They Don't Dance Much: A Novel (29 page)

‘No. I slipped on a banana peeling and fell on this arm,’ Wilbur said. ‘Fractured it.’

‘Is that a fact?’ Smut said. ‘How come you didn’t notice where you was walking?’

‘Because I was drunk,’ Wilbur said. That was Wilbur Brannon for you. Anybody else would have said it was just carelessness that made them do it.

Buck Wilhoyt got a quarter’s worth of nickels and went over to the other side where he could play the nickelodeon. Wilbur Brannon sat down beside Smut.

‘What’s this about them arresting Dick Pittman?’ Wilbur asked Smut.

Smut took a bite out of sandwich number two and washed it down with a slug of bock beer. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘Somebody got the sheriff to come out and search me for corn liquor. They couldn’t find none up here, so the sheriff got the notion of searching the cabins. He found a pistol in the cabin Dick’s been staying in. It was in Dick’s locker and was a thirty-eight. The sheriff’s interested in thirty-eights right now.’

‘He told me about finding the empty thirty-eight shell,’ Wilbur said.

Over on the other side Buck Wilhoyt got the nickelodeon started up. He was playing his favorite piece, ‘My Pretty Quadroon.’

‘They’re just bluffing Dick,’ Smut said. ‘They ain’t got nothin on him at all. I don’t know what in the world he had the gun for, but everybody knows he wouldn’t kill anybody. No doubt he’ll be out in the morning.’

‘Looks like you’d go in and bail him out,’ Wilbur said.

‘I went in this afternoon,’ Smut said. ‘The sheriff told me to hold off a couple of days and he thought everything would be O.K.’

‘I don’t see any point in arresting him in the first place,’ Wilbur Brannon said. ‘Plenty of people have got a gun that the sheriff doesn’t know about. It’s got so a gun’s a necessity in this country after dark, and all day on Saturday.’

‘You ain’t just saying that,’ Smut said. ‘I don’t quite understand it, but I guess the sheriff knows what he’s doing. When he found the gun that day he told me not to say anything about it, and I didn’t. This morning when he come out after Dick he just said he wanted to hold him for questioning.’

Wilbur took out his cigarette case and offered one to Smut, but he was still eating. Wilbur took a cigarette out and tapped it on the counter. ‘I believe the sheriff’s got the time of Bert’s disappearance figured down pretty close. He’s spoken to me about it several times,’ Wilbur said.

‘How does he do that?’ Badeye asked.

Wilbur put the cigarette in his mouth and took out his paper book of matches.

‘Why, I helped him there,’ Wilbur said. ‘I saw Bert on Wednesday. On New Year’s Day. I remember it because it was New Year’s. We shot a game of pool in the Elite Pool Room about night. I beat him, and I remembered him saying it was the first time he’d lost a game of pool this year. It was the first game he’d played, I suppose.’

‘When was it that they found he was missing?’ Badeye said.

‘I went out there to his house on the next Wednesday, January the eighth. He wasn’t there then. He hasn’t been there since,’ Wilbur said. He struck a match on the sole of his shoe and held it to his cigarette.

‘A week’s a hell of a long time when there’s been a murder,’ Badeye said.

Wilbur blew a couple of smoke rings up toward the ceiling. In the other room the nickelodeon shut up with one last rumble, and I was certainly glad of it.

‘Well,’ Wilbur said, ‘as a matter of fact it probably happened—whatever it was happened—before Saturday afternoon. Between Wednesday, say at six o’clock, and Saturday afternoon at five o’clock. That was when John Weyler passed Bert’s place on foot and heard the mule braying like he was starved.’

‘That’s getting down pretty close,’ Smut said.

A couple of cars drove up outside, and I heard folks going into the dance hall from the other entrance. I got up from the booth and went to my stool back of the cash register. Just as I got there two men came in the front. One of them was Old Man Joshua Lingerfelt. The other one was Baxter Yonce.

Old Man Joshua just wanted his nickels. He got them and went over to the other side. Baxter Yonce spoke to everybody and sat down on the stool that was next to the one Wilbur Brannon was sitting on.

‘Smut, let’s have a drink,’ Baxter Yonce said. ‘I need a drink the worst sort.’

‘I don’t believe I want one. I ain’t drinking anything but beer tonight,’ Smut said.

‘When I tell you the latest you’ll be ready for a drink of hard liquor,’ Baxter Yonce said. He crossed his legs and reared back on the stool. Baxter was sweating like it was the middle of July.

