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

Kaufman’s place was busier. There were half a dozen men and two women at the bar, couples in two of the booths, and a pinochle game at a back table. The juke box was blaring.

Our table, though, was empty. We sat just as we had before. Kaufman was busy at the bar; he didn’t see us come in or sit down.

He saw us, and met our eyes watching him, a minute or so later. He was pouring whiskey into a jigger glass in front of a man at the bar and the whiskey came up over the rim of the glass and made a little puddle on the varnished wood.

He rang up the sale, then came around the end of the bar and stood in front of us, hands on his hips and looking belligerent and undecided at the same time.

He pitched his voice low. “What do you guys want?”

Uncle Ambrose took it deadpan. There wasn’t a trace of humor in his face or in his voice. He said, “Two white sodas.”

Kaufman took his hands off his hips and wiped them slowly on his apron. His eyes went from my uncle’s face to mine and I gave him the flat, level stare.

He didn’t meet it long. He looked back at Uncle Ambrose.

He pulled out a chair and sat down. He said, “I don’t want any trouble here.”

Uncle Ambrose said, “We don’t like trouble either. We don’t want any. We wouldn’t make any.”

“You want something. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you levelled?”

“About what?” my uncle asked.

The tavern-owner’s lips went together tight for a second. He looked like he was going to get mad.

Then his voice was calmer than before. He said, “I’ve placed you. You were at the inquest on that guy got slugged in an alley.”

My uncle asked, “What guy?”

Kaufman took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He said, “Yeah, I’m sure. You were in the back row, trying to keep outa sight. You a friend of this Hunter guy, or what?”

“What Hunter guy?”

Kaufman looked like he was going to get mad again, then he pulled in his horns.

He said, “Lemme save you trouble. Whatever you want, it ain’t here. I ain’t got it. I levelled with the coppers and at the inquest. I don’t know a damn thing about it I didn’t tell ‘em. And you heard it; you was there.”

My uncle didn’t say anything. He took out a pack of cigarettes and handed it toward me. I took one, and he held it out to Kaufman. Kaufman ignored it.

Kaufman said, “It’s all on the level. So what you coming in here for? What the hell do you want?”

Uncle Ambrose didn’t bat an eyelash. He said, “White soda. Two glasses.”

Kaufman stood up so suddenly that the chair he’d been sitting on went over backwards. Redness was spreading upward from his neck. He turned around and picked up the chair, pushing it back under the table carefully, as though its exact position there was a matter of importance.

He went back of the bar without saying another word.

A few minutes later the bartender, the tall skinny guy, brought our white sodas. He grinned cheerfully and my uncle grinned back. The little wrinkles of hell-with-it laughter were back around the corners of his eyes and he didn’t look deadly at all.

Kaufman wasn’t looking our way; he was busy at the other end of the bar.

“No Mickey?” Uncle Ambrose asked him.

“No Mickey,” said the bartender. “You couldn’t make a Mickey with plain white soda so it wouldn’t taste.”

“That’s what I figured,” said my uncle. He handed the slim guy a dollar bill. “Keep the change, Slim, for the baby’s bank.”

“Sure, thanks. Say, the kid was nuts about you, Am. Wants to know when you’ll be out again.”

“Soon, Slim. Better run along before his nibs sees us talking.”

The bartender went back to the pinochle table to take their order.

I asked, “When did all this happen?”

“Last night. His evening off. Got his name and address from Bassett and went calling. He’s on our side now.”

“Another hundred bucks?”

My uncle shook his head. “There are guys you can buy, kid, and guys you can’t. I managed to put a little silver in his kid’s bank.”

“Then that wasn’t a gag about the kid’s bank—I mean, about keeping the change out of the buck?”

“Hell, no. That’s exactly where that change will go.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

Kaufman was coming to the near end of the bar again, and I shut up and went back to watching him. He didn’t look our way again.

We stayed there until a little after midnight. Then we got up and walked out.

