The Heavenly Table(35)
“Shut the hell up, Matilda,” the bodyguard said. “This don’t concern you.”
“Oh, yes, it does,” she said. “You lured that poor old man out here with the promise of work, and then you turn around and treat him like that? It ain’t fair, is it, girls?”
Emboldened by the prostitute’s sympathetic remarks, Johnny decided to resist. First he dug his heels into the ground, then tried to jerk out of Henry’s grasp. When that didn’t work, he swung the banjo around and clipped the end of the bodyguard’s nose with it. A loud twang reverberated through the air.
“Oh, shit,” Esther said, a cigarette dangling from her chapped lips. “That’s probably the last song that ol’ coot will ever play.” She was wrapped in a thin Oriental robe and had a thick layer of pancake makeup spread over her face like putty. Her corpulence had gone down in value lately, as thinner bodies became more and more the vogue among the younger clients, so nowadays Blackie advertised her in much the same way a diner did their blue plate special, in that, though it wasn’t the best fare on the menu, it was by far the cheapest and would satisfy any hunger if you ate enough of it. A long column of gray ash dropped from the end of her smoke into the damp crevasse between her two sagging breasts.
His eyes now bulging with rage, the bodyguard snatched the banjo out of the old man’s hands and beat him with it about the head like a flyswatter until it lay scattered on the ground in a dozen broken pieces. By the time he finished, Johnny was sobbing like a baby. Disgusted, Henry tossed him into the back of the wagon, then climbed back up on the seat. Eddie wondered if he should try to blow a little tune to help calm the situation, then decided against it. One wrong note and the big man was liable to murder them both. Instead, he reached over and tenderly patted the top of his partner’s bloody scalp.
“I can’t stand watching this,” Matilda said. She stood up and began walking toward the creek.
Ignoring the commotion around her, Peaches, the third and by far the most striking of Blackie’s offerings, with her long bleached-blond hair and ability to speak certain words in French, said to Esther, “I remember this one house I worked in up in Chicago. They had a regular orchestra. Played every night in tuxedos. I slept in a bed with silk sheets, had a colored girl named Lucy woke me up every afternoon with a breakfast tray and a little vase of flowers.” She took a sip of her coffee and swiped at a fly buzzing around her face. “Now look at me. Three-dollar screws in a pup tent. In Michigan, no less. Sometimes I wake up and wonder what the hell ever happened.”
“You’re in Ohio,” Esther told her.
“Oh, Jesus,” Peaches said. “And I thought it couldn’t get any worse. I swore to God I’d never step foot in this state again after that week I spent in Akron with the rubber man.”
“You know,” Esther said, as she watched the wagon turn out onto the main road, “they really didn’t sound that bad to me.”
19
AFTER THEIR SECOND robbery, a bungled affair in Danville, Georgia, in which Cane’s pistol went off accidently as they fled out the bank door with six hundred dollars, and Cob fell off his horse as they galloped out of town, it was decided that, if they were going to survive, they needed to spend some time focused on marksmanship and staying in the saddle. That same night they broke into a hardware store in a nearby hamlet and stole three Springfield rifles and five Smith & Wesson Schofield pistols and several cases of ammunition, along with enough pork and beans and oyster crackers and chocolate bars to last them a week. They rode deep into the hills the next morning and set up camp in an isolated valley rimmed with limestone outcroppings and dotted with patches of lush green grass.
Over the next several days, they went through over a thousand rounds of ammunition and burned out the barrels on two of the pistols. If it hadn’t been for Cob’s idea of sticking chewed-up wads of licorice in their ears, prompted by memories of Pearl and his efforts to regain the Great Silence, the repetitive blasts would have probably destroyed their hearing, as well. Though Chimney turned out to be by far the best shot—able to knock the head off a crow with the Springfield at a hundred yards after only a couple of hours of practice—Cane, and occasionally even Cob, were soon blowing tin cans and ground squirrels into the air at a respectable fifty. Getting the hang of shooting and reloading on horseback at anything faster than a walk proved more daunting, and Cob nearly broke his neck several times before he was allowed to quit. Still, by the time they broke open the last box of bullets, Cane and Chimney felt confident that they could hold their own in a fight.
They were packing up, getting ready to ride out of the valley, when they heard the buzzing sound. “There it is,” Chimney said, pointing at what looked like a giant mosquito high up in the sky coming toward them. As it got closer, the airplane began to descend, and by the time it passed over them, it was close enough that they could make out two goggled men inside. They saw the one in the seat behind the cockpit lean out a little and look down at them. Cob raised his hand and waved. “I bet there’s one of them carnivals or county fairs goin’ on around here somewhere,” he said. “I wish we could go.”
At the other end of the valley, the plane turned and began to circle back. The pilot, Reese Montgomery, was a golden-haired playboy who had spent the last two years traveling around the country spending his tycoon father’s money like water and looking for adventure and unique items of interest. Three months ago, he had leased a private coach from the B&O for himself and his butler and cook, and another rail car to carry two of his latest acquisitions: a German-built Fokker two-seater biplane he found on the Brownsville black market, and the Eau Claire County Nut Cracker, a burly cage-fighter raised in the Wisconsin logging camps who had recently gained a certain notoriety for castrating several of his opponents with his teeth. Also traveling in the second car was Arnold Whistler, the playboy’s mechanic and go-to man in an emergency. A former maintenance supervisor at one of the Montgomery textile mills, he had been an employee of the family since before Reese’s birth. There had been a time when he thought, if he demonstrated enough diligence and loyalty, he might be made head manager at one of the bigger factories, but that time had passed, and his primary duties these days consisted of covering up felonies and filth and secretly wiring back reports to John Montgomery from time to time, informing him of his brat’s whereabouts and latest erratic behavior. Still a little wary of the Nut Cracker’s mood swings, he slept in the cockpit of the Fokker with a small five-shot Colt within easy reach; and every morning he reminded himself that if he could put up with their shit just a few more months he could retire to a little cottage he had purchased on a hill overlooking Camden, Maine, and never again have to negotiate a payment plan with a battered woman or end another telegram to Montgomery senior with “Your Faithful Servant.”