“I do not,” she said. “Maybe I think they’re scary. Are they pushing very hard, or is it natural?”
“Maybe forty years ago they pushed very hard,” I suggested, “but now I think it’s natural.”
“Do you have the feeling,” she asked, “that a lot of famous people lurk in the background of those stories?”
“You mean, they’re very specifically not name-dropping? Yeah, I had the same impression.” Slotting one of Boyd’s quarters, I made a selection, and Artie Shaw’s Begin the Beguine began to wander like a lost soul around this terrible room.
“But why are they here?” Katharine asked. “They have money, they’re sophisticated, they’ve lived all over the world.”
“Health problems.”
“This is the only spot on Earth with the right climate?”
More quarters, more selections. Shrugging, I said, “I guess it’s the only spot with the right climate and a handy speakeasy.”
Boyd and Laura had started dancing, a bit stiffly but with a lot of élan, and Farley was putting more drinks on the table when we got back to it. Farley gave us a sheepish grin and said, “They’re nice people.”
“This ought to be my round,” I said, though my first drink was barely touched.
“It’s mine,” Farley said, picked up Boyd and Laura’s empty glasses, and went back behind his bar. The other three customers watched the Chasens dance, simple smiles on their honest faces. Katharine and I sat sipping our first drink till our host and hostess returned to the table, with Glenn Miller’s Little Brown Jug beginning to churn in the background. Both of them had somewhat high color, and seemed well pleased with themselves. Boyd grinned at me: “Well? Find anything there you like?”
“As a jukebox,” I said, “I consider it a major national asset.”
“Good man.”
Laura rested a feather-light hand on my forearm. “Tell me the truth, Tom,” she said, seeming unusually serious. “Did you notice Clyde McCoy’s Sugar Blues on that machine?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you play it?”
“No.”
“Good.” Patting my arm, she told her husband, “We can keep him.”
“We’ll have to keep them both,” Boyd said. “They’re a matched set.”
Katharine laughed, surprising me very much. “You two are wonderful,” she said.
“Of course we are,” Laura told her. Somehow, her glass was empty again. “Boyd, darling,” she said. “Let’s pub-crawl.”
“Your restlessness never ceases to amaze me,” he said. His glass was also empty. Rising, he said, “Come along, you two, help me restrain this woman’s wilder impulses.” And he turned to call, “So long, pardner!” to Farley, who offered in return his hesitant smile, plus a small wave from a filthy bar rag. On the jukebox, Little Brown Jug gave way to Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump.
I said, “Our drinks aren’t finished.” They weren’t, in fact, started.
“Bring them along,” Boyd said. “Farley doesn’t mind.”
“Yoo hoo!” Laura cried. “Farr-lee! We’re stealing your glasses!”
Another smile, another pass of the rag, and this time a nod as well.
So we took our glasses.
33
It’s hard to pub-crawl in western Kansas and eastern Colorado, particularly if you’re trying to limit yourself to speakeasies, but the Chasens managed it surprisingly well. Most of the joints we hit were legal bars, if the truth be known, but they all at least looked disreputable, and as the afternoon wore on into evening they began to fill up with a clientele to match. In a place called the Polka Bar, with pale green concrete block walls, one burly monster in a leather jacket offered to punch Boyd out for some obscure reason of his own, but Laura laughed so gaily, and fluttered her hands so uncaringly, and said so many ineffable words so fast that the lout found himself somehow dancing with the wife rather than fighting with the husband; Boyd’s only voiced reaction, watching them swirl away across the crowded dance floor, was, “What low taste that woman has. How she wound up with me I will never know.” Within a minute she was back, flushed and buoyant, kissing Boyd on the cheek and saying, “Such fun places you bring me to! Where shall we go next?”
Somewhere in through there we had dinner, in a ramshackle restaurant completely covered with shingles, inside and out. It was like eating in a lumberyard, an image encouraged by the chef’s apparent use of sawdust as a thickener in the sauces. This chef, Tony, a squat gnarled villainous older man with two missing fingers and a lot of aggressive tattoos, came out to talk voluble Italian with Boyd, who seemed to handle himself moderately well in the language; at least he made Tony laugh a lot, while Laura explained to us that they’d known Tony for years, since before he’d quit the sea: “He was chef on several yachts. Why he came to this dry place, with nary a squid nor a shrimp in sight, is one of life’s most baffling mysteries.” My coq au vin wasn’t very good, but Tony had proudly presented us with two bottles of bardolino — his treat — which turned out to be the softest and gentlest Italian wine I’d ever tasted, so I couldn’t call the meal a total loss.
Around midnight, Katharine and I started making noises about going home, but our hosts wouldn’t hear of it. We were just barely moving into the realms of the after-hours joint, a more modern and therefore more plentiful sort of speakeasy. And so the gay round continued; we’d drive for ten or twenty minutes, we’d pull in at some half-full gravel parking lot next to some unprepossessing roadhouse, we’d enter to a flurry of greetings — the Chasens were known everywhere we went — and we would then drink or eat or both on the Chasens’ tab. Several times I tried reaching for a check, but Boyd and the waiters maintained a conspiracy against me. Once I quit being guilty and embarrassed about such behavior, I rather enjoyed it.
We had left a place called the Tick Tock, and were entering the Rolls under the harsh glare of a parking lot floodlight, when Boyd made a strangling sound, stiffened, and fell face down across the front seat, absolutely rigid, legs sticking out of the car behind him. Awful rasping noises came from his throat, and his fingers scratched like little dying insects against the leather of the seat, but otherwise he was a block of wood. Laura, about to enter the car on the other side and finding Boyd’s head there on the seat, clucked and said, “Now, isn’t that just like a man. Boyd, I can’t think where you get this taste for melodrama. Tom, would you be a darling and turn poor Boyd over?” During all of which speech she was briskly opening the glove compartment, removing from it a smallish zippered leather bag, and opening the zipper to reveal a compartmented interior filled with tubes and bottles and a hypodermic syringe.
I ran around to the driver’s side, grabbed Boyd by the thighs and found his flesh quivering beneath my hands; more like a machine vibrating than a person. I wrestled him onto his back, while Laura prattled on in her careless way, little comments about Boyd thinking of no one but himself, plus interpolated directions to me: “Just loosen his tie, Tom. Oh, I suppose you might as well unbutton the collar, too.”
Boyd’s face was gray-blue in that glaring light, and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Instructing Katharine to push up Boyd’s left sleeve, Laura reached down with those feathery fingers of hers — but now they seemed fingers of thin steel — forced Boyd’s rigid jaws apart, inserted a wooden ice cream stick between his blue-black lips, commenting, “If you swallow that tongue, my darling, you won’t like it at all, and don’t say I never warned you.”