1. That day so still so burning
By the brought-down look of that gas-plate trap you’d scarcely have guessed it was the best deal we’d had yet. Everybody in L.A. was driving convertibles and us two fools thinking if a place had a rag carpet it had true class. This place had a carpet and cups, too. I was glad not to have to drink out of that shaving mug any more.
I got a job car-hopping but Daddy is too hard of hearing to do much along those lines himself. His right ear is as good as anyone’s, but the left is the one the guard at Industrial bust. What Daddy is best at is just hanging around the house in his tattery shorts with a stick of tea in his teeth.
Now and then he’d make a deal with a Mexican for half a can of backyard tea, double-wrap it and sell it to some other hill-billy as the pure Panama. That way we’d catch up on the rent and have enough left for a bottle of gin.
Other times people paid Daddy off in a pair of two-tone shoes the wrong size or a wristwatch with a home-made hairspring for me. “Daddy,” I told him at last, “this stuff is nowhere. Why take just anything?”
“For that grade of pot you’re lucky to get just anything.”
“But all you get is junk. Sheer junk.”
“I’ll take that too if I can get my hooks into it,” he told me.
I was still that simple I didn’t know what he meant.
I found out in due course. In that same room right under the roof where you had to battle for every breath.
On that day so still so burning.
I woke up with a lawnmower that had one blade missing ticketing around the room, cutting comers and coming back. It took me a full minute to realize the racket was all inside my head. I was face-down on the sofa with a hangover like a cliff.
I could feel my arm just hanging. And the watch with the homemade hairspring, that hadn’t run for days, hanging onto my wrist. Everything in that room was just hanging on. Everything in the world needed fixing.
“If I’m going to wake up feeling like this,” I told him, “I might as well drink whiskey.”
“You start on that again, Little Baby, you’ll be drunk again before night.”
“What makes me sick will cure me,” I told him. It was what he’d so often told me.
“There’s better cures than whiskey, Beth-Mary,” he pulled a switch on me.
“If submitting to that spike in your pocket is what you’re driving at, forget it,” I told him, “I’d sooner do without care.”
“I’m not asking you to undergo anything at my hands I’m not willing to undergo at yours.”
“I don’t want you to undergo a thing at my hands,” I told him, “I don’t want to punch holes in your hide—why punch holes in mine?”
He come to sit beside me on the horsehair sofa and took my hand in his own.
“Baby,” he told me, “Little Baby. Once we agreed that I was to take care of you in the big things and you were to take care of me in the little ones.”
“But why begin with the big ones, Little Daddy?” I asked. For at sight of that needle my strength simply drained.
“What kind of man do you think I am? You think I want to see my little wife go to work sick? Don’t she deserve my care?”
“Daddy,” I told him with what strength I had, “you’ll be more sorry than you now know if you do me this way. For your own heart’s sake, don’t do me this way.”
“Baby,” he told me, “a fact is a fact. And today’s fact is, are you going to work sick or well?”
There wasn’t any question of not going to work at all. I’d already missed one day’s car-hopping. When you missed two they automatically de-hopped you.
“Fair is only fair, Beth-Mary,” he told me,” so hold out your pretty arm.”
Fair is fair. And a fact is a fact. Yet I didn’t hold out my arm. I just let him have it, he took it so gentle. He hadn’t been gentle in so long. He began stroking the down, up and down. Watch out for Christian Kindred when he starts being gentle.
“Don’t jerk, Little Baby,” he told me so soft—and no sooner had he said it than my arm jerked of itself and jerked the whole outfit clean out of his hand and left the needle shivering in my hide. I hadn’t got Drop the First.
“Blowing a whole sixteenth! Fool! After what I distinctly told you”—Daddy went into a simply terrible huff—“you realize you just cost us two-seventy-five?” How that child did huff and puff about my spendthrift ways.
In that room so close so burning.
We couldn’t afford to blow another two-seventy-five, that was plain. So I looked the other way for the sake of thrift. And felt a gentle whoof, like someone had touched my heart. And felt the gentlest tingle; like someone saying “Darling.”
That was all. But Daddy felt much better.
“Was that the real thing, Daddy?” I asked. For somehow I’d expected something far greater.
“It’s the real thing alright, Little Baby.”
Us two fools. We didn’t either us know what the real thing was. “Lucky for you we had a sixteenth-grain left in the paper,” Daddy told me, “lucky for you that needle didn’t snap when you blew the shot. God must have his arms around you, girl, that’s the only way I can figure it.”
Somebody got his arms around me alright but I’d hate to think it’s the party he claims. The minute I got my blouse off that night he banged me again. “That one is history, Baby”—like that he said it. As if he’d been lying in wait all day just to bang me.
“That one is history”—I didn’t know what he meant till it brought me up deathly sick over the wash basin.
“Why, it wasn’t no bigger shot than the first,” he pretended he couldn’t for the life of him figure that one out—“it was only a sixteenth-grain, Little Baby.”
“It may have been only a sixteenth, Little Daddy, but it was into the vein and the first was just into the skin.” I let him know I was on. “A fact is a fact,” I reminded him.
“What makes you sick will cure you,” he reminded me. And grinned. Just grinned.
The way that boy makes history on my hide since, he ought to be a professor in a school. What if that vein collapses? Will History collapse, too? O, I forgive him for the money he threw away like it was afire! the clothes he hocked to get more money that were my clothes. I can forgive him for making me do time for him.
After all, if he made a whore out of me, I made a pimp out of him. If I did time for him, he done time for me. If he hocked my clothes to support his habit, I’ve hocked his to support mine.
For Little Daddy, much as he likes to dig, never digs too deep. He never fools with that one spot in my heart where I’ll never forgive him ever. For all his brags he has never yet said to me, “Baby, who took you from your baby?”
Little Daddy, the day you say that to me will be the day I’ll take my turn on you. And I won’t stop with banging you. I’ll bone you like a fish.
Little Daddy wants someone to give him credit for something so bad, but I don’t give him Credit the First. Why make things easy for him? Since when did he ever make things easy for me?
“You were a hare on the mountain,” he’ll brag right to my face, “when I fired your way you were done for.”
“I was done for before ever you took aim, Little Daddy,” I have to remind him, “every sport in town was firing my way two years before you came calling, bringing me caramel candy like I’d never seen the back room of a bar. Little Daddy, I felt sorry for you with your haircut out of Boys’ Industrial and the town sports laughing because you thought nothing had changed since you’d gone. You made it so plain, Little Daddy.
“But I weren’t no hare on the mountain. I’d been pigmeat two whole years.”
“Who made a whoor out of you? Who turned you out?”
O, it goes right through me when he says whoor like that. And well he knows it. “Little Daddy,” I tell him sweet as sugar candy, “don’t trouble your poor heart so. I did it to send money back for the baby’s care, nothing more. All you done was tell me what a fair price was for the product I was marketing. For that I’m still grateful to you.”
“You were against working with a sponge when your time came around,” he keeps trying, “but I made you work with one all the same. Who ever treated his old lady harder than that?”
“If I hadn’t worked through how would I have made enough money to keep my Little Daddy knocked out?” I ask him. And pat his little cheek.
He slaps down my hand, peevey boy—“Baby, who made a dope fiend out of you?”
He’ll get that needle under my hide in more senses than one.
“I don’t consider myself a fiend about dope or anything else,” I’m forced to point out to him. “I’ve taken a little liking to the stuff and don’t know how to quit, that’s all.”
“Then you’re not actually against it, Baby?” And grins. Just grins.
“I’m against it in my heart, Little Daddy. Right there’s the difference between me and you.”
“That’s what I like so much about you, Beth-Mary,” he tells me, “your mind is so weak.”
“I know I can’t ever be so strong as you, Little Daddy,” I have to admit to him, “for I’m not so weak to begin.”
“Then take your own chances and suffer the consequences,” he says.
