Ms. Etta's Fast House

by Victor McGlothin

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Essence best-selling author Victor McGlothin’s knack for crafting superb noir fiction was showcased in the Black Expressions’ selection Borrow Trouble. With this sensational novel, McGlothin brings back notorious hustler Baltimore Floyd for more seamy intrigue. In 1947 St. Louis, Ms. Etta’s is the place where a sinner can get all the boozy action he craves—that is until ladies’ man Baltimore Floyd rolls into town and falls in the sack with the wrong woman.

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Three months deep into 1947, a disturbing calm rolled over St. Louis, Missouri. It was unimaginable to foresee the hope and heartache that one enigmatic season saw fit to unleash, mere inches from winter’s edge. One unforgettable story changed the city for ever. This is that story.

Watkins Emporium was the only black-owned dry goods store for seven square blocks and the pride of “The Ville,” the city’s famous black neighborhood. Talbot Watkins had opened it when the local Woolworth’s fired him five years earlier. He allowed black customers to try on hats before purchasing them, which was in direct opposition to store policy. The department store manager had warned him several times before that apparel wasn’t fit for sale after having been worn by Negroes. Subsequently, Mr. Watkins used his life savings to start a successful business of his own with his daughter, Chozelle, a hot-natured twenty-year-old who had a propensity for older fast-talking men with even faster hands. Chozelle’s scandalous ways became undeniably apparent to her father the third time he’d caught a man running from the backdoor of his storeroom, half-dressed and hell-bent on eluding his wrath. Mr. Watkins clapped an iron pad lock on the rear door after realizing he’d have to protect his daughter’s virtue, whether she liked it or not. It was a hard pill to swallow, admitting to himself that canned meat wasn’t the only thing getting dusted and polished in that backroom. However, his relationship with Chozelle was just about perfect, compared to that of his meanest customer.

“Penny! Git your bony tail away from that there dress!” Halstead King grunted from the checkout counter. “I done told you once, you’re too damned simple for something that fine.” When Halstead’s lanky daughter snatched her hand away from the red satin cocktail gown displayed in the front window as if a rabid dog had snapped at it, he went right on back to running his mouth and running his eyes up and down Chozelle’s full hips and ample everything else. Halstead stuffed the hem of his shirttail into his tattered work pants and then shoved his stubby thumbs beneath the tight suspenders holding them up. After licking his lips and twisting the ends of his thick gray handlebar mustache, he slid a five dollar bill across the wooden countertop, eyeing Chozelle suggestively. “Now, like I was saying, How ’bout I come by later on when your daddy’s away and help you arrange thangs in the storeroom?” His plump belly spread between the worn leather suspender straps like one of the heavy grain sacks he’d loaded on the back of his pickup truck just minutes before.

Chozelle had a live one on the hook, but old man Halstead didn’t stand a chance of getting at what had his zipper about to burst. Although his appearance reminded her of a rusty old walrus, she strung him along. Chozelle was certain that five dollars was all she’d get from the tightfisted miser, unless of course she agreed to give him something worth a lot more. After deciding to leave the lustful old man’s offer on the counter top, she turned her back toward him and then pretended to adjust a line of canned peaches behind the counter. “Like what you see, Mr. Halstead?” Chozelle flirted. She didn’t have to guess whether his mouth watered, because it always did when he imagined pressing his body against up hers. “It’ll cost you a heap more than five dollars to catch a peek at the rest of it,” she informed him.

“A peek at what, Chozelle?” hissed Mr. Watkins suspiciously, as he stepped out of the side office.

Chozelle stammered while Halstead choked down a pound of culpability. “Oh, nothing, Papa. Mr. Halstead’s just thinking about buying something nice for Penny over yonder.” Her father tossed a quick glance at the nervous seventeen-year-old obediently standing an arm’s length away from the dress she’d been dreaming about for weeks. “I was telling him how we’d be getting in another shipment of ladies garments next Thursday,” Chozelle added, hoping that the lie sounded more plausible then. When Halstead’s eyes fell to the floor, there was no doubting what he’d had in mind. It was common knowledge that Halstead King, the local moonshiner, treated his only daughter like an unwanted pet and that he never shelled out one thin dime toward her happiness.

