Hard Rain Falling (5 page)

“The place is empty?”

Denny looked at Jack. He began to grin. “Empty as hell, man. What’er we waitin for? Let’s ditch the car an
bust in!
”

“Sure to be money laying around someplace,” Jack said. “What a fuckin
break!
”

The Weinfelds were not rich and the house was not a “mansion,” but the boys had no experience at all with the really rich, and so could not tell the difference. Weinfeld owned a small shoe store specializing in work shoes and odd sizes. He made a comfortable living, and his home was a comfortable one; in 1947 it would have been worth about $20,000. It was surrounded by hedge, lawn, and trees, and there was heavy, ornate-looking furniture in all the rooms; deep, wall-to-wall carpeting in most of the downstairs, and one very large, extremely beautiful blue Persian carpet in the living room, its border ornate designs in white, maroon, gold, and blue. The boys stood in the middle of this carpet, looking around themselves at the most splendid home they had ever seen outside the movies. Jack noticed that most of the windows in the house had the thick double-draperies that could be used in blackouts, and so he pulled them and turned the lights on. There was a large fireplace, and over it a mantel adorned with small delicate glass figurines of animals; and above that there was a picture—an oil painting—of an attractive, pleasant-looking woman in a white dress with a blue sash. The picture had its own little light above it, which went on with the wall lights when Jack flicked the switch. (The switch bothered him; it made no sound, no
click
, but the lights went on anyway.)

“My God,” Jack said.

“What’d I tell you?” Denny said proudly. “Aint it a mansion? We ate lunch up in his room. He’s got a room all to himself up there, with his own desk, and all kinds of crap all over the walls. He must be a lonely fucker, er why would he come down to the poolhall?”

For a while they forgot all about their purpose in breaking into the house, and explored.

“Holy cats,” Jack said. “Did you see this
shower?
One sprayer up on top,
four
on the sides. Man, they must stand in there and just plain go out of their minds. An the control aint two handles, it’s one that goes from cold to hot.”

The master bedroom was on the main floor and in the center was a large double bed, with gilt posts and a white headboard. All the furniture in the bedroom matched and there were sets of pictures on the wall. On the bed was a coverlet of gold satin, and Jack could not resist throwing himself onto the bed. “Man!” was all he could say. He lay on his back and looked up at the crystal light fixture in the ceiling.

Denny began at last to go through the drawers in the high bureau. “This guy must have fifty pairs of socks,” he commented. In one top drawer he found cuff links, an old worn gold ring (which Denny pocketed), and assorted trinkets, but no cash. Jack got up and helped him, going through the woman’s vanity table. Then both of them examined the suits in the man’s closet, finding only ticket stubs and a few pennies.

“Where’s that bar?” Jack wanted to know. “Maybe there’s some booze. I could use a drink.”

“It’s in the basement. Let’s go.”

The party room had a red tile floor, a fireplace (
another
one! Jack thought with amazement), brightly colored cushions on metal furniture, and a polished wood bar at one end, with three leatherette-capped stools. Jack sat at the bar and Denny went around behind. There were several bottles of liquor visible on the backbar, and Denny discovered a small refrigerator, which proved to be about half-full of bottled beer. Denny held up one of the glistening bottles and said, “Lookie. West Coast brand. What fuggin cheapskates. What’ll it be?”

“A boilermaker, my good man.”

“Lessee,” said Denny, examining the bottles on the backbar; “do you want Scotch, bourbon, rye, or maybe gin?”

Jack giggled. “Make it Scotch and rye. I ain’t never had either.”

Denny took two pilsner glasses, put them on the bar, half filled them with a mixture of whiskies, and then added beer from one of the bottles, which he then tipped up and drained. He and Jack tapped their glasses together and drank.

“Whew. Jesus H. Christ!” Denny said after a moment.

Jack grinned at him expectantly. “Let’s have some more.”

“You know, this has been a hell of a night, man. We get laid, race all around hell in a Caddie, an here we are drinkin expensive booze. Do you reckon this is how the rich folks live?”

“If we only had some money,” Jack said. “I wonder where they keep the spare cash.”

“Have a nother drink, baby.”

“I wonder when they’re comin home?”

