Honky-Tonk Girl

by Charles Beckman, Jr.

  He said no and tried to make it sound as if he meant it.

  But she moved to the arm of his chair, leaning over and smiling with her clean young lips only inches away. “Please, Johnny. Just a couple of enchiladas between friends. I won’t cause you any trouble.”

  “Well, just a couple of enchiladas between friends, then....” he said, weakening powerlessly.

  They used her new Oldsmobile convertible. She changed into a simple blue dress made of some silky material that caressed her impudent young curves, and she changed into nylons and high heels. Johnny made one stop—at Eddie Howard’s flat, where he left the two weeks’ advance pay for the rest of the guys in the band. Then they were out on the highway to Mexico, cruising at an easy eighty in the big red automobile.

  Ruth sat near him in a familiar, intimate way as if they were a young married couple driving away for the weekend. She lifted one knee. The breeze rippled her dress far up along a golden-tanned thigh as she adjusted a stocking top. Johnny started to remind her of her promise not to cause him any trouble. Instead, he decided to concentrate on the road ahead. She settled back comfortably against the cushions, letting the wind stream through her blonde hair.

  She asked how he had gotten his face mashed up and, when he gave her the details, he heard the sharp intake of her breath. He glanced at her then and saw that she was dabbing with a Kleenex at a thin trickle of blood coming from the corner of her lip. She quickly snapped on the radio and looked up at the stars that were just beginning to come out. “Let’s forget all about it for a few hours, Johnny. Maybe we’ll both be dead soon. But we can steal a couple of hours for ourselves, first....”

  They crossed the Mexican border and drove into a pueblo of dusty streets and adobe buildings clustered around a plaza. There they parked the car and walked through crooked, dark side streets to the place that served the wonderful enchiladas. It was a dimly lit cantina with white washed adobe walls plastered over with bullfight posters. Smells of corn shucks, chili, cigarette smoke and dust mingled with the out-of-tune harmonies of a five-piece band struggling with American stock arrangements up on a rickety bandstand.

  They ordered enchiladas and a bottle of tequila. After the second bottle of the fiery liquid, the evening took on a hazy aspect. At one time they were on the hard-packed dirt floor, dancing. In the warm, red haze, Johnny felt Ruth’s curves fitting themselves nicely against him, her palm sweating in his hand. Her skin was damp under the thin dress. The band was struggling with an arrangement of Duke Ellington’s Gal from Joe’s. Ruth sang the lyrics softly as they danced. She did wonderful things to it. She was a little drunk. Her face was shiny with perspiration and she ground her body against his.

  Then they were sitting across from each other at a small table. A burning candle stuck in a bottle cast a flickering glow over their faces. She leaned over, her knees pressing against his under the table. “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long what I finally told you this afternoon, Johnny,” she said, her tongue thick and loose from the tequila. “Never could get ‘nough nerve. Every night I went down to hear your band...said it was for my thesis....” She shook her head, closing her eyes. “It was for you, Johnny.” She kept her eyes closed tightly.

  “I’ve been in love with you since I was fifteen....”

  The music was playing loudly. Johnny pulled her fingers away from her face. He didn’t want to hurt her. She was such a youngster. He tried to tell her as gently as he could that she was suffering from a post-adolescent crush.

  “You’re about twenty. I’m nearly thirty-five, honey. I’ve been a big name, but lately I’ve been slipping. I’m on the downgrade. Right now you think I’m a pretty terrific guy—let’s not spoil it by doing something you’ll be sorry for later. You see, I’m not the marrying kind of guy....”

  She hammered on the table top with her fists. “There you go, with your damned musician’s ego! I’m not in love with you because you’re such a damned hot musician. Can’t you men ever understand how a woman feels? I’m in love with you ’cause you’re Johnny.” Then she colored. “And I’m—I’m not saying anything about your having to marry me, am I?”

  “You’re tight,” he said. “And you’re too young to know what you’re talking about.”

