GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES

by Parris Afton Bonds

  Behind him, the Gypsy urchin said, “Uhhh, Duke.”

  He sighed. “Charlotte, this is S&S’s cook, Romy Sonnenschein. You remember, Rabbi Hickman’s Jewish Relief Program I told you about.” While it was not a full disclosure, he felt guilty, as if he were actually lying to Charlotte. “Romy’s from . . . well, all over, but – ”

  “I’m Irish, mainly,” she said, stepping forward, her chin lifted with great dignity. “The Potato Famine left me family’s education a little spotty, ye understand, and I was hoping – ”

  “The Potato Famine happened nearly a century ago,” Charlotte said, replacing her glasses on the bridge of her patrician nose with a puzzled look directed at Romy.

  “Aye, that it did,” she said, never skipping a beat, “but for me family tis like yesterday. So, tis hoping I am that yuir library has some easy reading books that can be borrowed.”

  He stared down at her. “Your family?”

  But she was already fingering the shelf of titles on the row nearest Charlotte’s desk.

  “We can do that,” Charlotte assured quietly. Her fingertips clumped atop the desk blotter, she pushed upright her medium tall frame with its ample curvatures, reminding him that he had been too long without the feminine touch. “But you will need to fill out a library card, Romy.”

  The girl looked over her shoulder from another shelf she was perusing. “Can we just put it on his card?” She nodded up at him.

  Instantly Charlotte perceived the root of the problem. Her response was a gentle smile. “But, of course.”

  Lugging the load of library books back to the pickup, he noticed Romy was unusually quiet. “So, is your mercurial mind busy matchmaking for Charlotte and me?” That boyish part of him that still believed in his mother’s fairy tales wanted to believe this wrath of a waif could indeed cast some magical spell over stark reality.

  And the stark reality was Charlotte was freshly widowed. She had earned a college degree. She was a city girl now. With an eight-year-old daughter, Clara. And plenty of other dudes calling upon her.

  “Let me look,” Romy said, climbing into the passenger’s side of his rusty green Ford. Almost half-heartedly it seemed to him, she opened her purse and withdrew the pack of cards. Restacking the books to form a table between them, she passed him the playing cards, saying, “Shuffle and cut into three piles.”

  Thank God, the nearest pedestrians were not tall enough to peer into the parked pickup. Feeling like the village idiot, he hastily shuffled and cut the deck.

  One by one, she turned over the piles, then began distributing the cards in a rainbow pattern. As if she actually believed in what she was doing.

  While she studied the cards for what seemed an inordinately long time, car horns honked, kids shouted, and trolley car bells clanged. At last, she turned those green peepers up at him. “’To yuir own self remain true’”

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded emphatically.

  “What the shit does that mean?”

  She lifted bony shoulders. “Ye’re wanting a home, not a house. The proper wife for yuirself. Ye know, respectable like. And bairns. All that – tis yuirs for the choosing. But beware of what ye choose.”

  Somehow, she had inveigled him into the art of her Gypsy con game. “I feel like a dupe,” he grumbled.

  Her laughter was pure trouble. So was her suggestion, once they reached the gravelly road that turned off the two-lane highway into the seven-mile stretch of S&S ranchland. “Teach me to drive, Duke.”

  He looked askance at her. “No.” If he wasn’t firm handed, this smidgen of society’s swindlers would take over S&S ranch life.

  Her grin perched her freckles higher on her cheeks. “Think on it. The time I could save ye running yuir errands. Picking up egg mash at the feed store. Dropping off the salt licks in the pastures. Returning yuir library books.” This last with a smirk.

  “And what mischief you could manufacture – like driving off with my pickup and never coming back.”

  Her smile widened. “You’d want me back?”

  “I want you like I want a bullet between my eyes.”

  She ignored that. “What harm could come from teaching me to drive? Ye know, in case of emergency. Ye’d still be the Keeper of the Keys.”

