Shabby Street

by Orrie Hitt

  “I guess so.”

  “And I didn’t learn a thing.”

  The motorboat swung wide at the end of the lake, turning toward us, plowing a wide furrow in the water.

  “Well,” I said, “maybe you don’t have to know anything.”

  Her old man had plenty of money and she wasn’t the worst looking head in the state. She’d do all right for herself.

  “Maybe you’re right, Johnny,” she said, standing up. “Perhaps I don’t have to know anything. Only what I want.”

  I got up, feeling the hot sun on my body.

  “We ought to be getting in,” I said. “I don’t want to keep your father waiting.”

  She nodded and pulled the red cap down over her hair. Her suit, a one piece thing, matched the color of her cap. She filled it out pretty good all over, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t been somewhat wrong about her.

  Her legs flashed brown in the sun and she cut the water like the sharp point of a knife. I waited until she came up for air and then I went in after her, traveling fast.

  I beat her to the shore and she laughed about that.

  “With those shoulders of yours,” she said, “you ought to be able to swim all day.”

  I gave her a grin and took her arm as we went up through the deep sand.

  The Connors summer home was a big place, long and rambling. All of the rooms were on one floor, arranged in sort of a square, and these were connected by a wide, screened-in porch.

  “You know where your room is, Johnny?”

  “Yeah.”

  She padded off across the porch and I went down to one of the corner rooms. It was a large room with a double bed and maple furniture. The wide window pointed straight at the lake.

  I took a shower in the tiled bath and rubbed down good. I’d just put my shorts on when somebody knocked on the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Would you like a drink, Johnny?”

  What I wanted to do was see Connors, find out about the job, and get the hell back to the hotel. Clerking wasn’t my life’s work but I didn’t have this other job yet and it was better than nothing.

  “Dad got back,” Beverly said, “but he’s gone down to the lake for a dip. He said you might like a drink while you’re waiting.”

  “Well, then, I’ll take a beer.”

  “Surer?”

  “Positive.” I tried to put my socks on but I had to dry my feet some more. “I usually drink beer.”

  “Okay.”

  I got into the rest of my clothes, slung the coat over my arm and went outside. I saw her suit hanging on the porch railing, so I draped mine beside it.

  She came along the porch, carrying a tray. There was a bottle of beer and a couple of highballs on it.

  “We’ll go around to the terrace,” she said, handing me the tray.

  I’d never seen a terrace before, not that I knew about, but I found out that it was nothing more than a lot of rocks thrown around on top of the ground. The small space was crowded with a couple of tables and some wicker furniture. A gray-haired woman lounged in one of the chairs, her head thrown back, her eyes closed.

  “Mother,” Beverly said, “I’d like you to meet Johnny Reagan. Johnny, my mother.”

  The woman slowly opened her eyes and blinked at the sun. I had the feeling that she’d closed them just a couple of seconds before we got there.

  “How do you do?” she wanted to know, pulling herself up out of the chair.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Mrs. Connors was a short, skinny woman with dark eyes and a trace of fuzz across her upper lip. She was wearing purple shorts and a yellow halter that sagged away from her loose breasts. I didn’t like her for sour apples.

  “Good swim?” she wanted to know.

  “Very good,” Beverly said. She poured the beer and it foamed up over the top of the glass. “Johnny’s pretty sharp in the water.”

  Her mother grunted and put the highball away without fooling around about it.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve got to go and see about dinner. I wish I could get help that would stay out here in the sticks in the summer. Becky got mad and quit again.”

  “Oh, no!” Beverly tasted her drink and glanced at me. “Isn’t that horrible?”

  I agreed that it was.

  “Stupid help!” Beverly complained, after her mother had gone. “They can stay out here all summer, living just like us. You’d think that they’d appreciate it. But they don’t. They’re just — stupid!”

