The Listener

by Robert McCammon

  The streets were quiet as evening came on. Most of the meager little downtown area had closed up except for a barbershop on the next block. The cicadas of early August were shrilling in the trees, the air still and humid. As John Partlow approached the barbershop and its spill of light upon the sidewalk he saw taped to the front window a poster for Honeycutt’s extravaganza. It bore a rather crude drawing of Cupid about to let fly an arrow into a Valentine’s Day heart. Above the drawing was the statement of subject matter as Hilda Nevins had already told him: A Better Understanding Of The Facts Of Life. Below the drawing was printed A Lecture Given By Dr. William Honeycutt With His Able Assistant Ginger LaFrance, No Man Should Miss It. Then at the very bottom, stamped in red by the same kind of portable rubber stamping device that he himself knew so well was Eight O’Clock, Thursday August 2nd, Elks Lodge Auditorium, Admission Twenty-Five Cents.

  John Partlow allowed himself a faint smile. His Able Assistant, Ginger LaFrance. Yes, that would bring the farmboys in from miles around. But twenty-five cents? Damn, they thought highly of themselves!

  He walked on south toward the Stonefield Cafe and found it housed inside an old red caboose sitting alongside railroad tracks that cut across the center of town. He pushed in through the batwing doors past the sign that said Whites Only, settled himself in a booth on a hard slab of a wooden seat, and studied a chalkboard on the wall to decide between the main dishes of fried chicken, chicken-fried steak and something called Minnie’s Meatloaf. His arrival brought forth a few curious glances from the six men and two women who were already being served by a chunky, curly-haired waitress, but they were used to seeing travelling salesmen even though his white suit and straw fedora marked him as a cut above the usual.

  He took off his hat, ordered the fifty-cent special—fried chicken, black-eyed peas, collard greens, a piece of cornbread and a glass of iced-tea (“as sweet as you can make it, darlin’,” he said to the waitress)—and found himself looking at his own reflection in a mirror that hung behind the counter.

  He had realized several weeks ago that he’d done a rash thing by returning to the Edson place. The action had meant he’d lost an entire county to operate in. If the Edson woman had gone to the law, they might be looking for him thereabouts and they would know his car right off. So scratch that whole county off the list, and to hell with it. Then, toward the middle of July, he’d gotten rough treatment that had cemented his decision to find new territory. When he’d driven to the farmhouse of a recently deceased man in Burleson County and presented the Golden Edition Bible ordered by old dead Jonah, he had received the business end of a shotgun pointed in his face by a wizened widow who informed him that he must be a damned flimflam man because she’d already bought the Angel-Touched Good Book Jonah had made out to her from the Sacred Heart Bible Company of Houston.

  So…with everything to consider, it was time for him to pack up his operation and move.

  East or west? A coin flip determined it. Hello, Shreveport and the Dixie Garden Hotel.

  As he ate his supper, he kept checking the clock on the wall next to the mirror. One more glass of sweet iced-tea and a cigarette or two, and then…maybe it would be interesting to take a little stroll around town, what there was of it.

  When he asked the waitress where the Elks Lodge was, she gave him a knowing look that made him want to slap her so hard her big front teeth would shatter. The place was just over on the next block to the east, she said, past a small park and the statue of the local Confederate hero Samuel Petrie Blankenship, whose eyes—she was proud to say—wept bloody tears whenever a nigger walked past.

  He told the waitress to inform Ollie that he was staying with the Nevins, and therefore did get a dime taken off his bill. He left the dime for the waitress in a wet puddle on the table where he’d spilled out a little tea, and then he put his hat on, straightened his tie and stood up. He felt the floor trembling under his shoes and heard the wail of an airhorn that shook the windows in their frames. As he went through the batwing doors the freight train that was rumbling through the town in a clattering caterwaul of thunks, bellrings, whistleblows, hisses and metallic clanks was just passing the cafe, stirring up whirlwinds of dust and grit that danced back and forth along the street. A few dogs chased the engine with their teeth bared and their barking swallowed up by the cacophony.

