Frankie got off his hands. ‘You tell ’em, Mr Floor Show,’ he applauded weakly; and drank on in the hope of somehow postponing the sickness. ‘Can’t afford to get sick now,’ he mourned the long-gone fiver.
‘I knew there was somebody out there,’ Mr Floor Show observed, squinting far over the little line of red-white-and-blue footlights, ‘I heard breathing’ – and resumed his fluttering about in the orange shorts for want of anything better to do, like a crazed burlesque queen, pausing only to stamp his foot with a girlish petulance and assert, ‘I’ll have you know I’m every inch a man!’ Then, seeming suddenly to tire of everything, began torturing himself in a voice full of a hoarse glee at its own pain: ‘Boop-de-oop-doop ’n razz-muh-tazz, kizz muh feet ’n kizz muh azz – interdoosin’ to you ouah supah-sulphous walkin’-talkin’ seeeepia doll, ouah tiny mite of dynamite – Miss Dinah Mite! Meet her ’n greet her! Come out, honey! Mello as a cello ’n merry as a berry – Boys! The strain from hernia!’ The three-piece band began beating it out while Miss Mite took over.
‘I wonder who’s boogin’ my woogie now.’
Yet the strange brown cats of the Kitten Klub all sat wanly smiling, like copper cats that never bled, whose blood was formed of others’ tears.
Copper cats out of some plastic jungle wherein only the neon kitten above the bar felt pain, only the Budweiser bottles sweated tears of joy, and only the monkeys overhead knew better.
FEED THE KITTY
the legend below the neon kitten commanded. Off and on, off and on, with a sort of metallic beggary unmatchable by any human panhandler.
GET UP A PARTY
FEED THE KITTY
GET UP A PARTY
FEED THE KITTY
An outsized octoroon venus began galloping about on spindle legs just to make her belly shake – it was distended as if with some malignant growth; her absurd finery flew behind her, she paused only to beg breathlessly:
‘Daddy, I want a diamond ring
’N everything––’
Her G string was upheld by court plaster and a gilded cardboard crescent swung for some reason from her navel while she went into a convulsive series of bumps; like some dark Diamond Lil just fed on Spanish fly.
‘You got to get the best for me––’
with the G string bounce-bounce-bouncing.
Frankie Machine squeezed his temples, to keep the panic down till it ebbed back down his nape. Leaving him a reasonless desire to go hurrying out through the snow to the nearest station, whatever the cost, in the hope of getting some sort of charge at County. ‘They got to give it to you when you’re really sick,’ he assured himself, ‘they can tell when a guy got to have it, doctors can tell, they ain’t like cops, they help a guy get to sleep.’
––and the ram-bam of the drums going into ‘Song of the Islands.’
Above the empty iron-banging din a waitress dropped a trayful of drinks. The shattering of the glass tinkled, in the sudden silence that followed, like an echo of soiled laughter along any soiled bar and Frankie applauded clumsily, numb with bar whisky and an utter weariness.
‘Tough it out, kid, tough it out,’ he tried to urge himself, feeling the first line of sweat forming along his forehead. But the whole business of escape seemed so hard, so useless, so endless and so long, a voice like another’s voice answered his anguished blood: ‘Tough it out for what? What for? What’s it all for anyhow?’
A brownskin buck feigning drunkenness bumped the edge of his table, upsetting his beer, then pretended to apologize by wiping it all into Frankie’s lap with a blue silk handkerchief. Frankie stood up weaving. ‘What you up to, cousin?’
‘I wasn’t lookin’, man,’ the buck apologized, ‘I’m tryin’ to get my bearin’s, where the people are.’ He went off waving the silk handkerchief as if trying to dry it on the drifting smoke.
Then the noise came on again, the juke began, the singing seemed more shrill, the lights changed from a delicate nursery pink to a raw and bleeding scarlet so that the barflies’ faces beamed, one moment, like so many tawny-pink cooks in a Cream of Wheat ad and in the next were flushed by an apopleptic light as though caught, in the very instant of the hemorrhage that bathes the brain without warning, into so many cream-colored plastic horrors.
