20
HOWDY’S REPERTOIRE COVERED A LOT OF STYLISTIC GROUND in a short period. In addition to a couple of originals, he kept the dance floor packed with a western swing medley, jumping all over the Spade Cooley classic “Shame on You,” followed by Bob Wills and Tiny Moore’s “Ida Red Likes the Boogie” out of which he made a smile-inducing segue into Louis Jordan’s “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” that sounded as close to Asleep at the Wheel as one man could get. To wrap up the set, Howdy grabbed his Louisiana roots and growled a furious and swampy version of “Diggy Liggy Lo.”
“Whew! That’s right,” Howdy called over the applause that followed the end of the set. “Steal a kiss with every chance when you do the Cajun dance,” he said. “I’m gonna take five.” He took off his guitar and held it in the air to share the applause. “Y’all get a cold one and we’ll get back at it in just a few.”
The second he stepped offstage, Howdy was set upon by a cute little blonde who told him she loved his hat and his song about the guy who got lost in tequila town. She was too shy to say anything else and was gone before Howdy could say much more than thanks. Too bad, he thought, he had plenty more to say.
He headed over to the bar where Skeets was in his usual place, talking on the phone. Howdy chugged a cold glass of water, then got a beer and sat down to catch his breath and let his sweat-soaked shirt dry out a little. A minute later, Skeets hung the phone up and pointed at Howdy. “Son, you still got it,” he said. “They love ya.”
“Can’t help it if the crowd’s got good taste,” Howdy said with a wink.
Skeets smiled and slapped his hands together. “Hadn’t heard any Spade Cooley in a coon’s age.”
“Shame on you,” Howdy said. “Fix your damn jukebox or something.”
Skeets looked around the club and said, “Jew see Slim?”
“Can’t say as I have,” Howdy said, taking a cursory glance around the room. “Why?”
“Oh, doesn’t matter. Just thought I saw him earlier is all. If he was here, I thought I’d tell you both at the same time. But I can tell you and you can tell him later.”
“Tell him what?”
“You two might just be in luck.”
“Good luck or bad?”
“Good,” Skeets said, waving a hand at the telephone. “That was Jodie Lee I was just talking to.”
“No kidding?” For the past seven years, Frank and Jodie Lee owned a honky-tonk called the Beer Thirty that was a few miles outside of Lawton, Oklahoma. They were good people. Howdy had played there a half-dozen times, though not in the past year or two.
“Jodie Lee, huh?” Howdy smiled, just hearing her name. A beauti-ful and funny woman, sassy and strong. She’d been a barrel-racing champion as a younger girl. Sat on a horse as good as anybody he’d ever seen. He’d always liked her. Thought Frank had married way above his station and had told him as much on more than one occasion. Frank was smart enough never to argue the point. He just told Howdy what an unbecoming thing jealousy was. “I haven’t seen Jodie since . . .” Howdy thought about it a second. “I can’t even remember when it was.” He picked up his hat and rubbed a hand over his head. “Probably last time I played in Lawton, whenever that was. How’s she doing?”
“Says she’s doing all right for a widder woman,” Skeet said, expecting that Howdy knew.
But he didn’t and it hit him like an unpleasant surprise. “A widow?” He looked down at the bar, then up at Skeets. “Frank died?”
Skeets looked at him like he was the slow kid in the class and said, “You think of some other way she could be widowed?”
“What happened?”
“I told you, Frank died.”
“We’ve already covered that,” Howdy said. “You got any hows or whens?” He lowered his voice and said, “She didn’t kill him, did she?” Like it wasn’t completely out of the question.
Skeets gave a wry smile and shook his head. “Not that it didn’t cross her mind a few times back when he was still drinking, but, no. It was cancer. ’Bout a year and a half ago.”
That sucked the humor out of the conversation. Quietly, Howdy said, “Damn.” His eyes closed in condolence and understanding, his head shaking slowly. “Cancer.” He knew the kind of pain and suffering that rode in on that horse. He’d seen it up close, the disease having made two unwelcome visits to his own house. His mother when he was a young boy, his father a few years ago. Their faces came to mind and he said the little prayer he always did when he thought about them.
