nothing, damn you to hell!” Her voice got louder and louder until, when she hit the last word, she was screaming. He stared at her, not believing what he was seeing or hearing.
“You listen,” she went on. “You just shut that mouth of yours and you listen. Nobody’s trying to run you. Nobody wants to own you. Own you! I wouldn’t take you in marriage if you crawled. I’ll live with you, I’m no good, you’re no good, I’m a slut and you’re a pig and I live with you. But marriage? You should live so long. You should positively live so long.”
Joe had never seen her like this before. He was lost. It made no sense.
“Just to be alone,” she said. “So we can live like people instead of animals. Not luxury. I wouldn’t care if the place were worse than this. How that could happen I don’t know, this place is for pigs, but it wouldn’t matter. Just so we could live alone without the rest of the world in our living room, without that rat friend of yours here, without—”
She stopped. She took a breath. She found a cigarette and lit it and inhaled deeply.
“You think it over, Joe. You think about it. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. I can get the same job either way, Joe. Either if we get our own apartment or if I get my own apartment, and don’t think I won’t. You think I’m trying to own you? I’ll walk right out on you, Joe. I can do it. It’s up to you. I leave with you or without you but I will be damned if I’ll go on living here.”
She walked to the door. “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she said. “You make up your mind.”
And she stormed out and slammed the door. He sat there, his eyes on the door, and he thought about everything she had said and the way she had said it. He was still sitting there when Shank came in.
“Shank,” Joe said. “Got to talk to you.”
“Yeah?”
“I got a problem, Shank.”
“Bread?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“So talk.”
“Anita and I are going to split.”
“Leaving town?”
He shook his head. “Not that. To a pad of our own. She wants to. You know how chicks get. They need privacy.”
“I get it.”
“Which means I’ll need money. I don’t know how I’m going to swing it. Like, you’ve been paying the tab for a long time. Now I’ve got to pick up my own end of it. Anita says she’ll get a job but that’s no good. We couldn’t make it that way. Which means, I’ll have to find a gig.”
“You think so?” Shank said flatly.
Joe shrugged. “Why not? Maybe something around the area, you know, because I have no eyes to put on a suit every morning. Clerking in a Village shop, waiting tables in a coffee house, something like that. I ought to be able to find a gig without sweating.”
“Finding is easy. Holding is harder.”
“I don’t read you, man.”
Shank lit a cigarette and talked through the smoke.
“You really think you could hold a job? You think you could get up every morning and go to work no matter how dragged you felt?” Joe was silent.
“Work,” Shank said. “A nice draggy routine, one day after the other. You could ball it up on the weekend, man. No work for two whole days. And a hot dollar an hour would give you forty bucks to play around with. Man, you could really move on that sort of bread.”
“What else is there?” Joe turned away. “That’s just it, man. Either way I lose. I ought to be able to hold a job. I mean, there’s a lot of pretty stupid cats working their eight hours a day with no trouble. So—”
“Maybe that’s what makes them stupid.”
Joe looked up.
“You want a job?” Shank grinned. “I’ll give you a job, baby. Sales work. You pick your own hours and you make all the bread you want. Get dragged and you take the day off. Get hungry and you work overtime. No sweat, not anywhere up or down the line. I’ll give you a job if you’re hungry. But don’t go square on me. Don’t clerk in a shop or wait tables in a coffee joint. If you want to work you might as well make it pay.”
“You mean selling.”
“What else?”
“Selling pot,” Joe said. “I would have asked you. I didn’t think you had enough trade to pass around.”
Shank’s smile spread.
“Selling pot,” Joe repeated. “That’s one easy circuit. Anita might not go for it. She’s funny about that. But she’ll learn. It’s good bread and it’s easy. You sure you’ll cut me in on it?”
“Sure. But you’re not clear on it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s not pot.”
“No? You branching out? Selling peyote, bennies, that type of stuff? I didn’t know there was that kind of bread in it. Peyote and bennies are almost legal.”
“Not peyote,” Shank said. “Not benzedrine, not goof balls, not dexies. Something else.”
He took Joe by the arm. “Come here,” he said, leading him to the dresser. He pulled open the drawer, took out a small cardboard box, opened it.
Joe stared.
“Heroin,” Shank said.
“That’s evil stuff, Shank. I don’t want to fool around with it.”
“Who fools? I don’t fool, man. I sell. A king-size difference. My customers like me. Everybody likes me. No sweat and no bother. You know the mark-up on this stuff? Fifty, seventy-five percent. Nice big margin. Can’t lose, man.”
“You can go to jail.”
“They give tickets for jaywalking, baby. I still cross in the middle of the block. You can’t swing with all the laws, Joe. You got to play it the way it has to be played. It’s the only way.”
Shank pursed his lips. It amazed him the way he always felt years older than Joe although chronologically it was the other way around. Now, I’m hiring Joe as a salesman after having ceremoniously raped Joe’s woman not too long ago. Shank was getting a special kick.
“I can understand it,” Shank said. “I been selling hard stuff since the Mau-Mau took his fall. My new connection put me wise to it. I was bugged at first. Nervous. Everybody on the street looked like law to me, every shadow a detective with a big gold badge and a cannon in his holster. You get used to it. The money is very tall and the customers come to you instead of the other way around. You get used to it and you get to like it. A man has a pocket load of horse and he never starves, Joe. Money in the bank. Think about it.”
Joe picked up one of the capsules, held it between his thumb and forefinger. Anita wouldn’t like his handling horse, he was certain. It was nothing they had ever talked about, but it was one of those things she was against, automatically.
But he also knew Shank was right about a job being no good for Joe. And Anita and he couldn’t move out on Shank unless they had money. And they had to move out or Anita would move on her own.
Why not let her move and forget it? He wondered about that and couldn’t come up with anything definite. In a number of ways the chick was an utter drag. No doubt about it—she was holding on, hanging on, wanting to change him, to grab him by the neck until he turned into a husband. But that was natural. She was a chick and chicks were like that. It was a question only of who would get there first, whether he could change her before she changed him. She was already very different from the innocent little virgin who had traipsed down to the Village to peer at the funny people.
And she would change some more.
But now it was Joe’s turn to make a concession. He and the girl would find an apartment. And he would sell for Shank. He could be cool about it. The police would never catch him.
“I’m in,” he said finally.
