Shabby Street

by Orrie Hitt

  “I’ll return your car in the morning,” I told him one day. “I got hold of a Ford that looks pretty good.”

  “You didn’t have to do that, Johnny.”

  “I feel like a fool, running around in your car all the time.”

  “You shouldn’t, Johnny.”

  “I’d hate to tell that to the other agents.”

  He laughed and lit a cigar. He’d been real decent to me, right along, asking me out to the lake during the summer to swim and for supper under the pines once in a while. Of course the other agents in the office didn’t go for that as much as I did, but that was their own fault. Some of them were so damned lazy they wouldn’t even look at a clock to find out the right time of the day. A couple had been in the business for over twenty years, all of it with Connors, but most of the others were just passing through, earning a living while they scouted around for something else.

  “This is Friday,” Connors told me.

  No insurance man has to be told when it’s Friday. That’s pay day, the end of the week, the day when a guy can go out and get drunk and try to make somebody else’s wife.

  “Like to have you out for dinner tonight, Johnny.”

  I hadn’t been out there for over ten days but I knew that Janet would raise hell about it. I’d been working late almost every night, selling insurance, and we hadn’t gone any place. I’d promised her, though, that this weekend we’d take a run up into the mountains, rent a room, get loaded and try to figure out where we were going.

  “Thanks,” I said to Connors. “But I’ve got something on for tonight and I’ll have to ask for a rain-check.”

  Anytime I was stupid enough to ask for a rain-check to sit across from his pinched-face wife I ought to have my skull examined.

  “There won’t be many nice days left,” Connors said. He got up and went over to the window; the September sun blazed warm on the red and gray carpet. “I thought it might be the last chance for the Missus and Beverly and the two of us to sit out under the pines.”

  That was sure a hell of a way to spend an evening. The mosquitoes always buzzed around under the pines, sucking more blood out of my arms than I had in my whole body. If his daughter had been somebody like Julie Wilson I’d have gone out there if I had to walk through the woods barefooted. But Beverly left me cold; she left me so cold that every time I looked at her I thought winter had set in.

  “We get some nice weather in October,” I said. “Sometimes it’s hotter in October than it is right now.”

  He puffed thoughtfully on his cigar and the blue spirals of smoke crawled upwards through the sunlight.

  “I’m not going to be here in October,” he said.

  I shrugged and picked up my report off the desk. I couldn’t see what he was so annoyed about but I didn’t want to get into it any further with him. I liked Connors and I liked his job but all the rest of it I could skip and not ever miss.

  “Maybe we could make it next week,” I said.

  Next week, in two weeks, almost any time but this night. Somehow I had to get a few hours with Janet and fix things with her. I’d told her so much about the girl I was trying to get loose from, to keep her away from Connors, that I couldn’t even get it straight myself. On top of that, she’d come up with the idea that she was pregnant and that she was going to have a kid almost any day. She had me running around like a fly on a piece of bread.

  “Whatever it is,” Connors said, “you’ll have to put it off, Johnny. I’ve got something on my mind and I want to talk it over with you. It’s about my going away in October.”

  “I don’t know where you could go,” I said.

  He pushed up the window and pitched the cigar outside. He was always throwing things out of the window. I wondered that the city put up with it.

  “It’s like this, Johnny,” he said. He went back to the desk and sat down. He put another cigar in his mouth and chewed on it. “The old lady and I’ve wanted to take a long trip for so damn many years I can’t remember.”

  “You should get a trailer.”

  He shook his head.

  “Where we’re going a trailer wouldn’t be any good. We’ve talked a lot about traveling in Europe — not just one country, or two countries, but every last one of them.”

  “I see.”

  He struck a match and tried to get the cigar going but he’d chewed it so much that it wouldn’t work. He swore and threw the cigar in the waste can. That guy spent enough on cigars to support a family of five.

  “We’ve been talking about it again lately,” he said. “We’ve been planning about really doing it at last. Do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think you can run this place for me while I’m gone, Johnny.”

  I slowly put my report down on his desk. I stuck my hands in my pockets and leaned back on my heels, staring down into his fat face. I felt like asking him if he was blowing a spoke out of one of his wheels. He’d been nice to me and all that and I’d been doing a good job, but I hadn’t expected anything quite so big.

  “I hope you know what you’re saying, Mr. Connors.”

  He grinned and rocked around in his swivel chair.

  “You can bet on that, Johnny.”

  I was pretty sure that he didn’t know but I wasn’t going to argue with him about it.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “There’s a couple of more things that I have to iron out before we discuss it in detail, but they’ll be squared away by tonight.”

  “I see.”

  He gave me a big grin and tapped his fingernails on the top of the desk.

  “I think you’d be making a big mistake to turn down my invitation, Johnny.”

  “I guess I would.”

  “So I’ll expect you?”

  I wondered about Janet and how she’d scream at me. She’d told me a lot of times that if I didn’t treat her right she was going to phone Connors and tell him what I’d done at the hotel and how I was living with her and a lot of other things.

