“Where would you put all of this?”
“Right here in this room. It’s big enough so there’d be space left over, no one would be crowded.”
“What about the drinkers?”
She filled her glass but left it on the table. “Over on the right. Nobody ever goes in that room and you wouldn’t know it’s there, but it wouldn’t be anything to put a bar in there.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’d never fit our Saturday crowd in there unless you packed them like sardines.”
“Chip, you wouldn’t want that kind of crowd if you had gambling. I don’t even want them now, but there’s not enough money just in the girls and I have to have every drink sale I can get. Put in tables and the idea would be to cut that crowd to a third of what it is. Maybe less than that, maybe a fifth, say, on Saturdays.”
“Some of those drinkers wind up going upstairs.”
“And most of them don’t. Instead they make noise and start fights, and that’s the last thing you can tolerate when you have gambling tables.”
“How would you cut the drinking crowd?”
“Easiest thing in the world. Leave out the beer taps. Sell imported beer by the bottle at seventy or eighty cents. Push the hard liquor price up to a dollar a drink, nothing cheaper. The way it is now, we’re selling girls to men who come here to drink. The other way, we’d be selling whiskey to men who come here for girls and gambling. And when a man’s gambling he doesn’t mind paying high prices for whiskey, and when he wins he likes to celebrate with a girl.”
“You’ve got it all figured out,” I said.
She drained her glass. “It’s not something that just came to me in a flash. I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Without the drinking crowd, I guess you wouldn’t have much need for a bouncer.”
She didn’t seem to hear me. “There won’t be anybody opening up over the county line. And there won’t be anybody else opening up here as long as Claude Tyles is Sheriff, and they won’t get him out without burying him. Nobody even bothered running against Claude in the last election. He’s well liked, Claude is. Not that he likes that many people himself. It’s a rare person that Claude Tyles takes a shine to.
“Nobody else opening up, and all the gambling trade in this county and the next one. The drink business would go down but the profits would go up, and less aggravation involved. Be a five-girl house in no time at all, maybe go all the way up to seven girls if it worked that way. And with gambling, business spreads out more. It doesn’t all concentrate on Saturday night. Might even raise the price on the girls to fifteen dollars. And they’d be making tips on top of that with the right kind of crowd.”
She poured herself another drink. If it was affecting her, I couldn’t see how.
“Make more money on drinks and more money on girls, and that’s not counting what the gambling brings in. I haven’t made that kind of money in so long I have trouble recollecting what it feels like.”
She drank her drink.
“Only one thing wrong,” she said.
“What’s that?”
Her eyes locked with mine. “I’m too old to be bothered with it. It means all that work and concentration, and I ask myself what’s the point? Would you like a drink instead of that Coke, Chip?”
“No, thanks.”
“What I should be doing is cutting down, not building up. I’m not ready to pack it all in yet. Not this year. If I closed up now I’d die of boredom. But you feel yourself slowing down, you know. You feel yourself getting sick of people. The customers. You don’t have the patience to put up with them. Little signs like that. Another couple of years, next year or the year after that, and it won’t be a bad idea to get out of here and live in a big hotel in Puerto Rico and let people fetch me things. I have money saved. Not enough to do it in style, but more than a little.”
She gave her head a shake. “But if I expanded I’d have all I need and then some. Thing is, I’d have things just about ideal by the time I wanted to retire. And who in the world would take it over? Rita and Claureen between them couldn’t run a pool hall. They couldn’t run a race. Two days of operating this place and the whole thing would fall apart.
“In fact, they couldn’t even help me out enough in getting things organized. I’d need a man, and he would have to be somebody smart and sure of himself, somebody who could get on good with Claude Tyles, somebody who wouldn’t rub the girls the wrong way or be after them all the time. And assuming I had the luck to turn up someone like that in this part of the country, which is as likely as mucking out a stable and finding an emerald, why, what chance in the world would there be that he’d be someone I can trust?”
“I see what you mean,” I said.
Her eyes challenged me. “Do you?”
“Well, uh, sure.”
“I wonder if you do. You think about it, Chip. You think about it, and one of these days I’ll bring up the subject and then we’ll talk about it some more. Meanwhile you just give my problem some thought, will you?”
The thing is, subtlety generally sails right on past me. When Geraldine first started opening up that night I wondered why she was telling me all this, and I decided she just wanted somebody to use for a sounding board, bouncing words off me when she was actually talking to herself. And I figured she picked me for the same reason that she played chess with me — I was working for her, and I didn’t have anything better to do.
She closed for the night as soon as we finished talking, and I went upstairs and got undressed for bed. And I stretched out and put my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, and then I immediately opened them and sat up and switched the light on.
She hadn’t just been talking to me. She had been talking about me.
(Of course when you read this it’s probably pretty obvious all along, especially because I put her conversation right after the one with the Sheriff. But that other conversation wasn’t even in my mind when I sat listening to Geraldine, so maybe it should have been obvious to me anyway, but not as obvious as it seems.)
Anyway, I sat up in bed and figured out what it was all about. Sheriff Tyles thought I should stay in Bordentown, and said that Geraldine thought the world of me. And Geraldine wanted to expand the business but couldn’t do it without the help of some man who was capable and honest and had an in with the Sheriff, someone she liked and trusted, someone who could take over the whole operation when she was ready for complete retirement.
Which meant that I had found the one thing I never even thought to look for in Bordentown.
A Job With A Future.
I got up and walked around the room a little. I had that sensation in my mind and body of having had too much coffee and all I had was one cup with supper. I just kept pacing, and then I went down the hall to the bathroom only to find out that I didn’t really have to go after all. Just nerves, I told myself nervously, and went back to my room and paced the floor again.
A Job With A Future. A Position With Real Opportunities For Advancement.
I couldn’t believe it.
Because, after all, that was the one thing I had been looking for ever since they booted me out of Upper Valley Preparatory Academy. I left that stupid school determined to make my way in the world and do all the good old Horatio Alger type things and work my way up in the world. And I never got anywhere. In fact I never got close to getting anywhere, because I kept getting idiotic jobs and drifting into idiotic situations.
Until finally the most idiotic situation of all brought me to Bordentown, a town that barely offered opportunities for stagnation, let alone advancement. And instead of one idiotic job I got two of them, and instead of trying to make my mark in the world I just tried to stay alive and let time pass, figuring that sooner or later I would get up and get out of Bordentown, but not even being in any rush to do that because the whole idea of getting ahead in the world seemed like something I was never going to get around to.