“After that atrocious spectacle, neither was I.”
Lucas laughed, then said, “Well, I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it. Would you like a refund?”
“It’s hard to believe they get paid for that.”
“The Lewis Family is actually quite popular. Didn’t you notice? There wasn’t an empty seat in the house.”
“Yes, but—”
“Look at it this way. Did you think about your problems while you were watching them—that is, if someone like you has any? About the war, say? If not, then they did their job. Sure, those poor bastards can’t sing or dance their way out of a paper bag, but being so goddamn awful is part of their appeal.”
“But when an ape is the most talented one of the bunch, then—”
“Mr. Bentley is a chimpanzee,” Lucas said curtly. “Not an ape.” Although he knew that the five brothers who made up the Lewis Family were a stupid, vulgar bunch—and, Lord knows, they were almost impossible to deal with at times—criticism of any of the acts he brought to the Majestic always rubbed him the wrong way. For sure, he’d rather be booking someone with class, say, one of the famed Barrymores or the juggler W. C. Fields, but he did his best with what he’d been handed. He flipped his cigarette out into the street where it landed in a pile of fresh manure. “Come on, let’s go upstairs and have a drink.”
As soon as he locked the door to the room, Lucas began shedding his clothes. “Hold up,” Bovard said. “Let’s not get in a hurry.”
“Don’t worry,” Lucas replied with a smirk, “I’m not going to defile you. I just need to get this goddamn suit off.” He reached for a silk kimono hanging on a hook. Then he poured some Kentucky Tavern into two dirty glasses, and handed one to the lieutenant. It had a bit of dry lipstick on the rim. Probably Caldwell’s, Bovard figured. The druggist had found a tube of red in the nightstand drawer the other night, had it smeared all over himself by the time they tied him to the chair. “Cheers,” Lucas said, as he sank back on the bed.
Bovard sat down on the chair and took a drink. He was beginning to regret his decision to come here tonight. He looked about the room, the wrinkled sheet stained and crusty, the smashed crackers scattered on the rug, the leather whip curled up like a viper in the corner. The smell of a slow, relentless decay hung in the stale air, and he found himself breathing through his mouth as lightly as possible. Silence filled the room and he nervously took another sip. Bovard wondered, for the first time, how Lucas had ended up here in this tomb. He recalled something an uncle had once told him: “Vincent, whenever you find yourself in a situation with nothing to say, just remember that most people love to talk about themselves. A condemned man could probably forestall his execution by fifteen precious minutes just by asking the hangman where he hailed from.” And the truth was, he realized, he actually was curious about how Lucas had become overseer to an endless parade of debauched thespians, shameless comedians, and mediocre songbirds hoping for a big break. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?” he finally said.
The theater manager arched an eyebrow at the lieutenant, then looked into his glass, twirled the amber liquid around. “Sounds like we’re getting serious.”
“No, I just wonder how you came to be working here.”
“You mean at the Majestic?” Lucas said.
“Yes,” Bovard said.
Lucas rose up and poured himself another drink. “Well, I grew up in Meade,” he began. His family had been well off, the bulk of the money coming from a brewery and a canning factory that his grandfather had built from scratch. He’d always felt that he was a little different from other boys, but he didn’t realize why until he went skinny-dipping one summer afternoon when he was thirteen with a couple of older cousins. Their nakedness aroused him so much that he cramped up and nearly drowned in three feet of water. Lucky for him, they’d thought his erection was caused by a story one of them told about seeing a neighbor’s housekeeper through the fence one night in the backyard, sitting astraddle a drummer who’d been canvassing their street that day selling magazine subscriptions, pumping up and down on him like a piston while the moon shined on her round, white ass.
“That’s quite a detailed description for something you heard so long ago,” Bovard said.
