To this lopsided shambles owned by this unlicensed ghost, this speakeasy spook who had been alive once but had died in the crash and was now only haunting the thirties, came trudging, some uphill and some down, all those who could not admit that the money was spent, the dream was over; the magic done. They still wore the clothes they wore before 1929 and no one knew when they might buy clothes again.
By and large they were theater people who had lost their theater: ingénues, leading men, stagehands, ticket brokers, managers of road shows, starlets and prima donnas. Albeit that, just for the time being of course, they were ‘hostesses,’ con artists, sneak thieves, con-men, procurers, cardsharps, pennymatchers; and a few honest just plain bums.
The first thing Dove saw when he entered the cave was the lion-headed amputee they had left at the brothel. By what alley-route he had beat them here only someone who lived on ball-bearings could know.
Finnerty drank with his back to the half-man, indicating to Dove that was the wisest way. So Dove felt somehow relieved when he heard the skated platform wheel down the floor, out the door and onto the open street.
Then, ready to let the murmuring hours spin, he put a nickel in the juke to help them begin.
the machine began
‘Now I’ll come to the point,’ Finnerty informed Dove when the bubbles all were blown, ‘I need the help of a healthy boy. I take it your health is as good as it appears.’
‘A might better, mister,’ Dove made a conservative guess, ‘and I’m always ready to make an honest dollar.’
‘You can call me Oliver, for that’s my name.’
‘You can call me Tex. For that’s where I’m from.’
‘My line of work, as you may have guessed, Tex, is women. Do you know anything about them?’
‘I know that if God made anything better I aint come across it yet, but that’s as far as my knowledge goes.’
‘In that case it don’t go far,’ Oliver decided, ‘but the question is whether you’re interested in going to bed with a young woman who has never been to bed with a man before.’
‘Mister, I’m a Southern boy and wouldn’t disadvantage no young girl that way.’
‘Southern don’t enter into this, Tex,’ Finnerty assured him, ‘The young woman is bound and determined to hustle. It’s all settled but the bother and inconvenience of breaking her in.’
‘Your field being women,’ Dove pointed out, ‘I reckon that’s your job, mister.’
‘Why, that’s precisely the reason I can’t, don’t you see?’ Finnerty tried patience. ‘If I did it she could come back a year from now and law me on the white slave act, for I’ve a record in that line I don’t mind admitting. I’ve already been busted on that charge once, and I don’t cherish being busted again. But someone like yourself that she’ll never see again – Oh, don’t be afraid of having to use force, for you shant. You won’t even have to undress this child.’
‘That don’t sound like no virgin girl to me,’ Dove told the pander.
‘That’s her claim, so I take her at her word,’ Finnerty told Dove. ‘The point is that, if you did me this one small favor, she couldn’t make that claim in the future. Do you follow me?’
‘I follow you to a certain point,’ Dove decided, ‘after that it’s a mite unclear.’
‘Maybe this will clear things up.’
Dove put his hands stiffly behind his back. ‘Mister, I can’t read my own name if it was writ on the side of a barn, but I know a hundred dollar bill when I see one. And I think you’d best put that one away.’
Finnerty tucked it into Dove’s breast pocket.
‘Mister, I can’t take that,’ Dove told him firmly without making a move to give it back.
‘Don’t worry,’ Finnerty promised, ‘You’re not taking it, country boy. You’re carrying it for me, that’s all. You’re carrying it across the street and up the stairs to a room where this young lady is waiting for you. When you come in the room you’ll hand it to her without a word – if I know her greedy little heart she’ll put it in her slipper and you take it from there.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘She’ll tell you that herself, country boy.’
They were at the back entrance of the house which they’d entered by the front before Dove hesitated.
‘Just one thing I’d like to ask, mister.’
‘What’s that?’ Finnerty was too close behind him.
‘I’d rather you call me Tex ’stead of country boy.’
‘Right-o, Tex,’ Finnerty agreed, and shook Dove’s hand to seal the deal.
Dove shook, and stepped through the door Oliver held wide.
A girl with the pallor of one who lives indoors, one low of flesh but high of bone, in red shorts and red halter. Dove heard the door lock behind him.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.
‘Floralee,’ she told him, ‘and I sing like a damned bird. But how did I fly here?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know, country girl,’ Dove told her, ‘but I’m to give you this.’
He took his last ten dollar bill and handed it to her. Just as Finnerty had said, she had a greedy little heart, for she stuffed it down her slipper right away without even bothering to glance at it and snapped the button that held up her shorts.
If Dove, in the minutes that followed, heard murmured laughter from behind a wall, he didn’t let that divert him from the sums he had now to do in his head.
‘It costes me ten dollars to make a hundred,’ he figured, ‘at that rate I don’t see how I can lose.’
On a morning so damp the salt wouldn’t dust Dove wakened feeling like something chewed up and spat out. His seersucker, hung on a nail on the wall, looked like something fished out of the river. Everything his eyes fell upon looked fished-out or spat-out. He had a big bad head and held it hard, mourning ‘Oh, it drinked dandy but Lord the afterwards. The way the world is going I don’t think it’ll last.’
But the Financial Counsellor was whistling cheerfully as he buttoned himself into a freshly pressed financial-looking suit.
‘Happened on a most curious certificate,’ he announced as soon as he saw Dove get one sick eye wide, and drew it forth like a document. ‘What do you reckon happen when one of them girls trots all the way downtown for a free marcel?’
‘Reckon she gets herself fixed up right pretty,’ Dove took a hazy guess.
‘Reckon she do if she got three-fifty. Which you know very well she don’t. Did you read this thing you’re selling?’
For once Dove was glad he couldn’t.
Fort touched a prong of his sunglasses to the fatal figures. ‘I warned you to stay clear of that Georgia hand,’ he reminded Dove, ‘now my advice is that you stay indoors. There must be a chance of husbands on the lookout for a country-lookin’ gin-head by now.’
‘I was only tryin’ to make an honest dollar in a crooked sort of way,’ Dove explained.
For reply Fort fastened his face one moment to the mirror and must have been pleased by what he saw. For he left with a confident, executive stride, a man who’d be rich in six weeks if not in five.
Dove went to the window. Street to sky, New Orleans looked shrouded. He saw its fearful loneliness. He felt its dreadful heat. ‘It’s a misling day,’ he thought, ‘I reckon I don’t deserve to rise, doin’ that innocent country girl the way I done. What’s to become of her now?’
Fort was back in the doorway. ‘Was two blocks down afore I missed ’em,’ he explained, picking up his blue sunglasses.