Shabby Street

by Orrie Hitt

  “Not here, Johnny. When the auditor got finished with the books he found some irregularities but he also, found a sixty-four hundred dollar surplus. That’s the money she turned over to me. And that’s the money I just gave back to her.”

  “Hot damn!”

  “She’s in love with you,” Connors told me again. “I asked her to come up here but when I offered her the money she didn’t want it. She told me how you’d been overdrawn at the bank that day — she had misjudged the account, Johnny — and she felt sick about it. She wouldn’t tell me why she just didn’t go down and redeposit it the day you had the trouble.”

  I remembered how I’d slapped her around the office, cursing her and the way she’d ran out wearing my overcoat.

  “Women are nuts,” I said.

  He shrugged and returned to his desk.

  “She may have done you harm, Johnny, but I’m sure she meant only good,” he said. “You’ll have to take it from there.”

  “How come you gave it to her?” I wanted to know.

  “Just now, I mean? What if I hadn’t been able to raise the dough?”

  “But I knew you would,” he said, smiling. “I talked to Miss Noxon yesterday afternoon. I could see nothing but success in her venture. You needed money and she needed your business.”

  “It didn’t have to happen,” I said, growing cold all over. “I shucked it out for peanuts and all the time I could have sailed through it, easy.”

  “You’re out of it, Johnny. That’s worth something.”

  “Yeah. It’s worth about twenty grand that I’m out of.”

  “Ten years from now you’ll never know.”

  “Who’s kidding who?” I asked. “Twenty-four hours after I’m dead I’ll still be seeing all that money!”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “Like a broken back.”

  “In case you want to see the girl,” he said, “she’s working out of town at a motel. Shady Lawn. Know where it is?”

  “On the old Lime Road.”

  He nodded and sucked on the cigar.

  “Couple of old folks own it. The girl says they want to sell and she seems mighty interested in it. The new highway’s going through there, you know, and it’ll be a real hot spot. You might stop over there and see her.”

  “I’ll see her in hell,” I said.

  He kept talking about the motel, the money that could be made and the steady life it would be, until I got sick of it. After he’d repeated the same things three times I told him good-bye and jumped out of the door.

  I went down to the street, got in the car and pointed it in the direction of Route 6, the main road west. I flipped the radio switch and got an earful of “Turkey in the Straw” and nineteen different reasons why I should buy a Family Protective Insurance Policy. I decided that Cynthia Noxon wouldn’t like it one bit when I started bleeding her customers through the mails. All I had to do was get out there and buy myself a bunch of stamps.

  I drove real close to the restaurant where Julie Adams worked. I didn’t even slow the car.

  I didn’t think of anybody, really, except Janet and the screwy things she’d done. How the hell can a woman love a man and still throw him to the cannibals?

  I was almost to the city line when I noticed the envelope on the floor. Even before I picked it up and opened it I knew what was in there. Sixty-four hundred bucks. No note. Just the money. Money with perfume on it.

  When I got to the intersection I was knocking off fifty. I didn’t have to slow up. Route 6 was sharp left but old Lime Road was straight ahead and the light was green.

  Shady Lawn, he’d said. A motel. Cripes, that was a deadfall if I’d ever heard of one. A guy could work his legs off to the knees on a deal like that. People coming all hours of the nights and knocking holes in the walls and getting sick like dogs. People swiping your towels and bending the keys when they used them for bottle openers. People keeping you so busy you didn’t have much time for anything else.

  I slowed, thinking about Janet and how she was going to start yelling when I walked in. I grinned and kicked the gas pedal on the Ford. She could only yell just so long and I could sit that out. Then I’d tell her. All of it. The way it had been and the way it could be. Later, after we’d talked it out, we could do something else. Something real personal.

  Like holding hands.

  Or something else you haven’t read about in this book.

  The End

  If you liked Shabby Street check out:

  Dolls and Dues

  I

  IT WAS the hundred and fourth day of the strike. That is, it was a hundred and four days if you counted Saturdays and Sundays. And when you work for a hotel you count everything.

