He dropped the pillow, reached for the dresser drawer, came up with his.38 and banged Violet across her new permanent with the butt.
Sparrow watched the sausage slide at last out of the depths of the gown and saw, with a melancholy regard, a fine round piece roll beneath Stash’s heel – a heel stained yellow with mustard or indignation where the sock was torn. Sparrow felt a twinge of disgust at the way everything in the joint, bedclothes, underwear, curtains and walls, was daubed with fresh mustard. One hell of a way to run a house.
‘Bein’ unsanit’ry is worse’n bein’ goofy,’ he philosophized softly while recovering the remains. ‘Funny I done like mustard’ – wiping the bread clean on a handy corner of the dresser scarf. Heard the bathroom door slam and glanced up to see why all these people were so excited. Stash was in a neutral corner, breathing hard and looking beat to the floor. Sparrow saw him lay the.38 back in the drawer, put his head between his hands and whimper.
Must be crying because he was so hungry, Sparrow reasoned. ‘You want a bite, Old Man?’ he asked consolingly. ‘Anybody could have a appetite after all the exercise you just done. How come you don’t take it easy nights after the way you work all day? You burnin’ the candle at bot’ ends? You like a nice piece sandrich?’
Stash shook his head; he was too miserable to raise it.
‘You don’t relax enough,’ Sparrow counseled him. ‘You’re not so young like you think no more. If you don’t take things a little easier you’ll lose your stren’t, you won’t be able to do your fam’ly duty. You might even lose your job. After all you got responsibilities, Old Man.’
‘How can sleep?’ Stash pleaded with a ptomaine eye. ‘Is too much gone on. I’m tellin’! Pretty soon hoosband gone by brooms closet.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Sparrow reassured him, ‘we still got two flutes from Old McCall left.’
‘Is not for drinkin’, by brooms closet – is for some place sleepin’! Sleepin’!’ His voice rose in a plaintive wail for peace and understanding, trying to make someone on Division Street remember what sleep was. Nobody seemed to need sleep any more on Division but poor old Stash Koskozka.
Sparrow studied him calmly, with a steerer’s clammy eye. ‘What you hollerin’ at me like I was a unnerground dog? You tryin’ to make trouble for me?’
‘All he is to me is trouble,’ Violet affirmed loudly from the bathroom.
‘You must be siko-static, Old Man,’ Sparrow decided with his best bedside manner, ‘you should go by a sikostat. He’ll take yer temper’ture. He’ll patch yer dirty roof where it’s leakin’ a little. You look like somethin’ the cat never buried.’
In the bathroom Violet studied her image with a rising dismay: a thin streak of drying blood soiled her ten-dollar one-day-old permanent. Her hair would have to be shampooed and hennaed and there went the sawbuck she’d been a full month chiseling off Old Husband. She strode back into the bedroom and jerked the old man’s head up with a neat rap under the chin with the hairbrush.
‘Look, you. You rurned my perm’nent. You gonna give me a tenner for another.’ She began hauling him by brute strength as if to the nearest cashier’s window; at the bathroom door he broke free.
‘I’m gone!’ he shrieked, breaking blindly for cover down the hall, bumping from doorway to wall all the way down to the broom closet, pausing there to fumble down the sides of his long underwear. The closet key was in his pants, the pants were hanging on the bedpost and he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t find any pockets now.
For the closet was his sanctuary, where a chair and an army blanket, kept in reserve for storms like this, would lend him a brief security, if not sleep, before morning lighted the way toward his icehouse refuge. But something about his feeble fumbling at the closet door enraged her anew. ‘You ain’t even man enough to get into a closet,’ she taunted him brutally.
Stash turned in the dim-lit hall in all the chaste white pride of his long drawers and told her, like a saucy child, ‘Who wants? I’m not tell Mrs No-good where at is chippest restaurant-bakeree on Division. Ha! Ha!’
‘Go on!’ Violet commanded. ‘Get in there! Who wants you ’n your secondhand pumpernickel? You’re bot’ dried up! Lock the door after you, go croak under the scrub pail, it’s where you was born! You ’n the rest of the brooms!’ Abruptly, inflamed by a memory of day-old beef stew, she bore down upon him.
Stash wheeled and made for the fire escape, one side of the hall to the other like a rider on a trick bicycle, trying to ward off her blows with his thin little elbows. Down the hall a woman with her hair in crimpers opened her door just the tiniest crack.
‘Don’t excite yourself, honey,’ she advised Violet.
Immediately Vi raced back – for what she wasn’t certain – till she saw the.38 lying where Stash had tossed it so wearily. Sparrow stepped lightly to one side to let her pass on the return trip. ‘Where’d that motherless animal go?’ she wanted to know. Just like that: ‘Where’s that motherless animal hiding?’
‘Hoosband went that way,’ Sparrow informed her, pointing helpfully toward the fire escape, ‘only he got no pants. Ain’t you gonna give yer old man his pants, honey?’
‘What for? He ain’t gonna have nothin’ left to put into ’em. I’m gonna shoot it off.’
‘Wait,’ Sparrow cautioned her. ‘Don’t plug him till I get the pants. I don’t like seein’ a man get shot wit’out pants on.’ His sausage string wandered up and down while he picked the pants off the bedpost, brushed them down with the butt of the sausage and wandered back down the passage, casually inspecting the names on the doors to see whether anyone he knew had moved into this particular goats’ nest.
Poked his nose onto the fire escape to see if anything worth watching awhile was going on out there: not much doing there either. Just the white bottom of an old man’s underwear shuddering wretchedly through the frost-covered crisscrossed ironwork in the winter dawn. Just an old man holding his head in his hands trying, somehow, sometime, to get to sleep for a little while.
It looked pretty cold to Sparrow, trying to sleep all scraunched up like that with Violet sneaking up underneath and the alley arc lamp’s light shimmering down the barrel of the.38.
‘I like to get up close to accidents,’ Sparrow recalled, switching the string in mild anticipation, and just as he switched it Violet pointed the barrel toward the arc lamp: in the shattering of the lamp the old man went forward with the blast as though catapulted by the Hindquarters of Destruction. To come up with his knees on the ironwork and his fingers clutching Violet’s fluttering gown. ‘Stash give double sawbuck,’ he begged off. He sounded ready to cry, he was that crushed by fear.
‘Then get your dirty wallet ’n start makin’ good,’ she gave him his terms. ‘’N while you’re gettin’ it put water on the stove for dishes. You’ll have just time to clean them up before you go by job. Jumped-up-Jesus-from-Joliet, Old Man, I got to get some sleep sometime tonight.’ She herded him down the hall before her. In the dimness Stash paused to plead over his shoulder, ‘You not shoot Old Man in ess, hoa-ney?’
‘I just ain’t made up my damned mind.’
Then saw someone else in the hall and made her damned mind up in a hurry. Sparrow was leaning confidently against the wall, advising a shadow wearing a badge, ‘Here’s your man, Sergeant, here’s your man.’ Stash felt the.38 returned gently to his hand and held it in dull surprise.