Never, though, did I wonder on the ring’s origin. Any remembrance ofTadesville and the lady in the woods had long fallen out of my mind, gone like so many of my other gin-triggered hallucinations.
Until St. Louis, June of 1964.
The mandolin player and I were in a hotel room playing stud poker with some of the locals. I’d dropped my last twenty, my flask was empty, and I was getting up to leave when one of them, a short guy in a black suit who’d been winning all night, asked me if he could see the ring. I slipped it off and handed it across the table.
Quicker than a pelican diving for lunch, he snagged a jeweler’s loupe out of his vest, popped it into his eye, and leaned back under the floor lamp. “I’ll give you a thousand bucks for it,” he said after no time at all.
I’m sure my mouth fell open. In my entire misapplied life, I’d never once been packing a thousand dollars.
“A thousand bucks. Right here, right now.” The little man leaned forward. His eyes were tiny and wet, like a ferret’s.
The table went quiet.
“Family heirloom,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice my hand shaking as I reached across the table for the ring, slow, giving him time to up the offer.
“Fifteen hundred.” He closed his fist around the ring.
“Not for five thousand,” I heard my voice say.
No one breathed. The mandolin player was looking at me like I’d just landed from Mars. Night after night, he’d seen me drop the ring like junk into my banjo case, giving it no thought. That night, I’d just forgotten to take it off, was all. Now he was watching me kiss off fifteen hundred solid for it.
The little man in the black suit hesitated for a long minute, then opened his hand and pushed the ring toward the center of the table. “Not worth five grand,” he said.
The wind went out of my chest. My brain screamed to say I’d been kidding; fifteen hundred was fine. But my gut said pocket the ring, get up easy, and vamoose.
And that is what I did, not at all sure what had just happened.
That one time, my gut was right. The next day, I got thirty-two hundred for the ring from a pawnbroker. I’d started downtown first, in a fancy jewelry store just off the main drag.
“Where’d you get this?” the jeweler asked, setting the ring down on the black felt counter pad.
“Family heirloom.” It still sounded reasonable to me.
“It’s four carat, clear quality, well-faceted,” he said. He eyed my greasy suit. “If you can prove ownership, I’ll give you six thousand for it.”
“For this ring?”
“For the diamond. The setting is junk.”
But he wouldn’t spring a nickel without papers, nor would the next half-dozen jewelry stores I tried. So I went to the hockshops, and got the thirty-two hundred. Not as much as the fancy stores, but it was better than a poke in the eye.
I bought a used Pontiac ragtop, white on black with red vinyl indoors, spinner hubcaps on the wheels. With the money left over, I embarked on a grand spree of black label whiskey and high stakes cards. The band, understandable, moved on, but that was no concern. I was living the high life.
I blew through the money in days. Most of it got left on card tables, and the last three hundred was beat out of me by two guys in knit hats outside a bar. I’d been shooting off my mouth, buying drinks for the room.
Stranded, broke, without prospect of a banjo job anytime soon, I started sleeping in my car.
And I started browsing.
At first I aimed for department store jewelry counters when they was at their busiest, taking care to nip only at vodka beforehand so the only thing on my breath would be the smell of Lifesaver peppermint. I acted the confused husband, torn between so many choices spread before me on the counter, figuring the clerks, mostly teenage girls, would be too eye-rollingly bored to notice a bauble missing when I told them I needed to think and turned to leave.
But whiskey had prickled my nerves. I started sprouting tremors, and that got me beady eyes from the counter clerks. And twice, serious-looking gentlemen followed me out. Both times I slipped them, but high-tone stores had lost their potential.
I aimed lower, started browsing hardware stores and bead shops. That was slow work, usually needing a whole day to boost enough to trade for a lone pint, and green goods at that.
The last day of July was inhospitable, sixty degrees and pouring gray rain. I was huddling under the eave of the train station to catch my breath after tapping the costume jewelry store across the street for a pocketful of junk. The owner had been on to me right off, but a half-dozen teenie girls had followed me in. Chattering and giggling, they swarmed the counters like bees, giving me enough cover for a quick sweep and a fast vamoose. Still, I’d been stupid, risking a grab when I knew the owner was watching, and the episode had left me shaking.
That year, black raincoats was the fashion. And in the downpour, the folks scuttling into the station looked like morticians racing to a train wreck. Except for one woman, hugging at the collar of a white coat that stood out bright against all the black ones. Dark hair, lush red mouth, she set my spine to tingling like I was leaning against needles. Brushing past, she whispered, “Greedy now, banjer man?”
It wasn’t just her mouth talking. It was the red of her lips and the white of her coat. It had been a long time since I’d remembered anything for sure, but that rainy afternoon, one memory came back sharp as the Devil’s own pitchfork.
Tadesville, 1954.
“I believe I almost am,” I thought to yell at the back of her, as she disappeared into the terminal. “I believe I almost am,” I said again, this time to myself.
People was looking at me. I hustled down to the viaduct to get away from the crowd and think.
A hallucination, I told myself. From the mash.
A vision, my other self said.
It’s been ten years, my first self said.
She could have been only twenty then, or thirty, my other self said. She’s still there, living in the woods, in a cottage full of diamonds.
That ring was the only one, my first self said. For sure, she didn’t know it was valuable, else she wouldn’t have tossed it to me for playing a few tunes. It was a fluke.
I shut down the voices. When you’re dead broke, stealing for half-pints to quell tremors, flukes take on new importance. They become likelihoods.
I came out of the viaduct into bright sunshine. The darkness and the rain were gone. I took that to be an omen, a portent, of a better day coming.
Tadesville.
THE drugstore map for Michigan showed no Tadesville, not west of Detroit or anywhere else. That made sense, being as there’d been no people there, save the woman. I pocketed the map for future use and went outside to ponder.
Problem was, I’d never known the route, because I’d been cradling my head in the backseat, caring only about the bumps Arnie wasn’t dodging.
Arnie. Arnie Norris, of Randall’s Corners, Illinois.
Approached like he was being called just for old times’ sake, he might remember the route to Tadesville.
There was a phone booth at the corner. The operator said there was a Norris listed in Randall’s Corners. I pulled my hand off the phone, having a better thought. Nudging his mind in person might be better, especially if he’d enjoyed enough good fortune since our jug band days to spot his old banjo man a twenty-money I could use for traveling. I went back to the drugstore to consult an Illinois map. Randall’s Corners was in the middle of the state, right on the way to Michigan. I made a show of putting the map back and left.
I hocked what I could, excepting the banjo, sold the spinner hubcaps at a junkyard, and headed north with the top down, serenading the telephone poles, cars, and trucks with songs of whiskey, rivers, and diving ducks.