I’m suffering the consequences every hour since that day on South San P. Street.
That day so still so burning.
2. Watch Out for Daddy
“Stuff is making a regular little go-getter out of you, Baby,” my Daddy begun getting proud of me the hour we got off San P. Street, “now all you need to get is a little know-how.”
“Daddy, I already know how,” I told him.
“You know how all right but you don’t know with who. Your smalltown ways don’t fit out here. Don’t ever tell a trick you’re married and have a baby daughter. You don’t ask him to buy you a drink. You don’t drink with him at all. You ask him does he want to play house or not? Buy your own drink, Baby. Don’t you want to be real great? Don’t you want to keep your Daddy knocked out?”
We got so great, shortly thereafter, that we were both kept knocked out. Every time we walked into a joint someone was sure to holler, “Look who’s here!” Usually the bartender. Everybody with class was hollering hello. I got over being bashful and advanced clear to the Anxious-to-Please stage. “Are you satisfied, Mister? You’re not disappointed?”
And Daddy got even more anxious than me. “Are you alright, Baby?” He’d sneak me a fast whisper from behind a potted palm in the lobby where he had no right whatsoever to be—“You want to go home and rest now? You tired, Baby?”
You call that a pimp?
“Baby, did that cat act married-like? Does he want to see you again? How did he come on, Baby? Fairly great or so?”
“Not too bad,” I answered offhanded one time—“as a matter of fact, not bad at all.”
“Why don’t you marry the man for God’s sake then?” he turned on me—“I won’t stand in your way! Imagine it—a hustler falling in love with one of her own tricks! And you can call yourself a whore? Why, I think you like this trade.”
He’d never said a thing that hard to me before.
“I’ll go back to car-hopping tomorrow,” I told him. “I think I make as sorry a whore as you make a macker.”
That hurt his feelings.
“No wife of mine is going to be seen hustling hamburgers,” he got real stem to make himself out the real thing in mackers.
And I never answered him so offhand again. “Daddy, that fellow was just no good whatsoever,” I’d report, “if he got an old lady I’m sorry for her.”
After a spell Daddy just stopped asking. And I just minded my own peace and didn’t use so much platinum nail polish.
L.A. people like a young country-looking couple. There were gifts almost every day. Ankle-bracelets and earrings and perfume for me and nylon shorts for my Daddy. Right up to the end, everyone tried to help. Even the old clerk at the desk tried to warn us the night Daddy came into the lobby with an envelope in his topcoat pocket.
“A message for you,” he told Daddy—and scribbled nabs on a phone slip. Daddy folded the slip without looking at it. It was still in his hand when I opened for him and they followed in like I’d opened for them.
One on each side, patting Daddy all over, and Daddy giving them the wrong pocket every time he turned. I set tight as a little gray mouse. You do yourself nothing but harm to ask, “Where’s your warrant?” They’ll tell you, “We don’t need one for a rooming house.” You can tell them, “This ain’t no rooming house this is a hotel” then if you want. But one will wait while the other fetches and they’ll make the warrant stick then if they have to plant something to do it. Well, you asked for it.
“Everything us two kids own in this world is right in that there grip, mister,” Daddy told them and got rid of his coat on the bed.
There wasn’t anything but old clothes in the grip, and that was right when Daddy got his real good chance. He had two C-notes in his fly and one of the nabs went into the bedroom. All daddy had to do then was pick that envelope out of the coat pocket, hand the nabber left alone with us one of the C’s and flush the tea down the toilet. Only the other came back just then and he was the one found the right pocket at last. He tried a seed on the very tip of his big cow-tongue—“What’s this?” he asked the other clown.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Daddy told him, “I never seen it before.”
But he looked just so all in.
All we could hope for was the stop-warrant from Kentucky wouldn’t show up in court.
I remember His Honor putting his glasses on to see how come Daddy done two years so young. They were the rimless kind. “Two murderous fights in two years,” His Honor told himself, out loud.
If he had just asked me what had happened, I would of told him. Then he wouldn’t have had to read all that paper.
When my Daddy came out of Boys’ Industrial and began courting me, how he battled everyone he thought had courted me before! Even though all I was was the first sight he saw wearing a dress. Yet them evil town-boys had only to name some country boy like he’d had a roll-in-the-meadow with me and Daddy would whup that boy, no questions asked. But the kids he whupped were the ones who’d had no more fun with me than that of walking me home from vesper services. All I hoped was one of them boys wouldn’t be so mean as to bring up the name of the Morganfield boy.
He was the one I started to lewdlin’ with and it got out of hand—yet I hadn’t set eye on him since Christian had begun courtin’ me. Fact is it wasn’t but a bare ten days between that last night with the Morganfield boy and my first all-night night with Christian. Seven months after, it wasn’t a certainty in my mind to which one of them boys I owed my condition. But of course I chose Daddy. I’ve always had good taste.
When I seen Daddy waiting by the pinball machines I tried to get him out of the bar. But he lit up the machine and paid me no mind. No mind at all. When the Morganfield boy came in and seen Daddy, he knew who Daddy was waiting for, too.
I asked the bartender to help me get Daddy out. Or the Morganfield boy either one. And the Morganfield boy would have been more than happy to leave; but for the way he’d look in the eyes of others. “Leave them have it out,” the bartender told me.
“I recommend you to leave,” Daddy gave me orders. But I got no farther than to go through that bar door. Something held me outside. I knew what was going to happen in there.
Daddy has his own ways. He didn’t so much as reproach that boy. He simply invited him to a game of pinball.
They played several games, so I was later told, with the Morganfield boy playing to lose, until Daddy accused him of tilting. The Morganfield boy just shook his head knowing it was no use denying anything.
“You ain’t by way of being much a man, are you?” Daddy then put it to him; and that the boy was forced to deny. I was standing outside the door when I heard the bartender turn the key in the lock.
The Morganfield boy must have heard it turn, too. It was the last key he ever heard turn. He lingered a week after that beating then died in the night.
A week after, I had my girl-baby. The very spitting image of Christian.
Christian won a plea of self-defense in the same courtroom; the same week I gave the baby up for adoption.
Ten days later we were riding a moving van into L.A.
His Honor didn’t have to keep his specs on any longer. He’d read enough for a spell. “Young man, I think you’re a Menace to Society,” and by the way he snapped that glass case shut I knew that was what he’d really been wanting to say all along. He had his excuse.
“I think society is a menace to my Daddy”—it was out before I could bite my tongue. Because that was what I’d been wanting to say all along.
“Prisoner remanded in lieu of bail. Cash bond set at five hundred dollars. Case continued till Thursday at nine.” He was really going to give it to my Daddy Thursday at nine.
Forty-eight hours to raise half a grand. It could never be done by turning tricks even at the outrageous prices I charged.
“If you tell me to go for the sodium amytal, I’ll go,” I told him, for I’d worked with knockout drops when we were hard pressed once before. It isn’t my line. But when it comes down to a matter of Daddy’s freedom I can do anything.
Daddy forbade me. “Forget the rough stuff, Baby. If you slipped we’d both be busted. Just get what you can on your coat. Then what you can on your watch. You don’t actually need that Japanese kimono. If there ain’t half a grand hanging in your closet I miss my guess. Only don’t dump it all in one joint,” he warned me. “Spread it around so it don’t look like we’re thinking of blowing town or nothing like that.”
My coat. My watch. My kimono. Not one word about his coat, his watch, his raw silk pajamas or his red silk foulard robe. That child is so jealous of his clothes he can scarcely bear to part with a button if it’s pearl.
I spread the stuff around like he told me. Half a bill for his topcoat. Another for his watch and ring. I only got twenty for the foulard robe. I didn’t begin to spread my own things till his were gone. I got the half a grand up without losing either my Longine or my chubby. Daddy got to sign his bond just before midnight Wednesday.