  The afternoon was growing late, the weather cold. All day long gray clouds had hung over the city, threatening snow. It was only October and already you could see the frost of your breath in the air, feel the paralyzing chill that crept through the soles of your shoes from the sidewalk and moved upwards into your legs.

  “I don’t know why the union doesn’t quit this thing,” Felix Morse said. He said the same thing almost every day. “We’ve lost more wages now than we’ll ever get back.”

  Felix and I had stopped on the corner of Ninth and Grand. We worked together on the picket line, from three until five, walking to the right and around the block, carrying weather-beaten signs. The Penn George Hotel occupied nearly all of the area, with the exception of a clothing store on the Eight Street side. Since it was nearly five, and not enough time remained to make another tour, we decided to call it quits.

  “You got your car, Paul?”

  I told him I had. Actually, it wasn’t my car; it belonged to my father. It was a good-looking wagon, a new Merc, and until the night before, it hadn’t had a scratch on it. Now, however, the left front fender was a mass of crumpled tin.

  “Drink?” I asked Felix.

  Felix, who was in his early forties, was married to a German refugee. They had three children of early school age and the strike had been rough on Felix, as it had on most of the hotel help.

  “I get ashamed of you buying me drinks,” he said.

  “Aw, forget it, will you?”

  We stood our signs against the side of the building and walked down the street toward the Melody Bar. I thought I knew how Felix felt. He was just as proud of his ability to pay his own way as he was of the fine rolls he baked. Since the strike he had lost both.

  “You’re lucky you’re not married,” he told me. “Look at this jacket! See the holes in it, Paul?”

  I had noticed the jacket before. It was blue, made of some thin material, and the cuffs badly frayed. There were holes in the elbows.

  “If this weather keeps up,” I said, “we won’t have anybody to work the picket line.”

  There were only a few guys left, anyway. Of the more than two hundred who had walked off the job the first day, less than thirty were still active. Some of the men had drifted into jobs at the cork company while others had been absorbed by other hotels. All of the waitresses had helped us picket the first couple of weeks but now they, too, were gone. A few had hired out with restaurants. A few had gone south. Two, it was said, had given up prostitution as a sideline and gone to bed in earnest. One of these, a redhead, now looked to be pregnant.

  “By golly,” Felix exclaimed as we approached the Merc, “you sure got it all racked up, didn’t you?”

  “Well, it still runs.”

  “I’ll bet your father raised hell.”

  “He doesn’t know about it yet.”

  Felix nodded. “You’d better get it fixed before he does. I heard him telling the chef one day that it was the only new car he ever owned.”

  Everybody at the Penn George Hotel knew my father. His slightly stooped shoulders, graying hair and tired face were as familiar to those in the kitchen as they were to the employees in the lobby or the general offices upstairs. He was an agent for the Great Northern Life Insurance Company and
the salary savings policies which he sold in the hotel had been a big help to him on his quotas. Since the strike, however, many of the policies had lapsed and he’d lost income. He worried about the payments on the Merc, frequently shouted at my mother about the large grocery bills and castigated me for having joined the strikers and made the hotel manager, Mr. Sloan, angry with him.

  “Cost a lot to get it repaired,” Felix said, inspecting the damaged fender. “Hundred dollars, maybe more.”

  “Closer to three hundred.”

  He laughed and we continued down the block.

  “But you’re insured.” It was a statement of fact. “I never heard of an insurance man who wasn’t.”

  Felix was only partially correct. Of course the car was insured because of the finance company, but there wasn’t any way a claim could be filed. I’d lent the car to my girl friend, Ellen Morris, to drive to Riverhead the night before and on the way back she had struck the rear end of a large truck near Candlewood. There had been no damage to the truck and, fortunately, the driver had not insisted on calling the police, nor had he made a record of the license number of the Merc. I hadn’t known until later that Ellen’s driver’s license had expired. It was up to me now to raise the necessary funds and have the car fixed before my father got a good look at the smashed fender.

