Fiction: Dancing at the Driftwood Hotel (#9)

A novella with some real characters

By Roger Owens

Lester Clayton, after helping clear the docklines, was down in the engine room when he felt the boat rock to the right (starboard, he thought stubbornly), and he listened carefully for a heartbeat before he went back on deck. The engines sounded good. Lester had been Assistant Parts Manager at the Ford dealership in Prosperity, South Carolina, nearby Birdswood, and before that he’d been a Ford mechanic for six years, ever since he got out of high school. Two of those years had been on contract to the US Army, which service had kept him out of the war. The only reason he drove a Buick was because his daddy had given it to him when he’d bought a new one, and he admitted to himself, with a dose of guilt, that he had loved it. It was a really nice car. He hated to let it go, but it had provided a nice nest egg for him and Porcelain, which he would need when they found a place to live.
    He knew a diesel as well as the next guy, and these babies were doing fine. There were two of them, around three hundred horsepower each he figured, but the brass labels were in a foreign language and he couldn’t read them. Each of them drove one of the screws that stuck out below the stern. They sat on steel platforms that inclined towards the bow, to keep them in line with the screws, and a gearbox was fixed to a smaller platform behind each one, with steel control rods coming from the claustrophobic ceiling. He tightened his lips in disgust. He was sure there was a term for the ceiling on a boat, low and cramped or not, but damned if he could remember what it was. The control rods pulled levers that ran across the gearboxes through slots from side to side, and when the gearshift levers in the wheelhouse above were pushed forward the boat went ahead. If pulled back to the middle mark, they shifted the engines into neutral. If the wheelhouse levers were pulled all the way back, the engines would shift into reverse. It was a nice, simple arrangement; it allowed the engines to be powered in different directions as an aid to steering in an emergency. This boat could turn on a dime. Joe Hook was evidently unaware of this, for the throttle arms from the overhead – he remembered it now, the overhead! – powered the engines down evenly and Joe used the wheel to turn the boat.
    Once on deck he saw they were headed for the shore of Biscayne Bay, and on the beach he could see Mister Blackie getting out of his car. Lester was amazed when it turned out Joe Hook seemed to be so much more important than himself. He’d been so sure that cop was after him he was witless with fear, and would have killed the fat bastard on the spot. He could do it, too, gun or no gun, any day and twice on Sunday. He figured he could have counted on the boy, Jackson, to help. They would have dumped him in the bay and no one the wiser for it. The truth was, Mister Blackie had shot that nasty little fisherman in his defense without he’d ever met Lester before, and if he had to, Lester would go to the electric chair for him. The South Carolina native and former Klansman gritted his teeth when he thought about it. He would do it, by God.
    Jackson had shown himself to be a man in all ways the last few weeks, and Lester and he were becoming pals. It had been a long time, at least by the lights of a fellow twenty-six slim years old, since he’d had a pal he could trust. His best friends in Birdswood would have killed him for what he was doing. Miscegenation, that’s what Klanners called it, getting children on a black woman, or – oh God in Heaven forbid – a black man ever getting children on a white woman. It was a sin, a crime beyond imagining, worse than rape, worse than murder. Now all he felt was shame at how stupid he’d been, how stupid they all were, hating and beating and killing each other from generation unto generation, over what? The color of their skin? Was that what the God of Peace had intended when He made people? Made ’em all different, every color and size and shape, just so’s they could fight over it all the time? The idea was ridiculous. God was the Creator of the world, the entire universe, and a White Christian Knight of any God-damned thing ought to have known that. He could not possibly be that much of an idiot.

Blackie Wainwright, which he was just beginning to admit was how he now thought of himself, could hear the police sirens coming down the beach. He wondered what the hell his crew had fouled up now, because it looked like they had pissed off somebody important in a serious fashion. The Horny B. was slowing, riding her own wake towards the shore. Lottie was jumping up and down, waving to him frantically in an apparent effort to get him to swim to the boat. The sight of her delicious titties bouncing up and down stopped him for a second, but the cops were coming closer all the time. He had to make a decision.
    Winchell Sanford Wainwright III, scion of the Cape Cod Wainwrights and betrothed of Pauline Gooding of the Penobscot Goodings, would have stood his ground, knowing he’d done nothing wrong, and demanded an apology from the highest authority in the state. Blackie Wainwright, with enough money to buy two more boats in his hands and a woman to die for waiting with open arms, turned back to his car, grabbed his gun, stuffed his cash deep in his pocket and headed for the water.
    The slimy grey muck on the bottom sucked at his feet, and he sank halfway to his knees with every step. The thick green water was up to his waist, and the Horny B. was churning up black mud thirty yards away. He gave up on keeping the gun or the money out of the salt water and just fell forward, stroking for the boat with all his considerable strength. By the time he got there, they had a rope ladder over the side for him. The cops were on the shore by his car, some of them yelling to him to come back, others ordering the boat to come to shore. He shook his head as he climbed aboard. They couldn’t bring the Horny B. to shore here if they wanted to. And they sure as hell didn’t want to. As he dragged himself through the sally port, one of them broke out a bullhorn.
    “This is the police! We are ordering you to return to shore! What?” The last word echoed across the bay as the officer and his bullhorn turned aside. A skinny kid in an oversized uniform was talking in the guy’s ear, apparently informing him that a boat that size couldn’t come ashore here. “We— We are ordering you to return to the city dock! This is the Miami Police Department! Return to the city dock!” Blackie pulled himself up on the deck just as Lottie hit him with a huge hug and kiss so fast they damn near went right back over the side. He was getting mud all over her nice yellow dress, and she didn’t even care. What a gal!