But O that long walk down the courthouse corridor, with an eyedropper hype in one cup of my bra and a bottle of dolaphine with a five-spot wrapped around it in the other before we made the open street.
As soon as we made it he wants to grab a cab back to the hotel for his clothes. My own coat was hanging over my arm.
“I got a sneak-hunch somebody’s waitin’ for us there,” I lied. Because I know how he respects my sneak-hunches.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But I won’t go back.”
“I take your word only because I have to,” Daddy gave in with doubt.
Then that big cold lonesome lights-out bus. Without a driver, without a rider. Waiting just for us.
The aisle had just been swept and a little wind kept snooping under the seats to see was it clean there, too. We sat in the back seat, us two fools, and Daddy turned his collar up against me. He was still trying to figure whether I’d hocked his clothes ahead of my own. The question was only technical, of course; but it was important for him to know all the same. I’d never gone against orders before, and he had no way of knowing if I had or not. I scarcely could blame him for feeling brought down.
After the way he’d come hitchhiking a vegetable truck into L.A. and in two months rose to the top of the heap, from San P. Street to Beverly Hills; after all the class he took on in almost no time at all; after the argyles and the monogrammed shirts, the cordovans and the easy days, till he’d reached a point where people with class invited us both to spend an afternoon on a yacht in The Bay—to be leaving now with no more to show than tracks down both arms and heel-holes in both socks would have brought down an even yet greater Daddy than mine. Except of course there ain’t none greater. He may not be the best macker there is. But he is the meanest little old dog of a Daddy in town.
After Vegas the trick would be to see how long we could keep from coming sick in a cornfield. I didn’t show him the dolaphine till it was breaking light and I was getting a weak streak through my own middle. Daddy had just rest-stop time enough to fix hisself. There wasn’t time for me there and it’s a long deal between stops. When I did fix at last I added just a drop of water to replace what I’d used; so Daddy wouldn’t fret at sight of the stuff going down too fast in the bottle. Or he might get sick sooner than need be.
Just before Vegas I took a little closer look and seen it was fuller than I’d filled it. I didn’t say nothing. I just let him handle the refills and didn’t let him know I was on until we got on the highway with a half a bottle of dolaphine-water between us and Chicago. That was when I showed him the fiver.
He laughed then, he was feeling real good. “Everything’s going to be perfect, Baby,” he told me. Then we both fixed and sure enough it looked like everything would be perfect.
“Baby,” he told me, “you’re taking care of me in the little things.”
“I’m taking care of you in the big ones as well,” I told him—“Didn’t I tell His Honor where to head in?” I got that in quick because it had to be settled while Daddy was still feeling well.
“You certainly did, Girl-Baby,” he come through ever so nice.
Now you see how he is? God help me if ever his eye lit on a pawn ticket for a red silk bathrobe—but when he got a really legit beef on me, like costing us everything we own for the sake of one sassy smalltown remark, he just laughs the whole deal off.
“Stay out of sight,” I hurried him then, “here comes our transportation.”
I’d thumb down a driver and get one foot in the car, then I’d say Wait For My Brother Mister and up would jump Daddy out of the bushes and come just a-trotting. I guess for a short spell there he was the up-jumpinest, very trottinest little Daddy on Route 66. Once he up-jumped and come a-trottin’ so fast a lady driver wheeled off with a strip of my skirt in her door handle.
“Daddy,” I scolded him, “don’t up-jump so fast, else you’ll be swinging a one-legged whore.”
Comical things like that are what I say every now and then. Not very often. Just from time to time. If I do it oftener Daddy says, “I’ll make the jokes in this family.”
* * *
Neither of us were making jokes when we stepped down off that Odgen Avenue trolley. Four cross-country days of Wait-For-My-Brother-Mister, four cross-country nights on watery dolaphine. I felt like something that had been on a raft three weeks at sea.
The sidewalks so glarey, so hard. The sky all so bare. The people when they pass looking straight ahead—I wouldn’t touch one for fear he’d scream. And how that ass-high Chicago wind comes right at you, so mad, it feels like it wants to cut you a new petoochi right then and there.
We went into a grocery and bought a box of graham crackers just to get out of that wind. A sign said SLEEPING ROOMS. That was for us. I just leaned, I was that done in. Christian kept one arm around me. He was trying for something, I couldn’t make out just what, with that old doll behind the counter. When his arm went for my wrist I knew what he was trying for. Daddy’s been trying for my Longine for some time now.
He could of got maybe twelve dollars for it off the old woman—if he could of got it off me. But he had to settle for six dollars on his own hour-piece. That I’d paid forty dollars for.
And then handed the six right back across the counter for a week’s rent sight unseen. How could she afford to make a trade like that? She won’t be in business long.
But she threw in the crackers and took us upstairs with her keys in one hand and a quart of milk in the other. The stairs were so dark we would of got lost on the way up but for that bottle. My throat was so parched I could near taste it. If she’d set it down when she opened the door I would of picked it up for her and then let my tongue just hang. But she only needed one hand to open the door.
For that door you didn’t even need one hand—it hung so far ajar we could of squeezed in between it and the jamb one by one. Inside the room she looked right into my face and set the bottle down on the dresser.
Then she looked into Daddy’s and picked it up again. Daddy got too much pride to ask for things and I was too sick to. She went downstairs taking it with her.
“She needs it to light the way down,” I told Daddy.
He pulled up the shade and I seen a square of red brick wall dripping wet though it wasn’t raining. I seen a brassy old high-ended bed. I seen a soggy mattress made of great big lumps and tiny bums. I seen four green-paper walls. I seen a holy calendar from what year I couldn’t tell but I’d judge it was B.C. This one made the San Pedro trap look sharp.
“I’ll see you at the Greyhound Station,” I told my Daddy.
“You can’t come sick in the open street, Beth-Mary,” he told me; and he got to the door before me and locked it so tight all you could see through it was two inches of the hall.
“I’m sick already,” I told him though it killed me to admit it. Daddy don’t let hisself come sick in his mind, heart and bowels like me. He puts his own sickness down for the sake of mine. That way I get to be sick for both of us.
He put newspapers under me. He made me a little pillow out of his hole-in-heel socks and a hand towel with a red border. He took my shoes and stocking off so’s I wouldn’t get runs when I started to kick. He put my chubby over me. He called me his Girl-Baby.
That’s what he calls me when he loves me the most.
Watch out for Daddy when he loves you the most. You have to come next to deathbed before he lets himself act tender.
“Let me take your Longine, sweetheart,” he told me, “else you’ll crack the crystal when you start in to swing.”
“I’d as soon keep it on,” I told Daddy.
For I felt the big fear coming on. It was coming a-slipping, it was coming a-crawl, it was slipping and crawling down that slippery red wall.
“Don’t leave me, Christian,” I asked him then.
“I’ve seen you from Shawneetown. I saw you through L.A. I’m here to see you the rest of the way.”
“The rest of the way is by the stars,” I told him.
“By starlight or no light,” he told me, and his voice started going far away then; yet I knew it was telling me I wasn’t to have Stuff any more ever. Something got a grip on that red brick wall and wouldn’t let go.
“Pull down the shade,” I told him, “they’ve changed their plans.”
He pulled down the shade. I could tell by the shadow that fell as it fell. I had a little secret to tell. “Where are you?” I asked him.
“Right beside you, Beth-Mary.”
“They’re waiting in the hall,” I told him my secret: “They’ve stole the master key.”
He put a chair under the doorknob and stuffed the keyhole to humor me. “Daddy is here right beside you.”
There was somebody in that hall all the same. And somebody on the rooftop too.
The Federal man was beside the bed pressing my left hand for prints; but I hid the right under the covers because that was the one that really counted. I kept turning the wrong hand like Daddy turning the wrong pocket because it was me wearing that big stop-warrant W and not Daddy at all. That was what I’d been suspecting for some time now. “Beth-Mary,” the Fed began to sound like my Daddy, “try to rest till dark.”
