The Midnight Cool Page 5

  IgotaonedollarbillfromthemanonthehillwhosgotonefiftyIgotonefiftythankyouverymuchonefiftyonefiftythataintshiftywho’sgottwo? So! Two? Two? Two? Fine little mare! She’ll grow into money!

  Yip! Yip!

  The mare sold at two twenty-five. Kuntz slapped his plait hard and threw a fistful of peanut shells after her as she was led out. On the other side of the podium, another horse was already coming in, no halter, naked as a jaybird, driven by two colored boys with hickory sticks. She raced to the center of the ring and tossed her head, wild-eyed. Every time she made a dash for the out-gate, the dealers there would step forward and lash their sticks at her.

  Alright, boys, away we go. This one here’s never been to town!

  Kuntz’s diamond horseshoe ring flashed. The horses came and went. Ten seconds, twelve seconds tops. Peanut shells flying. Men darting out to pick up a hoof or measure a horse with their sticks or wrench open his mouth to see his teeth. The spotters jumping around like monkeys. Men bidding with a wink, a raised thumb, a nod. One old fellow across the ring made his bids with nothing but a twitch of his ear. Up in the back, men sat with their arms tightly clamped on their chests, and nothing moved but eyes.

  A team of good cat-hammed tobacco mules was led into the ring. The bidding kept up, lively as anything. Charles was chewing his knuckle again.

  Fellow back there, he said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder towards the stalls, we got to talking. Said President Wilson rides around Washington in one of them cars.

  Billy didn’t take his eyes off the mules, who looked like they could go and go and go. Nothing like a pair of nice mules. He could look at them all day. Bonnyman was bidding on them.

  In one of what cars?

  In one of them Pierce-Arrows. Said Hatcher once paid to have a whole orchestra come up from Nashville for a party. Said that the black mare beat up another horse at the hitching post one Sunday morning a few months ago while he was at church and no one’s seen her in town since. This fellow thought he had sold her back then.

  Now Billy was watching Bonnyman. He had noticed that Kuntz always looked at him before slapping the plait for a final sale. Bonnyman would give the slightest shake of his head. Pass, or yes. Then the plait would come down. Smack. Sold.

  Well all I know is, a horse don’t get that mean without some real meanness done to her.

  You don’t know nothing about him, Charles said shortly.

  That’s true. I don’t. Billy looked over. Don’t care to either.

  Smack! The mules were sold. Lloyd Bonnyman got them. Five bills.

  By noon, when the sale paused just long enough for Kuntz to eat four hard-boiled eggs and brush the shells onto the hats of the men below, maybe a hundred animals had been run through. Billy had kept his eye on Lloyd Bonnyman. By the time their team came up, he had bought twenty-six mules, for two twenty-five to two fifty a piece.

  When their two painted mules appeared out of the darkness of the in-gate, Shorty was between them, just two skinny legs and two little hands hanging on to the leads.

  Billy worked his way over to Bonnyman, squeezing between men and hickory sticks.

  Good-looking, these two.

  Bonnyman said nothing.

  Billy nodded. Oh yes. Them two will go high.

  The bids came in slow. Shorty was leading the mules back and forth. A couple fellows in the middle rows were bidding. Nothing was catching fire. Billy saw he needed to do something. He ducked behind Bonnyman to rap the podium. Kuntz paused and looked down at him, jowls wagging.

  Billy grinned. Tell em these two been all around the world.

  Kuntz looked up and repeated it to the crowd. Man here says they been all around this world. Still the bidding went sluggishly along. Two fifty. Two fifty-five. Finally he dropped the plait, at two seventy-five for the pair.

  The mules disappeared out the gate. Kuntz’s peanut shells hit them on the rump and slid down into the sawdust. Billy realized he had been holding his breath. He hadn’t noticed that Charles had also made his way over behind him. They stood there next to Lloyd Bonnyman.

  Somebody stole them mules, Billy said to Lloyd Bonnyman. He smelled like an apothecary. He was looking through his book, and he did not lift his head.

  Those yours?

  They were until a few seconds ago.