Well, at that time the Port of Miami was up by Virginia Key, so we headed south for a ways until we were passing Key Biscayne, and Blackie cut over east by the shore to the south of that island. It was nothing but a big lot of mud and mangroves, with Australian pines sticking up like a bunch of Christmas trees that have gotten lost and wandered too far south. Like a lot of places down there, a deeper channel often runs along the edges of the islands and it’s a good thing too, because otherwise I doubt we would have made it. At times that water looked no more than five feet deep, and the Horny B. needed all of that to keep from making marks on the bottom, if you know what I mean. As it was, we churned up black muck and sand in our wake. Much shallower and we would have been “polishing the props,” as Blackie bitterly said whenever the water got “too thin.” That happened a lot those days, but we never got in too much trouble. That was one hell of a day though, because besides the goings-on with the sheriff and all, we finally got to hear who Joe Hook really was and what had set that big Palm Beach son of a bitch on fire so bad.
    Seems Joe Hook was really a bank robber, if you can believe it, and seeing him with my own eyes like I did, I never could. He was running with a gang out of Okeechobee and they liked to take their work out of town. They pulled a daylight heist at the Flagler, Southern, and Maritime Bank on Highway AIA right in downtown Palm Beach, and it went bad. This had been in June 1942, when the war was raging and criminals were viewed as exceptionally vile. Unpatriotic. And just imagine, the first officer on the scene was none other than Undersheriff Carl Willard Schoolie. Not Deputy Undersheriff. Oh no, at that time Carl Willard had attained the highest non-elected position available in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. Then came the robbery at the FS&M. But I am sorry that I, Mr. Jackson L. Davis, have gotten way ahead of myself; for once, telling this story, Joe would not be quiet.
    So we heard how Henry B. Hook was born in West Winfield, New York in 1856. His first wife was Savannah Milford, who died childless at the tender age of 28 years in 1889. A stone was raised by her grave in the Bridgewater Cemetery, which at that time left Henry’s date of death blank, since of course at that time Henry wasn’t dead. In 1907, Henry took up with a local woman named Ella Sue Bostwick, a much younger woman. Ella had been born in Cassville, New York, a hole in the road down Route 8 from West Winfield. Her parents were dead and her sisters were tired of supporting her. She moved into his house. When she bore his son, Joseph Milford Hook, in November 1910, all pretense at being his “housekeeper” disintegrated.
    If she had come from somewhere else, they might have pulled it off, even back then. He could have gone away, and brought her back. Claimed they were married. He could have taken her away, brought her back, and then claimed they were married. For the love of God, he could actually have married her, right there. Nobody would have really cared. It would have been far less scandalous than how the Mayor of Bridgewater had been forced to marry his first wife. That woman’s father had resorted to political blackmail. Of course she was in the family way and there wasn’t anything to stop it, and afterward she and the Mayor had lived happily for twenty-seven years, until she died in a fire at the county barn. They raised three fine girls and one rather squirrely boy, as Joe recalled of him, but he had joined the Marines and gone to China. The squirrely boy, I mean. I wondered exactly what Joe Hook might think was squirrely in a boy, seeing as how he preferred girls’ clothes about half the time, or on half his body at any given time.
    But Henry B. Hook did none of those things, neither marrying Ella nor claiming to have done, and all anybody could ever think was that money was somehow involved, but no one could ever point a finger, let alone lay one, on how that could have happened, as his first wife’s family had been no better off than anyone else. Nobody gave a damn if he married again or not. The problem was, they were both from right there. Everybody knew them. Hell, everybody knew everybody, just like back in my home town. That can be every bit as much a curse as a blessing.
    Joe’s mother was treated like a tramp. As Joe mumbled the story to Lottie and Blackie, it became clear he had been put upon as a child. He had been small – hell, he was still small – and his mother would put him in dresses, hoping to protect him from the bullies at school. It was not unusual for boys at that time to be dressed like girls until they were six or seven years old. Why, I have pictures of my Grandpa Lee, a man as tough as dried fish, aged five years, in frilly little dresses. Had them back home anyway. Talking about the pictures. So, I guess it kind of stuck with Joe. Wearing dresses, I mean.
