CH02 - Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

“Jumped you?”

  “Three big buck niggers,” I said. “One of them held a razor to my throat. I think you can still see the nick. Then one of the others hit me a few times in the stomach. They got my watch and my wallet and my suitcase, they even got the change out of my pocket. I had the ticket in my shoe.”

  “That was good thinking,” he said. “You go to the police?”

  “In New York? What good would that do?”

  “I hear tell it’s another country up there.”

  “More like another world. If you tell those New York police you’ve been robbed, they act like you’re wasting their time.” Which was true enough, incidentally. When I had a place in the East Village, somebody kicked the door in one day and robbed me, which was actually one big reason why I didn’t have anything but the clothes on my back. I wasn’t there at the time, and there had never been anyone holding a razor to my throat, but you can see that the story had elements of truth to it. It was sort of a matter of arranging the truth so that it made sense.

  “So all I had was the ticket,” I went on. “I had sixty-two dollars left after I bought my ticket, but they got it when they got the wallet. I figured it would be plenty to keep me going until I found work in Miami. A fellow was telling me there were plenty of jobs down there. At those hotels.”

  “That the kind of work you did in New York?”

  “No, I was bussing tables in a cafeteria.” I actually did that for a day once, in a cafeteria on Second Avenue. That job ended when I dropped a tray. They took it for granted that you would drop a tray now and then, but not on a customer. “But from what I heard you didn’t need much experience to hire on as a bellhop or something.”

  He was nodding. He didn’t really look like that Dodge commercial anymore.

  “After they robbed me,” I said, “I didn’t know what to do. I just knew I had to get out of New York.”

  “No place for a white man.”

  “That’s the truth,” I said. “Dope addicts and niggers and long-haired radicals and I don’t know what else. And being robbed and all, I just wanted to get away from there. But I didn’t want to go to Miami with no money at all. I figured I’d starve before I got settled. So I worked out how much money I would need and traded my ticket so that I could get as close as possible to Miami and still have a few dollars left to live on.”

  “And that’s how you picked Bordentown. I was wondering about that.”

  “I guess it would have been better to stop further north. In North Carolina, say, because that would have left me with more money. But I wanted to get as far as I could, and anyway my mother was from South Carolina originally—”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “She was born in Charleston. Her maiden name was Ryder. But there’s no family left now.”

  “I didn’t think you seemed like the typical Yankee.”

  “Well, I’ve always lived in the North. But I never felt, you know, that it was really home to me.”

  We went on like this for a while, and he got less and less like that Dodge commercial and I got more and more South Carolina into my voice. I didn’t want to get carried away and lay it on too thick, but as long as it was going over well I figured it was worth staying with. He wanted to know about my plans. I said I would just try to find work in Bordentown. There weren’t many jobs, he said. Ever since the space people closed their operations in Savolia, jobs were tight all over the area. Especially in the winter, when there was no farm work to speak of. I said I was willing to do just about anything, and as soon as I had money saved I could go down to Miami.

  “Don’t want to go anywhere without some identification,” he said. “You’d get the same reception anywhere. First police officer who sets eyes on you wouldn’t have no choice but to lock you up. I suspect you can write away for certain things. Driver’s license, for example.”

  “I never had one.”

  “Draft card, for certain. This day and age you don’t want to go anywhere without a draft card.”

  “I’m only seventeen,” I said. On my eighteenth birthday I had decided that it wouldn’t hurt to stay seventeen as long as possible. It seemed to me that if you didn’t get around to registering for the draft you wouldn’t have to make any Big Decision as to whether or not you would burn your draft card.

  “Need a social security card,” he said. “You must of had one, I guess. Recollect the number?”

  I didn’t.

  “Easier to go ahead and get a new one, then. You try writing to them for a replacement and those fellows in Washington, they’ll be a year getting back to you. I could tell you stories about those people up there. What else you’ll need is a Sheriff’s ID Card. I’ll fix you up with one of those. At least we can do that without going through a passel of red tape. You just apply for a social security card down to the courthouse, and on the form you put that you never had one before. That’s the easiest way to go about it. Not entirely legal, but in police work you learn that there’s laws and there’s laws. Know what I mean?”

  “Laws to help people and laws to get in people’s way?”

  “I guess you understand my meaning, boy.” He looked at me and I looked back at him, deciding that he was a pretty nice guy. He clucked his tongue again. “Reckon you could do with a bath and a change of clothes,” he said. “Or with running what clothes you got through the washing machine. The wife can do that while you’re in the tub.” I almost said I didn’t have a wife. Then I realized we were talking about his wife, and his washing machine, and his tub.

  “Like to had me wondering when you pulled those drawers out of your pocket last night. I sat up wondering what kind of damned fool pervert carries his underwear in his pocket. Guess they must of been chafing you some on that bus ride. How long were you on that bus?”

  “On to forty hours.”

  He clucked again. “And eating in those greasy diners, were you? Fifty cents for a hamburger sandwich and you have to hunt for the meat, and fifteen cents for coffee. That’s not but brown water. Never had a real Southern breakfast up there, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Grits and eggs and fries and sausage and coffee that the spoon stands up in? I guess they don’t know how to eat up there. What’s that Northern food like?”

