Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  The first-class sleeper cabin had its own bathroom, or at least a nice washbasin with hot water and other facilities. By the time we’d washed and brushed our teeth we had no more than half an hour to go before arriving in Regina, when it was going to be my turn to perform. Moreover, I knew, metaphorically speaking, this was no Rachmaninoff Prelude in C Sharp Minor party piece. I would be expected to give a major performance using a sexual musical score I’d never seen before in my life and which, after the oral sex experience, might contain unimaginable feats. Mostly I feared I was now running on empty, and that Wee Willy would be incapable of raising his weary head from the twin oval cushions on which he rested.

  I thought about confessing there and then, but remembered that Juicy Fruit had previously warned me that she was the one in charge; she was making all the decisions. After all, she knew all about men and we might just sleep and then start whatever lessons were to come in the morning. What can a girl do when a boy can’t . . .?

  ‘Well now, what shall we talk about, Jack? We’re about to be lovers and know nothing about each other, so let me guess . . . you speak nicely and use big words and you’re seventeen and haven’t yet been with a woman; you play jazz piano and Peter Cornhill says you also play classical and come from Toronto. That tells me heaps.’

  ‘Well, what for instance?’

  ‘Oh, you know, decent family, good education, safe and secure, I’d say born with a bit of a silver spoon in your mouth, but then what I can’t figure out is what on earth you’re doing in Moose Jaw on River Street playing the piano.’

  I laughed. ‘On my eighth birthday my dad, who was a council garbage collector, came home drunk as usual, smashed the little birthday cake my mom had baked with his fist and threw me against a wall. Usually he beat up my mom, but he didn’t that time. Two weeks later he won a battered harmonica in a craps game and gave it to me as a belated birthday gift. He told me I could blow crap instead of talking shit.’

  I then gave Juicy Fruit a brief summary of my life in Cabbagetown and the luck that reading books and a talent for music and the careless gift of a battered second-hand harmonica had brought me. I fished into my jacket pocket and produced my shiny new Hohner Echo Elite. ‘I don’t feel secure without a harmonica,’ I confessed. ‘My dad’s thoughtless gift started everything. The rest I owe to four older women, if you don’t count my mom.’ I stupidly enumerated them, ‘Miss Mony, Mrs Hodgson, Miss Frostbite and Miss Bates,’ as if Juicy Fruit would have been any the wiser for knowing their names.

  She smiled wickedly. ‘And now it’s five older women . . . Miss Juicy Fruit!’ she cried happily.

  ‘Oh my god, you’re right!’ I exclaimed.

  She laughed. ‘We’ll soon see about that, Jack. You’ll have to tell me how you feel in the morning, eh?’

  My heart sank. I knew I was going to fail her for sure.

  ‘Now you have to guess about me. I got you all wrong. See how you do,’ Juicy Fruit challenged.

  I pretended to be thinking hard. ‘Well, let me see, Fruitino, that sounds Italian. You’ve already told me you’re a born and bred flatlander. Italian? That’s food, eating it or growing it. I’ll take a guess and say you come off the land from a big Italian family battling on a small farm, the long drought and the Depression, dust and debt. Your family was forced to leave the land and do the best they could.’ I shrugged. ‘At eighteen, with maybe younger brothers and sisters, you had to help support your family, so you did the best you could to survive.’ I was cheating of course. Almost all of this was sheer speculation that came from reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, where he talked about the Oklahoma dustbowl. But, of course, I knew Saskatchewan had been through the same experience and with much the same suffering for people on the land. It was just a guess but it paid off. Miss Frostbite would often say, ‘Jack, if you listen carefully, people will tell you everything about themselves.’

  I had always been a good listener. Mostly, I suppose, because my entire life had been controlled by instructions, other people’s plans and aspirations for me. Listening is what got me out of poverty and gave me a life, unlike most Cabbagetown kids who were destined for a job that involved little more than brute strength. My own father, a garbage collector, was a good example of what I could have expected. And while there was no shame in what he did, he was somebody who never listened to anyone. He knew everything he thought he needed to know but he had no say in his own destiny other than to become a vicious and bitter drunk.

