Boulevard (15 page)

“No, I didn't have that much to drink.”

“You knew I was waiting for you.”

“No, I didn't.”

“You liar. You know I'm always at the Corral waiting for you. And you went to Blacksmith's and sucked somebody's cock. Jesus.”

“Henry, you do it all the time.”

He fell silent, staring fixedly into the glass counter. “Who was it?”

“Some old man.”

“Old?”

“Not as old as you are. But really nice. He was really nice.”

“You sucked his dick out in the middle of the bar?”

“I sure did.”

“You're trash,” Henry shook his head. “I guess I ought to remember that. You're exactly the kind of trash that comes here from Alabama.”

“You do the same thing in the bathroom nearly every night we go out.”

“Well, at least, I'm in the bathroom.”

Newell shrugged. He was writing the prices on the stickers for the new magazines like
Cock Lust, Babes Away, Mama's Got More
, and
Big Juicy
, for the corner
with the big-breasted-women magazines that Miss Sophia found to be distasteful, though she cleaned that part of the store as carefully as any other.

“Alabama is a very nice state,” Miss Sophia said, “though it was not one of the original thirteen colonies of the United States.”

“That's right,” Newell said, “there's nothing wrong with coming from Alabama, is there, Miss Sophia? You tell him.”

But she already had. Henry Carlton was giving her such an ugly look, too, as though she were not welcome, when she knew perfectly well that she was, because she worked here, after all, and she had been working here for many years, so many years that really, she had no idea of the number, or when she had started the job, who had been the president at the time, or any of the questions they would use to interrogate her when they took her in, and this confused her, but the mop handle was heavy in her hand and it led her back to the floor, where she started mopping again, saying, “Franklin Roosevelt was the president,” she said, “when I started working here. Franklin Delaney Roosevelt.”

They were laughing, but she knew what she knew.

“That was the year I was Queen of Carnival,” she said.

They could think what they liked. Newell said, though, and she listened because she had already started to like him, “Miss Sophia, it don't seem like you could be old enough to have worked here all the way since then.”

She was walking the mop bucket across the store to the novelties section, which would have to be dusted soon. “I'm older than I look. It's been that way all my life.”

Henry Carlton left the store, but she had the feeling she would be seeing him again. He was one of them that looked at the ground while he walked, nearly slumped over. You had to have misgivings about a man like that, Miss Sophia thought.

Sometimes she could see the future, sometimes she only thought she could. That night, looking across the store at Newell, so pretty in his blue sweater, that nice neck rising out of the collar so touchable, she had the feeling something was coming. She had the feeling Newell was coming onto the night shift to bring a change.

All night she cleaned and watched Newell, his motion so neat, his hair combed just right, his slender fingers counting the quarters. The hunks and studs who came in the place to look at the dirty movies in the back, they were noticing Newell, too. “Where's that guy with the snout usually works here at night,” one of the studs asked, or he might have been a hunk, “looks like a mouse.”

“Ben didn't show up,” Newell said, dripping quarters through his fingers, “so I'm on nights till we hire somebody. Six nights a week.”

“You cute thing, you. Aren't we the lucky ones?”

Newell smiled and leaned on the cash register. “Next in line.” Holding out his hand, the tender palm lightly callused at the base of the fingers.

She told Mac the next day, came in early to tell him, wearing her white chiffon with the satin bodice, a ribbon tied at the back. Wearing her soft white flats, pretty little things, and so comfortable. She told Mac, “I like that boy on nights. You keep him there.”

“You mean Newell, Miss Sophia? I was thinking to hire somebody else for the nights and bring him back to days.”

“Oh no, you leave him,” she said.

“You ain't getting any ideas about him, you dirty old man.”

Miss Sophia waved her hand at him and headed away.

She dusted the novelty counters that night, the long Caucasian-colored dildos, the chocolate ones, the fringed plastic pussies with hair, which she dusted with the same care as the men's organs, because they were there and she was a professional. She dusted the novelties most of the night, each and every carton of French ticklers, every bottle of Rush, and the whole night she watched Newell work, and so did Mac, who stayed late himself, smoking cigarettes in the carriageway and keeping an eye on things from the background.