“All right then,” said Mr. Watkins, in a cool calculated manner. “We’ll put that there five on a new dress for Penny. Next weekend she can come back and get that red one in the window she’s been fancying.” Halstead started to argue as the store owner lifted the money from the counter and folded it into his shirt pocket but it was gone for good, just like Penny’s hopes of getting anything close to that red dress if her father had anything to say about it. “She’s getting to be a grown woman and it’d make a right nice coming-out gift. Good day, Halstead,” Mr. Watkins offered, sealing the agreement.

“Papa, you know I’ve had my heart set on that satin number since it came in,” Chozelle whined, as if the whole world revolved around her.

Directly outside of the store, Halstead slapped Penny down onto the dirty sidewalk in front of the display window. “You done cost me more money than you’re worth,” he spat. “I have half a mind to take it out of your hide.”

“Not unless you want worse coming to you,” a velvety smooth voice threatened from the driver’s seat of a new Ford convertible with Maryland plates.

Halstead glared at the stranger then at the man’s shiny beige Roadster. Penny was staring up at her handsome hero, with the buttery complexion, for another reason all together. She turned her head briefly, holding her sore eye then glanced back at the dress in the window. She managed a smile when the man in the convertible was the only thing she’d ever seen prettier than that red dress. Suddenly, her swollen face didn’t sting nearly as much.

“You ain’t got no business here, mistah!” Halstead exclaimed harshly. “People known to get hurt messin’ where they don’t belong.”

“Uh-uh, see, you went and made it my business by putting your hands on that girl. If she was half the man you pretend to be, she’d put a hole in your head as sure as you’re standing there.” The handsome stranger unfastened the buttons on his expensive tweed sports coat to reveal a long black revolver cradled in a shoulder holster. When Halstead took that as a premonition of things to come, he backed down, like most bullies do when confronted by someone who didn’t bluff so easily. “Uh-huh, that’s what I thought,” he said, stepping out of his automobile idled at the curb. “Miss, you all right?” he asked Penny, helping her off the hard cement. He noticed that one of the buckles was broken on her run over shoes. “If not, I could fix that for you. Then, we can go get your shoe looked after.” Penny swooned as if she’d seen her first sunrise. Her eyes were opened almost as wide as Chozelle’s, who was gawking from the other side of the large framed window. “They call me Baltimore, Baltimore Floyd. It’s nice to make your acquaintance, miss. Sorry it had to be under such unfavorable circumstances.”

Penny thought she was going to faint right there on the very sidewalk she’d climbed up from. No man had taken the time to notice her, much less talk to her in such a flattering manner. If it were up to Penny, she was willing to get knocked down all over again for the sake of reliving that moment in time.

“Naw, suh, Halstead’s right,” Penny sighed after giving it some thought. “This here be family business.” She dusted herself off, primped her pigtails, a hairstyle more appropriate for much younger girls, then she batted her eyes like she’d done it all of her life. “Thank you kindly, though,” Penny mumbled, noting the contempt mounting in her father’s expression. Halstead wished he’d brought along his gun and his daughter was wishing the same thing, so that Baltimore could make him eat it. She understood all too well that as soon as they returned to their shanty farmhouse on the outskirts of town, there would be hell to pay.

“Come on, Penny,” she heard Halstead gurgle softer than she’d imagined he could. “We ought to be getting on,” he added as if asking permission to leave.

“I’ll be seeing you again, Penny,” Baltimore offered. “And next time, there bet’ not be one scratch on your face,” he said, looking directly at Halstead. “It’s hard enough on women folk as it is. They shouldn’t have to go about wearing reminders of a man’s shortcomings.”

Halstead hurried to the other side of the secondhand pickup truck and cranked it. “Penny,” he summoned, when her feet hadn’t moved an inch. Perhaps she was waiting on permission to leave too. Baltimore tossed Penny a wink as he helped her up onto the tattered bench seat.

“Go on now. It’ll be all right or else I’ll fix it,” he assured her, nodding his head in a kind fashion and smiling brightly.

As the old pickup truck jerked forward, Penny stole a glance at the tall silky stranger then held the hand Baltimore had clasped inside his up to her nose. The fragrance of his store-bought cologne resonated through her nostrils for miles until the smell of farm animals whipped her back into a stale reality, her own.

