The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (28 page)

“Oh, boy!” I said. “Like a million. Let’s jump rope or climb trees or something.” I felt all scooped out. My shoulder was throbbing and my head was keeping time with it and every one of my nerve ends seemed to be jangling.

A middle-aged nurse came in, smiled at both of us and said: “I’m sorry. It’s time for his medicine.” She handed me two pills and a glass of water. I swallowed them and washed them down. The water tasted brackish. But in a few moments the throbbing in my shoulder and head eased. The nerves stopped jangling.

“Kip,” Fran said. “I’ve heard the whole story several times already, but I still can’t – can’t hardly believe it.
You
, Kip!”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me! Were you worried about me, Fran?”

“No,” she said. “I was over at Haggards. Helene cheated as usual, but I ended up winning. I won—”

“Two dollars and eighty cents,” I finished. Fran always won or lost that amount, to within a few pennies. It was really phenomenal.

“Two sixty-seven,” she corrected.

I looked at her and grinned. She was wearing a plain, round little piece of blue felt that looked like a beany and had cost eight dollars. I remembered how I’d beefed about it. She needed a permanent but still her hair was pretty. It was just plain brown, with some strands of gray in it, but it was nice. She had her lipstick on a little crooked and there was a faint tracery of lines in her face and she looked very tired, but still cute. She was wearing her powder-blue suit and for a woman with two children, I had to admit she still had one helluva figure.

“You know, Kip,” she was saying, “in spite of what happened tonight, I think it would be a good idea for you to take a night off once in a while. I thought about it after you called the last time and said you were staying in town. I realized how awfully tiresome and monotonous it must be for you never to have a night off away from me and the kids.”

I started to protest vehemently until I saw the twinkle in her eyes.

“Kip,” she said, softly. “Those girls you got mixed up with, tonight. Were they very pretty – very young and pretty?”

“Good God, no!” I told her. “They were hags, both of them.” I knew that was what she wanted me to tell her. I grinned.

Another nurse came into the room and went around to the foot of the bed to look at my chart. She was a young bleached blonde, and beautiful, a little doll, with her big blue eyes and a shape that even the crisp white uniform couldn’t hide. She smiled over the chart at me and winked. I closed my eyes and rubbed the sight of her out of my brain.

“She was very attractive,” Fran said in a moment and I knew the blonde nurse was gone.

“Nah!” I whispered. I was getting terribly sleepy again. I could hardly keep my eyes open. “She was a mess, a horror! Besides, after tonight, I
hate
pretty women.”

“Is that
so
, Kip Morgan?” Fran said. “Where does that leave me? What am I, just a dowdy little housewife?”

I looked up at her. It was funny, the sleepier I got and the more I looked at Fran, the prettier she became. I mean
really
pretty. You know, from inside of her, like. I reached out and took her hand. I said. “They must’ve given me sump’n. Can’t – stay – awake . . . You goin’ – stay here – with me . . . Right here?”

“Yes, darling,” she said. “All right. Helene Haggard is staying over at the house.”

Her voice droned on and I wanted to tell her thanks for coming and for staying here with me and for being so pretty and being my wife and all, but I guess I went to sleep instead.

I’d never so much as laid eyes on her before going in this place, the
Here’s How
, a nightclub on Route 1, a few miles north of Washington, on business that was 99 percent silly, but that I had to keep to myself. It was around 8 at night, with hardly anyone there, and I’d just taken a table, ordered a drink, and started to unwrap a cigar, when a whiff of perfume hit me, and she swept by with cigarettes. As to what she looked like, I had only a rear view, but the taffeta skirt, crepe blouse, and silver earrings were quiet, and the chassis was choice, call it fancy, a little smaller than medium. So far, a cigarette girl, nothing to rate any cheers, but not bad either, for a guy unattached who’d like an excuse to linger.

But then she made a pitch, or what I took for a pitch. Her middle-aged customer was trying to tell her some joke, and taking so long about it the proprietor got in on the act. He was a big, blond, guy, with kind of a decent face, but he went and whispered to her as though to hustle her up, for some reason apparently. I couldn’t quite figure it out. She didn’t much seem to like it, until her eye caught mine. She gave a little pout, a little shrug, a little wink, and then just stood there, smiling.

