One-Eyed Jacks

by Brad Smith

  Hands held out, Wilson began to back away from them. “Hey, I know how it is,” he said. “Guys don’t like to have their women fucked by their betters.”

  And Tommy decided then. Mac had his hand on his arm, but Tommy had decided and he just smiled. He was in no particular hurry.

  “Let’s have another,” Mac was saying.

  “Sure, Mac.”

  “What can I say?” Mac asked. “The kid’s a peckerhead.”

  In his room at the Jasper, T-Bone Pike sat in a chair by the open window and tried to read the Bible so kindly left for him by the Gideons. He couldn’t concentrate though. His mind kept going to Lee Charles. He wished that Tommy would show, he wished that Herm Bell would show. He wished he knew what was going on.

  During anxious moments in the past he’d managed to calm himself by reading favourite passages from the good book. Even that wouldn’t work tonight. Finally, he decided to walk over to the hotel on Isabella, just to have a look around. He took one last glance at the open Bible as he laid it on the chair.

  — blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth —

  “Could be they got their work cut out tonight,” T-Bone said and he left the room.

  When he reached the hotel, he could see the night clerk inside, seated at the front desk, reading a newspaper. T-Bone kept walking. He went into the alley past the hotel and walked around to the back. He climbed onto a loading dock there. The back door was open and he stepped into a cluttered storage room. There were stairs to the left, an aged elevator to the right. A single dim bulb overhead.

  T-Bone stepped forward and slipped on the floor, almost fell. He saw that the planking was covered with blood and that it came from the elevator.

  Herm Bell was inside, his back propped against the wall, his eyes half open, his right hand clutching his stomach.

  “Mr. Bell!” T-Bone said. “Oh lawdy, oh lawdy....”

  He rushed into the elevator, skidding wildly on the bloody floor; T-Bone had never seen so much blood. Not even in the ring. Not even in Jacksonville.

  “Oh, Mr. Bell. What they do to you?”

  Herm’s eyes flickered. “Hey, T-Bone. Hey.”

  His voice was cracked. He grimaced when he spoke and T-Bone saw at once that his gums were white. T-Bone put any thought of running for a doctor out of his mind. He knelt on the floor beside Herm, put his arm on Herm’s shoulder.

  “Hey T-Bone, you’re here.”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Bell.”

  “Had a little... run in with Tony Broad. I duked him, T-Bone.”

  “Easy now.”

  “He got me with a blade, I think. Ain’t nothing. We gotta... take care those creeps, T-Bone. Lee’s got trouble. Room 403. She’s gonna need us.”

  Herm closed his eyes against the pain.

  “Okay, now.”

  Herm’s ragged breath filled the elevator. He opened his eyes again, looked past T-Bone.

  “Damn, lookit all the blood,” he said. “I got him good, T-Bone. Didn’t I get him?”

  “You got him.”

  “Tell Tommy I got him good.”

  “I do that. Take it easy now.”

  T-Bone looked at Herm’s right hand, clutched over the wound in his stomach. The knuckles were torn open from the punches he’d landed.

  “Okay,” Herm breathed then. “We gotta... take care of this.”

  “Easy now.”

  “We... take care of this,” Herm said and he smiled. “Then we’re going to... Sully’s. Gonna give you a snooker lesson.”

  “Yup.”

  “Aren’t you gonna... say it?” Herm said then. “Tell me... tell me where you’re from.”

  T-Bone swallowed, tasted the salt from the tears running down his cheeks. “I from Missouri.”

  Herm nodded, closed his eyes a moment against the pain. “The show-me state.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay then... we got a game at Sully’s.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Bell. We got a game.”

  “Penny a point.”

  “Yes sir. Penny a point.”

  “God, I’m tired, T-Bone,” Herm said then. “Took a lot outta me, I guess. More than I figured... I just need... a minute to rest. Then we’ll go get those creeps. Me and you, T-Bone. Me and you. Just let me... close my eyes a minute.”

  He slipped to the side then and would have fallen over except for the strong arms of T-Bone Pike. His breath became shallow, and T-Bone held him and then Herm Bell closed his eyes and he rested.

