David Goodis: The Moon in the Gutter

Kerrigan watched him as he walked away, crossing the cobbled surface of Vernon Street and heading toward the taproom on the corner of Third and Vernon. The name of the place was Dugan’s Den and it was the only dive in the neighborhood that sold legitimate liquor. All the other joints were in the back rooms of wooden shacks or in the cellars of tenements. Most of the alcohol sold along Vernon Street was homemade and the authorities had long ago given up trying to catch all the bootleggers. Every once in a while there’d be a raid, but it didn’t mean anything. They never kept them locked up for long. Just long enough to let them know that payoffs had to be made on time. So a few days later they’d be back in business at the same old stand.

He stood there at the edge of the alleyway and watched the scarecrow figure of his brother moving toward the murky windows of Dugan’s Den. When the fifty cents was used up, Frank would hang around Dugan’s and beg for drinks, or maybe he’d steal some loose change off the bar and make tracks for the nearest establishment where twenty cents would bring him a water glass filled with rotgut. But there was no point in worrying about Frank.

There was no point in even thinking about Frank. It was a damn shame about Frank, but then, it was a damn shame about a lot of people.

Approaching voices interrupted his thoughts. He looked up and saw the two men. He recognized Mooney, the sign painter. The other man was a construction laborer named Nick Andros. They came up smiling and saying hello, and he nodded amiably. They were men of his own age and he’d known them all his life.

“What’s doing?” Nick greeted him.

“Nothing special.”

“Looking for action?” Nick asked. He was short and very fat and had a beak of a nose. Totally bald, his polished skull shone in the glow from the street lamps and moonlight.

Kerrigan shook his head. “Just came out to get some air.”

“What air?” Mooney grumbled. “Thermometer says ninety-four. We might as well be in a blast furnace.”

“There’s a breeze coming from the river,” Kerrigan said.

“I’m glad you feel it,” Mooney said. “For supper I had a plate of ice. Just plain ice.”

“That only makes it worse,” Kerrigan said. “Try a lukewarm bath.”

“I’ll hafta try something,” Mooney said. “I can’t stand this goddamn weather.” He was a tall, solidly built man with sloping shoulders and a thick neck. His hair was carrot-colored and he had a lot of it and always kept it combed neatly, parted in the middle and slicked down. His skin was very pale, almost like the skin of an infant. Although he was thirty-six, there were no lines on his face, and his gray-green eyes were clear and bright, so that the only sign of his years was in his voice. He looked more or less like an overgrown boy. Actually he was a widely-traveled man who’d studied painting in Italy on a fellowship and had been hailed as an important discovery in the art circles of Europe. He’d come back to America to find that his water colors were acclaimed by the critics but ignored by the patrons. So he’d changed his style in an effort to make sales, and the critics roasted him and then forgot about him. Then everybody forgot about him. He returned to Vernon Street and started painting signs in order to eat. Sometimes when he was drunk he’d talk about his art career, and if he was terribly drunk he’d shout that he was planning another exhibition in the near future. But no matter how drunk he was, he never said nasty things about the critics and the collectors. He never said anything about them one way or another. His primary grudge was against the weather. He was always complaining about the weather.

Nick was laughing. “You shoulda seen him eating the ice. He has a big block of ice on a plate and he’s biting it like it’s meat or something. He musta et up about ten pounds of ice.”

“That’s bad for you,” Kerrigan told Mooney. “You’ll ruin your stomach, doing that.”

“My stomach can take anything,” Mooney said. “Anything at all. If I can chew it, I can eat it. Last week in Dugan’s I won three dollars on a bet.”

“Doing what?” Kerrigan asked.

“Eating wood.”

Nick nodded. “He actually did it. I was there and I saw him bite the edge off a table and chew it up. Then he swallowed it, the whole mouthful, and he collected three dollars off the slummer.”

“Slummer?”

“The playboy,” Nick said.

“What playboy?”

“The playboy from uptown,” Nick said. “Haven’t you seen him?”

Kerrigan shook his head.

“Sure,” Nick said. “You musta seen him. He always comes to Dugan’s.”

Kerrigan shrugged. “I hardly ever go in there, so I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, anyway, he’s one of them playboys who likes to go slumming. One night about a year ago he walked into Dugan’s and now he’s one of the regulars. Comes in two, three times a week and drinks himself into a coma. But some nights he only has a few and then he goes out looking for kicks.” Nick shook his head solemnly. “A queer proposition if I ever saw one. I’ve watched him, the way he looks at a woman. Like he ain’t satisfied, no matter how much he gets.”

“Maybe he ain’t getting anything,” Mooney commented.

“Maybe,” Nick conceded. “But on the other hand, I think he knows how to operate. I got that impression when I offered to get him fixed up. It was something he said when he turned me down.”

Kerrigan looked at Nick. “What did he say?”

“He claimed it does nothing for him when he has to pay for it. Paying for it takes away the excitement.”

“Maybe he has something there,” Mooney said.

“He makes a lot of sense, the way he explains himself,” Nick went on. “I asked him if he was married and he said no, he’d tried it a couple times and it always bored him. I guess it’s a kind of ulcer in the head that gives him loony ideas.”

“You think he’s really sick that way?” Kerrigan murmured.

“Well, I’m not an expert in that line.”

“The hell you’re not,” Mooney said.

Nick looked at Mooney. Then he turned again to Kerrigan and said, “I guess most of us are sick with it, one way or another. There ain’t a man alive who don’t have a problem now and then.”

“Not me,” Mooney said. “I don’t have any problem.”

“You got a big problem,” Nick told Mooney.

“How come? I got no worries. There’s nothing on my mind at all.”

“That’s your problem,” Nick said.

Kerrigan was gazing past them. He said, “I wonder why he comes to Vernon Street.”

“Hard to figure,” Nick said. “Lotta ways of looking at it. Maybe in his own league he don’t rate very high, so he rides down here where he don’t hafta look up to anybody.”

“Or maybe he just don’t like himself,” Mooney remarked.

“That’s an angle,” Nick agreed. Then he frowned thoughtfully. “What it amounts to, I guess, he’s probably safer down here.”

“Safer?” Kerrigan said.

“What I mean is, he knows he can pull certain stunts on Vernon that he couldn’t get away with uptown.”

“What kind of stunts?” Kerrigan asked quietly.

“Whatever he has in mind.” Nick shrugged. “Who knows what he’s gonna dream up? It’s a cinch there’s something wrong with him, otherwise he wouldn’t need this Vernon Street routine.”

Kerrigan turned his head slightly and looked into the darkness of the alley behind him.

Then he looked past the heads of Nick and Mooney and focused on Dugan’s Den.

He said, “I could use a cold drink.”

“I’m dry myself,” Nick said.

“Me, I’m dying from thirst,” Mooney moaned.

Kerrigan smiled dimly. “I got some loose change. It oughta buy us a few beers.”