Free Half of Paradise by James Lee Burke

on.”
    J.P. sat in the straight-backed chair opposite Hunnicut. He watched the big man sweat and wipe his face.
    “What did you want to talk about?” he said.
    “I’ll tell you if you give me the chance.”
    “I ain’t feeling too good. I want to get some sleep tonight.”
    Hunnicut leaned his weight forward, opened the desk drawer, and handed him an envelope.
    “What is it?”
    “Look for yourself.”
    He opened the envelope by tearing off the end and looked inside.
    “Train tickets,” he said.
    “You’re going to Nashville.”
    “The Barn Dance?”
    “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