Every Brilliant Eye (2 page)

Then the cops hit a blind pig over the Economy Printing Company at Twelfth and Clairmount and it was all over in a kaleidoscope of flame and spraying glass that had lasted a week, killed forty-three, and taken the National Guard and the United States Army to hose down. It’s still The Strip, but the neon’s gone and there are boards over the bottle-smashed and fireburst windows, and following the general rush from the bars to the after-hours places the street is as quiet as a dead cat in an alley. Except for the hookers on the corners. We’ll be rid of them when we’re all nuclear dust.

One of them was crossing in front of the A-l Hardware on her way to the corner when I parked at the curb and climbed out. She stopped, looked at me, and said, “Lost, mister?”

I studied her, patting my pockets for a cigarette I didn’t have. She had on a glistening black plastic raincoat that came to the tops of her thighs and nothing underneath. Sandals and orange-painted toenails to match beads the size of crabapples in her ears. Her lipstick was orange too and her brown skin looked purple in the light from the store’s display window. She wore her hair cut close to her head. She reminded me of someone and I didn’t like it.

“What’re you,” I said, “fourteen?”

“You want fourteen? I can do fourteen, mister.”

I shook my head and walked past her toward the open door next to the hardware. Behind me she said, “I wouldn’t go up there, mister.”

I looked back at her. “I bet you would.”

“Not if I showed up in the dark as good as you, mister.”

“I’m not a mister,” I said. “I’m a private dick.”

She laughed, with a tinkle that was worth ten dollars all by itself. “We be good together, then. I’m a public pussy.”

Gray light from a greasy fixture at the top of the stairs slid down the rubber-clad steps between a brick wall on one side and painted plaster on the other. The stairwell smelled of marijuana and old sex. I had climbed fifty miles of stairs just like them and I was still in the same place. At the top I followed a narrow hall with a bare hardwood floor to a door at the end with an L of light showing around it. When I knocked, the door came open three inches. I looked at a chain and an eye behind it in a black face.

I said, “Inner City Action Council?”

Nothing. A radio behind the eye was playing so low only the electric bass wrinkled the atmosphere.

“I’m just in from L.A.,” I tried. “Scouting for the Lakers. Guy I sat with on the plane said I could get a drink here.”

“I don’t play.” The door closed.

I put my ear to the panel. The door was reinforced oak and I couldn’t hear anything. But I couldn’t count on that working both ways. I retraced my steps down the hall. The boards reported back.

Downstairs I stood in front of the hardware store and wished I had a cigarette. I was still wishing five minutes later when three couples boiled out of a doorway across the street and came my way at an angle. I could see their yellow shirts and electric blue blouses before I could see anything else. And six sets of bright teeth. They were talking in high affected whines and laughing, but when they saw me they clammed up.

In the pool of light on the corner of Twelfth, the girl in the raincoat stood smoking a cigarette and trying to handle it as if it weren’t a fencerail. I walked that way. Just as I got there a twelve-year-old Thunderbird with a broken muffler and Woody Woodpecker painted on the passenger’s door burbled to a stop against the curb in front of her. The window came down and an Afro poked out the opening. “Let’s see what you got, sweets.”

I said, “Dangle, darling.”

Two eye-whites rolled at me.

“Court’s closed all day,” I said. “You’ll miss church waiting on bail.”

“Hell, whyn’t you say so in the first place?” The window rolled back up and the heap chugged on, its exhaust roaring off blank-faced buildings on both sides of the street.

“I thought you said you was private,” said the girl.

“I did. I am.”

“That’s restraint of trade, mister.”

“Our lawyers will work it out. What’s your name?”

She smiled. “Candy.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, Thelma.”

“Thelma, how’d you like to make twenty bucks standing up?”

“I don’t know. I never tried it.”

I gave her the twenty and my arm. She took both as if they were her first in weeks.

T
HE THREE BLACK COUPLES
were conversing loudly with the eye behind the door when we topped the stairs. I thought at first they had drawn the same bare wall I had, but then someone laughed, mostly squeezed air, and I knew they were just stoned. On the way up with Thelma I had taken off my hat and stashed my tie in a pocket. People tend to remember such things long after features are forgotten.