    Then his momma died from the influenza in 1922 and Joe was left to be the forgotten, illegitimate son of an aging, thoughtless father. Henry died in 1926, and his name was naturally added to the stone under which Savannah had, these many years past, entered her eternal rest. His body, as well as his name, rested beside her on Cemetery Road there in Bridgewater. This did not suit Joseph Milford Hook, then aged 16 years, one damn bit – no, it did not. He set out to get enough money to pay for a stone with his beloved momma’s name on it, and Henry’s too, and he determined he would have it put in the same cemetery as the one with Henry B. and Savannah’s names on it. To this end he went east, and robbed a bank somewhere in Massachusetts. He returned to Bridgewater and offered a man he took to be the owner of the cemetery five hundred dollars, an outrageous sum, to place the stone, by written contract, within ten paces of the stone where Henry and Savannah lay for eternity.
    When Joe found out the man was merely a caretaker and gravedigger and had taken his money for nothing, he went to the cemetery on a day a funeral was being held, waited until everyone else was gone, and then shot the caretaker dead, right there behind the old pump house. Didn’t even wait until the man had covered the dearly departed from that day’s business, and he noted with particular rage that the bastard wore a new coat. From his money for the nonexistent stone, no doubt.
    The town clerk, Stanley Owens, was very put out to have to find someone new to dig graves, with no notice and all. He sat in the town office, at his rolltop secretary desk, in his blue apron with suspenders, his crisp white sleeves banded with garters, his green Visiglass accountant’s visor shading his eyes from the mild green light from his banker’s lamp, as if he’d stepped directly into Bridgewater from 1880 right then and anyone who didn’t like it could be damned and go to hell. Stanley shook his balding head, rolling his hands together like mating snakes, not seeing the plethora of office paraphernalia, the staple pullers and tape dispensers and paper clip holders and the Notary Public stamper he’d used maybe ten times since he’d first got it in 1903 – all stuck willy-wag into the pigeonholes of the open desk. He coughed out the “heh, eh, eh,” which was his trademark, half laugh and half cough, so creepy the young local girls wouldn’t go inside the town hall with him there. Work at the cemetery, it seemed to Stanley, was already backing up. Two bodies instead of one now required the attentions of a caretaker. Perhaps that young Hungerford fella, his third cousin Bruce from over Cassville way, might be suitable. And for sure, somebody had to look into who might have killed old Elias Milford. Why, he was father to Henry B.’s first wife Savannah.
    That had pretty well sunk things for Joe Hook in the great state of New York. When he discovered that he had killed his father’s father-in-law, he knew he couldn’t stay. Elias Milford’s being the father of poor Savannah only served to set Joe further from redemption than he had ever believed possible. So Joe headed south, and that is how he found himself robbing a bank in Palm Beach, Florida.
    Things had gone smoothly until Schoolie showed up. In response to an armed-robbery call, Undersheriff Schoolie had barged through the bank doors and when a man turned towards him with what looked like a gun, he’d shot him dead. The man was a local plumber named Leslie Chandler. He was holding a piece of corroded pipe he’d removed from the lobby bathroom to show the manager, who was a notorious skinflint and wouldn’t pay to have it fixed if he didn’t see the holes himself. The lines of customers, most of whom hadn’t known the bank was being robbed, went berserk. Joe’s accomplices, “Handsome” Harry Thomas and a fellow named Jasper Kling, were dressed like all the other farmers. Joe Hook, of course, was dressed as a woman, in a simple white frock and a wide-brimmed, white straw boater hat with a red ribbon. They slipped out with the screaming crowd, and Joe had actually bumped into Undersheriff Schoolie and been knocked down. His stylish white vinyl purse, the one with the pink trim that matched his lipstick –filled with thirty-six thousand dollars in stolen cash – went sliding across the floor. Schoolie had apologized profusely and offered his sweaty hand to help the 110-pound Joe Hook stand up. Then he had retrieved the heavy purse and carefully brushed it off before returning it to Joe and watching his ass appreciatively as Joe swayed out the door.
    The dead plumber had cost Schoolie three years’ seniority. When the full story became known, that the “woman” was a man and had participated in the robbery, it cost him even more, mostly in respect. His wife left him. His friends laughed at him behind his back, he was sure.
    But now, here Joe was, back where Schoolie could get him. Joe was more shaken than when we carried the dead fisherman out for the crabs. And let me tell you again, Joe was no coward. He was tougher than old paint, and those skinny arms were strong enough to boat a spinner shark nine feet long. I reckon he was about thirty-five years old then. Joe I mean.
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[Editor’s Note: The novella of which this installment is a part can be ordered from Amazon.]

Copyright © 2017 by Roger Owens