Die Dog or Eat the Hatchet (29 page)

“Juh-Juh-Johnson.”

“Well, ‘Mistuh’ Juh-Juh-Johnson,” Croker said, “you done just poked your finger in the wrong man’s pie.”

He dipped in his pocket for a match, struck it alight with his thumbnail, fired up his cigar and puffed it greedily, the burning coal casting Jack o’ Lantern shadows across his face. He shook out the match and cut a glance at Rusty.

“Get this sumbitch out on the deck.”

Grinning like an egg-sucking dog, Rusty grabbed Johnson’s ankles and started dragging him through the bar to the deck.

Excitement rippled through the drunks in the bar; this was a rare and unexpected treat. The men piled outside.

Grace dropped her broom. It clattered to the floor. She bolted for the door behind the bar. Croker cackled, “You don’t wanna watch, honey?”

I was frozen in place behind the piano.

“What’s going on here, Horace?” I said.

Croker was just putting a scare into the guy … Wasn’t he?

“It’s ‘Mister Croker’ tonight, son,” Croker said.

Then he said, and he wasn’t asking. “You oughta come see this.”

I sloped to my feet and followed Croker outside. He was limping eagerly ahead of me, tracking the trail of Johnson’s blood, his gimp leg hardly able to keep up with the rest of him. Outside, Rusty hauled Johnson to his feet and slammed him back against the deck rail. Johnson let out a yelp as the wooden boards sagged against his weight. Croker shooed Rusty aside and then sized Johnson up.

“How much d’you weigh, Johnson?”

Johnson’s bloody face crumpled into a frown. “Suh?”

“‘Bout a buck-ninety?”

Croker turned to the crowd of drunks. “Two minutes tops, I reckon.”

“Hell,” said one of the drunks. “I’ll take me summa that action.”

The men started betting, their voices thick with boozy bloodlust.

Johnson glanced around the crowd for a friendly face and found mine. I saw a glimmer of hope in his eyes as he recognized me from Rusty’s truck. But there was nothing I could do to help the poor bastard. I ducked my eyes to light a cigarette, shuffling back into the shadows. Johnson gave a wretched sob.

Croker consoled him. “There-there now, boy.” He patted Johnson’s head and then grimaced in disgust, wiping the blood from his hand on the man’s shoulder.

He turned his head to look at me.

“Back when I was a young’un,” Croker said, “we used to play us a game called coon-on-a-log—” He gave a burlesque gasp and raised a hand to the shocked ‘O’ of his mouth, as if he’d spoken out of turn. “Raccoon, that is. Gee whizz, I wouldn’t wanna cause no offence.” He winked at Johnson chummily.

“How we played it was,” Croker continued, “we caught us a coon and then we floated him out on a log on the swamp. Then we set the dawgs on him. Bet on which of the dawgs would fetch him down off the log and how long it’d take.”

I glanced down into the pond at the cypress tree stump.

Johnson was bawling now, choking on snot and tears.

Croker smiled at him wistfully.

“I must be getting sentimental in my old age,” he said, “‘cause I surely do miss the good ole days.”

And then he shoved Johnson hard in the chest.

Johnson carted back over the deck rail, hitting the pond with a splash. He exploded to the surface, retching swampy water, wearing a wig of duckweed. The crowd leaned out over the rail, leering like Romans at the Coliseum. I was about to skulk back inside the bar when Croker caught my elbow and dragged me over beside him. “Best seat in the house, Smitty.”

Johnson was thrashing his arms and screaming that he couldn’t swim.

Croker laughed. “Boy, that’s the least of your worries!”

Below the deck came a guttural growl that chilled my blood to ice.

Johnson must’ve seen Big George emerging from the shadows beneath the building, because the color drained from his face, his eyes bugged wide, the tendons in his neck stood out in cords, and he screamed,
“Sweet merciful Jesus!”

For a non-swimmer, Johnson sure learned fast. He thrashed across the pond to the cypress tree stump. Clutching at the exposed roots, he tried climbing up onto the stump, the crowd cheering or cursing his efforts, depending on which way they were betting. Scaling the roots like a ladder, he damn near made it.

Then a huge V-shaped ripple knifed through the water towards him.

I heard someone gasp and realized it was me.

Before Johnson could drag his legs from the water he was yanked below the surface so violently that the tree roots he was gripping snapped away from the stump like twigs.

