‘Why, for callin’ you scarce-hipped like I done. There was no call for my takin’ an advantage such as that. As a matter of fact, you got what railroading folk call a mighty trim caboose.’
‘The bathroom’s to the right.’
‘M’am, I’m right sorry, indeed and double-deed I am. But the fact is I’m plumb fatigued and now I got to rest a spell.’
She padded around the bed and peered out into the hall. ‘I’ll get a party who’ll restore your strength,’ she promised.
Her back was to him, her hand on the knob and the pocket of her parade pantie bulged with his wallet so plainly he could see the grain of the leather through the sheer of the cloth; but he didn’t try to snatch it. Instead he hooked a fingertip in the rubber-band that bound it, stiffened his arm exactly as he had just seen her stiffen her leg, and thus derricked it as neatly and nervelessly as she had derricked his pants.
She sensed a slight movement behind her and whirled toward the bed. There the big boob lay pretending to sleep and anyone could see at a glance he was faking. ‘Mister, I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, but it isn’t me,’ she gave him final warning and stepped into the hall – ‘Knifey! Knifey-Love! A party to meet you!’
Dove sprang out of the cot, into his pants and was out the window shoes in hand.
Two Negro girls directly across the way, watching for men to come out the front – they spent their afternoons keeping count – appeared mildly surprised to see one come out the window instead. How do you count that?
Someone, it seemed, was forever thinking up ways of doing things that no one else had thought up before.
There’s one advantage women have over men: they can go down to hell and come straight up again. An old song says so and it says just right. Yet it fails to allow for special cases like Dove Linkhorn’s.
Dove knew he’d been underground all right. The moment he stepped back onto the Canal Street side of the Southern Railway Station it seemed he had either come up out of somewhere or else the sky had risen an inch.
The city fathers, Do-Right Daddies and all of that, Shriners, Kiwanians, Legionaires, Knights of this and Knights of that, would admit with a laugh that New Orleans was hell. But that hell itself had been built spang in the center of town – this they never could admit. For panders and whores are a plain disgrace, and Do-Right Daddies are family men whose families are part of themselves like their backs.
But not many a daddy (do-right or do-wrong) is satisfied simply to own a back. He has to kick loose of home and fireside now and again. He has to ball with outlaws, play the fool on the door-rock, and have a handsome hustler call him by his first name in the presence of an out-of-town friend. That makes daddy feel like a man again. Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written.
It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn’t help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn’t carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through.
It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice. When opening time was closing time and everyone was there, down where you lay your money down, where it’s everything but square, where hungry young hustlers hustle dissatisfied old cats and ancient glass-eyed satyrs make passes at bandrats; where it’s leaping on the tables, where it’s howling lowdown blues, when it’s everything to gain and not a thing to lose – when it’s all bought and paid for then there’s always one thing sure: it’s some Do-right Daddy-O running the whole show.
There were stage shows and peep shows, geeks and freaks street. It wasn’t panders who owned the shows. There were all down old Perdido Street. But it wasn’t geeks who ran that chippified blondes and elderly rounders, bummies and rummies and amateur martyrs. There were creepers and kleptoes and zanies and dipsoes. It was night bright as day, it was day dark as night, but stuffed shirts and do-righties owned those shows.
For a Do-Right Daddy is right fond of money and still he don’t hate fun. He charged the girls double for joint-togs and drinks, rent, fines, towel service and such. But before any night’s ball was done, he joined in the fun.
Later he had to be purged of guilt so he could sleep with his wife again. That was where the pulpit came in. There had to be something official like that to put the onus on the women. The preachers, reformers, priests and such did this work well. Some girls were just naturally bad, they explained. Others were made bad by bad men. In no case was it ever the fault of anyone who profited by the shows. Daddy, you can go home again.
Pulpit, press, police and politicians pushed the women from crib to crib and street to street – yet never pushed any but diseased ones out of reach. Daddy still wanted some healthy good-looker available for his weekend and there had to be a retriever to fetch her. That was what helped keep pulpits filled, increased newspaper circulation, made the arrest blotters look respectable and gave politicians a record to ride.
When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn’t until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can’t have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?
The girls themselves read of the latest crusade, but their eyes skimmed idly over the print. When the last sermon was preached, the last editorial written and the last raid done, then those who had preached, written and raided would be coming down to see them for a bit of fun again.
That was the ancestral treachery no one would admit.
Yet over the treachery, under the revelry, there hung, that airless summer, a feeling that this was all as sad as hi-jinks in an invaded land. In the ravaged faces of young girls and the painted faces of boys in secret bars there hung the sense of impending defeat.
Lonely bones of the old French Graveyard, that had slept contented decades through, felt it and wakened to work their dusty way out through brick, through wood, through stone.
Dove Linkhorn, passing a crumbling wall, peered in and saw how harshly death dealt with old bones.
Old bones that death would not let lie still. Spaniard and Frenchman, Creole and Kentuckian, bones of sailor and hunter alike, women of honor and women kept, all bones bleached the same in the Saturday sun. They too had been to Hell and come up again.
Dove’s own bones felt sore. ‘Too dern much runnin’ ’n jumpin’,’ he scolded himself, ‘nothin’ to show for it but a suit of clothes ’n a pair of shoes ’n a dollar watch. Things could be worse.’
When a girl with eyes that could only have been gotten in a box of tacks demanded, ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’ Dove didn’t feel it was right to lie to her.
‘I got a dolla,’ he admitted, ‘but I don’t feel like foolin’.’
She opened the door. ‘Come in here. I’ll make you feel like foolin’.’
Ten minutes later Dove came out hungry enough to eat snake. There was a poor-boy sign at the end of the block, but before he could reach it another girl stopped him by swinging a screen door right in his path. ‘Boy, you got a dolla?’