by James Ross
I sat outside the roadhouse that morning, on a little wooden chair that was painted green (Smut put the nail kegs in the car shed and said we wouldn’t use them any more, because they didn’t have enough tone for a roadhouse), and I read the Charlotte Observer. On the sports page it said that if it kept on hot that afternoon the home team would win. The heat wilts those Yankees when they come down here, and the Yankees we got hired on our football teams win because they have got used to it by then. The paper said there would be a big crowd at the game. I figured maybe we’d get a little trade out of some of the South Carolina folks that would come up the River Road on the way to Durham.
It turned out that there was a lot of traffic on the highway that day. From eleven o’clock to twelve we did a pretty good business. We sold ten or twelve pints of liquor and a lot of gas. It kept us all busy for a while, but in the afternoon things slacked off.
That afternoon a lot of the cotton-mill hands came out. They looked like they felt out of place in that shiny new roadhouse at first, but most of them bought some liquor. It wasn’t long before they were acting like they were used to roadhouses and had been raised in one. They went in the little room that was marked private, and played the slot machines and cussed them as much as usual. They all bet on the pin-ball machines that were legal. Some of them sat in the booths and played poker. They were a little quieter than usual.
There wasn’t much farm trading going on that afternoon. I reckon it had got out by then that Smut had sold out his stock of groceries and such odds and ends like plowlines and nails and work shoes. There was a sprinkling of country boys hanging around, but mainly from curiosity. They all liked to hear the nickelodeon. One of them would match another one to see who put the nickel in the slot. When the piece played out they would match again and get another record going. They liked the mournful-sounding records that were sung by hillbilly singers. Their favorite was some bird named Basil Barnhart, the Bear Mountain Barytone. It was a pity the bears let him get away.
My new job was different from what I’d been doing before. I had to wear a tie and sit on the stool back of the cash register. Matt and Sam, the waiters, had little ruled pads that they used to write up the amount a customer owed. The customer was supposed to give me the ticket and pay me. Then I took the tickets and stuck them on a long nail-like thing that was bottom side up. When the business was done for the night I had to add up the tickets and they had to come up and balance with the money in the till. Then I had to fix up the copies of the menu, but that wasn’t much of a job. During the week we didn’t aim to change the menus very often. But for the opening night we had a long list of things that we were ready to serve.
When it got dark that night there still wasn’t anybody there except for the usual Saturday night crowd of mill hands and loafers from Corinth. They were mostly pretty tight by then, but still not noisy. I couldn’t understand it. Wilbur Brannon was sitting outside, talking to Dick Pittman. Smut came out of the kitchen and walked up to where I was sitting. He leaned his elbows on the table the cash register was on.
‘Not much of a crowd, so far,’ he said. He sounded like he was getting a little anxious. He had on his best clothes: a black suit, with a white shirt that was clean, and a black bow tie. He looked good except for his hair. It needed cutting. He still looked tough, for his coat was a little too tight and made his shoulders look like they were going to bust through.
‘It’s not late yet,’ I told him. I looked at the clock back of me. It was a big wall clock that advertised Bruger’s Ale. ‘It’s just six-thirty now,’ I said.
‘I know. But all we got so far is our usual crowd,’ he said. ‘And I got too much invested here to ever get it back from them.’
The crowd didn’t get any bigger, and about nine o’clock I was still stitting there working on a crossword puzzle that I found in an old Sunday paper. It began to look like I would have time to finish it even without a dictionary. Smut came back of the counter again. He jerked his bow tie like it was too tight.
‘Well, looks like a flop,’ he said, sounding gloomy as a young preacher that’s just been sent to a mountain charge.
‘Don’t get discouraged so early in the night,’ I said to him. ‘You know we always did our best business at the other stand from ten o’clock on.’
He mumbled something and went and got a cup of coffee. He would look pretty bad if nobody showed up but the usual crowd. It would take just about a month of that to put him out of business. I got worried myself. I’d be out of a job too if the place didn’t make a go of it.
