GYPSIES, TRAMPS, AND THIEVES

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She manufactured a smile. “Lyndon.” Underneath the table, saddle oxfords that she longed to kick off tapped in time to the electric guitar’s sliding notes coming from the stage.

  Studying the Jack of Spades, she said, “However, there is a knight, a young rival of intellectual ability and polished charm, who could cause ye much bitterness.”

  Johnson in turn, tapped the Ace of Spades. “And this? I know about Aces and Eights. The Dead Man’s hand. So, who wins? The Jack or the King?”

  Delaying, she tap-danced her fingers over the card grouping, while she sought something plausible and commendable. “Between the two of ye, ye might say it is a duel to the death as to who wins in the political showdown. But ultimately the King always wins, doesn’t it?”

  His wide mouth stretched from ear to ear in a pleased grin

  One by one, she turned over one handful after another of the remaining cards, positioning them before her randomly, as if she were painting a picture.

  What? What? What? What could she devise out of the meaningless spread? The guitar’s unusual music distracted her. She took another fortifying sip of the fiery drink.

  At last, noting the rare clump of three queens in one corner, with another off to the side, she improvised, “Many women will influence your life, but one, more so than the others, will steal yuir thunder. She will not be a part of yuir family, ye understand,” she expounded, “but she will rule alone, on her own power and charm.”

  He frowned, and she hastily searched for something with which she could wrap up the reading on a positive note.

  She studied the enormous number of low-end cards that predominated the rest of the spread, and, feeling it wiser not to mention he was among the bottom feeders that were politicians, she fabricated, “But it is the common people ye shall elevate. And by which make yuir mark in history,” she capped off with one of her congratulatory smiles, as if the man would, indeed, achieve all that she had predicted.

  “Your good, li’l lady.”

  She stifled her relieved sigh. As the gamblers of the wild west films would say, ‘Never let ‘em see ya sweat, partnuh.’ Or cry.

  Duke surprised her by standing and saying, “Let’s dance.”

  Trusting her jaw had not dropped open, she rose to her feet, albeit a little unsteadily. His expression, as dark as her past, did not bode well. She was not oblivious to how terse had been his grudgingly given brief reading lessons over the last few weeks – in the kitchen with their two chairs purposely positioned a distance apart, as if she might have influenza or poison ivy or the clap.

  And as for the writing lessons, he brushed them aside, declaring he didn’t have time or he was too tired.

  The guitarist was playing Jimmy Dorsey’s popular ‘Deep Purple.’ Duke was so tall her eyes were on chest level with his red flannel shirt’s double row of metal snaps. His arm around her waist in a trapeze artist grip, he glided her round the sawdusted floor and away from the few other couples, dancing. For such a tall man, he was unusually graceful and light on his feet.

  Exuberance bubbled up from a place in her that had gone numb these past two months. Her Gypsy’s feet delighted in the liberty afforded by the dance. If only she were barefoot.

  With a grimace of dislike, he glared down at her. “I know what you are,” he told her, his breath rustling ringlets at her forehead that insisted on straying from her head scarf. “A four-flusher. A fraud. A thief.”

  She tilted her head to give him a smarmy grin. “I think ye like me, Duke McClellan.”

  His grip on her hand and around her waist tightened. “I am warning you, one slip-up – breeding bull or not – and I’ll ring your neck like I would a chicken’s.”

  “Ye have a fascination with me neck, have ye now?”

  “What?” The music had stopped, and so had he.

  “Tis the second time ye have mentioned it. The last time I believe you threatened to use yuir razor to cut ‘my pretty little throat’.”

  He blinked. His mustache convulsed. “Holy shit!” He dropped her hand, released her waist, and strode off, leaving her standing there with the few other couples who had joined them on the dance floor.

  Feeling all eyes upon her, a fiery blush blasted through her. She wanted to make a break for it, to run from the saloon, to run for freedom.

  Instead, compelling strains of that electric guitar glued her saddle oxfords. The music ended abruptly, and she looked up at the stage. The guitarist, a man in one of those ten-gallon hats and an equally large beard, rose and, laying aside his guitar, reached for the long neck beside his tall stool.

