South Street

by David Bradley

  Brown had watched, silent and motionless, while the stream of emotions had flowed across Frankie’s battered features. His right hand, almost invisible against the stained wood of the table, moved out toward Frankie, drew back, and moved out again, stopping short of Frankie’s arm, suddenly becoming starkly visible as the palm turned upward before the hand balled into a fist and drew slowly back again.

  “Now,” said Maria. Brown and Frankie looked up quickly, almost guiltily. “I got the steaks on first. Figured if I did it that way you wouldn’t get through moren three rounds a drinks.”

  “Moren three!” Frankie said indignantly. “Him, maybe. Not me. He’s the lush.”

  “Right,” said Maria. “You’re the drunk.”

  “Listen to her, willya, Adlai! My own daughter-in-law, my own flesh an’ olive oil, callin’ me a drunk.”

  “You know what the doctor said,” warned Maria.

  “Yeah. He said the way I smoke an’ drink I shoulda been dead five years ago. Goddamn good thing I didn’t listen to him. Now bring us some booze. I want—”

  “You want a Rusty Nail an’ Adlai wants a scotch-rocks.”

  “Right,” said Frankie.

  “Wrong,” said Brown. “I’ll just have a beer.”

  Maria stopped dead in her tracks and her mouth fell open. “What?”

  Frankie sighed. “It sounded like he said beer, but I’m gettin’ old an’ my hearin’ ain’t so good no more an’ I can’t believe that.”

  “Adlai, you been comin’ in here for years an’ you ain’t never had anything but scotch-rocks.”

  “I’m on the cart,” Brown said.

  “Oh yeah,” Maria said. “The cart. What in hell’s the cart?”

  “Halfway to the wagon,” Brown told her.

  Maria gave Brown a concerned look. “He ain’t kiddin’, Frankie. He means it. He’s sick. Come to think of it, he didn’t even ask me once to go to bed with him when he ordered. Somethin’s wrong. Adlai, you in love or somethin’?”

  “Or somethin’,” Brown said.

  “Beer?” said Maria.

  “Beer,” said Brown.

  Maria shook her head, wrote it down, and headed for the bar.

  “That girl musta done a real job on you,” Frankie observed.

  “Nothin’ to do with her,” Brown snapped.

  “Okay,” said Frankie. “I’m too old to argue. Let’s change the subject. So you moved out. Where you livin’ now?”

  “I found this place over on South Street,” Brown said.

  “That was fast.”

  “There isn’t exactly a waiting list,” Brown said.

  Maria returned with Frankie’s Rusty Nail and Brown’s beer. “Look, Adlai,” she said, “I don’t mind if you’re turnin’ over a new leaf or whatever it is you’re doin’, but if guys stop makin’ passes at her a girl starts to worry. Why not pinch me or somethin’, just for old time’s sake?”

  “I’m scared to,” Brown said. “That husband a yours would kill me when he got out.”

  “He is out, an’ that never stopped you before.”

  Brown sighed, reached out and patted her behind. She slapped his hand and scampered off to the kitchen.

  “You sure change quick,” Frankie said.

  “I haven’t changed. I just moved.”

  Maria returned with a full tray. “There you go, there’s the tossed. I’ll be back with the steak and baked. You do still eat steak, don’t you, Adlai? Or did you give up meat?”

  “Well,” Brown said, “I like it better on the hoof.”

  “Hey, he’s soundin’ better, Frankie. Quick, talk some sense into him before he has a relapse.”

  “Jesus,” said Brown, “just let a man decide he wants to cut down on his drinking and not make passes at other people’s wives and you make him sound like he’s a candidate for the psycho ward.”

