Dutch Curridge

by Bryant, Tim

  "Never heard of 'im,” Cholly said. "He play?”

  "No,” I said. "But he might hang out at the clubs, time to time. Young guy.”

  "He a white man?” Cholly said.

  "No sir,” I said.

  He twisted his face up again, and that time, when it came undone, something had changed behind it. It was like he'd seen some kind of light through his blindness, or at least thought he had.

  "What you be needin' with 'im?” he said.

  "I think he might be in some trouble,” I said.

  "Sounds like that might be,” Cholly said, and turned away. "I got nothin' more t' say to you.”

  I tried to tell him that he had me wrong, that I was trying to help. It was all for nothing. He would't say another word. Stood there like he'd suddenly gone deaf too. After a couple minutes of me and Alto standing there looking stupid, looking back and forth at each other, then at Cholly, then at his snotty nosed kids, we turned to leave.

  "Don't guess I could talk you into pickin' a little guitar 'fore we go,” I said. The stone never moved. I never did find out if he was any damn good.

  The next day, I was sitting at the Brickyard, drinking a Jack and Pepper and telling Big Rube about this little row of houses that I'd discovered. How all these poor folks right in Stop Six were living worse than the dogs over in Vickery. Of course, Rube knew all about it.

  "Them people over there ain't much better off than if they was slaves,” Rube said. "They come in to town on Saturday afternoons, buy supplies. Sometimes a few of 'em 'll come in here and have a drink.”

  She was standing there polishing a glass with a dirty cloth when I saw an idea come across her face. It was hard to miss that kind of thing. Big Rube was a hard woman, the kind that put the hood in womanhood. She set her face every morning as if, when she walked out the door of her house, she was walking into the ring with Jersey Joe. She didn't even change it to smile.

  "I was just thinkin',” she said. "You oughta go talk to Joe Harmon.”

  "Joe Harmon,” I said. "Man over at the drug store?”

  She nodded. "Tell him same thing you told me about that Calhoun baby.”

  I hated going in over there. Joe Harmon was the only person I knew who talked more than me. Knew more stories than me, Dandy, and Slant put together, and wanted you to hear every last one of 'em.

  "He ain't that bad,” Rube said. "Only reason no one likes Joe is, only time they ever see him, they're already feelin' bad when they walk through the door.”

  "Now that you mention it, I ain't feelin' so good,” I said. I downed my drink and paid up. Joe's pharmacy was just a block down the road from the Brickyard Hotel, so I left the Chummy where it was and walked.

  I wondered what it was that made me think I had any business sticking my fool nose into other people's business. Part of me wanted to walk down to Joe's, turn the corner and just keep on walking. Let go of the whole thing. Maybe walk right on through the neighborhood, past the edge of Stop Six, right on out of Fort Worth, never look back. But then I got to wondering if maybe that's what Whitey had done. That made me think of poor Miss Vita. Miss Vita had been like a second mother to me, and no man likes to see a mother in distress, not even a second one.

  I hitched up my pants, cocked my hat just so, and walked through the door of the pharmacy. It smelled like old people. Sick old people.

  "Dutch Curridge,” Joe said. "What in the world can I do you for?”

  10

  That evening, I took the Chummy out for a spin. We ended up where we always ended up. On a long stretch of county road just southeast of Weatherford that had once been called Clear Fork and now went by a number I could never remember. The road was red dirt, and it cut through a big swath of farmland, cornfields on one side, cotton on the other. It looked like a vein, especially at dusk, and it cut through a part of the world that I knew like my own skin.

  I could stop the car on a slight grade just after I reached the old creek that had once divided our land from the neighbor's. There was a place to pull off, an area that had once been the start of a trail up the creek side. From there, I could see our old farmhouse, sitting against the west skyline like a lost painting.