  She met him at the stage steps. “Do ye mind, if I look at yuir guitar?”

  “Hell,” he mumbled, “have at it honey,” and stumbled on down the steps.

  What did she have to lose? Clearly, Duke was ready to throw her over.

  Eyes blinking against the blinding stage lights and careful not to trip on the multitude of snaking electrical cords, she settled atop the stool. With reverent hands, as if examining a holy relic, she picked up the guitar. Caught up in examining the instrument, so different from a flamenco guitar, she gradually became unmindful of the saloon’s patrons.

  She was not good at opening up to people. At allowing her vulnerable side to come out of hiding. It was, maybe – like something they had to earn. Like a trust thing. But hidden behind the guitar, she was a flower bud unfurling.

  Hesitantly, at first, she began to strum, to feel her way over this exotic instrument’s landscape. Lost in its exploration, she became someone special. Someone uniquely defective.

  The musical piece started out as an insistent chord, beckoning one to join in some intimidating memory – a soul’s yearning that, surprising even her, evolved into an arpeggio de guitarra, followed by a swelling, sensual scorcher.

  By the time she finished, and she had no idea how long she had been playing, she heard applause. Dazed, she looked around at the shadowy, small assembly, on their feet at the tables surrounding the stage. From where, and when, had drifted these other patrons?

  Shaky, she set aside the guitar, and slid down from the stool to grope her way down the dimly lit stage steps. The little man from hell waited for her at the bottom.

  “Let’s dance,” Moe said.

  Trapped on the steps between the dream world above and reality below, her fingers already crushed by his grimy paw, she acquiesced, letting him yank her onto the dance floor. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys’ ‘San Antonio Rose’ was playing on the juke box.

  As short as she was, they were a nigh equal match, with her topping his height by not much more than a couple of inches. Surprisingly, Moe stepped in time with the quick music, swinging her around like she was a rag doll.

  His walnut hard glare reinforced his venomous expression. “Right now,” he told her, leading her off the dance floor, “your twin is marched out each day to the Klinkerwerks brick factory. But you rat on me, Sonnenschein, and your brother’s skin will make a pretty lampshade for Sachsenhausen ‘s officer’s quarters.”

  Moe knew then – he had remembered her!

  And trailing immediately on that panicky thought came the exhilarating one – Luca was still alive!

  Yet that knowledge did nothing to assuage the self-reproach, the shame and guilt, that gnawed at her every waking hour and still hounded her dreams at times.

  At fifteen, she had deserted him, abandoned him, after they had both undergone that first round of sterilization. In the lab’s outer room, they both momentarily had awaited the SS guard to come for them. Luca lay in fetal position on the cold, metal bench. He was too weak to stand and hacking up deep coughs of sputum from inside his chest that echoed around the antiseptic, white-tiled room.

  Its door to the outer hallway had stood negligently ajar – tempting her to make a bid for escape. Loyalty to Luca . . . or a chance for life?

  § CHAPTER TEN §

  Steam off the weekly wash wreathed the kitchen. From the deep sink’s cold soak, Romy w
as wringing the ranch hands’ soiled clothing, which she had sorted and segregated into woolens and cottons and colors, and then transferred them, with more Ivory soap flakes, into the electric copper tub for boiling. The men’s Sunday best she would stand overnight in cold water containing a blue whitener.

  Young Bud’s overalls invariably seemed to be the dirtiest, and rubbing them on a scrubbing board helped little. It was as if a roped bronco dragged him through the chaparral six days a week.

  The back door swung open, and Duke, ducking his Stetson, entered. In one hand, he held his shotgun, in the other, by its legs, a lifeless turkey. “In time for Thanksgiving,” he said, flopping it onto the sink counter.

  He filled the muggy kitchen, leaving her little space for breathing and making her uneasy. After all, her freedom still depended on how well she did her job – and on his good will.

  Duke and she had established a tacit routine in order, not only to avoid getting in one another’s way, but also to avoid one another - period. The less they saw of each other the better. He made no bones about it.

