by James Ross
The dance hall didn’t have much furniture in it, but there was a bunch of booths on one side of it, and there was the nickelodeon. There were a lot of different-colored lights in there too—blue lights and soft yellow lights—and we tried them out one night. It was light enough to see in there, but that was all. It was more like a sort of thick twilight. Smut said an atmosphere like that would aid business and help increase the population of the county at the same time. That was always Smut: trying to kill two birds with one stone.
In the back of the dance hall there was a little room where folks could gamble if they felt like taking a chance. Over the door to this room there was a sign, ‘PRIVATE’; I knew Smut had that put there so everybody would dive right in. There were two slot machines in that room; one of them paid off in slugs that could be cashed in and the other paid off in nickels and dimes. Then there were a couple of pin-ball machines over in one corner. They weren’t supposed to be anything out of the way. They didn’t pay off in anything and folks were supposed to play them just for fun. But you could bet on them, and everybody would, you could count on that. Smut said if anybody wanted to roll high dice back there, why, that was what he wanted them to do. And if anybody was interested they could probably always get up a game of stud poker or blackjack in that room.
We still had gas tanks out in front, but Smut said he was through working on cars like he used to do. He was a good mechanic and had been in the habit of working on cars during the week. But he said that was a thing of the past. If the farmers and mill hands wanted their cars fixed they could do it themselves.
The men had built six tourist cabins a good ways back of the main building. They built one cabin bigger than the rest, for Smut and me to live in. There was just one room—plus a room for the shower—to our cabin, but it was a bigger room than in any of the other cabins. Smut figured that part of the help could sleep in the cabins in the daytime and he could rent them at night.
These cabins were painted white and trimmed with dark green. There was a light in each one, a bed and a sort of bath, and a dresser. We made sure there was a spittoon and a waste-basket in each one of them too. Smut said he expected to reap a golden harvest out of the cabins.
We got the last of the kitchen things put in on Thursday afternoon of that week, and that night we built a fire in the big stove to see if the flue was going to draw all right. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, and Smut and myself and Catfish sat in there after ten o’clock when everybody else had gone. I still hadn’t heard anything about the rest of the help, and I was curious to know who it would be. Smut got out a bottle of some sort of cheap rye and poured us all a drink.
I gulped mine down and said, ‘Smut, who all’s going to work down here with us after we get started?’
Smut poured himself a cupful of whiskey and stuck his feet up on one of the tables we had back there. ‘I got things all lined up,’ he said. ‘I got Rufus Jones to be head cook. There ain’t a better cook in this part of the country.’
Rufus Jones was a big, fat nigger. I knew him well. ‘He’s pretty good,’ I said.
‘He’s had experience,’ Smut said. ‘He’s cooked for colleges and for railroads. He used to cook at the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham.’
‘When he was young that nigger sho could fix a chicken stew,’ Catfish said. He raised the key to the door to the firebox and opened it. Then he took a splinter and lit that from the fire. When the splinter was burning good he lit his cigarette from it.
‘Where’s he stay now?’ I asked Smut.
‘Who, Rufus? He’s on the chain gang in Scotland County,’ Smut said.
‘If he’s on the chain gang how in the hell’s he going to cook for us?’ I said.
Smut drank his liquor and sat the cup down on the table, between his feet. ‘His time’s up today,’ he said. ‘I’m going to meet him in Corinth in the morning and bring him out here. I was down to see him last week and give him the money to get up here.’
Catfish got up and walked over to the bottle of liquor. He picked it up and poured his glass full, just like it was his liquor. He turned up his glass and drank it off at one blow. Then he sat the glass down on the table and batted his eyes. ‘Wham!’ he said. ‘Extra good liquor! You know, that there little black Johnny Lilly told me tother day that he countin on bein first cook in this place.’
‘Johnny Lilly?’ Smut said. ‘Hell, he ain’t no first cook. He’s gonna be second cook. Why, he ain’t never cooked in no place but in the Sanitary Café in Corinth. And you know what kind of place that is. You have to sift your grub before you eat it, to get the sand and the gravels out, and the horseshoe nails.’
