Charlie Whitesox
ALL THE REGULARS from the nightside Chronicle staff were at their usual table in the Magnolia Club when Charlie Brown came in out of the raining night. The first thing Charlie heard, as he handed his crisp new London Fog trench coat and sodden felt hat to the Negro doorman, was Calhoun’s loud mouth. Calhoun was the night news editor and sometimes temporary managing editor during the periodic purges staged by the executive editor, who tended to fire hotshot editors when they were so good that he felt threatened. They had a new managing editor again, from North Carolina, and his honeymoon with the man upstairs still had not run its course. So Calhoun was happily free of the added responsibility that he dreaded and back on the news rim putting together each night’s edition, which is what he loved.
Calhoun even felt relaxed enough to take a couple nights off work because his wife’s parents were visiting from Alabama, and she wouldn’t let him sleep in the daytime when they were in town. Between the demands of the executive editor and his wife, Calhoun was kept on a short leash, but didn’t care as long as he could do the job he loved most of the time.
During his time off, he had watched a lot of daytime TV in and around visiting with the in-laws. He had watched for probably the tenth time a black-and-white Humphry Bogart movie about a crusading newspaperman. Calhoun had been full of the Bogart movie all night, busting to tell its plot blow by blow to anyone who would listen. He was so wound up he kept popping out of the news-desk slot, yelling stop the presses, stop the presses out of the side of his mouth. Then he would chortle and clap his hairy hands and go back to laying out pages.
Calhoun’s antics had been getting on Charlie’s nerves while Charlie tried to write his week-ender “think piece” on political corruption in the South. He had almost braced Calhoun about it, which would have been a mistake. Calhoun could be as surly when crossed as he was funny when happy.
When Charlie remembered that the independent party’s sheriff candidate was throwing a big fish fry down on the levee that night, he grabbed the chance to get out of the news room before he got in trouble. Maybe he could find an angle on the candidate’s alleged connection to the local underworld.
Here in the club, with the City Final put to bed, the teetotaling Calhoun was very happy now. He waved at Charlie from his accustomed head of the table always reserved for the newsmen, using his inevitable glass of grapefruit juice full of bar cherries like a scepter, without pausing in his tale.
“… So Bogie pauses, see –” He crouched half out of his chair, building his narrative like some necromancer at a hobgoblin’s convention. He left hand clutched an imaginary telephone receiver to his ear; his right held the grapefruit juice.
“So Bogie pauses,” he said again. “Then — Wham! He shoves that phone right up to the presses” — a lightning stab of the left arm, with the shadows to his left ducking — ” and he says you hear that, mister wise guy? You hear that? That’s the final edition, wise guy, and when it hits the street, you’re not going to have a friend left in this state. You’ve been playing my town for a sucker, wise guy, and now it’s your turn. See how you like it. So long — sucker!”
The imaginary phone flashed down, and Calhoun’s knuckles exploded on the table, sending the shadows grabbing to save their drinks. Calhoun sank back, spent.
“Then what happened, Calhoun-Man?” The amused, indifferent voice belonged to the city hall reporter from Savannah who everybody called Lightnin’ Man, for his way with the women.
“Stop the presses for real now,” another voice said quietly, with a silken contempt sheathing its non-Southern accents. “Be quiet, Calhoun-Man. Here comes our real-life crusader up to the table round. Or oval, in this case. Belly up, Sir Charles of the White Stockings. I see by the black light of this den of iniquity that you are wearing your bona fides.”
“Charlie Boy!” Calhoun’s voice still was jolly. “Wet at that fish fry, wasn’t it? Fish any good? You gotta big scoop? Got the big dirty? Did the candidate get sloshed and step on his dick with revealing quotes? You gonna stop the presses on the late-night final to re-plate the break page with his deathless prose? Third horse in a three-horse race admits to sleazy payoffs from Dance Bail Bonds? You finally got the goods to bring The Dancer down?
