Jack did not feel any regret. After all, what else could you do with twenty dollars?
Four
Billy got the full force of his lonesomeness that night, back again at Ben Fenne’s, half-waiting for Denny and the others to come and get him for the party. There were only a few games going, nothing for Billy—at the keno table some college boys were playing for ten cents a game—and so he sat at the counter back of the keno table and near the pinball machines, nursing a cup of coffee, waiting, trying to pretend that he was not waiting; trying to pretend that he did not want the other boys for friends, only opponents. He felt like a fool.
It was odd how he had dreamed about it, when he had gone back to his room to stash most of his money and then lie down for a rest. He remembered parts of the dream vividly: he had given Denny twenty dollars to guarantee that he wait for him; how he had said to someone—it wasn’t really Denny, in fact, Billy thought it might have been a Negro kid—exactly the same words he told Denny, “Now you don’t have to sweat me out.” Only in the dream everything had been so mixed up. He had been playing pool, all right, but out in a wide green field, with white clouds above. The grass was like a golf green, and he had been lying down, shooting the pool balls. The sun had been hot on his back, and there were other kids around. They seemed to be all about ten years old, and he thought that maybe in the dream he had been a kid, too. He was the only one playing pool; the rest of them were on the edge of the field, picking flowers. Then it got confusing. One of the kids came up to Billy, holding a bunch of flowers up to his face—Billy could see him again, grinning through the flowers—and for some reason, Billy handed the kid some money and said, “Now you don’t have to sweat me out.”
He sipped at his coffee, and then glanced at the clock. It was twenty after seven. He shrugged to himself. Something was bothering him, and he was certain that it wasn’t just Denny. Something about the dream. Was it money he had handed the kid? He tried to focus the picture in his mind. There was something.... Then he got it. But it was even crazier. It wasn’t money, it was his right arm the kid took. Billy could now remember thinking with mild amazement that it hadn’t hurt to take off his right arm. Right is might, he thought; no, that’s bassackwards. And what had he said? “Now you don’t have to let me out.” His aunt at home had a couple of dream books which she used to consult regularly; maybe she could explain it to him. He tried to laugh, but the memory of the images still bothered him. The wide field, a place he had been before, as a kid. Probably a football field. Clouds, sure, you could always expect some clouds in Seattle; the funny part was the warmth on his back, which he could still almost feel. “Now you don’t have to let me out,” it seemed in his recollection, because all the other kids finished picking flowers and then ran down the street; but they weren’t going home. He was the one that had to go home, up over all those hills; they were all going downtown to sell the flowers or something.
“Your name’s Billy, isn’t it?”
Billy looked up into the white face, startled, and said, “That’s right.”
The man was obviously a plainclothes cop; big, beefy, hard mouth. But he seemed friendly enough. “Could we talk back here?” he asked Billy.
“Sure.” Now thoroughly frightened, Billy followed the cop to the back of the poolhall, where they sat down next to each other. Billy sat forward, letting his hands fall between his legs. He wanted to press his hands together, to keep them from trembling, but he didn’t. “What’s up?” he said. He smiled at the cop weakly.
“Got a guilty conscience?” the cop said.
“Don’t everybody?”
The cop didn’t like that. Billy noticed something strange about his field of vision; he could see the cop’s face clearly, but around it was a sort of rainbow aura, and everything else was misty and indistinct. The face, the big, white face, looked a little sour at Billy’s last remark, and it said, “No. Not everybody. You’re new around here, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Billy said. “I just come down from Seattle to visit my aunt.”
“You won a lot of money this afternoon, Billy. But you had a lot when you came in, too. Where’d you get the money?”
“That fifteen dollars was my trip money, sir.”
“When are you going back to Seattle?”
“Sunday night, sir. On the train.”
“That’s good,” the cop said. He stood up. “Just a friendly talk, boy. No harm. You’re a pretty good pool gambler, boy.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
You motherfucker!
