She was drinking Bloody Marys.
Her arms were slim, the hands graceful.
He stood beside her, talking to Bailey, establishing that he was known here, safe to talk to, finishing his scotch and ordering another. Bailey knew the drill. The fact was that a good bartender could do half your work for you. And Bailey was a good bartender.
She was listening. She couldn't help it. The guy beside her was listening too — Tom could see him sinking lower onto his stool in slow, alky oblivion.
Then Bailey pulled his usual masterstroke.
"Tom? Do you know Cindy?"
An introduction. She smiled and turned and they shook hands. Her eyes were deep blue and wide and absolutely gorgeous.
He owed Bailey on this one. He'd say so.
Later.
~ * ~
Bailey poured a Rum and Coke and watched Tom Braun laughing and talking to Cindy. Good to see somebody having fun, he thought. The bar's a little weird tonight.
He'd thought that maybe you'd have to have worked here night after night to notice it so he'd mentioned it to Erica. But Erica just gave him a look. So he'd thought, well, maybe it's my imagination —but he didn't really believe that. Since he'd come on at six, before the bar was even very busy, he'd been aware of some kind of thickness in the air, a kind of tension, a sort of manic strain to the conversation. Like the night was coiling up for something.
He'd seen it before.
New Year's Eve was always pretty strange, and Saint Patty's Day, and sometimes even Christmas, when the bar was filled with people too lonely to have anywhere else to go. He remembered working a union bar once on a night after a long hard truckers’ strike had ended — how the room was charged with a high mix of rising spirits and downright bloody murder. The kind of night when, for whatever reason, fights break out and drunks get dangerous and you kept your eyes open and an empty bottle handy just in case.
It was irrational, maybe, but he had one now behind the bar rail.
Because of the strangeness.
Since six o'clock he'd been feeling it, a sense of disquiet just below the surface. And despite Erica's response to him, he thought that the waitresses must be feeling it too. They were all a little distant tonight, working their jobs like it was sheer drudgery — when usually they managed to have some fun here. It was that kind of place.
So actually he was glad to have been able to give Tom a hand with Cindy.
That, at least, was normal.
He wondered what Susan did the nights Tom was out prowling. Or how she took it in the morning. He liked Susan, even though he didn't know her as well as he knew Tom. Not for him to judge. But this kind of stuff was not terrific for a marriage.
Down at the end of the bar a woman was crowing for a gin and tonic. He poured it for her, thinking he was going to have to cut this one off soon if she kept on slugging them down like this, unusual for a woman to get so loaded so fast and so intently, thinking this while carrying the drink over to her and looking at the two young girls who for some reason were standing there glaring at him over by the jukebox, when the weirdest fucking notion occurred.
What if it was the women?
Customers, waitresses.
What if it was all of them?
Nah, he thought. You're losing it. That's nuts.
But he looked around. He poured and served and looked around.
And the thought refused to go away. Every time there was the slightest lull in business the thought would prick at him and he'd feel the thickness start to rise in the room and the walls start to close a little.
It wasn't the guys.
It was the women who kept reminding him of those truckers blowing off steam after four months of no pay and no work and the wife and kids howling, who reminded him of bad Christmas Eves and bad Saint Patrick's Days.
It was the women.
And then he thought, that's bullshit, just look at Cindy sitting there with Tom, nice woman, everything fine. Check her out. Look at her looking at him like she'd like to reach over and just . . .
. . . eat him up.
I'm gonna have to watch this closely, he thought.
Troubled Sleep
The wind was hot.
It was a burning wind — it burned through Susan's sleep like acid on silk, reaching deep into each smooth furrow of her body. The nightgown was too much. Her breasts felt as though covered with sand, with insects, as though she lay buried to the neck in an anthill in a hot summer storm. By turns it was terrible and then sweet — a tickling, moving, crawling sensation. An awareness of the physical that not even sleep could override.
Her fingers moved to the neck of her nightgown, traveled down its front and parted it over her body. The feeling remained but it was better now, more purely pleasure, less frightening in the complexity of its overwhelming sensuousness.
Her tongue moved over dry cracked lips. Her fingertips went to her breasts, plucked the nipples up, caressed them as through layers of sand. A groan escaped her open mouth into the blasting wind.
~ * ~
What was that?
Elizabeth sat bolt upright in bed, listening.
Some sort of cry.
The sound had poured through her sleep, snatched her into wakefulness, its final tendrils dragging over her like scraps of vine.
It had come from outside.
She leaned toward the window, her fingernails brushing the wire mesh screen. She looked down through the branches of the tree to the street. It was empty. A gust of wind slid a sheet of newspaper along the sidewalk, rustled the shrubbery below. The entrance to the building was silent.
A dream, she thought.
The newspaper lay stirless in the gutter. She listened to the sounds inside her apartment. The clock ticking, the distant hum of her refrigerator, the dense silence.
She was beginning to feel sleepy again.
Something screamed, it sounded like a child's scream and just beyond the screen something hurtled through her field of vision, a sudden pale blinding flash of movement.
