Tobacco Town

by Hunter James

Charlie Simpson woke on that chilly September morning with a new fever in his bones, a good strong rich smell of fresh tobacco in his nostrils, a devilish new excitement in his belly. Another September had come, and now it was the first day of the yearly tobacco sales— busy times at the cafe, good money coming in, always a busy time in that part of town. Good, exciting times, too, in a way, with a lot of different people coming in the barbershops and poolrooms or in Charlie's cafe or in any of the other places along North Trade Street and talking about almost nothing except the sales and how the prices were holding up. The best time of the year for all the merchants and tradesmen in the raucous Winston warehouse district.

The thought of it all came over him with a rush, like the smell of the tobacco itself, as he was crawling out of his cramped bed and preparing to get dressed. A bit cool for early September, but he knew it would be hot again as soon as the sun got up over the town.

He had been though it all before, always at this season, on the opening day of the auction, the good feeling of that day and of all the days to come, from then until after Christmas, when the auction would slowly draw to a close. Always a special time in the life of Charlie Simpson.

He had heard the cries out in the street long before dawn, while he was still lying there half asleep in the crowded little flat that he now owned after finally paying off the mortgage on the building that included both his suite of rooms and the cafe below. He couldn't help wondering sometimes if maybe he'd made a big mistake by spending so much of his life on North Trade Street. Maybe he should have invested his money instead in one of those suburban malls that had sprung up all around the city after the war.

But that was only on the bad days. Suddenly the season would turn again and he would just nod philosophically and tell himself that maybe he hadn't made such a bad choice after all and that, anyway, the street was his life—always had been and always would be—and so he might as well and stop worrying about what might have been and play out as best he could the hand he had been dealt.

Again he heard the cries of the new arrivals out on the damp cobbles of the cool morning, the trucks driving up and the men starting to unload their great bundles of leaf. A big day all right. He went to his window and listened for a moment to the shouts and laughter of the farmers looking to make a real killing and maybe even hoping they could get back home with some of their loot before throwing it all away on liquor and women.

It was as if the Carolina backcountry had disgorged itself of its whole population—hundreds of farmers in their faded coveralls and khakis and maybe half as many farm women in their homespun cotton print dresses—and sent them barreling down dusty washboard roads in the first dawn toward the boisterous tobacco town of old Winston.

The noise had started long before daylight: the harsh grating and banging of the warehouse doors, the Ford pickups revving up their motors, the shouts of the farm families as they impatiently waited for the start of the auction. Some had even come from as far away as Southside Virginia. Danville. South Boston. Blacksburg. Driving all night with their wives and whole families, hoping to beat the crowds only to find the crowds already there.

Certainly the biggest day of the year for all the tradesmen and merchants in the warehouse district, bigger than ever this year perhaps because all the talk had been that prices on the Winston's Old Belt market would set records like nothing anybody had seen since the boom times of the twenties. That was when Charlie had first come to the town, though not yet to North Trade Street, and every time he told himself it was time to move on again, the new season would smite him with its bracing memories and the thought of reunions with a lot of the good close friends he had made over the years.

Yes—and always that good fresh smell of new tobacco! Could his life ever be quite the same with that smell in his nostrils? That sudden, seductive, almost voluptuous smell, at once acrid and pungent and overpowering. Not at all like the old dead smell that forever hung over the town and had first earned it the named of tobacco-stinking Winston.

The old smell drifting up from the cigarette manufacturing and plug tobacco plants, invading the very walls and floors of the buildings themselves, the clothes you wore, the darkest, most secret spot where you might hope to hide from it, as intimate a part of the town as all of the lovely fall color spreading down out of the hills of Sauratown, so much a part of everybody's life that people who had grown up there never even noticed it anymore or merely breathed more deeply and said, "The smell of new money. Yep. That's what it is all right. It's sure means a lot to this old town."

Now, on this morning, with the new crop starting to arrive, the pace of the town would suddenly quicken and the people all along North Trade could put behind them the last dead languor of the August dog days. Charlie could even hear the exhilaration in the shouts of the farmers out there in the streets as they were unloading their crop and watching as the warehouse workers scurried about placing it on the big scales and then in long rows on the wide floors where the auction was to take place. Charlie lingered at the window only a moment longer. Already past time for him to get downstairs and start preparing for the crowds that would soon be swarming in for breakfast.

Yet, even on those first cool autumn mornings, with the chant of the auctioneers echoing through the big warehouses and the crowds of farmers in the streets, with all the good feeling inside him, Charlie Simpson would still find too many of the old bad memories drifting back.

It would hit him of a sudden that he was fifty-five years old and that all of his talk about leaving the street someday and setting himself up in something with regular hours and none of the headaches posed by the cafe business—well, he must have known that it was just that: talk, and would never be anything else, nothing to make him think that life would ever get any better than it had been these past thirty years.

Not that there some good memories and some good times. He had sure palavered about them often enough. The subject was bound to come up whenever his customers started coming in for an early breakfast. It was just that all of his investment in those years had never come to anything, a little money in the bank though hardly enough for him even to start thinking about retirement.

On this day Charlie felt it more than ever, the old sad things of the world, the deep melancholy way down inside him somewhere. Always the same and yet not the same. Still it was true: he knew that this was to be his one special day, somehow different from all the others in the whole long year.

-*-

How different he did not realize until he got his first look at the stranger: a seedy, pock-marked little guy standing at the end of the alley when Charlie went down to open up. Charlie looked at him. That sudden feeling of uneasiness in his stomach, where had it come from? A feeling of something almost like fear.

Why, forever after that, did he somehow identify it with the stranger, a complete newcomer to the town, a tawdry character nobody on the street had ever seen before? Yet there he was, having drifted into town with the first chill of autumn, with the first cry of the tobacco auctioneers, as though something almost supernatural, something downright uncanny, something that Charlie had no name for, had brought him there to fulfill some peculiar and insidious destiny.

