by Jeffrey Lent
Some time passed. Jamie sat without moving. Victor came from the kitchen with a platter of food, short flat noodles twisted in the middle mixed with bitter greens and tinned and fresh fish, the fresh cut in strips and rings, all in a sauce—white, not red—and spread over with finely shaved cheese. A loaf of hard crusted bread. Left all this with Jamie eating it and went again into the back, not waiting for any comment. Reappeared as Jamie mopped the platter with the last crust and took it up and placed down a plate with a chop of meat on it, the meat covered with a thin pale brown sauce and some kind of mushrooms. The meat was not pork and not beef and Jamie had no idea what he was eating but he ate and it was good. And finally Victor came back again with another platter, this time of pickled vegetables and slices of meat and cheeses and he removed the plate with the chop bone on it to the next table and set the new platter down and then sat across from Jamie and helped himself to food. And Jamie was not sure if this was Victor’s food or if he was meant to share it so he sat back and placed his napkin on the tableside and his hands over his belly. Victor looked at him and gestured to the platter and said, “Antipasto. Try some with me.”
Jamie took some up with his fingers and ate. He liked it and said so. Then both were quiet until the platter was empty. Both sat back. Jamie raised his hands up and locked his fingers behind his head. He said, “That was good. All of it. Now, I bet that was a two-three dollar meal.”
Victor lifted both hands into the air, fingers spread. “No charge. On the house. I got no work for you. I got nothing needs doing. No sweeping up, nothing to wash, nothing to carry off. Nothing needs nothing.”
“What makes you think I wanted work?”
He shrugged as if it was obvious. “You got nothing to do. Around all the time. Knowing nothing. Going where you don’t belong. Nice clothes but so. The food, that is for your curiosity. And walking back in here after last night. Either stupid or brave and maybe both. So, I give you the food. Maybe you learn a little something. It’s a favor to you.”
Jamie nodded. Took the money clip from his inside coat pocket and without ceremony or show stripped out four dollar bills and laid them flat on the side of the table. “I pay my way Victor. What you think of me, you’re only right so far. I did come back because of the food. And also because I want work. But I’m not talking about swamping this joint out or scrubbing up after you. Now, the thing is, you know what kind of work I want and I know you’ve got some of that going on. And those two things don’t add up to a job for me just like that. And you’re right—there’s plenty I don’t know. But I got a couple things going for me, things you consider enough you might find a use for. One, I’m quick to learn, to put the pieces together. Two, I’m new and don’t look like the kind of fellow’d be working with you. So. You think about that.”
He spent the remainder of the afternoon in a building across the street, led there by Victor down a cellar bulkhead to a cool stonewalled room. There at a small table with a kerosene lamp the two men of the night before sat, one laying out slow hands of solitaire while the other read through a newspaper or racing form, he couldn’t tell which. They paid no attention to him at all and only spoke to one another from time to time briefly in Italian. Two walls were lined with wooden casks and from these he drew out wine to fill crates of empty bottles all of a uniform size but free of labels or other markings and then stoppered them from a box of corks and repacked them in the wooden crates until there were eight such crates loaded. It was dusk when again he went to the restaurant where he sat with the young daughter as she drew maps for him on butcher paper, labeling each street and then marking more carefully the alleys that ran up between them. He felt slow and stupid beside the bright sure intelligence of the child but paid careful attention at least until the end when she handed over the maps and told him, “Don’t worry—you can’t get lost unless you try and drive the horse. Just hold the lines loose and he knows where to go and where to stop. I’ve done it myself.”
The wagon had raised sloped shelves that rose to a peak in the middle and the shelves were lined with empty peck baskets. There was room behind the seat under the shelving for the cases of wine. The horse was an old bright bay with heavy feathered feet and strung between the hames was an old set of cowbells on a thong. The clappers of the bells were abraded to tender thin strikes of iron against the greened bronze and so did not ring out but rather chimed in the moist stilled air as if delight muted.
