Jitterbug

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Where’d you get that? Gidgy said you took your last cut in cocaine.”

  “This an advance. I’m lining up customers for some tires. I can get you a set.”

  “I got mine recapped just last month.”

  “Recaps are no good, you see ’em all along the highway from here to Willow Run. These are on the house, little brother. Thanks for not saying nothing to Lizzie.”

  “I’ll roll on the caps a while longer. One Littlejohn with a court date’s plenty.”

  Earl’s face went blank as a slab. He snapped the band back on the roll and returned it to his pocket. “Do me a favor, Dwight? Don’t bleed all over my rug from them holes in your hands.”

  “It ain’t that. One of us has to look out for Elizabeth if the other one goes to jail.”

  “I know, babe.” He laid a hand on Dwight’s shoulder. “I ain’t such a much as a big brother. Ma was telling me all the time, look out for Dwight. I tried, you know what I’m saying? Then I’d forget. Too much Pa in me, I guess. You always was the hope of the family.”

  “That’s horseshit, Earl. If it weren’t for you, we’d still be in Eufala unloading cotton for a dollar a day.”

  “I always was the idea man, but you’re the one that sticks. That’s why I want you to take them tires. I see things, you know what I’m saying? I see things, and I know if anything happens, Lizzie’ll get took good care of. Who’s going to do that if I’m in the joint and one of them recaps blows and my little brother winds up smeared all down the apron?”

  “I guess I’m taking the tires,” Dwight said.

  Earl showed his gold tooth. He squeezed Dwight’s shoulder and let go. “Whitewalls, what do you say?”

  “No. I’d have to repaint the jalop to live up to ’em.”

  Elizabeth came out, wearing a summer cotton dress with shoulder pads and white pin dots on deep blue, her white platform sandals emphasizing the muscles in her calves from pushing carpet sweepers and standing on tiptoe to dust the tops of cabinets. She had coral polish on her toenails and a white carnation over her right ear that made her look a little like Billie Holiday.

  “I’m feeling lucky this fine Saturday,” she said, pulling on a pair of white cotton gloves. “I’m thinking of putting two dollars down on a horse with a name that hits me right. Who’s running?”

  Earl put on his zoot-suit coat, pulled a rolled-up Racing Form from a side pocket, and smacked it against his palm. “Number Three in the second’s called Steady Dee.”

  Her sudden smile was like a flashbulb going off in Dwight’s face. “Earl, be a good husband and fetch me my purse.”

  Steady Dee came in at five to one.

  It was the daily double. Earl had ten down in addition to Elizabeth’s two. When he explained to her that they had just made one hundred and twenty dollars, she screamed and threw her arms around him and they almost tumbled off the bleacher seat. Dwight, who had kept his money in his pocket—he was superstitious about betting on himself—basked in their ecstasy and the sun on his back. It was a warm clear day at the state fairgrounds, not as humid as it had been, and the crowd had broken out its brightest prints and whitest flannels. There were more straw boaters than he’d seen in one place since before the war. Except for Pearl Harbor he’d never considered himself especially patriotic, but when “The Star Spangled Banner” played over the public-address system and the crowd rose in a body with hand on heart, he felt a lump as if he’d swallowed a cotton boll. The drink and hot-dog vendors, exempt from rations on the retail end, had to keep going back to empty their apron pockets to make room for more cash.

  Earl split the one hundred and twenty down the middle, spread the sixty on two horses in the third, and cleared twenty when Fear Itself placed and Betty’s Gams won. Elizabeth hugged them both. Dwight smelled her warm moist skin mingled with the citrus perfume.

  When Earl came back from the booth, he announced he’d split again, betting thirty on Happy Daze to show. Happy didn’t. Dwight stayed out of the argument when Earl proposed doubling down in the fifth race. He did over Elizabeth’s protests, and won again when a filly named Once in a While came in by half a length at two to one. By then he’d bought and consumed six Pfeiffer’s, and this time Dwight took a hand, or rather two arms, and restrained him physically from placing the entire day’s winnings on the nose of Peace in Our Time. Peace finished with the pack. They left before the seventh, one hundred and seventy dollars to the good.

