by John Ridley
Ego. My ego was working me. Tired as I was: “Just for a minute.”
“Thata boy, Jackie. We'll see yew down in tha bar.”
FIVE MINUTES LATER. The bar was barely populated. A few people. One couple. A guy at a table in the back waved me over with his glass. He was alone, no wife. Maybe he was the guy who'd called up. Maybe it was a convention of Jackie Mann fans. I went to him.
“Welllll, Jackie Mann,” he drawled. “Hava seat, Jackie Mann.”
I took a look around. “Where's your wife?”
“Oh, Ah expec' she'll be along in uh minute. Go on theyah, take uh chair.”
Something about him … Something about him edged me a little. Maybe it was his way of talking. I never much cared for the sounds of the South. Maybe it was his breath that stank of liquor and his clothes of cigarettes. His clothes. The suit he wore was rumpled and out of style by a few years—the wide lapels telling as tree rings—but he sported it in ignorant pride, unaware it made him look clownish in the hotel bar with the Lacoste-wearing tourists and business travelers decked in miracle fabrics.
So he was a poor Southern white guy. So what? He was a fan. That's how strong my act was: Even poor Southern crackers dug it. I sat.
He said: “Ah wasn't sure if yew was actually gonna come on down. Some show folk, they're … well, yew read how they ahr in them gossip magazines. They jus' too good. They wouldn't take uh long elevator ride jus tah meet uh fan. But not yew, Jackie. Not—”
“I'm sorry, I don't think I got your—”
“Missuhs an me, we're not from heyah, yew know? Takin' uh little vacation. Had tah save up uh lot. Everythang cost these days. Everythang. Ain't like we got much.”
I didn't say anything to that, not wanting to make the guy feel bad by agreeing with what was obvious about him.
“Then we get heyah, an tha missuhs wants tah see a show. Now, Ah ain't hardly got money for that, but when uh woman wants somethin', well, yew know how that is, Jackie. Talkin' about wantin' thangs, yew want uh drink?”
“It's a little early for that”
As if to prove how wrong I was, the guy gulped some of whatever was in his glass.
I made a broad show of checking my watch. That minute he had promised me this was going to take was stretching into ten.
“I'm not trying to be rude, but I really need to—”
“Dighton.”
“I'm sorry, I don't—”
“Yew asked mah name, didn't yew? Dighton Spooner.”
Taking out a pen, reaching for a cocktail napkin: “Mr. Spooner, why don't I just give you my autograph and then you can—”
“Don't mean nothin' to yew, do it, muh name. Yers didn't mean nothin' tah me neither. Tha wife wants tah go see uh show, an' Ah see Jackie Mann's at tha club, so Ah take her, an' Ah don't thank nothin' of it.”
I started to get up. “If you could tell your wife that I'm very sorry I couldn't—”
“We're on vacation, like Ah said. Like Ah said, we're not from around heyah. Know where Ah'm from, Jackie? Ah'm from Florida.”
I looked hard at the guy and I knew what it was that made me uneasy about him: his ear—messed up like at some point something had gnawed away at it. A rat. One of his own kind. I sat back down. The sudden lack of strength in my legs gave me no choice.
“Yeah, now yew startin' tah recall, ain't yew, boy?”
I recalled. The last time I saw that chewed-up ear I was taking a ride with three rednecks in the dark of Florida, heading for as much of a beating as they felt like handing me.
“Yeah, yer name didn't mean nothin', but soon as yew walked out onstage Ah recalled right off. Ah said: Goddamn, there that niggrah who squirrled away from us. Now heyah yew ahr entah-tainin' jus' like yew said.” He took a big, long sip of his drink. I could almost track the booze as it worked through his body, making him dark and sullen.
He said with narrow, spiteful eyes: “Big star and everythang, everybody clappin' for yew, laughin' at yew … A big niggrah star.”
At night in the dark, when I was alone and he was with two others, this man was as terrifying a thing as existed. In the day, in the light, when I could see him for what he was—a cheap lush—he did not scare me. My father had cured my fear of drunks.
