The Midnight Cool Read online

  He looked back at Cherry. He felt suddenly confused.

  She’s got top-shelf bloodlines, that horse, he said. Top-shelf. She’s quality, that mare. She’s— He faltered.

  Cherry frowned. I’ll tell you what Mister Hatcher said to Catherine, but you got to swear not to repeat it. She was so upset, you see. He told her that the money he paid the dead man’s family was more than the poor man would make in a year. He said, the world doesn’t mourn a man like that. Not much more than it does a dead dog . . .

  She kept going, but now Charles was just watching her red-black lips. All he could hear was a voice in his head: I ain’t no dog!

  His hand clenched at his side. He could not shake the voice nor the confusion. He began to babble.

  You’re mistaken, Miss Tisdale! That horse has got bloodlines better than anybody in this here room! I been all around this world, Miss Tisdale, and I seen all kind of horses and I know horses better than most men know their own selves. And that horse is— Let me tell you something about horses, Miss Tisdale. When you breed a horse—when you bring a stallion to a mare with the intention of breeding them—well you don’t know what’s gonna happen.

  Cherry’s cheeks and neck flared with streaks of red and her eyes had gotten big. Her dark mouth hung a little ways open. He realized with horror that the subject of horse breeding was not one you brought up with a girl like this. But he could not stop. His mouth just kept going.

  That horse, she might kick him in the teeth and walk off and be done with it and that’s that or she might turn around and lift her tail—

  Cherry put her hand to her mouth.

  Lift her tail and take him, Charles finished, miserable. He turned. Edmund Hatcher was standing beside him. How long had he been there? Christ!

  You don’t say, Edmund Hatcher said coolly. And if that’s the case, he said, what do you think about a human girl? Seems to me she’d kick a fellow like you in the teeth before you even opened your mouth.

  Well I don’t know nothing about human girls, Charles muttered, dropping his chin. I do know about horses.

  Misery. Complete and utter humiliation. Edmund Hatcher reached across him to take Cherry’s arm. His eyes bore the rawness of a bad hangover.

  If you’re finished here, Cherry, Edmund said harshly, Missus Dimwiddle wants to make a donation.

  By some miracle Charles managed to scrape himself together.

  Now hold on a minute, he said, and reached into his pocket. I was fixing to make a donation too.

  Just as the words left his mouth he realized he had no money on him. He groped around. He looked at Cherry. She had the box out, waiting. Her cheeks were still crimson.

  Every bit counts, she said weakly.

  He hasn’t got any money, Cherry, Edmund said sharply, and then they were mercifully gone.

  Charles paced in the bright sunlight on East Main, the world’s biggest fool. He could hardly get his thoughts in order. Flower boxes along the sidewalk burst with red and white geraniums. compliments of the richfield ladies’ beautification club. Old men dozed on the benches. He kicked a rock that skidded to the middle of the street, then stopped to roll a cigarette. When he had it lit he looked up at the sky, tried to imagine a zeppelin like a gray ghost, silently hoving into view. And then—zumph!—all of it crumbling. Awful. Unthinkable. But at least it would erase the terrible humiliation of his encounter with the girl.

  He tried to remember the German word the professor had used but he could not. It had sounded so strange, like a sneeze. His thoughts were still tangled in confusion.

  A mankiller! She couldn’t be. She was so beautiful, that horse!

  He turned on Second Street, towards the depot. Halfway down the block he heard a jangle of bells and the creak and clatter of wooden wheels. He stopped. Coming towards him, helter-skelter down the middle of the street, a ramshackle low-slung conveyance rumbled, pulled by two goats and driven by a gigantic colored man with such arms and legs and hands and feet that Charles could only imagine that if he stood up he would be eight feet tall. He looked like something from a bad dream, a prophet or a madman. The cart jumped and lurched forward and sideways all at once. Turned the corner of Water Street, then was gone.

  Charles realized he had been holding his breath. Time to get the hell out of this place, he said aloud.