  Juicy Fruit now looked at me open-mouthed in what I took to be a mixture of admiration and incomprehension. ‘Why, Jack, how could you possibly know all that? We only met tonight. You couldn’t have known I’d win you in the raffle.’ She laughed. ‘I’m still putting my baby sister Maria through her last year in high school; she wants to be a hairdresser.’ She pointed a long painted fingernail at me. ‘I got you dead wrong and you got me dead right and I’m the one supposed to be doing the teaching!’ She shook her head. ‘Oh my, oh my! Ain’t that something now? When I was seventeen I was just a dumb kid with nice tits and a starving family and look at you, eh. Same age and reading books and playing the piano so folk come from everywhere to hear you.’

  ‘Yeah, look at me, real bright I don’t think! I didn’t even know how to perform a passionate kiss. All theory and no practice, books and piano but nothing else.’ I grinned. ‘Believe me, if what you can teach me could have been found in books I’d have been a Lothario by now.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘No, not a what, a who; he was a character in a book written a long, long time ago. A Lothario has his wicked way with women and doesn’t always treat them very well.’

  ‘Sounds like most men I know,’ Juicy Fruit said, then collecting herself she leaned forward and touched me on the knee, excited as a schoolgirl. ‘Oh, Jack, baby, we’re going to have us some fun tonight. Just you wait and see. It’s been a long time since I got excited over a man.’ She gave my thigh a squeeze. ‘Ain’t no puppy fat there. All good muscle!’

  Leaning forward with her dress falling open a bit at the top she gave me a glimpse of her truly beautiful breasts, and as the train approached Regina with a rhythmic chuffer, chuffer, chuffer, chuff, chuff, chuff, I could feel a vague stirring. Wee Willy was either waking up or stretching in his sleep.

  CHAPTER TEN

  WE ARRIVED IN REGINA to be met at the station by Alf Fields, the hotel chauffeur, in a chocolate-brown 1939 Pontiac. Judging from his expression and curt response to my ebullient ‘Good evening, you must be Alf’, he was clearly not thrilled at having to make such a late pick-up. ‘We’re sorry to bring you out so late, Alf,’ I said.

  ‘Taxis,’ he said, pointing to a cab rank. He was as tall as me but impossibly thin. I carried no fat but I must have been twice as broad across the shoulders. It was as if his long string-bean body only had the capacity to produce one word at a time and each word had to be curt or mean. The way he slammed the rear door of the Pontiac after we’d ensconced ourselves, then the deliberate omission of ‘sir’ left us in very little doubt about his attitude. Juicy Fruit glanced at me, her right eyebrow slightly arched in silent comment.

  Even though the train trip had gone so well and we’d got on like a house on fire, I was anxious that nothing should dampen our spirits before we arrived at the hotel, and Alf the driver wasn’t being helpful. God knows this was going to be difficult enough without us having to put up with a bunch of sour-faced staff looking down their noses and making silent though undoubtedly snide judgments about the late-night advent of Mr and Mrs Kupple (thanks very much for the moniker, Reggie, about as subtle as a slap in the mouth).

  As if the name wasn’t a giveaway, we were carrying identical suitcases, small Woolworths overnight bags, which were highly indicative of a one-night stand and certainly not of an extravagant and carefully planned twenty-four-hour honeymoon.

  I almost envied Reggie his abortive wedding night. At least it was his wife who couldn’t cope. It was different
when the woman was the virgin. Innocence and ignorance, purity, faithfulness and love lay folded in the pleats of the pure white surplice she wore figuratively as her nightdress on her wedding night. She was allowed, almost expected, to weep in lamentation for her lost virginity, while I was expected to rise like a stallion on his hind legs, whinnying in exultation that I’d been given the opportunity to get rid of a tiresome and unfortunate boyhood affliction.

  ‘Nice guy!’ I said now, turning to Juicy Fruit.

  ‘Take no notice of that long streak of dry shit, Jack,’ she advised, her River Street language reminding me abruptly of who and what she was.

