Within seconds of hearing the offer, Sugar could already taste the liquor on his parched tongue. A pint! By God, he’d down it in one long drink. And two dollars! That would buy two more. As far as food went, why, he could worry about that later. “Let me see it,” he said.
Pollard led him around the side of the building. “There it is,” he said, pointing at an outhouse at the edge of the alley, made of rough slabs with a rickety door hanging a little cockeyed from leather straps.
Sugar opened the door and the stench brought tears to his eyes. A cloud of flies emerged into the sunlight, as if even they couldn’t stand the smell anymore. He held his breath and looked inside. The contents were bubbling up over the top of the hole, like a volcano ready to erupt. Just as he was on the verge of telling the man no, he thought of the pint again. “How would I go about it?” he asked, once he stepped away from the door.
“Ye’d have to dip it out,” Pollard said. “It’s easy. The lid lifts up. I usually do it myself, but I hurt my back the other day.” He pointed to a dented tin bucket lying near the back door of the bar. “You can use that.”
“But where would I put it?” Sugar asked. “That’d be quite a pile by the time I got done.”
“Jesus Christ,” Pollard said, “what do you want me to do, hold your hand, too?” He looked around, then nodded toward the well-kept yard that belonged to the Grady bitch on the other side of the alley. “Just toss it over the fence there.”
“Two dollars and a pint, right?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Could I have a snort ’fore I get started?”
“Ha!” Pollard said. “I might be dumb, but I ain’t plumb dumb. I’ll pay ye when you finish the job.”
For the next three hours, Sugar dipped shit from the hole with the leaky bucket and carried it across the alley, dumped it over the other side of the fence. By the time he finished, there was a pile of waste standing four feet high in Mrs. Grady’s backyard, the edge of it sliding slowly toward the meticulously maintained plot bordered with seashells and white pebbles that contained her prizewinning rosebushes. He was just getting ready to knock on the back door of the bar to ask for his pay when a policeman sped up the alley in a car and stopped. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the cop asked in a sharp voice.
“Just got done cleanin’ out that jake,” Sugar explained. The thin coat of excrement that covered his clothes and hands and arms was already beginning to harden in the sunlit air.
“No, I mean why the fuck are you dumping it in Mrs. Grady’s yard?” the cop said. His name was Lester Wallingford, and his father was the chief of police in Meade. He and his brother, Luther, were the only two full-time employees on the force, and in their sibling rivalry to outdo each other, they were apt to arrest people for little more than spitting on the sidewalk, especially if one of the ten cells in the jail happened to be empty.
Sugar looked over at the pile, then noticed for the first time a tall woman with long, iron-gray hair in braids and a fringed shawl about her shoulders watching them from a window on the second floor of the house. “I’m just doing what the man told me to do,” he said to Lester.
“What man?”
“The barkeep in there.”
“Who? Pollard?”
“I don’t know his name. He just told me he’d give me two dollars to clean out his jake, said to put it over the fence there.”
Lester got out of the car and pounded on the back door of the Blind Owl. A minute or so later, Pollard opened it and stuck his head out. “Can I help ye?” he said in a casual tone, an innocent look on his meaty face.
“Did you hire this man to empty your shithouse?”
Pollard squinted past the policeman at the black man standing behind him, and his brow furrowed as if he were puzzled. “What the hell you talkin’ about?” he said. “I’ve never seen this fucker before in my life.”
It took Sugar a moment to realize what was happening, but when he caught on, he kicked at the bucket and yelled, “That’s a lie, you sonofabitch!”
“Now settle down,” Lester told Sugar. “You don’t want to be talkin’ to white folks like that.” He turned back and regarded Pollard suspiciously. “You tellin’ me this man just took it upon himself to dip out your crapper?”
Pollard shrugged. “I guess he musta. I don’t know why, though. Maybe he’s one of them perverts. I’ve heard some of them get their jollies rollin’ around in it. Like I said, I’ve never seen him before.”
“He’s lying, Officer,” Sugar yelled. “He promised me two dollars and a pint of whiskey for doing this!”
“What’s this about a pint?” Lester said. “You didn’t say nothing about that before.”
“See?” Pollard said. “He’s makin’ it up as he goes along. Christ, you ought to know how them fuckers are when they get caught.”
Screaming another obscenity, Sugar kicked the bucket again, and Lester drew his revolver. “I’m tellin’ you for the last time,” he warned, “settle down.”
“But you surely don’t believe him, do ye?” Sugar said.
