David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and '50s (Library of America) (61 page)

H
E STOOD
there and told himself he was getting the answer. He knew it had no connection with any man’s face or any man’s name. His eyes were focused through the window facing Vernon Street. He peered out past the murky glass and saw the moonlight reflected on the jutting cobblestones. It was a yellow-green glow drifting across Vernon and forming pools of light in the gutter. He saw it glimmering on the rutted sidewalk and going on and on toward all the dark alleys where countless creatures of the night played hide-and-seek.

And no matter where the weaker ones were hiding, they’d never get away from the Vernon moon. It had them trapped. It had them doomed. Sooner or later they’d be mauled and battered and crushed. They’d learn the hard way that Vernon Street was no place for delicate bodies or timid souls. They were prey, that was all, they were destined for the maw of the ever hungry eater, the Vernon gutter.

He stared out at the moonlit street. Without sound he said, You did it to Catherine. You.

It was as though the street could hear. He sensed that it was making a jeering reply. A raucous voice seemed to say, So what? So
whatcha gonna do about it?

He groped for an answer.

And the street went on jeering, saying, Your sister couldn’t take it, and the same goes for you. And it chose that moment to display its hole card. It opened the door of Dugan’s Den and showed him the golden-haired dream girl from uptown. As he stared at Loretta, he could hear the street saying, Well, here she is. She’s come to take your hand and lift you from the gutter.

Loretta was walking toward him. Something quivered in his brain and he thought, She reminds me of someone. And then it was there, the memory of the hopes he’d had for Catherine and himself, the hopes he’d lost in a dark alley and yearned to find again.

But taproom noises interfered. Two dimes clinked on the table
as Dugan poured a drink for Frank. At the table Nick Andros poured gin for Dora. “Say when,” Nick said. But Dora said nothing, for gin had no connection with time. As the gin splashed over the edge of the glass, Kerrigan looked toward the table. He saw Frieda getting up from the floor. Mooney was doing the same, and they almost bumped heads as they came to their feet. Then Frieda staggered backward and bumped the humpbacked wino off his chair. Channing caught hold of Frieda and tried to steady her and she said, “Let go, goddamnit, I can stand on my own two legs.” There was a shout of approval from Dora. It inspired Frieda to a further statement of policy. She said to Channing, “Don’t put yer hands on me unless I tell you to.”

Channing shrugged, preferring to let it go at that. But Nick Andros frowned and expressed the male point of view, saying, “You’re wearing his engagement ring, he’s your fiance.” Frieda blinked, looked down at the ring on her finger, and then with some energetic twisting she pulled it off. For some moments she seemed reluctant to part with the green stone. She held the ring tightly, frowning at it. Then suddenly she placed the ring on the table in front of Channing. Her voice was quiet as she said, “Take it back to where you got it. This pussycat’s a self-supporting individual.”

For a moment Channing just sat there with nothing in his eyes as he thought it over. Then, with another shrug, he lowered the ring into his jacket pocket. So that took care of that, and then he was smiling at Frieda and saying, “Have a drink?”

Frieda nodded emphatically. She sat down beside him and watched him pour the gin. She lifted the glass and said loudly, “This juice is all I need from any man. Even if he wears clean shirts.” But then, as though using her right hand to make up for a left-handed swipe, she patted the side of Channing’s head and spoke in a softer tone. “Don’t take it to heart, sweetie. You’re really cute. It’s nice to sit here and drink with you. But that’s as far as we can take it. After all, it’s every cat to his own alley.”

So true, Kerrigan thought. He looked at Loretta, who stood there waiting for him to say something. His eyes aimed down to what she had on her finger, the hinged ring from the Greek’s loose-leaf notebook. His brain said, No dice. She’ll hafta take it off.
And his heart ached as he gazed at her face. Her face told him that she knew what he was thinking and her own heart was aching.

He said, “I’ll have a talk with the Greek. He’ll get rid of the license. All he has to do is light a match.”

She didn’t say anything. She looked at the ring on her finger. She started to take it off and it wanted to stay there, as though it were a part of her that pleaded not to be torn away.

He said, “It’ll come off. Just loosen the hinge.”

Her eyes were wet. “If we could only—”

“But we can’t,” he said. “Don’t you see the way it is? We don’t ride the same track. I can’t live your kind of life and you can’t live mine. It ain’t anyone’s fault. It’s just the way the cards are stacked.”