He held the lines loose as directed and the weary horse drew the wagon up through the alleys sprawled against the hillside over the town, the alleyways’ hardpacked dirt just wider than the wagon itself and edged with homemade fencings of wire or upright planks each of a different size and length and each set with a likewise gate and as they went along people, usually an older woman but several times men of different ages and thrice children, were waiting to step from the gate to the wagon with a peck basket or two filled with vegetables mostly but sometimes breadstuffs and always each a washed empty bottle identical to those in the crates. The baskets were not always full but regardless each was exchanged for a bottle of the wine and the people bore those away inside empty baskets. All of the people nodded and spoke briefly to Jamie and he nodded back but made no effort to speak. There was no exchange of money and no record-keeping for he drove the route as marked out and the baskets were loaded in order front to rear. Once he clearly saw a small tight square of folded money stuffed down the side of a basket filled otherwise with new lettuces and after seeing this he did not look, did not want to see any more. The system struck him as elaborate and beautifully simple.
When he returned he unhitched and unharnessed the horse and stabled it in the small shed behind the restaurant, forking hay into its manger and filling the tub with fresh water pumped up in the yard and carried in by the bucketful. He rubbed the horse down with a piece of old sacking. Outside now was humid and rancid and he dragged out an old patched canvas tarpaulin from the wagon bed and covered tightly the baskets of food. Then he went into the kitchen of the restaurant which was still, clean and empty but for the girl. She was eating a plate of bread fried and dredged with syrup. She was ten or eleven, very pretty. Old enough to study Jamie carefully and not quite old enough to know why. He sat across from her.
“What’s your name?”
“Loredona. I already know yours.”
“You cook that up yourself?”
She looked down at the plate and back up to him, embarrassed. As if he’d caught her out someway.
He said, “Your father out front?”
She nodded. As if she could not speak to him. No longer the absorbed self-important child directing him over maps hours before. She almost made him angry. Very gently he said, “Loredona. Please run ask your father to come here a moment when he gets a chance. Tell him I’m back.”
And watched her go through the swinging door to the front, her pretty hair down her back and her legs bare below her knees. When she passed through the door a low surge of voice and thronged presence filled the opening. He knew it could be Victor coming back or the two fuckers in cheap suits from the night before. But left his knife where it was in his pocket and reached fast across the table to cut the slightest wedge from her fried bread with her own fork and smear the wedge through the syrup before taking it into his mouth and swallowing it, pulling the fork back slowly through closed lips. Set the fork back on the plate, turned the way it had been.
The girl came back with her father and with a hand motion Victor brought Jamie away from the table to the yard where they peeled the canvas back and Victor went around the wagon, touching each basket with the first two fingers of his left hand as if counting but Jamie knew it was something more than inventory. Then they replaced the canvas and Victor paid him. It was more than he’d expected. There was no talk of the work done or the morrow. Victor gave him a loaf of bread. And went back inside.
It was near midnight; the air was close with rain. He went uptown. People moved under the electric ligh
ts, each lost in the crowd but each distinct upon passing, features highlighted in a way daylight would not proffer. The opera house above the city hall was emptying out for the night. The street was filled with gigs and buggies, the sidewalks with people dressed for the show. He was going the wrong way and so turned and drifted with the crowd. Finally he fell into the backwater of a streetlight post and leaned against it, putting one foot up behind him on the post. He lighted a cigarette and waited and caught the arm of a passing man and asked where Charlie Bacon’s Supper Club was. The man paused and with deliberate delicacy lifted Jamie’s hand free of his arm and dropped it and told him to follow his nose.
