LEONARD, Elmore - Tishomingo Blues

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ELMORE
LEONARD
Tishomingo
Blues
For Christine
_____________________
I'm going to Tishomingo to have my
ham bone boiled,
I'm going to Tishomingo to have my
ham bone boiled,
These Atlanta women done let my
ham bone spoil.
Performed by Peg Leg Howell
Atlanta, Georgia, November 8, 1926
______________________
1
______________________________________________________________________________
DENNIS LENAHAN THE HIGH DIVER would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece
on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-
foot steel ladder. The tank itself was twenty-two feet across and the water in it never more than
nine feet deep. Dennis said from that high up you want to come out of your dive to enter the
water feet first, your hands at the last moment protecting your privates and your butt squeezed
tight, or it was like getting a 40,000-gallon enema.
When he told this to girls who hung out at amusement parks they'd put a cute look of pain on
their faces and say what he did was awesome. But wasn't it like really dangerous? Dennis would
tell them you could break your back if you didn't kill yourself, but the rush you got was worth it.
These summertime girls loved daredevils, even ones twice their age. It kept Dennis going off that
perch eighty feet in the air and going out for beers after to tell stories. Once in a while he'd fall in
love for the summer, or part of it.
The past few years Dennis had been putting on one-man shows during the week. Then for
Saturday and Sunday he'd bring in a couple of young divers when he could to join him in a
repertoire of comedy dives they called "dillies," the three of them acting nutty as they went off
from different levels and hit the water at the same time. It meant dirt-cheap motel rooms during
the summer and sleeping in the setup truck between gigs, a way of life Dennis the high diver had
to accept if he wanted to perform. What he couldn't take anymore, finally, were the amusement
parks, the tiresome pizzazz, the smells, the colored lights, rides going round and round to that
calliope sound forever.
What he did as a plan of escape was call resort hotels in South Florida and tell whoever would
listen he was Dennis Lenahan, a professional exhibition diver who had performed in major
diving shows all over the world, including the cliffs of Acapulco. What he proposed, he'd dive
into their swimming pool from the top of the hotel or off his eighty-foot ladder twice a day as a
special attraction.
They'd say, "Leave your number," and never call back
They'd say, "Yeah, right," and hang up.
One of them told him, "The pool's only five feet deep,” and Dennis said no problem, he knew a
guy in New Orleans went off from twenty-nine feet into twelve inches of water. A pool five feet
deep? Dennis was sure they could work something out.
No they couldn't.
He happened to see a brochure that advertised Tunica, Mississippi, as "The Casino Capital of
the South" with photos of the hotels located along the Mississippi River. One of them caught his
eye, the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino. Dennis recognized the manager's name, Billy Darwin, and
made the call.
"Mr. Darwin, this is Dennis Lenahan, world champion high diver. We met one time in Atlantic
City."
Billy Darwin said, "We did?"
"I remember I thought at first you were Robert Redford, only you're a lot younger. You were
running the sports book at Spade's." Dennis waited. When there was no response he said, "How
high is your hotel?"
This Billy Darwin was quick. He said, "You want to dive off the roof?"
"Into your swimming pool," Dennis said, "twice a day as a special attraction."
"We go up seven floors."
"That sounds just right."
"But the pool's about a hundred feet away. You'd have to take a good running start, wouldn't
you?"
Right there, Dennis knew he could work something out with this Billy Darwin. "I could set my
tank right next to the hotel, dive from the roof into nine feet of water. Do a matinee performance
and one at night with spotlights on me, seven days a week."
"How much you want?"
Dennis spoke right up, talking to a man who dealt with high rollers. "Five hundred a day."
"How long a run?"
"The rest of the season. Say eight weeks." "You're worth twenty-eight grand?" That quick, off
the top of his head.
"I have setup expenses-hire a rigger and put in a system to filter the water in the tank. It stands
more than a few days it gets scummy."
"You don't perform all year?"
