Blue City

chapter 11

I walked on tree-lined sidewalks beside broad lawns for five or six blocks, cut across a triangle of public park, and abruptly found myself in the slums again. They seemed to form a circular zone which surrounded the heart of the city, as if the money that was concentrated in the downtown banks and business houses was thrown outward by centrifugal force, skipping the rundown areas around the center and enriching the periphery. Now there were no more lawns and no more trees. The massed tenements shouldered in to the street and narrowed the sky. A drunk was sleeping noisily in a doorway, and in another a pair of dispossessed lovers possessed what they could of each other against the wall.

An all-night restaurant in the next block reminded me that I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before. There were no customers, and I went in and slid into an enclosed booth at the back.

“A couple of fried eggs,” I told the young man in the dirty apron who dabbled halfheartedly at my table with a wet rag.

“No eggs. All I got is fish and chips.”

“Make it fish and chips.”

He shuffled away, as if sleepiness was an element he waded through all night. My table was covered with checkered brown oilcloth, worn threadbare by many threadbare elbows. At the end of the table against the wall were a glass canister of sugar with a pouring spout, a bottle of vinegar, salt and pepper, and an unlabeled bottle of ketchup with a bloody mouth. A cockroach stepped out from behind the ketchup, gave me a quick impassive once-over, decided that I was of the Brahmin faith, and walked earnestly across the table on errands of his own. Somebody had left a newspaper on the bench beside me, and I picked it up and swatted the cockroach, permitting his soul to transmigrate into the body of a quartermaster.

The paper had been left open at the editorial page, and the title of one of the editorials caught my eye: “Our City, an Example to the Nation.” I read idly down the column:

“Pretty hot stuff, eh, Mac?” the waiter said over my shoulder. “I read that one myself.”

“You liked it?”

“Don’t kid me.” He set my plate in front of me and spat on the floor. “My old man and my old lady worked out at Sanford’s for the last thirty years. They’re gettin’ old now, and they make less than they did when they started. My brother was there for a while, till they broke his elbow with a lead pipe and threw him out of town. He was one of the foreign agitators they were talkin’ about in this story in the paper. If Bobby was a Communist, I’m Uncle Joe Stalin with bells on.”

“How does the story go over with people in general?”

“Those that want to believe it, believe it.” He gave me a knife and fork and pulled the vinegar into the center of the table. “Practically everybody that’s got any money in the bank and thinks he can squeeze some more. And all the goddam little bank clerks and salesmen and stenographers that go around suckholing their bosses. The rest of us take it for the crap it is. Christ, everybody knows who owns the paper.”

“Sanford?”

“You’re a good guesser. Coffee?”

“Yeah.”

“With or without?”

“With.”

He brought me coffee in a thick white cup, and shuffled away again.

When I was swallowing the last of my fish and chips, the door of the restaurant opened and somebody came in. On general principles I slumped down in my seat so that my head wouldn’t show over the back of the booth. It was just as well I did that, because the voice I heard was Joe Sault’s:

“You can give me that brief case now.”

“You’re damn right I can,” the waiter replied. “You think I like keeping stuff like that under the counter?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everybody in the insurance business carries a brief case, don’t he? I got a right to carry a brief case, don’t I?”

“So now you’re selling insurance? If the cops found that thing in here, it’d fix me.”

“No cop interferes with my business.” A coin rolled on the counter. “Here. Buy yourself a syringe and keep your nose clean.”

“Yeah,” the waiter grumbled. “That goes for everybody, Sault.”

“Mr. Sault to you, eh?” The door opened and closed.

“To hell with you, Joey,” the waiter said to himself.

I leaned around the corner of my booth and made sure that Sault was clear of the windows. On the way out I flipped the waiter a half and told him to keep the change.

From the doorway I saw Sault pass under a street light halfway down the block, walking jauntily with his black brief case swinging beside him. I followed him at the same pace until he had turned the corner, then walked faster to shorten the distance between us. When I reached the corner, he was about two hundred yards ahead of me, headed downhill towards Main Street.

I didn’t want to go downtown, where my friends the police were concentrated, but I decided to follow Sault. Perhaps he would lead me to Kerch, or to somebody else I’d like to know better. I could have caught him and tried to make him talk, but that had failed before. I was losing faith in the direct approach. And now that I had a gun I felt I could afford to wait a little.

At the next corner he went straight on across the street and down the next block. I crossed to the other side and moved up on him, ready to duck into a doorway if he turned his head. There were few pedestrians on the streets and even fewer cars, but Sault swaggered for his own benefit as if he were walking among admiring crowds at high noon, the local boy who had made good.

Someone tapped lightly on a first-floor window just above my head, and I recoiled as if a gun had popped. It was only a late whore holding out her heavy breast the way a butcher holds up a steak for the customer’s approval. I wagged my head and she jerked down her blind to keep out peeping toms.

A woman with a streetwalker’s jaded lilt in her step approached Sault from the opposite direction and stopped him under a street light. She put her hand on his arm in a gesture of appeal, but he brushed it off. She lifted her skirt, dug into the top of her stocking, and showed him something in her hand. He jerked his head in my direction, and I slid into the mouth of an alleyway. They crossed the street towards me, Sault walking ahead and the woman trailing along behind like a German wife. They seemed to be headed for my alley, and I retreated with my hand around the butt of my gun.

I squatted against the wall behind a big paper carton and heard the two sets of footsteps, one heavy and assured, the other quick and uncertain, coming down the alley towards me.

