They Don't Dance Much: A Novel (3 page)

I took another drink out of the spider-webbed bottle. I looked at the bottle when I’d finished my drink. It was about a third gone. I set it down beside me on the ground. I was getting a little tight then.

‘It’s a damned shame the way they sell land for taxes in this county,’ I said. ‘They might know I’d pay my taxes if I had the money.’

Smut took another cigarette out of his shirt-pocket. He didn’t offer me one.

‘Advertise your land for taxes this time?’ he said.

‘In the
Enterprise
today,’ I said.

Smut struck a match on his shoe and held it to the cigarette. He held this match like he did the other one, to see if his sweetheart had changed her mind. This time there was a strong red glow after the flame went out.

‘Loves me now,’ he said. ‘Must want to go to a dance. Oh, well, Jack, you know how it is. Around the Courthouse all they care about is getting their salaries and graft. To hell with the Little Man for all they care. Just so they get theirs.’

‘They’re fixing to put me on relief,’ I said. ‘It’s a known fact that I can’t pay my taxes now. Nor this fall either. The boll weevils stripped my cotton.’

Catfish woke up and yawned. ‘Cotton don’t bring nothin nohow,’ he said. ‘Time you pay for the seed, the guano, and all, you owe somebody money for the priviledge of workin yo own cotton. I done quit cotton.’

‘What you mean, “quit”?’ Smut said. ‘You ain’t started yet. I doubt if you ever done a day’s work in a cottonfield in your life.’

‘Use to raise it. Time of the war when cotton were forty cent a pound I clear over a thousand dollar in Marlboro County, in South Callina.’

‘What’d you do with it?’ Smut asked.

‘Throwed it away. Lived high as a kite till the money was gone. Had a Ford machine, a talkin Victrola. Kept a jar of liquor on the kitchen table, day and night.’

‘You got that now,’ Smut told him.

‘There’s nothing to farming nowadays,’ I said. ‘Not even a living.’

‘Not for the little farmer,’ Smut agreed.

‘Now, if I was out of debt I could get along,’ I said. ‘Or if I could borrow enough to get some more land—some good land—and some farming machinery.’

‘Why don’t you borrow from the Federal Government?’ Smut said.

‘Because I already owe more than the place’s worth,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you sell your farm and get you a job at public work?’ Smut said.

‘If I sold it and paid up my debts I wouldn’t have a dime,’ I said. ‘Getting a job’s a tough proposition. I’ve already tried it.’

‘I know they’re hard to get,’ he said, and stretched his arms above his head. ‘But you got more education than the average fellow around here.’

‘I just had one year at Yadkin College,’ I said, ‘and that was a waste of time. I didn’t pay them anything, so it wasn’t a waste of money. But I’d ’a’ better been down here making liquor, or something. Yadkin College ain’t much of a college, but the year I was there I learned a lot of new ways to spend money, and no new ways of making any.’

‘It’s a proposition, all right,’ Smut said.

‘I got to do something,’ I said. ‘This advertising my land for taxes has got me worried.’ But it was LeRoy and his bill that was worrying me the most.

Smut propped his chin in his hands. He twisted his mouth around, and it looked like he was considering something.

‘Tell you what, Jack,’ he said. ‘I might be able to give you a job.’

‘I’ll take it,’ I said. ‘When do I start?’

‘Any time. Only I don’t know whether you’ll like it or not.’

‘I’ll like it, all right. What’s it doing?’

Smut looked around him like he was afraid somebody would hear him, but there wasn’t anybody else there except for Catfish, and he was nodding.

‘Tell you what, Jack. I’m going to branch out. It don’t look like it tonight, but fact is, I been making good money down here. Mostly over the week-ends. I’m going to broaden out down here.’

‘You going to put up a bigger filling station?’ I asked. It didn’t look like the best spot in the world to me. It cornered on the river road, and that was a paved highway that went on to Miami, in the long run, but by the time cars got as far down as Smut’s place they were going pretty fast and didn’t stop often.

‘Not a filling station, exactly,’ he said. ‘What I had in mind was a sort of roadhouse. You know, dine and dance. ’Course I’ll have to sell liquor, and a little gas.’

‘You think a roadhouse’ll pay in this country?’ I said.