  Maria grinned. “Only if it’s you, sweetheart, only if it’s you.” She turned and wiggled her bottom pleasantly as she walked away. Brown leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  Frankie grinned. “Eat your salad.” They ate in silence. In a few minutes Maria delivered the meat and potatoes, tapping Brown playfully on the cheek as she went away. The bar slowly filled with the bodies of business people and professionals stopping off for a drink or two or three. Many of them lived nearby—Frankie’s was on a side street just off Rittenhouse Square. At the bar men in business suits with briefcases at their feet told lies to expensive-looking women with high, hollow cheeks and thin, unadorned arms. Chatter made a dull hum, as if a giant machine idled somewhere nearby. From time to time Frankie rose to greet someone, calling them by name and waving. Brown gradually slumped lower in his seat, so that his hand traveled less and less distance conveying slivers of red meat and lumps of potato to his mouth. From time to time his left hand reached out and pulled his glass of beer toward him, and he took a few big swallows. Maria, bustling past, dropped off a full bottle. Brown nodded and smiled and kept on eating, his mouth working easily. The last bite vanished down his throat. He wiped his lips, swallowed the rest of the beer. Frankie grinned as he mopped up his plate with a piece of Italian bread. “She ain’t killed you appetite, anyways.” Brown smiled tightly and wiped his lips again. “Hey, Maria,” Frankie yelled, “how ’bout some dessert?”

  Maria appeared with her pad. “How about it?”

  “Just coffee for me,” Brown said.

  “I want some ice cream an’ pie,” said Frankie.

  “I’ll bring you some sliced pineapple,” Maria told him. “Did you take your pills?”

  “The hell with the pills an’ the pineapple. I want some ice cream, goddammit.”

  “It’s not on your diet.”

  “You ain’t my mother.”

  “Your mother’s dead, an’ she’d a lived a lot longer if she’d stayed on her diet an’ taken her pills.”

  “All right, all right,” sighed Frankie. “Sliced pineapple. Now don’t just stand there. Jump!” Maria shot him a look of mock terror and moved away. “She’s a nice girl,” said Frankie. “Too bad she married that kid a mine. He ain’t been outa jail but three, four weeks, an’ he already beat her up half-a-dozen times.”

  “Why doesn’t she beat him back?” Brown said.

  “Ask her. She’ll give you some goddamn crap about how it’s just his way a showin’ how much he loves her. I musta not loved his mother then, ’cause I never raised a hand to that woman. Not that I wasn’t tempted.”

  “That explains it,” Brown said seriously. “If a kid doesn’t see love demonstrated in the home it screws him up.”

  “Yeah,” Frankie agreed, “that must be it.”

  He leaned back and loosened his belt just as Maria arrived with his pineapple and Brown’s coffee. As she turned away Brown reached out absentmindedly and patted her. She smiled at him. “Never mind, doll, your heart ain’t in it.” Brown snorted, heaved himself erect, and shoveled sugar into his cup.

  “How’d you end up in Poughkeepsie?” Frankie asked around the ring of pineapple he was stuffing into his mouth.

  Brown shrugged and sipped his coffee. “I met A—this girl in New York. We had a good time for a couple a weeks, but she was going back to school. So I went up there with her and found this job at a bar, workin’ behind on busy nights an’ bein’ bouncer on Tuesdays when the regular guy had off.”

  “You was a bouncer? That where you got so mean?”

  “Only on Tuesdays,” Brown said. “The regular dude had everybody so scared all I had to do was sit in the corner and read. That bouncer was plain crazy. He’d sit up in the corner just praying somebody’d start something, only everybody was too scared of him. So he started hiding so people would think he wasn’t around. You ever see a two-hundred-and-forty-pound bar bouncer tryin’ to hide behind a begonia?”

  “Heh,” said Frankie. “Sounds crazy to me.” He pushed the last piece of pineapple into his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “Goddamn,” he said, “I hate pineapple. What happened
to the girl?”

  Brown took a deep breath. “We came to a parting of the ways. She wanted me to work for her father. I said I preferred the bar.”

  “Whad her father do?”

  “He ran a vanilla factory, and he worked part time as a personnel consultant for Nabisco.”

  “You know, sometimes I don’t know when you’re kiddin’ an’ when you’re not.”

  “Neither do I,” Brown said. “Actually, he was the regional director of the NAACP, but it amounts to the same thing.”

  Frankie looked at Brown uncomprehendingly. Brown smiled tightly behind his coffee cup. “Well,” Frankie said, “I’ll say this for you: in six years you never brought a woman in here didn’t have real class, you know? Class. Not like that damn Louie an’ his bony Jewish bitch. I hope he runs outa gas in the middle of a goddamn Death Valley, an’ he has ta listen ta her yammerin’ until he dies a thirst. Speakin’ a that, you, ah, wouldn’t maybe be lookin’ for a job, would ya? I mean I know you been to fourteen different colleges an’, aw shit.”

