A Moment of Doubt (10 page)

When next he looked up, Windrow saw he had walked about two miles from the Seaman's Chapel, all the way along the Presidio, past Fort Mason, Gas House Cove, the Marina Green, to Fillmore, and a couple of blocks down Fillmore to Chestnut. He turned into the first bar he came to—and left immediately. As with the second and the third. Th ese were all highly polished oak places, hung with ferns, bound in brass, mostly uncurtained glass on at least two sides, with double doors standing open to the bright sunny air. Not his kind of joints. He recalled the Sea Witch, a few blocks down, a few doors up from the second and probably last remaining seedy influence on this entire side of town, the Presidio Th eater, representing that interesting residual phenomenon of the nineteen-sixties, pornography for nice people.

The Sea Witch was a narrow, dingy place, there was a catbird seat right against the door as you came in, with about twelve tarnished chrome and tattered red naugahyde cushioned stools making their way down the bar towards the single bathroom at the back. Beyond that there had once been a narrow galley, now gone, and the space left behind was piled high with cartons full of new and used long necked brown bottles of Hamm's, the only beer they served in the Sea Witch. You could always count on no more than three or four regulars being there, unless there was a wake someplace later on, when the place would be full. Not many of this kind of people lived in this neighborhood in San Francisco anymore. Windrow wondered if many of this kind of people lived anywhere
anymore. A middle-aged lady held down the catbird seat, with plenty of makeup so badly applied it looked like her lips were out of focus. As Windrow sat to her left the bartender, a man with many miles on his face, squinting against the smoke rising from his cigarette, dropped an icecube into the lady's drink and covered it with a generous slow pour out of a bottle of Popov. Then he set the bottle on the bar between them and lit her Chesterfield for her. A tall man stood at the far end of the bar. He had a cigarette in one hand and one foot up on the rail, and he stared deep into the mirror beyond the bottles behind the bar. All the gestures, all the moves in this place seemed as if they had been rehearsed for the cabaret scenes in
To Have and Have Not
, forty years before, and were now endlessly being reenacted—parodied—by an aging company of geriatrics with time on their hands and nothing else to do but perfect their stagely business, while they quietly drank and smoked the day away. It was the kind of joint that opened at six a.m. and had a few customers right away. All of them would be home in bed, quietly smashed, by three or four. A second shift would sift in about noon. These would be domesticated by sunset, dark at latest. Unless there was a wake someplace. In which case they all would still be there at nine, seriously drunk, talking blarney, and the joint might get crowded.

Apparently there was no wake today. Only one other customer was in the place. He was an Irishman, short, with thin hair and a nose swollen by drink, who now appeared from the direction of the bathroom and took a stool at the bar in front of a screwdriver, midway between the seated lady and the standing, tall man.

It was Windrow's kind of place . . .

There they were, all four of them, slightly younger. I checked the copyright notice on the back of the title page. 1984.

Windrow took the stool between the woman and the pay telephone to the left of the door. “Bushmills, with a beer back,” he said. The bartender retrieved an icy long neck and stood it on the bar.

“Buy Myra the drink,” the tall man said, swaying slightly. “Fella too.” He slurred his speech a bit, and Windrow could see the man had a pretty
good heat on, for ten o'clock in the
morning.

“Aw let the fella buy his own drink, Mike,” the woman next to Windrow rasped, and she smiled at Windrow. Her voice was a jagged mass of sound, made up of spikes and jolts of frequencies that struggled through some unmentionable thicket in her throat, between her lungs and her mouth. It sounded like the old woman was on intimate terms with all the whiskey and cigarettes in the Marina District. Either that, or someone had kicked her in the throat. Windrow couldn't decide. It didn't seem like the joint was that rough . . . .

Her throat was intact! Damaged, but intact . . . .

