by Bryant, Tim
"Hardboiled, but hot as a door knob after a nuclear blast. Tim Bryant's work is blessed not only with originality, but with a kind of madness that makes it one of a kind and as special and surprising as a one eyed, three hundred pound toad with a picnic basket. I love this guy's stuff. Seems to me his success is assured."
-- Joe R. Lansdale
"Tim Bryant's Dutch Curridge deserves a place at the table with Sam Spade, Lew Archer, and Philip Marlowe. Curridge--ex-lawman, habitual dance-hall hound, and reluctant champion of the
oppressed--discovers secrets old friends and old Fort Worth would rather let rest. Grab yourself a pig's foot and a bottle of beer and settle in with Bryant's twist on Texas noir."
-- John A. McDermott
DUTCH CURRIDGE
by
Tim Bryant
Copyright 2010, by Timothy D Bryant
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping or by information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address: Tim Bryant,
406 County Road 2081, Nacogdoches, TX 75965
[email protected]
ISBN: 1453735151
CreateSpace
Thanks to my wife Leela for habitual inspiration, and to my parents, Bob and Jean Bryant, for unflagging encouragement. Love to Molly and Jackson for reminding me that books are magic.
This book is dedicated to my grandmother, Thelma Grice, who taught me that reading makes you not only a better writer but a better person.
1
Between nine o'clock on the evening of November 27, 1953 and sunup on the twenty-eighth, Whitey Calhoun walked all over Fort Worth, starting in Stop Six, in East Fort Worth, and winding up in the west neighborhood known as Tremble. It's a jaunt of some twelve miles, but he wasn't walking in a straight line. To compound things, he was weighed down with a dead baby boy in a cardboard box. The box was wrapped in the comic section of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Whitey wasn't setting the streets on fire. I could've made the same trip in less time, and I was forty-three years old and as run down as any juke joint on Ninth Street.
During the course of his travels, Whitey ran into at least two people. A third, an early morning milk man named Donnie Barlow, almost ran into Whitey as he followed his route up toward Vickery Place. And somewhere just after four o'clock in the morning, he cut across the corner lot of the old Stockyards Hotel and Boarding House toward the end of Exchange. I was asleep inside Room 2-A, no more than fifty yards separating us
I'm Alvis Curridge, Jr. Most everyone calls me Dutch. I was born and bred thirty miles west in Weatherford, but I've spent all my adult life here in Cowtown.
I've never owned a foot of land in my life. Never cared to. What I've seen, you buy a house you can call your own, it becomes your world. Hungry? Kitchen's down the hall on the right. Sleepy? You know where the bedroom is. Living room. Says it all: this is where I live. Within these walls right here.
I had a room at the boarding house barely big enough for a bed. Shared a shower and a toilet with some decent enough folks. Had a cabinet with a plate and a couple of glasses. A closet that wasn't half full. My friend Ruthie Nell, who had a room two doors down from mine, said the rooms there were jail cells, but I was free as a man could be. Folks sweating it out to pay that monthly note, just to have some place they gotta run to every evening soon as the whistle blows. There's your prison right there.
Here's the thing. When I got hungry, I drove down to Peechie Keen's. Peechie's was a little bar on the corner of Thirteenth Street and Jones, in a fourteen acre track of downtown real estate known, modestly, as Hell's Half Acre.
It wasn't anything but a common saloon, but they usually offered a free lunch with the purchase of a few drinks, an act of no small charity in my view. Granted, the meal usually consisted of pickled eggs or pickled pigs knuckles. Pretty much anything you could pickle was fair game. But if you drank enough beer, it usually slid down just fine.
When I needed a siesta mid-afternoon, often as not I'd head over to Brown's Mule Square. Grab a few winks in the back of the Chummy. I was driving the 1932 Austin Chummy back then. Green and black. A toy of a car with a top speed of thirty-five miles an hour. Bought the thing off a sheriff's deputy for thirty-five dollars and a case of beer, as a realistic alternative to the Ford V-8. Car salesmen all over Dallas and Fort Worth were still marketing the V-8 as the favored car of Clyde Barrow. Fifteen years after they'd gunned him down. Ford V-8 had power, speed and glamour. Three things I needed more of.
But what I'm getting at is this. Fort Worth wasn't just my home. It was my house. A few people were starting to get televisions, but I had movie theaters. A nice library full of more books than I could ever read. Plenty of good grub and enough alcohol to keep the drinks coming 'til they fit me for my wooden overcoat. Had some good rooms here and there where I could go and catch a good band now and again.
Hell, the Crystal Springs Dancing Pavilion, over on White Settlement Road in Dallas, was one of the rowdiest nightspots going, but they handed out a free cake of soap to each patron at the door, just to show how clean they were. I didn't buy the cleanliness routine, but I stopped by often enough that I hadn't had to buy soap in fifteen years either.
Whitey Calhoun shared Fort Worth with me, but it was big enough that we never got in each other's way. That morning at four o'clock was probably the closest we'd been in years. Oh, I knew the boy. More to the point, I knew his mother, Vita Calhoun.
