Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  “Something in a book I read, Mr. Bill.”

  “You read a book?”

  “I sneaked it off Miz Eustis’s bookshelf the other night, read it real quick, she never noticed it gone.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A bunch of crazy mixed-up white folks in Paris, France. One of ’em had his hammer shot off in the war.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “The Sun Also Rises, Mr. Blind Bill.”

  “That so? That’s from Ecclesiastes. See? While you was yammering to me you coulda been reading. Get busy.”

  “I ain’t got time. Miz Eustis gonna get Uncle Romulus all over my ass already.”

  “Well, dammit! Read me the column.”

  I sighed, “Alright, Mr. Blind Bill. I’ll read the column to you, but that’s all I can do. Really.”

  “Set. Read,” he said. He walked back to the porch like he had eyes, sat down in his rocker and put down his guitar. He folded his hands on his lap and waited while I put on the glasses Miz Eustis had me fitted with last year. I unfolded the paper.

  “Spunt County Shouter. Week of September 26, 1926,” I said.

  “Hell, I know that!” said Blind Bill. “Read ‘The Pea-Patch Poet’ column.”

  The Pea-Patch Poet Column, by Virgil Homer

  Well, the crops are in, and I guess if you hunker down on your nail keg there, we can get back to whatever it was we were talking about, and what all’s gone on in the county while you were out following the mules or the combine machine, or fiddling with the cantankerous engine on your John Deere Model 21s, like I heard you were last week.

  Where was I? Lessee . . . I could tell you about some more adventures of hometown boys in the Great War—I already told you about Paul Minius—he went over and joined the Canadian Army before the Uni-ted States got into the war, and he got to see the famous boxing match in ’17 between Man-Mountain Mannon of Syracuse and Kid Troy from over in Anatolia County. People who saw it are still talking about it.

  Or I could continue the story of U.S. Gant who left France in 1918 and hasn’t made it home yet. Not that he ain’t trying—his wife keeps hearing bad things, but his Aunt Hera keeps getting postcards from people all over the world who’ve seen him—they say he looks determined, grim and a lot thinner than he used to. He’s on some Caribbean island, supposedly. He’s taken more ships that have sunk or wrecked or run aground than any man alive.

  “I heard enough about that asshole,” said Blind Bill. “I hope he don’t get off yammering about him again.”

  “Let me read, Blind Bill.”

  But you’ve probably heard enough. Maybe he should sign up with one of those people who are always trying to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in an aeroplane. He couldn’t do any worse than he has already, except maybe be killed outright.

  So I’ll devote this column to the greatest event ever in this county —for those of you who have been dead or on the Planet Mars for the last two weeks.

  I’m talking about The Game.

  As everybody knows, Ap Low is the best checky-player in Spunt County. A Napoleon of the draughts, a General Pershing of the harlequined gaming board. Well, he’s probably even better than that. When he visited Corinth last year to see his brother Jupe, he played everybody there, too. Most of the games was over faster than you can say Jack Robinson.

  Anyway, Ap was as usual over at the picnic table in front of the Spunt County Courthouse, taking on all comers.

  As they tell it, down at the depot the noon train pulls in and a guy dressed in his Sunday best (this was Tuesday) steps off and he’s got no luggage, just a big flat box under his arm. Merk Jones, the Western Union boy, said he didn’t ask anything, just looked around till he saw the courthouse clock and started walking that way. (I myself was witness to most of what happened but I’m relying on eyewitnesses as to events which happened before my hurried arrival on the scene.) ---A-ny-way, old Eb Short was as usual warming his spot on the green park bench when he saw the stranger approaching. He said what attracted his attention, besides the flashy suit, was that the man walked with sort of a stopped walk, like his feet was on the wrong legs, and that he had a long thin face with a big nose and he was wearing a goatee beard, first one seen in Spunt County, I’m told, since Professor Panteen closed the Lyceum back in ’88. So Eb watched and listened real close.

  The stranger came right up to the picnic table. Ap was just clearing off four of Jimmy Theyer’s kings in one jump, as he usually does. The stranger said:

  “Are you Mr. Ap Low?”

  “Yep,” said Ap.

  “I hear you play some checkers.”

  Ap leaned back and looked the stranger over.

  “I been known to. What can I do for you?”

  “My name’s Bill Marshius. I come all the way from Crossett, Arkansas, and I aim to beat you in a game of checkers.”

  The crowd gasped. Last time somebody said that was back in 1911, and you all know what happened to him.

  Ap’s eyes narrowed.

  “You play hafta-taka-jump?”

  “Either way’s fine with me. I done beat everybody in Arkansas both ways.”

  “Best two-outta-three, don’t hafta-taka-jump?” asked Ap.

  “Fine with me,”said Marshius. “Do you want to make it interesting?”

  Ap Low sat there like a rock for about fifteen seconds, then he reaches in his overalls and takes out a fifty dollar gold piece. They said you could see the eagle blink as it came out of his pocket. He put it in the middle of the checkerboard. (Jimmy had cleared off the board while all the talk was going on.)

  “Boy,” said Blind Bill. “That Virgil Homer sure can write!”

