When Clinton entered the place, the three younger men did not look at him, but he knew they were aware of him. He walked up to the desk, where the mustached officer was shouting into a telephone. The officer, as he continued his conversation, studied Clinton from head to foot, but his manner was impersonal. Then he hung up and went on looking at the boy, waiting for him to speak.
“I’m lookin’ for Berry-berry Williams,” Clinton said. “I’m his brother.”
The lieutenant spoke in a loud voice so that the other policemen would hear: “This kid’s lookin’ for his brother: Berry-berry Williams.”
Clinton turned to look at the three men on the benches. None of them spoke; but each of them glanced at him and grinned in a private way.
“You happen to know where he is, sir?” Clinton said.
“When’d you get to town?”
“Just a little while ago.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Hitchhiked. A fella picked me up on his motorcycle.”
“What fella?”
“I don’t know who he was.”
“What’s your name?”
“Clint Williams.”
“Berry-berry’s your brother, huh? You carry a knife, too?”
Clinton reached into his pocket. “I got a little one, a fingernail knife.”
“Never mind,” the officer said. Then, “You sent your brother two hundred dollars. What for?”
“He needed it. He was goin’ into the shrimpin’ business.”
The officer raised his voice again: “Berry-berry was goin’ into the shrimpin’ business, did you guys know that?”
One of the policemen laughed out loud this time. But the other two only snickered. The behavior of all these men caused Clinton to flush red with embarrassment and annoyance, and he tried to suppress these feelings.
“Your brother hasn’t claimed that two hundred. It’s still over at the Western Union. Who’s Ralph? He another brother?”
“He’s my father.”
“Your father know where you are?”
“Sure. I told him I was comin’ down here. How’d you know his name?”
The officer did not answer this question. “How old are you, Clint?” he asked.
“Sixteen.”
“What’re you gonna do, stick around, wait for Berry-berry to turn up?”
“I don’t know yet. Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Nope.”
“Then he’s not here? I mean in jail?”
The officer shook his head. “We don’t know where he is.”
“Well,” Clinton shrugged. “I guess I’ll just have to start lookin’ for him. Thank you, sir.”
When he had reached the door, he heard the officer’s voice. “Clint. Come back here.”
He went back to the desk. Ramírez asked him to sit down, and then the two of them had what seemed to be a friendly conversation. The officer asked a number of obtrusive questions, unrelated to Clinton’s search; and there were long pauses in which Ramírez looked at Clinton in a quizzical way that caused the boy to squirm in his chair. But Clinton believed that the officer was interested in helping him find Berry-berry.
At length, Ramírez consulted a list of telephone numbers glued to the surface of his desk. Then he picked up the phone and dialed.
“Sellers? Ramírez.” He looked at the clock on the wall. “Three-thirty. —‘Cause I need to know something, that’s why. You sleep too much anyway, fat ass. Listen, where’s Berry-berry? —No, nothing like that. The girl hasn’t talked yet; she probably won’t either. —His kid brother’s here lookin’ for him, come all the way down from Ohio. —Oh, screw you, you’re such a goddam lily. Go back to sleep.”
He dropped the receiver into its cradle. “He don’t know either. Bail bondsman. Sometimes those guys know everything. But he don’t know where Berry-berry is.” He put a cigarette in his mouth, but he did not light it. “Your brother used to be in the Festival a lot. That’s a strip joint on Gasparilla. But you can’t get in there, you know.”
“Maybe I could just go in there and ask around.”
The officer took the cigarette from his mouth and pointed with it. “Listen, you know what I want you to do? At noon tomorrow, there’s a bus goes to Naples. You get on that bus and go home, hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Festival is situated cater-cornered at the end of Gasparilla Street, across the street from the Tin Pot Arms. The pilings that support the building are partly in the water, in the Gulf of Mexico. On its board-and-batten exterior has been painted a myriad of colored bubbles on a field of green, so that the place has the look of an enormous earthbound balloon. Lettering on some of the larger bubbles enumerate its wares: FUN, BEER, DANCING, GIRLS, CONTINUOUS ENTERTAINMENT, FOOD.
