Entrapment and Other Writings (17 page)

“Call a priest! Call a holy father!” Lucille began hollering and ran out into the street to get one. Enright started to sag. I caught him around the waist and Zaza and Beth-Mary were helping me to get him up straight when two cops stormed in followed by Lucille. Who did she think
she
was working for?

“Who hit him?” Cop One wanted to know, taking Enright away from me.

“
That
one skulled him with a shot-glass,” Lucille got right in there, pointing out Beth-Mary—“and
that
one”—pointing out Zaza—“skulled him with her handbag!”

Enright raised up as though all he’d been doing with his head on the bar was resting it—“I’m not pressing charges!”

I’d never seen a man come around that fast before.

“And I don’t blame you,” Cop One went along, taking Enright’s big moon-face between his hands and studying it like a map. There was a black and blue bruise on one side where the shot-glass had grazed it and a lump, just starting to come up, on the other.

“I fell over a beer bottle,” Enright explained everything.

I sat at the back bar looking straight ahead because I felt Cop Two’s eyes on me.

“Get the two broads into the wagon,” Cop One told Cop Two.

“
Which
two?” Cop Two wanted to know; not taking his eyes off me.

“The one who pitched the shot-glass and the one who swung her handbag.”

“I’m not pressing charges neither!” Lucille suddenly came back into her right mind; and handed Cop One her ID card.

“Did I ask you to show me that?” he asked her. She put it back in her bag.

“That’s right,” Cop One congratulated her. “Keep it safe, honey, you’re going to need it at the station.” Then he turned to Cop Two: “Take all three of them.”

“What about
him?
” Cop Two asked.

“Put the broads in the wagon.” Cop One decided, “I’ll take the pimp in the squad so’s they don’t fight over him all the way to the station.”

The
pimp?
That just
might
be me. Just
might
.

Yet neither one of those stupid bulls so much as noticed a mink chubby lying across the front bar.

Now every few minutes I heard the big door at the block’s far end being opened. Yet I never heard it being shut. As if it had opened just far enough to let people with bills in their hands in to squeeze through. If you can’t let somebody out for free, I thought, for God’s sake let somebody in for nothing.

Then I heard a whole pack coming and got back out of the way in case they came through my door.

“Brideswell! Brideswell!” some kukefied broad was hollering, “
have
consideration!”—but it wasn’t Beth-Mary.

Someone was slammed against the door like the mother-cops had backed her up flat against it and were milling around. I could hear them milling; she couldn’t get loose. Then all the feet began going away fast way down the line. Till a cell door slammed.

That was when it came to me that Enright might already have bonded out my fool. She might be back at the front bar this very moment. the chubby in front of her, listening to whatever the old man was telling her she ought to do next. Like letting her Little Daddy kick his habit cold turkey in Cook County Jail while she went on feeding her own.

O Shining City of Seen of John I thought, if that fool of mine lets that old man talk her into
that
, there’ll be no use of her waiting on the courthouse steps when her Little Daddy comes down them; because she won’t have a Little Daddy anymore. Because Little Daddy’ll be clean, he’ll be his old self once more. What need then will he have for a country whore with marks on her arm?

No, Little Baby, there’s no hardluck story in the book that’ll work
then
. Because Little Daddy won’t even rap to you. He’ll walk right on by, hop a cab to the Trailways depot and be back in Old Shawneetown, never to leave again, by morning.

And when the baby is big enough to understand, Little Daddy’s going to tell her her real mother died young. And never give that piece of trade he left on the courthouse steps further thought.

Yet I really couldn’t believe Beth-Mary would come in on me.

On the other hand, there was the time in LA when she spent a whole afternoon in a movie with a nab. But maybe that was just because she liked the movie. Besides, that was different. I was setting home in my red foulard robe—the one with the tasselly sash—reading Mad. I wasn’t setting behind a solid door in blue jeans with a patch in the seat. Little Baby, aren’t you
ashamed
to let your Little Daddy walk around in tennis shoes in midwinter? Don’t you want your Little Daddy to look
sharp?

