Memphis Luck

by Gerald Duff

  “Stay right there, buddy,” J.W. said. “See can you think about where you went wrong in your life the very first time you can call up. I’ll get right back to you, and you can tell me when it was.”

  As J.W. walked away, he could hear the limo driver beginning to tell his story of woe about being nothing but a working man doing a job. The breath was whistling back into the man Tyrone had facedown on the lush Bermuda of the yard as J.W. walked up. As soon as he drew in a good lungful, the man would start talking, J.W. knew, if he truly was Ronnie Katz, and he’d be protesting his treatment and threatening dire consequences for anybody near him.

  It is born and bred in any man that ends up being a lawyer, J.W. mused as he stirred the figure before him on the ground in the side with the tip of his shoe, just like a suck-egg dog will rob every hen’s nest it can find, no matter how much you whip him off of it and try to break him of the habit. He is natural to it, and it to him.

  “I had a dog one time, a red-bone hound,” J.W. announced, “down in Panola County, Mississippi, when I was a kid. And he would suck every free-range egg he could find on the place, and let me tell you, he could find them all.”

  “Is that right?” Tyrone Walker said, getting a good purchase on the cuffs he had fastened on the man on the ground and beginning to pull him to his knees, assisting him in the effort to rise by tugging strongly at the man’s coat collar from behind, as well.

  “I’m not going to ask how that observation is relevant to the situation, Sergeant Ragsdale,” Tyrone said, “since I expect you’re not going to need any encouragement to tell me.”

  “Thing of it was,” J.W. said, reaching out to help get the cuffed man stood up and pointed in the right direction, “I had the idea one day to break him of the habit, that dog name of Bobo, by busting open a egg before he got to it and pouring about half a bottle of Tabasco sauce in it. Setting up a surprise for him, see.”

  “Did you get that done?” Tyrone said, and then speaking to the man in front of him, “Come over here in the light so I can see your pretty face.”

  “I did, and Bobo found it, and he ate it, and you know what?” J.W. said. “He wasn’t even fazed. Didn’t turn a hair. He liked it, see, but that kind of backfired on him on down the road.”

  “How’s that?” Tyrone said. “Damn, Ronnie,” he went on. “You look terrible. You lost too much weight, son. What you been eating?”

  “Yeah,” J.W. said. “Bobo was never satisfied with a plain old raw egg ever again. If it didn’t have that zing, he didn’t want it, from then on. Got so damn discouraged with the quality of them Panola County eggs, Bobo just stopped eating them. He decided they wasn’t worth the trouble no more. It was kind of pitiful to watch him run up on one and then just kind of turn away from it.”

  The man Tyrone Walker had stood up in the reflection from a streetlight still hadn’t spoken, his head thrown back as though he was exhausted from a burst of physical activity that had left him drained and in need of some deep breathing. He coughed twice and broke into a sob.

  “Evening, Counselor,” J.W. said. “I know you done met Sergeant Walker, but let me introduce you formally, give y’all a chance to talk about life in the islands, you know, shoot the breeze a little, get acquainted.”

  “Belize is not an island, Sergeant Ragsdale,” Tyrone said. “You don’t actually think Ronald Q. Katz would be so conventional as to run off to a Caribbean hideaway, do you? He wouldn’t do that. It’s much too usual, and Lord, the price of real estate on a tropic isle. Just prohibitive.”

  “I do believe Mr. Katz, Esquire, has learned the same lesson old Bobo Hound did,” J.W. said, “back down yonder in Panola County. He seems to have stopped doing what he always loved to do before. It’s lost its suption.”

  “How’s that?” Tyrone said.

  “He ain’t made a peep. He ain’t said a word, and we been standing here in the yard probably two or three minutes. Back in the old days, Ronnie would’ve said four or five paragraphs by now. He would’ve done got out a writ on your ass, Sergeant Walker, for knocking him down on that old wet grass and getting his pants all muddy and stained up.”

