All Sparrow had heart enough left to say was, ‘Let me up, Vi. I don’t know what’s gettin’ into you lately, you didn’t use to be like this all the time.’
She didn’t give him time to figure out a thing. She chirped kisses upon him instead. In time to the coffee’s steady perking.
‘The coffee’s perkin’ over, Vi.’
He never remembered for a moment that the Jailer had never once scolded Widow Koskozka for leaving her door a bit ajar.
She let him up at last and, as he turned, shaken, to the percolator, goosed him with a single loonlike warning – whoop! He went clean off the floor on the point of her thumb, half a foot into the air, staggered hysterically into the wall and wheeled like a wounded rabbit to get his back up against something solid and looked at her in a panting despair, awaiting some final blow.
‘Never do that,’ he warned her weakly, hysteria darkening his eyes. ‘Never do that ’n never call me that.’
‘Wait’ll I get you in bed,’ she consoled him. ‘I’ll make it all up to you, Goosey-joosey.’ And followed him mercilessly all the way back to the bedroom, breathing on his neck and tossing her flaming henna helmet about like a conquering lion’s mane. He had been an entertaining toy in his time – but how could a girl afford a toy that never brought in a dime and drank up every stray nickel left lying loosely about? He wasn’t weakening nearly as fast as had Old Husband, who’d given out entirely at the end of the first week. Sparrow only seemed to be a bit frayed around the edges. And the rent three weeks overdue.
Somebody had to go.
And she didn’t mean Rumdum.
‘You don’t know how I miss Old Man, now he’s gone,’ she tried for some reason to convince the punk, ‘you don’t have no idea how sweet that old man could be when he wanted.’
‘Don’t come on with the cheap romance,’ the punk scolded her. ‘You married him for his fifty a week ’n all you miss is that fifty.’
‘Well,’ she admitted,’ he wasn’t as much fun as you. You’re the most fun I ever had with pants on,’ she flattered him with a knowing nudge. ‘You ’n your bedroom eyes.’
‘I think I’m the most fun you ever had with ’em off,’ he agreed dismally.
‘’N just to think,’ she went on breathlessly, ‘I’m all yours, Goosey Lover.’
‘Don’t call me that, it sounds like goosey liver.’ But what he really felt was that she wasn’t all his so much as he was all hers and that there was no rest for the weary. It wasn’t just coincidence that her favorite tune about the house, day after day, began to be:
‘All of me,
Why not take all of me?’
He devised a more subtle means of evading her than that of the midnight snack. It was too easy for her to seduce him
right there on the kitchen floor to the tune of the percolator’s perking. He took to heading for the bathroom.
‘Don’t, Vi,’ he’d plead, as she’d drag him off the bed’s edge down into the sweaty sheets. ‘Don’t – I got to go by the bat’room.’ From beneath the bed Rumdum listened with sympathy; and a dull foreboding.
She’d relent then. For five minutes. Then he’d hear her making for the bathroom door; he’d grasp the knob firmly – there was no lock – and haul back like a crazed paralytic while she’d pull, shrieking at her discovery of this new game, on the other side of the knob.
Once, drowsing contentedly on the can beside the little five-watt bulb glimmering above the paper holder in the tiny darkened cavern, he understood, dreamily, Old Husband’s love of the broom closet and failed to hear her tiptoed approach – when she rattled the board above his head he almost went into shock.
‘Go back to bed,’ he begged, ‘for God’s sake,’ but she fetched him in an iron grip, pants dragging and the plumbing’s antique roar in his ears, flat down upon the cold linoleum.
While Rumdum galloped excitedly about them, nipping their heels.
Ten minutes later he rolled over, panting, wishing he had a pillow under his head. ‘Pull up the shade, Goosey,’ she ordered him, ‘let’s see if it’s gettin’ light.’
‘If I pull up the shade I’ll go up with it,’ he recalled the ancestral burlesque retort without humor. ‘I know now what they mean by “mortal coil,”’ he decided to himself, ‘’cause I got one I got to shuffle off before they haul me out of here with my toes turned up.’
Twelve weeks of their hot-breathed union and the mornings were finding him faint. The punk woke to his ninetieth common-law dawn, on the first day of December, feeling he’d never make the ninety-first. He rose like a haunted ghost, washed in cold water and took one last fond look at the friendly percolator: that had revived him many an ardent midnight and now would revive him no more.
Beneath the sink Rumdum slept with one ear alert for the coffeepot’s first perk. Vi was trying to wean him off beer with coffee.
Sparrow couldn’t take the chance, even now, of putting the pot on the stove. She wakened to its contented perking as to some slow aphrodisiac and the time was come to go. He found three halves, wrapped in a ten-dollar bill, in her apron. The last of Old Husband’s insurance money, and a pang of conscience flicked him. ‘So long as she don’t shoot herself when she finds out I ducked on her,’ he hoped anxiously. ‘Maybe she’ll get over the shock some day.’ And left as if it had been the percolator he had loved here so long and so well; it was all he truly regretted leaving.
He could not know that even then Violet lay wide awake and listening to his every secret move, scarcely daring to breathe for fear he might change his mind. ‘If he decides to hang on any longer I’ll have to hurt his feelin’s, that’s all,’ she determined firmly. ‘I’ll have to tell him right out I can’t afford him no more.’
She heard the door shut ever so softly and turned over on her side with the sighing relief of a job well done.
‘I always wanted to get out of this crummy neighborhood anyhow,’ Sparrow rationalized going downstairs. ‘One more winter with Vi ’n I’d be tearin’ all my pieces off the calendar too.’
He went past Frankie’s door noiselessly these days; there was no use trying to talk to the dealer any more. ‘When a Polak gets an idea in his head you can’t get it out wit’ a crowbar,’ Sparrow decided ruefully.
And so returned, with the city a golden roar in his ears, to the horse-and-wagon alleys of his childhood; with a rueful renascence in his heart.
For the alleys never changed. It was as though no time had passed since he had first escaped down them: playing hooky from that first truant officer as he was on the hook from Violet now. It seemed the same morning of golden escape.
The alleys had always been his sanctuary; they had been kinder to him than the streets. He had spent those long-ago days searching the ashcans for the tinfoil in discarded cigarette packs. Though the boulevard gutters had been better for tinfoil prospecting, the alleys had always been safer.
The tinfoil racket had been abandoned for the pursuit of beer corks. A still on Blackhawk Street had paid a dime a hundred for them in those days.
Beer corks were money: they were lagged, in lieu of pennies, along the sidewalk cracks. One red beer cork was worth five of the common brown-and-white rootbeer variety, and once Sparrow had hoarded a pearl beyond price: an orange-and-green job with an owl engraved upon it. No one in the neighborhood had ever seen one like it, he was offered as high as a hundred to one, in rootbeer tops, for it. Then he’d lost it out of a hole in his pocket and it had left a ragged little hole in his heart.
‘Five up!’ He recalled how the lagger’s single toss had represented a gamble of five corks and the lagger nearest the line had gotten first toss – five from each player – and could keep all that turned up heads. He could then toss them one at a time or all at once just as the whim took him. Then the runner-up got second toss and by the time tossings came around to Solly Saltskin there was usually only one left anyhow and that was his by default, there were no other tossers. But he’d toss it anyhow, just because the others had; it wasn’t often there was anyone farther off the line than Solly.