Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (28 page)

Croker grinned at me around his cigar stub. He reached behind the desk, his hands disappearing from view. I heard the snap of buckles; leather straps being loosened. Then his hands reappeared and he tossed his wooden leg down onto the desk and gave a grateful moan.

“My dawgs are barkin’ today,” Croker said, massaging his stump. “Even the dawg Big George took.” He nodded at my mauled mitt. “That’s something you’ll get used to, Smitty. ‘Specially when it rains.” I hid my hand self-consciously. “I’ll have Doc Culpepper take a look at that paw for you, when the ole souse sobers up tomorrow. Speakin’ of which …”

He fetched a jar of hooch and two grubby glasses, filled them both and then handed me the cleaner of the two, which wasn’t saying much. As I leaned forwards to take the glass, the chair creaked beneath me, the floorboards wobbled like a diving board, and I flinched as Big George thrashed excitedly in his pond. Was it just my imagination, or did it sound like the gator was waiting directly below where I sat? The way Croker was smiling, I knew it wasn’t my imagination. I gulped down the hooch to try and quiet my nerves.

“What exactly are you running from, Smith?” He emphasized the phony name.

I played dumb. “Who says I’m running from anything?”

“Me,” he growled, a flash of fire in his eyes. “Son, do me the courtesy of not mistaking me for one of them fools out there. Any man plays the peeanna as good as you, oughta be leading a band in the city someplace, not singing for his supper in a swamp tonk. Now I’ll ask you again: what are you running from? And more to the point: what kinda trouble can I expect by hiring you on?”

I thought it prudent to stretch the truth.

“Mister Croker—” I said.

“Horace,” he reminded me.

“It’s nothing that’ll come back to you,” I assured him. “Just a big misunderstanding about a gambling debt.”

I couldn’t tell if he bought it or not.

“Just so long as we’re clear,” he said, “it’s a delicate operation I’m running here.”

He raised his glass and sloshed the hooch around inside it.

“Any man rocks the boat, he’s going overboard.”

Or below deck, I thought.

“I understand,” I said.

Croker nodded. “Good enough.”

He picked up his wooden leg and beat it on the desk like a giant drumstick. “Gracie!” Footsteps scuttled downstairs. Grace skulked inside the office. I found myself sitting up a little straighter in my chair. “Fix up the spare room for Mister Smith,” Croker told her, slurring his words. He was gesticulating drunkenly with his wooden leg. She glanced at me, and her gaze must’ve lingered longer than he liked, because Croker clubbed the limb in his palm, looking like he wanted to paddle her ass with it. Grace flinched at the slapping sound, gave a servile nod.

She started backing from the room—but as she pulled the door closed she shot me another glance that shivered down my spine like footsteps on the grave.

And that right there should’ve warned me of the trouble to come.

* * *

The room wasn’t much, but it was more than I had. A cot that looked like a torture rack, with a wafer-thin mattress and a rock for a pillow; a washbasin and a shaving mirror next to the lamp on the nightstand. The window looked out on the hills, where Croker’s whiskey still fires glowered in the night like red devil eyes. He was running a delicate operation, alright. Had to be making money hand over fist.

“Is everything to your liking, Mister Smith?”

I turned towards the voice.

Grace lingered in the doorway, her hourglass figure haloed by the light of the hall like an angel outside the pearly white gates. But there was nothing angelic about the glint in her eye as she asked me, “Will you be wanting anything else?”

I swallowed hard. “Not right now.”

She smiled like she knew it wouldn’t be long, and then she shut the door behind her, trapping me in the room with the lingering scent of her perfume. I splashed my face with water from the washbasin, reminding myself—in case my missing fingers weren’t enough—that I was sworn off dames for life.

* * *

That dead of night, I snapped awake to the sound of booming drums. For a moment I had no idea where I was. Heart pounding to the drumbeat, I bolted upright. The bed was quaking beneath me like the end of the world. Fumbling to light the lamp on the nightstand, my stumps prodded the edge of the cabinet. Pain bolted up my arm and I let out a yelp. Then I realized the drumbeat was the headboard of Croker’s bed thumping against the thin wall of our neighboring rooms as he rutted his wife.
Boom, boom, boom.
Croker was snorting like a hog with his snout in the trough; Grace was yipping like a small dog being kicked.
Boom, boom, boom.

