by Bryant, Tim
"I can look in on that,” I said. I knew almost every cop on the force. I had started off working for the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department in 1942. Held out 'til '44, by which time I'd come to the realization that I was just a little too bad to be a decent cop and way too damn decent to be a bad one. There was a parting of the ways. Never regretted it for a second.
"I 'preciate that,” Miss Vita said. "But I don't right expect he'll be there. Message he had for me, said he was headed for Cleco.”
I'd never heard of Cleco in my life. Far as I knew, he might be running down to Cleco's on the corner for a few groceries.
"Cleco's?”
"Cleco, Mississippi.”
"Your boy got any business in Cleco, Mississippi?” I asked.
"Terrance ain't got no business bein' anywhere near Cleco, Mississippi,” she said. "That's where we come from when he was just a baby. All he knows of Cleco, that's where his daddy was killed.”
I had never until that day known that Miss Vita, the seemingly always happy-go-lucky Miss Vita who had never failed to greet me with a big old smile all those years back at the Dry Goods store, had come to Fort Worth with that kind of tragedy at her heels.
"I'm sorry, ma'am,” I said, and then felt a little foolish as well, it being so long after the fact.
I could actually hear Slant Face suck in a breath. For once, I hoped he would say something.
"You think he was trying to tell you that he was in some kind of trouble?” Slant finally said.
"I reckon maybe there was somebody else listenin' in on 'im,” she said. "Somebody Cleco, Mississippi wouldn't of meant squat to.”
According to Miss Vita, the baby never once cried, not even when the midwife, an old family friend named Sarah, pulled him out of seventeen year old Della Kimble. The silence had hung heavy in the air on the brisk fall morning, and it had never dissipated. Doctor Roosevelt Teal warned them not to expect much. The baby's lungs were underdeveloped. This would lead to pneumonia and then to worse.
Bringing him to me was their last idea. The baby was almost as white as its mother and could pass easy enough. If Della had come from a better part of town-- say, Vickery Place or even Quality Grove-- she'd have been able to carry the baby right in the front door of Saint Joseph's herself. Of course, that would have required Della, which would have necessitated the family not jerking her away and shipping her off to cousins in East Texas like they did.
Vita had pulled her brown knit sweater around the baby, tied the sleeves loosely across his chest, and kissed both him and her son on the forehead.
"Della Kimble?” I said.
"Kimble," she said. "Her family live here in Stop Six. You'd think they come from uptown, all a sudden."
"Any kin to Vester Kimble?"
"Her granddaddy,” she said. "That man give Terrance all kinds o' grief.”
Vester Kimble was a Deputy Sheriff with Tarrant County, a man with a grandfatherly face that he hid behind the most unsympathetic moustache I'd ever laid eyes on. And where Sheriff Stubblefield had the beady black eyes of a possum, Kimble's had been taken from the laziest hound dog in thirteen counties.
"He told Terrance straight to his face, one day, if he ever got his hands on him, he'd beat six shades of you know what out of 'im,” she said.
Kimble seemed to have motive and opportunity, but I knew better than to walk into the Sheriff's Department and confront him on his own ground. I didn't have a lick of proof to back up even the weakest of accusations. What I needed to do was beat the bushes and find out how many people had seen Whitey as he made his shadowy crossing of the Cowtown neighborhoods.
It's like putting a story together. Say, the story of me and Dandy driving up on a squirrel migration on the Arlington Highway. You can tell the story any number of ways, but there's only one right way. You just try to get as close to that as you can, each time you tell it.
It's easy to know when it goes wrong. Most times, the person listening can tell quicker than the one telling. In a way, solving the disappearance of Whitey Calhoun amounted to no more than telling myself the story of it until I got it right.
4
Dandy O'Bannon was another ex-cop. O'Bannon, who was ten years older than me, had been injured in the Battle of the Mame during the Great War. Least that's what he told. One way or another, he'd wound up with a head full of German shrapnel and a nervous tick that made him look like he was always blinking into really bright lights— like if he started to cry, little pellets and things would squeeze out and roll down his cheeks. He also came home with a life-long hatred for anything French, which endeared him immensely to Slant Face.
I wasn't even ten years old when America started shipping guys over there. But I remember doughboys coming through Fort Worth by the trainload, grinning and waving their hats like they were already in the victory parade.
Of course, I didn't know Dandy O'Bannon back then. I met him long after the Germans had gotten through with him. I had been working a sting at the Top O' The Hill Terrace on Division Street in Arlington. An illegal gambling joint, it prospered for years under the philosophy that nobody in either Dallas or Fort Worth had any interest whatsoever in what might be going on halfway between. When the law finally did show an interest, the guys at Top O' The Hill got good at hiding things. Dandy was standing beside me the day I turned my report in to the Sheriff's Department, stating that there was no discernable criminal activity to be found in the place. Next day I turned in my badge and headed straight back to the place to celebrate. It was a simple matter of economics, in a way. Old man Binion paid better for my services.
Dandy and I had formed a sort of brotherhood, based on a mutual conviction that the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department was crookeder than any road in the state of Texas, and we held regular meetings at Peechie's.