She nodded slowly. And just then the ring came off. It dropped from her limp hand and rolled across the floor and went under the bar to vanish in the darkness of all lost dreams. He heard the final tinkling sound it made, a plaintive little sound that accompanied her voice saying good-by. Then there was the sound of his own footsteps walking out of Dugan’s Den.

As he came off the pavement to cross the Vernon cobblestones, his tread was heavy, coming down solidly on solid ground. He moved along with a deliberate stride that told each stone it was there to be stepped on, and he damn well knew how to walk this street, how to handle every bump and rut and hole in the gutter. He went past them all, and went up on the doorstep of the house where he lived. As he pushed open the door, it suddenly occurred to him that he was damned hungry.

In the parlor, Bella was lying face down on the sofa. He gave her a slap on her rump. “Get up,” he said. “Make me some supper.”

T
HERE WERE
three of them sitting on the pavement with their backs against the wall of the flophouse. It was a biting cold night in November and they sat there close together trying to get warm. The wet wind from the river came knifing through the street to cut their faces and get inside their bones, but they didn’t seem to mind. They were discussing a problem that had nothing to do with the weather. In their minds it was a serious problem, and as they talked their eyes were solemn and tactical. They were trying to find a method of obtaining some alcohol.

“We need a drink,” one said. “We need a drink and that’s all there is to it.”

“Well, we won’t get it sitting here.”

“We won’t get it standing up, either,” the first one said. He was middle-aged and tall and very skinny and they called him Bones. He gazed dismally at the empty bottle between his legs and said, “It needs cash, and we got no cash. So it don’t matter whether we sit or stand or move around. The fact remains we got no cash.”

“You made that statement an hour ago,” said the other man who had spoken. “I wish you’d quit making that statement.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“I know it’s true, but I wish you’d quit repeating it. What’s the use of repeating it?”

“If we talk about it long enough,” Bones said, “we might do something about it.”

“We won’t do anything,” the other man said. “We’ll just sit here and get more thirsty.”

Bones frowned. Then he took a deep breath as though he were about to say something important. And then he said, “I wish we had another bottle.”

“I wish to hell you’d shut up,” the other man said. He was a short bulky bald man in his early forties and his name was Phillips. He had lived here on Skid Row for more than twenty years and had the red raw
Tenderloin complexion that is unlike any
other complexion and stamps the owner as strictly a flophouse resident.

“We gotta get a drink,” Bones said. “We gotta find a way to get a drink.”

“I’m trying to find a way to keep you quiet,” Phillips said. “Maybe if I hit you on the head you’ll be quiet.”

“That’s an idea,” Bones said seriously. “At least if you knock me out I’ll be better off. I won’t know how much I need a drink.” He leaned forward to offer his head as a target. “Go on, Phillips, knock me out.”

Phillips turned away from Bones and looked at the third man who sat there along the wall. Phillips said, “You do it, Whitey. You hit him.”

“Whitey wouldn’t do it,” Bones said. “Whitey never hits anybody.”

“You sure about that?” Phillips murmured. He saw that Whitey was not listening to the talk and he spoke to Bones as though Whitey weren’t there.

“I’ll give odds on it,” Bones said. “This man here wouldn’t hurt a living thing. Not even a cat that scratched him.”

“If a cat scratched me, I’d wring its neck,” Phillips said.

“That’s you,” Bones said. “Whitey ain’t made that way. Whitey’s on the gentle side.”

“Gentle?” Phillips had a thoughtful look in his eyes as he went on studying Whitey. Then he said, “Maybe gentle ain’t the word. Maybe the word is timid.”

Bones shrugged. “Whatever you want to call it. That’s the way he is.” He spoke to the third man who sat there, not saying anything. “Ain’t that so, Whitey?”

Whitey nodded vaguely.

“He ain’t even listening,” Phillips said.

“What?” Whitey blinked a few times. He smiled mildly and said, “What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” Phillips said. “Let it drop.”

Whitey shrugged. He aimed the mild smile at the empty bottle. The curved glass showed him a miniature of himself, a little man lost in the emptiness of a drained bottle. Aside from what he saw in the bottle, he was actually on the small side, five feet seven and weighing 145. His eyes were gray and he had the kind of face that doesn’t attract much attention one way or another.
The only unusual thing was his hair. He was thirty-three years old and his hair was snow white.

