Tar Heel Dead

by Sarah R. Shaber

  But there was the rub. The end of summer did come. On the weekend after Labor Day, the beach joints began to empty. By October they were closed for the season. The summer girls were back to fulltime classes and frat parties at the boys’ schools. Beach weekends at Allen’s gave way to football weekends a long way inland and sorority balls that didn’t include a loan officer some of the sisters had met at the beach.

  In June, July, and August he usually left the office early on Fridays. On that gray Friday in October he had no reason to leave when closing time finally dragged itself to his door. Not that he could fail to notice closing time. His secretary, Miss Just-call-me-Sherry Bailey, would see to that.

  She pecked on the glass that partly separated Allen’s cubicle from the rest of the loan office and called to him as though he were on the other side of a wide chasm instead of behind a three-foot desk.

  “Oh, Allen,” she said, tapping her watch.

  He had never told her to call him by his first name. That had been her own idea.

  She half closed her eyes in what he took to be an unconscious imitation of a Hollywood seduction. “Mother’s visiting her sister in Greenville this weekend, so you’d be welcome to keep me company for supper, or—” she paused and blinked at him “—whatever.”

  Thirty-nine if she’s a day, Allen thought, and she knows as much about being a woman as I do about being an antelope. This is her idea of how to seduce her handsome young boss.

  “No, thanks,” he said aloud, barely lifting his eyes from the half-memorized file on his desk. “I’ve got plans.”

  “Well, you know the way if your plans should change. Toodle-oo,” she called as she waved from the door.

  Toodle-oo, Allen thought. Nobody says toodle-oo, not even in the movies. Oh well, I said I had plans for the weekend. What are they?

  “I plan,” he said aloud to the empty office, “to drink beer and see if I can pick up Jenny.”

  Jenny was the only barmaid left in town worth picking up. She worked in the only bar left in town worth drinking in. All the beer joints and beachfront motels had closed, but the Holiday Inn remained open through the winter, serving Sunday dinner to North Carolina farmers and hardware merchants and providing lodging to traveling salesmen and occasional tourists, tiring early on their way to or from the year-round beaches farther south. The inn featured what passed for a lounge in North Carolina in the 1960s—a dimly lit room off the restaurant where you could buy beer or a glass of wine but not a mixed drink. The lounge, in turn, featured Jenny.

  Jenny was Allen’s age, more or less. She came from a farm community a hundred miles inland, and as far as Allen knew, she had never been any farther from home than she was now. He estimated her I.Q. at 90 percent of her bust measurement. She was loud, over-painted, and not the sort of girl Allen’s mother would have wanted him to bring home. But Allen wasn’t planning to take her home, just back to the beach cottage as he had done a couple of other times since Labor Day when he couldn’t find anybody better and she wasn’t already taken by some salesman or trucker.

  He hurried through the lobby, barely slowing at a greeting from Clarence, the night clerk-manager-franchisee of the inn, and on into the lounge. He had hoped and half expected to find Jenny alone. Not only was it too early for most of the regulars, but there was a high school football game that evening. The contest held no appeal for Allen, but it would draw most of the locals away from any other form of entertainment. As his eyes grew accustomed to the near darkness, however, he saw Jenny seated with two strangers at a table near the far end of the bar.

  Allen had never learned whether Clarence didn’t mind his lounge waitress’s sitting with the customers or whether Jenny just didn’t care if he did mind. Either way, that’s what she was often doing when she wasn’t actively serving customers.

  “Come on over, Al,” she called to him with her usual siren volume.

  Allen saw one of the customers motioning to her to be quiet.

  A hopeless task, he thought as he started toward them. If the man didn’t want him to come over, Allen figured, he must be trying to pick Jenny up himself. All the more reason to get over there and cut him out early.

  Jenny was sitting sideways to the door where she could see any arriving customers. The man who had been motioning sat to her left, facing Allen as he approached the table. He was huge, obese, and now folded his hands across his enormous belly.

  He looks, Allen thought, like a big fat frog.