But Windrow didn't give it that much thought. Th e memory of the young sailor's blackened tongue, how it had swollen in his mouth and forced its way out between the dead man's clenched teeth during the night, of the smell of death in the room, that overwhelmed even the pungency of the salt air and creosote and rotting barnacles from the underside of the pier, that seeped up through the floorboards of the chapel dedicated to the memories of sailors lost at sea, these would not let him yield his fullest attention to the matters at hand, not even to the shambles of a case that had started out yesterday so simply; let alone to the drunken man at the end of the bar, or the ruined larynx of the woman beside him. It was all he could do to choke down half his shot, then the rest, and follow it with a swallow of beer. But that seemed to improve things a bit . . . .

“When, Myra?” the tall man croaked, watching his image in the dark mirror behind the bar.

“Oh, Mike . . . ,” the woman chided.

The tall man cleared the bar in front of him with the side of his hand. The glass shattered against the wall next to the bathroom and fell to the floor in pieces. Th e barroom became very still. The tall man continued to watch the mirror, and spoke very quietly. “When they going to cut it out of you, Myra?”

The woman picked up her drink and held it to her mouth. After a pause she said, “Take it easy, Mike, it's just a little cancer.”

A nerve worked along the line of Mike's jaw.

“They'll get it all out in a day, and I'll be back in a week,” Myra added gently, but loudly. It seemed that any sentiment she wished to express required a certain a threshold of energy in order to suffciently vibrate what was left of her larynx, to get some coherent sound out of it.

Precisely the observation I'd made only moments ago!

The tall man's teeth were clenched. “And if they don't, Myra?”

Myra took a sip of her drink and placed it carefully back down on the bar. The bartender parked one foot on the rim of the sink beneath the countertop, and carefully, deeply inhaled through his cigarette, his fingers poised nearby, waiting, as it quivered in his pursed lips.

“Why then,” Myra rasped, watching her fingers turn her glass in the pool of moisture that had condensed down its sides, “why then I guess I won't be back, will I . . . ?”

“Hey, buddy!”

“Ah,” the bartender said, dropping his foot to the duck-boards on the floor beneath him, “what's all this about, anyway? Myra ain't goin nowhere. Huh? Are ya, Myra . . . ?”

“HEY, goddammit . . .”

I looked up in a daze. The proprietor, a huge, unlit cigar sticking out of his face, glared at me from behind his glass counter. “Can't you read, bud?”

I looked around. There was nobody else in the store. “Who? Me?”

“Yeah! You! Who the fuck—.” He impatiently removed the cigar from his mouth and jabbed it in the direction of a hand-lettered rectangle of shirt cardboard taped to the edge of a shelf teeming with pornography, a few inches from my nose. “‘Absolutely No Browsing!'” he yelled, quoting the sign for me, “Says right there, absofuckinlutely no browsing. You buyin that goddamn book?”

“Buying, what, no, I wrote, I mean I . . . think I . . . have read it already . . . .” I sputtered to a halt, completely at a loss, for once, for words.

“Then put it back,” the man said. “No browsin the skin mags.”

“But,” I began, showing him the cover, “this isn't . . . .”

“Sez you,” the man sneered. And he prized his upper denture offits gums with a pop, displayed it on the tip of his tongue, and replaced it with a lascivious smack.

I looked at the cover myself. It was pretty sleazy. Not bad, really. I'd nearly forgotten the tableau of a runaway cablecar trailing severed nude limbs of mangled gender into the yawning maw of a berserk Tenderloin. At the time I had complained about it to the publisher who, with malevolent relish, as if taking pains to polish the roundness of my education, informed me that if it weren't for the great expense lavished by himself on cover art, books
such as mine would scarcely justify their existence, let alone that of their author's.

Or, wait a minute, maybe it was the cover of
Th e Gourmet
I'd complained about?

Maybe, by the time
Cable Car To Hell
came out, I'd learned my lesson? After all, by the time
Cable Car to Hell
came out,
I
was the publisher.