After a time he found it, two blocks off the main street. The entrance was canopied and gilt lettering spelled the name against polished wood over the entire front. There was a small crowd waiting outside. He went close to the windows and could see nothing more than tables filled with men and a few women. Waiters in high aprons over white shirts and black trousers with ribbon down the sides glided back and forth. He could see no entertainment. It was a restaurant was all. It began to rain, a poor spittle of soft summer mist. He went across the street and smoked again. After a time he saw that men also passed by the building to turn down an alley along its side. Few came back out onto the street. He finished his smoke and went down the alley and came to a single door overlit with a bare electric bulb. He went up and rapped hard on the door. When it was pulled back he could see only a hallway but could hear music, voices, a woman singing. He said, “I’m looking for Joey.”
The man behind the door said, “Wrong place pal. No Joey here.”
“She sings.”
“Thought you was looking for a Joey.”
“That’s right. She sings here.”
“You been fed a line. Ain’t no Joey here, he or she. Ain’t nothing here for you.” And the door was shut. Jamie stood and then knocked again. This time there was no response. After a time a couple of men came up behind him. They stood and he felt them watching his back and after a moment one said, “They won’t let you in, they won’t let you in. Don’t be an asshole, step out the way and give others the chance.”
He went back across the street and watched the alley. It was only men that came and went. The men leaving were in high color, laughing and filled with themselves. Some too drunk were helped by friends. He watched one lean, holding his knees, being sick over and over. He stood and smoked. After a time the rain grew strong and fewer and fewer men came up the alley. The sky paled with a thin dawn through the rain. He was cold and his last cigarettes were falling apart in their paper package and he was wet all the way through his clothes. He went back down through the streets to his room. Men were out now going to work. He stripped off his wet clothes and draped them over the chair and the bedstead. Then lay on the mattress and for the first time pulled the rotting blanket over him and lay shivering, his teeth monstrous with cold. The rain had come in his open window and the mattress was wet beneath him. After a time he slept.
He did this work for four days, rising at noon or later and getting shaved and drinking coffee and reading the papers until late afternoon he’d go to the restaurant and be fed before crossing to the cellar-room and bottling wine from the casks. There were two routes and he alternated nights with them. He was not charged for his food and ate well but not like the first day. He did not see the girl Loredona again and decided this was by design. He also could not find Joey in the brief freedom of his afternoons. He learned some things. The one wall of slightly smaller casks held grappa that Victor poured off into crockery jugs or tin buckets, diluted with water and flavored with caramelized sugar and a small amount of vinegar poured from a jar packed with hot peppers, and these were sold to people who would rebottle it and sell it as whiskey. He also learned he’d be paid once a week, Monday afternoons. He wasn’t sure he liked this, even if it felt like a regular job. Still, he had no choice but to trust. Nights when he finished work he’d walk uptown and patrol the streets until the early summer dawn lightened the east like river water rising to drive him to sleep. He bought a paper shade for his window. He sat one night at quarter of one in Charlie Bacon’s and ate a steak and palmed a five-dollar bill to the waiter and asked about the back and the waiter thanked him and gave him directions to the bathrooms. He did not try the alley entrance again. He bought a new shirt and had the old one scalded and ironed with starch. He washed his socks in his room with handsoap. At night he’d flatten his cuffs between the pages of a magazine and slide it under his mattress. Not counting the new clothes and shoes but adding in what he’d been paid his money was holding steady. Except for the steak. With what he was owed he was ahead.
