No Tomorrow

by Jake Hinkson

  I turned around at the door. “How I talk to him?”

  “Yeah. He’s meaner’n Bob Steele. And remember, to him, you been sent by the devil.”

  Chapter Three

  A little past the river, just as the main road headed out of town, I turned up a stringy side path marked Church Hill Road. Snaking through the hills, I followed the road to a little bridge straddling a sparkling rivulet. On the other side, atop a green hillock sat a large wooden building with a flight of stone steps and a large sign out front that read: The Blood-Bought Baptist Tabernacle. I parked next to the sign and pulled a little round pocket mirror from my glove compartment. I was checking my hair when the front door of the church opened.

  A man in a black suit with no tie or hat walked out. His eyes were closed. Even as I got out of the car, he didn’t open his eyes or change his expression.

  “Howdy, “ I said.

  “Howdy,” he said in a pleasant rasp.

  “Are you the preacher here?”

  He walked down the steps, hands at his sides, but he still didn’t open his eyes. “I’m Brother Obadiah Henshaw,” he said. “Glad to know you, Miss …”

  “Billie Dixon,” I said walking toward him and extending a hand.

  Brother Obadiah Henshaw had cropped black hair on top of a high, wide forehead. He kept his eyes squeezed shut, and it took me a moment to realize the son of a bitch was blind.

  “I suspect you just noticed something about me,” he said.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Lost my sight in the war. Lost my sight and saw the light. Never read scripture before the war, but the Lord sent a feller to read me the word while I was laid up in the ward. I memorized it all – the entire Bible – laying there on my back and listening to that feller read. One of these days, when I’m called to the final judgment, the Lord will restore my sight. The first thing I want to see is the face of my Lord Jesus. The second thing I want to see is them words. I just want to see them wonderful words.”

  I had a feeling that Brother Obadiah Henshaw had repeated that story many times.

  He extended his hand in my general direction. When I met his hand, he gave me a shake that felt like he meant it. Holding on, he smiled and said, “What was your name again?”

  “Billie Dixon.”

  “What’s the Billie short for?”

  “William, actually.”

  “You’re a woman with a man’s name?”

  “Yes sir, that’s my lot in life.”

  “Now, how’d that come to be?”

  “I was named after my father. He ran out on my mother before I was born, and to get back at him, she gave me his name and then dumped me on his mama’s doorstep.”

  Still holding onto my hand, Brother Henshaw said, “That’s a peculiar thing for a woman to do.”

  “She was a peculiar woman. That’s the story grandma told me, anyway.”

  The preacher finally let go of my hand.

  “Where you from, Miss Dixon?” he asked, not unpleasantly.

  “Well, sir, that’s why I came up here to see you today. I’m from Hollywood, California, and I’ve been led to believe that you don’t care much for the motion picture business. Is that fair to say?”

  Now the preacher seemed to pull back. His heavy brow tightened as he turned his attention toward the sound of the water down the hill. “The Lord doesn’t care much for the motion picture business, Miss Dixon. I just take my lead from him.”

  “Yes, sir. I respect that you feel that way. But I work for a fine company called Producer’s Releasing Corporation. It specializes in wholesome family fare such as westerns. Now, I know we all love the stories of the American frontier, stories of the brave pioneer men who founded this country. I’m sure you can see how pictures like that can be a culturally edifying experience for the whole community.”

  “Culturally edifying?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Is that the end of what you got to say?”

  “Well …”

  “Because I don’t happen to agree with you, Miss Dixon. Seems to me that the California moving picture business is just a tool of Satan, a smoke-and-mirror show that he puts on to lure unsuspecting folks into all kinds of indecency. In this town, the movie theater is little more than a make-out place for wayward teenagers and local ne’er-do-wells. Those people on screen? Women paid to walk around in nightgowns and drink liquor and kiss men for money. Harlots, that’s what the Bible calls those kinds of women.”