  TWENTY-SIX

  She was over an hour late when she finally reached the hotel. She’d stopped twice for drinks on the way, but no amount of liquor could make her numb tonight. She took the elevator in dread fixation. She’d been trying to concentrate her mind’s eye upon some point down the road; she couldn’t say the experiment was going well. She dared not think of Tommy at all; she forced him from her mind, dropped him from all thought and memory.

  In the room Tony Broad was beginning to think she wouldn’t show. He’d managed to keep Bobby Dean sober; he was lying on the bed, fully dressed except for his shoes, waiting to go to work. A handsome man whose looks were going fast, a never-was actor who’d fallen to whiskey and his own lack of intelligence and imagination, a lifetime loser whose only claim to fame these days was an over-sized cock.

  Callahan was the loose cannon on deck, still boozing, still high from the killing the night before. If Tony Broad had a conscience he’d be worried about turning the addled kid loose on Lee Charles. But by that time the shooting would be finished and Tony wouldn’t care what happened to the smart-mouthed bitch. Still, Tony was on edge. Herm Bell’s arrival had made him nervous. Who else could he expect?

  When he heard the small rap on the door, he knew he had his movie. He attempted to greet his actress with a kiss but she turned her head and all he got was ear.

  Lee came into the room like Daniel checking into the lion’s den. When she pushed Tony away she felt the hard steel beneath his jacket. Sure, she thought, why not guns? She was convinced that whatever could go wrong tonight would go wrong, and in a big way.

  After a moment she took her coat off, and Tony placed it on a chair. Lee stood there quietly, trying to avoid eye contact with the clumsy camera and the other creeps in the room. The Callahan kid was standing, wild-eyed and hungry, by the door. There was a rummy-eyed man of about forty on the bed; he was wearing a tuxedo and Lee decided that the outfit was part and parcel of what was about to happen. Tony Broad asked if she wanted a drink, and she turned him down.

  “I plan to be out of here quick as I can,” she said. “Where’s the money?”

  Tony reached into his coat and pulled out a wad of bills wrapped in a rubber band. “Twenty-five hundred,” he said. “You get the other half when the job is done.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Tony smiled and shook his head, then showed her the rest of the cash. He tossed it carelessly on the bureau. Lee counted the first roll then put it in her pocket.

  “And I will collect the rest,” she told him. “You’d better know that.”

  Tony showed his revolting smile again and then took a shimmering white evening dress from the bed. He indicated the bathroom.

  “I want you to put this on,” he said. “The two of you are dressed for an evening out, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, this is Bobby Dean.”

  The shadow on the bed looked at Lee without a flicker of expression, like she wasn’t there at all. She welcomed the detachment, preferred it over the condescending Tony Broad and the leering punk

  Callahan across the room. She took the dress from Tony Broad and turned away.

  “And Lee,” Tony said to her. “You don’t wear anything under the dress. It gets too complicated, you understand?”

  She went into the bathroom and closed the door. She laid the dress across a chair there, then stepped out of her pants and her blouse and her underthings. Then she sat on the edge of the tub and cried.

  So much for
the tough dame. So much for the broad with the smart answers.

  She sat naked on the cool porcelain and for the first time in memory she cried for herself. She cried out of self-pity and disgust and she cried for what she would lose tonight and never find again. And when that gave way she cried out in hatred — for Tony Broad and his ilk and for the wheels that had turned to deliver her here tonight. Hatred for Mac Brady and Nick Wilson for what they’d brought Tommy to do. For Dunston, that tight-fisted bastard, and for her mother, sitting in Rosedale with her money and her inbred cat.

  And for the memory she’d carry from now on.

  But crying wouldn’t do it, she knew. She stood and looked at the dress she was to wear. A sleazy piece of imitation silk, cut low in front and slit up the thigh. Tony Broad’s idea of class. She laid the rag aside and looked at herself in the mirror, at the body that had gotten her into this mess.

  Traitor.