  Allen greeted Jenny with a peck on the cheek and nodded to the fat man.

  “I’m Allen,” he said. “Allen Wade.”

  The frog man took Allen’s extended hand in a big soft mitt and said in a surprisingly high, squeaky voice, “Webb Wickersham’s the name. Some folks call me Wide Webb, but I don’t know why. This here is Billy Webb. His last name’s the same as my first because we’re related. He’s my step-neighbor-in-law.”

  The big man laughed harder at his own joke than anyone else did. Billy Webb, who looked to Allen like a typical lanky redneck, took the loan officer’s hand in a corn-grinder handshake like a country politician’s.

  “Hey, y’all,” said Jenny as Allen sat down. “Maybe y’all ought to talk to Al. He’s in the money-lending business.”

  “Who needs money?” Allen asked of no one in particular.

  Wickersham forced his wide mouth into an unconvincing smile, almost closing his eyes with the rolls of fat he pushed up his cheeks.

  “Jenny, you talk too much,” he said. “Get Allen a beer on me. And bring me and ol’ Billy another round.”

  Jenny hopped up to fill the order. Allen gave her a familiar pat on the bottom to establish his territoriality against the two men he now saw as most inferior rivals. He was sure she’d prefer him to either of these homely fossils.

  “Kitchen open?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “But they ain’t doing no business either. They’ll sell a bunch of hamburgers and french fries later on when the game lets out, but we won’t do no good in the lounge all night. About all the regulars but you got families, and they’ll be with them for the game instead of out drinking beer.”

  “I didn’t want a local business report,” said Allen. “I just need some supper. Bring me a sandwich platter of some kind.”

  Jenny slipped around behind the bar, yelled “Cheeseburger and fries” through an order window into the kitchen, and trotted back to the table with three bottles of beer on a small plastic tray.

  As she served them, she asked Wickersham, “Why’d you want me to shut up? You said you needed $2,500 to make $10,000 in a week. Allen’s a loan office manager. Maybe he can loan you the money.”

  The big man laid his head back and sucked deeply on his beer, his eyes half closed. Foam flecked his grizzled mustache.

  It’s not a frog he looks like, Allen thought, it’s a bull walrus enjoying himself in a rainstorm. I wonder if walruses have shaggy gray manes like his.

  At last the man set his beer down and responded to Jenny’s question.

  “My dear child, not every business can deal with every other business. Now I think the time has come to talk of other things.”

  “That’s right,” said Billy Webb. “This guy might be a police.”

  “Al ain’t no po-lice,” said Jenny. “He don’t even like po-lice. Least he don’t when they drive up to his little beach place when we’re skinny-dipping.” She giggled and patted Allen’s cheek.

  “That don’t matter none,” said Billy. “We don’t need him hearing about our business.”

  “Now, now, children,” said Wickersham. “Let’s just all forget the subject of mine and Billy’s finances and talk about something more pleasant, like having a tooth pulled or perhaps the war in Vietnam.”

  Again he laughed heartily at his own joke and steered the conversation to country music, sending Jenny to the jukebox for a quarter’s worth of his favorite selections.

  They spent the next two hours chatting about car racing, state poli
tics, television shows—topics that would not normally have held Allen at the table for twenty minutes. But he had become like a housecat outside a closed door—the more they wanted to shut him out of their business, the more he wanted in. He bought them round after round of beer, trying to pace himself at one beer to two each for the others.

  The beer seemed to have no more effect on Wickersham than on the bottles he drank it from, but Billy Webb’s eyes grew ever more bleary, his speech ever more slurred. At last, when Wickersham left for the men’s room, Allen saw his chance. He sent Jenny to the jukebox with a handful of change and told her to pick the six songs she liked best. That should give him plenty of time. She couldn’t decide what day it was in less than twenty minutes.

  “What was it you guys were needing that money for?” he asked softly as the first record started.

  His conspiratorial tone seemed to work.

  “To buy a truck,” Billy whispered back.