  In the train’s wake, John Partlow brushed away a few specks of grit that had settled upon his lapels and aimed his chin in the direction of the Elks Lodge.

  The moment he entered the brownstone building on Fourth Street he was struck by the sight of a blonde woman sitting behind a table next to what he assumed was the door to the auditorium. She was selling tickets and putting the money in a cigar box, and taped to the white cloth that draped the table were several of the Honeycutt Facts Of Life posters. She had a knot of five men of various shapes, sizes and ages before her in the process of spending their hard-earned coins for a little racy education. What struck John Partlow about the scene was that the woman wore a white long-sleeved hospital coat buttoned up to the neck, the demurity of which did not exactly match the amount of thick makeup on her face and the slash of crimson lipstick across her mouth. Indeed, she appeared to be wearing a doll-like mask that allowed absolutely no expression, which intrigued John Partlow because the idea of hiding one’s true self—or one’s true face—was never far from his motivations. He put himself behind the gaggle of local men. They talked and laughed too loud and jerked with nervous anticipation before the woman’s cool gaze, as if she were a female from a far distant and more worldly world, which of course she was. When John Partlow reached her his first glance was into the cigar box to see how the team was doing tonight, and it appeared from his quick estimation that they’d sold between twenty-five and thirty tickets.

  “My, my,” he said, and he looked into the woman’s eyes.

  They were the color of champagne, he thought. Just that suddenly he felt as though he’d downed a glassful of the bubbly—or several, enough to make his head spin. The champagne-colored eyes, which were a little almond-shaped like those of a feline, seemed to scan him up and down. No expression registered on her face. She had a pug nose, a broad mouth and a forehead that was an inch too high and a chin that was an inch too wide; she was no raving beauty, but in her own way she was to John Partlow very—and maybe disturbingly—attractive. There was something in her face both sophisticated and crude. He thought that she was champagne at the top and rot-gut down deep. Hiding her real self from the world, just as he did. Her hair, obviously dyed blonde because dark brown was showing at the roots, was a mass of curls at the front and pulled back tight along the skull with black-and-red lacquered combs. He inhaled a whiff of her perfume, which smelled to him of a sweetly-musky and beguiling scent that he could only describe as charred roses.

  Neither one of them spoke for a few seconds. Finally he gave a crooked grin and said, “What’re you lookin’ at?”

  “A little too much sugar for a dime,” she answered, again with no expression. She had a Southern accent, but it was high-brow. It was from the mistress of the plantation rather than from the backwoods Bertha. Her eyes narrowed just a fraction as her gaze moved across the praying hands tieclip, the pleated white shirt and the vanilla-cream suit coat. “What’re you dressed up so pearly for?”

  “For you,” he said, regaining his balance on this slippery dancefloor. “I wouldn’t want to hear all about the facts of life dressed like a tramp, would I?”

  Her face remained immobile. “A quarter gets you in, same as the tramps.” She tapped the edge of the cigar box with a forefinger, the polished nail glistening blood-red.

  “I am from Shreveport, stayin’ with the Nevins.”

  “Good for you. No free rides, pearly.” Her gaze shifted from him because two more men, both of them farmers in their best overalls, had just entered the Elks Lodge. She dismissed him with, “In or out, as you please.”

  A little piece of coal had begun to heat up in Jo
hn Partlow’s stove; he was not used to being dismissed, surely not by a bleached-blonde thirtyish housewife who thought herself such a smooth piece of leather. Ordinarily he might have shrugged his shoulders and turned on his heel, but this setup interested him from a professional point-of-view. He dropped a quarter into the box and took the ticket she offered. Then he walked on into the auditorium and left her smiling silkily at the rubes.