I think it was a little after ten that a couple of cars drove up outside. They honked the horns and I went outside, not to wait on them, but just to get away from that stool I’d been sitting on for three hours. The cars had South Carolina license plates, and in the moonlight I could see that they were folks that had been to the football game in Durham. They had on football-game clothes. Dick Pittman was at one car, taking their order. I heard the fellow that was driving say: ‘It always gives me a good appetite to see them Damyankees come down here and get beat. I want a steak sandwich with all the doodads slapped on, and a cup of coffee.’ The woman that was sitting beside him in the front said, ‘Give me a steak sandwich too, and I’d like to have a glass of sweet milk, but I don’t suppose that would agree with all the liquor I’ve drunk this afternoon.’
‘Don’t get milk,’ the man told her. ‘We’re gonna drink some more liquor right now.’
‘If we do,’ the woman said, ‘then we’ll sit right here until whoever’s going to drive home sobers up. I’m not going to ride with some drunk behind the wheel.’
‘The drunker I get the better I drive,’ the man said.
There were four other people in the back of that car. One man was sitting next to the window, and a girl sat between him and the necking couple that was on the other side. This other girl was sitting on the boy’s lap. They acted like they hadn’t seen each other in a long time. The way they smacked and gulped was enough to make your stomach turn over. They were too busy to disconnect their mouths and talk, but the other couple back there ordered steak sandwiches for all four of them. A steak sandwich cost forty cents and that was six of them. Two dollars and forty cents at one pop. I thought to myself, ‘A few more cars like that and we’ll do all right.’
I went back inside, and it wasn’t long before here come Dick. He went to the back and pushed in the swinging doors that opened into the kitchen. ‘Gimme eight steak sandwiches, two American cheese sandwiches, toasted, one Swiss cheese on rye, one ham, toasted, one pimento cheese, toasted, one order of French fried potatoes, one glass of pineapple juice, two glasses of tomato juice, and thirteen cups of coffee.’ he said. About that time another horn started blowing outside and Dick broke for the front again.
Smut had been standing down the counter from me, talking to Badeye Honeycutt. When Dick started yelling that order he stopped talking to Badeye and came up to where I was. He looked a lot livelier.
‘That wasn’t no bad order,’ he said.
‘Not bad,’ I said. He sat down at the counter and picked up a menu that was lying there. ‘Gimme a pencil, Jack,’ he said. I did it, and he commenced adding it up on the back of the menu. He finished his calculations and threw the pencil back to me.
‘Comes to five dollars even,’ he said. ‘Probably sell them some gas too, and some liquor.’ He fixed his bow tie again and twisted his neck around. Then he stood up and straightened his shoulders and looked at himself in the mirror that was on the wall on the other side of the counter. ‘Hell, we’ll do business yet,’ he said, and started back toward the kitchen.
That was just the start. Folks from the football game kept stopping in, and they ate a lot of grub. They bought liquor and gas in about equal amounts. About eleven o’clock a crowd of kids from Corinth, with their girls, descended on us. As soon as they located the nickelodeon in the dance hall they commenced playing that and dancing. There wasn’t any cover charge, but once inside th
ey spent some money. They would dance awhile, then sit in the booths and get something to eat and drink. They kept the nickelodeon going steady.
But the freest spenders out there that night were the folks that worked in the hosiery mill in Corinth. In the main they were young fellows, because only a young man can see well enough to run a knitting machine. I guess they averaged making forty dollars a week, or about as much as a cotton-mill hand made in a month. Most of them could count on their eyes giving out on them about the time they got to be thirty years old, and it looked like they would be saving their money against that day. But none of them ever saved any. They all kept good cars, and most of them managed to find a gold-digging girl. The girls dug their boy friends that night, but Smut Milligan got part of the profit.
