she knowed who she was. I was standing at the counter, wanting to buy a Police Gazette, and I just stood there, watching her. She was stacking some red tins of Prince Albert tobacco. Her hands was moving sure and steady. And when she finally seen me and come over, her hips rolled, like she was a woman, not a girl.
“Say, miss,” I said to her when she give me my paper, “what’s there to do in this city for fun?”
“You could go to a picture show.”
“Besides that.”
She didn’t say nothing right off, and then she reached down and picked up a piece of Juicy Fruit.
“You could chew gum.”
She was smaller’n most women, half the size of my Ma, but she looked me straight up in the eye. She had dark eyes, they was deep set in her face, but they was a-sparkling. She liked my looks, I could tell. And why not? That day I was wearing a three-button sports jacket with tan linen trousers and a nice straw Panama.
I took the gum and shucked off the wrapper.
“Do you know, miss,” I said, “how much money Mister William Wrigley Jr. has made offa this gum? Total, I mean.”
“That’s a strange question.”
“I got a reason for asking it.”
’Course, my reason for asking it was I wanted to keep talking to that gal as long as I could. There wasn’t no other customers at the cigar stand, so I put both my elbows on the counter. I smiled so she could see all my teeth.
“I could guess.” She smiled back and cocked her head to one side. “But it’d just be a guess.”
Well, the good thing was, I did know. And it was a good story, how that old boy Wrigley got rich offa chewing gum. I’d just read all about it in the Chicago Tribune.
“He’s made millions,” I said. “So many millions he don’t know how many millions he got.”
“Millions? Off nickel gum? Well, well.”
“Mister Wrigley begun his life selling washing soap, see. And to get people to buy his soap, he’d give ’em a tin of baking powder as pilon, a little extra free thing. Then he found out folks liked baking better’n washing. So he started selling baking powder and giving out packs of chewing gum as pilon. Then he found out people liked chewing better’n anything.”
The cigar lady smiled again. “Seems almost a crime for one man to have so much money.”
“I guess it don’t seem like a crime if you’re the man that’s got it.”
“I guess not.”
“Say, what’s your name?”
Before she said a word, I knowed she was gonna give it to me. “Louise. Louise Brown.”
“Good to meet you, Miss Brown.” I bowed from the waist. “Will Reed. From East Texas. I’m trading some oil leases ’round here. Now, I am gonna chew this Juicy Fruit, like you said, and make that Mister William Wrigley Jr. five cents richer. And then I think I will go see a picture show. But you know anybody that likes to go to a picture show by theirselves alone? How ’bout you come with me?”
“Thank you, but no.”
“Why not?”
“I have an eight-year-old son. I’m a war widow.”
Good godamighty, how could somebody that looked so young and so fresh have a eight-year-old son and be a widow? Only I didn’t think she was lying. I said, “Bring the boy. I like kids. And I think I seen a Tom Mix picture down the street. A kid ain’t a kid if he don’t like Tom Mix.”
“Oh, my son doesn’t like Tom Mix.” She laughed and pushed a piece of hair outa her eyes. “My son is Tom Mix.”
The movie house was called the Wigwam and the three of us—me and Louise and her boy—drove there in a getaway car. We had us a great time. The story was about cowboys and Injins and when Tom Mix pulled out a six-shooter and blowed away a pack of Injins, the boy jumped up on his seat and started hollering.
People turned their heads all over that movie house.
That didn’t bother me none, I liked a kid that knowed how to blow some wind outa his belly. But Louise got kinda upset. She grabbed the boy—his name was Lewis—down offa his seat and throwed her arm around him. “Hush, angel,” she said. Then she leaned over to my ear. “You see what I mean.”
I could smell her perfume; it made my head spin.
After the picture show, I took ’em for chocolate sundaes at a soda fountain down the street, and that’s when I found out more about Louise. She told me she was working at the cigar stand because she’d give up her real job, second in charge of claims for the Burlington Railroad, to a veteran of the War.