‘Ain’t you got any white fellows hired?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘Several. I got everything lined up. I got Dick Pittman to wait out front and handle the gas. Dick’s had lots of experience in filling stations. He’s pretty dumb, but it don’t take no genius to wipe windshields.’
Smut picked up his cup and poured the rest of the liquor that was in the bottle into the cup. He held the cup in his lap and went on: ‘I got Badeye Honeycutt for a bartender. He’s had plenty experience mixing drinks. Ought to make a good man. Then I got Matt Rush and Sam Hall for waiters. I can just pay them off in what they eat, and a dollar now and then. Badeye’ll probably be glad enough to strike off even if I’ll furnish him in liquor and what little solid food he eats.’
Smut drank his liquor then and didn’t say any more. He sat there wrinkling his brows and it looked like he was busy thinking, and didn’t want to be bothered. Catfish was dozing in his chair. The liquor and the warm room were a little too much for him. I sat there by the stove and thought about the boys Smut had hired.
The nigger cooks were all right. Matt Rush and Sam Hall would do. Sam Hall’s daddy was a meat-cutter in Corinth. Matt Rush was a bastard and lived with his mother. She worked in the cotton mill. Those boys had been hanging around Corinth for about twenty years apiece and never had been caught working, but like Smut said, he wouldn’t have to pay them much. But I didn’t think much of Badeye Honeycutt.
Badeye ought to make a good drink-mixer—I could see that—for it was about all he’d ever done. He mixed drinks for himself and for other folks. I guess he was forty years old, and if you were to squeeze his cheek I don’t doubt but that you could get out half a pint of liquor. He was bound to be saturated with it. His daddy had been a liquor-maker before him, and when he was a boy Badeye had to help around the still. He sold liquor himself, after he got grown, but they caught him and fined him a hundred dollars. That made him pretty cautious for awhile and he finally went North. He worked in speakeasies up there until liquor came back legal. Then he traipsed back to Corinth and commenced working in pool rooms, bowling alleys, hot-dog joints, and such places. He was loud-mouthed and common before he went North, but going up there had made him worse. Just because he’d been to Chicago and Detroit and come back alive he thought it made him smarter than other folks around Corinth.
Badeye looked mean and sneaking. His glass eye was cocked a little, or didn’t fit right. His other eye was cocked back. It made him look like he was always looking behind him. The hair on his head was dark and bushed up like he’d slept on it wrong. His skin was sallow and there were a lot of black moles on his face and neck. He was always talking out of the side of his mouth like he’d seen gangsters do in the movies. I was afraid he’d get fresh with the customers, but it wasn’t my roadhouse.
Catfish kept nodding and nodding, and his head got a little farther over every time. Finally he fell out of the chair and woke up. He bounced around on the floor and put his hand on the stove, that was hot. He jerked it back and stuck his fingers in his mouth. ‘Great God!’ he said. ‘Confound my soul! Done ruint my hand on this here stove. I’m burnt bad.’
He got up complaining and sucking his fingers. Smut looked over his shoulder at him. ‘Put some lard on it, Cat, and take a drink of liquor,’ he said.
Catfish stopped t
aking on. ‘Ain’t no more liquor in that bottle,’ he said.
Smut pulled out the drawer of the table. He took a bottle of liquor out of the drawer and handed it to Catfish. ‘Here,’ he said.
Catfish opened the bottle and took a long slug. He set the bottle down and looked at his hand. ‘I ain’t burnt so bad,’ he said, and belched. ‘I don’t know’s I’m burnt bad enough to use no lard.’
‘I didn’t think you was,’ Smut said, and belched himself. ‘Gimme that bottle,’ he told Catfish.
Catfish didn’t do it right off. ‘Just one more little small drink, Mr. Smut,’ he said, ‘to gimme courage. I got to walk some powerfully dark woods roads before I git home.’
‘Well, all right,’ Smut said, ‘but it better be small.’
Catfish didn’t drink out of the bottle this time. He took the glass and poured that full. He swallowed it down without batting an eye.
Smut looked at him, then at what was left of the liquor in the bottle.
