He had sixty-five dollars’ worth of John T. Stoddard’s greenbacks in his wallet, he was smoking one of John T. Stoddard’s stogies, and he was sitting across the aisle in the streetcar from a very nice looking fortyish woman in a big picture hat. Her occasional glances at the six-foot Guild in his white boiled shirt, black suitcoat, black serge trousers, and black Texas boots said that he was probably a rapscallion, but an interesting one. Only when her soft brown gaze fell to the .44 strapped around his waist did her lips purse in that social disapproval city folks display for people not their kind.
In addition to watching the woman, Guild just enjoyed the ride. He liked the way the streetcar ran down the center of the sprawling town with its three- and four-story buildings and all its buggies and rigs and wagons. He enjoyed watching all the men in straw boaters and high-buttoned suits and the women in flowered hats and twirling red and blue and yellow parasols, and he liked seeing all the big shiny store windows filled variously with high-button shoes and fresh bakeiy goods and pharmaceuticals and barbers in dark suit coats and handlebar mustaches stropping their razors and patting shaving cream on sagging faces. There was a music to the city that he sometimes longed for, the announcing clang of streetcars, the hoarse whistle of the factory changing shifts, the traffic policeman’s street corner instructions to keep moving, keep moving, the sweet passing laughter of women he could at least dream about.
The woman he’d been playing eye games with got off about three blocks before he did, and as usual he felt a vast and personal disappointment, as if she’d been the woman he’d been meant to marry only she hadn’t understood this and had gone shopping for rutabagas instead, and with not so much as a glance back at him. Not a glance.
The city changed abruptly. Where the stone and brick and wooden business buildings had given way to wide streets lined with forbidding iron gates and what passed for mansions in a midwestern town this size, so then did the mansions give way. Now the streets narrowed and the houses grew smaller and uglier in appearance, immigrant houses already sixty years old, older than the town’s incorporation itself. Wild, filthy children ran the streets, and a cornucopia of garbage—the red of tomato rinds, the yellow of gutted squash, the tainted brown of sun-rotting fly-infested beef—filled curbstones and gutters alike.
Mothers bellowed harshly for their children, threatening enormous violence if the kids did not show their faces soon. Drunks wound and wove amid it all, one poor bastard puking into a garbage can, puking blood. There were cats and dogs and a few horses, all rib-gaunt and glassy-eyed from malnutrition, and here and there you saw a man smack a woman hard in the face or belly, and you saw a woman bash a man with a broom. White faces, black faces, brown faces, red faces, all showed the toil taken by living here. The sadness so easily became rage, and the rage so easily became despair. This was the part of city life Guild hated, the eternal poor and their eternal doom.
When he stepped off the platform of the streetcar, he took from the pocket of his coat the piece of paper John T. Stoddard had given him containing Victor Sovich’s address.
The house stood two stories tall. It looked as though it had once been green. Now there was so much grime it was hard to tell what color it was. Not a single window remained intact. Cans, newspapers, pages of magazines, and plump brown dog turds covered the thin grass of the front yard. A small mulatto child, perhaps a year and a half, lay naked on the front step, fondling himself and crying.
A woman with a leaf-shaped paper fan bearing the name of a funeral home on its front side leaned in the doorway, watching Guild approach. Next to her squatted a dog with dirty white fur. From what he could see of the woman, she looked Mexican.
“Hello.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m looking for a man named Victor Sovich.”
“I don’t know a man named like that.”
Beneath the thin white cotton of her dusty dress, a beautiful, breathtaking set of breasts rose and fell with her breathing.
Guild sensed eyes watching him from all the windows of this tightly packed neighborhood. A word from her and two or three young men would no doubt appear, and Guild, if he wasn’t quick and ruthless enough with his .44, would most likely be sorry.
“I have some money for him. Five hundred dollars.”
He felt sorry for the quick, cheap light in her brown eyes. She had so little money, the child at her feet obviously malnourished, that mention of it made her almost ugly with desire. “Money you say?”
“Money. Five hundred dollars.”
“For this Victor?”
“For Victor. Yes.”
Guild would never be sure what happened next. No matter how many times he tried to reconstruct it, he just couldn’t get the sequence straight.
Apparently Victor Sovich had been hiding in the vestibule right behind the woman. No other position would have allowed him to catapult out of the house. Or maybe he didn’t catapult out of the house. Maybe Sovich came from behind him. Or from the side.
Not that it mattered.
The man with the fancy tattoos and the gray chest hair and the slick-shaven head and the biceps like coconuts started his attack by hitting Guild in the ribs.
Not that Sovich gave him a chance to do anything about it.
Before Guild’s fists came up reflexively, Sovich hit him twice in the face and once more in the stomach.
Guild knew that he was bleeding, knew that he had peed his pants, and knew that he was making some kind of vague mewling sound.
Then Sovich slammed a right cross straight into Guild’s crotch.
If Guild was not precisely unconscious at that point, he certainly was when his head slammed against the ground.