Joe Gores - Hammett

‘How’s it going, Pop?’

‘Settin’ up and taking nourishment,’ exclaimed the old man happily. ‘I thought you was off the sauce.’

‘What makes you think-’

‘Don’t I know you, Hammett?’ He shut the lower half of the Dutch door and belatedly the upper half behind the lean writer. A buzzer beside the door would announce any opening of the downstairs street door. ‘You only come around when you don’t have the price of a jar or can’t find anyplace to sell you one.’

Hammett sat down all at once in a hardwood arm rocker that had the rockers attached to the posts in the old cleft style. ‘I fell down,’ he said. ‘I hit my head.’

‘Good it’s the head. That’s where it can’t hurt you none.’ The thick blue-veined gentle fingers explored the back of the scalp. ‘I’ll get the horse linament.’

The old man went through the connecting door to the other room of the tiny suite that came with his manager’s job at the Weller. Hammett sat without moving, his head slightly lowered and his long-fingered narrow hands hanging laxly off the chair arms until Pop bounced back into the room with a dark bottle. Hammett uncorked it to sniff the contents.

‘I’d be afraid to rub a horse down with this stuff,’ he said.

‘Just apply internally.’

Hammett’s Adam’s apple worked in his lean throat. Pop sank down into a worn mohair rocker.

‘Knew a feller killed himself like that.’

‘Sure you did. See in the papers where a nun choked to death taking communion?’ A mulish look on his face, he tipped up the bottle again for a second long slug and lowered it wet-eyed. ‘Whew! Jesus, that’s rotten.’

‘Just off the boat,’ said Pop absently.

‘Cattle boat.’

‘Okay, what’s chewing at you, Sam?’ demanded the old man harshly.

A somber light entered Hammett’s eyes. ‘Vic Atkinson.’ He lowered his head and started to cry. His sobs had a harsh nighttime sound in the little room. Pop watched him with bright speculative eyes.

‘So what makes him being dead your problem?’ he asked when Hammett subsided.

Despite all the whiskey, he told it as if he were writing a report, dryly and factually in grammatical, unadorned English. The two men passed the bottle back and forth until Hammett’s voice began to slow, soften, slur, lose resonance and direction. His head dipped. He gave a long soft snore.

‘Hammett! Sleep on your own time.’

His head jerked up. ‘You old bastard.’ He’d met Pop in an Army hospital in the desert near San Diego in 1920, where they’d each been sent for damaged lungs. The same hospital where Josie… He demanded blearily, ‘Where’s that bottle?’

‘It’s empty.’

‘You’ve got another.’

The old man paused in the open doorway to the other room. ‘You’re goin’ after whoever did it, ain’t you, Sam?’

‘What else can I do?’

Vic was dead because of him, that was the long and short of it. I hope they beat your goddamn head in.. And here was Hammett piss-ass drunk instead of out finding the bastard that did it. Everything he touched turned to shit. Every living thing.

He started to curse in a low hoarse voice. Pop Daneri came through the doorway with a new bottle. It looked to him like a long night. But all his nights were long, and would be a damned sight longer if it weren’t for Hammett. Hammett had gotten him this job back in ’21, when Pinkerton’s had used the Weller as a place to stash surprise witnesses in court cases. Except for Hammett, he’d have lived at the veterans’ hospital until he rotted.

‘Drink up, you damned fool.’

Hammett drank. The whiskey seemed to revive him. The cursing jag, like the crying jag, had passed. He started to talk about the hospital, and the desert, and the other patients. Everybody but Josie.

‘… time Whitey Kaiser bought the five bottles of patent medicine that was about ninety proof, and drank them all and slugged his doctor?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘Remember that bushy-headed guy with half an ear missing that you suckered into betting on the sidewinder against our Gila monster in that boxcar out on the edge of a desert?’

‘And Josephine A. Dolan,’ Pop cut in deliberately. ‘What d’ya hear from Josie these days?’

It stopped Hammett like a wall. She was still his wife, even if.. He cleared his throat.

‘You know how it is, Pop.’

‘No, I don’t know how it is, Sam. You tell me.’

Hammett reached a long arm for the bottle. How did you sum up a love and two lives? Josie. Nurse in his ward. Round face that smiled easily, freckles and the sort of coloring that went with red hair, though hers really wasn’t. Slender and wiry, tireless and inventive when aroused.

‘Poor Josie,’ he said aloud.

Married to a lunger and a lush and a writer — all in the same guy. Win, place, or show, and he came in out of the money every time.

After lights-out, they’d sneak out together hand in hand, across the desert to a little ravine where there was a flat place under some trees. You could smell the dry earth and cooked vegetation cooling off after the day’s heat, especially the small plants that were crushed under their excited bodies. Athletic and fun and rough-and-tumble, leaving them spent and breathless.

‘We used to make a game out of cursing each other, Pop. I always won. She’d put her hands over her ears because I knew more words than she did.’

The tenderness was afterward, when they’d stare up through the trees at the big close desert stars while their hearts slowed and the sweat dried on their bodies.

‘I think the only really happy times Josie had with me were when I was working for Al Samuels. Steady job, steady paycheck…’

Not fair. It was the drinking that bothered her, not the uncertainties of a beginning writer’s life. In the crummy apartment down on Eddy Street. Then after she’d left him once and come back again, out in the nicer place on Hyde, with the old beauty there under the darkness of a thousand waxings of wood-paneled walls. But there it had finally become destructive: the drinking and the cold-faced scenes, and she hadn’t covered her ears anymore when the cursing started.

‘We were going in different directions,’ he said aloud.

‘Where are Josie and the girls now, Sam?’

‘Down south. Up in Montana.?Quien sabe? ’ He staggered to his feet. ‘Don’t ever need me for anything, Pop.’

‘Go to hell,’ said the old man without heat.

‘Yeah, sure,’ said Hammett. ‘I’ll take this with me.’ He waved the bottle, lurched, straightened. ‘Vic Atkinson counted on me, and where’s he now?’

He weaved to the door, opened it, and rammed his head into the upper half that hadn’t opened. He cursed and fumbled at the latch. Pop Daneri could hear him carom off walls to muttered comments on his progress down the hall.

When the sounds had faded, Pop went over and shut the door. From below, faintly, came the careless slam of the front door. He reached in under the scalloped green shade of the floor lamp to pull the chain and plunge the room into darkness.

Pop threw the window up so he could lean on the sill and stick his head out. Hammett was cutting across the deserted intersection, weaving, bottle in hand.

As he slid the window back down, Pop shivered as with a chill. God help whoever had killed Vic Atkinson.

It was shortly after nine o’clock on Thursday evening. Hammett, his pace firm, his clean-shaven face pale but his eyes clear of any trace of dissipation, crossed the floor of the echoing rotunda at City Hall. His steps rang on marble so highly polished it gave the illusion of being soft underfoot. As he passed each claw-footed, ridiculously ornate brass light standard, his elongated shadow wheeled across the floor. He skirted the central staircase and moved between pillars supporting the vast domed ceiling five stories above.