Then stopped.
And meowed.
A cat.
A slim white cat with a black-spotted tail.
You little shit, she thought. You scared me half to death.
The cat stared in at her wide-eyed, wary. It paced the ledge. Must have come from the floor above, she thought. Living dangerously, making a jump like that.
Her heart was still pounding.
The cat sniffed the ledge and window screen, its pink nose twitching. It gazed at the tree and seemed to contemplate the downward climb. Then it glanced back at Elizabeth. It did not seem terribly comfortable with her there, close enough to touch were it not for the screen. She wondered why. Cats usually took to her immediately.
Poor thing. It really did look scared out there.
The tip of its ear was missing.
There was only a little blood, it wasn't much more than a scratch, but the wound looked very recent. The blood was still glistening. Catfight, she thought. The eyes looked alert, frightened.
Frightened of her. She could swear it.
"What's the matter?" she whispered.
It was as though she'd hit it with a stick. The cat jumped out onto the nearest branch, ran to the main trunk of the tree and then raced suddenly down, disappearing into the shrubs below.
She watched until it was out of sight and then fell back away from the window into the cool softness of her bed. She lay a moment staring at the shadows playing across the ceiling and then closed her eyes.
Too bad, she thought. I could have patched her up a little.
The cat's amber-yellow eyes appeared before her, bright and full of some strange knowledge, before she fell asleep.
Barflies
This lady is terrific, he thought.
Close quarters had revealed a number of things. Slim waist, small firm breasts beneath the tight white sweater — with mercurial nipples that went hard or soft according to some runic chemistry, some inter
nal winds of change — pale, smooth skin and delicate collarbones, a long and graceful neck, and full wide lips. Which smiled at him frequently.
Her name was Cynthia Jackson and she lived on 74th Street just off Central Park West. She was probably ten years younger than Tom and did not seem to mind the fact that he was older, she had a sister from Chicago whose visit last week she'd found very trying, and she was a photo-retoucher by trade and worked at home.
She in turn had elicited from him that he was an editor and that he was both married and had a child. This did not seem to faze her either.
If they got by Andy they were usually interested.
So that when she got up to use the john he knew she'd be back.
He ordered another round of drinks and watched her walk past the tables to the ladies' room, tight jeans promising equally fine slopes of leg and thigh.
It was only when the drinks arrived that he noticed the woman beside him.
She was drunk, leaning low over the bar. Not much to look at to start with and getting much worse by the moment. Scrawny inside a faded red t-shirt and tired-looking.
She smiled at him.
"Hi," she said.
She licked her lips.
Uh-oh, he thought. This one wants to talk.
"I'm gonna make you a promise," she said. Her words slurred together like a bad erasure.
"Shoot."
"Somebody don't give me a job soon, say one week, I'm gonna fucking murder myself. I swear it."
"Uh-huh."
"Waitress job. HMV. Anything. One week and then the hell with it, I'm checking out. That asking too much? Job as a waitress in a place like this?"
"No."
"Damn right. It's something to me, though." She took a slug of what appeared to be a gin and tonic.
"Look," she said. "I'm not stupid. Just finished my dissertation. Been writin' it three and a half weeks — first time out in nearly a month. So what do I do? Go out and drink up what's left of my money. In a joint like this. Drink so much I can hardly talk to anybody. Nobody to talk to in a month and now I can't talk to anybody. That make sense to you?"
"No. You're doing okay, though."
"Thank you. But doncha see it's self-destructive? I gotta have something normal happen to me. Got to make some money. Maybe waitress. 'S normal. People tip you. Know how much it costs to write a dissertation? How much they charge you for the privilege of writing yourself to death? Lotta money."
"What was the dissertation?"
"Schizophrenia."
He could think of nothing to say to that so they drank their drinks.
What a mess, he thought. Hair long, limp and tangled. Skin the color of mushrooms. Eyes all red and bleary — they were disturbing eyes. Beneath the weird conversation you could sense real pain, and a lot of it, just below the surface. Beneath the eyes there was something else. He didn't know what and didn't want to.
"It's the dissertation's made me crazy," she said, almost to herself. "Dissertations break up a lot of marriages, you know that? 'S very common." She waved her hand in dismissal. "Me, of course, I ain't married."
He saw Cindy walking toward him through the crowded tables. "You'll be all right," he said.
"Sure I will. 'Course I will."
Bailey was looking at them and Tom nodded toward the woman. Better cut her off, the nod said. Bailey nodded back.
"Friend of yours?" said Cindy, sliding onto the barstool.
There was a cattiness there he didn't like. It surprised him. She hadn't seemed the type. It was as though between the time she'd left the bar and the time she returned something had changed about her.
"We just met," he said. His tone was cool.
"That's nice," she said, a sardonic smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
But he saw that his tone of voice had not been lost on her. She was staring directly into his eyes. And the look on her face said, I'm taking you home tonight. So don't he a pain in the ass, please. Not over her, anyway. Relax and enjoy it.
