The Heavenly Table(33)
As soon as they had shaken hands on the deal, the farmer headed home with a new spring in his step, and Blackie began handing out tools and barking orders. He had all of his hopes pinned on the new army base; the way he saw it, Camp Pritchard was his last chance to turn things around. For the past several years, ever since he’d had a falling-out with the police chief in St. Louis and fled the city with a price on his head, he had traveled around the Midwest like a nomad with three girls and his bodyguard, Henry, selling * for peanuts and barely making enough to keep going. Now he was down to petty cash and a worn-out Hudson and his ruby ring. To think that he had once been the go-to man for a state rep from Missouri who had a predilection for mother-and-daughter combos, and had shared a bucket of cold oysters and a Swedish opera diva with an Iowa congressman. And everything that he’d worked ten years for ruined just because he was in a rotten mood one night and refused to contribute another dime to the weekend getaway the chief was building on a lake outside of town! The vagaries of life and fate. He had thought about that a lot lately; if only this, if only that. There were just too many ifs in the f*cking world. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work.
By that evening, most of the manure had been shoveled from the dirt floor of the pole barn and the weeds cut down. A fire pit had been dug out front and some logs placed around it to sit on. Three canvas tents had been set up in a row under the shed roof, and strings of Chinese lanterns hung between the termite-riddled support posts. The wagon was parked off to the side and the horses corralled behind it in an old rusty-wired pen that Virgil had built years ago to keep a pair of prize Angora nannies separated from his Nubian bucks during breeding season. Though they still had to dig a latrine and set up a bar, Blackie called it a night, satisfied with the progress they had made. Henry lit some kindling and put the coffee pot on, and the women walked down to the creek in their underwear to wash off before supper.
No sooner had they finished eating than Virgil Brandon returned wearing his false teeth and a clean shirt. He had consumed a dozen raw eggs over the past several hours, and had it in his head that he was going to ravage Esther all night long. He followed her to one of the tents swaggering a little, his chest puffed out. Everything was a blur after that. Lord Jesus, he had never experienced anything like it. His dentures had flown out of his mouth and bounced against the canvas wall when he shot his load. The big girl was like one of those newfangled milking machines that Carl Mendenhall was replacing all his help with, and he couldn’t have held back if his life depended on it. After she helped him put his teeth back in and get his pants back up, he stumbled out of the tent without a word and past the campfire, where the rest of them sat drinking coffee.
He was lying on his bed staring up at the dark ceiling when he remembered that Esther had nibbled on an apple core the entire sixty seconds he was on top of her. With an anguished groan, he rolled over and pulled the sheet up over his head. Jesus, what had he been thinking? A damn bushel of eggs wouldn’t have done him any good. Why, sometimes at night he could barely make it to the piss jar in the corner without having an accident. They were probably over there having a good laugh about him right now. Shamed in his own goat shed. For the first time since he’d buried his wife, he had to fight back tears. But after a while, he became aware of the fishy smell wafting up from his damp, gray crotch, and it was long after midnight before he finally quit imagining a different outcome the next time he walked over for his free piece, and drifted off to sleep.
The next morning Blackie handed Henry his last fifty dollars and sent him into town to find some musicians and a barrel of cheap whiskey. From his many years of peddling flesh, he had learned that music, combined with the right amount of liquor, often made men just as freehanded with their money as the women did, and he was determined to siphon off as much soldier pay as possible before somebody figured out that war was not the answer. “Go around and spread the word as best ye can,” he said. “Tell ’em we’ll be open for business tomorrow night.”
“What about the law?” Henry asked.
“Let’s make some money first. No sense talking to ’em with empty pockets.”
Several hours later, the bodyguard returned with a duo in the back of the wagon, an ancient, toothless banjo player and a shaggy-haired, barefoot boy with a harmonica. Though everything about them, from their puke-splattered rags to their bloodshot eyeballs, indicated a serious problem with alcohol, Henry hadn’t thought twice about bringing them back to the camp. He had never met anyone who played music for a living who wasn’t f*cked-up in some sad or depraved way, the same as those who painted pictures or wrote books or traipsed about spouting lines on a stage from the latest melodrama. In his opinion, only the truly miserable were really any good at artistic endeavors of any kind.
“Jesus, where did ye find these two?” Blackie asked, as he pulled a plug of tobacco from the pocket of his brocaded vest and bit a chew off.
“Some dive,” the bodyguard replied. Henry was built like a middleweight pugilist, with big hands and thick shoulders and a wide back. A Remington Model 1888 revolver hung from a leather holster around his waist and a little Stevens pocket pistol was strapped to his left calf. But even though his job sometimes required him to be brutal, Henry was by no means an unfeeling person. When he was a young man in Erie, Pennsylvania, he’d entertained ambitions of entering a religious order, but the old priest at his church, Father Hamilton, a man turned cynical and mean from years of being exiled to a land of lake-effect snow and sour wine and illiterate parishioners who smelled like cooked cabbage, had scoffed at such an idea. Instead, he had recommended the new steel mill that had just opened up. It had been a great disappointment, and the only way Henry was able to accept it was to remind himself that everything happened for a reason, which was something his grandfather used to say whenever things turned to shit. Of course, not knowing what else to do, he hired on, but two years later, walking home after finishing a twelve-hour shift in the furnaces, he came upon a man beating a mutt with a garden spade. Words were said, and one thing led to another; and as he tried to explain to his mother that night when he slipped in the back door to tell her goodbye, he’d had no choice. A bastard who would do such a thing to a poor, defenseless animal deserved to die, he hoped even God would understand that. By the time he met Blackie trying without success to build a fire under a railway trestle in the middle of Iowa during a cold rainstorm, he had been on the run for several years. Although the pimp had only one whore at the time, a pockmarked farm girl named Vera who he’d grown up with in Nebraska, he claimed, with an air of confidence that belied his cheap suit and rundown shoes, that he was on his way to St. Louis to make his fortune. Within a couple of minutes, Henry had the fire lit and was sharing his last can of stew with them. “You religious?” Blackie had asked, pointing at the small wooden cross that hung from the stranger’s neck. “Not really,” Henry said. He’d stopped going to Mass right after the old priest consigned him to the steel mill. “My mother give it to me the last time I saw her.” “Good,” the pimp had said. “I could use a man like you.” They had been together ever since, had seen a hundred girls like Vera come and go over the years.