Glancing over, Lester saw that Mrs. Grady was still watching from her window. She was bound to cause trouble if he didn’t make an arrest, and, though he figured Pollard was lying through his teeth, he couldn’t prove it. “Well, unless you got a paper or something saying that he hired you,” he said, “I don’t have no—” Just then, Sugar saw the barkeep wink, and he went crazy, lunging past the cop and trying to jerk the door open to get at the dirty bastard. “That’s it!” Lester yelled, sticking the barrel of his gun in the black man’s face. “You’re goin’ to jail.” He clapped a set of tarnished handcuffs on Sugar’s wrists and shoved him toward the car.
“You ain’t gonna allow him to sit his ass on your seats like that, are ye?” Pollard said. “Covered in shit like he is?”
The lawman thought for a minute, then said to his prisoner, “You’ll have to stand on the running board.” They both heard Pollard start chuckling, and Sugar turned to stare at him, his eyeballs bulging with hate. He didn’t know how long he’d stick around this cow town, but he vowed right then and there that the last thing he would do before he left was burn this motherfucker’s bar down. When they arrived at the jail, the cop made him empty his pockets in the parking lot out back. “What’s this for?” Lester asked, pointing at the razor. Sugar shrugged. “Shaving.” Not in the mood to waste any more time messing around with a penniless vagrant when he could be out looking for real lawbreakers, Lester didn’t bother questioning him any further about it, even though the man didn’t look like he’d done much grooming as of late. He was, however, concerned about the smell from Pollard’s shitter causing trouble among the other jailbirds, simply because it would give them something new to whine about, so he allowed Sugar a couple of minutes to wash off in a bucket of water before leading him down the hall toward the cells. As they passed a bulletin board on which was pinned a copy of the Jewett Gang wanted poster, he said to the cop, “Those dirty dogs held me up the other day.”
“Sure they did,” Lester said.
“No, really, they did. Took my hat.”
Lester shook his head. “Whatever you say, pal.” It was common knowledge among lawmen that when it came to criminal types, the more miserable and luckless they were, the more grandiose and numerous their lies and fantasies. Did this fucker really think that he’d believe the most notorious band of outlaws to emerge since the James Gang would bother stealing a hat that a colored boy wore, especially one who used a goddamn vine to hold his pants up?
In the cell across from Sugar’s was a country preacher by the name of Jimmy Beulah. He was dressed in a pair of baggy dress pants with a wrinkled white shirt buttoned tight around his neck. After a while, Sugar asked him, “What they got you in here for? Stealin’ from the collection plate?”
“Attempted murder,” Beulah replied blandly, brushing away one of the many flies that had followed the new prisoner in. “What about yourself?�
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The man’s answer took him a little by surprise, but Sugar figured he was probably trying to bullshit him, maybe scare him into giving up his supper or something. But even if he was, and the fucker turned out to be no more than a public nuisance or a petty thief, Sugar still wasn’t about to admit that he was behind bars simply for cleaning out a sonofabitch’s shithouse and being played the fool. He hemmed and hawed around a bit, mostly cursing the cop, and then, instead of answering the question, asked the preacher another: “Who’d ye try to kill?”
“According to them, it was some soldier,” Beulah said. “To be honest, I don’t really remember.”
“Oh,” Sugar said. Jesus, he thought, maybe he wasn’t lying after all. “Why not?”
“I get like that when I drink,” Beulah answered. “Why, I even forget the End Times is a-comin’ if I get enough in me.”
“End Times,” Sugar repeated. “My mother used to talk about them.”
“She was a God-fearin’ woman, your mother?”
“All her life,” Sugar said, recalling the number of times that he’d heard her in the other room of the house praying for his soul, fervently at first, but then, as he got older, not so much. He realized suddenly that he’d been the one who had worn her out, and that she’d been right to shut the door on him.
“Remind me again,” Beulah said. “What is it you’re in here for?”
Sugar spent a silent minute retracing the events of the last week or so in his mind. He thought again about Flora and her fucking boyfriend, and the bloody white woman on the kitchen floor, and the promise he had made to God on the roadside after he found his bowler shot to pieces, the promise he had broken the first chance he got. And he knew that as soon as he got out of here, he’d break another if he made one, and continue to do so until one disaster or another finished him off for good. He saw the preacher looking at him, waiting for a reply. But instead of giving him one, he rolled over in his bunk and went to sleep.
