The Dance Boots

by Linda L Grover

  “Oh, I’m fine, Miss Winnie. We got two new boys here; like you to meet Sam and Vernon. Friends of mine.”

  “Pleased to meet you, boys; any friend of Punk’s is a friend of mine.”

  Ingrum told us to come out and sit with him and his friend; the night was over. We felt a little shy so sat at the table back of them and watched them bowl. We could see right away that Ingrum could really bowl; he started out looking kind of funny, sort of running on his tippy-toes, but then on that last step he turned graceful and set the ball down so gently you couldn’t hear a sound, his right leg lightly extended and crossed behind his left heel. Miss Winnie wasn’t too bad, either, but she was kind of clumsy, not graceful at all like Imgrum, and self-conscious about her dress, which she smoothed and tugged down in front and back every time right after she let go of the ball.

  “One ninety-five to one forty-two. Beat the pants off you again, didn’t I, Winnie?” Ingrum’s eyebrows, forehead wrinkles, and Adam’s apple moved up and down suggestively. “Beat the pants right off you! Haw! Haw!”

  “Naughty, naughty, Ingrum; and in front of the boys, too.” She giggled and shook a finger at him.

  She was nice enough to me and Vernon, flirted a little when she asked us where we were from, how we got to the Palace, then started giving us the third degree like she was Grandma LaForce or one of those other old ladies up at the reservation, instead of this white lady big as a man, with shiny red lips and big yellow curls on top of her head and these little drawn-on crescent moon eyebrows. Where did we live in Duluth, she wanted to know, why didn’t we live on a reservation, how did we get to Minneapolis, how did we like Minneapolis, did everybody live in teepees up north. “I heard the Indians up there are wild, just wild. And drink? You boys don’t drink like that, do you?” She didn’t mean any harm I guess. “Say, did you get supper? Montie, did these boys get to eat? Boys, are you hungry?”

  “Well, whatta you think? I’m getting them something right now, Winnie, got some hard boiled eggs left over, and fried potatoes, lot of onions. Here Punk, Chief, Shorty—come and fix yourselves a plate.”

  “Mr. Mountbatten’s all right,” whispered Punk, “and Ingrum, too, though he’s got some funny friends. You’ll see what I mean, but they won’t bother you. Miss Winnie either. I say it takes all kinds: everybody’s different and everybody minds their own business, know what I mean?”

  We nodded; sounded fine to us. What did he mean, anyway?

  Miss Winnie stood, smoothed and tugged her dress down over her front and behind again, and waited, giving Ingrum this look, tapping her toe impatiently, until he stood, too, then Punk and me and Vernon did, too. Mr. Mountbatten didn’t pay any attention. She said, “Excuse me, fellas, must go powder my nose,” and walked over to the can, her backside waggling back and forth, not a bad walker for a woman of her size and shape.

  “Wish I had that swing on my back porch!” Ingrum sang it in a thin tenor, a man in love.

  She looked back over her shoulder, hands on her hips like Betty Grable. “Oh, you! You are a naughty boy!” she called back with a deep giggle.

  Vernon raised his eyebrows at me and pointed with his mouth, so slightly nobody else would notice him noticing, toward Miss Winnie, who was opening the door marked “Gentlemen.”

  Punk caught it. “He ain’t allowed to use the ladies’ room,” he whispered to explain.

  Mr. Mountbatten was all right, like Punk said. He treated us fine: paid us every Saturday night, good as clockwork, right after the Palace closed, fed us a decent meal at the end of each day, didn’t mind if we took a little time off on the weekday afternoons, so long as there was one of us there to set up. He kept back a dollar a week out of our pay, which he put in an envelope for each of us in the safe. When we needed money we’d have it, he said; it was a good habit to get into while you’re young. By the end of summer we each had a pretty good-sized stack of bills in our envelopes, maybe ten, twelve dollars.

  When Buster heard about how we had jobs and a place to stay he thought he wouldn’t go back to school in the fall but would hitch down to Minneapolis instead. Maggie didn’t want him to go but then Louis went up for a visit and told her that he could bring Buster back with him. She fixed her youngest a bedroll and packed them some food, like she did for everybody who left her house, walked them to the corner, and then went back inside the house to her room, to cry where nobody could see her. To Maggie, Buster was still Biik, her baby boy, her last one to leave and the only one she didn’t have to send to boarding school.