  I drank the beer and made some mental rules as concerned the Connors family. I had no opinion about the old guy himself, but I had a great big idea about mother and daughter. Anything that might happen to them was all right with my conscience.

  We talked some more and she swung her long legs around but I didn’t pay any attention to them. I was getting a little tired of her company by the time Connors came up from the lake.

  The water ran down off his fat stomach and splashed onto the terrace. His chest was big, almost like a woman’s, only covered with thick gray hair. “Have a drink, Daddy?”

  He gave Beverly a pat across her backside. She jumped and he laughed at her.

  “Your hand’s all wet!”

  “If you wore some clothes,” he said, “you wouldn’t know it.”

  Her face colored slightly and she swung away from him.

  “You run along,” he said. “Maybe you can help your mother. Johnny and I have something we want to talk about.”

  She gave me a smile before she left.

  “Don’t let him do all of the talking,” she warned. “He will, if you give him a chance.”

  Connors stared after his daughter until she disappeared around a corner of the house. Then he shook his head, laughing, and sat down in one of the chairs. The frame of the wicker shifted over to a precarious angle and hung there.

  “Great girl,” he said, with pride. “Great pal.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Only child,” he went on. “Not spoiled. Not spoiled a bit.”

  “No.”

  He could think any way he wanted. He was paying for it.

  He talked about the lake, and this house, and how long he’d been coming out there every summer. The sun burned across my face and I began to get sleepy.

  “It’s been a good life,” he said. “And it’s come out of the life insurance business. Every bit of it.”

  I tried to wake up.

  “That’s the way I had it figured,” I said. “A man can make his own goal when he’s selling. Nobody’s going to tell him to take it easy and not do so much.”

  ..“You’re right, Johnny.”

  “You wouldn’t tell me I could only write so many policies. Instead, you’d tell me to get out there and get more.”

  “I guess you have the general idea.”

  “And you’d be doing me a favor,” I said. “Because I’d be making more. We’d both be making more.”

  He told me about some of his agents and what they didn’t want to do and why they didn’t want to do it. It was obvious that I’d said the correct thing and every time he gave me a chance I said some more of the same.

  “You talk like you might fall right into it,” Connors said, after a while. He squinted his eyes into the sun, following the movement of a canoe in the middle of the lake. “That’s why I asked you up here today. I had the same thoughts last night.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Funny how you can decide something so quickly.”

  “Yeah.”

  He stood up, rubbing the palms of his hands against his eyes.

  “We’ve got a routine questionnaire down at the office that would have to be filled out,” he said. “But you hadn’t ought to have any trouble with that. Never had any — money troubles, have you?”

  “I’ve been broke.”

  “I mean, never swiped any money, have you?”

  “No.”

  “That’ll be all right, then. Of course, we’ll check where you’ve
worked, and like that, but there shouldn’t be any question about it. You can have the job if you want it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’d start at sixty a week, plus commissions.”

  “Not bad.”

  He went around the house and I followed him.

  “I’m going in to town after dinner,” Connors said. “I’d like to have you eat with us and I’ll take you in when I go.”

  I thought about the hotel and how something might happen before he checked on me the next day.

  “Maybe I could use the phone?”

  “Help yourself,” he said. “You’ll find it in back of the third door, down.”

  “Thanks.”

  I was getting tired of thanking him. He hadn’t done much for me yet.

  “There’s liquor in there, too,” he said. “And beer in the coke box. Help yourself. I drink quite a lot, so don’t think I’ll hold it against you.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He shuffled off, his weight making some of the boards squeak. I went to the third door and pushed it open. I saw that it was a play room with a pool table, record player and a slot machine. The coke case was over in one corner, and, above that, several shelves loaded with liquor.

  I got the hotel on the phone right away, but it wasn’t Janet who answered. It was the day operator and she sounded as though her temperature was up fifteen degrees.

  “Let me talk to Janet,” I said.

  “She ain’t here.”

  “This is Johnny.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “I wanted to talk to Janet,” I said. “But maybe I can leave a message.”

