Four’s Company

By Stephen Smith

It was a cold and wet walk to the venue. Me and the boys, Danny, Dick, and Bobby marched single file, wearing heavy rain jackets and caps that covered our mugs, probably looking like some spy espionage gooks. We carried our outfits in doctor’s bags at our side and my knuckles were frozen around its rain-slicked handle. I couldn’t stop thinking about the water leaking into my bag and staining my hat or shrinking my suit.

“I got it cleaned just this morning, you think the audience wants to see us looking like a bunch of drowned rats?”

“Not a whole lot we can do about it, Frankie. We’re almost there. Keep walking.” Danny said in front of me.

I tried to hold the bag under awnings as we passed. Didn’t seem to help much as the overhangs rained sluices of water from their edges. Teddy, our old tenor, died earlier this week, he got hit by a brick. Danny sung with us a couple years prior and now was a last-minute replacement. The weather wasn’t helping our moods.

The fighting across the ocean might be done, but all this talk of bettering our nation through temperance kept everyone nervous. I thought at least the rain might keep the dry Protestants indoors.

A carriage passed us on the left. The horses’ manes stuck to them like glue and their hot breath blew out in puffs. The driver held a tight grip on the reigns while his passengers – some old codger in a dull suit and a fox half his age wearing a white dress – held news rags over their heads. The centre of the soaking pages sagged as water gathered in its bowl of bleeding ink. I saw Dick with his eye screwed on that broad, rolling his gaze along the supple curve of her spine before getting tangled in her drenched yellow beehive of hair. The Gent glared back at Dick. Dick turned his eyes straight and mimicked Bobby’s march as he led our band of minstrels.

Bobby’s walk always lurched and stuttered, with one butt cheek staying rock firm while the other loosened and jiggled like a jelly fresh from the mould. Bobby also stuttered whenever he was asked about it. Grenade, shrapnel, shredded in 21 places, he saved the gory details.

“Got an eye for another man’s dime, eh Dick?” I hollered.

“Shaddup.” He said as he tried to shrink into his jacket.

“Hey, we do good tonight and you won’t even need to steal her. She’ll come running with half the other ladies in Manhattan. Gold mine, my friend, gold mine.”

Puddles gathered in the street collecting light from street-level windows, turning the road into a gleaming lightshow.

“Gentlemen,” Bobby called. “I believe we have arrived on target.”

I followed his eyes to a board lit by a floodlight. The board tilted to one side, and a couple letters of its namesake were peeled away. It illustrated a cross-eyed cat wearing a suit and tie with a martini glass balanced between its claws. Beside it were the words, “The Cat’s Meow.”

***

The space behind the red velvet curtain was awfully dark. One of the boys swallowed hard and another shuffled their feet on the stage. We were all dressed to the nines, red and white pinstripe vests with white sleeves, blue suspenders clinging to our shoulders, and boaters fastened on our heads. The water that I’d been worried about left a cold stain between my shoulder blades. Nothing the audience would notice. Bobby twisted the mic stand in his hands and a voice leaked through the heavy curtains.

Ladies and gentlemen, for your entertainment, the Cat’s Meow is proud to present, Four’s Company.

The curtains rattled as stagehands cranked their strings in the wings. A spotlight cut through the dark and found me and the boys. Glowing embers of cigarettes speckled the audience, a swarm of fireflies gathered in the confines of the bar.

The moment the curtains finished their noisy withdrawal, Bobby’s low voice hummed into the microphone, melting the silence. Following his lead, we picked up the other chords and the words spilled from his throat like silver.

 

When I was young, I rode to the British Isles

On the eastern shore, I met a fine English dame

I told her I planned to stay awhile

And I asked for her name

Back home I had a Nancy of four

A family to dote and keep an eye on

Not long after I left, Nancy slammed the door

Boots on feet, helmet on hair, I was off to war

“Bobby?”

“Yeah, Dick?”

“What was the broad’s name?”

“Whose?”

“The broad, the one on the shore. What was her name?”

“Hmmm… Ingrid Kettleburner.”

“That’s my sister!”

***

Me, Danny, and Bobby sat in the alley behind the venue on some crates that had been stored inside, out of the rain. The rain stopped awhile back, but water still gurgled through the eaves troughs.  Me and Bobby lit up, puffing smoke like a couple of well-dressed chimneys. Danny just sat there all quiet, staring up at the starless sky. I offered him a drag, he said nah, I said it’d take the edge off, he said shove it. Touchy.