  Sure, it was simple for you, standing there in the mirror. You ought to try it out here sometime. It’s not that easy. Sometimes the things that everyone thinks are so fucking wonderful are nothing but a curse. Look at that face, look at those breasts — how’d you like people to admire you for your tits? Do you have any idea how that feels?

  No way. You stand in that looking glass, lady, and you got no idea. Out here men slaver over your body like it was a goddamn shrine; sometimes you wish you could leave it behind for a time, just step outside of yourself a while, go for a walk, get a drink maybe. Leave the half-wits to worship away in peace, they never gave a shit about you anyway.

  In the refuge of the mirror, it was a snap. You’re all flash in there, you’re all style; you look great, but you only got two dimensions. It’s the third one that kills you, don’t you know?

  The only man who ever made the connection between her body and her mind — herself — was Tommy Cochrane. Oh sure, he liked the body, but with Tommy it was different. He liked the whole package — elbows, knees, ears, teeth. Her. He knew that her smart mouth was nothing more than defence, like a fighter slipping a punch.

  He knew her. In the end, it was that simple. Not only did he know her but he was the only one who ever had. And the only one she’d ever wanted to.

  That alone made him worth saving. That alone justified being here. Because that is why we’re here, right? You in the mirror, you listening? We’re here to save him. Remember that.

  But who says we have to do this? We got each other — who says we get to have the farm too? Each other, hell, that was more than most people ever end up with. More than we ever figured on. Who says we have to be tough and go for everything?

  Being tough wasn’t that easy, wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Besides, all the tough broads lived in the mirror anyway.

  In the looking glass, where the living was easy.

  There was a knock on the door, and she heard Tony Broad’s insistent voice. Lee looked to the door, then back to the mirror, to the hard-eyed woman standing there.

  On the other side of the door Tony Broad was getting antsy. He had the principals in place and he was hot to get on with it, to get the fucking thing shot and done with. Tonight was Tony’s last night in the city. Billy Callahan didn’t know it, but Tony was leaving on the one o’clock train and he was leaving his young gunsel friend behind.

  Now he knocked impatiently on the bathroom door again.

  “Yeah, get the tail out here,” Callahan grinned from across the room.

  On the bed Bobby Dean was staring at the wall, wishing he had a drink. What was going to happen in the next half hour meant nothing to him. He only wished to get it going because he knew he could have a drink when it was done. He’d fuck anything that moved, any way he was told; it meant nothing more to him than pissing against a wall. He’d seen that Lee Charles was a looker — couldn’t miss that — but that didn’t mean a hell of a lot to him either. Bobby didn’t care much for women and he didn’t care for men either. There were days when the only reason he didn’t kill himself was that he didn’t know if there was whiskey in the hereafter.

  “Keep it on a leash ’til we’re done shooting,” Tony Broad was telling young Callahan.

  “Sure thing, Boss,” Callahan smiled.

  And he was still smiling as the door crashed open, hinges ripping screws from the woodwork, and Thibideau Pike — from the great state of Missouri by way of the Catskill mountains — stepped into the room, holding a sawed-off double barrel in both hands. T-Bone was trembling with rage, his eyes were wild, his teeth bared; beside him Callahan looked like a girl scout.

  “What the fuck — !” Tony Broad was shouting.

  Bobby Dean made an effort to rise from the bed. Like in Cleveland, he was looking for a window to go out.

  “You don’t move, mister,” T-Bone said coldly. “I come for Lee Charles.”

  In the bathroom Lee had thrown the gaudy dress into the tub and she was dressed in her own clothes again. She was through crying and she was through bargaining with the woman in the mirror. She didn’t have to do this, and Tommy didn’t have to fight, either.

  Just as she didn’t need this night to be on her mind and on her conscience now and forever.

  “I’m leaving,” she said to the mirror. “You do what you want.”

  She was ready to walk out on Tony Broad when she heard T-Bone Pike’s noisy arrival. She saw the woman in the mirror smile — happy for the rescue, for what was going to happen and for what wasn’t going to happen.

  She opened the bathroom door and stepped out into the room. She gasped when she saw T-Bone. He was holding a gun and his shirt was covered with blood, but it was his eyes that took her aback. They were filled with hatred, with cold vengeance, with a malevolence she could not begin to associate with the man behind them.

