Blonde on the Spot Page 2

  Seventy years ago, men would have reined in at this spot, circled the surrounding country with a watchful eye, beat the dust from their clothes and fumbled for a bag of shag. Behind, in front and around them would have stretched open country with never a sign of human existence to be seen.

  It’s pretty certain that those forefathers of ours would have been watchful at this spot. Maybe one of them would have spat tobacco juice on the dry ground, loosened his colt and said quietly: ‘This y’ere’s Injun country.’

  Maybe that’s true today, still. It’s reckoned that more than a third of all the Indians in the whole United States are resident in Oklahoma,

  They don’t wear feathered headdresses and blankets any longer. They’ve abandoned their ponies for the tramcar and their blankets for lounge suits. In fact, the Indian has become as much part of the American people as have the Irish, the Dutch, the English and the French. They are American citizens now, with full rights of citizenship, many of them having risen to prominence and occupying positions of great distinction in all professions as well as in politics.

  There’s a story that I heard in Oklahoma that’s reputed to be true. It concerns that famous American humorist Will Rogers and shows how much the Indian has become assimilated by the American nation. Will Rogers was in conversation with a New England lady who asked him if his people had come over to America on the Mayflower. Will Rogers tousled his hair, grinned and said: ‘No, ma’am, but we met the boat.’

  But there are still a number of Indians who have refused to accept the pressure of civilisation. These are the reservation Indians, the blanket Indians as they are called. They live in reservations, are untaxed and live the way of life they wish to live, in huts or tepees, cut off from the amenities of civilisation but protected by the law from crafty businessmen who otherwise would cheat them of their birthright.

  Me and Sally wisecracked as we drove along. That’s the way it was with us all the time, wisecracking, laughing and enjoying each other’s company.

  But beneath the outward veneer of fun and excitement there was growing a strain of awkwardness. It wasn’t that we didn’t get along well together. It was just that … well … it just does happen that way sometimes. You meet a dame, you like her and she likes you. Then for a time everything is wonderful and you wouldn’t ever want things to be any different.

  Then, after a time, a little thing she does gets you on the raw. Maybe she’s done it hundreds of times before but you haven’t noticed it previously. You’ve noticed it only the last dozen or so times. And after that, it gets worse and worse. Because now you begin to look for it, you begin to wait for it to happen, and all the time your nerves are getting all set to screech when it does happen.

  And all that happens over a little thing that you wouldn’t think about twice, normally.

  Sally had one or two little habits like that – poking me with her forefinger was one of them. Whenever she wanted to attract my attention, or maybe when she was about to say something that she thought I oughta give all my attention to, she’d jab me with her forefinger: ‘Oh, Hank,’ she’d say.

  That forefinger began to loom large in my world. It got so that most of the day I was tensed, waiting for that forefinger to jab me. It didn’t hurt me a little bit. But it got me so tensed, I’d have rather had a poke in the puss with a knuckle-duster than a gentle jab with that forefinger.

  I’d begun keeping count, and the day we rolled into Oklahoma City, I’d been fore fingered exactly eleven times since breakfast.

  There was another thing she did, too, that got me mad. She sometimes wore a pearl necklace. And when she wore it, she’d suck the necklace and try to talk through it.

  She got me so mad doing this, I bawled her out on it. That got her mad then, and she went into a sulk that lasted several hours. Now, like most men, sulking is something that drives me crazy. If I do something that gets a dame sore, I’m ready to apologise if I’m in the wrong, and I’m even ready to apologise if I’m in the right – provided it makes the dame happy and she knows that I meant what I said when I bawled her out.

  But this sulking business … whew! Every time I saw I her scowling puss staring stony-faced, dead straight ahead of her, it got me so mad I wanted to draw into the side of the road and shove her out on her fanny.

  ‘Okay,’ I thought. ‘What’s the point in making I ourselves unhappy? Let’s enjoy life.’ So I leaned over and said in a friendly way: ‘Snap out of it, honey. Let’s go some place and enjoy ourselves.’