“Can you just imagine it, boys,” I said. “Tonight goes well enough, we can fly off into that night, go explore the world, let everyone know we’re alive.”

“If you want to explore the world, you should’ve taken a boat five-years ago,” Bobby said, holding his cigarette between smiling teeth. “We had welcoming occupancy.”

“I want to do it in five-star hotels and stages in front of an adoring audience. Not crawling through ditches while dodging bullets and cannon fire.”

“Gives you a good appreciation for the little things.”

“But I need an appreciation for the big.”

Danny was still sitting on the crate, seeming to ignore every word.

“Danny, why you such a piker about smokes? Doc says they’re good for you, gets your libido in swing, or something like that.”

He turned to me, raising an eyebrow. “Is that really what they say? Sounds unpleasant.”

“Well, it’s what I hear, I mean I don’t know, why don’t you go ask a doctor?”

He did that short and snotty laugh that comes out of the nose, before turning back to the street, maybe watching the occasional buggy totter by like drunkards on their way home.

“I feel like there might be a lot of things doctors don’t know yet and possibly some that they never will,” he said.

Me and Bobby glanced at each other, both sucking smoke. We exploded into laughing fits and slapped our knees while Danny’s shoulders shrugged higher and higher.

“Ah that’s a good one, Little D,” Bobby said. “But as long as they know how to stitch up a hole in a man’s heart, that’s good enough for me.”

“I don’t think they can actually do that.”

“Tell that to a buddy of mine. His lady fired a bullet straight through his heart when she left him, but he’s still walking and talking to this day. The doctor patched him up real good.”

As Bobby ripped into more laughs, and Danny kept stewing on his crate, something felt off.

“Hey fellas,” I said. “Where’s Dick?”

***

The audience gave a light applause and chuckle after we revealed Bobby’s intimacies with Dick’s sister. Almost in tandem, the dying embers of cigarette butts were snuffed out, and a whole new generation was lit and burning.

My eyes adjusted to being pierced by the spotlight, and I could make out the details and features of the folks sitting in the dim bar. In the back, hicks in overalls and yellowed white shirts leaned against the bar, strangely there were no drinks in front of them. The crowd was amalgamous, gents dressed in suits or vests, ties loosened from the workday and chewing on tobacco, flappers ready to jump from their chairs, fascinators poking from their heads like a bad cowlick. Amongst the sparkle and shine, there was the woman in white, hair like a collection of honeycombs, and the old man next to her, shooting daggers into Dick.

Dick grabbed the microphone, and his forehead was the surface of a glass of lemonade on a hot day. He coughed into the mic, and the quiet din of the crowd peeled away as all eyes turned back to the stage.

A light hum came from his throat that cracked and wavered, but as he found his tone his voice warmed with fire as the silken words slinked from his lips. Me and the boys snapped along, carrying his rhythm and providing our own glowing cords.

Those shady rat cats down in the alley

Hear them slinking n’ crawling on their belly

Sniffing for a cheese to nibble

King’s gonna grind em all down to kibble

I’ve seen the brightest city light

Felt the road groove and crack between my toes

Everything I know disappeared in white

There was nothing left but the blows

“I’ll tell you something about rats, there was one snooping around in the fridge one night.”

“Is that right, Frank?”

“Yeah, the darn thing was a monster, at least the size of me, or better yet Bobby over there.”

“Well, what did you do?”

“I grabbed my browns bat, and clubbed em over the head.”

“That’s real brave Frank. Didja kill it?”

“Nah, it just screamed and scampered away into Dick’s room. Say fellas, do rats usually have curlers in their hair?”

***

“Last I saw him he said he was going to check out the little boy’s room.” Bobby said.

Me and Bobby flicked our cigarettes into a puddle already brimming with drowned butts. Danny kicked his crate to the side and joined us as we wandered back inside. The back halls of the venue were cramped and an aura of smoke lingered around dangling, naked lightbulbs. We passed a door leading into the kitchen where a slick coat of grease covered everything. Between the guys and dolls rooms, a couple was tangled up in each other’s arms sucking face. A fascinator stuck out of the mess and I nudged them aside to knock on the boy’s room.

