Ruby Dallas

By Jim Harris

Growing up on the wrong side of the river in raw and raucous Dallas at mid-century, a young man finds himself again and again in places he should not be, where decisions have to be made about mending errant ways or breaking the law, about continuing in school or going to work, and about listening to the voice of God or the songs of Nina Simone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098301415

Book preview

21

CHAPTER 1

SO THERE I WAS IN A PLACE I SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN.

I’m cleaning the griddle. It’s 9:30 p.m., a school night, and this guy in a suit walks in, strolls to a rear table, and starts studying the menu like it’s 6 or 7 p.m.

I’m the one who should be studying already, although I didn’t do a lot of that and no one, especially my teachers, ever thought of me as scholarly.

I keep my head down under the exhaust hood, pushing a new pumice stone, grease flowing over the back lip of the griddle and into a metal trash can that I will empty into an even larger can in the alley before I go home.

I take a quick glance at the short and beefy customer at the table. He’s dressed with a tie and looks like he could be going to church. There weren’t many folks dining in suits in the cafe. He’s looking at the back of the menu. That’s where the steaks are listed. Surely he’s not going to order a steak this late.

The cowboy sitting at the counter, who has been drinking coffee for at least two hours, finally leaves. I tell him thanks and come back.

Other than Mickie Joe, the kid younger than me who washes dishes behind the swinging metal door just to my right, I’m the only one working tonight. I’m looking at the griddle. I’m going to have to acknowledge this clod pretty soon, but he is still studying the menu as if he were trying to decipher a hidden code in some literary treasure.

I set aside the scrubber and grab a fresh cleaning towel. I wipe my hands with it while I’m walking from behind the four red booths in a row and attached to each other parallel to my workspace in front of the griddle. I pass the lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickle containers, and the charcoal grill, the red bricks disappearing into the ceiling, the wrought iron rods gray and clean. On them probably two hundred burgers have been cooked in the past 24 hours.

I pick up one of the remaining water glasses, the ice long melted, at the end of the counter.

When I reach the man at the table, he doesn’t look up. He’s still studying the menu.

How’s it going? I ask him, although I am really saying to myself, What the hell is with this guy?

I set the water in front of him.

He has taken off his hat, which looks like it belongs in a James Cagney gangster movie. I’m thinking that maybe he’s not from the city, but he sure doesn’t look like a tourist to anywhere. The head is mostly bald, but he has long mops on the side and the top back.

How are the ribeyes tonight? he asks when he finally looks up. He’s now looking me right in the eyes as if he is asking a very important question in a court of law or something.

They’re good, I said. Delivered just before six tonight. Been on ice since then.

How about I see them? he says.

Sure, I say and start walking toward the rear door swinging now from Mickie having brought clean glasses to stack beneath the counter. Mickie’s a good kid, always quiet and never a complaint and works like a dog.

I bring two steaks on butcher paper back to the customer, the red and white marbleizing in the meat looks like it is ready to be photographed for a grocery store ad.

He studies both pieces as if he is going to be making an important decision in his life.

They both look good. He points a stubby finger at one of them. I’ll take that one, he says. Medium rare and a cup of coffee, black. Forget the salad.

So I put the steak on the grill I had already brushed clean for the night, pour him a cup of coffee, and get back to scrubbing the griddle.

Meanwhile the customer has pulled out the afternoon Dallas Times Herald, spreading it on his table so he can read it like he is examining a map or an architectural rending. This guy is unique. He’s holding the edge of the paper with his left hand, the coffee cup clutched with his right.

Delivering the Herald was the first job I ever had, if you don’t count the time in the fifth grade when I sent off to White Plains New York for a box of personally signed Christmas cards that I peddled to the members of my dad’s church.

So I still had feelings, some negative, but mostly positive, about the Herald and the customers on my delivery route, a few of them real happy to beat a kid out of the $1,75 a month they paid to have the Herald on their porch in the afternoon each day and early in the morning before church on Sunday.

My second real job was as a bag boy, then checker at the Wyatt’s Supermarket in Deerpath Shopping Center about three blocks to the east of my house on Overton Road at Sunnyvale Street.

Yes, I had some negative feelings about that job too, my grocery store career careening into a ditch after two years when I had a fight with Bud Harkness in the alley behind the store late one night after closing.

I think Bud and I were both scared shitless about fighting each other, but I happened to get in the first lick, my homerun swinging right fist catching him beside his head and sending him into a bundle of cardboard boxes and sprawling onto the pavement where all sorts of grocery goods had rotted, permanently befouling the air behind Wyatt’s.

That was the beginning and the end of that fight, and of my employment there.

Bud was a nephew of the manager, Mr. Lester. He was a different kind of adult. Once when I asked him to be off one Saturday night to go on a date, which was really a lie, he said it wouldn’t be too long until I would learn that when a pretty girl poops, it smells just like everyone else’s stuff. I never did figure our what was wrong with him.