  No reply. Stony silence.

  ‘Where’d ya like to go, honey? ‘

  More silence. Only this was a painful silence. It kinda sat all round me like a wall of ice. It got me annoyed.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘If you don’t want me around, you can get out and walk.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said. Her voice was emotionless.

  I twisted the wheel savagely, swerved into the side of the road and pulled up with a squeal of brakes.

  ‘Okay,’ I yelled. ‘Start walking.’

  She sat there like a stone image. I waited. Then I lit I a cigarette and worked my way through it. The wall of ice was still surrounding me. Sally just sat staring in front of her. She didn’t make any move to get outta the car. But she didn’t get friendly either.

  After I’d reached the end of the cigarette I heaved a sigh of exasperation.

  ‘You getting out? ‘

  ‘I’ll get out at the next town,’ she said.

  I breathed a loud, deep sigh of disgust, let up the clutch and drove on.

  When we got to the next town, I drove right through it until I got to the outskirts at the far end, and then I said: ‘Look, honey. There’s no future in us being this way. How’s about us being friendly?’

  Stony silence.

  I grunted, and for the second time slewed the wheel and braked abruptly at the side of the road.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’re in a town now. You can start walking.’

  Her face was quite composed as she turned in her seat and grabbed one of her small cases that was in the back. ‘I shan’t want the other stuff,’ she said.

  I looked at the case. It contained her nightwear and a few articles of toilet.

  She got one hand on the door handle, pressed it down and opened the door. In another few seconds, she’d have been out on the sidewalk hot-footing for an hotel and a shakedown for the night. She couldn’t have had much dough in her bag, and everything else she had in the whole wide world was in the rest of her cases stacked away in the back of my car.

  Yet she wasn’t hesitating. She’d have got out and walked away from me just the way she was, little dough and no clothes apart from those she stood up in.

  And why was she gonna do this?

  She was gonna do it all on account I’d bawled her out for sucking her pearls.

  That’s the crazy kinda things dames do.

  I reached over the front of her, grabbed the door just as it began to open, and slammed it shut again. Sally made a sudden movement like she was gonna try and get outta the car in a hurry. I let up the clutch (the engine was still running) and swung out on to the crown of the road. By the time she’d got the door open, I was doing twenty, and by the time she’d decided she would risk jumping out of the car at twenty miles an hour, I was doing forty. She slammed the door shut, glared at me and said:

  ‘Stop and put me down, if you please.’

  I went on driving.

  She stamped her foot. ‘Let me out,’ she demanded.

  ‘Shuddup,’ I told her.

  She sat there, fuming. There were wicked, angry flickers in her eyes, and I expected smoke to come out of her mouth at any moment.

  ‘I demand to be put down,’ she said.

  ‘You’re good and mad, aincher?’

  ‘I am,’ she said hotly.

  ‘Thank God,’ I said piously. ‘For hours, you been sitting there like an obelisk. It’s good to know you’ve got emotions, even if it is just sheer bad temper.’

  She said something that sounded like ‘Pswshaw’ and relapsed into a sulk once again.

  I drove for a solid three hours after that, trying to get her sociable the whole time. She was mildly non-committal at the end of those three hours, just enough to warrant stopping for something to eat. Fortunately the joint we stopped at sold hard liquor. I ordered a coupla ryes before we ate, and kept ordering them right through the meal. We both got warmed up a bit, and after we’d danced a bit, with the jukebox supplying the rhythm, we got sociable again.

  But that sulking business didn’t happen just once. It happened a great many times in the three months it took us to travel to Oklahoma City. That’s what I mean when I say there was a glowing strain of awkwardness beneath the pleasant outer surface of our relationship.

  And it probably wasn’t all Sally’s fault. I guess I ain’t no better than the next fella. I mayn’t have been too easy to get along with myself.

  And that’s the way things were going when we hit Oklahoma City at eleven o’clock one morning. And because things were that way, getting to Oklahoma City more or less decided the future issues for us.

