James Burke - Half of Paradise

April comes into the room and stops behind my chair. We look at each other’s reflection in the dresser mirror. She is beginning to swell with child. Her dress is too tight. She don’t want to wear one of them maternity things. Don’t want to believe the baby is there. She told me she’d like to have a miscarriage. When she gets high she pretends she ain’t knocked up. I see the lines around her eyes and neck. Said she was twenty-seven. Must be older by ten years. Older than me. Hard to tell. She’s been jazzing since she was fifteen. First time in a woodshed with her uncle. She ain’t going to look good pregnant. Probably get fat and swole up like a sow. Wonder if she’s laying anybody besides Elgin. She always smells like she’s rutting when she takes off her pants. She ain’t going to get no more laying with a swole belly. A man don’t like to climb over a baby to get to it. She’s got a look in her eyes. She’s on it. She walks past my chair and out of the mirror and sits on the side of the bed and takes off her shoes. Her eyes stare at me flat. Sunday morning. She was over at Elgin’s. Prayer meeting with a needle in the tangle of sheets.

Need to dress and catch air before she starts talking. One paper of snow wrapped up in a sock in the drawer. I got to walk across the room and get it and cut out. She pulls her skirt over her knees and lays down in bed. She ain’t got any pants on. Rutting. I walk to the dresser jesus my head throbbing like the marrow of my skull brittle and cracked dust breathed into my brain and the pain drops down my back and circles my chest. Untwist the sock and tear the paper open. Put the powder under the tongue and wait. I feel it sucked into the skin taste it in the throat. Bitch was wrong. Never had to mainline. Ain’t going to neither. It don’t hurt you under the tongue. Niggers do it all the time. Don’t bother them none. You’re okay if you don’t jab it in the arm. Troy was hypo. Snow ain’t no different than getting drunk. Remember when I got tight on moon once. I could smell it in my sweat the next day. It ain’t no worse than moon. It don’t drive you blind or insane. Feel it spreading through my head and chest. Put on my shoes and shirt and get a drink at the bar and go down to the depot. Honey-colored hair. A little overweight but it makes it better.

“What did Virdo say?” April said. Her voice was slow and far away.

“He says I’m through.”

Her eyes turned from the ceiling and looked at him and blinked.

“I’m through,” he repeated.

“What?”

“He called me white trash.”

“He’s not going to fire you. He told me so.”

“Ask him again.”

“He’s just going to leave you off the show for a while.”

“I ain’t taking no more insults from him.”

“Don’t be foolish. I talked with him. He’s not going to fire you, and that’s all there is to it.”

She’s really hyped, he thought. She sat up on the bed with her skirt over her knees. Her eyes blinked at him again.

“We talked it over. He said he would give you another chance. Why did you tell me you were through?”

He buttoned his shirt and laced his shoes and didn’t answer her. The pain in his head and body had lessened. The fingers of his right hand twitched as he tied his shoe string.

“Why did you tell me those things?” April said.

He left the room without putting on his coat or tie. He rang for the elevator and waited. It didn’t come. He heard April open the door of the room.

“Where are you going?” she said. “Come back and explain to me why you said Virdo fired you.”

He walked down the stairs to the lobby. He had to pause at the second flight and rest. The twitching in his fingers spread to the muscles of his arm. He walked two more flights and stopped again. He leaned against the wall and breathed hard. He felt his heart twist from the strain. Didn’t have no sleep, he thought. I’ll sleep this afternoon and let the whore fix me up. Makes a man right. Cleans the fatigue out of him. I need another piece like that blond slut back home. Should have gone to see her again before I left. He went down the last flight to the lobby and entered the bar.

The bartender was chipping up a block of ice in the cooler. The pick splintered a few pieces of ice on the floor. The bottles behind the bar were covered with a white sheet. There was no one else in the room save a Negro who was wiping off the tables with a rag. J.P. asked the bartender for a straight whiskey.

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s Sunday. We can’t serve drinks until after one o’clock.”

“Give me a bottle to go.”

“We can’t do that either, sir.”

He left the hotel and walked down the sidewalk in the sunshine to the cabstand. He rode out to Jerry’s Bar behind the depot with the hot summer wind blowing in his face through the car window. He ran his fingers along his jaw and felt the dried blood of the razor nicks flake off as he touched them. He looked down at his shirt. It was the same one he had taken off last night. There was a small drop of blood on the soiled collar. The cab drove through the train yard over the railroad tracks and stopped in front of the bar. The electric sign over the door with the shorted-out letters buzzed loudly. He paid the driver and went inside. Jerry was behind the bar.

“Good morning, Mr. Winfield,” he said. The bald spot in the center of his head shone dully in the light. He had an ingratiating mercantile manner that made J.P. want to spit. “What will you have?”

“A straight.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jerry put the jigger on the bar and filled it from a bottle that had a chrome spout fixed to the top. J.P. drank the bourbon neat and had the jigger filled again. The whiskey burned the inside of his stomach. He didn’t remember when he had last eaten.

“I want a girl for the afternoon,” he said.

“Talk to my wife. She takes care of all that.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs.”

J.P. started towards the back.

“Mr. Winfield, you didn’t pay for your drinks.”

He reached in his pocket for his wallet and found that he didn’t have it.

“Give me a blank check and a pen,” he said.

“We don’t cash checks as a rule, Mr. Winfield.”

“Don’t you think it’s good?”

“It ain’t that. I know it’s good coming from you, but Emma don’t like me taking checks from nobody.”

“You ain’t running the only cathouse in town. You want me to go somewhere else?”

Jerry took the empty jigger off the bar and looked up the stairs at the back of the room.

“All right. I’ll cash it for you. But don’t let Emma know about it,” he said.

J.P. wrote out a check for a hundred dollars. Jerry took out for the two drinks and placed the rest of the bills and a couple of coins on the bar. J.P. folded the money and put it in his pocket. The room smelled of sawdust and flat beer.

Emma, the bartender’s wife, met him at the top of the stairs. She was big for a woman, and she had masculine features and thick muscular arms. She looked at him with her opaque colorless eyes.

“You pay here before you go any further,” she said.

J.P. took some money out of his pocket, counted it, and gave it to her.

“Where is Honey?” he said.

“She’s got a customer. You want to wait?”

“No.”

“Go into that room on the right. I’ll send a girl in.”

He went into one of the bedrooms. The single window was boarded on the outside. The only furniture was a wood chair, a large double bed that was covered with a spread tucked in tightly on all sides, and a night table ringed with glass stains with a tin washbasin on top. There were cigarette burns on the floor, and a half-empty glass of beer on the windowsill. There was a lipstick print on the rim of the glass. He turned on the overhead light and looked at the cracked wallpaper and the stains on the bedspread and he turned it off again. He sat in the wood chair and took his package of cigarettes out of his pocket. It was empty. He crushed it and threw it on the floor.