  “Bill, let me finish this thing! I’m late already. Miz Eustis’s probably having a hissy fit already!”

  “Go on, go on,” said Blind Bill.

  Marshius started to reach for his billfold.

  “I don’t want your money,” said Ap. “That money’s what you get if you beat me two out of three games.”

  “What do you want, then?” asked Marshius.

  Ap looked him up and down. “I assume you got a way of getting home?”

  “I certainly got money for a ticket home.”

  “Well,” said Ap, “if I win, I want everything you’re wearing except your wallet. All the way down to your birthday suit. Right here on the square. And you got to walk from here to the depot.”

  “You asking me to get arrested for indecency?”

  “Oh,” said Ap, looking around and winking at Deputy Marshal Marshall who had stopped to listen. “I think we can get the law and some of the ladies to look the other way.”

  Marshius looked at him real hard. “That what you want? Me jay-bird naked if I lose? You’re betting $50 against that? That what you want?

  Ap looked him over again, real hard and slow like. “Mr. Marshius, I think you’re the kind of man who would take that bet even if I didn’t have a dime.”

  “Let’s get this straight. Two out of three. Don’t have to take a jump. Your fifty dollars against me stripping off naked and walking to the depot. That it so far?”

  “Yep.”

  “And we play on my board?”

  “Fine with me,” said Ap.

  “Then mister,” said Marshius, holding out his hand. “You got a deal.” The man took the box out from under his arm. He laid it on the table, opened it. He took out a hinged checkerboard. It was made of white marble and onyx. The crowd gasped again and people went running off to get everybody, including me.

  Then, according to Eb, Marshius brought out his men. They were made of round and polished ebony and ivory. Jimmy Thayer picked two up, then held them behind his back. Then he held his clenched fists out.

  “Call it, Mr. Marshius,” he s
aid.

  “Left hand.”

  Jimmy opened it. “White,” he said. “That means you move first.”

  “I know what the hell it means, kid.”

  They set the counters up. By now there must have been a crowd of 200 people around, me included, and more every minute.

  Then Ap Low looked across the table and he said, “Mr. Marshius, let’s play some checkers.”

  CONTINUED NEXT WEEK

  * * *

  “I’ll be goddamned,” yelled Blind Bill. “That ain’t right!” You’re just saying that cause you’re in a hurry. Read me the rest o’ it.”

  “That’s all, Mr. Blind Bill. I didn’t know it was coming!”

  “He always says continued next week, but he always tells a whole story, goddam him!”

  “Hell, Bill, everybody knows how that checker game came out! Why—”

  Blind Bill clamped his hands over his ears. “Don’t you tell me! Don’t you dare tell me!” he yelled. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Goddam you, just for that you be here with the paper first thing next Thursday morning and you read me what happened, you hear me? What a nasty-ass trick to play on a poor blind man!”

  He took his hands away from his ears. He was right, Virgil Homer had never done a column that way before.

  Everybody but Blind Bill Orff knew how that checker match turned out anyway.

  “You just be dammed sure you be here next week, you young turd!” He picked up his guitar and put a sawed-off sanded-down end of a Coca-Cola bottle on the little finger of his left hand. “Damn Virgil Homer!” he said. He pulled a screaming slide note with a quick jerk of both his hands. It sounded like a rusty two-handed file pulled across a loose nail on a wet day. It hurt my ears.

  I took off running for town. I didn’t want to be real close when Blind Bill started playing. He pulled a long wailing note, then another. I turned onto Delphi street to put some houses between me and him. Then he started singing, growling loud and nasty:

  Go tell Aunt Rhody—ahhhr!

  Go tell Aunt Rhody—oowah!

  Go tell Aunt Rhody,

  That ol’ grey goose is dead.

  Yahhhhh!

  One she been savin’,

  One she been savin’ lordy lordy,

  One she savin’,

  Make a feather bed!

  They said Blind Bill lost his wife a long, long time ago, and he never got over it, which is what made him such a mean old man. But that was way before my time.

  II

  I ran in toward the square, crossing the old interurban tracks and leaving Darky Town.

  There was a clatter of hooves on the side street and I stopped. The sounds got louder and then came out onto the main stem.

  Everybody referred to them as the Horsey Set, or the Riding Club, only there wasn’t one in this burg, not officially anyway. In the front was Mr. Ness—he was the guiding light, and his father’d made all the money he lived on. He was only about thirty, but him and his bunch had been riding their horses—Kentucky thoroughbreds all—all over the county since I was a baby. They were always on picnics or hunting or fishing trips. That must be where they were going today because Mr. Ness had on that big ol’ fishing vest with all those reel-and-rod plugs stuck all over it, some of them must have had fifteen hooks each on them. Ness was about the only man in the county to use a reel-and-rod. I’ve seen him fishing from the saddle with the horse standing in shallow water. In fact, I ain’t ever seen Mr. Ness or none of the others off their horses that I remember. I probably wouldn’t recognize them standing on their own two legs.

  It was early in the day so they weren’t drunk yet. You only had to watch out for them in the evenings and at night when they sometimes rode hell for leather through town on their way to Ness’s house, where, rumor has it, the revels continue late into the night. Where they find all the liquor I don’t know; all I know is it drives them crazy when they’ve had some.

