Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

Mary wanted to go in with us, for the adventure, she said, but Helen was glad enough to stay outside of the gloomy building.

“This isn’t a very good section,” Eric said, apparently regretting the impulse which had made him bring his wife here. “Keep the doors locked, and if anybody tries to bother you just drive around the block.”

We left them bundled up in their furs in the front seat, and knocked on the door of the silent house. A glass window set high in the huge carved door was painted over and shone whitely like an eye blinded by cataract. We knocked again, and when nobody answered opened the door and entered the dark hallway. The hall was deserted, but it was odorous and murmurous, alive with the memories and promises of human life: cooking and eating, copulation and birth, quarrels and music and violence.

The first door to the right showed a crack of light. I knocked on it and the crack widened.

“Who you want?” said the half-face, leathery and wrinkled and crowned with a grey poll, which appeared in the lighted crack.

“Does Mrs. Hector Land live here?”

“Bessie Land live down the hall,” the old man said impatiently. “Third to the left.” He shut the door.

We stepped carefully among perambulators and empty milkbottles and found the door. I lit my lighter and found a card nailed to the door with a thumbtack. It bore two autographs: Mrs. Bessie Land, Mrs. Kate Morgan.

I knocked on the door and a woman shouted brusquely: “Go away, I’m busy.”

There were sounds from inside the room which indicated the nature of the business.

“I don’t like this,” Eric said suddenly. “Let’s get out of here.”

I said: “Did you expect Mrs. Land to receive you in her drawing-room with her best tiara on?”

I knocked again and the sounds ceased. A young Negro woman came to the door holding a cotton wrapper across her breast. She kicked without malice at a white mongrel puppy which bounded out of the darkness and nipped at her slippers.

“Mrs. Hector Land?” I said.

“Bessie ain’t here. She ain’t in business any more anyway. If you wait a few minutes, maybe I–?”

She raised her right hand to stroke back her hair and made her right breast rise under the wrapper.

“We came to see Mrs. Land,” Eric said hastily. “On business. That is, not–” He blushed and subsided.

“Suits me,” the black girl said, and smiled without warmth. “I’m tired tonight. Bessie’s over at the Paris Bar and Grill. Around the corner to your left.”

We found Helen and Mary shivering in the car in spite of heater and furs, and drove around the corner to the left. A gap-toothed neon in red and orange flickered on the dirty snow like a dying fire, proclaiming the Paris Bar and Grill.

“Better come in and have a drink,” I said to Mary. “It’s cold out here.”

“Are you quite sure it’s safe?” Helen said. “It looks like an all-Negro place.”

“So what?” I said. “This is a democracy, isn’t it? They drink the same liquor we do, and it makes them drunk just like us.”

“Come on,” Mary said, and we all went in. There was a lunch-counter along the left wall, along the right a row of booths with tall thin partitions between them, and a bar at the back. At the right end of the bar there was a boogie-woogie piano with a black boogie-woogie pianist playing it. The big room was loud with the intricate rustle and jangle of boogie-woogie, thick with smoke, and crowded with people. But there wasn’t much talking, and there was no laughter. I realized with a jolt that everyone in the room was conscious of our presence. I was embarrassed by the power of my skin to stop a roomful of conversations. Our progress down the room was a little like running a moral gauntlet.

All the booths were full but there was room at the bar for us. We sat down and asked the bartender for four bourbons and the whereabouts of Mrs. Hector Land.

“Right beside you,” he said to me with a smile. I looked at the woman beside me. She was black but comely, like the girl in Song of Songs: well-made, with strong delicate lines in her face and long narrow eyes. But her eyes weren’t very well focussed and her mouth was gloomy and slack. There was a little glass of brownish fluid in front of her.

“Mrs. Land?” I said.

“Yes.” I smelt wormwood on her breath.

“I’m Ensign Drake. This is Lieutenant Swann, who would like to ask you a question or two.”

“Questions about what?” she said drowsily. Her eyes swung in her head slowly as if by their own weight.

“About your husband.”

“You know Hector? Why yes, you’re a Navy officer, aren’t you? He’s in the Navy.” Eric was standing by her shoulder now. She turned on her stool to look up at him, resting her cheek on one hand. Her elbow overturned the glass in front of her.

“Damn,” she said without feeling. “Another one, Bob.”

“Haven’t you had about enough, Bessie?”

“That’s what you always say. When do I ever get enough? Give me another one, Bob.”

He shrugged his shoulders and filled a fresh glass for her. Mrs. Land paid him out of a black leather bag.

Mary, who had missed nothing, didn’t miss the bag. “That’s good leather,” she said to me in a whisper. “Her clothes are good, too. Why on earth does she live like this?”

“Too much drinking can explain anything,” I said. “But it requires explanation in turn.”

“There’s a reason for everything, including drunkenness, I suppose.”

“She isn’t so drunk.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” Mary said, so loudly that the bartender cocked an ear. “I know females and female drunkenness, and she’s so drunk that you’ll get no sense out of her. We might as well go home.”

“The young lady’s right,” the bartender leaned over the bar to say confidentially to me. “Bessie’s here every night and never leaves till we close the bar at midnight. She can take an awful lot, but not when she drinks absinthe. It puts you to sleep, see?”

I looked and saw. She breathed slowly and heavily like a patient in anaesthesia. Her movements were sluggish and uncertain. Her eyes were clouded.

“So Hector ran away from the Navy, eh?” she was saying. She laughed a laugh which descended the scale and died in a groan. “He always said he’d do it when the time came. Ever since he joined Black Israel.”

A tall man in a tan fedora and overcoat who was sitting on her other side leaned towards her and said through thin purple lips: “You’re talking a lot of crap, Bessie. Hector wouldn’t like that, would he?”

She straightened, and the last curves of laughter were smoothed out of her face. The piano-player began Suitcase Blues, and surprisingly she started to hum with the music in an alcoholic contralto. Before the song ended there were tears rolling down her cheeks, and when it did she put her head down on her arms and sobbed. Her glass rolled off the bar and crashed on the floor.

Eric said to her back: “I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”

“Don’t you think she should be gotten out of here?” I said to the bartender. “We’ll take her home if necessary.”

“She’s all right if you don’t try to talk to her,” he said coldly. “Try to get her out of here before midnight and she fight like a wildcat.”

“You will not come and see her tomorrow,” Helen Swann was saying to Eric. “You’ll stay in your own home for at least one day of your leave, I hope. And for God’s sake let’s get out of here and back to civilization,” she concluded petulantly.

Civilization consisted of paying three times as much for our drinks and listening to the same kind of music played worse. After I agreed to go and see Mrs. Land the next day instead of Eric, Helen began to enjoy herself again, but Mary didn’t. We were in a smoke-filled basement, the most crowded because the most popular place in town, and it didn’t agree with Mary. After a couple of drinks she asked me to take her home.