Smut looked over at him. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Dick Pittman just now confessed he killed Bert Ford and robbed him,’ Baxter said. ‘They wrung a confession, out of him.’

‘No!’ Wilbur Brannon said.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Smut Milligan said. He looked horrified. He opened his mouth and his eyes were popping. I was watching him close, so close that for a minute I didn’t really realize what Baxter Yonce had said.

Smut stood up and hitched at his belt. ‘You must be kidding me,’ he said to Baxter.

Baxter Yonce crossed himself. I don’t know why he did it. He was a Presbyterian when he went to church.

‘I hope God may strike me dead if it ain’t the living truth,’ he said. ‘Says he was looking under Bert’s bee-gums for money when Bert come up on him. Says he shot Bert and took what money he had on him.’

‘Well, for God’s sake!’ Badeye said. ‘What’d he do with him after he shot him, Mr. Yonce?’

‘Says he threw him in Rocky River that same night.’

‘How’d he get the body down there? Bert Ford was a big man,’ Wilbur Brannon said.

‘He took Bert’s car and made a trip down to the river and pitched him in that very night. Said he weighted the body down with an old mowing-machine wheel that he found somewhere around the barn. I guess the catfish took care of the rest of it.’

‘God, he must have worked fast that night!’ Wilbur said. He looked a little sick and spat out his cigarette.

‘Somehow it don’t sound exactly right to me,’ Badeye said, and began rubbing his finger over his glass eye.

‘Oh, they got the goods on him,’ Baxter said. ‘They was cross-examining him about where he was that week and at first he couldn’t remember nothing.’

‘Hell, how could anybody remember anything that far back? I don’t even remember where I was myself a single night back in January,’ Badeye said.

‘You’ll remember about the first of January there was a mighty cold snap,’ Baxter Yonce said. ‘Well, they got him to admit that he remembered that, and then they started working on him.’ Baxter shifted his legs. ‘Damn if I couldn’t use that drink of liquor,’ he said. But nobody made a move and he went on:

‘They worked on him and he couldn’t remember a thing. His memory was kind of hazy. But finally they got him to say that he was out one night toward the last of the week. He said he spent the night with a married woman on the mill village.’

‘Who was she?’ Badeye asked.

Baxter Yonce recrossed his legs and twisted his back, like he would have been more comfortable if the counter stools had been made with backs to them.

‘Confound these stools anyway!’ Baxter said. ‘It was Dave Cline’s wife. Dick said it was Thursday night of that week that he laid her.’

When he mentioned Thursday night Smut Milligan stiffened and looked toward me.

‘At first he wouldn’t name the woman,’ Baxter said. ‘But after they done some persuading his memory got fresh and green. So the sheriff got the woman for questioning. She said it was a damned lie. Finally, just about dark, Dick broke down. He said he done it, and told just how it was. It was all over Corinth when I left.’

‘God, it’s a bad thing!’ Smut said.

‘Oh, there won’t be no lynching. Bert wasn’t well enough liked for that,’ Baxter Yonce said.

The nickelodeon had been quiet for some time. Maybe Buck Wilhoyt and Old Man Joshua Lingerfelt had been putting their nickels in the slot machines over on that side. But just then the thing started playing again. It was a different song, but about the same sort of stuff Buck had been playing at first. Somehow it jarred my nerves that night.

‘How about that drink of liquor?’ Baxter Yonce asked.

‘We’ll have one,’ Smut Milligan said. ‘You earned your drink, Baxter.’ Smut got up and went into the kitchen.

He came back with four fifths of a quart of rye and we all had a drink. I figured it was all right, since we were all drinking out of the same bottle.

Wilbur Brannon was shocked at what Baxter had told us. You could see that. He hated to think that Bert Ford, who had been maybe his one friend, had been shot and then fed to the fish in Rocky River. He hated to believe that it was Dick Pittman who had done a thing like that. Wilbur Brannon got a good part of his living out of a bunch of nigger shacks in the slums of Charlotte. He had been in the penitentiary for peddling dope. In a way he was an outcast in Corinth. But it seemed to tear him up to find out that others could be sorry too.

‘I wonder if they just beat the poor boy till he made up a cock-and-bull story to get some peace,’ Wilbur said. He finished his drink and set the glass back on the counter.

‘Oh, they never harmed he boy. They just wore him down with questions and he had a guilty conscience,’ Baxter Yonce said.

‘But just because his gun was a thirty-eight and the sheriff found an empty thirty-eight shell out at Bert’s was no sign the boy killed Bert,’ Wilbur said.

