The Drowning Pool

Chapter 9

The building was pink stucco, big and new and ugly. It had a side entrance with “Romp Room” lettered above it in red neon. The wall was blind except for the door and a couple of round screened ventilators. I could hear the noise of the romping from the outside: the double-time beat of a band, the shuffling of many feet. When I pulled the heavy door open, the noise blasted my ears.

Most of it came from the platform at the rear end of the room, where a group of young men in white flannels were maltreating a piano, a guitar, a trombone, a trumpet, drums. The piano tinkled and boomed, the trombone brayed, the trumpet squawked and screeched. The guitar bit chunks from the chromatic scale and spat them out in rapid fire without chewing them. The drummer hit everything he had, drums, traps, cymbals, stamped on the floor, beat the rungs of his chair, banged the chrome rod that supported the microphone. The Furious Five, it said on his biggest drum.

The rest of the noise came from the booths that lined three walls of the room, and from the dance-floor in the middle where twenty or thirty couples whirled in the smoke. The high titter of drunk and flattered women, the animal sounds of drunk and eager men. Babel with a wild jazz obbligato.

A big henna redhead in a shotsilk blouse was making drinks at a service bar near the door. Her torso jiggled in the blouse like a giant soft-boiled egg with the shell removed. The waitresses came and went in an antlike steam, and all the whiskies came from the same bottle. In an interval between waitresses, I went up to the bar. The big woman smashed an empty bottle under it and straightened up, breathing hard.

“I’m Helen,” she said with a rubber-lipped public smile. “You want a drink, you find a seat and I send a waitress to you.”

“Thanks, I’m looking for Pat.”

“Pat who? Does she work here?”

“He’s a man. Young, big, with curly dark hair.”

“Friend, I got troubles of my own. Don’t you go away mad, though. Try the waitresses if you want.” She took a deep breath when she finished, and the egg swelled up almost to her chin.

“Two bombs, beer chasers,” a waitress said behind me.

I asked her: “Is Gretchen here?”

“Gretchen Keck, you mean? The waitress jerked a flat thumb at a tall girl on the dance floor. “That’s her, the blonde in the blue dress.”

I waited till the music stopped, and crossed to an empty booth. Some of the couples stayed where they were in the center of the room, arms locked, face to face. A Mexican boy in blue jeans and a white shirt stood with the tall blonde. Gretchen was as light as the boy was dark, with a fair skin and a pull-taffy pompadour that made her taller than he was. They couldn’t stand still. Their hips, pressed flat together, moved in a slow weaving round and round until the music started and quickened their beat.

While she danced on a dime by herself, he moved in a circle about her, turkey strutting, flapping his arms like a rooster, leaping and stamping. He moved his head and neck in the horizontal plane, Balinese fashion, danced squatting on his heels like a Cossack, invented new gyrations of the hips, body and feet jerked by separate rhythms. She stood where she was, her movements slightly mimicking his, and his circle tightened about her. They came together again, their bodies shaken and snaked through their length by an impossible shimmy. Then she was still on his arched breast, and her arms fell loose. He held her, and the music went on without them.

In the booth behind me, a woman called in bracero Spanish upon the Mother of God to witness her justifiable act of violence. She thrust herself out of her seat, a gaunt Mexican girl with hair like fresh-poured tar. From her clenched right fist, a four-inch knife-blade projected upward. I moved, bracing one hand on the seat and pivoting. My left toe caught her instep and she fell hard, face down. The spring-knife struck the floor and clattered out of her reach. At its signal the dark boy and the blonde girl sprang apart, so suddenly that the girl staggered on her high heels. The boy looked at the knife on the floor and the woman struggling to her knees. His eyes watered and his bronze face took on a greenish patina.

Slouching and woebegone, without a backward look, he went to the woman and tried awkwardly to help her rise. She spat out words in Spanish that sounded like a string of cheap firecrackers. Her worn black satin dress was coated with dust. Half of her sallow pitted face was grimy. She began to weep. He put his arms around her and said, “Please, I am sorry.” They went out together. The music stopped.

A heavy middle-aged man in a fake policeman’s uniform appeared from nowhere. He picked up the knife, broke it across his knee, and dropped the blade and handle in the pocket of his blue coat. He came to my booth, stepping lightly as if he was walking on eggs. His shoes were slit and mis-shapen across the base of the toes.

“Nice work, son,” he said. “They flare up so fast sometimes I can’t keep track of ’em.”

“Knife-play disturbs my drinking.”

