Much later that evening—in the wee hours, to be exact—we had another minor set-to among ourselves, this time in a basement joint called the Tiger’s Rag. This one started when the bandleader announced that the next number would be the last one of the night and Shouse asked Billie to dance. He was the only stag at the table, although he’d started out with a date, a blond looker named Greta Something-or-other who struck me as being too nice for the likes of him and proved me right about midway through the evening. They were slow-dancing together when Shouse must’ve said or done something real wrong because Greta suddenly pulled away and slapped him so hard his hair jumped. Mary and I were right beside them and we laughed along with some other dancers who saw what happened. Shouse stood there and rubbed his jaw as Greta went to the table to get her purse and vamoose. Then he looked at me and Mary and said There’s plenty more fish in the sea, and moved away into the crowd. Mary rolled her eyes and said he’d never catch anything but trash with the kind of bait he used.
Anyhow, when the last dance was called, John and Billie, who’d been enjoying themselves for most of the evening, were in the middle of a hot-eyed, hissing spat that they were trying to keep from turning into a scene. Mary later told me it had to do with a soldier who’d cut in on John and then held Billie too close for John’s liking. To make it worse, Billie didn’t seem to mind. So John cut back in on them. The soldier looked irked and said something, but whatever John said in response was something the soldier wanted no part of and he hustled off. Billie was so angry she pushed John away and came marching back to the table with him at her heels. They’d been going at it in angry whispers for about ten minutes when Shouse asked her for the last dance. Billie jumped up and said You bet, Ed. She grabbed him by the hand and practically yanked him out onto the floor.
John lit a cigarette and nudged me and jutted his chin at a great-looking girl dancing near our table. He was trying to affect indifference to Billie and Shouse and not even glance their way, but his face was stiff as wood. Good thing he wasn’t keeping an eye on them, because when I caught a glimpse of them through the swirl of dancing couples they looked like they were trying to have sex through their clothes. The stupid bastard had a hand on her rump and she was nuzzling his neck. Then I lost sight of them again. I was afraid if John saw them he’d lose his cool and flatten Shouse in the middle of the dance floor and then here came the cops.
I told him I hadn’t had a dance with Billie all night and better do it before the number ended. As I got up I gave Mary a look and cut my eyes at John. She was quick to pick up, and she distracted his attention from the floor by asking if he’d been in touch with his family lately.
I made my way through the mob of dancers and tapped Shouse on the shoulder. He turned with a glare, then saw it was me and his expression eased up quick.
Ah hell, Pete, he said, you sure know how to break up a man’s good time.
Billie looked at me over his shoulder and said Hiya, Pete, you wanna dance with me? She was drunker than I’d thought.
Shouse stepped back and said She’s all yours, partner. I clamped one hand around his right forearm and grabbed him by the nuts with the other and gripped hard enough to stand him up on his tiptoes. His eyes bugged and he made a croaking sound and I told him to shut up and stay still or I’d crush them like eggs. I told him to quit bird-dogging our women if he didn’t want his face to end up in pieces.
Okay, okay, he said, his voice cracking. His eyes were watery with pain. I unhanded him and he let out a quivering breath and hunched over slightly and gingerly felt his goods. The dancers around us were staring curiously and Shouse tried to smile like the whole thing was some kind of joke. I told him to get going, in case John had seen what he’d been up to, and he made his way off the floor and toward the exit.
Billie was looking at me like she didn’t know whether to be mad or amused or what. I opened my arms to her and said I believe this is my dance, mademoiselle, and she laughed and said Well it sure is, Mon-sewer.
As we swayed to the music, I told her it was no skin off my nose what she did with who, but one stupid squabble in public by any one of us could bring the roof down on all our heads.
She asked why I was blaming her, she wasn’t the one with the jealousy problem. Talk to him, she said.
I said I would, but it would help if she wouldn’t give him reason to be jealous in the first place.
Yeah, yeah, she said, I hear you, big daddy.
Then she gave me a lazy-looking smile and said Tell me something, Petey, where you carry your gun?
I had to laugh, the question was so completely off the point.