‘When he was out here this morning he said he made a ballistics test of the shell,’ Smut said.

‘Oh, nuts!’ Wilbur Brannon said. ‘If I understand it right you take the slug from the body of the victim and then you can tell from the barrel of the gun if it was fired from that particular gun or not.’

Badeye raised up from his perch on the counter and snickered.

‘I’d like to see the sheriff making a ballistics test,’ he said. ‘I bet he thinks the way you make a ballistics test is to make the prisoner let down his britches.’

‘That’s right,’ Wilbur said. But he didn’t laugh.

‘Anyway, he’s confessed,’ Baxter Yonce said.

Smut Milligan was chewing on a toothpick. I noticed he had taken a mighty small drink of liquor. Things were beginning to break, and he aimed to be sober.

‘Ain’t it remarkable how cunning a half-wit can be?’ Smut said. ‘You wouldn’t think Dick could have pulled a thing like that and got rid of the evidence that way.’

‘He’s foxier than I ever give him credit for,’ Baxter Yonce said.

Sam Hall spoke up for the first time since Baxter came in. ‘Dick wasn’t so dumb about some things,’ Sam said. ‘You take about mechanics. He could take a complicated piece of machinery apart and then put it back like it was supposed to be.’

‘That’s right,’ Smut said, and nodded. ‘He was a pretty damn good jackleg mechanic. On cars, and on other things too. Like radios and refrigerators.’

‘He wasn’t so brainy this time, after all, though,’ Baxter said. ‘I understand he didn’t get but a couple of hundred off Bert when he killed him. He claims he already spent that on foolishness, and says he couldn’t find any money under the bee-gums. It all goes to show that crime don’t pay.’

‘It pays some folks,’ Badeye said, and uncorked a bottle of port wine that was on the shelf behind him.

‘Not in the long run,’ Baxter told him.

Badeye took a long slug of the wine, then recorked it and put it back in its place.

‘Have it your way, Mr. Yonce,’ Badeye said in a polite voice.

They sat there talking about instances to prove that Dick was pretty smart and other instances to prove that he was pretty dumb. They finally decided that the only certain thing was that he was behind the eight ball for the time being. While they were talking the crowd started increasing.

The crowd thickened and we were short-handed. Dick was in jail and Matt Rush had gone to Corinth with the evening-paper man. He said he’d be back in a couple of hours, but he hadn’t shown up. For a while Sam handled all the booths on both sides, but finally it got so bad that he had to have help. So I told Smut that I would take care of the booths on our side and that he could handle the cash register, and that was the way we worked it.

I could have handled the counter and let Badeye have the booths, but I had my reasons for doing the way I did. Fisher and Lola had come in. They were sitting in one of the booths on this side and hadn’t been waited on. I didn’t see them come in; I just happened to look over toward the wall and there they were. It looked like a good chance to do a little eavesdropping.

You could tell it was spring from the clothes the Fishers wore. They had on their two-tone shoes. Fisher had on a greenish-looking tweed outfit and was smoking a pipe. Lola had on a skirt that looked like tweed too, and she wore a checked jacket. She was bareheaded. The Fishers sat on opposite sides of the table that was in the center of the booth.

I took my pencil and one of the little ruled pads and went over to them.

‘Has someone waited on you all?’ I asked them.

‘Someone has not,’ Fisher said, and sucked on his pipe.

Lola looked down at the menu that she had opened and spread out on the table. ‘Are these really Western steaks?’ she said.

‘Yes, Mrs. Fisher,’ I said. ‘Mighty good steaks.’

‘I’ll have a steak with shoestring potatoes and a little coleslaw,’ Lola said. She handed the menu to Fisher. ‘Don’t you want one too, honey?’

Fisher didn’t even look down at the menu. ‘I’m not in a steak mood,’ he said. ‘What I want is a drink. Tell Milligan to fix me a highball. Tell him to put some whiskey in it.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘Oh, honey, don’t start drinking! You’ve already had two,’ Lola said. She leaned over the table, put her hand under Fisher’s chin, and pouted a little.

‘Come on, sweet, I don’t like to eat by myself,’ Lola said.

Fisher moved his head away from his wife’s hand.

‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll be here with you,’ he said.

Lola shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh, well,’ she said. ‘He’s not eating tonight. Mad with me, I guess. Jack, be sure and bring me all the different kinds of beefsteak sauce. Worcestershire sauce and that hot stuff.’