  Bonnyman looked straight at him from under the shadow of the derby. Long deep lines stretched from the wings of his nose to the corners of his mouth.

  Next time use fabric dye, he said. It’s a hell of a lot more convincing than shoe polish.

  Billy was still trying to think of the perfect retort to this when the next lot came in, another mule team, and Bonnyman turned to bid.

  The sale lasted until ten o’clock that night. When it was over a couple of bootleggers came down in a big Reo and set up behind the barn. The Johnson twins, regular fixtures of the Saturday sale. They stood beside the car, identical, with eyes like cross sections of hard-boiled eggs while men lined up to buy pints of whiskey smuggled down over the Kentucky border. From the moonlit yard came the sound of starting motors and clopping hooves and occasionally a plaintive whinny, the sound of hundreds of uneasy horses and mules being moved on to new fates.

  Charles bought a pint of whiskey and they took it to the side of the barn, where men squatted and smoked, going over the sale.

  We did good, Billy said to Charles, but Charles only grunted.

  Looking up at the sign on the side of the building, he asked the man next to them who the son was, of Kuntz and Son.

  You seen that big idiot around with the rake? the man said, pushing his tobacco with his tongue. The one who looks like a big dumb ape?

  Charles nodded. Nearly scared him to death when we pulled in today.

  That’s the son. That’s Gus Kuntz.

  He told them the story. When Missus Kuntz had had her first and only child, and it came out a boy, Kuntz had been so excited by his vision of a family business that he had hired a sign painter to change the sign the very next day. Six months later, their nurse dropped the little baby on his head. Broke something in his brain, and he had never amounted to anything but an overgrown child, good for nothing but raking and baiting mousetraps. Yet all the years gone by, Kuntz had never had the heart to repaint the sign.

  Well, Billy said, packing his pipe with his thumb. You never do know what life’s going to give you. A man can’t be certain of nothing but that everything’s gonna change. Wouldn’t you say so, Charles?

  Charles was counting the money they had made. He looked up, squinting, smiling at some private vision of his own.

  Gospel truth, he said.

  Money Matters

  Money Matters

  by Leland Hatcher

  The Richfield Gazette

  What is the value of a man’s life?

  It has occurred to me that Richfield’s young men would comport themselves differently on a Saturday night if they knew the answer to the question posed above.

  The figure? $54,000.

  I have arrived at this amount by ballpark estimation, of course. The men who work on my factory floor are paid four dollars a day. That is twenty-four dollars a week, $1200 a year. Over a forty-five-year period, not accounting for inflation, this adds up to $54,000 earned. Yet time and again, I see these men dangerously carousing on a Saturday night as if their lives are worth precisely nothing. In the worst cases, I see lives that otherwise might have been industrious and prosperous utterly ruined by the use of alcohol. If every bottle of illegal whiskey came with a $54,000 price tag, wouldn’t these young men think twice before shelling out to the bootlegger?

  This town stands on the precipice of greatness; indeed so stands our country. When the current war is over, a new war—an economic war—will decide the fates of nations. Richfield stands the chance to be on the leading edge, when the time comes, if and only if our young men begin to act as if they knew what their own lives are worth.

  Schrecklichkeit

  professor james c. li
tton of vanderbilt university

  will lecture on

  the growing german threat to civilization

  reading room of the sumner hotel

  friday 3:00

  all welcome and encouraged to attend

  hosted by the richfield society for the aid of the fatherless children of france

  When Charles saw the notice on the board at the courthouse he tore it down and shoved it in his pocket. It sounded like just the place he would find her. Catherine Hatcher. For two weeks he had been searching, with only one success. She was sitting in the window of the soda fountain on Front Street, alone, eating an ice cream sundae. He stood there on the street, unnoticed by her, watching the way the spoon slipped in between her lips and the way she so earnestly studied it and licked the back of it after every bite. He had never seen anything more beautiful in his whole life and he knew that he would not again as long as he lived.

  In the shack that night with a new pouch of Corn Cake, he had lain on his bed smoking, studying the girl in the Pears’ soap ad.

