Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  When she had gone, we all agreed that Martha was a good soul and that the old deaf-mute was a lucky man. But we couldn’t help trying to take her off. And I laughed with the others till, suddenly, it occurred to me that her accent and her little turns of speech sounded, on our lips, just like things the Ram was quoted as saying in his civics class. He said “territority” and “A-rab” and “how come” and “I’m done.” I knew that Letitia’s own father didn’t say things like that; it only showed the kind of low company Lou Ramsey had always kept, even as a boy in Clark County.

  Well, when Martha went for the mixers, it was time for Bob and Horst and me to flip a coin to see who was going outside and buy us a pint of whiskey at the back door, which was where you always had to buy it. Unfortunately, I was odd man, and so I began collecting the money from the other two. Letitia didn’t understand about the whiskey, and we had to explain to her about local option and Clark County’s being a dry county, and about bootleg’s being cheaper than the legal whiskey in Chat­ham. But while we explained, she didn’t seem to listen. She only kept looking at me questioningly, and finally she squinted her eyes and said, “Are you sure you know how to buy it, and where?”

  I went out the front door and around to the kitchen door, and bought the whiskey from Martha’s husband, who had gone back there to meet me. I was glad for a breath of fresh air and to be away from the others for a few minutes. And yet I was eager to get back to them, too. I hurried toward the front, along the footpath between the parking lot and the side wall of the tavern—a dark wall of unpainted vertical planking. The night seemed even hotter and muggier now than it had earlier. The sky, all overcast, with no stars shining through anywhere, was like an old, washed-out gray sweater. On the far side of the parking lot, a few faint streaks of light caught my eye. I knew they came from Aunt Martha’s tourist cabins, which were ranged along the edge of the woods over there. The night was so dark it was hard to tell much about the cars in the parking lot, but I could tell that they were mostly broken down ja­lopies and that the lot looked more like a junkyard than any real parking lot. Everything I saw looked ugly and raw and unreal to me, and when I came round to the front, where the one big light bulb above the entrance still flickered brightly in its swarm of bugs, I could see a field of waist-high corn directly across the road, and somehow it looked rawer and more unreal to me than anything else.

  When I rang at the front door to be let in again, the old man had already come through the place. He opened up for me, grinning as though it were a big joke between us—his having got there as soon as I did. But I didn’t want any of his dumb-show joking just then. He was making all kinds of silly signs with his hands, but I passed by him and went on back to our booth. And I was struck right away by how happy Letitia looked when she saw me. She didn’t seem to be concerned about her uncle at all, which, of course, was what I was watching to see. I was glad, and yet it didn’t ease my mind a bit. What were you to make of such a girl? Ever since we got there, I had been watching her in a way that I felt guilty about, because I knew it was more curiosity than sympathy. And I was certain now that she had been watching me, for some kind of sign. I couldn’t have been more uncomfortable. It was strange. She was such a marvelously pretty girl, really!—with her pale yellow hair and her almond eyes, with her firm little mouth that you couldn’t help looking at when she opened it a little and smiled, no matter how much respect you had for her, and no matter what else you had on your mind. I kept looking at her, and I tried not to seem too self-conscious when I drew the pint of whiskey out of the pocket of my linen jacket and put it on the table.

  But I did feel self-conscious about it, and even more so because she continued to sit there just as casually as though we were having a milkshake somewhere after the show and were settling down to enjoy ourselves for the rest of the evening. When I first came back, she had looked at me as though I were a hero because I had gone around to the back door to buy a pint of bootleg whiskey and had got back alive, and now she commenced puttering around with the glasses and the mixers with a happy, helpful attitude. Bob and Horst and their two dates were still jabbering away as much as before, but Letitia made me feel now that they weren’t there at all. She had set the three tumblers in front of me, and so I worked away at opening the pint bottle and then began pouring drinks for us three boys. I wasn’t sure how much we ought to have right at first, and I decided I had got too much in two of the glasses. I tried to pour some back into the bottle, and made such a mess of it that I cursed under my breath. During this time, the jukebox was playing away, of course, but I do think I was half aware of some other noise somewhere, though it didn’t really sink in. It didn’t even sink in when Letitia put her hand on my sleeve, or when I looked up at her and saw her looking at me very much as she had outside the door a while before. The others still went on talking, and after a second Letitia drew away her hand. She began fidgeting with her gardenias, and she wasn’t looking at me any more. For a moment, I wondered if she hadn’t really expected us to have the drinks. But it wasn’t that, and now I saw that she had tilted her head to one side to get a better view of something across the floor. I cut my eyes around and saw that the curtains to the Ram’s booth had been pulled apart and that there he was, in plain view, with his girl and his star pitcher and outfielder and their two girls. I thought to myself, She’s just now realized that they’re all here together. Then I took another look over there, wondering why in hell they hadn’t kept those curtains drawn, and I saw that something very unusual was up.

