Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

  She got up and went behind the bar and came back with a Coke for me and her bottle of banana liqueur. I couldn’t remember her ever bringing the bottle to the table before. Usually she took her glass back each time and refilled it.

  She said, “I used to have gambling in here, you know. I must have told you that.”

  “I think you mentioned it.”

  “Did very well with the gambling. Then there was an election and I was let know that there wouldn’t be any trouble if the tables and slots and all went, so they went. By the time it was all right to replace them, it just wasn’t worth it. Ewell and that Morgan were doing good business and everything was off around here, I was down from seven girls to two, and I couldn’t be bothered. When Ewell retired I don’t mind telling you it gave me ideas. There was that much business open, and I was sure to get a good portion of it. And then when Morgan’s place went up in smoke—”

  She picked up her glass, looked at it, and drank it down. This was as surprising as the time I heard her swear. She always took the stuff in little sips, and a drink would last her so long that I doubt she actually drank more than half of it; the rest evaporated.

  “I would have six tables for cards,” she said. “No more than that. Five tables of poker and one of blackjack. On the poker you let the deal pass and just charge so much an hour to sit in the game. No cutting the pot. Morgan was cutting pots there at the end.

  “On the blackjack, you would have to have a dealer. I could deal it myself, as far as that goes. Any fool can. The only problem is if you have a dealer working for you and you can’t trust him, because a blackjack dealer can think of fifteen different ways to cheat the house and you’ll be forever trying to keep up with him.”

  She poured herself another drink. And drank it right down.

  “And one craps table,” she said. “That’s all you would need. You let the players run the game, same as the poker. Then what I would do is slap slot machines all over the place. You make a ton on slot machines and all you have to do is take out the money and put a drop of Three-In-One Oil in the works once a month. No one ever lost money on a slot machine. Except the damned fools who play them.”

  “Where would you put all of this?”

  “Right here in this room. It’s big enough so there’d be space left over, no one would be crowded.”

  “What about the drinkers?”

  She filled her glass but left it on the table. “Over on the right. Nobody ever goes in that room and you wouldn’t know it’s there, but it wouldn’t be anything to put a bar in there.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’d never fit our Saturday crowd in there unless you packed them like sardines.”

  “Chip, you wouldn’t want that kind of crowd if you had gambling. I don’t even want them now, but there’s not enough money just in the girls and I have to have every drink sale I can get. Put in tables and the idea would be to cut that crowd to a third of what it is. Maybe less than that, maybe a fifth, say, on Saturdays.”

  “Some of those drinkers wind up going upstairs.”

  “And most of them don’t. Instead they make noise and start fights, and that’s the last thing you can tolerate when you have gambling tables.”

  “How would you cut the drinking crowd?”

  “Easiest thing in the world. Leave out the beer taps. Sell imported beer by the bottle at seventy or eighty cents. Push the hard liquor price up to a dollar a drink, nothing cheaper. The way it is now, we’re selling girls to men who come here to drink. The other way, we’d be selling whiskey to men who come here for girls and gambling. And when a man’s gambling he doesn’t mind paying high prices for whiskey, and when he wins he likes to celebrate with a girl.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out,” I said.

  She drained her glass. “It’s not something that just came to me in a flash. I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Without the drinking crowd, I guess you wouldn’t have much need for a bouncer.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “There won’t be anybody opening up over the county line. And there won’t be anybody else opening up here as long as Claude Tyles is Sheriff, and they won’t get him out without burying him. Nobody even bothered running against Claude in the last election. He’s well liked, Claude is. Not that he likes that many people himself. It’s a rare person that Claude Tyles takes a shine to.

  “Nobody else opening up, and all the gambling trade in this county and the next one. The drink business would go down but the profits would go up, and less aggravation involved. Be a five-girl house in no time at all, maybe go all the way up to seven girls if it worked that way. And with gambling, business spreads out more. It doesn’t all concentrate on Saturday night. Might even raise the price on the girls to fifteen dollars. And they’d be making tips on top of that with the right kind of crowd.”

  She poured herself another drink. If it was affecting her, I couldn’t see how.

  “Make more money on drinks and more money on girls, and that’s not counting what the gambling brings in. I haven’t made that kind of money in so long I have trouble recollecting what it feels like.”

  She drank her drink.

  “Only one thing wrong,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  Her eyes locked with mine. “I’m too old to be bothered with it. It means all that work and concentration, and I ask myself what’s the point? Would you like a drink instead of that Coke, Chip?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “What I should be doing is cutting down, not building up. I’m not ready to pack it all in yet. Not this year. If I closed up now I’d die of boredom. But you feel yourself slowing down, you know. You feel yourself getting sick of people. The customers. You don’t have the patience to put up with them. Little signs like that. Another couple of years, next year or the year after that, and it won’t be a bad idea to get out of here and live in a big hotel in Puerto Rico and let people fetch me things. I have money saved. Not enough to do it in style, but more than a little.”