Now I know this pitch and it’s nice, because of course I smiled back, and with that I was on the hook. A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back. Not that I wanted to, as I suddenly changed my mind about the cigar I had in my hand, stuck it back in my pocket, and wigwagged for cigarettes. She nodded, and when she came over said: “You stop laughing at me.”

“Who’s laughing? Looking.”

“Oh, of course. That’s different.”

I picked out a pack, put down my buck, and got the surprise of my life: she gave me change. As she started to leave, I said “You forgot something, maybe?”

“That’s not necessary.”

“For all this I get, I should pay.”

“All what, sir, for instance?”

“I told you: the beauty that fills my eye.”

“The best things in life are free.”

“On that basis, fair lady, some of them, here, are tops. Would you care to sit down?”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Not allowed. We got rules.”

With that she went out toward the rear somewhere, and I noticed the proprietor again, just a short distance away, and realized he’d been edging in. I called him over and said: “What’s the big idea? I was talking to her.”

“Mister, she’s paid to work.”

“Yeah, she mentioned about rules, but now they got other things too. Four Freedoms, all kinds of stuff. Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

“I heard of it, yes.”

“You’re Mr
Here’s How
?”

“Jack Conner, to my friends.”

I took a V from my wallet, folded it, creased it, pushed it toward him. I said: “Jack, little note of introduction I generally carry around. I’d like you to ease these rules. She’s cute, and I crave to buy her a drink.”

He didn’t see any money, and stood for a minute thinking. Then: “Mister, you’re off on the wrong foot. In the first place, she’s not a cigarette girl. Tonight, yes, when the other girl is off. But not regular, no. In the second place, she’s not any chiselly-wink, that orders rye, drinks tea, takes the four bits you slip her, the four I charge for the drink – and is open to propositions. She’s class. She’s used to class – out West, with people that have it, and that brought her East when they came. In the third place she’s a friend, and before I eased any rules I’d have to know more about you, a whole lot more, than this note tells me.

“Pleased to meet you and all that, but as to who you are, Mr Cameron, and what you are, I still don’t know—”

“I’m a musician.”

“Yeah? What instrument?”

“Any of them. Guitar, mainly.”

Which brings me to what I was doing there. I do play the guitar, play it all day long, for the help I get from it, as it gives me certain chords, the big ones that people go for, and heads me off from some others, the fancy ones on the piano, that other musicians go for. I’m an arranger, based in Baltimore, and had driven down on a little tune detecting. The guy who takes most of my work, Art Lomak, the band leader, writes a few tunes himself, and had gone clean off his rocker about one he said had been stolen, or thefted as they call it. It was one he’d been playing a little, to try it and work out faults, with lyric and title to come, soon as the idea hit him. And then he rang me, with screams. It had already gone on the air, as 20 people had told him, from this same little honky-tonk, as part of a 10 o’clock spot on the Washington FM pick-up. He begged me to be here tonight, when the trio started their broadcast, pick up such dope as I could, and tomorrow give him the low-down.

That much was right on the beam, stuff that goes on every day, a routine I knew by heart. But his tune had angles, all of them slightly peculiar. One was, it had already been written, though it was never a hit and was almost forgotten, in the days when states were hot, under the title
Nevada
. Another was, it had been written even before that, by a gent named Giuseppe Verdi, as part of the
Sicilian Vespers
, under the title
O Tu Palermo
. Still another was, Art was really burned, and seemed to have no idea where the thing had come from. They just can’t get it, those big schmalzburgers like him, that what leaks out of their head might, just once, have leaked in. But the twist, the reason I had to come, and couldn’t just play it for laughs, was: Art could have been right. Maybe the lilt
was
from him, not from the original opera, or from the first theft,
Nevada
. It’s a natural for a 3/4 beat, and that’s how Art had been playing it. So if that’s how they were doing it here, instead of with
Nevada’
s 4/4, which followed the Verdi signature, there might still be plenty of work for the lawyers Art had put on it, with screams, same like to me.

Silly, almost.

Spooky.

But maybe, just possibly, right.

