Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

Lifting the empty glass against the light, Joe looked through it, into and through the empty crystal bed of the vanished golden sea. He felt for a moment purged of his sins and wholly well, shriven by rye and cured of his ills by the swallowed vision. Then, instantly afterward, he felt terribly sick. He was sick to his stomach and afraid that he was going to humiliate himself by vomiting on the bar. Closing his eyes and mouth tightly, he bowed his head and sat very quietly until his stomach stopped churning, or stopped, at least, churning so violently. He became aware after a minute or two that Yancy was repeating something he had said before.

“You sick, Joe?” Yancy said. “You sick?”

“No.” Joe lifted his head and set the empty glass, which he had continued to hold, gently on the bar. “I’m all right.”

“The hell you are! You’re sick. You feel like fainting again?”

“I’m all right now, Yancy. Four quick ryes on an empty stomach are too many. You were right as usual. In a minute I’m going home.”

“I’ll tell you what. You go lie down in your back room, and I’ll drive you home after closing.”

“I can drive myself. Thanks anyhow, Yancy.”

“You have one of those fainting spells while you’re driving, you’ll pile up and kill yourself, that’s what you’ll do.”

“Don’t worry about it, Yancy. I’ll get home all right.”

He slipped off the stool suddenly, and his stomach began to churn again immediately with the movement, and he stood gripping the edge of the bar until it and his stomach settled and became still in a precarious resumption of their proper places and conditions. Yancy watched him warily. Anger and anxiety were equal parts of Yancy’s expression.

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe I’ll read about you in the papers.”

“Not me.” Joe shook his head and managed a grin. “You’d never find a couple lines in all those pages.”

“Sure. Big joke. Go ahead and be a hero, sonny. See who gives a damn.”

“All I want to do is go home, Yancy. Does it take a hero to go home?”

“Go on home, then. Go on.”

“I’m going. Right now.”

He turned and started carefully across the room among the tables, some of them empty and some still occupied by the last sad dogs of the night. Yancy stood watching him for a few seconds, and then, prompted by remembrance of something he’d wanted to mention, he walked around the end of the bar and followed. In the short hall to the alley, he caught up.

“I don’t need any help, Yancy,” Joe said. “I keep telling you.”

“Who’s helping?” Yancy said. “I just thought of something I wanted to tell you, that’s all.”

“What’s that?”

“A guy was in here asking about you. Last Thursday, it was. A fat slob with a bald head with little scars all over it. Ugly bastard. You know him?”

Joe stopped just inside the alley door, thinking and shaking his head.

“I don’t think so. I can’t think of anyone I know who looks like that.”

“Well, he was in here asking about you. Where you were. When you were expected back in town. Things like that.”

“Maybe he wanted to sell me some insurance or something.”

“More jokes. More big laughs. You in the market for insurance?”

“Not quite. I’m not considered what they call a good risk.”

“Just be careful you don’t get to be an even worse one.”

“Worrying again, Yancy?”

“Over you? Hell, no. I told you it wasn’t worth the trouble. Anyhow, he’s probably just a guy who’s got fat and dropped his hair since you knew him somewhere sometime, and since you don’t seem to give a damn who he is or why he was here, I’m sorry I bothered to tell you. Go on home.”

Yancy turned and went back through the hall to the front room and the bar, and Joe, opening the door and pulling it shut behind him, stepped out into the alley and stood for a moment breathing deeply of the night air. Even the effluvium of things that gather in alleys seemed crisp and pure and invigorating after the stale air of the club. Lifting one arm, he placed the hand flat against a brick wall, and a coolness crept from the brick into the hand and seemed slowly to move up the arm into his body. He wondered if it were true that the coolness did so move into him, or if it were only, instead, a matter of suggestion. His stomach was feeling much better. He was reasonably sure now that he was not going to be sick after all.

Letting his arm drop to his side, he began to walk carefully along the wall toward the space in which he had left his car, and he had reached the space and almost the car when two men took shape in the darkness and moved toward him. He thought at first that they were merely going to separate and pass on either side and go on, but they stopped abruptly with him between them, and he was forced to stop also by strong hands gripping his arms. He understood then that the positions were accomplished by design and that the two men were in effect the jaws of a sprung trap in which he was caught for a reason not yet clear.

One of the men was a kind of exemplary average. He could have walked all day on a hundred streets without being particularly noticed or remembered at all, and even now, in the dark alley, he was not impressive, except that he was, in his implicit purpose, a threat. The other man was, on the other hand, a monstrous deviation from the average. He was the result of a terrible joke played by a gland on an organism, and if he had walked one street for one-half of one hour, he would have been noticed and remembered reluctantly by everyone he met. His appearance was brutish. Huge head with jutting stony jaw. Enormous hands and feet that swung and shuffled with a suggestion of anthropoid power. The total effect was one of deformity, distortion and disproportion of bones, and there was a name for it, this glandular joke, but Joe couldn’t think of the name or precise cause, only that the soft bones of extremities continued to grow when other bones did not.

“Hello, Lover,” the monstrous man said. “We thought you were never coming. We waited and waited and we thought you were never coming.”

He pronounced the term of endearment lingeringly, fondling it with his tongue as if he were loathe to release it, laughing softly afterward as if it were a joke at least as good as the one that had been played by a gland on him. Average laughed too, a brief burst of air that was more like a snort than an expression of amusement

“Cupid’s a comedian,” he said. “Always with the humor, that’s Cupid. You’ll like him.”

Joe stepped back, trying to release his arms from the hands that held them, but he was not strong, could not hope to prevail or even compete, not even with the unusual strength that is created by the strange chemistry of fear.

“What do you want?” he said.

“You, Lover,” Average said. “Like Cupid told you, we been waiting and waiting.”

“Why? What do you want with me?”

“Well, it seems you been a bad boy. It seems you been keeping company you had no business keeping, and someone figures you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Someone figures you ought to be taught what happens to bad boys who keep the wrong company.”

Cupid lifted his enormous free hand and cupped it beneath Joe’s chin, tipping the head back and looking down into the tilted face with an expression that was a caricature of affection. His voice was an incongruous croon.

“I like you,” he said. “We’re going to be good friends. Lover and Cupid are going to get along fine.”

Average laughed again, the explosive snort, and Joe felt shriveled and incredibly old and sick with shame, knowing now that what he had thought was dead had yet to be killed. Park Avenue ending in an alley. After the North Shore and Connecticut, violence and degradation in some dark corner. Most shameful of all in the evaluation of himself, a fear of physical pain that he had never accorded the anticipation of death. Despite this, aware of what was certainly coming, he felt a desperate and inconsistent urgency to get it over with as quickly as possible.