And what does
she
have to show for five years of hustling, except that mink chubby? That, chances are, she’s had to forget by now.

The cold began coming up off the floor. But I knew it was from inside myself that it was really coming. I hadn’t used anything except paregoric for almost sixty hours; and that had been by mouth.

I got a cigarette out of my pocket and got it lit with one hand. I didn’t draw the smoke up my nose because I wasn’t sure what happens when nicotine hits paregoric. Hold tight, Little Baby, I told Beth-Mary, Daddy may be about to drowse about.

Way up and far off I heard a church bell inviting everyone to Sunday mass. Everyone except Beth-Mary and me. Us two fools; the only place we get invited is jail. Just jail.

Can we help it if we’re cute?

Then all the doors, both sides the other side of the solid door, were standing wide. All the broads had gone home. All the mother-cops had taken them home and not one of them was coming back. I was the only one left locked up.

Then someone pulled the shade.

I was in some kind of old country barn with just one weakass bulb burning high high up and swinging a little. All I was wearing was the red silk foulard robe with the tasselly sash. That I thought Beth-Mary had hocked in LA. I had nothing on under it. And there was a smell of burning; like in a lion-house.

I saw their shadows moving whenever the bulb swung a little; they were all lionesses. That I had to fight one by one.

That was to be my punishment for not being a broad.

Then the burning smell came stronger and I came to with my cigarette burning out on the floor under my nose.

I’d never had a dream like that before.

I got down off the bunk and put my eye to the string of light beneath the door.

“Beth-Mary!” I called under the door, “are you alright, Little Baby?”

Not a sound, not a whisper the other side of the solid door. If I could only hear her whining,
“Little Daddy, can’t we just drowse about?”

I got back on the bunk and read the question again that that fool had chalked there in yellow chalk, right over my head. And suddenly I had the answer.

“At your mother’s house, fool,” I told him right out loud. But I didn’t have a piece of chalk, of any color at all, to write my answer down.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cigarette come rolling under the door. It came a full two feet into the cell before it stopped rolling.

And heard my fool’s high heels go clickety
-clacking
down the corridor.

And keep clickety-clacking away.

You’d think a pimp could do no wrong, for God’s sake, the way them two stick up for one another. You know what that old Southsea bartender told me before I come out here at this ungodly hour?—“You been a bad girl, Beth-Mary, you got to make it all up
to your Daddy now. You can’t spend a whole night turning one trick anymore.”

I flew right
at
him—“You take care of
your
customers, old man, ’n I’ll take care of
mine
.”

For God’s sake, just because he goes my bond he thinks he can talk to me like my Little Daddy.
Nobody
talks to me like my Little Daddy. What do
I
care if people say he’s no good? Don’t I know that? Of
course
he’s no good. But he’s the best connection a hustling woman ever had ’n I’ll go all routes with him.

Don’t douse the light yet, mister. Just hang some old tie over it. Else I’ll sleep till the buses stop. Then I’ll have to hail a cab. One cab less, my Little Daddy’s out one day the sooner. I know he’s working up a perfect fit at me as it is out there.

He’s lucky to have someone outside working to get him out, as
I
see it. How many them locked-up cats got anyone outside hustling for
them?

And had it not been for me forcing the old man to bond Zaza out with me, he’d have left her set until her day in court. Only I wasn’t about to leave her—Why should I? Was it
her
fault he walked into a flying shot-glass? So what if she swung on him with what was nearest to hand? What did he expect after almost knocking her to the floor?

When she opened that handbag at the station we both broke up. But the mother-cop just shook her head ’n asked “What happened
here
, honey?”

The inside of the bag was a mess of cold cream, broken glass with kleenex and bobbie pins stuck in it. What she’d hit Enright with was a two-pound jar of Pond’s cold cream; that she’d swung with on her way to work. Small wonder that old man went out cold.

She didn’t even claim the bag when we got sprung. “Nothing in it but a quarter and a few pennies,” she told me, “and I’d have to scrape cold-cream off
them
.”