What really bonded us, though, was a particularly cold night back in late '49. It was right after my ex-wife Noreen left me, and, if she split because I spent too much time carousing, then her leaving only served to give me more time and opportunity for it.
"What are the grounds?" County Court Judge Raymond S. Lynch had said, when Noreen come to him wanting the divorce.
It's a good bet Noreen Curridge had never given it that much thought. Like me, she tended to work on instinct, even if her instincts led her to wildly different conclusions. But no-fault divorce hadn't yet caught on in Texas, so she was given a laundry list of various charges she could stick me with and a week or so to choose one.
I knew Judge Lynch better than Noreen did. I'd had enough dealings with the man to recognize that the grin and shake of the head he always gave me when I delivered suspects into his custody was the same one he was shooting across the courtroom at my wife.
Noreen went to work, and people started placing bets. Divorce on the grounds of cruelty, willful desertion, failure to provide, withdrawal of conjugal rights, adultery, impotence, gross neglect of duty, homosexuality and incurable insanity were all tossed off the list. She was teetering between the grounds of discord and strife and the grounds of perpetual drunkenness. Discord and strife might have ruled the day if I hadn't shown up on that last night three sheets to the wind.
Our little one bedroom house on South Milam looked the way she'd always wanted it to look. All the pieces of me were missing, except the pieces that stood there on the front porch. We stayed in the front room and made small talk out of habit, and then we went back and made love out of spite. Maybe it was in spite. I tried to act like I wasn't surprised, and she tried her best to act like she was.
"Alvis, I made my decision," she said.
"You're going to keep me after all?"
"I'll make a compromise," she said. "I'll keep your house."
Perpetual drunkenness doesn't even sound serious when you're sober. It sits there at the end of "divorce on the grounds of" like a big punch line. Something for Ray Lynch to grin and shake his head at.
Lying there naked as Adam and following a crack in the ceiling that I
had never noticed before, I felt happy in my sadness. She, meanwhile, felt sad in her happiness, and that meant we were both happy at the same time for the first time in years.
Dandy and I had pretty much been living out of Big Rube's bar in the Brickyard Hotel, partaking of the half-priced drink specials and playing dominos. That night it was us, Slant Face, Big Rube, and Cisero Dearlove, playing Moon and pounding Irish Whiskeys. We always wound up playing either Moon or Mexican Train because you didn't have to partner up for them. None of us were good team players. We didn't trust each other.
About midnight, Slant Face and Cisero were looking at their watches, Rube was yawning, but me and Dandy didn't want to give it up. We decided to take off for the Top O' The Hill in Arlington. Grabbed one or two more for the road and out the door we went.
Cut to the Northwest Highway out of Dallas, and here we come, me at the wheel and Dandy riding shotgun. Our full speed ahead 35 miles an hour had slowed down to a crawl just this side of the county line. Dandy could have got out and walked along side me without breaking a sweat. That's if he'd been able to walk a straight line. The Northwest Highway was teeming with squirrels, I shit you not, all migrating across the two-lane from right to left, darting into and then back out of my head lamps like furry little omens. The Chummy was shaking like a scared puppy, me slamming to a halt each time one of them raised its head and looked at me. Hell, if either one of us had been alone, we'd have thought we were losing our mind for sure.
"What the goddamn hell did Rube put in my drink?" I barked.
"I don't know, Dutch," Dandy said, "but she made mine a double."
When the squirrels all stopped dead in their tracks, I pulled the car into the long grass and drove alongside the highway, pointing through the window as Dandy bounced around like a kid, swinging his door open, leaving half his insides in the ditch.
"We've been poisoned," I said, watching him with one eye and the squirrels with the other, trying to convince myself than one was a trick of the mind.
"Maybe it's one of them plagues, like in the Bible," Dandy said. Dandy ain't even a religious man, most of the time.
"Ain't no goddamn squirrels in the Bible," I said. At that point, I would almost have rather it been the poison.
Half an hour later, we finally inched our way past the darkened hulk of Arlington Downs race track. I remember wanting to stop really bad, but the place was of no use at all at two o'clock in the morning. The other, Top O' The Hill Terrace, would certainly be.
When we got to our destination, we ended up telling the squirrel story to everybody there at least once. Most of them looked at us like we were fools, smelled our breath and laughed us off. A couple said they had heard of such things, and we wondered if they were crazy too.
From then on, those goddamn squirrels kind of followed Dandy and me around everywhere we went. We got to thinking about them like they were some kind of sign. You see something like that, you tend to want to give it meaning, carry it around with you. I thought it had something to do with Noreen leaving, but, at that point, pretty much everything did. I expected to see them squirrels around every corner for a good while. Maybe it was Noreen I was really looking for. I never saw either the squirrels or her again, but from time to time, I could sure as hell feel them both.
5
I had just seen Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys and Big Bill Lister at the Pavilion and decided to take in Lester Young, who was swinging through town for a one-night show at the Rose Room. My two favorite sounds in the world, next to the sound of Ruthie Nell's voice when she got all high-pitched over some breaking news story, were Lefty Frizzell's singing and Prez's horn. I could listen to him blow that thing until the cows came home, but he only came through town every once in a great while. I never had an ounce of trouble at negro clubs like the Rose. I'd gotten into more jams at Hispanic clubs around town.
