Free They Don't Dance Much: A Novel by James Ross

and if you were to squeeze his cheek I don’t doubt but that you could get out half a pint of liquor. He was bound to be saturated with it. His daddy had been a liquor-maker before him, and when he was a boy Badeye had to help around the still. He sold liquor himself, after he got grown, but they caught him and fined him a hundred dollars. That made him pretty cautious for awhile and he finally went North. He worked in speakeasies up there until liquor came back legal. Then he traipsed back to Corinth and commenced working in pool rooms, bowling alleys, hot-dog joints, and such places. He was loud-mouthed and common before he went North, but going up there had made him worse. Just because he’d been to Chicago and Detroit and come back alive he thought it made him smarter than other folks around Corinth.
    Badeye looked mean and sneaking. His glass eye was cocked a little, or didn’t fit right. His other eye was cocked back. It made him look like he was always looking behind him. The hair on his head was dark and bushed up like he’d slept on it wrong. His skin was sallow and there were a lot of black moles on his face and neck. He was always talking out of the side of his mouth like he’d seen gangsters do in the movies. I was afraid he’d get fresh with the customers, but it wasn’t my roadhouse.
    Catfish kept nodding and nodding, and his head got a little farther over every time. Finally he fell out of the chair and woke up. He bounced around on the floor and put his hand on the stove, that was hot. He jerked it back and stuck his fingers in his mouth. ‘Great God!’ he said. ‘Confound my soul! Done ruint my hand on this here stove. I’m burnt bad.’
    He got up complaining and sucking his fingers. Smut looked over his shoulder at him. ‘Put some lard on it, Cat, and take a drink of liquor,’ he said.
    Catfish stopped taking on. ‘Ain’t no more liquor in that bottle,’ he said.
    Smut pulled out the drawer of the table. He took a bottle of liquor out of the drawer and handed it to Catfish. ‘Here,’ he said.
    Catfish opened the bottle and took a long slug. He set the bottle down and looked at his hand. ‘I ain’t burnt so bad,’ he said, and belched. ‘I don’t know’s I’m burnt bad enough to use no lard.’
    ‘I didn’t think you was,’ Smut said, and belched himself. ‘Gimme that bottle,’ he told Catfish.
    Catfish didn’t do it right off. ‘Just one more little small drink, Mr. Smut,’ he said, ‘to gimme courage. I got to walk some powerfully dark woods roads before I git home.’
    ‘Well, all right,’ Smut said, ‘but it better be small.’
    Catfish didn’t drink out of the bottle this time. He took the glass and poured that full. He swallowed it down without batting an eye.
    Smut looked at him, then at what was left of the liquor in the bottle.
    ‘Damn if you ain’t going to get drunk,’ he told Catfish. ‘You already drunk enough liquor to founder a mule.’
    Catfish pulled his hat down over one ear. ‘That ain’t nothin,’ he said. ‘I ain’t never been drunk. Cose I been high as a kite, but not down drunk. Liquor don’t bother me. I takes it or leaves it alone.’
    ‘That’s half right, anyway,’ Smut said.
    Catfish buttoned up his overall jacket and went out the back door. When he hit the ground he commenced singing, ‘Death Gonna Lay His Cold, Icy Hands on Me.’
    Smut shivered. ‘Got kind of a gruesome turn of mind, ain’t he?’ he said.
    ‘Kind of,’ I said. ‘By the way, Smut, what’s my job going to be when we get started up?’
    ‘You can be the cashier,’ he said, and yawned. ‘You’ll have to look after the cash register and keep the books; course I’ll help you. I’m going to keep an eye on the whole works myself. I got to, if I ever get out of debt.’
    The next morning Smut went to Corinth and got Rufus Jones. When they got back to the roadhouse Smut told me that he got Fletch Monroe sobered up enough to get out the paper that day, if he