We Five (10 page)

“No. Do you want me to get you a cup from the house?”

“What? And give your opinionated Aunt Lucille a chance to say something
new
about how sucky my chances are of getting a husband? I don't know why she has it in for me.”

“I think she means well, Jane. She just can't overlook those things the two of you have in common.”

“Excuse me, Ruth Thrasher, but I have absolutely nothing in common with your shriveled-up old Aunt Lucille!”

“Now who's talking smack about old people?”

“Who's that guy walking up to the trailer?”

“By the look of his livery uniform, I'd say he's the courtesy van driver from Lucky Aces.”

“That was fast.”

“I think he must be picking us up first. Put your shoes on.”

The man seemed more boy than man. He looked like a college kid. Very well groomed and nice-featured. Big lips, though. Mick Jagger lips. He introduced himself as Tom. Full name: Tom Katz.

In the van, Tom, now seated behind the wheel, said that his father had a sense of humor.

“Katz is a Jew name,” said Jane, seating herself right behind their young, good-looking driver. “Are you Jewish?”

“First, Jews don't generally like it when you use the word ‘Jew' as an adjective, although I don't think you meant anything by it.”

“Oh I didn't mean anything at all. I
like
Jews. Especially the ones who give me the giggles like on
Seinfeld.
”

“Well, as it so happens, I'm
not
Jewish. I mean, technically. Although my father's Jewish. Hence the name. But to be Jewish your mother has to be Jewish and my mother was a Pillsbury. Not one of the baking company Pillsburys, but the Greenville, Mississippi, Pillsburys. Though ironically, Mama did go to the Pillsbury bake-off one year before she married my father, but they wouldn't let her compete because they were afraid people would think things were rigged if she'd won. The good thing was that she got one hundred dollars anyway just for showing up and being a good sport, and everybody liked her cobbler and didn't even guess it had brandy in it.”

“You're a good driver,” said Jane. “You handled yourself on that ice patch in a very fruity way. You know: ‘with a plum.'”

Ruth rolled her eyes.

“A plum?” asked Tom, addressing Jane through the rearview mirror.

“Jane only tells jokes that have to be explained,” shouted Ruth from the rear of the van. “In my opinion, they stop being jokes at that point and just become a nuisance.”

Jane emitted a low growl. “What I was
trying
to say, Ruth, is that I notice he hasn't spun us into a ditch like some people we know and love.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “They did put us through a little mini training course. But it was mostly about how to treat our passengers—you know, how to lay the Southern hospitality on real thick, since a bunch of Lucky Aces employees are coming from other parts of the country where rudeness is the order of the day. My four buddies and me—as it happens: we're locals. We just graduated from Ole Miss last year, so we know all about Dixie manners.”

Jane looked as if she was merely feigning interest, but she was actually genuinely engaged in what Tom was saying and couldn't help it that her face didn't register sincerity convincingly. “You graduated from college and now you're working for a casino?”

“Just till the end of the summer. We all thought it would be nice to get ourselves a taste of the real world before going on to law school.”

“You're all going to be lawyers?”

“Well, four of us. Pardlow wants to be a legal historian. He wants to write about the law and go on Court TV and CNN and say shit like—sorry. Say
stuff
like, ‘Well, you know, Wolf, this isn't the
first
time a man has been charged with killing his whole family with a fireplace poker. That would be the People of Ohio versus Billy Pokeman back in 1923.' Anyway, I mention my buddies because we've been watching the five of you since we started working at the casino a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh, you
have
?” Jane raised her eyebrows for the benefit of Ruth, the way people in sitcoms do to show wry, shared interest.

Tom nodded. “And we were wonderin' if any of you were seeing anybody. I mean, we haven't noticed any guys hanging out at the casino who looked like they might know you.”

Jane laughed. “You mean since you don't see any guys who might be our boyfriends, that means we don't
have
any?”

“Yeah. Well,
yeah.
”

“Well, we
don't
have any boyfriends,” Ruth blurted. “And some of us aren't even in the
market
for boyfriends.”

“Just one-night stands,” Tom Katz let fly.