‘Damn if you ain’t going to get drunk,’ he told Catfish. ‘You already drunk enough liquor to founder a mule.’
Catfish pulled his hat down over one ear. ‘That ain’t nothin,’ he said. ‘I ain’t never been drunk. Cose I been high as a kite, but not down drunk. Liquor don’t bother me. I takes it or leaves it alone.’
‘That’s half right, anyway,’ Smut said.
Catfish buttoned up his overall jacket and went out the back door. When he hit the ground he commenced singing, ‘Death Gonna Lay His Cold, Icy Hands on Me.’
Smut shivered. ‘Got kind of a gruesome turn of mind, ain’t he?’ he said.
‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘By the way, Smut, what’s my job going to be when we get started up?’
‘You can be the cashier,’ he said, and yawned. ‘You’ll have to look after the cash register and keep the books; course I’ll help you. I’m going to keep an eye on the whole works myself. I got to, if I ever get out of debt.’
The next morning Smut went to Corinth and got Rufus Jones. When they got back to the roadhouse Smut told me that he got Fletch Monroe sobered up enough to get out the paper that day, if he didn’t take a backset. The reason Smut was so anxious for it to be published this time was that he had a big ad to put in there.
That afternoon we stuck poles on each side of the highway and hung a big sign between the poles. Of course it was up high, so it wouldn’t get knocked down by the first big truck that came along. On the sign it said:
BIG FORMAL OPENING, OCT. 28
RIVER BEND ROADHOUSE
DINE AND DANCE
FRESH PIT BARBECUE
CHICKEN DINNERS
EVERYBODY WELCOME.
Besides that, Smut had stuck posters all over Corinth where he could get folks to let him, or where he thought he could get by with it. He had nailed them to trees, and telephone poles, and pasture fences. He seemed to think it would get a big crowd out there for Saturday night. But I doubted it; I thought he might work up a good business in time. But not right off the bat. I could see us sitting around Saturday night with nobody out there but the usual mill hands and farmers and kids from uptown that ought to have been home studying their Sunday-School lessons for the next day.
6
THAT AFTERNOON SMUT SAT around and worried about the Enterprise getting out. He said Fletch told him that he would stay sober, but you couldn’t put much dependence in Fletch. He was off to the bootleggers at the drop of a hat. About four o’clock Smut got ready to go to Corinth and see how Fletch was getting along. But while he was trying to find the truck keys a car pulled up in the yard. It was Astor LeGrand’s car, and Fletch was with Astor.
Fletch opened the door and hopped out. He looked mighty bad; you could tell he was sober. He was a long, slim fellow, with hollows under his eyes, and lips that were yellow from cigarette stains. He’d light a cigarette and let it burn into his lip before he threw it away. He was waving a couple of newspapers in his hand.
‘Here you are, Smut,’ he said. ‘Out on time, just like I promised you. I brought you a couple of copies here.’
‘Did you mail them all out?’ Smut asked him. I reckon he was afraid maybe Fletch had just set up the type and run off a couple of copies and then took a notion to come out and throw a long drunk.
‘Every damn subscriber will get his paper in the morning, and if he don’t want to read it he can go to hell,’ Fletch said. He didn’t sit down, but stood there kind of twitching his shoulders. His hands hung down by his side. He kept clinching his fingers together, then unclinching them.
Smut opened the paper. ‘I’ll get you a drink in a minute, Fletch,’ he said. ‘How’re you today, Mr. Astor?’
Astor LeGrand sat down on one of the nail kegs. ‘Nothing extra, thank you,’ he said.
I picked up the other paper that was lying across Smut’s lap. I guess Fletch didn’t know much news that day. Most of the paper was about our opening the roadhouse. On the first page there was a full column about it. In the main it just said that the River Bend Roadhouse would be opened to the public on Saturday, October 28, and went on to tell about Smut Milligan and what he had in mind. Then there were several other little pieces about who was going to work down there. One of them said: ‘Mr. Matthew Rush has accepted a position as waiter with Mr. Richard Milligan at River Bend Roadhouse. Mr. Rush is well known about Corinth and has spent most of his life here. He will begin his new duties tomorrow.’ The rest of them were about like that. There was a lot of guff about Mr. Milligan having operated various roadhouses and taverns on the Pacific Coast, from Lower California to British Columbia. The piece said he was amply qualified to serve the public.
