TWENTY-THREE

Little was a country man and his house was a country house. It had that clean, spare feeling that only sparsely furnished farmhouses seem to have, with their high ceilings and waxed pine floors and interior walls of painted planking. The dining room held a heavy oval table of golden oak that was covered with a cloth of white damask and laden with a great platter of fried chicken and bowls of country vegetables. The room was cool and filled with the odor of freshly baked cornbread, and over our heads a ceiling fan turned languidly in the soft evening air. Two people, a man and a woman, were already seated at the table. Little introduced the man as Tom Moore, a huge, silent Cherokee of about thirty years who conditioned and pitted the gamecocks. Moore’s wife was a tiny, intense young Indian girl named Lacy who had a pretty face and a shy smile.

My host removed his hat and hung it on a hall tree that stood near the door. He took his place at the head of the table and a moment later his wife, Annie, came into the room carrying a steaming bowl of cream gravy. She was a small woman near his age, still lovely despite her years, with a calm face and a pair of liquid brown eyes a man could get lost in. As soon as she set the gravy on the table, I scooped her up in a big hug and swung her around, her feet off the floor.

“Put me down, you big ox,” she said with a laugh.

A few moments later we were seated at the table. We all waited with our hands in our laps while Annie said a long blessing, then we dug in. When the meal was finished, Little and I rose from the table. I went over to where Annie sat, and leaned down to give her another kiss on the cheek. Poking me gently in the ribs, she looked up, and said, “Don’t be gone so long the next time, stranger.”

She’d been one of my favorite people as long as I could remember. Like many young mountain girls, she’d come down out of the Ozarks not long after the turn of the century with stars in her eyes and dreams in her heart. Landing in Hot Springs, she got a job as a waitress in one of the resort hotels where she soon fell under the thrall of a gambler named Spunk Morgan, a surly, ill-tempered man from Kansas who used her hard and often beat her unmercifully. Somewhere along the way she encountered Chicken Little and true love blossomed. Not long after they met, Spunk Morgan suffered a belated attack of good manners and vanished, never to be heard from again, and the happy couple quickly wed. Less than a decade later they moved to the farm near Tulsa where they raised three children—two boys and a girl. The girl and the older boy were both college graduates, but their youngest son was in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester doing ten years for manslaughter. “There’s wild blood coming from both sides in them kids of mine,” Little once said to me sadly. “And blood will tell whether it’s in people or fighting cocks.”

One time several years earlier over a bottle of good scotch that loosened his tongue, he’d told me of a trip he and Annie made back to the Ozarks in the early days of their marriage. They stripped and swam naked in a wide, gravel-bottomed pool where Licking Creek meets the White River, and then spread out an old quilt on a bed of honeysuckle and made love in a shaded glade where all around them the green-clad mountains rose high into the sky.

“Annie’s a Baptist now,” he said once he and I were reinstalled on the veranda. “She got religion a few years back, but I don’t begrudge it. My momma, God bless her poor old soul, was a Holiness, and I reckon that she got slain in the Spirit at least a dozen times.”

“Slain in the Spirit?” I asked, puzzled.

“That’s when the Spirit of the Lord descends on you and knocks you out cold. Usually you come up talking in tongues. I’ve seen it myself on occasion, though it has never happened to me. But as for Annie being a Baptist, it hasn’t made her any less lively where it matters. However, I’ve told her several times that she could stand to pay more attention to that verse in the Bible where it says a Christian woman should bridle her tongue.”

I laughed. “I don’t think there is any such verse, Little.”

“Well if there ain’t, they ought to be.”

Before he had a chance to explore other deficiencies in the Holy Scriptures, I brought the conversation around to our business. “Here,” I said, reaching in my pants pocket for the keys that had come in the mail the previous Friday. “It’s a garage,” I told him. “A good, sturdy building, with meshed windows and strong doors.”

“Have the windows been painted up on the inside?” he asked.

“No, but that’s a good idea. I’ll take care of having them blacked out as soon as I get back home.”

“It won’t hurt a thing to be safe,” he said. “We don’t want nobody looking in there and remembering that car. You got the address?”

From my wallet I took the card that had come with the keys and gave it to him. Without looking at it he dropped it into his shirt pocket where he’d put the $2,000 I’d given him earlier.

“Who rented the garage?” he asked. “We need to make sure the rent is kept current.”

I grinned but he couldn’t see it in the darkness. “Nobody rented it,” I said. “It was bought by a moving company up in Cicero, Illinois, that’s really just a post office box.”

“Is that a fact?” he asked casually. I could hear the smile in his voice.

“Yeah, and the car’s a dark gray ’41 Pontiac four-door with a rebuilt motor. It’s registered to the moving company.”

“When’s it going to be put into the garage?” Little asked.

“A couple of days beforehand. It’s got a brand-new battery and runs like a dream, so you shouldn’t have any trouble with it.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“Now, what about Clifton Robillard?” I asked. “Do you know why he’s going to be up here tomorrow night? I don’t like coincidences. They spook me.”

“Ain’t no coincidence to it that I can see. I’ve been told that he’s been making the cockfights around Tulsa for years, and since this is the big fight of the year it makes sense that he’d be here. It’s been advertised in cocking newspapers all over the country, and I imagine there will be a whole slew of folks from down in Texas.”

“How did you find out he was coming?”

“A fellow I know just happened to mention his name and I perked up my ears. This man talked to him on the phone last week, and Robillard said he’d be looking for some heavy betting action.”

“You don’t know him, do you?” I asked.

“Not by name or I would have mentioned it when you first come up here and told me about him. I may have seen him around, but I ain’t never met him that I can recall. I just figured you’d want to know.”

I thought for a long while. The only risk I ran was that it was not wise to have Robillard see me and Chicken Little together. But that was a very minor risk. If everything went right, he’d hardly be in a position to tell anyone. On the positive side, running into him at the chicken fight would give me the pleasure of popping up where I wasn’t supposed to be and perhaps irritating him even more than I already had.

“I probably should play it safe and go home in the morning, but I think I’ll stay an extra day and try to get under the man’s skin,” I finally said.

“That’s fine with me, boy. It’s your call.”

“Can you put me up another night? I hate to be an inconvenience to you.”

“Oh, hush. You’re always welcome here and you know it.”

“I’ll need to phone Della and let her know I’m staying over.”

He nodded. “It might be best not to call from here at the house, though.”

I quickly agreed. In those days a long-distance call was made by first dialing the operator, who then called your party for you. When the call was completed, she made a separate receipt for it, then the carbon of the receipt was included when the bill came. Which meant that the phone company kept a paper record of all long distance calls. And the cops knew it.

“We’ll take Annie into Tulsa tomorrow for lunch at the Mayo Hotel,” Little said. “She’ll like that and you can make your call from a pay phone.”