“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—”
“Geraldine was saying he was taking a long time.”
“—and finally I thought maybe he was one of those who couldn’t finish that way, and I looked up to ask him, and he was like you see him, and I talked to him, and nothing; he was dead to the world.”
“You tried to wake him?”
“A little. I was scared, you know, to try too much.”
I went over and put a hand on the man’s shoulder. I gave him a shake.
Nothing happened.
“I even put water on his face,” Claureen said.
“No reaction?”
“Nothing.”
“I wonder if he’s dead.”
She grabbed my arm. “Oh, Holy Jesus! Chip, don’t you even go and say a thing like that!”
“Did you check?”
“No, but—”
“Because it’s possible, you know.”
“Would it stay like that after you were dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“What a horrible thing!”
“I don’t know. If you gotta go—”
“Oh, Mother of Pearl,” she said. She was trembling. “Imagine me doing that to a dead man. Oh, I’m just shaking fit to die myself!”
I picked up his wrist and looked around for his pulse. It took me a little while, but ultimately I found what I was looking for and told Claureen she wasn’t a murderess.
“I thought I Frenched him to death,” she said. “Oh, mercy.”
“You may have Frenched him into a coma,” I told her. “His pulse is there but it’s very slow. It’s as if he was in some kind of hypnotic trance.”
“I hypnotized him? I didn’t say anything like, ‘Look into my eyes,’ or any of that. All I did was—”
“I know what you did,” I said, quickly. “Maybe I’d better tell Geraldine to call the doctor.”
“At this hour?”
“I don’t know what’ll happen if we wait until morning. Suppose he comes to in the middle of the night? With nobody around?” I put my ear to his face. “Or suppose he does die, for that matter. He’s breathing, but it’s so faint you wouldn’t believe it.”
“What’ll we do?”
“Maybe an orgasm would wake him.”
“That’s what I tried, Chip. That’s what took so long. I did everything I could think of. Even the vibrator.”
“And nothing worked?”
“Nothing. If it worked, he wouldn’t be here.”
“That’s a point.”
“What’ll we do?”
“I’m going to tell Geraldine.”
“She’ll kill me,” Claureen said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not your fault.”
I went downstairs and told Geraldine what the problem was. Rita was sitting with her at the time. There were just the two girls there during the week, Rita and Claureen. They both had rooms upstairs that they slept in after working hours. On weekends or particularly busy nights another girl would work the busy hours, usually Jo Lee or Marguerite.
Rita just stared while I was talking. “I never heard the like,” she said.
“I have,” Geraldine said. “Never saw it, but heard of it. Heard of men overdosing with sleeping pills and then going with a girl, and they never wake up afterward, but that’s something else because they don’t stay hard like that. But I’ve heard of this, too. What you have to do is get their rocks off and then they wake up.”
“Claureen hasn’t been able to,” I said. “And she tried everything.”
“Don’t even ask me,” Rita said.
“Oh, I won’t.” Geraldine thought for a moment.
“Claureen’s young,” she said, and went silent again. Then she said, “God damn it to hell, you just never get to retire in this business. You think you’re retired and you find out you’re not. God damn it to hell.”
She got up and went to the stairs. Rita and I sat and looked at each other.
I said, “I never heard her swear before.”
“Neither did I. And I’ve been here for almost three years. Geraldine wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful. I can’t believe it, Chip.”
“What happens now?”
“I don’t know.”
What happened was that Claureen came downstairs. She was wearing a dress and shoes instead of the wrapper and slippers. We stared at her. She came over and sat down at our table.
“She cursed,” she said, hollowly. “Geraldine cursed.”
“Did she curse you, honey?”
She shook her head. “She just cursed
generally, like. She said, ‘God damn it to hell.’“
“She said it down here. Twice.”
“And then she told me to put a dress on and come downstairs. I didn’t want to just go and leave her there with that, uh, with him, and I said I don’t know what-all, and she just turned and looked at me. And I just put on the dress and the shoes and I came down here.”
“You look so pale, girl.”
“Look at how I’m shaking—”
Rita said, “Was she doin’ anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“With that farmer.”
