She stared back at me. She was as cool as ice.
“Have we met somewhere?” she asked. “I believe we have,” I told her. She was the blonde I had picked out of the shoe box—now incredibly grown up and clothed.
The bartender set my drink before me and began fixing her Manhattan.
He had a bored look on his face. He’d heard a lot of pickups made, most likely, at this very bar.
“Not too long ago,” she said.
“No,” I told her. “Just a little time. At an office, I believe.”
If she knew what I was talking about, she surely didn’t show it. And yet she was too cold, too icy, too sure of herself.
She opened a cigarette case and took out a smoke. She tapped it and stuck it in her mouth and waited.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t smoke. I don’t carry fire.”
She reached into her bag and took out a lighter. She handed it to me. I snapped it and the flame licked out. She leaned to get the light, and as she did I smelled the scent of violets—or, at least, of some floral perfume. I imagined it was violet.
And suddenly I became aware of something I should have thought of at the very first. Bennett had not smelled the way he did because he had used shaving lotion but because he had failed to use it. The scent of him had been the smell of the sort of thing he was.
The girl got her light and leaned back, dragging in the first lungful of the smoke. She let it trickle from her nostrils very daintily.
I handed her the lighter. She dropped it in her bag.
“Thank you, sir,” she said.
The bartender put her Manhattan on the bar. It was a pretty thing, with the stemmed red cherry exactly positioned.
I gave him a bill.
“The both of them,” I said.
“But, sir,” she protested.
“Don’t thwart me,” I pleaded. “It’s a passion with me—providing pretty girls with booze.”
She let it pass. She eyed me, still a little coldly.
“You’ve never smoked?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“To keep your sense of smell?” she asked.
“My what?”
“Your sense of smell. I thought you might be in some sort of work where a sense of smell might be an asset.”
“I had never thought of it that way,” I said, “but perhaps I am.”
She picked up her drink and looked at me closely above the top of it.
“Sir,” she said calmly, evenly, “would you like to sell yourself?”
I’m afraid that that one got me, I didn’t even stammer. I )U5t stared at her. For she wasn’t kidding; she was businesslike.
“We could start at a million,” she said, “and bargain up from there.”
I got my mental feet back under me again. “My soul?” I asked. “Or is the body all? With the soul, it would come just a little higher.”
“You could keep your soul,” she told me. “And the offer comes from you?” She shook her head. “Not me. I have no use of you.”
“You represent someone? Someone, perhaps, who’d buy anything at all. A store and close it down. Or an entire city.”
“You catch on fast,” she said.
“Money’s not everything,” I told her. “There are other things.”
“If you prefer,” she said, “we could consider other things.”
She put down her drink and reached into her bag. She handed me a card.
“If you should reconsider, you can hunt me up,” she said. “The offer’s still wide open.”
She was off the stool and moving out into the gathering crowd before I could answer or do a thing to stop her.
The bartender drifted past and looked at the untouched drinks.
“Something wrong with the liquor, bud?” he asked.
“Not a thing,” I told him.
I put the card on the bar and it was upside down, I turned it over and bent above it to make out what it said, because the light was dim.
I needn’t have read it. I already knew what it would say. There was one difference only, in a single line. Instead of “Property Management,” it said “We Deal in Everything.”
I sat there cold and huddled, perched upon the stool. The place was so dim that it had a foggy look, and there was a rumble of disconnected human talk that somehow sounded not too human but like the gabbling of monsters or the hoots of idiots. And through it, and above it, and in between the talk, the piano still was tinkling like a dirty joke.
I gulped the Scotch and sat there with the glass cradled in my hand. I looked around for the man behind the bar to get another one, but he had suddenly gotten busy with new customers.
Someone leaned on the bar beside me, and his elbow jogged the Manhattan and the glass went over. The drink spread out like a coat of dirty oil across the polished wood and the stem of the glass snapped off close up against the bowl and the bowl was shattered. The cherry rolled along the bar and stopped at its very edge.
“I’m sorry,” said the man. “It was clumsy of me. I’ll buy another one.”
“Never mind,” I told him. “She isn’t coming back.”
I slid off the stool and made it to the door.
A cab was cruising past, and I stepped out and hailed it.
The last light of the day had faded from the sky and the streetlights were on. I saw that a clock set up on a corner in front of a bank said it was almost six-thirty. I’d have to get a hustle on, for I had a date at seven and Joy, more than likely, would be fairly well burned up if I should turn up late.
“Going to be a great night for coon hunting,” said the cabby. “It is warm and soft, and in just a little while the moon will be coming up. I wish I could get out, but I got to work tonight. Me and another fellow, we have got a dog. A black and tan. He has got the sweetest mouth that you’ve ever listened to.”
“You’re a coon hunter,” I said, making it half a question, but not entirely so. Not that I was interested, but it was clear the man expected some reaction from me.
It was all he needed. Probably all he had expected.
“Been one man and boy,” he told me. “My old pappy, he use to take me out when I was nine or ten years old. I tell you, mister, it gets into your blood. Come a night like this and you can hardly stand it wanting to be out there. There’s something about the way the woods smell at this time of year and there’s the special noise the wind makes in the trees when the leaves are loosening and you can feel the frost just around the corner.”
“Where do you go to hunt?”
“Out west, forty or fifty miles. Up the river. Lots of timber in the river bottom.”
“You get lots of coons?”
“Ain’t the coons you get,” he said, “Lots of nights you go out and you come back with nothing. The coons maybe are just an excuse for getting out in the woods at night. There ain’t enough people get out into the woods, at night or any other time. I ain’t the kind of guy that goes around spouting about communing with nature, but I tell you friend, if you spent some time with her you’re a better man.”
I settled back in the seat and watched the blocks slide past. It was still the same old city I had known, and yet it seemed to me that now there was a leering quality about it, as if sly shapes might be peering out at one from the shadowed angles of the darkened buildings.
The driver asked me: “You never went coon hunting?”
“No, I never have. I do some duck hunting and sometimes go out to South Dakota for the pheasants.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I like ducks and pheasants, too. But when you come to coons, they are something special.”
He was silent for a moment, and then he said: “I guess, though, it’s each man to his own. With you it’s ducks and pheasants and with me it’s coons. And I know a man, a real gone old geezer, that messes around with skunks. He don’t think there’s nothing like a skunk. He makes friends with them. I swear he talks to them. He clucks and coos at them and they walk right up to him and climb up in his lap and let him pet them like a cat. Then, like as not, they go trailing home with him, like a happy dog. I tell you, it is unbelievable. It would scare you to see how he gets along with them. He lives in a shack out in the river hills and the place plumb crawls with skunks. He’s writing a book about them. He showed me the book. He’s writing it with pencil on a common dime-store tablet—the rough kind of paper that kids use at school. He sits there hunched over the table with a stub of a pencil he has to lick every now and then when it gets too faint, writing away at that book in the light of a smoky old lantern setting on the table. But, I tell you, mister, he can’t write for shucks and his spelling’s something terrible. And it’s a downright pity. For he’s got a book to write.”