"I knew sumpin' had sure gone wrong," he told Prather Goode one morning later that week. "Knew it the minute I laid my eyes on that little fart."

He would always begin the story that way, and the rest of the morning-crowd would listen as he went through it all: how quickly and inexplicably that first little twinge of uneasiness had come over him when he looked up and saw the newcomer.

"A real mangy character, he was. Wearin’ some old khaki work-clothes that looked like they mighta been two or three sizes too big for him. And he had these here little funny eyes. Yessir. That's the main thing I remember: those funny lookin' eyes of his, just jumpin' all around like they had come unhinged somehow. Sort of floatin’ around like them little specks of dust or flotsam the way you see it in the water after a storm."

Jump around as they would they had an unnerving habit of always coming back to land on Charlie Simpson. So it must have been then that he first realized the strange queasy little feeling in his belly was a whole lot more than just his imagination.

"Seed him when I first come down that mornin'—just one of them guys you see hangin' around in the alley sometimes. Didn't think too much about it at first. It was only later when I looked up and seed him just lookin' in at me with them crazy eyes of his. Like he didn't have nothin' better to do all day but stand out there and look in the winder. Like he couldn't even come in and order him a couple of eggs or a big slab of ham or sumpin' like that. Maybe talk to some of the other fellas. Guess I'd of felt a lot better about it if'n he'd just gone on and done that. Wouldna changed nothin' that happened though."

Prather, himself a former tobacco buyer, now working part-time in one of the barbershops he had bought with his savings, would come in each morning around five o’clock for his plate of eggs, sunnyside, often with his son Ryerson. It would never be long before the talk turned back to the stranger with the crazy eyes. Ryerson and his father had heard Charlie speak of that day so often, of that day and all the days to follow, the story so familiar to them now, that they almost felt themselves a part of the old man’s curious adventure.

The way Charlie always explained it was this: It was as though after all the good feeling of the early morning hours something had gone terribly wrong with his life, not just the old regrets this time, but something far more profound and disturbing. That's the only way he knew how to describe it. The way he always told it was that somehow he had known without being able to say why that the little guy with the swishy eyes was different from all the thousands of others he had seen hanging around in front of his cafe. Funny how he could be looking right at Charlie and those crazy eyes of his never standing still for a second.

Anyhow, that was the way he would always remember it. Every time he looked up on that first morning he saw the man loafing around out there on the sidewalk, staring into the cafe and not just into the cafe but directly at Charlie himself. It was the eyes that did it. Staring at him with an almost maniacal zeal. At such times Charlie would feel something more inside him than the usual chill of unrealized ambition. He would again talk of it as though there was something a little other-worldly about it—how the stranger would go away for a while and then suddenly reappear with those eyes jumping around at everything and nothing before again fastening on Charlie Simpson.

So he knew now that something definitely was wrong, even if he couldn't say why exactly. He knew it didn't make any sense. Why the man could have been any of a hundred others; the town was always haunted by strangers at that season, when the tobacco auction was just getting started: pimps, con men, bootleggers, card sharps, pool hustlers, you name it. Charlie Simpson had seen them all. So what made this guy so special? All he knew was that he got a kind of a funny feeling in his gut every time he looked up from the grill and saw him: a grizzled, stooped, mangy little character pacing the sidewalk and casting a fevered gaze through a big plate glass window that said:

TRADE STREET BAR AND GRILL

Char. Simpson, Proprietor

Earlier, on that first morning of the stranger's appearance, Charlie had realized that despite all the good feeling of his waking hours he hadn't quite been himself anyway. A lot different now than when he was younger; always a different feeling now whenever the season began to turn, a little reminder in the air that the years were finally catching up with him.

"Felt like I might be comin' down with sumpin.' Just didn't feel right somehow. Like I say, that was before I ever even seed that fellow and them strange little eyes of his’n. Kept tryin' to ignore him, tryin' not to think no more about it, and when, whatdya know, the fellow finally did come inside and set a spell. I spoke to him just like I’d speak to anybody else that seemed new in town. Says I, 'You in for the sales?' And so he looks at me a minute like I done gone and lost my mind and says, 'Sales? What sales?'”

At this point Charlie’s voice would take on a more confidential tone. “My first thought was that he must be on dope or sumpin' like that. Can you all imagine anybody bein' in town the first day of the tobacco sales and not even know what's goin' on? So I says to him again, 'You must be in town for the sales.' And whatdya know, that same blank stare and crazy eyes. 'Sales,' he says. 'What sales?' And then just latchin' onto me again with them funny unhinged eyes.

Most of the morning crowd would have come and gone, but the story never ceased. Charlies would take a seat on a tall stool in front of the grill and just keep on talking to whoever was left to hear.

"Well, I guess I don't have to tell you that I was gettin' mighty anxious for the moment when we'd be gettin' some more customers in the place. Didn't pay him no mind. Just moved up and down like always, servin' breakfast to some of my early bird customers. Hardly light, you know, at that time of mornin' in September. But you know. Funny thing. It just seemed to me like I could still feel them funny eyes on me, just feel 'em swishing around all crazy-like and then landing smack dab on the back of my neck.

"So you know what the next thing he says to me is? He says, 'Mighty funny smell in this town.' Well, I don't haveta tell you that if I hadn't knowed it before I woulda sho knowed right then he was a stranger. I says to him, 'Smell? Why that ain't nothin.' Ain't nothin' but the smell of tobacco. You one of them fellers that ain't never smelled tobacco before?' I tried to speak to him without turnin' my back from the grill, like it didn't matter to me none one way or the other. So I says, 'Ain't never smelt no tobacco, eh. Well, you mustn't be from around these here parts.'

