The Kind One (18 page)

“She was still going to high school. So I went over to her school and waited around. Blood was coming through my shirt and it was colder than shit and windy and it was starting to snow. Then she come out, and I told her what happened and how I needed to get outa town, and you know how broads are, she started crying and begging me not to leave her. I told her I didn’t have no choice and I needed some dough. She only had something like two bits on her, but she said she knew where her old man kept some dough stashed away at home.

“I waited around till she come back with the money. It was about forty bucks. She brung a suitcase too. She was planning on going with me. I told her that wasn’t a good idea, but I promised I’d come back for her when the heat was off.

“So I went down to the train station. All the time I was still bleeding and feeling like I was about to pass out. But I was just scared to death of them wops. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between me and them and still be in America, so that’s how I wound up here,” and he laughed. “All ’cause of them anchovies. And I don’t even like fucking anchovies.”

“You ever see her again? Your girlfriend?”

“What do you think?”

There were some guys in the other corner of the steamroom and suddenly they started laughing at something. We looked at them, and they were dim in the steam, faded like an old photograph, and suddenly I had this feeling as though it was a hundred years in the future and everybody in the steamroom was long dead, and Darla was dead too, and Dulwich, and Sophie, and everybody else in the world and every dog and cat and horse and cow and fish and bird, so why did anything we said or did or thought or felt really matter?

“I heard some shit,” said Bud. “About you and Darla. Up at the lake.” I started to say something, but he held up his hands to stop me. “You don’t have to splain nothing to me. I know you and her ain’t up to any monkeyshines, ’cause you never would do that to me. Plus you’re too smart. But you got any idea who mighta started this shit?”

I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. I shrugged.

“Well, I’ll find out. Eventually I always find out everything. But understand something. This ain’t about you and Darla. It’s about politics. Politics ain’t just like when you’re electing a mayor, it’s all the time and everywhere. People see you rising in the organization, so they wanna throw in a banana peel and hope you slip on it. I just thought you oughta know.”

“Okay, Bud. Thanks.”

“I’m leaving town for a couple days. On business. Maybe you could take Darla out someplace. Show her a good time. She’s been hiding out in her room with a bottle ever since Thursday night. That ain’t healthy for her. She’s turning into a regular boozehound.”

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

   THAT NIGHT I dreamed I was pissing my name in the snow. Since I wasn’t sure what my name was, I was paying close attention, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, it was like I was able to write my name but not read it.

A dog was barking, but then it stopped. I looked out toward the half-frozen river.

The buildings of the great city across the river rose black and jagged, seeming more like mountains than buildings. The starving dog I had seen on the ice was gone. I realized it must have broken through.

Panic surged through me. I ran out on the ice. It was clear like glass. I looked down and in the dark water I saw Vera Vermillion.

She was naked. She was on her back. She was looking up at me. Her auburn hair was floating around her head in a snaky tangle. The current was carrying her, and her fingernails were clawing at the ice and making white streaks in it. Shouting her name, I ran to keep up. But she was moving along faster and faster, till finally she was borne away. I felt like I was about to burst with grief. I fell facedown on the ice, and began to cry.

After a while I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. It was my mother.

She was young, maybe twenty-five. She had coppery hair and light-blue eyes. She was smiling at me.

I sat up. She was wearing just a thin summer frock that left her arms bare, and I said: “Aren’t you cold?”

“No. Are you?”

“No.”

“Don’t cry about the dog. It’s all right.”

“It didn’t drown?”

She shook her head. Her face was so beautiful, I couldn’t get enough of looking at it. I noticed a faint, crescent-shaped scar on her left cheek. “What happened there?” I asked.

But she just smiled a little, and shook her head again, and laid a finger on my lips. An overpowering drowsiness possessed me. I lay back down, and my eyes closed. I was curled up on the hard ice of a wintry river, but I felt as comfortable as if I were inside on a soft rug in front of a blazing fireplace. I was basking in the warmth of
her.

   DARLA DIDN’T LOOK like somebody that had been on a five-day bender. She came down the stairs in a curve-hugging white silk gown with a halter neck and patches of black beads over the left breast and left hip. Three plump pearls dangled from each earlobe, and she was wearing a pearl bracelet on her left wrist.

