Half of Paradise (35 page)

“I want a girl for the afternoon,” he said.

“Talk to my wife. She takes care of all that.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs.”

J.P. started towards the back.

“Mr. Winfield, you didn’t pay for your drinks.”

He reached in his pocket for his wallet and found that he didn’t have it.

“Give me a blank check and a pen,” he said.

“We don’t cash checks as a rule, Mr. Winfield.”

“Don’t you think it’s good?”

“It ain’t that. I know it’s good coming from you, but Emma don’t like me taking checks from nobody.”

“You ain’t running the only cathouse in town. You want me to go somewhere else?”

Jerry took the empty jigger off the bar and looked up the stairs at the back of the room.

“All right. I’ll cash it for you. But don’t let Emma know about it,” he said.

J.P. wrote out a check for a hundred dollars. Jerry took out for the two drinks and placed the rest of the bills and a couple of coins on the bar. J.P. folded the money and put it in his pocket. The room smelled of sawdust and flat beer.

Emma, the bartender’s wife, met him at the top of the stairs. She was big for a woman, and she had masculine features and thick muscular arms. She looked at him with her opaque colorless eyes.

“You pay here before you go any further,” she said.

J.P. took some money out of his pocket, counted it, and gave it to her.

“Where is Honey?” he said.

“She’s got a customer. You want to wait?”

“No.”

“Go into that room on the right. I’ll send a girl in.”

He went into one of the bedrooms. The single window was boarded on the outside. The only furniture was a wood chair, a large double bed that was covered with a spread tucked in tightly on all sides, and a night table ringed with glass stains with a tin washbasin on top. There were cigarette burns on the floor, and a half-empty glass of beer on the windowsill. There was a lipstick print on the rim of the glass. He turned on the overhead light and looked at the cracked wallpaper and the stains on the bedspread and he turned it off again. He sat in the wood chair and took his package of cigarettes out of his pocket. It was empty. He crushed it and threw it on the floor.

The door opened and the girl came in. She was thin and tall with long straight black hair, and she looked as though she had been up all night. She had on light blue shorts and a knitted sweater without sleeves. Her mouth was thin like a spinster’s, and she used her lipstick to make her lips look larger. She undressed by the bed and put her clothes on the chair. She looked at the crushed cigarette package on the floor.

“Say, this room ain’t a garbage can,” she said.

“Get in bed.”

“Listen. We have to keep our rooms clean. Miss Emma don’t like them dirty.”

“You ought to set fire to the whole goddamn place, then.”

“Wait a minute, mister. I’ve had a hard night. I don’t have to put up with any stuff from you.”

“I ain’t come in here to talk about your dirty floor. Get on the bed,” he said.

“I have to look at you first.”

A half hour later he sent down for a bottle. The girl asked for beer. She said whiskey made her sick. She got drunk very easily, and she talked obscenely while they made love. She hadn’t taken off her lipstick and she smeared it on the side of his face. He felt the whiskey go through his body, and he had that same thick feeling in his head of the night before, and the strain of the alcohol and sexual labor made him short of breath. He wished he had taken another girl. She had had only three bottles of beer, but she was very drunk. He drank down the whiskey and felt it hit hot in his stomach. The girl opened another beer and smoked a cigarette. She got up once to use the bathroom. They could hear the music from the jukebox down in the bar and she popped her fingers in time to the tempo. After a while she became half asleep, her mouth open, and lay relaxed on the bed and didn’t move her body with his.

“Go tell that woman to send in another girl,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Just tell her to bring someone else in, and you can take the day off.”

“What’s wrong with me? You want a special kind of jazzing or something?”

“I didn’t pay you to fall asleep.”

“You must think you’re some kind of wonderful lay. I’ve had better lays from a sixteen-year-old boy than you. You don’t even know how to get it in.”

“Get the hell out.”

“I hope somebody else gives you a good case of clap, you bastard,” she said.

She put on her light blue shorts and knitted sweater and house slippers and left the room. A minute later somebody knocked on the door.

“Put something on. It’s me,” Emma said.

J.P. got up from the bed and slipped his trousers on. He felt dizzy when he stood up. Emma came in and shut the door behind her.

