The Spyglass Tree (14 page)

“You know me, Mister Dub.”

Dud Philpot changed the pistol to his left hand then and swung his right but missed him and lost his balance again, and Will Spradley jumped forward to keep him from going down and jumped back, realizing that he had touched him
.

“Aw, Mister Dub.”

Dud Philpot slapped him again then, forehand and backhand
.

“I’ll teach you.”

“I ain’t done nothing, Mister Dub. You been knowing me all this time, Mister Dub. You know that, Mister Dub.”

“Shut up!”

“But Mister Dub—”

That was when Dud Philpot began hitting him with the pistol
.

“What you going to do, Mister Dub? I ain’t done nothing I ain’t done a thing. What you going to do, Mister Dub?”

Dud Philpot struck him a gashing swipe on the side of his head with the barrel then, and Will Spradley staggered, watching him through the blood and fell and started crawling toward the door
.

“Please, Mister Dub, please, sir,” he said, but he knew that Dud Philpot was getting too tired to raise the pistol again
.

“I told you not to move.”

That was when he kicked him. It was not strong enough to hurt, but Will Spradley pitched himself forward into a sprawl
.

“Get up!” Dud Philpot’s voice was almost a whisper
.

But Will Spradley didn’t get up any further than his knees, and he kept his legs together and held one arm around his stomach and the other hand before his blood-streaked face. I said, Please, sir, and he still doing it. I told him please sir, because he got me and he know it. I could get him, too, but I can’t because then it would be all that. I could do it right now if I
wanted to. I could ram him right now and grab him and turn him every way but aloose. He ain’t thought about that. He so worked up, he forgot about that. I could grab him right now. All I got to do is ram right on into him. Lord, don’t let him think about that now. He surely kill me if he think about that. If he think about that, I’m gone and ain’t nobody going to do nothing either. White folks
.

“Please don’t, Mister Dub,” he said in a falsetto that was no less deliberate than habitual. “Please have mercy, Mister Dub. Oh Lord, Jesus, have mercy, Mister Dub.”

Dud Philpot had started kicking him again then, but he had to stop and catch his breath every time, and at first all Will Spradley had done was keep himself covered as he was and wait
.

I said please and he was still doing it, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to shoot me and he was too tired to aim straight anyhow, and I was thinking it was almost over because he was too tired and weak to be mad, because he was so tired he was going to have to start thinking about it and remember it wasn’t me because he knew—good and well knew—it was Gile. So he had doubled over, hoping that would hurry it because he had to get somewhere and get the bleeding stopped
.

But the next kick had not come and that was when he had suddenly realized how much danger he was really in. That’s the part that really scared me and I was hauling out of there and out here before I knew it, gun or no gun, because I could hear him just standing there huffing and puffing like that, and I knew if he fainted it was going to be me if he come to saying I did it and if he didn’t come to, I didn’t have no chance at all. White folks. White folks. White folks. But now I got to get there and tell Gile
.

And black ones, too. Yeah, them too. Goddamn right, them too. Because ain’t no use of them saying that because that don’t make me that, just because I didn’t do that. They can call me anything they want to, but anybody say I’m that don’t know what they talking about. That’s all right with me because goddamn the luck I know they going to say it anyhow, because all
I want to do now is get there and tell Gile. They can say anything they goddamn want to
.

he came on and on and on pulling against the pain and pumping against the stiffness and the swelling and then he had his second wind and his second chance. But he still couldn’t really believe it was happening to him.

N
ot that I didn’t already know people like Will Spradley. I have always known and heard about people like him. But I must say that it has also been my good fortune to have also always known quite a few who could easily have been very much like him but were not. There was Ed Riggins, for instance, better known as Evil Ed Riggins and perhaps even better as Old Man Evil Ed. By which people of all persuasions in and around Gasoline Point meant that he was not only somewhat foul-mouthed as if on principle but also downright badassed when crossed.

