Ceremony (4 page)

I was not happy. I had learned so little from Amy Gurwitz that I felt as if I'd gotten stupider while I was in there. It wasn't so much that I suspected her of lying. I had no sense at all of her or her reactions. It bothered me. She seemed in some ways the full realization of what a sixteen-year-old kid would imagine adult sophistication to be. Like a cartoon of a rich Back Bay matron. But that's all she was. There was no fun in her, no pleasure in the game. No showing off. No rebellion. No flirtation. And she was living with some guy old enough to have amassed the bundle it had cost for that town house. None of it was right. I didn't like it. I had the feeling that maybe she didn't care if I liked it.

I looked at my watch-after four. I was hungry. I left my car where it was and walked over to the Cafe Vendome on Commonwealth and had a cheeseburger and three beers. When I got through it was 5:05. With the rain still coming I walked down Commonwealth and across the Common and on into the Combat Zone at the foot of Boylston Street. It was twenty-five to six when I got there. But that didn't matter. Time stood still in the Combat Zone. You could see a dirty movie or a quarter peep show at most hours of the day or night. You could purchase a skin magazine specialized for almost every peculiarity. You could get a drink. Fellatio. Pizza by the slice, adult novelty items. Everything necessary to sustain the human spirit. The neon lights and oversized flashing bulbs and crudely drawn signs that advertised all of this and much more (All Live Acts! Nude College Girls!) were plastered onto old commercial buildings, some of them once elegant in the red brick and brownstone that Boston had been built in. Above the one-story glitz of the Combat Zone the ornamental arched windows and the intricate rooflines of the old buildings were as incongruous as a nun at a stag film.

I moved along lower Washington Street with my hands in my pockets, trying to look like a guy from Melrose whose wife was away till Thursday. Except for the Back Bay, Boston's streets are routinely narrow and twisted. Washington Street where it descends into the Combat Zone is notably so. Cars cruised slowly by. Often they were filled with young men drinking beer from the bottle and yelling out the window at women. Sailors from other countries, women in suggestive clothes, men in stretch fabric suits and miracle fabric raincoats with epaulets and belts, an elderly Oriental man moving through on his way to Chinatown, seeming oblivious of the crudely packaged lust about him. Winos shuffled about down here too, and kids wearing black warm-up jackets with yellow leather sleeves that said Norfolk County Champs 8Q-81 in the center of a large yellow football on the left front.

I had April Kyle's picture in my inside pocket, but I didn't need it. I'd studied it. I knew what she looked like. At least, I knew what she looked like when she'd had it taken for graduation. The Combat Zone look Was a little different. I hadn't seen a cashmere sweater or a pair of Top-Siders down here in some time.

Two girls came out of a bar ahead of me. One was black, one was white. They both wore blond wigs. They both had on slit skirt evening gowns with sequins and cleavage. The white girl wore open-toed sling-back high heels. The black girl had on boots. Both wore transparent plastic raincoats with transparent hoods up over their wigs. The white girl was smoking a joint. I smiled at them as they came toward me.

"Hi, girls," I said. "What's happening?"

The black girl said to her friend, "Now, he ain't no cop, is he?"

The white girl said, "Oh, no. He's a dentist probably from Cow Hampshire."

The black girl said, "Bullshit," making it a foursyllable phrase, and the two of them kept moving. I'd have to work on my suburban look a little.

In the window of a store next to a peep show there was an assortment of leather items. Their uses weren't apparent, but bondage and discipline seemed a good estimate. Two men with crew cuts held hands while they looked in the window beside me. One of them had on a black motorcycle jacket. The other wore a black turtleneck jersey and a down vest. Both wore low white sneakers and dark socks. The one in the leather jacket nudged the other one and whispered something. They both giggled, and I moved on.

Rock music with a heavy thumping drive racketed out of the bars and strip joints, the multicolored neon reflected from the shiny streets and rain-polished windows, someone blared his automobile horn insistently, between two parked cars a man vomited while another man in a long blue overcoat held him around the waist to keep him from pitching forward. In the window of an adult bookstore there was a collection of magazines devoted to naked children of both sexes, hairless and innocent, wearing makeup.

