They Don't Dance Much: A Novel (7 page)

‘He was just drunk,’ I said.

‘Cose he was drunk. He was havin delicious trembles. But that don’t make no difference. He done got money and he got it buried.’

‘How’d you manage to get away from him that night?’ I said.

‘By settin there half the night, till he passed out cold as a cucumber. Atter the first two drinks I wa’n’t in no special discomfort. That was hellish strong liquor Mr. Bert was drinkin.’

‘He didn’t tell you much about his money,’ I said.

‘He talk about it right much that night, off and on. Always say the same identical thing. Thutty thousand dollar. Buried.’

‘He never did say where it was buried, though, did he?’

‘Well, not exactly. Ever time he start to git off on that he git to cussin and complainin about the snakes and alligators and such truck.’

‘What snakes and alligators?’

‘Confound if I ever do know. He claim the room was full of snakes and such varmints. He’d say: “Catfish, git this here dang pilate offen my year. Knock this cottonmouth out from under the cheer,” he’d say. “Look at that there alligator sneakin up the side of the wall. But I can’t shoot him,” he’d say. “I got to keep my gun loaded for that there Tom Flake.” I went over to where he was settin, but I couldn’t see no snakes. I humored him, though; I batted round with my hands and tuk the broom and knocked on the wall and acted like I was sweepin the snakes outen the room. That was some time we had that night!’

‘I’ll swear!’ I said. ‘Does he go on drunks like that now?’

‘Not that long,’ Catfish said. ‘His liver won’t stand for it now.’

I sat there thinking about Bert Ford and wondering if he told Catfish the truth, or if Catfish was just yarning. I quit talking to him, and finally he got discouraged and went out and talked to the carpenters.

I figured he was lying to me, but I wasn’t sure. Bert Ford always had plenty of cash on him. One time one of his croppers killed another nigger and they set his bond at a thousand dollars. Bert went to Corinth and pulled out the money, for it was during the busy season and he needed the nigger. Bert must have thought the nigger could beat the case anyway, and he did.

I kept studying about what Smut had said the night before, when he was getting into bed: ‘What I’d like to know is a way to separate them from it.’ That was what I wanted to know too. I needed money worse than Smut did. He was in pretty good shape. I needed money to pay off LeRoy Smathers. After I got that paid I could use considerable for other things. I didn’t like to work for another man. I wanted some place of my own, even if it wasn’t anything but a hot-dog stand. Still I knew I couldn’t get enough money to open up anything, working for twenty-five dollars a month. And I couldn’t see any way of making more than that.

Catfish hung around till that afternoon. He charged a can of salmon and a box of crackers to his account and made his dinner off that. About two o’clock he loaded up his old car with five hundred pounds of sugar and left. I reckon he came up there aiming to get Smut or me to haul a load of sugar down to his place on the pick-up, because we could haul more on that. But when Smut hadn’t shown up after noon Catfish decided to go on with part of a load. He had some beer that needed to have sugar put in it.

It was late when Smut got back. He drove the truck back of the filling station and left it there. He came around to the front and sat down in the door, beside me.

‘Well, I got practically everything lined up today,’ he said. ‘I’m just about ready for the big opening now.’

‘When you aim to be ready?’ I said.

‘In a couple of weeks, at the outside. I got the men coming in here tomorrow to build them tourist cabins. And the new part is going to be ready for us to move in day after tomorrow.’

‘How long will it take them to remodel this filling station into a dance hall?’ I asked him.

‘Not long. They ought to finish it in less than a week. I got a load of fixtures coming in here tomorrow. And the men to put them in.’

He had it sized up just about right. Two weeks from that day we could have had the big opening night. But that would have made it on a Monday and that wasn’t a good time. People wouldn’t have had time to get straightened out from the past week-end. So Smut put it off till Saturday of that week. We spent the rest of the week putting on the finishing touches.

It was a different-looking place after the carpenters got through and the painters finished painting it. The new building was closer to the paved highway than the filling station had been. Smut hired Sam Durkin to take his barn-moving machinery and pull the old filling station over beside the new part. Then the filling station was worked over and made into a dance hall.