  I didn’t mention brown rice. “Like a machine made it,” I said.

  “You come on now,” he said, beaming. He led me out of the cell. “I’ll just get you set with a sheriff’s card, and then we’ll take a run over to my home and see if you got the kind of appetite that would have made your mother proud. Look at the way those pants are falling off of you. I swear the wife’s gone take one look at you and run straight for the kitchen. Nothing brings out her cooking like someone who looks like he could profit from it.” He patted his belly, of which there was quite a lot. “She feels guilty, feeding me. But you’ll be a real challenge to her.”

  I said, “This is awfully nice of you,” or something like that.

  “Oh, just put it down to Southern hospitality,” he said, grinning. “We don’t cotton to everybody. But we take care of our own kind, boy.”

  FIVE

  BY THE END of the week I had a Sheriff’s ID Card, a social security card, and a South Carolina driver’s license. I also had two jobs, one of which paid me fifteen dollars a week and my lunches, and the other of which brought in five dollars a week, breakfasts, dinners, and a room of my own. Sheriff Tyles fixed me up with the license and one of the jobs, and his wife Minnie got me the other one.

  (I had to take a road test for the license. I had never done much in the way of driving, and I don’t know that I had any natural talent for it, but the test was no great problem. When you take the test in the official sheriff’s car, there aren’t a hell of a lot of inspectors who are likely to fail you. I didn’t hit anybody, so I passed.)

  Minnie Tyles took to me right off. I hadn’t been that confident she would be thrilled when her husband brought me home. Forty hours on a bus and a night in a jail cell h
adn’t improved my appearance that much. But when we walked in the door he boomed out, “Minnie, this here boy hasn’t had a decent meal in three days and his mother was a Charleston Ryder.” I don’t know which part of the sentence went over the heaviest. I was a little lost myself, and for a minute there I thought he was saying that my mother was a member of some South Carolina version of the Hell’s Angels.

  I had about four meals, and I had them all at once. And then I had a bath while my clothes washed and dried, and then I had a big piece of pie and another couple of cups of coffee. The more I ate the happier that woman got. It was really something to watch.

  “Of course he’ll sleep here until he finds some place,” she told the Sheriff. “Won’t be any trouble to fix up the spare room for him.” I said something about not wanting to impose, and they both acted as though they hadn’t heard me, which was fine with me.

  The job situation didn’t look very promising. There wasn’t much available, and most of the high school kids left town when they graduated, unless their fathers had businesses for them to go into. I spent a couple of days looking for work and couldn’t get anywhere. “I couldn’t ask you to work for what-all I can afford to pay you,” one shopkeeper said. “Easier to hire a nigger for fifty cents an hour, and I wouldn’t let you work for that kind of wages even if you said you would. And with business the way it is I couldn’t pay you more.”

  Then Minnie came up with something. “Now I’ll tell you right off it isn’t so much of a job,” she said. “But Reverend Lathrop has been poorly lately that’s at the church we go to, and with his wife gone two years in May it’s all he can do to look after himself. Lucille that’s his daughter cooks his meals for him and does the cleaning, what she can keep up with; some of the women from the church do his ironing and all, but if there was someone who would come in a few hours a day, because with it being an old house and all and things always breaking down, and the yard to keep up and the trash to be taken out, and what with one thing or another, and him getting along in years, he was twenty years older than Helen that was his wife, and her dying first, and Lucille still in school so that she has to run home and cook his dinner for him and then back to school again—”

  It wasn’t very much work. The main reason that Rev. Lathrop was poorly was that he did in a quart of corn whiskey every day. This tended to limit his movements, and he spent most of his time sitting in the back parlor with a bottle and a glass listening to the radio. I did things like shoveling ashes out of the coal furnace and taking out the trash (and burying the empty liquor bottles under the rest of the garbage). I would get there around ten in the morning, by which time Lucille was off at school and her father was already at work on the daily bottle. She came home at noon and fixed dinner for us, and then I did things like trimming shrubbery and replacing frayed lamp cords and repainting the upstairs bathroom, sort of doing all the repairs and maintenance work that tends to get neglected when you knock off a quart a day. How late I stayed depended on whether or not Lucille came straight home from school. She was a cheerleader, and if there was a basketball game or a practice session scheduled she wouldn’t get home until five or six. No one ever exactly spelled it out, but the idea was that Rev. Lathrop shouldn’t be left alone if there was a way to avoid it. I don’t know what they were worried about. I never saw him get off that chair. Lucille used to bring his dinner to him, and he ate between drinks. He had a pretty good appetite for someone who drank that much, but he never really paid attention to his food, just ate it because it was there. I had the feeling that if she skipped his dinner he wouldn’t notice it.

  He didn’t bother me, though. He would look at me if I was in the room, and now and then he would quote scripture, but if I spoke he never gave any sign that he had heard, so before long I got out of the habit of talking to him. Once I had an insane urge to polish his bald head along with the furniture, just to see what would happen. Of course I didn’t, but I’m not sure he would have noticed.

