by Gil Meynier
She should find a way of looking in on him every day to see if he was all right. What a fine manly fuss he’d raise if he found out that she was worrying about him! People are like children; you have to do what’s good for them without their knowing it.
Mayhew came in. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink. Gardening was a fool’s occupation, he thought, but—he shrugged his shoulders—one has to fill one’s time. He went to the icebox and helped himself to some food which he ate standing up. For good measure he sucked a couple of raw eggs. If someone did not eat them, they went to waste.
There was permanent smile on his round, elderly pink face as if he were constantly amused by his own thoughts. What was it he had been thinking about? Yes, the Paphian mimp.
The Paphian mimp was a certain pucker of the lips considered needful for the highly genteel. Lady Emily told Miss Alscrip, the heiress, that it was acquired by placing oneself before a looking-glass and repeating continually the words “nimini pimini.”
That was from General Burgoyne’s The Heiress (1781). Then there was another recipe.
“Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prisms. You will find it serviceable if you say to yourself on entering a room: papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prisms.”
That was from Little Dorrit. Charles Dickens (1885). Mayhew shook his head and, chuckling to himself, pursed his lips for the words “nimini pimini” and went to his room.
It wasn’t much of a room, this partitioned-off half of what had been a large back bedroom. But what can you expect for the kind of rent he was paying.
By the time it was dark, Mrs. Fred, Mrs. Jard and Joe had gone to the icebox, each assembling his own sketchy evening meal.
Mrs. Fred had gone out again. She was now lying on a battered deck chair at the back of the property, near the hen-coop. It had been a hot day but the sting of the sun was lacking in the warm evening air and she would stay there until it was cool.
She listened to the hens settling down for the night. There was something she did not understand about the hens. It had happened a while back. Someone from the City Hall had come and told her that it was all right for her to have up to twenty-four hens within the city limits but that she would have to get rid of her rooster. She had only about a dozen hens and they weren’t very good layers and she couldn’t see the sense of getting rid of the rooster. The man had told her that a city ordinance said that she should. Whoever wrote the city ordinance didn’t know much about hens.
There were many things Mrs. Fredenham did not understand and as the days went by she made less and less effort to try to understand them.
Shaved, carefully dressed and his hair freshly slicked back, Joe left the house, walking briskly toward town.
3
PEOPLE were lolling on their porches commenting on the heat of the day or the cool of the evening, watering their lawns, calling in their children and being neighborly. Going down Sixth Avenue, Joe scuffed his shoe against a small red tricycle carelessly left on the sidewalk near a funeral home. He looked around for someone to curse at. When he reached town he went directly to the car lot.
There was a red glow over the city from all the signs. Most of it came from the neon on the ten-story hotel and the movie house on Congress Street. When he neared the car lot he walked faster. He was in luck. His favorite car, the black Packard convertible, was there. That car made you feel you had something. He went into the tin shack at the back of the lot and paid his money to the night man. They stayed open until ten.
The night man placed Joe’s $6.75 in the desk drawer.
“Have a good time, Stud. I wish I could.”
Joe was an established customer so there was no deposit. He left the night man in the shack with the calendars and their candylike nude girls dressed in candlelight and garden hats.
He went to the car. He liked the smell of the black roadster. He never tired of the odor of gasoline, rubber and oil. The steering wheel was gummy and sticky from other hands, but what of it! The car was his for tonight. He looked into the glove compartment and, sure enough, someone had left an empty pint sitting there. He’d get rid of it later. The top was down and half a tankful of gas showed on the gauge. The mushy-sounding starter stirred up the engine and Joe backed out of the parking space in a splatter of gravel.
For a while nothing much happened. He drove around town, up and down Congress from the Rialto down to the Plaza where they showed Mexican movies. There were five movie houses on Congress and they had good-looking girls in the glass cages under the marquees. Beyond the Plaza, to the west, Congress Street sloped down to the bridge over the dry riverbed and petered out against the mountain, ten or twelve blocks away. Joe drove down there a couple of times to see what was going on in the Mexican eating places and dance halls.
Joe had a theory about women. Let them see you in a sporty car and when they’re ready they’ll come to you. If you get to be known as the fellow in the black convertible, it’s that much easier. If they had seen you driving a different car, all you had to say was that you were a car dealer.
Coming back from the dead end of Congress Street he slowed down as he passed the empty circus grounds. There was a girl walking to town on the unpaved sidewalk. He did not offer her a lift. Let her ask for it!
A car dealer! That was a good one. Joe was smarter than that. He had come to Tucson to do war work. War work. The Army had rejected him because he had some skin trouble. Skin trouble. Hell, it was all gone now. It got cured fast after that fellow told him to try washing with mechanic’s soap. Anyway, the war was over and he had never done any war work. He’d been here about a week when he fell into this Fredenham deal. Looking for a place to live because the hotel on Broadway was cutting into his money, he had walked up to this busted-looking house, on a hunch. Mrs. Fred had sat and talked to him for hours, as if he had been a caller. She had treated him like a caller, as if she thought he was someone she knew. She was alone in the big house and the more she talked the more he saw possibilities. She had gone on telling him about an old friend who had died in Phoenix and she wanted to send twenty-five dollars for the funeral. He had said he’d be glad to send it for her. He kept the twenty-five, of course, and the next day he came around again. Then he moved in.
