Shabby Street

by Orrie Hitt

  “What for?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I bought us another round and thought about it. A chippie. A real chippie. Just like the rest of them. Only she was honest. She had something to sell and you could either take it or leave it.

  “What do you do for a living, mister?”

  ‘I’m a farmer.”

  She took my right hand in hers and turned it over, looking at it.

  “You’re a liar,” she said. Her eyes were blue and steady. “I’ll bet there’s only one thing you ever farmed.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s have another drink.”

  “When you going up to your place?”

  “Right after this one.”

  “Okay.”

  She didn’t fool around with the drink like I expected. She put it away fast and stood up. After she got her coat from the rack I held it for her and she shrugged into it. For some reason I thought about that coat of mine Janet had worn out of the office, covering her nakedness. I wondered if I’d ever get it back. I decided I wouldn’t.

  We went out to the street and I told her I had a car and we could ride. She said, no, it was only a couple of doors away and we’d walk.

  She was wrong. It was the third door.

  “Look, mister,” she said, after we got inside the warm hall. “I’ve got to level with you. I hate this!”

  “You don’t live here.”

  “No. The man works nights. He never gets back until after eleven and — well, it’s all right. We can go under the stairs — there’s an opening there — and if we keep quiet — ”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I said, Merry Christmas.”

  She was silent for a moment and I could hear her breathing hard there in the darkness.

  “You knew,” she said. “You saw the line.”

  “Yeah. On your finger. Real white, like you’d just taken the ring off.”

  “I did, if it’s any satisfaction to you.”

  “Maybe it’s easier that way.”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I had a loose twenty in my right hand pants pocket and I wound my fingers around that.

  “You got somebody?” I wanted to know.

  “Kids. Two. A boy and a girl.”

  “And the old man?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I know it.”

  “Korea,” she said, wearily. “Dead — six months, almost. And they got his insurance all screwed up. They write me I’ll get it all at one time. What the hell good does that do?”

  I went over to the door and opened it. I took out my wallet and found another twenty and a ten. Then I closed the door and stuffed the three bills into her cold hand.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said and kissed her once.

  “Merry Christmas,” she said and cried.

  Then I left her and went out into the street and pulled the door shut.

  A sign in a store window said there were four shopping days left before the big day. I laughed and walked on. I didn’t have to worry about that.

  She could do it for herself.

  CHAPTER XX

  Christmas Eve

  I SHOULD HAVE gone home but it was too early for that. Beverly would be horsing around with the Christmas presents, wrapping them up, and she’d have the radio turned down low with the music soft. If I wanted to be entertained I’d have to sit in a corner, away from the tears in her eyes, and scratch my head with first one hand and then the other.

  Merry Christmas, baby. To hell with you. Spook around the house all the time, growing bigger every hour, and squall all you want. To hell with you.

  I got in the car and sat there watching the people in the street, under the green and red lights, walking with packages. Some of them had kids and some of them were alone and some of them walked so close together that you knew they weren’t just thinking about Christmas. They were thinking about that diamond ring, and the monthly payments, and how the jeweler could have the ring back if that wouldn’t do the trick.

  Rings, I thought, what was so important about a ring? A guy bought one, stuck it on a girl’s finger, and then asked her if it was all right. Maybe she was coy or a little afraid or a whole lot of both and she’d tell him they ought to wait. The guy would wait, feeling sick, and he’d wonder if he should have bought her a bigger ring, if that would have made it easier and sooner. Sometimes the guy would look around and he’d find another girl who didn’t need a ring, didn’t need anything at all except a little time. And maybe the girl would do some looking, too, and she’d stumble into a guy who didn’t have to give her a ring, a guy who wouldn’t take up a lot of her time.

  What’y know, I thought, I must be getting slopped. I rolled down the window and let the cold air sweep inside. Then I started the car and pulled out into the traffic.

  Merry Christmas, you stupid jerk.

  Half-way down the block I parked in front of a liquor store, got out and went inside.

  “Merry Christmas,” the clerk told me.

  He looked like a patsy if I’d ever seen one.

  “Sure,” I said. “And, now, little man, what would you like Santa Claus to bring you?”

  “Say, mister, you don’t have to get that way.”

  “Shut up and give me a bottle of Old Forester.”

  “Okay; okay.”

  I left him a ten and carried the bottle out to the car. I sat in there, watching the people again, and worked the cap loose. Usually I didn’t drink liquor but once in a while it does a guy good to change his style. The door on the sidewalk side of the car was jerked open.

  “Hey, how about a slug of that, bub?”

  I looked at the face, a middle-aged face with a week’s growth of whiskers and deep lines. His eyes were those of a man who walks a crowded street alone.

  “Sure,” I said and handed him the bottle.

  He took a long drink. His hands shook and some of it ran down and dribbled off his chin.

  “Thanks, mister,” he said, returning the jug.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He hesitated before closing the door.

  “You’re a good guy,” he said.