“New dress?” I said.

“Mm hm. Joan Crawford wore a dress just like this in
Letty Lynton.
”

Anatoly, Bud’s eight-fingered butler, held the front door open for us. “You are pretty as princess,” he said to her. “On snowy night. In St. Petersburg. Long ago.”

“Why, thank you, Anatoly,” said Darla with a gracious princess-like nod.

Teddy Bump and Tommy were hanging around outside, smoking and passing a pint of Haig & Haig back and forth. Tommy looked pasty-faced and haggard; even though they used to fight all the time, he’d taken the death of Goodlooking Tommy hard. Teddy glared at us from under his crooked eyebrows.

“Now you boys behave yourselves,” said Darla as we walked past.

Teddy looked like he was about to bust he wanted so badly to say something, but all he did was throw his cigarette down and grind it out under his shoe.

I opened the door of my Packard for Darla and she hitched up her gown and got in. We drove down the sloping driveway to the front gate. Willie Cooney was sitting in a chair reading the funnies with a flashlight. Everybody called him Willie the Coon, though not usually to his face, since he heartily hated Negroes. He had a nose that looked like it had been broken about a dozen times and a jutting jaw and shoulders a yard wide. He’d spend all night at the gate, and I knew there was at least one more guy somewhere out there in the dark patrolling the walls; Bud had brought in extra guys to guard the house when he got back from Lake Arrowhead.

Willie gave us a lazy wave and hit a button, and the tall iron gate rattled open.

We drove down the hill and across Franklin and continued south. It was nearly midnight, and there wasn’t much traffic. Los Angeles was mostly a town that went to bed early.

“Ever notice something funny about Teddy’s eyebrows?” I said.

“Sure. They’re pasted on.”

“They’re fake?”

“Yeah. And he wears a wig and false eyelashes too. Bud told me about it. He’s bald as a billiard ball all over his body. He was born that way. Some kinda rare disease.”

“No hair on his arms, or legs, or—?”

“Nowhere. Not even down around his you-know-what.”

We both had a good laugh about it. Now Darla had me pull into a filling station to buy her some Lucky Strikes. When I returned to the car, my heart jumped as I heard a gunshot. But it was just a backfire from a red Buick moving slowly by on the street.

Darla touched my hand to steady it as I lit a cigarette for her. She didn’t seem to have been drinking, which I was glad of. She was in a good mood, because she was going to sing tonight.

The place we were going was on Adams Boulevard, a little south of downtown. She said it was one of the first joints she sang in after she’d arrived from Aurora. I asked her what it was called but she said it didn’t have a name.

We crossed San Pedro. We were in a neighborhood of once-fine houses that had mostly gone to seed. Now Darla told me to pull over.

“That’s it,” she said, nodding at a gloomy mansion that didn’t seem to have a single light on inside.

“I don’t think anybody’s home,” I said. “Or maybe they’ve already gone to sleep.”

Darla laughed. “They’re in there. And they’re not asleep.”

We were lit up from behind as another car parked. A very dressed-up man and woman got out of a long white Marmon and walked toward the mansion. Darla and I followed.

The couple looked a bit odd, since the woman was about a head and a half taller than the man. We all went up the front steps, and the man knocked on a heavy wooden door. A panel was pulled back, and the stern face of a Negro appeared.

“Open sesame,” said the man in a booming deep voice as the woman giggled.

“Well, if it ain’t Earl and Shirley,” said the Negro.

“Hello, Otis,” said Darla.

The Negro’s face was split by a big grin and two gold teeth gleamed at us.

“Darla,” he said, and opened the door.

We stepped inside. It was nearly as dark inside as out. By the light of a lone candle, I saw that Otis looked like a character out of
The Thief of Baghdad.
He was wearing a turban, a loose silk blouse, and baggy silk pants, and had a wide curving sword hanging from his side. He was about six and a half feet tall.

“Little Brother told me you was coming,” he said.

“How have you been?” said Darla.

“The same. Everything been zackly the same round here cepting you ain’t been here but now you back here everything zackly the same.”