  The house had never changed, at least not as far as I could see. It was a simple farmhouse, bleached hard white by long hard years of Texas sun. There was a porch that stretched across the front of it and then wrapped to one side. I could see the front door and the windows, and if I crossed the road, I could see the second door on the side, the one that lead straight in to my old bedroom. To the other side, I could see right into the kitchen window and the screened-in back porch, with its ringer washing machine. In the yard, I could see articles of clothes dancing in thin air, but if I squinted hard enough, I could even make out the clothes line, stretched between two T-shaped iron posts in the backyard.

  I ran my mind across every memory I could scare up of playing in those fields with my sister Lizabeth when we were small. We'd had two mules, Duke and Charlie. A singletree and a doubletree. A turning plow. Georgia stock plow. A bunch of hoes that I was usually in charge of sharpening. Sharpening the hoes was my special talent. Special because it kept me out of the cotton fields for awhile.

  We worked about eight acres of cotton back then and used most of the remaining land for potatoes, peas, popcorn. My favorite time of the year was fall, right after the cotton had come in and school had started back.

  Afternoons, Lizabeth and me would go out to the barn, shuck and shell popcorn. The corn would have been sitting there in cribs, drying out and drawing rats. When we dug into the crates, the rats would either scurry into the dark of the barn or burrow down deeper.

  "There one goes," Lizabeth would yell out, and I'd wallop it a good one with the old Louisville slugger. Sometimes I'd sneak the .22 and a little rat shot and just stand there and pick 'em off. We'd take turns, one of us running 'em out and the other whacking, but I never let Lizabeth use the gun. The thought of the rats never bothered me any. I loved popcorn.

  One day, I was feeling my Cheerios, as the saying goes, and decided to take the twelve gauge out on our daily expedition. We couldn't stir up any rats that day, but I had a bad itching to pull that damn trigger, so I strung up some cans across the top of the woodpile and leveled my aim.

  I'd never shot a gun that big before, I must have been close to eight by then, and when it kicked against my scrawny little shoulder, I flopped down on the ground so hard, I guess I must've looked like one of Lizabeth's rag dolls.

  The loud crack of the gun scared her about half to death, and when she saw me go down, it threw her into full blown hysterics. I'll never forget seeing her standing over me.

  "Get up, Alvis. You've got to get up.”

  I finally pulled myself up, mainly just to get her to pipe down. That memory never dimmed over the years, and I kept it close by, just to make sure it never did.

  I pulled out a flask of Wild Turkey Bourbon and went over the afternoon's conversation with Joe the pharmacist. He was about my own age and come from the same background that I did, so I knew him to be trustworthy. I'd never heard the story he told me, but I instinctively knew it to be true.

  "I been working pharmacy here in Fort Worth for more than half my life,” he said, "and this is something that'll stay with me 'til the day I die."

  He'd been working at a pharmacy down on Brooks and Maple. Place that ain't there no more. So one night, just like half a jillion others, Mrs. Spivey, the help there, came up to him and said, "Mr. Harmon, there's a negro woman out here wants me to wrap up a package for her. Can you please do it?”

  The drug store had always wrapped people's gifts and things, for a small fee. Didn't make a fortune out of it, but it kept 'em in Coca-Cola money.

  Harmon didn't know what to make of Mrs. Spivey. He knew she didn't have a personal problem doing such a thing, even if it was a colored customer. But he said, "Sure, I'll do it,” and went out and took the lady's box.

  "I take it and measure out the r
ight amount of paper,” he said. "When I go to turn the box over, to start wrappin,' this poor lady gets a look on her face like she's just about to have a stroke. I ask her what's the problem. She says, 'Just be careful 'bout shakin' it around.' I go to wrapping it up as nice as I can. Not as nice as Mrs. Spivey, but not so bad. And I ask her, does she want a bow put on it. She tells me she does want a bow, so I put a big blue one on. This same damn thing happens again about two, three weeks later. Different woman, but everything pretty much the same. Mrs. Spivey won't touch it, just leaves the room. Goes out back and smokes a cigarette."