Jane mimed drumsticking a snare. “Ba-bum-bum! Does your Pillsbury Dough Mama know her little Jewboy talks like this?”

Tom locked eyes with Jane through the rearview mirror. “Not to get too P.C. on you here, but Jewish men don't generally like it when you put the word ‘boy' after the word ‘Jew.'”

“I was just funning you.”

Ruth interjected sourly, “Why don't you
explain
to Mr. Katz just how that was funny?”

“Oh why don't you just hush up, Ruth?”

Tom tried to get the conversation back on track: “I guess what I'm tryin' to say is that we all—my four friends and me—we're gettin' a little hard up for some decent female companionship. And ya'll are the only ladies anywhere
near
our age in skuzzy Casino Land who don't look like they used to be strippers or drug addicts, or've been out there spreading STDs around since junior high school.”

Jane's mouth fell open. Ruth rolled her eyes again and tried to find something distracting out the window to take her attention away from the conversation.

“You're awfully disgusting,” replied Jane, with a casualness to her delivery that belied the harsh sentiment, “
and
awfully picky, considering you drive a courtesy van for a living.” Jane punctuated her observation with a flirty wink directed toward the van's rearview mirror.

“Nothing wrong with being picky even while you're slummin',” replied Tom. “Anyway, if I can get all your phone numbers, then I'll divvy them up between the guys, and we'll all do something together. Some nice, safe, ‘break-the-ice' group activity.”

“Count me out,” said Ruth, under her breath. She was looking at a cotton field, the plants not yet plowed under. Little white bolls polka-dotted the landscape like dandruff.

“I tell you what I'll do,” said Jane, sounding like a used-car salesman. “I'll give you
my
phone number. You can probably get it easy anyway. It's in the book under ‘Higgins Antiques.' And I'll talk to my friends—including Ruth here, who I'm sure would be up for anyplace where she can get fried catfish or hot tamales or ribs. Ain't that right, Ruth?”

“You act like I'm a shark that just has to eat all the time,” said Ruth, still looking out the window.

Jane ignored this. “Anyway, Mr. Katz, I'll let you know how I did when you call.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” said Tom. “You'll like my friends.”

“You mean even though they're clearly ‘slummin' to be with us?”

“I shouldn't have said that. They're good guys. And they know you're good girls.”

“What does that mean: ‘good girls'? Maybe you haven't noticed, but we all work as cocktail waitresses in a casino.”

Tom laughed. “We won't hold that against you.”

Ruth groaned again, this time quite audibly.

Tom Catts and his four friends, all of whom worked at the Tulleford Cotton Mill, took their luncheon in the High Road. At six or seven minutes past the matutinal hour of eleven o'clock from Monday through Friday (luncheons were not taken on Saturday half-holidays), the five men placed themselves side-by-side upon the long bench which had been installed by Mr. Crawdon to accommodate those who came to have their shoes repaired in his shop. Sometimes there was a lady or gent waiting upon the bench for the heel of a top boot to be mended or a blucher to be revamped. But this person would not reside there for very long after the importunate arrival of Tom and his fellow millhands, for their intercourse was noisy and roistering, and their slovenly workingmen's dress—oily and cotton-fibre-dusted fustian—was equally difficult to bear, especially if one was not disposed to affiliate with those of ill-bred behaviour and disreputable appearance. As the men would laugh and jostle one another whilst clanking their lunch buckets and clinking their tin cups, the customer would be crowded and crushed to the point of removing him or herself to another precinct—perhaps the bench in front of the blacksmith's shed or the one before the linen-draper's concern, or even the fishmonger's shop (where the fragrance of fish was only slightly less insulting to the nostrils as that of working men bearing the stench of grease and metal-and-spindle-lubricating mineral oils about their persons).