On the back there was a full-page ad of our place. It was about like this:
BIG FORMAL OPENING SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28
THE RIVER BEND ROADHOUSE
Mr. Richard (Smut) Milligan announces that he will be ready to serve the public with Superior Sea Food, Sizzling Steaks, Curb Service, Dancing Accommodations, Hot Rhythm, and Various Other Things, at his location on River Road and Lover’s Lane. Special Accommodations for Tourists. Smut Milligan is experienced in the operation of Roadhouses, Etc., and promises a real treat for all visitors to his establishment. He has engaged competent help as follows: Mr. Jack McDonald, Cashier; Mr. Walter Honeycutt, Head Waiter; Dick Pittman, Curb Service; Matthew Rush and Sam Hall, Waiters; Rufus Jones and Johnny Lilly, Cooks. Your special attention is called to Rufus Jones, who will have charge of the kitchen. Rufus is known far and wide for his steaks. He has cooked for Alpha Beta at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C.; the Washington Duke Hotel in Durham, N.C.; and for the Pullman Company. [They forgot to say anything about him cooking for the chain gang in Scotland County, but I guess some things are better forgot.] We are anxious to serve you.
SPECIAL ATTENTION, TOURISTS! We have tourist cabins with lights, running water, soft mattresses, and all modern conveniences. TRY OUR CABINS!
When I finished reading my paper, Smut was still deep in his. I looked up at Fletch Monroe. He looked like he was on needles and pins. He would lean his weight on one foot, then shift it to the other. His shoulders were twitching up and down and he was working the sides of his mouth like some woman that is itching to get in the conversation, but can’t. Finally Smut got through reading and said: ‘Well, it’s all right, Fletch. Let’s go get you a drink.’
‘Pal, I need one!’ Fletch said, and they went inside. In a minute I went in there too. But Astor LeGrand stayed where he was.
There wasn’t anything much to do, so I just sat in there with Smut and Fletch and watched Fletch drink. Smut got him a pint of some sort of rye liquor and Fletch commenced drinking it out of the bottle. He took a drink of water after each swallow of liquor. The drinks he took were about the biggest ones I ever saw anybody take. He took three drinks in about thirty minutes’ time and the pint was all gone. It made him steady; he quit fumbling around with his hands, and his shoulders got still. Fletch talked to Smut about how he thought bus
iness was going to be, and things like that. I could see that Smut was tired of him. Now that the paper was out and it was all right about that, Smut wished Fletch would go on off. He turned on the radio pretty loud and would pretend not to hear the questions Fletch asked him. Pretty soon Fletch gave it up and just sat there talking to himself and smoking.
After awhile Smut looked around at Fletch. He saw the pint bottle was empty and he went back and got another bottle. It was four fifths of a quart this time. He handed the bottle to Fletch.
‘You better go on home, Fletch,’ Smut said. ‘You might get drunk and sick out here, add no doctor handy. Astor’ll take you home.’
Fletch put the bottle under his arm and mumbled something. His face looked like he was studying about something that happened a long time ago. He went outside, and in a minute I heard Astor start up the car. I wondered how come Astor LeGrand to bring Fletch out there in the first place. He was a big shot in Corinth, and wasn’t running any taxi.
The next day was a hot one for October, and I thought that was a sign we’d maybe have a fair crowd out that night if it kept on like that. The warm weather would make the young folks restless and they’d have to go somewhere and do something. It being hot so late in the fall would make them more restless than hot weather in the summer-time, when it’s supposed to be hot and everybody takes off most of their clothes and sits around resigned to it. I thought they might as well come to the roadhouse as not.
The main trouble was, there was a big football game over at Durham that afternoon. That always draws big from Corinth. Boys that don’t have but one shirt to their name will save up and go to Durham or Chapel Hill to take in a football game. Especially if it’s one of these intersectional games. Then the girls are always egging them on to take them to football games. In the fall a girl gets rated by how many football games she gets to go to.