One of the drunks cursed bitterly as he lost his bet.

Big George exploded to the surface with Johnson clamped between his jaws like Croker’s cigar. The gator shook its head with spine-shattering force, and then it went into a death roll, churning the water like a leathery ladle as it drowned its prey. Johnson screamed and spewed blood and beat his fists pitifully against the giant angular snout. And then he finally stopped struggling. His arms flailed lifelessly. His head lolled on his shoulders like a ragdoll. The gator submerged with his prize.

Croker nudged my ribs. “See, what he’ll do now is, he’ll tuck ole Johnson under the tree stump. Let him turn good and ripe before he snacks on him later.” He chuckled at the wonder of nature. “Ain’t that something?”

I stumbled back from the rail, choking down a geyser of puke.

“Something you ate?” Croker said. “Or something that ate Johnson?”

The crowd howled with laughter.

Grinning ear-to-ear, Croker turned to Rusty and chided him, “Now the next time I tell you to bring me the nigger who’s stealin’ my whiskey—you
bring me
the nigger who’s stealin’ my whiskey.”

Rusty paled; nodded sheepishly.

“Aw …” Croker said. “S’alright, Rusty. No harm, no foul.”

Tell that to Johnson, I thought.

Croker ground out his cigar on the deck rail.

Then he started limping back inside.

“Last call at the bar,” he said, “a round of drinks on Juh-Juh-Johnson!”

The cheering crowd barged past me in their rush to refill their glasses. I stayed right where I was. Staring down numbly at my reflection on the water’s bloody surface, I couldn’t help wondering … If this was what Croker did to a whiskey thief—what would he do to the man screwing his wife?

The first time it happened, Croker was away on a rum-run.

He liked to make the deliveries himself, sample the sins of the city. His buyers were always keen to show him a good time—and a good time gal—anything to keep their supplier happy and the liquor flowing. Before he left that night, all dolled up in his best suit, reeking of ship-on-the-bottle cologne, Croker asked me to keep my eye on Grace. That was a little like Othello asking Casanova to watch over Desdemona. But I kept a poker face and told him, sure. Even if he hadn’t asked, it would’ve been hard not to.

It was after closing. Grace was clearing the tables, emptying ashtrays and collecting glasses onto a tray, while I escorted the coochie gals to the door. As I locked the door, I was startled by the crash of glass behind me. I turned to find Grace on her hands and knees, doubled over in pain, a rubble of broken glass from the tray she had dropped strewn across the floor. I rushed to help her—

Stopped in my tracks.

Where her blouse had ridden up, I saw her back was hashed with scars, the flesh lacerated by the straps and buckles of Croker’s wooden leg, where he must have flogged her with the limb. Some of the scars were faded with age, others more recent, scabbing away to pink tattoos. Stamped on her kidneys was a fist-shaped bruise, black as a thundercloud, where Croker had signed his work like an artist.

Grace glanced up at me, and her face flushed with shame as she realized I’d seen the scars. She pulled down her blouse to cover her back.

I crouched down beside her as she started gathering the broken glass onto the tray. “Let me do that.” I touched her arm gently and she stifled a hiss of pain and I wondered how bad the rest of the bruises were. I said, “Grace—” And then I stopped myself. It was the first time I’d said her name aloud outside of dreams from which I woke hot and sweaty and fearful of the day I might act on them.

She must have realized it, too. Her hands were shaking and she cut her finger on a sliver of glass. A drop of blood dripped to the floor; drizzled through the gaps in the floorboards; landed down in Big George’s pond with an echoing plink.

She started crying.

“Hey, now …” I said. “It’s nothing, just a little nick.”

I had more experience with finger wounds than I would have liked.

I helped her to her feet and she teetered against me, burying her face in my chest. She clung to me, crying hot tears that soaked through my shirt and scalded my skin. Her breasts were pressed against my chest. Our hearts beat together like tribal drums. I stroked her back to comfort her—only to comfort her—swallowing hard as my shaking hand traced the outline of her brassiere strap. I took a deep breath, inhaling her scent, and I must have made some kind of sound because she looked up at me, and I looked down at her, and I remembered what her husband had told me, how he and Big George had once stared into each other’s eyes, that he’d never known an understanding like it.

“Why the hell do you stay, Grace?”

“Why do you?”

Two reasons.

“Money,” I said.