  “No. Absolutely, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” he said patiently, as if explaining arithmetic to a child, “my answer is not only based on your incompetence at everything in general, but also on principle. Deep in the belly of my pickup resides a bond between it and me. Like the bond forged over time between man and horse. The synchronization of the clutch and the brake. The smooth shifting between the gears. The rev of the engine like a big cat purring. This is something you, a female, could never understand,” he finished and swung down from the pickup.

  “Ye Devil’s dung. Do ye seriously think yuir precious Charlotte walks to work?”

  He could feel her blistering gaze between his shoulder blades. But when he went to open the barbed wire gate, he heard the click of the ignition switch. He looked over his shoulder. She had slid behind the wheel.

  He barely managed to leap into the cab’s passenger side as the pickup flashed past, before her hand was latching onto the stick’s knob. She shifted with a grinding that compressed every disk in his backbone.

  “Shit!” he growled, reaching for the key.

  The old Ford stalled out, and he sighed with relief. “I swear I’m going to whup your crazy ass when we get back to the ranch house!”

  All too quickly, she pumped the pedal and clutch again, and the pickup lurched into new-found freedom. With her right hand, she fought off his attempt to turn off the engine. “Giddy up, little doggie,” she yipped.

  Down the road, with a whoop of laughter she hurtled his pickup, yanking the fence gate along with it.

  Only as the ranch house came into view, did she sober up. “How do I stop?” she yelled.

  His own laughter fought with fury. He leaned past her flailing arm and flipped the switch. The pickup jolted to a bucking halt.

  Breathing rapidly, she slowly and most reluctantly turned her eyes, widened in apprehension, up at him.

  Fury won. With that, his arm shot out to haul her tail-over-teakettle, face down across his nearest knee. Whack after resounding whack he delivered on that small rear.

  “Yeoowwl,” she wailed. Beneath his well-placed smacks, she squirmed like a hog-tied calf.

  He could not remember feeling such a release of curdled frustration, such pure satisfaction, almost a sensual pleasure, in days, maybe months, even. Hell, maybe years.

  But enough was enough. “Gather your things,” he said, shoving her upright, “it’s back to Austin we’re going.”

  § § §

  Gideon was sorting through a pile of constituents’ slush mail that Johnson had relegated to him. His job was to respond to them. Some were absolutely nutty.

  Honorable Lyndon B. Johnson ~

  RESIST THE NAZI TAKEOVER!!!! STRING UP THE COLLABORATORS.

  Sincerely,

  Huckleberry Finn

  But, then, when Gideon glanced up and saw that crooked Gypsy grin, he knew he was just as nutty.

  Irina’s purloined purse in her hand, there stood Romy, wearing someone else’s scuffed, two-toned saddle-oxfords. Behind her towered the darkly angry Duke McClellan. On his shoulder, he toted the cardboard crate from the Jewish Relief Program.

  Gideon could feel his scar twitching. He had a good idea what was on the rancher’s mind. To renege on the National Youth Association program and rid himself of a street chiseler with no impulse control.

  This did not bode well. If Romy raised a stink with the press, and that she very well could, given her crafty gift of Gypsy ensorcellment, it might mean the disclosure of Johnson’s clandestine Operation Texas – and would mean all Jewish refugees who were living, and working, illegally in the United States, himself included, would be deported.

  Nevertheless,
he stood and gave the pair his attorney’s urbane smile. “Romy – McClellan – wonderful to see you both. How do I come to be so graced by your visit today?” As if he had no interpersonal savvy.

  “I want to see Johnson.”

  “But, of course.” Johnson, however, was in Washington on Capitol Hill. “What is the purpose of your call, may I ask?”

  “I am fed up with this under-the-table scheme of his – hiding Jewish refugees –at the taxpayers’ and my expense.”

  “Your expense?” he temporized.

  McClellan looked at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and said, “Where do you want me to start, Goldman? How about today? She commandeered my pickup and took out my fence gate.”

  Hell, that was reason enough. “But your agreement was with the rabbi, was it not?” he pointed out in a most reasonable tone. “To take on Romy as your cook?”