It wasn’t long before Halstead mustered up enough courage to revert back to the mean tyrant he’d always been. His unforgiving black heart and vivid memories of the woman who ran off with a traveling salesman fueled Halstead’s hatred for Penny, the girl his wife left behind. Halstead was determined to destroy Penny’s spirit since he couldn’t do the same to her mother.

“Git those mason jar crates off’n the truck while I fire up the still!” he hollered. “And you might as well forgit that man in town and ever meeting him again. His meddling can’t help you way out here. He’s probably on his way back east already.” When Penny moved too casually for Halstead’s taste, he jumped up and popped her across the mouth. Blood squirted from her bottom lip. “Don’t make me tell you again,” he cursed. “Ms. Etta’s havin’her spring jig this weekend and I promised two more cases before sundown. Now git!”

Penny’s injured lip quivered. “Yeah, suh,” she whispered, her head bowed.

As Halstead waddled to the rear of their orange brick and oak, weather-beaten house, cussing and complaining about wayward women, traveling salesmen and slick strangers, he shouted additional chores. “Stack them crates up straight this time so’s they don’t tip over. Fetch a heap of water in that barrel, bring it around yonder and put my store receipts on top of the bureau in my room. Don’t touch nothin’ while you in there neither, useless heifer,” he grumbled.

“Yeah, suh, I will. I mean, I won’t,” she whimpered. Penny allowed a long strand of blood to dangle from her angular chin before she took the hem of her faded dress and wiped it away. Feeling inadequate, Penny became confused as to in which order her chores were to have been performed. She reached inside the cab of the truck, collected the store receipts and crossed the pebble covered yard. She sighed deeply over how unfair it felt, having to do chores on such a beautiful spring day, and then she pushed open the front door and wandered into Halstead’s room. She overlooked the assortment of loose coins scattered on the night stand next to his disheveled queen sized bed with filthy sheets she’d be expected to scrub clean before the day was through.

On the corner of the bed frame hung a silver-plated Colt revolver. Sunlight poured through the half-drawn window shade, glinting off the pistol. While mesmerized by the opportunity to take matters into her own hands, Penny palmed the forty-five carefully. She contemplated how easily she could have ended it all with one bullet to the head, hers. Something deep inside wouldn’t allow Penny to hurt another human, something good and decent, something she didn’t inherit from Halstead.

“Penny!” he yelled, from outside. “You got three seconds to git outta that house and back to work!” Startled, Penny dropped the gun onto the uneven floor and froze, praying it wouldn’t go off. Halstead pressed his round face against the dusty window to look inside. “Goddammit! Gal, you’ve got to be the slowest somebody. Git back to work before I have to beat some speed into you.”

The puddle of warm urine Penny stood in confirmed that she was still live. It could have just as easily been a pool of warm blood instead. Thoughts of ending her misery after her life had been spared fleeted quickly. She unbuttoned her thin cotton dress, used it to mop the floor then tossed it on the dirty clothes heap in her bedroom. Within minutes, she’d changed into an undershirt and denim overalls. Her pace was noticeably revitalized as she wrestled the crates off the truck as instructed. “Stack them crates,” Penny mumbled to herself. “Stack ’em straight so’s they don’t tip over. Then fetch the water.” The week before, she’d stacked the crates too high and a strong gust of wind toppled them over. Halstead was furious. He dragged Penny into the barn, tied her to a tractor wheel and left her there for three days without food or water. She was determined not to spend another three days warding off field mice and garden snakes.

Once the shipment had been situated on the front porch, Penny rolled the ten-gallon water barrel over to the well pump beside the cobblestone walkway. Halstead was busy behind the house, boiling sour mash and corn syrup in a copper pot with measures of grain. He’d made a small fortune distilling alcohol and peddling it to bars, juke joints and roadhouses. “Hurr’up, with that water!” he shouted. “This still’s plenty hot. Coils try’n’a bunch.”

Penny clutched the well handle with both hands and went to work. She had seen an illegal still explode when it reached the boiling point too quickly, causing the copper coils to clog when they didn’t hold up to the rapidly increasing temperatures. Ironically, just as it came to Penny that someone had tampered with the neighbors still on the morning it blew up, a thunderous blast shook her where she stood. Penny cringed. Her eyes grew wide when Halstead staggered from the backyard screaming and cussing, with every inch of his body covered in vibrant yellow flames. Stumbling to his knees, he cried out for Penny to help him.