"If I can work six months I'm doing good."
"Then what?"
"I've been a ski instructor, a bartender ..."
Billy Darwin's quiet voice asked him, "Where are you?"
In a room at the Fiesta Motel, Panama City, Florida, Dennis told him, performing every
evening at the Miracle Strip amusement park. "My contract'll keep me here till the end of the
month," Dennis said, "but that's it. I've reached the point ... Actually I don't think I can do
another amusement park all summer."
There was a silence on the line, Billy Darwin maybe wondering why but not curious enough to
ask.
"Mr. Darwin?"
He said, "Can you get away before you finish up there?"
"If I can get back the same night, before show time."
Something the man would like to hear.
He said, "Fly into Memphis. Take 61 due south and in thirty minutes you're in Tunica,
Mississippi."
Dennis said, "Is it a nice town?"
But got no answer. The man had hung up.
This trip Dennis never did see Tunica or even the Mighty Mississippi. He came south through
farmland until he began to spot hotels in the distance rising out of fields of soybeans. He came to
signs at crossroads pointing off to Harrah's, Bally's, Sam's Town, the Isle of Capri. A serious-
looking Indian on a billboard aimed his bow and arrow down a road that took Dennis to the
Tishomingo Lodge & Casino. It featured a tepeelike structure rising a good three stories above
the entrance, a precast concrete tepee with neon tubes running up and around it. Or was it a
wigwam?
The place wasn't open yet. They were still landscaping the grounds, putting in shrubs, laying
sod on both sides of a stream that ran to a mound of boulders and became a waterfall. Dennis
parked his rental among trucks loaded with plants and young trees, got out and spotted Billy
Darwin right away talking to a contractor, Dennis recognizing the Robert Redford hair that made
him appear younger than his forty or so years, about the same age as Dennis, the same slight
build, tan and trim, a couple of cool guys in their sunglasses. One difference, Dennis' hair was
dark and longer, almost to his shoulders. Darwin was turning, starting this way, as Dennis said,
"Mr. Darwin?"
He paused, but only a moment. "You're the diver."
"Yes sir, Dennis Lenahan."
Darwin said, "You've been at it a while, uh?" with sort of a smile, Dennis wasn't sure.
"I turned pro in '79," Dennis said. "The next year I won the world cliff-diving championship in
Switzerland, a place called Ticino? You go off from eighty-five feet into the river."
The man didn't seem impressed or in any hurry.
"You ever get hurt?"
"You can crash, enter the water just a speck out of line it can hurt like hell. The audience thinks
it was a rip, perfect."
"You carry insurance?"
"I sign a release. I break my neck it won't cost you anything. I've only been injured, I mean
where I needed attention, was my first time at Acapulco. I broke my nose."
Dennis felt Billy Darwin studying him, showing just a faint smile as he said, "You like to live
on the edge, huh?"
"Some of the teams I've performed with I was always the edge guy," Dennis said, feeling he
could talk to this man. "I've got eighty dives from different heights and most of 'em I can do
hungover, like a flying reverse somersault, your standard high dive. But I don't know what I'm
gonna do till I'm up there. It depends on the crowd, how the show's going. But I'll tell you
something, you stand on the perch looking down eighty feet to the water, you know you're alive."
Darwin was nodding. "The girls watching you..."
"That's part of it. The crowd holding its breath."
"Come out of the water with your hair slicked back. .."
Where was he going with this?
"I can see why you do it. But for how long? What will you do after to show off?"
Billy Darwin the man here, confident, saying anything he wanted.
Dennis said, "You think I worry about it?"
"You're not desperate," Darwin said, "but I'll bet you're looking around." He turned, saying,
"Come on."
Dennis followed him into the hotel, through the lobby where they were laying carpet and into
the casino, gaming tables on one side of the main aisle, a couple of thousand slot machines on
the other, like every casino Dennis had ever been in. He said to Darwin's back, "I went to dealers'
school in Atlantic City. Got a job at Spade's the same time you were there." It didn't draw a
comment. "I didn't like how I had to dress," Dennis said, "so I quit."