Sometimes under my arm, I told her, sometimes at the small of my back, sometimes both places at once. Why was she asking?
She giggled and said because I’d swear you’re carrying one right…there, and she pressed her belly hard against an erection which I swear to the living Jesus I hadn’t been aware of. There are women who can do that—give you a hard-on before you even know it—and she was one of them.
My face went warm and I drew back from her a little.
Awwww, she said, I was enjoying that.
I took a gander toward our table but couldn’t spot any of our bunch through the crowd. Then the number was done with—and none too soon—and it was time to go home.
On our way to the car, Billie had to step into an alley to throw up. She came back wiping her mouth with a handkerchief and said Well hell, no wonder I was sick, my stomach was full of puke. John was the only one who didn’t think it was funny.
I had the Vickie’s heater turned up high on the drive back, but there was a chill in the car that had nothing to do with the weather. I had a hunch John was angry with Billie about more than her drinking. He’d probably seen how she was dancing with Shouse.
Neither of them said a word to each other until they got back to their room in the apartment, and then oh man, did they cut loose. Mary and I could hear them all the way down the hall and out in the living room, where we were having coffee to take the edge off the booze. We didn’t catch too many of the particulars, but they were chiefly along the lines of drunken squaw, stupid Hoosier, low-down tramp, jealous asshole, and so on.
Mary was big-eyed with shock at the names they were yelling at each other. I patted her leg and said people in love say the darnedest things. She hit me with the heel of her fist and said it wasn’t funny and she’d be mortified if I ever spoke to her that way.
I said every couple had its own style, and John’s and Billie’s was simply a little livelier than most.
Mary said yeah, well, she’d thank me never to be so lively with her.
Oh no, ma’am, I said, I know what’s good for me.
She scooted up next to me and gave me a hard kiss, then said You really are something, you know that?
Gosh lady, I said, what brought that on?
She laughed and kissed me again.
I mean it when I say I don’t know why she was so tickled. Then again, I have to confess that even though I’ve known my share of women they’ve always been a mystery to me. They’ve always seemed a lot like the stars. You know how on a cold winter’s night the stars can seem so beautiful and somehow comforting and at the same time make you feel really lonely? That’s how it’s been for me with women. So many times, even as I held them naked in my arms, they’ve felt as far away as the stars.
John and Billie were still at it when we went to bed. Then suddenly their squabbling stopped. Mary was holding me tight and we listened hard, and then heard a rising volume of familiar gruntings and gaspings and the creakings of their bed.
Well now, I said, sounds to me like somebody’s kissed and made up.
Mary’s laugh was low and lascivious. She said it sounded to her like a lot more than kissing, and she rolled up on top of me. And in a minute we were doing a lot more than kissing too.
The next day, we agreed that from then on nobody would have more than three drinks, including beer, when we did a night on
the town. John laid down a tougher rule for Billie—no alcohol at all, nothing but soda water or ginger ale for her. Everybody knew Indians couldn’t hold their liquor, he said. He didn’t say that Billie had proved it at the Tiger’s Rag, but we all knew that’s what he thought.
Billie liked her booze and wasn’t happy about John putting the clamps on her, but she didn’t want to get into another big tiff with him. And although Mary thought John was being unfair, Billie didn’t want her arguing with him about it either. But, Mary being Mary, whenever we were clubbing together and John went off to the men’s room or onto the dance floor with Patty or Opal, she’d let Billie sneak a sip or two of her drink. Sometimes Billie had more of Mary’s drinks than Mary did and would be obviously tipsy at the end of the night. John would say it went to show that an Indian could get drunk just breathing the whiskey fumes in a nightclub. It took a while for him to catch on to the game they were playing on him.
It was a funny kind of friendship between Mary and Billie. Billie was slightly older and a lot more experienced, but Mary was wiser in many respects and often acted toward her like a protective big sister. And like a spoiled little sister, Billie wasn’t above taking advantage of it. During the first few days we all lived together, Mary made a big breakfast and John always joined us, but Billie wouldn’t get out of bed till almost noon, after her breakfast had gone to waste, and she’d be hungry and asking when lunch would be ready. A few days of this was all Mary could take. The next morning when John came in the kitchen he found that she had made breakfast for only me and herself.