Another thing, not really unusual along Skid Row, was his voice. He always spoke in a semiwhisper, sort of strained and sometimes cracked, as though he had a case of chronic bronchitis. At times when he spoke there was a look of pain in his eyes and it seemed that the effort of producing sound was hurting his throat. But whenever they asked him about it, he said there was nothing wrong with his throat. They’d insist there was something wrong and then he’d smile and say that his throat was dry, his throat was very dry and he could use a drink. Some of them would check on that and treat him to a drink and maybe two or more shots. But no matter how many shots he had, he went on speaking in the strained painful whisper.

He’d arrived on Skid Row seven years ago, coming out of nowhere like all the other two-legged shadows. He made the weary, stumbling entrance to take his place in the soup lines outside the missions and the slow aimless parade up and down River Street. With nothing in his pockets and nothing in his eyes, he joined the unchartered society of the homeless and the hopeless, to flop on any old mattress and eat whatever food he could scrounge and wear what rags he could pick up here and there. But the primary thing was the drinking, and it was always a problem because there was always more thirst than cash to purchase drinks. In that regard he was identical with the others, and when they saw he was no different from themselves, they didn’t bother to ask questions. He was accepted and included and completely ignored. There was an unspoken agreement that they’d leave him alone, they’d pay no attention when he got drunk and stumbled and fell and passed out. It applied to any condition he was in; they’d definitely leave him alone. That was all he wanted and that was why he liked it here on Skid Row.

The three of them sat there with Bones and Phillips discussing the alcohol issue and Whitey staring at the empty bottle. It was getting on toward midnight and the wind from the river was colder now, and much meaner. On both sides of River Street the taprooms and hash houses were crowded. In the hash houses there was a demand for hot soup. In the taprooms they hollered for double shots and gulped them down and hollered again.
The bartenders hollered back and told them to be patient, a man had only two hands. The sounds of drinkers and bartenders were reaching the ears of Bones and Phillips and they were getting irritated and sad and then irritated again.

“Listen to it,” Bones said.

“I’m listening,” Phillips said. But as he said it the sounds he heard were not coming from the taprooms. These were new and abrupt noises from several blocks away. It was a clamor of shouts and screams, glass breaking and things crashing and footsteps running.

“They’re at it again,” Bones said.

“The hell with them.” Phillips waved wearily in the direction of the violent noises.

“They buried two last week,” Bones said.

The sounds were coming in waves, getting higher and higher, and at the top of it there was someone screeching. It was on the order of the noise an animal would make while getting crushed by a steam roller.

“It gets worse every day,” Bones said.

Phillips made another weary gesture.

Bones said, “They’ve been at it for more than a month. You’d think they’d have it stopped by this time.”

The screeching noise faded and then for some moments it was quiet down there three blocks away. But all at once there was a crash and more shouting and screaming and a raging flood of curses and then policemen’s whistles and running feet.

Bones stood up to have a look. He was looking south along River Street but he couldn’t see anything down there. Up here along Skid Row there were a lot of bright lights, varicolored and sprinkling the darkness with the all-night glow from eateries and cut-rate stores and pawnshops. But where Skid Row ended the bright lights ended, and down there south on River Street there were no lights at all, only the hulking shapes of four-story tenements and three-story warehouses, and here and there the masts and funnels of freighters docked in the river. Bones went on trying to see what was happening three blocks south and all he saw was the darkness. Finally he sat down again, and just as he did so there was a very loud scream from down there and then much more noise than before. Now some of it was automobile noise, the roar of engines picking up speed, the whine of tires making sharp turns, then the high-octave scream of brakes performing sudden stops. But the human screams were louder than the automobiles; the yelling and crashing and thudding seemed to stifle the noise of the police cars.

It went on like that and the noise of the police cars was like frustrated growling, confused and fumbling, unable to cope with the louder noise.

Phillips snorted. “Them clowns.”

“Who?” Bones asked.

“The cops,” Phillips said. “The city’s finest. The sturdy enforcers of law and order.”

“They sound like they need help.”

“They need brains, that’s what they need. That’s what’s wrong with them, they got no brains.”

Bones frowned indignantly. He assumed the look of a solid citizen defending the abilities of the police force. He said stiffly, “Quit jabbing needles in them. It ain’t easy to be a cop in this district.”