  While I was trying to think of what to say to that, he turned his shut eyes to me and said, “So I reckon you can go on back to Claude Jeter and tell him that he’s gonna have to do more than send some Hollywood floozy out here to sweet talk me.”

  I dabbed my brow with a handkerchief. While I did, a side door to the church opened, and a woman stepped outside.

  She was a looker. She wore a simple white blouse and a long brown skirt, but her unpinned hair hung about her shoulders in strawberry-blond curls and her thin eyebrows arched high over sleepy blue eyes. As she moved though the grass in her bare feet, she smiled politely and said, “I didn’t realize we had a visitor.”

  “This is Miss Dixon from Hollywood,” the preacher said. “Claude Jeter brought her all the way down here to set me straight on my theology.”

  I smiled. “I don’t know if I’d put it exactly that way myself,” I said. “But I am pleased to meet you …”

  She put out her hand, and as we shook I noticed a plain gold wedding band. “Amberly Henshaw,” she said. There was something different in her bearing and voice – different from her husband, different from all I’d seen of the town of Stock’s Settlement so far. She moved as gracefully as if she’d been to finishing school, and she pronounced her name with the crispness of someone who’d had elocution lessons.

  “Mrs. Henshaw, it’s so nice to meet you. I was just talking to your husband here about your conflict with nice old Mr. Jeter.”

  Mrs. Henshaw smiled at that. “Now, I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that, Miss Dixon. Claude Jeter is certainly old but he’s not exactly nice. He doesn’t have much use for people. Mostly he just sits around that theater of his smoking his cigars and playing with his rooster.”

  Brother Henshaw made a face like he tasted sour milk. “I can’t abide that dirty old man.”

  His wife nodded. “I do miss going to the pictures, though. I haven’t been in years. I used to go quite often, before the war.”

  Brother Henshaw murmured, “Mm. I’m sure that drunkards who give their lives to Christ sometimes miss the taste of whiskey.”

  She answered him. “Yes. I suppose they do.”

  Her husband nodded.

  “Well,” she said, “if you’ll excuse me, I’m going down the hill to dip my feet in the water.” A soft breeze lifted her hair and I caught the scent of her perfume. It was nice, and surprisingly strong. I wondered if the preacher – who seemed like the kind of man to impose austerity on his wife – allowed her to wear it because he liked the smell as a compensation for what he couldn’t see.

  Mrs. Henshaw smiled at me and shook my hand again. “Goodbye, Miss Dixon.”

  As I watched her walk down the hill, the preacher asked, “Are we done?”

  “Sir?”

  “Unless you want to ask Jesus Christ to become your personal Lord and savior, then I don’t know what else we have to discuss.”

  I turned to him. “Well, there is one possibility we have not discussed.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Mr. Jeter might be willing to make a faith offering to the church.”

  The preacher’s lips curled up in something between contempt and amusement. “You trying to bribe me, girl?”

  “Not at all. I’m merely pointing out that Claude – that Mr. Jeter would like to tithe a portion of his earnings to the church every week. He can’t do that, however, if he’s not permitted to earn a living.”

  The preacher laced his thick fingers together and bent t
hem back and forth to crack his knuckles. “Funny thing … I’ve railed agin drink as much as I ever railed agin pictures, but I never once had a shiner offer to cut me in on the proceeds.”

  “I – ”

  The preacher stepped toward me, his head lowered like a bull’s. “I think you better scoot on down the road, missy, before me and the Lord learn you about the wages of sin.”

  I held up my hands. “No need to get pugilistic, Brother Henshaw. I can take no for an answer. Thank you for your time.”

  I went back to my car, fired it up and backed out of there.

  I headed down the hill, cursing the job as never before. Arkansas preachers and movie theater roosters. I dreaded to see what Tennessee had in store for me. As I neared the bottom of the hill, I saw Amberly Henshaw with her feet in the water, her face lifted to the sun. As I approached the bridge, she opened her eyes and looked back up the hill. Her husband had gone back inside.

  She stepped out of the water and waved me down.