He grinned at me and said What’s the gag?
I nodded toward Mary and said Ask her.
Mary said You want some breakfast, Johnny?
Well, sure, John said.
Then you better drag your girlfriend’s lazy behind out of bed, she said, and have her make it for you. I’m not the household cook.
John stood there, rubbing his chin, then smiled and said, No, kid, you sure ain’t. I’ll be right back.
He returned in a few minutes with Billie in hand. Her robe was open and you could see her dark nipples pushing against the thin cotton undershirt. A few black curls of private hair were showing at the edge of her panties. She was rubbing her eyes like a drowsy child and grumbling about getting rousted from bed. What was going on, she wanted to know.
Time for breakfast, John told her.
I don’t eat breakfast, Billie said.
I do, he said. And I’d be grateful as all hell, babydoll, if you’d make it for me.
Billie said Me? Jeepers, Johnny, I can’t cook.
Time to learn, he said.
I’ll teach you, honey, Mary said. She went around the table and closed Billie’s robe and belted it, like she was tending a disheveled child, and I pretended not to see the scolding look she gave me.
In no time at all, Mary taught Billie her way around the kitchen, and from then on they took turns making breakfast.
Breakfast was about the only meal we ever ate at home. Christ, we had it good in Chicago. We were loaded with dough and spending it hand over fist on restaurants and sharp clothes and good times galore.
It might be hard to believe that we could move around in public so freely without being recognized, but it’s the truth. Like I said before, most people don’t really look at others, and it’s even truer in a big city than in a burg. Only cops pay close attention to the faces around them—but then so did we. We all had pretty good antennas for detecting cops, and we almost always spotted them before they did us.
It was funny to have the police in three states searching for us, and all the while we were right in the heart of Chicago, having a swell time, us and our girls. Even Charley, the last of the bachelor holdouts, got himself a steady girlfriend, a singer he’d met in a lakeside club. He insisted we had to hear her sing, so one night the bunch of us went over to the club where she was working. And Charley was right, she was a really fine crooner, and very pretty. She was Mexican—her name was Corazón or Concepción, something like that, I don’t remember exactly because Charley had nicknamed her Tweetybird and then called her Tweet for short, and that’s what we all called her too. She had a beautiful complexion the color of caramel, and gleaming black hair she wore in a braid down to the small of her back. After her set, she joined us at the table, and the way she and Señor Charles looked at each other it was obvious that amor was in the making. Any woman who could appreciate Charley’s charms under his pudgy, middle-aged plainness was aces with us, but naturally that didn’t keep us from kidding him about robbing the cradle and asking her what kind of mickey he was using to make a doll like her fall for an old fatty like him and so forth. Tweet had a great sense of humor, however, and took the ribbing as well as Charley did. She had come to Chicago from Tucson, where her widowed mother and younger sister still lived, and she was the only woman in the bunch who had never set foot among outlaws before throwing in with us. When we met her, Charley had of course already told her who we were.
The next day, when it was only us guys having a drink together, he said he’d told Tweet the truth about himself on their second date. He was afraid she’d be shocked, scared, maybe go running to the nearest precinct station to rat him out. To the contrary, he said, she was—to use his word—enrapt.
A gentleman does not kiss and tell, he said, but I will say that the remainder of that evening proved most exhilarating.
I laughed and said It’s an old story, pal. Even the nicest girls can get all gooey about us gangster types.
That’s a fact, Charley said. A man can only wonder at the fearsome mysteries of the female heart.
Hell, Red said, even women don’t understand women.
Charley said some ancient sage once remarked that any woman on earth would willingly mate with the world’s bloodiest tyrant in hope of bearing a son strong enough to murder the father.
What the hell did that mean, Russell wanted to know.
Charley said he wasn’t exactly certain, but he didn’t for a moment doubt the truth of it.