  It wasn’t a large auditorium, maybe room for fifty people on wooden church-pew seats facing a stage shrouded by wine-red curtains. Glass globes at the ceiling lit up the place with a slightly yellowish hue. Just above the stage, fixed to the wall, was the cast-iron head of an huge-antlered elk blackened by time. A fog of cigarette smoke was already rising to the roof, its ascent bothered only marginally by a single fan that sought vainly to clear the air. John Partlow saw that indeed he was the twenty-seventh attendee to this gathering of overalls, bowties and snuffboxes, and including the two farmers who’d come in behind him that would be seven dollars and twenty-five cents, which was a pretty paltry haul in anybody’s racket.

  He figured there had to be more to this than met the eye. He sat down over on the left side where there were only four other men. He took off his hat, placed it beside him on the pew, and waited for the show to begin.

  Five more men drifted in, bringing the audience count up to thirty four. About fifteen minutes after John Partlow had taken his seat, the blonde huckster in her white hospital coat walked down the aisle without looking to right nor left but with a slow and enticing roll of her ample hips. She went through a door on the right side of the stage. Then everybody sat and waited some more while the cigarettes burned down, tobacco was spit into tin cans or inhaled from snuffboxes, and one of the older men had a coughing fit that sounded like his lungs were clogged with Louisiana mud.

  Without fanfare the curtains were opened. A few men clapped with anticipation and John Partlow looked around at the grinning faces and wished them all dead.

  Blondie stood at center stage behind a podium. A haze of cigarette smoke drifted around her. On her right was a table with a cardboard box atop it, and on her left was a small blackboard on wheels. She was holding an honest-to-God pointer, the kind a grade school teacher would use to show the dumbfool students how two and two made four and how “cat” wasn’t spelled with a “k”. Except John Partlow thought that the way she held it and looked at the audience with a little curl to her upper lip said she wished it were a bullwhip. Abruptly her face altered itself into a smile, which John Partlow noted did not exactly register in the cautious eyes. She said, “Good evenin’, gentlemen,” and a third of the audience good-eveninged her back with a couple of them hollering out their “howdies” that sounded liquor-laced. “We’re waitin’ for Doctor Honeycutt,” she announced. “He should be here any minute.”

  “We don’t need no doctor in this house!” somebody shouted, followed by a burst of nervous laughter.

  John Partlow folded his hands in his lap. This was going to be an interesting entertainment for a summer’s eve, and totally unexpected in a rube berg like this.

  “Dance for us, darlin’!” urged a black-bearded and overall-wearing man who sat two rows in front of the visitor from Shreveport.

  “Oh, I don’t dance for strangers,” she answered, keeping her smile fixed in place. “But…I imagine we’ll all be good friends by the end of the doctor’s lecture. In the meantime, I ought to make myself more comfortable.” Then, moving as smoothly as a snake through wet grass, she came out from behind the podium and unbuttoned her prim hospital coat. The sight of the flame-red dress underneath it caused all chuckling and jibes in the audience to immediately cease. She took the coat off, folded it and put it on the table beside the cardboard box, and John Partlow wondered how it was that a woman could pour herself into a dress. The coat’s stiff starch had hidden Blondie’s curves, which were breathtakingly dramatic. Up on the stage now stood a red-hot sexbomb, who used her hands to smooth the dress and so slowly moved along the fleshy territory it barely concealed. In an instant the ownership of the Elks Lodge auditorium changed from its audience to the woman onstage, and in the silence that ensued the smoky air was heavy with what John Partlow could only describe as wanton desire coupled with a little plain shock. He doubted the local wives and womenfolk in this town had ever dared to show so much leg and breast in public. But here was the dish, all dished out.

  She’s got them, he thought. Nobody would be asking for their money back now, no matter what.

  “Here’s our Doctor Honeycutt!” she said brightly, but there was a grind of hard grit in her voice.

  The man who advanced along the center aisle was staggering more than walking; he was two sheets to the wind, and John Partlow watched with increasing amusement as the silver-bearded so-called doctor in his gray suit, vest and black bowtie stumbled over his own two-tone shoes. The inebriated educator of the evening went to the door on the right side and had as much trouble with the handle as if it had been a live catfish coated in motor oil.

