The Gutter and the Grave (18 page)

“Two hot rum toddies,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” the waiter answered, and he walked away.

“See?” Toni said. “I win.”

“Just hold it a minute,” I told her.

We waited. Five minutes passed. The man handling our table wandered back. “Sir, the bartender says he is not equipped to make hot rum toddies, sir. He suggests, if you care for rum, a planter’s punch or a Cuba libre, or a zombie.”

“I’ll have rye and soda,” I said. “Toni?”

“A whiskey sour,” she said.

When the waiter was gone, I asked, “So who wins? He knew what we were talking about, but he didn’t serve it.”

“Nobody wins.”

“And the stakes?”

She winked. “We’ll work it out.” She looked as if she were really anxious to work it out. I was rather anxious myself.

“The hell with the drinks,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

“No. It’s hot as the devil in here, isn’t it?”

“I feel fine.”

“You’re not sitting in a raincoat.” She unbuttoned the top button of the coat. “Am I showing?” she said.

“No.”

“Dare I try another button?”

“Go ahead. Live.”

She unbuttoned another button. “Okay?”

“Fine.”

“I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not wearing a bra,” she said.

“Mmm, yes, I know.”

“Stop it, you lecher.”

The drinks came. Emmett finished his set and came over to the table carrying a glass of Scotch. “We’ve got a convention,” he said. “A noisy bunch of bastards from Los Angeles.”

“Where?” Toni said.

“Over there.” Emmett pointed. “The funny men with the hats and the big buttons. Ha-ha, hilarious. I’ve been listening to them. They’re telling toilet jokes. High-class humor.”

“They don’t sound too noisy,” I ventured.

“They’re resting,” Emmett said sourly. “One of them requested ‘Beer Barrel Polka.’ He said, ‘Hey, stop playing all this
cool
music, hah? Give us something hot like ‘Beer Barrel Polka.’ž” Emmett pulled a sour face. “I’d like to give him a hot poker, all right, and you know just where.”

Toni laughed in obvious delight. She had a laugh
that could be as dirty as they come sometimes, and sometimes as dainty as society-pinky-raised-for-teatime. This time it was dirty. I loved it.

“Give me a request,” Emmett said. “Let me get the taste of the beer barrel out of my mouth.”

Toni looked at me. She didn’t just look at me; she invited me, she promised me, she claimed me. And then, still looking at me, she said to Emmett, “Play ‘Lover.’ž”

“Great,” Emmett said, and he left the table. Toni and I sipped at the drinks. I took her hand and kissed it, and Emmett fiddled around with an intro and then went into “Lover” with a vengeance. It was plain from the moment he began playing that he intended the song to last for four hours. He would play it in every style and tempo he could dream up. He would play variations and then variations on a variation. He would play “Lover” until it came out of the ears of the noisy men from Los Angeles.

For my part, he could have played it all night.

We listened, watching each other.

“I love you,” I said.

“Shut up and listen to the music,” Toni answered.

“Sure, but I love you.”

“I love you, too, shut up,” she said, without pausing for breath.

A guy who looked like a truck driver staggered past our table on the way to the men’s room. He was wearing a blue suit, the tie yanked down, his collar open. He had thick hands covered with black hair. He
almost knocked the drink out of my hand, backed off, said, “Excuse me, Bud,” and then saw Toni. His eyes lingered on her a little longer than I thought necessary. He allowed a low whistle to escape his lips, and then he bowed to the table and went off to the john.

“Jackass,” I said.

“He’s drunk,” Toni said.

Emmett was really warming up at the piano. “Lover” was taking on forms it had never known. We listened. Toni squeezed my hand every time Emmett fingered a particularly exciting riff. I was feeling great. And then the truck driver came out of the bathroom, and I saw that he was wearing the Los Angeles convention button on his lapel, and I saw his eyes seek Toni the moment he closed the door behind him, and I knew there was going to be trouble. I knew it the moment he came out of the john.

He walked to our table and stopped with his hands on his hips.

“You newlyweds or something?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “we’re newlyweds.”

“That why you’re holding hands?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why we’re holding hands.”

Toni had looked up at the man briefly and then turned away. She watched Emmett’s hands as they reached for keys. The guy kept talking to me, but watching Toni.