56
AT SIX O’CLOCK that evening, Chimney left the Warner to meet his brothers in the park. He was wearing his goggles and duster and holding the leather driving gloves in one hand. Thoughts of Matilda had preoccupied him all day, and he was in a hurry to get out to the Whore Barn to see her again. He had burned up two tanks of gasoline driving the Ford around and remembering the way her lips curled back when he slipped inside her, the way she had patiently talked him through his first clumsy attempts. To kill more time, he had gone back to O’Malley’s for another shave, but the barber took one look at his face, still as smooth as when he’d left the shop yesterday, and just splashed a dime’s worth of lotion on his neck. “Well, did ye get ye any woolly jaw last night?” he asked Chimney.
“Sure did.”
The barber shook his head sadly, then glanced over at the father-in-law still sitting in the chair by the window. “Boy, whatever you do, don’t get married. Me, I had to go home and listen to that goddamn Nancy bitch about money the whole evening. Shit, she even had ol’ Jim there ready to crack, didn’t she, Jim?”
“I don’t remember,” the old man said stiffly.
“Listen to him,” the barber said, as he made the boy’s change. “She could poison the both of us with that slop she calls supper, and he’d still take up for her.”
Just then another customer walked in, and Chimney slipped out the door. He stopped at the McAdams and drank a couple of beers and ate a sandwich of bloody roast beef topped with a thick slab of onion, then returned to his room to take a bath. As he soaked in the hot, soapy water, he fell asleep and started to dream that he was back in the shack with his family at Tardweller’s. They were trying to decide whether or not to eat a groundhog that had crawled into the yard and died under the front steps. It seemed that he and Cane were arguing against it, but Pearl and Cob were for it. Then a car horn honked outside the hotel, and he jerked awake and scrambled out of the tub. He leaned against the sink panting, his heart pounding against his rib cage. Must have been that damn onion, he thought. They never had agreed with him.
Cane was seated on the park bench reading another newspaper and smoking a cigarette, while Cob stood at the edge of the pond again, tearing off pieces of bread from a loaf and tossing them to some geese. For every piece he fed the birds, he ate one. A teenage boy and girl in a small boat kept rowing around in a circle out in the middle of the water, and every time they turned his way, Cob waved like he’d never seen them before. He had to give Cane credit, Chimney thought as he walked toward them, they looked more like a schoolteacher and his pet dunce than a couple of outlaws with a bounty on their heads.
“Anything about us in there?” Chimney said.
Cane put down the newspaper and dusted a spot of ash off the front of his suit. He glanced over at Cob, then across the pond at the storefronts and bars that lined Water Street. “They’re still calling us cowboys,” he said.
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing we changed our looks then,” said Chimney.
“And they’re speculating we’re in Ohio now.”
“So? They can speculate all they want.”
“Yeah, but the trouble is they just happen to be right. Did ye take it out today, the car?”
“I must have drove it a hundred miles or better,” Chimney said.
“So you got the hang of it?”
“Not much to it, really. Shit, Cob could probably drive it if you tied a pork chop to the steering wheel.”
“I’m thinkin’ we might be ahead to get on out of here,” Cane said. “Sooner we get to Canada, the better.”
“Oh, no,” Chimney said. “You promised me if I helped ye with that old man, I could have some fun. Hell, we’ve only been here two days. I’m just startin’ to know my way around.”
“Yeah, but shit, brother, you could—”
“I don’t care. I’m not leaving till I get my fill out at the Whore Barn.”
“Well, how long do you need for that?”
“I don’t know,” Chimney said. “At least another night or two.”
Cane sighed, watched Cob toss the last of the loaf into the dirty water. “All right, you got until Saturday morning, but then we’re leaving. I don’t care if you got one of ’em dog-knotted.”
“What’s today?”
“Thursday.”
“Fair enough,” Chimney said, “but I’m goin’ to need some more money.”
“Jesus Christ, you’ve spent that five hundred already?”
Actually, he still had at least a hundred left, but Chimney liked the feeling that carrying a wad of cash in his pocket gave him. “Most of it,” he said. “Remember, the car was two-fifty. And I went ahead and bought a couple gas cans and a gallon of motor oil for when we’re on the road. Plus there was—”
“Okay, okay,” Cane said. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a roll of bills, counted some off. “Here’s two hundred. Even at four dollars a shot, that’s fifty pieces of ass.”
“Yeah, but what about—”
“No, that’s it. You run through that, I expect to see you walkin’ bowlegged.”
