The Red Barn Club was five miles out of West Lake, Iowa, on a blacktop road, or so I’d been told. So far all I’d seen were farms and farmland, the latter still patched with snow, the fields flat except for an occasional stubborn corn stalk hanging crookedly against the pale orange sky like a crutch in search of a cripple.
This was the end of my second day since leaving Florida. I’d done six hundred miles (give or take a hundred) both days, and had staggered into Des Moines earlier this afternoon, checking into a Holiday Inn which had a breathtaking view of the local freeway. The first thing I’d done after getting in my room was call the number I’d found in Glenna Cole’s apartment at the Beach Shore. It didn’t even take a long distance call: West Lake was one of a number of smaller towns in the surrounding area included in the Des Moines phone system.
The voice on the other end of the line was female, pleasantly so, and answered this way: “Red Barn Club, Lucille.”
I bluffed. “Excuse me… I was calling the Red Barn restaurant.”
“We are a restaurant, sir.”
“Oh, well, I’m from out of town, in Des Moines for the night, and they tell me the Red Barn’s a good place to eat, so…”
“Where are you calling from, sir?”
And I told her, and she gave me directions, which I followed, and now I was driving along a gently rolling black- top road, looking idly at farms and farmland, wondering where the hell this place was, anyway, and saw it.
And almost missed it.
The Red Barn was, of all things, a barn, a reconverted one to be sure, but driving by you could miss it easily, take it for just a freshly painted building where cows lived and hay was kept.
After the pleasant female voice on the phone, eagerly dispensing directions to the place, I hardly expected such a painstakingly anonymous establishment: The wide side of the barn facing the road had no identifying marks, no sign decorating that expanse of red-painted, white-trimmed wood: No lighting called attention to the structure, and there weren’t any cars around. The only tip-off was the white picket fence gate, which was open and did have a small sign saying RED BARN CLUB. Why the low profile? I wondered. What was this a place where rich guys came to pay to fuck sheep?
Whatever the case, I was joining the fun. I eased the Opel GT down a wide paved drive beyond the gate, followed around to a large parking lot in back, large enough for several hundred cars, and presently about half full, and on a week night, no less. I parked as close to the door as I could, pulling in between a Ford LTD and a Cadillac. Mine was one of the few cars in the lot without a vinyl top. This place had something, apparently, that attracted a money crowd. Good-looking sheep, maybe.
There was some lighting back here, subdued, but lighting; and over the door, which was in the middle of the barn side, was a small sign, red neon letters on a white-painted wood field, just the initials: R B C. That was either class or snobbery, I wasn’t sure which. I wasn’t sure there was a difference.
The interior was a surprise. The lighting was low-key, as I’d expected, but it was a soft-focus sort of thing, gold-hued, glowing, not unlike the sunset I’d just witnessed.
The girl who greeted me at the door was glowing, too. A honey-haired young woman with a bustline you could balance drinks on. She was wearing a sleeveless clinging red sweater and high-waisted denim slacks and a beaming smile. The smile was phony, but she was good at it. And the bustline was real, so who cared?
“Are you a club member, sir?”
I said I wasn’t. I said I was from out of town. Which was a little moronic, since the Red Barn Club wasn’t in a town.
“Will you just be dining with us, then, sir?”
“I guess so,” I said.
And was led up some stairs into the dining room. I hadn’t had time to absorb the entryway I’d been standing in, having been confronted with all that honey-colored hair and teeth and tits, but I did have time to notice a closed door at the bottom of a short flight of steps off on the right from the entry landing.
But I was going upstairs, not down, and I was in a dining room, a surprisingly folksy one, at that. The decor was western and about as authentic as a Roy Rogers movie. Like the exterior, the walls were painted red with white trim. The dining room was separated into four rows of booths, a row against each wall, two rows side by side down the middle of the room, each booth made out of bare rough wood, picket-fence sides, crosshatched beams for roofs. The rustic effect was offset by plastic flowers on plastic vines twined around the front roof beam of each booth.
I was in one of the side booths, next to a window, which had shutters below and ruffled, red-and-white checked curtains above. The curtains matched the tablecloths. I was wondering if I could see the parking lot from where I sat, but the shutters proved to be permanently closed.
I wanted to look out over the cars in the lot and see if I could spot a certain one.
Glenna Cole, or Ivy (as my late friend the Broker had called her), drove a light blue Stingray. Of course she might have changed cars en route, but not necessarily. It was worth checking, anyway.
I was standing up in the booth, peeking out through the ruffled curtains, when the waitress came, a girl less busty but equally as attractive as the honey-haired greeter at the door. She too was wearing the red sweater and denim slacks combination, which proved to be the uniform of all the young women working at the Red Barn Club.
I ordered, spent some time trying to look out the window at the lot, to no avail, and the food came, and was nothing special. The specialty was nothing special, in fact: barbeque ribs that were okay but that’s all. Salad, hash browns, bread, all of it okay. Nothing more.
Outside of whoever hired the waitresses being a good judge of pulchritude, the Red Barn didn’t seem to me to have what it took to attract a hundred or so cars on a Thursday night. But that’s how many cars were out there.
Only how many people were in here?
A few couples, some foursomes, everyone dressed casually (I was the only person in the room with a coat and tie on). Twenty-four people, maybe. Figure ten cars, at the most.
I had the waitress bring me a Coke from the bar and I sat and drank it.
Then I went down to find out what was behind that closed door.
8
It was a room full of tables. The walls were that same barn red with white trim, but there was a noticeable absence of decoration. Only at the far end, which was given over to the bar, was the mock western motif of the upper floor continued: horse-collar mirrors; some western paintings; chairs made from the same rough wood as the picket fence booths upstairs; tables that were glass-covered wagon wheels. But that was just in the bar area. Throughout the rest of the room the walls were bare, the tables were cardtables, round, the chairs metal folding type with padded backs and seats.
It was also a room full of people. The cars in the parking lot now seemed justified, and then some. There wasn’t an empty seat in the house, though I felt sure one would be found, and room made, at any table I might care to join.
There was one small area of the room that was unlit, with several long tables which were covered. This, I learned from a waitress, was where the roulette and craps was played, on the weekends. Week nights, only the card tables were open.
This wasn’t Las Vegas, but for a place stuck between a couple of Iowa cornfields it was close enough. It certainly lacked the trappings of Las Vegas, excluding the showgirl-pretty waitresses, who went around keeping the customers well-lubricated, but all of it went on the bill, none of your free drinks stuff here, and instead of chips, the players used money, stacks of it littered each table, paper money, and not that multicolor stuff they use in Monopoly, either: the real, green thing.
To be in this room you had to be a member. I was a member. I had just paid ten dollars for an out-of-town
