Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (8 page)

“Hard for me to say at the time, Kid. Though later I did develop an opinion. Tobacco stains on his shirt were right.
Chewed-up-lookin’ hat was right. ’Bout the right height and weight. Problem was there was a ball in his right eye and another in his cheek some few inches down that played all hell with his good looks. He was dirty, though, even before he hit the street. That you could tell.

“Anyhow, the crowd’s still standin’ there arguin’ ’bout is he or isn’t he but me, I need a drink. Wouldn’t you fellas? I maybe seen Little Dick West shot dead in Newton, Kansas and now I’m maybe seeing him shot all over again. Kind of thing unnerves a man. So I head for the saloon. I’m just stepping through the doors when I hear another shot and turn and look and there’s the crowd movin’ away in little waves like when you toss a pebble into a gone-still pond and at the center of this partic’lar pond’s the shooter, the big fella, and he’s on his knees. And then I watch him fall and then he’s squirmin’ face down in the dirt.”

He took another pull from the bottle and passed it to Faro Bill.

“What happened?” said the Kid.

“Shot his goddamn balls off,” said Canary Joe. “Holstering up his Remington Model Three. Don’t know how in hell he done it but he managed. Few hours later, word in the saloon was he’d died from loss of blood.”

“Hot damn,” said the Kid. “That’s some yarn all right. You want to pass me that bottle, Bill?”

“Ain’t over yet,” said Joe. “Not quite. Six months, maybe seven months later I’m in Witchita, on my way to nowhere in partic’lar, just driftin’ through. There’s a noose back in Montana with my name on it but I ain’t worried. I’m in Rowdy Joe Lowe’s dance hall, drinkin’ and eyein’ the ladies, thinking about a little recreational expenditure that night if y’know what I mean. Now, ’member I said Little Dick West was suppos’d to’ve been shot dead in Witchita?

“The first time,” said the Kid.

“That we know of,” said Faro Bill.

“Shot by a farmer whose place burned ’bout a month
later, with him in it. See where I’m goin’ on this?” said Canary Joe.

“I think so,” said Faro Bill. “You’re going to tell us you’re in there eyeing the ladies when in walks . . .”

“When in walks Little Dick West. That’s right. Stands directly beside me at the bar and orders whiskey, nice as you please. And this time I’m sure. I’m damn sure. There ain’t no ball in his cheek or his eyeball this time. He’s so close I can smell him and he don’t smell good. It’s the same damn hat and the same damn tobacco juice all over his shirt and the same damn Colt he pulled in Newton.

“I guess the folks in Witchita got pretty short memories as these things go because nobody even bats an eye seein’ him in there. The barkeep serves him, the drinkers keep drinking—hell, a couple of the ladies even give him a look by way of
well, maybe
. But me, I’ve seen him a bit more recently so to speak and I guess my memory’s a little bit better so I pay up for that last one and get the hell out of there fast as I can, because I know for plain honest fact that Little Dick West is the unluckiest man who ever walked the Lord’s green earth and that’s a certainty.”

A wind had come up from the west. The night was colder now those last few hours before dawn and the men drank silently a pull apiece and warmed their hands by the fire and the Kid shook his head thinking about luck and Little Dick West while Faro Bill rolled yet another Durham and lit it with a twig aflame. The horses snorted, chilled in sleep.

“We better get us some rest, boys,” said Canary Joe. “Long way to ride yet tomorrow. I’ll gather us up some more of that mise’ble firewood I guess, get us through to morning.”

He rose to his feet and stepped slowly into the waiting dark.

“
You watch out for Little Dick West, now
,” said Faro Bill laughing and it was then that they heard the echo of his words from the mouth of Chunk Herbert dying against the
juniper tree, clear this time and no mistaking them, not
I-ill
or
Lily
but
Li’l Dick West, I shot Li’l Dick West in Dodge City, Kansas
and the fusillade seemed to come from everywhere at once and ended Chunk’s luck and their own along with it for good and ever.