  "Finally,” he said, "Mrs. Spivey can't take it no more. She comes to me and says, Mr. Harmon, if you're gonna keep wrappin' them boxes like that, I think I might have to work somewhere else. It just gives me the spooks.”

  "Well, why in fire would you wanna do somethin' like that?” he said.

  And she finally made the man see that, for the past few weeks or months or whatever, he had been wrapping up little dead negro babies. The local hospitals, negro hospitals, but also some of the regular ones, would know that these poor people couldn't afford no full blown funeral. So, if they had a baby die on them, the hospital would give them the baby in a little cardboard box. Probably something they had laying around with medicine vials in it.

  Then, the people got to taking those boxes and going to Joe's pharmacy or to other pharmacies to get them all fixed up pretty, make 'em look more special, so they wouldn't just be burying an old cardboard box in the backyard.

  It was a hell of a thing to think about.

  The sun had disappeared over the horizon while I stood there thinking about it, leaving barely enough evidence to match the pale light coming from the farmhouse kitchen. A skinny moon hung over the cornfield, as if to remind me that it hadn't ever left the way I did.

  I hung around until the lightning bugs all left, and the mosquitoes took their place. A time or two, I thought I saw my old mother in the kitchen window, as if she was baking something for company that would never arrive. Her happiness, she'd always said, was in the baking.

  I screwed the top on the whiskey and walked back to the Chummy. As I pulled away, it seemed like I saw the kitchen light go out right on cue. Might have just been me.

  11

  I located Dock Price easy enough. Big Rube knew the guy, or at least knew some of his family. Trouble was, he was living in Shreveport now. While I had been perfectly willing to chase Lewis Freeman's record around old haunts in Fort Worth, I couldn't see traveling out of state for any reason at all, much less in pursuit of something I had deep doubts about anyway.

  That well might have been the end of that particular road, had Rube not decided to get in touch with Price's daughter-in-law, who passed along some information that I found too intriguing to resist.

  "According to Dorothea," Big Rube said, "Dock piled up so much debt playing poker, he finally had to sell the business and leave town."

  I didn't know Dorothea, didn't know her father-in-law, but anybody who could lose more money than me playing poker was all right by me.

  "Who was he in debt to?" I said. I knew a hell of a lot of poker players.

  "Chester Merkley," said Big Rube.

  "The Chester Merkley?" I said. I didn't know Merkley either but I certainly knew the name. He had once owned a good portion of the land that now made up Thunder Road, and word was, he had made a killing, figuratively and probably literally too, when the clubs started being built up there.

  "How many Chester Merkleys you know?" Big Rube said.

  "You reckon Merkley got the record collection?" Slant Face said, sensing that the conversation was about to take an interesting turn.

  "Dorothea says she thinks Merkley took stock of all the records a month or so before Price sold out the whole store," Big Rube said, "sold them to some uptown businessman against Dock's debt. She don't know who it was."

  "Looks as if we get to go hunt down Mr. Merkley," Slant Face said. He was buttoning and unbuttoning his shirt sleeve, a nervous habit that let me know he was ready to go.

  I knew Merkley had done some jail time several years back, on a charge of assault and battery with intent to kill. He had found his son in the Starlight, a club that he had no connection with, and had shown his displeasure by pistol whipping him until his head had more hits than the Andrews Sisters.

  He would have gotten off without the "intent to kill" if he hadn't wrestled the arresting officer's gun away from him and fired off two shots at the boy on his way to the squad car.

  Anyway, he had always been one of the reasons I limited my time on Thunder Road, so I had no particular interest in looking him up, especially to ask if he recalled having any records about ice cold Nu Grape in his collection.

  "I really don't know if you want to ask this kind of guy if he has any songs about soda pop in his record collection," I said.

  "You already have," Big Rube said.

  "Have what?" I said.

