The Main

when the policemen enter.

Three men sit around a table in back, one a tall, boney tramp with a concave chest who has the shakes so badly that he is drinking his wine from a beer mug. The other two are arguing drunkenly across the table, pounding it sometimes, to the confused distress of the third.

“Floyd Patterson wasn’t shit! He never… he couldn’t… he wasn’t shit, compared to Joe Louis.”

“Ah, that’s your story! Floyd Patterson had a great left. He had what you call one of your world’s great lefts! He could hit… anything.”

“Ah, he couldn’t… he couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag! I used to know a guy who told me that he wasn’t shit, compared to Joe Louis. You know… do you know what they used to call Joe Louis?”

“I don’t care what they called him! I don’t give a big rat’s ass!”

“They used to call Joe Louis… Gentleman Joe. Gentleman Joe! What do you think of that?”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why did they call him Gentleman Joe?”

“Why? Why? Because… because that Floyd Patterson couldn’t punch worth shit, that’s why. Ask anybody!”

LaPointe crosses to the group. “Has anyone seen Dirtyshirt Red today?”

They look at one another, each hoping the question is directed to someone else.

“You,” LaPointe says to a little man with a narrow forehead and a large, stubbly Adam’s apple.

“No, Lieutenant. I ain’t seen him.”

“He was in a couple hours ago,” the other volunteers. “He asked around about the Vet.” The name of this universally detested tramp brings grunts from several bommes at other tables. No one has any stomach for the Vet, with his uppity ways and his bragging.

“And what did he find out?”

“Not much, Lieutenant. We told him the Vet come in here late last night.”

“How late?”

The proprietor lifts his head from the skin magazine and listens.

“Well?” LaPointe asks. “Was it after closing time?”

One of the tramps glances toward the owner. He doesn’t want to get in trouble with the only bar that will let bommes come in. But nothing is as bad as getting in trouble with Lieutenant LaPointe. “Maybe a little after.”

“Did he have money?”

“Yeah. He had a wad! His pension check must of come. He bought two bottles.”

“Two bottles,” another sneers. “And you know what that cheap bastard does? He gives one bottle to all of us to share, and he drinks the other all by hisself!”

“Potlickin’ son of a bitch,” says another without heat.

LaPointe crosses to the bar and speaks to the owner. “Did he seem to have money?”

“I don’t sell on the cuff.”

“Did he flash a roll?”

“He wasn’t that drunk. Why? What did he do?”

LaPointe looks at the owner for a second. There is something disgusting about making your money off bommes. He reaches into his pocket and takes out some change. “Here. Give them a bottle.”

The proprietor counts the change with his index finger. “Hey, this ain’t enough.”

“It’s our treat. Yours and mine. We’re going fifty-fifty.”

The arrangement does not please the owner, but he reaches under the bar and grudgingly gets out a bottle of muscatel. By the time it touches the counter, one of the bommes has come over and picked it up.

“Hey, thanks, Lieutenant. I’ll tell Red you’re lookin’ for him.”

“He knows.”

They have been wandering for an hour and a half, threading through the narrow streets that branch out from the Main, LaPointe stopping occasionally to go into a bar or cafe, or to exchange a word with someone on the street Guttmann is beginning to think the Lieutenant has forgotten about the Vet and that young man stabbed in the alley last night. In fact, LaPointe is still on the lookout for Dirtyshirt Red and the Vet, but not to the exclusion of the rest of his duties. He never pursues only one thing at a time on his street, because if he did, all the other strings would get tangled, and he wouldn’t know what everyone was up to, or hoping for, or worried about.

At this moment, LaPointe is talking with a fat woman with frizzy, bright orange hair. She leans out of a first-story window, her knobby elbows planted on the stone sill over which she has been shaking a dust mop in fine indifference to passers-by. From the tenor of their conversation, Guttmann takes it that she used to work the streets, and that she and LaPointe have a habit of exchanging bantering greetings on the basis of broad sexual baiting and suggestions on both sides that if they weren’t so busy, they would each show the other what real lovemaking is. The woman seems well informed on events on the Main. No, she hasn’t heard anything of the Vet, but she’ll keep her ears open. As for Dirtyshirt Red, yes, that sniping bastard’s been around, also looking for the Vet.

Guttmann can’t believe she ever made a living selling herself. Her face is like an aged boxer’s, a swollen, pulpy look that is more accented than masked by thick rouge, a lipstick mouth larger than her real one, and long false eyelashes, one of which has come unstuck at the corner. As they walk on, he asks LaPointe about her.

“Her pimp did that to her face with a Coke bottle,” LaPointe says.

“What happened to him?”

“He got beat up and warned to stay off the Main.”

“Who beat him up?”

LaPointe shrugs.

“So what did she do after that?”

“Continued to work the street for a couple of years, until she got fat.”

“Looking like that?”

“She was still young. She had a good-looking body. She worked drunks mostly. Hooch and hard-ons blind a man. She’s a good sort. She does cleaning and scrubbing up for people. She takes care of Martin’s house.”

“Martin?”

“Father Martin. Local priest.”

“She is the priest’s housekeeper?”

“She’s a hard worker.”

Guttmann shakes his head. “If you say so.”

Back on St. Laurent, they are slowed by the last of the pedestrian tangle. Snakes of European children with bookbags on their backs chase one another to the discomfort of the crowd. Small knots of sober-faced Chinese kids walk quickly and without chatting. Workingmen in coveralls stand outside their shops, taking last deep drags from cigarettes before flicking them into the gutter and going back to put in their time. Young, loud-voiced girls from the dress factory walk three abreast, singing and enjoying making the crowd break for them. Old women waddle along, string bags of groceries banging against their ankles. Clerks and tailors, their fragile bodies padded by thick overcoats, thread diffidently through the crowd, attempting to avoid contact. Traffic snarls; voices accuse and complain. Neon, noise, loneliness.

“Now that is something,” Guttmann says, looking up at a sign above a shop featuring women’s clothes:

North American Discount Sample Dress Company