They Don't Dance Much: A Novel (11 page)

Smut got up and walked over to the window. He took a little box off the window sill and shook two dice out of it. ‘Roll you for five bucks, Wilbur,’ he said.

Wilbur looked at Bert Ford, who was sitting there rolling his snuff-brush around in his box of snuff. ‘Want to get in on this, Bert?’ Wilbur said.

‘Naw,’ Bert said, and put the snuff-brush into his mouth.

Wilbur rolled first. He rolled a nine. Smut came up with an eleven to start with and Wilbur peeled off a five-spot from a small roll he took out of his pocket. They rolled again and Smut won again. Wilbur didn’t pay him that time, but said, ‘That’s five I owe you.’ He looked toward Bert Ford. ‘Still don’t want to get in?’ he said.

Bert hesitated a minute. ‘Yes, by God, I will get in,’ he said.

They got to rolling them up against the wall pretty fast. I don’t know that there’s any craft in rolling dice—just luck. But for a while Smut was lucky. He was taking ten dollars in every time they rolled. But just as sudden the luck started toward Bert Ford. He won eight times in a row before he lost one to Wilbur. Losing to either one of them was bad for Smut, for he’d been the main loser in the poker game. But he wouldn’t quit.

After a while Wilbur said: ‘Well, I’ve already lost thirty dollars more than I won playing poker. I think I’ll quit this dice-chunking right now.’

Bert Ford looked around his back. ‘Got enough, Milligan?’ he said.

Smut gave him a hard look. ‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘Roll.’

‘All right, son,’ Bert said. He rolled an eleven.

Smut lost three in a row before he won. Then he said: ‘Here I go now. Watch my smoke.’

‘I’m watching,’ Bert Ford said. He took off his hat and threw it on the floor. He spat toward the corner of the room, and looked around him like he was amongst enemies and was afraid somebody’d knife him in the back.

Baxter, Wilbur, and myself bent over there and watched the dice rolling. Niggers talk to the dice, but Smut and Bert didn’t say a word. Maybe they were praying. If they were, Bert’s praying did the most good. He was lucky that night, or he was a better bones-thrower than Smut was. When they finally quit, Smut gave him a check. ‘Hold it off for a week, if you will,’ he said to Bert.

‘All right,’ Bert said. He took out his pocketbook, folded the check in the middle, and put it in there with the bills. He had a lot of bills in that cheap-looking pocketbook. If they were big ones he had a sight of money on him.

Bert picked up his hat, dusted it across his legs, and put it on. He took his snuff-brush and snuffbox out of his hip pocket and took a big dip. ‘See you all later,’ he said, and went out the back door.

Baxter had his mouth open all the time they were throwing the dice, but when Bert left he shut it. Then he opened it again and said, ‘Great God!’ He took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead.

Wilbur Brannon laughed. ‘Some Bert,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know he fooled with the dice.’

‘He wasn’t fooling,’ Smut said. He grinned a sick grin when he said it.

I went back to the front and turned out the lights. Badeye had already left. I knew Johnny Lilly was still in the kitchen and I went back there, for I was hungry. I was opening the refrigerator when Smut pushed open the swinging doors and came in.

‘Want me to fix you a sandwich?’ I said to him.

‘Jesus, no!’ he said. ‘I couldn’t eat after
that.’
He came over to the refrigerator and got an ice cube and put it in a glass.

‘I need a drink,’ he said, and poured a stiff one out of a bottle that was on the top shelf of the refrigerator.

He sat down in front of the stove and sipped his drink. I finished eating my sandwich and turned to go. ‘I locked the front door and turned out the lights,’ I said.

Smut set the glass down on the table that was back of him. ‘Wasn’t that a hell of a way to lose money?’ he said. He propped his feet against the bottom of the stove and his elbows on his knees.

‘It was a quick way,’ I said, and started to walk away.

‘Wait a minute, Jack. Don’t you want a nightcap?’ he said. He turned to Johnny, who was standing by the stove smoking a cigarette.

‘You can go, Johnny. We’ll turn out the lights,’ he said. Johnny took one of the stovelids off and threw his cigarette in the stove. He turned and went out.

I sat down on the table that was directly back of Smut. He got up and poured himself another drink and he fixed one for me. He brought the drinks over where I was sitting and handed me mine. Then he sat down in the chair and lit a cigarette.

‘I was a damn fool. I’d lost sixty dollars in that poker game. I hated to see it go. I thought maybe I could get it back with the dice. But I played hell.’