“Well,” Lucas replied, “it was a memorable day.” Anyway, not knowing what else to do, he’d tried to fit in, even dated a couple of girls from the better families in high school, but it was hopeless. All he could think about whenever he was with them was their brothers. Sometimes the only thing that kept him from killing himself was knowing that someday he’d be leaving, taking his secret with him. “It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Lucas said, “going off to William and Mary.” On campus, he quickly became acquainted with a shadowy group of his own kind. They were so secretive and paranoid that they didn’t even acknowledge each other’s presence in public, but by the end of his first semester, he’d been to bed with all of them, even a fat one with a clubfoot and an addiction to sweets who lost his mind over the winter break and ended up entering a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. And then, one evening in the library, he happened across a reproduction of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and decided he wanted to be an artist. He dropped out of school the next fall, spent the next several years wandering around Europe, supposedly searching for inspiration. “Of course,” he told Bovard, “that didn’t make my old man happy, but he went ahead and paid for everything anyway. I think by that time he had things figured out, and was just relieved he didn’t have to look at me anymore.”
He stopped for a moment and put out his cigarette in an ashtray, then settled back on the bed again. “I was getting ready to board a train for Berlin with an Italian boy I’d fallen in love with, a street cleaner, of all things,” he said wistfully, “when I got a telegram that he was dying.” But by the time he arrived back in Ohio, his father was already in the ground, and Lucas soon discovered that the old patriarch, as sensible and prudent a man as ever lived, had lost almost everything investing in a rubber plantation in Bolivia that, as it turned out, existed only on a sheet of worthless paper. That was over eight years ago.
“He didn’t check it out first?” Bovard said.
“Well, he had lost most of his marbles by that time,” Lucas explained. “Old-timer’s or thick blood or whatever.”
“That must have been quite a blow.”
“Oh, it was, but looking back on it now, I suppose it could have been worse. I missed Giuseppe for a while, but I was lucky that the theater job opened up. I’ll be the first to confess that I have no skills whatsoever. By the time the taxes were settled and the funeral paid for, Mother didn’t have anything left but the house and some jewelry.”
They sat there for a while without speaking, and then, through the open window, Bovard heard some men passing by in the alley below. They were talking loudly and he thought he heard Wesley Franks’s voice among them. He stepped over and pushed the dirty curtain back just enough to peek out, but they had already disappeared around the corner.
“Something wrong?” Lucas asked.
“No, I just thought I heard a familiar voice. One of my men.”
Lucas smiled and pulled open the drawer on the nightstand. He withdrew the small brown bottle the pharmacist had brought over the other night. “Some of this will help you forget all about him,” he said. “At least for tonight.”
The lieutenant hesitated. He was already a little drunk. “Not too much,” he said. “I damn near missed reveille the other morning.”
Lucas spilled a little into both their glasses and they drank. Then he stretched out on the narrow bed and lit another cigarette. Taking a drag, he patted the empty place beside him, and Bovard thought of the ugly slattern in the hotel room in Columbus. She had done exactly the same thing. Lucas blew smoke rings at the ceiling while he watched the lieutenant fumble with the buttons of his uniform. After dropping his pants, Bovard happened to glance over at the dead actor’s face on the wall, and
was suddenly stricken by his merry, eternal gaze. Evidently, the old boy was still having a ball when he had posed for the poster. Bovard stared back at him for a long moment, vaguely wondering if he had been up to this room, too, then stepped unsteadily to the edge of the smelly mattress. Time seemed to slow down, and he thought of Odysseus’s men, drugged by the lotus-eaters. Perhaps, he thought dreamily, if he survived the war by some quirk of fate, he and Wesley could settle down on an island somewhere in the Aegean Sea. They could become simple farmers or fishermen, live in a stone house filled with golden sunlight. He heard Lucas sigh, felt a hand come to rest on his leg. His mouth felt dry, and the last thing he remembered was wetting his lips with his tongue.