“Frank was as tough a man as I ever knew,” Skeets said. “Hard to imagine anything slowing him down, much less stopping him.”
“Yeah,” Howdy said, thinking of his dad, his idol, bigger than life with that cigar jutting from between his teeth. “Hard to imagine, all right.”
The thing that wasn’t hard to imagine, since he’d seen it with his own eyes, was how much Jodie loved old Frank. He knew how much they’d been through together—the drinking, getting sober, all that and more. And he knew what they meant to one another. He hated to think how bad it must’ve hurt her. But there was no good way to ask that question, so he just said, “She’s running the place by herself now?”
“The Beer Thirty?” Again Skeets shook his head. “She lost it, paying the medical bills.”
Howdy rubbed a hand over his face. “Oh, man, that’s tough.”
“Not that he meant to, but Frank didn’t leave her much more than a few good memories and a lot of bad debts.”
The words echoed in Howdy’s mind. A few good memories and a lot of bad debts. He couldn’t help himself. He thought there might be a song in there. But he resisted pulling out his little pad to write it down. He just said, “What’s she doing now?”
“Well, that’s where the good luck comes in,” Skeets said, slapping the bar. “She’s got a place down in Del Rio.”
“Del Rio?” Howdy acted like he would’ve bet good money that eight wild horses couldn’t have dragged that girl out of Oklahoma. He said, “The hell’s she doin’ down there?”
“Pickin’ herself up by her bootstraps,” Skeets said. “You know Jodie. Ain’t exactly the type to rely on the kindness of strangers. She somehow managed to take over J.D. Maddox’s old club.”
“The Lost and Found?”
Skeets gave a nod. “Don’t ask me how, but she did. Anyway, she had ole J. Fred Hawkins lined up for a two-week gig, but that rascal ended up in jail somewhere south of Memphis. And it looks like he’ll be there long enough to inconvenience her, so she’s looking for somebody to fill in.” Skeets shrugged. “She called me, asked if I knew anybody available on short notice. I told her about you two stumbling in here looking for work.”
“ ’Preciate that,” Howdy said. “What’d you tell her about Slim?”
“Didn’t have to tell her anything. Turns out she knows him. Del Rio’s his neck of the woods. She said he’s worked for her a couple of times, glad to have him come back.”
“The world keeps getting smaller, don’t it?” Howdy said. He drained his beer, then looked at his watch. “I guess it’s about time for me to get back to—”
The end of his sentence got lost in the sound of a table being overturned and glass shattering. A couple of girls sitting near the ruckus screamed and scattered, causing Skeets and Howdy to look toward the back of the room where they saw a big son of a bitch wrestling with Slim.
Skeets nudged Howdy and said, “I told you that boy was in here.”
21
SKEETS WAS REACHING FOR HIS PISTOL WHEN SOMETHING dawned on Howdy. He gestured, palm out, for Skeets to leave the gun where it was for the time being. “I got this,” he said, heading for the confrontation, like he already had a good idea. A couple of steps later, realizing it was a dumb rat what didn’t have two holes, he stopped, turned around, and said, “But don’t run off. I might need you.”
The big guy’s name was Buddy Cooper. About Slim’s height but carrying an extra fifty pounds, mostly upstairs, rough as a cob with a jaw lik
e a bulldozer. None of which would have mattered had Buddy not also been the jealous ex-boyfriend of the girl Slim had been kind enough to escort home the previous night. Her name was Ginger, actually named after the character on Gilligan’s Island, if you can believe it, even had a sister named Mary Ann. In any event, it turned out Ginger had run into Buddy during happy hour over at the Pump Room earlier tonight. Well, Ginger had a few too many and couldn’t keep her big mouth shut, just had to let Buddy know that other men found her irresistible. Including this tall handsome who had been singing at the Piggin’ String the night before.
Well, once he got properly lubricated, Buddy, who had finished at the bottom of the anger management classes the court had required him to attend last year, drove over to the Piggin’ String in a jealous, green-eyed rage to show this singing cowboy who the real man was in this part of Tarrant County.
