said with prim pride: ‘This is
While out of the years when the world had gone only half wrong the juke picked up a faded and raggedy tune.
Till the strange cats looked all around.
It was time to be going home, if he could just find out where one was. It was time for bed, time for a drink, time for a charge and time to give himself up. There was nothing left for Frankie Machine, with his hands pressed so hard to his temples, but the bottles behind the bar, the age-old monkeys above the bottles, and the voice of the wind, bringing snow, rain and sleet, down all the streets where the squadrols sought him.
‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick,’ Frankie told himself. ‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick ’n not havin’ no place to go.’
Afraid to stay and afraid to leave, afraid of those at the tables about him and wanting to fight them all, he sat on with his right hand trembling so that he had to use the left to bring a glass of beer to his lips; he tried to keep the tiny stage in focus as he drank on.
A white girl with a mouth like a baby carp’s was trotting around up there as though being moved on strings, singing in a tinny little sing-song.
with three sets of lights and carrying the battery concealed in one hand. ‘Take ’em off, honey,’ someone called. ‘The war’s over!’
But all she did was to prance like a little circus pony with the light on her navel flickering weakly, like a symbol of all such purchased humanity: purchased, marked-down, remaindered and sold out.
In the uproar and the odor, in the heavy sweat and the crash of bottles, within the smash of the drums and Mr Floor Show’s incessant shrieking, watching the passion of the octoroon venus and studying Frankie Machine’s dead-cold despair, the two amber strippers sat wanly on and on.
Once one laughed restlessly while the other drank without pleasure. Idling over the amber glasses, both were careful, Frankie saw, to put the glasses down softly after drinking so as not to clink them vulgarly upon the table; both drank and put them down together, in some sort of cunning pact, then raised their brown eyes each to each.
And both sat wanly smiling.
the baby carp bawled to the neon cat.
and went up so high on ‘down’ that the neon kitten closed his eyes, drew in his ears and arched his back a bit to indicate his suffering. For only the neon cat felt pain and only the bottles wept small tears. Only the monkeys yearned for home.
While all sat wearily, wisely, wanly. All sat faintly smiling.
A brown and white chorus came out one by one, seemingly too indifferent toward each other to come out together, till there were five. Though each wore only slippers and a G string, all seemed overdressed, so studiously had their nakedness been donned. Each pore powdered, each taut pink nipple tinted with fingernail polish and dusted with some mauve talc, the armpits shaven and deodorized, each navel dusted and the hair swept back behind each small catlike ear.
The last one came out shading her eyes with her hand while bumping listlessly, as if half in shame. It was only the glare in her eyes and a general indifference to her public. When she’d bumped out of the glare she dropped her hands, wetted the fingertips with her tongue in a gesture Frankie knew so well that his hands came away from his temples – it took his heart in a single hot, tightening stitch and would not let the taut heart go and would not let him breathe. She daubed each naked nipple moistly, threw back her head and began stroking the hair coiled on her nape in a slow and sensual indolence. He brushed his shot glass off the table and stood up.
Molly could not see him weaving against the table out there in the dark while he was trying to understand to himself whether it was time for him to leave, before she saw him, or time to go to her before he lost her again.
He felt a sickening sort of shame, this was just the way he wished not to be in finding her again: broke, sick and hunted. What was it someone had said of her long ago? ‘She’s the kind got the sort of heart you can walk in ’n out of with boots on.’
Then the act was done and she was gone, they were all gone as if they hadn’t been there at all. As though the whole act had been a kickback from an overcharge, something he’d formed in his brain out of beer fumes and smoke.
Yet went weaving heavily through smoke and fumes toward the tiny dressing room offstage.
Wearing army brogans on his feet.
All that day, aslant the window, a long-forgotten, tangled black aerial wire touched continually at the pane as if Poor Peter had at last found another game than that of planting paper daisies to pass his days. He was jerking it from the roof just to taunt her – who else would be up there in such weather, with the wind like a whip and the ice on the walks? She turned on the radio to muffle its constant tap-tap-tapping; but all she could get was some fire- eating preacher offering her a choice of salvation or brimstone and even that was better than the tapping. What troubled her most was that, even when the wind seemed still, yet the wire tapped on.
She pried the sash up an inch with a shoehorn. But it dangled on just out of her reach. So she shut the window, realizing it was just one more trick they were playing on her.
And that Vi was no better than the rest of them any more. For all her fine talk about poor man’s pennies, the way she was carrying on with the Jailer, it seemed she thought more of landlord’s nickels these days.
Vi and the Jailer and that Frankie, leaving without so much as a word of good-by, all he ever thought of was himself. The preacher, droning eternally on and on, began hinting certain things about certain people, he was worse than any of them and in sudden fitlike fury she pulled the radio off the dresser, wheeled into the hall and dropped it over the rail without so much as looking to see whether someone might be coming up the stairs to catch damnation on the point of his skull.
She heard the crash below and the Jailer’s startled voice: ‘Who t’rows t’ings?’ The set had missed him by inches.
‘It’s that priest talkin’ against me again,’ Sophie explained, knowing she’d done just right, and wheeled back into the room, locking the door behind her. Then called, to answer the Jailer’s angry rapping, ‘You’ll all get just what you got coming! I’m giving it to all of you now!’
There was no further knocking at her door all that endless afternoon. Only, toward evening, the rapping of Jailer’s hammer where he was putting a couple final raps to the radio. ‘He’s always better at knockin’ somethin’ apart than puttin’ somethin’ together anyhow,’ Sophie told herself with pleasure.
The evening of the night that no one came at all and she wanted the moon to move.
Only the moon to move, it seemed so little to ask, for it moved for everyone else.
All anyone ever did for her was to flush the toilet down the hall and when would he ever quit flushing that nasty thing anyhow?
Not one of them heard, hours later, the stranger’s step in the hall below, listening there to hear whether he were expected, then begin coming on heavily, like one almost too tired to mount one more flight. She peered out, the door an inch ajar, like an animal expecting pursuit and knew: ‘It’s Frankie comin’ home.’ To make it all up to her for leaving like that without even saying goodbye.
Without even telling her what it was for that the wagon men had wanted him. Without even telling her it was all a lie about him and that public hide on the first floor front. Without giving her so much as a word to fight with when the neighbors said things behind her back. It would serve him right if she told him now: ‘You’ve brought it all