  One Sunday I let Minnie take me to hear him preach a sermon. The Sheriff never went to church, but Minnie went religiously. She introduced me to all her friends, which took in most of the congregation, and told everybody my mother was a Charleston Ryder. (Actually my mother’s maiden name was Leigh, which was where my first name came from, but that sounded too Southern to be true. And she was from Lawrence, Kansas, and I think her grandparents ran a way station of the Underground Railway for runaway slaves headed north. I don’t think that would have gone over as well with this crowd.)

  The one time I heard him preach, I had trouble believing it was the same vegetable who spent the other six days of the week in the back parlor. He stood straight and tall and had a great deal of presence. The sermon itself wasn’t designed to make you think a whole hell of a lot. He came out against sin, creeping socialism, federal intervention, drinking, gambling, and sins of the flesh, without getting too specific on any of these points. I won’t say I enjoyed it, but I was really proud of him the way he stayed on top of things. I was sure he would fall over or forget what he was talking about, but he never once dropped the ball. He was pretty impressive.

  When I finished up at the Lathrop house, sometimes I would drop over to the station and talk with the Sheriff, and about twice a week I would get invited home for dinner. Or I might see a movie. There was one movie house in town and they changed the bill three times a week, and even so the movie was usually one I had seen four or five years ago. The theater was always close to empty, and whether or not they had an afternoon show depended on how many people showed up. Mr. Crewe wouldn’t run the projector unless he had at least ten people in the audience.

  He was one of the people I’d tried to hit for a job. I never heard a man laugh louder. “Why, if I paid myself a salary,” he said, “I’d go broke tomorrow. I’d have to close.”

  Then, after the movie, or instead of the movie, I would sometimes stop for a cup of coffee at a diner. The coffee wasn’t sensational but one of the waitresses was, and I liked to talk to her. She had told me that she wouldn’t go out with me because her boy friend was in Vietnam, and I was only seventeen and she was nineteen and she didn’t go with boys younger than herself. I figured sooner or later she would change her mind, and even if she didn’t the coffee wasn’t that godawful.

  Then I would walk about a mile out of town, or get a lift if I had had supper with the Sheriff and Minnie. There was a place there on one of the country roads called the Lighthouse, where I had a room and got my morning and evening meals.

  “It’s not a job with a future,” Sheriff Tyles said, “but you could do worse. It puts a roof over your head and a few dollars in your pocket and it’s good experience if you ever want to go into law enforcement. Old Geraldine runs a decent place. You won’t find water in the liquor and you’ll never hear of a customer getting rolled, not even one from out of the state which you would expect. Now and then a fight will get out of hand and there’ll be a certain amount of cutting, but you always have that when you have men and whiskey. Hasn’t been anybody killed there in onto four years, and that was Johnny Piersall that everybody was surprised he lasted that long. If there was ever a boy looking to get killed, that was Johnny Piersall.

  “And Geraldine has a doctor in once a week, and everything is clean and decent. So for the most part all you have to do is be there. You’ll be a deputy in case you have to go so far as to make an arrest, but I doubt that’ll happen at all. You might have to stop a fight now and then if it gets too ornery, or you might have to hit some old boy upside the head for abusing one of the girls. But being there is the main thing, and the less you have to do the more Geraldine will like it. It’s like a life insurance policy, there’s never yet been anybody complaining that he’s not getting sufficient use out of it.”

  So that was my job. From around nine at night until around four in the morning, with time for a nap in the early evening unless something came up and they had to call me. At the Lighthouse, owned and operated by Geraldine Si
mms.

  There are, as Sheriff Tyles and I had agreed, laws and laws. Laws to help people and laws to get in people’s way. I guess I had always had more or less that attitude myself, and maybe more of it when you consider my parents’ occupation and my own work as a termite salesman. (Not that I actually sold termites.)

  Even so, I have to admit that the job came as a surprise to me. I’d already had a lot of unusual jobs, and in fact I had gotten to the point where I took it for granted that I would go on having unusual jobs. I always figured that sooner or later I would find what I had been looking for all along, which is to say a Job With A Future, but that never seemed to be the kind of job I got and I was beginning to see a pattern developing.

  But I never expected to be employed as a Deputy Sheriff in a South Carolina whorehouse.

  I just never expected it.

  SIX

  GERALDINE SHOOK her head. “You’re in trouble now, Chip.”

  “I am?”

  “Bad trouble.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  Her hand, thin with a tracing of blue veins, moved quickly and decisively. She lifted a pawn of mine, set her bishop in its place.

  “Check,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Think it out if you want, but I can speed it up for you. If you play King takes Bishop, I play Queen to King Eight—Checkmate. If you play King to Bishop One, I play Bishop takes Queen.”

  I looked at the board for a minute, and she was right. She generally was. I nodded slowly.

  “You resign?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Want another game?”

  “Not right now. I have a feeling I’m never going to learn this game.”

  “You’re getting better.”

  “I can’t keep my mind on it the way you can, that’s the thing. I used to play in New York and I would win most of the time because I could see a move or so in advance, and that was better than the guys I played against. I even thought I was pretty good, because of generally winning.”