  In a powder keg warning voice, the rancher volleyed back, “I don’t care who is responsible, but I don’t want to be responsible for this refugee.”

  Hmmm. How to buy time to diffuse this issue? “Romy, what do you want?”

  That gap-toothed, thoroughly irritating grin. “I want to see ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’.”

  To keep from bursting into laughing, he scrubbed his scar. “Uhhh, that might not be a bad idea, since Representative Johnson is not in at the moment.” Not in for several days, actually. “It’s lunch time. Why don’t we take in a moving picture? By that time, in a couple of hours or so, maybe Johnson will be available.”

  “I don’t have a couple of hours to waste,” McClellan growled. “I’ve the last of the season’s hay still to be baled and – ”

  “But it’s not wasted if ye ask the librarian – Charlotte, isna that her name – to accompany us,” Romy said with a smug smile. “After all, tis courtin’ ye want to be, aye?”

  The girl, too, was wisely buying time. What a finagler. And this librarian? Charlotte?

  That next two hours, spent in the Paramount Theatre, only blocks away from the Capitol and the library, with himself seated next to Romy, and Duke next to Charlotte, had to be the most entertainment Gideon had experienced since . . . well, since the euphoria of pulling off the Loo card heist at the Kempinski, and that had also been at the girl’s instigation.

  The animated Grimm’s musical fairy tale had the audience watching the screen in awe-struck fascination – while he watched with fascination his companions’ faces.

  Charlotte’s eyeglasses deflected whatever expression might have been glimpsed in her eyes, but her lips were curved with pure pleasure. She was leaning into the brunt of McClellan’s shoulder, which may have accounted for much of her obvious pleasure.

  Stetson in his lap, long legs splayed, McClellan was oblivious to the females on either side of him as he took in the fairy tale flickering on the screen. And his chain-sawed features had eased up from their cabled ‘don’t mess with me’ warning of earlier.

  However, it was Romy’s expression that most entertained Gideon. Her mobile features were in constant play, rivaling those of Snow White’s, the wicked Queen’s, and the seven dwarfs’ combined.

  With the film credits rolling and the need to continue to stall for cooling-off time for McClellan, Gideon suggested the soda fountain at Charlie’s Café. “Surely, by then Johnson will have returned to his office.”

  The waitress Adelle was still casting calf eyes at the rancher. He gave her a friendly wink but the scornful look he cast Romy, as she slid beside Gideon into the booth, was hardly friendly. Plainly, he was still determined on his course to rid himself of her.

  After orders were placed, Gideon said, “This matter of exchanging Romy here for another cook could well land you with someone worse, McClellan.”

  Beside Gideon, Romy stiffened and her eyes narrowed at him. The warm air that was burnt-up grease turned suddenly stale and frigid.

  “A worse employee,” he amended.

  McClellan shifted his tall and rangy frame to lounge against the booth wall, his arm draped casually over Charlotte’s backrest. “Your little con artist, Goldman, could learn a thing or two about honest work from those seven dwarfs with their merry ‘Ho-ho, it’s off to work we go.’”

  She beamed, “But Duke, t’was the dwarfs who kept the messy house. And the lovely intruder who straightened it, aye?”

  “You call ‘straightening’ house what you do?”

  “Besides,” she continued, this time with a pouting ire, “not all dwarfs are merr – ”

  Desperate, Gideon cut her off before she could blurt something damaging about Morris Keller’s former operations. “She has a point, McClellan. Give her a second chance, why don’t you?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?” Charlotte asked softly.

  § § §

  The split leather sofa in Duke’s office, where he slept nights, beckoned him from his rathole of a desk. Of course, tomorrow morning, like most mornings, he would awake with every muscle aching, especially his lower back, where the colliding cushions sagged beneath his weight.

  Rubbing his eyelids, he felt even their muscles ached.

  Ignoring his exhaustion, he returned his attention to the S&S ledger and its mocking numbers. While it had looked like the swarms of grasshoppers would carry off the ranch and the cows with it, he had held on. When over the last few years of drought and dust, many ranchers and farmers had simply walked away, he had continued to battle tooth and nail to keep the S&S afloat.

