Shabby Street

by Orrie Hitt

  “You’re hurting me, Johnny!”

  I hooked my finger under the brassiere strap and the thing popped open.

  I touched her breasts and her little flat stomach. Her fingers clawed at my clothes and I heard a button strike the wall. My hand kept going down. She kissed me once more, real hard, and then she flung herself back on the bed, moaning.

  “Janet?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you’re afraid — ”

  “It’s all right,” she murmured. “I’m not afraid.”

  I bent and kissed her again. Her arms coiled around my neck, making my shoulders ache. She clung to me with a passion that made me weak, made me almost sick, made me want to die right there in that room.

  I pulled the shades down for her that night.

  CHAPTER II

  Morning After

  I SAT on the arm of a chair, staring out of the window at the newness of the morning, seeing nothing. I didn’t even bother looking at her. I knew that she was in bed, with the sheet pulled up around her chin, hiding herself like I didn’t know what was underneath. Right then, I didn’t much care.

  “You’d better wait until after the others leave for work,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “It wouldn’t seem right, you going out of here at this time of the morning.”

  “How’d they know what room I just left?”

  She was quiet for a long time, so I turned and looked at her. Her hair slashed a dark ribbon across the white pillow. Her face was flushed and her eyes had a sparkle to them. She smiled and stretched.

  “I guess they wouldn’t,” she said. She puckered up her nose and dug down into the bed. “Anyway, I wouldn’t care an awful lot. It would be different if we didn’t love each other.”

  I just stared at her.

  She rolled over on her side, facing the wall, and I watched one finger trace a lazy design on the wallpaper.

  “It is love, isn’t it, Johnny?”

  I got up and walked around the chair a couple of times. I couldn’t remember everything I’d told her. I was pretty sure that I’d only told her all of the things that any man would tell any woman he happened to take to bed.

  “I’d want to be sure, Johnny. I’d want to be awful sure.”

  “Yeah.”

  She sat up in bed. The sheet slid down and lay across her hips. Her nightgown dipped away from her breasts, and the hollow between them appeared deep and warm.

  “Promise me something, Johnny?”

  “Sure.”

  I offered her a cigarette, trying to keep my eyes on her face. She shook her head and I dropped the pack on the end table.

  “Promise me it won’t happen again, Johnny?”

  “All right.”

  “Maybe it’s real, Johnny, and maybe it isn’t. We ought to know, for sure, before it happens again.”

  “Okay.”

  She bit her lip and stared at the points her toes made in the sheet.

  “I just hope nothing happens because of — last night.”

  I began to sweat. I grabbed up a cigarette, lit it and went over to the chair and sat down. I put my shoes on, jerked the strings tight and tied a good, fast bow knot.

  “I gotta breeze out of here,” I said. “I can’t miss seeing that guy Connors this morning.”

  “Kiss me before you go.”

  I kissed her. She arched her back and pulled me nearer. I had a pretty good idea how it was with her. She’d been all alone, almost always, and now she thought she’d found somebody.

  “Make it good,” she said. “And get the job.”

  I walked over to the door.

  “I’ll let you know,” I said.

  I stepped out into the hall and closed the door. Maybe she’d see me again and maybe she wouldn’t.

  An old lady was running a vacuum in the lower hall but she didn’t bother giving me so much as a glance. I heard her shut the cleaning machine off just as I went down the steps.

  It was a good morning, clear, and with gentle puffs of white clouds roaming a blue sky. The leaves on the maples were a cool green and some of the dew from the night before lingered in the air.

  When I got to Main I stopped in a diner and had coffee and a hard roll. It was still pretty early, only a few minutes after nine, and I didn’t think I ought to get down to see Connors before ten.

  I had another coffee and kidded the waitress about it going to be a hot day.

  “I don’t care how hot it gets,” she said. “As long as the flies stay out of here. The heat, I dress for that. I don’t mind the heat. It’s the flies that chase hell out of me.”

  She had a big body and a little uniform. She was dressed for the heat — and anything else that didn’t require much clothes.

  I left the diner a few minutes before ten. A little further down Main I stopped in a cigar store and looked up Connors’ address in the phone book. I saw that he had a place in town, one out in the country and an office in the five-and-dime building at forty-four Main.

  The Connors office was on the second floor, reached by one of those fancy elevators you run yourself. I made a couple of round trips to the basement, prior to stepping off into a rather large waiting room lined with chrome furniture and frosted glass windows.

  “Yes, sir?”

  The blank face on the opposite side of the counter belonged to a pair of glasses and a fifty-year-old biddy.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Connors,” I said.

  She tried to smile sweetly.

  “So would I,” she said.

  I lit a cigarette and let the smoke wander around her long nose.

  “I’m looking for a job,” I said.

  “I don’t know of any here.”

  “Well, he said there was.”

  “He ought to know.”

  “I’ll go along with you on that.”

  The nose carried the glasses away and left me by myself. I picked up a folder that said “Get Nifty — Be Thrifty.” I didn’t read any of it. I could see that it was just a lot of crap about why a guy should hock his life to an insurance company so that he could die, some day, on a full stomach.

