Read Online They Don't Dance Much: A Novel by James Ross - Free Book Online Page A

that afternoon. One of them was a picture of a lake, that was bordered with pale green trees. The water in the lake was blue and the sky above was blue too, with little cottony-looking clouds in it. Underneath it, it said, ‘Under Italian Skies.’ So I reckon the man was an Italian. The other picture was of two women taking a bath in a little creek. Underneath this picture it said, ‘Morning Ablutions.’ One of the women had a locket hung around her neck. They were good-looking women, but a shade heavy.
    In the back there was a good-sized kitchen with plenty of cooking tools and a range that was long as the average room. And Smut had bought enough dishes and knives and forks and spoons to take care of an army. I wondered if he’d ever make enough money out there to pay for it all.
    The dance hall looked very high class. I wasn’t a good dancer, but Smut and Catfish spent about half their time till Saturday waltzing over that floor. We had a nickelodeon in there, and Smut would put in a nickel and then he’d grab Catfish around the waist and they’d go to town. Smut led—he was a good dancer—and Catfish could follow good as any woman in Corinth. That nigger was loose as a goose. Sometimes Catfish would get out by himself and buck-dance. He spent a lot of time that week dancing when he ought to have been off making liquor.
    The dance hall didn’t have much furniture in it, but there was a bunch of booths on one side of it, and there was the nickelodeon. There were a lot of different-colored lights in there too—blue lights and soft yellow lights—and we tried them out one night. It was light enough to see in there, but that was all. It was more like a sort of thick twilight. Smut said an atmosphere like that would aid business and help increase the population of the county at the same time. That was always Smut: trying to kill two birds with one stone.
    In the back of the dance hall there was a little room where folks could gamble if they felt like taking a chance. Over the door to this room there was a sign, ‘PRIVATE’; I knew Smut had that put there so everybody would dive right in. There were two slot machines in that room; one of them paid off in slugs that could be cashed in and the other paid off in nickels and dimes. Then there were a couple of pin-ball machines over in one corner. They weren’t supposed to be anything out of the way. They didn’t pay off in anything and folks were supposed to play them just for fun. But you could bet on them, and everybody would, you could count on that. Smut said if anybody wanted to roll high dice back there, why, that was what he wanted them to do. And if anybody was interested they could probably always get up a game of stud poker or blackjack in that room.
    We still had gas tanks out in front, but Smut said he was through working on cars like he used to do. He was a good mechanic and had been in the habit of working on cars during the week. But he said that was a thing of the past. If the farmers and mill hands wanted their cars fixed they could do it themselves.
    The men had built six tourist cabins a good ways back of the main building. They built one cabin bigger than the rest, for Smut and me to live in. There was just one room—plus a room for the shower—to our cabin, but it was a bigger room than in any of the other cabins. Smut figured that part of the help could sleep in the cabins in the daytime and he could rent them at night.
    These cabins were painted white and trimmed with dark green. There was a light in each one, a bed and a sort of bath, and a dresser. We made sure there was a spittoon and a waste-basket in each one of them too. Smut said he expected to reap a golden harvest out of the cabins.
    We got the last of the kitchen things put in on Thursday afternoon of that week, and that night we built a fire in the big stove to see if the flue was going to draw all right. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, and Smut and myself and Catfish sat in