  She gave her head a shake. “But if I expanded I’d have all I need and then some. Thing is, I’d have things just about ideal by the time I wanted to retire. And who in the world would take it over? Rita and Claureen between them couldn’t run a pool hall. They couldn’t run a race. Two days of operating this place and the whole thing would fall apart.

  “In fact, they couldn’t even help me out enough in getting things organized. I’d need a man, and he would have to be somebody smart and sure of himself, somebody who could get on good with Claude Tyles, somebody who wouldn’t rub the girls the wrong way or be after them all the time. And assuming I had the luck to turn up someone like that in this part of the country, which is as likely as mucking out a stable and finding an emerald, why, what chance in the world would there be that he’d be someone I can trust?”

  “I see what you mean,” I said.

  Her eyes challenged me. “Do you?”

  “Well, uh, sure.”

  “I wonder if you do. You think about it, Chip. You think about it, and one of these days I’ll bring up the subject and then we’ll talk about it some more. Meanwhile you just give my problem some thought, will you?”

  The thing is, subtlety generally sails right on past me. When Geraldine first started opening up that night I wondered why she was telling me all this, and I decided she just wanted somebody to use for a sounding board, bouncing words off me when she was actually talking to herself. And I figured she picked me for the same reason that she played chess with me—I was working for her, and I didn’t have anything better to do.

  She closed for the night as soon as we finished talking, and I went upstairs and got undressed for bed. And I stretched out and put my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, and then I immediately opened them and sat up and switched the light on.

  She hadn’t just been talking to me. She had been talking about me.

  (Of course when you read this it’s probably pretty obvious all along
, especially because I put her conversation right after the one with the Sheriff. But that other conversation wasn’t even in my mind when I sat listening to Geraldine, so maybe it should have been obvious to me anyway, but not as obvious as it seems.)

  Anyway, I sat up in bed and figured out what it was all about. Sheriff Tyles thought I should stay in Bordentown, and said that Geraldine thought the world of me. And Geraldine wanted to expand the business but couldn’t do it without the help of some man who was capable and honest and had an in with the Sheriff, someone she liked and trusted, someone who could take over the whole operation when she was ready for complete retirement.

  Which meant that I had found the one thing I never even thought to look for in Bordentown.

  A Job With A Future.

  I got up and walked around the room a little. I had that sensation in my mind and body of having had too much coffee and all I had was one cup with supper. I just kept pacing, and then I went down the hall to the bathroom only to find out that I didn’t really have to go after all. Just nerves, I told myself nervously, and went back to my room and paced the floor again.

  A Job With A Future. A Position With Real Opportunities For Advancement.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Because, after all, that was the one thing I had been looking for ever since they booted me out of Upper Valley Preparatory Academy. I left that stupid school determined to make my way in the world and do all the good old Horatio Alger type things and work my way up in the world. And I never got anywhere. In fact I never got close to getting anywhere, because I kept getting idiotic jobs and drifting into idiotic situations.

  Until finally the most idiotic situation of all brought me to Bordentown, a town that barely offered opportunities for stagnation, let alone advancement. And instead of one idiotic job I got two of them, and instead of trying to make my mark in the world I just tried to stay alive and let time pass, figuring that sooner or later I would get up and get out of Bordentown, but not even being in any rush to do that because the whole idea of getting ahead in the world seemed like something I was never going to get around to.

  (If you really knock yourself out trying not to end sentences with prepositions, that last sentence would wind up seemed like something around to which I was never going to get. I mean, it’s an awkward sentence anyway, just sprawling all over the place, but I think it would be even worse if it didn’t end with a preposition. Or two prepositions, actually.)

  Some of the kids I knew in New York were very much into Zen, and one girl made me read a description of Zen Archery, in which you don’t exactly aim the arrow at the target and don’t exactly ever let go of it. You just become part of the bow and arrow and let yourself happen along with the bow and the arrow, and somewhere along the line the arrow goes from your fingertips to the target. It read very nicely, but I wasn’t sure if it made any sense. The girl said it was easier to understand if you were stoned. I tried to get stoned a couple of times but nothing happened. Now, though, I was beginning to understand.

  Because this seemed to me like a case of Zen Advancement, of Zen Making-One’s-Way-In-The-World. I hadn’t tried to do anything, just sort of becoming part of Bordentown and letting the rest happen, not even pointing myself at the target, not even letting go of the string. Bull’s-eye!

  TEN

  “YOU SEEM DIFFERENT,” LUCILLE SAID.

  “I do?”

