‘Anyone but him, Mama,’ he told her – then suddenly realizing how very near she had come to throwing him off the track he made up his mind twice as firmly as before – ‘Mama, I’m going to hear from your own lips that it was you who switched on me and nobody but you.’
Mama knew that tone and could only sit shaking her head miserably, ‘No. No. Let me die the worst death there is if I took it.’
Finnerty rose.
‘Oliver, I know what you’re going to do. But I just can’t fix my mouth to say what you want me to.’
Finnerty pulled on a single mitten. He drew the cloth down tight over each separate finger. When every wrinkle had been smoothed he turned his wrist slowly to test its hinge. Then he drew on the other glove.
‘Yes,’ Mama told him. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
‘I knew you done it all the time,’ Finnerty said, ‘and I’m not billing you for it. But never let me hear you say again that you play it straight. Not to me you don’t say it. Here.’
He poured her a cognac and offered it full to the brim without a spilling a drop. But Mama’s hand shook so when she took it he had to help her to bring it to her lips. When it was empty she held it out for more. He filled it again. This time she drank more steadily. And still she wanted more.
‘If I can save one sparrow a single misstep,’ she began.
‘That’ll do for now, old woman,’ Finnerty told her, ‘I’ve got work to do and so have you.’
And left to study his mouse.
What passed for the Wrath To Come on the walk and what passed for the Wrath inside the parlor were hells an earth apart. Though that amateur savior warned the women of the middle-pits of Hell, the women themselves felt sure that the pits were reserved exclusively for finks. Certainly no reasonable God would hold a grudge against a girl for earning her bread by the sweat of the sex with which He had blessed her. But to save one’s own skin by crying off on a sister – no God worth the name would overlook as lousy a trick as that.
Beside, God must be on their side because He was on Mama’s. And wasn’t Mama forever bringing home moulting canaries or bargain goldfish because she felt sorry for them? Didn’t she say almost every day, ‘If I can save one sparrow a single misstep it makes my own missteps worthwhile?’
Long after midnight old lonely trains called up to Mama like lovers forever arriving too late for love. Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving. But the windows were darkened, the doors were locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust.
Mama would rise from her bed so wide, the Woman The Pope Didn’t Want, so fierce to defend the weak and the motherless, so watchful of the sparrow’s fall until a dollar was involved. And saw some too-late lover come to stand below a lamp that made the whole night look hired.
Down on the corner she heard some woman jangling around for a straight four dollar trick. Then her husband, down the block, signaling with a set of keys of his own – ‘I got a trick here, Baby, so come on home.’ And the empty night came down again.
From somewhere upstairs or somewhere down, a mountain girl’s voice began telling the dark—
And knew, Mama knew that soon or late the hour would come when the hurry-up wagon would haul girls with pride and girls with none, those who had saved and those without Penny One, to that cellar below the cells where one door leads to freedom and another door leads to jail. One back to the street and one to a tier. That some would buy out then and some would bail out and some would cry off on their sisters.
‘If I can’t die sanctified,’ Mama crossed herself where she stood, ‘at least let me die blessed.’
Because the air was so close, the whiskey so bad, the prices so high and the place so hard to climb up to, everyone came to Dockery’s Dollhouse night after night while other bars stayed empty.
Everyone came, that is, but the law. To this lopsided shambles, where the floor slanted slightly, no police ever came. When the big hush fell that meant trouble was starting, the old man drew the shutters until the trouble was done.
The old man had himself never fought another man in his life – yet he took a senile pleasure in watching others go at it. He pretended that it was the manly thing, to ‘let them fight it out’ – but the titillating joy he took when the first blood flowed was a womanish delight.
And though there were frequent brawls, he took care that none attracted the attention of strangers on the street outside. Only the steady thud of the fans overhead and a desperate scuffle of shoes and breath would be heard when two panders fought up and down the floor.
Suddenly as it began it would be done. Doc would be letting in the light, victor and vanquished would be having a shot on the house, the babble of voices would rise once more, the juke would start Dream Train or It’s Only a Paper Moon – and everyone would feel something real had been accomplished at last.
‘Let’s see what them damn mackers are up to,’ hustlers would suggest to each other on afternoons off – ‘I’d rather see a fight tonight than ride the New York Central—’
If a man were hurt so seriously that he could not rise to drink, old Doc poured a shot down his throat personally, and friends hoisted him and deposited him behind some less lucky dive.
Yet all the fights were strangely unnecessary, and not one of them ever solved anything. The mackers never fought over anything real, like money or love. Had High Daddy really told Easy Rider’s woman that she didn’t dress her man with class? Had Easy Rider actually said that Spanish Max would stool on his own mother? They fought for their honor, that must have been it.
Not because they had too much whiskey in them, but because they hadn’t enough. Their lives went dry as their glasses; lack of love parched their throats. They wished to be drunken, forever drunken.
‘Too much salt on the potato chips,’ someone was always complaining to Dockery.
‘Them chips is what gives people a thirst,’ Doc explained, ‘it’s why the mustard bowls is always full and plenty of good old salty pretzels too.’
To be drunken, forever drunken.
Yet Dove came there at noon, long before the drinkers’ hour, only to put his sample case below the table and his book above it, to order a poor-boy sandwich and a bottle of beer.
Then the book before him, the beer forgotten, at last he saw for himself how different an A was from a B.
He was studying M and N one noon when a shadow fell across the page and Finnerty’s finger shut the book like shutting it forever.
‘What kind of con is this – Fairy Tales – you connin’ little kids or something now, country boy?’
Dove took his book and pocketed it. ‘Hello, Oliver,’ he said.
Finnerty shook his head incredulously. ‘To think I took you for the simplest fool in town. To think that I thought that W on your forehead stood for Watkins.’
‘I’m in the field for Watkins, Mister,’ Dove reminded the pander with understandable pride.