Chapter 37
By ten to six, Mr. Binny and his brothers were settled on the back porch.
The yard was still squishy with last night’s rain, and the girls walked on tiptoes to the cocktail tables to keep from getting their shoes wet.
For fifteen furious minutes, everyone slapped themselves like lunatics, clapping Mrs. Tartt’s geraniums between our palms and rubbing the oil on our skin.
Without rain, the mosquitoes hadn’t been that bad, but now they’d shown up in swarms, blood feasting, eating us alive.
Slapping at her neck, grimacing, Charlie marched along the bushes, reciting the rules.
I’d remember the litany if I lived to be a hundred.
“One dance minimum, ten dances max. If he hasn’t turned yet—”
“He’s a dead john,” we all called.
“Everybody know the password to get inside?”
“Frances!”
“If you hear ‘Night and Day,’ it means trouble. Nobody comes in—”
“Jeezus, I’m dying out here, Charlie,” Flossy said, digging her heels into her ankles. Red blotches and streaks ran up her white legs. “Can’t we wait in the house?”
“Fine, but stay by the door in case somebody drives up,” Charlie said. Every one of them jumped up to follow Flossy inside. In Charlie’s opinion, we should at least give the illusion we had plenty of girls if a customer walked up—
They didn’t even make it up the first porch step.
I heard it too. A noisy chain-drive engine, coming not from town but from the left, headed south down muddy Lamar.
I leaned forward to see a wide green truck rattle up, brakes whining, and jerk to a stop in front of the house.
I watched, terrified—who would be coming from that direction?
The truck bed had tall wooden slats, and inside I could see bodies standing.
I squinted harder—had the sheriff come the back way for a surprise attack?
“Well I’ll be damned. Those look like college boys to me,” Ruby announced, though her eyes were worse than mine.
Sure enough, a blue letterman jacket jumped off the truck bed, then a white shirt and several navy blazers, and a car horn blew, and the boys all turned in its direction.
A rickety Model A rounded the curve with shirtsleeves hanging out the open windows—again not coming from the direction of the square or the school.
They must’ve skirted the town so the police or the school wouldn’t spot them, I thought.
Charlie said something to Mr. Binny and he planted his hands on the keys, playing the heavy opening chords straight out of First Christ Methodist’s eleven o’clock church service.
“I’ve had it! I ain’t dancing to that funeral march shit no more!
” Ruby hollered. She stamped her red shoes up on the porch like a brat.
Mr. Binny stood up from the piano stool and took a step back, his black coat buttoned all the way up to his grumpy frown.
Ruby tore into him, shaking her finger, and Mr. Binny did not look like he was appreciating being talked to thataway.
“Miss Charlie!” he called, but Charlie hollered at him, “Just play something! I don’t care what!
” Ruby put her face back in his, and he finally threw his hands up and barked out to his brothers and the drummer started drumming like feet running.
Then Mr. Binny’s fingers hit the keys LOUD and the horn came blaring behind it, playing a heart-racing version of “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and the music filled the entire yard and when it was time, Mr. Binny’s three brothers sang with all their lunch, “IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING!
” I guess Mr. Binny figured these were desperate times and that dirty-mouthed white girl had her a point, so for the sake of his own job safety, it was time to pick up the beat.
Boys were almost to my table, nine boys to be exact, most of them large and laughing and throwing punches at one another.
Behind them were another five or six smaller ones in stiff blue jackets.
As the big ones ducked through the arch in the hedge, they did not stop to gaze in wonder this time.
Behind me, a high, almost deafening wolf whistle made me look back.
Ruby Slipper was on the dance floor, staring down the first college boy, a thick, letterman-jacketed, long-armed ape I didn’t trust an inch.
In her short red dress, Ruby lifted one foot and spun around, making her skirt rise up around her legs.
Ruby had good legs, strong and shapely, and then she spun in the other direction and stopped on a dime, and she and the ape-boy stared each other down like animals.
Something hypnotic was coming off Ruby, dangerous, filthy.
Even Charlie was staring, looking a little starstruck herself.
“’At one’s mine,” ape-boy said and blew past me like he might throw Ruby over his shoulder.
