it all lined up. One thing about Clarence: he never let you down. He couldn’t; everybody that knew him knew he would have to be a son of a bitch, being my half-brother.
Last year Virgil (that’s right. Snopes. You guessed it: Uncle Wesley’s youngest boy—the revival song leader that they caught after church that day with the fourteen-year-old girl in the empty cotton house and tar-and-feathered him to Texas or anyway out of Yoknapatawpha County; Virgil’s gift was inherited) and Fonzo Winbush, my patient’s nephew I believe it is, came up to Memphis to enter a barbers’ college. Somebody—it would be Mrs Winbush; she wasn’t a Snopes—evidently told them never to rent a room to live in unless the woman of the house looked mature and Christian, but most of all motherly.
So they were probably still walking concentric circles around the railroad station, still carrying their suitcases, when they passed Reba Rivers’s at the time when every afternoon she would come out her front door to exercise those two damn nasty little soiled white dogs that she called Miss Reba and Mr Binford after Lucius Binford who had been her pimp until they both got too old and settled down and all the neighborhood—the cop, the boy that brought the milk and collected for the paper, and the people on the laundry truck—called him landlord until he finally died.
She looked mature all right in anything, let alone the wrappers she wore around that time in the afternoon, and she would probably sound Christian all right whether religious or not, to anybody near enough to hear what she would say to those dogs at times when she had had a little extra gin; and I suppose anybody weighing two hundred pounds in a wrapper fastened with safety pins would look motherly even while she was throwing out a drunk, let alone to two eighteen-year-old boys from Jefferson, Mississippi.
Maybe she was motherly and Virgil and Fonzo, in the simple innocence of children, saw what us old long- standing mere customers and friends missed. Or maybe they just walked impervious in that simple Yoknapatawpha juvenile rural innocence where even an angel would have left his pocketbook at the depot first. Anyway, they asked if she had an empty room and she rented them one; likely they had already unpacked those paper suitcases before she realised they didn’t even know they were in a whorehouse.
Anyhow, there she was, having to pay the rent and pay off the cops and the man that supplied the beer, and pay the laundry and Minnie, the maid, something on Saturday night, not to mention having to kehose big yellow diamonds shined and cleaned until they wouldn’t look too much like big chunks of a broken beer bottle; and that Yoknapatawpha innocence right in the middle of the girls running back and forth to the bathroom in nighties and negligees or maybe not even that, and the customers going and coming and Minnie running stacks of towels and slugs of gin up the stairs and the women screaming and fighting and pulling each other’s hair over their boys and clients and money, and Reba herself in the hall cursing a drunk while they tried to throw him out before the cops got there; until in less than a week she had that house as quiet and innocent as a girls’ school until she could get Virgil and Fonzo upstairs into their room and in bed and, she hoped, asleep.
Naturally it couldn’t last. To begin with, there was the barbers’ college where they would have to listen to barbers all day long when you have to listen to enough laying just spending thirty minutes getting your hair cut. Then to come back there and get a flash of a leg or a chemise or maybe a whole naked female behind running through a door, would be bound to give them ideas after a time even though Virgil and Fonzo still thought they were all Reba’s nieces or wards or something just in town maybe attending female equivalents of barbers’ colleges themselves. Not to mention that pure instinct which Virgil and Fonzo (did I say he was Grover Winbush’s nephew?) had inherited from the pure fountainheads themselves.
It didn’t last past the second month. And since the Memphis red-light district is not all that big, it was only the course of time until they and Clarence turned up at the same time in the same place, especially as Virgil and Fonzo, still forced to devote most of their time to learning yet and not earning, had to hunt for bargains. Where right away Virgil showed himself the owner of a really exceptional talent—a capacity to take care of two girls in succession to their satisfaction or at least until they hollered quit, that was enough for two dollars, in his youthful enthusiasm and innocence not only doing it for pleasure but even paying for the chance until Clarence discovered him and put him into the money.
He—Clarence—would loaf around the poolrooms and the sort of hotel lobbies he patronised himself, until he would find a sucker who refused to believe his bragging about his—what’s the word?— protege’s powers, and Clarence would bet him; the first time the victim would usually give odds. Of course Virgil would fail now and then —
“And pay half the bet,” I said.
“What?” Clarence said. “Penalise the boy for doing his best? Besides, it dont happen once in ten times and he’s going to get better and better as time goes on. What a future that little sod’s got if the supply of two-dollar whores just holds out.”
Anyway, that’s what we were going to do tonight. “Much obliged,” I said. “You go ahead. I’m going to make a quiet family call on an old friend and then coming back to bed. Let me have twenty-five—make it thirty of the money.”
“Flem gave me a hundred.”
“Thirty will do,” I said.
“Be damned if that’s so,” he said. “You’ll take f it. I don’t aim to take you back to Jefferson and have you tell Flem a goddamn lie about me. Here.”
I took the money. “See you at the station tomorrow at train time.”
“What?” he said.
“I’m going home tomorrow. You dont have to.”
“I promised Flem I’d stay with you and bring you back.”
“Break it,” I said. “Haven’t you got fifty dollars of his money?”
“That’s it,” he said. “Damn a son of a bitch that’ll break his word after he’s been paid for it.”
Wednesday evenings were nearly always quiet unless there was a convention in town, maybe because so many of the women (clients too) came from little Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi country towns and Baptist and Methodist families, that they established among the joints and dives and cathouses themselves some … analogous? analogous rhythm to the midweek prayer-meeting night. Minnie answered the bell. She had her hat on. I mean her whole head was in it like a football helmet.
“Evening, Minnie,” I said. “You going out?”
“No sir,” she said. “You been away? We aint seen you in a long time.”