  Buster was small for his age, too small to set pins, Mr. Mountbatten said, or anyway too small to set pins for pay. He could stay with us if Punk didn’t mind, and could help out a little and eat supper every night, but not for pay. Miss Winnie thought a boy that age should really be in school and not hanging out at a bowling alley every night where God knows what kind of people come and go. She offered to take him to her boarding house to live; Biik seemed to bring out her motherly side.

  “You can sleep in my room; there’s a nice class of people where I live, and there’s plenty of room. I’ll put a little cot in there for you right next to me, and you can go to school. A boy like you should be in school, make your mother proud.”

  Biik was speechless. I could hear what he was thinking, how he wasn’t going to sleep on a cot in a rooming house next to some fella named Miss Winnie.

  Vernon told her he’d promised Maggie not to let his little brother out of his sight.

  Vernon met Dolly one night not long after we started at the Palace. She came in to bowl with her girlfriend and their dates, a couple of guys who looked like they should be in the army. This offended Vernon, who gave his lanes to Buster and put on his shirt to go get a drink of water at the counter, so that he could pass close enough to get a good look at those draft dodgers out with those two good-looking girls.

  “Hey, Sitting Bull, can you bring us four beers?” one of the guys asked. Vernon kept walking. “Hey, you! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!”

  “Crazy Horse! What does it take to get some service around here?”

  “He ain’t a waitress; he’s a pin setter.” Ingrum had walked over to their lane. “You gotta go up to the counter to get your beers. And we can’t serve the young ladies; they don’t look twenty-one to me.”

  The draft dodgers bowled badly—maybe that was what kept them out of the army, Buster said. Vernon didn’t say anything, just kept avoiding those balls that the two bums were throwing as hard as they could, trying to knock out the pin boy or break his legs, and lining up the pins that were crashing wildly, erratically, but also sporadically as the draft dodgers drank their beers. He returned the balls as hard as he could to the bums but returned the girls’ more gently. The taller one, the one they called Dolly, was better than the guys and had a pretty good approach, Punk thought. We looked out at her through the pin windows and could see he was right. She took her time about it, squinting to line herself and her ball up with the pins, then taking four slow and controlled steps, hefting the ball with her right arm like she didn’t use the left at all (‘Needs a little more control from that left arm, her release’s a little early, but she’s got it,” Punk said). She looked strong, had muscular-looking arms and legs. On one calf she had a big maroon birthmark. She rolled a fourteen-pound ball with ease. If somebody who knew what he was doing could work with her she could get to be pretty good, better than Miss Winnie, if she kept it up, was Punk’s opinion.

  On her ninth frame Vernon kept Dolly’s ball. He put his shirt back on and carried the ball out of the pit and to her lane himself, showing her a chip that might keep it from going straight, and offered to help her find a better one. It took them a long time; Dolly told her friend and those bums to go ahead and finish without her. She came back to the pits and for the rest of the night stayed off to the side of the last lane, sipping coffee and watching Vernon work without his shirt, stretching her neck like Olive Oyl in order in order to peer through the little window to the pin pit. He wal
ked her home, and she came back the next night, and the night after that, and most nights after that, except for the Monday nights she went to roll bandages at the YWCA and Wednesdays, which were Girls’ League night at the Baptist church. Mr. Mountbatten told us we weren’t allowed to have girls back in the pits, so Vernon watched her through the pin window. Usually she sat with Miss Winnie at the table next to the bar, where Winnie could keep an eye on Ingrum and all the ladies who she was sure were after him. The two of them smoked a blue fog around their table.

  On slow nights Dolly and Vernon bowled, and we watched them through the pin windows. Vernon didn’t look much at her when they were talking, or when she looked at him, but when she bowled he stared like he was at the movies. He was fascinated by every single thing about her, that was plain to see: The port wine birthmark shaped like a palm tree, her chain-smoking, how she’d made enough working at a laundry to support her mother before she died. Her arms and shoulders, big and muscular from handling the mangle at the laundry. Her blue sweater that matched her eyes. Dolly looked right at Vernon when he talked to her, those nearsighted, sky-colored eyes seeking and reading in his nearly black ones what he was too bashful to say, squinting a little just like when she was concentrating on the pins. She treated me and Buster like we were her own little brothers, Punk like a friend she and Vernon were always happy to see. She’d never been to Duluth, she said, had always wanted to see Mozhay Point.