A thought occurred to me that had not occurred before. What was Harry Kyle doing in the Zone when he'd seen his daughter? Selling clap insurance? Catching the Harry Reems retrospective at the Pussycat Cinema? I'd never fallen under the spell of the Combat Zone. I was in favor of female nudity, but the Zone left me with the queasy feeling I used to get when I smoked first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. I had quit smoking in 1962, but I could still remember it clearly. The pack of Camels in the shirt pocket, the first drag with coffee after breakfast, the days in Korea when we'd take a break and light up, the automatic gesture I always made leaving the house of patting my chest to make sure I had cigarettes, the satisfied feeling when I did, like having money in your wallet. Now when I left the house I patted my hip to check the gun.

A silver-gray Buick Electra pulled up to the curb near me and a black woman in a lavender jump suit got out. The Buick pulled away and the woman stepped into the doorway of a pinball arcade out of the rain. The pants of the jump suit were tucked into the tops of black suede boots with very high heels. She wore no coat and she shivered as she stood in the doorway. A middle-sized black man with long arms got out of a white Jaguar sedan parked at the curb and joined her in the doorway. She gave him something and he put it in his pocket. I went over to the doorway and stood beside them. The woman's hair was in a silver-tipped natural. She had prominent teeth and her lipstick was the same shade of lavender as her jump suit. There was a small, new moon scar beside her left eye. The man's nose was flat and broad. He had a mustache trimmed thin and high cheekbones that made him look Oriental. He was wearing a white cowboy hat with a peacock feather and a white leather trench coat with the collar turned up and the belt knotted in the front, the big gold buckle dangling free beyond the knot. I said, "Excuse me, I'm looking for a girl-maybe you could help."

The black man eyed me. The woman looked at him.

"What'd you have in mind, man?" he said.

I took April's picture out of my pocket and showed it to them. "Her," I said.

The man looked at the picture in the light that spilled out of the arcade. He shook his head. "Ain't one of mine," he said. "What's your interest? I mean, I know some girls just as good if your taste run that way."

"Nope," I said. "I want to find her."

The man grinned. "Figured you wasn't no tourist," he said. "Cop'?"

I said to the woman, "How about you?" I showed her the picture. "You ever see her'.'"

"She don't know nothing," the man said.

I ignored him. I looked at the woman. She shrugged. The man moved more fully between us. "I say she don't know nothing," he said. "She don't talk. I talk." His shoulders were sloping and the neck that showed at the open collar of his coat was thick and muscular.

"I noticed that," I said.

"You fucking with me, man," he said. His dark eyes gleamed at me.

"Not me," I said. "I'm just looking for this little girl." "How come?" "Parents want her home," I said.

"They think she around here?"

"Yeah."

"And they don't like their little sweetie giving blow jobs in the back seat of some John's car?" he said.

".Yeah." "Ain't our problem," he said.

"No. It's mine," I said.

"They paying you?" he said. The woman stood motionless, hugging herself, shivering, paying attention only to the black man. Like an attentive dog. That's probably where she got the scar near her eye. Obedience training.

..Yes… "Whyn't they come look for her themselves? I had a kid run off, I'd go get her myself. I wouldn't waste money on some shoofly."

"Too busy, probably." I said. "Maybe too scared. Guys like you would scare them."

“I don't scare you'?" he said.

"Not very much," I said. He grinned and took his hands out of his coat pockets. In the right hand was a brown leather sap. He tapped his palm with it. I reached out with my left hand and snapped it away from him.

"Reflexes," I said. "You spend your time pushing around drunken high school kids and your reflexes go."

He looked at me with his eyes half shut.. I was about three inches taller than he was and he had to look up slightly. Never an asset.

"Quick," he said. He looked at the woman. "See? I told you he ain't no tourist." As he talked he was absently untying his belt that held his trench coat closed.

I said, "If you open that coat I will clean your teeth with your sap."

He was indignant. "What's the matter with you, man?" he said.

"If you got a piece," I said, "it's dumb to keep it buttoned up under your coat."

He looked at my coat. It was hanging open. "I got no piece, man," he said.

"I do," I said. "And now I got a blackjack too."

"You asking for a lot of trouble, Jim."