"He didn't say nothin' else for a while. And I just stood there with my back to him, but I could see him all right. I got this tall chrome-plated coffee urn there by the grill and I can see his expression in it, all long and weird-looking, like in one of those glasses at the county fair. About that time I see Jesse—that's Jesse Talbot, what runs the hardware store—coming in. Likes his eggs just like you do, Prather. Sunnyside. Two strips of bacon. I had it all waitin’ for him when he came in. And so just as I was about to shove Jesse's plate in front of him the new guy has completely disappeared. I moseyed over to the door and looked up and down the street. No sign of him anywhere.

"So I says to Jesse, 'Jess, what happened to that little squirt? You see him leave?' But, hell, Jess didn't know nothin’ about it. He says, 'Who's that, Charlie?' And I says, "Why that odd-lookin' duck with them swishy eyes in his head. But Jess he just sets there and looks puzzled and says, 'Can't recollect seein' anybody like that, Charlie.' So I says, 'Sumpin' mighty funny about that fella. Felt it ever since I come in this mornin.' If'n I had to guess I'd say he's probably runnin' from sumpin.' And old Jess just looks up and says, 'Well, I guess that would be a pretty good guess, Charlie. People on the street this time of year, you can't never tell what kind of sorry lowdown meanness they might've been into. Worsen that, you can't tell what kind of meanness they might be gonna git themselves into."

-*-

So that's the way it was with Charlie Simpson in those days. The way he told it, that feeling of uneasiness, of a past too quickly fled, hung over him all that morning. Just when he thought he was beginning to feel like his old self he looked out the window and saw the man again. It was different this time: the stranger had got up a crowd somehow and appeared to have forgot all about Charlie Simpson.

"So help me that little feller had gone to preachin' with all his might. But I guess you remember that as well as I do, Prather. ‘Cause he was a whole lot closer to your place than mine."

"Remember it very well," Prather said. "Had good reason to remember it."

"Can't remember all his words," Charlie said. "Sumpin' like, 'Beware the way of the transgressor! Beware the way of the transgressor!'"

Charlie would sometimes get up and act out the part, repeating the words as best he could remember them or as time, perhaps, had since rearranged them in his mind. "Yes, sinner! Beware! For the Lord spoke to me in a river of light and I was bathed in his holy light, and the Lord said until me, 'Beware, sinner! Beware the way of the transgressor! For it is meet you should beware his evil ways!"

Charlie would pace the floor in front of where Prather was sitting, his arms flogging the air. That was one of the few times anybody ever saw him acting a real card, the way he always had back before the years had got to him.

It was Prather himself who finally ran the guy off. The preacher, if that is what he was, had fetched up a powerful big crowd and was making an awful lot of noise and was getting ready to pass the hat when Prather Goode figured he was drunk and maybe dangerous too. He went out of the shop with his razor open in his hand, motioning for the fellow to beat it on out of there and find another place to spread his gospel.

Charlie would fall silent, and a little shiver would run through him, whenever Prather got to that part of the story. He would always remember how the barber had stood there with that razor open and how the man had simply stared him down, razor and all, turning his back on the little crowd and yelling in his face.

"Beware the way of the transgressor! Beware! . . . "

He kept staring Prather down and Prather staring right back at him and holding the razor and the crowd getting bigger all the time until finally Bill Spease the cop came wading through.

"Didn't take Bill long to break it up," Charlie would say. "But then sumpin' else funny: Bill just sort of punches him with his nightstick and that little feller goes to fallin' all over the concrete and yellin' bloody murder and cursin' Bill Spease in some of the foulest language you've ever heard in your whole life and I guess the only reason Bill didn't lock him up right then and there was that he was too stunned to realize what was happ’nin.' A minute later he looks around and the little guy has completely disappeared."

That wasn't nearly all. The man had gone in the barbershop that same afternoon, acting as though everything was as normal as could be and ordered "the works." Then he'd gone straight over to the Trade Street Billiard Palace and started a brawl, broken cues, broken beer bottles—"the works."

"Could've got a lot worse if Bill Spease hadn't still been around to break it up," Prather said.

The regulars in Charlie's place were all talking about it that afternoon when Prather and his son went over for Cokes.

"Sho won't no easy job," said Fat Sprinkle, a poolroom hanger-on. "You know, that little fella don't look like much, but Bill couldn't do nothin' with him. Starts punchin' away at him with his slapstick, but that don't work neither. So finally he has to go for his gun and the handcuffs and haul him off to the lockup."

-*-

The newcomer had spent only one night in jail. After he got out, that was when it really got rough on Charlie. Every time Charlie looked up, there he was, like some gaunt and ageless specter out to wreck vengeance on the whole town. Or maybe only on Charlie Simpson, his eyes never quite still except to stare at the slightly paunchy cafe owner.

Charlie began to get used to him after a while. Just one of those really queer ducks you see around.

"Got so he'd come in the place almost every mornin' for a while. Never ordered nothin’ to eat. Never ordered nothin’ to drink. But he wasn't takin' up much room so why worry about it? Funny thing was, one mornin’ not long after he'd been in that brawl down at the poolroom he came in and sat around for maybe an hour or so without speakin' to nobody and then the minute I mentioned somethin’ about needin’ an extra waitress to help out durin’ the sales season, up he jumps and says, 'Well, maybe I can find you somebody.' I says, "What?" And the little guy says, "Sure, I know lotsa girls needin’ work. Maybe I could send one of them around.’

"Well, he don't even wait for an answer." That was the way Charlie remembered it anyway. "He just hauls ass out the door, hangs there a second, lookin' back at me in that wild haunted way he had, and off he goes into the sunlight. So I figured he musta been some kind of pimp or sumpin’ and figures I don’t never hire nobody but rundown old whores in this here place. Figured that was the last I’d hear outa him. Him of all people thinkin' he knows anything about findin' somebody to help out in the cafe?"

Maybe he did. And maybe he didn't. Maybe it was only a coincidence that a young woman came in later that day and applied for a job.