I started to regain some of my self. “Better step careful. We're not in backwater Florida now.”
“Yew tha one ought tah be careful, niggrah.”
A thought occurred to me. A bad one. I did a quick look around for any more of the white-trash trio who might have come to finish what they'd never properly started.
The balance of fear shifting back in his favor gave Dighton a smile. “Settle up, boy. Ah ain't got nobody with me. Jus' tha missuhs, like Ah said, an she's back at the motel.” He gave our surroundings an overdone inspection. “Naw, we cain't afford no place like this.”
He raised his glass to the waiter, signaling for another round.
Continuing: “Nope. Jus' me an tha missuhs. Don't much pal around with Jess no more. Yew rememba Jess? Redheaded Jess. After what happened that night he sorta got spooked. Spooked by a spook.” Dighton grinned at his own cleverness. “Don't pal around at all no more with Earl. Cain't. Earl's dead. Earl's dead, an yew tha one that killed him.”
I said nothing. My face danced with confusion.
“You killed Earl.”
“I—”
“Well, whadayah expec', boy? Take uh steel pipe, put it tah uh man's head; whadayah expec' 'cept that he gonna die?”
In an instant the past was present. The thin/fat redneck was moving for me, hand brass-wrapped and ready to do work. I swung the pipe and could feel the resonance of metal on bone through its shaft and across my body. But even against a memory so real I protested.
“I didn't ki—”
The waiter came 'round, set down a fresh drink before Dighton.
As he moved away, I started again, guarded: “I didn't kill him.”
Dighton sipped at his booze, savored it same as he savored the moment. He reached into a pocket and took out a clipping—yellowed and torn—that seemed to be as old as the jacket he pulled it from. In a grand gesture, a ham actor playing to the cheap seats, he held it to me.
I did nothing, my show of defiance, but only for a moment. I took the clipping, unfolded it. It was from a newspaper, and read:
AREA MAN KILLED IN ATTACK
A local man was killed late yesterday night in what witnesses called an attack by a colored drifter.
Earl Colmbs of Kendall was killed near North Miami by what police say was a single blow to the head from a blunt object.
Witnesses, Jess Rand and Dighton Spooner, both also from Kendall, said they were driving with the victim, when they came upon a colored man walking alone who appeared to be in distress. The three men stopped to inquire if the colored needed assistance, when the drifter swung a metal pipe, striking Colmbs in the head and killing him. The colored then fled the scene. Rand and Spooner, attempting to give aid to Colmbs, did not pursue the suspect.
It went on from there. The article dryly recounted the eyewitness's details, the police search for the colored suspect, mentioned Colmbs's survivors. There was no mention of the redneck's brass knuckles or their board with nails. The article had nothing to say about how the victim, poor, departed Earl Colmbs, and his buddies tried to deliver a lynching that night.
Still …
Still, I had killed a man. By accident, in self-defense, but I had killed a man. I don't know if what I felt was revulsion or guilt or sorrow despite the circumstances, but when mixed together it was a sickness that thrashed in the pit of my stomach before seeping through my body. Soon there wasn't a part of me that wasn't infected with the sense of murder.
Whatever the emotion, it was more than what Dighton felt. He seemed not to care about his dead friend but only to take pleasure from the state he'd reduced me to.
Fighting my own affliction, I tossed down the article. “That's not how it was.”
“Tha's what
tha papers say. Tha papers don't lie.”
“It was self-defense. It was you three who—”
“Yew got anyone tah say otherwise?”
The man in the car, the one who saved me … What were the chances of ever finding him?
Dighton put an end to that train of thought with: “An no matter how yew say thangs was, how yew think uh Florida jury's gonna feel about it? What's tha word of uh niggrah against uh fine, upstandin' white?”
I considered that. Then I considered that if this redneck really thought he had the law on his side, he wouldn't be sitting across the table from me, boozing. The cops would already be putting iron on my wrists.
“You willing to take that chance?” I bluffed.
“Are yew? 'Cause tha way Ah figure, no matter what uh jury say, it ain't gonna be no good for some celebrity niggrah tah have this kind uh shit swimmin' around him anyhow. Know what Ah'm sayin'?”