“Never heard the name till now,” I told him, “but the first hustling broad I meet who answers to it, I’ll tell her she’s suppose to come down-town.”
“It’s only me, your little Daddy,” that Fed tried his best. “Look at me, Beth-Mary.”
“I have seen you somewheres before,” I told him. “You’re the nigger bellboy tried to pimp me off my little Daddy on San P. Street—remind me to have him cripple you back of the parking lot. It won’t take as long this time as before.”
Not till that moment did Daddy know I knew about that deal.
“Beth-Mary Kindred,” he asked me—“Look at me. Are you putting it on?”
“Come closer,” I told him. For I was much more sly than he ever had supposed.
He came up close. He was all misty-white. “Get out! Get out!” I screamed right out—I wanted to cry, I wanted to laugh, I was freezing cold, I was sweating-wet. I couldn’t get up still I couldn’t lie still. I wanted to feel of someone’s hand. Yet I couldn’t bear human touch.
I can hear a country mile off, sick or well. Daddy don’t hear a thing till it’s next to his ear.
I heard steps in the hall. I said what I heard. Was it really steps or not? He didn’t know whether to duck or go blind.
“Hold my hand and be still, you talk too much,” I told him—“say something to me—Hush! What train is that?” It troubled me to hear a passenger train making time and not being able to tell was it going west or coming to run me over.
“That’s the New York Central, sweetheart.” He thought he could tell me just anything.
“Christian Kindred—finky liar—you good and well know that ain’t no New York Central.”
“Maybe it’s the Illinois Central then. Maybe it’s the Nickel Plate. For all I know, Baby, it could be the Rock Island.”
“You lie in your teeth. You know as well as I it’s the Southern Pacific.”
“That’s right, sweetheart,” he agreed too soon, “it’s the Southern Pacific for sure.”
“Wait in the hall!” I hollered right at him—“Do as you’re told!”
He closed the door quiet to make off like he done as he was told. He didn’t dare leave me. Yet feared to come near me. “Little Baby,” I heard him ask, “don’t battle me so. You’re grinding your teeth.”
It’s the kind of sickness you do well not to grind your teeth. But I wasn’t battling him. I was battling it. Though it’s a sickness it’s the purest of follies to battle. Yet you have to battle it all the same. Battle and grind till your strength is spent in hope of one blessed moment of rest.
That moment comes yet it’s never blessed. Your nose runs. Your eyes water. Your mouth drools like a possum’s in love. “Daddy,” I told him, “I don’t want you to see me looking this way.”
Then it’s some sort of fever-doze where you’re dreaming by the moment. Yet know right where you are all the while. It’s something real wild that can’t be endured. You endure it all the same.
It’s all misty-white, it’s like under water. Yet of a sudden the whole room will come clear and everything in it stands out to the wallpaper’s tiniest crack.
It’s the sickness that turns you against yourself. You’re like two people, a weak cat and a strong, with no use for each other but they can’t pull apart. “I don’t deserve to be punished like this,” you hear the weak cat grieve.
“If you deserved it, it wouldn’t be punishment,” the tougher party tells.
“Then let me get it all and be done. Let me come to the end of suffering then.”
The stronger cat just scorns all that.
It goes and it comes, it creeps or it runs, there is no end and it’s never done.
“Then why just dole it? Let me have it all at once,” the weak cat begs.
“If you could see an end it wouldn’t be punishment.”
It’s all so useless. It’s nothing like sleep.
Once my eyes cleared and I saw Daddy plain: he was watching the light beyond the shade, waiting for the dark to come down. “Here I am,” I could guess what he was thinking, “without a penny, without a friend. And a W on my forehead. If I get picked up it’ll be a long deal before us two fools sleep side by side again. Who would fix a poor broad in a rented bed then?”
“Daddy,” I whispered to him, “I got too many worries to go through with this.”
He tried to give me something by mouth but my lips felt pebbly. I spit it all out. Daddy ought to have known better than that. Your mouth doesn’t want it, it’s your vein crying out. You can’t ease a vein habit by mouth. Not even with graham crackers.
I felt him unstrapping my Longine. “You’re getting it all spittly,” he told me. I tried to swing my arm but I was too weak.
I must have dozed, because I heard Daddy’s voice near at hand; yet he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking on the phone.
“What time can my wife and I catch a bus to Shawneetown, sir? We can’t go directly? Nearest stop is Morganfield? But are you certain it won’t be overcrowded, sir? I don’t mind for myself, but I’m traveling with my wife and little girl. I want them to be rested when we get home.
Yes sir—that’s the reason we prefer travelling by Greyhound, sir. O no sir, not by far, I should say this isn’t our first trip by Greyhound. ‘We know we’ll travel in comfort when we take Greyhound’ is how the little woman puts it. Our little girl prefers Greyhound too. ‘And leave the driving to them, Daddy’ is how our little girl puts it.”
I opened one eye.
It seemed a peculiar time to be putting me on.
But there he was, making all arrangements.
I was too tired to follow. He just went on and on. I didn’t hear him hang up when I came around again he seemed to have cancelled with Greyhound.
‘‘Bluebird Lines? What time is a bus available to Shawneetown, sir? Shawneetown, Illinois, yes sir. No, we don’t want to charter it, there are only the three of us—my wife, little girl and myself. I don’t mind standing up myself—I’d stand up all the way, it wouldn’t bother me in the least. But I have to think of my wife and little girl. You’re sure it won’t be overcrowded? Plenty of seats for everybody? I see. Yes, one next to the window—for the little girl, of course.” He hung up.
Grey is for Greyhound. Blue is for Bluebird. But what color is a pimp who thinks it’s funny to make comical phone calls over a dead telephone when his old lady is preparing to die for lack of a fix?
He came over to the bed. He touched my hair and said “Lay back, Beth-Mary.” So I knew he’d give up trying to amuse me. “Just rest. Your Little Daddy’s with you.”
My Little Daddy’s with me alright. The Jesus God, what can be said of a man who can even make a failure of pimping? There we were with movie directors putting hundred-dollar-bills in my hair, so faggy they didn’t even mind Daddy coming along, having the both of us out on a yacht in The Bay; him in clothes so classy he called himself a “technical advisor” whatever that may mean. And me so cute they used to brag about me all over the boat.
Then he has to get on Stuff and I have to get on because he’s on. How do you like that for a man who once had good sense? Honest to God, when I think of the silk shirts, the lounging pajamas, the watches I wore and the French-heel shoes, the black lace undies and smoking jackets, the dresses I looked like an actress in—all down the drain like the sixteen-gauge hype you’d fixed with.
All gone. All down.
“You’re still my one true tiger, Beth-Mary,” he told me with his hand still on my hair.
I felt like his one Old Faithful. I didn’t feel like nobody’s tiger. I just felt bowed low.
Poor pimp, he does his best.
“Let me take your Longine now, Sweetheart,” he told me, “else you’ll crack the crystal when you start to swing.”
“Put it where I can see it,” I asked him and he strapped it onto a handle of the bureau. I could see the shiny golden circle hanging even though I couldn’t see the time. At least I knew where time was to be had.
“Baby,” he told me, “you got the worst part over.”
Then the big sick hit me bigger and sicker than before.
It comes on real quiet, like nabbers at work—the only thing that’s something deep inside you and something far outside, too. The only thing that feels so soft that hits so hard. The only thing that’s more like nabbers at work than nabbers at work.
Nabs holding both your arms—then letting you pull loose just to see where you’ll hide. There’s a key in your door but it won’t turn. Nabbers coming down both sides trying all doors—Get your back flat against the wall. Maybe they won’t try this door at all. Maybe they’ll never find you.
