Shabby Street

by Orrie Hitt

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  Wet Kisses …

  There she was, alone out there on the raft with me — and naked. I moved a little closer.

  “Maybe I’m the wrong kind of a guy for you,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking this way to you. I’m not smart — the way you are. I don’t even know what kind of a fork to use when I go out.”

  I kept on talking and I kept on moving in on her. I told her how much fun she was and how much I liked her.

  “I like you, too,” she murmured.

  All the time I kept getting nearer. Until I could feel the heat of her body. Until I could hear her deep breathing. Then I touched her smooth skin and the rockets went off. I pulled her head around and mashed my mouth down on her lips. She trembled and clung to me.

  She was still in my arms when we lost our balance and fell off the raft into the lake …

  SHABBY

  street

  by ORRIE HITT

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Dolls and Dues

  Also Available

  Copyright

  CHAPTER I

  Dark Passion

  I SAT on my stool behind the hotel desk, thinking about the redhead who had just checked into two-four. Then I forgot all about her as the telephone girl started straightening her sweater in some interesting places.

  “Lord!” Janet Hobbs sighed. “Only ten-thirty! Isn’t this night ever going to end? Half-hour to go.”

  By my watch every night in this creep joint was too long. The rugs in the lobby were faded and the seats of the chairs sagged worse than the knees of my pants. The manager had a lousy disposition and a couple of ulcers as big as watermelons. One of the bellhops was always chasing strange-acting guys. After almost a month in the racket I was ready to get out of the hotel business for good.

  I kept looking at Janet as she went about making her connections at the switchboard. There was one connection I was willing to bet she hadn’t made yet. I’d only known her three weeks, but already I’d been thrown out near home a couple of times. That didn’t bother me any. Hell, I told myself, give me enough time and some night she’d let me pull the shades down for her.

  “Coffee later, Johnny?”

  “Yeah.”

  She went back to her buzzers, her slim fingers dancing over the board. She wasn’t any raving beauty. She just looked innocent and interesting. Her hair was black and her eyes were black and she had a pink rose complexion. She also had an hourglass figure with round, soft curves that wobbled just right when she walked — and got me thinking all wrong.

  A drunk came in and tried to get the key to somebody else’s room. I gave him the right key and he went off toward the elevator, swearing and stumbling. I kicked the stool out of the way and started counting the cash in the drawer.

  It was a damn shame for a guy to be caught in a mouse trap like the Hotel Shelly.

  The redhead came down from two-four and tossed her body outside. I got the cash mixed up and started all over again.

  The only difference between the Hotel Shelly and the city dump was that the hotel had a roof over it. Besides, the dump was out past the edge of town — past Clarke Street, even. Every time I thought of Clarke Street my feet felt like they were stuck in a couple of piles of sand. Clarke Street was the beginning of one world and the end of another.

  “You ought to go down and see your folks some night,” Janet said. “They’d be glad to see you.”

  She told me the same thing every night.

  “To hell with it,” I said.

  I told her the same thing every night.

  There was no sense for me to knock on the door of number eight Clarke Street. That place was so crowded now there wouldn’t be room enough for me to stand inside on one foot. My brother Sam and his wife and four kids had moved in the same day I’d checked out. They only had five rooms on the second floor. The way my old man snored they’d have to sleep with their heads stuck out of the windows. They were welcome to it.

  I closed up the cash sheet for my shift and thought about number thirty-seven Clarke Street. That was the big apartment house at the corner of Clarke and Main. That was a tear in another piece of cloth. That was where Julie Wilson lived.

  The last time I’d seen Julie she’d been pushing the baby carriage down Main, her slim body looking good in a thin summer dress, her blonde hair cascading over her square-set shoulders, her chin plenty stubborn and her eyes defiant.

  “Hello, Julie,” I’d said.

  The late evening shadows had been falling off the tops of the buildings into the street and she’d looked at me for a second or so before she knew who I was.

  “Hello, Johnny Reagan,” she’d said.

  And, then, she’d leaned down, looking at the kid, a slight smile pulling at her full lips.

  “He looks like me, Johnny.”

  “Yeah.” It’d been getting so dark that I couldn’t tell if the kid had one or two heads. “Yeah,” I said, “she looks like you all right.”

  “He,” Julie said. “He’s my boy.”

  “Okay.”

  She’d gone on down the street, passing under the light, and I could see that she was walking real straight, like she didn’t care. I’d watched her for a long time, thinking about what a lot of guts she had. She wasn’t crying, or yelling for the army to bring her sergeant back and make him marry her. She was just living it out to the end of the string.