  A couple of them had saddlebags on their mounts. I nodded to Miz Dianne Rio whose mother my older sister had worked for before she ran off to Memphis. Miz Dianne looked like she hadn’t got much sleep—she wasn’t as old as Mr. Ness and the others—she’d only been running with them for four or five years. I waited till they turned off toward the Creek Road Bridge and ran on down to the courthouse square.

  It was already 8:10. Uncle Romulus was gonna whop me sure when Miz Eustis told him I was late.

  I passed some people coming out of the Prokrus Mattress and Furniture Store wrestling a big ol’ chair out onto the sidewalk. (I’d of built the doors of a furniture store wider.) Then as I was hurrying by the Apex Theater I saw they had some new handbills up where the announcement of the next movies should be.

  I already had seen the movies playing this week—Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and The Wizard of Oz with an actor named Larry Semon, and a comic Negro actor named G. Howe Black who didn’t even notice when lightning struck him in the head. (The film wasn’t much like the book—Oz is where Czecho-Slovakia is on a map, and Semon and some fat man dress up like the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman for about two minutes—it was a real bad print, too, and from way up in the balcony where us folks have to sit, you couldn’t see much.)

  But these notices weren’t for a movie. Mister Ashneel’s Traveling Players was coming to town for three days next month. They were doing a play a night for three nights—The Little Killt Babies, Who’s Been At Mother? and Murders in the King’s Palace plus an 11 p.m. performance “for gentlemen only” called Girls With Big Jugs (of oil). Admission to the other plays was 50¢, the late show was a whole dollar!

  The courthouse clock chimed the quarter hour.

  I ran into Coretta, Miz Eustis’s help, standing outside the Jitney Jungle.

  “There you is, you no good whelp!” she said. “You done dawdled so long Miz Luvsey done all her shopping already ’cept for some stuff in there, and she’s ready to go. Now she got somethin’ else for you to do. You supposed to go down to the courthouse and wait all day, if necessary, for a man to show up who’s gonna be working for Mr. Eldridge.”

  “But Coretta, I ain’t even . . .”

  “I do not want to hear it. Mr. Eldridge had to call all around town by long distance from Acedia all the way over in Anatolia County till he found Miz Luvsey—he’d forgotten all about the man till Boss Primagenus reminded him.”

  “How’ll I know him? All white folks . . .”

  “Don’t the hell give me that, I.O. You’s supposed to meet him at the sheriff’s office. You just look at every white man comes in there and listen to their business until you find the right one. You oughta like this, I.O. They got lots of stuff you can set on your ass and read at the sheriff’s office.”

  “Coretta, I’m afraid of the sherriffs!”

  “Well, you should be, rightly so, and someday you might have to deal with them, but I guarantee one thing—you don’t bring that man back out to the place you gonna be dealing with Uncle Romulus in ways you ain’t never seen!”

  “Aww . . .”

  “Get your black butt down to the courthouse and don’t come back till you got the man or till they lock the place up tonight. Don’t you make me put these packages down!”

  I started away. “Tell Miz Eustis that cemetery looks like an afterbirth!” I said. I ran toward the courthouse, past the usual bunch was sitting on their chairs and benches, but the closer I got the slower I went.

  The sheriffs’ truck with the wire cage on the back wasn’t in its spot, so I knew they were gone, there being three sheriffs and no deputy, the place would be locked up while they were out on a run.

  I was heading toward the south door when I saw the strangest thing I ever saw coming from the west side of the square, and heads was turning all over the place.

  It was a man a
bout five feet tall, but about half that wide at the shoulders so he looked like a walking icebox. He had a big thick square beard that looked like the business end of a coal scoop, and on his head was a black and yellow cap. He didn’t have on a shirt and wore a pair of bib overalls, only they were made with just one strap over the right shoulder, and from here they looked like they were made of brown leather. It made my butt tighten just to think what it must feel like in there on a hot day. He had on some boots made out of another kind of hide, lighter in color than the overalls. He went up the west steps and out of sight.

  I went in and down the cool corridor and turned left, and there was the man coming down the hall at me, looking up and down at the signs over the doors. I stopped and he went by, and I saw there was a big square folded piece of yellow and blue paper sticking out of the back pocket of his leather coveralls. Right away I knew he’d been brought out of prison to finish his time working somewheres.

  I went to the sheriffs’ office, which was of course closed, with a sign saying, “Be back whenever justice is meted out.” Then there was a shadow on the door beside me. I turned. It was the man in the leather outfit. He was looking at me with the most piercing grey eyes I’d ever seen. I sort of jumped.

  “They sure know how to hide a sheriff’s office in this county,” he said.

  I swallowed. “Well, sir, it ain’t in the usual place.”

  “Hey!” said a voice down the hall. “Y’all got business there?”

  It was Deputy Marshal Marshall standing with his hands on his belt. Just like we got three county sheriffs and no deputy, we got one town deputy and no marshal.

  “I have to report to the county sheriff,” said the man.

  “I reckon I’ll do while they’re gone. Come on down to my office. What about you?”