Darwin paused, turning enough to look at Dennis.
"But you like to gamble."
"Now and then."
"There's a fella works here as a host," Darwin said. "Charlie Hoke. Chickasaw Charlie, he
claims to be part Indian. Spent eighteen years in organized baseball, pitched for Detroit in the '84
World Series. I told Charlie about your call and he said, `Sign him up.' He said a man that likes
high risk is gonna leave his paycheck on one of these tables."
Dennis said, "Chickasaw Charlie, huh? Never heard of him."
They came out back of the hotel to the patio bar and swimming pool landscaped to look like a
pond sitting there among big leafy plants and boulders.
Dennis looked up at the hotel, balconies on every floor to the top, saying as his gaze came to the
sky, "You're right, I'd have to get shot out of a cannon." He looked at the pool again. "It's not
deep enough anyway. What I can do, place the tank fairly close to the building and dive straight
down."
Now Darwin looked up at the hotel. "You'd want to miss the balconies."
"I'd go off there at the corner."
"What's the tank look like?"
"The Fourth of July, it's white with red and blue stars. What I could do," Dennis said, deadpan,
"paint the tank to look like birchbark and hang animal skins around the rim."
Darwin gave him a look and swung his gaze out across the sweep of lawn that reached to the
Mississippi, the river out of sight beyond a low rise. He didn't say anything staring out there, so
Dennis prompted him.
"That's the spot for an eighty-foot ladder. Plenty of room for the guy wires. You rig four to
every ten foot section of ladder. It still sways a little when you're up there." He waited for
Darwin.
"Thirty-two wires?"
"Nobody's looking at the wires. They're a twelve-gauge soft wire. You barely notice them."
"You bring everything yourself, the tank, the ladder?"
"Everything. I got a Chevy truck with a big van body and a hundred and twenty thousand miles
on it."
"How long's it take you to set up?"
"Three days or so, if I can find a rigger."
Dennis told him how you put the tank together first, steel rods connecting the sections, Dennis
said the way you hang a door. Once the tank's put together you wrap a cable around it, tight.
Next you spread ten or so bales of hay on the ground inside for a soft floor, then tape your plastic
liner to the walls and add water. The water holds the liner in place. Dennis said he'd pump it out
of the river. "May as well, it's right there."
Darwin asked him where he was from.
"New Orleans, originally. Some family and my exwife's still there. Virginia. We got married
too young and I was away most of the time." It was how he always told it. "We're still friends
though ... sorta."
Dennis waited. No more questions, so he continued explaining how you set up. How you put
up your ladder, fit the ten-foot sections onto one another and tie each one off with the guy wires
as you go up. You use what's called a gin pole you hook on, it's rigged with a pulley and that's
how you haul up the sections one after another. Fit them onto each other and tie off with the guy
wires before you do the next one.
"What do you call what you dive off from?"
"You mean the perch."
"It's at the top of the highest ladder?"
"It hooks on the fifth rung of the ladder, so you have something to hang on to."
"Then you're actually going off from seventy-five feet," Darwin said, "not eighty."
"But when you're standing on the perch," Dennis said, "your head's above eighty feet, and
that's where you are, believe me, in your head. You're no longer thinking about the girl in the
thong bikini you were talking to, you're thinking of nothing but the dive. You want to see it in
your head before you go off, so you don't have to think and make adjustments when you're
dropping thirty-two feet per second per second."
A breeze came up and Darwin turned to face it, running his hand through his thick hair. Dennis
let his blow.
"Do you hit the bottom?"
"Your entry," Dennis said, "is the critical point of the dive. You want your body in the correct
attitude, what we call a scoop position, like you're sitting down with your legs extended and it
levels you off. Do it clean, that's a rip entry." Dennis was going to add color but saw Darwin
about to speak.
