by Stan Hayes
I was ready to go anyway, so I hauled my largish ass up and headed for him, catching his eye as I stopped at his table. “Howdy,” I said, very much the local boy. “How ya doin’? I’m Lee Webster, radio station WQUE.” He shot a brief smile, squinty-eyed, up at me.
“Oh, yeah? Well, siddown for a minute, Mr. Lee Webster. You’re just the man I need to see.” He shifted in his chair as I took the one on his left, extending a hand. Clear, steel-gray eyes, precision-grade ball bearings, examined me. We shook as he said, “My name’s Moses Kubielski. Whaddya do over there?” His voice pitched high, for a burly type.
“Newscaster, deejay, relief engineer and time salesman,” I said, “and they’ve probably thought up something else for me to do since I left this morning. That your Buick down at Smokey’s?”
“Yep. Ya take yer news-hawkin’ seriously.”
“It’s not that big a town. I was just over at Buck’s Billiards. If news makes it to Buck’s, it’ll be over the county line by sundown.”
“I believe it.”
I looked up to see Nelson Lord walking towards us. “Hey, Webster,” he said. “How ya doin’?”
“All right, Nels, how’re you?”
“Fine and dandy,” he said, looking at Kubielski and extending his hand as he spoke. “Howdy. I’m Nelson Lord.”
“Kubielski,” he said, shaking Lord’s hand. “Moses Kubielski.”
“I’ve seen you in here a time or two. Food suit you OK?”
“Better than that.”
“Good.” He glanced up at the sound of a rap on the café’s window. Two young girls who looked about sixteen stood outside at the café window. The dark-haired one waved, the way you would to flag a cab. “Scuse me. Pussy ain’t got no patience.”
“I don’t see how you keep it up, Nels,” said Webster, gazing raptly at the nubility on the far side of the glass. “Daytime, nighttime; you’ll be dead before you’re forty. You better find you sump’m regular and settle down.”
“You go ahead. I druther pay by th’ job,” he said, grinning over his shoulder as he turned toward the door. “Maybe they ain’t th’ safest stuff in th’ world, but them sweet little thangs got what it takes to cage my gyro. I prob’ly won’t hafta jack off for a day or two. Ketch ya’ll later.”
“Nice piece, n’est pas?” said Webster, looking out at the girl. “They don’t call ol’ Nels ‘Sluts-a-Plenty’ for nothing.”
“OK, for jailbait,” said Kubielski as Lord walked outside. “Here’s hopin’ the café’s rest room has one of those ‘Employees Must Wash Hands’ signs. Anyway, what I wanna talk with ya about might not be big news, but it’s gotta be off the record. Might be some advertising in it for ya.”
He damn sure knew how to get my interest. Sales commissions are over half my income, and new accounts pay another 10% for the first year. Fuck journalism, in other words. “OK; I’ll tell you when I can’t listen anymore without going on the record. What’s up?”
“I’m thinkin’ of buyin’ the Ritz Theatre from Walton, but I don’t want to share the bath he’s been takin’. Why ain’t that place fillin’ up?”
“Hadn’t thought that much about it; I love movies, and I’m one of the Ritz’s best customers. You don’t have to fight your way through much of a crowd, though, unless the film’s a Walt Disney. You know anything about running a movie house?”
Reba took his order for a large lemonade, and mine for another Coke. “I’m a projectionist,” he said. “What about the other three houses? Any of them serious competitors?”
“Not any one, but he’d do a lot better if a couple of them just went away. Two are just cheap neighborhood flicks, and the Roxy’s not much better, but four movies are still a lot for a town this size. It keeps ticket prices down, for one thing; you’re not going to get rich charging fifty cents, and fifteen for kids. The others charge kids just a dime to get in, and then some of them stay all day.”
“Any of them advertise with you?”
“Nobody but the Ritz, and that’s rare. The paper gets most of what ad money is spent, and it’s not much.”
“Hm. And show business is supposed to be exciting.”