Driving down Congress once more, he saw the same girl again. She was standing in front of the drugstore at the corner of Meyer Street. He was about to give her a honk when he saw her meet up with the fellow she obviously had been waiting for. To hell with her! On a brutal impulse Joe brusquely turned left on Meyer just as the girl and her boy friend were crossing the street. He almost hit them and they sure scattered in a hurry. Lucky there had been no police around. It was risky to do stuff like that in town. But he had enjoyed it.
Satisfied with the scare he had thrown into them he turned at the next corner and made his way toward South Sixth. The brightly lighted tourist courts had their No vacancy signs out.
He had vacancies! He thought of the girl in the front bedroom. He’d have to get better acquainted before he could figure what she was good for. Twenty-five bucks was a fair start. She looked as if she had possibilities.
His mind dwelt lingeringly on her romantic aspects until he was out on the Nogales road, past the vets’ hospital and the closed war plant. Gradually he speeded up and soon he was driving through the night as fast as the car could go.
Driving gave him a feeling of power. He had never owned a car but driving these rented wagons was better than owning your own. You could drive the heart out of them; you didn’t care how much rubber it cost when you slammed on the brakes. When they became sluggish and no longer gave you a thrill you just took them back and said: “Don’t give me that clunker any more.”
He passed the place where he wanted to go, a small house off the main road, but he continued on for a few miles because he was enjoying the beating he was giving the old Packard convertible. He was getting its peak roar out of it and the windstream felt good and sharp to his elbow. She was beginning to
smell hot. If they had forgotten to put oil in her, he would like to run her until her guts stuck together. That would teach them a lesson. But it would also take up more mileage than he wanted to pay for.
Abruptly he took his foot off the accelerator and then let the car choke itself from top speed to almost a standstill. It covered quite a distance before he finally put on the brakes and maneuvered to head the car back to town. Before picking up speed again he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the empty pint. He half turned his body and threw the bottle on the pavement behind him. It broke in a glassy splash that, for an instant, caught the red glint of his taillight then settled across the road, glittering on its own under the stars. “A present, from me,” said Joe to the world at large and he enjoyed the thought of what the broken glass would do to the tires of the next suckers that came along.
He didn’t speed up but drove at a leisurely clip back to the dirt road that led to the little house off the main road. Several cars were parked in the yard and no light showed in the shuttered windows. Everything looked normal. Joe got out of the car, walked to the side door and knocked.
After a short wait he heard the sliding cover of the peephole slam shut and the door was opened by an old fellow who locked it again behind him. The old man greeted him.
“Hi, Lucky.”
But no smile went with the greeting. In the cold appraising eye of the old gambler, too old to deal, but spry enough to be useful around the gambling house, there was envy and contempt.
Joe ignored him and went into the room where they had the crap table. The windows were tightly shuttered inside as well as outside and the room was completely bare and dark except where a compact cluster of people leaned over three sides of the brightly illuminated crap table.
It was mostly the same crowd that always gathered there, with a couple of new faces. The blonde woman who shrieked and moaned was there with the same fellow she always had. He was doing all right, Joe would say. Joe waited until he could squeeze in at the corner of the table on the dealer’s right.
The dealer was a pale, thin man who kept the game moving briskly. Early in the evening he worked the crap table by himself, the owner dealing blackjack in the other room and the third man running the roulette wheel. Later on in the night the roulette and blackjack would fold and the boss and the other man would take over the crap game.
It was the blonde’s turn at the dice. The dealer deftly raked in the bets from the previous pass and paid off the winners. The customers all watched the blonde lean over and shriek and moan as she threw the dice. Joe handed over to the dealer a five and a one, folded lengthwise together, the five on the outside, and no one noticed that he got ten one-dollar chips in exchange. His elbow on the edge of the table to stake out his place, he slipped four of the chips into his coat pocket.
The dealer was going good, talking to the dice, calling the rolls, making the terse comments that encourage play, raking in and paying out and keeping the crowd lively.
Joe dropped a quarter on the table, and the next time the dealer paid off, while the customers were laughing at the blonde, he tossed a couple of dollar chips over to Joe’s corner. Joe casually picked up the quarter and left the two dollars on the table.
The blonde had pulled a new one tonight and everybody was watching her, except the fellow who was with her. She had tucked away some yellow chips in her brassiere and every time she ran out of smaller chips she said:
“Well, I’ve got to go to the bank.”
And she reached in there and the customers broke their necks watching her.
This was an easy night. They paid no attention to Joe and all he had to do was pick up the chips that were tossed over to him and to look out for the owner or the other houseman. Occasionally, when someone else was buying chips from the dealer Joe cashed in some of his chips and held the bills in his hand for a while so that if any of the house guys came in they would think he was losing. When you win you have chips. When you are losing you have to pull out the bills.
