The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown (free ebook reader TXT) 📕

short and heavy-set, with long arms that looked powerful. He looked about forty or forty-five. He wore a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and his arms were hairy as a monkey’s. His hair was slicked back and glossy, but he needed a shave. He still wore the thick-lensed glasses.

He rang up twenty cents on the register for the two beers he’d just drawn and then came around the end of the bar and approached our table.

I kept my eyes on him, studying him, weighing him.

He looked tough, like a guy able to handle himself in trouble. But then most bartenders in this part of town look like that; or they wouldn’t be bartenders here.

He said, “What’s it, gents?”

His eyes happened to fall on mine, and I locked them there. I remembered orders. I didn’t move a muscle, not even a muscle of my face. But I thought, “You son of a bitch, I’d just as soon kill you as not.”

Uncle Ambrose was saying, “White soda. Two glasses of plain white soda.”

His eyes slid off mine and looked at my uncle. He looked doubtful, not knowing whether to take it for a joke and laugh, or not.

Uncle Ambrose didn’t laugh. He said, “Two glasses of white soda.”

He dropped a bill on the table.

Kaufman managed somehow to seem to shrug his shoulders without really doing it. He took the bill and went behind the bar. He came back with the two glasses and change.

“Anything for a wash?” he wanted to know.

Uncle Ambrose deadpanned him. He said, “When we want something else, we’ll let you know.”

Kaufman went back of the bar again.

We sat there and didn’t do anything and didn’t talk. Once in a long while Uncle Ambrose took a sip of his white soda.

The two men at the bar went out and another group, three this time, came in. We didn’t pay any attention to them. We watched Kaufman; I don’t mean we didn’t take our eyes off him for a second, but in general we just sat there watching him.

You could see, after awhile, that it began to puzzle him, and that he didn’t like it a damn bit.

Two more men came in, and the couple sitting in the booth left.

At seven o’clock a bartender came on duty. A tall, skinny man who smiled a lot and showed a lot of gold teeth when he did. When he went behind the bar, Kaufman came over to our table.

“Two more white sodas,” my uncle said.

Kaufman looked at him a moment, then he picked up the change my uncle put on the table and went behind the bar to refill our glasses. He came back and put them down without a word. Then he took off his apron, hung it on a hook and went out the back door of the tavern.

“Think he’s going for the cops?”

My uncle shook his head. “He isn’t that worried yet. He’s going out to eat. Think that’s a good idea?”

“Good Lord,” I said. I just remembered that this was another day I’d practically gone without eating. Now that I thought of it, I was hungry enough to eat a cow.

We waited a few minutes longer and then went out the front way. We walked over to Clark Street and ate at the little chili joint a block south of Chicago. They make the best chili there of any place in town.

We took our time about eating. While we were drinking coffee, I asked, “We going back there tonight?”

“Sure. We’ll get back by nine and stay till about twelve. He’ll be getting jittery by then.”

“Then what?”

“We help him jitter.”

“Look,” I said. “What if he does call copper? Yeah, there’s nothing illegal about sitting a few hours over white soda, but if the cops get called, they’ll want to ask questions.”

“The cops are squared. Bassett’s talked to the looie who’d get the call at the Chicago station. He’ll tip off whatever coppers he sends in answer to the call, if he sends any.”

I said, “Oh.” I began to see about the hundred bucks. This was the first dividend, unless you counted that Bassett had said he’d canvass the buildings that had back porches on the alley. Maybe he’d have done that anyway, but squaring something like this was definitely in the line of extra service.

After we ate, we went to a quiet little place off Clark Street on Ontario and had a beer apiece and a lot of conversation.

We talked about Pop mostly.

“He was a funny kid, Ed,” Uncle Ambrose told me. “He was two years younger than me, you know. He was wild as a colt. Well, I had itchy feet, too. I still have; that’s why I’m a carney. You like to travel, Ed?”

“I think I would,” I said. “I never had much chance up to now.”

“Up to now? Hell, you’re just a pup. But about Wally. He ran away from home when he was sixteen. That was the year our dad got a stroke and died suddenly; our mother had died three years before.

“I knew Wally’d write sooner or later, so I stuck around St. Paul until I got a letter from him, addressed to both me and Dad. He was in Petaluma, California. He owned a little newspaper there; he’d won it in a poker game.”

“He never told me about that,” I said.

My uncle chuckled. “He didn’t have it long. He was gone by the time my wire went out in answer to his letter. I’d told him I was coming, but when I got there he was wanted by the police. Oh, nothing too serious; just a hell of a swell criminal libel action. He was too honest to run a newspaper. He’d come out with the flat, unvarnished truth about one of Petaluma’s leading citizens. Probably just for the hell of it; anyway, that’s what he told me later and I believed him.”