Sunday there was no work. When he woke midafternoon and walked uptown the place he had his coffee was closed. He was able to buy a paper at a newsstand and a package of cigarettes and sat on a bench reading and smoking. Some few people passed, on foot, in buggies and gigs. It was only with a report as a gunshot high on the hill over the town that he realized the quiet was also the stilled quarry works. He put the paper down and listened as the sound came closer and rounded a corner onto the street, a small two-seater automobile with brass fittings, balloon tires and no doors. Once on the level the backfiring stopped and the machine accelerated and sped down the street, the driver wearing goggles and cap and the woman beside him muffled in white muslin gauze. He stood watching them go. It was only then he realized everyone had been traveling in the same direction. He followed down to the south end of the street and crossed over the river and came to a park. There was a grandstand and a trotting track, both empty, the track only bearing the beaten pocks of the night before. But people were eating picnics on the grass and there was a game of baseball. Along the river in the shade of elms men were fishing and boys in dark tights were swimming. In the shadow of the grandstand was a small cluster of concessions and he bought a pasty from a ginger-haired old woman with blooms of color on both cheeks who grasped his shirtfront and pulled him close to smell his breath, declaiming in a thick-tongued Scottish accent she’d sell none of God’s good fare to drunkards. The pasty dough was tough and still raw inside and the stringy meat and chunks of potato tasted old to him. He lay on the grass midway of the picnicking families and those watching the ball game, supporting himself on one elbow to survey the game and the crowds of people. It was all slow and stagnant. Watching, it seemed to him everyone was only defined by their others, as if their chatter, their animation, their display was all for those observing. He knew there was reason for him to be out among these people. He felt himself in motion, not unlike the small boys swimming in the river. Pulled along to where he’d end up. He lay on his back and watched the thick-bellied summer clouds, vaulting against the pitched sky.
Monday he woke early with a terrible hunger and went down onto the street. It was nine in the morning and the men had been three hours gone to the quarry, first shift of the week. The street was quiet, with women already stringing washing. He wanted breakfast before anything and decided since he was up early he’d spring for a hot bath as well as being shaved. So he turned upstreet away from the barbershop and toward the common-table restaurant and so did not see her sitting on the stoop two doors down from his own. But heard her feet on the cobbles and her small cries of his name and turned and she stopped then, feet away from him, her head turned up at him, chin tilted to one side, defiant and cocky, saying nothing. Showing him the purple and black plum that was her right eye and the crusted black blood around her nostrils. Her dress the color of raspberry jam dirt-caked and one sleeve torn free. In the moment they stood looking at each other before speaking she lifted one hand to pluck at the torn sleeve, trying to press it back into place.
He got her upstairs to his room without being seen and left her, carrying the wash pitcher down to the back where he roused the woman proprietor and purchased hot water and carried it back up. She was out of her dress, sitting on the bed in a chemise and knee-length knickers trimmed with lace. Her upper arm wher
e the dress had been torn was bruised peach and blue in thick horizontal bars, the flesh-shadows of fingers. He left her to clean herself and ran up the street and bought four fried egg sandwiches in a paper sack that turned transparent with grease and a can of coffee and a pint bottle of milk and then to a druggist for three paper packets of headache powder. And thought also of the raspberry dress thrown off into a corner of the room and sought a dry-goods shop and bought a cheap ready-made dress off the rack, using his hands to outline her height and shapes. And then stood, feeling stranded, while the clerk folded the dress and wrapped it in paper and tied it up. Finally the package was before him, and he paid and swept it up and went out toward her.
She was crosslegged on the bed, wearing his extra shirt buttoned up with the tails covering her in front and behind. She watched him with her eyes cut sideways as if doubting her decision to come to him. He put the dress parcel on the chair and the sandwiches on the bedstand and handed her the coffee and milk and then fished the powders from his pocket and held them out, saying, “These should ease you a bit.”
“I’m making trouble for you.” She drank down half the milk and refilled the bottle from the can of coffee and tipped out two of the powders on her tongue and washed them down.
“That old bird downstairs is deaf as a post. You don’t have to worry over her.”
“Shoot,” she said. “You could murder somebody in one of these rooms and wouldn’t anybody care, long’s the room’s paid up. That’s not the trouble I’ve got in mind.”
He took one of the sandwiches from the sack and left it open on the bed between them. He said “Help yourself” and bit into the bread and egg and then said, “So what happened to you?”
“Not what but who,” she said. Then, “You never made it into Charlie Bacon’s did you? Seems to me you didn’t try very hard. But they told me, Mike told me, said, ‘That slicked-up boy what’s hauling wine for the guineas is outside asking after you and I run him off.’ I’d thought you were the persistent type.”