“O.K., Gert,” Sault said, “put up and you can have it. No money, no smokey.”

They had stopped before they came to me, and stood together in the faint light that reached them from the street. Their shadows lay along the dirty concrete in front of me, enlarged to heroic size. The woman’s shadow raised its elongated hand to its tall head, posed like a baroque saint in agony.

“I can pay you for what you give me now,” she said urgently. “If I pay you for last week, I won’t have any money left.”

“Sure you will, Gert. You can always make some money, a fine girl like you.”

“I want to go home,” she whispered. “I been pounding the pavements since eight o’clock. Give me a break, Joey. I couldn’t get to sleep for three nights now.”

“I want to give you a break. I’d love to give you a break. But I got expenses to meet, remember that. I don’t have capital to carry my friends on the cuff.”

She spoke now with a deathly coquetry, and her shadow huddled towards him. “If you give me just one, you could come home with me. I got to keep a buck to eat tomorrow. You used to like me, Joey.”

“Did I? Maybe I did. But I don’t pay for it, kid. Hell, sometimes I get paid.”

“Please, Joey.”

He pushed her away, and her shadow staggered soundlessly across the alley. I had a childish impulse to play Robin Hood, to hold him up and give her all the marijuana in the brief case. But in the long run it wouldn’t do her any good, and it wouldn’t do me any good at all.

“I got no more time to waste, Gert,” he said sharply. “Pay me the four dollars from last week and I’ll sell you two, cash on the line.”

“All right, you dirty Shylock.”

His shadow jerked and started to walk away.

“Joey, where are you going?” she cried in sudden terror. “Don’t go away. Come back. Please.”

“Pretty please. And I like you to call me Mr. Sault.”

“Pretty please,” she said desperately. “Mr. Sault.”

“And five bucks, eh?”

She went to him humbly and gave him what was in her hand. He clicked open the brief case and handed her a little package wrapped in newspaper. I watched them over the edge of the carton.

“Now thank me,” Sault said. “I didn’t like your crack.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sault,” she said, in a voice breaking with hatred and relief. “Thank you, Mr. Sault. Thank you, Mr. Sault.”

He turned on his heel and walked down the alley. She followed him like a vicious she-dog who hates and fears her master, still mouthing her thanks. Their shadows stalked them out, hardening and shrinking to life-size as they emerged into the street. The woman went one way and Sault went the other, walking more jauntily than ever. I followed Sault.

One block north of Main Street he turned left on West Mack. I crossed the street as soon as he was out of sight and came up to the corner cautiously. A block away on Main Street I caught sight of a policeman dawdling under a street light, but he paid no attention to me. When I looked around the corner in the direction Sault had taken, he had disappeared.

A hundred yards down the block a woman came out of a doorway, her raddled face lit into brief rosy youth by a red neon sign over her head which said, “Full Course Italian Dinners.” She hobbled mincingly towards me on high heels, and I went to meet her.

“Lonesome, friend?” she said as we passed.

“Yeah. I like to be lonesome.”

“O.K.,” she said wearily. “I was just asking.” She went on up the block like a sick old bird with a drooping tail.

I looked into the restaurant window, past a boiled lobster and a big plaster sundae on which generations of flies had left their marks, and saw Sault’s profile in a phone booth. He seemed to be arguing excitedly, like a man being asked to do something he didn’t want to do.

I moved away from the window and walked back to the corner to wait for him. In another minute he came out of the restaurant without his brief case, and walked rapidly in my direction. I left the corner, jumped into the first doorway I came to, and flattened myself against the door inside a triangle of shadow. He passed me on quick feet, his eyes fixed straight ahead in gloomy concentration.

I gave him a slow count of fifty, and stepped out of the doorway. He had almost reached the next corner. I recrossed the street and hurried after him, staying close enough to keep him in sight and far enough away to be unrecognizable if he turned around. He went straight on uphill towards the northside residential section. Up Lillian Street to West Farmer, across the little park at Farmers’ Square, around the corner at the First Presbyterian Church, and up Fenton Boulevard. We were coming into the streets where I had played when I was a kid, and all their names came back to me of their own accord. I passed the iron fence I used to vault over into the churchyard, and noticed how much lower it seemed.

Once we got on Fenton Boulevard, which was lined with elms and maples, it was easy to keep him in sight without being seen myself, though I had to stretch my legs to keep up with him. His broad-brimmed fedora and dark, form-fitting topcoat moved ahead of me down a corridor of trees, alternately lighted and shadowed. The pace he set made me breathe noticeably, but the chase took on a dreamlike quality, as if we were hustling down dark streets that existed only in my own mind. I had the irrational nightmare suspicion that I was hunting a man who was hunting another who would turn out to be me.

I noticed a house I had trespassed in when it was being built, and written my name in the wet plaster. It didn’t look like a new house any more. When I looked back to the street Sault was gone.

I stepped off the sidewalk onto the spongy lawns and ran after him. A long, black car crawled down a side street and turned the corner ahead of me in the direction Sault had gone. I instinctively stopped behind a bush, and, when the car passed under a street light, I knew why. Garland was at the wheel.

Two houses up from the corner a front door opened suddenly and threw a shaft of light across the porch where Sault was standing. He stepped inside and the door closed behind him.

Garland’s car crawled up the boulevard and out of sight. I stood in the dark, wondering about several things. I wondered, for example, why Joe Sault should go to my father’s house to visit my stepmother at four o’clock in the morning.