"How'd you know I was lookin?'

"Just took a chance,"

Her name was Selma: not a bad looker, dark, about thirty five. Charlie immediately suspected her of having a disreputable past.

"Today's Thursday. You can start tomorrow it you wanta."

-*-

It was not yet daylight when Charlie went down to the cafe next morning, the air misty and the cobbles still damp from a shower that had wakened him briefly in the night. As usual, Prather Goode was there for an early breakfast. Another fine autumn day, a lot of people coming and going, a lot of money changing hands. Even at this early hour the pickups loaded with great piles of ripe golden brown tobacco had begun to block off the street in front of the Big Winston Warehouse, the farmers and floor bosses working in unison now to get the leaf inside and ready for the sales.

For Charlie it was a morning like all of the other mornings at this season. The air still cool, the feeling of richness and melancholy inside him. He used to talk about those times, too: how the past would kind of hang before him like an old portrait and how he could suddenly see himself a lot more clearly than at other times, and not always liking what he saw: a man already too far past his middle years, a little too fat and a little too bald, the dark thorn-like hairs somehow too prominent on the backs of his hands, a man of no means, no promise, no hope, a cipher, unloved and unfeared, perhaps even the butt of jokes from people passing by in the street.

That was just his way of talking, when he was feeling a little down. Charlie knew as well as anybody that he had plenty of friends on that street. He knew that when or Jesse Talbot or old Clyde Fortner, the feed store operator, or Ross Cohen, the haberdasher, or Fat Sprinkle or Prather himself or any of the others in the part of town were speaking of him, one of them would be sure to say:

"Old Charlie Simpson. A good old boy, Charlie. Not many like him left in this town."

How long had it been since he had come to that street? More than thirty years now. More than thirty years since he left Boone Styres place on Liberty. Sometimes Charlie would reflect aloud on those years—on the unreality of it all, the little he had to show now for all of his years of work. Would it have been different if he had accepted one of those offers to go on the road as a salesman of fertilizer or farm machinery? Perhaps. Unless he was feeling really down he seldom stopped to think about all that. Mostly he liked to talk about all the good times he’d had when he had first come to the town as a young man..

"Winston was really boomin’ in them days. Biggest town in the state and everebody talkin’ ‘bout how we was sho gonna be the next Atlanta. That crowd up there at Reynolds T’baccer, well, I reckon they sho done a lot for the town, but I think mostly they just wanted to keep all that new money for themselves. Wouldn’t let the Southern Railroad come through. Wouldn’t let no kinda industries come in. Too skeered they might be bringin’ in too many union folks with ‘em. So we just kinda died there for a while, Prather. But it sho was some big times while it lasted. Yessir. Too many big nights of drinkin,’ Prather. Too many big nights of knockin’ around with the girls."

One of the guys he'd run with in those days, Claude Messick, a good man with a cue, still came around to the cafe sometimes.

"Ever see him, Prather"

"Sure. Yeah, he comes around to the shop now and then. Same old Claude. Pretty much taken with the bottle now though."

Charlie had been married for a while to one of the waitresses over at Boone’s place. Later, after she'd run off to Florida with an auto mechanic from Iron Station, the only women he took any interest in were the streetwalkers who came into his place sometimes and waited to be picked up. They still came in, but Charlie was no longer their man. What had gone wrong? He just wasn't sure.

"Seems like some things just ain't meant to turn out, Prather. Yet with just a little luck . . . "

On one such morning, when Ryerson Goode had again gone into town with his father for an early breakfast, he found out that the man with the crazy eyes, after dropping out of sight for a week or more, had suddenly come back and had twice appeared in the door of the cafe that morning—gaunt, haunted, menacing, his eyes always fixed on Charlie Simpson.

"Whatcha want, mister?"

"Nothin' ya got."

This time Charlie recognized the feeling in his belly and readily confessed it: it was fear. That was the morning he had started reaching in the drawer under his cash register to make sure he still had his snub-nosed .38. Maybe half a dozen times he found himself going over to the drawer to reassure himself. He kept up a good front, though. He kept telling everybody along the counter that he was sure "gonna take care of that little squirt one of these days."

There was something else, too. Once, he went out of his way to tell Prather and all the others how pleased he was with his new waitress. He found it easy to talk to her. He had even talked to her about the swishy eyed little stranger who kept coming around and trying to cause trouble.

"She's sure been right friendly," he told Ryerson’s father with a wink. "She's made it a lot easier for everybody. When the guy comes around and starts starin' in at us, she just laughs him off. And when she sees me gettin’ a little pissed off, she says, 'Now, Charlie, honey, don't you go doin' anything that's gonna get you in trouble now."

So maybe without quite admitting it even to himself Charlie began to feel that the place had come to mean more to her than just a job. Had she spotted him as a man of unusual character and substance and rectitude?

-*-

In his room at night he thought of almost nothing else. One Friday evening in early October he kept wishing he could invite her up sometime. He sat looking around at the place and realized it would need a lot of fixing up before he could even think about anything like that. A lot of paint and some new wallpaper. Some decent furniture. A real drab place as it was now: no curtains, the shades shot full of holes, a chest of drawers with one leg missing, some wooden crates turned upside down to serve as chairs.

He had come down with a real case of the glooms. He went over by the window and stood looking out at the street, that strange mood still on him. The cobbles glistened under the hard damp October chill and he could see the faded glimmer of neon on the marquee of the U. S. A. Hotel: a street shadowy and unreal, made out of cardboard, depthless, full of darkened shops and hooded curb-market stands and cheap rented flats occupied by hustlers, drunks, peddlers, whores, pimps and Charlie Simpson.

Maybe he would go out after a while and see if the poolroom was still open. Just something to do to kill a little time. Two women came up the street looking for action, but Charlie definitely wasn't their man. Charlie stood holding a tumbler of bourbon and just looking out at the cobbles and thinking ahead to the day of his death. A long time yet, though who could say that it wouldn't be upon him before he realized it?