Pretty soon the chips stopped coming to him. When he was sure that he understood that this was all for tonight, he left the crap table and went to the other room. He still had five dollars’ worth of chips he had held out on the crap deal. He stood by the roulette wheel where only two people were playing. After watching the play for a while he thought it was time for zero to come up. On the next spin, at the last possible moment, he placed the five dollars on zero and double zero. If he won he would be eighty-five dollars to the good. He didn’t win.
The old doorman saw him lose at the roulette wheel.
“How’d you come out, Lucky?” he asked as he unlocked the door.
“Bah ..said Joe, and he shrugged his shoulders as in disgust.
The old man chuckled.
The boss had told him to smile when the customers won, but he preferred to chuckle when they lost. And they always lost in the long run. He had reason to chuckle. He, at least, was sure of his five bucks a night, every night, just for watching the door.
“Come again,” he said.
Joe drove back to town. He turned off Sixth and parked on a side street alongside a night-club. There were about twenty cars already parked there along the dark, unpaved curb. He put up the canvas top and fastened it. Late at night a closed car is better. Then he sat in the convertible and waited to see what would develop.
A few couples came out, got into their cars and drove away. Some argued before they got into their cars. There was one couple, Joe was pretty sure that the girl was going to leave her fellow right there. She started to walk away from him and for a moment it looked good. But the fellow went after her. They argued a bit on the sidewalk and eventually they went back inside.
Once, at closing time like this, a man had come out with two girls. They were all pretty high and they didn’t have a car. When they finally got into Joe’s car, he took them for a ride in the country. After an hour or so, he and the man had switched girls. That was the only time Joe had had any real fun.
While he sat in the dark parked car on the side street he thought about Dorry. It was nice to think of a girl like that, asleep in the front bedroom.
He thought about her, in various ways, until the night-club closed. Then, when he might have had a chance to pick up something a police car drove up and the squad watched the people get into their cars and drive off. Joe didn’t like police cars. He started the black Packard and drove off without waiting.
In a bad mood he drove south again and out on the road to El Paso.
There were a couple of brightly lighted roadhouses on the desert, cars nosed up to them like so many flies around a piece of cake. Joe drove on. There was no time for that now.
He pulled up in front of an all-night lunch counter and went in.
It was almost two o’clock. At two o’clock back there in the gambling house, Mac would take off his eyeshade, roll down his sleeves and the boss would take over the crap table. He’d get into his car, drive toward town, turn off on the El Paso road, honk his horn just before he reached the lunch counter and once again as he passed it. Then he would go and wait for Joe a little farther along the road.
Joe had a cup of coffee. When he heard the honks he put a nickel in the juke box. When the piece was finished he casually left the lunch counter and drove off. Three minutes away—the time it took the juke box to play one piece—Mac was waiting for him at the side of the road. He was standing there pretending to look at his back tires. Joe pulled up behind him and joined him.
“Hi, Mac,” said Joe.
Mac nodded.
“Twenty-nine apiece, Mac,” said Joe, reaching into his coat pocket for the already folded bills he had placed there back at the lunch counter.
Mac looked at him and said coldly:
“Count again.”
It didn’t seem possible that Mac could have kept track of all the chips, but obviously he had. Joe felt caught and helpless. The extra five he had held out to play roulette stuck in his mind
and for a few seconds he seemed to be incapable of mentally readjusting the total.
His hands in his pockets, looking at Joe with angry eyes and a hard face, Mac said:
“I make it thirty-one fifty.”
Joe tried to laugh it off as he fumbled with the money.
“I guess I’m not very good at quick figures,” he said.
“You’d better learn,” said Mac slowly, as he took the money.
Without another word Mac got into his car and drove off. Joe watched him make a U-turn at the next roadside parking place and head back to town, to the hotel on Broadway where Joe had first met him. Joe felt clumsy and helpless. The feeling of being a big operator was gone. Mac had treated him like a kid. Joe felt like taking off after him and ramming the heavy Packard right through his flimsy car.
His mind full of curses, Joe turned the car around, and rather than follow Mac he turned off on a dirt road and speeded up. It was a bumpy, washboard road and as he drove on his fury mounted. Everything had gone wrong tonight.
“I’ll get him for that,” Joe repeated to himself as he held the car to sixty on the lousy road. When he hit Broadway, several miles east of town, he made a sharp skidding turn on the gravel and headed for home.
As he neared the golf course he saw a man rise unsteadily from the bench at the bus stop and step onto the road. The man looked vaguely like Mac. Same build. He was shakily thumbing Joe for a ride.
Joe gritted his teeth, stepped on the accelerator and hurled the car at the wobbly man on the road. “Here, you bastard,” he said as the car struck the man and knocked him back toward the bench.
Some time later he slowed down. His hands were hurting from holding on too tightly to the wheel and he felt sick and scared.
He made his way through the side streets and put the car back on the car lot. There were no scratches or dents on the right front fender that he could see.