His red-rimmed eyes peered from a face that was gullied by time. “New in these parts, ain’t you?”

“Yeah,” I answered, though I felt as if I’d been in Nopal Valley for days. “Speaking of my drinking, I haven’t been doing any.”

He signaled to a waitress. “We’ll fix that.” She set down a trayful of empty glasses grained with the leavings of foam. “What’ll it be?”

“A bottle of beer.” I disturbed the bar whisky. “Ask Gretchen what she’s drinking, and if she’ll have one with me.”

The drink and Gretchen arrived simultaneously. “Helen says no charge,” the waitress said. “Your drinks are on the house. Or anything.”

“Food?”

“Not this late. The kitchen’s closed.”

“What, then?”

The waitress set my beer down hard so that it foamed, and went away without answering.

Gretchen giggled, not unpleasantly, as she slid into the seat across from me. “Helen’s got rooms upstairs. She says there’s too many men in this burg, and somebody has to do something to take the pressure off.” She sipped her drink, rum coke, and winked grotesquely over the rim of the glass. Her eyes were naïve and clear, the color of cornflowers. Not even the lascivious red mouth constructed with lipstick over her own could spoil her freshness.

“I’m a very low-pressure type myself.”

She looked me over carefully, did everything but feel the texture of the material my coat was made of. “Maybe. You don’t have the upstairs look, I admit. You can move, though, brother.”

“Forget it.”

“I wish I could. I never get scared when something happens, it always come over me later. I wake up in the middle of the night and get the screaming meemies. God damn that babe to hell.”

“She’s there already.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. These Spanish babes take things so hard, it’s getting so a girl can’t have fun any more.”

“You do all right,” I said. “If Pat can be believed.”

She blushed, and her eyes brightened. “You know Pat?”

“He was my buddy,” I said, almost gagging on the word. “In the Marines.”

“He really was in the Marines, then?” She seemed surprised and pleased, and was sharper than I thought.

“Sure. We were on Guadal together.” I felt just a little like a pander.

“Maybe you can tell me.” She bit her lower lip and got lipstick on her teeth. Even her front teeth were bad. “Is it true what he says, that he’s a secret agent or something?”

“In the war?”

“Now. He says him being a chauffeur is only a blind, that he’s some kind of an undercover man.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“He tells so many stories, half the time I don’t know what to believe. Pat’s a swell joe, though,” she added defensively. “He’s got a good brain, and he’ll go far.”

I agreed, as heartily as I could. “Yeah, a good guy. I was hoping to see him tonight. There’s a business opportunity in our organization, and he could get in on the ground floor.”

“A business opportunity?” The words had a magical four-color advertisement quality, and she repeated them with respect. The cornflower eyes saw Gretchen in an apron freshly laundered in the new Bendix, cooking for Reavis in the tiled kitchen of a new one-bedroom G.I. house in the suburbs of what city? “In L.A.?”

“Yeah.”

“He might be at my place. He waits for me in the trailer sometimes.”

“Can you leave now?”

“Why not? I’m a freelance.” The patter went on like a record she’d forgotten to turn off, but her thoughts were far ahead, on Gretchen in a new phase: attractive young wife of rising young executive Reavis.

She stroked the fender of my car as if it was an animal she could win by affection. I wanted to say, forget him. He’ll never stay long with any woman or pay his debts to any man. I said: “We’re doing good business these days. We can use a boy like Pat.”

“If I could help to get him a real good job—” she said. The rest of it was silent but unmistakable: he’d marry me. Maybe.

A few blocks off the main street I turned, as she directed, down a road lined with large old houses. The eroded asphalt rattled the tools in the trunk of the car. It was one of those streets that had once been the best in town. The houses were Victorian mansions, their gables and carved cornices grotesque against the sky. Now they were light-housekeeping apartments and boarding houses, wearing remnants of sleazy grandeur.

We went up an alley between two of them, to a yard oppressed by the black shadows of oaks. There was a trailer under the trees, on the far side of the yard. In the light of the headlights I could see that its metal side was peeling and rustling like an abandoned billboard. The littered yard gave off an odor of garbage.

“That’s our trailer there.” The girl was trying to be brisk, but there was a strain of anxiety rising in her voice. “No lights, though,” she added, when I switched off the headlights and the engine.

“He wouldn’t be waiting in the dark?”

“He might have gone to sleep. Sometimes he goes to sleep here.” She was on the defensive again, describing the habits of a large and troublesome pet whom she happened to love.