He grinned at me. “It was a swell excuse for me to go on the road awhile, to look for him. I knew he’d head out of California, because the libel business wasn’t something they were going to extradite him for, but he’d get out of the state. I picked up his trail in Phoenix, and I was just behind him several places before I ran into him in a gambling joint across the border from El Paso, in Juarez. Juarez was a wild and woolly spot in those days, kid. You should have seen it.”

“I suppose he lost whatever he’d pulled out of the newspaper.”

“Huh? Oh, he’d lost that long before. He was working at the gambling joint. Dealing blackjack. He was fed up with Juarez by the time I got there, so he quit the dealing. He was picking up Mex and wanted me to head with him for Veracruz.

“Kid, that was a trip. Veracruz is a good twelve or thirteen hundred miles from Juarez and it took us four months to make it. We left Juarez with a stake of, I think, eighty-five bucks between us. But that changed into about four hundred bucks Mex, and while it wasn’t much on the border, it made you rich when you got a hundred or so miles in, if you talked the lingo and didn’t get yourself into the sucker joints.

“We were rich for half of that four months, filthy rich. Then in Monterrey we ran into some guys that were smarter than we were. We should have headed back for the border then, for Laredo, but we’d decided on Veracruz and we kept going. We got there on foot, in Mex clothes, what there was of them, and we hadn’t had a peso between us in three weeks. We’d damn near forgotten how to talk English; we jabbered spik even to each other, to get better at it.

“We got jobs in Veracruz and straightened out. That’s where your dad picked up linotype, Ed. A Spanish-language paper run by a German who had a Swedish wife and who’d been born in Burma. He needed a man who was fluent in both English and Spanish—he didn’t speak much English himself—so he taught Wally how to run his linotype and the flat-bed press he printed the paper on.”

I said, “I’ll be damned.”

“What now?”

I laughed a little. I said, “I took Latin in high school. Pop suggested Spanish when I started taking a language and said he could help me with it. I thought he remembered a little from having taken it in school himself. I never realized he could talk it.”

Uncle Ambrose looked at me very seriously, as though he were thinking, and didn’t say anything for a while.

I asked after awhile, “Where did you go from Veracruz?”

“I went to Panama; he stayed in Veracruz for a while. There was something about Veracruz that he liked.”

“Did he stay there long?”

“No,” said my uncle shortly. He glanced up at the clock. “Come on, kid, we better get back to Kaufman’s.”

I looked at the clock too. I said, “We got time. You said we’d get back at nine. If there was something about Veracruz he liked, and he had a job, why didn’t he stay there long?”

Uncle Ambrose looked at me for a moment and then his eyes twinkled a little. He said, “I don’t suppose Wally would mind your knowing now.”

“All right, give.”

“He had a duel, and he won. The thing he liked about Veracruz was the wife of the German who ran the newspaper. The German challenged him to a duel, with Mausers, and he couldn’t get out of it. He won the duel all right; hit the German in the shoulder and put him in the hospital. But Wally had to get out of there quick. And privately, in the cargo hold of a tramp steamer. I learned from him later what happened. They caught him four days out and he had to work his passage swabbing decks when he was so seasick he couldn’t stand up. Wally never could stand the sea. But he couldn’t jump ship till they docked for the first time. That was in Lisbon.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said.

“Nope. Fact, Ed. He was in Spain awhile. Had a screwy idea he wanted to learn to be a matador, but he couldn’t get an in; you got to start at that trade really young and have some pull even then. Besides, the picador part disgusted him.”

“What’s a picador?” I asked.

“The lancemen, on horseback. Horses get gored almost every fight. They fill ‘em with sawdust and sew ‘em up so they can go back in. They won’t live anyhow, once they’re deeply gored, and so—Hell, skip it; I always hated that part of bull-fighting myself. Last card I saw though, down in Juarez a few years ago, they pad the horses and that part’s okay. A clean kill of the bull with the sword; that’s all right. It’s better than they do in the stockyards here, for that matter. They use a—”

“Let’s stick to Pop,” I suggested. “He was in Spain.”

“Yeah. Well, he came back. We finally got in touch with one another through a friend back in St. Paul we both happened to write to. I was with a detective agency then—Wheeler’s, out in L.A.—and Wally was in vaudeville. He used to be pretty good at juggling—oh, not a top act, even as jugglers go, but he was good with the Indian clubs. Good enough for a spot with a fair troupe. He ever juggle any lately?”

“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t.”

“You got to keep up on something like that, or you lose it. But he was