Jitterbug (26 page)

“I splashed barbecue sauce on the other one.”

“You can’t wear that to the track. People think you came to bury a horse.” Earl undid the tie, slapping aside Dwight’s hands as he tried to stop him. He jerked it from around his neck, draped it over his own shoulder, and untied his own, gold turtles on a ruby field. Dwight protested, then gave in and put it on. Earl helped him make the ends even. Then he went back into the bedroom and came out tying a green one with red sailboats.

“How many ties you got?”

“Gate, I got better things to do with my time than count my ties. Where
is
that woman? We’ll miss the daily double.”

“How you feeling?”

“With my fingers.” He held them up and wiggled them. Then he went into the little yellow kitchen, took down a bottle of Four Roses from a cabinet, and splashed some of its contents into a water tumbler. “How about a bracer? Them bleachers get hard.”

“No, thanks. And you know what I mean. You tell Elizabeth where you was the other night?”

“She didn’t ask. I thought maybe you told her.”

“You know better than that. You a junkie, Earl?” He lowered his voice on the last part.

“Do I look like one?”

“You could. I don’t know what one looks like. I thought you was going to start staying away from guys like that Gidgy.”

“Didn’t say that. You got cash? Track’s no fun you don’t put something down.” He fished a roll of bills out of his pants pocket and unwound the rubber band.

“Where’d you get that? Gidgy said you took your last cut in cocaine.”

“This an advance. I’m lining up customers for some tires. I can get you a set.”

“I got mine recapped just last month.”

“Recaps are no good, you see ’em all along the highway from here to Willow Run. These are on the house, little brother. Thanks for not saying nothing to Lizzie.”

“I’ll roll on the caps a while longer. One Littlejohn with a court date’s plenty.”

Earl’s face went blank as a slab. He snapped the band back on the roll and returned it to his pocket. “Do me a favor, Dwight? Don’t bleed all over my rug from them holes in your hands.”

“It ain’t that. One of us has to look out for Elizabeth if the other one goes to jail.”

“I know, babe.” He laid a hand on Dwight’s shoulder. “I ain’t such a much as a big brother. Ma was telling me all the time, look out for Dwight. I tried, you know what I’m saying? Then I’d forget. Too much Pa in me, I guess. You always was the hope of the family.”

“That’s horseshit, Earl. If it weren’t for you, we’d still be in Eufala unloading cotton for a dollar a day.”

“I always was the idea man, but you’re the one that sticks. That’s why I want you to take them tires. I see things, you know what I’m saying? I see things, and I know if anything happens, Lizzie’ll get took good care of. Who’s going to do that if I’m in the joint and one of them recaps blows and my little brother winds up smeared all down the apron?”

“I guess I’m taking the tires,” Dwight said.

Earl showed his gold tooth. He squeezed Dwight’s shoulder and let go. “Whitewalls, what do you say?”

“No. I’d have to repaint the jalop to live up to ’em.”

Elizabeth came out, wearing a summer cotton dress with shoulder pads and white pin dots on deep blue, her white platform sandals emphasizing the muscles in her calves from pushing carpet sweepers and standing on tiptoe to dust the tops of cabinets. She had coral polish on her toenails and a white carnation over her right ear that made her look a little like Billie Holiday.

“I’m feeling lucky this fine Saturday,” she said, pulling on a pair of white cotton gloves. “I’m thinking of putting two dollars down on a horse with a name that hits me right. Who’s running?”

Earl put on his zoot-suit coat, pulled a rolled-up
Racing Form
from a side pocket, and smacked it against his palm. “Number Three in the second’s called Steady Dee.”

Her sudden smile was like a flashbulb going off in Dwight’s face. “Earl, be a good husband and fetch me my purse.”

Steady Dee came in at five to one.

It was the daily double. Earl had ten down in addition to Elizabeth’s two. When he explained to her that they had just made one hundred and twenty dollars, she screamed and threw her arms around him and they almost tumbled off the bleacher seat. Dwight, who had kept his money in his pocket—he was superstitious about betting on himself—basked in their ecstasy and the sun on his back. It was a warm clear day at the state fairgrounds, not as humid as it had been, and the crowd had broken out its brightest prints and whitest flannels. There were more straw boaters than he’d seen in one place since before the war. Except for Pearl Harbor he’d never considered himself especially patriotic, but when “The Star Spangled Banner” played over the public-address system and the crowd rose in a body with hand on heart, he felt a lump as if he’d swallowed a cotton boll. The drink and hot-dog vendors, exempt from rations on the retail end, had to keep going back to empty their apron pockets to make room for more cash.