‘Bingo bango bongo
I don’t want to leave the Congo …’
The monkeys above the clamor regarded each other in genuine fright, for the octoroon war horse was on the loose again, charging furiously about in a skirt of pale pink grass while Mr Floor Show pursued her playfully, bounding like a man trying to goose a butterfly and finally leaning over the piano to deal the pianist a blow as weak as his humor. ‘I could just smaaash you!’ In one corner somebody sniggered.
‘I want the frim-fram sauce,’
the war horse went into some two-year-old novelty tune,
‘With the aussenfay
And cha-fa-fa on the side.’
‘We go till gangrene sets in!’ Mr Floor Show threatened everyone with ferocious gaiety and under the curtain of perfume and smoke, under the pall of all their lives, poisoned by the shame they had somehow been taught to feel at not being white, their voices ceased altogether, the singing and the laughter ceased; and only the dead-flat whirring of the fans came on like a wind rising from the world they had left behind their tenement doors. In the sudden silence one of the brass ankles at the next table put her palm slantwise beneath her nose, sniffed once and said with prim pride: ‘This is one thing you don’t see me do’ and right outside the door someone smashed a bottle on the walk, the juke cried out, the music went on, the laughter picked up in the very teeth of that dead-flat warning wind.
While out of the years when the world had gone only half wrong the juke picked up a faded and raggedy tune.
‘Red sails in the sunset,
All day I’ve been blue.’
Till the strange cats looked all around.
It was time to be going home, if he could just find out where one was. It was time for bed, time for a drink, time for a charge and time to give himself up. There was nothing left for Frankie Machine, with his hands pressed so hard to his temples, but the bottles behind the bar, the age-old monkeys above the bottles, and the voice of the wind, bringing snow, rain and sleet, down all the streets where the squadrols sought him.
‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick,’ Frankie told himself. ‘Nobody can stand gettin’ this sick ’n not havin’ no place to go.’
Afraid to stay and afraid to leave, afraid of those at the tables about him and wanting to fight them all, he sat on with his right hand trembling so that he had to use the left to bring a glass of beer to his lips; he tried to keep the tiny stage in focus as he drank on.
A white girl with a mouth like a baby carp’s was trotting around up there as though being moved on strings, singing in a tinny little sing-song.
‘When the lights go on again
All over the world …’
with three sets of lights and carrying the battery concealed in one hand. ‘Take ’em off, honey,’ someone called. ‘The war’s over!’
But all she did was to prance like a little circus pony with the light on her navel flickering weakly, like a symbol of all such purchased humanity: purchased, marked-down, remaindered and sold out.
In the uproar and the odor, in the heavy sweat and the crash of bottles, within the smash of the drums and Mr Floor Show’s incessant shrieking, watching the passion of the octoroon venus and studying Frankie Machine’s dead-cold despair, the two amber strippers sat wanly on and on.
Once one laughed restlessly while the other drank without pleasure. Idling over the amber glasses, both were careful, Frankie saw, to put the glasses down softly after drinking so as not to clink them vulgarly upon the table; both drank and put them down together, in some sort of cunning pact, then raised their brown eyes each to each.
And both sat wanly smiling.
‘That’s how I got sin-ukul,’
the baby carp
bawled to the neon cat.
‘Ya put me on a pin-ukul
’N then ya let me do-ow-own,’
and went up so high on ‘down’ that the neon kitten closed his eyes, drew in his ears and arched his back a bit to indicate his suffering. For only the neon cat felt pain and only the bottles wept small tears. Only the monkeys yearned for home.
‘Bingo bango bongo
I don’t want to leave the Congo …’
While all sat wearily, wisely, wanly. All sat faintly smiling.