  This all happened in an instant, of course—much quicker than I can tell it. The Ram was getting up very slowly from his seat and seemed to be giving some kind of orders to his pitcher and his outfielder. His own girl was still sitting at the table, and she stayed there, but the two other girls were climbing on top of the table. Pretty soon, they had opened the little high window above their booth—there was one above each of the booths—and you could see that the next thing they were going to do was to try to climb out that window. I guess they did climb out, and it wasn’t long before people in some of the other booths were doing the same thing.

  After a minute or so, there was nobody left on the dance floor, and all of a sudden someone unplugged the jukebox. Without the music, we could hear the knocking on the doors of the tourist cabins, and I began to notice lights flashing outside the little window above our booth. I knew now there was a raid on the cabins, but I didn’t want to be the first to mention the existence of those cabins to the girls. And though I was sure enough of it, I just couldn’t make myself admit that the raid would be happening to the tavern, too, in about three minutes.

  I saw the Ram leave his booth, and he seemed to be starting in the direction of ours. Letitia looked relieved now, and actually leaned forward across the table as though she were trying to catch his eye. Both Bob Southard and I got up and started out to meet him, but he held out a stiff arm, motioning us back, and he went off toward the beer counter without ever looking at Letitia.

  When Bob and I turned back toward our booth, Horst and the girls were standing up, saying nothing. But Letitia gave me a comforting smile and she opened her mouth to say something that she never did say. I can almost believe she had been about to tell me how shy her uncle was, and to ask if I noticed how he wouldn’t look at her when she was dressed up this way.

  But now the Ram was headed back toward us with Martha, and Martha had slipped on some brown loafers. There was loud banging now on the front and back doors of the tavern, but apparently she and her husband weren’t set to open up yet; I guessed the old man hadn’t finished hiding the whiskey. By now, anybody who was going to get away had to chance it through the windows. We could hear people dropping on the ground outside those little high windows, and hear some of them grunting when they landed.

  As soon as the Ram and Martha got near us, he said, “We’re going to put you out of sight somewhere. They won’t want to take too many in. They just want their quota.”


  Martha wasn’t ruffled a bit. I suppose she could see we were, though. She looked at the girls and said, “Chickabiddies, I wouldn’t have had this happen for nothing in this world.”

  The Ram glanced back at his own booth, to make sure that his athletes were still there—and maybe his girl friend. They hadn’t moved a muscle. They just sat there very tense, watching the Ram. You would have thought they were in the bullpen waiting for a signal from him to come in and pitch. But they never got one. The Ram said to Martha, “Just anywhere you stick her and the rest of them is all right, but upstairs in your parlor would be mighty nice.” From the way he said it, you would have thought he was speaking to one of the old lady teachers at Westside.

  “You know I ain’t about to hide nobody upstairs,” she said firmly but politely. “Not even for you, honey baby.”

  “Then put them in the powder room yonder,” he said.

  “If they’ll fit, that’s fine,” she said. She led the way and we followed.

  It was over at the end of the counter—just a little closet, with “she” painted on the door and a toilet inside, and not even one of the little high windows. Martha made sure the key was in the lock, inside, and told us to turn off the light and lock ourselves in. We had to squeeze to get in, and one of us would have stood on the toilet except there wasn’t a lid. While we were crowding in, the banging on the doors kept getting louder and began to sound more in earnest, and Martha’s husband ambled up and stood watching us with his mouth hanging open. Martha looked around at him and burst out laughing. “He can’t hear it thunder, bless his heart,” she said. And the old fellow laughed, too.

  The Ram said, “Get them inside, please, ma’am. They’ll have to fit.”

  But Martha merely laughed at him. “You better git yourself outside if you expect to git,” she said.

  “I don’t expect to git,” he said.

  “What’sa matter?”

  He looked back over his shoulder at the room, where there were only eight or ten people left, most of them staggering around in the shadows, looking for a window that wasn’t so high. “They’ll have to have their quota of customers,” he said, “or they might make a search.”

  “Well, it’s your funeral you’re planning, not mine,” Martha said, and she winked at nobody in particular. Then her little green eyes suddenly darted another look at her husband. “O.K.,” she said, “and I better take a quick gander to see he left out their quota of whiskey-take.” With that, she slipped her feet out of her shoes again and padded along behind the counter and into the kitchen, with the old man following her. The banging on the doors couldn’t get any louder, but they could have knocked the doors down by this time if they had really been as earnest about it as they made it sound. And we would long since have been locked inside the toilet except that while the Ram and Martha were having their final words, Letitia had put one foot over the sill again and was waiting to say something to her uncle.

  “Uncle Louis,” she began very solemnly. The Ram’s face turned as red as a beet. Not just his face but the top of his head, too, where his sandy hair had got so thin. And, from the quick way he jerked his head around and fixed his eyes on the front door, it seemed as if he hadn’t heard the banging over there till now. The truth was he didn’t want to look at Letitia. But of course he had to, and it couldn’t wait. So he sticks out that square chin, narrows his eyes under those blond eyebrows of his, and gives Letitia the hardest, impatientest look in the world. But it was nothing. The thing that was something was not the expression on his face but the one on hers. I won’t ever forget it, though I certainly can’t describe it. It made me think she was going to thank him from the bottom of her heart or else say how sorry she was about everything, or even ask him if something couldn’t be done about hiding those poor athletes of his. I thought most likely it would be something about the athletes, since their being there with him was bound to make a scandal if it got into the newspapers. But in a way what she said was better than any of that. She said, “I don’t have any money with me, Uncle Louis. Do you think I ought to have some money?”