They’re trying it, they’re telling our name doorway to door—“Beth-Mary Kindred. Beth-Mary Kindred. Beth-Mary”—I saw my Daddy’s face, so dear, so sort of pulled with care—“Beth-Mary, I’m right here beside you.”
Then I knew nabbers at work had been just sounds inside my fevery ears.
Spook-docs and croakers, bug-docs and such, meatballs and matrons, nurses and all, there’s not one cares whether you live or you die. For not one knows what true suffering is. But Daddy who stayed on my side and beside me that sorriest day of any, you know. And you’re the onliest one who knows.
People like to say a pimp is a crime and a shame. But who’s the one friend a hustling broad’s got? Who’s the one who cuts in, bold as can be, when Nab comes to take you? Who puts down that real soft rap only you can hear to let you know your time is up and is everything alright in there Baby? And when a trick says, “Where’s the twenty I had in my wallet?”—who’s the one he got to see? Who’s the one don’t let you get trapped with the monstering kind?
When ten o’clock in the morning is dead of night, who still keeps watch over you?
“What time is it, Daddy?” I asked him.
“Time to get off the wild side, Beth-Mary,” he told me like he’d found out for himself at last. Then just set on. So pale, so wan.
I turned my head toward him so’s he’d know I was with him.
“Is it getting a little darker, Christian?’’
“It’s nigh to dark, Beth-Mary.”
All I could do was touch his wan hand. My fingers were too weak to hold it. Yet he took it into mine and pressed my palm to let me know.
“Baby,” he told me, “I’m sorry for what I done to you on South San Pedro Street.”
And said it so low, poor just-as-if-macker, as though I were part of his very heart still. That I heard it clear as little bells.
I must have slept then for a spell, because I dreamed I was buying seeds for some flower that blooms under water and when I woke it was raining. And someone kept humming from ever so far. When the rain stopped the little hum stopped. And all was wondrous still. When the rain began the hum began, from ever so far I could scarcely hear.
“Is that you humming, Daddy?” I asked.
Nobody answered. Nobody was near. The hum came closer—a little girl’s humming. How could such a tiny hum come from so terribly far?
“You need sleep, Mother,” she said my name. Sick as I was, my heart sank yet farther.
I lay on my pillow, how long I can’t tell. After a time I noticed my Longine was gone. But it was all one by then.
I didn’t have to open my eyes to know that Christian was gone too. I didn’t care, one way nor another.
I didn’t care for anything.
I was the one the law had wanted all along.
Then I heard his step.
My Daddy’s step way down. Then the key turned in the lock and his voice came to me—
“Are you going to sleep all day, Little Baby?”
“Not if Little Daddy is going to make me well,” went through my mind; but I was too weak to say it. All I knew, by his voice, was that he had scored. I felt myself getting well before I could tell where he was at. Then I felt his arm holding me up and the slow press of the needle—he hardly teased me at all this time—though that’s Daddy’s pleasure and I don’t begrudge him—he hit me then in a way no doctor or nurse on earth ever could. It takes a junkie to fix a junkie. And nobody knows how to fix you like your own Little Daddy. Little orange fires began to glow deep inside me. I felt myself getting warm.
“Don’t try to sit up yet, Little Baby”—and when he said that I saw him clear. I saw my own Little Daddy’s face. My onliest Little Daddy. His face so old so young. So sort of pulled with care. He dried my nose and mouth and patted me with a warm damp rag. Then he dried me ever so gentle. Nobody can gentle me like my Little Daddy.
“You’re the best connection a working girl ever had,” I told him then.
“Don’t try to talk yet, Little Baby,” he told me. “We’ll have good times again—This is the old Christy talking now.”
He didn’t look like the old Christy. Not by far. I remembered the old Christy.
Yet I’ve tried to live without him and it’s like living without a heart at all.
How old was I when he came past looking so young yet so old? Seventeen? I was needing someone to lean on.
“I want to get up, Christian,” I told him again. He brought me my slip and turned his head while I dressed. When I looked in the bathroom mirror I gave a bit of a jump to see how thin my face had got. Still, it had a bit of color now. I added a little more.
“I’m ready to go to work,” I told him when I came out.
“Sit down, Beth-Mary,” he told me, “I don’t know whether you’re ready or not.”
I thought he meant I wasn’t strong enough yet. But that wasn’t it at all.
“We won’t make a bankroll tricking bums,” he let me know.
I felt his drift. Yet I wasn’t sure.
“Is there some other kind of trick?”
He got up and walked around. Daddy had something on his mind.
“It’s time to go the kayo route, Baby,” he told me.
“You didn’t want that route in L.A.,” I reminded him. “How come you want to go it now?”
“Different circumstances,” he told me.
“What different circumstances?” I wanted to know.
“Look around you, Beth-Mary. Just look around you.”
I looked around. I looked at the bed still damp with sweat and the walls the brick was showing through; the wash-basin like something stole off a junk-wagon and four inches of alley-window that gave down the last of day.
“I see what you mean, Little Daddy,” I told him. “Where you going to get the prescription?”
“A place called the Southsea. A bartender name of Ram.”
“You’ve been covering a lot of ground, Christian,” I praised him. “If we score do I get back my Longine?”
I remember a time he would have clobbered me for checking him like that. Now he grinned weak-like.
“Get your handbag,” he told me. “I want you to meet some classy people.”
“What about my Longine, Daddy?” I made bold to press him harder.
Then he pulled his wallet and flashed me the pawn ticket.
“You keep checking me out,” he warned me, “next time I’ll hock you.”
“I just wanted to know whether you’d sold it or hocked it,” I let him know.
And out we went, down the stairs and onto the street.
Just two fools leaning on each other.
3. O Shining City Seen of John
O Shining City Seen of John I thought, if that country fool of mine has but the country sense to phone Enright, that he can keep the chubby if he’ll go our bond and forget who threw the shot-glass, at least one of us can make the street and it had best be me.
If she don’t we’re both going to get too sick to call for help on anyone but God, and God can’t help you from behind a solid door. The solid door is where they lock you when you deny being a user but they know you’re one all the same. It’s part of the treatment, I’ve had it before.
That’s why I was keeping an eye on that string of light between the floor and the door. Because that time we were busted in L.A. and they wouldn’t let Beth see me, she rolled a cigarette under my door to let me know she was making the street. For a country fool to get city-smart takes but five days in Los Angeles.
Poor piece of trade who needed someone strong to lean on—Who’ll you lean on now if your Little Daddy gets time? What’ll you do when the dolaphine gives out? Ride Trailways to Shawneetown?
Who do you think’ll be at the station to meet you? The Shawneetown Parent Teachers Association? I doubt you’ll be able to score for your midnight fix at the Shawneetown General Store, Beth-Mary.
Face up to it, Little Baby: you were bom unfit to be anybody’s mother and you’re unfit yet.
Where Can I Get A Good Piece of Tale, some fool had scratched in yellow chalk, on the wall just over my head. I couldn’t think of an answer.
I didn’t feel good, I didn’t feel bad. Just a little low in mind for knowing I was never going to play the clarinet after all.
“But Daddy”—the fool complained after I told her I’d seen the clarinet, marked down to twenty bucks, in the hockshop window —“Daddy, how do you know that you can play that thing right off?”
“How’m I going to learn to play the licorice-stick if I don’t have a licorice-stick, Beth-Mary?” I tried cold reason on her. Then I forgot about the licorice-stick because she started putting on her chubby.
“Hang that right back up,” I told her. In no uncertain term.
Right off she has a story—she needs it to keep the wind off her.
“You’ll do better to worry about the law than the wind, Little Baby,” is what I told her then.
There’s no wind blows that that broad fears. All she had in mind was showing the chubby off in front of Enright’s other hookers, especially that one calls herself Zaza. Had Beth-Mary had so much as a pearly-grain of sense she’d know that I was only leading the poor broad on.