  I slammed on the brakes and the car slid ten feet down the gravel road as a curtain of dust swept over us.

  She ran up to the car, her faced flushed with sun and dotted with sweat. “Tomorrow,” she said. “He’s going visiting after lunch.”

  “What? I don’t … I hadn’t planned to stay the night in town.”

  She shrugged as if it didn’t make the least difference one way or another. “Then don’t,” she said. “But he’s going visiting tomorrow after lunch, and I’m staying here.”

  Without saying anything else, she turned and walked back down to the water. I looked up the hill at the church. Then I put the car in drive and headed for the movie theater.

  As I drove, I kept hearing Amberly Henshaw’s crisp voice saying, “Tomorrow.”

  What did she want from me? Why did she want me to come see her? Could she take one look at me and tell?

  No one in Texas ever spoke out loud about such things, of course, but I noticed that once I hit puberty and prettied up a bit, along with the inevitable male attention came one miserable-looking housewife who lingered too long at my grandmother’s store to talk to me. One night, she stopped me after work, calling to me from the driver’s seat of her husband’s car. She stepped out, her mouth trembling as she tried to say my name. Then she started to cry and ran back to the car. She drove away, and I never saw her again.

  My first week in Los Angeles I met a shorthaired factory girl who took me to the Well Well Club on La Brea. It was a world I hadn’t even dreamed of. Girls in jeans and work shirts dancing with dames in heels and skirts. It was a hell of a time for me. I dressed like Marlene Dietrich and bedded secretaries and servicemen’s wives. It was fun, but nothing ever stuck. Dodging police raids was bad enough – I still have the scar where I sliced open my hand crawling out the bathroom window one Friday night – but dealing with dames was even worse. People just had too much to lose. Families. Careers. They all went back to their boyfriends or their husbands. They settled, and then they settled down. I’d seen more than one old flame pushing a stroller down the street.

  But this redneck preacher’s well-spoken wife was a whole other prospect completely. I wasn’t a damn fool. I knew where I was. I knew I had no business going to see her.

  “Tomorrow,” she’d said and looked me in the eye.

  Tomorrow. I couldn’t remember the last time that word had held much promise, but now I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  Tomorrow.

  I didn’t go back to the movie theater right away. I stopped down the street and checked into Stock’s Settlement’s only motor lodge.

  Chapter Four

  That night, the Eureka Theater opened for business. I gave Claude a mystery picture called Strange Illusion to run. The thing was a couple years old, and it didn’t make a damn bit of sense, but it was spooky and queer enough to keep you interested. I thought it was one of our better pictures, actually.

  An hour before show time I went up in the booth with him to load it.

  “Say,” I said, “what’s the deal with the preacher’s wife?”

  Claude unspooled one of the reels onto a big platter behind the projector. He grinned at me behind his smoke and whiskers. “You met Sister Amberly, huh?”

  I smiled back at him. “I sure did. She’s a treat.”

  “Awful pretty girl, that’s for sure. Beauty queen from Missouri.”

  “Beauty queen?”

  “Yeah Miss Something-or-Other. I don’t guess anyone around here knows much about her or her people. I don’t know that she’s got any people to speak of, come to think of it. Mind you, I ain’t never talked to her – not to pass more than pleasantries, anyway. She and the preacher don’t come in here, of course. And I ain’t one for church.”

  “Yeah, what about that? I thought all you country folk were religious.”

  He puffed on his cigar and said, “I once saw a preacher take a shit before a church service. He was a circuit riding Methodist from Missouri, and I was about seven years old. I was coming through the woods, and he was leaned up against a tree taking a shit. A few minutes later, I saw him get up at a tent revival holding the Bible and talking about Jesus this and Jesus that, but all I could think about was him taking a shit. Been that way ever since.”

  I stuck my hands in the pockets of my vest and looked out the projector window at the empty theater. Claude had swept it out a little earlier and plugged in a fan.

  “Too bad you never talked to Sister Amberly,” I said. “You missed out.”