One day somebody would come and knock at the door and he would be lying there dead, not alive at all, not even the remains of a pulse; and then whoever it was would call the cops and the coroner, and then the men in the ambulance would come and take him down to the morgue and just stand there shaking their heads at the sadness of it all.

"Maybe it's just as well," one of them would say. "An old guy like that, with no friends or anything, and where was his wife anyway? Yeah. It's just as well. Just as well that the old guy is dead."

An old man now with nothing to look forward to. Just dump him out in the rain somewhere and let it go at that. What did it matter anyway?

"The poor old bastard," someone would say. "Not even a friend to come to his funeral."

-*-

The next day—Saturday—was the day that everything started coming together for Charlie Simpson. Who would have guessed it? He must have sensed it, as he so often sensed so many things about his fading life, before coming downstairs that morning. He had been unable to sleep and had got down there along about four or four-thirty, long before anyone else was stirring.

So what should happen but that just as he went to unlock his door the man— preacher, demon, whatever he was—moved in on him, terrifyingly, coming at him out of the alley from which Charlie had just emerged.

"Where is she?"

"Who?"

"You know who."

"You mean the new waitress? Whatcha need to see her about? Anyway, she ain't due in till six."

That was the way it went, the hurried conversation outside, and Charlie quickly unlatching the door and stepping inside and the man trying to force his way in behind him. "So I tell him, 'Sorry, we ain't open yet. You can come back around five.'

"But that fella, he didn't move a muscle," Charlie told Prather a little later. "He just stood there like he was waitin' on sumpin' real important. Like a shift in the earth or sumpin' and all the mountains to fall down on top of the town. So I just kept watchin' him from inside the big winder while the grill was gettin' hot and the coffee beginnin' to perk. Why was he askin' about Selma anyway? Had they known each other from somewheres? I wondered if I oughta say sumpin' else to the cops. But about daylight he disappears and it’s the biggest day of the week and I'm busy with breakfast and didn't think no more about it for the time bein.’”

Saturday always was THE big day in Winston during the auction season. The day all the farm families came into town to do their shopping. Already the haberdashers had hung out their gaudy wares over the sidewalks, and soon now as more and more of the curb venders would be open for business, the air heavy with the smell of cantaloupes and apples and overripe peaches and bananas—all those smells from the curb market across the street mingling with the ever-present smell of tobacco and also with the smell of bacon and eggs frying inside the Trade Street Bar & Grill.

Charlie Simpson, Proprietor.

A big day—and toward evening a lot of drunk farmers on the streets, younger guys mostly, flush with the proceeds of a week's sales and looking for trouble, the tawdry women bargaining with them from the windows of their second-story flats.

“Yep," Prather says. "Gonna be another real big day."

He and Charlie had been friends for at least twenty years, maybe longer. They had both come to Winston as young men, hoping to make good in the city.

"Tobacco stinking Winston," everybody called it then. But there was gold in that smell, and it would last a long time after tobacco auctions anad even tobacco itself, to some extent, had gone out of fashion. Real boom times, just as Charlie was always saying, maybe the last the city would ever know.

Prather was still working the markets in those days, traveling the roads from eastern Carolina to northern Kentucky; a good life till he started experiencing those first pains in his chest. He had worked long enough as a buyer and saved enough and had begun to invest a lot of the money, first in barbershops, the only other trade he knew, and then in rent houses. He had opened his first barbershop on Liberty Street, corner of Liberty and Sixth, right in the middle of the warehouse district. Now he had either owned outright and had half-interest in a whole string of shops all over the warehouse district.

He ordered his eggs sunnyside—"the usual."

"You runnin' a little late today, Prather.”

"Wouldn't you know it? Old man Spainhour was waiting on me when I got in this morning. You know him, Charlie. Comes in every couple of weeks and expects me to wait on him first thing . Before I can even get my own shave. And still pays me two bits like always. Still thinks its 1933, I guess. Can't say anything, though. He's some of the madam's kin."

Prather Goode ate greedily, to make up for the time he had lost with old man Spainhour.

"Well, I guess you're gonna just have to tell him, Prather. Clue him in on the fact that it's 1953 now and he's got to keep up with the times."

The place was crowded by now and Charlie still had no one but good old reliable Ethel Rosenthal to work the booths. His other two waitresses—Ruth Gentry and the new girl— were late on this busiest of all autumn days. And Charlie was getting a little frantic when Ruth finally got there; she looked all pale and bloated from a big night on the town. She bragged sometimes that she could take on eight, ten, twelve men in a row in the back seat of her roadster. "Another big night, eh, Ruth?"

She had tried to disguise her hangover with powder and a great smear of rouge, but already the sweat had begun to creep through. She dragged herself to the back, slugged down a mug of coffee and turned to face the customers.

She came up and looked over Ryerson’s shoulder as he was finishing his eggs. His father had driven him into town that day so that he could catch a movie and hang out with some of his friends on the corner in front of O'Hanlon's Drug Store. Prather had already left the cafe, anxious to get ahead of the barbershop crowd.

"Prather's boy, aintcha? Ain't you sumpin,' though? Almost growed, aintcha?" She stopped again as she came back carrying her first order of the morning. "Son, I learned a lot in the ten years I been tryin' to make a livin' in this town. You're a fool if you think the world's on your side. I guess that was my first and hardest lesson: world ain't nothin’ but a gimmick to trick old ladies."

Some of the sports who’d heard all this laughed their loud ribald laughter and then tried to cheer up the faded waitress.

"Come on, Ruth," somebody would say. "You got some good years left. From what I hear you ain't slowed down none. I heard you still the best quick piece in this whole town!"

