“You managed to walk out of here with the only unaccompanied female that’s been in all week. Congratulations.”
“She got what she came in for, all right.”
“Uh-huh. You want something to drink?”
I didn’t really want any, but I didn’t want to look like a lightweight. “Same as before.”
He set the drink down in front of me, and a man next to me turned and gave me the eye. He looked like he was in his forties, with thin brown hair on top and an oft-broken nose.
“You want to paint my portrait, Gertrude?” I asked, and his expression got harder.
“Goddamn it, Gleason,” the man said. “I told you a million times not to serve kids in here.”
“Who’s a kid?” I said, self-consciously deepening my voice, fortifying my feeling of adulthood with the thought that I had just had carnal knowledge of a woman in her middle thirties.
“You’re a kid,” the man said, apparently unable to read my thoughts. He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “And you smell like shit, too. Go home and wipe your ass and come back when you’re twenty-one.”
“This is a speakeasy,” I protested, feeling my voice rise. “There’s no minimum age.”
“There sure as hell is. I pay off the law, and one of their conditions for looking the other way is, they don’t want to see any goddamn kids in here. You understand me? Now scram.”
He took my drink off the table and handed it back to Gleason, and I suddenly felt like I was ten years old.
“Shit, Gleason, I got Stanley Gerard coming down from K.C. tomorrow. I don’t want him to see anything like that, got me?”
“Yes, sir, Mister Shelton.” Gleason nodded with great dignity as I slid off my stool and headed for the door, my cheeks burning with shame and rage. I went to my car and sat for a while, dreaming of revenge, and then I headed for home.
~ * ~
4. The Duesie
The next day I stayed around the house reading. Around four-thirty in the afternoon I headed over to my girl’s house, just a block away from Mildred’s. Sally was home and her parents weren’t, and they weren’t expected back until evening. We screwed furtively in her room upstairs, and as I was zipping back up I said I’d be going.
“Now? But I thought we might go to a picture show,” Sally whined.
“I’m feeling a little peaked. I think I’d better go on home,” I said with a pout to show what a physical wreck I was. She scowled and turned away from me, and didn’t acknowledge me as I left. Outside in the car I laughed out loud. What I was feeling was horny and dirty, still, and what I wanted now was my dirty, drunken, middle-aged gal Mildred.
I stopped by the blind pig for a bottle, and Norman was once again alone, so I let him buy me a drink.
“Shit, these hot days like this it ain’t worth staying open. I’m barely making my nut here.”
“How big’s the nut?” I asked. “If you’re paying more than twenty bucks a month rent you’re being robbed.”
“I pay seventeen-fifty, and that ain’t the problem. I have my stock to account for, and I have to pay people to stay in business. In case you ain’t heard, this stuffs against the law around here.” He knocked his back and poured another.
“Who do you pay? The cops?”
“Them first, and then there’s other guys. Guys from out of town. Costs me damn close to a hundred and fifty bucks a month just to open the goddamn door.”
Downstairs someone opened the big carriage house doors and started up a car. Then the door shut and the driver tapped the horn, and I looked out the window in time to see a Graham Custom Eight, obviously the pride and joy of the ape behind the wheel, who wheeled out onto the street and burned rubber up 12th, honking his horn again at the corner.
“That’s one of the guys I gotta pay to stay in business. He rents the garage space downstairs.”
“What’s his racket?” I asked.
“His racket is, people pay him so they can stay in business,” Norman said, a little irritated. Again he wanted to give me another drink, but I demurred and started to leave. I stopped at the door and asked him if he knew the owner of the Royal Crown.
“Larry Shelton? I know who he is. He don’t know me from a snake’s dick.”
“All right,” I said. “See you.”
I parked in Mildred’s garage again. When I knocked on the front door there was no answer, so I tried the knob. It opened and I went inside.
“Mildred?” She didn’t answer, and I wondered if she wasn’t passed out upstairs. “I got you a bottle.” The downstairs was neat and clean, and so was the upstairs. The bed was neatly made, and turning it down I saw that the sheets had been changed. Mildred wasn’t as sloppy a drunk as I’d thought.
I could have gone back to Sally’s and made her happy by taking her to a movie like she wanted, but instead I headed for the Royal Crown and hoped I wouldn’t have to clash with Larry Shelton.
~ * ~
Parked in front of the Royal Crown was the only Duesenberg SJ I had ever seen outside of the pages of a magazine. I parked a few doors down and hopped out. I stood before the SJ for a minute, wondering where it had come from and to whom it belonged. Its top was down, and shortly a yokel slouching down the sidewalk slopped to join me, whistling in admiration.
“You know what that is?” he asked.
Paying the dope, I scratched my head. “Some sort of convertible?” I said.
“‘At there is a Duesie SJ.”
“Like the Jesuits?”
“Nuh-uh, it’s a Duesenberg. Some of ‘em’s got a ram’s horn manifold’ll boost you right up to four hundred horsepower.”
“This one?”
“You’d never know unless you drove it, or looked under the hood.”
