I conveyed this revelation to Naps and he was not pleased. He told Miss Melba, and she was less pleased, but began making her round of phone calls all over again, anyway. “Dat’s right, Sherm. It aint Austin. Austin is the young lady’s name. Her momma’s name is Polk. Miz Theron G. Polk. Thank you, Sherm, you’re a sweet old daddy.” When she had finished all of the calls, I went to her and personally apologized for inconveniencing her. She made light of it, satisfying me that there was no favor which she would not do for a friend of Naps Howard. She loved him like a mother, she said; there was not a finer colored gentleman on earth. “Aw, Miss Melba,” Naps protested.
They bantered with each other and took no further notice of me. I discarded the idea of going out and trying to persuade Dall to come inside; he would be too difficult to persuade and I was in no mood for arguments. I wandered restlessly around the spacious foyer, inspecting various calendars and signs and business cards (the latter of lawyers and physicians) tacked to the walls. “Don’t ask for green stamps,” said one home-fashioned sign. “Because the only green thing around here is your money.” In a lower corner some customer had penciled: “Don’t ask for no blue stamps neither, because the only blue thing around here is my balls.” NO PROFANITY IN THIS HOUSE responded another sign. There was a small and discreet ad for “Knights, the man’s prophylactic,” and, conveniently nearby, a long wall-mounted dispenser, requiring a quarter; on its white enameled surface someone’s ballpoint pen had scrawled an admonition: “Youll get the clap if you don’t strap this rubber wrap into your lap,” and beneath that a sight-rhyme in pencil by a dissenter: “I’d rather have the dose, Than wear one of those.” Officially the dispenser bore the usual printed hypocrisy, “For the Prevention of Disease Only” which someone had amended by scratching out the “Dis.” At the deep, nether end of the foyer I came across a card which advised: “After a night on the town, why not sober up at Campbell’s Deluxe Grill. Free Alka Seltzer until six a.m.” The omission of the question mark after “Grill” irked me; I always chafe at such illiteracies. I took out my pen and was about to emend the oversight when a plump black hand shot out and grasped my arm and almost hauled me off my feet through a door and into a hallway, where I was embraced by the owner of the hand, a Negro girl no taller than myself but twice as thick, who heaved: “You waitin for me, chickabiddy mans? Well, come on!” and, deaf to my panicked squawks, dragged me on through the hall and into the room where the phonograph was jiggling and churning in a rhythm to which she began to dance with me, exclaiming, “Oh, you the richest-lookin man I ever saw! You mus be jus made of money!”
Out of step and out of wits, I stammered, “I don’t want to do this. I—”
“My, but you in a hurry I Well, let’s go, then!” Again I was all but jerked out of my shoes, and spirited off to a side room, hardly more than a closet, containing nothing but one small cot. She let go of me for an instant, long enough to close the door and shuck her scanty garment, then she turned and, seeing that I was doing nothing but trying to get around her and open the door again, besieged, “Here, let’s us take off that Sears sucker coat.”
She succeeded in manhandling me out of my jacket and was fumbling around with my belt when the door opened and there was liberating Miss Melba, who snapped, “Bernice! How many times do I got to tell you? Doan come out less I pushes the button! Shame on you!” She snatched me from the jaws of that vice and led me back toward the front of the house, leaving poor naked Bernice pouting behind us, on the verge of tears. “We got a bead on yo lady friend,” Miss Melba informed me. “One of the boys spotted her and her momma headin into a place over on Hooper Street. Naps’s waitin on you out front.” She walked me to the front door and said, “Y’all come back and see us soon’s you get the chance. Night-night.” I thanked her for her help and wiggled into my coat while running down the front walk to the car. Naps had the engine going, and impatiently pulled out before I had the door closed.
“What a time to fool around,” Naps reprimanded me. “Yeah,” Dall joined in. “What the hell?” I started to explain, but Naps began to fill me in on what was up. Vinny, a cab driver, had seen two women, one young, one old, both brunettes, walking down Grand Avenue, and had followed them until they turned into Hooper Street and entered a place at Number 55. It wasn’t a hotel; Vinny wasn’t sure what the place was, but he knew it wasn’t a hotel, it wasn’t a motel, and it wasn’t a brothel. Maybe a tourist home, he had suggested. No sign or anything out front. Did he say any more about what they looked like? I asked. “Yeah, sounds like them, all right,” Naps said, “He said the young one was slim and pretty, the old one was fat and mean-lookin.”
