Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“What about the law?” Henry asked.

“Let’s make some money first. No sense talking to ’em with empty pockets.”

Several hours later, the bodyguard returned with a duo in the back of the wagon, an ancient, toothless banjo player and a shaggy-haired, barefoot boy with a harmonica. Though everything about them, from their puke-splattered rags to their bloodshot eyeballs, indicated a serious problem with alcohol, Henry hadn’t thought twice about bringing them back to the camp. He had never met anyone who played music for a living who wasn’t fucked-up in some sad or depraved way, the same as those who painted pictures or wrote books or traipsed about spouting lines on a stage from the latest melodrama. In his opinion, only the truly miserable were really any good at artistic endeavors of any kind.

“Jesus, where did ye find these two?” Blackie asked, as he pulled a plug of tobacco from the pocket of his brocaded vest and bit a chew off.

“Some dive,” the bodyguard replied. Henry was built like a middleweight pugilist, with big hands and thick shoulders and a wide back. A Remington Model 1888 revolver hung from a leather holster around his waist and a little Stevens pocket pistol was strapped to his left calf. But even though his job sometimes required him to be brutal, Henry was by no means an unfeeling person. When he was a young man in Erie, Pennsylvania, he’d entertained ambitions of entering a religious order, but the old priest at his church, Father Hamilton, a man turned cynical and mean from years of being exiled to a land of lake-effect snow and sour wine and illiterate parishioners who smelled like cooked cabbage, had scoffed at such an idea. Instead, he had recommended the new steel mill that had just opened up. It had been a great disappointment, and the only way Henry was able to accept it was to remind himself that everything happened for a reason, which was something his grandfather used to say whenever things turned to shit. Of course, not knowing what else to do, he hired on, but two years later, walking home after finishing a twelve-hour shift in the furnaces, he came upon a man beating a mutt with a garden spade. Words were said, and one thing led to another; and as he tried to explain to his mother that night when he slipped in the back door to tell her goodbye, he’d had no choice. A bastard who would do such a thing to a poor, defenseless animal deserved to die, he hoped even God would understand that. By the time he met Blackie trying without success to build a fire under a railway trestle in the middle of Iowa during a cold rainstorm, he had been on the run for several years. Although the pimp had only one whore at the time, a pockmarked farm girl named Vera who he’d grown up with in Nebraska, he claimed, with an air of confidence that belied his cheap suit and rundown shoes, that he was on his way to St. Louis to make his fortune. Within a couple of minutes, Henry had the fire lit and was sharing his last can of stew with them. “You religious?” Blackie had asked, pointing at the small wooden cross that hung from the stranger’s neck. “Not really,” Henry said. He’d stopped going to Mass right after the old priest consigned him to the steel mill. “My mother give it to me the last time I saw her.” “Good,” the pimp had said. “I could use a man like you.” They had been together ever since, had seen a hundred girls like Vera come and go over the years.

“And what about the whiskey?” Blackie asked, as he looked the musicians over.

“It’ll be here this afternoon.”

The pimp made a beckoning motion with his hand. “Well, come on, boys, let me hear something.”

Climbing down off the wagon, the pair nodded to each other, and began awkwardly trying to find some sort of matching rhythm, the old man picking at the strings of the banjo with his arthritic fingers, and the boy shyly doing a little shuffle with his feet while trying to follow along with the mouth harp. Unfortunately, the longer they played, the worse they sounded, and before they could finish the first song — Blackie couldn’t figure out if it was supposed to be “Dixie” or “Camptown Races” or possibly even some deranged version of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—the girls had emerged from their respective tents and were bent over double, cackling with laughter. When the final notes died away, they all clapped and sat down around the campfire. Still giggling, they passed the coffee pot around and began rolling cigarettes.

Henry looked at Blackie and shrugged. “Hell, boss, once them soldiers get liquored up, they’ll sound all right.”

“Christ, Henry, they’d give a dead man a headache,” the pimp said. He spat a stream of black juice on the banjo player’s shoe and walked away without another word.

After Blackie disappeared around the last of the tents, the bodyguard turned and asked the boy, “What’d you say your name was again?”

“Eddie. Eddie Fiddler.”

“Well, tell me now, how many songs you know, Eddie?” Henry hoped that perhaps they had just gotten off to a bad start. Stage fright maybe. He had heard it happened to the best of them on occasion. Even Esther, probably the least self-conscious person he’d ever met, occasionally got the jitters if too many voyeurs crowded into her tent to watch her play a tune on some john’s skin flute.

The boy looked at the banjo picker for help, but the old man had his eyes glued on the women. “Oh, hard to say, really,” Eddie said weakly. “A few, I reckon.” Last evening, out of their minds on a bottle of moonshine called Knockemstiff that he had traded his shoes for, they had stolen a dozen baby chicks from a coop in somebody’s backyard and ate them alive for dinner. He had awoken this morning tangled up in a patch of ivy with a raging headache and a tiny beak stuck between his two front teeth.

With the tip of his finger, Henry tapped the boy’s forehead hard several times. “Do I look like someone you wants to be a-lyin’ to?”

“No, sir,” Eddie mumbled, afraid to move. Staring at the cross hanging from the big man’s neck, the realization of how low he had sunk since leaving home suddenly brought on a wave of nausea, and he had to swallow several times rapidly to keep from blowing feathers and booze all over the man’s shiny black boots.

“So, goddamn it, how many do ye know?”

“Two,” the boy answered. “The one we just played, plus’n another one. We ain’t been together all that long.”

“Now why in the hell didn’t you tell me that before I brought you all the way out here? You and that ol’ soak done wasted my whole morning.”

“You didn’t ask. Besides, Johnny says all music sounds pretty much the same anyway.”

“Lord Almighty!” Henry cried. “That’s got to be one of the dumbest fuckin’ things I ever heard in my life. How long you been playin’ that harp anyway?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Eddie said, trying to remember just how many days it had been since he and the old man had met. “Maybe a week?”

“Sonofabitch,” Henry muttered as he turned and headed toward the wagon.

The banjo player made a great show of bowing to the women and smiling with his gum ridges, then asked the boy, “Did we get the job?”

“I don’t think so,” Eddie answered as he watched Henry climb up on the wagon seat and unwrap the reins from the brake handle.

“Well, shit, ask him.”

“Johnny wants to know if we got the job?” the boy called out.

“Fuck, no,” Henry yelled. “Now get your asses in the wagon so I can haul you back to town.”

“Come on, Johnny,” Eddie said. “Looks like he’s in a hurry.”

“You go on,” the old man said. “I’m a-thinkin’ I’ll just stick around here awhile.” He winked at the whores, then eased himself down on a stump and began strumming the banjo slowly, as if he was about to serenade them with a love ballad.