Ruth cursed the men silently and quickened her pace to keep up with the growing crowd. Ryerson left about that time, but not before he looked up and saw the stranger again. There he was, just like always, and maybe he had been out there a good long time, just staring at Charlie through the steamed-over plate-glass window.

Nothing had changed: for long moments he would stand there inanimate, sullen, and then with an abruptness that was always startling he would go striding rapidly back and forth in front of the door. Charlie wondered if he was getting ready to preach again. About nine-fifteen, Selma, the new waitress, appeared; and then something really funny happened. The man grabbed her arm and twisted her back against the building. Charlie saw them talking and thought maybe he'd better go for his gun. Before he could make up his mind to grab it Selma shook off the bum and came on inside.

"What is it?" Charlie wanted to know. "Is that piece of slime bothering you?"

"It's OK, Charlie. Don't bother about him."

A little later that day, after the luncheon crowd had cleared out, Ruth explained what it was all about. "That's her husband—or was, till they broke up. Two or three years ago, I guess it was, maybe longer. Surprised you didn't know that, Charlie. You mean she didn't tell you? I reckon as how she was ashamed to say anything about it. I mean, a guy like that . . .

"Anyhow, he keeps showin’ up every couple of months or so and wantin’ money. I asks Selma why she doesn't let somebody know—report him to the law or somethin’ like that. But she says, 'Naw, Ruth, I can't do that. I sure can't do that.' She's scared a’ him, you see. And I mean really scared in a big goddamn way.”

-*-

Charlie didn't find out how scared until the early hours of Sunday morning. For once in his life things appeared to be going well for Charlie Simpson.

"Prather," he said one Saturday at breakfast, long after his “adventure” was past and he had got his health back. "Don't ask me how it happened, but I just got to thinkin' that that girl and me might go a long way together. Ordinarily, you see, she would’ve been off by five or six, but she comes up about that time and says, 'I need the money, Charlie. I don't mind stayin’ to help out.' I needed the help all right. Nobody with me that evenin' except Joyce, and we still had a lot of business. But to tell you the truth, I got the feelin’ that it was a whole lot more than money. You know what I mean: it's just that feelin' you get sometimes. Because, you see, even when all the customers had gone Selma, well, she just acted like she didn't wanta leave at all. As you can imagine, that was sure all right with old Charlie Simpson. I'm cleanin' away all the clutter while she sits at the counter puffin' on a cigarette.

"Then she wants to know if I mind if she stays on there a little while longer just sort of to get herself together.

"Crazy question, eh, Prather. I mean, this was a real dish, and I said, 'I'd not only be proud to have you stay, I'll even get you a little somethin' to make it worth your while. So I got out some of that real good bonded whisky that old man Claiborne brings down here ever once in a while from his place up at Lowgap. You ever tasted it, Prather? There's no storebought nowheres that’ll even compare with it. Why he ages that stuff in them hickory casks of his'n until its as mellow as a warm night in September. There's a secret to it, Prather. Dunno what it is exactly. Don't reckon he's ever told any man that; but he's got a way of makin’ that stuff with a taste that's better'n anything you’d ever get from any distillery in this here whole country. So I decided I'd let her try a little taste."

Prather had patronized old man Claiborne from time to time, and so had some of the other customers. Everybody agreed that Charlie was right. There was no storebought to compare with it. Claiborne had plenty of the other kind too: raw white moonshine for the regular bootleg trade. Not often that Charlie kept much bootleg on hand.

"I poured her a tumbler about half full and told her to try it straight. Went down smooth as silk. She says, 'My god, Charlie, that's wonderful.' So I could see that maybe we were gonna have a regular little drinkin’ party.

"Offered Joyce a glass out of politeness. Was mighty glad when she turned me down. Said she'd better get on home. Her old man would be waitin’ up. Would give her hell if he caught her with liquor on her breath."

Charlie would draw the story out as long as possible: how he watched the older waitress go out, waited till he heard the click of the door latch, listened as her footsteps went up the street and turned the corner. A misty rain came up, promising colder weather before dawn. Then came more footsteps. O. K. Pitts, the cop, on his nightly rounds.

Charlie? Well, the way he remembered it, he had gone out back to his storage room a couple of times, once to get the whisky and once to study himself in the bathroom mirror. "Prather, I have to tell you the truth. I had just about decided that I'd been way to hard on myself."

It came to him suddenly that maybe he wasn't as used up as the thought. Still had some of his hair, anyway. A certain intensity in his eye. A lot of people had asked him why he didn't get married again.

"Too much a man of the world to get married," he always told them.

This girl, Selma. Would she be willin' to go up and spend the night at his place? A shame the old dump looked no better.

"I got to wishin' I'd moved off Trade Street a long time ago—maybe got me a place in one of those swanky new apartment complexes that've been goin' up all over the place since the war. I figured I’d tell her that. Hell, forget about this dump. We'll be livin’ in real style after a while. I figured I could scrape up a little money from somewheres. So I knew I wouldn't have to lie when I told her that if she'd just bear with me I’d fix her up with a place just as nice as anything you've ever seed in this town. Except for all them big places the tobacco millionaires built.

"The place was kinda beginnin' to cool off, and I noticed she was startin' to shiver a little. Well, I figured that another drink of that Lowgap bottled-in-bond would be just the ticket. She took a glass, and drank it, but she was awful nervous. Kept sloshin’ it out on her hand. And what a hand, white and all delicate and really the hand of a child almost. Beautiful, Prather. Most beautiful hand I ever seen. So we swapped a couple more drinks, and were beginnin' to feel pretty good, and I noticed for the first time she was willin' to tell me sumpin' about that ex-husband of hers. I mean, he musta been a real gold-plated prick if you know what I mean. It’d still bring tears to her eyes to talk about it, and I'd see that good whisky sloshin' out and just stand there listenin' as them tales she told got bigger and bigger. Like all the tricks he used to pull. How he'd wait on her in the dark and then beat hell out of her before she even knew who it was hardly and how he was always surprisin' her out of some creepy alley or courtyard and tryin’ to git money outa her."

