In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  “I hung around a couple nights thinking I’d run into you leaving.”

  “I never leave there by the front or even the side, just to avoid the moon-faced boys and men. At least I try and avoid them.”

  “You want one of these sandwiches?”

  “I’d just puke it up. My stomach’s awful sore. He worked me over pretty good.”

  “You look a little rough but those bruises’ll fade out. I never seen a woman beat up before. It would be one sick pup would do a thing like that.”

  “Good God. You don’t just not know a thing about women, you’re stupid about men too.”

  He took another bite of sandwich. “All right. I’m ignorant. Who did all this to you?”

  She shook her head, not denying him but as if he were hopeless. “I already told you I’m an entertainer. What that means is I wear outfits that make clear there’s a girl underneath and five or six times a night I stand up there on Charlie’s little stage and sing. Songs like ‘If You Were a Kinder Fellow Than the Kind of Fellow You Are’ or ‘The Man Was a Stranger to Me’ or to slow em down a little things like ‘Don’t Go Out Tonight Daddy.’ You wouldn’t know it to hear me talk but I’ve got a good voice. Between numbers I have to circulate, work up the crowd. Keep em buying drinks, let em buy me drinks—which is always nothing but cold tea. Keep the money flowing. That’s what Charlie says he sees you hanging around the back, Get out there girl and keep the money flowing. Sure some of it flows to me. Fellows tip you for a song, you flirt a little bit, they tip some more. And there’s some who’ll get a crush on a girl and bring presents to her, give her money that sort of thing. Charlie doesn’t allow his girls to hook but that doesn’t mean some of the girls some of the times don’t make arrangements to meet men outside of the club. What they do then is their own business unless they get arrested and then they don’t have a job. Now, the thing about that business is you have to pick and choose. Because what you want to do is keep the fellow coming around, both to the club and on the side. So you have to work them along, maybe giving a little but mostly putting the idea always in their heads like they’re getting far more than they are, or like they’re just about to. Some girls can keep a man going for months like that. There’s others who don’t bother with it but pick their men carefully, usually older men who long since gave up ever seeing a young woman with her clothes off again. Now those fellows, you choose the right one, the faster, more eager you are, the longer you’ve got them nailed. I’ve not gone that route myself. Although there’s more danger in the tease-squeeze-and-run. Mostly I’ve been lucky.”

  “You feel as lucky as you look?”

  “Pretty much. I’ve been whopped on a time or two before. You try to avoid it but it’s like anything else—there’s hazards peculiar to the work. Like I said, it’s not so much the what as the who.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is the brother-in-law of the mayor.”

  “Married to his sister or his wife’s sister?”

  “Sister.”

  “I don’t see the problem. Man’s not going to run to his brother-in-law complaining about some entertainer girl who wouldn’t do as he wanted.”

  “That’s exactly the problem. That’s where you’re wrong and where I got into trouble. See, Mayor Townsend, he bet his brother-in-law twenty dollars that he wouldn’t be able to bed me. And the fellow, Michael Heany is his name, he’s been trying for a month, being a sweet little lump of cash growing in my pocket. And last night when he lost his temper with me I went right on like I can’t help myself and laughed at him, telling him on top of everything else he was out twenty dollars to Townsend. That’s when he took hold of my arm and started in larruping on my head.”

  “Still, it seems to me he’d be the one worried, what he did to you.”

  She nodded. “It’s a game, see? The rules ain’t written down but everybody knows them. A girl can take a boyfriend and everybody knows about it and it’s all right. And all the men think that’s what they want. But if a girl just sleeps with the men, takes their presents and cash and sleeps with them, well then she’s a whore and nobody else wants to chase after her. It’s all the chase, see? It’s all in trying, not getting.”

  “I still don’t see the problem.”

  “Pride,” she said. “Mister Michael Heany made the mistake of talking about how head over heels he was about me and Townsend made him the bet. That took it outside the rules, see? It wasn’t any longer a game but a competition. But the thing is, now it’s over, the one who has to lose, lose finally and all the way, isn’t Michael Heany. It’s me. And it’s not just Charlie will be rid of me, it’ll be the whole town. I have to get out of here.”

  He studied her. After a time he said, “You going to drink the end of that coffee or could I have some?”

  She shook her head. “Those powders are working. I don’t need anymore.”

  He took up the can and drank what was left, cold. Then said, “It all makes sense but for the last. He already beat up on you. What more could he do?”

  She took a bite of the cold sandwich and shuddered and put it down. “That’s how I know you’re fresh in town, Slick. Because Mister Michael Heany, he’s just a numbnuts clerk in the city hall. But his brother, he’s the chief of police.”

  “It’s not such a great thing.”

  She put her hands on the mattress behind her and leaned on them and looked at him. “Being chief of police?”

  “No. Knowing all the ins and outs of this little burg. It’s not that great an accomplishment. You shouldn’t feel so superior over it.”

  “Stop looking at my thighs.”

  He was quiet a moment, then said, “They’re right there.”