In the middle of the night, he awoke feeling as if he had been wrapped in gauze, his head as dull as a wedge of cheese. Lucas had rolled off the bed and lay passed out on the floor. He dressed hurriedly, and then, after taking one last glance around the shabby room, made his way down the dark stairs. He found a cab parked at the corner of Paint and Second, and had the driver let him out a block from the foggy camp entrance. As he sneaked past the three sleeping guards, that stupid song comparing life to a fucking pie started up in his head again, but now it didn’t sound quite so bad. In fact, he was humming it softly to himself a few minutes later when he tripped over a boot that some bastard had left in the aisle of the barracks and damn near broke his neck.
33
AT THE EDGE of a sandbar along the Scioto River, Eddie Fiddler was sitting cross-legged on a blanket he had stolen off a clothesline in Waverly, staring at the black water streaming by a few feet away. Johnny was lying beside him, humming in his sleep. The boy was debating once again about whether or not to take off before the old fucker got them in big trouble, or somebody from back home saw him making a fool out of himself. Thanks to Johnny, half the people in Meade had already witnessed that. After the man at the Whore Barn demolished the banjo, Johnny had stayed shit-faced for several days, woefully claiming that his music career was over with, but as soon as they ran out of liquor, he began to panic. “I’ll be goddamned,” he said, drawing on all of his inner strength, “if I’m gonna let some two-bit goon destroy everything I’ve worked for!” Within a couple of hours, he’d come up with a new routine. Now Eddie danced and beat on a tin can with a spoon while the old man blew the harp and sang songs. It was humiliating—they sounded even worse than before—but somehow they got by. Shopkeepers got in the habit of tossing them a nickel just to get them to move on down the street; groups of soldiers looking for a good laugh were sometimes worth a quarter or more, especially if they were drunk themselves; once they were even offered two dollars to perform in a saloon, only to find out too late that the owner had provided all of his customers with rotten eggs to throw at them. Eventually, though, the police ran them out of town, and they had headed south to Waverly.
Eddie straightened out his legs and leaned back on his elbows as he recalled how he had ended up in such sorry straits. It all started the day he killed his mother’s cat and his father had made him return Tom Jones to that little sex maniac Corky Routt. It was all his fault, Eddie figured; well, at least to an extent. After taking the book back and complaining that he hadn’t been able to find even one dirty thing in it, Corky had told him to forget about that baby shit, that he had something a thousand times better than that now. “What do ye mean?” Eddie had asked. “Those Nesser girls over in Slab Holler,” Corky replied. “They’ll fuck a man silly if he brings their pappy something to drink.” And so he had spent the next two weeks thinking about what that would feel like. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he’d waited one night until his parents went to bed, then slipped off with two jars of Ellsworth’s wine. As long as he was back home before sunup, he assured himself, nobody would be the wiser. He was trying to get his nerve up to knock on the Nessers’ door when out of the woods came an old man carrying a banjo over his shoulder and singing “The Ol’ Black Cat Shit in the Shavings.” He was short and rail-thin with an egg-shaped goiter sticking out of the side of his neck and a head of wild gray hair badly in need of a trim.
“What ye got there?” the man had asked when he saw him standing in the shadows near a pile of firewood a few feet beyond the porch. Thinking that he was the girls’ daddy, Eddie had passed him the jar of wine. He watched the man drain it in two long gulps, then smack his lips and reach into his back pocket for a pint of blended whiskey. He uncorked the bottle, then stuck out his hand and said, “My name’s Johnny. What they call you?”
“Eddie Fiddler.”
“I reckon you lookin’ for some woolly jaw, ain’t ye?”
“Well, I…I…” Eddie stuttered.
“Don’t worry,” Johnny said. “I’m good buddies with the old man. I’ll get ye fixed up.”
“Oh,” the boy said. “So you ain’t their pap?”
“What! Hell, no. If’n them little bitches was mine, I’d have done killed them all. I don’t see how ol’ Harold stands it, some of the shit they pull.” He took a sip from the bottle, then handed it to Eddie. “Which one ye want?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “I ain’t never been here before.” Then he tipped the bottle up and had his first taste of whiskey.
“Well, if it was me, I’d take the one they call Spit Job. She’s still got a tight one, or at least she did the last time I came through here.”