  He would arise early, before dawn, to claim the bathroom, admittedly a mess from her hour-long bathing ritual the night before, then make his own chicory coffee, and with sunup would tend to the barn animals, returning at seven to breakfast with her and the hands.

  She looked askance at the gaunt bird. “I’m supposed to pluck that meself?”

  His long mouth tugged down his mustache’s shaggy ends. “Isn’t that what a cook does?”

  For over a month, she had been on her best behavior, burning little and ringing the breakfast, lunch, and dinner bells on time – while he continued to allot an hour of his time following dinner to provide her the agreed upon reading lessons. This was usually Friday nights, after the hands had withdrawn to the bunkhouse, previously reserved for checkers with Sally. Who had called it off?

  The lessons were purely impersonal on his part, but for his occasional, stingy praise – “That a girl!” And last Friday, at her pestering, he had, at last, included a writing lesson. The few times his glove mitt of a hand overlapped her Lilliputian one, demonstrating how to grip better the pen, so that her strokes were not so shaky – well, that praise and his touch had brought a different kind of warmth to her skin

  The door burst open again; this time it was Bud. “Hey, Romy, do you know where my cap – oh, Duke,” he said, coming up short.

  Duke eyed the tennis racquet in the kid’s hand. “You plan on cleaning the stalls this morning with your racquet?”

  “I – uh,” she intervened, “had asked to borrow the racquet.”

  Duke’s quizzing gaze switched to her.”

  “To beat the parlor rug,” she explained.

  She reached up and with a damp, wash-reddened hand pushed back the mop of sun-blond hair that tumbled over Bud’s eyes. He was only a little taller than she. In some ways, he reminded her of a younger, more innocent Luca, before the SS had snatched him from the streets. “Yuir washed cap is on the clothesline – between the parlor rug and Micah’s overalls.”

  “Oh, swell,” he grinned, passing the racquet to her. “Thanks, Romy! On my way to the stalls, Duke.”

  Once the door closed again, Duke looked at her with a searching scrutiny. After a moment, he said, “You’re too old for him.”

  “What?” She stared up at him, not certain she understood.

  “For Bud. That is exactly why I didn’t want you here, stirring up the men.”

  “Ye dung heap, ye bag of ballsch, ye – ” wordless with fury, her grip tightened on the racquet.

  “Don’t even think about it, Sunshine – or I’ll turn you over my knee again.”

  At that, she let a slow knowing grin tilt her wide mouth to one side. “Ye’d like that, wouldn’t ye now?”

  What she glimpsed behind his own dark smile surprised her. That glint in his eyes could have knocked her off her feet – so rare but so powerfully erotic was it. Then it faded.

  “No. I wouldn’t. After my old man came home from the Great War, he was handy with his fists on ma and me.” He looked unseeingly down at the pairing of her small huaraches and his large boots. “Believe it or not, I’ve never hit anyone – before you.”

  She shrugged. “What with yuir size, no one would be fool enough to take ye on.”

  He straightened, rubbed the back of his hand across his mustache, then gazed down at her with weary eyes. “Only you. Only you are foolish enough to take me on But that time in the pickup will be the first and last, Sunshine. You have my word.”

  Funny that, the tingly way she had felt with his hand on her backside, private as it was. She looked down, formulating her question. “That thing about Bud just now, ye’re still trying to find a reason to get rid of me, are ye not?”

  “Look, all I ask is you take care of your duties, so we can get through this year with the least amount of trouble.”

  And keep out of his way. Nevertheless, she prodded, “But the weekly reading and writing lessons, they will continue?”

  He sighed and hitched his shotgun upright, resting its barrel upon his shoulder carelessly. But she knew better. He was never careless. “Yeah. I’ll also keep to my word about that.”

  A chancer she was. But if you didn’t push for what you wanted, if you just settled, well, you had yourself a rut that was an open-ended grave.

  And, thus, she pushed on, saying, “Duke, dunna ye see, we could be friends? We’re stuck with one another for a year. And, blessed saints alive, I dunna want ever to marry – and ye, well, ye want to marry someone. Someone who make a real home for ye and who will – ,” she made a swallowing noise, “ – who can give ye children. So, I can be of help to ye. Really. I mean it.”