  She looks a little like that, he said after a while. Leland Hatcher’s daughter.

  Across the room, Billy looked up. He was whittling, a little bird taking shape out of a hunk of wood in his lap. He blew the picture a kiss off the tip of his knife.

  Surely not. She can’t be as pretty as my Daisy Bell.

  You ought to see her, Billy. She’s something else. I can’t get her out of my head.

  He asked about her whenever and wherever he could. Most times, men just shook their heads. Or puffed out their cheeks and said something like what Twitch had said: Don’t you and me both want to know. She went to the women’s college on the north side of town. She sat at the suffrage booth at political rallies, handing out pamphlets on Votes for Women. Last summer she had walked down East Main Street, smoking a cigar. Her brother, Edmund, had just graduated from Vanderbilt and was a good-timing boy. People said that ever since their mother died, killed when her car went off the bridge on Defeated Creek, they had both been a little wild.

  Charles took a drag and tapped his lip.

  She’s got this gap, he said. It’s something, I tell you, Billy.

  A gap between her teeth? Billy picked up the bird and held it to eye level. He studied it for some time. Well send me a wedding invitation, he finally said.

  Don’t tease me. Someday I’m gonna make a million dollars. Hire an orchestra from Nashville just because I feel like it.

  Maybe you ought to make your million before you go chasing your million-dollar girl.

  Charles folded his arms across his eyes. Ah, forget it. They ought to paint it on a sign and hang it around my neck. World’s biggest fool. He looked over at Billy. What’s the use? I ain’t ever gonna have no orchestra. No dumbwaiter.

  Billy pointed the tip of his knife at him.

  Now hang on. Talk like that will get you nowhere.

  Charles touched his lip again. This smile—ah, you wouldn’t understand. I see it at night when I’m lying in bed. See it all day long. Makes it so I can’t eat. Can’t sleep. He sat up and put his feet on the floor, grabbed his forelock and tugged. She had studied that ice cream so seriously, as seriously as she had spoken about Black Tom Island. Billy was right, of course. What would a girl like that ever want to do with a man like him?

  My poor ma, he said to the ground. It ain’t fair. The tricks life played on her.

  Billy looked down at his knife, snapped it shut, pressed it against his knee. He closed his hand around the half-formed little bird. Looked up at the girl on the wall and sighed a heavy sigh that made the candle next to him go out. He pointed his knife at a newspaper that Charles had tossed on the floor. The headline read, governor rye says suffrage is coming.

  Don’t know what they want the vote for, he said somberly. They already rule the world.

  The afternoon of the lecture, Charles wet his hair and combed it until it clung to his skull and took the interurban to town. When he got to the hotel, the program was already well along. Standing in the doorway, looking in at the sea of people, he had the same feeling he had at the gates of Everbright, an intimidation that made his head feel light as a balloon. Then a gray-haired lady in the back row turned and slid along her bench and beckoned to him. Next thing he knew he had sat down, quick and quiet as an obedient dog.

  There was a map of Europe tacked up on the wall, a jagged red line drawn down the center of it to indicate the Front. A stocky stone-faced man traced it with a pointer.

  The Battle of the Somme has raged like wildfire all summer, he was saying. Six weeks of fighting. Thousands upon thousands dead already. And no sign of a break in the German line. Not a budge.

  Charles scanned the room. Leland Hatcher was in the front row. His son was beside him. There were a dozen pretty girls to the left and right of them. But not her. He knew just by the shape of their ears and the curve of their necks that none of them were her. After watching her eat that sundae, he could pick the line of her neck out of ten thousand girls, easy.

  Schrecklichkeit, the professor said, whapping the map with his pointer. A bit of saliva flew from his mouth. It means frightfulness. The term the Germans have coined for the kind of war they are waging. Kaiser Wilhelm has raised up an army of godless men, trained them to understand that the rules of battle are null and void. They are merciless. They are bloodthirsty. The kaiser himself has become a soulless maniac.