  “Sergeant Ragsdale,” Tyrone said in an earnest voice, “I do believe Ronnie Katz has seen the error of his ways and has come back to Memphis to atone. He is prepared to submit himself to the due processes of the justice system of the great state of Tennessee. Do not misjudge this man.”

  “I do expect you’re right, Tyrone,” J.W. said. “He’s learned his lesson, and as soon as he stops blubbering, I think he’s going to request to talk to counsel. Let’s give him a ride downtown and get every thing all cranked up and good to go.”

  “They’ve turned lights on in the big house, I see,” Tyrone Walker said. “You want to transport him and the limo driver together?”

  “You go on with Ronnie,” J.W. said. “I’ll wait for a squad car to get here and pick me and the driver up.”

  Then addressing Ronnie Katz, by now in an advanced state of tears and moaning, “Good seeing you this evening, Counselor. Isn’t this a wonderful time of the year to be coming home to Memphis again? Lord, just smell that Mississippi River funk.”

  Tyrone began to direct his seized felon toward the car, and J.W. called after him. “One thing I want to know, Tyrone,” he said. “How come you get all the easy ones like old running Ronnie here and I get the poor old dead ladies like Miss Beulahdene?”

  “The ones I get ain’t easy, J.W.,” Tyrone said. “I just make them look that way.”

  “Oh, that’s it, huh?” J.W. said. “I knew it was something scientific.”

  NINE

  J.W.

  Six a.m., Ronnie Katz in custody, and he should be in bed, J.W. knew, trying to get a little sleep before showing up at the Midtown station again sometime before noon, but he still felt wound a turn too tight to face heading for the rent house on Tutwiler. He’d likely toss around for an hour before passing out in bed, and he’d dream crazy shit that would leave him grumpy all day.

  Turning the car left on East Parkway instead, he headed toward the Jewel Box out toward the airport, a drinking establishment known for being either the latest place you could get a drink at the end of a long night or the earliest place you could find one at the beginning of a new day.

  Three or four cars were parked in front of the building, leftovers of the evening just completed, and two pickup trucks loaded with ladders, cans of paint, and tarps were pulled in at the side, early birds of the day just dawning.

  A house painter had to maintain a certain level of alcohol in his blood to be able to function, J.W. considered as he alighted from his Buick, and every painter he’d ever known paid due attention to that professional fact of life. Maybe it was some kind of chemical need the body was required to satisfy, J.W. thought as he marched up to the bar and took a seat. Probably all the reagents and dyes in paints get into a painter’s brain and spleen and liver and all those other innards, and set up an imbalance only alcohol can counteract.

  Maybe scientists were working away right here in Memphis, maybe out at the Schering Plough Laboratories or Buckman Chemicals, trying to figure out why every house painter in the MidSouth and beyond was either a damned old drunk or doing his best to achieve that calling. Were women ever house painters, J.W. wondered and decided not, since he had never seen one up on the side of a building swabbing away.

  “You can’t blame a painter for doing what his body system makes him have to do,” J.W. said to the bartender before him, who was taking a deep drag on an unfiltered cigarette. “You can’t judge him, and you can’t hold him responsible.”

  “I don’t hold nobody responsible for nothing,” the bartender said. “What can I get you, friend?”

  “Heaven Hill and water back,” J.W. said. “I like that attitude you just expressed, too. I flat out tell you I do.”

  “Why, thank you,” the bartender said, stubbing out his cigarette and going to his pocket for another one. “I do make one exception to that rule,
though, I got to say.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I do judge the tobacco companies, Philip Morris in particular. Them fuckers have give me cancer.”

  “Well, an exception proves the rule,” J.W. said. “Nothing wrong with that. Make that Heaven Hill a double.”

  Two seats down the bar, one of the painters from one of the pickups outside was taking his medicine and trying to get the attention of a woman seated at the corner to his left. J.W. could see from her reflection in the mirror above the bar of the Jewel Box that the woman was past being drunk, and had entered the stage where she had consumed enough alcohol to make herself sober, a stage which would last up to a half hour provided she kept drinking. If she stopped suddenly now, took her foot off a steady pressure on the accelerator and touched the brake, she’d fly right through the windshield, seat belt fastened or not.