That smile of his again. That goddamn smile.
I knew what he was saying.
The air was getting weak. Breathing was hard and thought would've been impossible except I was beyond thought. Nerves made my actions bypass my useless brain. As I had back in Florida, I was operating on instinct.
Instinct told me to get down to what was what: “How much?”
“Welllll, Ah ain't a greedy man—”
“How much to make you go away and stay away?”
“Ah was tryin' tah tell yew, boy—”
“Don't call me—”
“Boy, Ah was tryin' tah tell yew, Ah ain't uh greedy man, but that don't mean Ah don't like money. Ah like it jus' fine. How 'bout we call it five thousand dollars?”
The cat was pure hick. To most Charlies off the street, five grand was a fortune. I wasn't a Charlie off the street. I was raking more than seven hundred in a good week. Five thousand dollars wasn't letting me off cheap, but it was very affordable, especially when it came standard with the promise of staying out of jail and clean of headlines. Only, I didn't need him to know that.
Protesting: “Five?”
“Shit, Ah seen all them people at yer show. Ah read them Hollywood magazines. Ah know how show folk live. Five thousand ain't nothing.”
“It's not the kind of money a man walks around with.”
“Oh, Ah understand that.” Dighton scribbled in the air at the waiter for the check. “Me, tha missuhs, we gonna be around for uh few more days. Ah'll give yew uh ring before we head on outta heyah.”
The waiter brought 'round the bill.
Dighton started to fish out some money, stopped, looked to me. Again, that smile. “What the hellam'ah doin'?”
He left the bill for me along with the clipping saying: “Gowon an' make a souvenir a' that. Ah got lots others.”
I CALLED SID, set him up with a story about having to do a quick purchase of this or that that I'd seen and loved and had to have right away, then hit him with the punch line of needing five grand. If Sid bought or disbelieved what I was handing him, I couldn't tell either way. He'd worked with enough talent who had their hidden bents that a sudden need for cash for one reason or another didn't get a rise out of him anymore. He Western Unioned the money out to me.
Then I waited for word from the shadow of my past. Making it through one day, through a night and a show carrying fear and anxiety was like trying to live a normal life with fire ants crawling over you: They were always with you, always tearing away at you. They were with me the second day, the second night and show. The third day of not hearing from the hick did nothing to calm my worries, but it gave me a little pinprick of hope that maybe he'd gone away. Maybe he'd gotten scared or lost his nerve or figured putting pressure on me would likely cause him more trouble than—
The phone rang. It was Spooner.
We met again in the hotel bar. He wasn't alone this time. This time he was with a woman, long and lean and plumpless. From neck to ankle she was a stick of a figure, no bumps, no curves. The secondhand clothes she wore—shirtwaist dressed in three-year-old Montgomery Ward fashion that would most likely get stretched into service for another two—said she was probably Mrs. Spooner. That she was anywhere near the man at all said definitely holy matrimony was involved.
I got in Dighton's eye line, waved him over to me. He waved me over to him. He was holding the cards. I went.
“Jackie,” he said with a big show of excitement at my arrival. “There yew ahr.” To the woman: “Told ya Ah knew Jackie. Didn't Ah say Ah knew him? Jackie, say hello tah tha missuhs.”
“… Hello” was all I could force from myself. I knew nothing of the woman except that she was with Spooner. That's all the more I needed to despise her.
Mrs. Spooner returned my greeting. Then she went on to tell me how much she had enjoyed my show, couldn't recall when she'd had herself such a good laugh. She told me, in a pleasant Southern lilt, that vacations, going out, were a rare treat, and that seeing me onstage would make their trip all the more memorable.
I wanted to hate the woman, but as polite as she was, as humble as she was, as different as she was from the man she'd married, all I could do was feel sorry for her.
Spooner, impressing his wife taking a backseat to the bitterness grown from the compliments she handed me, stood and walked me aside.
Alone together, away from the table, I handed over an envelope of get-lost money. The way Spooner eyed the cash I'd have figured he was going to get sexual with it.