“You said ‘our trailer,’ by the way. Yours and Pat’s?”

“No sir, he just visits me. I got a bunkmate name of Jane, but she’s never home nights. She works in an all-night hamburger up the line.”

Her face was a pale blur, swallowed completely then by the shadow of the oaks. Their sharp dry leaves crackled under our feet. The door of the trailer was unlocked. She went in and turned on a light in the ceiling.

“He isn’t here.” She sounded disappointed. “Do you want to come in?”

“Thanks.” I stepped up from the concrete block that served as a doorstep. The top of the door was so low I had to duck my head.

The little room contained a sink and butane stove at the end nearest the door, two narrow built-in bunks covered with identical cheap red cotton spreads, a built-in plywood dresser at the far end cluttered with cosmetics and bobbypins and true-romance comic-books, and above it a warped, dirty mirror reflecting a blurred distorted version of the girl’s room, the girl, and me.

The man in the mirror was big and flat-bodied, and lean-faced. One of his gray eyes was larger than the other, and it swelled and wavered like the eye of conscience: the other eye was little, hard and shrewd. I stood still for an instant, caught by my own distorted face, and the room reversed itself like a trick drawing in a psychological test. For an instant I was the man in the mirror, the shadow-figure without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.

“It’s kind of cramped,” she said, trying to be cheerful, “but we call it home sweet home.”

She reached past me and closed the door. In the close air, the smell of spilled rancid grease from the stove and the sick-sweet odor of dime-store perfume from the dresser were carrying on an old feud. I wasn’t rooting for either. “Cozy,” I said.

“Sit down, sir,” she said with forced gaiety. “I’m out of rum and cokes, but I got some muscatel.”

“Thanks, not on top of beer.”

I sat on the edge of one of the red-covered bunks. The movements of the man in the mirror had the quickness and precision of youth, but none of youth’s enthusiasm. Now his forehead was bulbous like a cartooned intellectual’s, his mouth little and prim and cruel. To hell with him.

“We could have a little party if you want,” she said uncertainly. Standing in the full glare of the light, she looked like a painted rubber doll, made with real human hair, that wasn’t quite new any more.

“I don’t want.”

“Okay, only you don’t have to be insulting about it, do you?” She meant to say it in a kidding way, but it came out wrong. She was embarrassed, and worried.

She tried again: “I guess you’re pretty anxious to see Pat, eh? He might be down in his place in L.A., you know. He don’t usually go down in the middle of the week, but a couple of times he did.”

“I didn’t know he had a place in L.A.”

“A little place, a one-room apartment. He took me down one week end to see it. Gee, wouldn’t that be funny if you came all the way up here to find him and he was down in L.A. all the time.”

“That would be a scream. You know where it is, so I can look him up tomorrow?”

“He won’t be there tomorrow. He’s got to be back on the job, at Slocum’s.”

I let her think that. “Too bad. I have to get back to L.A. tonight. Maybe you can give me his address.”

“I don’t have the number, but I could find it again.” Her eyes flickered dully, as if she hoped to promote something. She sat down on the bunk opposite me, so close that our knees touched. A pair of nylons hanging from a towel-rack above the bed tickled the back of my neck. “I’d do anything I could to help,” she said.

“Yeah, I appreciate that. Does the place have a name?”

“Graham Court, something like that. It’s on one of the little side streets off North Madison, between Hollywood and L.A.”

“And no phone?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Thanks again.” I stood up. She rose like my shadow, and we were jammed in the narrow aisle between the beds. I tried to move past her to the door, and felt the touch of her round thighs.

“I kind of like you, Mister. If there was anything I could do?”

Her breasts were pointed like a dilemma. I pushed on past. The man in the mirror was watching me with one eye as cold as death. “How old are you, Gretchen?” I asked her from the doorway.

She didn’t follow me to the door. “None of your business. A hundred years, about. By the calendar, seventeen.”

Seventeen, a year or two older than Cathy. And they had Reavis in common. “Why don’t you go home to your mother?”

She laughed: paper tearing in an echo chamber. “Back to Hamtramck? She left me at Stanislaus Welfare when she got her first divorce. I been on my own since 1946.”

“How are you doing, Gretchen?”

“Like you said, I’m doing all right.”

“Do you want a lift back to Helen’s?”

“No thank you, sir. I got enough money to live on for a week. Now that you know where I live, come and see me sometime.”

The old words started an echo that lasted fifty miles. The night was murmurous with the voices of girls who threw their youth away and got the screaming meemies at three or four a.m.