  That made one.

  I wiped off the top of the bottle and had a couple of snorts. The liquor was hot and it burned going down. I capped up the bottle and put it on the seat beside me. I had a feeling I was going to get lit up like a rocket on Fourth of July.

  I drove down the street, wondering what I ought to do. If I knew where Janet was I’d hunt her down and twist her arm until she unhooked herself from that dough. But I didn’t know. Maybe I’d never know.

  There were plenty of places outside of town where a guy could have fun. This time of the year there’d only be the loose ones floating around, the guys and dolls who wanted to whoop it up, the unhappy creatures who either didn’t have a home or didn’t want to go there.

  Like me.

  I drove real slow, swiping another belt of Old Forester. Hell, I shouldn’t be unhappy. Maybe I was in for a tight squeeze in the next couple or three weeks, but after that I’d have the good old world by the short stuff. It wasn’t like other years when I’d bought cheap wine and mixed it with beer for kicks, just because the rooms at home were so messed up I didn’t want to hang around there.

  I could remember my mother, when I’d been a kid, and how she hadn’t been able to make cookies or fruit cake and how she’d cried and cursed at the old man about it. The old man, I guess, figured the holidays as open season and he wound up every year in a series of blind staggers. One Christmas Eve he’d lugged home a pig’s head, tossed it on the kitchen table and told her to start making sausage. She’d flown into a rage, cursing him, and she’d gone off to bed. The next morning he’d been asleep at the table, using the pig’s head for a pillow.

  I circled the block, still wondering what I ought to do. If it hadn’t been so far I’d ha
ve driven over to Waymart and looked up that Trail of the Lonesome Pine singer. But it wasn’t worth the effort. She interested me just about as much as a dead policy holder.

  It was only a short distance to Clarke Street and I headed that way. I guess that’s where I’d been going in the first place, only I’d been putting it off, kicking myself around.

  Merry Christmas!

  There’s something about the end of the year, the phony forgiveness that a lot of people like to hand out, that sort of gets you. You get to thinking about that night when a lot of guys around you crapped out, when the mail didn’t come, when your first sergeant shot himself because he was sick and tired of it all. You think of the little blonde who lifted the twenty off the bar and did a Houdini through the girl’s room. You think of snow on the ground, of red-faced people plodding through the night and singing, and you remember how it had been for you when you were a kid and you sat in the dark and cried because there wasn’t anything at all. You keep thinking like that and drinking and the whole world suddenly seems sort of small and sad.

  You wish it was the second of January. Or April Fool’s day. Or almost any time except what it is.

  I parked in front of Julie’s house, on the opposite side of the street, and put the bottle back into action. There was a light in her window, a Christmas wreath with a red candle in the center of it, and I could see other lights beyond that. Small lights, all different colors, the kind they put on trees. Once in a while somebody walked in front of the tree lights, blotting them out, and I knew that it was Julie.

  I got out of the car and started across the street. But I didn’t go all the way. I just stopped and looked. She was in there and I wanted to be with her, but I knew that it wouldn’t be any good. She had the tree and her kid and she’d be thinking, maybe, about that lousy sergeant and the way he’d left her, alone, to pay the consequences of their fun. As soon as I got my boat bailed out I’d come back and take her for a ride, just like I’d told her. A long ride. One that would last us for a spell.

  There was still some liquor left so I had a real long one as soon as I crawled into the car. Then I drove on down the street and parked. Not in front of the house, but a few doors away. There were several old junks bumper to bumper in front and I knew that my brothers and their families were tearing things apart upstairs.

  I walked back to the house and up onto the porch. I could hear them all right. And they weren’t singing. They were fighting like a bunch of pack rats in a dump.

  “Hello, Johnny.”

  I looked down to the end of the porch, into the shadows. She was leaning up against a post, smoking. I walked on down to her.

  “Hi, Lili.”

  “Your family’s really raising hell up there,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You going up?”

  I thought about that, trying to flush the whiskey out of my brain so I could figure it out.

  “To hell with it,” I said.

  If I took the money up to my mother now they’d only get it away from her. They’d drink it up and when it was all over nobody would have anything left except the shakes.

  “I’m glad, Johnny.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She hunched her shoulders, pulling the coat in close. She flipped the cigarette into the yard and stood looking up at the sky.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The clouds under the moon looked gray and ugly and lonesome.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She moved around a little bit and when she finally stopped she was right up against me. The perfume back of her ears crept up over the collar of the coat and slapped me in the face.

  “Christmas is a hell of a time of the year, Johnny.”

  I agreed that it was.

  “It’s the one day that when you’re no good you know it. You think of all of the things you’ve shoved aside and you want to slit your throat.”

  “I’ll loan you a knife,” I told her. “I’ll even watch you do it.”

  She was just a chippie and I had half a snootful and I didn’t give a damn about her.

  “Must you be so cruel?” she wanted to know. She didn’t move away from me but she started to tremble and I could hear her crying. “Can’t you be human with me for once?”

