some dead limbs out of the woods, cut a little sapling for a fishing pole, and after putting my rifle together, I hung it high in one tree with the bungee cords. I also made a lean-to, with a sheet of plastic I’d bought in one of the little hamlets, back in the southern Ohio hills. It was time to eat. I went fishing.
It only took a second to tie a popping bug on the line before I flipped it out on the surface of Seneca Lake. I only gave it a little jiggle, and a fish hit it. I brought it in and flipped it up on the bank. One more, and I would stop to clean and cook them.
As I flipped the bug out again, my thoughts turned to the old Seminole man who had taught me to fish. He’d be proud of me, but as the second fish took the popper, I remembered to thank him.
Bluegills are my favorite fish for eating, but for pleasure, I like to fish for bass. These were both fat fish, but they’d go a lot better if I’d have thought to bring some salt.
Long after I had cooked and eaten my fish, I sat gazing into the coals of my fire, brooding over my situation. After smoking three cigarettes, I felt sleep pulling at my eyes, so I stretched out and gave it up for the night. It didn’t work. I kept watching the stars through the foliage of the trees. And Abe Roster just wouldn’t stay away.
Was I justified in killing him? Oh, I’m not talking about legally justified. I didn’t give a darn about the law. If they got me, it was a prison. Just another lifestyle. The lifestyle for everyone else would not be disturbed, and after a while, no one would remember the guy that got off the boxcar.
But hey, maybe Old Charlie, and Buck, might have a cold one for me, and that brought a chuckle.
A ball bat, when used as a weapon, is a murder weapon. It takes special care not to kill a man when you hit him with a ball bat. Roster had tried to kill me, and his boss was in on it. Well, that was settled, and I just spent the rest of the night figuring how I would do it.
My Biggest problem was the fact that I knew nothing about Cambridge, and even less about Abe Roster. That was a handicap. Now an out-and-out murder, where you’re so angry that you don’t conceal your actions, is a very simple thing. Boom! The guy is dead. Now you run!But see. That wasn’t me. It’s not that I was against killing him without giving him a chance to fight back. That didn’t bother me at all. I didn’t want to get caught. I didn’t want to die in the electric chair, and I didn’t want to go to prison.
Why? Simple. I did not start this crap. Abe Roster did when he tried to rent me a barstool. He knew beyond any doubt that he was starting a fight. So my take on it all is that Abe had to die. Nuff said. In my head, he was already dead.
The croaking frogs and the crickets finally pulled the curtain down over my eyes, and dawn came with the sure knowledge that a problem had been solved.
I needed to do some scouting. Like I needed to get a feeling for the city of Cambridge, and I needed to find out where the casino was, that Marcello owned, and I needed to find a place where I could watch it. The two month’s growth in my beard would help as a disguise, so maybe a ball cap, and some glasses. Senecaville. There had to be a store there. I would go shopping.
Phil Richards, the guy that wanted me to be a bouncer in his club. Just like that, it came to me, as I stepped down from the entrance of the “Neighborhood Store” in Senecaville. Was he for real? No one had ever offered me a bouncer job before. Shoot, he hadn’t even seen me fight. He was basing his offer on what he had heard.
The way the man had talked, he was having a bad time. People busting up his club, and running away his customers, but the man didn’t mention why Roster was giving him a bad time. Well, truth is, I didn’t really want the job. I liked my carnival job. I’d been around Carneys all my life. That’s where I was comfortable, and that would be hard for someone that’s not with it to understand.
We stick together. We look out for each other. Just imagine how it would be if you moved your house and your business every week. Every week for ten months, you do business in another town. But now comes the good part. All your neighbors move with you, and you’d have to see a midway being set up to understand. People are all over the place and rides are being set up, joints being set up, and the food concessions are getting ready for inspection. Yeah, who would believe it? The whole show gets inspected by the state inspectors before it can open. A show which breaks down on a Sunday night will be open for business in another town on Monday.
The only advantage I could see about going to work for Mr. Phil Richards was that his place would give me a base to operate from. I would meet people I could talk to, some of them already enemies of Abe Roster. Well, I still had a problem. Richards hadn’t told me where his nightclub was located, so I’d need to think about that for a while.
After a bit of looking, I found that there were only two roads in the area that had nightclubs. Route 21, was the first I visited, and Also where I first saw the casino which was set back off the road. Bulldozers had cut the hell out of the hills to make a giant place to set the casino and park the cars. The second road was route 40 going east, and that’s where I found the Grotto along with another called the Hi-Lite. The Hi-Lite was the fancy one. The Grotto was just ho-hum.
It was a small building―for a nightclub that is―built of wood, maybe sixty feet long, by thirty feet deep, and the most interesting thing of all, it had a privy. Yeah, an outside shit house, with a sagging door and wasps’ nests hanging from the ceiling. It was old, and that meant the building was also old.
Nobody was home. At least there were no cars in the parking lot, but that meant nothing. It was a nite club. People would come after dark, so I had some time on my hands. I just sat there on the seat of my bike thinking for a few minutes, and then I turned the machine out of the parking lot onto the highway. I drove east, just sort of poking along because I knew that soon I would come to a town. That’s the way it was in Ohio. I don’t think you could go anywhere in the state without running into a town within ten miles, and I was soon proved correct. Old Washington.
At first, it looked like just the one main street, but later I saw side streets and houses, and then the graveyard. The one that would have the monument commemorating the passing of General Hunt Morgan. I had to see it, so I turned off into the entrance of the cemetery, and there it was right up front. I pulled by motor scooter right up in front of it, and just sat there letting the whole story of this man run through my head. And then I had the thought he most likely didn’t think of the fact that history would remember him, or that a town where he was considered an enemy, would erect a monument to him. I was glad he wasn’t buried here. It would be some kind of hell to be buried in enemy territory.
Feeling kind of low, I rode back to Phil Richard’s place. I rode my bike around the back of the building and found a place in the grass where I could lie down. It only took two minutes before I was asleep.
I went in the back door. The back partition of a booth was right beside me as I walked in the door, and the first thing that met my eyes was the most beautiful set of blue eyes I had ever seen. They locked with mine, but although it seemed like a long time, I knew it was only for a second. There was another girl beside her and across the table were two more. But what really surprised me was the actual interior of the club itself.
It was a cave. A man-made cave, with artificially controlled lighting. The whole damn ceiling was covered with stalactites, dripping down like so many creepy icicles, and the booths were all like carved out of stone, and in the middle of the booth was a rock table coming out of the wall, and the seats were also rocks. Out in the middle of the floor were tables made of either rock, or tree stumps and the same with the seats, and there were people everywhere.
A three-piece combo was off to my left, so I turned to my right, and began walking toward the bar. There