  She sobbed with impotent rage. “I’m not tight,” she hiccoughed. “An’ I’m not that young! I’m not a virgin, if that’s what’s got you worried. Not since one night in the back seat of a car when I was sixteen. It hurt like hell an’ we were both scared silly. I never would let anybody touch me after that. But now I’m really in love an’—an’ I want to belong to you, Johnny. You understand?” She covered her face and cried tears of shame.

  “Take me somewhere else,” she whispered in a muffled voice, hiding behind her fingers. “Everybody here is starin’ at me.”

  Johnny talked with the bartender and he let them have a private little dining-room in the rear of the place. It was a small room with a single table covered with a red checkered tablecloth on which stood a candle in a green wine bottle.

  Ruth repaired her face by candlelight. “Made a fool outta myself,” she apologized, keeping her eyes lowered. “Sorry, Johnny.”

  “I’ll get us some more tequila,” he said, starting out of the room.

  “Johnny...play for me. Borrow the bandleader’s trumpet and play for me. I want to show you something—”

  He was too loaded to think the request was, at best, unusual. When he went back to the bar, he thrust a wad of bills into the hand of the bandleader who cheerfully surrender his battered cornet. Johnny was beginning to feel drunker by the minute from the tequila. Back in the little dirt-floored room, he sat down and played softly for Ruth. The yellow candlelight flickered, the shadows danced and Johnny blew the horn in his soft, big way with low guttural tones and high full ones. The horn was against his lips and his own music was in his ears. He reached somewhere into the depths of his subconscious and played wild, crazy, abandoned notes.

  Then, through the reeling shadows, he became aware of Ruth. She was a vague shape before him, moving to the tempo of the music. Her eyes were glassy, fixed on the shining bell of the stubby cornet. Her face was dripping perspiration. She was as drunk as he was.

  “I’ll show you, Johnny Nickles...,” she panted.

  She fumbled with a row of snaps down the front of her dress and opened a zipper over her left hip. Then she pushed the dress off, exposing first one creamy shoulder then the other. The dress slid down her body and fell in a heap on the dirt floor.

  Johnny realized with a jolt that the crazy kid was going to do a striptease! Right in front of him, in the little dirt-floored room, with the candlelight spread like a yellow mantle over her slim and exquisite body.

  She began to move in jerking steps to the music, swaying in and out of the shadows. Then, impatiently, she tore her silk undergarments off until nothing remained but her bra and garter belt. Her vibrant golden-tanned flesh was writhing and rippling to the insistent beat of his music. Her blonde hair tumbled wildly over her face.

  Johnny’s playing grew hotter and hotter and her body seemed to be on a string, jerked and twisted to each beat of his rhythm.

  But then she was no longer before him. There was nothing before him but the shadows and the music in his ears. The music that built up to the sky. There were wonderful, impossible things in his mind, his heart, his ears. They had to come out of the horn. Then, suddenly, his fingers became uncertain. They began to fumble over the valves. His sureness deserted him. And he knew he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t make it come out any more....

  What he was playing broke off abruptly in a cracking screech. He stood there swaying, his thick black hair falling over his forehead. Then he took a stumbling step forward and lowered the horn from his lips. He stood looking down at it and it slid from his fingers to the floor and a sob came out of his lips. Then he was walking. There was darkness around him, then bright lights, then darkness again. He stumbled against clay walls and stumbled over n
arrow gutters and sidewalks. And he cried as he walked, choking on hot bitter tears.

  Ruth was behind him somewhere, calling. He could hear the frantic tapping of her heels.

  Then he felt her hands, pulling at him.

  “Johnny...wait, please—”

  He fell into a dark doorway, covering his face with his hands.

  She pulled at him desperately. “Darling...please....”

  He tried to shake her loose.

  “Can’t you see,” she said, “you’re sick! You’re sick.... You were playing some wonderful things back there. I heard you. You can’t help it if you’re sick, down on your luck, fighting something you can’t see.”

  Her face, marble white, was a tear-streaked blur in the darkness.

  “Darling, you’re still a wonderful musician,” she cried, her mouth working loosely. “I love you, Johnny....” She rattled on, half-hysterically. “I’ve always loved you. When I was a girl in high school, I used to have a little radio next to my bed and sometimes I could get your band late at night. For the last two months I’ve been going down to that stinking little mousetrap on Honky-Tonk Street every night...and I’ve just been sitting there watching a cocky, smart-alecky trumpet player drinking himself down the hill...and every night I’ve loved him and wanted him m-more....”