Climb into bed any time you feel like, mister. I’ll jump in in no time. I just feel like yakking first for a while. Do you mind? It all just strikes me as so comical. I never robbed nobody my whole life.
Even that credit-card we got the chubby on was by my Daddy’s hand. I couldn’t get my own hand in a rain-barrel. But I’m in and out of jail like a fiddler’s elbow all the same.

I’ll say this for Little Daddy—he never lets me set for long. Even when he had a W on him in LA, and couldn’t show up in the court-house hisself, he sent a bondman down to spring me. I know he’s mad enough at me to eat snake, lettin’ him set there a week already. I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions when he comes down those court-house steps.

First thing he’ll want to know is how much did Enright put up for the chubby. When I tell him I sold it outright for three hundred to the old man, he won’t believe me. Not until I tell him the old man don’t know the coat is hot. That’ll put him in the switches—especially if Enright has turned it over. We can’t go back there if he has.

When he gets around to asking why
three
hundred, when bond is only a hundred-fifty, I’ll have to tell him I got Zaza out. He’ll find out anyhow.

Enright thinking he got all three on the hook is the biggest laugh of all time, Zaza thinks. He figures to get five hundred for the coat, tell us all he got is three so we’re all square, and make hisself two hundred.

“
Keep
the coat, old man,” I told him, “it’s
yours
. Just get us out of here.” Zaza kept her mouth shut when I told him that. And she was good as gold when we were locked up together, too.

“Please take these stupid earrings back, honey,” she asked me, “as a
favor
.” I took them back even though they don’t mean a thing to me. For a fact I don’t even remember who put them on me. It wasn’t the earrings, I told Zaza, it was the way Daddy went about getting them that got me burned—“I don’t hold
nothing
against you,” I told her—“if it wasn’t for my bad aim you wouldn’t even be settin’ here.”

“I’m just sorry about your having to give up your chubby,” she told me, “your old man is going to be hot at you for that.”

“Not for long,” I told her, “you don’t know my Little Daddy.”

Nobody knows my Little Daddy. Once in LA somebody gave him
one of those tennis-bats. Right away he got to be jumping nets all over town. He has the flash notion he’s going to be a tennis-player and he don’t even know where the places are they play for God’s sake. My part is to buy him a box of balls and a pair of white shoes. Then everything’s going to be perfect.

“You want to be a tennis player,” I told him, “be a tennis player. And I’ll get me a pimp who
is
a pimp.” I never all my days heard tell of a pimp jumping over a net. Or one tennis player asking another would he like to say hello to the girls.

“I don’t need a tennis-bat to swing a smalltown hide like you,” he told me—“the flat of my shoe will do.” After all the times I put him to bed when he was hitting the bars, and after that the times I scored for him when was too weak to score for himself, he called me “small-town hide.” What could I
do?
I bought him the box of tennis balls and the white shoes and a T-shirt to match and we march into the bar where we hung out, him holding his stupid bat.

The bartender took one look, hollered, “O look girls” and made swishy moves like a little girl throwing a balloon.

That put an end to Little Daddy’s tennis career. He traded off the lot, that had cost me a twenty-dollar trick plus cab-fare, for six sticks of lowgrade pot. Then tells me, “Forget it, Little Baby, let’s just go home and drowse about.” As if nothing had happened at all.

Now he comes leaping into Enright’s—“I’m mastering the licorice-stick!”

He’s going to join the musicians’ union, he’s going to play with a big-name band, we’re going to send for the baby, hustling and hypes and shakedowns and busts are just a thing of the past—yet he doesn’t even have the stupid flute out of the hockshop window.

“Everything’s going to be perfect, Beth-Mary—only we got to get down there before someone else grabs it!”

But I know it’s just another just-as-if deal like with the tennis-bat.

“Daddy, couldn’t you learn to play a clarinet first, from someone who already owns one?” I asked him—“When you get the hang of
it we’ll get you one of your own—not a secondhand one—a
new
one, Little Daddy.”

“Is that all you think of me and the baby?” he asked me. “Doesn’t your husband’s career mean
anything
to you? You want your daughter to grow up in
your
footsteps?”

Daddy, I thought, if you weren’t so weak inside you wouldn’t come on so hard.