Drifting South. Charles Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ on a heavy piece of glass that laid atop a chicken crate. Ma had at some moment the year before fancied that that particular crate would suit as a new coffee table, being me and my brothers had broken past repair the one she had before it…something she wasn’t pleased about, being that that one was actually store-made furniture. She’d made me and my brothers scrub and sand down the new one to where it was nothing but shiny dry wood and no chicken, before she stained and lacquered it and after all the fuss, it came to sit in the middle of her living room. Her decorations and lately Uncle Ray’s feet tended to take up most of the space on the glass top she was always keeping tidy for customers and company.

      Uncle Ray sitting there as usual looked to me the same as he always did, pretty much. He had two suits that he’d switch wearing every so often to his preference, one brown and one black. That day must have been a black day, because that’s the suit of clothes he had on.

      Both suits had wide white stripes up and down them and he’d usually wear a pair of shiny tan boots that he was so particular about when he’d step off a boardwalk. But Uncle Ray hadn’t been able to wear his boots for weeks because his feet were so swollen after the beating that had been put on him.

      “She here or downstairs?” I asked quiet.

      Uncle Ray didn’t take his eyes away from a straight razor in one hand that he was pushing slow and so careful against the grain of a small white stone he had resting on a leg.

      “She’s in the back,” he said.

      He finally looked up at me because I’d been standing there looking at him, and he pulled a flask from his coat pocket. Then he took a long swig of gin as easy as a person would take a drink of lemonade.

      Uncle Ray was one of those people who drank from morning to bed, always straight gin liquor, and he never seemed the least bit drunk whether he sipped or chugged. I didn’t care if he drank or not, or was drunk or not, but it was bad news that he wasn’t hungry. I knew I had to either make dinner myself—if I could find something to make—or rustle up something for free somehow from one of the bars in Shady.

      I’d never spend my own hidden stash on food, even hungry as I was, and I knew better than to ask Uncle Ray for eating money because lately he’d always said he was broke as a three-legged polecat whenever I’d asked him.

      Ma never believed Uncle Ray was as poor as an honest man, either, like he was so fond of saying at other times. He made a weekly wage from the elders for the doctoring that he did in Shady, and even though Uncle Ray always tended to gamble and drink away whatever money he’d make or win, Ma thought he squirreled away a little bit. But I guess after he got all busted up, I could see where he wasn’t able to make much of a living because he had to spend so much of the day with his feet up in air.

      From what folks said, the only reason Uncle Ray was back with us at all was because the Shady elders convinced him to do so. The elders were all business, and quick at convincing. Word was that every one of them was from Ol’ Luke’s bloodline and they ran everything. The head of the elders was Tobias Chambers, and that’s who you’d go to if you were having some sort of problem you couldn’t handle by yourself. Once Mr. Chambers listened and nodded, that problem got fixed. And fixed for good. But if he didn’t nod, whatever problem you had was about to get dreadful worse.

      Uncle Ray couldn’t walk for weeks after he left Ma and broke the elders’ contract with him to doctor in Shady. The elders tracked him to New Jersey and sent serious men to fetch him. Uncle Ray came back with both feet busted up, which displeased and troubled Ma, but Uncle Ray did seem to like staying with us more than before he tried to run off, or at least he acted like he did around Ma while he was hobbling around.

      I walked toward the kitchen and could feel the pine planks underme moving up and down, and then I heard the muffled sound of loud music and static coming from the transistor radio in Ma’s bedroom. I looked over my left shoulder at the framed picture of Jesus that Ma had hung at the entrance of the narrow hallway. The picture of him with bright lights coming from his head was bouncing back and forth against the wall a little, and when the Jesus picture was agitated, is how me and my brothers could always tell for certain that Ma was busy working. Not just working, she was busy working. We’d learned from more than a couple of times when she’d lost business to our interruptions, that we weren’t to bother her until the Jesus picture calmed, unless one of us needed her for something of an emergency nature. She always said not to disturb her business at all over nothing serious if her door was closed and locked, because Ma never closed her door unless she was working. But we all knew as long as the Jesus picture was steady that we could peck on her locked door about this and that without too much fuss from one of her customers.

      I pulled on one end of the twine that was hanging over a nail to level the picture of Jesus when Uncle Ray said, “Your momma made pork hash this morning, but your brothers wiped the kettle clean.”

      “She make any bread?”

      “They finished off the johnnycake, too.”

      I stuck my head in the kitchen and saw the kettle and plates and forks soaking in a washtub, walked over to open the icebox, and there wasn’t a scrap of food in it except for a half-empty jar of mustard and the top stub of a pickle floating in a canning jar. Same as yesterday and the day before. Looking around in that icebox put me in a worse mood than I was in already. The thought of that hash made my mouth water.

      “You been at Hoke’s this whole time?” Uncle Ray asked.

      I walked back in the living room and nodded.

      “Make any jingle manning the broom?”

      Uncle Ray had put his straight razor, whetstone and flask away. He was staring at me with eyes set close together like a hawk while training his new wide mustache that went all the way down to his chin. Wasn’t his business whether I made anything or not so I kept quiet, but the fact was I didn’t make anything.

      “Until they let you back in the poker games, that violin is what’ll earn you a living. The way you fiddle on it all the time, you should be down in the saloons making it work for you.”

      I’d been thinking about trying my luck in the music business, being the gambling business had been going so poorly. Uncle Ray had told me I had an ear for making music the first day he’d gave me that fiddle after winning it in a knock-rummy game. I was playing “Cripple Creek” and “Don’t Hit Your Granny With a Big Ol’ Stick” and a bunch of other old mountain tunes before that evening was over.

      Music did come easy to me, the same way Ma had always fretted that most things did to me. I wasn’t as sure about that as she was, but she feared the easy, because she believed people became lazy if they don’t end up venturing to where things are hard for them. And to Ma, there weren’t but a hair of difference between laziness and evilness. She kept all her boys busy and I guess tried her best not to raise lazy, evil sons, but I believe it was a bigger job than one woman by herself could sometimes handle.

      I just figured music came easy to me because I’d always loved to listen to it so much. But what I couldn’t do was sing like good singers can, so I didn’t see profit or future in making music, and my goal in life was to make money however it could be made the quickest and the easiest and the most. I wanted to be rich because I’d seen how the rich are treated so different than folks are with nothing but holes in their pockets, and I’d never owned nothing without a hole in it somewhere.

      Anyway, I was still standing there in the hall next to Ma’s kitchen and had just gotten back from Hoke’s Billiards Emporium. I’d been there all the last night and into that morning, waiting on a new shooter I’d СКАЧАТЬ