The Reivers (24 page)

"Sho," Ned said. "That's what I'd say too if it was me. I'll try. Ill be in early tomorrow morning to get Lucius, but the best chance gonter be at that track tomorrow just before the race." He said to me: "Folks is already kind of dropping by Possum's lot like they wasn't noticing themselves doing it, likely trying to find out who it is this time that still believes that horse can run a race. So likely we gonter have a nice crowd tomorrow. It's late now, so you go get some sleep whilst I takes that mule of Possum's back home to bed too. Where's your sock? You aint lost it?"

"It's in my pocket," I said.

"Be sho you dont," he said. "The mate to it is the left-footed one 'and a left-footed sock is unlucky unlessen you wears both of them." He turned, but no further than the fat cook; he said to her now: "Unlessen my mind changes to staying in town tonight. What time you setting breakfast, Good-looking?"

"The soonest time after your jaws is too far away to chomp it," the cook said.

"Good night, all," Ned said. Then he was gone. We went back to the dining room, where the waiter, in his short sleeves now and without his collar and tie, brought Miss Reba a plate of the pork chops and grits and biscuits and blackberry jam we had had for supper, neither hot nor cold now but lukewarm, in deshabille like the waiter, you might say.

"Did you get her to sleep?" Everbe said. "Yes," Miss Reba said. "That little son of a—" and cut it off and said, "Excuse me. I thought I had seen everything in my business, but I never thought I'd have a tooth stolen in one of my houses. I hate little bastards. They're like little snakes. You can handle a big snake because you been already warned to watch out. But a little one has already bit you behind before you even knew it had teeth. Where's my coffee?" The waiter brought it and went away. And then even Ifrat big shrouded dining room was crowdedj it was like every time Boon and Butch got inside the same four walls everything compounded, multiplied, leaving not really room for anything else. He—Butch— had been back to the doctor's, or maybe in the tin badge business you knew, everybody who didn't dare refuse you a free drink. And it was getting late, and I was tired, but here he was again; and suddenly I knew that up to now he hadn't really been anything and that we were only just starting with Mm now, standing in the door, bulging, bright-eyed, confident, breezy and a little redder, the badge itself seeming to bulge at us as with a life of its own on his sweaty shirt, he—Butch—wearing it not as the official authorisation of his unique dedication, but as a boy scout wears his merit badge: as both the unique and hard-won reward and emblem of a specialisation and the pre-absolution for any other activities covered or embraced by its mystic range; at that moment Everbe rose quickly across the table and almost scuttled around it and into the chair next Miss Reba, whom Butch was looking at, bulging at now. And that was when I rated Boon down a notch and left Everbe first for trouble. All Boon had was Butch; she had Boon and Butch both.

"Well well," Butch said, "is all Catalpa Street moving east to Possum?" So that at first I thought he might be a friend or at least a business acquaintance of Miss Reba's. But if he was, he didn't remember her name. But then even at eleven I was learning that there are people like Butch who dont remember anybody except in the terms of their immediate need of them, and what he needed now (or anyway could use) was another woman, he didn't care who provided she was more or less young and pleasing. No: he didn't really need one: he just happened to find one already in the path, like one lion on Ms way to fight another lion over an antelope that he never had any doubts about licking (I mean licking the lion, not the antelope) would still be a fool not to try throwing in, just for luck you might say, another antelope if he happened to find - one straying in the path. Except that Miss Reba turned out not to be an antelope. What Butch found was another lion. He said: "This is what I call Sugar Boy using Ms head; what's the use of him and me being all racked up over one hunk of meat when here's 'another exactly like it in all important details except maybe a little difference in the pelt."

"Who's that?" Miss Reba said to Everbe. "Friend of yours?"

"No," Everbe said; she was actually crouching: a big girl, too big to crouch. "Please—"

"She's telling you," Boon said. "She aint got no friends no more. She dont want none. She's quit, gone out of business. Soon as we finish losing this horse race, she's going away somewhere and get a job washing dishes. Ask her."

Miss Reba was looking at Everbe. "Please," Everbe said.

"What do you want?" Miss Reba asked Butch.

"Nothing," Butch said. "Nothing a-tall. Me and Sugar Boy was kind of bollixed up at one another for a while. But now you showed up, everything is hunky-dory. Twenty-three skiddoo," He came and took hold of Everbe's arm. "Come on. The surrey's outside. Let's give them a little room."