“You don’t understand Bisque-think. In the minds of the great majority of Hamm County’s thirty thousand-odd souls, excitement’s not the objective, at least if you’re of legal age. The goal is to get through life with a minimum of personal disrepute, while discreetly enjoying that of your fellow citizens.”
“Well, looks like the clergy’s got that action sewed up. Lotta churches in this little burg,” he said.
“Jesus. Pun intended; you are such a city slicker. Churches’re the key to understanding Bisque, or any other little ‘burg’ like this in which you may find yourself,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“It’s a matter of ecclesiastical pecking order, proto-redneck variety. Your place in the grand scheme of Bisque society is determined in a big way by which church you belong to.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do say. I say further that if you want to rise above Bisque’s hoi polloi, you’ll hie yourself to one of the dual pinnacles of godliness; the First Baptist or the First Methodist.”
“This because of the quality of the religious instruction available.”
“Disingenuousness ill becomes you, pilgrim. You know full well that the concentration of luminaries in the congregations is what it’s about.”
He leaned back in his chair, letting me have it with the steel-grays, point-blank. “Don’t assume that I know anything about the God dodge. I’ve avoided it as completely as possible up to now, to what I believe’s been my benefit.”
“I can say pretty much the same. I’m no pew-hustler; just telling you what turns the wheels around here.”
“Thanks. At least movies run it a close second.”
“Nope,” I told him. “Not for a minute. They run a distant third, maybe, behind another branch of religion.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The primary passion in these parts. Football. ‘Fuhbawl,’ as it’s said around here. And high-school ‘fuhbawl’ in particular.”
“I’ll be damned,” he laughed. “ ‘Fuhbawl.’ Why all the enthusiasm?”
“Well, let me try to approach it from your point of view. I understand that you’re from New York.”
“By way of Balamer.”
“Where?”
“Bal-ti-more.”
“OK. But let’s stay in New York for a minute. In New York, what does yer average married couple do to forget their troubles and have a little fun?”
“Hell. All kinds of things; screwing other married people, for one, but high school football’s way down on the list.”
“How about baseball?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You a Dodger fan?”
“No,” with the flick of a sneer. “I follow the Yankees, off and on.”
“Well, in this part of the country high school football’s opening day, the All-Star game and the World Series all rolled into one. Kids make the players their first heroes, then some of them become the heroes of the next generation. And even though most of the star players don’t make it to a college team, they’re still big guys around town for years afterward. People stop them on the street and remind them of some big play that they made back in ’39. Makes a lifetime of choppin’ cotton, truck-drivin’ or sellin’ insurance a little more palatable.”
“I suppose. But they do like Walt Disney.”
“Oh, yeah. Can’t get enough of Bambi and Cinderella.”
“Well, that’s one thing New York and the boondocks have in common. Maybe it just takes a good story to fill up the house, wherever it is.”
“Could be,” I said. “Thing about a Disney flick is, promotion. You know it’s coming for a long time before it shows up, and there’s a big hangover after it’s gone. Dolls, hats, shirts, cups- they probably make as much from that crap as they do from the box office.”
“Well, the Ritz can’t be an all-Disney house; what would you do in my shoes?”
“I’m not sure I know enough about your shoes, or where they’ve taken you up to now. And why you think you’d like it here. It’s a hell of a long way from little old New York.”
“Actually, I got most of my movie-house experience in Balamer.”
“Well, still, I’d say that it depends on how much you can put into it, and how long you can wait to get your money back. If you get it back. It’s gotta be a long shot, any way you look at it.”
“Looks like it to me, too. Well, there can’t be a deal without a price. We’ll see what his is. Any idea how long he’s had it on the market?”
“As far as I know, he hasn’t really had it on the market- until now,” I told him. “I didn’t even know he was having that much trouble making ends meet. He’s kept up a good front- the place always looks good, and he does have traffic, even though it looks like he could use more.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m not interested in gettin’ into a bid war with anyone. Keep this under your hat until I decide one way or the other, and we’ll do some business.”
“Wait a minute. How much business are we talking about? What if you don’t do the deal?”