“Golly Moses,” I said. “Imagine just leaving it on the street like that. Somebody might just open the hood and take a look inside at the manifold.” I was tired of pulling the hillbilly’s leg and I left him standing there gaping, tormented by the temptation I had just placed in front of him. I didn’t blame him, though. It was a beautiful piece of machinery, black and white with red trim, and it made that Graham I’d spotted earlier look like a galvanized trash barrel on wheels.
The sun was low and the temperature dropping, but the Royal Crown wasn’t hopping quite yet. Gleason spotted me at the door and shook his head, jerking it at Shelton, who sat there talking to a swell who looked like he might belong to the Duesenberg. At any rate, the man was wearing a suit that wouldn’t have seemed shabby behind the wheel of a car like that. Shelton’s back was to me, and two stools down from him sat Mildred, still able to balance on the stool despite the approaching dusk. She had on the same thin sleeveless dress as the day before, probably the only flattering summerweight one she had. I took the stool next to hers despite Gleason’s frantic, silent attempts to wave me away, his head shaking so hard his jowls shook like rubber balloons filled with water.
“Gin,” I said, “and another gimlet for the lady.” He just stood there looking at me, lips tight, and then he turned disgustedly and made a single drink, which he placed in front of me. Then he leaned down.
“Leave the chippie alone,” Gleason whispered. “She’s with those fellows tonight. “
“The hell with that,” I said in a normal tone of voice. “I said another gimlet for the lady.”
Gleason shook his head disgustedly, and Mildred, sensing that some free booze was on offer, turned my way. She looked nice, I thought, better than she had last night before things got started, and she smiled in recognition. “Hello, there, Wayne.” Her eyes promised the foulest of biblically proscribed delights.
“Mildred.”
Gleason put the gimlet down in front of her.
“You sure are sweet.”
“Thanks. I stopped by your house with a bottle, only you weren’t there.”
“Nope, I was here.”
“You want to go drink it, once you finish that?”
She glanced over at Shelton, sti
ll deep in conversation. “What the hell,” she said, and she knocked the gimlet back in a gulp and slid off the stool. “Lead on, MacDuff.”
I laid down some money on the bar, and Gleason shook his head at me with a very grim look on his face.
We were halfway to the door when Shelton noticed us.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Mildred.”
“I’m tired of waiting, Larry, and this nice young gentleman offered me a ride home. Wasn’t that kind of him?”
Larry Shelton looked at me without much pleasure. “You look like a boy doesn’t understand what ‘stay the hell away’ means.”
“You said to stay away until I was twenty-one. Today’s my birthday.”
He softened a little. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” Grinning, he showed off a gap between his front teeth that made Floyd’s look like an orthodontist’s masterwork, and he stuck out his hand for me to shake. “Come on over here and I’ll buy you a drink for your birthday. “
I thought for a second, stupidly, that I’d pulled one over on him, and approached him with my hand extended. The man with the snappy suit watched the transaction with bored disinterest, impatient to resume his conversation with Shelton and annoyed at the distraction.
When I was three feet away from Shelton, he grabbed his own drink from the bar and threw it in my face. I stood for a moment, humiliated, with bourbon running down my face and dripping off my chin as he and his friend cracked up laughing.
“You were about to offer the lady a ride home on your bike, junior?” the man in the suit said.
“Come on, Mildred,” I said, turning to face her, but she wasn’t there. She was leaning against the bar in hysterics, laughing so hard that no sound was coming out, doubled over with her hands resting on her shapely knees. Tears rolled down her cheeks, streaming kohl in their wake as they had yesterday, and my first urge was to throw my fist at her jaw. Instead I put the slug onto Shelton, and I got him so fast he went down with the first blow to the midriff. Mildred was still laughing, and so was the man in the suit. I gave Shelton a kick to the ribs and another to the belly that knocked the breath clear out of him, and I grabbed my own unfinished drink from the bar. I poured it into his hair and rubbed it in with my hand like scalp tonic.
Everybody was laughing but me and Shelton, and I wanted to, God knows. Gleason stood behind the bar making a valiant effort to keep a straight face, but his eyes shone with joy.
“All right, boy,” the man in the suit said. “You’ve had some fun, now it’s time to run along.” He was still smiling, but he said it like he meant it.
My honor was restored, and I was happy to go now. “Come on, Mildred,” I said.
“Huh-uh. Mildred’s not going.”
I almost made a smart remark, but Mildred was back on her bar-stool now, wiping the smeared makeup off her cheeks with a wet bar rag, facing the bar and studiously pretending I wasn’t there.
“You with them or with me, Mildred?”
She turned around. “You’re a dear sweet boy, Wayne, but tonight’s kind of a grown-up night for me, if you don’t mind. I’ll see you some other time.”
“You hear that, Wayne? Now scram.”
It was crazy, but at that moment I wanted Mildred more than I had ever wanted any woman before, more than I had ever desired anything in my whole life. I wanted to fuck her, run away with her, marry her, raise a family. I didn’t care that she was a lush and a slattern, that she was nearly twenty years older than me, or that she had dropped me for the first prosperous swinging dick that came through the barroom door. I wanted her right then and there, and I took her by the arm.
