Lawrence Block - Chip Harrison Scores Again

So what I learned to do was sort of let it be their idea to take the fight outside. I’d walk through the room calling out, “Awright now, all you boys, let’s clear the way for these two. They’re trying to take it outside and you better stand back and make a path for them.”

Now nine times out of ten there would already be a path for them big enough to drive a tank through, because as soon as one guy yanked a chair back everybody but the guy he was squaring off against would get the hell out of the way. But since the others would be backing off at the same time that I was doing my number, it sort of looked as though they were following my orders and opening a path to the doorway. And the fighters were left with the notion that they were the ones who wanted them to go outside and the crowd had been stopping them.

So out they went.

I never followed them outside. Others would, and would form a ring around them, and the watchers more or less made sure that nobody got too cute with a knife or kept on going after the fight was supposed to be over. There were two reasons why Geraldine didn’t want me to do anything more than get them out. For one thing, she was afraid a whole crowd might turn on anybody who did too thorough a job of policing an outside fight. For another, she didn’t really give a damn if they killed each other six ways and backwards, as long as they did it outside.

A couple of times I had to hit guys. My club was a steel bar with a thick wrapping of leather, and it scared the hell out of me. If I hit someone too hard I could easily kill him and if I hit too soft I could get a knife in my ribs. Since I am (a) basically non-violent and (b) a coward, I didn’t want either of these things to happen. Sheriff Tyles had given me lessons on just how much force to use and said I had the touch down pat, but I figured there was a difference between the rifle range and the field of battle, and I wasn’t all that confident I would do it right.

The first time was when a kid about my age knocked the neck off a beer bottle and started after another kid. I missed his head.

He got a broken collarbone out of the deal and I got an extra ten bucks from Geraldine.

Another time one guy pulled a knife and started moving in on his cousin, I think it was. I managed to come up behind him, which helped me keep my cool. I gave him the right kind of tap on the head and it worked just the way it was supposed to.

Now both of those times were exciting enough so that I would just as soon never have them happen again, but that still doesn’t change the fact that they were rain on the desert.

I mean, nothing else really happened.

“I’m not really a bouncer,” I told Geraldine once. “Not if you figure my occupation by the amount of time I spend on various chores. You know what I am?”

“What?”

“A hired chess player. And you ought to be able to hire somebody who could beat you once in a while.”

“I like to win, Chip. And I don’t suppose I could hire Sammy Reshevsky for five dollars a week.”

“And room and board.”

“You don’t eat much. And the room is there. I have four more rooms than I have a use for. Would you believe this was a seven-girl house when I opened it? There’s not enough weekday trade now to support the two I’ve got. But if you just have one girl in a house it’s a joke, and if a man has to have the same girl every single time he might as well marry her. I used to have seven and I used to collect twenty dollars on Saturdays. Now it’s ten every day of the week. Everything costs more at every store in the county and what’s the one thing that’s dropped in price?”

“The Chamber of Commerce ought to advertise that. As a tourist attraction.”

“Tourists? You wouldn’t get tourists here if you gave it away. Bordentown. I never heard of anyone coming to Bordentown by choice.”

I could have named one.

“Anyway,” she said, “it’s worth five dollars a week for a game of chess now and then.”

So I played chess, and sent fights outside, and sat around a lot, and talked to Claureen and Rita, and ate eggs and grits and sausages for breakfast and hamburgers for supper, and around two or three or four in the morning Geraldine closed up and I went upstairs to my room and got undressed and hopped into bed and went to sleep.

Alone.

I suppose you find that hard to believe. So do I, now that I think about it. I mean, you may have gotten the idea by now that sex is usually in the forefront of my mind, and if you didn’t get that idea you get a low score in reading comprehension. Because it usually is. In fact it just about always is.

But I never once had either Rita or Claureen, and I never once had any of the weekend girls. (I never really got to know the weekend girls, as far as that goes; they were always busy then, and so was I.) And obviously I never had Geraldine. The tobacco farmer was the only one who did all the time I was there. I’m sure she could have given me the equivalent of a college education, and I certainly liked her as a person, but the only game I ever thought of playing with her was chess.

But what stopped me with Claureen and Rita?

Well, I wasn’t interested.

It wasn’t that they were unattractive. They were pretty enough, but not in any meaningful way. The best way I can think of to explain it is that you could sit and talk with them for an hour or so, and then when you left the room you would have a little trouble remembering what they looked like. I suppose that could be an advantage with a prostitute. I don’t know.

But the thing is that the Mary Beth who wanted my bus ticket had turned me off prostitutes in general, and any of the fantasies I had toyed with about whores with various organs of gold just didn’t hold up for me any more. And even if they had, for Pete’s sake, I was sitting there every night while these girls went upstairs with men and then came back down and yawned and joked about it. I got to like them a lot in certain ways, especially Claureen. The two of them put together didn’t have enough brains to make one reasonably intelligent girl, but I liked them. And they would have come to bed with me if I asked, either of them would have, and they more or less let me know this in a quiet way, but we all knew it would have made it awkward between us afterward. It wouldn’t have been so awkward that I wouldn’t have been willing to live with it if I had really wanted to ball them, but I didn’t, so nothing ever happened.

Besides, after the first week or so I had my hands full with Lucille.

The first time i met Lucille was the first day I worked at her house. Minnie took me over that morning after Lucille had already left for school and introduced me to Rev. Lathrop, which was a little like being introduced to a tree or a mountain. I started in on chores and worked up to lunchtime, when Lucille came home to do the honors.

(One thing I’m evidently never going to get right is this business of calling meals by the right name. I grew up with the idea that what you had around noon was lunch, and what you had in the evening was dinner. In Bordentown they called it dinner at lunchtime and what they had at dinnertime was called supper or evening meal. I got this down pat while I was there but it’s hard to keep it straight from a distance.)

Anyway, whatever you want to call it, Lucille came home from school and cooked something. And I introduced myself to her and she introduced herself to me (because her father was already too far gone to introduce us, assuming he remembered my name. Or her name, for that matter.) And I looked at Lucille, and Lucille looked at me, and all of a sudden there was enough electricity in the air to cause a power failure.

She was the cleanest, healthiest, prettiest little thing I ever saw in my life. She was really a shock after the East Village. See, for the past three months I had gotten used to girls who would live in a pair of dungarees and a surplus navy jacket. I’m not putting that down, because some of the girls I knew in New York were really beautiful, and with some of them you could sit and talk for hours at a time, really rapping on and on about everything. You could really relate to them as people, which is what it’s all about and which makes everything much better.