  “Not with me,” she said. “Janet doesn’t work here any more. She got herself fired.”

  “What?”

  “Just as she was coming on, too. Another five minutes and I’d have been out of this trap. She comes in when this guy is up at the desk, wanting to check out, and saying that he was paid up for the whole week. They’re blaming you and saying you’re a crook, when up walks Janet, big as life, and says she did it. So they fired her. Beats me why she’d — ”

  I put the phone back on the cradle and lit a cigarette. I noticed that my hands were shaking. Then I went across the room and jerked up the lid on the coke box.

  I didn’t have anything to worry about.

  CHAPTER IV

  Desire

  CONNORS ate enough steak for five ditch diggers and it gave him a good case of jumping stomach. Afterward, we went out on the porch and gave the mosquitos a chance to grab themselves a transfusion.

  “Maybe I ought to see a doctor,” Connors said, belching.

  “That might be a good idea,” I said.

  He was sprawled out in one of those low slung canvas deck chairs that look like they’ll collapse almost any second. Beverly got him a big glass of bromo seltzer and I tried to figure out, while he was drinking it, where he had room to put it. I guess maybe he didn’t, though, because he started burping like a firecracker in wet grass.

  “I thought you were going to take Mr. Reagan in to town,” Mrs. Connors said when she joined us. “Perhaps he has something he wants to do.”

  She was damned right I had something to do. Janet might have got herself sacked on account of me, not yelling, but she was apt to get thinking it over, later, and decide to square herself with the hotel. If she pulled a fancy stunt like that I wouldn’t be able to use them for a reference. And I couldn’t use the factory, the place I’d worked before, because I’d gotten next to the boss’s wife too fast and too often. Hell, it hadn’t been my fault that she’d hung out around the shipping room, looking for something all the time — and finding it real easy. But that didn’t make any difference, except that I wouldn’t be able to get a say-so from the little runt on any job I was trying to get. And the job before that, the one in the restaurant checking in supplies, that was a sad bit of business, too. She’d been at least forty and I wouldn’t have undresed her with the pot washer’s hands. The only thing, the pot washer had been doing it all right and when he’d slid away into the night without leaving a forwarding address, she’d coyly waved her finger under my nose. And I’d waved right back at her. From the door. On the way out.

  “Perhaps Beverly would run you in,” Connors said to me. He swung his head around to look up at his daughter. “Would you mind doing that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Sorry as hell, Johnny, but I — ”

  “Oh, that’s okay.”

  “And you might stop at the baker’s,” Mrs. Connors told Beverly. “I’d like a cake made for Thursday of next week.”

  “Bridge again?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Hell!”

  Beverly went inside and Mrs. Connors told me she didn’t know what this generation was coming to. I told her I didn’t, either. Which was the truth. Anything could happen.

  Beverly was gone about fifteen minutes but it was almost worth the investment of even my time. She had put on a tight fitting skirt and an off-the-shoulder blouse. And I mean it was off the shoulder, almost down to her elbows. But the front of it was a farce because it went just so low and no further. I remembered how flat she’d looked up there that afternoon and that she hadn’t been much better in the bathing suit. I made up my mind that she’d either put on a different style bra or she’d graduated to falsies, because she wasn’t flat any more. Real or not, she had plenty up there now to push around.

  “I wish you wouldn’t wear clothes like that,” Mrs. Connors said as Beverly sauntered across the porch. “It’s almost indecent.”

  If the old lady could have her way she’d most likely throw her kid into a tin barrel and hitch a lock onto it.

  “Oh, let her alone,” Connors said.

  I told them goodnight, that I’d enjoyed the dinner and that they sure had a swell joint out in the sticks.

  “Come down to the office in the morning and fill out those papers,” Connors said as I went down the steps. “Say, around nine-thirty.”