“Let’s say this; if I’m the new owner of the Ritz, I’m going to use radio to build traffic. We’ll do the business it takes to make it happen. And I’m making a little side bet with myself that I will be the new owner.” He pulled some bills out of his pocket, extracted one and put the rest back. It was a hundred. Holding his hands at the edge of the table, he tore it in half, then tossed one half to me. “If I pass on the deal, you get the other half. If I make the deal, you still get the other half, but you credit it to the Ritz’s advertising account.”
I stuck the ripped C-note in my shirt pocket. “You’re an interesting guy, Mr.--”
“Kubielski. Moses Kubielski. I’m just a guy who likes movies, Webster. Where do you do your drinkin’?”
“All over the place. Why?”
“I like to have a beer now and then, and I thought I might get to know the town a little quicker if I went to the main waterin’ hole to do it.”
“One block west and two blocks north, just this side of the railroad depot. The Bisque Lunch Room. They pour three or four different kinds of draft, and, as the name suggests, you can have lunch there. Or the same thing for dinner. Of the fifty-seven varieties of redneck, you can generally count on seeing a good cross-section. I usually stop in there after my evening show. Sundown Serenade. Tune me in sometime; fourteen-forty on your radio dial.”
“I’ll do it. By the way.”
“What?”
“Why’s it pronounced ‘BIS-kew’ insteada ‘Bisk’?”
“Same reason that Cairo, Georgia’s KAY-ro, Buena Vista’s Bewna Vister and Albany’s ALL-binny, I guess. I’m sure that the guy this burg was named after didn’t say it that way.”
“Any idea who that was?”
“Major Hamilton Hubert “Hamm” Bisque. A Cajun, so the story goes, that picked up a grant of Creek Indian land for his service to the Republic in the War of 1812, farmed it, and got around to prompting the eruption of this commercial carbuncle on an otherwise innocent body of sandy clay in 1847. So the county’s named Hamm and town’s named Bisque, or ‘Miscue’ by certain of its residents, and all of its high school athletic opponents.”
“My, my. Well, see you at the movies, Webster.”
“You bet. You’re going to do well here.”
“Oh yeah? How do ya know?”
“I’m sort of a visionary. A peripheral visionary.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, sometimes I get a feeling about the future, but maybe a little bit skewed toward the inconsequentials.”
“I can see how that might be helpful in this town,” said Moses as he stood up. “From what you’ve told me, I see it goin’ 4F one better.”
“How’s that?”
“Bisque looks like a 5F society to me- food, fuhbawl, flag, fuckin’ & fear. I can live with that.”
“Saturday mornings kick ass, don’t they, Flx? Hotel’s about empty, just Clara to make up the three-four rooms that people’re staying in. Now that Mom’s let us run the elevator by ourselves, we can go where we please. Nothing to it. Just look down at the bottom of the door to see the floors coming up, so you can match up with the doors on the floor you’re stopping at. I like that elevator roulette trick you taught me; just ride up and down with my eyes closed, pull the handle to stop the car, open my eyes, and go up or down to whichever floor I’m closest to. Then hop off and walk around the floor and snoop around.”
“It ain’t snoopin’, Jackie; it’s security,” Flx squawked softly. “You can’t tell what the hell might be going on in a hotel. May not be many guests in here, but they’re still strangers, and they bear watching.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. You know a lot for a two-year old.”
“A two-year old Goshawk, son. Accipiter Gentilis, that is, which is a damn sight different from a two-year old human.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Glad you hatched out, anyway.”
“Didn’t have any choice. When it’s time, it’s time. Eggs’re like that. And I wasn’t gettin’ all that much air, since Mike painted my damn shell olive drab.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t realize you were in there when I traded him my black aggie for your egg. I thought it was just a nice smooth rock. Once I had it, I saw how much it looked like a bomb, so I cut up an Old Maid card and made those little fins for it.”
“Damn glad you didn’t take a notion to drop it- me- outa some window. Bad enough that you named me what you did.”
“What’s wrong with ‘Flx’? It’s the good part of that bus’s name. Wouldja rather’ve been ‘Flxible’?”
