Chip Harrison Scores Again

Nine

Sheriff Tyles said, “Well, I hear tell you got a salary increase, boy. I hear you’re coming up in the world.”

“Oh, I’m getting rich.”

“Reckon Geraldine thinks a lot of you.”

“It was because I finally won a game of chess,” I said. “So she decided I ought to have an extra five dollars a week.”

“You wouldn’t be getting it if she didn’t like the way you were doing the job.”

“There’s not much job to do. Playing chess with her is about three-quarters of the job.” I took a sip of Coke. “Anyway, I don’t guess it’s enough to retire on.”

He clucked. “Well, it’s all in how you look at it, isn’t it? An extra five dollars a week, look at it that way and I’ll admit that it ain’t so much. But since you were only getting five dollars to start with, what you got amounts to a hundred percent increase, and I never heard of anybody kicking at a one hundred percent increase that they didn’t even have to go and ask for. Even a goddamn nigger labor union ought to be happy about a hundred percent increase.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

He winked. “You keep doubling up that way, you’ll be rich in no time.”

“Guess you’re right.”

“On the subject,” he said, “how you making out as far as money is concerned? You able to get by all right?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. I had been buying clothes from time to time, and other things, and I was only making twenty a week from the two jobs — well, twenty-five now — but there was really nothing to spend money on. I even got my books free from the local public library, not because I was too cheap to buy a paperback but because the only ones in town were at the Atlantic station, and all they had were four shelves of swinging swapper garbage and one rack of Brian Garfield westerns. Every once in a while I would go back to see if they got something new, but they never did. I guess they were waiting until they sold the ones they had.

The library had a lot of good books. The only trouble was that they had all come out before the Second World War. This was okay as far as the fiction was concerned, I could get into old stuff well enough, but when I wanted to figure out how to fix the Lathrop television set I ran into a stone wall. There was nothing in the card catalog under Television.

“I’ve even been putting some money aside,” I told him.

“Thought you might be. Probably got more than enough for the fare to Miami, I’d say.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, probably.”

“Be summer in a few months,” he went on. “Florida weather’s no attraction that time of year. Not that it’s a bargain here. Myself, I don’t mind the heat one way or the other. I’ll sweat on a hot day, but I never minded sweating. Must do a man good. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it, the way I see it.”

I said something bright, like “Uh-huh.”

“Heat bother you much?”

“Not usually.”

“Didn’t think so. A Yankee, your typical Yankee, the heat’ll get him and he won’t mind the cold. With folks down here it’s the other way around. The way some of us were complaining about the first week in February, and it wasn’t all that cold. Of course our heat isn’t the kind you’ll get in a big city, where the buildings hold it in. Makes somewhat of a difference.”

I nodded.

“Minnie was saying you really made a good impression on the Reverend. She’ll see him Sundays after the service and as like as not he’ll have a good word for you.”

“I hardly ever talk to him.”

“Well, I wouldn’t let on in front of Minnie, but I wouldn’t be all that surprised if that’s what the drunken old sonofabitch likes about you. Last thing he wanted was for those old hens to saddle him with a nursemaid. Imagine the kind of person they’d be apt to pick. Some Salvation Army jackass with a ramrod up his ass who’d either be watering the old sonofabitch’s whiskey or praying all over the place. Just for the sake of somebody leaving him alone, I don’t suppose the Reverend would even mind if you was screwing his daughter six times a week and twice on Sundays.”

I came within inches of cardiac arrest. But the Sheriff went sailing right on, and I’m sure to this day he just tried to pick the least likely example he could possibly think of. He gave me a bad moment, though.

“And Geraldine’s happy with you, too. Happier than she lets on. She don’t let on much, that one, but I got to know her pretty good over the years. Had a place here for the longest time. Set it up herself. There was this woman she was working for who was doing wrong by everyone — girls, customers, law enforcement people. Geraldine, she opened up on her own and got the right backing and the right girls working for her and sent the other old bitch clear out of the state. She knows what she’s doing, that one.”

“I can believe it.”

“In her day, wasn’t a better-looking woman in the county. You can believe that one, too.”

“I do.”

“Wasn’t that bad myself, in those days. Before Minnie’s cooking.” And he patted his paunch and let his eyes drift off to examine old memories. Before Minnie, too, I thought, and wondered if Geraldine and the Sheriff still got it together once in a while for Auld Lang Syne. On holidays and birthdays, say. I sort of hoped they did.

“She thinks a lot of you,” he was saying. “She thinks you’re a good man to have around the place. Me, I think you make a damn fine Deputy Sheriff.” He clucked again. “Well, I’m running off at the mouth again, and you better get on back if you want your supper. Just thought I’d give you a few things to think about.”

A couple of days later Geraldine said, “Mate in four, starting with Knight to King Five. See it?”

I studied it for a long time, then nodded and started picking up the pieces.