  Fairweather, the other clerk, came on at five of eleven. He was forty-five and as bald as a tennis ball in the sun. He got a bottle out of the cash drawer, went behind the key rack and made a lot of noise with his nose. When he came back I could see some brown spots down the front of his white shirt. Maybe he looked like hell, but there was one thing about him — he was one hundred percent for the hotel and that helped make up for the fifty percent I lacked.

  I had to stick around until after he checked the cash. He put on a pair of five-and-ten-cent store glasses and looked everything over like he had a first mortgage on the place. I was getting a whole lot tired of Fairweather.

  “On the button,” he said, after a while.

  I went through the lobby and out to the street. Janet was down at the corner talking with a big, fat man. The white polo shirt the man was wearing hung on him like a burlap bag. I lit a cigarette and walked toward them.

  “I want you to meet Mr. Connors,” Janet said, tossing her curls. Mr. Connors, Johnny Reagan.”

  “Hello,” I said.

  The fat man grunted and I felt a big, warm hand wind around five of my finger
s.

  “Mr. Connors is in the insurance business,” Janet told me.

  We struggled briefly and I got my hand back.

  “Life insurance,” Connors said.

  “That’s a tough racket,” I said.

  “I have agents working for me,” Connors explained. “Six of them. I don’t do any of the collecting any more myself.”

  “Well, that’s different.”

  “And it isn’t a racket,” he insisted. “It’s a good way of making a living.”

  “Sure.”

  All the insurance men I’d ever known had had big cars — fast and often.

  “Johnny works in the hotel,” Janet said. “On the desk.”

  I gave her a hard look; I didn’t like to be reminded about the crumby job I had.

  “Once I get myself a better deal,” I said, “I’m pulling out of that Siberia.”

  “I know they don’t pay much,” Connors said.

  “You can say that again.”

  “A young fellow ought to have a better job than that.”

  Sure, I thought, thirty-one, and five years worse off than if I’d stayed in the box factory. The box factory hadn’t paid much, either, but there was always somebody around who could punch the clock for you and build up overtime. At the hotel you could work until they swept you up off the floor and they wouldn’t even give you a bottle of beer for your trouble.

  “Supposing I wanted to get in the insurance business?” I asked Connors. “How would I go about it?”

  He tried to tuck his shirt into his pants but he couldn’t quite make it.

  “You might just as well come right out and ask me for a job,” he said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “No hedging with you, Johnny.”

  “It wouldn’t get me anyplace, if I did.”

  He was silent for a couple of minutes, looking me over real good. His face was fat but there was something strong about it, too. Maybe it was his eyes, small eyes that seemed to pull you right up against him. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was, probably six feet, and he held his head back a little, staring up at me.

  “I guess you’re used to meeting the public, Johnny?”

  A guy meets the public in a hotel, in bars, in the box factory, on Clarke Street. The public is people and people are all over, crawling around the world like mice on a box of cheese. A guy can’t help stumbling over them.

  “I’m used to meeting the public,” I assured him.

  “And selling? Ever do any selling, Johnny?”

  When I was twelve I’d done a little selling for Mae, who’d lived down at the end of Clarke Street, about a yard of cinders away from the railroad. I’d gone up to Main, about ten at night, wandering along the sidewalk and asking all the guys I met all the questions Mae had told me to ask. Mae had been a whore and the cops had run me in for being a kid pimp. I’d given up selling right away.

  “I never had a chance,” I told him. “I got stopped before I ever got started.”

  He nodded and lit a cigar as long as my right leg. The smoke from it smelled good in the damp June night. Janet coughed once and waved the blue cloud away from her face. She had a nice smile and clear white teeth. She was a fairly good looking head.

  “Tell you what,” Connors said. “Why don’t you come down to my office in the morning and we’ll talk this thing over.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I will.”

  “I think one of my men has made up his mind to quit and there might be a possibility for you.”

  “That would be a good break, all right.”

  “No promises,” he said. “But we can both think about it.”

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t have to think about it. All he had to do was wave a job at me and I’d knock him down on my way to work.

  He gave Janet a big, friendly hug and said goodnight. He went across the street and got into a Cadillac that had wire wheels and lots of chrome. The engine ripped a hole in the night as he shot off up the street.

  “Thanks, Janet,” I said quietly. “Thanks a hell of a lot.”

  She looped her arm through mine and crept in close. She had a soft, round hip and I didn’t try to push her away. We walked slowly through the alternate patches of light and shadow.

  “You might get a good job out of Mr. Connors,” Janet said.

  “Yeah.”

  “He seemed to like you.”

  We kept on walking. The top of her head, about five-feet-two from the ground, hung down there below my left shoulder. All around me was the good, clean freshness of her.