He was one I was to find myself remembering again as soon as I realized what turn the story Will Spradley was telling me was about to take. Any time his name used to be mentioned around the fireside or on the swing porch, somebody always had to say something about how he never was one to take any stuff from anybody, especially white people, whom he almost always called white folks. Even when he was addressing them individually, he would say, What say white folks or, Howdo white folks or say, Lookahere
white folks and so on, and he was the one who referred to important looking white women not as Miss Ann or Miss Lady but as Miss I Am, as in “Look at Miss I Am up there, call herself clerking on that typing machine. White folks, white folks, white folks. I declare to God!”

Everybody knew the one about how he used to signify at his own boss man back in the old days up in the farming country before moving down into Mobile County during the wartime shipbuilding boom in Chickasaw. All you had to do was be somewhere sometime as I was in the barbershop that time when somebody reminded him of Old Man Jake Turner Cuthbert.

Whoever it was went on to say, I remember one time when damn near half the farm folks in that district was still standing around that little old two-by-four crossroads town after dark, waiting for old man Jake to get back from the county seat with the payroll. You remember that, Ed? And Old Ed Riggins said, Goddamn right I remember it and all them old hunch-shouldered, boney-butt peckerwoods standing around everywhere waiting for him, too, just like us, and I’m the one got to tell him. I said, Where the hell is that goddamn old white man with my money I done sweated all the week for? I said, This is Sadday night. I said, I done give him the time he hire me for and now this here is my goddamn time he messing with. He ain’t paying me for this and look at all these stores still open so people can settle up a few things and pick up a little something and get on home. Goddamn.

And I told him, too. I said, Man, where you been, white man, just coming in here this time of night? I said, Man, you know this is Sadday. And he come talking about nigger, and I said, Man, nigger nothing. I said, Business is business. I said, Nigger ain’t got nothing to do with this. I said, What about all these old hungry white folks around here? Just like everybody else. And he said, Yeah, but nigger. And I said, Man, how you going to nigger your way out of something like this? I said, You know good and well I
am eating out of a paper sack. I said, You the one eating out of the cupboard, not me and these people. I said, I’m eating out of a paper sack one can at a time.

I also knew what people in Gasoline Point meant when they said Old Evil Ed Riggins
didn’t even lower his voice in the bank
because I was there one day when he came in. It was not that he was loud. He wasn’t. But when he spoke in his normal tone of voice, you suddenly realized that the tone everybody else was using was hardly above a whisper and also that they were moving about as if they were not only in church but at a funeral.

As a matter of fact, he didn’t even raise his voice when you saw him standing somewhere signifying at everybody in earshot as I came upon him doing at the entrance to Hammel’s Department Store one day. When he said, Well, let me get on in here and see if I can figure out what these old Mobile, Alabama, white folks coming up with this time, he was not really trying to get attention. He was only thinking aloud in public and signifying and scandalizing anybody who happened to be listening.

He also used to like to say, You damn sure better be on your goddamn p’s and q’s because you can bet your bottom dollar these old goddamn white folks going to be trying to come up with something else, and damn if I believe they know what the hell it is they own selves most of the goddamn time, if you want to know the goddamn truth. Hell, it ain’t my goddamn fault. I didn’t make them. I’m just trying to find out how to deal with these we got around here.

People used to say he walked with one shoulder hunched just slightly higher than the other because he was so used to wearing an underarm holster for his 38 Special and that when the weather was too warm for a coat or his stiffly starched blue denim overall jumper-jacket, you could tell by a little added drag in his sporty walk that he was carrying his back-up Derringer in a leg holster.

He had started out up in the country as a turpentine worker.
Then he had become a woodsman and hunting guide. That was how he got his reputation as the dead-eye pump gun and Winchester expert, bar none. He still hunted bear and deer as well as rabbits, possum, squirrels, and coons, ducks, and quail and now he also had a rowboat that he used not only for channel fishing but also for bagging ducks, marsh hens, and wild guineas up in Hog Bayou (which was also wild boar and alligator territory) and over in the canebrakes of Pole Cat Bay.