  At the Melody Bar a girl in a faded pink uniform came over and took our order for beers. Several men at the bar, mostly workers off the day shift at the cork company, turned to stare at the movement of the girl’s hips. Neither Felix nor I gave her a second look. She was a bum who had, before the strike, worked in the hotel laundry. She could be had, any hour of the day or night, for the price of a shot of gin.

  Several minutes later a few more of the strikers entered. Two of them, one a bellhop by the name of Digger and the other, a pot rassler whose name I couldn’t remember, joined us at the table. The rest drifted up to the bar, seeking information from the cork workers about the availability of jobs in the plant.

  “You single, too?” Digger asked me.

  I nodded.

  “It’s hell on these married guys,” he said. “I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

  The conversation was always the same. Sometimes one of the union representatives hung out at the bar or visited the picket lines and then the talk would be about higher wages, and the end of the strike, and a lot of other things that never seemed to happen. When we were by ourselves, though, we discussed those who had given up and sought other jobs or — and this was more interesting — speculated about the future of the hotel.

  The Penn George Hotel was one of the largest hotels in Georgetown, a city of slightly more than two hundred thousand population. It was one of a coast-to-coast chain. Had the Penn George been privately owned the strike would have been settled early, perhaps during the first week, but the chain could afford a long fight. The hotel now stood vacant, guarded by private detectives. Some people said it would reopen in the spring with a non-union crew recruited from within the chain. Others said that both the hotel and the workers were on the verge of going broke. It was hard to tell which version was correct, but one thing was sure — all of the former employees were busted flat.

  Business at the Melody Bar had been hurt by the strike, too. For a number of years the bar had been the official gathering place of the hotel employees, transient guests who were on the loose and the call girls who worked not only the Penn George but other hotels in the area. Since the strike, however, few of the employees had any money to spend, the guests had sought other accommodations and the girls had moved farther uptown.

  I had been luckier than most. A twenty-year endowment policy my father had taken out for me at the age of five and on which I had paid the premiums since my sixteenth birthday, had matured on the day the strike was called. The amount, slightly more than a thousand dollars with the settlement dividend, had seemed large at the time. Now, only a hundred days later, it was nearly all gone, the fender on the Merc was destroyed and Ellen and I hadn’t bought a stick of furniture.

  “It’s funny,” Felix said, taking one of my cigarettes, “but you never see that — what’s her name — any more.”

  “You mean, the coffee shop hostess?” Digger suggested, grinning.

  “The blonde, yes.”

  None of the others seemed to know what had happened to the girl. They didn’t let it die down.

  “She went to Colorado,” I said. “Denver. She got another job with the chain.”

  “She was a nice girl,” Felix decided, loosening his jacket. “Very nice.”

  The dishwasher leered. “Everytime she bent over to crumb off a table I dropped half of the hotel’s dishes.”

  I ordered another round of beers and paid for it. They talked about the girl some more, how her legs looked, and her eyes, and the way she had bumped her hips around. I barely listened to them. I wanted to forget about Sharon. She had nearly ruined it for me with Ellen. Or, rather, I had almost ruined it for myself.

  I had been on the job as hotel storekeeper for less than a day when I met Sharon Mays. She had come down to the cellar for some napkins and my first impression of her had been one of awe. Her body, unlike Ellen’s, was voluptuous and unhidden and her hair was a rich, white blonde. After that I’d taken the napkins up to her every morning but she hadn’t paid any attention to me until she’d seen me in the new Merc. I’d met her out at the fair grounds, near the parking lot, and she’d thanked me when I’d offered her a lift into town. Two evenings later while Ellen was at evening classes — Ellen thought that additional dictaphone training would assure her of a better job in the law firm where she worked — I took Sharon out dancing. At the hour when I was supposed to be picking Ellen up at the school Sharon was taking me to her room.

