Entrapment and Other Writings (18 page)

“I’ll tell you what I’ve about decided, Joan-of-Arc”—he never calls me
that
unless he’s furious with me—“I’ve decided it’s time for you either to get on a bus to Lexington or taper your habit down within reason.”

Nothing, not a
word
, about
his
habit of course. “So’s you can build it up higher than before?” I put it to him; which seemed to take him by surprise. “Little Daddy,” I went right on, “I’ll hustle for you, I’ll work for you. I’ll go to jail for you. If I have to be sick for two for you I’ll do that, too. And, if you want, I’ll roll you the biggest stick of tea in town. You’re the best connection I ever had and I think you’re here to stay.”

He doesn’t know that, when he took me from my baby, something in my heart shut hard on him.

Poor just-as-if boy, I was sixteen when he came by and became a sickness in my heart. I’m going on twenty-four and he’s a sickness to this hour.

I knew something was gnawing him from that first night, down by the river. When he told me he’d just done two real hard years at Boys’ Industrial I thought that that was it.

That wasn’t it at all. All his mother had had to do to keep him from doing a single day, was to claim him from the court. But she’d tied up to marry some fool who wasn’t
about
to let an outlaw boy in
his
house. She had her choice between having a husband or a son. She couldn’t have both so she picked the husband. Some husband.

That’s
what is still gnawing Little Daddy.

Yet Mother always gets a pass: “Mother done what she thought best for both of us.” So who’s left to blame for what happened
then?
Me!
I didn’t know he was on earth at the time; yet the whole thing is my fault now. He don’t say it in so many words; but it’s what he feels all the same.

“You ought to hate your old lady for what she done,” I made bold to tell him once, “not
me
.”

I’ll never make
that
mistake again. He’d never hit me in the face before. It was my first time. Poor just-as-if boy, what’s ever to become of him if anything happens to me? I needed someone strong to lean on when he came along ’n now it’s just two weak fools leanin’ on each other.

Poor useless boy—I’d rather have his hate than some fat square-fig’s love. Love or hate, whatever, it don’t matter so long as it’s real. My daddy’s hate is realer than any old square-fig’s love. His hate is more beautiful, I think, than love. Because it’s what he truly
feels
.

It’s why I told him that time, “Little Daddy, I’ll hustle for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll get sick for two for you, I’ll go to jail for you, I’ll go all routes with you. If you want I’ll roll the biggest stick of tea in town for you.”

What I’ve never told him is that, when he took me from my baby, the best part of my heart closed on him.

Mister, I don’t think that old tie across the light is working out. I can smell it starting to scorch. Try your cap instead. You only got two caps? In that case hang up the best one.

That’s better. Now crawl in here before you set yourself afire. I never chippied yet on my Little Daddy.

So I guess it’s time to try.

I. Barrel of Fun

The man who was letting everything go was sleeping one off in all his clothes. Six a.m. barely pinpointed the careworn shade of the second-rate hotel. The curtains were drawn as he had drawn them. Rain was on the walks below. Above the darkened
TV
screen a little clock made a muted ticking. In the utmost country of his brain the sleeper heard a ceaseless tolling. Marking some grief so distant that no wind but the one that blows in sleep might bring it. News of a lost day too dear for losing. Belled by some wind that once helped him home.

Perhaps it was the crash and screech of the traffic below that caused him to dream, for often his ears would be ringing and his eyes blinded by the whir and glare of these machines, and he would be conscious of himself lying, as though flung there, across the bed of the darkened room, hearing his own troubled breathing as he struggled to waken and could not.