  "Asked him if he had the record."

  "I did?"

  "He and his wife are the ones who took over that store in Quality Grove," she said.

  I reached down and tugged the button on my own shirt sleeve. The thread gave a little then gathered strength and pulled back. Slant Face was right. It was time to go.

  12

  In 1953, there were two places to go in Cowtown if you were looking for fun and asking for trouble. First was the drag along Ninth. The Rose Room stood proud at one end and, for the most part, only made promises it could keep. You could see some big names there. National acts like Lionel Hampton and Count Basie, as well as local acts like T-Bone Walker and Sam Hopkins.

  As you walked down Ninth, though, things got more rundown with each block, finally petering out with a string of juke joints, pools halls and pawn shops. A street singer named Mose Miner had been killed down there in broad daylight just a month or two back, his head almost cut clean off with nothing but the low E string of a guitar.

  Ninth Street was purely amateur hour compared to the other area, the piece of Jacksboro Highway called Thunder Road. Big time gangsters had pretty much taken over what was left of Hell's Half Acre and just moved it up the road a ways. The area was littered with nightclubs, strip joints, and gambling dens.

  If you were working a case and had numbers that didn't add or loose ends that didn't tie, they were two prime places you'd want to check out too. No great mystery there. Troublemakers hang out where the trouble grows wild and plentiful.

  Because the mix of trouble to fun was a little strong for my taste out on Jacksboro, I tended to stay away from there, at least most of the time. And, since Donnie Barlow had Whitey mentioning Ninth Street, I figured I'd best go down and have a look-see around. As much to check out Barlow's story as anything.

  I went in LeRoy's Bar and Pool Hall, because I knew LeRoy. He had four pool tables, three of which left a lot to be desired. Solution to that problem was that everyone started on the worst table, one that had a broken leg and serious lean toward the starboard side, and played up toward the good one.

  LeRoy kept the drinks cheap and strong, too, so, by the time you had a few games under your belt, chances were, you were doing some serious leaning too.

  "Bad enough, you guys come in here tryin' to scare off customers,” he said. "Now you act like LeRoy's Pool Hall's some kind o' control center.”

  "How's that?” I said.

  "Sheriff was in here lookin' for you, not half an hour ago,” he said.

  I picked up a pool cue that looked like it'd come through the war on the German side. I never played pool unless I was good and drunk. Of course, that made me fit right in at LeRoy's.

  "Stubblefield?” I said.

  "Beats me,” he said. "They all one and the same to me.”

  If Stub was down on Ninth, it was a fair bet he was looking for the same thing I was. I couldn't stomach the thought of him beating me to it.

  I moseyed on down Ninth, but I found myself looking for Stubblefield inste
ad of Whitey. What did I expect? That he was out beating the bushes, wanting to hire me back onto the force? That he wanted to compare notes as we each pursued Whitey Calhoun down alleys and back roads?

  I found a cheap little Stella guitar in one of the pawn shops and tried to talk the man behind the counter down from five dollars to three, on account of it missing a couple of strings.

  "If it was missing that E-string, you might have some trouble on your hands,” I said.

  "And if it was missin' two or three more, this fella here just might figure out how to play the damn thing,” Stubblefield said, walking through the front door. Alto had taught me two or three chords, but it was enough to fake my way through "Waiting On A Train” and several more.

  "I heard tell you were hangin' out down here,” I said.

  "Can't believe half what you hear, Curridge,” Stub said. "I guess the trouble comes in figurin' out which half is true.”

  He took a cigar out of his chest pocket and started working it over with a lighter. I briefly considered offering the Zippo.

  "So if I never believe a damn word that comes out of your mouth, I'll be right often as not then,” I said.

  The guy behind the counter wasn't amused and asked us to take our games out of doors. Didn't seem to want his reputation sullied by the law. Bad for business.

  "I need you to step outside with me, anyway, Curridge,” Stubblefield said.