And why was it was that Mr. Catts and his mill-mates should insist upon
this
particular bench and none other? The answer was a simple one: the spot where the bench was placed commanded the best view of Mrs. Colthurst's Fine Dress Shop, situated directly across the lane. Here the five young men partook daily of their forenoon refection (for unlike Mrs. Colthurst and her employees, who were not expected to begin work until eight o'clock, early-shift millworkers commenced their labours at half past six). Was there something architecturally interesting about the dress shop that drew the young men so close? Of course not. It was a rather drab and dingy building, only slightly redeemed by the charming colourful frocks hanging in its large street-side window. No, as the reader has, no doubt, already guessed, it was the young lasses who went thither to toil each day, and who, by fortunate coincidence, came
out
from it to take their bit of late-morning sun in fortuitous concurrence with the latter half of the young men's luncheon.

However, today was different. The weeks of male gawking begetting female blushing and bashful giggling had drawn to a close. A new epoch was dawning, ushered in by none other than Mr. Tom Catts himself, whose idea it was to move matters into a brand new sphere of engagement betwixt the sexes.

Tom, though informal leader of his group, was not its oldest member. This distinction belonged to Tom's lifelong friend Cain Pardlow, who, at three-and-twenty years of age, had watched his four companions wax from early childhood—their collective friendship cemented in the shabby and soot-begrimed side avenues of the Manchester neighbourhood of Hulme. It was from this city that the five had fled only two years earlier to seek employment in a different town—one that afforded fresh air and salubrious sunlight, at least during those hours spent away from the bronchiotoxic and Cimmerian cotton mill.

Cain was quite blind without his spectacles. He had dark brown hair and skin of perhaps a lighter tone than that of his companions, for as boilerman's apprentice, Cain worked in the mill year-round. The other four, who were engaged as spinners and weavers, slipped away with most of the other men of the town in early summer to make hay in the neighbouring fields, as was the long tradition of this parish. (It was a tradition that would soon be coming to an end with the anticipated demise of Lord Tulle, who had always wished his many tenanted acres kept under cultivation and the parish to maintain its historical bucolic character. His heir, on the other hand, was a majority stakeholder in one of the mills, and was eager to see Tulleford join the march to rapid industrialization, which was producing smoke-belching mills and factories from the Pennines to Liverpool Bay, whilst reducing the parish's cornfields to a state of permanent stubble. For an expenditure of only a few extra pence a week a farmhand could be enticed to abandon his plough and pitchfork and take up the operation of a mule spinner or a loom, which generated enormous profit for the mill owners.)

Cain Pardlow read. He read Lucretius and Epictetus and
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
and
The Six Enneads
of Plotinus, betwixt the alternate firings of the twin furnaces of the mill's new Lancashire boiler. He spoke sometimes to his chums of what he had learnt from his scholastic maunderings, but found little in their responses with which to fuel the flues of enlightened discourse, and therefore he largely confined his conversations with his mill-mates to more prosaic observations. It was axiomatic that most men (and women) in the mill town of Tulleford—with the exception of fireside dips into the Holy Bible and the occasional browse of a Manchester newspaper—did not read.

Cain was born a twin, and when his brother was brought forth into the world strangled by Cain's umbilical cord, his parents named the dead child Abel and its apparent fetal murderer the only logical companion-appellation. Though Cain was slender—almost scarecrowish in frame—yet he possessed nonetheless a gently rounded face, his cheeks deeply dimpled—the indentations becoming even more pronounced when he smiled—though this was not a common occurrence, for whilst Cain sometimes perceived the potential for levity in situations deriving from his daily intercourse, he was not inclined to acknowledge this fact upon his face, except when there should be missteps and pratfalls resulting from the impetuous blunderings of his mates. (For how could even the most inveterate stoic not laugh—or at the very least,
smile
—over such puerile behaviour?)

Next oldest by but a few weeks was the wittiest of the five, Jeremiah Castle. Jeremiah—familiarly called Jerry—was an orphan. He was, at a very young age, taken in by a benevolent cheesemonger and his equally benevolent wife, in whose company he grew to solid, strapping manhood (largely through the hoisting of heavy cheese wheels). Jerry was the strongest of the group, and though quick to put his opinions forward and to lose his temper with those who did not subscribe to them, yet he would never engage his fist unless it was absolutely necessary, and even then would apply it with measured restraint, lest the recipient of his displeasure incur permanent bodily injury.