  Louis bought a car, an Overland Red Bird—remember that car? He got it so he could drive up to Duluth to visit his true love, Maggie. When he got back to Minneapolis, he stopped by the Palace to tell us that a whole bunch of the LaForces were staying with Maggie, but that even with all those people around she was real lonesome for her boys, asked him to tell us we were welcome to come home anytime.

  The day Vernon turned seventeen Mr. Mountbatten made a Victory cake in the morning, before the Palace had any business, and boiled up a potato sausage and cabbage for a birthday party lunch. He gave Vernon a present “from the Palace” wrapped in white tissue paper, a wallet with five dollars in it. Ingrum and Winnie gave him box of handkerchiefs. Dolly came over after work and sat with Winnie while she watched Vernon work. It was a quiet night for Dolly. Winnie tried to teach her how to blow smoke rings and French inhale, but Dolly’s attention was all on Vernon. She sat with her legs crossed, twirling her right foot round and round while she smoked cigarette after cigarette, holding them right up to her mouth between her first and second fingers, inhaling one right after another, watching Vernon set pins through the little window at the end of the lane. She knew he’d be leaving, going into the army, now that he was seventeen, that Maggie had promised to sign for him.

  “Watch me, now, Dolly, and then you try it. You take a puff, then just keep it in your mouth, but don’t breathe with your mouth at all. Just stick out your bottom lip a little and breathe in with your nose,” Winnie instructed. “Like this.”

  Dolly roused herself and tried. She was polite, like Vernon, both of them so easy to get along with. They were like two peas in a pod, I thought, just alike. She French-inhaled a few times to oblige Winnie, but anybody could see her heart wasn’t in it. Her eyes were watery from smoke and sorrow at Vernon’s coming absence. She didn’t want to be the only pea left in the pod, a person could sure see that.

  So, it was time to get back to Duluth. We gave Mr. Mountbatten a week’s notice so he could find some other pin boys. That week Dolly came to the Palace every night except for Red Cross night at the girls’ Y; she skipped Girls’ League at church. She sat with Miss Winnie French-inhaling and blowing smoke rings while she watched for glimpses of Vernon at the ends of the two lanes he worked. “Pretty soon I’m going to remember seeing these little glimpses of Vernon in back of the pins way at the end of the alley, and I’m gonna wish for that again, wish I could be back here tonight seeing him through the pin window, wish I had that little bit,” she thought. “I’m gonna spend my days thinking of him while I’m at work, just like now, but I won’t be able to see him at the Palace at the end of the day.”

  “Hey, Winnie, know what I’m gonna do? When Vernon’s gone I’m gonna learn how to knit and make him a pair of socks.”

  “He’ll like that, won’t he? Know what, I’m gonna save my sugar rations, and Ingrum can give us his, too, and we’ll make some fudge to send to him.”

  “See this? I bought this bride magazine for when he gets back. It’s got all these wedding dresses in it, and things you can do to make your place all dolled up? And ideas for keeping things nice, too.”

  “Honey, you and Vernon are going to be happy as kings, that’s for sure.”

  “As soon as he gets back.”

  “That’s right, honey. As soon as he gets back.”

  “And I’m gonna have a baby, too.” Dolly’s nose began to redden.

  Winnie covered Dolly’s hand with her own. “You’ll have lots of babies, honey. As soon as he gets back.”

  Louis drove us back up to Duluth, where Maggie signed for Vernon to enlist in the army. He ended up in Italy, somewhere, Dolly thought, from what she could get out of his letters. She wrote to Maggie every couple of weeks whether she’d heard from Vernon or not. After a while Maggie invited her to stay with her in Duluth, and Dolly got on at the Lincoln Laundry DeLuxe, ironing shirts. They moved to a duplex apartment with two bedrooms, right around the corner from Dolly’s work. In the evenings Dolly knit socks for Vernon and the LaForce boys, too. When she started to really show and had to quit the DeLuxe she had more time and started some for me and Buster. She read that bride magazine over and over and got the place really dolled up, kept it nice. When we got word that Vernon was missing in action she stayed inside the duplex and didn’t go out at all. The baby was born right there in the duplex. Maggie told people that the baby was hers and that Dolly was watching the baby to help her out so she could go back to work at the mattress factory. Nobody believed it but they were too polite to say.

