Skeleton Crew

"The band?" She blinked at our instruments distrustfully. "Oh. I was hoping you were the caterers." I smiled as if caterers always carried snare drums and trombone cases.

"You can—" she began, but just then a ruff-tuff-creampuff of about nineteen strolled over. A cigarette was dangling from the comer of his mouth, but so far as I could see it wasn't doing a thing for his image except making his left eye water. "Open that shit up," he said.

Charlie and Biff looked at me. I shrugged. We opened our cases and he looked at the horns. Seeing nothing that looked like you could load it and fire it, he wandered back to his comer and sat down on a folding chair.

"You can set your things up right away," the thin lady went on, as if she had never been interrupted.

"There's a piano in the other room. I'll have my men wheel it in when we're done putting up our decorations." Biff was already lugging his drum-kit up on to the little stage.

"I thought you were the caterers," she repeated in a distraught way. " Scollay ordered a wedding cake and there are hors d'oeuvres and roasts of beef and—"

"They'll be here, ma'am," I said. "They get payment on delivery." "—two roasts of pork and a capon and Mr. Scollay will be just furious if—" She saw one of her men pausing to light a cigarette just below a dangling streamer of crepe and shrieked, "HENRY!" The man jumped as if he had been shot. I escaped to the bandstand.

We were all set up by a quarter of five. Charlie, the trombone player, was wah-wahing away into a mute and Biff was loosening up his wrists. The caterers had arrived at 4:20 and Gibson (that was the thin lady's name; she made a business out of such affairs) almost threw herself on them.

Four long tables had been set up and covered with white linen, and four black women in caps and aprons were setting places. The cake had been wheeled into the middle of the room for everyone to gasp over.

It was six layers high, with a little bride and groom standing on top.

I walked outside to grab a fag and just about halfway through it I heard them coming—tooting away and raising a racket. I stayed where I was until I saw the lead car coming around the corner of the block below the church, then I snubbed my smoke and went inside.

"They're coming," I told Gibson.

She went white and actually swayed on her heels. There was a lady that should have taken up a different profession—interior decoration, maybe, or library science. "The tomato juice!" she screamed. "Bring in the tomato juice!" I went back to the bandstand and we got ready. We had played gigs like this before—what combo hasn't?—and when the doors opened, we swung into a ragtime version of "The Wedding March" that I had arranged myself. If you think that sounds sort of like a lemonade cocktail I have to agree with you, but most receptions we played for just ate it up, and this one was no different. Everybody clapped and yelled and whistled, then started gassing amongst themselves. But I could tell by the way some of them were tapping their feet while they talked that we were getting through. We were on—I thought it was going to be a good gig. I know everything they say about the Irish, and most of it's true, but, hot damn! they can't not have a good time once they are set up for it.

All the same, I have to admit I almost blew the whole number when the groom and the blushing bride walked in. Scollay, dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers, shot me a hard look, and don't think I didn't see it. I managed to keep a poker face, and the rest of the band did, too—no one so much as missed a note.

Lucky for us. The wedding party, which looked as if it were made up almost entirely of Scollay's goons and their molls, were wise already. They had to be, if they'd been at the church. But I'd only heard faint rumblings, you might say.

You've heard about Jack Sprat and his wife. Well, this was a hundred times worse. Scollay's sister had the red hair he was losing, and it was long and curly. But not that pretty auburn shade you may be imagining.

No, this was County Cork red—bright as a carrot and kinky as a bedspring. Her natural complexion was curdwhite but she was wearing almost too many freckles to tell. And had Scollay said she was fat? Brother, that was like saying you could buy a few things in Macy's. She was a human dinosaur—three hundred and fifty pounds if she was one. It had all gone to her bosom and hips and butt and thighs, like it usually does on fat girls, making what should be sexy grotesque and sort of frightening instead. Some fat girls have pathetically pretty faces, but Scollay's sis didn't even have that. Her eyes were too close together, her mouth was too big, and she had jug-ears. Then there were the freckles. Even thin she would have been ugly enough to stop a clock—hell, a whole show-window of them.