  “Good girl!” he practically shouted. And the guy actually smiled—the very best, most unselfish kind of smile. He reached down in his pocket and pulled out a couple of crumpled-up bills. I saw that one of them was a five. Letitia took the two bills and stuffed them in the pocket of her jacket. “Good girl,” he said again, not quite so loud. He was smiling, and seemed nearly bursting with pride because Letitia had thought of something important that he had overlooked.

  “It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” she said then.

  “Why, sure it is,” he said. It was as though the whole raid was something that was happening just to them and concerned nobody else. And now she gave him that look again, and what it showed, and what it had shown before, was nothing on earth but the beautiful confidence she had in him—all because he was an uncle of hers, I suppose.

  “Good night, darling,” she said. She stepped back into the toilet with the rest of us, and it was every bit as exciting to see as if she had been stepping into a lifeboat and leaving him on a sinking ship. My guess, too, is that when the Ram watched her pulling the door to, he wished he was about to go down on a real ship, instead of about to be arrested and taken off with his girl friend and his two athletes to the jail in Thompsonville, the town where he grew up, and then to have it all in the Chatham papers and finally lose his job as civics teacher and baseball coach at Westside High. For that, of course, is the way it turned out.

  Somebody locked the door and we stood in there in the dark, and then we heard Martha come back and put on her shoes and go to open the front door. But we couldn’t hear everything, because at the first sound of the deputies’ voices the two other girls began to shake all over and whimper like little sick animals. Bob and Horst managed to hush them up pretty much, however, and before long I heard a man’s voice say, “Well, Lou, haven’t you played hell?” The man sounded surprised and pleased. “This is too bad, Lou,” he said. It was a mean, little-town voice, and you could hear the grudge in it against anybody who had got away even as far as Chatham and amounted to even as little as the Ram did. Or that was how I felt it sounded. “That wouldn’t be some of your champs over there, would it, Lou?”

  Letitia didn’t make a sound. She just shivered once, as though a rabbit had run over her grave, or as though, in the awful stink and heat of that airless toilet, she was really cold. It was black as pitch in there, but I was pressed up against Letitia and I felt that shiver go over her. And then, right afterward, I could tell how easily she breathed, how relaxed she was. I wanted to put my arms around her, but I didn’t dare—not in a place like that. I didn’t dare even think about it twice.

  Once our door was shut, we never heard the Ram’s voice again.

  In a very few minutes, the sheriff’s men seemed to have got everybody out of the tavern except Martha and her husband. The two girls had stopped all their whimpering and teeth-chattering now, and we heard one of the men—the sheriff himself, I took it—talking to Martha while the others were carrying away whatever whiskey had been left out for them to find.

  “Kind of sad about Lou Ramsey,” he said, with a little snicker.

  “I don’t know him,” Martha said, cutting things short. “I don’t know any of them by their last names. That’s your business, not mine.”

  The man didn’t answer for a minute, but when he did, he sounded as though she had hurt his feelings. “You ought to be fair, Mrs. Mayberry,” he said, “and not go blaming me for taking in them that just stands around waiting for it.” I thought I could tell now that they were both sitting on stools at the counter.

  “I don’t mind, if he don’t mind,” she said. “It’s his funeral, not mine.” And now it sounded as though it was the Ram she was mad at, even more than the man she was talking to.

  After a minute, he said, “I never been so hot as tonight.”

  “It’s growing weather, honey baby,” she said, an
d slapped her hand down on the counter.

  “There’s not nobody else around?” he asked her suddenly.

  “What are you asking me that for, honey baby?” she said. “You got as many as your little jail will ’most hold.”

  We heard him laugh, and then neither of them said anything more for a minute. The other men seemed to have made their last trips to the kitchen and back now, and I heard the man with Martha get down off his stool at the counter.

  “Well’m,” he said, “which one of you cares to make the ride this time?”

  “Whichever one you favors,” she said.

  “You know me,” he said. “How’s them kids?” For a second I was absolutely sure he meant us. But then he said, “How you manage to keep ’em quiet enough up there? You put cotton in their ears?” Martha didn’t answer him, and finally he said, “What’sa matter with you tonight, Mrs. Mayberry?”

  “You wouldn’t kid me about something like my kids, would you, Sheriff?” she asked, in a hard voice.

  “Like what?”

  “Like saying nobody’s never told you they was born just as deaf as their daddy, yonder.”

  “You don’t say, Mrs. Mayberry,” he said, sounding out of breath. “Nobody ever told me that, I swear to God. Why, I’ve seen them two towheads playing around out there in the lot, but nobody said to me they was deaf.”