Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [15]
“It might do that,” said Mary Ann.
John limped out, his head tucked low. “Sister, he ain’t in there.”
“Did you look well?”
“I looked all over, but you know I’d seen him if he’d been there, first thing when I crossed the sill.”
Mary Ann nodded and turned away. There was God’s plenty of gamblers and gambling dens in Memphis, shifting up and down the riverside like the packs of rats that also infested the docks, defying all efforts to exterminate them or drive them permanently away. The three of them worked their way south on Front Street, with John stepping into a second, a third gambling room, while Mary Ann and Jerry waited in the shadows by the door. At the fourth, just around the corner from the Gayoso Hotel, he was slow to return.
“Sister, he’s there but I can’t budge him,” John said when he finally did come back out. “He’s on a winning streak, at least.”
“That’s no matter,” Mary Ann said. “He’ll play till he loses the lot of it. Whatever he’s won and whatever he’s got.”
John took his second stick from her and rocked back on the pair of them, looking across at the lightening sky above the river. “It’ll soon be day.”
“You know that won’t stop him,” Mary Ann said. “It won’t stop a one of them.” She waited, then looked sharply at John. “Did you tell him that I’m here?”
“In a manner of speaking,” John said. “He ain’t able to hear it, the state that he’s in.”
He paused. Mary Ann was looking intently at the stain of light under the door in front of her.
“Might send Jerry after him,” John said, and forced a short barking laugh. “Jerry’s got a way with a mule.”
Jerry hummed and chuckled, but didn’t move. Mary Ann only clucked her tongue. “I won’t send him in there alone,” she said. “They’re apt to mistreat him.” Her pale hand darted for the handle of the door.
“Well, you can’t go in there—” John was saying, but he was too slow. Using both sticks, he struggled in after her, into the thick funk of liquor and smoke. Jerry stuck the pipe in his pocket, snatched his hat off his head and followed. Someone had risen to block Mary Ann’s path.
“Miss, you cain’t—”
“Don’t you dare put that hand on me.” Flaring her nostrils, she drew herself up.
The man fell away from her. “That’s Forrest’s wife.”
“Run the nigger out, at least!” someone called, with a curse, and another man said, “That’s Forrest’s nigger.”
Forrest sat at a table with his back to the door, his head sunk between shoulders so stiff they seemed to tremble, lank hair running sweat into his collar. It was close in the dark room, but not so hot as all that. At his left hand was a heap of silver dollars, and a neater stack of gold eagles high enough the sight of it made her breath come short. Under his right hand was a pistol.
She moved counterclockwise around the table till she had come within his field of vision, but he did not seem to see her. The red holes of his eyes tilted toward the spot on the table where the dice rattled between a pair of nail-bitten hands that scooped and shook and rolled them again, all to a low monotonous chant—she did not even want to make out the words of it. She had seen him so before, though seldom—when he was in his most terrible rage. Or not quite so. As a child she had once seen a fire eating away the core of a house till all its timbers were red coal and ash in the shape of a house with none of its substance, and maybe what she was seeing now was more like that.
“Mister Forrest,” she said. “It’s time to come home.”
The dice spun on the table, were smothered by a greasy cuff, raised and rolled another time. She called again and still he did not hear her.
“John,” she said. “Pick up the money.”
The other gamblers’ faces were hidden, shaded away under the brims of slouch hats, plug hats—only Forrest was bareheaded, his hair flaming out like the mane of a lion. John nodded to Jerry, who began scooping the coins off the table edge into a bag so long and narrow it probably had once been a sock. At that Forrest coiled and clutched up his pistol, but John dropped one of his sticks to cover the gun hand.
“Goddammit, Bedford. You