Abruptly Ray shifted away from the creature, who fell awkwardly over the back of the chair.
“I pay you a drink, but I don’t want you to touch me.”
“Merde alors! Why? I am not rotten.”
“I didn’t say you were. Maybe I am. All the same, it is finished. We won’t talk about it any more.”
“Gee, pardner, why you so hard on the old thing?” demanded Banjo.
“To protect myself, Banjo. You’ve got your way with the Ditch and I’ve got mine.”
Banjo laughed. “Youse right, pardner. Gotta meet them as they come—rough. Talk rough, handle them rough, everything make rough. For way down heah is roughhouse way and there ain’t no other way getting by.”
“I don’t mind the roughness at all,” replied Ray. “I like it. I prefer it to the nice pretensions of the upstage places. What gets me down here is the sliminess and rattiness. The only thing rough and real down here is the seamen and the Senegalese.”
“And the onliest thing is the one thing, pardner, that we know.”
“I wouldn’t know if that’s the whole truth.”
“ ’Cause youse tightwad business. You know that Algerian brown gal got a scrunch on you?”
“I know it, but I’m scared of her.”
“Why is you?”
“Because of her mouth. What a marvelous piece of business it is. But she’d just make tiger’s feed of me. Anyhow, I am safe. She thinks I have the change to take her on because I have one good suit of clothes and keep clean. As I haven’t, there’s nothing doing. She isn’t like Latnah.”
“Latnah is all right, eh?” Banjo said, carelessly.
“Sure. She’s the only thing down here I can see,” said Ray.
“Oh, you done fall for her, too?” Banjo chuckled.
It was dinner time. They went to a Chinese restaurant in the Rue Torte to feed for four francs each.
After dinner the boys came together in a café that they called Banjo’s hangout. Dengel, Goosey, Taloufa, Bugsy, Ginger, and Latnah, with Malty fooling near her, quite funny, grinning and gesturing like an overgrown pickaninny in amorous play.
Ray and Banjo came in and, relishing the situation, Banjo smacked his lips aloud and grinned so contagiously that all the beach boys, following his lead, imitated him. Malty became a little embarrassed, and Banjo said: “Go right on with you, buddy. Git that theah honey while the honeycomb is sweet foh you.”
Vexed momentarily, Latnah turned away, humping up her back like a little brown cat against Malty. Although under the reaction of resentment she had loaned those fancy pyjamas to decorate Malty’s limbs first, it had been no real conquest for Malty at all, for when Banjo did at last decide to take a turn in the pretty things, she felt the secondhand wear incomparably better than the first, and realized that for her Malty would never be able to hold a candle to the intractable Banjo.
The patronne of the café was quite taken by Banjo and his hearty-drinking friends, and she had given them a free option on the comfortable space at the rear for the use of their orchestra.
Taloufa had taught them a rollicking West African song, whose music was altogether more insinuating than that of “Shake That Thing.”
“Stay, Carolina, stay,
Oh, stay, Carolina, stay!”
That was the refrain, and all the verses were a repetition, with very slight variations, of the first verse.
Taloufa had a voluptuous voice, richly colored like the sound of water lapping against a bank. And he chanted as he strummed the guitar:
“Stay, Carolina, stay. …”
The whole song—the words of it, the lilt, the pattern, the color of it—seemed to be built up from that one word, Stay! When Taloufa sang, “Stay,” his eyes grew bigger and whiter in his charmingly carnal countenance, the sound came from his mouth like a caressing, appealing command and reminded one of a beautiful, rearing young filly of the pasture that a trainer is breaking in. Stay!
“Stay, Carolina, stay. …”
“There isn’t much to it,” said Goosey: “it’s so easy and the tune is so slight, just one bar repeating itself.”
“Why, it’s splendid, you boob!” said Ray. “It’s got more real stuff in it than a music-hall full of American songs. The words are so wonderful.”
“I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
Stay, Carolina, stay,
Stay, Carolina, stay. …”
“Don’t blow on the flute so hard; you kinder kill the sound a the banjo,” said Banjo to Goosey.
“I can’t do it any other way. A flute is a flute. It mounts high every time above everything else.”
“I tell you what, Banjo,” said Ray. “Let Goosey play solo on the flute, and you fellows join in the chorus. The chorus is the big thing, anyway.”
“Tha’s the ticket,” agreed Malty, who was blowing the tiny tin horn and looked very comical at it, as he was the heftiest of the bunch.
So Goosey played the solo. And when Banjo, Taloufa, and Malty took up the refrain, Bugsy, stepping with Dengel, led the boys dancing. Bugsy was wiry and long-handed. Dengel, wiry, long-handed, and long-legged. And they made a striking pair as abruptly Dengel turned his back on Bugsy and started round the room in a bird-hopping step, nodding his head and working his hands held against his sides, fists doubled, as if he were holding a guard. Bugsy and all the boys imitated him, forming