‘Damn right,’ he said. ‘I know it will.’

‘I’ll take a job with you,’ I said.

‘I got in mind a place to cater to a higher type than I’m catering to right now,’ Smut said. ‘These cotton-mill hands don’t do nothing but buy a little corn liquor, drink it, and then puke it right back up on the premises.’

‘They’re the main ones that come down here, though,’ I said.

‘Oh, they’ll keep on coming,’ he said. ‘But that’s all right. A roadhouse has got to take on all comers. What I want to do is to get the hosiery-mill workers to coming out here. They’re the folks that make what money’s made in Corinth.’

‘They spend it too,’ I said, ‘but most of those knitters like to ride around with their girls after they get off work. I reckon they’ve just been figuring that this place was a little too rough to bring a girl to.’

‘That’s the main reason,’ Smut said. ‘But you let me fix this place up and get it to looking streamlined and they’ll be right down here with their gal friends. Just changing the name of it from filling station to roadhouse would get some of them down here. You got to have a certain tone about a place to get suckers of the hosiery-mill type.’

‘You sure have got them figured out,’ I said.

‘I been studying them,’ he said. ‘I know I can make a road-house pay.’

‘How was you aiming to use me?’ I said.

‘Why, you can help me run the joint. I got to have some waiters and cooks. You might be the cashier.’

‘You sound like it’s all planned out,’ I said.

‘It is,’ Smut said. He twisted his neck around and spat in the direction of Catfish’s shoes. ‘I used to work in madhouses after I quit going to school. First and last, I worked in a lot of roadhouses. The folks that run them made plenty. Plenty.’

‘Were you ever a bouncer?’ I said.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I was a bouncer all up and down the Pacific Coast. I never had much trouble.’

I looked at his arms and I believed him.

‘I guess you won’t need me till you get the place worked over, will you?’ I said.

‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I could use you. I got a lot of dodging around to do in the next few weeks and you could run the joint for me part of the time. How much wages was you expecting?’

‘How about thirty dollars a month?’ I said.

He shut one eye and looked down at the ground. ‘That’s a little steep. I’ll furnish board and a place to sleep, you know,’ he said.

‘I can get board and room and thirty dollars a month in the CCC,’ I said.

‘It ain’t very good board there,’ Smut said. ‘How about twenty-five dollars a month to start with?’

‘Make it twenty-seven fifty,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t do it. Twenty-five is the best I can do right now.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘When do you want me to start?’

‘How about Monday?’

‘Monday suits me. How about borrowing your pick-up to bring my trunk down here then?’

‘You can have it Sunday,’ he said.

‘All right. I’ll see you Sunday afternoon,’ I said. I picked up the bottle of liquor and got up to go.

‘Don’t rush off,’ Smut said. ‘It ain’t late yet.’

‘It will be when I get home,’ I said, and I started back up the road.

SMUT MILLIGAN WAS A
couple of years older than I was, but I knew him pretty well. His first name was Richard, but everybody called him Smut. I don’t know what his last name really was. He didn’t know either. He was adopted by Ches Milligan and his wife when he was a baby. Ches Milligan used to run a grocery store in Corinth. His wife ran him. When she had his spirit broken—from what they tell me—she took a notion to go to an orphanage in Raleigh and get a baby there. She wanted a boy baby. She liked to tell males where to head in.

Smut was three or four years old then, but from what I’ve heard he never paid much attention to Mrs. Milligan. He was a tough kid in school and played hooky a lot. In the fall he’d traipse off to hunt muscadines and in the spring he went fishing in Pee Dee River, and sometimes in Rocky River. He gave the Milligans a lot of trouble. The old lady probably wished she’d let him stay in the orphanage. But she died when he was about sixteen. From then on Smut didn’t have any argument about what he did.

After his wife died Ches Milligan had plenty of freedom. But he was sort of lost and took to drinking. Right off he married the widow Bolick, a bossy woman, but she died on him in six months’ time. Ches was used to being told what to do, and having so much bad luck with his wives put him out of heart. He got to drinking so much that he lost his business. After a while he lost his home too, and then he put on a protracted drunk. He cashed in his insurance policies and stayed drunk till that was all gone. When he sobered up about all he had left was a shotgun and one shell. He cut the barrel off the shotgun and put the shell through his head.