"I'11 give you two hundred a day for two weeks guaranteed and we'll see how it goes. I'll pay
your rigger and the cost of setting up. How's that sound?"
Dennis dug into the pocket of his jeans for the
Kennedy half dollar he kept there and dropped it on the polished brick surface of the patio.
Darwin looked down at it and Dennis said, "That's what the tank looks like from the top of an
eighty-foot ladder." He told the rest of it, up to what you did to avoid the 40,000-gallon enema,
and said, "How about three hundred a day for the two weeks' trial?"
Billy Darwin, finally raising his gaze from the half dollar shining in the sun, gave Dennis a nod
and said, "Why not."
Nearly two months went by before Dennis got back and had his show set up.
He had to finish the gig in Florida. He had to take the ladder and tank apart, load all the
equipment just right to fit in the truck. He had to stop off in Birmingham, Alabama, to pick up
another eighteen hundred feet of soft wire. And when the goddamn truck broke down as he was
getting on the Interstate, Dennis had to wait there over a week while they special-ordered parts
and finally did the job. He said to Billy Darwin the last time he called him from the road, "You
know it's major work when they have to pull the head off the engine."
Darwin didn't ask what was wrong with it. All he said was, "So the life of a daredevil isn't all
cute girls and getting laid."
Sounding like a nice guy while putting you in your place, looking down at what you did for a
living.
Dennis had never said anything about getting laid. What he should do, ask Billy Darwin if he'd
like to climb the ladder. See if he had the nerve to look down from up there.
2
______________________________________________
THE TANK, PAINTED A LIGHT BLUE with curvy white lines on it to look like waves-Billy
Darwin's idea but okay with Dennis-was in place out on the sweep of lawn. Dennis changed his
mind about using that river water full of silt. He spoke to Darwin about it and Darwin got the
Tunica Fire Department to fill the tank from a hydrant by the hotel, giving each of the
firefighters a hundred-dollar chip they could play with or cash in. Dennis would bet they played
and hoped they won.
It was the Tishomingo Lodge & Casino's celebrity host, Charlie Hoke, the ex-ballplayer, who
got Dennis a place to stay, a room in a private home for a hundred a week. No meals, but he
could cook if he cleaned up after.
"Vernice," Charlie said, "is on a diet and hardly cooks anymore, goddamn it." Vernice, a
nicelooking redhead if a bit plump-which was okay with Dennis, he liked redheads-owned the
house, a three-bedroom bungalow with a screened porch on School Street in Tunica, the school
at one end, two bail bond offices at the other. Vernice was a waitress at Isle of Capri. Charlie
Hoke was supposed to be her live-in boyfriend, but had his own room so Dennis couldn't tell
how much time he spent with Vernice. They acted like they'd been married twenty-five years.
After Dennis looked at his room and agreed to take it, Vernice said, "I never met a high diver
before. Is it scary?" Dennis believed he could get next to Vernice without breaking Charlie's
heart.
It was Charlie, also, who got Dennis a rigger.
This was a man by the name of Floyd Showers from Biloxi, a skinny guy in his fifties with a
sunken mouth and skidrow ways about him. He always had a pint of Maker's Mark and cigarette
butts in the pockets of the threadbare suitcoat he wore with his overalls, wore it even during the
heat of day. Floyd had worked county fairs on the Gulf Coast and showed he knew how to stake
down and tie off guy wires, adjusting the block and tackle to pull forty to sixty pounds of
pressure. Charlie mentioned Floyd had done time on a burglary conviction, but said don't worry
about it, Floyd wasn't apt to get in any trouble.
This final day of setting up they were working late to finish. Dennis in red trunks stood on the
top perch-there was another perch below at forty
feet-looking down at Floyd tying off the last of the wires. Dennis pressed down on his end and
felt it taut.