A brown and white chorus came out one by one, seemingly too indifferent toward each other to come out together, till there were five. Though each wore only slippers and a G string, all seemed overdressed, so studiously had their nakedness been donned. Each pore powdered, each taut pink nipple tinted with fingernail polish and dusted with some mauve talc, the armpits shaven and deodorized, each navel dusted and the hair swept back behind each small catlike ear.
The last one came out shading her eyes with her hand while bumping listlessly, as if half in shame. It was only the glare in her eyes and a general indifference to her public. When she’d bumped out of the glare she dropped her hands, wetted the fingertips with her tongue in a gesture Frankie knew so well that his hands came away from his temples – it took his heart in a single hot, tightening stitch and would not let the taut heart go and would not let him breathe. She daubed each naked nipple moistly, threw back her head and began stroking the hair coiled on her nape in a slow and sensual indolence. He brushed his shot glass off the table and stood up.
Molly could not see him weaving against the table out there in the dark while he was trying to understand to himself whether it was time for him to leave, before she saw him, or time to go to her before he lost her again.
He felt a sickening sort of shame, this was just the way he wished not to be in finding her again: broke, sick and hunted. What was it someone had said of her long ago? ‘She’s the kind got the sort of heart you can walk in ’n out of with boots on.’
Then the act was done and she was gone, they were all gone as if they hadn’t been there at all. As though the whole act had been a kickback from an overcharge, something he’d formed in his brain out of beer fumes and smoke.
Yet went weaving heavily through smoke and fumes toward the tiny dressing room offstage.
Wearing army brogans on his feet.
All that day, aslant the window, a long-forgotten, tangled black aerial wire touched continually at the pane as if Poor Peter had at last found another game than that of planting paper daisies to pass his days. He was jerking it from the roof just to taunt her – who else would be up there in such weather, with the wind like a whip and the ice on the walks? She turned on the radio to muffle its constant tap-tap-tapping; but all she could get was some fire-eating preacher offering her a choice of salvation or brimstone and even that was better than the tapping. What troubled her most was that, even when the wind seemed still, yet the wire tapped on.
She pried the sash up an inch with a shoehorn. But it dangled on just out of her reach. So she shut the window, realizing it was just one more trick they were playing on her.
And that Vi was no better than the rest of them any more. For all her fine talk about poor man’s pennies, the way she was carrying on with the Jailer, it seemed she thought more of landlord’s nickels these days.
Vi and the Jailer and that Frankie, leaving without so much as a word of good-by, all he ever thought of was himself. The preacher, droning eternally on and on, began hinting certain things about certain people, he was worse than any of them and in sudden fitlike fury she pulled the radio off the dresser, wheeled into the hall and dropped it over the rail without so much as looking to see whether someone might be coming up the stairs to catch damnation on the point of his skull.
She heard the crash below and the Jailer’s startled voice: ‘Who t’rows t’ings?’ The set had missed him by inches.
‘It’s that priest talkin’ against me again,’ Sophie explained, knowing she’d done just right, and wheeled back into the room, locking the door behind her. Then called, to answer the Jailer’s angry rapping, ‘You’ll all get just what you got coming! I’m giving it to all of you now!’
There was no further knocking at her door all that endless afternoon. Only, toward evening, the rapping of Jailer’s hammer where he was putting a couple final raps to the radio. ‘He’s always better at knockin’ somethin’ apart than puttin’ somethin’ together anyhow,’ Sophie told herself with pleasure.
The evening of the night that no one came at all and she wanted the moon to move.
Only the moon to move, it seemed so little to ask, for it moved for everyone else.
All anyone ever did for her was to flush the toilet down the hall and when would he ever quit flushing that nasty thing anyhow?
Not one of them heard, hours later, the stranger’s step in the hall below, listening there to hear whether he were expected, then begin coming on heavily, like one almost too tired to mount one more flight. She peered out, the door an inch ajar, like an animal expecting pursuit and knew: ‘It’s Frankie comin’ home.’ To make it all up to her for leaving like that without even saying goodbye.
