The One Dollar Rip-Off

by Ralph Dennis

  “He died with good booze in him,” Hump said.

  “Well …” Temple felt closed out. He looked about for his topcoat. I’d tossed it on the foot of my bed. “I guess I ought to be going. I might make an early flight back to Boston.”

  “Good flying,” Hump said.

  I got his topcoat from the bedroom. On the way past my closet, I reached up and got the .38. I returned to the living room, the gun next to my leg, shielded from him.

  Hump helped him with his coat. I switched on the porch light and opened the door. He stepped out first. I followed. His man, Tip, looked up at us, one foot on the bottom step. I’d known he’d be there. Had felt it in my gut.

  Temple angled away, avoiding Tip. On the way past he said, “The business is finished, Tip.”

  “Yes, Mr. Temple.” Eyes locked on me.

  I brought the .38 away from my side. I tapped it against the front of my right leg. “It worth a kneecap, Tip?”

  Tip froze. His hands clenched, turned blue-white.

  “Call your dog, Temple.”

  “Tip.”

  Tip didn’t move at first. His pride was involved and maybe he wanted to believe it was worth a kneecap.

  “Tip.” There was hard command this time.

  Tip backed away. I stood in the doorway while they backed down my drive, until I saw the taillights vanish down the dark road.

  Half rain, half sleet fell during the funeral.

  Marcy wore her basic black without the pearls and cried a lot. Art stood on that side of the grave with her. He wore the same shiny blue suit he’d been wearing for the last ten years. He looked grim and thoughtful.

  Hump and I were on the other side of the grave with the preacher between us. Reverend Houston Mayberry, a Church of Christer, was the only clergyman we could find to read over Bill. He had bad breath and teeth like blue cheese.

  Reverend Mayberry didn’t know anything about Bill and he’d assumed he was a businessman. The way he talked about Bill you’d have thought, by dying, Bill had graduated out of the junior Chamber of Commerce here on earth and into that great Chamber of Commerce in the sky.

  Some minutes of that and Hump leaned over and told the Reverend to skip all that and go on to the Lord’s Prayer.

  Mayberry recited it like a little child who didn’t understand the words. By rote, without thinking.

  I looked up at the sky. Off to the east, above a clump of woods, a single buzzard circled slowly, slowly and then dipped out of sight.

  WIND SPIRIT

  A SHORT STORY

  All things being equal, and this equality being that of disturbed and frightened dreams, it is time to begin. So much garbage in one life and that life only thirty-five years spent. I had not planned to start my autobiography for another twenty-five years. If then. Maybe I’d have waited the full thirty years, for the approaching mellowness, for that one still moment of ripeness before the rot creeps in. No, thunders in, whistles in, explodes upon us. A second consideration: by then, the gall, the bile, might have been thinned down, watered down in the same way that they say the blood of old men is. Waiting, patient, my autobiography might have been charming and whimsical. The reviewers might say: “It brings back an America that doesn’t exist anymore.” In time, looking back from a distance and blinded by the shapes and shadows of memory, I might have come to believe that my life had its share of charm and beauty. Instead of what it is: a life the parts of which one kicks sand over delicately and moves on, never quite sure later exactly where the lump in the sand really is. Whether I was beaten up by six Japanese policemen in Atsugi or by three bull dykes in San Francisco. Only a few scars over my right eye say that it happened somewhere.

  My life to now has been a man’s version of what a southern lady’s life was once supposed to be. Limited, confined in definition. Born, married, had children, and died.

  Born? Check, 1930. In the sandy flat land of South Carolina, in a town called Turbeville. Memories of the violence of both birth and death.

  Married? Check, 1960. After the sullen drive down from Chapel Hill until we were across the state line and in South Carolina, in wedlock locked by a J.P. named Angela Slaughter who, in a voice that would have frightened God, asked if we were some of those Chapel Hill reds who believed in integration and that niggers had souls. Before she would sign the marriage certificate we had to assure her that we weren’t. Because whatever else we were, finally we were more frightened by the accidental meeting of sperm and egg than we were virtuous about equality.