  He walked all the way to the edge of town, where the Hatcher Boot and Shoe factory dominated the bank of Defeated Creek. At the corner of the humming building, next to a set of side stairs, a few willow trees leaned out over the water. He went and stood beneath them, then picked up a rock and threw it into the sluggish water below. Then another. Above, a kingfisher rattled at him and flew from one branch to another.

  Someone called his name.

  He turned. It was Twitch. He had just come down the side stairs. A scowl made his pinched-up face even smaller.

  If you’re here to see about the janitor position, it done been filled.

  Charles bristled. I ain’t interested in no janitor position.

  Well then you got a smoke? Because I just made a damn fool of myself in there, Twitch said.

  Charles heard the echo of his own voice at the lecture: Well I don’t know nothing about human girls. He softened, and went over to Twitch.

  I’m sure it couldn’t have been too bad, he said.

  They sat down on the step and Charles rolled two cigarettes. Twitch smoked fast, holding the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, from time to time pausing to groan in embarrassment. When the secretary told him the job wasn’t available, he had stood there and begged her to check and see if any other positions were open until she told him he had to leave. He was desperate, he said. His mother had run off years ago, and his father was sick and couldn’t work, and it was left to him to earn the bread and take care of his three young siblings. Everything getting more expensive. Listening to his story, Charles wondered if he had been wrong about him. He was a good man, Twitch. Plenty in his shoes would have bolted.

  Well I made a fool of myself this afternoon too, Charles said, flicking his cigarette into the dirt. Put my foot in my mouth trying to impress a girl.

  Girls, Twitch said. Shoot.

  You’re telling me.

  Look at us sitting here all hangdog, Twitch said after a while. It’s Friday afternoon. We ought to be tearing it up. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to run bootleg whiskey. Like those Johnson twins. Worth getting killed for that kind of money. He screwed up his face, thinking. But then I suppose you got to consider an eternity in hell.

  I might trade an eternity in hell for a million dollars.

  What are you talking about? Twitch turned to face Charles. You got it made. You can leave whenever you want. Go wherever you want. No one to take care of. No one to answer to. What’s a traveling man need other than the clothes on his back and some grub once in a while?

  Yeah. That’s the thing, Twitch. Charles stood up and considered the throbbing building. He could see the sweep of machinery in the upper windows. I ain’t just a vagrant. See, my father was a man like Leland Hatcher here. Bigger than Leland Hatcher. Why, it wouldn’t just be his name on the sign, it’d be his name on the cornerstone too. By rights I ought to be sitting pretty somewhere. Philadelphia, maybe—that’s where he was from. Where his people had been since the beginning of time. That’s where my mother met him and where they got married.

  Philadelphia, Twitch said, as if it was on the other side of the world.

  Yeah. Things ought to have been real different. Only one day when she was pregnant with me he went out to buy her a new fur coat in a snowstorm. A streetcar killed him. Knocked him dead. His family disowned her. You ever hear of such a thing? Cast her out without a penny. She got out of there, but she only made it as far as Bristol before she had me. And ever since I’ve been under the heel of the world. The world’s full of liars, ain’t it, Twitch? Full of cheats and liars and prevaricating individuals.

  Twitch nodded solemnly.

  Charles crossed
his arms and dug at the dirt with his toe.

  She kept me alive, my ma, when I probably should have ended up dead. She worked damn hard. She was too proud to beg. She pulled some fast hustles, but she never begged. She had to stoop pretty low.

  He paused. He never spoke of the lowest place, because somewhere in the deepest pit of his heart he did not forgive her for whoring herself at the Crimson Shawl. By that time, already so weak from the consumption that killed her, it was that or starve, and he knew it then. Even with this knowledge, the bitterness lingered, and he hated it. But there it was.