Charlie sank into his accustomed place beneath the barrage. He gritted his teeth at the Yankee assistant city editor, inexplicably known as Mouse. Charlie hated the baseball-team clubbiness of nicknames in the newsroom. He hated that Calhoun had just extended the nicknaming practice to a red-neck thug with pretensions of Southern gentility. Charlie hated Mouse individually, because it was Mouse who had first called him Charlie Brown, for the hapless comic-strip character, and then called attention to Charlie’s habit of wearing white athletic socks with his wash-and-wear suits from Montgomery Ward.
“Think you’re cute, don’t you, Mouse?” he said now.
“Say rather,” the dapper Midwesterner murmured, “I am aware of a certain physical attractiveness devastating to women and disconcerting to men. Right, Angel?” And he passed a hand with loving familiarity over the sleek fish-netted legs of the bargirl who had arrived for Charlie’s order.
“Oh you’re a reg’lar livin’ doll, you are,” Angel gave back. “If you wasn’t married, I’d rape you right here on the table.”
“Do what comes naturally,” Mouse urged gallantly. “Take no heed of tomorrow’s reckoning.”
She sniffed. “Last time I did that, I went PG and the louse went AWOL. You want your usual Bud, Charlie?”
He nodded and she went away. Lightning Man disengaged himself from the long-haired curvaceous woman who sat so close to him that she appeared glued to his hip, and leaned over the table.
“Hey, Charlie. What you doin’ still wearing them white socks, Charlie? They’re a dead giveaway. If Sweet Thang comes pub prowling after ya, all she’s got to do is ask was he wearing them white socks that glow in the black lighting. She can trail you all over the South that way.”
“My wife doesn’t tell me what to do!” Charlie Brown snarled.
“She sure don’t!” crowed Calhoun jubilantly. “Just like mine: she tells you what not to do!”
They all laughed then, because they knew both things were true. Charlie cringed back inside himself. He furtively sought the luminous dial of his watch. He should have been home an hour ago. But the reprobates here would vouch for him, assure Rita that he hadn’t been anywhere but here, so he came here and took the nightly ribbing.
Anything to keep the peace, God. Anything! To keep the peace, and maybe let him get a little when she was feeling generous, like on payday. At 29 years old, going without sex was worse than not having beer. He knew this because that was the choice she gave him when they first were married. God, he must have been naïve then, he thought. At least he’d finally put his foot down about that. Now he got his nightly beers all right, and maybe sex every other week or so. Somehow she made the infrequency his fault, too. She went on and on about other women, now that he had been transferred to nightside.
“Those night crawlers — those reamed-out whores,” she called them. She didn’t bring them up when she was honeyfuggling him to get her dress money and bridge club dues and Volkswagen payment. That’s what she called it, honeyfuggling. What a dialect pure Georgian was!
Other times, when she was irritable, which was an awful lot of the time, she said he got so much honeyfuggling while working the nightside that he wasn’t any good for anything at home. Truth was, he’d never been honeyfuggled by anyone but her in his life, and wasn’t sure he’d recognize it if it came his way. The more she warned him and accused him, the more he wished that she was right. He yearned for the casual male confidence of Lightnin’ Man or the Mouse that might have made Rita’s fears possible.
Charlie didn’t understand Calhoun; the news editor was old-fashioned hen pecked, and loved it, or he would have been an executive editor or a wire-service bureau chief in some other state by now. Calhoun was a hell of a newsman, but he needed a hen and a honcho to manage his daily life, and with his wife and the Chronicle’s crackpot executive editor, he had both. His orders from the home front were to stay with the Chronicle, not make waves — and absolutely no more alcohol.
Charlie felt himself to be made of better stuff. He yearned for his chance to prove it. He smiled in what he hoped was manly fashion at the good-looking women he met in the course of his political beat. He occasionally tried an entendre when occasion warranted but was secretly relieved when it seemed to fall on deaf ears or was turned into a joke by the recipient.