  ‘No, he’s not going to get away with this!’ I exclaimed, though I wasn’t quite sure what to do and was feigning courage I didn’t think I had. Politeness had always been my main defence, but I was damned if he was going to spoil things. I may only have been seventeen but I’d been to the Waldorf in New York with Miss Frostbite and they’d treated her and me with the utmost courtesy. We’d often arrived back very late at night from a jazz show or concert and the polite welcome we received had never varied. I may have been an ignorant teenager in some respects but I wasn’t a punk kid and if he was taking it out on Juicy Fruit, having guessed or been told her profession, I wasn’t prepared to allow him to humiliate her.

  When Dolly McClymont had snubbed my mother and refused to speak to her, my poor little mom had simply accepted this gross indignity for years. I only understood later how much this must have hurt and humiliated her, and how much it had affected me. The Dolly McClymonts, Mrs Hendersons and Alf Fields of this world can inflict a great deal of harm because they rely on their victims being too timid to retaliate. Yelling or pulling rank might not be the answer but I had seen not only my mom but Mac permanently damaged by bullying and I knew that being a victim could easily become a habit. Something always needs to be done, and early. It was just like when I was at school: you might end up with a bloody nose, but it will be the last one you have to endure. Bullies do not come back for more if you show them there is always going to be a price to pay. It was the only useful thing my father, a perfect example of a brutal bully, taught me.

  I knew confrontation wasn’t going to help me with Fields, it would simply make the atmosphere even frostier, and I could hardly complain to the management after we arrived. I guessed that if this scrawny bully in jumped-up chauffeur’s livery knew our true identity he probably thought he had us on the ropes. Something was required from me if I were to prove myself anything more than a cowed boy.

  I didn’t usually confront people directly; it just wasn’t my style. As Joe would say in one of his semi-biblical maxims, ‘Bad mouth begets bad mouth. Yo talk shit yo gonna end up eatin’ it.’ I remembered how Joe handled things once or twice when there’d been a sudden altercation in the Jazz Warehouse – two drunken businessmen at war with each other or two local Mobsters huffing and puffing and muscling up, sometimes even a couple of women shrieking at each other. Joe would simply turn to the band and say, ‘Drum solo! Loud. Real loud!’ The drums usually did the trick. ‘No use hollerin’ at each other when they cain’t hear nothin’.’

  I reached into my jacket pocket and drew out the Hohner Echo Elite and started to play, leading off with ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’, sung by Frank Sinatra, then into Jimmie Davis’s ‘You Are My Sunshine’, and Bing Crosby’s ‘Only Forever’. As we turned into a park I moved on to ‘In the Mood’ by Glenn Miller. They were some of the popular songs I’d play at the Brunswick most afternoons, then mix a bit of jazz for the cocktail lounge in the evenings.

  Juicy Fruit loved every minute and joined in singing the lyrics to ‘Sunshine’, which everyone in the world seemed to know. She had a nice clear contralto voice and followed the music well. Alf sat there stiff-necked and straight-backed, radiating disapproval as far as I could tell. It came as a big surprise therefore when he opened the back door for Juicy Fruit wearing a smile as big as a slice of melon.

  ‘Welcome to the Hotel Saskatchewan, Mr and Mrs Kupple,’ he beamed as I slid over to emerge through the same rear door. ‘That’s the best station pick-up I’ve ever done and I thank you most kindly. Why, you sure known how to handle a harmonica, sir! I play a bit myself, but sure as damn I’ve never heard it played like that. You’re a master, sir.’

  Two ‘sirs’ in a row! We were suddenly experiencing an entirely different Alf Fields who insisted on taking our luggage, such as it was, and escorting us into the hotel, shouting out to a sleeping desk clerk, ‘Randy, git movin’ boy! We’ve got important guests. Mr and Mrs Kupple have arrived. You see they get everything they need now.’ He placed our suitcases down and shook us both by the hand. ‘Damn, that was good!’ he exclaimed, shaking his head before departing.

  Randy, startled out of a peaceful sleep, jumped to his feet and hastily straightened his necktie and put on his jacket. ‘Welcome, sir, madam,’ he announced in a flustered voice. ‘Musta dozed off.’

  ‘That’s okay, buddy, it’s pretty late. Lousy time to arrive anywhere,’ I said. He didn’t seem any older than me but somehow I’d grown since we left Moose Jaw and he seemed more like the Jack of yesterday than the Jack of today. The harmonica had given me back some of the initiative. Juicy Fruit clung to my arm like a new bride and I felt her squeeze it gleefully.