“Oh. She made me leave the room. She wouldn’t even look at him until I left the room, and then—”
“What?”
“She locked the door. You know what she always said, that you never lock the door unless you-all are alone in the room. Geraldine locked the door.”
I started to say something, then stopped. The girls saw the expression on my face and followed my eyes to the staircase. The tobacco farmer was coming down it, neatly dressed, an absolutely blank look in his eyes. He came down and he walked out and the door closed behind him.
Maybe two minutes later Geraldine came down. She passed our table without a glance and drew a couple of beers for the drinkers at the bar. One of them said something and she joked back with them the way she always did. Then she came back to our table.
For the longest time in the world nobody said anything. It was really weird. We were all waiting for Geraldine to talk up, and she was off in some other world.
Finally she said, “You never really retire. You just can’t, want to or not.”
Claureen or Rita said, “What happened?”
“He came and went. Or he’d be there still, saluting the ceiling.”
Claureen or Rita said, “But what did you—”
There was a pause on the order of the Grand Canyon during which a whole load of expressions flashed over Geraldine’s face. You couldn’t really read any of them because none of them were there long enough.
Then all at once her whole face smiled. I can’t remember ever seeing a smile like that one before or since, and certainly not from Geraldine. A sour grin was more her usual speed. But this smile was the real thing, with lights going on and everything.
And she said, “I’m not going to tell you.”
And she never did.
That was a whole lot more excitement than we usually had. Most of the time nothing much happened. You know, if someone had told me I was going to be a Deputy Sheriff in a South Carolina whorehouse I would have thought he was crazy, but if he’d gone on to tell me I’d be generally bored with the job I would have known he was crazy. I mean, what could be boring about it?
The thing is, there wasn’t much to do. Five days a week there wasn’t much for any of us to do, and it was a big night if Claureen and Rita turned half a dozen tricks between them. Fridays and Saturdays were busier, particularly Saturdays, when the workers drew their pay and the farmers came into town to do their trading. I never tried to keep count, but on a decent Saturday the girls would be pretty busy all through the night, with hardly any time at all to sit around and talk. There was also pretty good bar business on Saturday—less on Friday—and there was an average of two fights every Saturday night. One a little before midnight, usually, and the other between one-thirty and two. Geraldine told me at the beginning that that would be the pattern and it usually came out just about that way.
The fights were a pain in the neck but I got so I looked forward to them. I knew they were going to happen sooner or later and I wanted to get them over with. They were the same damned sort of fights the apple pickers used to have in upstate New York. Two guys who were lifelong buddies would try to beat the hell out of each other after a few drinks, and the next week they’d be buddies again.
I had a club to settle fights with but I hardly ever had to use it. See, with most of the guys, they would get drunk enough to start a fight, but not so drunk that they didn’t know what they were doing. And one thing they were careful not to forget was that all they had to do was pull a knife or break something and Geraldine would bar them from the Lighthouse forever. Which meant they would be limited in terms of sex to their hands and their sheep and their sisters. They might chance getting killed in a fight, but they sure as hell didn’t want to be barred.
So what I learned to do was sort of let it be their idea to take the fight outside. I’d walk through the room calling out, “Awright now, all you boys, let’s clear the way for these two. They’re trying to take it outside and you better stand back and make a path for them.”
Now nine times out of ten there would already be a path for them big enough to drive a tank through, because as soon as one guy yanked a chair back everybody but the guy he was squaring off against would get the hell out of the way. But since the others would be backing off at the same time that I was doing my number, it sort of looked as though they were following my orders and opening a path to the doorway. And the fighters were left with the notion that they were the ones who wanted them to go outside and the crowd had been stopping them.
So out they went.
I never followed them outside. Others would, and would form a ring around them, and the watchers more or less made sure that nobody got too cute with a knife or kept on going after the fight was supposed to be over. There were two reasons why Geraldine didn’t want me to do anything more than get them out. For one thing, she was afraid a whole crowd might turn on anybody who did too thorough a job of policing an outside fight. For another, she didn’t really give a damn if they killed each other six ways and backwards, as long as they did it outside.