  Oklahoma City wasn’t a bit like you’d imagine it to be if you’d been just a reader of Westerns. There were no hitching rails, sideboards, rangy cowhands or pony express stations.

  Oklahoma City is as modern and more modern than New York. There’s skyscrapers there, wide macadam roads, and the sidewalks are jammed with jostling clerks, businessmen and fashionably dressed women.

  There’s wealth in that town, too. The town itself literally floats on wealth. Oil, the liquid gold of the West, flows beneath the concrete foundations of thosa towering skyscrapers. Oil-filled derricks can be seen everywhere and there’s even a derrick erected in th
e Governor’s own private grounds.

  And these derricks sometimes spring up overnight, There’s a reason for that. Oil ain’t like coal. If some fella strikes coal or gold, it don’t run away. It waits right there for him to come back with a pick and shovel and get right down to digging it out.

  But oil’s different. If you find oil, you gotta start pumping it up into your own pail right away. If you don’t some fella is gonna dig a hole of his own maybe a hundred yards away. And as soon as he begins to pump, the oil at the bottom of your boring is gonna run straight over to his boring. Yeah, if you’re ever lucky enough to strike oil, don’t waste time. Just get down to pumping it up before some other guy starts in doing the same thing.

  Me and Sally drove around the town for a time. Then we chose a quiet hotel, parked the car and washed, ready for lunch.

  After lunch, we took coffee in the lounge with a Grand Marnier liqueur to round off the meal and sat reading the midday papers while we smoked. There was a tall, sun-burned, grey-haired man sitting opposite. Once or twice I’d seen him glancing towards us, and after a time he and asked for a light. He was smoking a small, brown cheroot. When he spoke, it was with a pronounced Southern drawl.

  ‘Strangers hyar?’ he asked conversationally.

  ‘Just got in this morning,’ I told him. Sally glanced up from reading the funnies, flicked her eyes across his face and then looked back at the paper again. In that short, single glance, she’d examined him, weighed him in the balance and discarded him as being dull and uninteresting.

  ‘Ah kin tell from the way youse speak that youse from the North,’ he said.

  I felt like saying that I could tell from the way he spoke that he was from the South. But that may have seemed a little rude. I grinned and said: ‘Sure, fella, I’ve had the bowery twang ever since the Dead End Kids hit the screen.’

  He hadn’t a sense of humour. He didn’t know what to make of that. So he swallowed hard, cleared his throat and said: ‘Mebbe youse would appreciate a li’lle advice about the parts hereabout?’

  I began to tumble to his line then. Inevitably, in any town, there’s sure to be a show of some kind going on. These shows aren’t always strictly legal. And they bore the local citizens stiff. So there have to be fellas going around who whip up the sightseers. And sightseers were usually folks new to the town. This fella was doing his job, whipping up enthusiasm for some kinda racket.

  But I’m a sucker for rackets. I like to see everything, and I like to see it for myself. It’s caused by an irrepressible streak of curiosity that I’ve got. Many times, that streak of curiosity has got me in trouble. But I never learn.

  I said mildly: ‘Okay, fella, shoot. What’s your racket?’

  That took the wind outta his sails. He spluttered and managed to say: ‘Racket, sir? Ahm afraid youse misjudging mah motives.’

  ‘I ain’t,’ I told him. ‘Don’t lose your pants. I’m a customer. But give it to me short and sweet. Don’t try leading me by the nose.’

  ‘Ah confess, Ah doan’t know what youse mean.’

  ‘Can it,’ I said. ‘What’s the play? Where is it? How much does it cost?’

  He stared at me for a long time, his deep-set eyes reflecting his uncertainty. Probably he was upset at not being able to exercise his Southern charm and persuasion on me. Finally he said: ‘Arh yuh a sporting gennelman?’

  ‘That’s me,’ I said. ‘I’ve been interested in sport ever since I was born. Harry the Horse useta be one of my best friends.’

  His eyes shone. ‘Ah mean real sport,’ he said.

  ‘Such as?’ I probed.