Late in the evening he introduced Newell to Gus and Stoney, the men who kept an eye on the passageways that led from the courtyard of this building to adjacent streets. Mac watched the customers perusing the books, lining up to get quarters, some of them lining up two or three times so they could flirt with Newell a moment, sometimes even the sad husbands and fathers who came to watch the titty
movies, the lonely ones who could not get enough love at home, sometimes even one of the titty men would flirt with Newell a heartbeat or two. Miss Sophia saw, and Mac saw, or must have, since he announced to Lafayette, the man who looked after the girls upstairs during the evenings, “Newell is probably going to take over on nights from now on. You need to look after him when you're here. Let him know where to find you if he gets any trouble.”

“He been on days for a while,” Gus said.

“Yep. He's the most regular one I've had in a long time.”

“Be nice to have somebody who can count.”

“You're fucking preaching to the choir here,” Mac pulling at a jet black nose hair. “That midget rat-head son of a bitch come up short in the register every goddamn night.”

“Where you reckon he is?”

“I hope the motherfucker is dead in the bayou, that's what I hope. If he shows his Cajun ass around here, you need to hurt him pretty good.”

It was a good thing Miss Sophia heard that part, too, because only a couple of nights later, Ratboy did show up, sauntering himself at the hips like he always did, like he even had anything to carry down there, and them jeans needing to be washed for a month. First he stood in the light near the dildo case and blinked like he could not believe his eyes, then he spit on the carpet like the common stuff he was. He went plunking across the carpet
with that rabbit walk of his, that narrow ass riding against his tailbone; he stopped right behind the cash register and glared at Newell and said, “What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

“What does it look like I'm doing, Benjamin.”

“You take my job you shit fuck?”

“I got stuck with your job after you left it, is what happened. I was on days till you stopped showing up for work.”

Miss Sophia, heart bumping against her ribs, hurried out the back door, ventured upstairs along the back gallery, though she always hated walking up those stairs into funnyland, where the women did all kinds of notions with the big and important men in the suits and ties. She went past the rooms where the girls were laid out and groaning and performing every sort of mess you could think of, till at the end of the gallery she found Lafayette and stood in front of him and said, “That rat-head boy come downstairs.”

Lafayette slid up from the chair, very broad-shouldered and tall. “Is that a fact?”

“Yes, sir. That rat-face boy. And you know what Mr. Mac said.”

“He making trouble?”

“Sure is. All behind the cash register.”

His dark face darkened. She had accomplished her mission. So she turned around and shuffled away, hurried downstairs to get a good spot, since she could trust a man like Lafayette to know which side of the bread to butter.
To know to get right down here and clear Ratboy Ugliness out of the bookstore. Newell was standing between Ratboy and the cash register, and Ratboy was just bending down to get his knife out of his boot, the customers backing away from the register, confused at this turn of events, when Lafayette come rumbling through the curtains from the storeroom, pulled Ratboy over the counter by his shirt, took the knife out his hand, slammed him against a couple of walls, and then threw him right on the street. Good as any Western movie Miss Sophia ever saw.

The customers lined up to get their quarters, looking at one another like they had seen a good show. Lafayette stopped off at the counter to show Newell the alarm button under the counter, the one he already knew to use if the police walked into the bookstore. “Once is for the police coming in,” Lafayette said. “Twice is if you need help down here. You got it?”

“Yes sir.”

“I never knew a white boy to call me sir before.”

Newell shrugged.

Lafayette clapped him on the shoulder in front of the person who was trying to buy a copy of
Hunk Rider in Motor City
, one of the new paperback porno novels displayed with the all men's calendars. Lafayette squeezed Newell's shoulder some, Miss Sophia noted this. Then Lafayette went back upstairs.

Newell seemed shaken to Miss Sophia, but she offered no sympathy, since all she might have done was to take his face between her hands and stroke it, or some similar
touch of tenderness, and he would never have accepted this from her, so she said nothing to him, had no idea really if he even realized it was she who had fetched Lafayette, and in the end that hardly mattered. Newell seemed shaken, and Miss Sophia let him be.