Absently, I replaced
Cable Car to Hell
in its slot on the rack.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“Shhe . . .” the news vendor said. He replaced his cigar in his mouth, leaned back against the edge of the seat of his stool, and resumed his perusal of the
Police Gazette
.

So Myra had made it back from the hospital after all, I was thinking as I left the store.

Get completely drunk

Fall into a pit of nerves
Wake up somebody, somewhere else.

Change ‘Martin Windrow' to ‘Palmer Dendron.'

Engage plum blossom speculation . . . .

Create a genealogical chart of all the characters I've ever written. Show how they're related, which books, and multiple appearances, etc. Include a system of asterisks [*] to show whether I made them up or stole them from real life. Use a cross [†] to indicate whether or not they've been killed off . Create extensively indexed appendices to detail and census methods of liquidation, time of day or night (duration if excruciating), location, whether or not Mercury was in retrograde, etc. List murder weapons.

Distill wine from the plums.

You don't distill wine. One allows it to ferment.

Download latest exotic modem software from user group's electronic bulletin board.

Upload Martin Windrow fanclub info, with genealogical chart and appendices. Publish and market it as a Concordance. Compuserve?

Actually, have you ever seen a real private detective? He's probably about thirty-two, maybe even younger. He has a beard and mustache, and they're neatly trimmed. He wears a sweater vest and wool pants to keep from freezing ‘to death' in the San Francisco fog. His hair is done every morning with a hair dryer, carefully razorcut and styled every two weeks, no matter what. Bundles of keys and loose change tend to fall out of his pockets because of the semi-stylish cut of the pants. He chews on the ends of pencils and pens, these instruments are all over the place and readily show this abuse, but he can never find one that works when he needs to jot down a suspect license or phone number. Just last month he was busted by a uniformed cop for running a red light and couldn't talk his way out of the ticket. All in a day's work, he half shrugs and drops the pencil, but he ran the light in hot pursuit of a guy he'd been trying to get a line on for three weeks, who'd run it right in front of him and got away with it. Is that right, says the uniform, neatly clipping driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance to his ticket book, all in a row. Wait right here, sir, while I put you through the computer, just take a few minutes, no back talk, thank you, sir . . . . Didn't get the license number of the car either, the cop says over his shoulder as he walks back to the idling cruiser, tsk.

He's left fuming at the wheel, aw double-D gosh darnarootie, danged rotten ironic twist of the if it waddnt for dumb rotten he wouldn't have no
guignon
at all, not a-tall . . . . Hits the horn ring with his fist, the horn honks and he winces, checks the uniform in the rear view mirror, who glowers from under the visor, the underside of the visor lit by the glow from the screen of the DMV computer, the radio squawks, and our dick slides slowly down in his seat to wait for the ticket.

The next time you see him, this real detective, he's in the all-day mandatory driving school, to erase offhis license the points he's otherwise going to get for running the red light. He's just given up trying to get any sympathy from the instructor or the rest of the class, who were amused by his story for a few minutes, but it's the same
as everybody else's—they're all innocent—and anyway they would rather watch the educational film on cocaine abuse, starring a much re-habbed movie star. Our detective is left to chew on the end of a pencil, fitfully twisting the pages of the latest issue of
Psychology Today
in his lap, wondering how a convicted dope fiend can narrate a movie . . . show business . . . maybe that's the answer . . . . You think I'm kidding . . . .

“ . . . damn well the girl told you her whole dirty little story. We want to hear that story too, Mr. Windrow, every detail of it. We've had quite a few dealings with this little twitch in the past, and, frankly, I'm confident that if you tell it well enough Tiny here, even though he's a devout, I mean, dyed-in-the-wool fag, so that you can be assured that he'd scream bloody murder and call the cops on himself if a real female so much as showed him her tits, if you, as I say, tell the story well enough, Mr. Windrow, knowing our fourth party as well as we do, I'm fairly confi-dent that it would be such a horny affair that Tiny here would get of all by himself. So that we can all see and partake of the splendid joy of it, yet remain uncontaminated.”