Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“How do ye figure?”

“Things just seemed a little too easy in there. Hell, he seemed almost glad to see us. I’m bettin’ he had the biggest part of it hid somewhere else.”

“I knew I should’ve killed the bastard,” Chimney spat.

“Fuck, that won’t work. How’s he gonna tell us where the money is if he’s dead?” Cane wiped some sweat from his forehead with his sleeve and squinted up at the huge yellow sun bearing down on them. In less than twenty-four hours they had become murderers, horse thieves, and bank robbers, and all they had to show for it was three hundred dollars? Christ Almighty, he’d planned on that safe being stuffed with more money than they could carry away.

“Yeah,” Chimney said, “I see what you mean. Just need to scare ’em a little. Like when Bloody Bill chopped that ol’ boy’s fingers off that claimed he couldn’t open the safe.”

“Well, maybe not quite…”

“But I thought we only had to rob the one?” Cob said. “Wasn’t that the—”

“I made a mistake,” said Cane.

“Don’t you worry,” Chimney went on. “Next bank we come across, I’ll have the boss man squeezin’ silver dollars out of his ass by the time I’m done with him.”

—

A COUPLE OF hours later, as they made their way through a thorny brake in single file, Cob turned in his saddle and looked back at Chimney. “Can I ask ye something?” he said.

“What’s that?”

“If’n one of them whores you talk about is worth two or three dollars, how much ye figure a good ham cost?”

“Oh, probably about the same, I reckon. They wouldn’t be much difference between a whore and a ham.”

“Well, then,” Cob said, “how many of them could we buy with the money we got?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a hundred.”

“Whew,” Cob exclaimed. “That sounds like a lot.”

“Yeah, it’d take a day or two to fuck that many.”

“No, I mean, that’s a lot of hams, ain’t it?”

Chimney laughed. “You’re goddamn right it is. Why, if ye was to eat that many hams, ye’d probably turn into a pig yourself.”

“Oh, that’d be fine with me,” Cob said. “All they do is lay around in the mud all day while somebody feeds ’em horseweeds and slop. Shoot, what more could a feller want out of life than that?”

ALONG WITH THE establishment of the army camp at Meade that summer came a vast array of people from all over hoping to reap monetary gain from it, including a pimp who called himself Blackie Beeler, but whose real name was Philo Wilkinson. After making a number of inquiries, he finally found a place to set up business half a mile or so outside of town on the Huntington Pike. A house would have been preferable, but there wasn’t a single empty room left to rent by the time he and his girls arrived; and so the long leaky pole barn that had once sheltered Virgil Brandon’s goat herd was the best he could do. The retired farmer agreed to let the pimp have it for three dollars a week along with the understanding that he was entitled to a free piece of Esther, the fat one, whenever he felt the need. Hers was the body type he’d been raised on and the one that he still preferred. Why risk filleting your dick on a bag of bones when you could dip into something as soft and fluffy as a cloud? Virgil’s late wife had weighed three hundred pounds, and he still missed the way she’d made the bed roll like an ocean every time she attempted to turn over in her sleep.

As soon as they had shaken hands on the deal, the farmer headed home with a new spring in his step, and Blackie began handing out tools and barking orders. He had all of his hopes pinned on the new army base; the way he saw it, Camp Pritchard was his last chance to turn things around. For the past several years, ever since he’d had a falling-out with the police chief in St. Louis and fled the city with a price on his head, he had traveled around the Midwest like a nomad with three girls and his bodyguard, Henry, selling pussy for peanuts and barely making enough to keep going. Now he was down to petty cash and a worn-out Hudson and his ruby ring. To think that he had once been the go-to man for a state rep from Missouri who had a predilection for mother-and-daughter combos, and had shared a bucket of cold oysters and a Swedish opera diva with an Iowa congressman. And everything that he’d worked ten years for ruined just because he was in a rotten mood one night and refused to contribute another dime to the weekend getaway the chief was building on a lake outside of town! The vagaries of life and fate. He had thought about that a lot lately; if only this, if only that. There were just too many ifs in the fucking world. He rolled up his sleeves and went to work.

By that evening, most of the manure had been shoveled from the dirt floor of the pole barn and the weeds cut down. A fire pit had been dug out front and some logs placed around it to sit on. Three canvas tents had been set up in a row under the shed roof, and strings of Chinese lanterns hung between the termite-riddled support posts. The wagon was parked off to the side and the horses corralled behind it in an old rusty-wired pen that Virgil had built years ago to keep a pair of prize Angora nannies separated from his Nubian bucks during breeding season. Though they still had to dig a latrine and set up a bar, Blackie called it a night, satisfied with the progress they had made. Henry lit some kindling and put the coffee pot on, and the women walked down to the creek in their underwear to wash off before supper.

No sooner had they finished eating than Virgil Brandon returned wearing his false teeth and a clean shirt. He had consumed a dozen raw eggs over the past several hours, and had it in his head that he was going to ravage Esther all night long. He followed her to one of the tents swaggering a little, his chest puffed out. Everything was a blur after that. Lord Jesus, he had never experienced anything like it. His dentures had flown out of his mouth and bounced against the canvas wall when he shot his load. The big girl was like one of those newfangled milking machines that Carl Mendenhall was replacing all his help with, and he couldn’t have held back if his life depended on it. After she helped him put his teeth back in and get his pants back up, he stumbled out of the tent without a word and past the campfire, where the rest of them sat drinking coffee.

He was lying on his bed staring up at the dark ceiling when he remembered that Esther had nibbled on an apple core the entire sixty seconds he was on top of her. With an anguished groan, he rolled over and pulled the sheet up over his head. Jesus, what had he been thinking? A damn bushel of eggs wouldn’t have done him any good. Why, sometimes at night he could barely make it to the piss jar in the corner without having an accident. They were probably over there having a good laugh about him right now. Shamed in his own goat shed. For the first time since he’d buried his wife, he had to fight back tears. But after a while, he became aware of the fishy smell wafting up from his damp, gray crotch, and it was long after midnight before he finally quit imagining a different outcome the next time he walked over for his free piece, and drifted off to sleep.

The next morning Blackie handed Henry his last fifty dollars and sent him into town to find some musicians and a barrel of cheap whiskey. From his many years of peddling flesh, he had learned that music, combined with the right amount of liquor, often made men just as freehanded with their money as the women did, and he was determined to siphon off as much soldier pay as possible before somebody figured out that war was not the answer. “Go around and spread the word as best ye can,” he said. “Tell ’em we’ll be open for business tomorrow night.”