In the front of the roadhouse you would have thought you were in one of these high-toned grills in a big town. Everything was all fixed up, with the floor polished, and the booths on one side. The booths were made out of dark brown wood and there was a little light right over each booth. On the other side from them there was a counter with stools in front of it. In front of the counter we had two big, shiny urns for coffee, and up in the front, next to the door, there was the cash register. Over the booths and up next to the ceiling there were two big pictures painted on the wall. Smut hired some pointed-mustached Italian or Greek to come out there and paint them. This bird wore a tan-colored Mother Hubbard while he painted and he sung songs in some foreign language. There wasn’t much tune to the songs, or it may be that he just couldn’t carry a tune. He was a mighty fast painter and had the pictures finished before one o’clock that afternoon. One of them was a picture of a lake, that was bordered with pale green trees. The water in the lake was blue and the sky above was blue too, with little cottony-looking clouds in it. Underneath it, it said, ‘Under Italian Skies.’ So I reckon the man was an Italian. The other picture was of two women taking a bath in a little creek. Underneath this picture it said, ‘Morning Ablutions.’ One of the women had a locket hung around her neck. They were good-looking women, but a shade heavy.

In the back there was a good-sized kitchen with plenty of cooking tools and a range that was long as the average room. And Smut had bought enough dishes and knives and forks and spoons to take care of an army. I wondered if he’d ever make enough money out there to pay for it all.

The dance hall looked very high class. I wasn’t a good dancer, but Smut and Catfish spent about half their time till Saturday waltzing over that floor. We had a nickelodeon in there, and Smut would put in a nickel and then he’d grab Catfish around the waist and they’d go to town. Smut led—he was a good dancer—and Catfish could follow good as any woman in Corinth. That nigger was loose as a goose. Sometimes Catfish would get out by himself and buck-dance. He spent a lot of time that week dancing when he ought to have been off making liquor.

The dance hall didn’t have much furniture in it, but there was a bunch of booths on one side of it, and there was the nickelodeon. There were a lot of different-colored lights in there too—blue lights and soft yellow lights—and we tried them out one night. It was light enough to see in there, but that was all. It was more like a sort of thick twilight. Smut said an atmosphere like that would aid business and help increase the population of the county at the same time. That was always Smut: trying to kill two birds with one stone.

In the back of the dance hall there was a little room where folks could gamble if they felt like taking a chance. Over the door to this room there was a sign, ‘PRIVATE’; I knew Smut had that put there so everybody would dive right in. There were two slot machines in that room; one of them paid off in slugs that could be cashed in and the other paid off in nickels and dimes. Then there were a couple of pin-ball machines over in one corner. They weren’t supposed to be anything out of the way. They didn’t pay off in anything and folks were supposed to play them just for fun. But you could bet on them, and everybody would, you could count on that. Smut said if anybody wanted to roll high dice back there, why, that was what he wanted them to do. And if anybody was interested they could probably always get up a game of stud poker or blackjack in that room.

We still had gas tanks out in front, but Smut said he was through working on cars like he used to do. He was a good mechanic and had been in the habit of working on cars during the week. But he said that was a thing of the past. If the farmers and mill hands wanted their cars fixed they could do it themselves.

The men had built six tourist cabins a good ways back of the main building. They built one cabin bigger than the rest, for Smut and me to live in. There was just one room—plus a room for the shower—to our cabin, but it was a bigger room than in any of the other cabins. Smut figured that part of the help could sleep in the cabins in the daytime and he could rent them at night.

These cabins were painted white and trimmed with dark green. There was a light in each one, a bed and a sort of bath, and a dresser. We made sure there was a spittoon and a waste-basket in each one of them too. Smut said he expected to reap a golden harvest out of the cabins.

We got the last of the kitchen things put in on Thursday afternoon of that week, and that night we built a fire in the big stove to see if the flue was going to draw all right. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, and Smut and myself and Catfish sat in there after ten o’clock when everybody else had gone. I still hadn’t heard anything about the rest of the help, and I was curious to know who it would be. Smut got out a bottle of some sort of cheap rye and poured us all a drink.

I gulped mine down and said, ‘Smut, who all’s going to work down here with us after we get started?’

Smut poured himself a cupful of whiskey and stuck his feet up on one of the tables we had back there. ‘I got things all lined up,’ he said. ‘I got Rufus Jones to be head cook. There ain’t a better cook in this part of the country.’