  “Mr. Connors isn’t in this morning.”

  I glanced up, ready to swear, but I didn’t get around to doing it. I wasn’t looking at any phony glasses or long nose or anything like that. What I saw was a piece of blonde dynamite, supercharged with a pair of bright red lips and deep blue eyes.

  “Well, Julie,” I said. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Working.”

  I thought about Clarke Street, and Julie and her kid without any father.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “My third week.” Those wet, red lips parted in a smile. “I like it fine.”

  She had on a thin blouse and she was just tall enough for her breasts to point straight out at me across the counter top. Every time she breathed, they moved. And every time they moved, the more I watched them.

  “Mr. Connors won’t be in at all today,” Julie said. “He called this morning and said he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week.”

  “The lousy liar!”

  Julie studied her unpolished fingernails, picking them together.

  “You can’t talk that way around here,” she said. “All these people have got some class. You aren’t back on Clarke Street, Johnny.”

  “I’m not crying about that.”

  “Clarke Street isn’t so bad,” she said. “It’s how you live that counts.”

  I thought about Janet and the night before.

  “I’m living,” I said.

  “Besides, Mr. Connors didn’t lie to you, Johnny. Mr. Connors doesn’t lie. He’s one of the nicest men I’ve ever known.”

  “You’re beating a hole right through my heart,” I said.

  Her eyes clouded over and she stopped smiling. She started to say something, but one of the phones inside screamed and she went over to answer it. Beyond where she stood, leaning over a desk and writing s
omething on a pad, I could see some typewriters and adding machines and a couple of more girls.

  I could see Julie’s legs and they were sleek and trim, sliding up like little columns into the form-fitting folds of a thin pink skirt. I could remember how I’d watched those legs go up and down Clarke Street — when she was ten, when she was fifteen, when she was so damned beautiful that I looked the other way. I remember how I’d tried to get at her, once at night and once when we’d been swimming, and how she’d chased me off every time.

  She put the phone down, wrote some more on the paper, and then came back to the window. Her curves didn’t miss any loose movements and I didn’t miss any of her curves.

  I began to wish I’d never seen her again.

  “You know where Willow Lake is, Johnny?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Mr. Connors has a place out there. He’s moved out there for the rest of the summer.”

  “Well, good for him.”

  “When he called this morning he said to have you come out about two this afternoon.”

  Willow Lake was six miles from town. I wondered how I was supposed to get there.

  “His daughter’s going to stop around for the mail about one-thirty, and if you’re here at the office at that time you can ride out with her.”

  “Okay.”

  Things were looking better. If the old guy wasn’t interested in me he wouldn’t be going to all this trouble.

  “You won’t get mad if I say something, will you, Johnny?”

  “Why should I get mad?”

  One of her hands slid across the counter and touched, only briefly, the green sleeve of my sport shirt.

  “Wear something better than this, Johnny.”

  I looked down at the shirt. It really wasn’t green any longer, just a sort of pale green-blue shade that looked as though somebody had scrubbed it out on a pile of rocks. I’d been washing the thing days and wearing it nights to keep from running around naked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  My pants weren’t much better. Almost anybody could see, even without looking for it, the press-on patch I’d slapped on the right knee, inside, to keep the leg of the pants from falling off into the street.

  “Yeah,” I said again. “Thanks. I didn’t know I looked so like a crumb.”

  “Now, don’t go getting sore!”

  “I’m not.”

  Her blue eyes grew deep and solemn. The red tip of her tongue came out and moistened her lips. I could hear her breathing, full and unsteady.

  “I don’t know why I do things like this,” she said. “I should keep my big mouth shut. But you can’t go out to see Mr. Connors the way you look.”

  “I can’t take these clothes off,” I said.

  “Another pair of slacks and a nice shirt hadn’t ought to cost too much.”

  “It wouldn’t.”

  “You ought to be able to afford that.”

  I figured what I had in my wallet. I had something back at the hotel I had to take care of.

  “If they started charging me for air this minute,” I told her, “I’d drop dead.”

  She shook her head and turned away.

  “You’re always broke, Johnny.”

  “I didn’t have anything to start with.”

  “And neither did I.”

  She went over to one of the desks and yanked a drawer open. She lifted up some papers and took out her pocketbook. She dug around inside, removed something, then put the pocketbook back in the drawer and closed it.

  She was a good kid. She had a buck.

  “There’s thirty dollars here,” she said, sliding her little fist across the counter. “That ought to help you some.”

  “Maybe I won’t get the job.”

  Her eyes were steady.

  “You’ll pay it back, Johnny.”

  I dropped the bills into my shirt pocket.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll pay you back.”

  She didn’t ask me when and I didn’t try to tell her. I thanked her, gave her another good look and left.

  I went down to Barney’s at the corner of Main and West. I got a pair of slacks for fourteen ninety-five, a shirt for five bucks and a pair of shoes for eleven dollars. Barney had some sport coats on sale for seventeen-fifty, not bad looking, and I got a gray one with brown dots to go with the brown slacks.

