That evening I called Saber and told him I was sorry I had ever hurt his feelings or done anything bad to him. I also told him he was the best guy I ever knew, and that Valerie felt the same about him, although that was a lie. I also told him it was time to visit one of our favorite nightsp
ots, Cook’s Hoedown, the honky-tonk where Elvis said he loved to perform more than any other. I snapped my Gibson into its case and put it into the backseat of my heap and headed for Saber’s house. It was a bad choice.
Chapter
9
THE CLUB WAS on Capitol Street, and all the big Western bands and stars played there during the 1930s and ’40s, including Hank Williams. A disk jockey named Biff Collie used to let me in through the back door and allow me to sit in with a couple of the bands at the back of the stage. To this day I tell people I played with Floyd Tillman, who wrote “Slipping Around,” and Jimmy Heap, who recorded the most famous song in the history of country music, “The Wild Side of Life.” I don’t tell them I sat in the shadows, my acoustic Gibson lost among the drums and amplified instruments of the band.
It was a beer joint with a small dance floor and an earthy crowd. My parents wouldn’t have approved of my being there, and few kids from my section of Houston wanted to go there unless they had an agenda that had to do with the availability of uneducated blue-collar girls. But for me the coarse physicality of the culture, the hand-painted neckties, the slim-cut trousers, the two-toned needle-nose boots, the drooping Stetsons, the sequined snap-button shirts that sparkled like snow, all somehow created a meretricious artwork that was greater than itself, one that told the audience that fame and the glitter of stardom were only a callused handshake away. Even Saber seemed in awe of me when I stepped down from the back of the stage and returned my Gibson to its case. “Jesus Christ, I cain’t believe it’s you up there with those people,” he said.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said.
“Fuck it’s not. That’s Leon Payne.”
Payne wrote “The Lost Highway” for Hank Williams. I didn’t want to let on how proud I was, so I didn’t say anything.
“Let’s get a beer,” Saber said. “My best friend plays acoustic guitar for Leon Payne. How about that, music fans everywhere? Hey, those girls over there are looking at us.”
They weren’t, but I didn’t want to disillusion poor Saber. Cook’s Hoedown wouldn’t serve minors, as many of the nightclubs and beer joints did. So we went to a place called the Copacabana, over on Main. It had fake palm trees, the cloth trunks wrapped with strings of white lights by the entrance, and shades made of bamboo on the windows. It was a dark, refrigerated club, with only a jukebox on weekday nights. You could order beer or Champale from the waitress or at the bar; if you wanted anything harder, you had to bring your own bottle and order setups, which meant glasses, a small bucket of ice, and carbonated water or Coca-Cola or Collins mix at premium prices. Also, the bottle had to stay behind the bar. On Friday and Saturday nights there was a jazz trio and sometimes a female singer. There was a uniformed cop stationed by the men’s room, but he never interfered with the sale of alcohol to minors or bothered the patrons unless someone started a fight or he recognized a parolee.
Saber and I sat in the darkest corner of the room and ordered two bottles of Champale from the waitress. Saber lit a cigarette, bending his face to the cupped match, his eyes tiny with secret knowledge. “Did you see who was in the parking lot at Cook’s?”
“Whoever it was, why did you wait until now to tell me?”
“I didn’t want to stoke you up.”
“Then I don’t want to know.”
“It was Harrelson. With three other guys. They were in his pink convertible.”
“What’s Harrelson doing at Cook’s?”
“Girls from the welfare project are always hanging at the back door. He gets them to blow him, then drops them on a country road.”
“Stop making up lurid tales, Saber. The guy is bad enough as it is.”
“Anyway, I shot him twin bones and double eat-shit signs, plus the Italian up-your-ass salute. I don’t know if he saw me or not. Man, it’s cold in here. Check out those guys in the corner.”
A conversation with Saber was like talking to the driver of a concrete mixer while he was backing his vehicle through a clock shop. “Which guys?”
“In the suits. Tell me they’re not gangsters.”
“Lower your voice,” I said.
“The flight from Palermo must have just landed.”
I turned around slowly, as though looking for the men’s room. The waitress had brought out a tray on wheels and was setting silverware and a battery-powered electric candle on a table. Three men sat around a bottle of champagne wedged into an ice bucket. She served steaks with Irish potatoes wrapped in tinfoil to the two older men, although the club had no kitchen and to my knowledge never served food. The younger man wasn’t served a meal; he sipped from a champagne glass, one arm hanging on the back of the chair. None of the men spoke. When the waitress went away, the oldest of the three men tucked a napkin into his collar and bent to his food.
He was Frankie Carbo, my uncle’s business partner, the man who fixed fights the way Arnold Rothstein fixed the 1919 World Series. I had shaken hands with both him and Benny Siegel, and it would take years before I could acquire the words to describe the peculiarity in both men’s eyes. They saw you but did not see you; or they saw you and dismissed you as not worth seeing; or they saw you and filed you into a category that involved use or self-gratification.
Carbo probably was handsome at one time, but his face had become fleshy, his throat distended, his dark hair curling with gray on the tips. I saw his eyes cut toward me. I looked away.
“Told you,” Saber said.
“That’s Franke Carbo,” I whispered. “Don’t say another word.”
“The gangster you met at the Shamrock? I knew it. See the young guy?”