  “I was wondering how you knew him,” I said. “A big guy with plenty of money.”

  “I guess he’s got money.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “He used to come to Rotary,” she said. “That was last winter, when Rotary met at the hotel and before they decided to go out to Cranberry Inn. He had lots of calls and I tried to be nice to him.”

  “I guess you were.”

  She squeezed my arm tight.

  “I hope it pays off all right for you,” she said.

  Up the street a flashing neon light said Pawn Shop. Past that, on the other side, a lighted arrow pointed the way to the Emergency Finance Company. I wondered how many times my old man had gone up there and hocked his soul.

  We turned down a side street and the night was a deeper black.

  Janet lived on the third floor of a big brick building in the middle of the block. I had a room in a cracker box a little further down Center Street, two or three smells away from the tannery shed. Both places looked hulking and miserable against the gray night sky.

  “It’s a hell of a way to live,” I said. “Like a rat in the bottom of an empty barrel.”

  “It’s your own fault,” she said. “With me it’s different. I don’t have anybody, but you’ve got a family.”

  Janet’s father had shot her mother when she was just a little kid, and the father had stuck his head in the gas oven. An aunt had brought her up, but the aunt had died during Janet’s last year in high school.

  “Damn place looks like a tomb,” I told her; there wasn’t a light visible from within the brick house.

  “They all go to bed real early,” she said. “Most of them have to be on the job before eight every morning.”

  “I suppose so.”

  We went up the wooden steps to the long, wide porch. The low roof leaned out into the night and pulled the blackness inside. We stumbled over a floor mat and I swore softly.

  “’Night, Johnny,” she said.

  I could feel her right there, real close, and I didn’t want her to go away.

  “We should have stopped and had a beer,” I said.

  “I sure as hell don’t want to go to sleep just yet.”

  “You’re thinking about tomorrow morning, I guess.”

  Her hand slid up my chest and across my face. I could feel my beard crackle against the soft touch of her fingers.

  “Maybe I’m thinking about something else,” I said.

  A train whistle squalled in the night and a dog started to bark. Somebody next door swore loudly at somebody else and then things got quiet again.

  “You’re a funny guy, Johnny,” Janet said softly. “You talk so tough sometimes — so hard — and you aren’t hard at all.”

  She could take me any way she wanted to.

  “I’ll be thinking of you in the morning,” she said. “And wishing you luck.”

  She stood on her toes and reached up and pulled my head down. Her lips were dry and afraid and she just pushed them up against my cheek and let go again.

  “Plenty of luck, Johnny!” she whispered.

  My arms went around her hard and quick and I felt her whole body stiffen. Her back was warm and soft and the taut strap of her brassiere grew more rigid under my thumb.

  “Janet, baby!”

  She tried to turn her head away but I was too fast for her. My lips found her mouth without any trouble at all. My one ha
nd slid down to the small of her back, just above the roundness, and I slammed her to me. The heat from her breasts burned through my shirt and blazed twin dots on my chest.

  Her lips parted and a tiny sob came up from her throat. Her fingers kneaded my flesh, moving around, and her tongue flashed wild and hot.

  “Johnny!”

  She began to cry. She was afraid and I knew she was afraid. She was falling apart inside.

  I pushed the door open.

  “I’ll follow you,” I said. “I won’t make any noise.”

  “No!”

  I kissed her again and she didn’t try to get away. But she wouldn’t open her mouth any more and the tears were wet on her face.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” I told her. “Just hang onto my hand.”

  I couldn’t see her there in the darkness, but I could feel her trembling.

  “Johnny?”

  “Yes.”

  “I — ”

  She didn’t say anything more. Her voice died off into a whimper and she walked on into the house. Her fingers felt cold as she held tight to my hand.

  We went up the first flight of stairs and along another hallway. Somebody was snoring in one of the rooms and another guy was talking in his sleep. There was a fifteen-watt bulb at the bottom of the second set of stairs. We slid by that and kept right on going up.

  She unlocked her door and we went inside. It was as black as the inside of a bag in there and I couldn’t tell very much about the place.

  “I think I’m going to hate myself for this tomorrow,” she said.

  “Tomorrow’s a long ways off.”

  “Maybe it won’t come.”

  “Maybe.”

  She took me across the room and we sat down on the bed. We sat real close, sliding down into the hollow of the old mattress.

  “I’m almost afraid,” she said.

  “You needn’t be.”

  “It’s the first — time.”

  I pulled her around roughly, jamming my mouth down on her lips. She’d stopped her crying and I was glad of that. Her hair fell against my face and her mouth opened up and the night began.

  I got hold of her sweater and ripped it off her.