“Dick, you in there, buddy?”

The man’s hand slammed onto the wall next to my face and the girl giggled as they kept on twisting.

I knocked again. “Dick?”

Bobby and Danny were standing a ways away from myself and the lovely couple.

“Have you tried the knob?” Danny suggested.

I turned the brass handle as the gentleman started panting. The door opened to a dark stall and I flipped on the lights. There was Dick. Dick sitting pantsless on the john. Dick with his pants shackled to his ankles. Dick’s head lolling back. A white powder dusting the sink. Dick’s hat tilting to the side of his head. Dick’s sleeves rolled up, revealing little red pocks on the crease of his arm. A red mark burned into Dick’s face moments after I slapped him.

“What’re you doing? Get up, get up, get out!”

My slap woke him up, got him to focus his dull, glazed eyes on me. A string of drool crawled from his lips and I slapped him across the other cheek.

“Is this what we worked for? You to come in and screw everything up?”

Apparently the couple outside had halted their passionate kissing and were staring into the washroom along with Danny and Bobby. I turned to them and they turned their eyes elsewhere.

“Don’t just stand there, get some water, get some ice, get coffee, I don’t care, we’re on in ten and we gotta wake him up!”

As though I was his momma or something, I pulled up his pants, adjusted his hat, and yanked him off the toilet. He balanced on my shoulder, cheeks red with embarrassment or hooch as far anybody was gonna know. He could barely balance and I was having troubles pulling the slob along. Fortunately our stage room wasn’t too far away. Unfortunately it wasn’t empty when I dragged Dick in there.

A couple of suits were digging around in our bags, pulling out our street clothes and leaving em in a wrinkled pile on the floor. One was slipping his hands in and out of our coats and I caught his eye first.

He grinned at me with a broken smile and hooded eyes. His cheeks were swollen from a deficiency of manners and the stinking breath that smelled of corpse that he’d been holding in.

“Evening fella,” he said and I caught a metallic flash on his hip. Christ I thought, Who are these pigs?

His bag-rummaging friend took notice and tossed the limp bag in his hands onto the crumpled pile of clothes. He was the mirror reflection of breath boy, if he lost about 60 pounds.

I asked the obvious, “Who are you?”

They smiled at each other before turning their snarl of teeth back to me and Dick.

“We’re friends of your buddy, Dick there,” the skinny one said, extending a boney finger. “Dick owes our boss a small sum of cash for enabling his habits.”

Dick groaned on my shoulder and I felt him get a little heavier.

“Say,” said the fat one. “How much you fellas making from this gig tonight?”

Sweat creases my palm. “That isn’t any of you chumps’ concern.”

They both laugh, not the reaction I was hoping for and the fat one gets real close. “What’s your name, fella?” He said as he placed a meaty hand on my shoulder.

I squirmed away, “I’m Frank and you ain’t staying in our dressing room. You get back in the audience, we’ll deal with you after the show.”

He hit me in the stomach. Felt like he displaced my innards and I heard my breath rush out of my lips. I dropped to the floor, Dick followed shortly.

“Now, maybe we can talk business?”

***

Dick, cheeks rosied, sleeves still rolled up. Bobby and Danny, averting their eyes from him. The wonder twins sat in the audience, flanking the man and the lady Dick’d been ogling before. Of course. Me, last I checked I was all pale and ghostly. I pulled the mic towards me with more than a tremble in my fingers. I was supposed to banter, get the audience all warm and what have you, but I couldn’t find any heat, didn’t know where my fire burned off to. Alls I could do was hum up those fateful cords, the ones I’d carried with me all my life. The boys — a choir of the damned — tuned in, droning in their melancholy.

Oh, showbiz, there’s nothing like showbiz

Get my share of green rooms and lights in lime

Never had a need for any Mizz

When I only need the fellas for a real good time

I’m standing on a hill in the highest town

No matter where I look, everyone is down.

I wanna pull some air n’ let em know I ain’t a wiz

But there’s nothing like showbiz

“What’s so great about showbiz, Frank?”

“Well the best part is how you get to expose yourself to so many fine folks.”

“I guess Bobby got a headstart in that then.”

“How do you figure?”

“He’s already exposed so much of himself to Dick’s sister.”