Earl split the one hundred and twenty down the middle, spread the sixty on two horses in the third, and cleared twenty when Fear Itself placed and Betty’s Gams won. Elizabeth hugged them both. Dwight smelled her warm moist skin mingled with the citrus perfume.

When Earl came back from the booth, he announced he’d split again, betting thirty on Happy Daze to show. Happy didn’t. Dwight stayed out of the argument when Earl proposed doubling down in the fifth race. He did over Elizabeth’s protests, and won again when a filly named Once in a While came in by half a length at two to one. By then he’d bought and consumed six Pfeiffer’s, and this time Dwight took a hand, or rather two arms, and restrained him physically from placing the entire day’s winnings on the nose of Peace in Our Time. Peace finished with the pack. They left before the seventh, one hundred and seventy dollars to the good.

In Dwight’s car, Earl handed the money over to his wife with a flourish. She tucked it into her bra, but not before separating his original ten and giving it back. “Ain’t we going to celebrate?” she asked.

Nearing Kern’s Department Store, Earl told Dwight to pull over.

“This a nightclub now?” Dwight asked.

“Just do like your big brother says.”

Dwight found a spot and spun the Model A into it. Earl had his door open before he set the brake. He said he’d be just a minute and loped through the nearest revolving door.

Elizabeth, who had ridden in the middle with her feet on the hump over the driveshaft, slid over to the passenger’s side. “Now what’s that boy up to?” She peered out the window as if she could see through the wall of the building.

“Whatever it is, it won’t make a lick of sense to nobody but Earl.”

She watched the people whirling in and out through the doors. “I don’t even know if I thanked you for bringing him home.”

“You did, but you didn’t have to. He’s my brother.”

“Sometimes I forget he’s the older one. Was you two always like that?”

“Sometimes I think so. When I was little it was different. I was a runt, bigger kids picked on me all the time. Earl was there and whaled the tar out of ’em. Sometimes they was too big, they whaled the tar out of him. It didn’t matter none how big they was, though. He waded right in.”

“Now it’s you does the wading.”

He moved his shoulders. “It was Earl’s idea to come up and work in the plants. I never would of took the chance on my own.”

“Glad you did?” She was looking at him now.

“Most of the time.” He rubbed a hand over his face; he’d worked the swing shift Friday night and had gotten only three hours’ sleep. “Hell, all of the time. Or I should be. Sometimes you forget things wasn’t so great back home.”

She rearranged herself on the seat, placing her back against the door and gathering her legs beneath her. “Earl’s got his heart set on getting rich. What you got
your
heart set on, Dwight?”

He looked through the windshield. He. hadn’t taken his hands off the wheel, “I’m trying to put money aside. I don’t want to work with my hands my whole life. They got schools up here will take coloreds.”

“I had a cousin went to college. He’s a pharmacist in New Jersey.”

“Well, first I got to finish high school.”

“That’s a good plan, Dwight.”

“It’s a plan.”

The floor behind Elizabeth opened suddenly. She grabbed the back of the seat to keep from spilling out and scrambled back up onto the hump in the floor. Earl, one foot on the running board, planted a green paper Kern’s sack on the seat and took out a clamshell box.

“What’d you do?” Elizabeth’s tone was accusing.

“Just take the box. I feel like a street peddler here.”

She took it and tipped back the lid. A watch with a tiny square face and a gold expansion band lay inside the blue velour lining. The legend on the face read
UNIVERSAL CENEVE.

“It’s a Chronograph,” Earl said. “I’m getting tired of you axing me what time it is all day long. Here.” He took back the box, slid the watch off the form, and threaded it onto her slim wrist. “How’s it feel? They can take out some links or put some in.”

“You got this for ten dollars?”

“I didn’t go to the track with just the ten. Anyway, I got a account. You like it?”

“It’s beautiful. Earl, we can’t afford it.”

“Sure we can. Axe Steady Dee. Shit! I almost forgot.” He reached into the sack and took out a sapphire blue tie bisected by a vertical spear embroidered in silver thread. “I wants my tie back, by the way.” He tossed it in Dwight’s lap.

