“No. Only don’t worry no matter what you hear.”
“I won’t worry.”
“Listen, Marie. Go on up to the upstairs trap and bring me the Thompson gun and look in that wooden box with the shells and see all the clips are filled.”
“Don’t take that.”
“I got to.”
“Do you want any boxes of shells?”
“No. I can’t load any clips. I got four clips.”
“Honey, you aren’t going on that kind of a trip?”
“I’m going on a bad trip.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God, I wish you didn’t have to do these things.”
“Go on and get it and bring it down here. Get me some coffee.”
“O.K.,” said Marie. She leaned over the table and kissed him on the mouth.
“Leave me alone,” Harry said. “I got to think.”
He sat at the table and looked at the piano, the sideboard and the radio, the picture of September Morn, and the pictures of the cupids holding bows behind their heads, the shiny, real-oak table and the shiny real-oak chairs and the curtains on the windows and he thought, What chance have I to enjoy my home? Why am I back to worse than where I started?
It’ll all be gone too if I don’t play this right. The hell it will. I haven’t got sixty bucks left outside of the house, but I’ll get a stake out of this. Those damn girls. That’s all that old woman and I could get with what we’ve got. Do you suppose the boys in her went before I knew her?
“Here it is,” said Marie, carrying it by the web sling strap. “They’re all full.”
“I got to go,” Harry said. He lifted the chunky weight of the dismounted gun in its oil-stained, canvas-web case. “Put it under the front seat of the car.”
“Good-by,” Marie said.
“Good-by, old woman.”
“I won’t worry. But please take care of yourself.”
“Be good.”
“Aw, Harry,” she said and held him tight against her.
“Let me go. I ain’t got no time.”
He patted her on the back with his arm stump.
“You and your loggerhead flipper,” she said. “Oh, Harry. Be careful.”
“I got to go. Good-by, old woman.”
“Good-by, Harry.”
She watched him go out of the house, tall, wide-shouldered, flat-backed, his hips narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like, she thought, and when he got in the car she saw him blonde, with the sunburned hair, his face with the broad mongol cheek bones, and the narrow eyes, the nose broken at the bridge, the wide mouth and the round jaw, and getting in the car he grinned at her and she began to cry. “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Everytime I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There were three tourists at the bar at Freddy’s and Freddy was serving them. One was a very tall, thin, wide-shouldered man, in shorts, wearing thick-lensed spectacles, tanned, with small closely trimmed sandy mustache. The woman with him had her blonde curly hair cut short like a man’s, a bad complexion, and the face and build of a lady wrestler. She wore shorts, too.
“Oh, nerts to you,” she was saying to the third tourist, who had a rather swollen reddish face, a rusty-colored mustache, a white cloth hat with a green celluloid visor, and a trick of talking with a rather extraordinary movement of his lips as though he were eating something too hot for comfort.
“How charming,” said the green-visored man. “I’d never heard the expression actually used in conversation. I thought it was an obsolete phrase, something one saw in print in—er—the funny papers but never heard.”
“Nerts, nerts, double nerts to you,” said the lady wrestler lady in a sudden access of charm, giving him the benefit of her pimpled profile.
“How beautiful,” said the green-visored man. “You put it so prettily. Isn’t it from Brooklyn originally?”
“You mustn’t mind her. She’s my wife,” the tall tourist said. “Have you two met?”
“Oh, nerts to him and double nerts to meeting him,” said the wife. “How do you do?”
“Not so badly,” the green-visored man said. “How do you do?”
“She does marvellously,” the tall one said. “You ought to see her.”
Just then Harry came in and the tall tourist’s wife said, “Isn’t he wonderful? That’s what I want. Buy me that, Papa.”
“Can I speak to you?” Harry said to Freddy.
“Certainly. Go right ahead and say anything you like,” the tall tourist’s wife said.
“Shut up, you whore,” Harry said. “Come in the back, Freddy.”
In the back was Bee-lips, waiting at the table.
“Hello, Big Boy,” he said to Harry.
“Shut up,” said Harry.
“Listen,” Freddy said. “Cut it out. You can’t get away with that. You can’t call my trade names like that. You can’t call a lady a whore in a decent place like this.”
“A whore,” said Harry. “Hear what she said to me?”
“Well, anyway, don’t call her a name like that to her face.”
“All right. You got the money?”
“Of course,” said Bee-lips. “Why wouldn’t I have the money? Didn’t I say I’d have the money?”
“Let’s see it.”