Ironically he didn’t make any such effort with the night-crawlers that Rita feared most. The night people — the tarts and bar girls and predatory women who inhabited this tough, vibrant world that kept a vampire’s office hours — would find his soft core too soon, use him and abuse him and then throw him away. He had that much sense.
As long as he was Charlie Brown in white sox, ludicrous but with a bloodhound’s nose for news, they respected the armor of his calling. If he discarded that he would never get it back. He had worked too hard to earn that reputation, and it was the only thing in the world that really had any meaning to him. Once he had hopes for his marriage, but those were long gone. The only good part was that there weren’t any children to make it tragic.
Calhoun, finished with his Bogart tale, launched into another story, this one personal. Charlie poured his beer into his glass by rationed amounts and listened. Calhoun was a born storyteller. There was none better when he really got going. Now he was back in his cubbing days on the South Carolina beat, covering a moonshine raid in a gas-eating old Buick that had stalled him a mile from Frog Holler.
“… so I decided to cut across the fields to Bath, see. There weren’t all them gas stations over there that there are now, but I had a friend in Bath, see, and figured I could make it by dead reckoning –
“Dead is the word, ’cause I forgot about old Clancy Price’s plow horse being all hotted up with spring fever, if you know what I mean. I was walkin’ along easy like, see, watching for snakes, an’ I kept thinking I heard somebody following me an’ finally I looked over my shoulder and man! Have any of y’all ever seen a forty-foot-tall plowhorse with a three-foot-long hard-on, up close and personal in a pasture on a new-moon night …?”
Laughter. Charlie, too. Calhoun was really at the top of his form tonight. They were still laughing when Pick, the Innkeeper, inserted his sawn-off tenpin shape into the ultraviolet dusk beside Charlie. Pick often came over to listen but he never took the floor, never intruded. He loved the newspapermen because they were free advertising, and a floor show too, and the local cops never messed with a joint favored by the press. The bandits of the press added what Pick’s kind of bandits called “class.” The newsmen were often into him for healthy bar bills, or even poker loans, because they knew that Pick knew better than to Shylock a reporter.
Sometimes, Pick came to their table with a verbal message or, as now, lugging an ivory phone with a table jack. He called every reporter mister, a pleasing if obvious affectation. When he came with a tip, or with the White Tusk, as they called the movable phone, it generally meant headlines in the offing. Or another lonely woman looking for Lightnin’ Man or the Mouse.
This time, the Tusk was for Charlie Brown. The innkeeper addressed him politely by his actual name and plugged in the phone.
“A lady,” Pick said courteously, and went away.
“A lady, he says,” said Lightnin’ Man sadly. “I told you, Charlie. Didn’t I tell Charlie, Mouse?”
“You told him, Lightnin’ Man,” Mouse said. “You told him all along. You told him that Sweet Thang would track him down if he kept on carousing with us bums. A man can’t be invisible forever. No man can.”
“Not and wear white sox at the same time,” said Calhoun judiciously. “I think Einstein wrote a paper on it once. Or maybe H.G. Wells.”
Charlie tried to ignore them as he lifted the receiver and waited for Rita’s dreaded accents.
“Hello,” said a husky voice. “Winston?”
He swallowed his heart quickly and answered in the affirmative. Winston was the Christian half of his actual byline. This wasn’t his wife.
“Winston, are you drunk?” The way she said it made being drunk seem charming.
“No,” he said, treading water frantically as panic threatened to engulf him. Her voice was making the base of his spine want to wag the tail it didn’t have and contract into a spear point at the same time. He recognized the voice — and of course he couldn’t remember her name or where he knew her from. Of course.