Sinking back down on the bed, I curled my pillow around my head, which succeeded in muffling the noise but didn’t stop the bed from bucking like a bull. It felt like Croker was having his way with both Grace and me. Climbing from bed, I went downstairs and salvaged a cigarette from the ashtrays piled at the end of the bar.

Then I went outside to smoke on the gallery deck while I waited for Croker to finish up. He did—eventually—I had to admire the man’s stamina. He climaxed with a bellowing cry that roared like thunder. Moments later his snores joined the chorus of frogs croaking in the night. I hoped this wouldn’t be a nightly occurrence. (It would be.)

I finished my cigarette and went to ditch the butt. Warily approaching the deck rail, I peered down into the pond. There was no sign of Big George. All I saw was my reflection, shimmering on the inky black surface. I was about to flick away my butt when Grace appeared suddenly in the window behind me, hovering above my shoulder like an angel. An angel? Maybe that was wishful thinking.

She was gazing off into the distance. Her eyes were dewy with tears. Her lips smeared with blood. Her long blonde hair dangled down off her shoulders and veiled her breasts like gossamer. As she stared out over the swamp, I held my breath and watched her—

Until the cigarette butt singed my fingers and I dropped it with a hiss of pain. Grace heard the noise and looked down and saw me looking up at her. A drop of blood dripped from her lip, spattering her breasts as she smiled at me. Then she was gone, and as my cigarette sizzled out in the pond, I wondered if she’d even been there at all.

I turned back towards the pond, perhaps hoping she would reappear.

But this time all I saw was Big George, the moonlight reflecting off his eyes as he grinned at me.

Despite my concerns—about Croker, about Grace, about Grace and me, not to mention Big George—I settled into life at The Grinnin’ Gator with remarkable ease. The twenty bucks Croker paid me each week helped. That was no small spuds for a city gig, let alone a backwater tonk in the willywags. It was plenty enough to get me back on my feet, if not buy me new fingers. If I had any sense I would have saved up some scratch and hit the road just as soon as I could.

But I didn’t.

Besides, the money wasn’t the only reason I stayed.

True to his word, Croker arranged for Doc Culpepper to tend to my hand. He was the Croker family physician, and looked about old enough to have delivered Croker’s great-granddaddy, if not the baby Jesus. He’d treated young Horace when the boy lost his leg to Big George, even carved Croker’s wooden peg himself, although given the shoddy carpentry, I wasn’t sure that was anything to crow about.

The old buzzard gave me some shots, some pain pills, and some stinking salve to slather on my stumps; he checked my progress, changed my bandages every couple few days; even prescribed some advice I was too dumb to take.

We were perched at the bar. Croker was arranging a rum-run to the city, his voice booming through the closed office door as if he didn’t trust the telephone to carry his message. Grace was readying the place for opening, humming to herself as she scattered fresh sawdust on the floor. Recognizing the melody as the ragtime I’d been playing the previous night, I made a mental note to play it again, if it pleased her. One pretty gal is all the audience any musician needs.

“Something wrong with your eyes, too?” Doc Culpepper said, as he examined my hand.

I didn’t follow.

“There will be,” he said, “Croker catches you eyein’ his wife like that.”

I hadn’t been aware I was. “Like what?”

“Like a hungry dog outside a butcher’s window.”

I laughed and told the old fool I was sworn off dames for life.

Within a month, the stumps of my fingers were healing over nicely.

The scabs had crumbled away to reveal shiny pink layers of new skin. My hand wasn’t pretty to look at—it resembled a lobster claw—but lucky for me I could still play. Nowhere near my best, but way better than anything these hicks had ever heard. It amused me to think, if they’d just cast their prejudices aside, they could have gone to any juke joint in dark town, been enjoying music like this for years.

I played a short set every night, and a longer one weekends, when the place would be ram-packed with rowdies. Croker billed me to the crowd as ‘Smitty Three Fingers.’ The sonofabitch. “From the city,” he’d tell folks. Like The Grinnin’ Gator was moving up in the world. He told me to keep the nigger music to a minimum, or at least to mix it up with a few Southern standards, but I could tell he dug my sound. I’d often see him tapping his wooden leg, waggling his cigar between his lips like a conductor’s baton leading the orchestra.