Dwight picked it up, felt it, looked at the tab sewn to the back. “This is silk. I didn’t know you could get silk.”

“You can get anything if you got the cash. Henry Ford don’t wear no rayon.”

“I’d be scared to wear it. What if I get barbecue sauce oil it?”

“Then you take it to the cleaners. They got to make a living just like you and me. It’s good for the economy. Put it on.”

“You can’t run around spending money like this, Earl. How often you have a day at the track like today?”

Earl reached across Elizabeth and put a hand on Dwight’s knee. His expression was as close to solemn as it ever came. “I can’t think of nobody who’d put up with a jackass like me for a brother like you do. Not for a silk tie or a Brooks Brothers suit and a pair of Thom McAns. I done told you I’m nobody’s idea of a big brother. Just let me do this. It’s all I can swing.”

Dwight smiled and undid the tie he was wearing. The gold tooth in Earl’s grin caught the sun.

The rearview mirror was inadequate. Elizabeth took charge, evening out the ends and seating the knot so that there was no untidy dimple below it. She smoothed the shank along the placket of his shirt and smiled. “You look like Joe Louis on the town.”

“Speaking of doing the town,” Earl said. “What time is it by that Chronograph?”

She made a business of turning her wrist so that the jewels in the bezel glinted. “Five of six.”

“I knowed it was suppertime. My belly’s growling like a old lion. Let’s hit Carl’s and then do some clubbing.”

“The Forest?” Dwight felt uneasy about facing Beatrice. Despite what Gidgy had said, he was afraid he might have given her grief over telling Dwight about him.

“I’m tired of the Forest. We’re hitting the Trocadero.”

Elizabeth took in her breath. “I’m not dressed for it!”

“Sure you are. Show ’em the watch. If that don’t get us in I’ll blind the doorman with this here.” He dove into the sack, brought out a square box, and slipped a heavy silver ring onto his right pinky finger. It was set with a swirly blue stone. “It’s a tigereye,” Earl said, rocking his hand right and left to catch the light. “I was looking for a fire opal, but they wanted too much. Anyways I like this better. What do you think?”

Dwight said, “It looks like a blue marble.”

“What do you know? You was going to wear a black tie to the track.”

“It was gray.”

“How about it, sugar? Is it the flash, or is it the flash?”

“It’s the flash,” she said.

He said, “Ha!” crumpled the sack, tossed it to the floor, climbed onto the seat, and jerked the door shut. “Well, fire it up, little brother. Push that little button there on the side, Lizzie; that starts the stopwatch. Let’s see how many records we can bust between here and the restaurant.”

Dwight readjusted the rearview mirror and stomped on the starter.

X
AVIER
C
UGAT AND HIS
orchestra had opened up a third front on the stage of the Club Trocadero.

In the background, the musicians in their scarlet coats laid down a barrage with marimbas and trumpets while their black-tailed general worked the floor, beating his palms and stamping his patent leathers. Between them a handsome conga player pounded artillery out of a torpedo-shaped drum, his hair in his eyes. The singer, a Latin goddess of war in shimmering white with an explosion of red rose in her hair, chick-chick-a-boomed the chorus of “Cuban Pete” into a microphone that resembled nothing so much as a grenade. The dance floor was a whitecapped Nordsee of couples doing a frantic rhumba. The entire building shook like the hull of a destroyer under enemy fire.

A suspicious-looking doorman collected the six-dollar cover charge from Earl and turned them over to a greeter in tails and a dark study who conducted them to a tiny table near the short corridor to the rest rooms. Dwight, seeing Earl’s face go flat, feared a confrontation from which they could not possibly emerge victorious. His brother’s sudden grin as he stepped in to hold Elizabeth’s chair, which the greeter was obviously not going to do, filled him with relief. It occurred to him then, briefly, how much of his life had been lived according to Earl’s mercurial temperament.

Earl, fully ensconced as host, ordered Old Taylor and soda for himself and Dwight and a cherry Coke for Elizabeth. Their waiter glanced speculatively at Dwight, but did not ask for proof of age. He wasn’t asked often, although sometimes in the past his brother had been when he himself had not. He wondered at just what point he had begun to look like the older of the two Littlejohns.