As Howdy approached the mayhem, he could see it was a tight fight with a short stick, Buddy having the advantage, after jumping Slim without benefit of advanced warning. In such close quarters, both were reduced to throwing stunted punches at kidneys, noses, and the back of each other’s heads. From somewhere in the middle of it all Buddy growled, “I’m fixin’ to clean your plow, boy.”
And not only did it sound like he meant it, but it looked like he was capable.
In the midst of all this, Slim managed to plant a boot heel in Buddy’s gut, knocking him backwards over one of the pool tables. While prone on the green felt, Buddy kept Slim at bay by hurling the three, six, and eight balls in his direction. Although Buddy had been an all-state pitcher his senior year in high school, being drunk, horizontal, and twenty years older took a good bit of the mustard off his delivery. Slim, a good Pony League first baseman with that long stretch of his, ducked the first two balls, then caught the eight in his bare hand and threw it back, just grazing the side of that bulldozer jaw. Buddy reacted by grabbing a cue stick like he was going to step up to the plate with it. He rolled off the table and choked up on the stick, eyeing Slim’s head like it was a big fat one coming over the plate.
Slim was trapped by overturned tables and was backed into a booth. He was looking around for a weapon—why the hell that dumb-ass Howdy had thrown that pistol into the trash can still escaped him—but there was little to choose from that matched up real good with a pool cue. So he grabbed a longneck, broke the bottom off, and started swinging it back and forth the way you do in circumstances such as this.
Buddy had a look in his eye that you can bet Ginger had seen at least once as he closed in and drew into his backswing. But the damn thing got stuck. He couldn’t bring it around for a base hit, let alone a dinger. Confused, he turned and saw Howdy at the other end of the stick. “Who the hell’re you?” he barked.
“I’m the one who came here to whoop that boy’s ass,” Howdy said, one hand on the cue stick, the other pointing at Slim. “Question is, who the hell you are.”
“I’m the one who’s currently whooping his ass,” Buddy replied, tugging on the cue. “Let go of my stick and get in line. I got here first.”
“I don’t care when you got here,” Howdy said, tugging back. “I got a reservation.”
The confusion compounded like interest on Buddy’s face. “How the hell you think you got a reservation to kick somebody’s ass?”
Howdy jerked the stick out of Buddy’s grip, poked him in the chest with the blue-chalk tip, said, “That guitar Casanova there took advantage of my girl a couple of nights ago while she was drunk and I was outta town. That’s how.”
Buddy swatted the stick away when Howdy tried to poke him a second time. “Well then your reservation musta been for last night when this sumbitch was in here taking advantage of my girl.”
“What?” Like he was outraged by the notion of such sexual recklessness. Looking past Buddy, Howdy aimed the cue stick at Slim. “Boy, you best learn to keep that one-eye trouser trout of yours in its pen, you expect to see another birthday.” He made a move like he was going to charge Slim, but Buddy shoved him back.
“Hey, asshole, like I said, get in line. You can have him when I’m done.”
Howdy looked at Buddy, then Slim, giving the appearance of appraising the situation. Then he shook his head. “Nosir.” Like it was one word. “I don’t think there’d be enough left to make it worth my while.”
“Ain’t my problem,” Buddy said. “Sloppy seconds is all you’re gone get.” He was rolling up his sleeves now.
The other patrons were watching like it was a Jerry Springer special: Live at the Piggin’ String! Skeets was at the bar, smiling as he sipped a beer, enjoying the entertainment, like it was a hastily conceived floor show between musical acts. His pistol was right there, of course, ready to bring the curtain down on the whole thing if need be, but he had the feeling Howdy’s plan—whatever the hell it was—was gonna do the trick.
All the sudden, Buddy lunged at Slim, who slashed and jabbed with the broken bottle, saying, “Don’t come in here, less you want some stitches.” It forced Buddy to back off.
When he did, Howdy poked him in the back with the pool cue again. Said, “Hey!”
Buddy jerked around. “You poke me with that one more time I’m gone stick it in wunna your ears and out the other.”
Howdy tipped his hat back and tilted his head to one side, then the other, like he was sizing Buddy up. “Let me ask you something,” he said, as if they suddenly shared a secret. “You by any chance a gambling man?”