“What’s the trouble?” she said.

“Bring Honey in.”

“What’s wrong with the girl I gave you?”

“I don’t like her,” he said.

“I ain’t had any complaints about her before.”

“Send me another girl. I done paid for the afternoon.”

“It will cost you twenty-five dollars more,” she said.

“I already give you fifty.”

“You paid for Rita.”

“What difference does that make?”

“If you want somebody else you got to pay again.”

“The bitch went to sleep on me,” he said.

“She’s one of my best girls. I never had no complaints.”

“She sleeps with her mouth open.”

“A man told me last night she was the nicest lay in the house. Her customers don’t complain,” she said.

“I didn’t hire a wore-out whore that can’t stay awake.”

“If you’re one of these flip guys with different tastes you can go down the street. They’ll take care of you. I run a respectable place. There’s others waiting for this room that will pay extra to have Rita.”

She folded her heavy arms across her breasts and looked at him.

“All right. Here. Tell Honey to come in,” he said, giving her the money.

“She’s in another room now. You’ll have to wait a few minutes.”

After the woman had left he poured a glass of bourbon and sat in the chair and drank slowly and looked at his bare yellow feet on the floor. His fingers shook slightly on the glass. He thought about Honey and her soft belly and pink breasts. He had made love to the first girl twice, and he should have felt spent, but he could feel it go through him again, weak in the loins and the pit of his stomach, and he put the tip of his tongue between his teeth when he thought about it. He drank down the whiskey and filled the glass again. The bottle was two-thirds empty. He tried to remember what had taken place the last three days. Everything was confused in time, and he couldn’t concentrate on any one thing long without its becoming confused with something else. He knew that something had happened in a bar somewhere and there had been a fight. Maybe someone had taken him outside and rolled him. His watch. Yes, and his billfold. That had been it. There was a fight and he had been rolled. Saturday night he had been on the Jubilee. That was last night. He didn’t have his guitar with him or he could have played right. They had given him one of them goddamn electric things that sounded like somebody was twanging on a strand of baling wire. The only person who could use an electric guitar was Charley Christian, and he was dead. A man gave a guitar its tone. It didn’t need nothing else but the man playing it. J.P. could hear and feel the rosinous squeak of his fingers working over the frets and the chords vibrating through the dark wood.

The girl he had wanted came into the room. She had on a pink robe and sandals. Her hair had dark and light amber streaks in it. He expected her to smile or to make some show of recognition when she saw him. She didn’t speak, and her pale blue eyes looked at him for a moment and then turned away blankly as she took off her robe and dropped it over the brass bedstead.

“Miss Emma said you give Rita some trouble. This is just a straight date without no trouble, hear.”

“I didn’t bruise nothing of yours the last time I was here,” he said.

“Miss Emma says you give Rita a bad time.”

“I didn’t pay for no drunk whore to yawn in my face.”

“Well, I don’t want no trouble. Rita says you were acting flip. I give a straight lay and that’s all. You go see one of the other girls if you want something else.”

“Do you remember me?” he said.

“Lots of fellows come in. They’re one and the same to me, honey.”

She lay down on the bed in a receptive position. She rubbed the insides of her thighs with her palms. He poured a drink in his glass from the fifth and drank it down.

“Let’s go, honey. There’s others waiting,” she said.

“Get on top.”

“That means you got a complex about your mother.”

“Watch it.”

“Some fellows want to lay their mother and they don’t know it. I read it in a magazine once.”

“Get on top and do what you’re supposed to,” he said.

“I know my job. You don’t have to worry about that.”

She got on top of him and smiled stupidly. She raised up on her knees and then sat back. She touched him and adjusted herself again, supporting herself with one arm, and sat once more on his legs.

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” she said.

“It’s the whiskey.”

“You give Rita all you had. You ain’t got another lay in you,” she said.

“Wait a minute. I’ll be all right. I was all right before you come in here.”

“Are you saying you can’t get nothing on for me?”

“No. It’s just the whiskey. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

“Come back tomorrow,” she said.

“I hired you for the afternoon.”

“You ain’t got it to put in, honey.”

