“Apparently you learned about it without any help from me,” he said, trying to restrain himself, cursing himself: You bastard, she’s the one that’s in trouble; it’s not you. “I had settled it. I had said no. You were the one who—” Now he did stop himself, rein himself in. “Listen. There’s a pill of some sort. You take it when your time is due. I’ll try to get some of them.”
“Try where?”
“Where would I try? Who would ever need such? At a brothel. Oh, God, Charlotte! Charlotte!”
“I know,” she said. “We cant help it. It’s not us now. That’s why: dont you see? I want it to be us again, quick, quick. We have so little time. In twenty years I cant any more and in fifty years we’ll both be dead. So hurry. Hurry.”
He had never been in a brothel in his life and had never even sought one before. So now he discovered what a lot of people have: how difficult it is to find one; how you lived in the duplex for ten years before you discovered that the late-sleeping ladies next door were not night-shift telephone girls. At last that occurred to him which the veriest yokel seems to inherit with breath: he asked a taxi-driver and was presently set down before a house a good deal like the one he lived in and pressed a button which made no audible response though presently a curtain over the narrow window beside the door fell a second before he could have sworn someone had looked out at him.
Then the door opened, a negro maid conducted him down a dim hallway and into a room containing a bare veneered dining-table bearing an imitation cut-glass punch bowl and scarred by the white rings from damp glass-bottoms, a pianola slotted for coins, and twelve chairs ranged along the four walls in orderly sequence like tombstones in a military graveyard, where the maid left him to sit and look at a lithograph of the Saint Bernard dog saving the child from the snow and another of President Roosevelt, until there entered a double-chinned woman of no especial age more than forty, with blondined hair and a lilac satin gown not quite clean. “Good evening,” she said. “Stranger in town?”
“Yes,” he told her. “I asked a taxi-driver. He—”
“Dont apologise,” she said. “The drivers is all my friends here.”
He remembered the driver’s parting advice: “The first white person you see, buy them some beer. You’ll be jake then.”—“Wont you have some beer?” he said.
“Why, I dont mind if I do,” the woman said. “It might refresh us.” Immediately (she had rung no bell that Wilbourne could see) the maid entered. “Two beers, Louisa,” the woman said. The maid went out. The woman sat down too. “So you’re a stranger in San Tone. Well, some of the sweetest friendships I ever seen was made in one night or even after one session between two folks that never even seen one another an hour ago. I got American girls here or Spanish (strangers like Spanish girls, once, anyway. It’s the influence of the moving pictures, I always say) and one little Eyetalian that just—” The maid entered with two tankards of beer. It could not have been much farther away than wherever it was she had been standing when the woman in purple had rung no bell that Wilbourne could see. The maid went out.
“No,” he said. “I dont want—I came here—I—” The woman was watching him; she had started to raise her mug. Instead she set it back on the table, watching him. “I’m in trouble,” he said quietly. “I hoped you could help me.”
Now the woman even withdrew her hand from the tankard and he saw now that her eyes, even if they were no less muddy, were also no less cold than the big diamond at her breast. “And just what made you think I could or would help you out of whatever your trouble is? The driver tell you that too? What’d he look like? You take his number?”
“No,” Wilbourne said. “I—”
“Never mind that now. What kind of trouble are you in?” He told her, simply and quietly, while she watched him. “H’m,” she said. “And so you, a stranger here, found right off a taxi-driver that brought you straight to me to find a doctor to do your business. Well, well.” Now she did ring the bell, not violently, just hard.
“No, no, I dont—” She even keeps a doctor in the house, he thought. “I dont—”
“Undoubtless,” the woman said. “It’s all a mistake. You’ll get back to the hotel or wherever it is and find you just drempt your wife was knocked up or even that you had a wife.”
“I wish I would,” Wilbourne said. “But I—” The door opened and a man entered, a biggish man, fairly young, bulging his clothes a little, who gave Wilbourne a hot, embracing, almost loverlike glare out of hot brown flesh-bedded eyes beneath the straight innocently parted hair of a little boy and continued to look at him from then on. His neck was shaved.
“Thatim?” he said over his shoulder to the woman in purple, in a voice husky with prolonged whiskey begun at too early an age yet withal the voice of a disposition cheerful, happy, even joyous. He did not even wait for an answer, he came straight to Wilbourne and before the other could move plucked him from the chair with one hamlike hand. “Whadya mean, you sonafabitch, coming into a respectable house and acting like a sonafabitch? hah?” He glared at Wilbourne happily. “Out?” he said.
“Yah,” the woman in purple said. “Then I want to find that taxi-driver.” Wilbourne began to struggle. At once the young man turned upon him with loverlike joy, beaming. “Not in here,” the woman said sharply. “Out, like I told you, you ape.”
“I’ll go,” Wilbourne said. “You can turn me loose.”
“Yah; sure, you sonafabitch,” the young man said. “I’ll just help you. You got helped in, see. This way.” They were in the hall again, now there was a small slight black-haired dark-faced man also, in dingy trousers and a tieless blue shirt: a Mexican servant of some sort. They went on to the door, the back of Wilbourne’s coat bunched in the young man’s huge hand. The young man opened it. The brute will have to hit me once, Wilbourne thought. Or he will burst, suffocate. But all right. All right.
“Maybe you could tell me,” he said. “All I want is—”
“Yah; sure,” the young man said. “Maybe I awda sockm, Pete. Whadya think?”
“Sockm,” the Mexican said.
He did not even feel the fist. He felt the low stoop strike him across the back, then the grass already damp with dew, before he began to feel his face at all. “Maybe you could tell me—” he said.
“Yah; sure,” the young man said in his hoarse happy voice, “ask me another.” The door slammed. After a while Wilbourne got up. Now he could feel his eye, the whole side of his face, his whole head, the slow painful pounding of the blood, though in the drugstore mirror presently (it was on the first corner he came to, he entered it; he was indeed learning fast the things he should have known before he was nineteen years old) he could see no discoloration yet. But the mark was apparent, something was, because the clerk said.
“What happened to your face, mister?”
“Fight,” he said. “I knocked up my girl. I want something for it.”
For a moment the clerk looked at him, hard. Then he said, “Cost you five bucks.”
“Do you guarantee it?”
“Nah.”
“All right. I’ll take it.”
It was a small tin box, unlettered. It contained five objects which might have been coffee beans. “He said whiskey would help, and moving around. He said to take two of them tonight and go somewhere and dance.” She took all five of them, they went out and got two pints of whiskey and found at last a dance hall full of cheap colored bulbs and khaki uniforms and rentable partners or hostesses.
“Drink some of it too,” she said. “Does your face hurt very bad now?”
“No,” he said. “Drink it. Drink all you can.”
“God,” she said. “You cant dance, can you?”
“No,” he said. “Yes. Yes, I can dance.” They moved about the floor, bumped and shoved and bumping and shoving, somnambulistic and sometimes in step, during each short phase of hysterical music. By eleven oclock she had drunk almost half of one of the bottles but it only made her sick. He waited until she emerged from the washroom, her face the color of putty, the eyes indomitable and yellow. “You lost the pills too,” he said.
“Two of them. I was afraid of that so I used the basin and washed them off and took them again. Where’s the bottle?”
They had to go out for her to drink, then they returned. At twelve she had almost finished the first bottle and the lights were turned off save for a spotlight which played on a revolving globe of colored glass, so that the dancers moved with the faces of corpses