  In Dwight’s car, Earl handed the money over to his wife with a flourish. She tucked it into her bra, but not before separating his original ten and giving it back. “Ain’t we going to celebrate?” she asked.

  Nearing Kern’s Department Store, Earl told Dwight to pull over.

  “This a nightclub now?” Dwight asked.

  “Just do like your big brother says.”

  Dwight found a spot and spun the Model A into it. Earl had his door open before he set the brake. He said he’d be just a minute and loped through the nearest revolving door.

  Elizabeth, who had ridden in the middle with her feet on the hump over the driveshaft, slid over to the passenger’s side. “Now what’s that boy up to?” She peered out the window as if she could see through the wall of the building.

  “Whatever it is, it won’t make a lick of sense to nobody but Earl.”

  She watched the people whirling in and out through the doors. “I don’t even know if I thanked you for bringing him home.”

  “You did, but you didn’t have to. He’s my brother.”

  “Sometimes I forget he’s the older one. Was you two always like that?”

  “Sometimes I think so. When I was little it was different. I was a runt, bigger kids picked on me all the time. Earl was there and whaled the tar out of ’em. Sometimes they was too big, they whaled the tar out of him. It didn’t matter none how big they was, though. He waded right in.”

  “Now it’s you does the wading.”

  He moved his shoulders. “It was Earl’s idea to come up and work in the plants. I never would of took the chance on my own.”

  “Glad you did?” She was looking at him now.

  “Most of the time.” He rubbed a hand over his face; he’d worked the swing shift Friday night and had gotten only three hours’ sleep. “Hell, all of the time. Or I should be. Sometimes you forget things wasn’t so great back home.”

  She rearranged herself on the seat, placing her back against the door and gathering her legs beneath her. “Earl’s got his heart set on getting rich. What you got your heart set on, Dwight?”

  He looked through the windshield. He. hadn’t taken his hands off the wheel, “I’m trying to put money aside. I don’t want to work with my hands my whole life. They got schools up here will take coloreds.”

  “I had a cousin went to college. He’s a pharmacist in New Jersey.”

  “Well, first I got to finish high school.”

  “That’s a good plan, Dwight.”

  “It’s a plan.”

  The floor behind Elizabeth opened suddenly. She grabbed the back of the seat to keep from spilling out and scrambled back up onto the hump in the floor. Earl, one foot on the running board, planted a green paper Kern’s sack on the seat and took out a clamshell box.

  “What’d you do?” Elizabeth’s tone was accusing.

  “Just take the box. I feel like a street peddler here.”

  She took it and tipped back the lid. A watch with a tiny square face and a gold expansion band lay inside the blue velour lining. The legend on the face read UNIVERSAL CENEVE.

  “It’s a Chronograph,” Earl said. “I’m getting tired of you axing me what time it is all day long. Here.” He took back the box, slid the watch off the form, and threaded it onto her slim wrist. “How’s it feel? They can take out some links or put some in.”

  “You got this for ten dollars?”

  “I didn’t go to the track with just the ten. Anyway, I got a account. You like it?”

  “It’s beautiful. Earl, we c
an’t afford it.”

  “Sure we can. Axe Steady Dee. Shit! I almost forgot.” He reached into the sack and took out a sapphire blue tie bisected by a vertical spear embroidered in silver thread. “I wants my tie back, by the way.” He tossed it in Dwight’s lap.

  Dwight picked it up, felt it, looked at the tab sewn to the back. “This is silk. I didn’t know you could get silk.”

  “You can get anything if you got the cash. Henry Ford don’t wear no rayon.”

  “I’d be scared to wear it. What if I get barbecue sauce oil it?”

  “Then you take it to the cleaners. They got to make a living just like you and me. It’s good for the economy. Put it on.”

  “You can’t run around spending money like this, Earl. How often you have a day at the track like today?”

  Earl reached across Elizabeth and put a hand on Dwight’s knee. His expression was as close to solemn as it ever came. “I can’t think of nobody who’d put up with a jackass like me for a brother like you do. Not for a silk tie or a Brooks Brothers suit and a pair of Thom McAns. I done told you I’m nobody’s idea of a big brother. Just let me do this. It’s all I can swing.”