“Water! Throw the damned ... water!” he demanded.

She watched in amazement as Halstead writhed on the ground in unbridled torment, his skin melting, separating from bone and cartilage. In a desperate attempt, Halstead reached out to her, expecting to be doused with water just beyond his reach, as it gushed from the well spout like blood had poured from Penny’s busted lip.

Penny raced past a water pail on her way toward the front porch. When she couldn’t reach the top crate fast enough, she shoved the entire stack of them onto the ground. After getting what she went there for, she covered her nose with a rag as she inched closer to Halstead’s charred body. While life evaporated from his smoldering remains, Penny held a mason jar beneath the spout until water spilled over onto her hand. She kicked the ten gallon barrel on its side then sat down on it. She was surprised at how fast all the hate she’d known in the world was suddenly gone and how nice it was to finally enjoy a cool, uninterrupted, glass of water.

At her leisure, Penny sipped until she’d had her fill. “Ain’t no man supposed to treat his own blood like you treated me,” she heckled, rocking back and forth slowly on the rise of that barrel. “Maybe that’s cause you wasn’t no man at all. You’ just mean old Halstead. Mean old Halstead.” Penny looked up the road when something in the wind called out to her. A car was headed her way. By the looks of it, she had less than two minutes to map out her future, so she dashed into the house, collected what she could and threw it all into a croaker sack. Somehow, it didn’t seem fitting to keep the back door to her shameful past opened, so she snatched the full pail off the ground, filled it from the last batch of moonshine Halstead had brewed. If her mother had ever planned on returning, Penny reasoned that she’d taken too long as she tossed the pail full of white lightning into the house. As she lit a full box of stick matches, her hands shook erratically until the time had come to walk away from her bitter yesterdays and give up on living out the childhood that wasn’t intended for her. “No reason to come back here, Momma,” she whispered, for the gentle breeze to hear and carry away. “I got to make it on my own now.”

Penny stood by the roadside and stared at the rising inferno, ablaze from pillar to post. Halstead’s fried corpse smoldered on the lawn when the approaching vehicle ambled to a stop in the middle of the road. A young man, long, lean, and not much older than Penny took his sweet time stepping out of the late model Plymouth sedan. He sauntered over to the hump of roasted flesh and studied it. “Hey, Penny,” the familiar passerby said routinely.

“Afternoon, Jinxy,” she replied, her gaze still locked on the thick black clouds of smoke billowing toward the sky.

Sam “Jinx” Dearborn, Jr., was the youngest son of a neighbor, whose moonshine still went up in flames two months earlier. Jinx surveyed the yard, the smashed mason jars and the overturned water barrel.

“That there Halstead?” Jinx alleged knowingly.

Penny nodded that it was, without a hint of reservation. “What’s left of ’im,” she answered casually.

“I guess you’ll be moving on then,” Jinx concluded stoically.

“Yeah, I reckon I will at that,” she concluded as well, using the same even pitch he had. “Haven’t seen much of you since yo’ daddy passed. How you been?”

Jinx hoisted Penny’s large cloth sack into the back seat of his car. “Waitin’ mostly,” he said, hunching his shoulders, “to get even.”

“Yeah, I figured as much when I saw it was you in the road.” Penny was one of two people who were all but certain that Halstead had killed Jinx’s father by rigging his still to malfunction so he could eliminate the competition. The night before it happened, Halstead had quarreled with him over money. By the next afternoon, Jinx was making burial arrangements for his daddy.

“Halstead got what he had coming to him,” Jinx reasoned as he walked Penny to the passenger door.

“Now, I’ll get what’s coming to me,” Penny declared somberly, with a pocket full of folding money. “I’d be thankful, Jinxy, if you’d run me into town. I need to see a man about a dress.”

Delbert Gales stretched his legs when the train pulled into Union Station. The train had teetered through seven hundred miles of track along the Missouri Line, all the way from Texas. Delbert had sworn to himself, every hour on the hour, that the next time he boarded a train he’d have enough money to secure a bed on the Pullman car. The crook in his back proved that a man’s body wasn’t made to sleep propped up against a bench seat. And, after sitting down for nearly two days straight, he was eager to land his best pair of shoes on the cemented streets of St. Louis. With fifteen dollars to his name and a medical degree to his credit, Delbert had his sights set on a lot more. The letter he received two months ago informed him he had been accepted into the residency program at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, one of the few places a colored man could train to become a full-fledged surgeon. Despite Delbert’s thin frame and boyish appearance, he was twenty-two, educated and anxious to match wits with some of the brightest medical minds in the country.