  “Must be rolling in dough,” Barney said.

  “I haven’t seen so much money since I got my army bonus,” I told him.

  “Guys like you,” he said, “oughta see more money. You spend it, Johnny.”

  “Like water.”

  I had lunch in a dump opposite the railroad station. The prices in Nick’s were so low that if you got a roach with your dinner he charged you extra.

  “Mighty sharp,” Nick said.

  “Get your damned dirty hands off my coat!”

  “Okay. Okay.” He lifted the white apron from around his knees and wiped the sweat from his round face. “Who you studdin’ for tonight, Johnny?”

  “Shut up!”

  I went back to Connors’ office shortly after one. I looked around for Julie but I didn’t see her, so I guessed that she was out to lunch. The old bag with the nose was arguing with some policy-holder about an overdue premium and stuff like that. I threw a road block across my ears and sat down. Wearing the coat, I felt hotter than a stove lid in the sun.

  About one-thirty the door opened up and a girl came in. She was a real tall girl with dark hair and an unimportant face. There wasn’t anything wrong with her face, not actually, only it didn’t leave much of a first impression. Maybe that was because she wasn’t wearing any lipstick or other make-up, just the slight tan that had been given her by the outdoors.

  “Mr. Reagan?”

  “Yes.”

  I got up. I looked down at her. She was a couple of inches under six feet and not filled out any more than nature intended.

  “My name is Beverly. Beverly Connors.”

  “Glad to know you.”

  “Dad asked me to pick you up here and lug you out to Willow Lake.”

  The way she talked, I might as well have been a sack of potatoes. I guessed that she’d gone to Vassar, or some other snob school.

  “Okay, Miss Connors.”

  “You’re all ready?”

  I had my shoes on and my teeth were brushed. What the hell else did she want?

  “Sure.”

  I let her operate the elevator because I didn’t want to take a chance on it going down into the cellar again. She knew her buttons all right and we got to the first floor without any trouble.

  A yellow Packard convertible, with the top down, was parked at the curb.

  “Won’t you get in?”

  She didn’t have to write me an invitation. I got in, sinking up to my stomach in cushion.

  I got a glance of a long, straight leg as she slid in behind the wheel. I could tell, the way her dress lay across her thighs, that her legs were a lot better than some of the rest of her.

  “Dad won’t be home until around five,” she said. The Packard lurched out into the traffic and the heat funneled around the windshield. “He wanted me to invite you to stay for dinner tonight, so that you could talk later.”

  I was supposed to be at the hotel desk at four.

  “Would it be too much trouble to stop by the Shelly Hotel?” I asked her. “I ought to tell them I’ll be late.”

  “Glad to.”

  “Thanks.”

  There was something else I had to do, too. Somebody might give that guy in nine-four a bill and then the roof would blow off the place.

  “Mr. Reagan, I was talking to you.”

  “Oh? Sorry!”

  “I was asking you if you swim?”

  “Why, sure.”

  The wind dropped inside of the car and did things with her skirt.

  “Daddy suggested that I might entertain you while you’re waiting for him.”

  “That’s nice of you.”


  She smiled and threw her head back, letting her hair fall wild across her shoulders.

  “That means we go swimming, Mr. Reagan.”

  “Okay.”

  “You ought to pick up your suit, then. There aren’t any extra ones out there.”

  I didn’t own a suit. The last time I’d gone swimming I hadn’t needed a suit. And neither had the girl.

  “Forget about the hotel,” I told her. “Just stop by Barney’s and I’ll get myself a pair of trunks.”

  “Fine!”

  I gave her a big grin and casually lit a cigarette.

  CHAPTER III

  Jail Bait

  WILLOW LAKE is one of those summer resorts where the rich come in June to stay all summer, and where the poor come in July or August to spend two weeks — and manage to survive one.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Johnny?”

  It was late in the afternoon, around four, and by this time we’d got around to calling each other Johnny and Beverly. We were lying on a raft, about fifty feet off shore, soaking up the sun.

  “Nothing like it.”

  I sat up, yawning, and looked around. The surface of the lake was wide and silver, ringed with dark green pines. The shoreline was studded with sandy beaches and all sorts of little and big houses. At the extreme end a motorboat cut a white swath through the water.

  “You’re from Middlesville, aren’t you, Johnny?”

  “Yes.”

  “What part?”

  I thought about Clarke Street, where people slept four to a bed, where a couple of white fellows lived with colored girls, where the cops walked in pairs at night.

  “Just town,” I said.

  The raft jiggled and I knew that she was rolling over. She’d been doing that all afternoon, first one way and then the other, letting the sun burn her an even shade of brown. I’d looked at her a lot, trying to get interested, but I hadn’t had much luck.

  “All the time?” she asked. “Were you born there?”

  “Sure.”

  “So was I.”

  Well, I thought, good for her.

  “But I haven’t lived there very much for a long time,” she said. “Just during the summer months.”

  “Away to school?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you go back in September?”

  “I’m all finished,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?”