Clinton did not hesitate outside the place. He pushed the door forward and walked right in.
The Festival is one huge room. An elongated horseshoe-shaped bar occupies the center of it, and inside this horseshoe is a long spot-lighted ramp. These spotlights seem to be the only source of light in the place, so that its periphery, where the tables are located, appears at first to be in total darkness.
At the bar, a scuffle was taking place that engaged the attention of the bartender and the bouncer. Clinton’s entrance was therefore unnoticed by these people. He went directly to one of the tables that lined the walls and sat there in the dark. There were no other customers at the tables, but more than half of the bar stools were occupied. A large cluster of sailors on one side of the horseshoe bar looked across the ramp at a cluster of girls who sat opposite them. Other girls moved about desultorily among solitary male customers. Clinton watched several of these brief dumb shows of conversation but he did not wonder at what was being said because his attention was somewhat divided. A naked woman was making her way down the center of the ramp, unable to keep time with the jukebox music that accompanied her, but shaking various parts of her body in an awkward, lumbering rhythm of its own. Aside from Clinton himself, the only person in the room who paid any attention to the dancing woman was a lone sailor who looked upon her with the cold indifference of a butcher appraising a side of beef. Meanwhile, the bouncer, a wiry cat-like little man, was helping a big drunk with the problem of getting into his shoes.
All this activity in the Festival Night Club took place on a kind of screen projection of Clinton’s deepest concern: Berry-berry and his whereabouts. In his mind, when he saw this picture of Berry-berry, he could see only the back of his head, and it kept moving farther and farther away. This caused in him a painful anxiety that was centered in his chest. If a doctor had asked him to describe the feeling, he might have said it was like a wound caused by a poisoned arrowhead under his heart, and it caused his nerves to tingle in a hurtful way.
Suddenly one of the girls was at the table with him. He had not seen her approach. She sat so close to him that her thigh touched his. One of his hands had been in his lap. She placed her own on top of it. “Hello, cuteness,” she said. Her tone was impersonal but intimate: “I want a drink, you want company?”
“Okay.” His face was hot; it ached from embarrassment. The girl’s hand clutched his under the table. Then, moist and cold, it moved about restlessly on his lap until it came to rest lightly on his inner thigh, just below the groin. Her face shone with a kind of waxen deadness, as if the paint had been applied by a mortician, and masses of hair surrounded it like a dull brown shroud. Nothing in this face seemed to have any knowledge of what the hand was doing under the table: it crept about independently, like a wind-up toy forgotten by its owner.
When a waitress appeared at the table, the mechanical girl said: “I’m havin’ a champagne cocktail. What about you, hon?” She squeezed his thigh. His blood had risen in him, but this excitement was not pleasurable; it only increased his turmoil.
“I’ll have the same,” he said.
“Really? Well, I don’t think you’ll like it, honey. Why don’t you just get a highball?”
The waitress leaned forward. “Listen, Frances, you lost your goddam mind? Get him out o’ here. F’godsake, he’s still got his baby teeth; can’t you tell by lookin’?”
The girl said, “It idden my job to check I.D.‘s.”
“No, but you could use your head.”
Suddenly the little cat-like man stood at the table, jumping lightly from foot to foot, glancing from face to face. “What what what, what’s goin’ on? What is it, what?” He seemed unable to stand still or to focus on one object for more than a split second at a time. But he had already assimilated the situation. Within a few seconds Clinton was on his feet, being guided swiftly toward the door. The waitress and the girl remained at the table, quarreling.
On the sidewalk, Clinton said: “Look, I didn’t want a drink anyway. I’m just lookin’ for somebody. Ize lookin’ for my brother.”
“We haven’t got any brothers, what brother, who?” the bouncer said, in his rat-a-tat-tat voice.
“Name of Berry-berry Williams.”
