“I just want coffee,” the fat girl said. “You’ve got the bottomless cup, right? All the refills I want?”
The waitress said, “Fifty cents.”
“Uh huh.”
“I can’t read this,” Free announced. “But I know what I want. I want two basted eggs. Can I have some ham?”
“Ham,” the waitress said.
“Uh huh, go ahead,” the fat girl told him.
“Then I want some. Tea, if it ain’t too much trouble.”
“Tea.” The waitress nodded and went behind the counter. “Blind ’em. Country on the side.”
“Coffee will fix me up,” the fat girl said. “But it’s better with a little liquor in it.”
“That’ll go for most things.”
Candy giggled again. “I bet you were a swinger. A big, good-looking guy.”
The waitress returned with ice water, cups, and tin teapot. “You want cream and sugar?”
“Lots of sugar,” the fat girl told her. She dumped three packets into her cup, stirred it negligently, and drained it, then sat for a moment with her hands pressed to her temples. “More!” she called after the waitress. Free was moving the tea bag up and down in his pot; the fat girl leaned toward him, lowering her voice. “Can you still get it up, Mr. Free?”
He chuckled. “How’d I know that?”
“If you want to try, just ask me. When I’m not so wasted, okay? If you can’t, don’t worry about it. I’ve seen it happen with a lot of younger guys.”
“You’re a kind-hearted woman, Miz Garth.”
The waitress refilled the fat girl’s cup and dropped a fresh handful of sugar packets on the table. They bore the likenesses of poets: Byron, Shelley, Keats.
“I’m a sick one,” Candy said. “My head hurts me like you wouldn’t believe.” Her plump fingers trepanned the poets.
“Wish I knew something to help you.”
“I know already. I took four aspirins before I came downstairs the first time, and I drank about a quart of water. Now just give me six or eight cups of coffee and I’ll be fine.”
“Used to know a man that breathed steam. Him and me had a pot we’d make stew in and suchlike, and he’d fill her with water and set her on the fire till she boiled. Then he’d take her off and put his head down and pull a blanket over him.”
“That was a different kind of headache,” the fat girl told Free. “Or maybe not.” She had drunk half her coffee while he spoke. “See, what I’m doing is maybe the same thing, only on the inside. Your buddy put his water in his pot and I put mine in mine.” She patted her belly. “Now I’m boiling it. When we get back to your house, I’ll pull the blanket up for three or four hours.”
“You might not get your sleep out,” the old man said. “They’re comin’ today.”
“Who’s coming?”
“Them that’ll wreck my house.”
“They tell you that?” the fat girl asked.
Free did not reply.
“Just a hunch, huh? Mr. Free, you know I’ll do anything I can. But hunches don’t always work out.”
“Mine do, Miz Garth.”
The waitress brought Free’s eggs and ham, and more coffee for the fat girl.
“Listen, I used to have a boyfriend who was a hunch player. Like, he’d look over his form and see a horse called Try Me, and it would hit him. That was his horse. ‘Guilty,’ I’d tell him, but he’d go nuts unless he had something down on Try Me. Or he’d see a robin fighting a glass door, and then there’d be this horse Gallant Portal. Sometimes they paid, but he never had any cash, and he took mine.”
The old man looked up, interested. “Gallant Portal win?”
The fat girl shook her head, then looked as if she was sorry she had. “Finished three or four places out of the money. Andy—his name was Andy—was always after me to lose some weight. I was always after him to quit the horses. It got to where we made each other feel awful all the time.”
She stirred in sugar. “One time I was in this hotel, and I met this really nice, kind of elderly dentist. Some girls will meet a john like that and say a hundred bucks and if he says no they’ll say seventy-five and so on depending on how low they’re willing to go, and sometimes I do that too, only it depends on the john, what I think he’s like. This time what I said was listen, I’m starving, you take me to dinner and we’ll go up to your room and it’ll be great. So we went down the street and I had a lobster and maybe a dozen oysters, plus the baked potato and that junk.
“About an hour after that I was going uptown and I went past a pizza joint. The dentist had slipped me fifty and I was feeling flush. With a certain type, mostly your older johns, you can let them feed you and then give them a good time and act like you like them, and they’re liable to give you damn near anything. Anyway, I went into the pizza joint and got a large with everything, and I was sitting there in the booth with a bottle of Diet Pepsi and it came to me that Andy was like me and I was like Andy. I could have walked right past that pizza joint, but if I had there would have been another one down the street, and I would have gone in because I passed up the first one. And if I couldn’t, I’d just as soon die.”