“No!” I told Beth-Mary—“No, Little Baby, you don’t need a fur-piece to walk half a city block. Now hang it back up like I told you.”
“But it’s so cold, Little Daddy, the way the wind cuts right at you I might catch my death!”
“You have a greater chance of catching your death setting at a bar with that thing wrapped around you, whisking in and out of the cold,” I was forced to point out to her.
“I wouldn’t wear it in the bar, Little Daddy—I’d take it off till it was time to leave.”
Allowances have to be made for persons unsettled in the head. Though just when you think Beth-Mary has surely lost one of her marbles, she’ll pull something that makes you think she’s got one extra.
“Little Baby,” I asked her, getting her down on the bed beside me and one arm around her chubby, “you remember how we agreed your Little Daddy would take care of you in the big things if you took care of Little Daddy in the little ones?”
I worked the chubby off one shoulder.
“I never agreed,” she told me; hunching her other shoulder.
“I agreed for you,” I had to remind her.
“But Daddy”—she began trying to pull away from me—“all I want is to wear my own very own mink chubby to work. Why can’t that be one of the little things?”
“Because if you get busted on that mink in Enright’s, Enright is in trouble too. And that makes it one of the big things.”
“But Daddy, Enright don’t even know it’s a credit-card chubby.”
“And how do you know the next trick sits down beside you in Enright’s isn’t from the pawnshop detail, looking for that very coat you’ve just thrown across the bar?”
“I’d put on the coat so’s he couldn’t see the label.”
“For God’s sake, Beth-Mary, this cop isn’t some two-hundred-pound flatfoot wearin’ a badge and revolver. He’s a long-hair cat wearing glasses, with a book under his arm.’’
“I’d know he was law all the same, Daddy,”
“How would you know?”
“I’d just know, Daddy, that’s all. I’d just know.”
“You’d just know, would you? And what if you weren’t even there but he came in with your description to Enright and was waiting for you with a warrant?”
“Enright wouldn’t snitch, Daddy.”
“Beth-Mary, why take risks when everything is about to be perfect? As soon as I’ve mastered the clarinet we’ll both get off stuff and send for the baby.”
She pitched herself face-down across the bed with her shoulders shaking.
I kicked the mink onto the floor. I never should have mentioned the baby.
I let her sob for a while then pulled her up beside me and dabbed her eyes with Kleenex from her handbag. It wasn’t too clean because she’d been carrying her needle in it. She dry-sobbed, then got control.
“What good are things, Daddy?” she asked me then.
“What good are what things, Beth-Mary?”
“Having a chubby I don’t get to wear even. What good is that? Hassling every freaky old man on West Madison. What good is that? Just to stay out of jail? What good is staying out of jail? What good is anything, Daddy?”
It was getting close to her fix-time that was clear.
“Daddy,” she told me after a while, “I need rest,” and put her head on my shoulder.
It was getting dark and she hadn’t turned a trick for twenty hours. The telephone wires across the window took on light from the arc-lamp and swung a little in the wind. I let her nod off against me for five minutes by her Longine. “Beth-Mary,” I told her too low for her to hear, “I’m sorry I made a whore out of you.” Then I tied her green Babushka under her chin and got her to her feet. She wasn’t yet full awake, fumbling at the bow I’d just made in the babushka and smiling a little just to herself.
Then she was out the door with the chubby under the arm simply clickety-clacking down the hall and me right behind her—but I had to swing back to turn the key in the lock so she had a headstart. But I could take two steps to her one because of her heels and gained almost a flight on her before she hit the second-floor landing. Had it been five flights down, instead of only four, I would have caught her and dragged her back upstairs by those same heels; but she hit the lobby clickety-clacking so fast the desk-clerk glanced up. I had to slow down to a stroll.
Did you ever, all your bom days, hear of a simple-minded whore so purely determined, at whatever risk to herself and others, to have her own way?
She was waiting for me, under the marquee, with the chubby tight about her.
“You are the most pig-headed country fool ever to walk in shoeleather,” I filled her in right off, walking on the outside to cover the coat the best I could—“you are the slyest country-sneak ever to thrash about the cheapest bar in town”—I kept giving it to her all down Madison, meanwhile keeping on the hawks for the two-man squad that keeps an eye on Enright’s—“I’ve tried reasoning with your childish brain. I’ve whupped your pitiful hide till my arms ached—and you’re still the most calf-brained smalltown idjit a man ever got himself chained to.”
“Is that why you like me so much, Little Daddy?”—she got in just as she swung ahead of me into Enright’s—“because my mind is even weaker than your own?”
The lights in the holly-wreaths hanging across Enright’s bar mirror had been switched off for a week. He hadn’t gotten around to washing off the HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS chalked across the mirror.
Beth began taking off the stupid coat, taking her time to make certain that every woman in the joint had a chance to see she wasn’t wearing cat-fur, that it was the real thing. I just stood there studying her reflection.
“Just who do you think you’re showing off for, Baby?” I asked her. After all, the only other woman to see her, at the moment, was Lucille, a teen-age lush who never leaves the joint, that Enright uses as a B-broad because the chick drinks hard stuff along with the marks—and that’s all she gets out of sitting there, too.
The used-to-be hooker, Zaza, that Enright keeps in the dark at the back bar, still comes on like a hooker. But all she is now is a deadpicker and Enright gets half of what she steals.
“Little Daddy,” Beth-Mary told me kind of low, when she finally got the chubby off, “you didn’t make a whore out of me. I made a pimp out of you.”
Then she tossed the coat across the bar and turned her back on me like I didn’t exist.
You can always treat a woman too good. But you can never treat one too bad. My mistake had been in giving the broad her leadership. Now she was out of hand.
“Just because you got another beef going with your old lady,” Zaza tells me the second I sit down, “don’t mean you have to make up to me.”
It’s hard for a hustler to work a joint where she’s not on speaking terms with anyone but the bartender. I took note Zaza was glad to have my company even though she wasn’t about to admit it.
Zaza must have been goodlooking before she worked lumber camps. Now she was just burned-down timber.
Yet not so burned down but she might not help a trusted friend to get a certain clarinet out of hock. The broad needed someone to talk to so bad I figured she might just come up with twenty. Might just.
“I’m the one to blame for everything,” I took full responsibility for my idiot, “she’s a wonderful, wonderfull child—and that’s just where the trouble comes in. Because it’s just what she is—a mere child. Life can’t be just all a matter of getting kicks. Life has its serious side.”
Zaza looked me down then up from my Keds to my high hairline, then down again.
“Say something serious,” she finally asked me.
“Buy me a drink. I’m serious.”
“Why should I? Enright don’t want you hanging around your old lady when she’s working, so you come back here thinkin’ I’ll be grateful to have your company; only I ain’t. You’re going to put down the same old story on me, how you’re going to swing with another mink chubby any day now just to see how I look in mink. Only you aren’t. I’d be lucky if you swung with a pair of Goldblatt earrings for me.”
“Earrings?”—I picked her right up on that—“You want earrings, baby? Just don’t go away.”
I took a slow stroll toward the front bar past Lucille. She gave me her baby-lush smile but I didn’t even rap to her. Just strolled on by and came up behind Beth-Mary as if I meant to give her a hug. Instead I yanked her earrings off both at once—she yelped and swung about. But I was already strolling back. Now she knew she wasn’t the only one who could make a fast move in our family.
Lucille didn’t lush-smile me this time by. “I can get me any pimp in town?” She let me know how I stood with her now.
“Without an ID card?” I asked her and kept on moving. Yet I took care, when I got to the back bar, to put Zaza between me and the front door. Just in event anyone from the front bar should want to see me about something.
I squirrel-eyed the front bar and, sure enough, I see Beth-Mary coming. But I failed to take note of the shot-glass in her hand.