The dream that had come to dominate his nights was that of climbing a wide stone stair in which puddles still stood in the worn places of the stone. As though from a late afternoon scrubbing or an evening rain. It was a poor man’s building. One sensed that the stone staircase was the only part that was ever cleaned, or upon which the sunlight ever shone. And he would feel an odd twinge of pity or remorse at the worn places in those steps, for so many
human feet shuffling up and down for so many years, as though the worn places had been made by so many human knees in prayer that the staircase had become a sort of altar for having borne so much humanity …

A short Get-The-Hell-Out-Of-My-Way klaxon’s blast lit a little red warning in his shuttered skull, and he wakened at last, listening for some final, some incredible sound that would at once explain everything and seal his life forever. But all he heard was a door closing somewhere and the muted ticking of the tiny clock beside the old-fashioned dresser.

Fumbling at his open and tieless collar as though it still felt buttoned and tied, he thought,
hell of way for a man to wake up—hell of an hour
. His eyes searched accusingly for the little clock’s prim face. His fingers found his collar button, thread-loose.
This just isn’t my day
.

On its side on the dresser lay an empty gin fifth half-covered by yesterday’s racing form.
Did I pour the last of that down the drain or did I just dream I did? I hope I poured so much that I’ll still wake up clear-headed
.

No, I hope I didn’t pour off a solitary drop. Because I might as well be dead as feeling like this. I might just as well have had it all
.

I hope I got it all, that would serve me right for feeling this bad. No, I hope I drank just enough so’s it couldn’t be my day today. I hope I poured off the rest because I knew it didn’t matter whose day it would turn out to be. It never could be mine
.

Drop it
—he suddenly felt impatient with everything
—whether I poured it off or not I’ve had it all the same
.

He looked like he had had it all right. A grayish stubble framed his face. The button dangled by a single thread. He plugged in the percolator but didn’t remember water until his head was under the faucet. When he got the pot filled, he remembered there was no coffee.

The
DO NOT DISTURB
sign hung on the wrong side of the door. He fumbled in his pocket and found a note so crumpled he had to flatten it against his knee in order to re-read it.

You know damn well you haven’t
. He certainly didn’t look like a man about to bless anyone.

You and Vince? Or you and Virgil? Who the hell are you marrying, Baby? You think so much of the Marine, but why don’t you say what you think of old Pops?

Look out, Sonny
, he told the boy, and for a moment felt he had made a joke of sorts.
These are the jokes coming now
, the bookie explained to himself.

Then the loss came back like a sickness in the heart, and the joke hadn’t come off after all.

The little clock kept saying it was now past six, but why should it feel so anxious with post-time so many hours away?

After all, why should a girl with so much to give—and not a dime—miss a chance for a deal with Virgil?

A little past six but not yet seven. To the crucifix above the clock, all hours were one. So it had felt since hours first began. The magazine mermaid mirrored between them heeded neither clock nor Christ but telephoned instead some seaweed-green exchange. As she had since
Esquire
began.
Who was
she
trying to kid?

Only Christ waited patiently, with lowered lids and twisted limbs the restless second-hand around. For someone to throw away yesterday’s
Daily Racing Form
and open today’s for Jesus’s sake. It already lay beneath the door. A discolored door that was one of many, numbered odd or numbered even, along a furlong of turf-colored carpeting. Down the lightless tote-board of the hall.

The man who was letting everything go held his rumpled note down with both hands. As though a sudden draft might blow it away, as if knowing that the wind that blows below hotel doors blows all such scraps away for keeps.

He slept as he sat, and sank so fast he heard waters roaring past his ears. Then slower and more slow. Till he was weightlessly drifting down in one of those dreams where the sleeper seeks the steepest deeps to touch bottom so lightly he will not be catapulted to the surface. To sink so slowly no one will know; otherwise, it will be all to do again. He needed another’s touch, however light, to keep from rising. The green-and-sea-gold mermaid drifted close in the design of all desire. Without desire of her own. Unseen tides flexed and unflexed her thighs in all the patterns of passion, so various and invariable. No hard breathing; no breath. Only the slow slap and hollow wash of seas below seas … his toes pointed to the slant sea-floor. He closed his thighs hard as her own spread wide and her smile invited him knowingly: You. He smiled knowingly back: You.