  “All right. I’m sorry.”

  “You sound it.”

  “Say, what do you want me to do, get it engraved on a twenty dollar bill for you?”

  “Now you’re being nasty.”

  “Have it your way.”

  She tilted her head further back, resting it against my chest and she stopped crying. The moon hammered its way through the clouds and the whole night lit up.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said suddenly. “I’ll buy you a holiday drink.”

  I didn’t say anything. I could hear the racket upstairs and I thought of my wife at home and of Julie down the street.

  “There’s something I want to tell you, first,” she said, turning around. “You’re all wrong about your father. He’s just an — old fool. It was never him, Johnny. Never. And there isn’t going to be anybody else after tonight, not for a long time.”

  “How often do you tell yourself that, Lili?”

  Her face looked sad.

  “Every Christmas,” she said.

  She pulled my head down and touched her lips against my mouth. They started to move, opening up, and I could feel the hot flash of her tongue.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”

  I went.

  She had bourbon, without ice, and some ginger ale that was as flat as yesterday’s beer. I wished that I’d brought in the Old Forester but I was too tired to go out and get it. Besides, there couldn’t be very much left.

  “Fix yourself another one if you want,” she yelled from the bedroom. “I’ll be right out.”

  I poured a long jolt into the glass and went over and sat down on the davenport. I could hear the Reagans upstairs cutting the night apart. Once in a while I thought I could hear my mother swear, but I couldn’t be sure. My old man was laughing all the time and some of the kids were crying.

  Lili came out of the bedroom wearing one of those shortie nightgowns that no woman in her right mind would put on unless she had a sheet to go with it. There was just one light burning in the room, a table lamp with a weak bulb and a red shade, but I could see her fine. I could see so much of her as she came across toward me, cat fashion, that even the liquor I was drinking lost its jounce.

  “I wish you’d put something on,” I told her.

  She stood in front of me, right up close, smiling.

  “I’d only have to take it off again,” she said.

  I tried to look away from her but I couldn’t. I had no business being in there with her and I ought to get up and leave. She was a real pro, a flesh merchant, and I didn’t have to live out the rest of the night this way.

  “So long,” I said.

  I got up, spilling the drink, and started for the door. She let out a half strangled cry and grabbed me, hard. I tried to shake her off but she came in, pressing tight.

  “You’re a hell of a Santa Claus,” she said.

  My hands were on her shoulders, digging in. She moaned with the pain and jerked away. One of my hands slid down to where it shouldn’t go. I stopped hurting her then and she stopped moaning and there were just the sounds of our hard breathing in the room.

  “Turn off the light,” she said.

  I went over and turned off the light.

  The liquor snarled in my brain and my eyes hurt as I stumbled to the davenport. She was there waiting for me. Her hands were warm and soft and she wasn’t at all afraid.

  “Neither one of us is any good,” she said huskily.

  “No.”

  “Then we don’t have a thing to lose.”

  Her arms went around my neck, pulling me down there beside her. Her mouth was wild and alive and she bit me once or twice. My hands touched her and the fire fled
through her, growing bigger all the time, until it shot up into a sheet of flame that pulled the night apart.

  “Johnny!”

  “Damn you,” I said.

  The night belonged to us.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Homecoming

  OLD MAN CONNORS and his wife hauled back into town the day after New Year’s. I was at the office in Waymart, trying to get rid of a hangover, when Beverly phoned me the news.

  ‘They’re here in the apartment,” she said. “Dad said he’d like to see you right away.”

  “Okay.”

  “And — Johnny, let’s not make it too miserable, huh?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll have Martha fix dinner.”

  “All right.”

  I hung up and took an aspirin. It was a day off and nobody else was working. I’d driven over only to get the telegram. I’d have driven any place to get that thing. I’d been waiting long enough for it.

  I read it again.

  Mr. John Reagan, Provider Insurance Company,

  Waymart, New York.

  Suggest you call me New York office immediately relative ending personal feud.

  Cynthia Noxon

  I read it some more. I looked for a drink but there wasn’t any, so I sat down and laughed without it. Little Miss Moneymaker herself crawling like a snake in the hot sun. I picked up the phone and asked for her New York number. I sat back, feeling good, waiting for the kill.

  “Hello,” she said.

  The way she said it — no zip to it, just dead, like so many words written on a graveyard wall — I knew that she’d been sitting there alone, waiting, chewing her fingernails off up to the knuckles.

  “Well, bless your lovely thieving heart!” I told her. “Happy New Year!”

  “I was sure it was you,” she said, some of the deadness going out of her voice. Then, “Hello, Johnny Reagan.”

  “Hello, yourself.”

  “You got my wire, then?”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m paying for this call. Sure, I got your wire. You think I call up every jerk I know just for practice? Don’t give me any romance, baby. Just tell me what you want. Maybe I’ll listen and maybe I won’t. I get tired of listening real quick, these days.”