“I –” He started, and his throat closed on him. He took a gulp of beer and got going again, fast. “No, I’m not drunk,” he said. “I mean, a little. I had a couple beers at the fish fry, but I’ve just started on my first …” He didn’t want to say that. She wouldn’t know what fish fry and anyway, this wasn’t Rita, he didn’t have to explain anything. In confusion, he retreated to GI days in Germany. “Wass ist loss, anyway?”
The laughter over the phone was warm and caressing — with a brittle edge he couldn’t pin down in his present rattled state.
“You Continental devil, you,” she said with a smile in her voice. “I am happening, Winston,” she told him. “Everything is happening. Well — many things are happening. Winston, what are you doing?”
He tipped up his bottle and drained the rest of it straight off. The brew feathered over his arid palate and vaporized, with no noticeable effect. He heard Lightnin’ Man ask something, from the other end of a tunnel.
Mouse replied: “He’s talking to a woman outside the line of duty. That’s how he gets when he does that.” But she was speaking again, and Charlie was concentrating on her every word as if he life depended on it.
“… Winston, I don’t think you know who I am.” She was chiding him.
Gently, but that edge was there again. She needed for him to know who she was. Charlie Brown of the white sox was too good a reporter not to hear that in her voice. How many calls from women did he get at the Magnolia Club, she seemed to be wondering. None, not one he wanted to say. Until you. But his mind was still a blank.
“Look …” he said desperately. “How could I forget you? Your voice still does the things to me it always did.” He shut up in horror. Had he said that? If he hadn’t, who had?
“Listen to him!” said Lightnin’ Man. “You may have underestimated Sir Charles, Mouse.”
And then Lightnin’ Man winced as his long-haired woman poked him in the ribs. “Shut up, both of you!” she said with a strange fierce protective note in her voice. “Leave him alone!” But Charlie really wasn’t hearing them.
Because that ragged edge in the voice on the phone was coming clearer now. “My voice does things to you, Winston? Does it, I mean really? Then why didn’t you ever tell me what those things were?”
“I was afraid.” That was a universal truth, and out before he knew it. He heard her intake of breath.
“Of him, you mean?”
He was wounded. “Not of him!” (Him?) “Dammit, afraid of you! You know how I am around a woman who I. . .” His throat closed up again. This had to be a nightmare. But she was meeting him halfway, more than halfway.
“A woman that you what, Winston?”
He blundered into it crazily, the pic-maddened bull taking the cape. “A woman I wanted so much. I’m so afraid to show it, I always have been. Because you can make me feel so stupid and clumsy with one look.”
Miraculously, there were no more raucous comments or peals of laughter. The cynical crew of the Chronicle melted from around him and he had the table to himself.
“Poor Winston,” she said. “So terribly afraid of nothing. Is that really what you were thinking about, those times we were together?”
“… Yes.” It was a blanket affirmative to all those women down the years.
The edge in her voice softened. “And I though — but never mind. What are you doing, Winston? Or did I ask you that already?”
“I — I was … Well I’m having a beer.” His body was covered with cold sweat.
“Do you know what I’ve been doing?”
“No,” he said.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all night, that’s what. Didn’t they tell you at the newspaper?”
“I’ll kill them,” he said quietly. “All of them.”
Her soft laugh was back, and he reveled in it. “You sound really mad.”
“I am. At them,” he added hastily, and then found himself laughing with her.
Their laughter died a natural death. The line hummed.
“Do you know what I’m doing now?” she said. Lightly, but the edge was back.
“What?” he said.
“I’m waiting for you to invite yourself over to my hotel room, Winston. I’m coming apart at the seams and I need somebody to thread a needle for me and sew me back together. I need you, Winston,” she said.
The image of his wife’s unyielding, hard-cute face stood before his mind’s eye like an evil genie. But only for a moment.
“Yes!” he said. “Yes!” then, “Wait! Where are you? The Holiday Inn? Why — why that’s just four blocks from here, down Reynolds. What? Room 42? Right! I’ll knock twice. What? No, I won’t be followed. I — hey! Hey! Wait — no, never mind.”
