“I need to see him.”
The druggist was a compact little guy, and his full round bald head was painfully sensitive looking. In its sensitivity it could pick up any degree of disturbance, I thought. Yet there was a canny glitter coming through his specs, and Kiyar had the mark of a man whose mind never would change once he had made it up. Oddly enough, he had a small mouth, baby’s lips. He had been on the street—how long? Forty years? In forty years you’ve seen it all and nobody can tell you a single thing.
“Did Dr. Haddis have an appointment with you? Are you a patient?”
He knew this was a private connection. I was no patient. “No. But if I was out here he’d want to know it. Can I talk to him one minute?”
“He isn’t here.”
Kiyar had walked behind the grille of the prescription counter. I mustn’t lose him. If he went, what would I do next? I said, “This is important, Mr. Kiyar.” He waited for me to declare myself. I wasn’t about to embarrass Philip by setting off rumors. Kiyar said nothing. He may have been waiting for me to speak up. Declare myself. I assume he took pride in running a tight operation, giving nothing away. To cut through to the man I said, “I’m in a spot. I left Dr. Haddis a note before, but when I came back I missed him.”
At once I recognized my mistake. Druggists were always being appealed to. All those pills, remedy bottles, bright lights, medicine ads, drew wandering screwballs and moochers. They all said they were in bad trouble.
“You can go to the Foster Avenue station.”
“The police, you mean.”
I had thought of that too. I could always tell them my hard-luck story and they’d keep me until they checked it out and someone would come to fetch me. That would probably be Albert. Albert would love that. He’d say to me, “Well, aren’t you the horny little bastard.” He’d play up to the cops too, and amuse them.
“I’d freeze before I got to Foster Avenue” was my answer to Kiyar.
“There’s always the squad car.”
“Well, if Phil Haddis isn’t in the back maybe he’s still in the neighborhood. He doesn’t always go straight home.”
“Sometimes he goes over to the fights at Johnny Coulons. It’s a little early for that. You could try the speakeasy down the street, on Kenmore. It’s an English basement, side entrance. You’ll see a light by the fence. The guy at the slot is called Moose.”
He didn’t offer so much as a dime from his till. If I had said that I was in a scrape and that Phil was my sister’s husband he’d probably have given me carfare. But I hadn’t confessed, and there was a penalty for that.
Going out, I crossed my arms over the bed jacket and opened the door with my shoulder. I might as well have been wearing nothing at all. The wind cut at my legs, and I ran. Luckily I didn’t have far to go. The iron pipe with the bulb at the end of it was halfway down the block. I saw it as soon as I crossed the street. These illegal drinking parlors were easy to find; they were meant to be. The steps were cement, four or five of them bringing me down to the door. The slot came open even before I knocked, and instead of the doorkeeper’s eyes, I saw his teeth.
“You Moose?”
“Yah. Who?”
“Kiyar sent me.”
“Come on.”
I felt as though I were falling into a big, warm, paved cellar. There was little to see, almost nothing. A sort of bar was set up, a few hanging fixtures, some tables from an ice cream parlor, wire-backed chairs. If you looked through the window of an English basement your eyes were at ground level. Here the glass was tarred over. There would have been nothing to see anyway: a yard, a wooden porch, a clothesline, wires, a back alley with ash heaps.
“Where did you come from, sister?” said Moose.
But Moose was a nobody here. The bartender, the one who counted, called me over and said, “What is it, sweetheart? You got a message for somebody?”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh? You needed a drink so bad that you jumped out of bed and ran straight over—you couldn’t stop to dress?”
“No, sir. I’m looking for somebody—Phil Haddis? The dentist?”
“There’s only one customer. Is that him?”
It wasn’t. My heart sank into river mud.
“It’s not a drunk you’re looking for?”
“No.”
The drunk was on a high stool, thin legs hanging down, arms forward, and his head lying sidewise on the bar. Bottles, glasses, a beer barrel. Behind the barkeeper was a sideboard pried from the wall of an apartment. It had a long mirror—an oval laid on its side. Paper streamers curled down from the pipes.
“Do you know the dentist I’m talking about?”
“I might. Might not,” said the barkeeper. He was a sloppy, long-faced giant—something of a kangaroo look about him. That was the long face in combination with the belly. He told me, “This is not a busy time. It’s dinner, you know, and we’re just a neighborhood speak.”
It was no more than a cellar, just as the barman was no more than a Greek, huge and bored. Just as I myself, Louie, was no more than a naked male in a woman’s dress. When you had named objects in this elementary way, hardly anything remained in them. The barman, on whom everything now depended, held his bare arms out at full reach and braced on his spread hands. The place smelled of yeast sprinkled with booze. He said, “You live around here?”
“No, about an hour on the streetcar.”
“Say more.”
“Humboldt Park is my neighborhood.”
“Then you got to be a Uke, a Polack, a Scandihoof, or a Jew.”
“Jew.”
“I know my Chicago. And you didn’t set out dressed like that. You’da frozen to death inside of ten minutes. It’s for the boudoir, not winter wear. You don’t have the shape of a woman, neither. The hips aren’t there. Are you covering a pair of knockers? I bet not. So what’s the story, are you a morphodite? Let me tell you, you got to give this Depression credit. Without it you’d never find out what kind of funny stuff is going on. But one thing I’ll never believe is that you’re a young girl and still got her cherry.”
“You’re right as far as that goes, but the rest of it is that I haven’t got a cent, and I need carfare.”
“Who took you, a woman?”
“Up in her room when I undressed, she grabbed my things and threw them out the window.”
“Left you naked so you couldn’t chase her… I would have grabbed her and threw her on the bed. I bet you didn’t even get in.”
Not even, I repeated to myself. Why didn’t I push her down while she was still in her coat, as soon as we entered the room—pull up her clothes, as he would have done? Because he was born to that. While I was not. I wasn’t intended for it.
“So that’s what happened. You got taken by a team of pros. She set you up. You were the mark. Jewish fellows aren’t supposed to keep company with those bad cunts. But when you get out of your house, into the world, you want action like anybody else. So. And where did you dig up this dress with the fancy big roses? I guess you were standing with your sticker sticking out and were lucky to find anything to put on. Was she a good- looker?”
Her breasts, as she lay there, had kept their shape. They didn’t slip sideward. The inward lines of her legs, thigh swelling toward thigh. The black crumpled hairs. Yes, a beauty, I would say.
Like the druggist, the barman saw the fun of the thing—an adolescent in a fix, a soiled dress, the rayon or sateen bed jacket. It was a lucky thing for me that business was at a standstill. If he had had customers, the barman wouldn’t have given me the time of day. “In short, you got mixed up with a whore and she gave you the works.”