  ‘The wheel,’ he said.

  I tossed that around in my mind. He was talking about roulette. And that’s a game that’s always interested me. It’s always interested me ever since the Greek Syndicate got to work at Monte Carlo and broke the bank three times.

  He musta seen the interest in my eyes.

  ‘It’s on the level,’ he said; and speaking without thinking like he was, the Southern drawl was partly lost and replaced by the clipped accent of a Northerner.

  ‘Where do I go? ‘

  He said: ‘We dress it up a bit. Give the sightseers a spot of atmosphere. We give it the old Western touch.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I said dryly. ‘Where do I go?’

  He pulled out a gold pencil and a card bearing his name. He wrote full and precise instructions on the card, telling me how to get there.

  I tucked the card away in my breast pocket. ‘Is this thing on the level for sure?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘On muh word as a Southern gennelman.’

  I hadn’t believed him before. I certainly didn’t believe him when he gave me that assurance.

  But it didn’t make any difference to me. I’m a sucker … within limits.

  CHAPTER TWO

  To start with, Sally didn’t want to go. That gave a nice set-up to the evening, before we even left the hotel. She claimed she was tired and, after dinner, when I suggested we got going, she pouted and said she’d been looking forward to a quiet evening, reading, and then getting up to bed early.

  I said that was fine. She could read and go to bed and I’d go out visiting.

  Sally said she wasn’t gonna be left alone in a strange hotel the first night in town.

  I said that was fine. She could go get her coat and come with me.

  That was when Sally began to sulk. She came with me, but she sulked all the time. It got me so mad, I began to wish like hell she wasn’t coming with me.

  But she got her coat and climbed into the car like she was going to an execution. I shot a quick glance at hard, emotionless face and swore softly to myself. It’s one thing having a happy, carefree dame sitting on seat beside you and ready for any kinda excitement that might crop up, but it’s entirely different to have a dame with you that’s thoroughly miserable and determined to go on being miserable. That’s the way dames get, though. They’re all alike. You can be happy for a while, and then suddenly they wanna get good and miserable just for the hell of it. There’s a poet fella who useta run around dashing off love poems. He knew a thing or two about dames. He oughta have done. According to history, he climbed in between the sheets with quite a number. But he summed up broads in a few nifty words. He said something like this: ‘Women are impossible to live with ... or without!’ The fella who wrote this was a Lord, an English Lord. His name was Byron. And I reckon he showed good, sound horse-sense.

  So I drove off into the night, away from the city limit, with a bundle of misery perched on the seat beside me and wishing like hell I coulda left it behind to curl up in bed at the hotel.

  Now don’t get me wrong about Sally. I liked Sally. I liked her well. In fact, she was ace-high as far as I was concerned. But this sulking business was doing things. It was running my nerves ragged. It was getting me so I didn’t even want her around when she was moody this way.

  I drove on into the night, not saying a word, but all the time terribly conscious that she was sitting there, a kinda unpleasant burden that I had to carry around with me.

  The imitation Southerner had given me pretty clear instructions. Apparently there was a ghost town about twenty miles outside of Oklahoma City. Fifty or sixty years earlier it had been the site of an oil well. Overnight it had become a small town, crammed with prospectors and miners. Oil had been struck and there was a rush to soak up the wealth.

  First came the miners and the workers. Then came the lawyers. Sturdy wooden buildings replaced the miners’ tents. Then came the saloon bars with raw spirits, and finally the gamblers with their cards and wheels of chance.

  That had lasted a coupla years, and then unexpectedly the oil well had petered out. Overnight the town had become deprived of its source of wealth. The miners had drifted away, the lawyers had had no clients they could tie in a knot, the gamblers had had nobody to fleece, and the saloon keepers had had nobody to sell hooch to. Within a month, the town had become deserted. Nobody bothered to pull down the town. Why should they? The whole town was left standing the way it was, empty, untended and silent. A ghost town! With only the whispering echoes of the voices from a bygone age to give it silent life.