“How’d you get a job like that?” I asked her.
“My father sent me to business college.”
I near dropped my ice-cream spoon. Business college! I never knowed a woman that’d went to business college. Or any kind of college, far as that goes.
Louise Brown
“That musta been a hard thing to do, giving up that job,” I said.
“A war’s a horrible thing to go through. I thought a serviceman should have it.” Her eyes shifted down for a second. Then they come back up. “So, where are the oil leases you’re trading, Mister Reed?”
“Oil boom’s mostly in the Southwest.” I coughed.
“You a millionaire?” That was the boy.
“A millionaire?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Oil men are millionaires, I hear.”
He clucked his tongue. He was a cute kid, dark hair like his Ma, with a round shiny face.
I coughed again. Then I laughed. The papers was starting to talk more ’n more about millionaires them days, like that Mister Wrigley. There was so much money floating around after the war, and so many big oil strikes. But back then I hardly knowed how many zeros was in a million dollars.
“I ain’t one just yet, cowboy,” I said back to Lewis. “But how ’bout this? First million I get, you’ll be the first to know it.”
“Well, if you don’t got a million, how much you got then, Mister Reed?”
I dug a silver dollar outa my pocket. “I got enough to buy you a bag of them cream candies over there. Go get you some, and keep the change.”
I looked at Louise and winked. And damn if she didn’t wink back at me.
EIGHTEEN
Frank was still saying he was the Big Man of our team, and, for a while, even though he was a louse and a skunk, both, it quit eating at me so bad. That meant I could spend more time that summer up in Omaha, hanging around Louise.
I started really getting stuck on that gal.
She made me think about Vela, how I felt in my heart back then, except that Louise was a diff’rent kind of person. Vela was a plain, simple country girl. Louise was a city woman that’d seen things, and that knowed things.
Turns out, Louise was a German Jew who’d growed up in New London, Wisconsin. I never knowed too many Jews before. Back then, lots of people thought you shouldn’t mix with Jews, just like you shouldn’t mix with the coloreds. Henry Ford, the one that made that Model T, was blaming the Jews in the newspapers for just about ever’thing that was wrong in this country, like high rents and gambling and drinking and having “loose morals,” and how women’s skirts was getting so short and showing off the whole bottom half of their legs. To be honest, though, I liked it that Louise was a Jew. She was dark complected, like I said before, and that was new to me in a gal. And she was smart and knowed things about business. I heard that was a Jew thing too.
I coulda took Louise out ever’ night of the week, if she’d let me.
Her and her boy shared a house with a married couple, and sometimes she’d leave Lewis home and I’d show her the town—take her to the best eating places, or the best speakeasies, or t
he best shows. I wanted to give her a taste of the good life, and I think she liked that. Other times, we’d take the boy with us, and go to supper, or a picture show.
Ever’ so often, we’d just stay in and she’d cook me home-cooked food. And while the supper was getting fixed, I’d spend time with her boy. I felt bad he didn’t have no Pa, though if he’d had a Pa, I wouldn’t have his Ma. So I only felt half-bad. Anyhow, I’d do card tricks, or tell him stories—about my people, things like that.
“Any your family cowboys?” he asked me one time.
“My Grandma Ivy.”
He give a chuckle. “Ladies can’t be cow-boys.”
“In Texas, ladies are whatever they gotta be.”
I didn’t tell him the whole story about my Grandma Ivy. It was too rough. But I told him how my grandma’s folks went to Texas from Tennessee in the 1830s when ever’body was heading West, looking for God’s Country, and how Texas did look like God’s Country at first. The plains was full of grass, high as your waist, with antelope and buffalo roaming, thick as ever’thing, and the streams was clear and pretty, and there wasn’t no goddamn fences. And I told him how my Grandma Ivy learned how to ride a horse astride and to run cattle, just like a man. And how in them days, there was all kinds of codes of the West, but the rule most people went by was “Whatever you’re big enough to take, it’s yours.”
