The Last Fair Deal Going Down. David Rhodes

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СКАЧАТЬ her, Alice ordered a beer. John Charles filled a glass from a wooden keg and sat it before her. “Say, Baby,” he whispered, “how about ditching that friend of yours and us getting together a little later on?” Alice’s girl friend, taking the hint, not from the words, which she didn’t hear, but from the tone that characterized the mumbling, immediately announced her departure, stating that she could be reached at any hour to provide a ride home. Alice took her beer to a table and sat down with it. John Charles closed the bar at ten P.M. and he and Alice listened to country Western music from the jukebox while John C. told of his experiences with the law in Texas and Arizona, where he had been a deputy sheriff, and showed her newspaper clippings of famous contemporary crimes committed by old friends.

      Alice Van Hooser was a woman who had lived thirty-five reasonable years. She lived with her mother. Any advancement from this station was in some way going to be a concession, something given up momentarily before returning to normal. She gave in to being known around Dirty John’s as “Lil,” spending evenings in a motel, wearing black stockings, and sitting quietly at a back table watching John Charles behind the bar and knowing from his face that his wife would be coming in that night. To all this she gave in, but she was more than these things. She kept some to herself.

      Hermie had a baby girl while John Charles took Lil with him on a “run” into Iowa to pick up another load of bourbon. She lay in the hospital as quietly as an unexploded charge of dynamite: that is, she might have thought many things but mostly she was a wife who had heard so many plans and schemes and adventures and happenings and stories and tales from her husband and about him that she failed to care whether they corresponded to things that actually had happened or if they had happened, when. Furthermore, because she never knew what was true and what wasn’t concerning the actions of her husband, she either decided that everything was unreal or that at least everything was irrelevant to her situation, which included John Charles, the man. She thought this was the way she felt. Yet she could not account for the anxiety. What she did not know was that John Charles, the man, was very much connected with those everythings that were unreal and irrelevant.

      John Charles told Hermie about numerous fights he had taken part in at Dirty John’s. He recounted them in a very matter-of-fact manner though each presentation lasted over a quarter of an hour.² Once, listening, struggling with the baby, she had said that she didn’t care. This ended the story. John C. had bolted from the room, thinking that not caring was the same as not believing, which was more important.

      One night while Alice Van Hooser waited at her table for Mrs. Sledge to leave, two heavyset insurance salesmen walked into the bar. They had been drinking earlier in the evening and shouted at John C. to bring drinks. John C. brought them drinks and went back to sit next to his wife at the counter. Hermie, who didn’t like being at the bar at all, offered a statement establishing a relationship between these two men and the quality of the overall atmosphere of Dirty John’s. John Charles looked at the men for several minutes and got up from his stool to give them another drink. He secured himself a standing position between the two men. They were having difficulty standing up during those intervals when a high degree of gesticulation was necessary to the conversation. One of these physical explanations glanced off the shoulder of John Charles and he pivoted on his left foot and hit the man square on the jaw with his right hand, which mysteriously concealed a roll of nickels from the cash register. Before the other man could turn around John C. was in a low, semicrouching position with the stiletto blade extending from his left hand. “Come on, big man,” he shouted, “let’s see how tough you really are.” The man busted the top of a beer glass off on the counter and made a slow lunge at John Charles who easily stepped aside, cutting his arm as he passed. The man he had originally hit was picking himself off the floor and John C. stopped his assault with a kick to the face. His opponent with the broken glass had dropped it and was standing in the middle of the barroom, holding his bleeding arm and swaying back and forth. John Charles put his open hand against the man’s face and shoved him back onto an occupied table, sending glass, beer, bourbon, and cigarette butts flying around him. “Somebody patch up his arm,” said John C. “then throw the bastards out. I don’t want anybody dying in here and giving us a bad name.” Several men laughed and John C. walked back over to Hermie and cleaned his knife with a napkin.

      “Those bums will think twice before coming in here and starting trouble.”

      “So what!” Hermie said. “I’m going home. I hate this bar. It stinks in here and why do you want me to come anyway? Are you showing off? Well I don’t care. I DON’T CARE.” (She yelled this.) “You don’t impress me and I’ve got to take the baby-sitter home.”

      “Baby-sitter!” John C. closed the knife and put it back in his arm holster.

      “Yes, baby-sitter. It may have not occurred to you that that’s what it’s all about — baby-sitters and shopping and getting by.... And don’t wake the baby when you come in.” And she left.

      John Charles watched her walk out, smiled warily at several people sitting next to him, and went back to sit with Alice Van Hooser. Alice arranged her hair around her head and smiled. “How did I look?” he asked.

      “When?”

      “The fight.”

      “Fine,” she answered. John took a drink out of Lil’s glass and sat swirling the beer around the bottom of the glass, forcing out the few remaining bubbles.

      “The wife suspects something,” he said.

      “Did she say something?”

      “Yes.”

      “What?”

      “She’s getting a private investigator to follow me. Somebody around here must have been informing her.”

      “John ...”

      “Sure, Lil, I saw my lawyer yesterday and he said that the divorce papers will go through in a month. But until then we have to be careful” (he gestured), “because if we get caught by this detective the divorce will be thrown out of court.”

      “Why?”

      “Some legality.”

      “But John, a separation. Anyone can get a separation. My cousin ...”

      “Right. I’m getting one. As a matter of fact I’m all packed. The only thing that is left to do is decide about who takes the kid.”

      “But she’s only three months old, John.”

      “I know, but Hermie hates kids — always has. She wants me to take her.”

      John Charles did not have to take the child. In fact he never left home at all except for a week when Alice’s mother went for a visit to her sister’s house in Illinois. John C. started a Friday-night poker table in Dirty John’s and Alice began collecting her debts; she refused to come to the tavern when she knew Mrs. Sledge would be coming; she refused to stay overnight in a motel room, but went home to her mother; she said whiskey runs were too dangerous and refused to go along. John Charles bought her a diamond ring and complained that the divorce proceedings were being slowed down by false information brought in by the private detective, whom he had had a gun-fight with in Iowa after picking up a load of whiskey — but no one was hurt because John C. knew that if he shot him there would be a lot of very ticklish questions that were better unasked because it was just the excuse the law needed to throw the book at him because they had been after him ever since he had come to St. Louis from Texas because of the reputation he had built for himself down there and that in order to keep one step ahead of the law he had to be smart — smarter than even his emotions. Alice had the ring СКАЧАТЬ