“Aw hell, I seen the kid Wednesday or Tuesday. They won’t be back for a week. Hey, we can stay all fuckin night.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Have another couple of drinks, find the money, sleep, an cut out just before dawn.”

“What if we find a couple thousand bucks! Hey, we could go to Mexico, too!”

“Lemme try some of that gin now,” Jack said. “I never drank any of that, either.”

Billy lay in his bed in the Couch Street hotel and half-listened to a dim, fragmented conversation between a man and a woman in the next room. He was familiar with the subject of the conversation; he had heard it a thousand times at home: The war was over, the easy West Coast money was being pulled out of Negro reach, prices were going crazy, finance companies were getting stonyhearted again...Billy grinned bitterly. It’s like they wanted the war back, so they could make more money.

The man in the next room was trying to convince the woman that they should move to Detroit, where he was certain he could get work; she, on the other hand, did not want to leave her mother’s family. The argument went back and forth dully, and Billy stopped hearing it. He had his own troubles.

He got out of bed and took off his jockey shorts and went to the sink in the corner, turning on the hot-water tap. A thin stream of water fizzed out, barely lukewarm, and Billy took his washcloth out of his bag and gave himself a sponge bath, standing on the hotel towel and drying off with his own thick, fluffy towel. It always made him feel good to get clean, made him feel sharp and aware, and he smiled at himself in the mirror, and then, for fun, showed his teeth in a chimpanzee grin. Still naked, he brushed his teeth. They were small, well-formed, beautifully white, and he was very proud of them, as proud as he was of the small corded muscles of his arms and legs. He was skinny, bony-shouldered, yes, but it was deceptive. He watched the muscles of his forearms as he scrubbed his socks against each other and then rinsed them out; muscles he had built by doing pull-ups and the rope-climb at school; and for a moment he regretted having left school. But the feeling did not last; if he lacked the easy comfort of going to school, he had something far better—his freedom of action. That was more important than reading all those books about the white world that were such lies even
he
could see through them. This was much better.

Except for the thing that had wakened him from his sleep, the eye-opening, sudden awareness that he had been hustled the evening before. It had come to him with the impact of a kick in the chest: that pair of guys at the Rialto had cut him up, and done it easily. But what had made him sit up, fully awake and completely angry, was that he had let it happen. He was no mark. How had it happened? What had he been thinking about?

“
Stupid!
” he hissed at himself as he got dressed. Pure case of buck fever, so excited by the idea of playing there, playing the best in Portland, that he forgot all about hustling, just automatically pretended that everybody in the world was just like him and wanted to play their best, for themselves. He could just see those two guys, in the men’s toilet or someplace, splitting his money. Laughing at him. Well, they had a right to laugh; he had been a fool.

The voice of the man in the next room rose in sudden, wall-shaking anger: “
But what we goin do when Cholly Chill gets heah?
”

Billy made a face. Southern accent, very heavy; Billy could imitate that kind of accent easily. The guy probably came West for the easy war money, and now he was worried about what to do when winter came. Too bad for him; go back home and pick cotton and eat hog jowls, or whatever the hell they did in the South.

Do you know how lonely you are?

Billy was startled; it was not quite a voice, more than a thought.
What
, he thought,
lonely? I been lonely all my life. You mean homesick
. He laughed aloud, but it was a sick laugh, fake and unconvincing.

He had been in Ben Fenne’s an hour, practicing straight pool, when Denny and Jack Levitt came in. Looking at Denny’s bland Irish face, Billy wondered if he had been in on the hustle the day before. He
did
look tore-up and unshaved, as if he had spent a wild night on somebody’s money, and that was enough to make Billy suspicious of him, even though he came right over to Billy and laughed and said good morning, and introduced his friend Jack Levitt. This one was
something else
, too, the meanest-looking kid Billy had ever seen, with cold dead blue eyes, a head too large for his already large muscular body, blond curly hair, ruddy skin—just plain mean-looking, that was all. Billy shook his hand and felt his stubby fingers take a good hold on his own, and yet not squeeze too hard like a man trying to impress people. Billy decided he was afraid of Jack Levitt, and would do his best to have nothing to do with him.