  “We could go get some coffee at my place,” the painter was saying, “but it’s way out in Whitehaven, and my kids is all there asleep. I got the custody of every last one of them, and I just love them to death.”

  I have got to get that Heaven Hill stuck in front of me quick, J.W. said to himself, suck it up fast, and get the hell out of the Jewel Box and go home. Where is that cancer-stricken bartender?

  “I know I’m the one that smoked the cigarettes,” the bartender said, placing two glasses before J.W. “I ain’t quarreling with that fact. I lit them, and I sucked in the smoke from ever one of them, I grant anybody that. But I didn’t make the damn things taste so good and put them in a pretty package for people to buy. No sir. That part of it wasn’t me.”

  “Or,” the painter down the bar was saying to the woman currently stuck in the intermediate zone of fully-achieved drunkenness, “or we could go get some of that coffee out of that thermos in my truck. Sit out there for a while. That’s a workable option.”

  Doing her part, the woman took another strong sip from her drink, the bartender leaned in closer to J.W., waiting for a response to his judgment on Philip Morris, the painter turned to look in the direction of the two men to his right, his tongue jammed in his cheek as he pondered the next thing he might say to get the woman to join him in the promised land of morning coffee in the cab of a pickup, and J.W. shifted on his bar stool.

  “Tell you what, buddy,” J.W. said to the bartender, “here’s your money for the Heaven Hill, but I want you to give it to that lady down yonder.”

  “You don’t want your double H.H.?”

  “You don’t want your cigarette?” J.W. said, and then looking down the bar at the woman at its corner, called to her, “Sugar, just keep drinking your whiskey. Leave that old coffee alone.”

  “What you looking at?” the painter said. “Who you talking to?”

  “I ain’t looking at nothing,” J.W. said, heading for the door out of the Jewel Box. “And I ain’t talking to nobody. All I’m saying is hello and good morning, Memphis, Tennessee.”

  TEN

  Jimbo Reynolds

  Like most opportunities in life, Jimbo Reynolds considered as he watched them piling into the rows of seats in the auditorium before him, playing to a crowd of school kids is double-edged. There is an upside, and there is a downside. There is good to be gleaned and advantage to be taken, and there is a poison-hard chunk of inertia to be overcome to get the sorry little suckers to listen.

  The invitation to him as Ranch Foreman of the Sun-Up Ministry of the Big Corral to make a presentation at the weekly assembly of all students in Central High School of Memphis came as a double-edged opportunity. Don Condon had arranged it, of course, as part of his PR campaign of service outreach for the Sunrise Ministry. The publicity is free, Don had pointed out, coming out of such pro bono gestures, but the space in the newspaper is just as big as if you had paid top dollar for it.

  “It can’t be a chapel service,” Dennis Ryan, the vice principal of the high school had told Jimbo. “I hope you understand and appreciate that fact, Mr. Reynolds. We are a public institution, and we revere the separation of church and state. And we honor that constitutional imperative at Memphis Central High School.”

  “Call me Jimbo,” Jimbo said. “And let me tell you, Dr. Ryan, you ain’t going to find a cowboy anywhere who’s more of a believer in the constitution of the United States than the old boy talking to you right now. If you were to ask me to preach the gospel to these young’uns in a public school setting, I’d just walk off with my fists balled up. I wouldn’t say a word back to you, except so long.”

  “That’s reassuring,” the vice principal said. “There is some reluctance in segments of our faculty and staff about the matter, as you might well imagine. It’s been hotly debated in some quarters.”

  “I know that, Doctor,” Jimbo said. “I praise the vigilance of the standard bearers in your faculty. But what I’ll do at your assembly of these young students will cause no problems for you. I just want to talk about the West, what it means as a symbol and a reality in our great nation.