Billy stood, trembling with rage and relief, and watched the cop amble back to the bar, where he picked up a half-empty glass of beer and drank from it. God damn you, Billy thought, you rotten cop motherfucking bastard! Billy knew he had been braced just because the cop saw him and wanted to pass the time; had probably hoped that Billy would have fallen apart under the questioning and confessed to a couple of rapes and assorted chicken theft and mopery; braced him as a matter of routine, known that Billy had lied to him and didn’t care; just passing the time; probably off duty and having a beer before going home or on duty. Billy’s whole body trembled, and he walked into the men’s room and threw cold water on his face, and then wiped it off with a paper towel. He stood up at the big smelly urinal and tried to urinate, but it would not come. He stood there, trembling, waiting, occasionally shaking himself angrily. “Come on, dammit, pee!” he said through his teeth. But he knew all his rage was not directed at the cop; there was something under and behind it; the thought that they had not, after all, sent the police after him.
Why didn’t you? Why haven’t you tried to find me?
He wanted to burst into tears. It loomed over him: he was alone, unwanted, unsearched for, hounded by the police, useless, black. But even that didn’t matter; not the blackness. He wasn’t even black, just yellow. That didn’t matter; he could pat flour all over his face—he had done that once as a little kid—and they would still ignore him or laugh at him; it was him, not the blackness; him they didn’t want and let run away and did not care if he ended up in a strange jail and left to rot. With the dreadful clarity of self-pity he saw himself as he really was, a frightened little baby who hadn’t the guts to stand up to the accident of his birth, who hadn’t the character to make the world like him or eat it. Just another yellowbelly, just another fool who gave money away and hoped people would take pity on him.
“What the hell, I thought you fell in,” Denny said to him, grinning. He stood up to the other urinal, flipped out his penis, and began to piss noisily. “Man, you’re gray in the face; did that fuggin cop scare you?”
Billy pretended he was finished, and went to the sink. “Hell yes, man.”
“He’s an asshole,” Denny said. “Do you colored guys ever sunburn?”
Billy looked up at him. There was no mockery in Denny’s face. “Sure,” Billy said. “Just like anybody else.”
“I mean, you got sort of red hair, like me. Red-haired guys burn like hell, no?”
“That’s why I like to stay down in a nice cool poolhall,” Billy grinned.
“Yah, but your balls get moldy. Less go party-time.”
Well, well, Billy thought. Well, well.
He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare, and by the time they got to the top of the stairs and piled into the car, he was bubbling with humor, and when he got up on Jack Levitt’s lap—the only place he could sit—he said, “Now, every time we go over a bump, you owe me a dollar.”
“Have a beer,” Levitt replied.
“Make him pay for it,” Bobby Case said from the front seat. “He’s got all the fuggin money.”
“He don’t pay for shit,” Denny said. “This party’s on me.” Everybody in the car laughed, except Kol Mano, who was intent on cruising Broadway one more time, in the hope that they could pick up some girls. When they went past the Corner, there were a few guys leaning against a car in front of the drugstore at whom Denny blew
a loud razzberry.
Bobby Case said to Billy seriously, “You know, you and me ought to go to Frisco. There’s a hell of a lot of money down there, and they’ll spot you like crazy; we could cut those old fuckers up for a fortune. I did it once before, and they all thought I was just lucky.”
“That’s an idea,” Billy said. “That’s an idea.”
“Goddam,” Denny said, “you two’d be murder together.”
There were three boys in the car Billy had never seen before, and one of them said, “I don’t actually think you fooled anybody in San Francisco, Case. I think those men just couldn’t stand the idea of your beating them.”
“That’s true,” Billy said to him. The boy who spoke looked about eighteen, and had a high forehead and a long, inquisitive nose and almost no chin. “I’ve seen that in Seattle; guys who just couldn’t take the idea of bein beat by some colored kid.” He laughed. “They were my meat!”
“I’ve got your meat,” Denny laughed.