  She could go to hell.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be there.”

  “Bring your swimsuit. You and Beverly can have another race.”

  “Okay.”

  We’d done that a few times, in the early dark of evening, racing each other out to the float about two hundred feet off shore. I’d always beaten her easily and I’d be sitting on the float, laughing at her, when she got there. One night she’d been very tired and I’d had to help pull her up on the planks. The moon had been out high and bright and the top of her suit had dropped down. For just a couple of seconds her breasts had been right there in front of me, firm and round and white. It’d been the only time that she’d interested me in the least but I hadn’t done anything about it. Bothering her, I figured, would be worse than starting a forest fire in a high wind.

  “Send Sammy Grick in, Johnny.”

  “Sure.”

  I waved at Connors and went out to the agents’ room. The place looked like a country school house, with short rows of lift-up top desks, hard cane chairs and a blackboard at one end.

  “Hey, Sammy,” I said. “The old man wants a pint of your blood.”

  Sammy got up, kicking the chair away from his desk. Sammy Grick was a skinny kid, around twenty-five, with a hungry face and huge black eyes. He always walked with a slight stoop, as though the wind was blowing at his back, and he made it his business not to smile more than once a day.

  “I’ll give him a whole quart,” Sammy said. “I got a ten last night.”

  Sammy was the only competition I had in the office. Abe Wulderstein’s father had left him a pot full of money and he was in the business for kicks. Jack Carter was going on sixty and he had arthritis in his knees so bad that he’d rather hang himself than climb a pair of stairs. Willie Dixon was shopping around for a job where it would only be necessary for him to continue breathing in order to make a living, and Roy Johnson was so old that he couldn’t see good, even wi
th thick glasses, and he kept getting the rates all screwed up.

  “So long, slaves,” I told them and went through to the waiting room.

  Most of the morning they’d sit there and gripe, why they hadn’t made this or that sale and why this bastard or that bastard wouldn’t pay his premium on time. They didn’t know what it was all about. They were camping out in a field of clover and they couldn’t see it for the weeds.

  I went up to the cashier’s window.

  “Hi,” Julie Wilson said.

  She got up from her typewriter and straightened her skirt. She had on a gray thing that hung on her hips like a snake’s skin and her red blouse was all bumps and movement as she came up to the window.

  “Big week,” she said and gave me my check.

  I looked at it; a hundred and six dollars after deductions.

  “Slow,” I said.

  She put her elbows on the counter, held her chin in her hands and stared at me.

  “You’re a real clown,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “But I’m proud of you,” she said seriously. “I’m really proud of somebody who came up from Clarke Street and made good.”

  I thought about what Connors had just told me in his office. She didn’t know how good I was doing. I was on the verge of doing so good that I was almost scared.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She stood up, stretching, and the front of her red blouse climbed right up in the air.

  “I got a new Ford that’s the nuts,” I told her. “How about Sunday at two?”

  I’d seen her a couple of Sundays and we’d gone down to the river swimming. I hadn’t had any luck, so this time I thought maybe we could drive out to some inn, find a nice quiet corner and break out a jug. Of course, I didn’t have much time even on Sundays, because Janet didn’t go for the long excuses and I had to keep thinking fast all the while. But I wasn’t worrying about Janet right then. I had something else on my mind.

  “Gee, I can’t,” Julie said. “Not Sunday.”

  “You should get out and relax on a weekend.”

  “That’s what I’m going to do, Johnny.”

  “Yeah?”

  She tossed her blonde hair and gave me a wet smile that would have floored two men.

  “At last I got myself a boyfriend,” she said. “An honest-to-God gentleman boyfriend.”

  I looked her body over carefully.

  “That hadn’t ought to be hard to do,” I said.

  “He works on the gas line.”

  “Must be from Oklahoma.”

  “Texas,” she said. “His name’s Billy Duke.”

  “Hell of a name.”

  “They all call him Dooder.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  We talked some more about it. She said that the gas line would soon be strung across the mountains and that this guy would be moving on. She’d only been out with him three times and already he wanted to marry her and show her how to ride horses in Texas and all that junk. I got the impression that she wasn’t so much in love with him as she was glad to find somebody she could talk to and who didn’t know more about her business than she did.

  “Of course he doesn’t know about the baby yet,” she said. “That might spoil it.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “it might.”

  I took the elevator down to the street level and went outside. The sun was clear and hot and the shade from the awning out front felt good. The five-and-ten had the beach balls out again and some kid was screaming at his mother because she was too tight to buy one.

  I went across the street and got into the Ford. It was a forty-nine, but it was in good shape and the red paint job looked like new. The fellow who’d owned it had put on a duel exhaust system and it snarled like a piece of cloth ripping on barbed wire when I shot it out into the traffic.

  I drove over to the apartment.

  It was hot in there, even with the windows wide open, and I could hear the water drumming in the shower.

  The sound of the water died to a whisper.

  “That you, Johnny?”

