Three True Tales

THREE TRUE TALES

Picket’s Charge

The Last Haircut of Tom Mix

Cheetah, West

Robert P. Wells

Auld Makar Publications

First American edition

Copyright © 2015 by Robert Preston Wells

All rights reserved under the 1976 United States Copyright Act as amended, International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions, and all other global agencies protecting intellectual property. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, digital or analogue, or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of the publisher, excepting use of quotes in reviews.

Picket’s Charge, The Last Haircut of Tom Mix, and Cheetah, West are works of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

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The author’s choice of typeface is Palatino Linotype, 11-point; do not accept eReader imposed substitutions.

Published in the United States by Auld Makar Publications

Decatur, Illinois

ISBN: 9781310746819

Also by Robert P. Wells

Journeyman: Selected Poems

The Virgin’s Bastard

Overlord / Underhand

(a novel of WWII espionage)

Judith in Hell – WRNS Officer Judith Burroughs, P.O.W.

(its prequel, a novel of WWII)

Veteran’s Day

(a comedy in one act)

Picket’s Charge

Jeez, are you gonna deal, or what?

Francisco Cal Rodriguez froze at his colleague’s exasperated question, then shot a snarky glance across the table at the tall, brawny man opposite him, who leaned forward on the vinyl-upholstered bench-style seat with one expectant eyebrow raised. Cal’s calloused hands each curled around half a deck of cards, angled toward each other, his thumbs cocked at the corners.

He glanced down again and the cards zipped as he finished shuffling and tapped the deck straight, for the fifth time.

"Sure, amigo—if you ever quit bellyachin’. I just wanna make sure you can’t cheat."

Cal shifted the toothpick in his mouth from one corner to the other without using his hands and flashed a good-natured smile to go with the mock-insult.

He was a wiry man in his mid-twenties, with a thick head of wavy jet-black hair combed straight back from a low forehead, barely five-foot-six in his tall-heeled biker boots. Cal’s friends thought his nickname was short for California, their mutual birthplace; but it really stood for calaca, skeleton in Spanish. Brought up in a poor family in East Los Angeles, he had been very skinny as a boy.

Cal slapped the deck down on the ivory-colored Formica tabletop in front of the big man with short blonde hair.

Here you go, Kenny—cut! he challenged. And stop callin’ me Jesus—that’s my cousin, eh. Cal pronounced Jesus in the Spanish way, Hey-zoos, an old joke that had long since grown weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.

Kenneth Johansson returned a pained half-smile but said nothing as he reached forward and cut the cards in three places. He put the bottom cut in the middle, and pushed the deck back across the table.

The third player, stationed at the head of the foldaway dining table at the front of the mobile home serving as their gambling den, leaned forward in his canvas camp chair. He looked up from arranging small red-headed matchsticks into a neat pile in front of him.

What’s your rush, Kenny? We got all night. Our relief don’t show up ’til seven-thirty this mornin’.

The trio used wooden matchsticks as poker chips. Each player started with a box of three hundred Diamond matches. In betting, they valued the matches at a penny each, or sometimes a nickel if they were feeling the drink-induced allure of big-time gambling. The minimum ante was always five cents. As much as four or five dollars a night might be lost or won between them; but money rarely changed hands, as the loser usually just brought the next 12-packs of Michelob they favored, to start the following night’s game.

Each man had a tall, brown, gold-labeled beer bottle stationed by his drinking hand.

"No rush—you got that right, Pizza Man," Cal grunted, his hands quickly circling around the small table five times as he doled out the cards.

Kenny frowned as he pulled up his red-checked flannel sleeve to read his new time-and-date wristwatch: one-sixteen, May 7.

He was unaware he had failed to set his watch correctly. It was really early morning on the eighth of May; but according to his watch it was yesterday afternoon.

"Yeah, why the hell is that, Jack? Kenny turned to his boss, vexation furrowing his broad brow. We got stuck with the graveyard watch three nights in a row now. What if they settle the strike tomorrow? How is that fair, we should draw this crappy shift so much?"

Jack Pizza Man Tagliaferro, shop foreman of the Butcher’s and Meat Packer’s branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union to which they were bound, did not look up as he gathered in his cards and began to arrange them in his hand.

Management won’t settle this strike so quick—you know that. They wanna sweat us, he explained without emotion, nodding with the side of his head toward their workplace on the other side of the screen door, the Alpha Beta supermarket on Mulholland Highway. "But if we take the midnight shift again tomorrow, then we’re off for the weekend—and the whole next week to boot. We get to just kick back, go fishin’ if we want. No daytime picket duty—nothin’ at all."

He wore a satisfied half-smile as he put his cards face down and selected five matches and threw them into the center of the table. Then he tapped his forefinger against his temple as he looked up into the trusting blue eyes of his journeyman butcher, Johansson.

Always lookin’ out for us, he smirked. Ooh-rah.

Cal shifted the toothpick from one corner of his mouth back to the other as he stared at the cards in his hand.

"Well, damn, Jack, we can’t go fishin’, he pointed out. Didn’t you rent out your trailer to the Local while the strike’s on?" He glanced at their boss as he added five matches of his own to the pot, then motioned with his eyes around the interior of the mobile home – a 1971 Airstream, now four years old, burdened with the impossibly luxurious title Land Yacht Trade Wind Travel Trailer. Any cards? Dealer takes one.

"Yeah, you’re right, I forgot—no fishin’. Well, not in this rig anyway, agreed Jack, nodding as he slid two cards toward Cal, who flipped two replacements his way. Still, I got us some extra time off."

