David Goodis - The Blonde on the Street Corner

She didn’t return the smile. She spoke slowly and very quietly. “You’ll get started with me. If it ain’t tonight, it’ll be another night. Sooner or later you’ll be tired of waiting, and then it’s gonna be you and me.”

He winced. He opened his mouth to say something, but no sound came out. And then it was too late to say anything, because she was walking away. He heard the sound of her high heels clicking on the sidewalk, but somehow it wasn’t the sound of departure. It was more on the order of weird cackling laughter coming at him from all sides, telling him he was trapped. He shut his eyes tightly and again the blonde appeared on the screen of his mind and she was naked and she smiled at him and beckoned to him. He told himself he mustn’t move toward her. If he did, it would be the loss of his dreams, the end of all hoping for a cleaner better life.

He opened his eyes. He turned and saw the fur-coated figure of the fat blonde halfway down the block on the other side of the street. His mouth shaped a twisted grin and he muttered aloud, “That cheap slob. What do I want with her? She’ll never get me.”

He put his hands in his overcoat pockets. In one pocket there were a few Indian Nuts that he’d gotten from the penny slot-machine outside Silver’s candy store. He popped an Indian Nut into his mouth and chewed contentedly on the shell as he stepped off the curb and started toward home.

Trees with oranges. Big oranges. He reached up to grab one. Then he turned and saw a dog as big as a cow. It was a collie. It was even bigger than a cow. Dogs didn’t come that big. He backed away and the dog moved toward him. He was running. The dog bounded after him. He knew he was screaming with fear. But he could not hear himself screaming.

“Ralph, get up! It’s almost twelve o’clock!”

He pulled the covers over his head, turned around a few times, experimented to find the most comfortable position. The door opened just as he was pushing himself into sleep once more.

“Get up.”

“Ten more minutes.”

“I want to do this room. And I want you to get out of the kitchen. Then you’re going downtown to get a job.”

“Yeah. As if they’re waiting for me.”

The door slammed shut. For several seconds he kept his eyes closed, and then he was up, out of bed. He stared around at the room. Pale green ceiling, and the plaster was cracked. Burnt-orange wallpaper, and the design was faded to a meaningless blur. A small table. A highboy. A small mirror. A rug in its last stages. A window.

He walked to the window and looked out. Grey winter was freezing itself onto the alley. Narrow alley. The cement was giving way, and so were the outer walls of the dumb-looking plaster houses on the other side.

He walked to the mirror. And he looked at himself.

Gazing back at him, sort of tired and annoyed, was a young man, five feet eight inches tall, weight 153 pounds. The young man was thirty years old and his name was Ralph Creel. He had straight but indifferent light hair and light brown eyes and a straight nose. Once a girl had giggled that he looked like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. without a moustache. He had told her that she was crazy. But he had not forgotten about it.

As he walked into the bathroom he told himself that one of these days he would get into the habit of getting washed before getting dressed. His mother had been yelling about that for a long time, almost twenty years. But then it was easier to get dressed and then get washed. He shrugged and turned on the cold water.

The bathroom was too small. He had lived in this house for twenty-four years but he would never get used to the bathroom. It was too small. Adeline was always throwing her five-and-dime perfume and face cream and everything around the room and he was always bumping into a bottle or a jar. There would be a crash. His mother would come upstairs and start yelling and he would yell back and later on when his other sister, Ewie, got home from a day of grief behind a lingerie counter there would be another big fight and finally his father would tell them all to shut up. The matter would be ended until another bottle or another jar crashed to the bathroom floor.

He brushed his teeth with a sweet-tasting toothpaste. He swished the foam about in his mouth and then spat it out and scooped water in his palm and drank it fast. It was the one ritual of cleanliness that he actually liked. He liked to keep a clean taste in his mouth.

He gazed at his hands. They looked clean. No need for soap. He held his hands under the cold water faucet. He swished cold water in his face and ran wet hands over his hair. This took about four seconds. Without drying face or hands, he combed his hair in a fraction under six seconds. Then he dabbed a towel at his face, rubbed his hands dry and looked in the mirror. He needed a shave. If he was going in town today to look for a job he would need a shave. But he didn’t feel like shaving.

Besides, he didn’t feel like going in town today.

He walked into the kitchen. His mother was peeling potatoes. He looked at her. She was forty-eight years old. She looked younger. She did a lot of work and a lot of hollering. She was small and slim and still sort of pretty. She was blonde and she had grey eyes.

“Mom, where’s the morning paper?”

“You’re not gonna read,” she said, without looking up from the potatoes. “You’re gonna hurry up with breakfast and get out of the kitchen.”

He opened the icebox and took out an orange. He skinned it with his teeth and bit into it. The juice dribbled over his chin. He ran fingers over his chin and said, “Where’s the morning paper?” He walked over to the stove and put the light on under the percolator. He said, “I want the morning paper. I gotta see something important.”

“In the financial section?”

“Yeah — I’m worried about my stocks and bonds. Where’s the paper?”

“In the living room.”

He walked into the living room. In a few moments he came back to the kitchen. He said, “It’s not in the living room.”

“Then I guess Addie took it.”

“Oh, she did, did she? I guess that’s supposed to be smart, taking the paper to work with her. What does she think this is?”

“Who tells you to sleep until twelve?”

“That’s aside from the point.”

His mother looked up. “It’s not aside from the point. You’ve got no business getting up so late. Another fellow would get up at seven, or even six, and he would hustle down into town and he would keep going from one place to another, keep looking until he found something. Not like you, you bum. You don’t want to work. You never will work. You won’t go in town today. I know that. You think I don’t know it. You won’t go in town today and you won’t go tomorrow and the next day. You’ll never get a job. You’ll never get anywhere. You’ll always be a lazy, no-good bum. You and those other no-goods you go around with.”

He wasn’t paying any attention to her. He sipped black sugarless coffee. Spread before him was the sports page of the Record . He was reading about a new lightweight from Southwark, an Italian kid who was supposed to have a good right hand and—

“I don’t care if it’s digging ditches in the street. I don’t care if it’s collecting garbage. At least you should be doing something. A man should work. And you’re a man — maybe. Anyway, you’re thirty years old and in five more years you’ll be thirty-five and then what are you gonna do?”

He was deeply involved in the problems that would confront this Italian kid from Southwark. There was a mob of new lightweights hanging around now, and it was the opinion of the sports columnist that the Italian kid would have his hands full with them. The columnist was advising the manager not to rush the kid and -