One night, I had been at the Rose Room watching Red Callender's band, and there was one other pale face in the room, a guy I wound up drinking with and talking to after just about everyone else had split. It was only later that I found out I had been talking to Barney Kessel, the well-known guitar player. Thing is, you never knew quite what or who to expect, late hours at the Rose.
I had only been there a couple of hours this night when a young colored fellow came up and introduced himself to me.
"Sir, my name is Lewis Freeman," he said. "Are you Alvis Curridge?"
About the only time I'm called Alvis is when I've done something that's ticked somebody off, so I wondered if I was about to get the bum's rush. I think he saw me clinch up.
"Miss Vita Calhoun sent me."
"This some kind of joke?" I said. The chances of Miss Vita sending two young colored guys my way within a matter of days seemed slim at best. And this guy sure wasn't Whitey. He was short and stocky and dark skinned, all of which Whitey was not.
"May I sit down and talk to you?" he said.
Miss Vita had indeed sent him my way, but it had been a good two or three months since she had, so the one thing I knew about Lewis Freeman was that he was even slower moving than Whitey Calhoun had been. And it was a good chance he would have never found me if I hadn't walked right into his favorite place of pleasure.
"So what did she send you to me for?" I said.
Lewis Freeman answered the question with a story, and I drank two different beers while I listened.
Lewis had been born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1932. His father was a sharecropper who played music, mostly gospel, around southern Arkansas, mostly on weekends. He had a cousin who was a preacher, and they rode the gospel circuit around the backwaters of the state, making a little music and, hopefully, a little money as they went.
"My dad always told me, growing up, that he had purchased the small plot of land that we lived on from the proceeds of a record that he and Uncle Matthew had recorded in Atlanta, Georgia, for the Nu Grape soda company."
"Nu Grape?" I said.
"'I Got Your Ice Cold Nu Grape' was what it was called," he said, with a serious face. I gave him one back that said it didn't ring a bell.
"They named my dad and Uncle Matthew the Nu Grape Twins."
"And they weren't even twins?" I said.
Come to find out, the one payment had been all that Freeman's dad had ever received, and, now in his later years, he was suffering from lack of income, a feeling I could get behind. Assuming this guy wasn't just looking for a handout, though, I wasn't sure what I could do for him or his dad.
"So why did Miss Vita send you to me?" I asked one more time, having gotten no closer to an answer in the intervening minutes.
"Two reasons," he said. "Miss Vita says that you used to work with her, selling blues and gospel records here in town. I was hoping that you might be able to find a copy of that record for me."
It seemed like a futile dream, far as I could see. It had been years since I had sold my last copy of anything, and I was pretty damn sure it wasn't by the Nu Grape Twins who weren't even twins.
"And that's the easy part," Lewis said.
I was going to need at least one more drink.
"There are two men, stay down on Ninth Street, that are claiming to be the Nu Grape Twins. I've heard it straight from their own mouths. And they say they have payments from the Columbia Recording Company to prove it."
6
"Last Miss Vita heard from Whitey, he was in the tank,” I said. "That's why I need you to go down there and take a look around. See what you can scrape up.”
Dandy and I were sitting in Peechie's, waiting for Slant Face and James Alto to arrive.
"Last time I went in there, Stub tried to give me my old job back,” Dandy said. Sheriff Shelby Stubblefield was just about the only person at the Sheriff's Department who had been around when Dandy and I were there. Thus, he was our favorite object of scorn. The man hated being called Shelby so bad that we rechristened him Stub, a term of no great affection. In fact, neither of us could quite remember how he had earn
ed the name. Slant seemed to remember it being a salute to his lack of verticalness. I was pretty sure it was a shortened form of Stubborn As A Mule. Either way, or both, it stuck like the badge on his over-inflated chest.
For some reason, Stub was always trying to give Dandy his job back, a subject he'd never broached with me. I didn't know whether to take it as a compliment or condemnation. What it meant was, he would tolerate the thought of Dandy hanging around the place.
Slant Face soon joined the meeting. Having spent the previous nine hours screening the shit of every man, woman and child in the Richardson area for rubbers, tampons, and God knows what else, Slant's ability to chow down on Peechie's special of the day was either the supreme example of mind over matter or irrefutable proof of mental psychosis.
I looked at the Pearl Beer clock that hung on the wall over the bar. Everything about the thing ran backwards. The numbers rounded the face in the wrong direction, only the six and twelve being in their rightful places. The hands spun counterclockwise too. As a result, it told perfectly good time, but most people went nuts trying to read it.
It was 11:50a.m., which meant that Alto would be arriving within a few minutes. Alto played a pretty mean six-string guitar and could sing just like Lefty Frizzell, a talent I was in awe of. He was also a western swing fan and would have been headed for the Crystal Springs Ballroom that night, except for it being a Saturday night. Saturday night meant one thing to Alto: the Sunday morning Startle-Gram. The big one. Special edition. The one that just about slung him up and down the streets of Mistletoe Heights and Stop Six.