So Jack, this boss character, by now had smelled something fishy, and suddenly took a powder, to the stand where the fiddlers were parked, as of course the boys weren’t there yet, and came back with a Spanish guitar. I took it, thanked him, and tuned. To kind of work it around, in the direction of Art’s little problem, and at the same time make like there was nothing at all to conceal, I said I’d come on account of his band, to catch it during the broadcast, as I’d heard it was pretty good. He didn’t react, which left me nowhere, but I thought it well to get going.

I played him
Night and Day
, no Segovia job, but plenty good, for free. On “Day and Night”, where it really opens up, I knew things to do, and talk suddenly stopped among the scattering of people that were in there. When I finished there was some little clapping, but still he didn’t react, and I gave thought to mayhem. But then a buzzer sounded, and he took another powder, out toward the rear this time, where she had disappeared. I began a little beguine, but he was back. He bowed, picked up his B, bowed again, said: “Mr Cameron, the guitar did it. She heard you, and you’re in.”

“Will you set me up for two?”

“Hold on, there’s a catch.”

He said until midnight, when one of his men would take over, she was checking his orders. “That means she handles the money, and if she’s not there, I could just as well close down. You’re invited back with her, but she can’t come out with you.”

“Oh. Fine.”

“Sir, you asked for it.”

It wasn’t quite the way I’d have picked to do it, but the main thing was the girl, and I followed him through the OUT door, the one his waiters were using, still with my Spanish guitar. But then, all of a sudden, I loved it, and felt even nearer to her.

This was the works of the joint, with a little office at one side, service bar on the other, range rear and centre, the crew in white all around, getting the late stuff ready. But high on a stool, off by herself, on a little railed-in platform where waiters would have to pass, she was waving at me, treating it all as a joke. She called down: “Isn’t this a balcony scene for you? You have to play me some music!”

I rattled into it quickly, and when I told her it was
Romeo and Juliet
, she said it was just what she’d wanted. By then Jack had a stool he put next to hers, so I could sit beside her, back of her little desk. He introduced us, and it turned out her name was Stark. I climbed up and there we were, out in the middle of the air, and yet in a way private, as the crew played it funny, to the extent they played it at all, but mostly were too busy even to look. I put the guitar on the desk and kept on with the music. By the time I’d done some
Showboat
she was calling me Bill and to me she was Lydia. I remarked on her eyes, which were green, and showed up bright against her creamy skin and ashy blonde hair. She remarked on mine, which are light, watery blue, and I wished I was something besides tall, thin, and red-haired. But it was kind of cute when she gave a little pinch and nipped one of my freckles, on my hand back of the thumb.

Then Jack was back, with champagne iced in a bucket, which I hadn’t ordered. When I remembered my drink, the one I
had
ordered, he said Scotch was no good, and this would be on him. I thanked him, but after he’d opened and poured, and I’d leaned the guitar in a corner and raised my glass to her, I said: “What’s made him so friendly?”

“Oh, Jack’s always friendly.”

“Not to me. Oh, no.”

“He may have thought I had it coming. Some little thing to cheer me. My last night in the place.”

“You going away?”

“M’m-h’m.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“That’s why you’re off at 12?”

“Jack tell you that?”

“He told me quite a lot.”

“Plane leaves at 1. Bag’s gone already. It’s at the airport, all checked and ready to be weighed.”

She clinked her glass to mine, took a little sip, and drew a deep, trembly breath. As for me, I felt downright sick, just why I couldn’t say, as it had all to be strictly allegro, with nobody taking it serious. It stuck in my throat a little when I said: “Well – happy landings. Is it permitted to ask which way that plane is taking you?”

“Home.”

“And where’s that?”

“It’s – not important.”

“The West, I know that much.”

“What else did Jack tell you?”

I took it, improvised, and made up a little stuff, about her high-toned friends, her being a society brat, spoiled as usual, and the heavy dough she was used to – a light rib, as I thought. But it hadn’t gone very far when I saw it was missing bad. When I cut it off, she took it. She said: “Some of that’s true, in a way. I was – fortunate, we’ll call it. But – you still have no idea, have you, Bill, what I really am?”