  Claude peered at me over his cigar.

  “You best stay away from her.”

  I turned around. “What does that mean?”

  “Stay away. That husband of hers ain’t a man to trifle with.”

  “I don’t know what you’re implying, Claude.”

  “That’s good.” He measured some film, cut a frame with scissors, and spliced two reels together. Then he started unspooling another reel onto the platter. “Obadiah Henshaw was in the war, you know.”

  “He told me. Lotta guys were in the war.”

  Head down, with his cigar just a few inches away from the highly flammable film, Claude spoke through plumes of smoke. “Obadiah was in the Pacific. Got a Medal of Honor for bravery.”

  “That’s impressive. You know what he got the medal for?”

  “Sure. Everyone around here knows. Big deal when it happened. During a battle on one of them little islands, one of our boys got captured by some Japs. Japs was dragging this feller away, and Obadiah jumped them. Kilt three of them to rescue this feller. Shot one to death, stabbed one to death, and beat one to death.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yep. So you see what I mean now. He ain’t just some hillbilly with his nose buried in the good book. He’s a serious customer.”

  “Was he always that way?”

  “Well, let’s say he was always a handful. But he weren’t always religious, no. He used to be quite the hell raiser in his youth. That changed after he got blinded. Then he became hell’s worst enemy.”

  “How’d he get blinded?”

  “Wacked upside the head with a rifle in the war. Fractured his skull. When he come to, he couldn’t see nothing.”

  “Is … is that how head injuries work? I never heard of that before.”

  “Heck, I don’t know. But when he come back home he was blind as a bat, full of the Holy Ghost, and dragging that pretty wife after him. That’s been a year or more now. Don’t reckon I ever saw a man change so much. Maybe that Jap rifle rattled his noggin.”

  I looked through the projector window. A man and woman were in the theater.

  “Hey, looks like you have a couple of customers.”

  I followed Claude downstairs into the lobby. The lights were on and the place looked pretty good. I’d changed the poster outside and stacked some lobby cards by the cash register.

  The door to the theater opened, and the man and woman walked out.

  The man was as big as an armored car. Exc
ept for the bright red scalp visible beneath his blond flattop, his skin had been baked brown by the sun. He smiled when he saw Claude but frowned when he saw me. His big, dull faced turned to the woman for direction.

  Next to Amberly Henshaw, she was the prettiest woman I’d seen since Kansas City. Her cheekbones were high and her lips were full and plump. Like the man, she had blond hair and a face that got a lot of sun, but her pale green eyes were the opposite of his. One look at him and you knew he was a big dummy. One look at her and you knew she was sharp.

  She smiled. “Evening, Claude.”

  “Evening, Lucy.”

  “Opening for business?”

  “Gonna try.”

  “Obadiah Henshaw lift the embargo?”

  “Naw, but I figure to run a picture anyways and see if anyone turns out for it.”

  Claude turned to me. “This here is Billie.”

  “Billie Dixon,” I said, extending my hand.

  She gave me a strong handshake and stronger eye contact. “Lucy Harington,” she said. Smiling, she added, “The big ox behind me is my brother Eustace.”

  I extended my hand to the big man, but both Lucy Harington and Claude shook their heads.

  Claude said, “Eustace don’t much go in for shaking hands.”

  Eustace stared at his sister, waiting to see what she wanted him to do.

  She told me, “He’s pleased to know you, though.”

  Then the big man smiled at me. I smiled back and gave him a little wave.

  To Lucy I said, “Well, it’s nice to meet you both.”

  “What do you do, Miss Dixon?” she asked.

  “I work for one of the studios that leases films to Claude.”

  “Oh yes? How’re things in Hollywood?”

  “Oh, when the smog isn’t choking people to death it’s pretty sunny.”

  “You ever meet any movie stars?”

  “Sure, I met a couple. Tom Neal tried to pick me up once at a bar. Saw Lizabeth Scott at a nightclub.”

  “What about Cary Grant? You ever meet him?”