Knowing his way around, Naps got us to Hooper Street quickly and we found Number 55, a squarish and unhomely building which, contrary to what Vinny had said, did indeed have a sign over the door: Home Hotel. There was something perfectly familiar about this place to me. And to Naps too, who said, “Shit. This just one of them ofay cathouses. Vinny got bad eyes.” I suggested that perhaps Vinny got the number mixed up, or gave the wrong street, or that Miss Melba might have misunderstood him. “He said Fifty-five Hooper,” Naps repeated wearily. “This is Fifty-five Hooper. It’s all we got to go on. Mi’as well make sure. What I’ve heard bout that Miz Austin, she such a penny-pincher she’d stay at the cheapest place they could find.”
I got out of the car and asked Dall if he wanted to go with me, but he said he wasn’t fixin to go into no white whorehouse neither, so I told them I would probably be right back and entered the building. A thick-set oaf with a wizened Jewish face was sitting behind the desk, reading a racing form. “Pardon me—” I said, but without looking up at me he jerked his tough thumb brusquely in the direction of the stairs. “Would you happen—?” I tried.
“Just go on up,” he snarled impatiently, still not removing his eyes from his tip sheet.
“Would you happen to have a Miss Austin or a Mrs. Polk registered here?”
He looked up at last and regarded me tip to toe before replying, “Ask me something easy. We got Miss Smith and we got Miss Jones and we got em all. I don’t know who all we got, pal, to tell you the truth. Why don’t you just crawl up there and find out?”
“You don’t understand. I’m not—”
“I don’t understand nothing, pal. I just work here. I just sit here and watch the door.”
“I take it this is not a legitimate hotel, then?”
“Don’t be insulting. If you want a room, we got lots of rooms. With and without.”
“Do you have a registry? I just want to see if—”
“Pal. Look. You trying to find someone? Okay. So just walk up those stairs already, all right? I can’t help you. Sorry.” He returned to his tip sheet.
So I gave it up and returned to the car and we went back to Miss Melba’s. This time Dall condescended to go inside with us. He said he’d just as soon sit in there as all by himself out in the car. Naps introduced him to Miss Melba, explaining that Dall was a policeman. “Police?” Miss Melba demanded, indignant. “Naps, what you mean, police? I done paid all my hush money this week, and I can prove it!” But Naps hastily explained that it was the Little Rock police and Dall was simply trying to help me find Margaret. Still Miss Melba eyed Dall suspiciously, and was not very cordial in her attitude toward him. But the big, kindly old lady started the wheels turning again, trying to contact Vinny and check his information. We hung around. In a vague sort of subliminal way I was hoping that we might never find Margaret, and then I could slip away and have a romp with Bernice.
Vinny, we eventually learned with dismay, had bagged a long haul, somebody who wanted to go to Little Rock, and he might not be back for a couple of hours or more. Wasn’t that just too dandy? Two o’clock had already passed. Naps and Dall and I hadn’t waked up until nearly noon, Naps and I because we had been drunk, Dall because he had been on the night shift, and thus we still had some energy left, but we couldn’t last indefinitely. We sat down to a game of gin rummy w
ith Miss Melba for a fourth. All of the customers had gone except for those who had elected to spend the night by spending ten dollars more. I lost eight dollars after a dozen or so rounds and threw in my hand, retreating to a side chair for a doze. Dall was hot, and played on, eager at this chance to rob some niggers legitimately. I drowsed off and on, capturing an occasional short-subject dream in which Margaret was cast as a red-haired Hot Springs prostitute and I was a badged and badgered member of the vice squad, hot on her tail. I mean trail. The last and worst of these cinema chimeras Naps shook me out of. Vinny was back, he said. He said I had been mumbling aloud, “Got you now, you witch!” Vinny was back and had been contacted again, he said, and his information had been untangled: it was not 55 Hooper Street after all. It was 59 Hooper Street.
