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

A girl passed them. A girl who was older than they were and whom neither of them knew. She paid no slightest attention to them, her eyes didn’t even glance their way, although they both gazed lingeringly at her. They were evidently of an age-bracket beneath her interest.

“She puts out,” said Warren, glancing back after her.

“Aw, how do you know so much about it?” said Bruce irritably. He resented his friend’s assumption of a vaster and superior knowledge to his own in such matters, particularly when he knew it could not possibly have been gained at first hand.

“I c’n tell,” said Warren, still pontificating.

Somewhere behind them a car-horn gave a little interrogative tap. This brought both their heads around. A tar had glided to an insinuating halt with its door open. The girl veered aside and got in. The door made a sound (from where they were) like a twig snapping and the car went on again, with a great red coruscation of its tail-light panels.

“See? What did I tell you?” crowed Warren, as jubilantly as though he himself had been the car-owner favored.

“Yeah,” agreed Bruce grudgingly. But he found the trifling incident, non-personal as it had been, a stimulant to his already overcharged and brimming sensory condition, and he sensed that Warren did too.

They began looking into the faces of girls with a new boldness and avidity after that. The few return-looks that this drew were without exception indignant, forbidding or supercilious.

“What’s the matter with us?” Bruce wondered to himself.

The truth was there were no girls their own age abroad on the street. Or just under their own age, for they would have had to be that for Warren and himself to draw their interest. Feminine interest in their opposites seemed to ascend to the successive age-bracket just above their own. Bruce wondered briefly why that was, then gave it up as one of those enigmas of the laws of selectivity and attraction.

Finally they met two girls whom they knew, from the high school. The four of them came together and stopped in a little group.

“Hi.” Warren and Bruce each said.

“Hi,” the two girls said.

“Whatch’ doing?” Warren now asked.

“We went to the early show at the Acme.”

“Want a soda?” Bruce invited.

“We just now had one,” one of the girls answered. “We just came out of Riker’s a minute ago.”

“Where you going now?” Warren wanted to know.

“We have to go home.” Both girls took a tentative step backward. Regretful but obedient to orders. “We’re late now.”

“See you,” Bruce and Warren said.

“See you,” both girls said, and turned and went on their way.

“Man, I wouldn’t mind her,” said Warren wishfully.

“She wouldn’t do it,” said Bruce.

“I know she wouldn’t,” Warren agreed.

Since her family knew both their families well, this would have been suicidal territory in any event, not even to be contemplated.

They were back again at where they had started, the nearer edge of downtown. They halted uncertainly, stood huddled together on the corner. They were at a loss; nothing much had happened, and now they were beginning not to know what to do with themselves. The magic had commenced to thin a little.

They turned a trifle disconsolately and started back a third time, more slowly than before. The money was burning a hole in their pockets. It looked as though the expedition was going to be a complete fiasco. Adventure, carnival, call it what you will — and they had no specific name for it themselves — was keeping resolutely out of their reach.

Warren’s face brightened suddenly. “What d’ya say we go and have some beer?”

In this, as they both already well knew from several unsuccessful former attempts, the big difficulty was to get waited on at all. Most bartenders were afraid of risking their licenses if they served them, the age-stipulations of the State Liquor Commission being what they were.

They came abreast of a fairly ostentatious-looking taproom, stopped to look in at the crowd of men standing before the bar, then slunk on, badly stricken with stage-fright. “Too packed in there, we’d never get near the bar,” remarked Warren. The real reason, of course, being that they dreaded the ignominy of being refused service in from of all those people. Such a humiliation would have been like a small death to both of them.

Pretty much the same thing happened a second, then a third time. One of the places even had a small but conspicuous placard affixed to a corner of its show-window: “No Minors Served.” (Insulting word!) Before they knew it they were suddenly back at the railroad-crossing again, its barriers tilted vertical.

“Let’s go over on the other side of the tracks,” Warren suggested. “Maybe they’re not so particular over there.”

They crossed to the déclassé half of town, glancing about them with a mixture of self-consciousness (at their own daring) and boldness. Adventure suddenly seemed much closer now than it had back there in all those lights. Especially the love-adventure. The shabbiness, the furtiveness almost, that even seemed to cling to the very buildings themselves gave them a gratifying sense of risk and gameness. They plunged forthwith into the first bar they came to without any further misgivings, but their abrupt manner of entering, almost as though they were pushing away physical opposition from in front of them, betrayed them as novices.

It was perhaps still too early in the evening or it was not held in high regard in the vicinity: there was nobody in it but a woman standing chatting with the bartender over a glass of port or some such dark wine. She was slatternly in the extreme, and certainly far older than any of the girls they had been eying out on the street just now. She glanced at them curiously, but they were both too preoccupied at first staring at their own reflections in the sparkling bar-mirror, which was still a good deal of a novelty to them, to reciprocate her attention.

The bartender edged over, said with hypocritical respect: “Yessir, young gentlemen, what’ll it be?”

“I’ll have a beer,” Warren said in a husky voice, which was probably due to nervousness but (Bruce thought) created a very good effect.

“Same here,” Bruce said with what he hoped was the proper sangfroid. He tried to put his foot on the brass rail below the bar, didn’t set it in far enough, and it slapped down to the floor again with an embarrassing crash that rang out in the silence. He was glad there were no other customers than the woman in the place.

They sipped, found it tangy; they took ever deeper draughts.

“Beats a Coke, any day,” Bruce remarked sophisticatedly.

“Sure, what did you think?” Warren replied with some scorn.

They drained their glasses and the barman refilled them without being asked. Bruce was beginning to glow pleasantly. The unfamiliarity of the flavor had worn off by now — or at least he had gotten used to it.

A man came in, stood midway between them and the woman, and ordered a beer. She said something to him in a slurred voice and he turned his head the other way, away from her. He’d evidently only come in to quench his thirst, and not for dalliance. He gulped his beer down and went out again.

Warren suddenly left the bar, went over into a corner, and dropped a coin into a jukebox standing there. It made a preliminary whirring sound and then began to throb out a loose-jointed, clattering tune, much as though a quantity of detached nuts, bolts, and nails were being stirred about in a tin pan. As he returned to the bar again, the woman edged up to them with a sort of cringing, sidewise-motion. “Chances of a drink, boys?” she mumbled half-furtively. At closer range she looked even more unkempt than she had at a distance.