The sailor was about to make something out of it, but I gave one of the lot guards the highsign and he came over and took care of it. During a lull Bill Duff stepped down from his bally stand and strolled over to see me.
"Hello, Bill." I didn't work up much enthusiasm.
He said, "Thax." Then he said, "You'll lose your job real quick if somebody registers a bitch about that little trick you just turned. Cash for cash gambling's taboo around here. You're supposed to work on wages, not on take."
"Good old Bill," I said. "Always sticking your beak in my business. No, on second thought I guess it wasn't your beak you stuck in. Or was it?"
Bill started to get red. "I'm just telling you is all. That oldtime reaming don't go here. Old man Cochrane won't.. He stopped. I guess he just remembered that old man Cochrane no longer had a thing to say about Neverland.
"That was yesterday, Bill," I said. "Today all I have to do to square it is tip May fifty percent of the take."
Duff shook his head at me as if he couldn't understand how anyone as simple-minded as I appeared to be could go around without a keeper.
"You never did understand May, Thax. Lived with her for what was it-six years? And still you thought all she was after was the buck. When that wasn't it at all."
"Naw, naw. Not May. May's all heart. All out for her friends. Anybody knows that. Just ask 'em."
"Go ahead and laugh, Thax, you know so goddam much. But I'll say this for May-she offered me a hand when I showed up here down on my luck."
Which shows how much Duff knew about May and Robert Cochrane.
"Yes," I said, "I can't deny she was good to you, Bill. You've certainly made a big success of it."
He looked puzzled and then he started to get mad, but I had already spotted Billie heading for the nautch show and I dodged around the stand and went after her.
"Billie."
She looked back and saw me and smiled and came to a stop.
"Hi, Thax."
Funny thing. Standing there in the middle of Neverland with hundreds of loud-mouthed people milling around us, it still seemed like we were alone in a little world all of our own. Falling in love does that to you. It seems to surround you and the one you love in a shimmering crystal ball. The millions of people outside the ball are all mundane nonentities.
If a newsboy were to rush by right then yelling "Russia declares war on U.S.!" I couldn't have cared less. Just Billie. That's all there was.
"How are you making out?" she asked me.
"All right. It's a job."
"Did the police give you a bad time?"
"No." I kept staring at her.
"Don't do that, Thax. There's people around."
"Do what?"
"Look at me that way. You look like you wanted to eat me alive."
"I've already considered that."
"Oh honestly, Thax. What's wrong with you?" She wasn't really mad. I grinned at her.
"You going to work now?"
"Yes."
"How about meeting me tonight?"
A little V of consternation formed in her brows.
"I can't, Thax. Really. I've got something on tonight."
Another funny thing-the way instant jealousy can go off in a man like a hand grenade when he hardly even knows the girl who has perhaps just caught his eye.
"Date?" I said.
"Thax." Her voice was low, appealing. "Don't look like that either. No it isn't a date. It's just something personal I have to do. Alone. Some paperwork."
"Like a college girl with her term paper," I said.
Her laugh sounded a little embarrassed.
"I barely got through the eleventh grade, Thax."
"You're one up on me" I told her. I didn't tell her about Miss Raye who had been my tenth grade Lit teacher and who had thought I was very sensitive and used to have me over to her apartment after school to discuss books and writers and something else, until her landlady found out about it (I mean the something else) and told the school and they told my parents and then everything became very messy because I was only sixteen and Miss Raye was thirtyeight. And so I never did finish the tenth grade-though I've always felt that what I learned from Miss Raye was mighty valuable instruction in any man's education.
"Well," I said. "See you tomorrow then."
"All right, Thax. Tomorrow."
She reached and touched my hand.
"Not mad? I mean about tonight?"
"Uh-uh. Just suicide sick with disappointment."
"Thax," she said.
We smiled at each other and I said, "All right, I'll fight it. Have I told you the old Thaxton battle cry? 'Can Thaxtons fight? Aye, through the day and all the night!'
Billie laughed. "The last time I heard that it was in Robert Taylor's Ivanhoe movie. Only then it was 'Can Saxons fight.'
I shrugged. "Borrow a little here, steal a little there."
She said, "I'll see you later, Thax," and I said, "Sure. See you." And again I watched her walk off with all that hind action, and for a very wild and vivid moment I felt like a frustrated he dog when the bitch next door was in heat.
Then it passed, more or less, and I went back to work.
6
Cheeta swung into Tarzan's tree house that night- through the window and into his bed. It was Terry Orme, the apeman.
I struck a match and we looked at each other. I had been sitting there in the dark waiting to see if he would show up.
"I'm your roomy," I told him. "My name is Thax."
He didn't say anything. He studied me until the match began to hurt and I put it out. Then he spoke.
"There's a Coleman under that bed." His voice was like his body, a pipy little thing.
I rummaged under the zebra-clad bed and found the lantern and struck another match and ignited the two suspended bags in the lamp. A Coleman is brighter than the average lightbulb but it can throw weird shadows. Terry Orme looked a little weird sitting across the wide African room from me. He wasn't but about forty inches high.
I always think of midgets as being those poor little bastards with the large heads and the stunted arms and legs- which isn't so, because a true midget has a perfectly proportioned body, and they are a rare species.
I suppose that's why Terry Orme reminded me more of a jockey than of a midget. There was nothing foreshortened about his limbs: he was just very small. I couldn't even make a stab at guessing his age.
"You always come in through windows?" I asked him.
"You mind?" Tough little cuss.
"Uh-uh. I'm really working around to ask how come you're out climbing trees at this time of night?"
"How long have you had nose trouble?" he shot back. Some jockey.
I got up and walked over to him and he sort of hunched back on his little bed. I suppose I looked like a giant to him. And when you think of it, that's a hell of a way to go through life-living in a world where all the people around you are belt buckles.
How would you like to go swimming at the beach and have to look eye to eye with all the girls' navels?
I put out my hand.
"If we're going to be roomies, Orme, why not be friends?"
He looked at my hamsized hand but didn't take it. His small face was sullen.
"I don't have any friends."
I hung in there. I could be just as stubborn.
"You got me, Terry. All it costs is a smile." I thrust my hand closer.
"Well-" he muttered. Then he shook.
I smiled and went back and sat on my bed and gave myself a smoke. If I had him pegged right all I had to do was keep quiet and he'd emerge on his own. Because now it was his turn to make with the overtures.
He scowled at the floor and sent me a couple of covert glances.
"I got enough geetus that I don't have to live up here if I don't want," he said all at once. "I stay by myself because I don't like people. Most of 'em, anyhow."