“You’re such red hot newlyweds,” he said, “how come you’re holding hands in a dumpy bar, ’steada being home…”

“That’s enough, mister,” I said, cutting him short.

“I thought newlyweds were supposed to be such hot numbers,” he said, still watching Toni. Toni looked at him with a glance that must have given him frostbite of the toes, and then she turned back to the piano again, watching Emmett. The truck driver from Los Angeles didn’t like Toni’s glance. He’d probably never known a woman who could pack a slap into a look, and Toni’s had not only slapped him but slugged him where he lived.

“Or is this a cold newlywed?” he said, looking at her with real contempt but failing even to scratch the icy armor.

“Mister,” I told him, “you’re stepping on my toes. Get the hell back to your table.”

“Shut up,” he said, without turning from Toni. I started to get up, and he added, “What’s the raincoat for? You cold, missy? You got cold tits, missy?” He reached over for her just as I shoved my chair back. He yanked at the raincoat, snapping the buttons, pulling it open down the front, his hands tangling in the skimpy velvet top at the same time so that it tore open in a wide fleshy V that suddenly exposed Toni’s breasts. Her face flared with startled anger. She pulled the raincoat shut in a swift furious motion, and that was when I punched the truck driver.

I punched him in the mouth. I have never hit a man more solidly. Not to the left or the right, but square in the center of his mouth. I felt his teeth buckle, and suddenly Emmett was playing “Lover” frantically and loud, trying to cover the fight.

The Los Angeles blade backed up against the piano and threw himself at me. I caught him with a left to the gut and then he unloosed his right in a roundhouse swing that clipped me on the side of the head and almost put me out of commission. This was no boxer, understand me. But he weighed all of 200 pounds and when that wild-swinging bunched fist collided with the side of my head I felt as if I’d been hit by the Lexington Avenue Express. I shook my head just as another roundhouse started, the left this time, catching me on the jaw and sending me reeling backwards.

I tripped then.

Staggering back from the second sledgehammer blow, I tripped over a chair and fell to the floor. I shook my head and then I saw the feet coming at me. The truck driver was running the way a football player will when he’s kicking for the extra point. He stopped suddenly and his right foot went back and I knew that if he let it go at my head I was going to die of brain concussion. I tried to scramble to my knees, but the foot was back now ready for the kick, and I braced myself.

“You son-of-a-bitch!” a woman said, and then I realized the woman was Toni. She had leaped up from the table, forgetting all about the raincoat now, forgetting the torn velvet top under that coat. She picked up her heavy purse by the straps, and the raincoat swung open as she moved, and she came at the man, a bare-breasted fury swinging the bag at his head. His eyes popped wide at the frightening sight of her. He brought
up his hands to block the swinging arc of the bag, and that was all the time I needed. Toni had broken his stride, and now I was going to break his head.

I was on my feet by the time he turned from her. I moved in close, ducking inside another roundhouse, working closer, closer, and then doubling him over, pounding at his soft underbelly with short hard jabs. And then I opened him up with a left uppercut and when he staggered away from that, I threw a straight right into his face and the man from Los Angeles hit the floor and didn’t move.

There was a look of animal fury on Toni’s face. Her lips were skinned back over her teeth, her eyes flashed with excitement. She was breathing harshly and raggedly, her naked breasts rising and falling. I looked at her, and she smiled curiously and then pulled the raincoat shut and, holding it closed with one hand, she said, “You should have killed him.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Emmett was still playing “Lover” when we left.

* * *

I was out of the tenement hallway now.

It was brighter in the street, but not bright enough to kill the memory of that night, Toni leaping from that table like an aroused tigress, swinging her bag, giving me the time I needed. Not bright enough to kill the other memory, not two months later, the memory of her in Parker’s arms, Jesus how had things gone so wrong, what had happened, how did two people so crazy in love go wrong?

I found a liquor store.

I bought a fifth and I found a hallway, and I began drinking. But instead of obliterating Toni’s face and Toni’s body, the whiskey brought her back bigger than ever, life-size, her smile and her laugh and her eyes and her hair and her sweetness and her anger and her wild passion. All of it came back, the night I’d found her with Parker, the brutal pistol-whipping, and then the crash and the wisecracks, and the guff from every son-of-a-bitch in town, the Mexican divorce, and the dull aching pain, the dull knife edge that ripped and ripped and would never stop ripping no matter how many women there were, no matter what, never, never.