There was another class of folks from Corinth came out that night to investigate. They were the people that are supposed to be nice folks, but like a dram now and then. And when nobody is looking like to kiss somebody else’s wife and pinch her on the behind and let their hands drop on her thigh, always accidentally, of course. They all stayed out in their cars because they could get drunk more privately out there. If it got out that they had been drinking and cutting up it would hurt their standing in the church and with the best folks. There is a difference between the best folks and the folks that are just nice. The best folks are the ones that will go to the most trouble to keep other folks from knowing when they get drunk. There were just a few of them in Corinth.
Cars kept driving up outside, and Dick Pittman was working his legs off trying to take all their orders. Matt and Sam had their hands full with the customers inside the place; I was busy myself, and Badeye was handling the counter. Once in a while when Dick opened the doors to the kitchen to yell an order you could hear the cooks cussing each other, so I guess business was pretty brief back there too.
Finally Smut saw that Dick couldn’t take care of all the business outside. He sent Badeye out to help him. Badeye didn’t like it, but there wasn’t anything else Smut could do. He had to stay inside where he could keep an eye on the main part of the business. He took over Badeye’s job and began waiting on the counter.
The crowd got bigger and bigger. About midnight it was the biggest and making the most fuss. Right at the height of things Astor LeGrand and Baxter Yonce came in the front door.
They looked the crowd over for a minute. Then Astor LeGrand walked over to a chair that was in front of the cash register. He sat down there where he could get a good idea of how much money we were taking in.
Baxter Yonce stood where he was, up toward the door. He looked up at the walls where the pictures were and sort of squinted his eyes. Then he took out his glasses case and put his glasses on.
Baxter Yonce was a man that made plenty of money; he had the biggest garage and automobile agency in Corinth. He was red-faced and looked like he drank a lot of liquor. That was right; he did. He wasn’t as short as he looked to be; he was so big around that it made him look short. The clothes he wore were always good, but when you got to thinking about it you couldn’t ever remember how they looked the last time you saw him. They were that kind of clothes. He always smoked cigars, and he wore three rings on his left hand. One of them was a black onyx ring that had a white ‘Y’ in the center of it. Baxter walked over to where I was and leaned his right elbow on the showcase where we kept the cigars and the cigarettes.
‘Well, sir!’ he said. ‘Looks like this place is going to make money. I never would have thought it.’
‘Business is brief tonight,’ I said. ‘Course that crowd going home from the football game is one reason.’
‘There’s half of Corinth out here,’ Baxter said. ‘And when I come in I see a lot of cars outside from Blytheville and Seven Springs.’ He chewed hard on the end of his cigar.
‘I guess it was the football crowd started it. They stopped to get a bite to eat and other folks saw the cars parked around here and had to drive in to investigate,’ I said.
‘Oh, sure,’ Baxter said. ‘You pass a place where there’s a lot of cars parked and where there’s a lot of soft, fancy lights, and you got to stop and see what’s going on there.’
That must have been it. Anyway, it was a good opening night. Everybody in Corinth, but the best folks and the niggers, was there. They spent a lot of money too.
After a while the crowd began to break up. By two-thirty everybody had gone except Astor LeGrand and Wilbur Brannon. Wilbur always stayed up most of the night anyway. You could tell he was proud of the way things had gone. It would be a place where he could sit up nights. Anyway, over the week-ends. Astor LeGrand was a night hawk too. But that wasn’t the reason he kept hanging around that night. He was supposed to be a lawyer, but didn’t practice much. He didn’t have any office nor title in the Party, but he was the boss politician of the county. If you wanted a job with the county, or with the state, or with the Federal Government, you had to have a recommendation from Astor LeGrand. After you got the job you had to kick back a certain amount to him. The reason he got by with stuff like that was because he controlled the votes in the county. I don’t know exactly how he controlled them, but you could watch it, and the man that was backed by Astor LeGrand was the man that won. Sometimes it was pretty hard to find out who he was backing.