When I was a kid, she'd worked at a dry goods store that sold race records for thirty-five cents or three for a dollar. I'd save my money, get three, go home and play them until the steel phonograph needle on my Victrola bore through the shellac like a drill looking for oil. Sometimes I'd return and buy the same song over again.
After a while, Miss Vita took pity on me and would slip me an occasional replacement copy for free. One day, she came up to me while I was inspecting the new inventory.
"Mr. Curritch," she said, "You one of the only white people comes in here and buys records. They'd sell like hotcakes if they was in one of the white folk stores. Everbody likes 'em."
That's how I got my very first job, working for a colored store on the edge of Quality Grove on the north side of Fort Worth. Once a week, I'd come by and load up on the latest releases by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leroy Carr and Skip James, carry them down to the white dry goods store and mark them up. I didn't get rich, but I got first pick of all the best 78s. And I made a life-long friend in Miss Vita.
I had been awake for at least two hours when I'd finally gone to the front door of my room that Saturday morning. Might have been seven, seven-thirty tops. Plan was to stick my head out, listen for running water from down the hall, and either make a beeline for the showers or go back to my business, warming up two cans of beer on the cast iron radiator next to the bed. Two warm cans of beer and two Benadreams: the perfect hangover cure, as prescribed by my good Doctor Randall Phelps.
When I'd first unwrapped the box, untied the string and slipped the top off of it, I had thought it was all a joke. Damn thing looked like some kind of small animal. Maybe road kill. It was noticeably dead, blue and all, but it still had life smeared all over it. Had a look in its eyes that let you know it had seen some things. It hadn't been born that way.
I carefully wrapped the body in a gabardine jacket that hung in my closet and placed it back in the box. Then, I pushed it to the rear of an old ice box that hadn't worked right since the Roosevelt administration.
The Chummy didn't have a radio, so as I made my way toward Peechie
's, I sang "I Love You A Thousand Ways” by Lefty Frizzell. Mostly to keep my mind on something else. I have a bad left ear, a souvenir from the encephalitis outbreak of 1918, but when I imagine music in my head, I hear it out of both ears. Kind of like a blind man seeing in his dreams. And so I listened. The doghouse bass slapping time, those high piano keys dancing above the melody, the steel guitar whining just beneath it.
I drove past the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department on Belknap. It never entered my mind to stop. I was heading for Peechie's, same as any other morning. This time, though, it felt different. This time, it felt like someone had invaded my territory. I wasn't just driving. I was being driven.
2
Hell's Half Acre had once been notorious for its gambling dens and whorehouses. A thorn in the side of civility and common decency from the time of the Civil War right up until Prohibition, the coppers shook in their boots at the mere thought of going in there. By 1953, all that was left were a bunch of stories, and I knew all of them. I felt like a baby in his momma's arms in the Acre.
"Slant, you reading that damn thing?"
It was Slant Face Sanders-- sometimes called Horizontal Head due to the general lack of symmetry in his features-- leaned back, half asleep at our corner table with the daily news for a blanket.
Slant Face was born in Manchester, England and had come sailing up Galveston Bay with the Merchant Marines, just as the Great Depression was making its way down to Texas from the north. He'd hung around the Houston area awhile, then thumbed his way up to Cowtown and took a job at the sewage treatment plant out toward Richardson, working with a bunch of country boys who couldn't understand half what he said. More importantly, he was my number one drinking partner.
"How's tricks, Dutch?” he said.
"Somebody left a present at my doorstep last night,” I said.
"Eviction notice again,” he said.
"No,” I said. " A kid.”
"A kid? Like a human kid? For Christ's sake, Dutch.”
"Not exactly a kid kid,” I said, making a shape to indicate the size of the thing I'd found at my feet.
"Baby Moses in a basket!” Slant said, a little too loud. By this time, he was sitting up straight as a wooden Indian.
"Pretty much like that,” I said. I tapped a cigarette from a pack of Old Golds and lit it with the Zippo lighter that T-Bone Walker had used for a slide at the Rose Room in 1948.
"They obviously didn't know who they were leaving it with,” he said. "No offense, but it's not like anyone would exactly take you for a father figure.”
"Yeah, well, wasn't much I could've done to hurt it,” I said.
James Alto, a Tonkawa Indian that drove an early morning paper route for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or the Startle-Gram, as we called it, came ambling in and locked in on our table.
"You know a fella named Whitey Calhoun?” he said.
"Miss Vita's boy,” I said.
"He hired on with the clean-up crew at the paper a month or two ago,” Alto said. "Missed work last night. Came in late with a white man, didn't stay long.”
Last I'd seen Whitey Calhoun, some ten years earlier, he'd been drafted into the 761st Tank Battalion, an all-Negro company, in Camp Hood, but had been let go immediately, due to poor eyesight. Only guy I knew who missed the war and was unhappy about it.
"Think there's trouble?” I said.
"I just talked to Miss Vita,” Alto said. "She asked me to come fetch you.”
Vita Calhoun lived in Stop Six, so called because it had once upon a time been the sixth stop on some railroad that passed through town. To tell the truth, not much of anything stopped in Stop Six anymore. It was a part of the city that had already started to integrate itself, negros and whites brought together by a poverty as color blind as a barn owl.