I drank myself sick.

I let the anger build. I allowed it to start as a small black dot somewhere in my mind, and then I watched it spread, bubbling, spattering in larger black dots that merged until anger became the overwhelming reason for my being, until anger filled every corner of my mind with darkness, became an actual physical thing that jerked the fingers of my hands. I wished I could get at the truck driver again, but he was in Los Angeles. I wished I could get at Parker, but he was Christ only knew where. But Dennis Knowles was right here in good old New York City, and so the anger found a good solid focus on a real accessible hate object.

Like a drunken jerk, I left the hallway and went to the spider’s office, and I didn’t feel a bit like a fly until I threw open the door.

I’d shoved my way past the brunette receptionist, yelling at the top of my voice that I wanted to see Dennis. And then I opened the door to his private office, and Dennis looked up in real surprise, and I saw the other guy with him, and I suddenly felt very drunk and very incapable and very trapped.

The guy with Dennis Knowles was the guy who’d worked me over in Fran West’s hallway with a blackjack.

“Well, well, well,” I said, and the right hand in the cast felt clumsy and useless all at once, and I debated whirling and getting the hell out of that office, but something held me rooted to the floor.

“Haven’t had enough, eh, Cordell?” Dennis said.

I shook my head sadly, the way a grandfather does when a favorite grandson has just used a hammer on his gold watch. “Dennis,” I said thickly, “I really didn’t think you would stoop that low.”

Blackjack was standing alongside Dennis’ desk, grinning broadly. His grin was an amazing thing. It managed to convey the purest innocence and the darkest evil in one lopsided twisting of the mouth. He still looked about nine feet tall. He was wearing an
open-throat sports shirt, so the shoulders didn’t belong to any padded jacket; they were his. The bulging biceps were his too. The blackjack sticking out of his back pocket didn’t belong to his mother. He took it out and began slapping it on the palm of a hand the size of a tennis racket. I thought fleetingly of my own right hand. I began to sweat. The sweating had nothing whatever to do with the heat.

“I can stoop pretty low,” Dennis said. “You shouldn’t have come back to remind me, Matt. I’d almost forgotten about the nose until you showed up here and started asking questions.”

“But you weren’t man enough to try it yourself, huh?”

Dennis shrugged. “Why dirty my hands?”

I looked at Blackjack. “Your buddy Paulson is being worked over by the cops,” I said. “It’s not going to take them long to find out who you are.”

“Yeah?” he said. “That’s interesting because I’m leaving for Philadelphia tonight.” He grinned again. “As soon as I take care of something I didn’t finish proper.”

“Right here in your office, Dennis?” I asked. “Isn’t that a little dangerous?”

“Is it?” Dennis asked.

“It would seem to me…” I started, and just then Blackjack began advancing toward me. I wasn’t afraid, but I was covered with cold sweat. Fear is a thing that can incapacitate even a man who has two good hands, and I had only one and couldn’t afford to lose the power to control it. I waited. Blackjack, judging from
his face, had nothing to worry about. He was coming toward a cripple, and he was going to pound that cripple into the rug. He was obviously a man who took extreme pride in his handicraft, and it irked him that De Ponce had interrupted him in the execution of his chosen profession.

I waited, and I thought of the Judo throws I knew, and I began automatically rejecting all those that required two hands. I was narrowing the list with amazing rapidity as Blackjack closed in. I hit on one then, but it didn’t seem to me to be the best choice because all it would do would be to throw Blackjack and then I’d have to attack him after he was down and that still left me with my right hand in a cast. Unless…

I backed up toward the wall. Not too close to the wall, but close enough to accomplish two things. First, I wanted him to think I was ready to bolt so that he’d speed up and come rushing at me. Second, I wanted that wall close enough so that I could bounce him off it.

I accomplished the first thing immediately. Blackjack, thinking I was backing toward the door, began running toward me. I gave him time to build up enough speed and momentum, and then I took three fast steps toward him, throwing his timing off so that he reached me a fraction of a second before he thought he would. He could not stop, he could not pull up short; he was committed and he was ready to have his head collide solidly with a very thick immovable wall.