Half of Paradise

“Your train leaves at midnight.”

“When did I get on the Barn Dance?”

“About three hours ago, after I finished talking with Jimmy Lathrop.”

“Who in the hell is Jimmy Lathrop?” J.P. said.

“He’s the man that makes Live-Again, one of the biggest selling vitamin tonics on the market. From now on you make people drink Live-Again.”

“Why don’t you tell me first before you hire me out to somebody I never heard of?”

“You wanted to go to Nashville, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. But I like to be told before I’m hired out.”

“I got a contract in my office, signed by you, that says I manage your engagements and you got nothing to say about it.”

“I don’t feel like making no train trip tonight.”

“There’s something else in the envelope. Maybe it will make you feel better.”

J.P. took out the check and held it in the light from the desk lamp. It was for four hundred dollars, payable to him.

“Lathrop told me to advance it to you,” Hunnicut said.

“I still ain’t up to making a five-hundred-mile train trip tonight.”

“You’re giving me a burn in the ass, J.P.”

“You want me to take off in the middle of the night on two hours’ notice without telling me nothing except I’m going to sell vitamin tonic for somebody I ain’t even seen. That money won’t do me no good in a hospital or a cuckoo ward.”

“I want you to listen to what I got to say, J.P. Lathrop is one of the biggest men in the state. There’s a dozen of these fine politicians in the capital who get their bread buttered by Jim. He could have bought a boxcar load of hillbilly singers to push his product, but he picked you because me and him has done business before. If you think you’ve gotten big and you can tell me what to do, or slough off Lathrop’s offer, tear up that check and there will be someone else riding the train tonight.”

“I ain’t sloughing off his offer. I said I’m wore out and I want to be told about something once in a while.”

“I’m fed up talking with you. Either do what I tell you, or you can start back for the tenant farm and chop cotton like a nigger for three dollars a day.”

“You can’t break my contract.”

“I can do any goddamn thing I please.”

“Why does it have to be tonight?”

“Because I say so,” Virdo Hunnicut said, and slammed the flat of his hand on the desk. He wiped his sweating face. “Pack your things and get down to the station. When you get into Nashville go to the Grand Hotel. A man from the radio station will meet you there.”

J.P. sat for a minute and looked at Hunnicut. The room was quiet except for the creak of the straight-back chair and Hunnicut’s wheezing. He folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket with the tickets and walked from the room.

He packed the clothes he would need into a single suitcase, picked up his guitar, and took a cab to the depot. He rested his head on the back of the seat and looked blankly out the window while the cab rode downtown. The neon signs were a long blur of colored light without shape or form. The smell of the street, the tar and asphalt, and the dryness of the September night came to him through the open window. It was the end of day in the city; there was the burnt, electric odor of the streetcars and the dry scratch and flash of red as they crossed the electric connections; the pages of newspaper scudding along the sidewalks; the faint smell of rubber and gasoline from the automobiles; the Salvation Army band on the corner, with their high-collar blue uniforms and homely faces and loud brass instruments and tambourines and shrill voices, singing “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks We Stand”; and the missions where the bums could get a meal and a cot if they would sit through a sermon on salvation and Jesus Christ.

J.P. closed his eyes and let his head sag to one side. He didn’t know the cab had stopped at the station until the driver woke him. The redcap carried his bag into the waiting room; he sat down on one of the pewlike benches, put his guitar case beside him, and read the train schedule on the opposite wall. There were a few people in the waiting room. A porter slept in a chair by the platform door. J.P. took out his tickets and looked at them. Hunnicut had put him in a chaircar. He went to the ticket window and talked with the stationmaster and tried to get rese

rvations on a Pullman. The stationmaster told him that there were no more reservations to be had, and he would have to ride in the chaircar.

His train was announced over the loudspeaker, and he carried his bag and guitar case out on the platform. The ice and baggage wagons rumbled over the wood planks. The trainmen opened the vestibule doors of the coaches and put down the stepstool for the passengers. Men in overalls moved along the cinder bed by the side of the train with copper oil cans. J.P. walked down the platform and found his car. The conductor looked at his ticket and helped him up into the vestibule.

The car was crowded and the air was thick with smoke. He made his way down the aisle, bumping people with his guitar case, and took a seat at the end of the car. A soldier snored loudly next to him. J.P. pushed back the seat and tried to relax. His legs were cramped and he couldn’t stretch out. A child close by began to cry. The train hissed and jolted and moved slowly out of the station. The lights in the car went down, and J.P. felt the darkness go over him.

The telegraph wires are weaving through the air outside the window and I’m going to Nashville Tennessee for Big Jim Lathrop Big Jim sends bread and butter checks to the state capitol the train is rocking back and forth rocking and I lean back and sleep in the dusty smell of old cushions and the train rocks me down past the dust of the cushions to where it is cool like sheets against my back and then the hot wetness of her on top of me I felt the bone in Doc Elgin’s hand and I had to look away when he stared at me and he give April something in a package because I seen it in her drawer and she covered it over with a slip when she seen me looking at it she has small blue marks on her arms