Buddy kept one bloodshot eye on Slim so he couldn’t get him with that bottle, the other was more or less looking at Howdy. “What do you mean?”
“You know, games of chance,” Howdy said. “Wagering on a throw of the dice or the turn of a wheel or the choice of a card to determine the outcome of events.”
Buddy gave a half-assed shrug, thinking about that weekend he’d snuck off to Laughlin with redheaded Wanda and won three hundred bucks at the slots. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Why?”
“Let’s cut for it.”
“Cut for it?”
“Yeah,” Howdy said, like it was only natural. “High card gets to kick Casanova’s ass.”
As he watched Howdy working on Buddy, Slim shook his head a little and tried to keep from smiling too much. He liked the way Howdy thought.
“I already told you,” Buddy said. “I’m gonna kick his ass no matter what.”
“Well, now I think we’ve agreed that whoever gets second shot at this, ain’t gonna get no satisfaction. So I was thinking, we can turn it into a gamble, at least make it some fun for both parties.”
“Ain’t interested.”
“All right,” Howdy said. “I understand, stakes are too low.” He pondered it for a second before saying, “What if we sweeten the pot? High card gets to kick Casanova’s ass and gets paid for the privilege.”
Buddy got to thinking about his truck payment and said, “How much?”
“I dunno.” Howdy shrugged. “Fifty bucks?”
Buddy’s cable bill was overdue too, not to mention his rent. He said, “Make it a hundred.”
“Deal,” Howdy said. “Cash on the barrelhead.” He slapped his own money on the pool table and turned to the bar, snapping his fingers, yelling, “Hey, Skeets, you got a deck of cards in this place?” As he walked away, Howdy said, “And bring me my glasses while you’re there.”
As Skeets went to grab Dempsey Kimble’s marked deck, Buddy scraped together all his cash. He laid it on the table and said, “All I got is ninety-six and change.”
“Close enough.” Howdy gave him a collegial chuck on the shoulder, then stepped past him to take a swing at Slim with the pool cue. “You just keep your ass right where it is, lover boy,” he said. “One of us will be with you directly.”
Figuring it was best to play along, Slim menaced Howdy with the broken bottle and said, “Bring it on, you sorry-ass swamp cracker.” Gesturing with wiggling fingers. “I’ll kick both your candy asses.”
Skeets came over and tosse
d the deck to Buddy, let him pull the cards out of their box, get the feeling they were legit. “Brand-new deck,” Skeets said. “Hardly been used.”
By now a crowd had gathered around, and Skeets, not being one to miss a good opportunity, was taking various side bets.
Howdy pointed at the green felt of the pool table near the money. “Spread ’em out,” he said. “You go first or second, I don’t care.”
Buddy smeared the cards on the table. “I got here first,” he said. “I’ll pick first.” He huffed on his hands and rubbed them together for luck while he looked for a winning card. After a moment, he paused, turned to Howdy, and said, “High card wins, right? Gets to kick Romeo’s ass and gets a hundred bucks from the loser?”
Howdy shook his head and said, “Casanova.”
“What?”
“Romeo was the star-crossed lover,” Howdy said. “Casanova, on the other hand, was a famous seducer. I think that’s what we got here.”
Skeets cleared his throat in a manner to suggest Howdy should just get on with it. Slim just rolled his eyes.
“I don’t get it,” Buddy said.
“Don’t matter,” Howdy replied. “Romeo it is.” He put the glasses on, waved a hand at the fifty-two cards spread out on the Kelly green felt, and said, “Go for it.”
Buddy picked the jack of hearts and grinned like he was showing off new teeth. He turned to Slim, taunting him with the one-eye jack. “Your ass is mine, boy.”
Slim taunted back with his jagged glass. “Fat lady ain’t sung yet.”
“All right,” Howdy said. “My turn.” He waved a hand slowly over the cards, hesitating, acting like he was going for one card, then another. Ratcheting up the anticipation, the crowd pushed in closer with each fake. Finally, he picked a card. “Ha!” He showed it to Buddy and said, “Jack of spades.” Just screwing with Slim. The crowd loved it.
The Adventures of Slim & Howdy Page 8