Bee-lips handed it over. Harry counted ten hundred-dollar bills and four twenties.
“It should be twelve hundred.”
“Less my commission,” said Bee-lips.
“Come on with it.”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“You miserable little crut.”
“You big bully,” Bee-lips said. “Don’t try to strong arm it away from me because I haven’t got it here.”
“I see,” said Harry. “I should have thought of that. Listen Freddy. You’ve known me a long time. I know she’s worth twelve hundred. This is a hundred and twenty short. Take it and take a chance on the hundred and twenty and the charter.”
“That’s three hundred and twenty dollars,” Freddy said. It was a painful sum for him to name as a risk, and he sweated while he thought about it.
“I got a car and a radio in the house that’s good for it.”
“I can make out a paper on that,” Bee-lips said.
“I don’t want any paper,” Freddy said. He sweat again and his voice was hesitant. Then he said, “All right. I’ll take a chance. But for Christ’s sake be careful with the boat, will you Harry?”
“Like it was my own.”
“You lost your own,” said Freddy, still sweating, his suffering now intensified by that memory.
“I’ll take care of her.”
“I’ll put the money in my box in the bank,” Freddy said.
Harry looked at Bee-lips.
“That’s a good place,” he said, and grinned.
“Bartender,” some one called from the front.
“That’s you,” Harry said.
“Bartender,” came the voice again.
Freddy went out to the front.
“That man insulted me,” Harry could hear the high voice saying, but he was talking to Bee-lips.
“I’ll be tied up to the dock there at the front of the street. It isn’t half a block.”
“All right.”
“That’s all.”
“All right, Big Shot.”
“Don’t you big shot me.”
“However you like.”
“I’ll be there from four o’clock on.”
“Anything else?”
“They got to take me by force, see? I know nothing about it. I’m just working on the engine. I got nothing aboard to make a trip. I’ve hired her from Freddy to go charter fishing. They’ve got to hold a gun on me to make me start her and they’ve got to cut loose the lines.”
“What about Freddy? You didn’t hire her to go fishing from him.”
“I’m going to tell Freddy.”
“You better not.”
“I’m going to.”
“You better not.”
“Listen, I’ve done business with Freddy since during the war. Twice I’ve been partners with him and we never had trouble. You know how much stuff I’ve handled for him. He’s the only son-of-a-bitch in this town I would trust.”
“I wouldn’t trust anybody.”
“You shouldn’t. Not after the experiences you’ve had with yourself.”
“Lay off me.”
“All right. Go out and see your friends. What’s your out?”
“They’re Cubans. I met them out at the roadhouse. One of them wants to cash a certified check. What’s wrong with that?”
“And you don’t notice anything?”
“No. I tell them to meet me at the bank.”
“Who drives them?”
“Some taxi.”
“What’s he supposed to think they are, violinists?”
“We’ll get one that don’t think. There’s plenty of them that can’t think in this town. Look at Hayzooz.”
“Hayzooz is smart. He just talks funny.”
“I’ll have them call a dumb one.”
“Get one hasn’t any kids.”
“They all got kids. Ever see a taxi driver without kids?”
“You are a goddamn rat.”
“Well, I never killed anybody,” Bee-lips told him.
“Nor you never will. Come on, let’s get out of here. Just being with you makes me feel crummy.”
“Maybe you are crummy.”
“Can you get them from talking?”
“If you don’t paper your mouth.”
“Paper yours then.”
“I’m going to get a drink,” Harry said.
Out in front the three tourists sat on their high stools. As Harry came up to the bar the woman looked away from him to register disgust.
“What will you have?” asked Freddy.
“What’s the lady drinking,” Harry asked.
“A Cuba Libre.”
“Then give me a straight whiskey.”
The tall tourist with the little sandy mustache and the thick-lensed glasses leaned his large, straight-nosed face over toward Harry and said, “Say, what’s the idea of talking that way to my wife?”
Harry looked him up and down and said to Freddy, “What kind of a place you running?”
“What about it?” the tall one said.
“Take it easy,” Harry said to him.
“You can’t pull that with me.”
“Listen,” Harry said. “You came down here to get well and strong, didn’t you? Take it easy.” And he went out.
“I should have hit him, I guess,” the tall tourist said. “What do you think, dear?”
“I wish I was a man,” his wife said.
“You’d go a long way with that build,” the green-visored man said into his beer.
“What did you say,” the tall one asked.
“I said you could find out his name and address and write him a letter telling him what you think of him.”
“Say, what’s your name,