  “Okay. And thanks, again.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I followed the girl to the car and got in. She started the thing and swung out the driveway. I leaned back and lit a cigarette, wondering where I’d find Janet and how I’d handle her after I did.

  “I love a convertible,” Beverly said, pulling onto the main road. “Don’t you?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “They make the summer so much more alive.”

  “Yeah.”

  The sun burned red in the sky, dying fast. It was almost as though the sky had busted an artery, spewing out crimson blood all over the maples and the pines. I glanced at the girl beside me, trying to figure her right. At first she’d seemed tall and a whole lot gawky, but now she was just tall and not too hard to look at. I don’t mean that she was pretty — she could get herself a new plastic job and she’d never be pretty — but she wasn’t exactly repulsive, either. There was something inside of her, though, that made her a lot different than most girls I’d known. I could tell, easy, that she was trying to act prim all the time and that she was smoking plenty around the edges. If she’d wanted to be rich-bitchy nice she wouldn’t put on such a tight skirt or a blouse that was hardly big enough to cover up an idea. Of course her folks waded around in ten dollar bills all the time and she’d been to some fancy school, so that probably had something to do with it. But it would take more than those two things to keep her fastened down once she decided to break herself loose.

  “What kind of a car have you got?” she wanted to know.

  “I haven’t got any.”

  “That’ll make it hard for you selling insurance.”

  “I guess I can walk for a while.”

  “Sometimes people aren’t home. You have to keep going back.”

  “So I’ll just walk some more,” I told her. Or, I thought, I’ll get a pair of roller skates — a pair of roller skates and a broom to ride. “Maybe they’ll feel sor
ry for me,” I said. “After I wear four inches off my legs they might wake up and pay on time.”

  She laughed, throwing her head back for a moment, and I noticed that she had a nice laugh. It wasn’t a low laugh, or a sexy one, but it came from down deep, building up, like she felt it and wanted you to share it with her.

  “Dad’s got a Ford he might lend you,” she said. “We don’t use it much.”

  “That would be fine.”

  She was still smiling and when she glanced at me her eyes had a laughter all of their own.

  “You’re quite a character, Johnny. Did you know that?”

  I gave her a grin and watched the way the wind played around with the top of her blouse.

  “I don’t know whether to get sore at that or not,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know why you should.”

  I started to tell her I was sorry, because I didn’t want any trouble with her while her old man was on the hook, but she laughed again and I knew that she was just giving me the needle so I could feel it. That made it all right and I was pretty sure that I didn’t have to worry about her at all.

  “You don’t mind if I tell you something else, Johnny Reagan?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a most — unusual man.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I really mean that. I didn’t mean it about you being a character.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  We were getting close to town and as we met approaching cars I noticed that they bothered her. She’d haul the Packard way off to the right and a couple of times I thought we were going to go into the lumber business. Even in a car as big as the Packard those trees looked mighty rugged. I felt like saying something to her about it, but I didn’t. I just sat there and got nervous.

  “Most of the men I’ve met,” she said, making another pass at the ditch, “were fellows with upper-blood around here, or at college.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by upper-blood but I had a pretty good idea. She meant somebody with a quart instead of two pints.

  “I can understand that,” I told her.

  “And they all seem so — weak.”

  I’d known a guy in the army, a fellow by the name of Jigger, who’d been left a half million bucks by an uncle in Yonkers. We’d been separated after we’d been shipped out of the states but I’d hauled myself around there as soon as I’d been discharged. Only he hadn’t been at home, just his wife, a little English girl with a nose the size of a ripe pear. She’d sniffled a bit and shown me the letter from Jigger’s commanding officer. In plain language the officer had informed her that her husband, Corporal Sam Jigger, had accidentally pulled a pin on a hand grenade, had placed his body thereon and had gone the way of a lot of flesh — up in the air. I’d hung around the English nose for a couple of hours, long enough to find out that the only thing she’d saved had been the letter — she hadn’t found a way of spending that — and then I’d left.