Breaking up his revelry, I leaned close and hissed vicious. “You and me are even now, you understand? Blackmail's a crime. You come around again and jail's where you're heading even if I've got to head there with you.”
“Yew expec' me tah think yew'd—”
“Yeah, I would.” I was sharp about that. Sharp as a brand-new razor.
One long stare passed between us. There was some serious eye-screwing going on. As serious as the jail time I could do for murder or he could do for extortion. Spooner was the first to flinch, just a little, as he licked his cracking lips. He needed a drink. I could tell. But I could also tell he wanted to get away from me as much as I wanted him gone.
Wagging the envelope of cash: “This heyah's all Ah come for. Tah hell with yew” was his good-bye. He went back to the table and collected his wife.
I watched them go. To the side of the woman's left eye: a fading mark that looked something like a bruise.
I sat.
I stretched out my hands before me. All they did was shake. I calmed them down enough to signal a waiter. He came by and I told him I needed some liquor. What kind, I didn't care as long as it was strong.
My eyes closed.
A couple of deep breaths.
I'd made it.
I'd made it.
Five thousand dollars.
Spooner could have taken me for so much more. He could have taken my whole career from me, but I'd made it. I'd bluffed him and sent him off. Twice now I'd gotten away from him.
Still …
My mind was stuck in a groove of possibilities, and the nasty pictures it painted for itself—me in jail. Me in headlines. Me in ruins— is what gave me the worst of my jangles.
The waiter came back with my drink. I had to two-hand it up to my mouth. The second the juice hit my throat it burned hot, lavaed its way along my body, slagging all nerve endings, deadening all sensations. Halfway through my second glass I felt good and steady, and by the bottom of my third I wanted to smile. Were things really so bad? Were they? Trouble had come my way and I'd sent it walking. Jackie Mann had elevated himself to a place where he could buy his way out of a jam. Isn't that what the real stars did back in Hollywood? When situations went wrong—when they'd married the wrong person, when the wrong girl got pregnant, when they got busted smoking the wrong kind of cigarettes—didn't they just throw money at the problem and make everything right? When you looked at things that way, I was more the star than I thought I was.
Man, let me tell you: The liquor helped me think straight.
I
ordered another glass of gas, understanding why Sid'd used it to ease the hurt of losing his wife. Finally understanding why my pop dedicated his life to the stuff.
MONEY GOT ME OUT OF TROUBLE. Money helped me bury the memory of trouble.
When I got back to New York, feeling free and alive after my near existence-ending experience, I used money as a green salve to numb my pain.
I took myself a march along Fifth Ave. heading out to burn cash the way Sherman burned Atlanta.
Suits. I didn't much need them, but I got them. I got them tailored. Cye Martin's. They were good. They had to be good. They were what Sammy wore.
Watches. I needed more than one watch less than I needed the suits. What I really didn't need was the Vacheron Constantin I had my eye on: $1150. I got a two. I got a $900 Patek Philippe to go with it. If it shined, it was mine. I bought first and asked no questions later.
“Last time I checked, money was for spending,” Sammy had told me. Only now was I hearing him loud and clear. He also told me I was strictly a star these days. You couldn't be a star without star attitude and star style. I was planning on stocking up on both.
Make it two Patek Philippes.
I SCREAMED AT THE CABDRIVER to pull over. He did. Not so much because I told him to as because my screaming made me come off as some kind of nutcase that chances should not be taken with.
More screaming: “Turn it up.”
“What are you—”
“Turn up the radio!”
The hack driver grumbled Brooklyn prayers at me but increased the radio's volume.
I'd been expecting it. Not at that exact moment, no, but I knew Tommy had cut a record. I knew it'd been released to radio. I knew it had gotten some play, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I heard it.
My fists were shaking. Fists, because I was so excited for Tommy that on their own my hands had balled up until my fingers dug into my palm.
Tommy. My Tommy. And the picket-fence reception the radio got through the towers of Manhattan couldn't hurt the sweetness of her voice. A voice I was concentrating so hard on listening to, the song was half over before I could relax enough to enjoy it.