  “Do we have to go through this again?”

  “I’m just saying that ye’re a right good looking man. Ye could have yuir pick in any litter. For all that I may look the runt of the litter, I still am a female. I understand me sex and I be telling yuir stubborn self that I could help ye find yuirself a wife. The best of the litter for yuirself.”

  “With your Gypsy hocus pocus, naturally?”

  She ignored that insult. “Yuir pick should be the best of all the women who’d readily share yuir bed. I can assist you in this decision process. Now, mind ye, best suited to yuir temperament is Charlotte, but best suited to yuir goals is Sally.”

  He shook his head, as if she had stretched his credulity. “So, you’re saying I should give each a trial run in my bed? Is that it?”

  She could feel a summer’s day heat blistering her skin. Her imagination began to play out a moving picture’s romantic scene, frame by frame. Duke’s suntanned face, lowering over hers, his lips – lust! Why, she was lusting after this Texan!

  Never would she have imagined herself lusting after anyone. Giorgio could hardly be counted; he was more a screen projection of her girlhood’s imagination.

  “Nay,” she said, crisply and emphatically, “I am saying only we have Charlotte and her daughter over for Thanksgiving dinner. Bud told me that people do that here. Invite friends to celebrate and give thanks.”

  At the mention of Bud again, he frowned, and she hurried on. “Then, we can invite Sally and her father for Christmas dinner. See how Charlotte and Sally – and their families – fit in with yuirself, the S&S, and our ranch hands.”

  “Our ranch hands?”

  She displayed her disarming smile. “Well, I mean we hired help here at the S&S.”

  Pondering, he looked down at his enormous scruffy boots – as if her earnest suggestion was a production of mammoth size and complexity. “Thanksgiving is the day after tomorrow. That doesn’t give Charlotte much leeway.”

  “Oh, ye ask – Charlotte will come.”

  § § §

  Trooping behind Arturo, sombrero in hand, Jock, Bud, Skinny Henry, Glen, and lastly Micah shuffled in from the kitchen’s back door stoop. The ranch hands stood around the long table that afternoon, as if at parade rest for the Gypsy gypper’s orches
trated Thanksgiving dinner.

  And orchestrated it was, including the radio music she had selected, which drifted from the parlor – the NBC’s popular A&P Gypsies, sponsored by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

  Duke restrained from shaking his head at this latest ploy of hers. And yet he had gone along with it, wearing his best Sunday white shirt and only that morning even suffering her to clip with the kitchen scissors the overly long hair at his nape and in front of his ears.

  She had tugged him down onto one of the mismatched kitchen chairs and begun shearing him like a sheep. “A woman of Charlotte’s ilk will be wanting a clean-cut man, not a lion with a messy mane like yuirs.”

  She had no idea, as she circled him, how her small breasts had been poking his bicep like branding irons. “And while we’re at it, Duke McClellan, no five o-clock shadow at this afternoon’s table.”

  “And while we’re at it, Romy Sonnenschein,” he’d gruffed, “remove all your stockings you hung up to dry in my bathroom.”

  The sight of her damp and holey stockings and knitted underwear were an intimacy as unsettling as the tawny tuft he glimpsed beneath her uplifted arm as she ruffled fingers through his freshly shorn hair for a finished effect. Ridiculous, but his pulse leapt madly at the sight.

  Come dinner time, one by one, he introduced the ranch hands to Charlotte and Clara. The eight-year-old, who, like her mother, wore eyeglasses, peered through their thick lenses at each of the men and settled on Romy, who was placing on the table a large wooden bowl heaped with steaming, mashed sweet potatoes.

  “You’re the restless refugee?” Charlotte’s daughter blurted.

  Romy, blushing as red as her headscarf, glanced from Clara to Charlotte, who also blushed.

  “I shared with Clara about your escape from Germany,” Charlotte explained gently, “and the courage it must have taken, not knowing how to read or write in English proficiently.”

  Those gaping teeth bestowed an infectious grin. “I dunna do that – read or write so good – in any of the seven languages I speak.”