It means they got a chip on their shoulder, John said. Broads are pissed-off because men can kick their ass and fuck them by force if that’s what it takes. The only way a broad can kick a man’s ass is if another guy does it for her, but then she’s got to fuck that guy, like it or not. They figure the only guy they can count on not to stick it to them is sonny-boy, so that’s who they try to use to get back at all the other men in the world.
A provocative thesis, Jonathan, Charley said. You should be lecturing in philosophy at Yale.
You mean jail, Russell said.
Charley ignored the wisecrack and said the weakness in John’s reasoning was that it didn’t allow for such aberrant sonny-boys as Oedipus. As I’m sure you gentlemen recall, he said, Oedipus slew his father and had highly improper relations with his mother.
Red said With his father’s mother? He fucked his grandma?
Charley gave him one of his reproving schoolmaster looks and Red laughed.
Russell said he’d always thought Oedipus was the French word for a guy who jazzed with his face. Eat-a-puss, he said. Get it?
Charley looked pained, but he’d asked for it with that as I’m sure you gentlemen recall remark. He rarely got high-hat about his education, but whenever he did we were quick to jump on him for it.
Oedipus sounds like some raggedy-ass foreigner just off the boat, John said. I wouldn’t put a thing past some wop named Oedipus.
Russell agreed. He was sure Oedipus was a mug who once worked for Capone.
I know the mug you mean, I said. Reggie Oedipus. Wrecking-ball Rex they called him. Was doing thirty-to-life in Joliet for stabbing his old man and jazzing his mom. He spent so much time in the hole it ruined his eyes.
That’s him, Russell said. Old Rex didn’t know the meaning of the word fear.
Come to think of it, Red said, there were only about a dozen words old Rex did know the meaning of.
Charley said a little learning was
a dangerous thing and most dismaying to behold. But he was laughing too.
Except for Copeland and Shouse, we usually all had supper together and then went dancing afterward. When we didn’t go to a club we’d go to the movies, or now and then to the prizefights, where we always got ringside seats.
The girls loved boxing as much as we did, and sometimes they got so worked up at a fight it was more fun watching them than the pugs in the ring. I mean, when they got blood in their eye the girls were something to see. They’d holler for the boxer they were pulling for to kill the other one. They’d shout Kill him, kill him!—only they didn’t say it like guys say it, they meant kill him. When they’d get spattered with the fighters’ blood they’d go even wilder. They howled like wolves when their guy was landing some good ones, and when he was getting the worst of it they’d turn the air blue with the profanity they used on the other guy. Tweet’s Latin blood sometimes got so steamed she’d cut loose in Spanish that didn’t need translating but surely would’ve made her momma’s ears burn. And Billie—oh man, sometimes she looked like she was ready to jump into the ring and scalp somebody. At the end of a great round, Mary would be panting like she’d been fighting, her eyes blazing with a furious thrill.
One time during a terrific middleweight fight, we were all on our feet and yelling like crazy, and Opal got so carried away, flailing with her big fists, that she accidentally clipped Russell on the side of the head and knocked him down into his seat, and a guy in the row behind us started counting over Russ like a referee.
The girls’ excitement, however, was why we didn’t go to the fights more often than we did. Their screaming and carrying on drew a lot of attention, and compared to a movie house a boxing arena is pretty well lit up. There was too much chance somebody in the crowd would recognize us and blow a whistle, and how do you make a fast getaway from a ringside row in a packed house?
As for Copeland and Shouse, none of us had seen either of them since the night at the Tiger’s Rag until one evening when Red and Patty ran into Shouse in the parking lot of a riverside club. He was driving a beat-up Model-T coupe with a missing front fender, and Red naturally asked him how come, a guy with his dough? Shouse said he’d bought a brand-new Lincoln the day after Greencastle, but inside a week he’d lost all the rest of his money at the gambling tables and had to sell the Lincoln and get a cheaper car. That was Shouse for you. He told Red he’d moved out of Copeland’s place and was now living with a girl near the university, and he gave Red her phone number in case we needed to reach him. He said Copeland had taken up with some bimbo who worked the box office at a girlie club.
Handsome Harry Page 20