Just then there was a very loud crashing sound, as though one of the cars had collided with a brick wall. Or maybe it had run into another police car.

Phillips laughed sourly and disdainfully. “Listen to them,” he said. “Now they’re running around in circles and getting in each other’s way.”

“That sounded like a bad accident,” Bones said.

Phillips snorted again. “They’re always having accidents. They’re always making mistakes. They’re really brilliant, them policemen.”

Bones folded his arms and gave Phillips a glaring look. “It’s easy to talk,” he said. “Them cops are only doing the best they can.”

“Yeah, I know.” Phillips pointed toward the area of chaotic sound. “They’re sure doing a wonderful job of it.”

“I guess you could do better.”

“Me?” Phillips looked thoughtful for a moment. “If I was a cop I’d stay the hell out of that neighborhood. They don’t want cops down there. All they wanna do is raise hell and hammer away at each other. I’d let them do it to their hearts’ content. I wouldn’t give a damn if every last one of them wound up on a stretcher.”

“
It’s no use talking to you,” Bones said. “You just don’t make good sense.”

Phillips didn’t bother to reply. He looked at Whitey to see if Whitey was interested in the conversation. Whitey’s face showed no interest at all. He wasn’t even listening to the hectic noises coming from three blocks south. Whitey sat there gazing at the empty bottle set between Bones’s legs, and Phillips wondered seriously whether the small white-haired man was completely in touch with the world. He decided to find out, and he tapped Whitey’s shoulder and said, “You hear the commotion? You know what’s going on?”

Whitey nodded. But aside from that there was no reaction and he went on looking at the empty bottle.

“You know what it’s all about?” Phillips persisted.

Whitey shrugged.

“They’re fighting,” Phillips said. “Can’t you hear them fighting?”

Whitey shrugged again. “They’re always having trouble down there.”

“Not this kind of trouble,” Phillips said. “This is different.”

Bones nodded emphatically. “You can say that again,” he said. “It used to be they’d settle for some black eyes and busted noses, and maybe some teeth knocked out. But now they’re really at it. They’re out for blood.”

“They’ll get tired of it,” Whitey said. He sounded as though he weren’t inclined to discuss the matter further. Again he set his gaze on the empty bottle.

Phillips shrugged inside himself and decided there was no use in trying to get an opinion from Whitey. And anyway, maybe Whitey had the right idea. Like that little country overseas that never got in a jam because it stuck to a policy of minding its own business. Except that Whitey took it a lot further than that. Whitey wouldn’t even look, wouldn’t even listen. Chances were that Whitey never gave a moment’s thought to what was going on around him.

There was another burst of crashing and shouting and screaming from three blocks away and Bones said, “Listen to it. Good God, just listen to it.”

Phillips didn’t say anything.

“It’s getting worse,” Bones said. “The Lord only knows what’s happening down there. It sounds like a slaughterhouse.”

Phillips opened his mouth to utter a comment and then changed his mind and locked his lips tightly to prevent himself from voicing any further opinions. The effort was rather difficult for him because he was a man who gave considerable thought to local issues and felt quite strongly about certain matters. But he realized he couldn’t afford to feel too strongly; he suffered from a nervous stomach and at the clinic they’d told him it was important not to get excited. They said it was bad enough that he drank so much cheap wine and he shouldn’t make things worse by getting excited.

But the noise from three blocks away was on the order of hammer blows banging at the skull of Phillips and he winced as though he could actually feel the impact. He had come to Skid Row to get away from the memory of hatred and violence in a little mining town where the miners went on strike and he’d scabbed. They had come to talk to him and he’d figured they wanted to do more than just talk, and before it was ended there were three of them shot dead and a smoking rifle in his hand as he made a beeline for the woods. They were still looking for him in that part of the country, but that angle wasn’t what bothered him. What bothered him was the memory.

The memory hit him and went in very deeply every time he heard the violence down there three blocks away. It was like a voice telling him that Skid Row wasn’t really the hiding place it was supposed to be. It was a locale that constantly got played for a sucker. The Tenderloin tried its best to keep away from contact with the world but somehow or other the world always managed to make contact. The world tossed the bait and tossed it again and again, kept tossing it to get a nibble, and sooner or later the hook was taken and the line reeled in.

Phillips closed his eyes for a moment and listened to the sounds of the fighting in the street three blocks south of Skid Row. With his eyes shut very tightly he wished that Skid Row were soundproof.