"I can handle a lot of trouble," I said. If only I still smoked. A line like that needs cigarette smoke curling around it. "While we're waiting for it to start, why don't you take a walk?"

"You keeping the sap?" he said.

"I'm going to count five. If you're still here, I'm going to rattle your face with it."

He raised his hands slightly, "All right, man. All right, be cool." He jerked his head at the woman.

"No," I said. "Just you."

He put one hand out to take the woman's arm. I flicked the blackjack out and tapped him on the forearm. It was a light tap, but the weighted head of the thing would make his arm go numb.

"One," I said. "Two."

He turned and walked down the street away from us. There was no expression on the woman's face. She still hugged herself and shivered. "He ain't gonna let you roust him like that," she said.

"I think he just did."

She shook her head. "Nope. He gotta be first man. Specially in front of one of his girls. He be back."

"You know the girl," I said.

"What's the difference?"

"I'm worried about her. She's sixteen and tricking in the Zone." "Little blond honky do it, everybody gets worried. How come you ain't worried about me?"

"Nobody hired me to worry about you," I said. "You want to retain me?" "I seen her around," the woman said. "Suburb pussy." "Who's her pimp?"

She shrugged again. "Red, maybe?"

"Red got a last name?"

"I don't know. White dude, red hair."

"Coincidence," I said.

"Huh?"

"Never mind. Where's Red hang out?"

"Bar called The Slipper, down toward Boylston."

"I know where it is. You want my coat?"

She shook her head. "Trumps don't let us wear none," she said. "Say it's not sexy." "Trumps? The guy I just talked with?"

She nodded. "You better remember it. You gonna see him again, you hang around here." I held the blackjack out to her. "Here. When you see him give this back to him."

She shook her head. "Naw. He gonna be mad enough. I gotta take a beating now. I don't want to make him madder."

"What's he going to beat you up for?"

" 'Cause I seen you roust him."

The water dripped off the doorway canopy like a beaded curtain. A trio of sailors pushed past us in the doorway and went into the arcade. They all wore peacoats with the collars up.

I said, "You want to come with me?"

She looked straight at me for the first time. "Come with you?" She laughed. Derision. "Come with you? And do what? You gonna marry me? Take me away from all this?"

"I could take you someplace where Trumps wouldn't beat you up."

The laugh again. As mirthless as a knife blade. "People been beating me up all my life, man. One more won't hurt."

I nodded.

She smiled slightly. "Get lost. There's nothing you can do for me. You don't know nothing about it. Just get out of here 'fore Trumps gets back, maybe with help, and blows you away. There's nothing you can do for me."

"You want any money?" I said.

"The honky solution to everything," she said. "Keep it. You give it to me and Trumps take it away. Just get out of here. And watch your back."

I nodded again. "So long," I said.

"Yeah," she said.

I walked up through Chinatown, came out on Tremont, turned right, and the Zone was behind me. I crossed Tremont at Boylston and started across the Common toward Beacon. They were starting to put up the Christmas displays on the Common.

There weren't many people in the Common, and the rain still came steady, but not very hard. We were maybe five degrees from a snowstorm. The falling rain made the lights in the city around the Common haze a bit and soften. The rain also made the air seem clean, and it muffled the sound of traffic on Tremont Street and Charles Street. It was still and wet. A cop sat on a barrel-chested sorrel horse near the wading pool. He had on a glistening yellow slicker. There was a damp horse smell as I passed them. I liked it. When I was small there were a lot of horses around. They pulled the trash wagons and the milk carts. There was always horse manure in the streets. When Emerson and Whitman had strolled across this Common speaking of "Leaves of Grass," there were horses abounding—dignified and symmetrical with a pleasant odor.

I parked down from Amy Gurwitz's town house on Beacon between Exeter and Fairfield. I had to ride around the block for nearly an hour until a space cleared. The morning was clear and bright and the sun made stark shadows along the small bare trees in the tiny front yards along the street. I had a Thermos of coffee and a bag of corn muffins that I'd bought, recently made at a Dunkin' Donuts shop on Boylston Street. Say what you will about their architecture, Dunkin' Donuts makes a fine corn muffin. I ate one with some coffee.