  Randy, seemingly the only person on duty, was a model of obsequious attention as he escorted us in the lift to our eighth-floor room, which turned out to be a whole suite, not as swanky as Miss Frostbite’s suite at the Waldorf, but terrific just the same. There were silky curtains and fancy upholstered French chairs with those bent legs that bulge at the top, and carpets your toes sank into. ‘The honeymoon suite, sir,’ Randy announced proudly, handing me the key. Bringing his feet together and bowing slightly, he touched his head in a salute. ‘Just call the desk if you need anything, sir.’

  ‘Have a good sleep, Randy,’ I said, still a little high on the success of my harmonica ploy and feeling much more in control.

  The moment the door shut, Juicy Fruit burst into laughter, threw up her hands, danced over to me and flung her arms around my neck. ‘Oh, Jack, you were terrific. The harmonica sure turned that bastard around!’ She released me and twirled across the room, her outflung arm taking in everything around us. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Jack! Look at all this! I think I just died and went direct to heaven!’ She ran through to the bedroom where she let out a cry of delight. ‘Jack, come quick!’ I walked across to the bedroom to join her. ‘Look, Jack, the bed’s got curtains, like a love nest!’ She slipped between the lace hangings surrounding the four-poster bed and flung herself full length, like an excited eight-year-old. ‘Oooh-ah, feel the springs!’ she said, bouncing up and down. I noticed the cover had been removed and the bed turned down for the night.

  I grinned to see her so obviously happy, but I must say I was surprised. I’d imagined she’d have been pretty accustomed to . . . you know . . . assignations, lonely commercial travellers sneaking girls into their hotel rooms at night. But then again, I don’t suppose many commercial travellers booked the honeymoon suite, and I’d learned along the way that most of them stayed in cheap accommodation, boarding houses and the like, and entertained at the cocktail lounges of the big hotels to give their clients the impression they were staying there. They’d be the guys who’d drop me a quarter during the afternoon while I was playing in the foyer and say, ‘Hey buddy, when I come into the cocktail lounge with a client, will you just nod or smile and say, ‘Welcome back, Mr Brown.’ It helped to have a good memory – some nights I’d make a couple of dollars.

  ‘Jack, I’ve never seen anything like this!’ Juicy Fruit was excited almost to the point of tears. ‘Oh, we are going to have us such a good time, baby!’

  She brushed the curtains aside and headed for the bathroom. Moments later she was at it again. ‘Oh, quick, come and look! Jack, what luck!’

  I wasn’t much of an expert on hotel bathrooms – bathtub, tiles, towels, taps, soap holder . . .
I mean what else could you expect? Gold dragon’s head taps at the Waldorf, maybe, but not here. ‘What?’ I asked, seeing nothing unusual.

  She pointed. ‘The shower, it’s on its own. Look, behind those curtains. Oh Jack, let’s have a shower! Get lovely and clean for bed.’

  ‘Righto, you go first,’ I said, not thinking.

  ‘Jack Spayd! Now you listen to me, boy!’ Juicy Fruit announced in a voice that made me jump. ‘We’re alone and I’m in charge, remember?’

  ‘What . . . what is it?’ I asked, perplexed.

  ‘Get your clothes off.’

  ‘Huh? Right now? At this moment?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Ain’t any other moment I had in mind, honey,’ she said, undoing a zip in the side of her dress. She bent over and promptly pulled her green silk dress over her head and moments later stood in her panties, brassiere, garter belt, stockings and black court shoes. ‘Well, go on! Off with it,’ she said, flicking a scarlet-tipped forefinger in the direction of my suit. ‘We haven’t got all night!’

  Unfortunately that was exactly what we did have.

  She picked up the dress, shook it out and draped it over her arm then turned to me. ‘When I get back you be in your birthday suit, you hear me now Jack Spayd?’ she scolded.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I replied, touching my brow in an informal salute. The confidence I’d so recently gained was slipping away like quicksand. I watched as she click-clacked across the tiles and out of the bathroom in her heels and undies. She had a perfectly splendid bottom and nice long legs and what her bra contained was simply too marvellous for words.