When she wasn’t slaving behind the slab, Grace would sit in the bar and listen to me play. I’d position my glass on top of the piano so I could see her reflection.

There was no harm in looking, I reckoned; no harm at all, had I left it at looking.

People came to The Grinnin’ Gator for the liquor and the girls, and sure, once word got around, for the music too; but they kept coming back for Big George.

Croker fed his pet every weekend.

The crowd would gather on the deck like rubes around a carny barker as Croker leaned back against that rickety wooden rail and gave them his spiel.

Clutching some doomed critter by the scruff of the neck, he’d tell the crowd just as he told me, “I was just a young’un, fishing for channel cat with my Pap when this big bastard broadsided us, flipped our boat, flung us both in the swamp …”

And after Big George closed the show, Croker would lead the crowd back inside for another round of drinks, and I’d play a jazzy rendition of The Alligator Crawl.

Big George’s diet consisted mostly of chickens and rabbits that were housed in the tarp-shrouded hutch on the gallery deck; feral cats and stray dogs, which people would deliver to Croker in exchange for a jar of the good stuff; and once a prize boar hog that Marvin Scruggs lost to Croker in a fiercely contested arm-wrestling match. The way that hog squealed when Big George clamped his jaws around him, I thought that sound would echo in my memory forever. I’d never heard screams like it, not even my own, when

the cuck was taking my fingers. Not until the night Croker threw a man to the gator. Those screams were worse. Much worse.

That night started off so quiet, the proverbial calm before the storm.

A few lonely lushes sat around the barroom, muttering and glaring into their glasses of hooch. I’d finished my set, but was killing time till closing, pecking out a tune on the piano I’d overheard Grace humming in the shower that morning. Grace was sweeping the floor. I saw her cheeks flush as she recognized the melody and I wondered if she’d pictured me handing her the soap?

Croker was wet-ragging the bar like a deckhand. He’d seemed preoccupied that night. Distracted. Kept checking the time on the clock on the wall. By now I’d been working at The Double G long enough to know better than to ask.

And I found out what he was waiting for soon enough.

Around midnight, the front door clattered open and a colored man came sliding across the floor like a hockey puck, smearing blood across the floorboards in his wake. He skated to a stop at the foot of the bar, lay there curled in pain and wheezing for breath through broken teeth and busted ribs. His wrists were roped, his hands clasped together as if in prayer, shaking terribly. His face was swollen and glistening with blood like a freshly dipped candy apple. It took me a moment to recognize him as the fella I’d met on the back of Rusty’s truck.

Blood trickled from his wounds and dripped down through the gaps in the floorboards, spattering the pond below. Big George gave a hungry growl that rumbled through the bar like a subway car.

Rusty swaggered inside, wiping the blood off his hands on his pants. “Boy’s a bleeder!”

“This him?” Croker said to Rusty. “This the nigger been stealin’ from my stills?”

Rusty frowned. It clearly hadn’t occurred to him that he might have the wrong nigger. Acting on good enough information, he’d rousted the suspect from a juke joint in dark town, crocked him with an axe handle, before roping him to the back of his truck and then dragging his sorry black ass to The Double G. Rusty didn’t seem to relish another long ride to dark town. It was late; he was tired and thirsty. Fortunately for him, the colored man was in no fit condition to plead his innocence.

“Yessir, Mister Croker, sir,” Rusty assured him, “this is the nigger alright.”

Croker poured Rusty his reward, Rusty salivating like one of Pavlov’s pooches.

Then Croker raised the hinged end of the bar, stepped through, and let it slam down behind him. His wooden leg raked across the floorboards as he limped towards the colored man. Looming above him, Croker grinned like one of the stuffed gators on his walls. “So
you’re
the one, huh?”

The man shook his head. The whites of his terrified eyes peered out through a bloody mask. “Nuh-nuh-no, suh …” he rasped, wincing as his shattered ribs stabbed his insides. “Never stole me nunna Mistuh Croker’s whiskey, uh-uh.”

It had the ring of truth about it, and Croker glanced up at Rusty with his eyebrows raised. Rusty shrugged sheepishly. “You know niggers, Mister Croker, sir,” he said, as if voicing an accepted wisdom. “They ain’t stealin’, they lyin’.”

Croker chewed his cigar thoughtfully before returning his attention to the colored man. “What’s your name, boy?”