Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

“All right,” he said. “If you’ve been hired to give me a beating, why don’t you do it?”

“No, Lover.” Average gave Joe’s arm a little squeeze. “We can’t do it that way Not here in the alley. We got a nice place all set up for it. You can see how it is. You been doing someone wrong, and this someone wants to be sure you get what he figures is coming to you. Since he’s paying for it, he’s got a right to be sure. You admit that’s fair? Come along quietly now with Cupid and me. We’ll take you to this nice place where no one’ll bother us, and everything will be fine. You’ll see. Everything fine.”

They walked together down the alley to a side street and got into a waiting sedan, Average behind the wheel, Joe and Cupid in the back seat. Average drove slowly, apparently in no hurry to get to the nice place or anyplace, and after a few minutes he began to whistle cheerfully through his teeth. Cupid leaned back and opened his mouth in the shape of a laugh, but he began to make, instead of the sound of laughter, a very soft crooning sound, oddly musical, that might have been made by a mother to comfort her child. The sedan, under the guidance of Average, turned many corners and traveled on many streets, and after a while Joe no longer had any idea of where they were or might be going, except that the streets were narrow and littered and dark, lighted at long intervals by inadequate lamps at the curb.

Average whistled and Cupid crooned, and the shameful fear of physical pain was a malignancy in Joe’s mind. Watching Cupid from the corners of his eyes with a slyness made acute by growing fear and diminishing time, he began to think positively of escape, how he might accomplish it, and then, all at once, in a slight change of circumstances in his favor, he was acting instinctively without slyness or calculation or any regard for chances or consequences. The sedan slowed for a corner, turning left, and in an instant he was clawing at the handle of the door beside him, in another instant was sprawling headlong into the street. Vaguely conscious of fire in his flesh where it was seared by asphalt, he doubled and rolled and came onto his feet running.

Ahead of him was a high board fence stretched between two shabby buildings, and in the fence a wide gate sagged open on a length of chain. Hardly slackening his speed, he slipped through the opening and ran down an aisle between high piles of scrap iron and steel to another board fence at the rear. He ran along the fence to his right, pounding the boards with his fists in search of a gate, but he reached the juncture of fence and building, and there was no gate. Reversing himself, he ran back along the fence the other way, still pounding the boards, now beginning to sob softly, but still there was no gate. He looked up to the top of the fence, but it seemed incredibly high and impossible to scale, and there was, moreover, no time to try, for Average and Cupid were coming into the yard from the street, and it was imperative to hide from them at once.

Sinking to his hands and knees, he crawled along the building behind the piles of scrap, and after half a minute he found a sanctuary, a small hollow in one of the piles, and he crawled into this and vomited and lay very still, sucking in his breath between clenched teeth and releasing it slowly, a little at a time, to avoid making the slightest noise.

Average and Cupid ran down the aisle to the rear fence. Joe listened to the pounding of their feet and measured the distance between him and them by the sound. He knew very well that now was the time to act, that he should now get up and make a break for the front gate and the street and perhaps someone on the street who would save him, but he couldn’t move, could find nowhere in himself the strength or will to take what was plainly his best chance, and so he continued to lie quietly in his false sanctuary, sucking his breath between his teeth, the sour taste and smell of his own vomit on his tongue and in his nostrils. He could hear Average and Cupid examining the length of the fence. He could hear their footsteps, hear their fists beat upon the wood for evidence of a gate or a loose plank through which he might have gone.

“Maybe he went over the top,” Cupid said.

“No,” Average said. “I don’t think so. It’s a high fence, eight feet at least, and we’d have seen him going over. Probably he’s hiding somewhere in this junk.”

“It’s not nice of him to cause us so much trouble,” Cupid said. “Why did he want to run away and hide and cause us so much trouble?”