  She did not change position. “The smart thing is for me to get out of town. The problem is I need to wait until dark so I can go back uptown and figure a way to sneak into my room and get my stuff. I’ve got two valises of clothes I’d rather not give up and a roll of bills in my closet that I need pretty much to go anywheres. If nobody’s found it yet”.

  “You think someone’s gone through your room?”

  “Could be. I’d bet a dollar there’s at least some young beat-cop camped out in the hallway waiting for me to show up, probably hoping he can get a blowjob before he hauls me in anyway.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

  “Facts of life bother you that much?”

  “No. You don’t need to impress me. I figure you came here because you thought I could help. I’ll do what you need done. That’s all.”

  “I came here because there was nowhere else to go.”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “Not really.” She looked away from him. And then back. “I’d have come down even if you wasn’t here. This is where I grew up.” Then she stopped, as if having said already more than planned.

  “You don’t look Italian.”

  “I’m not”.

  “You got family here?”

  “No.”

  They were quiet. Finally he looked away from her to the window. It was afternoon but still early; the light fell into the room at a slight angle.

  “What’re you thinking?”

  He didn’t look at her. “Trying to figure this out.”

  “I know I’m trouble pretty much all the way around.” She said this flat, her voice old and bereft of anything.

  He looked at her. “Hey there, Joey.” Reached and touched her bare knee. The round cup of knee seeming to him an eye opened onto the world.

  She drew her legs up and stepped off the bed. Went to the side of the window and looked down on the street. Reached up and touched her broken nose and then the bunched eye. Then turned and pointed to the package on the chair. “What’s this?”

  “A dress.” Watching her.

  “For me?”

  “I figured your other one wasn’t any good anymore.”

  She took the package up and looked at him. Then opened it, dropping the string and te
aring off the paper with quick movements and he felt he was seeing her, that she was showing herself, for the first time. She shook the dress out and held it up before her, facing him. “It’s yellow.”

  “I thought it might look good on you. I always seen you in those dark colors. It’s just to get by.”

  “Don’t apologize you did something nice.”

  He didn’t say anything. She laid the dress on the chair and unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. She turned sideways to him and lifted the bunched dress over her head. The chemise top lifted to show her stomach, the small perfect shadow of her navel on her belly-rise. The sunlight was enough so he could see the rest of her through her underwear. Then she brought the dress down over her head and fitted it onto her shoulders and hips with her hands. Came to the bed and turned for him to button the back and then turned back to face him, her hands still smoothing it. She said, “How’s it look?”

  ‘“Good.”

  “I never owned a yellow dress.” Then, “How’d you size it right?”

  Without even thinking he raised his hands off the bed and once more described her to the air.

  She put her right hand flat up over her mouth and stood looking at him a long moment, her eyes bright on him. He sat and looked back at her, feeling as if his face could peel from him and fly through the air onto her. Without taking her eyes from him she reached behind her and unbuttoned the dress and stepped out of it and laid it over the chair. She stepped toward where he sat. “How come,” she said as she pulled the chemise over her head, “it seems like you’ve got so much more clothes on than me?” And sat beside him on the bed a moment and then lay back and said, “Take them off. Take my bottoms off.”

  Sweat-slick he took his weight up onto his elbows. Her neck to her breasts was mottled pink and white, the spray of blue veins like something grown under the sea. He stepped off the bed and went to the window and stood looking down at the street and smoked. It was afternoon, sometime. He couldn’t say better than that. When he turned she was as he’d left her, sprawled and open on the bed. One of her hands was down light between her legs.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “You never saw a naked woman before, have you?”

  “Not rightly.”

  “This your first time, idn’t it?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “I’m not talking about whatever you did with that old woman the other day. I’m talking about proper right loving.”

  “Well, I guess so.”

  “Lord look at you.”

  “Sometimes it just won’t go down.”

  “Come over here.” And reached for him.

  Later he lay on his back beside her. The afternoon light was gone altogether from the room but lay against the buildings across the street, giving the crackled paint and weathered wood a tone of softness not there otherwise. She was turned on her side away from him, sleeping he thought. The dense small knots of her spine descending to the small of her back and then the swell of her hips thrust back at him and he lay looking down the length of her and thought everything he’d ever seen in his life could be found there. Fruit of all sorts, the lay of land: pastures, meadows, turned ground. Hillsides rising up. The structures of bark replicated in the patina of interlacing skin tones, one flowing to the next. The knots and ribs of tree branch and root overlaying one another. Her hair wild marsh grass and wind blowing through hay and the bundling high fleet winter clouds. The parts of her never touched by sun newfound snowbanks hot to the touch. The salt of her skin. The furrow of her backside turned earth. The small pasture spring unseen from any distance at all but always there, the moisture seeping away to disappear into the surrounding ground. Her teeth a feral ivory. Her breath mist off a river.

  It was dusk when he woke beside her. It was only then that he thought of the Italian’s waiting wagon, the bottles of wine. It seemed a distant place, unreachable from the small reserve surrounding him in the room.

  There was no remorse but the sense he’d made a trade of sorts and the lost job now appeared to clarify and he wondered just how long it might have lasted otherwise, if he’d perhaps even someway saved himself. Everyone it seemed knew more of what he was doing than he did. So it was well and good. Time to scoot, he thought. There was still the question of money owed him. Other questions also. He sat up in the bed and smoked, sending trails toward the soft gasp of heat out the window. Joey rolled onto her back to look sideways at him. After a time she said, “Now what?”