“He don’t come around here n’more, neither d’you, you keep out o’ here from now on, completely, crazy kid, lose m’license, what you want? Get away, go.” Suddenly the door was swinging and the swift little man was gone.
A low brick wall protected the yard of the house next door. Clinton sat on this wall and lighted a cigarette. He could not imagine what he would do next. It seemed to him that he had run out of alternatives and would remain seated here forever. When he had put out the cigarette, he found that the wall was wide enough to lie down on. He lay flat on his back. Then he put the duffel bag on top of his stomach, folded his hands across it, and closed his eyes.
In order to keep his mind busy, he took a sensory inventory of his belongings: without moving, he could feel the money belt strapped to his stomach, the notebook tucked under his belt, the duffel bag on top of it, his own hands. And above them, the night itself and the sky, the stars. But he felt no sense of ownership about the night: it was part of Berry-berry’s leavings. When Berry-berry swept through a place, he seemed always to leave in his wake the garbage of a vampire: everything and everyone empty, meaningless, dead. Clinton saw the entire peninsula of Florida as a giant penis dangling into the sea, worthless, used up, spent; and the town, Key Bonita, nothing but an absurd tattoo on its crown. In his mind, weary, half-dreaming, the town was not a network of streets, but of branches; one did not walk here, one climbed; and the tree itself, in his half-dream, was a poor, withered Christmas tree, decorated by Annabel. She herself, perched in some high branch next to the moon, presided over her collection of shabby ornaments; like a puppet painted to impersonate a crazy woman, half angel, half whore, she gazed down with puzzled, indecisive eyes. “Are you still looking for Berry-berry?” he heard her ask, in a tiny, scarcely audible voice. “You are lookin’ for your brother, aren’t you?” But Clinton could not answer because he himself was part of Berry-berry’s garbage, an apparatus of nerves, exhausted, bloodless. He lay on the wall like some pitiful lizard, unable to shed his old skin: duffel bag, notebook, money belt . . . .
“Little boy,” said the voice, “I’m talkin’ to you. Are you the one is lookin’ for Berry-berry Williams? Now, listen, what’s wrong with you? I’d like to be your friend, and I just know you can hear me. Are you runnin’ a temp’ature?”
The angel-whore lowered her hand, touched his brow. Suddenly, in one motion, Clinton sat bolt upright on the wall. The woman standing on the sidewalk before him was like an enormous nine-year-old. She was no taller than himself, and she was not fat; but her tininess of manner made her body seem outsized, like a child whose glands had gone haywire.
“You sleep with your eyes open, little boy? Say, listen, you’re not turned on, or anything like that, are you?” she said.
Clinton turned away from the woman. He blinked his eyes several times, then looked at her more closely. Her innocence of face, even under the mask of paint, was flawless: her eyes were moist blue flowers, her skin clear, her lips full and soft, slightly petulant. The toes of her pink high-heeled slippers pointed inward, her stomach thrust forward, her chestnut-colored hair fell in long curls to her shoulders. Even her pocketbook, pink and large, held upside down, took on the aspect of an abused rag doll.
“It was a dream,” Clinton said aloud, but to himself.
“Oh! What kind?”
“I don’t remember. —Miss, did I hear you say something about my brother?”
“I just ast if you uz lookin’ for him is all. My girl friend tole me somebody uz lookin’ for him.”
“D’you know where he is?”
“No, I don’t, but when I seen you were a little boy, I only wanted to be friendly. D’you want to come over to my house?”
Clinton rose to his feet. “You don’t even know who I am, hardly.”
The girl took his hand and pulled him across the sidewalk toward the street. “C’mon, please?”
“Listen, who are you anyway?” Clinton said.
“I’m Shirley. What’s your name.”
“Clint,” he said. Then, “Hey, Shirley, tell me something, do you know where my brother is?”
“You already ast me that. And I don’t, honest. How come you’re lookin’ for him? Are you lost?”
“Me? No, I’m not lost. I’m just lookin’ for him.”