Charlie had looked at her hand and become enthralled all over again with its beauty, the fine delicate bones, the veins blue and lovely like the hands of some queen or noble lady in an old movie, the soft white flesh glistening beneath the slosh of good Lowgap whisky as she talked about the beatings and the terrible life she'd had until she finally got away from him.

That still wasn't all.

"'He's still out there, Charlie.' That's what she told me. Said he was allus out there watchin' the place, watchin' us, watchin' everything that was goin' on. I figured that the whisky and her imagination had kinda teamed up on her to make things even worse than they was. I went over to the winder, didn't see nothin' and pulled all the blinds shut.

"She keeps saying, 'Keep him outa here, Charlie. Do it for me.' And I tell her its OK, that there's nothin' to worry about now. So she asks for another drink, and she doesn't spill this one: she drinks it straight down, talkin' real fast and excitedly, you know, like there's real danger out there and its gonna come pourin' in on us at any minute. 'You don't know him,' she says. 'You don't know how good he is with a knife.' Said he kept one on him all the time, spent all his spare time practicin' with it. Maybe killin' folks too. I don't mean she told me

that. It's just a couple of things she said that made me wonder. Then she says, 'Don't even like to think of some of the things he's done, Charlie. Don't even like to sit here and think

about it.'"

That was when Charlie made his move. "Don't you worry none. That's all over now. That's all over.'"

He sort of let his hand rest on her shoulder; she let it lie undisturbed. So he tells her again, "It's all over. I got me a good .38 up there. You ain’t gotta worry none.”

He brought out the whole jar of good Lowgap whisky. She took a glassful and drank it without spiling a drop and sat there calmly smoking in the dark. Charlie had turned out all the lights except the single fluorescent over the grill. Things were looking pretty good when he turned back to where she was sitting.

"She was still shakin' a little and talkin' about how good her ex-husband was with a knife and sayin' she wasn't gonna cry no more even if she did feel like it and that the main reason she felt like it was because, well, look at what her life mighta been if she hadn't wasted so many years with a character that didn't even care, that didn't even . . . .'"

Then she began to cry in spite of everything. Charlie felt a new strength in his hand as he took her shoulder. "Nothin' to worry about now. Just remember I got me a good .38 that don’t take no arguments from nobody."

"All she says is, 'You're some guy, Charlie.'"

Outside, the muffled rainy dark. Inside, the beginning of a new chapter in the life and times of Charlie Simpson.

"She says, 'Sometimes he'll stare right through you, Charlie. Sometimes like you'll wake up in the middle of the night and feel those eyes on you . . .' Then she says, 'One night he caught me, Charlie.' . . . I didn't let on that I knew what she was gittin’ at. I'd been around. Anyway, she says, 'It wasn't anything much. And besides, he'd already left me and it was no real concern of his, was it, one way of the other? That's the way he does—goes away and you think you're rid of him and back he comes just when you're least expectin' it.'"

From the way he now told the story, always starting back at the beginning, everybody knew that he hadn't heard much of anything she said after that. Just those few words: "One time he caught me, Charlie."

Still, old Charlie Simpson had been around. Nobody had to explain things to him.

"I guess by that time she was pretty drunk. Because me, I look down and see that she's holdin’ her Camel with it burnin’ all the way down to her fingers. That skin of hers on fire and she ain't even feelin’ it. I'm tellin’ you that Lowgap whisky is a buster."

Charlie shook her a little and got no response. Then he had tried to wake her with a good strong reassuring voice:

"Look, I don't wantcha to worry about none of this. You lemme tend to it. I'll take right good care of that feller."

His voice fell empty in the silence; he kept hearing himself, as he explained it later, for a good two or three minutes after he'd got the words out.

"Then she says, 'Charlie, I can't explain how I know it, but I'm sure he's still waitin' out there.' Then she starts shakin' again, sloshin' my good whisky all over the place and me wipin' it up without sayin’ anything. Then I says, 'Look, you ain't gotta worry none about this. You can just come up to my place till he's gone.' She didn't make much response. I figured it was only because she was pretty drunk and that maybe I'd have to carry her up. I says, 'You wanta come?' She says, 'Whatdya think, Charlie? You think it'd be safe?' I got out my .38 and put it on the counter just in case if the guy tried to start trouble when we started upstairs. Because I figured everything was finally workin’ out the way I'd always planned it. I poured a couple more drinks just for good measure and says, 'Just don't you worry about that feller no more. I'll sho tend to him. I'll take real good care of it, and anybody that knows Charlie Simpson knows he's a man of his word."

-*-

Well, it didn't exactly work out for Charlie that time, either. The truth was, he wasn't ready to take care of much of anything. The way he told it later, and after he had got back from the hospital, and after all the big buildup, he was never even sure exactly what had happened. All he remembered was that when he came out a third time from the kitchen the .38 was gone and that Selma, suddenly sober, was pointing it at him, laughing the loud mocking laughter of his worst nightmares.

"Talked to me like nothin' we'd ever said mattered one little bit. And, of course, I reckon it didn't. I could see that after I’d had a little time to think about it. But listenin' to her call me all the names, talkin' like one of them gun molls you see in the movies, well, I guess you can imagine how surprised I was. 'OK fatso, move it,' she'd say. 'Just go on and move it, big boy, before this here thing goes off.'"

Charlie would get that distant look in his eye when he came to this part of the story and would always look away as though he were embarrassed to go on. Sometimes he wouldn't talk about it any more right then. It didn't matter. Everybody knew the whole story by heart. Everybody knew how the girl had unlocked the door to let the stranger in and handed him the gun and how he stood there holding it on Charlie while she filled a paper sack with cash.

A week's take, more than a thousand dollars after one of the busiest weeks of the year.