  Johnny pushed himself away from the wall. He tried to walk again, weaving from side to side as he went along. He stopped and ran shaking fingers through his hair. “Get away from me, kid,” he said thickly. “You’re a good little girl. Get away before some of my bad luck rubs off on you...go back to your playmates—”

  She tapped along beside him, clutching at his arm. “Johnny, you’re drunk. Please, you’re walking in the wrong direction. Let me help you. Wait a minute though, until I get my dress on—before I’m arrested or catch cold.”

  He waited and then permitted her to steer him back in the direction of the automobile. They had wandered into a dark section of town where the deserted streets were no wider than alleys.

  They passed an open doorway where a fat, greasy old woman squatted. She called, “Curios, senior?” She waved a piece of dirty candy in a grimy claw, “Dulces?”

  They walked on and as they walked, Johnny’s head cleared and his feet grew steadier. He swallowed lungfuls of night air almost hungrily.

  Ruth had been silent for several blocks.

  “Where are we?” Johnny finally asked. “Are you sure we’re goin’ in the right direction?”

  “Yes.” She looked up at him. “Johnny, are you sober?”

  He nodded. “Almost.”

  “Well...I think you ought to know. Somebody has been following us.”

  “What?”

  “No, wait.” She tugged at his arm. Don’t stop. Keep going and don’t look back. I’ve heard footsteps for several blocks. Every time we turn down a side street, whoever it is follows right behind us. Listen.”

  They walked for half a block in silence as Johnny struggled to clear his fogged mind.

  They passed under a dim street light and Johnny saw a doorway. He started to pull Ruth toward it. Then the hard, flat slap of a gunshot echoed down the street and a chunk of adobe wall flew away inches above Ruth Jordon’s head, showering them both with a white, powdery dust. Ruth screamed.

  Johnny plunged at her, knocking her into the shelter of the doorway with his shoulder. They huddled there, pressed close against the wall. Johnny could feel the quick, frightened pounding of her heart, close to him.

  They held their breaths, listening. There was no further sound in the still night. No more shots, no footsteps, nothing.

  Johnny started to move out of the doorway. Ruth clutched at him.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Slip back along the shadows close to the walls. Maybe I can surprise him.”

  “No!” she cried.

  “We can’t just sit here like clay pigeons, waiting for him to move up and get a better shot!”

  “Wait!” She fumbled in her purse. Then she pressed something cold and hard into the palm of his hand. “You can’t just go out there with nothing!”

  Johnny looked down blankly at the .38 automatic nestling in his palm. His tequila-fogged mind struggled with the whole situation—with the question of who was following them, and what was a youngster like Ruth Jordon doing with a gun?

  Then he slipped out silently and moved along the wall without waiting to frame any answers.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CROSSROADS

  Thursday Afternoon, 3:00 P.M.

  Earlier that day, Eddie Howard, the pianist in Johnny Nickles band, had stood thoughtfully in the doorway of his room, a thick wad of money in his hand and a puzzled look on his thin, anemic face. He watched Johnny Nickles’ broad, chunky back disappearing down the stairway. Then he went back inside and hunted up a pill and swallowed it thoughtfully. He didn’t understand why the band had been fired so suddenly. Things had seemed to be going along pretty well at the Sho-Tune. The crowds were building every week. Johnny Nickles was still a drawing card, even if he did play sloppily these days.

  Eddie stood in the bathroom in his pajamas and studied his face in the mirror. He usually slept daily until mid-afternoon. Even then, he always seemed to be tired. He had been in the band business for twenty years and he had been tired for twenty years. He put the wad of money on the edge of the lavatory and leaned over, gazing more intently into the mirror. He pulled at his cheek to get a better view of his eyeball. Then he stuck out his tongue and felt his pulse. He opened the medicine cabinet, studied the array of bottles there, selected one, unscrewed the top and shook out two small, pink pills into the palm of his hand. These he popped into his mouth and then turned on the tap, half-filling a glass tumbler with water which he drank down with the pills.