  One time, Twitch, we had nothing to eat and had nothing left to our names but an old hen that wouldn’t lay no more eggs. So she hoisted that hen up under one arm and me under the other and went door-to-door, asking people if they wanted to buy it. Well each woman took one look at her and one look at me and said, ‘You can’t sell your last hen, you poor woman, with that tiny child,’ and each one would load her up with bread and milk and things to eat. And she’d stash it in the alley and go on to the next house. Every damn house, all the way down the block. Why, we ate for days off of that one damn worthless bird. And then we ate the bird.

  With his heel he smoothed the hole he had dug in the dirt.

  She got the bum deal, my ma.

  Well that’s shit luck, Twitch said, frowning.

  Don’t I know it.

  You know, I could tell when I met you, Twitch said. You’re different than the average joker who comes around. It’s the way you hold your chin. You hold your chin like a rich fella.

  All I got of my father is this rabbit’s foot, Charles said, pulling it out of his pocket. It’s the real thing, this one, the hind foot of a hare killed on a full moon by a cross-eyed man. They aren’t any luck otherwise, bet you didn’t know that.

  Twitch held his knees. He looked mightily impressed.

  Blood will tell, Charles said. That’s what my ma always said. Sometimes she’d take me to the ball game and point out the rich boys and say, ‘Charles, see those boys out there. You got it coming same as they do, them Kings and Dukes.’

  Kings and Dukes?

  Those were the big names in Bristol. King and Duke.

  Well shit. Twitch shook his head. And they told me it was a democracy.

  No, Twitch, that’s the thing. It is! Charles sat down next to him. His heart was pounding like the machines above them. This is America. You, me, anybody can do it. You don’t even need to have a name. Look at Andrew Carnegie! Look at Russell Sage!

  Ah, that’s bullshit.

  Don’t talk like that, Twitch. You can do anything you want. You could own a factory like this someday. A man’s just got to write his own story. You can win the bread of life same as anybody.

  Twitch stuck out his jaw. He was studying Charles with his pinched-together eyes.

  It’s the way you hold your chin. Maybe you can teach me how to do it. Bet the girls go crazy for it.

  At this Charles remembered the way Cherry Orchard Tisdale’s little tongue had darted out when he told her who he was, run a course between her teeth before she said, Oh. You.

  He jumped up again. He leapt and batted the curtain of a willow tree’s branches. Then he spun around, grinning.

  Twitch! he cried. Let’s go get a drink. I’m buying!

  For the moment he had forgotten he didn’t have a cent on him. It didn’t matter. His heart was going like a dynamo.

  She had told her friend about him. Sonofabitch! She had told her friend about him.

  Edison Machine

  A mankiller.

  Yes, Billy thought, it made all the sense in the world. He had known plenty of hot horses, dangerous horses too. But this mare was different. Every day this became more evident. She did not even act like a horse, but stalked and plotted like a wolf. No doubt she had been beaten viciously and repeatedly, until something in her mind had broken.

  She’s good for nothing but the rendering plant, he said after listening to Charles tell the story. It’s what Hatcher ought to have done. What the lowest trader would do. No one passes on a mankiller.

  But Charles had looked so crestfallen that Billy began to backpedal. Then again, maybe that girl made the story up, he said. Who is this girl, anyhow? And Charles had brightened so much at this that Billy went on. Sometimes you got to listen to your gut, he said. And what does your gut tell you?

  It tells me I spent a hell of a lot of money on that horse.

  In the end Billy ended up convincing him that maybe he ought not give up yet. They had made some progress, he pointed out. While Charles was up at the lecture, he had managed to catch her and tie her to the fence. She was mad as hell, swinging herself like a ship’s boom, until Billy began to whistle, and she had immediately calmed down. He had started to sing, anything that came to mind, and while he did she was so calm she actually allowed him to run a brush over her, which was more than she had stood for in nearly three weeks.

  You’re right, Charles said, smiling for the first time that day. A man’s got to trust his gut.

  Music, Billy said, ignoring his own. Who knows? Maybe that’s all she needs.

