The Heavenly Table

56

AT SIX O’CLOCK that evening, Chimney left the Warner to meet his brothers in the park. He was wearing his goggles and duster and holding the leather driving gloves in one hand. Thoughts of Matilda had preoccupied him all day, and he was in a hurry to get out to the Whore Barn to see her again. He had burned up two tanks of gasoline driving the Ford around and remembering the way her lips curled back when he slipped inside her, the way she had patiently talked him through his first clumsy attempts. To kill more time, he had gone back to O’Malley’s for another shave, but the barber took one look at his face, still as smooth as when he’d left the shop yesterday, and just splashed a dime’s worth of lotion on his neck. “Well, did ye get ye any woolly jaw last night?” he asked Chimney.

“Sure did.”

The barber shook his head sadly, then glanced over at the father-in-law still sitting in the chair by the window. “Boy, whatever you do, don’t get married. Me, I had to go home and listen to that goddamn Nancy bitch about money the whole evening. Shit, she even had ol’ Jim there ready to crack, didn’t she, Jim?”

“I don’t remember,” the old man said stiffly.

“Listen to him,” the barber said, as he made the boy’s change. “She could poison the both of us with that slop she calls supper, and he’d still take up for her.”

Just then another customer walked in, and Chimney slipped out the door. He stopped at the McAdams and drank a couple of beers and ate a sandwich of bloody roast beef topped with a thick slab of onion, then returned to his room to take a bath. As he soaked in the hot, soapy water, he fell asleep and started to dream that he was back in the shack with his family at Tardweller’s. They were trying to decide whether or not to eat a groundhog that had crawled into the yard and died under the front steps. It seemed that he and Cane were arguing against it, but Pearl and Cob were for it. Then a car horn honked outside the hotel, and he jerked awake and scrambled out of the tub. He leaned against the sink panting, his heart pounding against his rib cage. Must have been that damn onion, he thought. They never had agreed with him.

Cane was seated on the park bench reading another newspaper and smoking a cigarette, while Cob stood at the edge of the pond again, tearing off pieces of bread from a loaf and tossing them to some geese. For every piece he fed the birds, he ate one. A teenage boy and girl in a small boat kept rowing around in a circle out in the middle of the water, and every time they turned his way, Cob waved like he’d never seen them before. He had to give Cane credit, Chimney thought as he walked toward them, they looked more like a schoolteacher and his pet dunce than a couple of outlaws with a bounty on their heads.

“Anything about us in there?” Chimney said.

Cane put down the newspaper and dusted a spot of ash off the front of his suit. He glanced over at Cob, then across the pond at the storefronts and bars that lined Water Street. “They’re still calling us cowboys,” he said.

“Well, I guess it’s a good thing we changed our looks then,” said Chimney.

“And they’re speculating we’re in Ohio now.”

“So? They can speculate all they want.”

“Yeah, but the trouble is they just happen to be right. Did ye take it out today, the car?”

“I must have drove it a hundred miles or better,” Chimney said.

“So you got the hang of it?”

“Not much to it, really. Shit, Cob could probably drive it if you tied a pork chop to the steering wheel.”

“I’m thinkin’ we might be ahead to get on out of here,” Cane said. “Sooner we get to Canada, the better.”

“Oh, no,” Chimney said. “You promised me if I helped ye with that old man, I could have some fun. Hell, we’ve only been here two days. I’m just startin’ to know my way around.”

“Yeah, but shit, brother, you could—”

“I don’t care. I’m not leaving till I get my fill out at the Whore Barn.”

“Well, how long do you need for that?”

“I don’t know,” Chimney said. “At least another night or two.”

Cane sighed, watched Cob toss the last of the loaf into the dirty water. “All right, you got until Saturday morning, but then we’re leaving. I don’t care if you got one of ’em dog-knotted.”

“What’s today?”

“Thursday.”

“Fair enough,” Chimney said, “but I’m goin’ to need some more money.”

“Jesus Christ, you’ve spent that five hundred already?”

Actually, he still had at least a hundred left, but Chimney liked the feeling that carrying a wad of cash in his pocket gave him. “Most of it,” he said. “Remember, the car was two-fifty. And I went ahead and bought a couple gas cans and a gallon of motor oil for when we’re on the road. Plus there was—”

“Okay, okay,” Cane said. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a roll of bills, counted some off. “Here’s two hundred. Even at four dollars a shot, that’s fifty pieces of ass.”

“Yeah, but what about—”

“No, that’s it. You run through that, I expect to see you walkin’ bowlegged.”

“You sure you don’t want to go with me tonight? Try out that fat one?”

“No,” Cane said, shaking his head. “We’re gonna go see that show at the theater, the one with the monkey.”