“Interesting thing happened in the next county over,” she said. “Used to be two regular gambling places there. About a year ago Ewell Rodgers had a second coronary, and you generally only get three of them, and he closed up and went and sat on his rocking chair. The other place was run by a man named Morgan from East Tennessee. He was getting all of Ewell’s crowd, and success must have gone to his head. He rubbed some people the wrong way that he shouldn’t have. He got raided and arrested, and while he was sitting in jail waiting for someone to put up bail money, his place somehow or other caught on fire, and the fire department just happened to take a wrong turn getting there. Not a stick left. Morgan took the insurance money and bought the fastest car he could find and drove all the way back to East Tennessee with the gas pedal on the floor.”

She got up and went behind the bar and came back with a Coke for me and her bottle of banana liqueur. I couldn’t remember her ever bringing the bottle to the table before. Usually she took her glass back each time and refilled it.

She said, “I used to have gambling in here, you know. I must have told you that.”

“I think you mentioned it.”

“Did very well with the gambling. Then there was an election and I was let know that there wouldn’t be any trouble if the tables and slots and all went, so they went. By the time it was all right to replace them, it just wasn’t worth it. Ewell and that Morgan were doing good business and everything was off around here, I was down from seven girls to two, and I couldn’t be bothered. When Ewell retired I don’t mind telling you it gave me ideas. There was that much business open, and I was sure to get a good portion of it. And then when Morgan’s place went up in smoke—”

She picked up her glass, looked at it, and drank it down. This was as surprising as the time I heard her swear. She always took the stuff in little sips, and a drink would last her so long that I doubt she actually drank more than half of it; the rest evaporated.

“I would have six tables for cards,” she said. “No more than that. Five tables of poker and one of blackjack. On the poker you let the deal pass and just charge so much an hour to sit in the game. No cutting the pot. Morgan was cutting pots there at the end.

“On the blackjack, you would have to have a dealer. I could deal it myself, as far as that goes. Any fool can. The only problem is if you have a dealer working for you and you can’t trust him, because a blackjack dealer can think of fifteen different ways to cheat the house and you’ll be forever trying to keep up with him.”

She poured herself another drink. And drank it right down.

“And one craps table,” she said. “That’s all you would need. You let the players run the game, same as the poker. Then what I would do is slap slot machines all over the place. You make a ton on slot machines and all you have to do is take out the money and put a drop of Three-In-One Oil in the works once a month. No one ever lost money on a slot machine. Except the damned fools who play them.”

“Where would you put all of this?”

“Right here in this room. It’s big enough so there’d be space left over, no one would be crowded.”

“What about the drinkers?”

She filled her glass but left it on the table. “Over on the right. Nobody ever goes in that room and you wouldn’t know it’s there, but it wouldn’t be anything to put a bar in there.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’d never fit our Saturday crowd in there unless you packed them like sardines.”

“Chip, you wouldn’t want that kind of crowd if you had gambling. I don’t even want them now, but there’s not enough money just in the girls and I have to have every drink sale I can get. Put in tables and the idea would be to cut that crowd to a third of what it is. Maybe less than that, maybe a fifth, say, on Saturdays.”

“Some of those drinkers wind up going upstairs.”

“And most of them don’t. Instead they make noise and start fights, and that’s the last thing you can tolerate when you have gambling tables.”

“How would you cut the drinking crowd?”

“Easiest thing in the world. Leave out the beer taps. Sell imported beer by the bottle at seventy or eighty cents. Push the hard liquor price up to a dollar a drink, nothing cheaper. The way it is now, we’re selling girls to men who come here to drink. The other way, we’d be selling whiskey to men who come here for girls and gambling. And when a man’s gambling he doesn’t mind paying high prices for whiskey, and when he wins he likes to celebrate with a girl.”

“You’ve got it all figured out,” I said.

She drained her glass. “It’s not something that just came to me in a flash. I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Without the drinking crowd, I guess you wouldn’t have much need for a bouncer.”

She didn’t seem to hear me. “There won’t be anybody opening up over the county line. And there won’t be anybody else opening up here as long as Claude Tyles is Sheriff, and they won’t get him out without burying him. Nobody even bothered running against Claude in the last election. He’s well liked, Claude is. Not that he likes that many people himself. It’s a rare person that Claude Tyles takes a shine to.

“Nobody else opening up, and all the gambling trade in this county and the next one. The drink business would go down but the profits would go up, and less aggravation involved. Be a five-girl house in no time at all, maybe go all the way up to seven girls if it worked that way. And with gambling, business spreads out more. It doesn’t all concentrate on Saturday night. Might even raise the price on the girls to fifteen dollars. And they’d be making tips on top of that with the right kind of crowd.”

She poured herself another drink. If it was affecting her, I couldn’t see how.

“Make more money on drinks and more money on girls, and that’s not counting what the gambling brings in. I haven’t made that kind of money in so long I have trouble recollecting what it feels like.”

She drank her drink.

“Only one thing wrong,” she said.

“What’s that?”

