Half of Paradise Read Online Free Page B

walked back to the wings where Hunnicut, Troy,
    Seth, and the brunette were talking. The auditorium had cleared.
    “You ain’t met April yet,” Seth said.
    J.P. looked at her.
    “This is April Brien,” Seth said.
    “Glad to meet you,” she said. Her eyes moved up and down him. Her peasant Irish face had a dull expression to it.
    “Evening,” he said.
    “April does all the spirituals in the show,” Seth said. He put his hand on the small of her back and let his fingers touch her rump.
    “Cut it out,” she said.
    He gave her a pat.
    “Lay off it,” Troy said.
    Seth winked at J.P.
    “Come in the office,” Hunnicut said. “I got a contract for you to sign.”
    They went into Hunnicut’s office, which he had rented with the auditorium. His white linen suit was soiled and dampened. The candy-striped necktie was pulled loose from his collar, and the great weight of his stomach hung over his trousers.
    “I start you on a straight salary at three hundred and fifty a month,” he said, “plus any commissions we make off records and special appearances. This contract says that I’m your manager and agent, and I take twelve percent of your earnings. We’ll see how you do, and later on maybe we can work out a pay increase.”
    “You take a commission off the same salary you give me?”
    “That’s right. But I’m the man that schedules all your appearances, and if you’ve got the right stuff I can push you right up to the top. I put a lot of people on the Nashville Barn Dance.”
    “How about an advance? That was my last dollar I give to that fellow for his suit.”
    Hunnicut took a black square billfold out of the inside pocket of his coat. He flipped it open flat on the desk and counted out several bills.
    “Here’s fifty dollars. Will that do?”
    “That’ll do just fine.”
    That night he and Seth went to a juke joint and got drunk and picked up two prostitutes. They spent the night in an apartment next door to the bar, and J.P. awoke in the morning with a hangover and looked at the woman beside him in the light and wished he had stayed sober the night before. He put on his clothes and counted the money in his wallet. He couldn’t find his clip-on bow tie, then he saw the prostitute sleeping on it, and he pulled it out from under her leg and left the room and caught a taxi to his hotel.
    He bought a new suit and a new pair of shoes and gave his old clothes to the porter. He checked out of the hotel and walked down the street, holding the guitar case by its leather handle. He thought about the long bus ride ahead with the band through the sun-baked, red clay country of north Louisiana. He thought about the money he would make singing, three times the amount he made as a sharecropper back home. And Hunnicut had said that he might go up to the Nashville Barn Dance. The sun was very hot, and he had to squint his eyes in the white glare off the pavement. It would be a long trip in the summer heat.

TOUSSAINT BOUDREAUX

    A South American freighter had come into port the day before to unload a shipment of coffee and to pick up another load of machine parts. Down in the hold a gang of stevedores waited for the gantry to lower the cargo net through the hatch. The temperature was over a hundred degrees in the hold. The iron plates on the bulkhead would scald your hands if you touched them. Toussaint looked up through the hatch at the bright square of sky. The Negro watched the gantry boom swing around from the dock and drop the cargo net into the hold, loaded with crates of machinery. The gang loosened the net and pulled the crates free with their hooks and dragged them across the floor. Toussaint and another man whipped their cargo hooks into the wood and slid a crate into position against the bulkhead. It was almost quitting time. He watched the empty net go back up through the hatch. The work whistle blew and the men picked up their lunch kits and walked up the metal steps to the deck and down the gangplank to