“Mildred, let’s go.” I had hoped to keep the pleading tone out of my voice, but I heard it just like everyone else did, high-pitched and boyish.
“Mildred, let’s go,” the man in the suit mocked in a voice like Mickey Mouse’s that deepened to a growl. “Let go of her arm or I’ll break yours.”
“Screw you, Charlie,” I said.
“The name’s Stan Gerard, and I own this place.” He stood up and moved toward me, and with no more telegraphing than I’d given Shelton he backhanded me across the face, and then he pulled something metallic out of his pocket and hit me with it, hard, and I closed my eyes for a second. Crazy colors floated before me, and another blow caught me on the ear as I went down. I never quite lost consciousness, but somehow I couldn’t open my eyes as they carried me through the bar to the rear and tossed me into the back alley.
“Don’t hurt him too bad,” I heard my beloved call languidly from her perch at the bar.
I hit the pavement, hard, and Stan Gerard spoke to me in a polite way before he went back inside.
“Can you hear me, Wayne?”
I indicated that I could.
“Like Shelton said, come back when you’re twenty-one. I’ll even buy you a drink. But not before then, got me?”
I nodded once again, and the door closed. I opened my eyes and looked around. It was getting dark, and I limped around to the side alley and made my way to the street, where my Hudson sat parked a stone’s throw from Stan Gerard’s Duesenberg.
Idiot, I told myself as I sat there pulling the starter again and again with no result. You’ve been running all over town, covering twice as much ground as you normally would have, and you didn’t stop for gas. With my cheekbone throbbing, I got out and started the humiliating six-block walk to my house and my bicycle.
~ * ~
5. In Which I Accept My Status, for Now
I couldn’t find my old man’s gas can, so I took a milk bottle in a wire basket from the back porch. As I climbed onto my bike with it I had an idea. I went back to the porch and took a second bottle, and then I rode over to the Skelly station on Hillside.
“Ain’t putting gas in there, not in a glass bottle.” The Skelly man shook his head firmly, letting it stop at the far end of each shake.
“I’ll put it in myself.”
“Nuh-uh. You take this metal can or nothing. Cost you a nickel extra for deposit, but you can get it back.”
Though the evening had cooled considerably, the asphalt beneath our feet still felt warmer than it should have, and the whole station smelled like gas, seeping up through the asphalt and past my nostrils to lodge in the spongy repository of my sinus, where it would slowly leak into my brain for the rest of the night if I didn’t get away. I could feel the fumes building up there, thick and nauseating behind my eyes, and I broke.
“Okay, put it in the can,” I said.
The Skelly man got up off of his chair and took the can over to the pump. He filled the can and I paid him and rode along the sidewalks back to the Royal Crown. I put the bicycle and the basket with the milk bottles into the rear seat of the Hudson and put some of the gasoline in the tank, and a little slug into the carburator. There was about a quart of it left, and I left it in the can on the seat next to me.
I headed one block east on Douglas and turned left over to First, where I parked in front of a two-story duplex. I got the bike and one of the milk bottles out of the back seat and filled the milk bottle with the can of gas. From the glove compartment I extracted Mildred’s purloined drawers, drenching them in the gasoline and stuffing them into the mouth of the bottle. I hopped back onto the bike and rode back to Douglas and, from the safety of a large coniferous shrub outside the Hillcrest apartment building, cased the front of the Royal Crown. The sidewalk was empty, and I pulled out my lighter and went for broke, coasting down the sidewalk with one hand on the handlebars and the other around the bottle. When I got to the Duesenberg, I stopped and propped the bike up on one leg as I flicked the lighter and lit Mildred’s gasoline-soaked intimates. They burned bright for a second and in a single action I threw the bottle at the dashboard and kicked the pedals into motion, hearing with no small satisfaction the breaking of the bottle and the whooshing sound of the fire erupting from the interior of the Duesie. I didn’t look back, but I could feel the heat at my back, and the sidewalk before me glowed yello
w in a way it hadn’t a second before.
I tore ass across Douglas against the light. Once safely across, I stopped in the shadowy entryway to a store that sold artificial limbs and settled in to enjoy the show.
~ * ~
The flames were big and bright, eclipsing the streetlights and engulfing the interior of the convertible. From the seat of the bike I watched a disbelieving Stan Gerard race out of the Royal Crown, followed by several others, including Larry Shelton; Mildred straggled out last, a little unsteady on her feet, and had to hold on to the doorframe in order to stay upright. I could hear them shouting, and people started crowding the sidewalk, pouring out of the surrounding buildings and passing cars that had stopped at the sight, all of them keeping a respectful distance from the fire. Finally Gerard, looking scared as hell, ran up to the car to get something out of it. Shelton caught up to him, though, and tackled him and pulled him back, an action that would probably have earned him an asskicking had the Duesie’s gas tank not chosen that moment to blow.