“You sure you don’t want to go with me tonight? Try out that fat one?”
“No,” Cane said, shaking his head. “We’re gonna go see that show at the theater, the one with the monkey.”
“Well, suit yourself,” Chimney replied. Secretly, he was relieved. He’d been thinking that he might spend the entire night with Matilda if the pimp was agreeable, and having his brother along would just complicate things up. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
“Be careful out there,” Cane said. He finished reading the newspaper, and thirty minutes later he and Cob each paid the fifty-cent admission fee and entered the Majestic. The place was packed and their seats were near the back under the balcony. A shiny-faced man in a tuxedo came out and told a few jokes, including one about a farmer with a homely daughter who put the Jewett Gang up for a night, thinking they were traveling salesmen. Thankfully, Cob wasn’t paying any attention
, the main thing on his mind at the time being the popcorn he was eating. But as soon as he swallowed the last kernel, he started asking Cane when the monkey was going to appear until finally an old woman with an ear trumpet seated in front of them told him to keep quiet.
As usual, backstage the Lewis Family—Barney, Marcus, Rufus, Stanley, and Wendell—was having another crisis. Fame and women, coupled with jealousy and vast quantities of alcohol, had slowly dissolved the familial bond among the five brothers, and now it seemed as if every performance was preempted by another demand from this one or that one. Tonight, Barney was refusing to go on unless Marcus admitted that not only had he drugged and molested Barney’s latest girlfriend, a burned-out torch singer named Dolly whom he’d picked up working in a five-and-dime in Pomeroy on the way over to Meade, but that he’d also given her a dose of crabs, which she had subsequently passed on to Barney. After much shouting and cursing and threatening, a fed-up Rufus jammed a derringer against the rapist brother’s head, and the truth spilled out in a torrent, followed by an apology, one of seven or eight that Marcus had already made that week; and Stanley signaled the stage manager that they were ready to roll. They then each took a small hit from a treasured jug of moonshine that was all that remained of their granddaddy’s last batch before he died, and then smacked each other in the balls, a ritual they had begun with their very first show back in Nitro, West Virginia, on April 3, 1909, and had continued right up to the present day, even though three of them now suffered terribly from hernias.
As they came out onto the stage, the orchestra burst into a bouncy piece of circus music, and the audience clapped wildly. For at least five minutes, Cane calculated, they ran around in a circle, five roly-poly fuckers with matching pencil mustaches, pinching each other on the ass and stealing each other’s hats while making goofy faces. Then the music slowed down, and they stopped and stood in a row with their hands over their hearts and began singing. Their repertoire included a couple of patriotic anthems, a medley of old pastoral favorites, and a rollicking version of “The Old Brown Nag.” Cob poked Cane in the arm. “That’s one of Mr. Fiddler’s favorite songs,” he yelled over the music. Finally, a trumpeter stood up in the orchestra pit and blasted an ear-shattering note, and the monkey, the one and only Mr. Bentley, dropped from the ceiling and began chasing the bozos around in a fucking circle again. Cob stood up in his seat openmouthed to get a better look, and the people behind him started hissing and yelling, and Cane had to threaten to leave in order to get him to settle down. Then Mr. Bentley disappeared for a minute, only to come back out again wearing a butler’s uniform and carrying a white towel over his arm. Grinning maniacally with his big yellow teeth, he walked along the edge of the stage bowing to the audience one minute, then bending over the next to shake his red ass at them. This went on for quite a while until some soldiers up front grew bored and started pelting the chimp with apple cores and bottle caps and pellets of popcorn. No sooner had Cob said, “They better not hurt him,” than a peanut struck the beast in the eye, and Mr. Bentley screamed and leaped over the orchestra pit into the row of army boys. Before Cane could stop him, Cob jumped out of his seat and started down the aisle. By then, several members of the Lewis Family were trying to pull Mr. Bentley off a private before something bad happened, like a repeat of the incident at the fair in Indiana last fall when he bit a man’s ear off. Fortunately, everything was more or less under control by the time Cob got to the front. The orchestra broke into an extended version of “Danny Boy,” and everyone returned to their seats and enjoyed the rest of the performance, which to Cob’s delight was just more of the same, though now, just to be on the safe side, Rufus, the stoutest of the brothers, kept Mr. Bentley restrained with a leash around his furry neck. Still, every time he passed by in front of the group who had insulted him earlier, he gave them a look of pure, unadulterated hatred, and several, not trusting the strap or the fat buffoon holding it, got up and left the building.
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