  Had children? Check, one daughter, Evadne. My child in spirit, but never in flesh. The last time I saw Evadne, ugly skinny child with arms and legs knotted like the boles on walking sticks, we were on a beach in Connecticut. Polluted beach. Dead black fish washed up by an oil slick sea. Patterns and swarms of flies. Both walking barefoot on the sand, stepping over the fish. My pale white feet with the sock fuzz still caught under the toenails. Hers bony and tanned, thin and flat as plaster slats. Loving her eye full face, the pale milky blue of marbles. But there was no way of touching her so that she would know and no words that could, with a running start, leap the gap. So that, together, as if by a signal that neither of us had given or had seen, we turned and walked quickly back down the beach to where the car was parked. Disgust and shame, I like to think, in the both of us.

  But maybe not in her: perhaps relief instead. Squinting into the overcast sky, still and patient while I brushed the sand from her feet with my handkerchief. Evadne was a’polite child to the last. “Come and see me again. Daddy,” she said. And I, polite also, said that I would … soon. A lie between us that calmed the fear we might meet again. That was a year ago, a bit longer, and I have not seen her. Nor does she, I expect, lean on her window sill and wait. Instead, if she leans at her window at all, it is to blow her liquid breath against the cold panes and cloud out any possibility that she will see me.

  Divorced? Check, 1964. Not a part of the southern lady’s life, but a part of mine. Knowing each other too well, and boredom with what we knew. The chancre in that special rose.

  Died? Left blank, not yet. But sometimes I think my whole shabby and discolored life is one prolonged wind sprint toward the grave. (But this is only a heightened sense of melodrama and rhetoric. The other night, parting for the last time from April I said, “All my love before I kick it to death.” Knowing quite well that, if one doesn’t know what the animal is or where it lives, one has a bit of trouble kicking it to death.) No, I do no wind sprints. My tired body does its own kind of hobbling on. My teeth are bad … in the last two or three months I’ve noticed they seem to be loosening, maybe even getting out of line so the uppers and lowers don’t match anymore. My hair, almost gone, is grown long on the sides and combed across to cover the bare dome center. The small blood vessels in my face appear to be exploding even as I stand in front of the mirror shaving.

  The real problem is genitalia. Oh, not that I’ve lost the ability to make love. On the contrary. One lady rising shakily from my bed, seen through gritty and swollen eyes of a five o’clock dawn, searching for last night’s drink, said, “I thought all the great lovers had left town.”

  I, for want of a better thing to say, answered, “I just got back to town.”

  “Stay awhile then,” she said, “and welcome back.”

  AndI, polite again, said, “Thank you,” while another part of me said, “Go home.”

  Two nights ago, at April’s apartment, angry at her because she suddenly moved toward the edge of the bed and said that she was hungry … out of anger I made love to her like I think rape must be.

  Violating my whole sense of myself and my sense of her. In the breath guttering, the afterwards, I found that I was crying out of this same anger, out of frustration, out of shame that I had found the rapist inside me. I had to hide it, pushing my face into the pillow and blotting against the pillow case … but perhaps a drop fell on her shoulder. At least, she noticed.

  “1 know why you’re crying.”r />
  I asked why.

  “Because it was so beautiful.”

  Which made me wonder.

  I don’t know what has happened. Something has. Maybe as recently as the last two or three months. A loss of soul, a death of the spirit.

  Or, because words mean nothing, a loss of spirit, a death of then-soul. High and serious terms for this special malaise. I have trouble with words now. I am not a professional writer. I am beyond all hope of that now. In fact, the whole effort to mend my bridges, to protect myself in case the writing came to nothing, has provided me with a good job here at the University. Teaching theater history. “Describe Hanswurst’s costume in detail. What were Goethe’s rules for action? W.B. Yeat’s attitude toward Ibsen and what does it mean?”

  The dissertation started and put aside has yet to be done. The students with their basic understanding of what flattery really is call me Doctor. I do not correct them because it takes time away from the class when other more important matters have to be treated, and, I sometimes think, it would be unkind to embarrass them. The notes on the sociological aspects of medieval French drama fade in my carefully kept and carefully avoided filing cabinet. Until the sap and energy rise again.