  Dwight smiled and undid the tie he was wearing. The gold tooth in Earl’s grin caught the sun.

  The rearview mirror was inadequate. Elizabeth took charge, evening out the ends and seating the knot so that there was no untidy dimple below it. She smoothed the shank along the placket of his shirt and smiled. “You look like Joe Louis on the town.”

  “Speaking of doing the town,” Earl said. “What time is it by that Chronograph?”

  She made a business of turning her wrist so that the jewels in the bezel glinted. “Five of six.”

  “I knowed it was suppertime. My belly’s growling like a old lion. Let’s hit Carl’s and then do some clubbing.”

  “The Forest?” Dwight felt uneasy about facing Beatrice. Despite what Gidgy had said, he was afraid he might have given her grief over telling Dwight about him.

  “I’m tired of the Forest. We’re hitting the Trocadero.”

  Elizabeth took in her breath. “I’m not dressed for it!”

  “Sure you are. Show ’em the watch. If that don’t get us in I’ll blind the doorman with this here.” He dove into the sack, brought out a square box, and slipped a heavy silver ring onto his right pinky finger. It was set with a swirly blue stone. “It’s a tigereye,” Earl said, rocking his hand right and left to catch the light. “I was looking for a fire opal, but they wanted too much. Anyways I like this better. What do you think?”

  Dwight said, “It looks like a blue marble.”

  “What do you know? You was going to wear a black tie to the track.”

  “It was gray.”

  “How about it, sugar? Is it the flash, or is it the flash?”

  “It’s the flash,” she said.

  He said, “Ha!” crumpled the sack, tossed it to the floor, climbed onto the seat, and jerked the door shut. “Well, fire it up, little brother. Push that little button there on the side, Lizzie; that starts the stopwatch. Let’s see how many records we can bust between here and the restaurant.”

  Dwight readjusted the rearview mirror and stomped on the starter.

  chapter twenty-nine

  XAVIER CUGAT AND HIS orchestra had opened up a third front on the stage of the Club Trocadero.

  In the background, the musicians in their scarlet coats laid down a barrage with marimbas and trumpets while their black-tailed general worked the floor, beating his palms and stamping his patent leathers. Between them a handsome conga player pounded artillery out of a torpedo-shaped drum, his hair in his eyes. The singer, a Latin goddess of war in shimmering white with an explosion of red rose in her hair, chick-chick-a-boomed the chorus of “Cuban Pete” into a microphone that resembled nothing so much as a grenade. The dance floor was a whitecapped Nordsee of couples doing a frantic rhumba. The entire building shook like the hull of a destroyer under enemy fire.

  A suspicious-looking doorman collected the six-dollar cover charge from Earl and turned them over to a greeter in tails and a dark study who conducted them to a tiny table near the short corridor to the rest rooms. Dwight, seeing Earl’s face go flat, feared a confrontation from which they could not possibly emerge victorious. His brother’s sudden grin as he stepped in to hold Elizabeth’s chair, which the greeter was obviously not going to do, filled him with relief. It occurred to him then, briefly, how much of his life had been lived according to Earl’s mercurial temperament.

  Earl, fully ensconced as host, ordered Old Taylor and soda for himself and Dwight and a cherry Coke for Elizabeth. Their waiter glanced speculatively at Dwight, but did not ask for proof of age. He wasn’t asked often, although sometimes in the past his brother had been when he himself had not. He wondered at just what point he had begun to look like the older of the two Littlejohns.

  The music was too loud for conversation. When their drinks came they lifted their glasses, making up their own toasts in their heads, and drank. It amused Dwight that Elizabeth could not resist eating her cherry first. Most women, the ones he had observed anyhow, saved theirs for last if they ate them at all. In some things, he decided, she would always be a girl of fifteen.

  The nightclub was filling rapidly. Dotted with ferns and dwarf palms in clay pots, its ceiling an aviary of papier-mâché parrots and its adobe-textured walls covered with bullfight posters and lattices strung with flowering vines, it looked as if it had been dug up by the roots in downtown Rio de Janeiro, or what someone who had never been closer to Rio than a Cesar Romero movie at the Capitol thought it might look like, and replanted square in the middle of the Rust Belt. At any moment Dwight expected a fat generalissimo to waddle in on the arm of a blond American starlet.