I was looking at the other reason.

She smiled at me sadly.

“We’re his pets,” she said. “Just like that damned monster of his.”

I bristled. “I’m nobody’s pet.” I tried to pull away but she wouldn’t let me go and maybe I didn’t try very hard. “I can leave anytime I want,” I said. “So could you.”

“With you?”

That’s not what I’d meant—was it?

“He’d find me,” she said, with grim certainty. “Wherever I went, he’d find me.” She shuddered against me. “I’d become just another ring on his neck chain.”

I pictured the three gold rings on Croker’s silver neck chain.

“What are you saying?”

“You think his other wives just up and left him?” she said. “You think he’d allow that?” She shook her head gravely. “They ever drain that pond, they’ll find a whole boneyard down there.”

“That’s crazy,” I said.

“He’s crazy,” she said.

And then I did something crazier; I kissed her.

Her head jerked back and she pulled away from me, and for one sinking moment I feared I’d misjudged things, and I was about to stammer an apology when she mashed her lips against mine and swallowed the words, and the next thing I knew we were attacking each other like wild beasts in a sack, biting and clawing, and I pushed her back across the room and sat her down hard on the piano keys, and a thunder of discordant notes boomed through the bar as I tore off her panties and she clawed at my pants, and then I entered her with a savage thrust that made us both cry out.

It was over quick, but it was good while it lasted.

We told ourselves it had to be a one-time deal, that we could never risk doing it again, even as she took me by the hand and led me upstairs to her bedroom.

* * *

After that night we awaited Croker’s trips to the city like children counting down the days till Christmas morning—starving for each other, sating our hunger with furtive glances and the electric brush of our bodies when we passed one another in the bar—and then unwrapping each other like presents.

The bastard never suspected a thing; I’m convinced of that; not then, he didn’t.

Christ, I came to hate the man. Every night I was forced to endure the sound of the headboard pounding against the wall, or the sound of him beating on Grace if he was too soused to screw, often both; it was more than I could bear.

If I was any kind of man I would’ve put a stop to it then and there. I’d have kicked in their bedroom door and killed him on the spot. Instead I cuckolded the sonofabitch in his own bed, and as I pounded the headboard against the wall I imagined I was cracking Croker’s skull.

* * *

Grace lay curled like a cat in the crook of my arm, teasing her fingers through my chest hair as I caught my breath. I fumbled for my cigarettes on Croker’s nightstand, lighted one, and sighed smoke towards the ceiling.

I started counting the scars on her back and quickly lost count.

“How’d a girl like you ever get mixed up with a guy like—”

“You?” She cradled her chin on my chest, smiling up at me.

“
Him
,” I growled, the hatred in my voice surprising me.

“Just lucky, I guess.”

She motioned for my cigarette and I held it to her lips and she took a drag and exhaled a plume of smoke.

“In another life,” she said, “I used to partner with a fella called Chauncey Clyde.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Not like that,” she said. “This was strictly business.”

I cocked the other eyebrow. “Doing what?”

“The short con, mostly.”

I tried not to smirk. “You were a grifter?”

“More like a grifter’s apprentice,” she said. “Chauncey did the talking; I was there to flash a little cleavage and a lotta leg and keep the mark’s mind offa business.” She gave a bittersweet smile. “Chauncey used to call me his Judas lamb.”

She saw the way I was looking at her and clawed my chest rug playfully.

“Oh … I would’ve made mincemeat out of you, darling.”

I let her think so.

“Chauncey and me, we were working our way through the state when we came to The Grinnin’ Gator. The place didn’t seem like much, and I didn’t like the feel of it all, but Chauncey took one look at the big neon sign and his eyes lit up like Christmas morning. That was that. We went inside to scout out the owner …

“Croker played the country rube to perfection. Chauncey mistook him for an easy mark. Thought we’d hit pay dirt. I don’t guess the booze helped his judgment; Croker was laying it on thicker than his country bumpkin act. That’s the thing about Croker. He like’s a damn gator. Pretending he’s a log, floating closer and closer, till he shows his teeth and by then it’s too late.

“Croker acted real interested in Chauncey’s business proposal. Like he could hardly wait to open his safe and fork over the cash. He took us back to the office to talk turkey. There was just the one chair. The wooden chair opposite Croker’s desk. Nailed to the floor on a ratty old rug. Croker calls it The Hot Seat.”