"Call the manager," Miss Reba said, quite loud, to me. I didn't even have to move; likely, if I had been looking, I could have seen the edge of Mm too beyond the door. He came in. "Is this man the law here?" Miss Reba said.

"Why, we all know Butch around here, Mrs Binford," the clerk said. "He's got as many friends in Parsham as anybody I know. Of course he's from up at Hardwick; properly speaking, we dont have a law officer right here in Parsham; we ain't quite that big yet." Butch's rich and bulging warmth had embraced, invited the clerk almost before he could enter the door, as though he—the clerk— had fallen headlong into it and vanished like a mouse into a lump of still-soft ambergris. But now Butch's eyes were quite cold, hard.

"Maybe that's what's wrong around here," he told the clerk. "Maybe that's why you dont have no progress and advancement: what you need is a little more law."

"Aw, Butch," the clerk said.

"You mean, anybody that wants to can walk in off the street and drag whichever one of your women guests he likes the looks of best, off to the nearest bed like you were running a cat-house?" Miss Reba said.

"Drag who where?" Butch said. "Drag with what? a two-dollar bill?" Miss Reba rose.

"Come on," she said to Everbe. "There's a train back to Memphis tonight. I know the owner of this dump. I think I'll go see him tomorrow—"

"Aw, Butch," the clerk said. "Wait, Mrs Binford—"

"You go back out front, Virgil," Butch told the clerk. "It aint only four months to November; some millionaire with two registered bird dogs might walk in any minute, and there wont be nobody out there to show him where to sign Ms name at. Go on. We're all friends here." The clerk went. "Now that that's all out of the way," Butch said, reaching for Everbe's arm again.

"Then you'll do," Miss Reba said to Butch. "Let's me and you go out front, or anywhere else that's private, too. I got a word for you."

"About what?" Butch said. She didn't answer, already walking toward the door. "Private, you say?" Butch said. "Why, sure; any time I cant accommodate a good-looking gal private, I'll give Sugar Boy full lief to step in." They went out. And now, from the lobby, we couldn't see them beyond the door of the ladies' parlor, for almost a minute in fact, maybe even a little more, before Miss Reba came back out, still walking steadily, hard and handsome and composed; then Butch a second later, saying, "Is that so, huh? We'll just see about that," Miss Reba coming steadily on to where we waited, watching Butch go on across the lobby without even looking at us. "All right?" Everbe said.

"Yes," Miss Reba said. "And that goes for you too," she told Boon. She looked at me. "Jesus," she said. "What the hell did you do to him?" Boon said. "Nothing," she said over her shoulder, because she was looking at me. "—thought I had see all the cat-house problems possible. Until I had one with children in it. You brought one in"—she was talking to Everbe now—"that run the landlord off and robbed all the loose teeth and fourteen dollars' worth of beer; and if that wasn't enough, Boon Hogganbeck brings one that's driving my damned girls into poverty and respectability. I'm going to bed and you—"

"Come on," Boon said. "What did you tell him?"

"What's that town of yours?" Miss Reba said. "Jefferson," Boon said.

"You big-town folks from places like Jefferson and Memphis, with your big-city ideas, you don't know much about Jjaw. You got to come to little places, like this. I know, because I was raised in one. He's the constable. He could spend a week in Jefferson or Memphis, and you wouldn't even see him. But, here among the folks that elected him (the majority of twelve or thirteen that voted for him, and the minority of nine or ten or eleven that didn't and are already sorry for it or damned soon will be) he dont give a damn about the sheriff of the county nor the governor of the state nor the president of the United States all three rolled into one. Because he's a Baptist. I mean, he's a Baptist first, and then he's the Law. When he can be a Baptist and the Law both at the same time, he will. But any time the law comes conflicting up where nobody invited it, the law knows what it can do and where to do it. They tell how that old Pharaoh was pretty good at kinging, and another old one back in the Bible times named Caesar, that did the best he knew how. They should have visited down here and watched a Arkansas or Missippi or Tennessee constable once."

"But how do you know who he is?" Everbe said. "How do you even know there's one here?"

"There's one everywhere," Miss Reba said. "Didn't I just tell you I grew up in a place like this—as long as I could stand it? I dont need to know who he is. All I needed was to let that bastard know I knew there was one here too. I'm going—"

"But what did you tell him?" Boon said. "Come on. I may want to remember it."

