When I finished up at the Lathrop house, sometimes I would drop over to the station and talk with the Sheriff, and about twice a week I would get invited home for dinner. Or I might see a movie. There was one movie house in town and they changed the bill three times a week, and even so the movie was usually one I had seen four or five years ago. The theater was always close to empty, and whether or not they had an afternoon show depended on how many people showed up. Mr. Crewe wouldn’t run the projector unless he had at least ten people in the audience.
He was one of the people I’d tried to hit for a job. I never heard a man laugh louder. “Why, if I paid myself a salary,” he said, “I’d go broke tomorrow. I’d have to close.”
Then, after the movie, or instead of the movie, I would sometimes stop for a cup of coffee at a diner. The coffee wasn’t sensational but one of the waitresses was, and I liked to talk to her. She had told me that she wouldn’t go out with me because her boy friend was in Vietnam, and I was only seventeen and she was nineteen and she didn’t go with boys younger than herself. I figured sooner or later she would change her mind, and even if she didn’t the coffee wasn’t that godawful.
Then I would walk about a mile out of town, or get a lift if I had had supper with the Sheriff and Minnie. There was a place there on one of the country roads called the Lighthouse, where I had a room and got my morning and evening meals.
“It’s not a job with a future,” Sheriff Tyles said, “but you could do worse. It puts a roof over your head and a few dollars in your pocket and it’s good experience if you ever want to go into law enforcement. Old Geraldine runs a decent place. You won’t find water in the liquor and you’ll never hear of a customer getting rolled, not even one from out of the state which you would expect. Now and then a fight will get out of hand and there’ll be a certain amount of cutting, but you always have that when you have men and whiskey. Hasn’t been anybody killed there in onto four years, and that was Johnny Piersall that everybody was surprised he lasted that long. If there was ever a boy looking to get killed, that was Johnny Piersall.
“And Geraldine has a doctor in once a week, and everything is clean and decent. So for the most part all you have to do is be there. You’ll be a deputy in case you have to go so far as to make an arrest, but I doubt that’ll happen at all. You might have to stop a fight now and then if it gets too ornery, or you might have to hit some old boy upside the head for abusing one of the girls. But being there is the main thing, and the less you have to do the more Geraldine will like it. It’s like a life insurance policy, there’s never yet been anybody complaining that he’s not getting sufficient use out of it.”
So that was my job. From around nine at night until around four in the morning, with time for a nap in the early evening unless something came up and they had to call me. At the Lighthouse, owned and operated by Geraldine Simms.
There are, as Sheriff Tyles and I had agreed, laws and laws. Laws to help people and laws to get in people’s way. I guess I had always had more or less that attitude myself, and maybe more of it when you consider my parents’ occupation and my own work as a termite salesman. (Not that I actually sold termites.)
Even so, I have to admit that the job came as a surprise to me. I’d already had a lot of unusual jobs, and in fact I had gotten to the point where I took it for granted that I would go on having unusual jobs. I always figured that sooner or later I would find what I had been looking for all along, which is to say a Job With A Future, but that never seemed to be the kind of job I got and I was beginning to see a pattern developing.
But I never expected to be employed as a Deputy Sheriff in a South Carolina whorehouse.
I just never expected it.
Six
Geraldine shook her head. “You’re in trouble now, Chip.”
“I am?”
“Bad trouble.”
“I don’t see it.”
Her hand, thin with a tracing of blue veins, moved quickly and decisively. She lifted a pawn of mine, set her bishop in its place.
“Check,” she said.
“Oh.”
“Think it out if you want, but I can speed it up for you. If you play King takes Bishop, I play Queen to King Eight — Checkmate. If you play King to Bishop One, I play Bishop takes Queen.”
I looked at the board for a minute, and she was right. She generally was. I nodded slowly.
“You resign?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Want another game?”
“Not right now. I have a feeling I’m never going to learn this game.”
“You’re getting better.”
“I can’t keep my mind on it the way you can, that’s the thing. I used to play in New York and I would win most of the time because I could see a move or so in advance, and that was better than the guys I played against. I even thought I was pretty good, because of generally winning.”
“You’re not so bad.”
“Thanks,” I said. I gathered the pieces and put them back in the cigar box. We were in the barroom, and there were three beer-drinkers in the bar. Geraldine went to see if they wanted refills. They didn’t. It was around eleven, the middle of the week, and business couldn’t have been much slower. Geraldine came back with a cold Coke for me and her usual glass of banana liqueur.
We talked about this and that, and then Geraldine was starting to say, “That tobacco farmer’s been a long time with Claureen,” when I looked up and Claureen was standing there in a pink wrapper and house slippers.
She said, “Chip? Could you come on up for a minute?”
“Trouble?”
Just that he’s asleep and I can’t wake him and I was afraid if I did wake him and he woke up nasty like they will sometimes—”
“He’s not a regular,” Geraldine said. “This is his first time.” This meant he wasn’t a treasured customer, so if it would simplify things to beat his brains in I should just go ahead and do it.
I got to my feet. Geraldine said something about the kind of men who fall asleep the minute they finish. Claureen took my hand and we walked to the stairs.
On the staircase she said, “It’s not like she said.”
“What isn’t?”
“I declare it’s too embarrassing to say. He didn’t fall asleep after. He fell asleep while.”
“While what?”
“What do you think?”
“Oh. Too much to drink, probably.”
“No, That’s not it. I know when they can’t because they been drinking. It’s not he can’t. Oh, you’ll see what I mean.”
In her room I saw what she meant. The tobacco farmer was stretched out on his back with his eyes closed and his arms at his sides. He had his socks and shoes on and nothing else.
“You see how he is, Chip? He’s still hard.”
“Uh, yeah. So he is.”
“He just sprawled out like that and I started doing him, you know, and he got like that right away. Just lying still like that, and hard as a bar of iron. And I did him and did him and did him and nothing happened. And I got to thinking, all right, you silly old son of a bitch, just how long is it gone take before you get where you’re going? But I just kept on and then I wasn’t even thinking about what I was doing, I thought about getting my hair done and I don’t know what-all, and the time just went on by—”