“Never mind that,” Average said. “What we got to do is find him. If we don’t, we’re in big trouble. Chalk don’t like guys to fumble a job. It’s bad for business. You take one side of the yard, and I’ll take the other. He’s got to be in here somewhere.”

Obediently, Cupid started through the piles of scrap on the side of the sanctuary. His huge feet shuffled slowly, scraping against the hard ground and disturbing a piece of metal now and then with a sharp clatter. Coming closer and closer to the sanctuary, he began to talk in his soft, incongruous crooning way.

“Come out, Lover. This is Cupid, Lover. Come out to Cupid, Lover.”

The crooning voice was more terrifying than a curse as a threat of evil. Joe pressed his face against the ground and covered his ears with his hands, and then he could not hear the terrible soft threat any longer, could not hear the shuffle of feet coming nearer and nearer, and after a few moments in the silence and darkness achieved by hands and closed lids he began to have a strange sense of peace and security, and he was lying so, in the false security of the false sanctuary, when great hands took hold of him gently and lifted him up and held him erect.

“Here’s Lover,” Cupid crooned. “Poor Lover’s dirtied himself. It wasn’t nice of you to run away and hide and cause Cupid so much trouble, Lover. Cupid’s angry because you ran away.”

Average came across the aisle from the other side of the yard. Saying nothing, he took Joe by one arm and started immediately toward the street. Joe did not resist. He had no longer any desire to resist or to suffer again the unbearable ordeal of escape. In submission, he achieved a kind of miraculous detachment from whatever was happening or might happen to Joe Doyle, an emotional immunity to Joe’s fear and Joe’s pain and Joe’s ultimate end, whatever it turned out to be. In the car, he leaned back beside Cupid and closed his eyes and sank briefly into exquisite physical lethargy. Charity was waiting for him in the vast, illimitable night behind his lids. She smiled at him sadly, and he could see, shining like traces of phosphorous in the darkness, the paths of tears across her thin cheeks. He nodded and returned her smile and tried to make her understand without words the miracle of acceptance and submission that had made all right everything that had been, a few minutes ago, all wrong.

The sedan turned a corner and stopped at last, and Cupid, crooning again, took him by the arm with his incongruous, monstrous gentleness and helped him out onto the sidewalk. They were standing now near the entrance to an alley. Average got out on the street side and walked around the front of the sedan and went into the alley without looking back, as if he had forgotten entirely that anyone was with him. Cupid and Joe stood waiting on the sidewalk, Cupid crooning and Joe quietly with his head bowed in a posture of prayer or reflection, and after a minute or two Average returned.

“It’s all right,” he said.

Together, Joe between the two, they went into the alley and past a parked car and into an enormous room with a concrete floor. Small windows were glazed with faint light at the far end. At the rear, near the alley entrance, a weak bulb in a conical shade cut a circle of light in the darkness. Joe stood in the light under the conical shade, his arms hanging, his head still bowed in the prayerful posture. He thought he heard, somewhere in the room, a whisper of movement, a ghost of sound, but it was not significant, whatever it was, in his present vast indifference. Cupid had taken off his coat in the darkness and stepped into the light without it. He was smiling and saying something, and Joe raised his eyes and listened intently in an effort to hear clearly what was being said, but for some strange reason he could not quite understand. He saw that Cupid was wearing a pink shirt with very thin white stripes, and he thought that the shirt was silk, but he wasn’t absolutely certain of this, either. He saw also that Cupid’s eyes actually seemed to be red, and this struck him as extremely odd. He wondered if it was just a trick of light and shadow. The eyes of Siamese cats looked red in certain circumstances, he knew, but he had never heard of the eyes of a man looking red in any circumstances whatever. He was so fascinated by Cupid’s red eyes that he did not even see Cupid’s huge fist when it was driven at his face. He was only aware of splitting flesh and splintering bone. Not even precisely of these. Only of the monstrous, incredible pain of them. Crying out with the pain, he fell spiraling in an immeasurable thunderous night to the concrete floor.