It was early evening, the sun going down over Arkansas across the river. No one sitting by the
pool, the patio in shade now. About an hour ago Dennis had spotted Vernice in her pink Isle of
Capri waitress uniform with Charlie out on the lawn talking. It surprised Dennis to see her here
at Tishomingo. She had looked this way to give him a wave as she walked back to the hotel.
Charlie had returned to the weird attraction he worked and was still there: a wirefence enclosure
that looked like half a tennis court and a sign on it that read:
CHICKASAW CHARLIE'S PITCHING CAGE
LET'S SEE YOUR ARM!
What Charlie had there, inside the enclosure, was a pitching rubber at one end and a tarp with a
strike zone painted on it hanging sixty feet six inches away. You made your throw and a radar
gun timed the speed of the baseball getting to the tarp and flashed it on a screen mounted in there
on the fence. Five bucks a throw. Get three in a row in the strike zone, you got three more
chances free. Hum one in ninety-nine miles an hour or better, you won ten thousand dollars. Or
you could challenge Chickasaw Charlie. If this big ex-ballplayer with the beer gut, fifty-six years
of age, failed to beat your throw, you won a hundred bucks.
It looked easy.
The first time Dennis left his work and wandered over there to see what was going on, Charlie
said to him, "Watch 'em. These young hotshots and farm boys come here thinking they have an
arm. Watch this kid with the shoulders." Wearing his John Deere cap backwards. "He throws
harder'n sixty mile an hour I'll kiss him on the mouth." The kid went into his stretch, brought the
ball up to his chest with both hands and threw it, Dennis believed, as hard as he could. The radar
screen flashed 54. Charlie said, "See?" and to the kid, "Boy, my older sister can throw harder'n
that. You ever see a knuckleball? I'm gonna show you a knuckler. Look here, how you hold it
with the tips of your fingers." Charlie stepped on the rubber, went into his stretch and threw a
ball that seemed to float toward the tarp before it dipped into the dirt and the radar screen
registered 66. Charlie said to Dennis, "They throw with their arm, you notice? 'Stead of using
their whole body. You play any ball?"
"Not once I climbed up on a diving board. I follow the American League," Dennis said. "Now
and then I'll bet the Yankees, except if they're playing Detroit."
"You're smart, you know it? How 'bout the '84 Series?"
"Who was in it?"
"De-troit won it off the Padres. You remember it?" No, but it didn't matter, Charlie kept
talking. "I was up with the Tigers and pitched in what became the final game. Went in in the fifth
and struck out the side. I got Brown and Salazar on called third strikes. I hit Wiggins by mistake,
put him on, and got the mighty Tony Gwynn to go down swinging at sixty-mile-an-hour
knucklers. I went two and a third innings, threw twenty-six pitches and only five of 'em were
balls. I hit Wiggins on a nothingand-two count, so you know I wasn't throwing at him. I come
inside on him a speck too close. See, I was never afraid to come inside. I've struck out Al Oliver,
Gorman Thomas and Jim Rice. Darrell Evans, Mike Schmidt, Bill Madlock, Willie McGee, Don
Mattingly, and I fanned Wade Boggs twice in the same game-if those names mean anything to
you."
Later on that day Billy Darwin had come out to see how Dennis was doing. By then he and
Floyd Showers had put up four sections of ladder and the metal scaffolding that supported a
diving board three meters above the rear side of the tank. Dennis told the boss they'd finish
tomorrow and then started talking about Charlie Hoke, amazed that a man his age was still able
to throw as hard as he did.
Darwin said, "He tell you about all the big hitters he's struck out, and what he threw them?"
摘要：

ELMORELEONARDTishomingoBluesForChristine_____________________I'mgoingtoTishomingotohavemyhamboneboiled,I'mgoingtoTishomingotohavemyhamboneboiled,TheseAtlantawomendoneletmyhambonespoil.PerformedbyPegLegHowellAtlanta,Georgia,November8,1926______________________1________________________________________...

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