He had cried out when another face suddenly materialized before his mind’s eye. A remote, lovely, inaccessible, face saying: “No, I haven’t heard from my husband; no, I’m sure he isn’t aware of the indictment; no, I have no knowledge of his business connections …” While Charlie Brown stalked her skillfully, knowing she was lying (thinking she was beautiful), little-boy determined to get the real story about the big man who commanded this lush and loyal creature. And who wasn’t worth hanging. Joe Dance, Dance Bail Bonds; the Dancing Man. The Dancer, as Calhoun called him now. A red-neck thug with delusions of Southern grandeur.
“What is it, Winston?”
There was an edge of fear in her voice now. Fear because she had put herself right out there, and now he might back down. Her fear bit at him. There was no way on earth that he was not going to the Holiday Inn, and right this minute.
The Dancing Man’s southern lady was on the run. He couldn’t imagine the courage it had taken for her to strike out for freedom. But she had. Now she must be on the run, wanting to get out from under Dance’s control and afraid she couldn’t. But that didn’t quite make sense.
Charlie was thinking hard, remembering things now. No, with her family and connections, she shouldn’t be afraid of the Dancer. Her family was Old South all the way, moneyed and powerful, with dangerous connections of their own, and they would not brook harm to a daughter of the clan. They hadn’t been happy with the marriage, but probably figured she’d come to her senses one day and ditch the bum. And now she had. If Dance had touched a hair on her head, he was the one who should be afraid.
So what was she afraid of tonight?
He heard it in her voice, but was unable to credit it. Tonight, she was out there in the night with the rain and her aching loneliness — and she had reached out to him. Him, of all people. And she was afraid that Charlie Brown wouldn’t come to her.
“Winston, are you there?” He heard the quaver.
“I’m here,” he said. “And I will very soon be there.” The joy of being alive and a man sang in his voice. “I’m on my way this very instant. This is me putting the phone down to come to you.”
He banged down the phone and almost upset Angel, who was lugging two unopened sixteen-ounce Falstaffs toward another table. Without thinking, he plucked them dexterously off the tray as he headed for the door. He spotted Pick about to open a big brown paper bag at the end of the bar. He remembered in a flash that Pick loved fat delicious jambons from Normandy House, and sent out for them three or four at a time. Charlie Brown shifted both cans of Falstaff to one hand and scooped up the sack on the fly.
“Hey, no!” That genial mobster, geniality forgotten, flailed his hands after the vanishing sack. “Goddamit!”
But Charlie was faster. Down the bar, around the cigarette machine, out the door and gone. Pick continued to splutter. Lightnin’ Man leaned his six-foot-plus on the bar beside him.
“Buy you another ham sandwich or two, Pickster?”
“But — but! He can’t …”
“It adds color,” Lightnin’ Man interrupted. “You know, like if we was cowboys, we’d jump out the window onto our horses and gallop away in all directions.”
“Charlie will be back,” Mouse said softly, at Pick’s elbow. “I’ll pay for the sandwiches and the Falstaffs.”
“He sho’ will be back,” called the rattled doorman. “He done gone off in the rain ‘thout his fine new London Fog. Or even his hat!”
Calhoun, standing next to Lightnin’ Man, swirled his grapefruit juice glumly and speared a cherry. “I just hope the story is worth him catching his death of cold and hell from Rita both.”
“Me,” said Lightnin’ Man, gathering his woman of the moment in his arms, “I hope he gets fucked within an inch of his life.”
“Lightnin’!” She elbowed him again, sharply, this time in the solar plexus.
“Well, I do,” he grunted. “And the same for me, on a night like this. Let’s go, sugar.”
Lightnin’ Man and his lady passed out into the raining street. Of Charlie Brown of the white stockings they saw nary a sign.
*Another “orphan story” from one of my collections of stories; a chapter that would not fit in Newspaper Gypsy.
