"Did you buy the mandolin?" Jimmie asked.
"It's already mine. I pay the interest on it so Mr. Pearl doesn't have to sell it. He lets me come in and play it whenever I want."
She returned the mandolin to the pawnshop owner, then came outside again. "Well, I'd better get going," she said.
"I'm taking us to lunch," Jimmie said.
"That's nice, Jimmie, but I got to get ready for work," she said.
"Where you work?" he asked.
She smiled, her eyes green and empty in the sunlight, her attention drifting to a car backfiring in the street.
"This time we'll drive you," I said.
"My bus stops right on the corner. See, there it comes now, right on time," she said, and started walking toward the intersection. A throwaway shopper's magazine was tucked under her arm. She looked back over her shoulder. "I've got your phone number now. I'll call you. I promise."
Jimmie stared after her. "You should have heard her sing," he said.
When the bus pulled away from the curb, Ida was sitting up front, in the whites-only section, totally absorbed with her magazine.
Just as we got into our convertible, the owner of the pawnshop came out on the sidewalk. He was a tall, white-haired man with a sloping girth and big hands and cigars stuffed in his shirt pocket. "Hey, you two," he said.
"Sir?" I said.
"That girl has enough trouble in her life. Don't you be adding to it," the owner said.
Jimmie's hands were on top of the steering wheel, his head bent forward. "What the hell are you talking about?" he said.
"Sass me again and I'll explain it to you," the owner said.
"Screw that. What do you mean she's got trouble?" Jimmie said.
But the pawnshop owner only turned and went back inside his building.
The next night Jimmie came in drunk and fell down in the tin shower stall. He pushed me away when I tried to help him up; his muscular body beaded with water, a rivulet of blood running from his hairline.
"What happened?" I said.
"Nothing," he replied.
"Is this about Ida Durbin?"
"That's not what they call her," he said.
"What?"
"Shut up about Ida," he said.
The next morning he was gone before I woke up, but our car was still in the carport. I crossed Seawall Boulevard to the beach and saw him sitting on the sand, shirtless and barefoot, surrounded by the collapsed air sacs of jellyfish.
"They call her Connie where she works. They don't have last names there," he said.
The previous afternoon Ida had called him at the motel and told him that he was a nice fellow, that she knew he would do well in college, and maybe years from now they'd see one another again when he was a rich and successful man. But in the meantime this was good-bye and he mustn't get her confused in his mind with the girl who was right for him.
After she rang off, Jimmie went straight to the pawnshop and told the owner he wanted to buy Ida's mandolin.
"It's not for sale," the owner said.
"I'm going to give it to Ida as a present. Now, how much is it?" Jimmie said.
"What do you think you're gonna get out of this, son?" he said.
"Get out of what?"
The owner clicked his fingers on the glass display case. "It's thirty-five dollars on the loan, two dollars for the closing charge."
Jimmie counted out the money from his billfold. The owner placed the mandolin in a double paper sack and set it on the display case.
"Can you tell me where she works or lives?" Jimmie asked.
The owner looked at him as though a lunatic had walked into his shop.
"Thought you were a put-on, boy, but I guess you're for real. She lives and works in the same place. On Post Office Street. You figured it out by now?"
The paint on the two-story houses was blistered, the dirt yards weedless and hard-packed, the bedsheets on the clotheslines flapping in a hot wind. Jimmie parked the convertible and looked uncertainly at the houses, the neck of the mandolin clutched in one hand. A city police car passed by, with two uniformed officers in the front seat. They were talking to one another and neither paid attention to his presence on the street. "I'm looking for Ida Durbin," Jimmie said to a black girl who was hanging wash in a side yard.
The girl was frail and wore a dusty yellow blouse with loops of sweat in the armpits. Her forearms were wrapped with a mottled pink and white discoloration, as though her natural color had been leached out of the skin. She shook her head.
"She has freckles and sandy red hair. Her name is Ida," Jimmie said.
"This is a colored house. White mens don't come in the daytime," she said. The wind flapped a sheet that was gray from washing across her face, but she seemed not to notice.
Jimmie stepped closer to her. "Listen, if this girl works in a place for white people, where would I -" he began.
Then Jimmie felt rather than saw a presence at the window behind him. The black girl picked up her basket of wash and walked quickly away. "You don't look like the gas man," the man in the window said.
He was white, with small ears, sunken cheeks, and hair that was as black and shiny as patent leather, oiled and combed into a slight curl on the neck.
"I'm looking for Ida Durbin," Jimmie said.
The man leaned on the sill and thought about it. He wore a creamy cowboy shirt with stitched pockets and chains of roses sewn on the shoulders. "Four doors down. Ask for Connie. Tell you what, I'll walk you there." he said.
"That's all right," Jimmie said.
"I'm here to serve," the man said.
On the way down the street, the man extended his hand. It was small and hard, the knuckles pronounced. "I'm Lou Kale. Connie's your heartthrob?" he said.
"The girl I'm looking for is named Ida."
"On this street, nobody uses their own name. That is, except me," Lou Kale said, and winked. "I was gonna call her Ida Red, after the girl in the song. Except she didn't think that was respectful, so she made up her own name. What's your name?"
Jimmie hesitated, touching his bottom lip with his tongue.
"See what I mean?" Lou Kale said. "Soon as people set foot on Post Office Street, their names fly away."
Lou Kale escorted Jimmie through the front door of a two-story Victorian house with hollow wood pillars on the gallery and a veranda on the second floor. The shades were drawn in the living room to keep out the dust, and the air inside the heated walls was stifling. The couches and straight-back chairs were empty; the only color in the room came from the plastic casing of a Wurlitzer jukebox plugged into the far wall. Lou Kale told a heavyset white woman in the kitchen that Connie had a caller.
The woman labored up a stairs that groaned with her weight and shouted down a hallway.
"Look at me, kid," Lou Kale said. He seemed to lose his train of thought. He touched at his nostril with one knuckle, then huffed air out his nose, perhaps reorganizing his words. He was shorter than Jimmie, firmly built, flat-stomached, with thick veins in his arms, his dark jeans belted high on his hips. His face seemed full of play now. "You're not here to get your ashes hauled, are you?"
"Who cares why I'm here. It's a free country, ain't it?" Jimmie replied. Then wondered why he had just used bad grammar.
Lou Kale made a sucking sound with his teeth, his eyelids fluttering as he watched a fly buzzing on the wall. Then he jiggled his fingers in the air, as though surrendering to a situation beyond his control. "You give your present to Connie, then you beat feet. This place is off limits for you and so is Connie. That means you find your own girlfriend and you don't try to get a punch on somebody else's tab. We connecting here?"
"No."
"That's what I thought!" Lou Kale said. "Connie, get down here!"
When Ida Durbin came down the stairs she was wearing a pair of tight, blue-jean shorts and a blouse that looked made of cheesecloth that outlined the black bra she wore underneath. She had been asleep, and her face was flushed from the stored-up heat in the upper levels of the building and marked with lines from the pillow she had been sleeping upon. Even in the gloom Jimmie could see the injury in her eyes when she realized who her visitor was.