  Buster went back to school and got a job at the hospital as a dish washer. The ladies in the kitchen liked him, he said, and made sure he had a big supper before he started work every night. I heard that the shoeshine stand in the White Front bar could use help, and got on as a shine boy. When it was busy, and Emil the main shine boy had to help Whitey at the bar, it was my job to tend the stand by myself. That was easy work: men would climb up the step to the high chair, and I would sit on a little bench cleaning their shoes, rubbing polish in and shining them up. When it wasn’t busy at the bar, Emil took over the stand and sent me out to find business on the street, where I would walk around with the shoeshine kit, a wooden box with polish and saddle soap, rags and brushes in it, asking men if they wanted a shine. I’d have to take the stuff out of the box, and they’d put one foot at a time up on the box, and I’d have to kneel. That was harder work, and I had to hustle because I got paid by the shine.

  I gave Maggie some money whenever I got paid, and Buster did, too, and you would think with all those people, the LaForces and everybody else, always coming to her house and staying there, they’d all be giving her some money and she’d be doing all right. But that’s not the way it was. Some people worked, some didn’t. Some gave her money, some didn’t. Some shared what they had, and some didn’t.

  When I turned eighteen I joined the Marines; Buster was so jealous and mad that he frowned and made faces until the kids around the house started making fun of him. One day one of his buddies brought him to a boxing gym to try it out; he took a liking to the sport and showed talent, became a local celebrity. Still, he was impatient. Maggie signed for him to enlist in the army when he turned seventeen. By then Japan had surrendered; he was part of the occupation. We sent Maggie our allotment checks for her, Dolly, and little Robert Vernon. I know she shared what she had with anybody who needed it, including those allotment checks. That’s the way it was with Maggie.

  I remember a night, one of the times when I ran from Harrod and was at Maggie’s, when she lived in th
at house back of the grain elevators. I remember she had a fire going in the backyard, and us kids were sitting on the back steps watching the sparks fly each time Sonny and Mickey reappeared like ghosts from the dark of the elevator yards with more wood and tossed it on top of the pile. It was late spring and sure cold out; our backs and backsides, too, were freezing, but our faces and hands were hot from facing the fire. Maggie and George were poking into the ashes with sticks, turning charred wood over to find the potatoes that she had set in there to bake. Some of the LaForces were down from the reservation, staying for a while, and they had brought a couple of the Dommage kids, mean little kids we had to watch around Buster because they took his bottle to drink when nobody was looking, and they hadn’t brought anything along to eat, as usual. Maggie gave them the first potatoes, took them out of the fire with her bare hands and split them so the white potato inside shone like the moon under the night sky, then handed them to the LaForces and the Dommage kids, too, like they were really important company, like they were doing her a favor eating her food. George bent over real close to his mother like he was helping her dig, and I could hear him whisper, “Why do you keep doing this? They’re a bunch of bums. Why should we be feeding them? It’s our food, and it’s our money. They act like we’re rich or something. They’re never gonna pay us back.”

  “Look at us, how lucky we are—we’ve got enough to share,” Maggie answered. “We’re rich enough.”

  The way it was with Maggie is, she always worked; at the mattress factory or cleaning hotel rooms or making baskets or beadwork to sell. She always worked, and so we did, too. That was other people’s business, whether they worked or not, she said. Just like it was our business that we worked. When you went to work you could be your own person, didn’t have to ask people for things all the time. We could see that. You could do what you wanted with your money. What Maggie wanted to do with her money was to give it away; a person who felt rich enough to do that would never be poor, she said, and a person who thought he didn’t have enough to give away would never be rich. “She died poor. Worked hard all her life and never had nothing, but she would give you the shirt off her back,” like George said. “She gave it all away.”