He looked at her. She was lovely. He guessed that compassion should have its limits.
The drunk was not long for the world anyhow. Her eyes kept closing. The long blink, his father used to call it. There was always a hotplate down at the end of the bar with a full pot of coffee going and Bailey was pouring her a cup.
He brought it over. Said something to get her attention.
She waved him away. Lurched suddenly to her feet and began to wobble through the crowd toward the door.
"Hey!"
Her purse was lying on the bar.
The woman stopped.
"Your purse," Tom said.
She wobbled back to them. Tom handed it to her and she smiled. The smile was pretty ghastly.
"Thanks," she said. Then her smile faded. "Thank you very much."
She wasn't thanking him for the purse. She was thanking him for talking. He felt a wave of pity. Even concern. There was something so final about the way she'd thanked him — as though they were the last words she ever expected to utter. He'd not given it much credence before but maybe the woman was a potential suicide after all, maybe she was serious and this last drunken lurch back through a crowd of strangers for a pocketbook she did not much care about and would not need where she was going was the end of it.
Jesus, he hoped not.
He watched the door close behind her. Through the window he could see her ascend the stairs.
Maybe not, he thought. Drunks were full of drama.
He saw that Cindy was watching her too, very closely. Her eyes were distant.
He heard a loud shriek of laughter from one of the tables behind him. He turned.
In a corner to the back of the room a woman was standing — she was one of a party of four — shaking with laughter. She had just poured her drink down the shirt of the small balding man in tie and jacket beside her, probably her date. The other tables had noticed and the laughter was loud and general. Even Erica, their table's waitress, stood there laughing.
The man stood up to shake the ice cubes off him, his bald head red and gleaming.
He wasn't smiling.
The Boot's Last Purse
The Boot and Jimmy Diamond stood across the street two doors down in front of the barber shop and watched the woman leave MacInery's.
They watched her weave past the cleaners, bobbing her head like a chicken, tits sliding every which way under the faded red t-shirt, purse dangling loosely from her hand. Boot had to laugh. She was exactly what they needed. A real stone alky they had here.
They waited till she got to the corner and disappeared down Riverside. Then they crossed the street and started after her.
The lady was barely conscious. Boot had his blade ready inside the jacket pocket but that was just a precaution. This was gonna be easy.
They picked up the pace. No sense her getting home before they reached her. You grab a purse, that was one thing. She opens her door, that's B&E, and there was no point upping the stakes for the same damn take. From the look of her she wouldn't be carrying much. But she'd been to a bar. And bars cost money.
It was dark on Riverside. Streetlights out in a couple of places, thank you New York City. They hung tight to the shadows and closed the distance. Boot had a look around. The street was empty. A new Mercedes glided by and passed them. He gave the nod.
They broke into a run.
Streetside, Boot went for the purse strap while Jimmy Diamond came up directly behind her and they had this down, man, really down, because the moment Boot touched the strap Jimmy would push her in the gutter, they had done it a hundred times by now, best team in the city. And it happened just the way they played it. Boot hit the strap and Jimmy Diamond slapped her back hard with the palms of both hands and stepped away.
Only she didn't go down.
Drunks fell down. Women, you could push them.
But this one just stuck out her fucking leg to brace against the impact and at the same time whirled so fast he'd never have
believed it in a million years, whirled on Jimmy Diamond and got hold of his arm.
And then she sort of pulled herself onto him.
Crawled onto him like some sort of bug — only fast, real fast, looking like maybe a spider would look to you if you were another bug and about to be eaten.
You could see Jimmy's face go grey, even though it was dark, even though it happened in just a second. She had him belly-to-belly with her legs wrapped around him like she was going to fuck the sonovabitch, like she wanted to fuck him, hips moving against him like that and it was grotesque, man, it was almost funny for a moment until the one hand came off his shoulders while the other tightened around his neck and Jimmy pulled back because he could see where that free hand was going but there was nothing he could do about it, the hand clawed across his eyes and Boot blinked his own eyes watching it, he could almost feel the pain himself and when the blink was over so were Jimmy's eyes.
There was blood pouring down his face. Boot screamed. They both screamed.
And the woman let Jimmy go then and turned to Boot.
He'd never moved so fast in his fucking life. Because there was nothing in that face you’d recognize as human. Well, there was one thing, it was smiling. But it was not a smile you could look at without getting scared sick that such a thing existed. It was not just crazy. The face looked at him the way a sewer rat had looked at him once down by the East River, eyes red with the pure love of biting and killing.
And this face smiled.
He did not look back or worry about Jimmy. Four blocks away he got the guts to turn and saw she wasn't following. Another two blocks and he realized he still had her purse dangling from his fist.
He stopped and opened it half-blindly, breathing hard, not even knowing why he was doing it except it was the right thing to do, it was normal, you stole a purse you went through it.
He turned it inside out on the sidewalk.
Lipstick. Hairbrush. Matches from MacInery's. Gum. Scraps of dirty paper. He found the wallet and opened it. There was a single dollar bill inside and a dime and a nickel in the change compartment.