  T-Bone turned to Lee as she appeared and then suddenly Billy Callahan made his move, charging at T-Bone from the side. T-Bone swung the butt of the shotgun around and clubbed the punk in the face. He hit him again and then a third time, smashing bone there, collapsing the young hood’s features into mush. Then Lee remembered the steel beneath Tony’s jacket. When she turned Tony was already reaching for the pistol.

  “T-Bone!” she screamed.

  She punched Tony Broad with all her might, landing the blow high on the cheek bone. He backhanded her viciously to the floor, then began to back away like a stone crab, his right hand still clawing beneath his coat. T-Bone spun away from Callahan as Tony showed the Colt and T-Bone shot Tony Broad full in the chest with a load of number-two twelve gauge, sending the cut-rate DeMille crashing backward through the bathroom doorway. He lay dead as a mackerel there, Hollywood heaven on a cold tile floor.

  Lee got to her feet, looked at Tony Broad. T-Bone turned and put the other load on Bobby Dean, who was crying like a newborn on the bed. Callahan was unconscious on the floor; his face resembled fresh hamburger.

  “Not me,” Bobby managed to say.

  T-Bone looked around the room. “Where the money, Miss Lee?”

  “We can’t do that, T-Bone.”

  “Yes, we can. They kill Mr. Bell. These bastards kill Mr. Bell.”

  Lee walked to the bureau, where Tony Broad had tossed the roll. She hesitated and looked back at T-Bone. Then she picked the money up.

  “That for the farm,” T-Bone said. “Now go on out of here, police be here.”

  His eyes softened and she could see it was T-Bone once again.

  Bobby Dean, with a rummy’s nerve, dared to move from the bed. He stood with his arms straight out, like Christ on the cross, and looked at T-Bone.

  “Let me walk out of here, man,” he pleaded. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about these cats. I got a train ticket for Detroit, on the dresser there, Tony bought it.”

  T-Bone nodded to Lee, beside the bureau. There were two tickets there. The other, Lee said, was in Tony Broad’s name.

  “You git on out now, Lee,” T-Bone said and he took the tickets from her. “Trouble coming for sure.”

  She ha
d her hand on his arm and she didn’t want to leave him. “What’re you going to do?”

  “Me and this man goin’ to Detroit, I reckon,” T-Bone looked at Bobby Dean. “You and me and this scattergun goin’ to Detroit and you gonna stick closer to me than a tick on a hound, you follow that?”

  “I got you, man. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

  T-Bone backed him off with the shotgun, then he took Lee by the hand and made her walk to the door.

  “Go on now,” he said. “We all got to get a move on, leave this behind.”

  “Oh, Thibideau.”

  “Don’t be startin’ that stuff,” T-Bone told her. “That ain’t like you, Lee Charles. You got the farm sittin’ in your pocket there, now you and Tommy go on.” There were tears in his eyes. “Take care of that huckleberry for me, Miss Lee, take care of each other.”

  She kissed him and then he pushed her away, urging her to go. He pulled open the broken door.

  “Sometime if a old nigger come to call,” he told her, “let him set down to supper. Will you do that?”

  “He’d better come to call.”

  “When you least expect it, Miss Lee. When you not even thinking about it, he be there.”

  And then he made her leave. T-Bone turned back to Bobby Dean, who was jumping like a frog on a hot plate. He’d been a drunk all his adult life and he’d never needed a drink so bad as this minute. T-Bone grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him into the bathroom. He showed him the mess that had until recently been Tony Broad.

  “See that?”

  Bobby’s stomach came up and he wretched into the bathtub.

  “That there be you come morning ‘less you mind what I say,” T-Bone told him.

  Bobby nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  T-Bone returned the nod. No one had ever called him sir before. He pushed Bobby toward the door.

  “Come on,” he said. “Detroit’s waitin’.”

  Tommy had himself another Irish, then he bought Mac Brady a drink. The band was playing a few numbers, going through the motions. Doc Thorne sang a little Satchmo, but to the young studs around the bar, he was no Lee Charles.