As I stood in the middle of Dildock Street, I was struck by seeing the tallest buildings of downtown Fort Worth from an angle I had never contemplated. It seemed a bit like viewing the back of my own head, looking at these things that I knew so well, from an angle so new that they were, for a second or two, almost unrecognizable.
Miss Vita had a three room frame house made from raw lumber. Kind of house they call shotgun houses, because you can stand at the front door and shoot a shotgun straight through and it'll come out the back without hitting a damn thing. It had been painted a dull green, and there was a chicken house that matched it. The entire place had been gift wrapped in chicken wire. I wasn't sure if it was to keep the chickens in or people like Slant and me out.
"Miss Vita," I said in a voice that was immediately lost amongst the clatter of the noisiest animals on God's brown earth. I called to her a few more times and tested the chicken wire. It didn't give much fight.
I was halfway across the yard and parting a flock of cluckers like Farmer Moses when an older version of the woman I once knew shuffled out onto her front porch. Even in her twenties, Miss Vita had always seemed a little larger than life, so it was comforting to see that she'd maintained a healthy advantage on me. In fact, my first image of her that day was more imposing than ever. I'm almost certain she commanded the damn chickens to attack me in some language I didn't understand. And she was leading the charge, coming at me with the business end of a broom.
"Miss Vita," I said. "It's Alvis."
"Alvis Curritch," she said, same way she'd done it twenty years before. She dropped the broom and come running like she was greeting a wayward son.
"Mr. Curritch,” she said. "You heard anything from my Terrance?”
I was so used to thinking of Whitey as Whitey that I had almost forgotten his actual name. It had also slipped my mind how much Miss Vita hated that nickname.
"No ma'am,” I said. "Don't expect I've seen your boy in a month of Sundays, I guess.”
"You don't know how good it is to see you,” she said, giving me an embrace that picked me clear off the ground and damn near took my hat off. "You and your friend come inside for a spell? I can pour some ice tea.”
As we walked up to the house, I motioned back away from downtown. Against the road that led to Worth Lake, within spitting distance, was an old time beer joint called Fleck's that I'd told Slant about a hundred times before. Fleck had a French revolver hanging on the wall, right over a sign that read "We Don't Serve Trouble Makers." Someone, probably Fleck, had come along later and added "or food" below that.
First time I'd ever stepped into Fleck's had been the night Whitey rode the bus back into town from Camp Hood. I'd been summoned by Miss Vita on that occasion too, to greet him at the station and bring him home.
"Whitey just needs somebody to play father to him ever once in a while,” she'd said.
How in hell was I supposed to be a father figure to anybody? What was I supposed to say? You don't need a daddy to make something of yourself, just look at me.
Miss Vita opened the screen door and the sunlight spilled down through the middle of the house and across my black boots. Alvis Curridge Sr. had stepped off a porch not unlike the one I was on and had never looked back. Sometimes I still felt a compulsion to follow him.
3
"I had a gun instead o' this here broom, I'd a shot a hole plum through you," Miss Vita said.
We sat inside the front room, a room she called the drawing room, though I could see little purpose for calling a room that. I nursed an ice tea with no sugar. Slant, proving difficult, opted for lemonade. Miss Vita kept herself busy talking.
I was surprised to find that the home reminded me of the old farm house I grew up in over in Weatherford. There was a picture on the wall of a light-skinned colored boy. He had a clump of hair so shocking white it reminded me of a nitrate picture negative I'd seen at the Sheriff's Department one time. I pointed it out to Slant.
"That's Whitey,” I said, low enough that Miss Vita wouldn't hear it.
"Somethin' bad done happened,” she said, wringing her hands like she was scrubbing them down with unseen soap and water. "I just know it.”
"He i
n trouble with the law?” I said. Whitey had been thrown in the drink tank a time or two, usually for his own protection as much as anything else.
"I sent Terrance to see you, Mr. Curritch,” she said. "We was in a heap o' trouble. Else, that little baby of his was.”
Slant looked at me like his lemonade had suddenly gone from sweet to sour.
"Terrance have a kid?” I asked.
"Baby boy,” she said. "Little bitty ol' thing. Ain't had a day of peace since it was born. Doctor Teal said somethin' was wrong with its insides, on account of bein' born too early.”
"Why you send him my way?” I said.
"Wudn't nothin' else we could do for that baby over here,” she said. "Baby has white in 'im, look almost white as you two. I told Terrance Mr. Curritch could get that boy in one of the white hospitals where they might could do somethin' for 'im.”
I suddenly wanted something stronger than ice tea with no sugar.
"Terrance never made it to my place,” I said.
"I already know it,” she said. "I got a message from 'im this mornin.' Said the cops had picked him up. Didn't say word one about the baby.”
"You got a telephone now?” I said. I knew damn well she didn't have a telephone.
"Lord no, you know I don't got no such thing,” she said. "He put in a call to the place where he works at, an' Mr. Alto come after me.” She said Alto like she was meaning Owl Toe, which I liked. Sounded much more Indian to me.