  “Come on up, Doctor!” Blondie urged, and now it really did sound as if her teeth were clenched. “Just open the door and come right on up! Pardon the doc, y’all,” she told the audience. “He just got out of a major operation, had to drain the fluid out of a whiskey bottle.” That brought a few chuckles. She pressed on: “Kinda looks like he might’ve got the cork stuck up his ass, too. William, honey? Just turn that little ol’ handle like you’re bendin’ your elbow for another snort! Come on now, do it for Ginger!”

  Somebody stood up to help the doc, but then Honeycutt by trial-and- error got the door open and started through. He turned to give a theatrical bow to the onlookers who were enjoying this spectacle as much as a hound dog enjoyed a coon hunt, and John Partlow recognized the man for what he was: a broken-down ruin of the sharpie he’d likely been in his youth forty years ago, maybe a flimflammer with some acting experience and stage presence because even shit-faced he wore his costume and his bard’s beard well. John Partlow mused that it was the ultimate fate of all confidence men: the loss of wit and quickness, the slide into a bottle because only there the Big Dream lived on, and without the Big Dream the confidence man had nothing to live for. It looked to John Partlow as if Doc Honeycutt’s days were fast running out, because this Facts Of Life lecture idea was as broken-down as the man.

  Still…he thought that Ginger LaFrance had potential. She knew what she was doing, how to use her body to command attention, and he imagined that she’d been Honeycutt’s valuable commodity for a long time…long enough, it seemed, for her to get sick and tired of him.

  Honeycutt was on stage now, pulling himself up to his full height though it appeared his legs wanted to sag out from under him. His full head of gray hair needed combing and the wild weeds of his eyebrows needed mowing. He nodded at Ginger as he took his place behind the podium, she gave him the pointer and sashayed over to the blackboard, and Honeycutt addressed the assembly in a voice slurred by devil whiskey but still strong enough to boom amid the rafters: “Gentlemen! You intelligent and brave men of—” There was a little pause here, as it seemed he’d forgotten where they were. “—Stonefield!” he went on. “I say intelligent because you are here wishing to gain more knowledge of the facts of life, and brave because you are here likely in spite of forces that may have tried to detain you! Yet with the knowledge you will gain here, you may bravely return to your homes and—may I say—earn the everlasting gratitude of your wives for having come here this evening! In truth you will thrill your wives with renewed vigor and performance, and if twenty-five pennies seemed a great expense to some of you tonight, rest assured you will leave here feeling as enriched as kings, which you will certainly be to your wives in your bedrooms forever more. Now let us first of all…” He seemed to blank out again for a few seconds; his mouth moved but made no noise and a shine of panic jumped into his eyes. Then he caught up to himself again and the moment of distress passed. He said, “Let us show our appreciation to
my lovely assistant Miss Ginger LaFrance, and I’m sure you boys would like to give her a nice big hand.”

  John Partlow joined in the applause, but much of it was for Honeycutt’s performance. Even as high as a kite, the old doc was still able to stick to his spiel. Likely he’d spilled it so often on stage to rubes like these that every phrase and pause came out on automatic. After the applause the real show began, and John Partlow watched with professional interest as the two grifters went to work. The show consisted of Honeycutt blathering on about “marital practices” in high-falutin’ lingo while Ginger took the low road and with yellow chalk drew dirty pictures on the blackboard. Honeycutt’s exposition was only so much noise to the depictions of penis, breasts and vagina that the woman sketched out, erased and then drew again with rather tantalizing movements of her hips. John Partlow noted that every new drawing made the penis and ladybumpers larger and the vagina more accommodating, and the abject silence from the house of yokels made it clear her messages were hitting below the belts. This went on for maybe twenty fascinating minutes. The doctor’s delivery stalled several times and he seemed to have gone mingo but the woman played it easy and in four or five seconds the doc drifted back to where he’d left off. Then Doc Honeycutt shifted gears and started the real low-down, which involved painting a mental picture of what went on in Tijuana, Mexico, with the help of the Spanish Fly you could buy from the sex doctors in that notorious town while Ginger drew increasingly larger and more rampant members on the blackboard.