The only explanation I ever heard anybody give for the way he always woofed and signified wherever he was around white people was that it was what he did to keep
everybody
reminded that no matter who you were, he was not the kind of man you could mess with and expect to get away with it. Nobody I ever asked or overheard around the fireside, on the swing porch, or in the barbershop or anywhere else ever claimed to know about any specific occurrence that it all could be traced back to. Nor could anybody name anybody anywhere who ever called his hand.

I did know who Dudley Philpot was when I woke up that morning but only by name because of the sign on the front of his store, which I had never set foot inside of but which I knew was about a half of a block off Courthouse Square going toward Carmichael Construction Supply Company. I did not know him by sight and I had never wondered what he was like because he didn’t have any kind of reputation that I had ever heard anything about.

Giles Cunningham, on the other hand, was somebody I already knew by sight as well as reputation. I had never actually met him, but I became used to seeing him in the barbershop and on the block during the past three years, and so I had also picked up enough information about him (most of it casual and incidental) to know that he owned the Dolomite Ballroom out near Montgomery Fork, the hillside eating place called the Pit (as in barbecue pit),
a short distance out of town on U.S. 80 going toward the Georgia state line, and that the Plum (as in plum thickets and also as in plumb out of town and nearly out of the country), the after-hours spot off Route 33 going south by east to the Florida panhandle, belonged to him.

By the time that I had become the upperclassman and prospective honor graduate that I was when I woke up that morning, I had also learned enough about him to know that he also owned two subdivisions, one near the campus and another out in the hill section where he lived, that he owned a chicken farm and fourteen hundred acres of farmland out in the country, and that he also had part ownership in several other concerns, including a dry-cleaning business which a cousin was operating in Chattanooga and a bay-front resort and fishing camp which his half-brother was getting started down below Mobile and Dog River.

I also knew that his houseman at the ballroom was Wiley Payton, an old trench buddy from the AEF and that one Speck (as in Speckle Red) Jenkins, an old L & N dining car chef out of Montgomery, took care of the day-to-day details at the Pit and that the man in charge out at the Plum was one Flea (for Fleetwood) Mosley, an old pre-Prohibition bartender and off-time pool shark from Birmingham.

Along with the ballroom into which headline road bands were booked once or twice a week, the Dolomite also had a big bar off the main lobby that was open every night and had its own combo and a floor show. The Pit was strictly an eating place that was open for breakfast and closed after dinner, which was served from 5:30 to 8:30
P.M
. on weekdays and 5:30 to midnight on Saturdays. The Plum was an old-time down-home jook joint with a honky-tonk piano player named Gits Coleman.

The Pit was also his headquarters. So that was where he spent most of his time during daylight hours and that was where you called to get him on the phone. He also spent a certain amount
of time at the other places, too, but anybody trying to get in touch with him always called the Pit first. Some people also knew that in case of an emergency, you could also get a message to him by calling Hortense Hightower.

He made a daily check of the Dolomite and the Plum either in the morning or early afternoon while things were being set up and then again at night when everything was supposed to be rolling. Sometimes he ran out to the poultry farm once a week and sometimes twice. Otherwise, he left everything up there to Ed Mitchell, a graduate from the School of Agriculture, who sent eggs and dressed chickens into the Pit and also to the clubs. The only time he made regular trips to his other farms further out in the country was during the planting and harvest seasons. Otherwise, he seldom went more than once every two or three weeks.

You could also find him in town for a while every morning because he usually went to the bank before noon, and when Wiley Peyton wasn’t with him during that part of the day, it was usually Flea Mosley, and unless there was some reason to check by the courthouse, the next stop was always his office at the Pit because that was where he usually took care of bills and orders. He always put in the big orders himself, and he also booked all the name bands and personally produced and promoted all of the special dances and coordinated the annual galas sponsored by the local social clubs.