  “Yeah,” Brown said. “I’m lookin’ for a job. What do I call you, Massa or Don?”

  “Shut up,” said Frankie. “You work good for me an’ I’ll treat you almost like you was Italian. Only difference is you get vacation in the winter ’cause you don’t need no suntan.”

  “That’s just as well,” Brown said, “’cause I burn real easy.”

  “You know, Adlai, that’s what I like about you: you’re smart. ’Specially your ass. You know, I got a bunch of goddamn fools workin’ for me. You take that Vito out in the kitchen. The other night they brings in a whole truckload a booze. I was busy, so I says to Vito I says, ‘Check them bottles an’ make sure them bastards ain’t cheatin’ me.’ Next mornin’ I looked an’ we was short three bottles a good red. So I calls Vito over to ask him what happened, an’ he says he don’t know, but he checked, just like I said, an’ every bottle was full.” Brown chuckled. Frankie sighed. “You want another beer?”

  “No thanks,” Brown said. “I gotta go clean up my apartment. If you want to call it that.”

  “Okay,” Frankie said. “Time was when you wouldn’t turn down a drink, but then you wasn’t drinkin’ beer then, either. Thanks for eatin’ with me.”

  “My pleasure,” Brown said, pushing his chair back.

  “Bull,” said Frankie. “You just like steak. G’wan, get outa here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Frankie watched as Brown went over and pinched Maria and then went out the door. He pulled a big white handkerchief from his rear trouser pocket, accompanying the action with a great deal of snorting. He replaced the handkerchief, struggled laboriously to his feet, and waddled back to the kitchen, to the glassed-in space he used for an office. Easing himself into an ancient wooden chair, he picked up the telephone and dialed. While the phone buzzed in his ear he reached out and shoved the door closed. The little room was stifling, and he pulled his handkerchief out again and wiped his face. “Hello,” he said into the phone. “Yeah, it’s me. Who the hell was you expectin’? An’ where you been all goddamn day, I been tryin’ to get … Yeah, well I ain’t payin’ you to shack up. You can shack up when the job’s done.” The telephone squawked indignantly. “All right, all right, how’d it go? … Fine. It ain’t gonna make the papers, is it? … All right, you can come in tomorrow afternoon an’ get the other half.” Frankie hung the phone up gently and smiled contentedly. He reached out and opened the door to let in some air. He sniffed the odor of simmering seasoned tomatoes, smiled, folded his hands across his ample stomach, and closed his eyes. In a few minutes he was snoring softly and gently, in the sonorous tones of a man whose scores are settled and whose soul is at peace with God and the world.

  Big Betsy rumbled into Lightnin’ Ed’s just as the Philadelphia pitcher tossed a perfect strike that would have entered the catcher’s mitt with a solid, satisfying meaty thump had it not first encountered the bat of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ lead-off man with a resounding, unforgiving crack and vanished from the big TV screen by way of the fence in the upper right-hand corner. “Shit,” muttered Leo, “everybody knows they’re gonna lose, but do they have to start in the first damn inning?” Big Betsy ignored both Leo and the TV—she hated baseball with a rare passion. It represented competition. Jowls joggling and her breasts bouncing, Big Betsy started down to the end of the bar to wait for Leo’s hurried attentions, but on her way she passed what she at first took to be a lampshade and then realized was a man, sitting at the bar. Big Betsy ground to a halt and rotated her head for a more detailed inspection. It was definitely male, and that made it a prospective customer, but if it was a John, it was about the weirdest John Big Betsy had ever seen. His eyes fixed on the TV screen, the weird John licked the back of his hand, sprinkled salt on it, took hold of the shot glass in front of him, grasped a wedge of lemon, licked the salt, bit the lemon, and swallowed the entire contents of the glass. Big Betsy blinked and shook her head. She waited until the next batter did whatever the next batter did, and then she leaned over the bar. “Hey, Leo,” whispered Big Betsy. Since Big Betsy’s whisper could have competed successfully with a fog horn, Leo came rushing over. Big Betsy moved on until she reached the far end of the bar, with Leo in hot pursuit.