I found the place just off East Sunset, only three blocks from the sea, and I got it for a song.

Lauderdale had been hit by a big one again the year before and on the first floor the water damage was extensive. It was no real problem though. I had money. We crewed the place through spring and summer and by start-of-season it was looking fine. I called it the Blue Parrot, after Sam.

And Sam was the main attraction for a while. Drinks are drinks when you come right down to it, even though Shiela and Cindy had instructions to pour stiff ones, to leave the shotglasses under the bar for the time being and buy back for the regulars. As for the girls, you’d be hard pressed to find a waitress or barmaid anywhere near Sunset who wasn’t halfway gorgeous. So that left Sam our novelty.

As novelties go I’ve seen worse. He’s an attention-getter for one thing, blue as the Caribbean with a bib of pure white across his chest. And he’s big around as the thighs on Schwarzenegger.

We hung a high perch for him to the far left of the bar and if you were sitting over there you could toss him a salted peanut and watch him pluck it out of the air, toss it back like a shot of Cuervo and turn to you with that myopic-looking one-eyed stare and croak, “
thanks, big boy, think can you afford another?
” People swore he sounded like Bacall, though actually he’d learned that line from a hooker who used to come into my first place in Miami. If you threw too wide or low you got the same baleful stare only longer, and then after a while the bone-yellow beak would open. “
God damn drunks
!”

He was ten years old and had plenty of lines by then, so he was good at the bar. But naturally I had ambitions for the place. As Florida goes Lauderdale’s a pretty wide-open town. The college kids do that and the gays. So a year later we went topless. We left Sam where he was and put a raised stage on the other side of the bar. The upstairs room was all tables but you could stand at the brass railing and look down at the dancers and at the same time cruise the bar.

We did it right, too. Most of the girls were college girls so the turnover was high but that also meant you had dancers who were young and pretty and wholesome-looking, not beat-up hooker-types. There were a handful of local girls but I stayed away from them in general. Down here you never knew when somebody’s drunken boyfriend from Fort Meyers or Punta Gorda was going to come barreling across Alligator Alley with a shotgun in back of his pickup, bent on saving darlin’ Maisie from a life of squalor. They brought in a nice crowd, mixed, men and women and mostly young.

We did real well with the wet teeshirt contests and the Best Buns contests and by the time we were open two years to the day I could count on packed houses three nights a week and no real slack time at all. We held our own off season, too, while other places closed down altogether.

Sam got fat. I fell in love with the new bartender.

Bernie was her name and she was older than most,
thirty-four, and she’d been married once the same way I’d been married, which was badly. For me home was a block away, right on Sunrise. Home for her was all the way across town. In no time at all my dresser drawers were full of skimpy teeshirts, shorts and panties, and her sister from Wisconsin was living at the place across town. I never regretted it.

We came up with another attraction that year. Her name was Mary.

Had it not been for Bernie I probably wouldn’t have hired her. It would have been too much temptation put in my way. You get used to topless dancers. But nobody got used to Mary.

“
Bwwaaak! Major babe alert!
” was the first thing out of Sam’s mouth when he spotted her. He was only stating the obvious. But there was plenty more than that. The only way I can say it right now is that Mary was
intimidating
to look at—that beautiful. Why in the world she wanted to dance topless for the Blue Parrot I never did figure. She was a pre-med student. Yet she could have been anything—model, movie actress, even, from what I could see, a legitimate dancer. Up on the stage her moves were terrific, if you ever got by that strong perfect body long enough see the moves.

And that glance.

It was amazing how she could rivet an audience with that glance. Her eyes were a pale, pale blue. Incredibly bold. Onstage they seemed to flicker everywhere at once, sweeping the entire ground floor and half the guys in the balcony. I never in my life saw so many men trying to make eye-contact with a woman. And a half-naked woman at that. It was uncanny. From the first night she danced she got the feature spot, and I never heard a single complaint from any of the other girls, all of whom had been there longer than she had. You knew she deserved it.