He lifted his new cards for a peek, flashed the deliberate smile of a bluffer as he picked them up and arranged them in his hand, added matches to the pot, then took a swig of beer.

Jack had bought the blindingly shiny second-hand Airstream the year before, needing a temporary place to live when his final divorce decree came through. The trailer packed compact versions of all the modern conveniences into its twenty-five foot silver shell – master bedroom suite, lounge room couches that also pulled out into beds, a shower, a toilet, overhead storage, a small double sink, a four-burner gas stove above the oven, a built-in multi-band Motorola stereo radio, a Dometic fridge-freezer where the rest of their beers presently sat cooling.

It turned out that his trailer made an ideal on-site strike headquarters, giving the picketing grocery workers a place to meet and strategize – neutral ground, like an embassy on foreign soil. This private space allowed the strikers to avoid setting foot in the boycotted supermarket to cool off, buy refreshments, eat, use its toilets, or otherwise patronize the store whose owners’ stingy behavior they were protesting against.

Jack had been peeved when strike action was first called. Nevertheless, soon after he saw an opportunity to profit from the labor dispute. He pitched his idea to union leaders, urging they rent his trailer for use by UFCW Local 770; and they took the deal.

Cal thought Jack had seemed very pleased with himself, not to say smug, in boasting to him of it: I figured the Local might as well help me pay it off, since it’s their fault we’re not workin’. And they’ll be responsible for keepin’ the generator goin’, the propane and water tanks full, and the septic tank empty.

Jack’s Airstream sat stationed along the far south side of the small shopping center’s darkened parking lot, an indefinite ebony expansive of asphalt lit at night only by the blazing blue-white overhead strip lights of the supermarket glaring out of the huge plate-glass windows fronting the store.

Space inside the compact trailer was limited, and Jack’s folding chair at the head of the dining table sat in his kitchen. The trailer door stood open for the cool night air; and, turning his head, Jack could see through the fly-screen the only things visible out in the darkness – distant street lights, and the supermarket’s white neon sign at the highway’s edge.

The tubing of the sign forming its B, low on neon gas, flickered feebly from time to time, but mostly it stayed off: ALPHA ETA.

Gimme three cards, said Kenny after he had anted up.

Cal cocked one eyebrow, but said nothing as they exchanged bad cards for good. Or good cards for bad. He could never tell with Kenny.

Everyone who knew Kenny understood he was possibly the worst card sharp in California, hesitant even when dealt good hands, his open face easy to read, with so many tells that some opponents thought feigned innocence was his bluffing strategy and so handed him unearned victories from time to time.

Kenny too understood he was a poor poker player; but he made up for it with practiced sleight-of-hand. To compensate for his lack of skills, when playing cards he often wore a sleeveless down vest, its splotchy camouflage colors suited to duck hunters. He also wore it to keep warm in their Meat Department’s walk-in cold-storage locker. He kept the vest’s pockets stuffed with the small Diamond matches they used, so many he might spontaneously combust one day, to help him stay in the game longer.

Happily for him, no one ever totaled the matchsticks at the end of the night to discover the oversupply.

I forgot. Are we playin’ ‘Joker’s Wild’? he asked uncertainly.

If you find a joker, you can make it as wild you want. I took ’em all out of the decks we use before we started.

So nothing’s wild?

"Not a thing, amigo. Including—an’ make that especially—my love-life. So how’s yours, by the way?"

Kenny Johansson was also unlucky in love, spectacularly so. His frequent romantic misadventures were their mirth, their play, and their sport.

Kenny deflected the question.

Never you mind, Cal. But, hey, speakin’ of wild, I heard somethin’ pretty weird last week. You know Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors, ol’ Gomer Pyle himself?

Jack and Cal exchanged skeptical glances before nodding at Kenny. Of course they had heard of the actors. As ex-Marines themselves, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. had been a favorite TV show.

Yeah, so?

I heard they got ‘married’—or whatever the fairies call it—a little while back. Some sort of messed-up queer ceremony they staged one night in Huntington Beach.

Rock Hudson’s a homo? Aw, come on, get outta here with that bullshit, scoffed Cal.

Jack looked down to hide his smile and just shook his head, trying not to laugh.

Kenny, a movie fan of long standing, had filled his head with Hollywood facts and trivia, legend and lore – quite a bit of it arresting but apocryphal. He subscribed to Variety; and he kept Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon among his prized possessions, an original banned 1965 copy he had obtained at great cost from a dirty book dealer. It was bedside reading; and he relished all the sordid adulteries, murders, suicides, and the fabulous sex and drug scandals – corruption covered up by equally amoral studio bosses protecting their assets.

He loved the idea of old Hollywood, which made him want to live close to it.

But he feared he might be mistaken for one of the many gays, as they now liked to call themselves, who lived in the hills above Hollywood – the Swish Alps – and so he rented a small apartment in Studio City instead, on the other side of the mountains. Here he found many of the film industry’s worker bees lived, and exchanged intriguing gossip. The fact that some of his Valley neighbors were homosexual as well escaped his notice entirely.

No, really, Kenny insisted earnestly. "I talked to a guy who swears he saw their wedding invitation. And he says they’re now hitched, and livin’ together and everything—callin’ themselves ‘Rock-Pyle’."

He did not see the joke. But Cal and Jack broke up laughing.

Kenny frowned, flustered. He had expected they would react with curious wonder, as he had.

Jack caught his breath first and reached for his beer again.

Jesus, Kenny, the clown who told you that was so full o’ crap the whites of his eyes must’ve been brown.

So you don’t think—?

"No.