  “What is it?” demanded Leo when he caught up with her. “I don’t wanna miss none of the action.”

  “Me neither,” said Big Betsy. “An’ that’s just what I wanna know—what is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That,” said Big Betsy, jerking her head.

  “Oh,” said Leo. “Damn if I know. It just walked in off the street.”

  “Lord!” exclaimed Big Betsy. “You mean they let it walk around loose?”

  “Well,” said Leo, “I guess maybe if it was uptown they’d lock it up, but down here, who cares? Now I gotta get back to the game. You want a drink?”

  “Nah,” said Big Betsy, shaking her head sadly, “it’s that time a the month.” Leo nodded understandingly and got her carton of milk out of the cooler. Big Betsy sighed: “I sure hope that check comes through a little early, ’cause I sure am sick a this white cow piss.”

  “It’s good for your ulcer,” said Leo, pouring the milk.

  Big Betsy grunted and looked down at the weird John. “He sure does like baseball,” she observed. The weird John was sitting tensely on his stool, eyes firmly on the screen, hands clasped as if he were praying.

  “Oh yeah,” said Leo. “He’s a real nut. He give me his own damn pregame show, quoted me battin’ averages an’ ERAs like they was gospel.”

  “Goddamn, Leo,” said Big Betsy, “what the hell is an ERA?”

  “Ask him. He knows everythin’. I betcha he could tell you what color Richie Allen shits.”

  “All I wanna know,” grumbled Big Betsy, “is when ma goddamn welfare check is comin’ in so’s I can quit ruinin’ ma insides with this … this …” Big Betsy waved both hands at the glass of milk in a gesture of total disgust.

  But Leo wasn’t listening. He had eased himself into a position from which he could see the TV. Big Betsy watched for a while, frowning constantly and superimposing a grimace each time she took a sip of her milk. The half inning ended, and Leo turned to wait on the dozen or so customers who were crowded into the section of the bar directly in front of the TV set. Big Betsy glowered in frustration. Twelve men in the room and she couldn’t even promote a short Coke because they were all too busy watching some dumbass toss a ball of horseshit at another dumbass while another dumbass tried to hit it with a stick. Big Betsy watched, cursing. She was put out by the inattention of all of them, but she was particularly put out by the inattention of the weird John, who, according to Big Betsy’s indisputably professional opinion, should have been particularly susceptible to her charms, since he had never before been exposed to them. Forty-five years of experience had taught Big Betsy to respect the seductive powers of unfamiliarity, but this particular individual seemed immune. Big Betsy thought he might be
a faggot, but Big Betsy had heard somewhere that faggots did not like sports. In fact, that’s how you could tell which little boys were going to grow up bent. Big Betsy glumly decided that she could not write off the weird John’s lack of interest to homosexual tendencies. Anger rose within her, increasing with every sip of milk she took. She thought hard. A light came into her eye.

  “Haw, haw, haw,” laughed Big Betsy the whore, throwing her head back as far as it would go and straightening her back to accentuate her bosom. She peered around through partly closed eyes as the sound of her braying laughter echoed in the confined space of Lightnin’ Ed’s. But nobody came over to ask her what was so funny. Nobody looked interested. Nobody even looked mildly distracted, except Leo, who gave her an angry, silencing glare and then turned his attention back to the TV set. Big Betsy brought her head forward once again and allowed her back to slip into a relaxing slump. She sipped her milk, made a face, sighed. For long minutes she sat motionless, but then a light glimmered in her eye once again. She climbed off her bar stool and marched down to the knot of men before the TV. She eased in between them, making room for herself with dainty heaves of bosom and buttocks, until she was directly behind the weird John. She pressed her breasts firmly against his back. She felt him stiffen slightly. Smiling to herself, she increased the pressure and rocked gently from side to side. The weird John slowly raised his hands to the level of his shoulders and clenched his fists. Big Betsy grinned broadly and tried to choke the weird John from behind with pure mama pressure.