Off we went again, doggedly. Light was seeping into the sky above the village of Morning Star to the East. We passed through town to Hooper Street and found, two doors down the street and not fifty feet away from the previously visited address, Number 59, which truly, as Vinny had said, seemed a strange dwelling, without any sign or anything out front. It was large enough to be a tourist home: fifteen or twenty rooms in a cuboid chunk of fake English Tudor with stuccoed and half-timbered sides, and a screened porch girdling it all around. In the early morning light it did not look ominous or sinister or even ludicrous like the old Austin house but instead it looked…well, perhaps institutional. Institutional? Then it’s a private sanitarium, maybe. A shame.
Naps stopped the car at the curb in front of it. “Now what?”
I said. “That’s just what I was going to say,” Naps said. “But since you asked it first, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you just sorta tippytoe up there and see if them doors’s locked?”
“Nothing doing,” I said. “What if they aren’t locked? Are we going to go in and prowl around all over the place, checking every room? Not me.”
“I’ll go,” Dall volunteered, holding up one of his feet for our inspection. He had on crepe-soled shoes. “Got a flashlight?” he asked Naps, and Naps produced one from the glove compartment. Dall took it, got out of the car, and disappeared into the morning twilight.
Watching him go, I remembered that it had been at this same time of early morning that Dall had sat with Margaret beside the pond, when she asked “Why have we come here to this water?” and he had comforted her and provided his chest for her to sleep against. Now he was entering a place where again she—supposedly—was sleeping. Naps dozed off at my side, and I ruminated. In the course of his sermons Naps had told me that he thought I was too detached to be involved with other people, but now I was involved, wasn’t I? I was trying to help, wasn’t I? “The common herd values friendships for their usefulness.”…And we were all using each other. In these intervals of reflection I came upon something easily recognizable and even expected but which I held up and turned over in my mind as though I were trying to extract some unique significance from a commonplace article: the breadth of my feeling for her was, if not love, at least a kind of fervent compulsive sentiment born partly of bare lust but mainly of lost desperate affinity and kinship. The world was stomping all over me, this wise boy napping at my side had told me; but if there were anybody really getting stomped on, it was her. It takes one to know one, and I saw now why Dall was helping too, and why Naps was helping too: we formed a perfect Quartet of Stompables, a foursome of abused, oppressed, rebuffed, and buffeted nobodies, losers, children outside the gates, eternal wanderers and wanters, tumbleweeds languishing in the anguish of a search for identity. And we had to look out for our own. We had to band together into a mutually protective junto and vanquish our demons, our archtyrants, the grin domineering specters and malfeasors who thwarted our striving. And we had to start winning, somehow, especially Margaret, because she was the lone and defenseless female. We would win, by dingies, even if we had to go in there and whisk her right out from under the old hen’s wing, which is what I resolved to do if nothing else worked.
Eventually Dall returned. It was full daylight now, after eight o’clock. “They’re in there all right,” he said. I asked him how he knew. “I saw her,” he said. He got back into the car, this time not in the rear seat but up front with us. He sat in silence for a long moment. Then he said, “I talked to her.” Naps and I badgered him for a full explanation, and he said that it was just a plain boarding house and that he had prowled noiselessly through it, trying doors, opening unlocked ones, skillfully picking the locks of some of the locked ones, flashing his light for an instant into the sleeping faces of the occupants, without incident, until at last he had found the mother, who was sleeping alone in a bed beside another bed which had been slept in but was now empty, and then Dall had roamed on through the house until he came to a screened sun porch and saw there a glow from the tip of a cigarette and a figure huddled into a deck chair, and it was Margaret, and he sat down and talked with her. She did not want to go back to Little Rock. She did not want to be in the play. She did not want to leave her mother. She did not want to see Slater, or Dall, or me, or anybody again. Dall argued with her, as quietly as he could, but then it was time for her to return to her room, because her mother would be waking up soon. Dall appealed to her to come with him to the car, but she would not.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 165