Feeling that he owed it to himself to take in the sights while strolling through the busy train station, Delbert spotted several tight skirts, attached to some of the nicest legs he’d ever seen. Red Cap baggage handlers darted here and there as he watched hordes of travelers scatting about, nearly all of them seeming to be in one big hurry. Delbert tried to ignore one shapely woman’s assets, who’d strutted out in front of him with a large suitcase in tow, but there was no denying her big city curves harnessed beneath a pink chiffon dress fitting so tightly it could have used some letting out in the back. After Delbert traced her steps all the way out of the depot, he realized he’d erred in judgment. The pink chiffon dress fit that woman’s behind just fine.

“Hey, kid!” someone shouted at him from an opened taxi window. “You gon’ stand there all day wishing you was that pink dress or you gonna get to going where you need to be?” The taxi driver turned his palms up when Delbert’s puzzled expression fell flat. “Suit yourself then.” As the checkered cab pulled away from the curb, Delbert flagged him down.

“Yeah, yeah. I need you to carry me to the Ambrose Arms, over on Lexington Avenue.”

“Now you talking,” the driver cheered. “If that’s the onliest bag you got, jump on in. I’ll have you there in no time.”

Delbert would have been all right with anchoring himself to that sidewalk for the rest of the afternoon, wishing he was that pink dress and countless others that clung just as tightly to other female travelers, but he figured he had better not get caught up doing anything that didn’t benefit his surgical training, big city girl-watching included. Delbert’s father, an automobile salesman, wouldn’t have stood for anything to get his only son off track after making numerous sacrifices to send him to Prairie View A&M University, outside of Houston, and subsequently to Meharry Medical College in Nashville. To show his appreciation, Delbert had taken life seriously, and made his father the proudest man in Ft. Worth, Texas. He had no designs on disappointing dear ole dad now. Delbert knew that being smart merely qualified him for success but didn’t guarantee it. He’d be forced to overcome the three things stacked against him. He appeared too young to be as accomplished as he was, he wasn’t tall, or well-built, like some of his contemporaries and his skin was two shades darker than most colored people considered acceptable for a surgeon at the time. Discrimination among Negroes was at its height, and many patients shared a common belief that doctors with lighter complexions were the smartest because they had more of the white man’s blood coursing through their veins. Delbert had proven that theory wrong hundreds of times and he was prepared to do so again, and as often as necessary.

On that warm spring afternoon he wandered through the lobby of the apartment building, realizing for the first time how nervous he had become. Nervousness about surgical training, becoming the man everyone back home expected and making it on his own without the benefit of his father’s bank account, caused his chest to tighten.

“I need to check in,” Delbert said to the male desk clerk. “There should be a room reserved for Gales, Delbert Gales,” he said, after the man glared his way and quickly blew him off to complete his current task. The clerk, who looked to be nearing age fifty, finally began perusing a list of names from a tablet of some sort on the back credenza.

“Uh, we have a room for Mr. Delbert Gales,” the older clerk replied, without lending much thought to the young man standing before him. “Uh-huh, a-uh Dr. Gales from Texas. He’s not in yet but you can wait for him over there if you like.”

Tired and hungry, Delbert wasted no time as he set out to clear up the man’s misconceptions. He extended his hand across the reception counter to offer his credentials. “I am Dr. Delbert Gales. Here is my identification. As you can see, I am from Texas and I’d like to have the key to my room. Now, unless you want me to call the hospital superintendent and have you explain why I’m standing here trying to convince you to hand them over then—”

“I guess I’d better check you in ... doctor,” the clerk backpedaled. He asked Delbert to sign the log, then handed him the key in a flash. “I hope you don’t hold it against me none but you appear kinda young to be a doctor. I got socks older than you.” He didn’t have to say another word. Delbert had seen and heard it all before.

“Then I suggest you get yourself some new socks,” he advised, while turning to walk away.