“I hope you’re not like him. ‘Cause he’s very, very mean sometimes.”
“Do you know him?”
“No, and I’ve never even talked to him, but my girl friend has.”
“Would she know where he is?”
“No, and she says she doesn’t care, either. And she won’t even talk to you, because you’re his brother and meanness runs in families. But I don’t believe that myself. Are you, though? Mean?”
“What’d my brother do that was mean?”
“I’m not a tattletale. Besides, I wasn’t there, and maybe it’s a lie. Now do you want to come home with me or not?”
“I can’t. I got to find my brother. —Besides, your folks don’t know me, or anything. And it’s late.”
Shirley laughed. “Don’t be silly, my folks are dead! My whole family is. I live over there.” She pointed across the street at the Tin Pot Arms Hotel. “Come on.” She guided him into the street.
Clinton saw a police car in front of the hotel. The officer in the front seat was smoking a cigarette. Clinton could not see the man clearly, but he knew that it was Ramírez and that he was being watched by him.
As they passed through the lobby, the old clerk stared at them indifferently. Shirley turned with sudden shrewishness toward the desk and shouted in a lower, almost harsh voice, through clenched teeth: “He’s only gonna visit! So why don’t you mind your own business, you filthy thing!” The clerk looked away as if he had heard nothing, seen nothing. Once out of his line of vision, Shirley giggled, and with a child’s sense of conspiracy ran tiptoe up the stairs, with Clinton close beside her. But when she paused to catch her breath at the top, she seemed much older, perhaps thirty or more. She looked at Clinton quickly, almost guiltily, from the corner of her eye: had he sensed this flaw in her game of childhood?
“Come on!” she said, leading the way up the hall. At her door, she stopped once again. “Now you wait here, and keep your eyes closed till I say okay. Okay?” Clinton closed his eyes.
Shirley stepped inside. He could hear the sounds of hurried activity within the room. After a moment, she took his hand and led him to the center of her room.
“Okay,” she said. “Now open.”
Shirley had lighted three kerosene lamps. The room was large, high-ceilinged, almost barren; but with these soft lights flickering through their glass chimneys, the place was far from dreary; and it was clean, well cared for. Between the front windows was a bed, with an ornamental iron headboard. At the foot of the bed was a wardrobe trunk, covered with a piece of faded purple chenille. One of the lamps had been placed on it and there were ash trays and glasses as well. Completing an intimate circle
around this trunk-table were two old straw armchairs, their cushions covered with the same faded chenille.
Shirley searched Clinton’s face for a favorable reaction to her home. She was not disappointed, for he said, sincerely, “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in.”
A soft breeze stirred the muslin curtains, and the lamp flames danced gently. There was in the air the good fragrance of a woman, her softness, her lilac and spice; and in the room itself, a cool and easy sense of freedom. It was the sort of a place in which, Clinton felt, a person might do as he pleased.
“Ize told once that lavender was my most becomin’ color,” Shirley said, “so I spent an entire Sunday dyein’ just about ever’thing I own, even my undies and m’panda,” She kicked off her slippers and opened a bureau drawer. “He sleeps in here.” She held up the panda: “See? Name is Herskelwitz, you want to hold him? I have to take a bath ‘fore I do another thing, so you just get comfy.”
“Is it okay if I lie down?” Clinton said. “I won’t go to sleep or anything.”
“You don’t have to ast me!”
“Well, it’s just, if I’m lyin’ down, I can think a whole lot better.”
Shirley took him by the hand and led him to the bed. They sat on the edge of it, his hand still in hers. “You know what?” she said. “I don’t think you ought to think about all the things you got to think about. Nobody should.”
“Maybe so, only I’ve got to.”
The girl looked at him for a moment, penetratingly, and then her gaze became diffused, passed through him and beyond him, as she said, “Would it make you feel funny if Ize to call you Willy?”
“Why do you want to call me Willy?”
“You just look like—like you should’ve been named Willy. I believe it suits you better’n that other name.”
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