  Yes, as a kid, he had walked away.

  Never again. He would prove he was better than his old man. Yet before the Great War’s violence, with its exploding shell that thereafter mangled his father’s personality, the old man had been, while not lovable, at least, not so mean. Duke often wondered if he could, indeed, claim to be much better than his pa those last few years.

  That morning in the pickup, he had let his temper get the best of him with that shrew of a sorceress the good rabbi had saddled him with.

  Beyond the desk’s yellow pool of lamp light, something drew his attention. But, of course, it would be she, standing barefoot at the ajar office door. She was worse than a returning plague of grasshoppers. He stifled a groan. “Yeah?”

  Hands behind her back, she glided as silent as a nun half way into the small room to stand just beyond the pale of lamp light. She wore only his old shirt and, of course, the kerchief that constrained her crazy curls. “Tis sorry I am about the gate.”

  What a fool he was, giving her a second chance at Charlotte and Goldman’s beseeching. “Oh, I’ll take the cost I’m out to replace the gate from your pay.”

  She frowned and with one hand rubbed her backside. “Ye already took it out of me hide.”

  “Is that what this midnight visitation is about?” Damn’t, she was his supernatural raven’s ‘Nevermore.’ “Well, you can take your complaint to the NYA and yourself with it, for all I care.”

  Her other hand came forward to produce a length of material that looked suspiciously like one of the barn’s printed feed sacks. “Tis curtains – curtains I stitched for the kitchen.”

  He scrubbed his beard-stubbled jaw. “So, this is a peace offering?” Although no expression of contrition inhibited her lively features.

  She looked affronted. “Peace offering? Nay. This is in trade for those reading and writing lessons we agreed upon.”

  His hand rubbed his mouth to hide its mustache’s twitch. The Gypsy girl was gutsy in a refreshing way, he’d give her that.

  He pushed away from the desk and crossed to the couch’s end table, this one an old cantaloupe crate. Sorting through its stack of library books, he found one Charlotte had recommended for Romy, Charlotte’s Web. Had Charlotte been hoping to make a subtle point?

  Slouching down onto the couch, he said, “Let’s get this over with.”

  Grinning, Romy padded the intervening distance to plop beside him.

  He flipped to the first page. “I’ll
read a page. Then you read it back to me, sounding out what words you can.”

  Drawing her legs under her and curling up like a kitten against him, she nodded enthusiastically. She smelled subtly of warmed vanilla and cinnamon and honeysuckle.

  With deliberated pauses, he read the opening sentence, underscoring each word with callused fingertip. “’Where’s Papa going with that ax? said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.’”

  Then Romy read the same sentence, rather well, but struggled with the last word, breakfast.

  He got no further than Fern’s, “’You mean kill it? Just because it’s smaller than the others?’”

  Romy slammed the book on his finger. “I dunna like this book.” Her freckles had paled, and her voice was scored.

  Interesting, her response.

  All right. He reached for The Sword in the Stone, another suggestion from Charlotte’s list. “My favorite,” he murmured. Draping an arm across the back of the couch, he began to read again, but she stopped him midsentence.

  “Miss Charlotte knows ye – knows yuir tastes right well?”

  “Hell, Sunshine, we’ve know each other since we weren’t much more than tadpoles.”

  She paused to consider this. “She’d make ye a good wife, Duke.”

  “Your opinion,” he joked, bemused by her upturned face, with its dusting of freckles, “or your fortune telling cards?”

  At this, she grinned. “Both.”

  “And yourself?” Although to him she seemed not much more than a tyke, she was certainly of marriageable age. And then there were the times she seemed more a siren. And that he did not want to give time or thought to. “Are you hoping to walk down the aisle one day?”

  Her expression turned deadly serious. “Och, no! Me mum and da, their marriage was such a blight, they killed each other. Never, never will I be so balmy over some chap as to sell me soul in marriage.”