Rufus Jones was a big, fat nigger. I knew him well. ‘He’s pretty good,’ I said.

‘He’s had experience,’ Smut said. ‘He’s cooked for colleges and for railroads. He used to cook at the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham.’

‘When he was young that nigger sho could fix a chicken stew,’ Catfish said. He raised the key to the door to the firebox and opened it. Then he took a splinter and lit that from the fire. When the splinter was burning good he lit his cigarette from it.

‘Where’s he stay now?’ I asked Smut.

‘Who, Rufus? He’s on the chain gang in Scotland County,’ Smut said.

‘If he’s on the chain gang how in the hell’s he going to cook for us?’ I said.

Smut drank his liquor and sat the cup down on the table, between his feet. ‘His time’s up today,’ he said. ‘I’m going to meet him in Corinth in the morning and bring him out here. I was down to see him last week and give him the money to get up here.’

Catfish got up and walked over to the bottle of liquor. He picked it up and poured his glass full, just like it was his liquor. He turned up his glass and drank it off at one blow. Then he sat the glass down on the table and batted his eyes. ‘Wham!’ he said. ‘Extra good liquor! You know, that there little black Johnny Lilly told me tother day that he countin on bein first cook in this place.’

‘Johnny Lilly?’ Smut said. ‘Hell, he ain’t no first cook. He’s gonna be second cook. Why, he ain’t never cooked in no place but in the Sanitary Café in Corinth. And you know what kind of place that is. You have to sift your grub before you eat it, to get the sand and the gravels out, and the horseshoe nails.’

‘Ain’t you got any white fellows hired?’ I asked him.

‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘Several. I got everything lined up. I got Dick Pittman to wait out front and handle the gas. Dick’s had lots of experience in filling stations. He’s pretty dumb, but it don’t take no genius to wipe windshields.’

Smut picked up his cup and poured the rest of the liquor that was in the bottle into the cup. He held the cup in his lap and went on: ‘I got Badeye Honeycutt for a bartender. He’s had plenty experience mixing drinks. Ought to make a good man. Then I got Matt Rush and Sam Hall for waiters. I can just pay them off in what they eat, and a dollar now and then. Badeye’ll probably be glad enough to strike off even if I’ll furnish him in liquor and what little solid food he eats.’

Smut drank his liquor then and didn’t say any more. He sat there wrinkling his brows and it looked like he was busy thinking, and didn’t want to be bothered. Catfish was dozing in his chair. The liquor and the warm room were a little too much for him. I sat there by the stove and thought about the boys Smut had hired.

The nigger cooks were all right. Matt Rush and Sam Hall would do. Sam Hall’s daddy was a meat-cutter in Corinth. Matt Rush was a bastard and lived with his mother. She worked in the cotton mill. Those boys had been hanging around Corinth for about twenty years apiece and never had been caught working, but like Smut said, he wouldn’t have to pay them much. But I didn’t think much of Badeye Honeycutt.

Badeye ought to make a good drink-mixer—I could see that—for it was about all he’d ever done. He mixed drinks for himself and for other folks. I guess he was forty years old, and if you were to squeeze his cheek I don’t doubt but that you could get out half a pint of liquor. He was bound to be saturated with it. His daddy had been a liquor-maker before him, and when he was a boy Badeye had to help around the still. He sold liquor himself, after he got grown, but they caught him and fined him a hundred dollars. That made him pretty cautious for awhile and he finally went North. He worked in speakeasies up there until liquor came back legal. Then he traipsed back to Corinth and commenced working in pool rooms, bowling alleys, hot-dog joints, and such places. He was loud-mouthed and common before he went North, but going up there had made him worse. Just because he’d been to Chicago and Detroit and come back alive he thought it made him smarter than other folks around Corinth.

Badeye looked mean and sneaking. His glass eye was cocked a little, or didn’t fit right. His other eye was cocked back. It made him look like he was always looking behind him. The hair on his head was dark and bushed up like he’d slept on it wrong. His skin was sallow and there were a lot of black moles on his face and neck. He was always talking out of the side of his mouth like he’d seen gangsters do in the movies. I was afraid he’d get fresh with the customers, but it wasn’t my roadhouse.