“Oh, Dr. Gales,” the clerk called out, “you forgot your identification. It sure will be nice having y’all stay here. Mr. M.K. Phipps and Mr. William Browning just arrived a little bit ago.” Those were the names of two other promising young doctors. Sure, Delbert had heard of them and he couldn’t wait to size them up for himself. He snapped out of a hazy daydream when the clerk informed him for the second time that a lounging suite had been prepared for the other arrivals throughout the afternoon. “So feel free to go right on up and knock off some of that traveling dust before you get settled in. That’s room number four-oh-seven, on the top floor. Take a right at the end of the hallway, you can’t miss it.”

“Thank you kindly.” Delbert said, after returning the I.D. to his billfold resting atop the granite counter. “And who would I speak to about having a few extra towels sent to the room?”

The clerk tossed a comfortable smile at him. “I’ll see to it personally, Dr. Gales. Wow, we sure are proud to have y’all here.” There was something peculiar in the way the older man’s perception of Delbert had transformed into overwhelming respect, just shy of adoration. The desk clerk’s expression begged to be addressed.

“Is there something else?” Delbert asked evenly.

“Well, now that you mentioned it, I get a little pain in my side after I eat my Maybelline’s chili.” The clerk poked at his side to point out exactly where his wife’s cooking had tormented him the most.

“I have a surefire remedy for that. Don’t eat any more of her chili,” Delbert answered matter-of-factly. “Apologize to her but turn it down from now on. Obviously, it doesn’t agree with you. Trust me, she’ll understand.” He left the clerk standing near the bottom of the staircase, grinning and rubbing his side as if he’d been miraculously healed.

When Delbert wandered down the hall toward the hospitality suite, laughter and merriment poured through the thin walls. As he lowered his bag to the floor outside room number four hundred and seven, the door whipped open from the other side. He poked his head in the doorway and almost had it knocked off in the process, as a wooden ice bucket, hurled in his direction, slammed against the door.

“Don’t forget the ice this time, M.K.,” a man’s deep voice shouted with exuberance from inside the oversized room. The ice bucket bounced off the solid oak door and ricocheted into the capable clutches of M.K. Phipps, who had once been an All-American tailback at Howard University.

“Bill, you just make sure to save me a seat at the table. I’ve been telling everybody back in Washington how I couldn’t wait to get you tangled up in a card game. I’m just the man to take some starch out of that pumped up ego you got going on and lighten your pockets while I’m at it.”

M.K. Phipps was still as fit as ever, after serving two years in the Army, and wore the same wide-toothed grin Delbert remembered seeing in newspaper photos. William Browning was taller with a slighter build, a paper-sack brown complexion and a full head of curly hair. He’d had the good fortune of assisting in a successful kidney operation, one of the first performed by a colored surgeon. William’s name was included in a national journal article discussing the ground-breaking procedure. William Browning, M.D. became an overnight star in the medical community.

“M.K. Phipps, well, I’ll be. I’m Delbert Gales.” When Delbert shook hands with the man who was built like a monument of steel, he understood why most would-be football foes feared going head to head with this one time hero of the gridiron. Delbert’s hand disappeared in the man’s colossal grasp.

“Delbert, nice to meet cha’,” M.K. beamed. “The boys are inside. Hop in and make yourself at home but keep an eye on Bill. He’s a much better card cheat than he is at suturing, so watch out for his slow finger drag on the shuffle. Don’t get distracted with his high-toned signifying or you’ll miss it when he’s dealing off the bottom.”

“Heyyy! I resemble that remark,” trailed M.K.’s offbeat comment, as William stepped to the doorway to get a look at who was holding up the card game.

“Bill, take care of Gales here,” M.K. said, as he started down the long hallway. “Delbert, I’d keep one hand on my wallet, if I were you.”

“Don’t take stock in anything that comes out of that kickball-sized head of his. M.K.’s been losing money to me for years and I’m not so sure he don’t like it that way. Ain’t nobody that bad at cards without trying to be.” William picked up the bag and carried it into the room.

“Thanks, uh ... William,” Delbert replied awkwardly, having been thoroughly impressed with papers William published regarding early studies on Sickle Cell Anemia.

“Call me Bill. Come on in and meet the boys.” He sat the leather luggage down and whistled loudly, cowboy-on-the-open-range style, above the noise spurred by numerous conversations all going on at once. Delbert didn’t know what to make of this conglomerat