“Where you from?” the boy asked, passing the bottle back.
“Nowhere special,” Johnny said. “Here and there. I’m on my way to Meade to see that army camp, but figured I’d stop by here first and get my dick wet.”
“You going to join up?”
Johnny laughed. “Shit, do I look like a fuckin’ soldier? But I am a-thinkin’ there might be some money to be made there.”
“How’s that?”
“Playin’ music,” Johnny said. “All’s I got to do now is find me a partner.”
Within an hour, Eddie had fucked Spit Job behind the woodpile and was headed for Meade with Johnny. They passed within a mile of his house, but the whiskey made the whole world glow that night with wondrous possibilities, and he couldn’t bear the thought of it ending so soon. He told himself instead that a day or two wouldn’t matter, but then it seemed like every time he was ready to go back home they somehow got hold of another jug and he was off to the races again. Then Spit Job had hitched a ride into Waverley last week, acting as if she wanted to be with him, and that made it harder than ever to leave.
Tonight, though, everything seemed hopeless. They’d spent the entire evening singing and dancing, and hadn’t even made enough coin to buy a pint of the cheapest stuff. Then Spit Job had ridden off with a couple of rough-looking farmhands, three-hundred-pounders with hands nearly the size of his head, and he and Johnny had finally given up and walked down to the river. It was an awful feeling, being sober and imagining what those two bulls were doing to her in the bed of their truck. Johnny had warned him about her, but Eddie truly thought that all she needed was someone to pay some attention to her, who wasn’t talking filth to her all the time and only trying to get in her pants. The hell with her, he thought, and with Johnny, too. Even if he had to walk all the way, he could be home in a day. Of course, his parents would both be pissed, especially his mother, and there would be a lot of bitching and questioning the first few days, but eventually they’d get over it. Nothing they could dish out, he figured, would be any worse than this.
He was just getting ready to take his leave when a rusty clattering Ford came bouncing down the lane and stopped close to the sandbar, maybe thirty feet from where they were lying. When the driver shut the engine off, Eddie reached over and shook Johnny awake, pointed at the vehicle visible in the moonlight. They listened for a minute to a man and woman talking loudly in drunken voices. Then the doors swung open and the pair emerged from the car unsteadily and climbed into the backseat. “That dirty dog,” Johnny said. “He gonna get him some.”
The man’s name was
June Easter. He was a former butcher who had cut the pinkie finger off his left hand while trimming out some chops, and had subsequently lost his nerve for the knife and become a baloney salesman. Now he just went around the countryside peddling other men’s meat in a frayed, fat-smeared suit that, on a hot day, smelled faintly like a corpse. He lived out of his car most of the time, and knew a hundred different spots where he could park for the night. Usually, if business had been good that day, he’d pick up some broken-down bar floozy to spend the night with; and tonight it was a redhead with a beer belly whose name escaped him, though he was fairly sure he’d fucked her a time or two before. After he got her naked and stretched out in the backseat, he pushed his pants down and started ramming her like he was trying to bust something loose inside. Eddie and Johnny listened to them go at it for several minutes, the woman’s head banging against the door and the man huffing and puffing like an old steam engine. Then suddenly, the seat stopped squeaking and one of them let out a groan and everything turned quiet.
After a few minutes, Johnny slipped up to the car cautiously. Looking in on them, he saw the baloney salesman lying on top of the woman with his pants gathered down around his ankles. They were both passed out. He reached inside and moved his hand around until he found the wallet in the man’s back pocket, and then discovered a nearly full fifth of gin and half a roll of some sort of lunchmeat in the front of the car. He and Eddie took off up the rutted road and went a mile or so before they stopped and looked through the billfold. There was nearly twenty dollars inside, enough to keep them drunk for a week. They spread their blanket under a tree and drank the gin and gorged on the meat and carried on until dawn. When they came to that afternoon, they walked back to Waverly to buy another jug and see if Spit Job was ready to do some more dancing.
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