  I was never in love with her; I was in love with Ellen Morris. I’d been in love with Ellen ever since high school, long before I’d gone into the army, and we looked forward to getting married. When the widow Morris died the previous year Ellen had held on to the apartment, saying that it was near my folks and that it would be a nice place for us to live. To be honest about it, I got from Sharon the one thing that I couldn’t get from Ellen. It was a more than satisfactory arrangement until one night, while we were parked at the rear of the hotel, Ellen had caught us in, as the newspapers would say, a compromising position. This had finished it off for me with Sharon but, two nights later, following an almost constant siege of tears and fights, Ellen ceased to be a virgin.

  “You know something?” Felix was saying. “I think if I had a car I’d pack up my family and go south. A good baker can always get a job down there. What’s the use of hanging around here?”

  Felix had been with the Penn George for fourteen years and I was of the opinion that he wouldn’t leave the city if he could.

  “What would your wife say to that?” I asked him.

  He stared thoughtfully into his beer. “She wouldn’t mind none, Paul. She says — but I tell her she shouldn’t say such things — that Germany was better than this.” He lifted his glass and frowned. “She’s not well,” he said. “And, besides, the alcohol at the cologne factory where she works bothers her hands. She wouldn’t have to work if they’d settle this strike. Does anybody think it will ever be settled?”

  “It’s the union,” the dishwasher replied. “If you’ve got a strong union, you can get somewhere. We made a mistake and got in with a bunch of bastards. All they care about is our dues.”

  “That’s all any union cares about,” Digger agreed. “Nobody can tell me different. How about that, Paul?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Paul’s father is in a union,” Felix said. “A new one. They don’t have any trouble.” Nothing like this stuff.

  “And they don’t get anything, either,” I reminded him.

  Frequently, my father and I talked about the unions. Not the Teamsters or the United Mine Workers or those you read about in the papers but the unions which affected us;
the union that represented the workers of the Penn George and the union that had just started to find its way into the Great Northern Life Insurance Company. The insurance union had promised the agents higher collection commissions, guaranteed renewals — a subject which I knew nothing about — less pressure from district managers, lower retirement age and longer vacations among other things. So far, the agents had received none of these. On the other hand, my father pointed out, the union was still too new to have strength. The company, which employed some twenty thousand agents across the country, had its home office in Georgetown and the organization of these agents into local groups required time and patience.

  “Another beer,” I told the waitress. “And bring some pretzels.”

  Felix buttoned his jacket. “I don’t like drinking on you, Paul. None of us should be doing it. We don’t know if we can ever pay you back.”

  “Sit down,” I told him, laughing. “I’ll send you a bill.”

  We talked about the strike breakers the hotel had hired the first week of the strike and then let go.

  “I guess they didn’t like Paul beating that one fellow up,” Felix decided. He slapped me on the arm. “Boy, you really clouted him.”

  “Well, he had no business letting the air out of my tires.”

  The cops had broken up the brawl but not before I’d knocked three of the fellow’s teeth out and smashed his nose. The judge, when they’d hauled us down to court, had told me that I had been within my rights but that I shouldn’t be so handy with my fists in the future.

  “They sure let them go in a hurry after that,” Felix said. “I guess those fellows didn’t want to get messed up.”

  It was getting dark outside. I looked at the clock on the wall — nearly six. Ellen rode the bus down from the heights and she usually arrived at her apartment about six-fifteen. Sometimes I had supper there with her and sometimes I ate at home. Since this was Thursday, payday in the factories, I decided that I could go home. My father worked late on Thursdays, which was also account day at the office, and by the time he reached the house he wouldn’t be able to tell a smashed front fender on the Merc from the neighbor’s ten-year-old Ford. Both my mother and I kept after him to see a doctor about his eyes but he ignored us, saying that it was partly old age and partly strain from working on his debit book. My mother worried when he collected at night — he said he had to, or he’d never get his money. His debit was in the lower section of the city, along the river, where the street lighting was bad and the alleys were dark. Mom said that he’d either step in front of a car some night, or fall down a flight of darkened stairs, and that this would be the end of him.