Without even telling her what it was for that the wagon men had wanted him. Without even telling her it was all a lie about him and that public hide on the first floor front. Without giving her so much as a word to fight with when the neighbors said things behind her back. It would serve him right if she told him now: ‘You’ve brought it all on yourself. It’s every bit your fault.’ But by the way he came on, so heavily with every step, she could tell how sorry he really was. He was sorry at last, truly truly sorry, he’d come back to make it all up to her now.
To make it all up, and have something to eat, a place to sleep and a place to hide – what was the difference whether he’d slept with this one or that, whether he’d hit some other bum on the head sometime or other – the main thing was he was coming back, he was sorry, for he loved her after all. She bit her nails with excitement.
Heard the struggler below lean for breath hard against the rickety rail – she hoped he just wasn’t drunk again. If he was she’d have to get him sober right away, she would have to work fast and be ever so still, he’d be so tired, so hungry and sick and broke and everyone against him – he would need her so badly and she whispered through the door all the way down the stairwell: ‘Hurry, honey,’ as loudly as she dared.
Then that same old fool down the hall, who by right should have been in bed for hours, began the same old record on the same dreary old all-night vic.
‘It all seems wrong somehow …’
The struggler heard, she heard him turn, he thought there was a party going on and had best not take such a chance after all. The door closed though the record went on.
‘That you’re nobody’s baby now.’
When it stopped she realized he must be going around the block, he was going to use the fire escape and fool them all, she would have to have the fire-escape door open for him.
Then down the hall he would come so softly, no one would hear his step at all. No one would know where her Frankie was so safely hiding.
No one, not even that Vi would know, she would feed him and bathe him and make him sleep and take care that passers-by didn’t waken him.
But the moon seemed too bright. Past all the blind doors to the rust-colored escape window that only long disuse had fastened: she got the shoehorn between the door and the sash and it came wide with a tiny flaking of rust onto the blanket across her knees. She had to stand up to let him know it was safe now to come up from the alley shadows.
Yet heard no steps on the iron stairs. No feet feeling for rusted rungs. No low whistle in the winter night to tell he was coming at last to her now.
Leaning upon the rust-colored wall, her feet felt blindly for the iron, her eyes blurred with winter moonlight; a tenement moon, a fire-escape moon, so bright, so steady, so unmoving – if it would move just e
ver so little, then he could come – he was afraid while it was shining so bright, and from behind her, from the room where the vic had played, a woman’s head was thrust out of a bright-lit door to ask, ‘Who’s prowlin’ around here?’
Then saw the vacant wheelchair and Sophie leaning for support upon the rail. From the moonlit air above, the troubled air below and the unbalanced air all about Sophie heard their voices clamoring toward her.
She could walk by herself if they just didn’t all hold her so tightly, she knew.
‘Take it easy, sister. One footsy at a time. That’s our girl.’
She was going, much too fast, down the gutter-colored hall between two square-capped voices and the pin-curled neighbors in their doors watching all the way down to the very last door of all. Where that double-crossing Vi stood wringing her hands because everything in the world happened to her even when it happened to somebody else.
‘All night she been wheelin’, back ’n fort’, back ’n fort’,’ someone complained, ‘I couldn’t get a wink, but I know what troubles she’s had so I let her be, I’m not the kind to make trouble for others, I’ve had too much myself.’
Then Violet’s compassionate voice, telling the neighbors just how everything had happened. ‘Them two, him ’n her, wantin’ to love each other just ever so long. Wantin’ so much ’n never knowin’ how, neither one of ’em.’
Sophie felt the Division Street wind slap her cheek and the winter air nip at her throat – it had been so long since she’d been in the open. Then the air came close and stuffy, houses and store fronts and people were passing in great dips exactly as though she were riding the roller coaster once more. And laughing softly to herself at such a pleasant surprise, felt herself coasting right down into some whitewashed hall toward a cornerless room.