“Well, suit yourself,” Chimney replied. Secretly, he was relieved. He’d been thinking that he might spend the entire night with Matilda if the pimp was agreeable, and having his brother along would just complicate things up. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Be careful out there,” Cane said. He finished reading the newspaper, and thirty minutes later he and Cob each paid the fifty-cent admission fee and entered the Majestic. The place was packed and their seats were near the back under the balcony. A shiny-faced man in a tuxedo came out and told a few jokes, including one about a farmer with a homely daughter who put the Jewett Gang up for a night, thinking they were traveling salesmen. Thankfully, Cob wasn’t paying any attention, the main thing on his mind at the time being the popcorn he was eating. But as soon as he swallowed the last kernel, he started asking Cane when the monkey was going to appear until finally an old woman with an ear trumpet seated in front of them told him to keep quiet.

As usual, backstage the Lewis Family — Barney, Marcus, Rufus, Stanley, and Wendell — was having another crisis. Fame and women, coupled with jealousy and vast quantities of alcohol, had slowly dissolved the familial bond among the five brothers, and now it seemed as if every performance was preempted by another demand from this one or that one. Tonight, Barney was refusing to go on unless Marcus admitted that not only had he drugged and molested Barney’s latest girlfriend, a burned-out torch singer named Dolly whom he’d picked up working in a five-and-dime in Pomeroy on the way over to Meade, but that he’d also given her a dose of crabs, which she had subsequently passed on to Barney. After much shouting and cursing and threatening, a fed-up Rufus jammed a derringer against the rapist brother’s head, and the truth spilled out in a torrent, followed by an apology, one of seven or eight that Marcus had already made that week; and Stanley signaled the stage manager that they were ready to roll. They then each took a small hit from a treasured jug of moonshine that was all that remained of their granddaddy’s last batch before he died, and then smacked each other in the balls, a ritual they had begun with their very first show back in Nitro, West Virginia, on April 3, 1909, and had continued right up to the present day, even though three of them now suffered terribly from hernias.

As they came out onto the stage, the orchestra burst into a bouncy piece of circus music, and the audience clapped wildly. For at least five minutes, Cane calculated, they ran around in a circle, five roly-poly fuckers with matching pencil mustaches, pinching each other on the ass and stealing each other’s hats while making goofy faces. Then the music slowed down, and they stopped and stood in a row with their hands over their hearts and began singing. Their repertoire included a couple of patriotic anthems, a medley of old pastoral favorites, and a rollicking version of “The Old Brown Nag.” Cob poked Cane in the arm. “That’s one of Mr. Fiddler’s favorite songs,” he yelled over the music. Finally, a trumpeter stood up in the orchestra pit and blasted an ear-shattering note, and the monkey, the one and only Mr. Bentley, dropped from the ceiling and began chasing the bozos around in a fucking circle again. Cob stood up in his seat openmouthed to get a better look, and the people behind him started hissing and yelling, and Cane had to threaten to leave in order to get him to settle down. Then Mr. Bentley disappeared for a minute, only to come back out again wearing a butler’s uniform and carrying a white towel over his arm. Grinning maniacally with his big yellow teeth, he walked along the edge of the stage bowing to the audience one minute, then bending over the next to shake his red ass at them. This went on for quite a while until some soldiers up front grew bored and started pelting the chimp with apple cores and bottle caps and pellets of popcorn. No sooner had Cob said, “They better not hurt him,” than a peanut struck the beast in the eye, and Mr. Bentley screamed and leaped over the orchestra pit into the row of army boys. Before Cane could stop him, Cob jumped out of his seat and started down the aisle. By then, several members of the Lewis Family were trying to pull Mr. Bentley off a private before something bad happened, like a repeat of the incident at the fair in Indiana last fall when he bit a man’s ear off. Fortunately, everything was more or less under control by the time Cob got to the front. The orchestra broke into an extended version of “Danny Boy,” and everyone returned to their seats and enjoyed the rest of the performance, which to Cob’s delight was just more of the same, though now, just to be on the safe side, Rufus, the stoutest of the brothers, kept Mr. Bentley restrained with a leash around his furry neck. Still, every time he passed by in front of the group who had insulted him earlier, he gave them a look of pure, unadulterated hatred, and several, not trusting the strap or the fat buffoon holding it, got up and left the building.

Later, on their way back to the hotel, while listening to Cob rail about the abuse the poor monkey had suffered, Cane saw the girl from the bookstore walk by with a dapper man in a nice suit holding her arm. He felt a little regret, thinking about how flustered he’d been in her presence, and he wondered if he could have been the one escorting her tonight if he had just spoken up. He stayed up half the night with Richard III, making his way slowly through Act Three and most of Four. Occasionally he paused to take a sip of whiskey and look a word up in the Webster’s. The hotel was old and creaky with the past, and for some reason the noises kept unnerving him. Finally, he got up with his pistol and looked up and down the empty hallway. Closing the door, he turned out the lamp and went over to the window. He could hear the sound of footsteps somewhere down the street. The church bell chimed twice. He stood looking out for a long time, thinking again of how far they had come, and how far they had yet to go.