“Why name a self-respectin’ Goshawk for a bus in the first place? All they do is roll. I fly, mister. You could’ve at least named me for a plane.”
“But we were on the bus when you hatched. You gotta respect that. And I just couldn’t get that ‘Flxible’ outa my mind. How you were supposed to pronounce it, I mean. Then Mom told me that they’d written it that way so it could be a ‘trademark’- still not sure what that is- and to just say it like the missing ‘e’ was in there. Now that I’m used to saying it, I like it better than with the ‘e’ in. Kinda stylish, doncha think?”
“Guess I can live with it. Since I won’t be hearin’ it from anybody but you.”
“Guess not. Anyway, I told you how much the hotel’s like our old building in New York. Both brick, and about the same size. It’s the main reason I like living here so much. But I wasn’t old enough to run the elevator there, even if they’d let me. I don’t guess I would’ve ever known the things about our old building that we know about this one. Like where the electricity comes in, in the basement. And how to turn it off, the way Denver showed us that time. It’s scary to think we could make the whole hotel just stop, if we flipped a couple of switches inside that big black box with the ‘Square D’ stamped on it, in the back corner next to the alley.”
“Um-hm.”
“It’s where I go when I’m missin’ Daddy real bad, so nobody but you’ll see me cry. You know that light green that the basement walls are painted? I don’t like the color much; it’s got so that when I feel sad, I see that pissy green, even when I’m not in the basement.”
“Yeah,” Flx squawked, even more softly than before. “I know.”
“Doncha think that livin’ in a big building like this is kinda like livin’ in New York?”
“I guess so.”
“With a building, you got a lot more to think about all the time than you would just livin’ in a house. You gotta get a lot more people to do things. And because there’s so much to do, you don’t get bored. I hate being bored. When I’m bored, I start to think about the things that make me sad. I’m pretty sure Mom feels that way too, ’cause she’s always doin’ stuff to
keep busy. Seems like it, anyhow.”
“No doubt about it.”
“I know she misses Daddy, too, sometimes. Remember when she asked me the other day, ‘Do you remember in New York, when your Dad and I’d pick you up at school to walk home in the afternoons, and we’d try to sneak up on the pigeons in the little park on Columbus Avenue? We could never even get close before they’d all fly away, though, making that ungodly noise when they did.’ I said yes, I remembered. ‘That was one of my best memories of New York,’ she said, and she had this kinda far-off look. Makes me wonder, if we hadn’t gone off to the desert, if maybe we’d all still be there in New York, sneakin’ up on the pigeons, still havin’ good times like that.”
“Yeah,” Flx squawked thoughtfully, “pigeons.”
“Being here’s OK, though; way better’n Los Alamos, anyway- out there in the desert, burning-up hot, no trees, and then cold at night, in that crappy little house; us on one side and some other people, that didn’t have any children, on the other side. It had a tin roof. Mom said there wasn’t any way to get the house clean, and if there was, it’d be dirty again in five minutes ’cause the place leaked at every seam. “At every seam;” I thought that was funny, like she was talking about a shirt or something like that instead of a house. And Daddy was gone almost all the time. Mom said his job was driving us all crazy, so she told Daddy she was takin’ me to Bisque, so I could grow up halfway normal. He didn’t want us to go, but he was so busy he just had to let us do it so he could get back to work.”
“Yeah,” Flx cackled musingly, “I guess he did.”
“Well, we’re here now, and have some good friends, like Ricky, to play with. We have fun out at his house, don’t we? Wish Mom had more friends. Aunt Cordelia comes by all the time, but she’s about the only person Mom sees, except when she goes to see that friend of hers in Augusta now and then. She knows some of my friends’ moms, from ’way back; went to school with them, but she says that she don’t have that much in common with them now. She says they’re mostly ‘bridge ladies,’ ’cause they play bridge with each other all th’ time and that’s all. Mom’s always sayin’ funny stuff like that. So lots of times it’s just us, and her, here in the hotel, waitin’ for bedtime.”