“Here, honey,” Zaza told her, holding out the earrings to Beth, “I don’t want them. My ears are pierced.”
Beth-Mary ignored the offer. She purely hates the idea of any other broad buying me anything. Especially a clarinet. “Daddy,” she asked me, “can I just talk to you?”
Now I knew I had her hanging. I just let her hang.
“What do you think,” I asked Zaza, leaning a bit back from the bar to make sure Beth didn’t miss a word I was saying, “of a woman who’ll use her daughter’s education-money for her own midnight-score? What kind of a woman would put her habit ahead of her husband’s musical career?”
Zaza lay both earrings down, very carefully, on the bar in front of her. She looked at them like she wanted no part of either one.
“I’m talking about what a drag a woman with a habit can be,” I kept right on, “what a day-to-day burden—”
Had Enright not walked out from behind the bar just as Beth pitched the shot-glass it would have skulled me instead of him. Zonk!—he spun half-about right into Zaza, nearly knocking her backward off the stool. She grabbed the bar with her left hand and swung her handbag with her right and zonk!—Enright went out cold face-down across the bar with his big behind sticking out.
“Call a priest! Call a holy father!” Lucille began hollering and ran out into the street to get one. Enright started to sag. I caught him around the waist and Zaza and Beth-Mary were helping me to get him up straight when two cops stormed in followed by Lucille. Who did she think she was working for?
“Who hit him?” Cop One wanted to know, taking Enright away from me.
“That one skulled him with a shot-glass,” Lucille got right in there, pointing out Beth-Mary—” and that one”—pointing out Zaza—“skulled him with her handbag!”
Enright raised up as though all he’d been doing with his head on the bar was resting it—“I’m not pressing charges!”
I’d never seen a man come around that fast before.
“And I don’t blame you,” Cop One went along, taking Enright’s big moon-face between his hands and studying it like a map. There was a black and blue bruise on one side where the shot-glass had grazed it and a lump, just starting to come up, on the other.
“I fell over a beer bottle,” Enright explained everything.
I sat at the back bar looking straight ahead because I felt Cop Two’s eyes on me.
“Get the two broads into the wagon,” Cop One told Cop Two.
“Which two?” Cop Two wanted to know; not taking his eyes off me.
“The one who pitched the shot-glass and the one who swung her handbag.”
“I’m not pressing charges neither!” Lucille suddenly came back into her right mind; and handed Cop One her ID card.
“Did I ask you to show me that?” he asked her. She put it back in her bag.
“That’s right,” Cop One congratulated her. “Keep it safe, honey, you’re going to need it at the station.” Then he turned to Cop Two: “Take all three of them.”
“What about him?” Cop Two asked.
“Put the broads in the wagon,” Cop One decided, “I’ll take the pimp in the squad so’s they don’t fight over him all the way to the station.”
The pimp? That just might be me. Just might.
Yet neither one of those stupid bulls so much as noticed a mink chubby lying across the front bar.
Now every few minutes I heard the big door at the block’s far end being opened. Yet I never heard it being shut. As if it had opened just far enough to let people with bills in their hands in to squeeze through. If you can’t let somebody out for free, I thought, for God’s sake let somebody in for nothing.
Then I heard a whole pack coming and got back out of the way in case they came through my door.
“Brideswell! Brideswell!” some kukefied broad was hollering, “have consideration!”—but it wasn’t Beth-Mary.
Someone was slammed against the door like the mother-cops had backed her up flat against it and were milling around. I could hear them milling: she couldn’t get loose. Then all the feet began going away fast way down the line. Till a cell door slammed.
That was when it came to me that Enright might already have bonded out my fool. She might be back at the front bar this very moment, the chubby in front of her, listening to whatever the old man was telling her she ought to do next. Like letting her Little Daddy kick his habit cold turkey in Cook County Jail while she went on feeding her own.
O Shining City Seen of John I thought, if that fool of mine lets that old man talk her into that, there’ll be no use of her waiting on the courthouse steps when her Little Daddy comes down them; because she won’t have a Little Daddy anymore. Because Little Daddy’ll be clean, he’ll be his old self once more. What need then will he have for a country whore with marks on her arm?
No, Little Baby, there’s no hardluck story in the book that’ll work then. Because Little Daddy won’t even rap to you. He’ll walk right on by, hop a cab to the Trailways depot and be back in Old Shawneetown, never to leave again, by morning.
And when the baby is big enough to understand, Little Daddy’s going to tell her her real mother died young. And never give that piece of trade he left on the courthouse steps further thought.
Yet I really couldn’t believe Beth-Mary would come in on me.
On the other hand, there was the time in L.A. when she spent a whole afternoon in a movie with a nab. But maybe that was just because she liked the movie. Besides, that was different. I was setting home in my red foulard robe—the one with the tasselly sash—reading Mad. I wasn’t setting behind a solid door in blue jeans with a patch in the seat. Little Baby, aren’t you ashamed to let your Little Daddy walk around in tennis shoes in midwinter? Don’t you want your Little Daddy to look sharp?
And what does she have to show for five years of hustling, except that mink chubby? That, chances are, she’s had to forget by now.
The cold began coming up off the floor. But I knew it was from inside myself that it was really coming. I hadn’t used anything except paregoric for almost sixty hours; and that had been by mouth.
I got a cigarette out of my pocket and got it lit with one hand. I didn’t draw the smoke up my nose because I wasn’t sure what happens when nicotine hits paregoric. Hold tight, Little Baby, I told Beth-Mary, Daddy may be about to drowse about.
Way up and far off I heard a church bell inviting everyone to Sunday mass. Everyone except Beth-Mary and me. Us two fools; the only place we get invited is jail. Just jail.
Can we help it if we’re cute?
Then all the doors, both sides the other side of the solid door, were standing wide. All the broads had gone home. All the mother-cops had taken them home and not one of them was coming back. I was the only one left locked up.
Then someone pulled the shade.
I was in some kind of old country bam with just one weakass bulb burning high high up and swinging a little. All I was wearing was the red silk foulard robe with the tasselly sash. That I thought Beth-Mary had hocked in L.A. I had nothing on under it. And there was a smell of burning; like in a lion-house.
I saw their shadows moving whenever the bulb swung a little; they were all lionesses. That I had to fight one by one.
That was to be my punishment for not being a broad.
Then the burning smell came stronger and I came to with my cigarette burning out on the floor under my nose.
I’d never had a dream like that before.
I got down off the bunk and put my eye to the string of light beneath the door.
“Beth-Mary!” I called under the door, “are you alright, Little Baby?”
Not a sound, not a whisper the other side of the solid door. If I could only hear her whining, “Little Daddy, can’t we just drowse about?”
I got back on the bunk and read the question again that that fool had chalked there in yellow chalk, right over my head. And suddenly I had the answer.
“At your mother’s house, fool,” I told him right out loud.
But I didn’t have a piece of chalk, of any color at all, to write my answer down.
Out of the comer of my eye I saw a cigarette come rolling under the door. It came a full two feet into the cell before it stopped rolling.
And heard my fool’s high heels go clickety-clacking down the corridor.
And keep clickety-clacking away.
You’d think a pimp could do no wrong, for God’s sake, the way them two stick up for one another. You know what that old Southsea bartender told me before I come out here at this ungodly hour?—“You been a bad girl, Beth-Mary, you got to make it all up to your Daddy now. You can’t spend a whole night turning one trick anymore.”
I flew right at him—“You take care of your customers, old man, ’n I’ll take care of mine.”
For God’s sake, just because he goes my bond he thinks he can talk to me like my Little Daddy. Nobody talks to me like my Little Daddy. What do I care if people say he’s no good? Don’t I know that? Of course he’s no good. But he’s the best connection a hustling woman ever had ’n I’ll go all routes with him.