‘No use worrying about that now,’ I said. I was sleepy, and in my mind I agreed with him that he’d acted like a fool.

‘No, it’s gone now,’ he said. ‘But I’m in a bind, sort of. How much you reckon that check I gave Bert Ford was for?’

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Two hundred and fifty dollars. Before that he’d won most of the seventy dollars I had to start with.’

‘I just gave you fifty out of the cash box,’ I said.

‘I had about twenty dollars on me before I got that out of the cash register,’ he said. ‘But that ain’t worrying me. What’s worrying me is that I got a four-hundred-dollar note coming up at the Farmers & Merchants Bank this week.’

‘Can’t you meet it?’ I said.

‘No. The money I lost tonight was going to be part of it. I’d aimed to make enough out of that game to bring it up to three hundred and fifty or four hundred dollars.’

‘Maybe you can get it renewed,’ I said.

‘Doubt it,’ he said, and he looked glum. ‘I had some trouble getting it in the first place. I’d already borrowed and they knew it. It just took more to fix up this place than I’d counted on.’

‘The way you been taking in money, it looks like they’d wait a month or two for it. In a little while you could make enough to pay for it,’ I said.

‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it got out how much money I been taking in. Don’t you ever tell anybody my business.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said.

Smut swallowed down his drink with one motion and sat the glass on the floor. ‘The reason I said that was that I don’t want Astor LeGrand to know exactly how much money I take in. Ever since I first come out here I been giving him a straight ten per cent to look out for me. I’m making too much now to do it. He ought to be satisfied with five per cent. And his brother-in-law
would
have to be cashier of the bank. If I tell them at the bank how much I take in out here, why it would be the same as telling Astor LeGrand.’

I saw he was right, of course. ‘It’s a mess,’ I said. ‘Offhand, I wouldn’t know where you could scrape up the money.’

‘Maybe I can stall Bert off awhile,’ he said.

‘Maybe so. He’s got plenty of money anyway.’

‘He’s got some. I don’t know how much,’ Smut said, and hitched up his belt. ‘He used to be in a business to make money.’

‘What was that?’

‘Used to be a strike-breaker. He’d get up a bunch of cutthroats and break up strikes that the unions were trying to pull.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Up North, and in the West. Badeye heard about him in Detroit.’

‘How come him to leave if he had a good thing?’

‘Must have got in trouble. Probably hit some picket a little too hard.’

‘They tell me he’s got thirty thousand dollars buried on his place,’ I said.

Smut looked at me hard. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked.

‘Catfish,’ I said. ‘He told me that one night when Bert had the snakes he told him he had thirty thousand dollars buried somewhere.’

‘One of them is a lie. There ain’t thirty thousand dollars in this county,’ Smut said.

‘I reckon so,’ I said. ‘But Old Man Joshua Lingerfelt told me just this afternoon that Bert said something to him one night about it.’

Smut studied awhile. ‘I remember something about that,’ he said. ‘I remember Baxter Yonce and Wheeler Wilkinson talking in the bowling alley up town one night. Baxter said Bert had a lot of money, fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, in a bank in Charlotte. He said Bert drew it out just a week before the bank busted.’

‘How’d Baxter know that?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. But Baxter ain’t a man to gossip,’ Smut said.

‘Wonder where he’s got it hid,’ I said.

‘Hell, if I knew that I wouldn’t be sitting here worrying about that note coming due at the bank,’ Smut said. He put his hands under his chin, and I went off and left him there to his worrying.

SMUT HAD TILL THURSDAY
to get up the money. Wednesday morning, while I was helping Matt sweep out the front, he came in. He had on his dark suit, and a hat for a change. He walked over to where I was sweeping around the tables.

‘I’m going to the bank, Jack. Don’t know whether I’ll be back before twelve or not,’ he said.

‘Hope you have luck,’ I said.

‘Hope so. If that Schlitz man comes this morning, take a dozen cases of beer, and tell the El-Putro man I can’t sell them stinking things he calls cigars. Tell him not to leave but one box this time.’ El-Putro was Smut’s name for the brand of cigars that man sold. The real name for them was some sort of Senators. Smut twisted his neck around and walked out to the front where the pick-up was parked.