  “I’m thinking on it.”

  “I’m wicked hungry.”

  “Yuht.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Yuht.”

  “Well don’t strain yourself thinking.”

  “I’m just trying to piece it all out. What comes next.”

  “You were supposed to haul hooch for the guineas weren’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She got off the bed and started to dress. “You sit there thinking. I’m dying here. And I’ve got to figure some way to get my clothes and stuff. And then what.”

  He stood naked and took her arm. “Hold on,” he said. “Let me go out and you stay here. Let me do a couple things and I’ll bring us back some food. Then we can work on your problem and how to get out of here.”

  She looked at him. Drew the chemise over her head and took up the dress and held it. Then said, “What makes you think I want your help?”

  “Well I don’t,” he said. “It just makes sense we work on this together.”

  “Sense to you maybe. I’ve steered clear of involving myself with men.”

  He nodded. “And you’ve done fine I guess. But it wasn’t me showed up on your doorstep bloodied and out of places to go.”

  “I don’t want to owe you nothing.”

  “You don’t. Free and clear. All right?”

  She sat back on the bed. She shook her head. “I know what kind of heart you’ve got.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Nothing. Go on. Go do what you want to do. But bring me something to eat. And don’t tell nobody I’m here.”

  He washed his face in the stale water left in the pitcher and slicked back his hair. He smelled her over him as he dressed, as if his skin was suffused with her and this distillation ran through his skin and throughout him. Dressed, he turned to where she sat waiting on the bed and said, “Get dressed and wait. Lock that door after me but be ready you hear me coming up the stairs.”

  He circled the long way to come upon the back of the restaurant. As expected the horse and wagon were gone from the shed. He stepped into the kitchen and there was no one there. He went then fast across the street to the backside of the opposite house. The brass padlock was off the hasp and he lifted one of the bulkhead doors and left it open and went down the steps. He kept his eyes steady and down as he came into the cool dripping room. Victor was behind the small table, his back inches from the rivulets seeping from the granite foundation stones. Even here a braid of sweat worked against his forehead. Across from him sitting out in the room was one of the other men. Jamie nodded to him and the man turned his eyes away, a broad sweep across the room. On the table was a lead and brass cashbox and the table was spread with stacks of banknotes and as he approached Victor laid one hand each on the end stacks and pulled them all together and lifted them and placed them in the box. Jamie all the time with his eyes on Victor’s as if the money wasn’t there.

  “I fucked up.”

  Not even a nod. “So why you come here?”

  “You owe me something for what I already did.”

  Now Victor smiled. “You stupid or what?”

  “No,” Jamie said. “I don’t think so.”

  Victor nodded. “You think you know something could hurt me.” The other man, beside Jamie, with his head tilted up now to watch him, rolled the fingers of one hand on the tabletop.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m the one would get hurt. But still, I did work for you and need to get paid
for it. It’s no big complicated thing.”

  “Everything is complicated. Most things bigger than you can know. And you so dumb and also young. So. I always do the right thing.” And lifted then a hand from the cashbox and took a banknote out and passed it flat onto the table before Jamie. It was less then he’d been paid for the first single day. He looked at it a moment and then took it up and said, “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well shit. I guess there ain’t no room to discuss it.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Don’t be coming round here again.”

  “You know what, Victor? I don’t guess I would want to.”

  And turned as if leaving. Took one step forward and leaned down even as he pivoted back around, swiping up from the caked floor the wooden mallet used for driving bungs and came around with it not only already up in the air but descending hard into the forehead of the scornful-faced man with the busy fingers who was rising up from his chair, his eyes flared with swift surprise, rising as if to help Jamie meet his forehead with the down-swinging mallet. The noise identical to the crack of bat against ball the day before in the park. The man sat back down and took the chair over sideways with him. Victor still had one hand flat on the table where he’d laid the banknote but his right hand had come off the cashbox and snaked toward his vest. Jamie dropped the mallet the moment the first man went down and now had the stiletto free of his pocket and drove it down through the hand that still lay on the table and this stopped the right hand, which paused midair, wobbling, then moved toward the left pinned to the rough boards. And Jamie reached slowly and took that right hand gently and held it in both of his and said, “Don’t touch anything Victor. Just set still.” His own hands trembling slightly. Victor leaned his head back to rest it against the wall behind him. His eyes rolled up and back again into his sockets and then up white again. The whites shot with blood as if he’d been cut there.

  “Easy now. Pay attention here, Victor.” Still holding the limp free hand, Jamie opened the cashbox and counted out notes until he had what was owed him. “Pay attention, Victor.” He reached and struck the stiletto with the flat of his hand, driving it a little deeper, moving it a little side to side. “All I’m taking here is what I’m owed. Not even a bonus for having to collect it like this, see.” He fanned the notes and then added one more five. “Now this here, this is to pay for the knife. That’s what it cost me. I don’t see a choice but to leave it with you.”