  And the way I’ll end up, after evoking all them truths from the way of the cowboy is this. Just picture it. Our president, the leader of the free world, given a few hours to relax after the burdens of all he’s got to handle, and what does he do? Why, he puts on his old work clothes, sturdy jeans and rough old cowpuncher boots, and he picks up an axe, and he attacks that scrub cedar which will spring up and ruin a man’s pasture land. And he does it with energy and force and determination, getting all sweaty and dirty, and he goes about it in the cowboy ways just as he does back in the oval office when he’s figuring out how to combat the efforts of terrorists to pop up and ruin our country and our way of life.

  “That sounds good,” Vice Principal Ryan said. “I believe that’ll work. It promises to be most acceptable.”

  Now the tumble of one kid over another one, the scrape of footwear against the floor, the hammer of auditorium seats being banged down, the squeals and shouts and groans of teenagers being forced to move from one place to another, the overall sound of the grunt and grab-ass and hoot of the young – all the menagerie of moan – began to subside, and Jimbo Reynolds made his first studied and choreographed move, thinking I hope Don Condon is taking good notes on that yellow pad he carries everywhere with him.

  Standing up from the hay bale on which he’d been leaning – Jimbo had had to bring that prop with him and promise to take it away when he left the premises. Jimbo Reynolds stretched his arms out at length, yawned big, took off his Stetson and fanned it back and forth a couple of beats as though to get a little breeze moving, and then he turned his back to the assembly of Central High School and looked up at the ceiling area of the rear of the auditorium as if aware of something of great interest and moment residing there.

  He held that pose for fully half a minute, acutely aware that the focus of the crowd’s attention was closing to a fine bead on the back of his head. Let it build, he told himself, let it build. But don’t let it boil over, don’t let it move beyond that magic moment of maximum concentration. You’ll know it when it’s there, and you’ll know when it’s fixing to get away from you, and you know that your knowing is the measure of your being a salesman who can forevermore close the hell of the deal.

  Almost, almost, hold it, hold it. Let it sizzle. Now, bust it wide open.

  “Partners,” Jimbo said, swinging around almost lazily as he pivoted on the heel of his left boot to face the audience, and seeing all those heads and all those faces and all those eyes turned in calibrated perfection settled precisely on him.

  “Partners, sometimes out on the trail, out on the range at the end of a day of doing my job, I look up at the sky, and I see things.”

  I’m on the upside, Jimbo said softly to that part of his brain which judged his actions and his affect and which did it truly and did not lie, I’m here. Use it. Use it hard.

  “I see things other folks don’t seem to. They tell me I’m wrong, some of them do, the weaklings, the ones whose life is nothing more than that of the cattle I have i
n my care. Cattle eat, they water, they doze. They eat, they water, they doze. And finally, they die.

  “They die, all right. They die if you can call eating and watering and dozing being alive.

  “I don’t. No, I call that the way of cattle, I call that being a piece of meat waiting to be cut up, fried over a fire, and consumed as fuel.”

  Some kid near the front of the audience tried to laugh at that, hoping for a reaction, but none came, and his cackle cut off as though somebody had just jerked hard on a rope around his neck.

  “What I call life is not that. What a wrangler knows to be real is not what a steer or a bull or a heifer or a calf can ever know. How could they? They’re meat, moving around.

  “I call life being able to see what’s not there and knowing that’s the real thing, that’s the truth, that’s the miracle. What comes out of what’s nothing to cattle is what’s real to a cowboy. If you don’t know that, all you’re doing is eating and watering and dozing as you creep toward a lonely death. And, partners, that don’t mean nothing.”

  Out in the audience of Central High School students, a third of the way from the rear of the auditorium near the middle of the row of seats in which they sat, Antwan leaned over to speak into Randall Eugene McNeill’s ear.

  “What that fool talking about, Do Run Run?” he said. “What’s he saying?”

  Randall Eugene shook his head once quickly, as though to discourage something trying to light on his face, and leaned forward in his seat. A prickle of heat had started up in his head, at a point just below the hairline, and he could tell if he positioned himself at just the right angle, the heat might grow, might spread out and up from its location, and that if it did, it might be able to come near the place where that chunk of ice had settled in as though to fasten itself securely in his head and stay forever.