After we got through sweeping and cleaning up there wasn’t much to do. The beer truck came, and the cigar salesman, and after they left I worked on a bookkeeping course I swapped out of Badeye. He said it was one he’d bought when he was up North. He said he got ambitious there for a while. Didn’t drink but a pint of liquor a day and saved his money. But it wasn’t long before he saw that a poor man didn’t have a chance. He got disheartened and quit the course. He claimed the correspondence school that sold him the course made him keep on paying for it, though, till it was all paid. Then they sent him the complete course. He said he’d lost the solutions to the problems he sent in, and anyway hadn’t sent in but twelve lessons when he quit. There was supposed to be ninety lessons in it, but lessons number 19, 21, and 53 weren’t there. He told me he lost them. On several of the lessons, but never on the front of any of them, there was this name: ‘Robert McCuiston.’ I guess that was the name of the man Badeye stole the course from. I swapped Badeye a straight razor and a bottle of hair tonic for it.

It was considerably after twelve o’clock when Smut put in his appearance again. He came past the counter and didn’t even look up at me when he walked by.

‘Any luck?’ I asked him.

‘Not a bit,’ he said, and went on to the kitchen.

I waited there, and it wasn’t long before he came back. He had a water glass full of whiskey and a bottle of ginger ale. We were by ourselves in the front.

‘Want part of this?’ he said, and pointed to the liquor.

‘I guess not,’ I said. ‘Might have a customer any time now.’

‘Damn the customers!’ he said. ‘Well, I did have a little luck—in a way. I got the note renewed for two months.’

‘That helps some, don’t it?’ I said.

‘Not much. They stuck forty dollars more on it for renewing it. And the regular interest on top of that.’

‘Hell-fire! That’s highway robbery!’ I said.

Smut took about half of the liquor in the glass. He chased it with a drink of the ginger ale, then wiped his hand over his mouth.

‘I got to Corinth,’ he said, ‘and I made for the bank. J. V. Kirk was there. He was mighty cordial, till he found out that I wanted him to renew the note. Then he hemmed and hawed. Finally he says: “Mr. Milligan, I don’t know what to do. Come back to see me tomorrow and I’ll let you know what we can do about it.” Well, that wouldn’t give me time to be prepared in case he wouldn’t renew it, so I says: “No, I think you ought to tell me now. Yes or no.” ’

Smut finished the glass of liquor. Then he finished the bottle of ginger ale and went on: ‘Finally he says to come back about two o’clock. I told him all right, I’d do it. I went back out to the pick-up. I drove down the street and parked back of the hotel, on Depot Street. Then I came back uptown by the back lots, and went in the back of the Hang-Out. You know that’s directly in front of the bank. I got a Coca-Cola and set down in a chair by the front door.’

Smut loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt-collar. ‘I waited a good while—an hour or so—when up drove Astor LeGrand. He went inside the bank and I guess he stayed in there half an hour. Then he come out, got in his car, and drove down the street toward the Courthouse. As soon as he left I walked straight to the bank. J. V. Kirk was sitting there in the cashier’s cage.’

Smut pushed the glass down the counter. He hitched his shoulders and jerked his tie off. ‘ “Mr. Kirk,” I says to him, “I had to come back up town for something, and just thought I’d drop in and see if you’d made up your mind about that note.” He sort of smiled and nodded his head. “I decided to let you renew it for sixty days,” he said. “Thanks, Mr. Kirk,” I said. “Course we have to make an extra charge for this service,” he said. “How much?” I said. “Forty dollars,” he said, and he never batted an eye.’

Smut took out a cigarette from his coat. He didn’t pull out the pack, just reached inside his coat and came out with one cigarette. ‘Well, that got me hot. I cussed a little and tried to get him down, but it wasn’t no use. I might as well been talking to a tombstone.’

‘So you signed it?’ I said.

‘So I signed it for forty bucks more than the old one. I got sixty days to get it in.’

The roadhouse made plenty of money in the next month. The way things went it looked like Smut could pay off the note in sixty days. He made over three hundred dollars clear, in a month’s time. But he’d bought too much stuff on the installment plan. That ate him up. He had to pay fifty dollars a month on the booths, the counters, and such fixtures. He had to pay twenty-five dollars a month on the stuff he’d bought for the kitchen. The furniture that was in the cabins had been bought on time too, and he had to pay forty dollars a month on that. What made it worse was that he bought it from Smathers & Company; if he was thirty minutes late sending in a payment LeRoy Smathers would be right out. Altogether, Smut had to pay out over a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month on stuff he’d bought. That didn’t leave him enough profit to pay up the note at the bank. Still, he didn’t make much effort to raise the money during November, but just let things ride.