“They’d fire her if they could, just to get rid of the embarrassment. Since they can’t, they’re hoping she’ll quit before the kids have to look at what Clayton did to her face. Goddam smalltown bullshit hypocrisy at its best, my boy. When he was in his twenties, Fred Miller used to rip and roar in the Nuevo Laredo whorehouses twice a month. More, if he could get an advance on his allowance from his daddy. And I have it on damn good authority that when Jessica Caltrop was plain Jessie Trapp from Sweetwater Ranch, she got real fat when she was sixteen and real thin again about nine months later. I’ve a mind to tell them that my memory’s even longer than their blue goddam noses, and I could embarrass them plenty if I wanted to. I wouldn’t even have to work at it that hard.”
“They can’t really blame Sadie for her ex-husband’s craziness… can they?”
“Grow up, George. Sometimes you act like you were born in a barn. Or some country where folks actually think straight. To them it’s about sex. To folks like Fred and Jessica it’s
“You’ll have to,” I said. “If you don’t, the ruckus might get back to Sadie. And she’s fragile now. This might tip her over completely.”
“Yeah,” he said. He rummaged his pipe out of his breast pocket. “Yeah, I know that. I’m just blowin off steam. Ellie talked to the folks who run the Grange Hall just yesterday. They’re happy to let us put on the show there, and it seats fifty more people. Because of the balcony, you know.”
“Well there,” I said, relieved. “Cooler heads prevail.”
“Only one problem. They’re asking four hundred for both nights. If I come up with two hundred, can you come up with the other two? You won’t be getting it back from the receipts, you know. That’s all earmarked for Sadie’s medical work.”
I knew very well about the cost of Sadie’s medical work; I had already paid three hundred dollars to cover the part of her hospital stay that her shitepoke insurance wouldn’t stand good for. In spite of Ellerton’s good offices, the other expenses would mount up rapidly. As for me, I wasn’t scraping financial bottom quite yet, but I could see it.
“George? What do you say?”
“Fifty-fifty,” I agreed.
“Then drink up your shitty beer. I want to get back to town.”
On our way out of that sad excuse for a drinking establishment, a poster propped in the window caught my eye. At the top:
Below were side-by-side photos of two bare-chested beefcakes with their gloved fists held up in the accepted fashion. One was young and unmarked. The other guy looked a lot older, and as if he’d had his nose broken a few times. The names were what stopped me, though. I knew them from somewhere.
“Don’t even think about it,” Deke said, shaking his head. “You’d get more sport out of watching a dogfight between a pit bull and a cocker spaniel. An
“Really?”
“Tommy Case always had a ton of heart, but now it’s a forty-year-old heart in a forty-year-old body. He got him a beergut and he can hardly move at all. Tiger’s young and fast. He’ll be a champ in a couple of years if the matchmakers don’t slip up. In the meantime, they feed him walking tank-jobs like Case to keep him in trim.”
It sounded to me like Rocky Balboa against Apollo Creed, but why not? Sometimes life imitates art.
Deke said, “TV you pay to watch in an auditorium. Boy-howdy, what next?”
“The wave of the future, I guess,” I said.
“And it’ll probably sell out — in Dallas, at least — but that doesn’t change the fact that Tom Case is the wave of the past. Tiger’ll slice him like coldcuts. Sure you’re okay with this Grange thing, George?”
“Absolutely.”