  “Maybe not,” she said. She yawned and stretched. She was lying on her back with one arm at her side and her other hand tucked palm-up under her head. I touched her armpit. (It’s a shame there isn’t a better word for it. When you hear the word armpit you think of deodorant. When I touched Lucille’s, all secretly smooth and hairless, I didn’t think of deodorant. I thought of other warm private places, and of better things to do with an armpit than rub deodorant on it.) I touched hers now, rubbing a little with the tip of my finger.

  “Maybe it’s me,” she said.

  “Maybe what is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was the middle of the week and the lunch hour was only twenty minutes over with. We had another half hour to ourselves and had already done what we did during lunch hours. Usually we would take our time, but this afternoon she didn’t want to pause along the way and admire the view. She just wanted to get there full speed ahead, and she did and I did, and it was very nice.

  But now she was in a mood, and it was something I wasn’t used to with her. I asked her what was the matter.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “Just that you seem all wrapped up in thoughts lately, and you might as well be a hundred miles away.”

  “I’m right here,” I said, and touched her to prove it.

  She moved my hand away. “Have you been thinking things, Chip?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  “Oh.”

  “I always think things,” I said. “I mean, I’m alone a lot, so I’ll let my mind just wander off on its own some of the time.”

  “You like doing that?”

  “It beats talking to yourself.”

  “I do that sometimes. Talk to myself. I don’t think much, though.”

  “Uh.”

  “I guess you must think I’m awful simple.”

  “What makes you say that, Lucille?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe on account of it’s true.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Just an old preacher’s daughter. Never been anywhere and never done anything.”

  “You’ve done a few things.”

  She sat up suddenly and put her legs over the side of the bed. Without looking at me she said, “Do you know what it’s like when you start thinking things and you can’t stop? You don’t want to think them but there they all are in your head and you can’t make them stop?”

  “I know.”

  “Does it sometimes happen to you?”

  “A lot of the time.”

  “It never happened to me before. I would just, oh, you know, I would just go along. Hardly thinking about anything, and if I ever had a thought that bothered me I would just whisk it off out of my head and not think about it anymore. Like a program on the television that you don’t want to watch so you turn it off. But now I can’t do that.”

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “You know what it’s like? Like having that bad television program going on in a set that’s inside of your head, and there’s no way you can turn it off or pull the plug or change the channel, so what do you do?”

  “Pray for a commercial,” I suggested.

  “Oh, you don’t see what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m sorry, Lucille. It was just a dumb joke.”

  “No commercials and the program’s never through, it just goes on. I reckon that’s why Daddy drinks. You know he told me about it once. He said one day he looked into his soul and saw something there that he couldn’t bear the sight of, and drink kept him from seeing it. And I always thought, well, why didn’t he think on something else. I knew what he was saying but I thought if something like that ever happened to me I would just make the thought go away, but you can’t, can you?”

  “You want to talk about it, Lucille?”

  “I guess not.”

  I put my arms around her and turned her face toward me. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.

  I said, “Hey.”

  “Lemme be, Chip.”

  “If something’s bothering you—”

  “Oh, I’m making something out of nothing is all. Never had a thought in my head before and I’m just not used to it. Just a mood I’m in that I’ll get over.”

  “Maybe it’s your period coming on.”

  “You think so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe that’s what it is,” she said.

  What it probably was, I felt, was that she had gotten a contact high from my own moods. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about what Geraldine and I had not quite discussed and what S
heriff Tyles and I had not quite talked over. Which was that I would stay in Bordentown and share the management of the Lighthouse with Geraldine, and together we would expand the operation and hire more girls and put in gambling tables, and in a year or two when she was ready to spend the rest of her days sipping banana liqueur in Puerto Rico, the Lighthouse would be mine.

  And I could see it all happening just that way.

  I got a paper and pencil and did a little rough figuring, and then I threw the paper away because the numbers I was using were just ones I was picking out of the blue. And the numbers didn’t matter, anyway, because you didn’t need them to realize that the Lighthouse, run the way Geraldine was talking about running it, couldn’t help but make a fortune.

  I mean, it wasn’t just a matter of being secure and established and successful.

  I’d get rich.

  It wouldn’t be hard, either. At first I thought that Geraldine only thought I was right for it for the same reason that she thought I was fit to play chess with. There just weren’t that many people around to choose from. But I had to admit it went further than that. I was honest, and I did get along well with the girls, and I seemed to have a feeling for handling the customers, and Sheriff Tyles, who she said didn’t take to many people, had done everything on earth short of adopting me. On top of all that, I kind of liked the business itself. I had always thought that the only reason anyone would want to go and live in a whorehouse was so he could have his pick of the whores, but I hadn’t picked one of them yet and I really liked living there. I mean, I felt at home there.