When she was watching Newell rearrange the novelties in the cases after she had dusted, she realized that he was the one who had always rearranged the shelves when she cleaned, even when he was on day shift, and that he was responsible for the harmony of the arrangements of plastic sex toys, harnesses, straps of leather with metal studs, black masks and steel tit clamps, bottles offering sexual potency, Newell was responsible for the arrangements that Miss Sophia had always admired, and when she realized that, she respected him all the more.

That night in her bed in her two-room apartment on South Bunny Friend Street, she was picturing the bookstore in her mind, reaching for herself with her hands, that part of herself that was a man's part, which never struck Miss Sophia as odd in the least, that she had a woman's breasts but a man's penis, that she could still think of herself as she, even though she went to sleep caressing her penis with her hands. She hardly thought about that. What she thought about was all the men coming in and out of the bookstore, Newell at the cash register so young and ripe and pretty, his gentleness and care as he shelved the magazines, as he built a display of bottles of Rush inside the glass counter, and all those men lined up all night to give him green money and get quarters
to play the movies, back in the rooms that Miss Sophia would later clean, all those hunks and studs in the stalls making little messes for Miss Sophia to remove. It was a grand life. What had she done to deserve it?

She was bad to drink on a weekend, though. On a Saturday morning she would take the St. Charles streetcar to Martin Wine Cellar where the liquor was cheap, and buy two half-gallons of vodka, not the worst but not the best, and two big cans of tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce if she was out, Tabasco, and take the purchase to the register where several cashiers were arguing about what color fingernail polish was the best for the girl named Tyesha, who was Miss Sophia's cashier. Tyesha said, “Good morning, Grammaw, same thing this week, huh?”

“If it's a Saturday it's time to buy my liquor,” Miss Sophia said.

“Where you get that wig?”

“I had this wig.”

“I ain't ever seen you in it.”

“I don't like to be a redhead on the weekend much,” Miss Sophia said, “but I felt like it today.”

“Where you get that dress?”

“Magazine Street. I might go down there shopping today. To get me something nice to wear for the Mardi Gras this year.”

Tyesha elbowed one of the other cashiers and asked, “Miss Sophia, what ball you plan a go to this year?”

“I believe I might get invited to Comus.”

The girls hooted and laughed and slapped hands on
the tight jeans over their healthy thighs. Tyesha loved to hear Miss Sophia say she might get invited to the Comus ball. Funny every time, no matter what. Miss Sophia picked up her brown bag and said, “I'll bring you the invitation, let you look at it. But I don't know what I'll wear.”

She rode back to Canal Street on the streetcar with the bag in her lap and caught the Desire bus to her stop near South Bunny Friend Street. She got to her apartment and set the bag onto the counter. Her hand was shaking as she pulled down a glass from the cupboard over the sink. All week she had nothing to drink at all. But she mixed a strong tomato juice and vodka with a big splash of Tabasco and drank it down like water, and the rush of the sugary liquor flooded her and filled her head with a roaring sound, and she was on her way again.

It was a good idea to eat before she got to the point that she ought not to be working the stove, so she got out the pot of gumbo and scooped out enough for a bowl and set it on the stove in the pot, and a hunk of French bread smeared with butter. She was weaving some as she stirred the gumbo, singing under her breath, “If ever I cease to love, if ever I cease to love,” the same snatch of tune over and over again. “Used to be my mama could sing that song,” Miss Sophia said to the pot.

When she had eaten and when the roaring in her head was sufficiently loud she went for a walk, most of the time winding through the neighborhood streets with some of the vodka in a flask, which she carried today in a
nice patent leather purse, maybe a bit worn; she was dressed in a purple tulle cocktail dress with a brown stain down the skirt, and for the walk she put on one of her hats, a pillbox with a bit of black veil. Walking in the sunny day along the neighborhood with the fog in her head and people looking at her, making remarks about her, more than likely, but at least today there were no loud boys to torment her, to call her old hag or witch or mop woman or any of the names the boys used for her. For Miss Sophia was well known in that part of town, part of the color, and she herself was aware of her status, which she maintained by showing herself on the streets whenever possible, as drunk as she could make herself. That was her only trick. Not like Ruthie the Duck Lady, who roller-skated around the French Quarter, not like the Bead Lady, who would use a carpet knife to threaten a person who refused to buy one of her Lucky Beads. Miss Sophia was more genteel.