Sometimes in a red shirt, sometimes in a yellow, wearing cowboy boots and a black silk bandanna, one foot on Dockery’s bar-rail or leaning on Dockery’s juke, he wasted no time in letting strangers know who he was.
‘Shake hands with Big Stingaree! Just up from the Rio Grande! See these boots? They cost forty dollars. See this hat? Cost thirty-five. I do most of the drinking here ’n all the buying. Anything you want, just point. I take care of my friends. You want to say hello to a girl, just say which one. They’re most of ’em mine but I’m not the jealous kind, I pass ’em around ’cause I know they’ll come back. They always come back to their Daddy-O. It’s what they call me, their Daddy-O, but you can call me Tex. Any time you drop by and I aint here just tell that old man behind the bar you’re waitin’ for Tex. Tell him what you want to drink – he works for me – and sooner or later I’ll be by with one on one arm and one on the other and most like a new shirt one of ’em’s just bought me. See this belt? A girl give me that.’
The whiskey brown, the rum so black, the beer so dark, the gin so pale.
‘Couldn’t read my name were it wrote a foot high on the side of a barn but I make more in a single day than some educated fools earn in a month. Drink up.’
Whiskey, corn liquor, gin or rye, Big Stingaree drank it down. Big Stingaree drank whatever was poured, till drops dribbled down his shirt red or yellow and beer stood in his boots. Once he stood up in a puddle of urine or wine, and his face looked lopsided with its load of rum. He waved his arms till somebody shut off the juke. Big Stingaree had something to tell all panderdom.
‘Burn down your cities!’ he demanded; and wove a moment to remember what else had to be done. ‘Burn down your cities ’n save our farms,’ he concluded lamely.
‘Well, go on, go on.’
But whatever it was he was trying to recall, that was all Dove could remember.
For sometimes once a day, sometimes twice, Finnerty’s gentlemen stood with eyes fixed to a wall to achieve vicariously that ancestral lust: the deflowering of a virgin.
Finnerty was right: it was a fantasy that had pursued them, every one, all their lives; they had not pursued it. They had only made of it a secret mystery that never could come true.
A mystery as false as it was secret. Yet Finnerty made it whirl with fiery colors, like a pinwheel in the dark; that becomes, when it is not spun, no more than a piece of painted wood. He instructed the girls not to yield their chastity easily, but only with tears, after a bit of a struggle.
At this game Floralee was no hand at all, for she couldn’t understand that the old game now had a new twist. Nor did she wish to understand. As soon as Dove entered and hung up his stetson she threw off every stitch and in a voice like little bells on a silver string began play-partying—
she invited Dove to clap hands with her—
Nobody could make her understand that that wasn’t at all how lovely reluctant virgins carried on.
Reba, on the other hand, played her part too well. Racing from one corner to another, she would shrink like a wild trapped thing, burying her face in her hands and crying ‘Never!’ to the walls, ‘Never! Never! Never!’
Beating Dove’s chest with both her fists, again her plate slipped as she pled for her honor. Yet that in no wise dismayed her. Good trouper that she was, she kept right on beating her gums in time to her fists, ‘Never! Never! Never!’
Considering the abortions she had survived, she was surprisingly fleet. Feinting Dove out of position, she would leave him breathless there in nothing but red garters and boots. At length he was forced to complain to Finnerty.
‘I admire talent in a woman,’ he protested, ‘and I don’t expect one to make things easy for me – but chasing that one up and down and around is simply wearing me out. She’s a fine little broad and all of that, but she’s just too zeelious.’
Sometimes the virgin was Frenchy. Kitty clamored to get into the act but the amateurish tattooing on her arms and legs, that she had inflicted upon herself as a child, disbarred her.
‘Who ever heard of a tattooed virgin?’ Finnerty dismissed her.
‘I’ll keep my clothes on,’ she offered.
‘They’d want their money back,’ Finnerty told her, ‘get down to the door where you’re supposed to be and don’t let me catch you off your post again.’
She did not perceive that had she only acted reluctant about performing, he would have appointed her to be deflowered upstairs instead of merely to stand guard below, hour upon dull hour.
It was never Hallie. It never could be Hallie. Yet what Finnerty would have given to get that one in there! There was no way of debauching her. She had been in a thousand corners with a thousand men and had come away with herself untouched.
It gnawed at him, just as it gnawed him that every time one of these Never! Never! innocents was deprived of her maidenhood he had to divide sixty dollars with Dove – admittedly a generous wage for that type of work.
‘There are those who’d be happy to give me a hand for nothing,’ he told Dove.
‘Fly-by-nighties,’ Dove reminded him, ‘here today and gone tomorrow.’
It was true, and Finnerty knew it, that Dove could not be replaced. Every time Finnerty put an eye to the wood to check on him, he was giving an honest day’s work for an honest wage. Reliable to the bone. And, nothing, it seemed, impeded his tidelike powers.
Like the sea, he came and went.
Indeed, Finnerty could not contain his secret enthusiasm for Dove’s prowess. ‘You never seen nothing like it,’ he invited Legless Schmidt to see, ‘God has put His arms around that ungodly clown.’
‘Why would God put His arms around something like that? You can leave God out of it, for I won’t pay a nickel.’
‘I wouldn’t think of asking you to pay,’ Finnerty employed his injured air. ‘I just thought you’d get a laugh out of the thing.’
‘It’s nothing to laugh about,’ the big half told the pander.
‘How can you tell till you’ve seen it?’ Finnerty insisted – ‘How this mad stud comes on! Man, it’s educational.’
‘Thank you, I’ll stay ignorant,’ the cripple decided firmly.
‘Think it over, friend,’ Finnerty suggested, ‘the offer is good any time.’
Why he wanted to involve Schmidt, Finnerty himself wasn’t clear in his own mind. He resented the crippled man’s air of independence as unbecoming when able-bodied men were out begging, but that wasn’t all of it. It was Hallie’s dismissal of his own charms, made so lightly, that was at the bottom of it. How could a woman prefer a man without legs to a little beauty like himself?
If you couldn’t get at somebody yourself, Finnerty knew, your next best bet is to get at somebody who has already gotten to her.
And whether for laughs or whether for lust, his mathematics of the soul began to add up nicely. Some white collar bug would wander in pretending to look for a friend; then another friend-seeker and another, till there were five or six. One by one Finnerty would take them out for a little private talk, and then his voice could be heard, confident, promising, reassuring from behind a half-open door. Till the bargain was sealed and a ten dollar bill changed hands.