Smut had been living on the streets for some time then, and Ches’s killing himself didn’t make much difference to him one way or the other. He must have been eighteen then, and he was grown. He hung around Corinth that summer, working in filling stations and playing baseball on Saturdays. That fall he went off to Harrell Junior College, but they kicked him out as soon as the football season was over.

He kept that up for a couple of years. In the fall he’d go to some little college and play football. After the football season was over he’d come back to Corinth and hang around till spring, when he’d go back to another college and make his board and room playing on the baseball team. In the summer he could always make enough to live on by playing baseball with some mill team. He wasn’t a bad baseball player, but the big league scouts that hang around this section never paid much attention to him. He was a sucker for a curve.

When Smut was twenty-one or twenty-two he left, and I didn’t see hair nor hide of him for three or four years. Then in 1935 he came back. One Saturday afternoon I walked into the City Bowling Alley. He was running the joint just like he’d been there all the time.

He had some money—he was bound to have had—and it wasn’t long before he bought out the River Bend filling station. There was a murder down there. The boy that owned the place was mixed up in it and had to go to the pen. I heard Smut got it at a bargain.

He made good from the start. During the week he didn’t have so much business, but on Saturdays and Sundays it was a live place. The loafers in Corinth told me that Smut didn’t go to bed from Saturday morning till sometime Monday. There was always a game of poker or blackjack going on in the back of the place. Smut got in those games and usually made money in them. He sold some gas and a lot of liquor.

When we were kids in high school I was a good catcher, but Smut was the regular catcher and I didn’t get to play much. I lay out of school one year so he’d get on through and I could have the field to myself. He was a big, rough fellow and I was always afraid of him. But he seemed to like me.

When we were kids in school most of the boys thought Lola Shaw was the prettiest girl there. Her hair was dark and she had big brown eyes. She had a sly way of looking at boys that got them down. It looked like she was trying to say, ‘Now if we were just off by ourselves couldn’t we have one hell of a time?’ She was a medium-sized girl, built with curves that were banked right. Her face was sort of oval-shaped. The boys all liked her fine, but girls didn’t.

Her daddy was old Flake Shaw, a horse doctor. He was a good horse doctor and saved his money. When he died he left his wife some property. She stepped out socially in Corinth then. She joined a couple of book clubs and took a big part in the P.T.A. You couldn’t pick up the
Enterprise
without seeing where she’d just finished entertaining the Ladies’ Aid Society of the Methodist Church. She was mighty careful about who she let Lola associate with, and when Lola finished high school she sent her to Duke University.

About the time Lola finished high school Smut Milligan noticed her. Or maybe it was her noticed him. Anyway they started running around together. That didn’t suit Lola’s mama. Smut wasn’t nice folks and she put her foot down. So Lola had to learn how to climb out of windows late at night. She might have slipped out to meet other boys, but Smut was the only one I knew about for sure.

While Smut was away from Corinth, on the Pacific Coast or wherever it was, Lola ran around with a lot of different boys. She would go out with nice fellows that were studying the Ministry, or Law, or maybe Accounting and Business Administration. She went with them to please her mother. After she got her duty done she slipped out with other boys around town, to have some fun. Back then I used to keep up with the boys she went with, because I had a crush on her myself.

The summer after Lola finished at Duke, Smut Milligan came back to Corinth. He had a few dates with her, out in the open, but I guess her mother commenced raising hell again and it wasn’t long before they were slipping out to meet each other. From the way she acted I thought Lola loved Smut, but she married Charles Fisher in September of that year.

I don’t think she’d ever had a date with him until about a month before they got married.

Charles Fisher was an only child. His daddy was Henry Fisher, the man that owned the Corinth Hosiery Mills. When Charles’s mother died she left him her property, and that amounted to around half a million dollars. He could have lived like a king off the interest on that, but he took a job in his daddy’s hosiery mill. They said the old man wanted him to keep on in the business. He worked all over the mill, at different jobs. When he married Lola Shaw he was about thirty-five years old. He was in charge of the Sales Department by then. He went to Northern towns like New York and Philadelphia and sold the hosiery they manufactured. That kept him out of Corinth a good part of the time.