Joe Gores - Interface

The workman’s gaze faltered. The hand dropped away.

“That’s what I thought,” Docker said.

Instead of continuing on down Market to First, he cut off down a narrow blacktopped alley called Ecker Street. His uneven stride was now springier, as if the Market Street confrontation was what he had been seeking. The alley took him between crowding ancient brick walls and eventually to Mission Street. Here he turned left, to First, crossed with the light and went out First.

The half-block to Minna Street was crowded with the sort of places which are always across the street from bus terminals, and Docker seemed to be searching again. He rejected first a drugstore that tastefully displayed its condoms on the candy counter, then a short-order joint with a back room featuring a wide variety of dildoes, merkins, and battery-operated body-massagers strapped like penises. At a bar which had SALOON painted across its front in heavy ornate circus-poster letters, he turned in.

Underneath SALOON was All Girl Bartenders!! in smaller red letters. Inside was a standard joint tricked out western, with a pair of plastic Texas longhorns over the back bar. Only one All Girl Bartender!! was behind the stick, wearing a Stetson and boots and a vest and a plastic pistol belt with a plastic Frontier Colt ball-ammo .44 in the holster, low on the hip of her dated red hotpants.

Docker dropped a dollar in front of the rodeo-shirted nipples she pointed at him across the bar. “Bourbon,” he said.

“And?”

“Huh? Oh. Put it in a glass.”

“Cute.”

The girl had a hawklike, predatory face and long black hair and legs like a dancer’s. Docker had his shot standing at the bar, putting it down in a lump like somebody dropping a horseshoe. The girl had no time to move away before he set the empty shot-glass back on the bar. She had no other customers to move to anyway, except a pair of south of Market types taking turns trying to sell one another pieces of the Yerba Buena Center.

“I just got into town,” said Docker to the girl. “I’m looking for a whore.”

“What’s her name?”

Docker said patiently, “You’ll do. How much?”

She leaned toward him sweetly while dropping a hand on the bar so the extended forefinger pointed at the door. She said, “And it’s bye, bye, baby. Now. Out.”

“Anything you think is reasonable. Just a cheap fuck—”

“The owner is an ex-pro wrestler who loves to work out on guys who four-letter his waitresses. He’s out in back playing with the beer kegs for exercise. If I should call him—”

“He gets a broken arm,” said Docker.

Some time went by. She sighed. She said almost regretfully, in a much softer voice, “Look, mister, I’m married. Honest.”

“So was my mother, it never stopped her.”

He patted the girl on the cheek and went out before she could say anything further, limping very slightly because the attaché case in his right hand put added strain on that leg. The All Girl Bartender stared after him. She wet her lips thoughtfully. Then she began assiduously wiping the plank with her bar rag, an unexpected blush mantling her cheeks.

Six doors down, Docker turned in at an open-fronted amusement arcade called Fun Terminal. Four guys were feeding the pinball machines that lined the left wall and ran down that side of the building’s midline. Three of them were whites; the fourth, at the machine closest to the door, was a wasted-looking black with greying hair and holes cut in his shoes to let his bunions breathe.

The right side of the Fun Terminal was filled with half-a-hundred dime and two-bit movie peep-show machines, each showing three-minute fuck films cut into thirty-second segments. Docker bought two bucks’ worth of quarters and fed them into the machines, switching after each quarter instead of watching any of the brutally pornographic films out. The eyepieces smelled of perfumed disinfectant. Unlike some of the other patrons, he occupied his right hand with his attaché case rather than his anatomy.

When he’d spent enough time there, Docker walked back to the change desk.

“You ought to furnish handkerchiefs,” he said to the hard-faced harpy on the stool. “I almost had an accident all over the front of one of your nice machines.”

“So next time wear a rubber.”

Docker crossed First Street still laughing. He ignored both the mid-block crosswalk and the angry horns and squealing brakes of the cars which the light at Mission released just in time to swerve or stop to avoid hitting him.

“I declare,” muttered the black man named Browne. “He’s a wild man.”

As soon as Docker had disappeared into the Trailways Terminal, Browne went after him. He was slower than Docker in crossing the street, more careful of traffic and using the crosswalk, so Docker was already at the ticket window when Browne came through the swinging doors.

Browne immediately slowed to an Uncle Remus shamble down the broad aisle between the orderly rows of nearly depopulated benches. He came into earshot as the ticket agent was saying, “One-way to Los Angeles? Yes, sir. The Silver Eagle leaves in just twenty-one minutes.”

Docker put his money on the counter. The lean, stooped, sad-eyed black man moved up beside him to study a posted timetable. Docker said, “What gate?”

“We... don’t have a gate,” said the ticket agent somewhat defensively. “Just outside and to your left, in Natoma Street. The bus stops there. Your luggage—”

“This.” Docker lifted the attaché case, then lowered it below counter-level. “I’ll carry it. What time does the bus get in?”

“Well, it makes several stops. San Fernando, Glendale, Burbank, North Hol—”

“I’m glad Trailways is hiring the mentally handicapped.

I bought a ticket for Los Angeles.”

“Ten-forty tonight.” The ticket agent had flushed.

Docker pocketed his change. “Jesus Christ. I could walk faster.”

He turned away from the window. The ticket agent turned angry, now florid features at the grey-haired black man reading the schedules.

“Next,” he snapped.

“Just browsin’.”

“Then quit blocking the ticket window.”

Browne put his face close to the agent’s. Browne’s eyes had yellowish bloodshot whites. “A soft voice turneth away wrath,” he said in a soft voice. “And saveth a fat lip.”

He followed Docker back through the terminal. The travellers scattered around the echoing, low-ceilinged room were mostly older men buried in paperbacks or newspapers. Browne’s steps quickened as Docker went toward the banks of doors opening into Fremont Street, then slowed again as the quarry turned right between the rows of benches.

This led only past a two-bit shoeshine stand and a bank of storage lockers to the men’s room. Browne hesitated, checked his watch, rubbed his hands together nervously. They were long, tapering dry-palmed hands that made a rustling sound against each other. Finally the black man went into the restroom also, entering the tiled facility crab-fashion as if to avoid the full force of any blow launched at him from behind the door.

Docker was nowhere near the door. Indeed, he was just feeding a dime into the slot of the furthest pay stall in the line. He went in without looking around at all as Browne headed for a urinal. Four of the twenty-one minutes before the Silver Eagle’s departure had passed.

The moment Docker’s stall door had clapped shut with its heavy click designed to make the patron feel his dime was well spent, Browne drifted down the line of stalls on silent feet. He stopped just short of Docker’s, precisely where the overhead fluorescents had no chance of casting his shadow under Docker’s door. He listened, poised.

From inside came the rustle of clothing. A pause. Then a grunt, a splash, a relieved sigh.