Free Live Free
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.”
Four Roomers Of War
It was not yet night, though the streets were already dark. A few stores and restaurants had switched on their lights. A neon sign thrusting like an erection from a bar on the corner winked redly at thirsty patrons who were not present. There was rain in the wind, and the feeling that the rain would soon turn to snow.
Stubb swore, rounding the corner. He took off his glasses and wiped their bottle-bottom lenses on the sleeve of his trenchcoat, then swore again as they were spattered with fresh rain. A Checker passed, throwing fine spray at the sidewalk. Stubb entered an alley and walked it with ferocious energy from end to end and back, looking in doorways, occasionally stopping to examine a garbage can, at last emerging where he had come in. Half a block down the street, a fat, blond girl in a white plastic raincoat waved to him, and he nodded almost imperceptibly.
She was waiting for him in the musty little hall, rain trickling from her coat and white plastic boots onto the worn linoleum. “How’d you do?” she asked. She loomed over him, a head taller than he.
“How’d
“I haven’t yet. I just went out for gum and stuff.”
“You shouldn’t smoke,” he told her. “Screws up your lungs.”
“Yeah,” the fat girl said. “That’s right.” She opened her purse and took out a pack of Viceroys. Two were gone. She pulled out two more. Stubb reached up to light hers, and she smiled.
“Going to be a lousy night,” he told her. “You ought to stay in.”
“I think maybe I will. Till eleven or twelve anyway. You going to watch TV? It’s
Stubb shook his head, drawing on his cigarette.
“You like the oldies almost as much as he does.”
“I saw a piece of it.”
“I wish they’d run
“I’ve got things to do.”
“Okay.”
She waited for him to go up the stair, then toiled after him. The parlor door was half open, but if the three people in the parlor had heard them, they gave no indication of it.
They sat before a television set as they might have sat around a fire. On the small screen, images hardened to harsh lines of black, then spread the shadows of humanity again. The voices of the film murmured like little waves, and like little waves seemed to die.
The most impressive of the three was an old man. He sat in the largest chair and gripped its arms as though for him it were a seat in a plummeting plane. He was bald. He had once been a powerful and perhaps even a fearsome man; now his chest had fallen in, and his blue eyes seemed awash in milk.
The man on his right aimed at a prosperity his check suit did not confirm. The leather of his wingtip shoes was polished and cracked, and his carefully knotted rep tie revealed at the knot an area worn threadbare by the heavy stubble of his chin. His broad mustache and thick hair shone black and oily as fresh paint. A tarnished chain stretched across his vest, ending in an empty pocket; there was a rubber daisy in his lapel.
A young woman in a black toque sat on the old man’s left. Her long-sleeved lace dress suggested Italy or Spain, but there was something of the East in her thin, strong face and dark eyes. Suspended from a silver cord about her neck was a circlet of silver from which three points radiated; it was no bigger than a small coin.
The man with the black mustache asked, “Would you like something, Mr. Free? A glass of sherry, maybe. Or I could make you some coffee.”
The old man seemed not to hear him.
“You may go to the kitchen and take whatever you can find,” the woman said. “He will not object.”
The other man glanced at her, and then (perhaps because he feared his regard had somehow offended her) looked around the room as if taking inventory of its dusty furniture. His eyes, slightly divergent and dryly black, might have been buttons of jet.
“Go on, Mr. Barnes. You are so hungry.”
“Can I bring you something?” the man called Barnes asked.
“For eight days I have fasted,” the woman said.
“Maybe then—”
“Nothing.”
Barnes rose. “I’ll fix tea, if there is any.”
Neither of the others answered, and he went into the kitchen. There he washed a teapot and put a pan of water on the stove. There was a tablespoon of black tea loose in a cannister, and, to his surprise, a little sugar in the sugar bowl. In the refrigerator he discovered a small cube of cheddar, which he ate. When he carried his tray into the parlor again, neither the old man nor the dark woman appeared to have moved.