Her eyes locked with mine. “I’m too old to be bothered with it. It means all that work and concentration, and I ask myself what’s the point? Would you like a drink instead of that Coke, Chip?”

“No, thanks.”

“What I should be doing is cutting down, not building up. I’m not ready to pack it all in yet. Not this year. If I closed up now I’d die of boredom. But you feel yourself slowing down, you know. You feel yourself getting sick of people. The customers. You don’t have the patience to put up with them. Little signs like that. Another couple of years, next year or the year after that, and it won’t be a bad idea to get out of here and live in a big hotel in Puerto Rico and let people fetch me things. I have money saved. Not enough to do it in style, but more than a little.”

She gave her head a shake. “But if I expanded I’d have all I need and then some. Thing is, I’d have things just about ideal by the time I wanted to retire. And who in the world would take it over? Rita and Claureen between them couldn’t run a pool hall. They couldn’t run a race. Two days of operating this place and the whole thing would fall apart.

“In fact, they couldn’t even help me out enough in getting things organized. I’d need a man, and he would have to be somebody smart and sure of himself, somebody who could get on good with Claude Tyles, somebody who wouldn’t rub the girls the wrong way or be after them all the time. And assuming I had the luck to turn up someone like that in this part of the country, which is as likely as mucking out a stable and finding an emerald, why, what chance in the world would there be that he’d be someone I can trust?”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

Her eyes challenged me. “Do you?”

“Well, uh, sure.”

“I wonder if you do. You think about it, Chip. You think about it, and one of these days I’ll bring up the subject and then we’ll talk about it some more. Meanwhile you just give my problem some thought, will you?”

The thing is, subtlety generally sails right on past me. When Geraldine first started opening up that night I wondered why she was telling me all this, and I decided she just wanted somebody to use for a sounding board, bouncing words off me when she was actually talking to herself. And I figured she picked me for the same reason that she played chess with me — I was working for her, and I didn’t have anything better to do.

She closed for the night as soon as we finished talking, and I went upstairs and got undressed for bed. And I stretched out and put my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, and then I immediately opened them and sat up and switched the light on.

She hadn’t just been talking to me. She had been talking about me.

(Of course when you read this it’s probably pretty obvious all along, especially because I put her conversation right after the one with the Sheriff. But that other conversation wasn’t even in my mind when I sat listening to Geraldine, so maybe it should have been obvious to me anyway, but not as obvious as it seems.)

Anyway, I sat up in bed and figured out what it was all about. Sheriff Tyles thought I should stay in Bordentown, and said that Geraldine thought the world of me. And Geraldine wanted to expand the business but couldn’t do it without the help of some man who was capable and honest and had an in with the Sheriff, someone she liked and trusted, someone who could take over the whole operation when she was ready for complete retirement.

Which meant that I had found the one thing I never even thought to look for in Bordentown.

A Job With A Future.

I got up and walked around the room a little. I had that sensation in my mind and body of having had too much coffee and all I had was one cup with supper. I just kept pacing, and then I went down the hall to the bathroom only to find out that I didn’t really have to go after all. Just nerves, I told myself nervously, and went back to my room and paced the floor again.

A Job With A Future. A Position With Real Opportunities For Advancement.

I couldn’t believe it.

Because, after all, that was the one thing I had been looking for ever since they booted me out of Upper Valley Preparatory Academy. I left that stupid school determined to make my way in the world and do all the good old Horatio Alger type things and work my way up in the world. And I never got anywhere. In fact I never got close to getting anywhere, because I kept getting idiotic jobs and drifting into idiotic situations.

Until finally the most idiotic situation of all brought me to Bordentown, a town that barely offered opportunities for stagnation, let alone advancement. And instead of one idiotic job I got two of them, and instead of trying to make my mark in the world I just tried to stay alive and let time pass, figuring that sooner or later I would get up and get out of Bordentown, but not even being in any rush to do that because the whole idea of getting ahead in the world seemed like something I was never going to get around to.

(If you really knock yourself out trying not to end sentences with prepositions, that last sentence would wind up seemed like something around to which I was never going to get. I mean, it’s an awkward sentence anyway, just sprawling all over the place, but I think it would be even worse if it didn’t end with a preposition. Or two prepositions, actually.)

Some of the kids I knew in New York were very much into Zen, and one girl made me read a description of Zen Archery, in which you don’t exactly aim the arrow at the target and don’t exactly ever let go of it. You just become part of the bow and arrow and let yourself happen along with the bow and the arrow, and somewhere along the line the arrow goes from your fingertips to the target. It read very nicely, but I wasn’t sure if it made any sense. The girl said it was easier to understand if you were stoned. I tried to get stoned a couple of times but nothing happened. Now, though, I was beginning to understand.

Because this seemed to me like a case of Zen Advancement, of Zen Making-One’s-Way-In-The-World. I hadn’t tried to do anything, just sort of becoming part of Bordentown and letting the rest happen, not even pointing myself at the target, not even letting go of the string. Bull’s-eye!