By the time we reached the end of the hall the door was closed, but then it opened without the chain and we crowded in on the far side of the group going in. I felt like an albino flea in a box of raisins. But the lights in the room were low and the only illumination in the hallway was the globe over the stairs on the other end. The sentry shot the bolt behind us and diddled the chain into its socket and I was inside.

“What’s it today?” the door-jockey asked Thelma. “Candy or Tiffany?”

She gave him a look that ought to have shrunk his shorts. “I’d tell you go fuck yourself, but why rub it in, right?”

It slid off him. Most things would, including falling pianos. He was a big man from the waist up, with a dollop of coiled hair on a head that was otherwise bald and a big belly and melons of muscle on his upper arms under a shirt a size too small, but his legs were bent and withered as if by a childhood disease. He could be tipped off them if he didn’t get in the first shot. I steered Thelma away.

“Job’s over, angel,” I said. “Hunt heads if you want.”

“Maybe I’ll just drink. I get caught working this place they mail my legs to Cincinnati. This a union shop.” She left me for the bar.

You never know what to expect in those places. Some of them look like any other saloon, others like an Arab carhop’s wet dream. Naked girls in chains for barmaids are not unknown. Usually, though, the mere prospect of a place to sluice down when the lights go up in the legitimate spots is enough to draw cash customers. This one was set up like a meeting hall, with a bare plank floor and lunchroom tables arranged in parallel rows and folding wooden chairs on both sides, and that’s probably what it was during the day. But at night all but the fluorescent ceiling tubes on the ends went out and the table at the far end blossomed thick glasses and bottles with off-brand labels.

The room had started out as adjoining apartments with a common wall. Nothing had been done to cover the seam where the two color schemes met. About sixty people were seated elbow to elbow at the tables and standing in clots in the corners, fingering their glasses and bobbing their heads in time with the music throbbing out of the ghetto-blaster on the bar. The whites of their eyes glittered like scattered bits of glass in the gloom.

They knew I was there, of course. You can fill all the tambourines you want with talk about how we’re all the same under the color, but that jungle sense dies kicking. I moved to the bar and asked for a double Scotch rocks.

The man behind the bar wore his hair in Stevie Wonder cornrows and a moustache and beard that looked like soot smeared around his mouth. He had on a white shirt with the tail out over a black sweatshirt. The black rubber butt of a revolver stuck out of his pants where the shirt split in front. “You with Thelma?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Kay.” He fisted some ice out of a portable cooler into a glass and poured from a fresh bottle. “Five bucks,” he said, pushing the glass my way.

I laid a twenty on the long table. While he made change from a pasteboard shirt box full of curling bills I said, “Barry Stackpole been in lately?”

“Don’t hear much names back here.”

“You’d remember him. He’s white, limps a little. Wears a glove on his right hand most of the time and he doesn’t use the hand much.”

He took a five and a ten out of the box, smoothed them, folded them, and poked them into his shirt pocket, watching me. I shrugged.

“Try that corner” he said.

I didn’t know how I had missed seeing his sandy head when I came in. He was sitting at the end of the far table with his back to the bar and his Dutch leg propped on the rung of a chair on the other side. Most drinkers seek the dark and he had that fluorescent-washed table all to himself. I started that way with my drink.

“Say, man?”

I looked back at the bartender.

“No refills, man. Drink up and take your buddy and split. I got no insurance against breakage.”

“That fifteen should cover the fixtures.”

Evidently the hat check girl was off tonight. I set my hat and drink on the table next to Barry and sat down. He didn’t look at me. He had a glass half-full of amber liquid in front of him with lumps of ice floating in it and he was playing with a flat tin ashtray, pushing down the lip with his thumb so that it flipped up and landed upside-down on the table with a racket like raining hubcaps. The table was littered with butts and flakes of ash. I watched him do it a couple of times.

“I’m disappointed,” I said then. “I expected to find you face down in a pile of empty shot glasses. Instead it’s tiddlywinks.”

He looked at me for the first time, focused, and grinned baggily. “Hey, Amos. I’m trying to get it to land right side up. Bastards loaded it.”