Maybe it was the timbre of our voices, but the crowd knew something was off. We were nothing more than a gang of kids performing at their school talent show and we just told a stinker that killed the audience in the worst way. Flappers weren’t looking to jump from their seats anymore, and the men were glancing at their watches. The hicks standing at the bar, they were glowering. Not just at us, but at everyone. And not a beer within their fingertips. And then it was Danny’s turn on the mic.

***

They sat me and Dick down in front of those mirrors with the light bulb borders. Dick looked real messed up and the thugs gave me shiner before they sat us down. Bobby and Danny didn’t show. They stood behind us, grubby hands creasing our shirts.

“Look fellas, when you warble your last note up there, this show’s gonna be a blowout.”

***

Danny looked back to us with apprehension drilled into his eyes. I whirled my hand, telling him to get on with it.

 

My time came and passed in the winter

No home no folks, only a splinter

But things couldn’t be so bad

A company of four showed me it ain’t so sad

Summer’s flowers bloomed

And my autumn replacement was doomed

Here we are now for your entertainment

And hopeful fame for our obtainment

 

No applause, the audience just looked back and forth at each other and us. A couple folks shifted their legs back all uneasy. The fat and skinny goons were reaching into their coats, and me and the boys were singing our prayers, when a waiter walked over to the lady in white. He balanced a drink on his tray and the wonder twins and the old codger eyeballed him as he presented the glass to her.

In the silence, the waiter’s voice was as clear as the glass. “From an admirer, mademoiselle.”

Blushing, the woman in white took the glass and sipped, Dicks cheeks got a little rosier as well. The old man and his goons weren’t as impressed, and the trio stood up all together, whipping pieces from their coats.

“All right, who’s the wise guy,” the old man growled, sweeping the barrel around the bar. For a moment, no one spoke, but mass panic shattered the quiet. The old guy’s eyes darted around with anger and twig and bulge whipped glinting pistols from their jackets and took aim at the stage. Me and the boys ducked our hands over our heads and tried to scramble away from the flashing muzzles. Some tipsy patrons started pummelling whoever they could, and the sound of bone beating against flesh was punctuated by smoky pops from the guns.

Bullets whizzed over our heads, burying themselves in the velvet curtain behind us with dull thuds. Bobby led our troop away from the fire and the melee. Danny was right behind him and as a final shot rang out, he was blown off his feet and fell into the dark curtain.

Me and Dick grabbed his arms as we passed and dragged him along. The two-man firing squad must have been consumed by the brawl, because no more shots peeled out. Bobby burst through the backdoor and me and Dick followed with Danny in tow. We leaned him up against an alley wall. Sounds of shattering glass, shouts, and splintered wood issued from the venue.

Against the wall, Danny was pale and a dark red splotch was blooming on his chest, staining his vest. His voice came out in a shaky wheeze.

“I never should’ve come back,” he said between laboured breaths. “Hey guys, someone want to give me a light?”

I tried to pull him to his feet, but he just stayed slumped against the wall and his skin was awfully cold.

“That stuff is bad for you. C’mon Danny, get up.”

“I think this is a bit more pressing,” he said, motioning towards his chest.

Bobby kneeled next to him and pressed his head into Danny’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Little D,” he wept. “It should’ve been me.”

With great effort, Danny reached up and patted Bobby’s head. “It’s okay, big fella. Stuff like this happens all the time.”

Dick kneeled next to him as well and offered a cigarette to his lips. He took it and Dick flicked his lighter open and set fire to the cigarette’s end.

“You’re the best damn tenor we ever had,” Dick said.

Danny took a long drag and puffed smoked between his lips.

“I know.”

Without another word, the cigarette fell from his mouth, his arms went limp, and the fire faded from eyes.

Bobby wept harder into Danny’s shoulder. Dick and I stared at each other with our blackened eyes.

“I’m sorry,”

I put my arm over his shoulder and gave him a squeeze.

“We all are.”

***

Wind carried the stringent scent of salt water into my face. Dick stood beside me at the railing, watching the water shimmer in the noonday sun. We were in matching blue and white uniforms, crossing the pond with the American navy. Bobby didn’t come with us, said he couldn’t do it again. He moved out west, took up a life of agriculture. Me and Dick wanted him to come along, but he had done his service, it was our turn to go see the world.