We walked into a cavernous room lit only by a few candles, the ceiling barely visible in the darkness. The floor was covered in colorful Persian rugs, and all the windows were hidden behind heavy purple drapes. There were several low sofas and low tables, and plush pillows were scattered about on the rugs and people sat or reclined on the sofas and among the pillows. The air was thick with the smoke of cigarettes and reefers.

A handsome young colored man, wearing a white dinner jacket, a red shirt, and a black bowtie, sat at a baby grand playing a lazy jazzy tune. He gave Darla a wink and a wave.

We sat down on one of the sofas. Three waiters, all colored and all dressed like Otis, were moving among the customers with trays of drinks. Darla ordered a cherry bomb, and I asked for the same, whatever it was.

I looked over the clientele. Several Negro men were cuddled up with white women, one hefty Negro woman was sitting on a portly white man’s lap, and two white women were passionately smooching. Darla was enjoying my obvious amazement.

“You ever seen a joint like this before?” she said.

“Nope. Looks like you and me and Earl and Shirley are about the only regular couples here.”

“Take a look at Earl and Shirley and tell me what they’re doing.”

They were sitting on another sofa. Earl was lighting Shirley’s cigarette; now he applied the flame to a big cigar sticking out of his mouth.

“Earl’s lighting a cigar.”

“Unh unh. That’s Shirley. Earl’s the one in the dress.”

I looked again. I could see it now. A guy dressed up like a broad and vice versa. I laughed.

The waiter came back with our cherry bombs, which turned out to be glasses of champagne with cherries in them. Darla ate her cherry, then asked for mine. As I handed it over, Little Brother, the proprietor of the place, appeared. He was a short, light-skinned colored guy dressed like his waiters and doorman except he wasn’t wearing a turban. His head was shaved and he had a gold earring in his right ear. He hugged Darla and kissed her on the cheek then presented me with a very limp hand to shake as Darla introduced us.

“Oh, he’s cute, sugar,” he said to Darla. “If I was you I’d go out and find a judge and get married right now.”

“Marriage just means three things,” said Darla. “Diapers, dirty dishes, and dinner.”

Little Brother laughed extravagantly, then sort of twirled away, at the same time clapping his hands above his head.

“Ladies? Gentlemen? Look who we got here with us tonight! Darla! Yeah, Darla’s back! And if we ask her real nice, she might sing us a song or two! With her sweet, bird-like voice!”

The candle-lit couples applauded softly for Darla. She finished off her cherry bomb and handed me the glass and walked over to the piano. She talked briefly with the piano player, then started singing “One Night of Love”—

“When at the break of dawn
I find my lover gone
I’ll whisper with a smile
I’ve lived a little while—
I’ve known one night of love.”

She seemed in her white gown to be a perfect creature of the smoke and the flickering light. I looked around the room, and saw people looking lost and dreamy as they listened, as if she was a witch casting a wonderful spell. Earl and Shirley got up and started dancing, with Shirley’s face buried in Earl’s false bosom. The two white women seemed unaware of everything else as they continued to kiss and caress each other; one of them had a cool, aloof beauty that seemed very familiar.

Little Brother came over and gave me a glass filled with a clear green liquid.

“Try this.”

I took a sip. It tasted like liquid licorice.

“Not bad. What is it?”

“Absinthe.”

“That woman over there? The one in the brown skirt? Is that Greta Garbo?”

Little Brother took a look. “Maybe. Maybe not. When people come in here, they check their names at the door. I’m glad you like the absinthe. It makes the heart grow fonder.”

Darla sang more songs, and I drank more glasses of absinthe. I began to see things I wasn’t sure were actually there. A gigantic blue and red and green parrot appeared on the arm of the sofa, squawked “So long!” eleven times, then flapped away and disappeared up a staircase. Greta Garbo gave me a sinister smile, then stuck out her unnaturally long tongue at me. A colored guy in a three-piece chesterfield suit was on a sofa with his hand up the dress of a writhing white girl. A big dark dick began to lift up out of his lap like a cobra out of a basket. Bats crawled across the purple curtains.