When I got home, Mom and Gardie were asleep. There was a note from Mom asking me to wake her whenever I got up, because she wanted to start looking for a job.

I was tired, but I had trouble getting to sleep. I kept thinking about what I’d learned about Pop.

When he was my age, I thought, he’d owned and run a newspaper. He’d had a duel and shot a man. He’d had an affair with a married woman. He’d traveled across most of Mexico afoot and spoke Spanish like a native. He’d crossed the Atlantic and lived in Spain. He’d dealt blackjack in a border town.

When he was my age, I thought, he’d been in vaudeville and was traveling with a medicine show.

I couldn’t picture Pop in blackface. I couldn’t picture any of the rest of it, either. I wondered what he’d looked like then.

But when I slept, finally, I didn’t dream about Pop. I dreamed about me, and I was a matador in a bull ring in Spain. I had black grease paint on my face and a rapier in my hand. And, mixed up like dreams are mixed up, the bull was a real bull— a huge black bull—and yet he wasn’t. Somehow, he was a tavern owner named Kaufman.

He came running at me and his horns were a yard long, with points as sharp as needles, and they gleamed in the sunlight, and I was scared, scared as hell….

*

We went back to the tavern at three o’clock the next afternoon. Uncle Ambrose had learned that was about the time Kaufman came on. Slim went off duty then, and came back later in the evening when things got busy enough to need two men.

Kaufman was just tying on his apron, and Slim must have just left, when we walked into the place.

He just glanced at us casually, as though he expected us.

There wasn’t anyone else there; just Kaufman and us. But there was something in the atmosphere, something besides the smell of beer and whiskey.

There’s going to be trouble, I thought.

I was scared, as scared as I’d been in my dream last night. I thought of it then, the dream.

We sat down at the table. The same table.

Kaufman came back. He said, “I don’t want trouble. Why don’t you guys move along?”

My uncle said, “We like it here.”

“Okay,” Kaufman said. He went back of the bar and came back with two glasses of white soda. My uncle gave him twenty cents.

He went back of the bar and started polishing glasses. He didn’t look toward us. Once he dropped a glass and broke it.

A little later the door opened and two men came in.

They were big guys and they looked tough. One of them was an ex-pug; you could tell by his ears. He had a bullet head and shoulders like an ape. He had little pig eyes.

The other one looked small, standing by the big guy. But only by contrast; a second look told you he was five-eleven or so, and would go one-eighty stripped. He had a face like a horse.

They stopped just inside the door and looked the place over. Their eyes took in all the booths and saw they were empty. They looked everywhere except at us. My uncle moved in his chair, shifted his feet.

Then they went over to the bar.

Kaufman put two shot glasses in front of them and filled the glasses without their having said a word.

That was the give-away, if there’d be any need for one.

There was a growing cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if my legs would wobble if I stood up.

I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Uncle Ambrose. His face was perfectly still, his lips weren’t moving, but he was talking, just loud enough that I could hear him. It surprised me for a moment that his mouth didn’t move, until I remembered the vent business.

He said, “Kid, I can handle this better alone. You go back to the can. There’s a window; get out of it and scram. Right now; soon as they’ve had a drink, they’ll make a play.”

He was lying, I knew. Unless he was heeled there wasn’t a way on earth he could handle this. And he wasn’t heeled, any more than I was.

I thought, I’m the one that’s supposed to be heeled. I’m the gun punk. I’ve got a new suit that looks like a hundred bucks and a new snap-brim hat. And I’ve got an imaginary thirty-eight automatic, with the safety catch off. It’s in a shoulder holster on my left shoulder.

I stood up, and my legs weren’t rubber.

I walked around back of Uncle Ambrose’s chair and started for the door of the men’s room, but I didn’t go there. I stopped short right at the end of the bar, and stood there where I could watch up the bar, front and back.

I’d brought up my right hand and let it rest with the fingers just inside my coat, touching the butt of the thirty-eight automatic that wasn’t there.

I didn’t say anything; I just looked at them. I didn’t tell them to keep their