“Now, that’s two dollars,” Billy laughed. Mano turned away from his driving for a moment with an impatient look, and Billy wondered if, after all, he didn’t like Negroes. Well, if he didn’t, fuck him. The others didn’t seem to mind. He guzzled beer from the bottle Levitt had passed him from the opened case on the floor, feeling the cold needles go down his throat. Tonight, he thought, I’m gonna party like the world was comin to an end.
Five
The party got out of hand almost immediately. The original idea had been a poker game to trim Billy Lancing, with a party to drink up as much of the free liquor as possible and haul the rest away—all very quiet behind the blackout drapes of the expensive home—but the poker game fizzled out, and then, to get some girls, they had had to invite too many people. It rapidly developed into a brawl.
The first odd thing Jack noticed was that Kol Mano disappeared only a few minutes after they had arrived. He had parked his car almost two blocks away, under some trees, and when they got to the house, sneaked around to the back and gone in, Mano had said, “This is uncool.” Shortly after Denny had shown Mano all the stacks of cased whiskey, Mano vanished, and Jack decided that a couple of the cases of whiskey were gone, too. Mano probably hadn’t planned to stay at all, and vaguely Jack felt as if he had been taken. Mano was strange; people had hinted that he was a drug addict, a queer, lots of things, but Jack didn’t know anything about it; he only saw Mano as a very cool man who never seemed to be too far from the money. Now he was gone. Jack had been meaning to sit down and have a talk with him. He shrugged. Some other time. There was the party going on.
Somebody had gotten on the telephone, and now there were about fifteen people running around the house, nearly two boys for every girl from the look of it; and Jack meant to get himself one of the girls. Just because he had been to the Model Hotel the day before and again that very afternoon meant nothing. He wanted a girl very badly. Some were even pretty, and he decided he wanted the prettiest one for himself.
He wandered through the three floors of the house, a bottle of Scotch in his hand, looking over the action. There were kids everywhere. None of them had ever been in a house like this before. Most of them, like Denny, lived in crowded homes in places like St. Johns or Sellwood, or Northwest Portland, and the sight of all this wealth subdued them. They just walked around at first, almost intimidated by the near-presence of the rich and powerful owners of the property, looking in the closets at the racks of expensive clothing, in the bureau drawers packed full of silken things. But after a while the whiskey and familiarity dulled their sense of being in a museum, and they began to get noisy, and to act as if they were in an ordinary home, having an ordinary party. Only Jack, Denny, and Billy Lancing knew for certain that they were committing a crime by just being in the house. They had told the others that they had permission from young Weinfeld. Bobby Case knew, too, but after wandering around for half an hour, he stole some of the kid’s clothes (which fitted him very well) and left the party.
On impulse, Jack went out into the hedge-rimmed garden in back of the house. There was a lawn, and the large black shadows of trees darkened the area to the rear of the garden. The sky above was clouded and tinted red from the lights of downtown. Faint noises came from the house; not loud enough, Jack felt, to be heard in the houses of the neighborhood, but light shone through amber window shades, and that could be seen—it was only in the front of the house and on the main floor that there were blackout drapes. Jack began to wonder if the neighbors would know the people were supposed to be on vacation. He did not know anything about how neighbors were supposed to be; he did not know that in upper middle-class neighborhoods such as this one, neighbors frequently did not know each other personally, did not even nod in greeting if they saw one another; he did not happen to know that the Weinfelds were Jews, and that there were no other Jews in this particular section of the neighborhood. So he began to be worried about what would happen if anyone saw the lights in the windows or heard a fragment of noise, a laugh, or a yell and decided to call the police.
He took a drink of whiskey and coughed. If the cops came, they would probably walk up to the front door and ring the bell. There were three or four cars parked out in front. The cops would notice these cars, and the boys they belonged to would be out of luck. But not Jack. When the cops came in, he would go out the back door. He looked at the hedge in the back. He could get over it easily; it was only about six feet high. He would have no trouble getting away. He relaxed.