“One day, in about eighteen and fifty-four,” I told Lewis, “some ruffians wanted to take over her Pa’s ranch. Her Pa was a religious old man and he wouldn’t carry a gun. And them ruffians kidnapped him while he was belling a cow and throwed him in the Nueces River, drowned him. But my grandma sure did pack a gun. She was only seventeen, just seventeen years old, but she stood up to them ruffians with a Winchester .45-70. You wasn’t supposed to kill a woman back then, ’though some of ’em done it. She was taking her chances.”
“Wshew,” Lewis said. “Your grandma was a tough one.”
“You ever jackknifed open a prickly-pear cactus pad, cowboy? They got devil spikes all over the outside of ’em, but it’s the inside of ’em, that’s where they’re soft and sweet. Full of mush and juice. That’s what lots of Texas women ’r like. Just like that. ’Course, some of ’em’s plumb the other way around. But I always walk a wide circle around that other kind.”
I give a look over at Louise, she was walking outa the kitchen, and grinned. She rolled her eyes.
After supper, on them nights at Louise’s, she’d send the boy up to do his schoolwork, and me and her’d play cards with that married couple: canasta, bridge, poker, whatever. ’Course, I knowed more about cards than any of ’em put together. But I always played fair. I figured if Louise caught me cheating, that’d be the end of it with her. So all I done was throw in a little show: I done riffles and overhands, I thumbed the cards and I crimped ’em.
“You play like a gambler,” Louise said to me one time.
“Yeah?” I said back. “I do a little gambling, here and there. If I get a run of dry holes. But I learned it from the best card-player in Maverick County. My Grandma Ivy. Though mostly she just used her cards to tell fortunes.”
“She ever tell yours?”
“She said in June, nineteen and twenty, I was gonna get a piece of chewing gum from a lady that was gonna run circles around me.”
I patted her under the table.
Lots of times, after them card games, me and Louise’d go upstairs to be by ourselves. She had a gramophone in her bedroom, and she’d pour herself some Scotch whiskey and we’d put on records. And that whiskey’d make her legs twitch.
“Dance with me, Will,” she’d say.
Well, I never could quite get the hang of the dances she wanted to do. They had the damndest strange steps, with the damndest strange names, like Ballin’ the Jack and the Buzzard Glide. Most times, I’d just put my arms around her waist and shuffle around a little. Then I’d kiss her on the neck to get her thinking about something else besides how my feet was moving.
Near ever’ time, it worked.
I don’t know what it was, but being with Louise felt right. She didn’t give me a itch, she didn’t make me jumpy, all I felt was good. It’s what I call that “old slow feeling.” I don’t mean old like a old rotted peach is old, I mean old like how this old round world is old. And slow, like how a creek runs slow at the deep parts. I can’t explain it more than that. Maybe some people woulda thought we was a odd pair, and God knows we looked like one, the top of that gal’s head barely come up to my armpit. But something inside told me we was pretty much meant to be together—the smart little Jewish lady and the outlaw.
Only problem was, she didn’t know I was a outlaw.
Big trouble come on a Friday night. Louise and Lewis had gone to Wisconsin to visit her folks, and I’d gone back to Tulsa for a few weeks. About ten o’clock, the telephone went to ringing. It was Frank and he said to come over to his place, he had something important to tell me. I jumped in my car and went over there right away. A fella named Wash was there.
“Sit down, Skinny,” Frank said to me.
Frank was all slicked up: pinstriped suit, silk shirt, diamond cufflinks. Wash was dressed up too, in a high-dollar suit, but his face didn’t match up with the rest of him. He had the face of a monkey and a lot of wrinkles. He had a cup of coffee in his hands; it was shaking.
Frank brung me my own cup.
“The Dago’s skipped town, Skinny. Wash here knows him. Says the Dago got word Slim’s maybe back. It’s not that he was afraid of Slim face to face. But he didn’t want to be bushwhacked.”