  April. Nymph. Between eighteen and nineteen years old. Strange to picture myself beside her pale blonde image. Last Saturday, at the football game with her, pushing past knees toward our seats, I heard one of the co-eds we passed say, “He must be her father.” I looked at April to see if she’d heard and found that she was blushing.

  I guess I am her father, both of us loving the scent of ritual incest.

  The green rank scent of it. Acting out in gesture and a language neither of us understands the closet drama in which the surface is more important than the depths. Once, trying to explain this to her, I said that I was writing my own Poetics. “The modem tragic hero is a man committed to something which he knows in his own heart to be absurd.”

  “What is absurd?” she asked. Incest and oatmeal cookies.

  After a moment: “You haven’t answered me.” I know. “I guess you’re not going to answer me.”

  Pouting. A muscle coils in her back. Ending in the rigid little toe of her left foot. On the side of which there is the centerless pit of a corn.

  Words bubble, child, but there is no answer.

  “Sometimes I don’t think you appreciate my intelligence.”

  “It is your mind I love most,” I say.

  The muscle uncoils and the com disappears under the twisted edge of the sheet.

  “Daddy you been on my mind,” April whispers. A smile which I answer. Then, dully, outside my window, the sharp crack of acorns falling upon unraked leaves. The crack of ice or sleet.

  “Child …” I say, now that she is under my wing, her nose wrinkling against the gracing hair of my chest … “Child, winter is not only coming. It is here.”

  April blows rings of hot wet air against my chest. “It’ll be alright. Daddy.” And between the even, smooth, matching teeth she clamps one of the gray hairs and jerking back her head tears it out.

  The next morning, an hour before my first class, as I stepped into the shower I noticed the pitpoint cake of blood where the hair had been. During the shower the cake dissolved, revealing the pit open and dark, without a bottom.

  Afternoon now. Winter light afternoon. Somewhere, somewhere between Harry’s and The Tempo, with a gray hair clutched between her teeth like a flower, April has decided to find herself a young man. Daddies are all-right, but young men reflect like windows and brightly polished sports cars. Done, enough.

  And let him kick it to death if he can find it.

  Winter light afternoon. The slow rain has not stopped, but has frozen into a wall. From my window, from my office high above, I watch students walk through the wall. It seems much easier than it probably is.

  This short story was originally published in the Spring 1967 issue of the literary magazine Lillabulero: Being a Periodical of Literature and the Arts, which was edited by Russell Banks.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ralph Dennis isn’t a household name … but he should be. He is widely considered among crime writers as a master of the genre, denied the recognition he deserved because his twelve Hardman books, which are beloved and highly sought-after collectables now, were poorly packaged in the 1970s by Popular Library as a cheap men’s action-adventure paperbacks with numbered titles.

  Even so, some top critics saw past the cheesy covers and noticed that he was producing work as good as John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross MacDonald.

  The New York Times praised the Hardman novels for “expert writing, plotting, and an unusual degree of sensitivity. Dennis has mastered the genre and supplied top entertainment.” The Philadelphia Daily News proclaimed Hardman “the best series around, but they’ve got such terrible covers …”

  Unfortunately, Popular Library didn’t take the hint and continued to present the series like hack work, dooming the novels to a short shelf-life and obscurity … except among generations of crime writers, like novelist Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap & Leonard series) and screenwriter Shane Black (the Lethal Weapon movies), who’ve kept Dennis’ legacy alive through word-of-mouth and by acknowledging his influence on their stellar work.

  Ralph Dennis wrote three other novels that were published outside of the Hardman series but he wasn’t able to reach the wide audience, or gain the critical acclaim, that he deserved during his lifetime.

  He was born in 1931 in Sumter, South Carolina, and received a masters degree from University of North Carolina, where he later taught film and television writing after serving a stint in the Navy. At the time of his death in 1988, he was working at a bookstore in Atlanta and had a file cabinet full of unpublished novels.

  Brash Books will be releasing the entire Hardman series, his three other published novels, and his long-lost manuscripts.