Harry Wenzel was funny. Sometimes he didn’t care what Irma did, nor how she acted. Sometimes he was jealous as a groom. Sometimes he flattened the guy Irma was flirting with and sometimes he took it out on her after the guy was gone.
I didn’t want any trouble. I had my drink and went out of there and didn’t think any more about it at the time. That was six months before Harry Wenzel was killed and that was when it started, I guess. That was the beginning.
It ended on a chill and rain-swept night in June. The fourteenth, to be exact, the night before opening day for the bass season. Every year, on this night, Harry Wenzel closed the place up against regular trade and held a special party, on the house, for a group of customers who were fishing fans.
There was nothing philanthropic about this on Harry’s part. He made a big night for these men, at the opening of the season, gave them rooms and provided an early breakfast so that they could get out shortly after sunrise and play for some of the bass in the lake behind the lodge.
It was a smart play. Later in the season, these men would come back here and spend their whole vacation at the place, fishing.
I’d been invited to the shindig, the past couple of years because I’d once done a feature story about Harry Wenzel’s early ring career. He’d never gotten over that quick flash of local fame. I was looking forward to the evening, as I drove up the long, winding driveway that led to the lodge. It had never been a brawl. We’d have only a few drinks, eat a lot of sandwiches and do a lot of lying and bragging about our prowess with rod and reel. It was always very pleasant.
I worked my battered coupe next to Pete Saterlee’s swank and shiny car. From inside I could hear some jazz piano that was the McCoy and somebody singing. The piano was fine and the singing was all right, though slightly whiskey-fuzzed at the edges. I was a little late and the party was evidently well under way. Then the grin froze on my face.
There was the deep and throaty barking of a dog. I rattled the knob when I found the door was locked and then knocked on the glass of the door. The barks subsided into savage growls. It meant that Satan was behind the bar with Harry tonight and that Harry Wenzel was drunk. That was the only time he brought the Great Dane inside.
I’d heard about that but I hadn’t seen it. I didn’t want to see it. People who had witnessed it had been much impressed; it had made a lot of talk around that part of the country.
Harry Wenzel would bring Satan up behind the bar, leading him on a stout choke-chain around his neck. The dog would ignore anyone at the bar unless they spoke to him, then he would turn and growl and show his great white, savage teeth.
Then Harry Wenzel put on an act. He would invite comment about the brute strength and savagery of Satan. He would say the customers were crazy, why, Satan was gentle as a lamb if you knew how to handle him. He would put the dog through a series of simple tricks and end up by forcing open the animal’s powerful jaws and sticking his hand full between them, for a moment, then pulling it out, unharmed.
All the time, Satan would be looking at Harry with his close-set, red and shiny eyes full of animal hate. Anyone watching, could tell the dog hated Harry Wenzel’s guts and would love to sink his fangs into his master’s throat.
Just to make sure nobody missed the point, Harry had a strong metal ring sunk deep into the floor behind the bar. At the end of his act, he would securely fasten the other end of the choke chain to that ring. Then he’d back off just past the length of the chain, deliberately turn his back on Satan and wait. In a few moments, without so much as a warning growl, the Great Dane would hurl himself toward Harry’s back, only to be brought up short, half strangled by his own weight and the power of his leap.
That was the end of it. Harry would turn around and Satan would sprawl peacefully, for the moment, on his belly, and satisfy himself once again with merely looking his hatred at the man who had partially tamed him. Harry would serve drinks around and bask in the awe and praise of his customers and laugh at the ones who told him he was foolhardy to play games with a murderous beast like Satan.
Looking through the glass of the door, now, I saw several people at the bar. I saw Harry Wenzel coming toward the door. He was waving his big arms and saying, “Sorry! Closed for the night. Come back tomorrow. Closed. Closed!”
“Okay, Harry,” I said. “It’s me, Matty.”
Harry Wenzel’s ugly face pressed against the glass for a moment as he peered out. Then his hand flirted with the door lock and the door swung in and open. He made a mocking bow and ushered me inside.
“What’s the idea of locking me out?” I said, kidding. “You don’t want me at your party, all right. I’ll go.”
“Matty Hoyle!” he yowled delightedly. “Thought you’d forgotten about the clambake. How’s the best dam’ newspaperman in these parts?”
He wasn’t kidding. I work for the Wildivood Press, the sheet that passes for the local newspaper. But once, before I’d gotten fired, I’d worked for one of the big wire services and that made me top drawer as far as Harry Wenzel was concerned.
He grabbed me in a mock wrestling bear-hug and pulled back his head, preparatory to banging me gently against the skull with his own massive, rock-hard forehead. I twisted and lunged away from him. I wanted none of that, even in fun. I’d seen Harry Wenzel knock out a big-mouthed roisterer at the bar, one night, who’d been giving him a hard time all evening, by butting him with the forehead like that.
“I didn’t want to hurt the guy,” Harry had apologized as they threw water on the character. “But somebody had to quiet him. I didn’t want to hit him. I didn’t want to hurt him.”
That was Harry Wenzel, a gentle soul who loved his fellow man. That was what he sold, but not many people bought it. He was a fairly good guy when he was sober but there was a hoodlum streak that came out when he was drunk. Everybody was always very nice and very tender of Harry Wenzel when he was drinking.
He took my arm, his laughter subsiding and steered me toward the bar. He squeezed my arm gently and left all his fingermarks. “Door’s only locked to keep out the peasants. You know that, Matty.”
Harry had been born and raised right in this township but the local people were always peasants to him when he was crocked. He’d bummed around all over the world as a seaman on tramp steamers and he’d seen and done plenty. You wouldn’t call him a small-town guy, even though he’d been settled in these parts again for over ten years, now!
But Harry had one weakness. He liked the arts, or what he liked to think of as the arts. The real big-time to him was anybody who could write and get paid for it; anybody who was connected with the stage or professional music. Every hack writer who ever had a greeting card verse published was somebody to Harry Wenzel. Every broken down bum of an ex-vaudeville trouper was a great actor. Every gin-mill piano-banger was a virtuoso. Anybody else was a peasant and Harry Wenzel would tell them so, if he was drunk.
A lot of people hated him. A lot liked him for what there was in it for them. Somehow, he had some good connections in state and county politics. Hundreds had tried to have his place closed up, from time to time, to have him thrown out of the township. Nobody had ever succeeded in eliminating Harry Wenzel.
“You missed it, Matty,” he told me, moving toward the bar. “I just gave the folks a little entertainment with Satan. You ever see the act we put on?”
I shuddered. “No, thanks. I saw the original. Remember, Harry?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Listen, you know everybody here, Matty? You know all these tosspots?”