The Heavenly Table

18

ALONG WITH THE establishment of the army camp at Meade that summer came a vast array of people from all over hoping to reap monetary gain from it, including a pimp who called himself Blackie Beeler, but whose real name was Philo Wilkinson. After making a number of inquiries, he finally found a place to set up business half a mile or so outside of town on the Huntington Pike. A house would have been preferable, but there wasn’t a single empty room left to rent by the time he and his girls arrived; and so the long leaky pole barn that had once sheltered Virgil Brandon’s goat herd was the best he could do. The retired farmer agreed to let the pimp have it for three dollars a week along with the understanding that he was entitled to a free piece of Esther, the fat one, whenever he felt the need. Hers was the body type he’d been raised on and the one that he still preferred. Why risk filleting your dick on a bag of bones when you could dip into something as soft and fluffy as a cloud? Virgil’s late wife had weighed three hundred pounds, and he still missed the way she’d made the bed roll like an ocean every time she attempted to turn over in her sleep.

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 pussy 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 fucking 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 fucked-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.

“And what about the whiskey?” Blackie asked, as he looked the musicians over.

“It’ll be here this afternoon.”

The pimp made a beckoning motion with his hand. “Well, come on, boys, let me hear something.”

Climbing down off the wagon, the pair nodded to each other, and began awkwardly trying to find some sort of matching rhythm, the old man picking at the strings of the banjo with his arthritic fingers, and the boy shyly doing a little shuffle with his feet while trying to follow along with the mouth harp. Unfortunately, the longer they played, the worse they sounded, and before they could finish the first song — Blackie couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be “Dixie” or “Camptown Races” or possibly even some deranged version of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—the girls had emerged from their respective tents and were bent over double, cackling with laughter. When the final notes died away, they all clapped and sat down around the campfire. Still giggling, they passed the coffee pot around and began rolling cigarettes.

Henry looked at Blackie and shrugged. “Hell, boss, once them soldiers get liquored up, they’ll sound all right.”

“Christ, Henry, they’d give a dead man a headache,” the pimp said. He spat a stream of black juice on the banjo player’s shoe and walked away without another word.

After Blackie disappeared around the last of the tents, the bodyguard turned and asked the boy, “What’d you say your name was again?”

“Eddie. Eddie Fiddler.”

“Well, tell me now, how many songs you know, Eddie?” Henry hoped that perhaps they had just gotten off to a bad start. Stage fright maybe. He had heard it happened to the best of them on occasion. Even Esther, probably the least self-conscious person he’d ever met, occasionally got the jitters if too many voyeurs crowded into her tent to watch her play a tune on some john’s skin flute.

The boy looked at the banjo picker for help, but the old man had his eyes glued on the women. “Oh, hard to say, really,” Eddie said weakly. “A few, I reckon.” Last evening, out of their minds on a bottle of moonshine called Knockemstiff that he had traded his shoes for, they had stolen a dozen baby chicks from a coop in somebody’s backyard and ate them alive for dinner. He had awoken this morning tangled up in a patch of ivy with a raging headache and a tiny beak stuck between his two front teeth.

With the tip of his finger, Henry tapped the boy’s forehead hard several times. “Do I look like someone you wants to be a-lyin’ to?”

“No, sir,” Eddie mumbled, afraid to move. Staring at the cross hanging from the big man’s neck, the realization of how low he had sunk since leaving home suddenly brought on a wave of nausea, and he had to swallow several times rapidly to keep from blowing feathers and booze all over the man’s shiny black boots.

“So, goddamn it, how many do ye know?”

“Two,” the boy answered. “The one we just played, plus’n another one. We ain’t been together all that long.”

“Now why in the hell didn’t you tell me that before I brought you all the way out here? You and that ol’ soak done wasted my whole morning.”

“You didn’t ask. Besides, Johnny says all music sounds pretty much the same anyway.”

“Lord Almighty!” Henry cried. “That’s got to be one of the dumbest fuckin’ things I ever heard in my life. How long you been playin’ that harp anyway?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Eddie said, trying to remember just how many days it had been since he and the old man had met. “Maybe a week?”

“Sonofabitch,” Henry muttered as he turned and headed toward the wagon.

The banjo player made a great show of bowing to the women and smiling with his gum ridges, then asked the boy, “Did we get the job?”

“I don’t think so,” Eddie answered as he watched Henry climb up on the wagon seat and unwrap the reins from the brake handle.

“Well, shit, ask him.”

“Johnny wants to know if we got the job?” the boy called out.

“Fuck, no,” Henry yelled. “Now get your asses in the wagon so I can haul you back to town.”

“Come on, Johnny,” Eddie said. “Looks like he’s in a hurry.”

“You go on,” the old man said. “I’m a-thinkin’ I’ll just stick around here awhile.” He winked at the whores, then eased himself down on a stump and began strumming the banjo slowly, as if he was about to serenade them with a love ballad.

As the boy climbed into the wagon, Henry said, “What the hell does he think he’s doing?”

“Oh, it’s hard to tell with Johnny. Sometimes he gets a little crazy if there’s a woman around.”

Henry stared at the old man for a minute, then cursed and jumped down off the wagon. Stomping across the campsite, he grabbed the banjo picker by the back of his frayed shirt collar and started dragging him away.

“Don’t you hurt him, Henry,” one of the girls warned. “He don’t mean no harm.” Her name was Matilda, and with her freckled pug nose and pigtails and tiny tits, Blackie was often able to pass her off to older men as a fourteen-year-old runaway fresh off the farm. She was also the most likely of the three women to cause trouble. Her father, a coal miner in West Virginia, had coughed up the last black shreds of his lungs on her eighth birthday, and she had nursed an abiding sense of injustice ever since when it came to workers’ rights. Her face was still recovering from a bruising Blackie had given her last week after an argument over menstrual cycle pay.

“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.”