She had no boyfriends. She told me once that she’d never met a man as tough as she was and I believed her. The
only one she flirted with was Sam, who’d wink at her. And I swear that now and then I’d catching him leering.

It was Mary who got the bright idea about the body painting. Like I say, she was a bold one. Here she was, brand new, with the best spot in the show, and she’s rocking the boat, trying to change things instead of just leaving well enough alone. If the idea had flopped it wouldn’t have helped her much with me. But of course she knew all along it wouldn’t flop. After all—they were going to paint
her
body.

The way it worked was that every night the customer got a raffle ticked with his first drink, right off the bat. At midnight I’d step up on the stage with all the tickets in a grey fedora hat and Sam perched on my arm. I’d stir the tickets around and then Sam would dip down and pull us out a winner. One of the girls would bring paintpots and brushes from off stage. Mary would come out and dance, and at the end of the dance she’d strike a pose, freeze, and I’d read the number on the ticket.

I’d hand the winner a pair of scissors so he could snip off her panties—that always got a rise from the crowd—and then the guy would start painting. When we figured he’d been at it long enough we’d black-light the place and bring up the music, and when Mary started dancing again it was wild. The paint was irridescent and the dark was how we got around the laws about booze and dancing and total nudity. It brought the house down every night. The paint was water base so half an hour later she’d be washed off and back again, an encore for a star.

Oh, we were rolling. Friday and Saturday nights we’d turn them away. Before it was a bar the Parrot was a bookshop, used and antique books, and before that an artist’s studio. So we only had space for about a hundred-fifty. But a hundred-fifty people all drinking all night is some pretty tidy cash, believe me. We were doing fine.

Then one night we were closing and I saw Bernie feeding Mary double scotches at the bar while the waitresses
stacked the chairs. Mary didn’t drink much normally so I wondered what was up. I walked over and ordered one myself. I could smell that perfume she always wore,
Possession
it was called, wafting through me like a subtle hunger.

After a while she said, “it’s weird, Stu. Tonight during the show? I felt
watched
.”

Well, you had to laugh.

The way she looked stopped us though.

“Hey you two, I’m serious. I don’t mean the way the guys normally look at you. Shit, I’m used to that. This was. . . . this was something else.”

I felt myself freeze inside for a moment. “You mean we got some creep out there? Like that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Whatever it was, I don’t need it.”

I watched her gulp the scotch.

There wasn’t much to say after that. I promised her I’d keep an eye on the crowd for her, see if I could spot anybody strange out there, and if I did I’d bounce him. I’d see this kind of thing before. Usually these guys are harmless, but you never knew. My promise seemed to help. She finished her double and went home and I just sat a while, aware of the lingering smell of
Possession
and thanking my lucky stars that I had Bernie there with me to remind me that I was much too old to try to comfort her further.

And the next few nights I did look, but there was nothing. Though Mary was saying it was happening
every
night to her now. She would get this feeling. I began to wonder about her. You could see she was troubled. You could see it in her eyes when she performed. They weren’t the same—you didn’t see the boldness there. She could still hold a crowd absolutely breathless but she wasn’t doing it with her eyes anymore, she was doing it with her will and with her body, and you missed something.

Then I started noticing things.

Little things at first. There was a light in the girls’ dressing room that didn’t seem to want to go off. I’d turn it off
at closing and come in next morning and it would be on again.

Now and then on alternate Friday and Saturday nights we’d bring in a live band, local boys, and they were always complaining that somebody was moving their instruments around in the storage room. Now, nobody had a key to that room except Bernie and I, and we sure as hell weren’t doing it. We lost that band in a couple of months. I couldn’t blame them. Those instruments were costly and all they ever got out of me by way of explanation was a puzzled shrug.

Then the chef started complaining about dishes rattling in the kitchen.