  “A truck?” said Allen. “What’s the big secret about a truck?”

  “It ain’t the truck that’s the secret,” said Billy. “It’s what we’re going to haul in it.”

  “What are you going to haul?”

  “We was gonna haul moonshine,” answered Billy. “We got a still. We got a load made. But we ain’t got a truck. Webb’s got this friend named Johnson that was going to front us the money, but he just up and disappeared. We got a $10,000 buyer all lined up, but we ain’t got no way to get the load out to him, and a moonshine buyer don’t never front you nothing.”

  At that a squeaky voice behind Allen said, “Billy Webb, have you never learned that a wise stillhand should be seen and not heard?”

  Wide Webb Wickersham had returned. He eased his bulk onto the little tavern chair.

  “Why should he be seen and not heard?” asked Jenny, who had just finished punching in her selections.

  “Because Billy just told this lad too much, my dear,” the wide man answered. “Well, at least now Allen knows why he doesn’t really want to lend us any money. Little lads from loan offices help schoolteachers buy Chevrolets. They don’t help bad men buy booze buggies. Right, Jenny?”

  He patted Jenny’s thigh as he spoke. She giggled, looked at Allen, and giggled again.

  Allen felt his face grow warm. Everything about Webb Wicker-sham was beginning to bother him, from the way he called Allen “lad” to the way he kept his big soft hand on Jenny’s thigh after his first pat.

  “I wouldn’t have to write it up as a truck,” he snapped. “I could say Jenny’s buying a Chevrolet.”

  “And just what would you show the company for title papers on that Chevrolet?” Wickersham asked.

  Allen couldn’t respond. To his surprise, Billy could.

  “I had a cousin that worked in a bank over in Raleigh,” said the lanky bootlegger. “He used to get money to gamble with out of the bank. He took a bill of sale and what he called—I think—a contract for a title or something like that.”

  “Was it a contract to furnish title?” Allen asked.

  “That sounds right,” said Billy. “And he’d put down that the car was from Alabama on account of he said that wasn’t a title state.”

  “It’s still not,” said Allen.

  “Anyway,” Billy went on, “if anybody in the bank was to check behind him, that held them off for a month or so, and if he was winning he’d pay off the loan, and if he was losing he’d roll it over.”

  “What does that mean, ‘roll it over’?” Jenny asked.

  “He’d write another one up the same way and use it to pay off the old one,” said Billy. “Maybe Allen could do that, or maybe he’s got some money of his own he could throw in with us.”

  Wickersham shook his massive head. “No, he doesn’t, and he doesn’t want to make any phony loans and put up the company’s money either. He’s the rabbit kind.”

  “What do you mean, Al’s the rabbit kind?” asked Jenny.

  “There’s two kinds of people,” said the fat man. “There’s the kind that live in holes like rabbits. That kind finds a quiet little job in a quaint little town. They stay out of everybody’s way, and sooner or later they get to be a deacon in the church. And later on they die and they’re buried by their grandchildren.

  “Then there’s the kind that weren’t made to live in holes—the kind that runs with the foxes, feasts on the hare, flees from the hound. Me and old Billy are the fox kind. Maybe you too, Jenny. You look like a vixen.”

  As he said her name, he slid his hand up her thigh and patted her fanny under her little black cocktail-waitress skirt.

  That did it!

  I won’t run, Allen thought, because I won’t have to. But I will have this one feast.

  “I can get your damned $2,500,” he said.

  Wickersham shook his head again. “No, my boy, I can’t let you do that. I bet that’s more than you make in three months, isn’t it? You can’t afford to take that kind of risk.”

  “Never mind what I make,” fumed Allen, who wouldn’t make $2,500 in four months. “What about the risk you and Billy take?”

  “We thrive on risk,” said Wickersham. “You stick with the Chevrolets.”

  His hand was still on Jenny’s bottom. He patted again, then squeezed. Jenny looked at Allen and giggled again.

  “You worry about your risk, and I’ll worry about mine,” Allen stormed at the big man. “I’ll get you your damned money, but I’ll have to have it back with carrying charges, plus I want a third of the profit.”

