Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

“Where have you brought me?” she said. “What are you going to do to me?”

“Do to you?” He took her face between thumb and fingers and turned it up and around and looked down into it smiling. “What a fantastic idea. I only brought you here to see something amusing. I told you that.”

Releasing her, he got out of the car and came around to her side and opened the door, and she got out beside him. A bulky shadow separated itself from the deeper shadow of a recession in a crumbling brick wall. The shadow moved toward them and became an obese man, and she had the most peculiar feeling that it was a man she had seen somewhere before, but this was probably only a contingent of terror and not so.

“You didn’t say you were bringing anyone,” the obese man said.

“Was I obligated to inform you?” Oliver’s voice was a soft expression of utter animosity, and Charity was aware that between these two men, in whatever strange relationship they had established, there was deep and abiding hatred. “Are you suggesting that I have no right to bring my wife as a guest if I please?”

“It’s not smart,” the man said. “It may be dangerous.”

“I think not. And if you’re worried about its compromising your usefulness in the future, you needn’t worry any more. I had already decided that your usefulness has been exhausted.” Oliver turned his head slightly toward Charity. “My dear, this is Mr. Sweeney. You’ll hardly believe it, I know, but you and he are old friends after a fashion. Isn’t that so, Sweeney?”

The man called Sweeney didn’t answer. Turning, he moved back to the dark recession and disappeared. Guided by Oliver’s hand on her arm, Charity followed and saw that there was in the recession a metal door which was now standing open, and she went through the doorway onto the concrete floor of a long dark building, a single enormous room, that was or had been almost certainly a garage. High, small windows at the far end were like blind eyes reflecting the feeble light from a lamp on the street outside. A single dim bulb burned in a conical tin shade at the end of a cord descending from shadows at the ceiling and cast upon the stained concrete a dirty yellow perimeter of defense against the darkness.

Sweeney brushed by, opened a door to a small enclosure that was mostly glass above a low wall of rough boards fixed vertically. The enclosure projected from one side of the room and was or had been the improvised office of what was or had been the garage.

“In here, please,” Sweeney said. “It will probably be a while yet, so you had better sit down and take it easy.”

“Yes, my dear,” Oliver said. “Here is a chair with a cushion beside the desk. I’m sure you will be quite comfortable in it.”

She sat down and folded her hands in her lap. It was hot in the small and dark enclosure, but she felt icy cold. Quietly she waited for the bad end of the bad night. Regret she felt, and fear and despair, and the greatest of these was despair.

The drum and the piano were tired. In the shag end of the night, in the rise and drift of sound from a litter of people at a litter of tables, the die-hards, the last dogs, the ones who never wanted to go home, their voices lagged and faltered and fell silent. The drum, in the end, had the final word. The piano, too tired to care, declined to answer. The litter heard no silence that was not its own.

In a tiny room off the short hall to the alley, Chester Lewis put a hat over his wiry hair, lit a cigarette, looked with his expression of chronic surprise at the miracle of thin blue smoke that issued from his lungs.

“It wasn’t good tonight,” he said. “I wasn’t with it.”

“You were all right,” Joe said. “You were fine.”

“No. It wouldn’t come. Not the good stuff. What came was gibberish.”

“You’re tired, that’s all. We’re both tired.”

“That’s right, Joe. We’re both tired. We’re a pair of tired guys, Joe.”

“Everyone gets tired.”

“Everyone doesn’t stay tired.”

“All right, Chester. You better get some sleep and forget it.”

“Sure, Joe. You better, too.”

“I’ll get along in a little.”

“You going to play again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll skip it.”

“How about a sandwich and a glass of milk somewhere?”

“I don’t think so, Chester. Thanks anyhow.”

Chester drew on his cigarette, examined with astonishment the miracle, of smoke.

“We’ve been good partners, Joe. You think so?”

“I think so, Chester.”

“I needed you. You came along just right.”

“We needed each other, Chester. It was right for both of us.”

“Yeah. I guess so. We’ve never said much to each other, though. There are lots of things we could have said that we never did.”

“Just with the drum and the piano.”

“That’s right. The drum and the piano. You hear what the drum was saying tonight, Joe? Tonight and last night?”

“I heard it.”

“The piano didn’t answer, Joe. It didn’t say a word back. Just changed the subject.”

“There wasn’t anything to say.”

“Yeah. I guess not. Nothing to say.” Chester dropped his cigarette on the bare floor and stepped on it, reducing his little miracle to a dead butt. “Maybe we’re more than partners, Joe. Maybe we’re friends.”

“We’re friends, Chester.”

“Funny how it begins and goes on, isn’t it? What makes and keeps two guys friends, Joe?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”

“Probably it helps if each of them pretty much minds his own business.”

“Probably.”

“Sure. That’s what I’ve been thinking. Well, be careful. Be real careful. I think I’ll be going along now, Joe. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Chester.”

Chester went out and back to the alley, and Joe went out after him and up to the bar where Yancy was.

“How’s everything, Yancy?” he said.

“No complaints,” Yancy said. “I’ll have rye and water.”

“You sure? No Martini?”

“You heard me. Rye and water.”

“I had a notion you’d switched to Martinis. Funny how I got such a notion.”

“Very funny, Yancy. I’ll laugh later.”

“You needn’t bother. Truth is, I don’t think it was funny myself.” Yancy poured rye and added water and set it out. “I got a message. I’m supposed to tell you something.”

“All right. Tell me.”

“She can’t come. Something happened. I’d have told you sooner, but you were late getting in and I didn’t have the chance.”

“What was it happened?”

“I don’t know. Something to prevent her coming. She said she was sorry, and she sounded like she really was. She said to tell you she’d come as soon as she could. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“She telephoned?”

“That’s right. Between six and seven. Nearer six, I think. She sounded all right, just like she was sorry.”

“Thanks, Yancy.”

He drank some of the good strong rye and water and sat looking into what was left. Behind him was the sound of the last dogs in the litter of the night. Between now and daylight were five long hours. In five hours a man could count perhaps twenty-two thousand heart beats.

All right, he thought, all right. There was a night and a part of a night in the room, and there was most of a day and a night on Long island, and there was a night and a day and a night and a day in Connecticut, and now there’s the finish, the end, nothing more. Whatever there was and however long it lasted, it was more and longer than you thought it would be or had any reason to expect it to be, and so you had now better have your rye and water and go home and to bed, and if you can forget it in the little time that’s left for forgetting, that’s something else you had better do, and if you can’t forget it, you can at least remember it and her with kindness and pleasure and pity, for she will probably need kindness and pity and the remembrance of pleasure far more in the end than you will ever need them.