“What’s on the fire this morning?” Denny asked him. “You want to run up to Rialto and make some gold?”

“I’ll play you, here and now,” Billy said.

“I’m broke,” Denny said. “Anyway, you’re too good for me.”

“I don’t go up to no Rialto for a while,” Billy said definitely. “You know what happened to me up there. Don’t you?”

“Sure,” Denny grinned, “you got your ass waxed. So what? There’s plenty of guys up there you can beat.”

“What’s in it for you?” Billy asked. “Why you bein so
kind
to me?”

“We make side bets on you, man. You win, we win.”

Billy had to laugh. “On your
guts?
Against your own
friends?
”

“Money’s money, baby. We need all the loot we can get.”

“Well, I found a home, you know? And I’m gonna hang around here for a while; see if I can’t get up an
honest
game.”

“You’re chickenshit,” Levitt said shortly.

Billy went back to his practice, turning his back on the other two. It made the skin on the back of his neck crawl to do it, but he had no choice. He shot carefully, and had to concentrate to keep his fingers from shaking. He heard them talking behind him, and then finally they went away.

It was Saturday, and toward noon the poolhall began filling up. Many of the customers were in their teens, and these congregated around the two small snooker tables in the back, playing pink-wild snooker or sitting in the theater seats and making side bets, or just sitting watching. The keno game had four players, all men in middle age, and the rest of the tables and the bar were crowded. There were two horse-pinball machines behind the telephone booths at the inner end of the bar, and both had players and circles of watchers around them. The radio was on to a baseball game, adding to the babble of voices, clicking balls, the electric clunking of the pinballs, and the noise of the ventilating fan. The long dark room was blue with smoke and moist with humidity. Billy saw that men coming in from outside were wet, although it hadn’t been raining an hour before. Rain, that was one thing he hadn’t gotten away from; it rained in Portland almost as much as in Seattle. Of course to Billy rain was interesting for only one thing: it slowed down the cloth, and he had to shoot a little harder than usual to get the balls to perform properly.

After a while, John the houseman came up to Billy and said, “You got to get off the table now.”

A pang of fear ran through him, and a split-second afterward embarrassment and anger; he knew he wasn’t being kicked off the table because of race, but because there were players waiting, and it was policy to kick off practicers when there were two- or three-handed games waiting. But he could not help feeling that first reaction, and when he turned to John and shrugged, he saw in his eyes an expression of understanding, almost wariness. John said quickly, “Players waitin.”

“Yeah,” Billy said. He paid his time and put his cue away, and then, idle, went over and stood watching the keno game.

Keno is played on a standard billiard table; at one end is a wooden platform raised almost an inch above the level of the felt, and along its front edge is a brass ramp. There are four rows of holes in the ramp, spaced alternately, and each hole is numbered. In the exact center of the platform is a starred hole. Any player whose ball lands in the starred hole gets a keno and the point value of the ball. If the ball or balls land in any other hole, the player gets the value of the hole, and if the number on the ball matches the number of the hole, he also gets a keno. The game is played with a regular set of fifteen pool balls, racked at the other end of the table. In the game Billy was watching, each keno was worth fifty cents from each player, and the player with high score when all the balls were on the rack got a dollar from each of the other players, less any kenos. Each game ended with a flurry of calculating and arguing over the score, but Billy saw at once that there was plenty of money changing hands. It looked like a game worth getting into.

Keno looks like a luck game, which is its chief attraction to poor players, but as Billy stood and watched, now drinking a bottle of Coke, the players with the best stroke always seemed to come out ahead. There was more to the game than met the eye; it was not enough to ram your cue ball into another ball so that it banked around the table and ended up on the platform, although that is just exactly what most of the players did. Players came and went; at one point, as Billy watched, there were six of them, and a man with the placid face of an idiot stood by the blackboard keeping score and talking about the game like a sports announcer. But the good players, without seeming to, always managed to play their cue ball back to a bad position for the next man, and instead of just getting a ball up onto the platform, played it so that it knocked into other balls, rearranging them on the platform and making higher scores. Also, the good players seemed to know the precise strength a ball needed to roll up to its keno hole and stay in it, without bobbling out or flying off the end of the table. Still, it looked easy to Billy, and he itched to get in.