  Charles turned his head to the big windows along the wall. A hard breeze shepherded big clouds across the sky. He began to jounce his knee as the situation settled on him. He was here, and she was not, and he didn’t understand half the words the fellow up there was saying. Like being locked up in a schoolhouse, only worse. He ought to have stayed to help Billy with the mare. He looked around, wondering if he could sneak back out. But he was hemmed in on all sides. No escape.

  The professor was cataloging a list of Germany’s war crimes. They cut off the hands of little Belgian children. Enslave their parents to work in their coal mines. Burn orchards, bomb churches, tear Jesus down off of the cross. Leave a wake of destruction wherever they pass. What we need to consider is that Kaiser Wilhelm’s plan is to terrify the civilian population so thoroughly that the Allied forces, regardless of what happens on the battlefield—he whacked the map again with the pointer—have no choice but to surrender. And then? He swept his eyes over the room. To take over the world.

  In the front row, Leland Hatcher’s head was bobbing up and down.

  The professor raised his pointer to the window.

  Look out there. Imagine the sudden appearance of a zeppelin. Hoving into view, a massive gray cloud. One moment, clear blue sky. Families having breakfast. Women bathing babies in the kitchen sink. Then you look out the window and there it is, from nowhere, and you have no chance to think. Next moment the bombs fall. And—zumph!—nothing.

  The gray-haired lady next to Charles jumped, and her hip brushed against him.

  Pardon me, ma’am, he muttered, and slid far to the edge of the bench.

  When it was over he applauded long and loud. He helped the lady up and handed her her purse. She smiled at him.

  Gracious, son, you’re a tall drink of water.

  A few of the girls from the front row had fanned out with collection boxes. Up at the front of the room, a cluster of people had formed around the professor, and another around Leland Hatcher, who was shaking everybody’s hand, a head shorter than everyone else but clearly the commanding center. Charles stood there watching the smooth way he piloted the discussion, wondering what it felt like, to have men listen to you with rapt attention. After a while he felt himself being watched. He turned. A girl with a collection box was looking him up and down. Her lips were painted and her cheeks too. His ears began to burn.

  She was in front of him now. She put her collection box under her arm.

  Are you new in town? she asked with a little ruffle of her hip. Because I know everybody.

  She told him her name wa
s Cherry Orchard Tisdale, and she held out her hand and he took it and squeezed her fingers. He knew the name Tisdale. There was the Tisdale building and the Tisdale School and the Tisdale addition. Close up her lips were the red of blackberries just before they ripened to black.

  He told her his name, and when she asked what line of work he was in he hesitated, and coughed into his fist. Only passing through, he said, and when he did he saw a change in her face. A widening of her eyes, a realization. Her tongue darted out.

  Oh, she said slowly. You. You’re the fellow who bought the horse.

  She took him in again, her eyes dragging along from his waist to the top of his head.

  But Cat said you were long gone. She said you were the kind who’s been everywhere and that you were probably in Chicago or New York by now.

  At the sound of Catherine’s name his heart floated an inch higher in his chest. He rocked forward on his toes.

  Well we decided to stick around.

  The girl’s face changed, a flash of fear in her eyes.

  You don’t still have that horse?

  When he said he did she stepped closer and dropped her voice. Her perfume smelled like the inside of a lily on the hottest summer day.

  Listen, she whispered. I got to tell you something. That horse. That horse is a bad horse.

  He laughed a little. Oh, believe me, Miss Tisdale, we know.

  No. That’s the thing. No one knows. Cat swore me to secrecy but—well—what if it got you too? I’d have that on my soul for the rest of my life.

  She leaned in and raised her penciled brows. Her voice so low he could barely hear her.

  That horse killed a man. A colored man, in Nashville.

  It took a moment to understand. Charles looked over at Leland Hatcher. His group had joined the professor’s, but he was still at the center. Hatcher was slapping one hand into the other, making a point to his audience. Charles remembered counting out his bills into that hand, nearly everything they had, the big white smile Hatcher had flashed when he snapped shut his fingers and tucked the wad into his coverall’s hip pocket. If she had killed a man—no, no one did that. Even the lowest trader wouldn’t just pass on a mankiller like that. And if he did, he’d at least give you fair warning.