LeGrand didn’t look nor talk exactly like a politician is supposed to. In fact, he didn’t ever talk unless it was the last thing left. He never went around slapping folks on the back, and he wouldn’t speak to you unless you spoke first. He wasn’t a big fellow, and if you saw him in a crowd he looked like the average man that politicians are always talking about. He usually stood around with his tongue in his cheek and always looked like he was thinking about something that was going to make him bust out in a laugh in a minute. He used to come out to the filling station once in a while and just sit around. He would say hello to Smut and that would be all. Now and then he’d walk all around the place and look at it like he was the owner. Sometimes on a good night he’d be there and sit where he could watch the cash register.
Astor LeGrand sat at the counter, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. Wilbur Brannon was on a stool beside him, and Smut was behind them, leaning his arms on the counter. I got up from my stool behind the cash register and stretched. I was pretty tired from sitting there so long.
‘Looks like you got a good thing out here, Smut,’ Wilbur said. ‘Judging by tonight, anyway.’
‘More people than money,’ Smut said. He looked at me and winked. If Astor LeGrand got the idea that we were mopping up it would be too bad. He might start charging too much for protection.
Astor LeGrand got up and stretched his arms. The ashes from his cigarette fell on my pants leg, for I had my foot propped on the rail in front of him. He reached down and brushed the ashes off.
‘Sorry, Jack,’ he said. He yawned and put his hand over his mouth and tapped it. He went out the front door.
‘Don’t rush off, Mr. LeGrand,’ Smut called after him. But he was gone. I could see Smut was glad he’d gone and wished Wilbur would do the same.
But Wilbur hung around for fifteen or twenty minutes and talked and rambled on. Smut got to yawning and it got me yawning. We sat there and yawned in Wilbur’s face. Finally he caught it and he said: ‘Well’—yawn—‘reckon I might as well’—yawn—‘get back to town.’—Yawn.—‘I’ve got the yawns.’ He yawned again and stood up.
‘Glad to see you doing so well, Smut,’ he said. ‘Hope it keeps up.’
‘Thanks,’ Smut said. Wilbur went out and Smut quit yawning.
‘I thought they wasn’t ever going home,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get over here and count up how much money we took in tonight.’
He went over to the nail that had the bunch of tickets stuck on it. It was full to the top. I had another bunch in a drawer of the cash register. I took them off the nail and put them in there when it got full earlier in the night. Smut got a pencil and a piece of paper and pushed the nailful of tickets o
ver to me.
‘Call them out,’ he said.
It took us a good while to do it. When it was done the night’s take amounted to a little over three hundred dollars. It was over half profit, the way I had it figured out. And that didn’t take into consideration the nickelodeon and the slot machines. ‘Not a bad night. Not bad at all,’ Smut said.
‘The football crowd helped us,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘and it ain’t a thing to be depended on. But later on, when folks get in the habit of coming out here, there’s other things that’ll make me money.’
‘What things, for instance?’ I said.
‘The cabins, for instance. Tonight I just rented two cabins. I got a dollar apiece for them. Dick Pittman told me the folks that went in them didn’t stay over half an hour either time.’
‘If the church folks in Corinth find out that you’re renting these cabins to folks that ain’t married, they’ll close us up,’ I said.
‘I’ll take care of them,’ Smut said.
‘How’ll you do that?’ I asked.
‘I’ll take care of them. If they start sticking their noses in my business I can blackmail hell out of a lot of prominent Methodists and Baptists in Corinth.’
7
SOME FELLOWS FROM CORINTH drove out the next morning and rented one of the cabins for a blackjack game. They could have played in the room that was marked private, but they wanted a cabin. Smut rented it to them for a dollar. That was cheap, but they invited him out to get in the game any time that day if he felt like it. That was the same as paying him about fifteen dollars rent.
That day a couple of tourists going south stopped in and had lunch with us. They sat in a booth in the café, a potty old man, and his wife that was thin and had a mouth too little to swallow a small pill. Sam hadn’t got back from Corinth, but Matt was in there with me and he took their order. They ordered fried chicken, and we happened to have some in the kitchen. Matt brought it out to them and waited on them while they ate. When they finished the old man brought the check up to me. I guess he hadn’t looked at it, for he said: ‘What’s the damage? I don’t have my glasses on.’
