Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“That’s what I think of my Jakie!” she proclaimed, rearing her head again.

Abbazzia reached out and roughed her hair slightly, as one would playfully disarrange a dog’s coat. “You stay with me tonight,” he vouchsafed indulgently.

The two remaining girls exchanged a quick look of chagrin and frustration.

Whether due to the preceding little by-play or not, Abbazzia had now mellowed into a better humor. “Come on!” he ordered. “What’re you guys standing around looking so glum about? There ain’t nobody dead here. And when there is, it ain’t going to be any of us. Let’s liven it up a little!” He turned to Augie. “Got anything on you?”

“Sure, never travel without it.” Augie produced a bottle.

“That ain’t our own, is it?” Abbazzia cautioned mistrustfully.

“Naw. This is the regular stuff, uncut,” was the answer.

The blonde was busily cranking the handle of a little flat-topped portable phonograph. She put a record on the mildly stirring turntable, lowered the needle-arm, and after a brief series of thin, piping discords, a tinny smothered voice began to whine:

“Dance with Augie,” Abbazzia commanded, giving the nestling redhead a slight push to dislodge her from the chair-arm.

The redhead pouted. “I’d rather dance with you.”

“Who’re you that he should dance with you?” one of the men reminded her.

Abbazzia’s eyelids lowered a trifle, dangerously. “I said dance with Augie. And you know how I mean. I get a kick just watching the two of you.”

At the repetition of the order, the redhead rose to her feet with a swift immediacy that left no doubt of her intention to fully obey, gave her dress a downward pull, and opened her arms statically toward her enjoined partner.

He remained fixed where he was. “Well, come over where I am, if you want to danst with me,” he said churlishly. “I ain’t going to you.”

She had to cross the better part of the room, until she was standing right up against him. Only then did he exert himself enough to put an arm about her waist.

They began to move together with tiny, almost minuscule steps that barely took them anywhere.

Abbazzia watched for a moment with eye-bulging intentness. Then, with querulous dissatisfaction, “That ain’t hotsy enough. Do it like you did it up in my place the other night.”

“It takes ’em a minute or two, they gotta get warmed up.” Sal chuckled obscenely.

“The music’s too slow,” the redhead protested defensively, her voice smothered against her partner’s shoulder. “You can’t do anything with it.”

“Here’s a better one,” the self-appointed custodian of the small phonograph announced, having shuffled a number of records hastily through her hands.

She interrupted the bleats coming from it, and after a brief hiatus, it resumed at a quicker tempo, with a sound like twigs being snapped coursing rhythmically through it.

The redhead’s convolutions became almost serpentine. Her partner remained more rigid, though only by a matter of degrees. She was like a wind-walloping pennant flickering and buffeting back against its flagstaff. Neither moved their feet, except to shift weight upon them. Now Sal, crouching on his haunches, beat his hands together in accompaniment low above the floor, as if fanning the music underneath their feet. The blonde snapped her fingers in time, throwing her hand out first to one side of her, then to the other. She called out, “Hey-hey! Hey-hey!” while she did so.

Abbazzia picked up a shaded reading lamp standing on a small table near him, held it aloft, and tipped the shade, so that all the light flooded out at one side, none at the other. He aimed it so that it fell upon the girl’s frenzied figure, making a luminous oval across the mid-section, striking her directly in the posterior.

Apprised of this, perhaps from former occasions, the girl accommodatingly hiked her skirt up to a point at which it revealed the undersides of her thighs.

“Back up more,” Abbazzia instructed the pair. “You’re getting out of range.” He adjusted the lamp meticulously as they did so, like a surveyor correcting his sights.

The girl, who had been snapping her fingers in time during the earlier stages, changed her jargon-calls now that a climax was being reached. She called out at intervals: “Charles-burg! Charles-burg!”

“Where’d you get that one?” the brunette squealed delightedly.

“There was an out-of-town guy at the club the other night,” the other explained. “Every time he got up, he wanted to say ‘Charleston!’ and he couldn’t get it straight, it wouldn’t come out right.”

“I like that,” her companion proclaimed zestfully. “It’s good.”

“Help yourself,” the first invited drily, “It’s free.”

They both chimed in together, parroting “Charles-burg! Charles-burg!” Then doubled over in risible appreciation of this newly coined bon mot.

The male participant in the exhibition, meanwhile, had suddenly begun to flag; moisture bedewed his pale face. His partner’s gyrations continued without inhibition.

“Hold it a minute,” he panted in an urgent, suppressed voice. “Get back from me, will ya?” He wrenched his companion’s clutching hands off and thrust her back away from him, so that there was clearance between them for the first time.

He stood as though unable or unwilling to move for a moment, exactly as the last paroxysm of the dance had left him.

The other four men watching gave vent to a roar of spontaneous delight that had something as unclean about it as a geyser of mud.

The brunette commented in an undertone: “Get that. He wore out before she did.”

The blonde said something to her in explanation behind the back of her hand.

“Oh,” said the first one knowingly, now that she was enlightened. “I forgot to think about that.”

“You what?” was the tart rebuttal. “How old are you anyway?”

The dancers separated and went their ways. Each in his own manner. She, to throw herself down in a chair, with head lolling back and fanning herself with one hand held limply, but otherwise composed, unconcerned. But he, slinking off with a suggestion of crouched maladroitness in his carriage, as though he were undergoing a private imbalance that she could not by nature be subject to. To seek a corner by himself, hook his fingers into his shirt collar, as if to ease an intolerable constriction, and sit there, head bowed, in a sort of male loneliness.

“That was good,” Abbazzia summed it up. “That was the best yet. He ain’t got no sense of humor, though,” he regretted, dismissing the whole episode.

He yawned cavemously. “I’m beat,” he said.

There were immediate preparations for departure by everyone in the room except the redhead. The brunette knuckled the closed bath-door glancingly in passing. “Come on,” she said possessively over her shoulder. “Jake’s getting sleepy.”

Carmine turned and asked Sal, “Which side of him you taking?”

“I’ll go over here,” Sal decided with a pitch of his thumb at the blank wall behind him. “You get in there. Augie can go downstairs and stick by the switchboard, Nick can go out in the hall and keep the elevator covered.”

“Go in there next door first and see if you can hear me,” Abbazzia ordered, eyes glittering alertly with the instinct for self-preservation. “We don’t want no slips. Both of you. Then come back and let me know.”

They nodded, opened the door, went out into the hall, and closed it after them.