“I paid seventy-five dollars for you and that other bitch, and you ain’t taking off.”

“You see me tomorrow night and I’ll give you one free.”

“You bitch,” he said.

“Take it easy.”

“You ain’t cutting out on me.”

“I’m not going to stay here and play hand games for you, mister. When you can get something on come back and I’ll take care of you.”

She took her robe off the bedstead and started to put it on. He sat up and pulled it off her. The sleeve caught on her arm and ripped at the shoulder. She grabbed the robe in both hands and jerked it away from him and got off the bed.

“All right, flip man,” she said. She pushed a buzzer on the wall by the light switch and put on her robe. Her shoulder showed at the rip in the seam. He got off the bed and came towards her. She pushed the buzzer again.

“I’d like to watch him beat the piss out of you,” she said, and went out the door.

“You goddamn whore.”

He put on his shirt and trousers. He felt shamed and enraged at the same time. His head spun when he reached over to pick up his shoes. He forgot to put on his socks. He wanted retribution against the two prostitutes and the madam. They had gotten him for seventy-five dollars. He was going out in the hall and either make the girl return to the room or get his money from the madam. Back home they’d burn a whorehouse down with coal oil if a man got treated like a nigger. They’d put the whores in jail and let any bum with a dollar in his overalls lay them. Said she’d gotten better jazzing from a sixteen-year-old. I could split her in two. I ain’t going to take no insults from a bunch of whores.

The door opened and a big man whom he hadn’t seen before walked in. The man had a flat, scarred face and tattoos showed through the black hair on his arms. The hair on his chest curled out over the top of his shirt. He had a short wood club in his Sand the handle wrapped with black tape and a hole drilled in the end filled with lead. Emma stood behind him in the doorway. Her hard eyes looked over the man’s shoulder at J.P.

J.P. backed away and got his knife out of his pocket. He opened the single blade and held it before him. He had seen a knife fight in a poolroom once and he remembered to keep the knife at an upward angle to parry a thrust or blow. He tripped backwards over the chair. The big man flicked the club across J.P.’s hand and knocked the knife to the floor. J.P. felt the bones in the back of his hand break, and a pain shot up his arm into his shoulder. He held his wrist with his other hand, and the man hit him across his good arm. He fell back against the boarded window and dropped to the floor. His trousers came loose and uncovered his buttocks. The pain was more than he could bear. His mouth opened and the muscles in his stomach tightened and convulsed. He felt that his arms were jerking without control when he tried to move them. The room was pink like blood diffused in water.

“The sonofabitch,” Emma said.

“Do you want to put him in back?” the big man said.

“I knowed he was going to cause trouble when he first come in here.”

“He don’t look like much now,” the big man said.

“I give him the two best pieces in the house, and he gets one of them drunk and he tells Honey he can’t get nothing on for her.”

The man picked up the knife off the floor and folded the blade and put it in his pocket.

“Give me the stick,” she said.

She leaned over J.P. and hit him across the jaw with the club. His face snapped sideways against the floor. His eyes were still closed and his mouth was open and a mixture of saliva and blood drained out on the hard-grained wood. His expression didn’t change. His broken hand had begun to swell.

“Put him behind the tracks,” she said. “Maybe one of the bums will give him the kind of swish action he wants.”

The big man picked J.P. up over his shoulder and carried him through the hallway and down the stairs. Honey stood in the doorway of the kitchen, smoking a cigarette, and watched them. She picked her teeth with her fingernail. The man took J.P. out the back door towards the railroad tracks. The brambled area behind the building was littered with broken glass and refuse that had overflowed the garbage cans. The man carried him over the tracks and the gravel bedding to the jungle. The trees and grass were powdered with dust from the passing trains. The man put J.P. down and went back to the building.

J.P. lay on his stomach with the side of his face in the dirt and his arm twisted under him. A train roared by and the ground thundered under him, although he was only vaguely aware of it. He slipped in and out of consciousness; he was at the bottom of a dark place without pain, and then the yellow light of afternoon came into his mind and he felt he could open his eyes but the bone-throbbing pain in his hand began and he choked on the blood in his throat and fell away into nothing again.