He was farther gone than I’d thought at first. His speech was okay—if anything it got more precise when he was tanked—but his head swayed and there was a glaze over his eyes that turned them from crisp blue to murky gray. While I was looking at him he picked up his glass in his right hand and drank from it. He wasn’t wearing his white cotton glove. The skin was shiny where the third and fourth fingers ended at the second knuckles.

I said, “I haven’t seen you use that arm in years.”

“I’ve been exercising. A doctor told me I’m using muscles meant for something else. He didn’t approve. They don’t approve of anything, and wind up jogging into the paths of butchers’ vans at forty.”

“You doing anything with it besides bending it?”

“My column’s set through next week. I’m on vacation.”

“What about the book?”

“The book’s deader than Lazarus. Take a necromancer to raise it.” He swirled the liquid in his glass, watching the lumps of ice collide. “This is honest liquor.”

“It’s stewed barbed wire.”

“What I mean. No phony aging or blending or storing in musty kegs in some Mick’s basement. Just the quick burn and that feeling you’ve got the world on your belt. Irene send you?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess she said she loves me or something.”

“She said to tell you good-bye.”

“Yeah?”

The conversation was going nowhere on a tankful of fumes. I looked around. The bass was still buzzing out of the portable radio on the bar. A pretty brown girl in a white jumpsuit with her straight black hair in bangs was standing in front of it, moving unconsciously with the beat and listening to a party in denims telling her about his childhood. You would sneak glances at her over your glass, admiring her trim lines and the way her white teeth flashed when she laughed, and then you would walk out behind her and she’d glance back and give you some hip action and the rest would be all business. I wondered what had happened to Thelma.

I said, “I didn’t know you were still seeing doctors.”

“Ongoing thing, chum.” Barry fingered the ashtray. “Until they pat me in my pasted-together face with the well-known instrument. I go in, say hello to the pretty nurse-receptionist—they’re all pretty these days, and none of them dates patients—show the man in the white blazer how my stump is doing, pick up my new prescription, and blow. Make an appointment for next week on your way out, Mr. Stackpole.”

“Prescription for what?”

“Headaches, pal. You ever try to chew a piece of tinfoil with a fresh silver filling in a back tooth? That’s my head when it’s cold or rainy, or when it’s muggy or snowing or when I flush the toilet and forget to jiggle the handle. Not that the aching ever goes away. It’s there, like Muzak. Our skulls weren’t built to accommodate steel plates.”

“I’ve got a papercut on my trigger finger,” I said. “Haven’t shot anybody all week.”

He grinned down at his drink. “Okay. No violins today.”

We drank. The overhead light threw pale double shadows on the table.

“This dump remind you of someplace?” Barry asked.

“A high school cafeteria with ethyl added.”

“There was a place in Saigon just after the Cambodia bugout. We got shitface there. I left for home the next day. What was it called?”

“Minh’s.”

“That sounds like it.”

“They were all called Minh’s,” I said. “And it didn’t look anything like this. There were candles on the walls and a fishnet behind the bar.”

“I didn’t say they looked alike. Half the clientele was Cong. They made your back crawl. You feel it?”

“At least twice a week, and in better places than this.”

“What it looks like,” he started, and stopped. “I did the program, you know.”

“Program?”

“A-goddamn-A. Meetings in church basements and like you said high school crematoriums.”

“Cafeterias,” I said. “No, you were closer.”

“All the meeting rooms look the same. Long tables like this and folding chairs and fluorescent lights and scrawny old ladies with rhinestone glasses and blond streaks in their hair, not at all what you expect of a burned-out alkie. It can’t compare with a redwood bar and rosy light from a Budweiser sign and a juke and a twelve-year-old bartender in a red coat and bow tie who calls you sir and are you ready to go again. If they put the guys who design bars to work on the rooms where AA meets, we’d lick alcohol abuse in a month.”

“Except for funny cocktail napkins. They can lose the funny cocktail napkins.”

“Funny cocktail napkins are the key to the whole thing. That’s the ridiculous note that makes the rest of the symphony sublime, like the flaw the Chinese used to build into their porcelains. Boxer shorts with evening dress. Without funny cocktail napkins the whole beautiful plan falls to shit.”