Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

In the depths of the golden rye and water, she raised her face and looked up at him sadly from under her hair on the heavy side, and he lifted the glass and emptied it of the rye and water and her.

“You still here?” Yancy said.

“I may be here for quite a while. What’s the matter, Yancy? You need the space?”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant you looked gone. Like part of you had walked off and left the rest of you.”

“I was thinking.”

“Well, that’s a bad habit to get into. A guy gets along pretty well until he starts thinking too much about things, and then he’s in for trouble. Trouble with himself, I mean, which can sometimes be the worst kind of trouble there is. I read a poem about that once. According to this poem a guy can survive pretty well on a diet of liquor, love and fights and stuff like that, but the minute he starts thinking he’s a sick bastard.”

“Is that the way the poem went?”

“Well, not exactly. That’s just the general idea.”

“I didn’t know you read poetry, Yancy.”

“Of course you didn’t. You didn’t even know I could read. You thought I was just an ignorant, illiterate slob.”

“Not me, Yancy. I’ve always had the greatest respect for you. I value your friendship and solicit your counsel.”

“Oh, sure, sure. Funny boy. What if I told you to go to hell?”

“You won’t.”

“That’s right. I won’t. Where I’ll tell you to go is home, but you won’t be in any more hurry to go there than the other place. You got no brains to speak of, that’s the thing about you.”

“Sometimes, Yancy, one place is much like another.”

“Yeah. I know that myself. You want another rye?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you would. I was only doing my duty to my lousy conscience. You going to play requests tonight?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t feel like it.”

“I know you don’t feel like it. You didn’t feel like it earlier with Chester, far as that goes. You were working.”

“It’s uncanny how you know things, Yancy. You must have some kind of special power or something. It makes a guy feel uneasy.”

“Well, I know when something’s fun and when it’s work, and playing the piano used to be fun for Joe Doyle, at least part of the time, but now it’s all work and when anything gets that way, all work, it’s no good any longer and ought to be stopped. Why don’t you quit, Joe?”

“Maybe I ought to quit eating and paying rent, too.”

“There are other ways to eat and pay rent. There are other places to go than a lousy club every night, and there are other things to do than play piano for a lot of God-damn tramps and lushes with nothing better to do than get maudlin over some cheap little tune that stirs up some cheap little memory.”

“I admire you when you’re eloquent, Yancy. You’re real impressive.”

“Okay. I ought to know better than to try. Maybe you’ll think about it, though. Maybe you’ll think about all the other things there are to do.”

“I know there are other things to do, if you know how. I don’t know how. All I know is how to play the piano, and I don’t know that a tenth as well as I wanted to and tried to.”

“Forget I said anything. I tell you I ought to know better, and then I try again before I can even get my mouth shut, and what I learn from the effort is that I ought to know better. It’s your business. If you want the last thing you see to be a bloodshot eye and the last breath you breathe to be a lungful of second-hand cigarette smoke, it’s your business.”

“Thanks, Yancy. What you say brings us to an interesting question, and it happens to be a question, believe it or not, that I’ve done quite a bit of thinking about at one time or another. The question is, Yancy, what do you do with what’s left of a life when only a little’s left. When I was a kid in high school I took a course in public speaking. We got up and talked about things. One of the things we talked about was this particular question of what we would do if we only had so long to live. Only a little while. I remember some of the things that were said, including what I said, and it was all foolishness. Everyone was running around in his little talk doing the little thing he liked the very best, and that just isn’t the way it is, when the time comes. No, Yancy, they’re doing pretty much what they were doing yesterday and the day before and the day before. They’re doing what they’ve always done and know how to do. They’re playing the piano, Yancy, the same as me.”

“Here,” Yancy said. “You need another rye.” He mixed it with water and pushed it across the bar. “You call me eloquent? I’m practically a mute, sonny.”

“It’s the rye, Yancy. It’s two ryes on an empty stomach. And maybe something else a little. I won’t say I haven’t thought about it, though. About what I’d like to do best the last thing. There are several things I’ve thought about, and the trouble with all of them is that they’re things that have already been done and can’t be done again. You know what one of the things is I’ve been thinking about and wanting to do? I’ll tell you. Listen to me and two ryes, Yancy. Two and a half ryes. I’ve been thinking about how I used to walk on hot summer afternoons out from town to the creek for a swim. That was when I was a little kid and lived in a little town, long before I got big and started living in this biggest of all big towns. I’d walk out about two miles on a country road, and the dust was white and hot under my feet, and it raised clouds around me as I walked. It got in my throat and made me very thirsty, and being thirsty was a great pleasure, because it made so much cooler and better the water that I drank from a well on the farm that the creek ran through. I drank the water from a tin dipper that hung from a nail driven into a tree a few feet away, and then I walked down across fields to the creek and swam naked, and afterward I came back and had another drink from the well and walked home. You can see that this is something a man might want to do again, Yancy, but you can also see that it’s something he can’t possibly do. Not again. He can’t do it again because it requires a certain time as well as certain circumstances, and time is something that can’t be done over.”

“Cut it out,” Yancy said. “Goddamn it, I was just suggesting it would be better for you if you went somewhere and did something that would give you a little peace and quiet and you could keep decent hours doing. I didn’t ask for any hearts and flowers, Goddamn it.”

“Excuse me, Yancy. I’ll have another rye.”

“The hell you will!”

“Are you refusing me service, Yancy?”

“Call it what you like. You’ve had three ryes already.”

“I know how many ryes I’ve had. I can count up to three ryes as well as anybody.”

“Three are plenty.”

“Am I creating a disturbance, Yancy? Have I given you any reason to discriminate against me? It seems to me that you are being very highhanded, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I don’t mind at all. You can say anything you like, and you can drink as many ryes as you like, and I’m damned if I’ll try to talk sense to you ever again.”

“Thank you, Yancy. You’re a very understanding bartender.”

“Superior, sonny. Superior’s what I am. I’ve been told by an expert.” Yancy supplied the fourth rye and water with a kind of angry abruptness of motion that plainly expressed his disapproval, and Joe looked into the tiny golden sea in a crystal bed and saw again the face of Charity smiling up at him with sad finality He lifted the glass and tipped it against his mouth, and she slipped over his tongue and down his throat as easily as an aspirin tablet. “Hey!” Yancy said. “Take it easy.”