A couple of times I had to hit guys. My club was a steel bar with a thick wrapping of leather, and it scared the hell out of me. If I hit someone too hard I could easily kill him and if I hit too soft I could get a knife in my ribs. Since I am (a) basically non-violent and (b) a coward, I didn’t want either of these things to happen. Sheriff Tyles had given me lessons on just how much force to use and said I had the touch down pat, but I figured there was a difference between the rifle range and the field of battle, and I wasn’t all that confident I would do it right.
The first time was when a kid about my age knocked the neck off a beer bottle and started after another kid. I missed his head.
He got a broken collarbone out of the deal and I got an extra ten bucks from Geraldine.
Another time one guy pulled a knife and started moving in on his cousin, I think it was. I managed to come up behind him, which helped me keep my cool. I gave him the right kind of tap on the head and it worked just the way it was supposed to.
Now both of those times were exciting enough so that I would just as soon never have them happen again, but that still doesn’t change the fact that they were rain on the desert.
I mean, nothing else really happened.
“I’m not really a bouncer,” I told Geraldine once. “Not if you figure my occupation by the amount of time I spend on various chores. You know what I am?”
“What?”
“A hired chess player. And you ought to be able to hire somebody who could beat you once in a while.”
“I like to win, Chip. And I don’t suppose I could hire Sammy Reshevsky for five dollars a week.”
“And room and board.”
“You don’t eat much. And the room is there. I have four more rooms than I have a use for. Would you believe this was a seven-girl house when I opened it? There’s not enough weekday trade now to support the two I’ve got. But if you just have one girl in a house it’s a joke, and if a man has to have the same girl every single time he might as well marry her. I used to have seven and I used to collect twenty dollars on Saturdays. Now it’s ten every day of the week. Everything costs more at every store in the county and what’s the one thing that’s dropped in price?”
“The Chamber of Commerce ought to advertise that. As a tourist attraction.”
“Tourists? You wouldn’t
get tourists here if you gave it away. Bordentown. I never heard of anyone coming to Bordentown by choice.”
I could have named one.
“Anyway,” she said, “it’s worth five dollars a week for a game of chess now and then.”
So I played chess, and sent fights outside, and sat around a lot, and talked to Claureen and Rita, and ate eggs and grits and sausages for breakfast and hamburgers for supper, and around two or three or four in the morning Geraldine closed up and I went upstairs to my room and got undressed and hopped into bed and went to sleep.
Alone.
I suppose you find that hard to believe. So do I, now that I think about it. I mean, you may have gotten the idea by now that sex is usually in the forefront of my mind, and if you didn’t get that idea you get a low score in reading comprehension. Because it usually is. In fact it just about always is.
But I never once had either Rita or Claureen, and I never once had any of the weekend girls. (I never really got to know the weekend girls, as far as that goes; they were always busy then, and so was I.) And obviously I never had Geraldine. The tobacco farmer was the only one who did all the time I was there. I’m sure she could have given me the equivalent of a college education, and I certainly liked her as a person, but the only game I ever thought of playing with her was chess.
But what stopped me with Claureen and Rita?
Well, I wasn’t interested.
It wasn’t that they were unattractive. They were pretty enough, but not in any meaningful way. The best way I can think of to explain it is that you could sit and talk with them for an hour or so, and then when you left the room you would have a little trouble remembering what they looked like. I suppose that could be an advantage with a prostitute. I don’t know.
But the thing is that the Mary Beth who wanted my bus ticket had turned me off prostitutes in general, and any of the fantasies I had toyed with about whores with various organs of gold just didn’t hold up for me any more. And even if they had, for Pete’s sake, I was sitting there every night while these girls went upstairs with men and then came back down and yawned and joked about it. I got to like them a lot in certain ways, especially Claureen. The two of them put together didn’t have enough brains to make one reasonably intelligent girl, but I liked them. And they would have come to bed with me if I asked, either of them would have, and they more or less let me know this in a quiet way, but we all knew it would have made it awkward between us afterward. It wouldn’t have been so awkward that I wouldn’t have been willing to live with it if I had really wanted to ball them, but I didn’t, so nothing ever happened.