“Hold on there, Tarzan,” I said and caught hold of his letterman-jacketed elbow.
“You each owe me a dime.” He slapped a huge handful of silver on the table and the rest filed after him.
I reckon I won’t be bothering with tokens tonight.
The ape grabbed Ruby by the arm and started swinging to Mr. Binny’s jitterbug.
There was hollering and whooping as his large friends, necks out, hunted down the rest of the girls—that was how they looked from here, like hunters on the kill.
Charlie was trying to yell over the music, “This is Trixie and her pretty twin Dixie—” The hulking boy, they must’ve been on the football team, ignored Charlie.
I did not like how he drug Dixie by her limp arm to the line of younger boys by my table.
I was about to jump up and help her when she reared back and smacked the beast in the ear so hard his head flipped sideways.
In a girlish Texas drawl, she said, “Pull me again and I’ll carve your eyeballs out with a fruit spoon and feed ’em to you.” Something about her eerie calm made him drop her arm and back away a step. Dixie crossed her arms and looked the young boys over like she’d be the one deciding.
The music roared, and soon all the girls were dancing with probably a dozen boys standing around watching.
“Cold drinks twenty-five cents, cigarettes a nickel,” I said over and over and sold a dozen of each in minutes and my God, it felt good to be busy.
The music was hoppy, exhilarating, really, and even Mr. Binny looked almost happy to be pounding away at the keys, his brothers wagging the horns side to side.
Flossy and her date were already disappearing around the other side of the house, with Ruby and hers practically chasing after them.
Charlie wanted two girls on the dance floor at all times to keep up the front, so it really was a race to go first.
Through the hedge, the road was still, the truck driver apparently asleep inside his cab, while the noisy action went on behind me.
Well, I guess that was the rush, I thought, but moments later another taxicab pulled around the curve headed south, with a second and a third one behind it.
When the back door to the first taxi opened, a boy fell out and then another landed on top of him.
They looked ossified, laughing and stumbling toward me, and it started all over again, dimes and drinks and drunks.
When I looked back, around seven thirty, there were more than two dozen boys on or around the dance floor, and I knew more were inside.
Something cowering inside me hoped they did not all have designs on going upstairs—five girls, divided by what, thirty or more boys was …
too many. “Get the pledges laid! Get the pledges laid!” I heard it over and over, like an Ole Miss tribal chant.
Sweaty boys cheering with sweaty fists, and the dimes were hard to collect as boys pushed past me, but then one would come along, like the first, and slap a handful of change on my table.
Through the kitchen window, I could see Charlie making liquor drinks as fast as she could pour them, then disappearing to open the side door and collect money where Mr. Tartt’s head was hanging on the wall.
Mr. Binny started ending the songs quicker, playing a double-time “Puttin’ On the Ritz.
” He’d heard the rules plenty himself, one dance minimum, so he was moving at twice the speed.
At some point, it must have been around nine, Charlie came out, though surely she was needed inside.
She stood for a moment and watched, not smiling—I knew what she was thinking: I’m going to beat you, Garnett Pittman.
How bizarre that the same way Charlie’d lost Meg was how she planned to get her back.
And then Flossy stuck her head out the back door and shrieked something and Charlie rushed back inside.
It was probably chaos in the house with girls ripping sheets off and getting new ones on and dressing to come back to dance all over again.
Ruby, who’d turned I did not want to know how many johns, was back on the dance floor, doing a cross between the Charleston and the Lindy hop—I’d seen this on the newsreel at the picture show with Jack.
It was one-handed dancing, nothing like a waltz or a foxtrot, and Ruby’s blond partner had on blousy, high-waisted trousers that flapped when he danced.
Ruby kicked her leg up and raised her skirt; head back, she licked at the sky—my God, she knew how to perform.
Boys cheered as her calf muscles throbbed, and if the wrong person showed up here right now, indeed they would think it was nothing more than a dance club in full swing.
I watched Ruby dance so long with the same fellow that finally Charlie rapped her on the shoulder, thumbing for her to either turn him or move on.
When she realized what had happened, Ruby stopped and suddenly laughed so wide I could see her back molars.
I reckoned Ruby had forgotten why she was even here.