"Prather," Charlie would say mournfully. "I believe that's the mostest cash I ever had on hand at one time."

So they had been planning the heist for a good long while. They had everything figured right to the day, the hour, knowing all about the big money coming in from the tobacco sales and maybe laughing at him in their dingy room at night as they worked over the details. What happened next was worst than any of that. Selma handed the sack to her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was and came toward Charlie again, still laughing at him and then hauling off and kicking him smack in the groin.

"How about that, fatso? How do you like it? You rather have it in the nuts?"

That was the part that always made Charlie stop and think. "Hell," he would say, "she didn't have no call to haul off and do that. Some folks, why they just plain don’t have no manners a-tall. Sometimes you gotta wonder how they was brung up.”

Bill Spease the cop came around after daybreak to make out a police report.

"Shoulda called us when it happened," Bill Spease told him. "Probably no catching up with them now."

Charlie couldn't remember anything that would give the cops something to work with. "So Bill, he says, ‘It looks kinda hopeless, Charlie. More than a thousand dollars. Closer to two thousand, I believe you said. An awful lot of money. Doubt if they gonna spend a whole lot of time sittin’ around countin’ it." Every time Bill would ask for more details Charlie would just shake his head and say, "Naw, they didn't say nothin’. Just took the money."

Charlie wasn't thinking about much of anything except the way Selma had turned on him all of a sudden, ridiculing him with great wild caterwaulings of laughter and then kicking him in the groin like, maybe, he wasn’t anything more to her than some kind of circus buffoon.

"'Spect they're a long way down the road by this time," Bill Spease said. "Hope it'll make some of the other people on the street a lot more careful."

Charlie didn't open up again all week. Mostly he just stayed in his room. Prather and his son had come up to see him one afternoon. He knew he was a sorry looking sight; he hadn't bothered to change clothes or shave or anything else since the robbery.

"Whatdya gonna do now?" Prather asked him.

"Don't know. Don't know what I'll do. Maybe it's too late to do anything. Guess I'm just tired of havin’ to think about it." He turned his head to the wall and his old friend would know it was only because he was trying to hold back the tears. Always knew there was something funny about that little fella, Prather. Knew it the first time I ever laid eyes on him."

-*-

Two weeks later, long before anybody had heard the whole story of his “adventure,” Charlie lay in a crowded ward at City Memorial Hospital, recovering from his second heart attack in as many years. Prather and Ryerson went up to see him one drizzly afternoon and were still there when Bill Spease came by with some good news. The cops had really got lucky; a team of plain-clothesmen had caught up with Selma and her affiliate in an old rooming house south of town.

"Got back more than half the money, Charlie. Just thought you'd like to hear some good news for a change."

"Sure," Charlie said.

Ryerson and his father had both watched him closely, knowing he wasn’t thinking about the money. He didn't even care about it anymore. Just take him on out and dump him in a filthy alley someplace and let it go at that. A sad old guy lying in a sad bed on a sad drizzly day just two weeks before Thanksgiving.

He managed a small, ironical laugh. "I can just hear them now, Prather. You know how it is. They all come to see you put away nice, but you know what they're thinkin' about somebody like me. 'Yeah,' they say, 'it's a lot better knowin' he's outa our hair. What good was he to anybody anyway?'"

"C'mon," Prather said. "You know better'n that. You know how many friends you got. And now you got most of the money back too. C'mon, it's gonna be a good year. Holidays coming up. I'll make sure the madam gets you out for a big meal."

"We could have saved him and us a lot of grief if we'd kept a closer eye on that little turd from the start," Bill Spease said. "Guess that's partly my fault. But you got so many guys to watch, especially at this time of year. Practically impossible to know where they're gonna try to hit you next."

Bill Spease went to the window and looked out. The drizzle had turned into a steady rain as the dark came on.

He stood there a long time without speaking. Then: "You know, it's a funny thing about that lady friend of his. You never know who to believe in a situation like that. She kept crying and acting like she was really sorry for what had happened and insisted she might not of gone through with it at all—says she'd even decided not to. But right at the last minute—I guess when she heard him rattling the door—she got scared and allowed as how she had no choice. Leastwise, that's what she says. Maybe she was hoping we'd make things a little easier for her. Don't know, though, I kinda got the feeling she was telling the truth. Hard to say why. I heard a lot of alibis in my life, and I guess you eventually get to where you can sort of tell the difference between a lie and what somebody at least thinks is the truth. Don't know what to think about this particular situation. But, like I say, I felt like she really did feel that she'd had a good chance to make things right for herself and she had screwed it up royally. Just one of those little feelings you get about things sometimes."

He moved away from the window and around to the other side of the bed, staring at the sick man for a long contemplative moment. "You just got a real bad break, Charlie. I guess that's just about all there is to say about it."

"Sure. That's all it was. Just one of them things."

"I guess she was afraid of what might happen to her if she turned on him. Can't say as I much blame her."

"Sure," Charlie said again, struggling to get his head off the pillow.

"Like I say, if you ask me, I think she was getting a little hooked on you."

Bill Spease went back to the window and again stood staring down at the rainy street. Everybody waited for him to go on. Ryerson began to think that there wasn't any more to the story. Then he nodded with a big sigh and said: "Hard to tell what might have happened if you'd had another day or two to work on her. Just plain hard to say. You just ran out of time, Charlie. That's all. Like I say, it could've happened to anybody."

Another long pause as Bill Spease stood looking back across the bed and out at the rain and down across a wide sweep of lawn toward the dying traffic of the November evening.

"Just not enough time, Charlie. That's the shame of it."

“Yeah."

Charlie Simpson still could lift his head only a little and the rest of his body not at all.

"Yep, I sure do envy you, Charlie. I sure do—and that's the plain god's truth. Maybe you ain't your old self right now, but I gotta tell you: I sure do envy you for that way you got with the ladies!"