"Nothing, I told you," Miss Reba said. "If I hadn't learned by now how to handle these damned stud horses with his badge in one hand and his fly in the other, I'd been in the poorhouse years ago. I told him if I saw his mug around here again tonight, I would send that sheep-faced clerk to wake the constable up and tell him a deputy sheriff from Hardwick has just registered a couple of Memphis whores at the Parsham Hotel. I'm going to bed, and you better too. Come on, Corrie. I put your outraged virtue on record with that clerk and now you got to back it up, at least where he can see you." They went on. Then Boon was gone too; possibly he had followed Butch to the front door just to make sure the surrey was gone. Then suddenly Everbe swooped down at me, that big: a big girl, muttering rapidly:

"You didn't bring anything at all, did you? I mean, clothes. You been wearing the same ones ever since you left home."

"What's wrong with them?" I said.

"I'm going to wash them," she said. "Your underthings and stockings, your blouse. And the sock you ride with too. Come on and take them off."

"But I ain't got any more," I said.

"That's all right. You can go to bed. I'll have these all ready again when you get up. Come on." So she stood outside the door while I undressed and shoved my blouse and underwear and stockings and the riding-sock through the crack in the door to her and she said Good night and I closed the door and got into bed; and still there was something unfinished, that we hadn't done, attended to yet: the secret pre-race conference; the close, grim, fierce murmurous plotting of tomorrow's strategy. Until I realised that, strictly speaking, we had no strategy; we had nothing to plan for nor even with: a horse whose very ownership was dubious and even (unless Ned himself really knew) unknown, of whose past we knew only that he had consistently run just exactly fast enough to finish second to the other horse in the race; to be raced tomorrow, exactly where I anyway didn't know, against a horse none of us had ever seen and whose very existence ('as far as we were concerned) had to be taken on trust. Until I realised that, of all human occupations, the racing of horses, and all concerned or involved in it, were the most certainly in God's hands. Then Boon came in; I was already in bed, already half asleep.

"What've you done with your clothes?" he said. "Everbe's washing them," I said. He had taken off his pants and shoes and was already reaching to turn out the light. He stopped, dead still.

"Who did you say?" I was awake now but it was already too late. I lay there with my eyes closed, not moving. "What name did you say?"

"Miss Corrie is," I said.

"You said something else." I could feel him looking at me. "You called her Everbe." I could feel him looking at me. "Is that her name?" I could feel him looking at me. "So she told you her real name." Then he said, quite gently: "God damn," and I saw through my eyelids the room go dark, then the bed creaked as he lay down on it, as beds always do since there is so much of him, as I have heard them ever since I can remember when I would sleep with him: once or twice at home when Father would be away and he would stay in the house so Mother wouldn't be afraid, and at Miss Ballenbaugh's two nights ago, and in Memphis last night, until I remembered that I hadn't slept with him in Memphis: it was Otis. "Good night," he said. "Good night," I said.

Chapter 10

Then it was morning, it was tomorrow: THE day on which I would ride my first actual horse race (and by winning it, set Boon and Ned—me too of course, but then I was safe, immune; I was not only just a child, I was kin to them—free to go home again, not with honor perhaps, not even unscathed, but at least they could go back) toward which all the finagling and dodging and manipulating and scrabbling around (what other crimes subsequent to—dl right, consequent to—the simple and really spontaneous and in a way innocent stealing of Grandfather's automobile, I didn't even know) had been leading up to; now it was here. "So she told you what her real name is," Boon said. Because you see, it was too late now; I had been half asleep last night and off my guard.

"Yes," I said; whereupon I realised that that was completely false: she hadn't told me; she didn't even know I knew it, that I had been calling her Everbe ever since Sunday night. But it was too late now. "But you've got to promise," I said. "Not promise her: promise me. Never to say it out loud until she tells it first."

"I promise," he said. "I ain't never lied to you yet. I mean, lied bad. I mean ... I aint... All right," he said. "I done promised." Then he said again, like last night, gentle and almost amazed: "God damn." And my clothes —blouse, stockings and underwear and the riding-sock— were neatly folded, laundered and ironed, on a chair just outside our door. Boon handed them in to me. "With all them clean clothes, you got to bathe again," he said.