  He picked up his thick-lensed, horn-rimmed glasses that had been lying on the toilet seat, and put them on. Then he closed the medicine cabinet, gathered up the money and walked back into the bedroom. He was not wearing his pajama tops and his rib cage showed through his skinny chest like latticework. The bedroom was strewn with clothes. Neckties hung from doorknobs, over chairs and over the foot and head of the bed. He shoved a pile of shirts fresh from the laundry off a chair and sat down. Maybe it was on account of Johnny’s drinking that Norman Norman canned them? But Johnny never got sloppy on the stand. It just made him play worse. Or maybe it was on account of Miff Smith’s murder? Maybe Norman Norman didn’t like that kind of publicity.

  Or maybe, Eddie Howard thought wryly, it was simply because the band was playing lousy music these days. It was coming apart at the seams.

  He hunted under the pile of shirts and found a pair of brown socks rolled up. He put them on and stepped into a pair of shoes. Then he searched around until he discovered a pair of slacks with a fair crease. Further search rewarded him with clean underwear and a long-sleeved tan sport shirt. These articles of clothing he assembled on his thin body. Then he stopped in the kitchen for a glass of milk and walked out of the apartment, locking the door after him.

  The rest of the guys, he knew, would be over at Tizzy Mole’s place. They had a poker game scheduled for the afternoon.

  The rest of the guys! Eddie grunted. There were only three others now, Link Rayl, the clarinet player, Tizzy Mole, the bass man and J. W. Richey, the trombone player. It wasn’t a healthy band to be in. He shivered.

  Tizzy Mole lived a couple of blocks down the street.

  As Eddie had anticipated, there was a card game in progress at the “Mole’s Hole,” as they called Tizzy’s two-room apartment. Cards and chips were strewn about. Saucers piled high with cigarette butts and empty beer bottles littered the place. The air was a hazy blue.

  Eddie stood in the doorway and coughed, then blinked owlishly and said, “Hi, fellows.”

  Tizzy was just coming out of the kitchen with a sandwich in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He was a small dark man with a crew haircut and ears like landing flaps. He was dress
ed in a Turkish towel knotted around his waist.

  J. W. Richey was lying on his back on the floor before Tizzy’s portable electric record player. Link Rayl was sitting on the floor with his back propped against a wall. There was obviously no place to sit on the chairs or sofa because they were covered with beer bottles, records and saucers. Richey had the record player going full blast.

  “We been fired,” Eddie said, standing in the doorway.

  The music rattled the windows in the small room.

  “What?” Link Rayl asked.

  Tizzy Mole put his beer down on a table and said, “I don’t see why you want to play that damned thing.”

  “I haven’t heard it in a long time,” Richey grunted. He laced his fingers behind his head for a prop and tapped a foot in space in time to the rhythm of the music. “Listen. That was good. We had it then.”

  He was playing a record from the Ghost Album.

  “Hey, he grunted. “There’s Miff’s drums. God, what a rhythm section!”

  The automatic arm shifted and the next record slipped onto the turntable. It was Link’s clarinet version of Teegerstrom Struts His Stuff. Then came Eddie’s piano chorus, the ghost of Jelly Roll Morton, played in the true old Storyville honky-tonk style.

  The trombone player half-closed his eyes. “Listen...listen, for God’s sake! Every phase, every lick....” He propped himself on one elbow and stared at Eddie. “You must have gone to bed with his records. You must have broken them up and eaten them with milk on your breakfast food.” He settled back on his hands. “Hell, you weren‘t playing piano that night. Jelly Roll came back to earth for one night, like they say. He got inside you. That was him playing, not you....”

  Tizzy Mole wiped the sweat off his face. “Listen, will you bastards stop talking about it like that? It gives me the bellyache.” He stepped over J. W. Richey and knocked the arm off the record. “I wish we’d never made the damned thing. Maybe Miff would still be alive. Maybe Zack would be, too. Maybe we’d all live a little longer.” He was shivering.