  Wickersham stared at him for several seconds, then turned and looked at Billy. Billy nodded.

  Wickersham turned back to Allen. “By God, you’re serious, aren’t you? Well, if you’re fool enough to give $2,500 to a couple of rascals to run illegal alcohol, we’re fools enough to take it. Let’s shake on it.”

  They shook hands all around and agreed to meet at the lounge early Monday evening when Allen could bring the money. At closing time Jenny left with Allen, but she didn’t help his ego much when he heard her tell Wide Webb that she would get in trouble with Clarence if he caught her going to a motel guest’s room.

  The next morning Allen rolled Jenny out of bed well before noon, her usual Saturday starting time, and drove her down to his office. He pulled an old file to find a Chevrolet vehicle identification number. He changed a couple of digits and typed out the paperwork for a used car loan in Jenny’s name in the gross amount of $2,640 with $2,500 net to borrower. He dated the check for the following Monday and instructed Jenny about when and where they would meet to cash it.

  Jenny had to work Saturday night, the busiest time at the lounge. Allen hung around until closing time and took her back to his place again. He tried to persuade her to stay over Sunday. She wasn’t working that night. But she insisted on going “up country” to see her parents. So the Sabbath passed more slowly for Allen than even his October weekdays.

  He went to the lounge, but under local blue laws he couldn’t even buy a beer on Sunday. He just sipped soda, watched a dull football game between two teams he didn’t care about, and tried to avoid talking to the two other stranded customers and the gray-haired waitress who worked there on Jenny’s days off.

  Finally Monday came. As he had instructed her, Jenny met him at ten o’clock at the bank where his employer maintained its accounts.

  “Joe,” he told the branch manager, “Jenny’s making a private purchase of a Chevy from a guy in Alabama, and he won’t take a check. Can you cash her out?”

  Joe could and did. After Allen and Jenny left the bank, he slid the money into his pocket and went back to his office, dreading the rest of the day. He handed Sherry the paperwork on the Chevrolet loan and gave her the same story he had given Joe the banker.

  Processing the loan took all of twenty minutes and left a long, empty day ahead. Unfortunately Sherry tried to fill it for him, sitting in his office most of the time with her micro-miniskirt halfway up her stomach and the slack white flesh of her inner thighs shining at
him like dead fish bellies. She prattled on endlessly, spouting vague generalities about the wild weekend she had spent with her mother gone, even though he was sure she hadn’t shared her bed with anything more interesting than a paperback novel and a cat.

  At last it was five o’clock. For the first time since Labor Day, Allen beat Sherry out of the office. He was at the Holiday Inn by 5:15. He rushed through the lobby. Clarence looked up from a mystery magazine as he passed.

  “Don’t get mixed up with Webb Wickersham,” called the innkeeper. “He’s bad news, Allen. He’s been coming around here off and on for fifteen or twenty years, sometimes spending big bucks, and he ain’t had an honest job the whole time. I saw you with him and his cousin or whatever he is the other night, and they’re back in here now asking for you. Whatever they’re up to, boy, it’s bad business. Listen to me now. Stay away from them.”

  Clarence couldn’t have known it, but he had just removed Allen’s last bit of fear that Wickersham might take his money and never be seen again. If he had been coming around for fifteen years, he wouldn’t leave for $2,500. Besides, he hadn’t wanted Allen to put up the money in the first place.

  “Don’t worry, Clarence. I can take care of myself,” he called over his shoulder.

  But he thought, let your grandchildren bury you, rabbit; this time, I’m feasting with the foxes.

  Wickersham and Billy Webb were seated at the same table as before. Jenny stood beside Wickersham’s chair with her tray dangling at her side. It was early on the slowest night of the week, and there were no other customers in the lounge. Allen joined them and handed the money openly to Wickersham. The big bootlegger pocketed it without counting it.

  “We’ll meet you back here on Sunday to settle up,” he told Allen as he got up to leave.