  I gave her a big laugh.

  “Expecting somebody else?”

  She gave me a laugh in return.

  “You know better than that, Johnny.”

  “Sure.”

  She was a good kid and I had to lie to her and I didn’t give a damn.

  “About that trip,” I told her. “We’ve got to break it off for this weekend.”

  I’d given it to her quick, right off the shoulder, and I expected her to yell at me. She didn’t.

  “That’s good,” she said. “Hand me a towel, Johnny.”

  I went to the closet and got a rough white towel off a shelf. I pulled the shower curtain aside and I saw her standing naked and wet in there. She took the towel and wrapped it around her tight little breasts and flat middle.

  “Be a hon, Johnny, and get me my robe.”

  I went out to the bedroom and pulled the robe out of the two-by-one hole in the wall. When I got back to the bathroom she turned her back to me, let the towel drop, and I slid the robe onto her.

  “Gosh, baby,” I said, “I didn’t mean to give you the business this week-end, but — ”

  “I said it was good, didn’t I?”

  “I know, but you were so high about it the other night when I suggested it,” I said. She still had her back to me and I put my arms around her, feeling her flat tummy. She leaned her head back and her hair felt wet against my shoulder. “You really don’t care, do you?”

  “No, Johnny.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “Is it?”

  She reached down and worked my hands loose. Then she turned around, slowly, until she stood there facing me. A tiny smile puckered the corners of her mouth and she blinked her eyes furiously.

  “A lot of things are funny,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You and me, Johnny — right from the start.”

  “I’m not laughing, baby.”

  I thought about the other night and how she’d cried in bed and how the prospects of her having a kid had froze me fast to the sheets. If she was going to laugh about that now I was going to get plenty sore at her.

  “I found myself a job today,” she said.

  “You don’t have to work.”

  She shook her head.

  “I want to work, Johnny.” She looked away and down. “I want to get back something that I’ve lost.”

  “Okay, but you won’t find it working.”

  “And I got myself a room,” she said, ignoring me. She tried to laugh but it broke off and fell away. “It’s right near the lunchroom. All I have to do is fall out of bed and I’m on the job.”

  “Well, suit yourself,” I told her. If she thought I was going to ask her to stay she’d made a left turn on a busy street. “You ought to know what you’re doing.”

  For just a moment she looked up at me, her mouth hurt and her eyes deep and dark. And, then, she was up tight, her fingers digging into my flesh, and she was telling me how it was with her and why it wasn’t any good for us.

  “I was so scared!” she breathed. “When you were sound asleep I’d sit up in bed and cry — it was so awful. I kept feeling the baby inside of me, getting bigger, and I hated you and I wished that I’d die. But when I found out that I was wrong, that there wouldn’t be any baby and I didn’t have to be afraid of that, I didn’t hate you any more. I tried to hate you and I couldn’t — and it frightened me.”

  I didn’t bother telling her so but she’d just pulled a two ton weight off of what was left of my nerves.

  “Listen!” I said. “Don’t cry any more, baby.”

  “Even after I called the office yesterday, I couldn’t hate you,” she went on. “I asked how I could get in touch with your wife and they said you were single and that you didn’t have any wife. I cried about that all afternoon.”

  “You shouldn’t do so much crying,” I told her. “I was only trying t
o get set with some money before we jumped off the cliff.”

  “It wouldn’t have cost any more to have lived married than it’s cost us this way.”

  I didn’t bother answering her.

  “You know that, Johnny, don’t you?”

  I shrugged and pulled myself loose. I walked over to the mirror and looked at my face. I’d have to shave before I went out to Connors.

  “When are you shoving off?” I asked her.

  She bit her lower lip and stared at the floor.

  “Right now. As soon as I get dressed.”

  “No hard feelings?”

  Her laugh was bitter.

  “You needn’t worry,” she said. “I won’t say anything to Mr. Connors about what happened at the hotel and I won’t cause you any trouble.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I — I love you, Johnny. That makes a difference.”

  She walked over to pick up the towel and the robe dipped apart in the middle. When she straightened up the robe split wide open and all I could see was her white body and her dark hair and her parted red lips.

  “Baby,” I said.

  After she’d told me about the kid, I’d been scared and timid and I hadn’t bothered her at all. But now she was all right and she was a woman and I was a man and we were all alone.

  “Johnny!”

  I ripped the towel out of her hands and tossed it over my shoulder.

  “Please don’t, Johnny!”

  I turned her around and pulled the robe down off her shoulders. It got tangled up in my feet but I kicked it loose and I picked her up. The hollows of her knees were warm against my hand.

  “I’m still leaving you, Johnny.”

  “All right.”

  I carried her into the bedroom.

  “Be careful, won’t you?” she begged as I put her down on the bed.

  “Sure.”

  I closed the venetian blinds and banged the door shut. The blue walls of the room became a murky gray. I watched her as I got out of my clothes. She lay there on the bed, not moving, her body full and alive and relaxed.