So the cooking job at the cafe was a mighty big step up from the other careers I had started as a schoolboy.

There were all sorts of perks that went with the job. The main ones had to do with the girls who frequented the joint, and then there was the opportunity to associate with a variety of adult human types who tended to treat me like I was an adult since I had the job I did.

I didn’t know it when I took the job, of course, being fourteen years old, but a lot of people thought of short order cooks as heavy drinkers and transient.

Well, as far as the adult action that came with the job, I always looked a little older than I really was.

Thus, it wasn’t surprising when the late, lone diner started talking to me, as I turned his ribeye, about some of the headlines and stories in the Herald he was reading.

For one thing, he mentioned a story about a famous Dallas stripper named Candy Barr who had been arrested by city policemen in a drug raid. I don’t think I was especially knowledgeable about strippers at my age, but this woman was on my radar because there was a man in my father’s church who dated Candy. Well, at least that was the story on Chris Christensen. Maybe it was a story that he made up. Who knows.

Chris was at least ten or fifteen years older than I was, and one year after I quit working in the cafe, he was sent to prison in Huntsville. This was at a time when there was turmoil in the city. He served only a few months or so, which was odd in itself, but it was just a couple of months after he got out that he was found dead in the Trinity River bottoms with several bullet holes in his chest.

So when my steak customer mentioned a Candy Barr story in the afternoon Herald, he got my attention, and I started wondering if he would leave the paper on the table when he finished dinner and took off to wherever he might have been going at 10 p.m. on a Thursday evening.

At any rate, it did not take long for me to cook the ribeye and pull a very soft baked potato from the oven, one of a stack of drawers next too the swinging metal door to the kitchen. I opened a second drawer for rolls, but they were all so hard, I decided to see if the customer might forget about a roll.

In fact, he did not ask for anything else except a refill on the coffee, and I went back to readying the café for closing.

It didn’t take very long for the customer to finish off his steak and bake potato. He’d stopped reading his paper. I wasn’t particularly focused on watching him eat, but he did eat like a starved dog over a recently opened can of Wyatt’s brand puppy chow.

I did not even have to ask him if he needed another cup of coffee.

Before I knew it, he was standing at the counter telling me that I had cooked a hell of a steak. Mickie had already put the closed sign in the front window, and when the customer looked at the clock over the cash register and saw it was ten minutes past ten, he told me that not only was the steak great, but he also said he appreciated my work.

I thought this was going to be a prelude to a big tip for me. However, what he did was stick out his hand to shake mine. I was thinking, what the shit.

My name is Jack Ruby, he said.

I shook his hand.

I’m Steve.

I own the Carousel Club, down on Commerce Street, he said.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about the Carousel Club or any other clubs downtown. The cafe was out on the south side of town, down Marsailas Street from my high school.

I must have had a puzzled look on my face when I said, That right?

Mr. Ruby fished a card from his billfold, handed it to me, and said, Come on down anytime. It will be on me. Bring some friends if you want.

I told him thanks.

And he told me thanks for a good steak, good job.

He walked out of the front door, Mickie Joe unlocking the door for him and holding it open.

I looked at the card and thought about having to get up early in the morning for school.

CHAPTER 2

SO THERE I WAS AGAIN IN A PLACE I SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN.

It’s 1 a.m. and I’m standing in my shorts in the hall outside my bedroom wondering what’s going on with my mother and father.

Both of them are dressed and moving toward the front door.

Layla Edwards has been killed, my mother says. We’re going to be with Elmer and Ellie. Go back to bed.

She says this like an Army sergeant, nothing sweet in her voice at all.

I could see in her eyes and hear in her voice that my mother had been crying, her right hand wiping her cheeks. She never displayed emotions in public or hardly with anyone.

My dad is standing at the front door, his hand on the handle. He’s staring at the door only a foot from his face like he is focusing on something troubling or on someone very far away, and he’s not saying a word. He doesn’t even look my way as he is waiting for my mother to step through the door ahead of him.

Before I can ask them anything, they are out on the front porch, and I wondering if I am having a bad dream.

Stunned and speechless, I crawl back in bed, and start thinking about the last time I saw Layla. A couple of years ago, maybe, I was at the Edwards home with my parents who played forty-two with Mr. and Mrs. Edwards at least once a month. The four of them are best friends. Maybe that was the last time Layla and I were together.

She was three or four years older than I was, or at least she seemed to be that much older. She always treated me as if I were a child. My parents had been friends with the Edwards for as long as I could remember.

Edwards, like my father, was a Baptist preacher. In fact, the family lived in a parsonage next to the Grand Prairie church where he was the pastor. I’ll bet the west wall of the church was no more than three feet from the east wall of the home.

I always thought of it as an odd place to live. You could look out the bathroom window and see into the sanctuary of the church.