I took a slow sip of my coffee. Fact is, I’d just heard it through the underground, that Slim was back, and on the prowl.
But I didn’t say nothing.
Frank kept going: “To my mind, it’s no big loss. He had too many no-count relations. Bad as Slim’s. Probably rat you out for five bucks. So I say we forget about the Dago. Wipe him right out of our minds. But summer’s almost over. We need somebody to take his place.” Frank throwed his eyes over to Wash. “I thought you two could meet.”
I looked over at Wash too. I give him one of my dog-snarl smiles. A “dog-snarl smile” is where you stretch out your mouth, like a friendly smile, only your top lip is hiked up a little more, and a little more of your top teeth are showing. It ain’t a friendly smile, but it’s hard to tell the diff’rence, if you don’t know how to read mouths.
“I wanta talk to Frank private here,” I said to Wash.
Wash didn’t say nothing, just took off.
Soon as the front door shut, I hit Frank with the questions you gotta ask about new ones: “He drink?” “Whore around?” “Keep his word?” Frank poured hisself a fresh cup of coffee and give me a dog-snarl smile of his own. His teeth was still white as snow, something that always struck me, since he never stopped soaking ’em in that black coffee. “I go way back with Wash,” he said. “He’s had his fingers in a lot of pies: forgery, mail fraud, dope-peddling. But the last year or two, he’s been blowing boxes.”
“So he’s a jug-heavy?”
“Yeah.”
Yeah, well, so what?
What was going through my head was something that’d been going through my head, faster and faster, for a long time. Even if we was making money, how long was I gonna be under Frank’s thumb? And how long was I gonna stay alive working with a bunch of fool ex-cons? And it wasn’t just my head telling me that. It was my bones, too. I think there comes a point in ever’ businessman’s life when his bones are “seasoned.” When he can trust his bones better’n anybody or anything else. And there was something in my bones that was telling me that Wash was gonna be trouble.
I was about to tell Frank we oughta take our time, that I wanted to have a say in picking our next partner, when there come a knock on the door.
“Probably Wash,” Frank said, but he was too lazy to get up. He just hollered: “Come on in.”
It wasn’t Wash.
It was three men, and they blowed into the roo
m. One of ’em had a black hood over his head.
All of ’em had guns drawed.
Both Frank and me jumped outa our chairs and I seen a flash of arm. Frank was grabbing down for his own gun. A .32 Derringer, stuck in a holster on his leg. The man in the hood hollered: “No, you don’t, Frank!” and I seen Frank lifting his hand. The man’s voice sounded like Slim’s. I didn’t know the other two men; they was grubby and hard-eyed.
The man in the hood stuck a pistol next to Frank’s ear, while his two partners grabbed Frank’s gun. One of ’em took a long piece of rope from offa his belt and tied Frank’s hands behind his back. Then he stuffed a bright red bandana between Frank’s white teeth.
The other one come over and patted me down. I didn’t have no gun on me. Then he tied my hands, too, but he didn’t gag me and he said low in my ear: “This ain’t about you, but keep outa the way.”
I looked over at the man in the hood. “Take that fool thing offa your head, Slim. I’m your friend.”
The hooded man didn’t say nothing, just went out the door, I guess to make sure there wasn’t gonna be no rank outside. When he come back in, he nodded his head at his partners, and the three of ’em marched Frank and me outa the apartment. Their car was back in the alley. A big, long Cadillac.
Frank was trying to break the ropes, but wasn’t no use. He was gurgling behind that gag.
They drove us about twenty minutes up and down back roads, towards the outskirts of Tulsa. It was late, so there wasn’t too many other cars around. Before long, we wasn’t passing nobody. Then the driver took a dark lane up a hill. At the top, he stopped and cut off the headlamps.
It was black as pitch, no moon, no nothing.
You could just see the lights of the city way off, a-twinkling.
All Honest Men Page 17