  Earl leaned over and yelled in Dwight’s ear, “Makes you want to run down to Mexico, don’t it?”

  “South America,” Dwight said.

  Grinning, his brother nodded and sat back. He hadn’t heard a syllable.

  A cigarette girl drifted by, wearing fruit on her head and a dress that showed she hadn’t any stretch marks. Earl caught her attention, laid a dollar bill on her tray, took a box of Parliaments, and refused change. She beamed her thanks and cruised on. Earl offered the box to Elizabeth. She took one. He lit it and one for himself off a table lighter shaped like a pineapple. Dwight wondered when his brother had switched from Luckies. They saw each other almost every day and he was conscious that they were losing touch.

  He was conscious, too, never had his mind off it for long, that he hadn’t held up his end of the bargain with Lieutenant Zagreb. He’d had every intention, after bringing Earl home from the record store on Erskine, of reporting to the lieutenant that Gidgy was his brother’s link with the black market; he’d even thumbed a nickel into the slot of a pay telephone a block from Sojourner Truth and dialed two digits from the card Zagreb had given him. Then he’d hung up. There was something about Gidgy’s eyes, or rather the absence of them in that long solemn face behind the smoked glasses, that told him he had more to fear from him than he did from the police.

  It had taken him the better part of forty-eight hours, on four hours’ sleep, to convince himself he wasn’t a coward, that he wasn’t afraid for himself. There was Beatrice, who had directed him to Gidgy in the first place, and who would certainly be caught up in repercussions if the Racket Squad raided Abyssinia Records and Sheet Music. There was Earl. And in all cases there was Elizabeth.

  He’d been thinking a lot about her since Beatrice had asked him who he wanted to find Earl for, himself or his sister-in-law. Shit, who was he kidding, he’d been thinking about her a long time. It took a near stranger to tell him why.

  He watched her now, smoking her cigarette like a grown-up lady, moving her shoulders to the clickety beat from the bandstand, leaning over to hear something Earl was saying, then tipping back her head and laughing, showing a horseshoe of perfect teeth and the long smooth line of her throat. She caught him looking and
winked, then turned her head to look at the band. The wink warmed him as if he were standing up to his neck in the Gulf off Mobile.

  Beatrice Blackwood was a smart woman.

  The rousing tune ended on a sting of brass. The crowd clapped and hooted, and Cugat went immediately into “My Shawl,” a romantic ballad with the drums and Bolivian scratches shunted into the background. Earl stood, a little unsteadily, burlesqued a bow from the waist, and gripped the back of Elizabeth’s chair. She shot a concerned glance at Dwight, who smiled back and lifted his glass in a gesture of blessing. She rose and accompanied Earl to the dance floor.

  The waiter came by. Dwight ordered another round, asking for the bartender to go a little more heavily on the soda and lighter on the whiskey, and paid for it. The waiter withdrew without a word or even a nod. Dwight reminded himself that that would have passed for hospitality unprecedented in Eufala. He was thinking too much of Alabama lately. He’d spent most of his nineteen years wishing he were anyplace else.

  The drinks arrived just as Earl and Elizabeth returned, Earl apologizing for his two left feet, Elizabeth telling him to stop, he was just fine. Dwight noticed a faint limp as she headed down the corridor to the ladies’ room.

  “Next slow one’s yours, little brother.” Earl plunked himself down and drank. “I should of waited for a jitterbug.”

  “You’d wait a long time with Cugat.”

  He made a face over his glass. “Starting to water down the booze. Your idea?”

  “It’s early yet.”

  “Dwight, you’re gonna make somebody a great wife.”

  The band threw itself into “South of the Border,” sealing off conversation; which Dwight thought was just as well.

  Elizabeth returned, smiled thanks at Dwight for her fresh Coke, and ate her cherry. They listened to the music, and then she and Dwight danced to “Cielito Lindo.” She’d freshened her scent in the ladies’ room. He knew she couldn’t afford any but the most common kind, yet he’d never smelled anything quite like it on any other woman. He decided she had a natural musk that changed it and made it exclusively hers.