  They had among their possessions an Edison cylinder machine, and Billy dug it out that afternoon, but he could only find two cylinders. A William Jennings Bryan speech against the railroad trusts and the Virginia Reel. He pulled out a stack of agricultural yearbooks to trade, saddled up Gin and headed for the used bookstore on a street near the depot.

  The man behind the register, fanning himself with a paper fan from a funeral home, peered at Billy from behind smudged glasses. Around him books were stacked in precarious columns, tobacco stains on the floor. It looked as if he had not had a customer in years.

  It’s mostly that ragtime trash, he said when Billy asked to see his music, grunting towards a box of cylinders in the corner. You new here?

  Billy nodded. Nice town.

  It’s going to hell in a handbag.

  Oh?

  Man who owns this building just raised my rent again. Gonna have to close. Well it’s just as well. Soon enough no one’s going to read books. Just the magazines and the papers. Won’t write letters either. Just those awful postcards. Postcard will be the death of the letter. ‘Weather is beautiful, wish you were here.’ Soon enough no one’s going to know how to express a true sentiment. Nor spell correctly.

  Well I don’t fool with letters, Billy said. Got nobody to write to.

  He picked up a scrapbook no bigger than a wallet. It was tied at the side with black ribbon, and when he opened it up it unfolded like an accordion, a single strip of paper folded a dozen times. The snapshots were dark and poorly framed, people’s heads hidden in the shadows of buggy awnings, blurry dogs, men cut off at the legs.

  You like that? You can take that. I’ve probably got two months left before I’ll have to close up. Maybe I’ll move out of town. Lived here all my life. First time I’ve ever thought about moving. Better go now. Those railroad men strike and it’s going to shut down this whole country.

  Billy closed the little accordion book and put it in his pocket. He looked out the window. Two little girls crossed the street, holding hands.

  Seems like a fine enough town.

  It’s named for a murderer. I’ll tell you the story, because it’s just like everything else. Back in the palmy days long before the war. Nothing but raw land and nothing to do but steal it from the Indians. The Rich plantation went on for miles. Young Master Rich, the most eligible bachelor in the county, his father works out a deal with another family up near Portland to marry their daughter. Together they’re going to own an empire, only young Rich in the end seems to have been a man governed by his heart, not his account books. You see, the night before the wedding, the bride’s family throws a party. At some point she and her groom go off into a parlor together. Everybody hears a shot, comes running. My gun, Rich says, got tangled in her dress. In his attempts to untangle his bride-to-be, the trigger got pulled.

  The man took off his gl
asses and rubbed them on his shirt and returned them to his face, no less greasy than they had been before.

  The gun got tangled in her dress. Imagine. The chances of such a thing happening. A tragedy for the poor young man. So heartbroken, in fact, that three months later, he goes down to Nashville and soothes his sorrow by marrying a pretty debutante. He had known her for some time, it seemed. Folks had seen them walking. Well he married her and brought her back up here. Town grew up around the plantation. Here we stand.

  He motioned to the window.

  Now we got men like Leland Hatcher, coming in here from away, no sense of the place’s history.

  Billy’s ears perked. He put his hand on a stack of books and leaned over the desk.

  Let me ask you something, sir. Does he strike you as a shifty fellow, Leland Hatcher?

  They all are. The man snorted. All of them with a lick of power.

  Dangerous?

  He’s from away, the man said, as if this was not an excuse for not knowing the answer but itself an answer.

  I see, Billy said, giving up. He wasn’t going to get a straight word out of this fellow.

  Ain’t it just the way people do things. Tell a story enough times, it don’t matter that it’s a bald-faced lie. Tell a story enough times and it becomes good as true.

  The man coughed.

  Hell in a handbag, yessir.

  Round Robin

  The day Charles finally found her again, he wasn’t even looking. He and Billy had been at the auction that morning and bought a couple of pelters to doctor up. Billy wanted to keep them a week and bring them to the opening night of the county fair, where they were bound to make more money. Until then they would have to keep living off potatoes and snared rabbits.