The waters came against him as a terrible door. Oceans of all ages kept him from turning and he had to waken or drown.

Awake again—saying
you
to a wall and
you
to a door and
you
to a window with a careworn shade—he studied his own grin in the mirror.

So it had all been a dream about Virgil?

Deep in the mirror’s restless depths the mermaid stirred a little.

“Baby,” he told her and made his voice stern, for he was older than she, “Just don’t do this. Just don’t do it.”

He did not say it so much as heard his lips say it.

He shut his eyes and his head began wheeling, but he kept them shut all the same. The whole third-floor hall began to creak and reel, came right at him, careening crazily, doors ajar, transom jutting, door-numbers wavering big as the doors.
This is how things have always been really
, and he felt a pang of sick delight. Then keeping so grim a hold on the bed’s iron edge that his knuckles went white, he watched the floor rock like the Barrel of Fun with some fool
trapped inside trying to keep his footing. Halfway up one wall, then half up the other—suddenly the fellow came up, grinning lopsidedly right in his face.

It’s best when it rocks
, he decided,
that’s how things really are down the hall
. He had been suspecting as much for some time now. Of that hall where music, classical or jazz, was piped in for two bits per hour.

Where tips were traded in the light and laughter in the dark. Up a green stairwell or down a green stair, muted music or half-heard laughter, glass upon glass in a promise of light. Carpet and transom, keyhole and key. Vows on daybreak’s earliest stroke like an afterthought …

Morning-time or morning-line, slow track or fast, early to the post or late: all things, classical or jazz, led past the all-night desk. Where, row over row on a timeless wall, other bookies’ keys awaited other bookies with tips far hotter than his own, leading all men at length through the keyless door and out to the long, low-storied street. Where, sidewalks dry or sidewalks wet, great trackless buses swung or waited. Where bettors passed or bettors re-passed, and nothing was as it seemed to be. Past bars whose mirrors reflected forever the wan faces of all the girls who said, “Just call me Baby.” Past paddock, past clubhouse, past brothel, past last summer’s rain and the summer’s before. Past long-ago times of just yesterday, long-ago times of the day before.

Nothing but the night-lamp that now burned ash-white. That had burned orange-yellow all night without wavering. Yet now had no color at all as though something had happened to him in the night that could not now be undone by any light, orange-yellow or ash-white.

He re-read that to see if he’d read it right. Then passed his hands under the strewn
Form
till he discovered the cork, set the fifth
upright and stoppered it tight
—can’t stand to attention without your damned hat, private
—and sank wearily back on the bed’s metal edge, fumbling for a cigarette.

This is all right if it happened to you when you’re nineteen
, he told himself, and gave up on the broken cigarette he’d found.
At nineteen you can still tell Mama all. At thirty-five you can still ace it through. But at forty-four you need your pride, and you can’t keep that by singing the blues, classical or jazz
.

Still, I got the blues all the same
.

Those Half-Past-Six a.m.-of-a-Rainy-Morning, Loser’s-Weather blues. When six p.m. came around once more, between the eighth race and the ninth, the grandstand lights would come on overhead to light one last trip to the windows for all good spirits still trying. Newsies would be calling, “Read what happened to Georgia Tech! Read what happened to Michigan! Read what happened to Iowa! Read what happened!” Something always happened to all good sports between the eighth race and the ninth.

“Remember,” she had reminded him so gently it hurt all the more, “I told you ‘Don’t let me go’? Still, you let me go all the same.”

“It was a cheating operation was why,” he had explained easily, knowing that at last he could explain everything. “Forty-four up against twenty-three—what kind of a farce is that, for God’s sake? All for your own good, Baby.”

“Drop the self-sacrifice angle,” she told him less gently, “you’re not the sacrificing type. Admit that what upset you was just that you got scared you might be a loser. Just for once in your life: admit something against yourself.”