Don’t douse the light yet, mister. Just hang some old tie over it. Else I’ll sleep till the buses stop. Then I’ll have to hail a cab. One cab less, my Little Daddy’s out one day the sooner. I know he’s working up a perfect tit at me as it is out there.
He’s lucky to have someone outside working to get him out, as I see it. How many them locked-up cats got anyone outside hustling for them?
And had it not been for me forcing the old man to bond Zaza out with me, he’d have left her set until her day in court. Only I wasn’t about to leave her—Why should I? Was it her fault he walked into a flying shot-glass? So what if she swung on him with what was nearest to hand? What did he expect after almost knocking her to the floor?
When she opened that handbag at the station we both broke up. But the mother-cop just shook her head ’n asked “What happened here, honey?”
The inside of the bag was a mess of cold-cream, broken glass with kleenex and bobbie pins stuck in it. What she’d hit Enright with was a two-pound jar of Pond’s cold cream; that she’d swung with on her way to work. Small wonder that old man went out cold.
She didn’t even claim the bag when we got sprung. “Nothing in it but a quarter and a few pennies,” she told me, “and I’d have to scrape cold-cream off them.”
Climb into bed any time you feel like, mister. I’ll jump in in no time. I just feel like yakking first for a while. Do you mind? It all just strikes me as so comical. I never robbed nobody my whole life. Even that credit-card we got the chubby on was by my Daddy’s hand. I couldn’t get my own hand in a rain-barrel. But I’m in and out of jail like a fiddler’s elbow all the same.
I’ll say this for Little Daddy—he never lets me set for long. Even when he had a W on him in L. A., and couldn’t show up in the courthouse hisself, he sent a bondman down to spring me. I know he’s mad enough at me to eat snake, lettin’ him set there a week already. I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions when he comes down those court-house steps.
First thing he’ll want to know is how much did Enright put up for the chubby. When I tell him I sold it outright for three hundred to the old man, he won’t believe me. Not until I tell him the old man don’t know the coat is hot. That’ll put him in the switches—especially if Enright has turned it over. We can’t go back there if he has.
When he gets around to asking why three hundred, when bond is only a hundred-fifty, I’ll have to tell him I got Zaza out. He’ll find out anyhow.
Enright thinking he got us all three on the hook is the biggest laugh of all time, Zaza thinks. He figures to get five hundred for the coat, tell us all he got is three so we’re all square, and make hisself two hundred.
“Keep the coat, old man,” I told him, “it’s yours. Just get us out of here.” Zaza kept her mouth shut when I told him that. And she was good as gold when we were locked up together, too.
“Please take these stupid earrings back, honey,” she asked me, “as a favor.” I took them back even though they don’t mean a thing to me. For a fact I don’t even remember who put them on me. It wasn’t the earrings, I told Zaza, it was the way Daddy went about getting them that got me burned—“I don’t hold nothing against you,” I told her—“if it wasn’t for my bad aim you wouldn’t even be settin’ here.”
“I’m just sorry about your having to give up your chubby,” she told me, “your old man is going to be hot at you for that.”
“Not for long,” I told her, “you don’t know my Little Daddy.”
Nobody knows my Little Daddy. Once in L.A. somebody gave him one of those tennis-bats. Right away he got to be jumping nets all over town. He has the flash notion he’s going to be a tennis-player and he don’t even know where the places are they play for God’s sake. My part is to buy him a box of balls and a pair of white shoes. Then everything’s going to be perfect.
“You want to be a tennis-player,” I told him, “be a tennis player. And I’ll get me a pimp who is a pimp.” I never all my days heard tell of a pimp jumping over a net. Or one tennis player asking another would he like to say hello to the girls.
“I don’t need a tennis-bat to swing a smalltown hide like you,” he told me—“the flat of my shoe will do.” After all the times I put him to bed when he was hitting the bars, and after that the times I scored for him when he was too weak to score for himself, he called me “smalltown hide.” What could I do? I bought him the box of tennis balls and the white shoes and a T-shirt to match and we march into the bar where we hung out, him holding his stupid bat.
The bartender took one look, hollered, “O look girls” and made swishy moves like a little girl throwing a balloon.
That put an end to Little Daddy’s tennis career. He traded off the lot, that had cost me a twenty-dollar trick plus cab-fare, for six sticks of lowgrade pot. Then tells me, “Forget it, Little Baby, let’s just go home and drowse about.” As if nothing had happened at all.
Now he comes leaping into Enright’s—“I’m mastering the licorice-stick!”
He’s going to join the musicians’ union, he’s going to play with a big-name band, we’re going to send for the baby, hustling and hypes and shakedowns and busts are just a thing of the past—yet he doesn’t even have the stupid flute out of the hockshop window.
“Everything’s going to be perfect, Beth-Mary—only we got to get down there before someone else grabs it!”
But I know it’s just another just-as-if deal like with the tennis-bat.
“Daddy, couldn’t you learn to play a clarinet first, from someone who already owns one?” I asked him—“When you get the hang of it we’ll get you one of your own—not a secondhand one—a new one, Little Daddy.”
“Is that all you think of me and the baby?” he asked me. “Doesn’t your husband’s career mean anything to you? You want your daughter to grow up in your footsteps?”
Daddy, I thought, if you weren’t so weak inside you wouldn’t come on so hard.
“I’ll tell you what I’ve about decided, Joan-of-Arc”—he never calls me that unless he’s furious with me—“I’ve decided it’s time for you either to get on a bus to Lexington or taper your habit down within reason.”
Nothing, not a word, about his habit of course.
“So’s you can build it up higher than before?” I put it to him; which seemed to take him by surprise. “Little Daddy,” I went right on, “I’ll hustle for you, I’ll work for you. I’ll go to jail for you. If I have to be sick for two for you I’ll do that, too. And, if you want, I’ll roll you the biggest stick of tea in town. You’re the best connection I ever had and I think you’re here to stay.”
He doesn’t know that, when he took me from my baby, something in my heart shut hard on him.
Poor just-as-if boy, I was sixteen when he came by and became a sickness in my heart. I’m going on twenty-four and he’s a sickness to this hour.
I knew something was gnawing him from that first night, down by the river. When he told me he’d just done two real hard years at Boys’ Industrial I thought that that was it.
That wasn’t it at all. All his mother had had to do to keep him from doing a single day, was to claim him from the court. But she’d tied up to marry some fool who wasn’t about to let an outlaw boy in his house. She had her choice between having a husband or a son. She couldn’t have both so she picked the husband. Some husband.
That’s what is still gnawing Little Daddy.
Yet Mother always gets a pass: “Mother done what she thought best for both of us.” So who’s left to blame for what happened then? Me! I didn’t know he was on earth at the time; yet the whole thing is my fault now. He don’t say it in so many words; but it’s what he feels all the same.
“You ought to hate your old lady for what she done,” I made bold to tell him once, “not me.”
I’ll never make that mistake again. He’d never hit me in the face before. It was my first time. Poor just-as-if boy, what’s ever to become of him if anything happens to me? I needed someone strong to lean on when he came along ’n now it’s just two weak fools leanin’ on each other.
Poor useless boy—I’d rather have his hate than some fat square-fig’s love. Love or hate, whatever, it don’t matter so long as it’s real. My daddy’s hate is realer than any old squarefig’s love. His hate is more beautiful, I think, than love. Because it’s what he truly feels.
It’s why I told him that time, “Little Daddy, I’ll hustle for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll get sick for two for you, I’ll go to jail for you, I’ll go all routes with you. If you want I’ll roll the biggest stick of tea in town for you.”
What I’ve never told him is that, when he took me from my baby, the best part of my heart closed on him.
Mister, I don’t think that old tie across the light is working out. I can smell it starting to scorch. Try your cap instead. You only got two caps? In that case hang up the best one.
That’s better. Now crawl in here before you set yourself afire. I never chippied yet on my Little Daddy.
So I guess it’s time to try.