But then, if he did get away (assuming the cops showed up at all), he would still be right back where he started: broke, locked out, etc. He felt a stirring of anger, not at society for failing to have provided him with money; not at himself for his refusal to work; but at the situation itself, for existing. Damn it! he thought. He took another drink of whiskey. There was nothing he could do about it now; so he might just as well get as drunk as he could, have fun, find a girl, and worry about later later.
“Hey,” said a voice out of the black. “Takin the air?”
“Who is it?”
“Billy.”
They approached each other. Billy, too, had a bottle, and they stood together for a few moments, drinking silently. Finally, Jack said, “What you doin out here? Takin the air yourself?”
“Yeah. This’s not much of a party, is it?”
“Well, you know.”
Later, when Jack had plenty of time to think about it, he wondered why he had not taken this golden opportunity to coldcock Billy Lancing and get his money. He had plenty of time to think about it, and he went over every possible motive in his mind. It wasn’t because he and Billy were friends, and even if they had been, Jack saw no reason not to do it; Billy had money, lots of it, and Jack needed money. And it was not because Billy was smaller and defenseless, even in a way trusted Jack not to take advantage of this accidentally private meeting; no such motive had ever stirred Jack in his life. And it certainly wasn’t because Jack didn’t think of it, or because he was afraid to, or because it seemed unethical to invite a person to a party and then rob him (that had been the original idea of inviting Billy). In fact, in all the time Jack had to think about it he was not able to come up with a logical, reasonable answer. They stood there in the garden and talked, and then they went back in the house. That was all that happened. It was inexplicable.
A great deal was going on inside the house. In the basement party room, three couples were dancing, and one lone boy was behind the bar trying out different exotic combinations of liquor. When Jack came in for another bottle, this boy was holding up something greenish in a milk-shake glass and grinning like a mad scientist. Jack took the glass from him and sipped at the drink; it tasted like sour candy. He gave the glass back and picked up a bottle half-full of Cutty Sark. He looked at the dancers. They all seemed to be elsewhere, moving slowly to the radio playing “Dream.”
It seemed so cozy. He went upstairs. The living room was empty. Several of the glass animals from the mantelpiece had
fallen or been dropped on the hearth, and were broken. The nice lady in the white dress with the blue sash looked out into the empty room with a nice, pleasant, warm smile, not noticing what had happened to her ornaments. Her beautiful Persian rug, too, had been damaged by cigarette burns and some spilled liquor, but she did not see it; she was looking off into the distance. Jack saluted her with his bottle and went into the kitchen. Denny, Billy Lancing, and three other boys were sitting around the kitchen table, talking. The room was full of smoke. Somebody had been cooking something on the stove, and it had boiled over and burned. There were long yellowish-black streaks down the side of the stove, and the gas was still on under a blackened pot. Jack went over and looked in, but he could not tell what had been cooking. The boys at the table seemed to be talking about another party, not this one, one that had happened in the past. Jack could not quite make out what they were saying. Either they were drunk, or he was. Perhaps they were all drunk. Jack’s ears buzzed, and his legs felt long and rubbery. One of the boys at the table finished his bottle and tossed it across the kitchen. It tinkled. Jack grinned. That was a funny thing to do. He looked at his bottle. Too full.
“I want a cigar,” he said. No one answered him. He wandered out of the kitchen. Where were the cigars? Oh, yes, in the “Library.” Jack knew this room he was looking for was called the “Library” because he had seen movies in which people had such rooms. It was a room full of books, a small room, but still, full of books. And there was a desk. He and Denny had searched through the desk the night before, looking for money. The son of a bitch that owned the desk did not keep money in it. The fool. Jack wandered around until he found the room. The light was off, and he flicked the mercury switch (which did not click) and caught a boy and a girl on the leather couch. Jack saw a flash of white thigh as the girl turned quickly toward him, smoothing down her skirt. Her face was smeared and puffed, her lips parted over two prominent rabbit’s teeth. The boy sat up, his long Hollywood haircut all messed and down over his forehead. He had pimples and the beginnings of a tiny mustache.
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