White Shadow (30 page)

AFTER I LEFT the chopped-up man, the funny cops, and Eleanor, I drank at the Stable Room and later got lost in Skid Row down in a bar called the Celebrity and spent the nine o’clock hour with a B-girl named Patty, talking about the rumor that someone had stolen Albert Einstein’s brain. Einstein had died the week before, and I’d been fascinated to hear that perhaps the man who’d done the autopsy had taken away what had made him most famous.

“Well,” said Patty, blowing smoke up into the big paddle fans above the bar. “I think it’s wrong. You can’t take apart a man after he dies.”

“What if it means that we’ll know more about the way he thought?” I said. “Don’t you want to know what made him smarter than you? Or me?”

“I don’t want to be smart,” Patty said.

I motioned to the bartender for another beer and of course another for Patty, because that’s what B-girls did. They sat around and got lousy drunk with customers, or if they were really hard pros they’d have the bartender serve them up a Shirley Temple while he got high as a pine.

“Why don’t you want to be smart?” I asked.

“Makes you think too much.”

“Hmm.”

“What do you do?” Patty asked. She had black hair and a pug nose, and her arms were a bit thick in her old silk dress made in the style of the old-time flappers.

“I sell vacuum cleaners.”

“Say,” she said. “That’s interesting. I love vacuum cleaners.”

“Come again?”

“What’s the best kind?”

“The kind I sell,” I said.

“Right,” she said, nodding. But she didn’t ask me more.

On the little round stage, a big old strong blonde was strutting around in a black bra and panties and swishing her butt in time to the snare drum player. She probably stood a foot over me, and she had thick muscular arms and legs. She looked like her thighs could crack a walnut.

“What’s your name?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“Guess not,” she said. “You married?”

“No.”

“I’m being nosy.”

“No.”

She leaned in, her breath was hot and laced with gin and cigarettes but her hair smelled like lilac shampoo and her breasts felt soft and warm as they crushed into my arm. “I don’t normally do this.”

I finished my drink.

The bartender walked over and I waved him away. The striptease Amazon girl was down to her pasties and shaking her big jugs as the saxophone player launched into a raunchy swag.

“That’s Linda,” she said. “She’s beautiful. I can’t dance.”

“What do you normally
not
do?”

She smiled and giggled, really giggled like a young girl, and shielded her mouth with her fist. Then she reached under the lip of the bar and grabbed me right on the pecker and breathed into my ear. “For ten bucks, I can make you forget about what’s on your mind.”

“You’re too good to me.”

She squeezed harder. I moved her hand, but she latched right back on it.

“You really never do this?”

“No.”

“Shucks.”

She let go and smoothed back her hair. She rested her head in her hands and then lit a cigarette before looking at herself in the mirror behind the bar to check her makeup and moving close to the stage, where she grabbed the big blonde’s ankle and handed her a quarter.

I went home.

DODGE DROVE along Bayshore Boulevard, skirting the edge of the neutral ground that once held the streetcars but was now dotted with palm trees, and down to Bay to Bay, where he cut up and headed toward the Episcopal church and turned onto Dale Mabry Highway, heading north. He passed the garages and restaurants and grocery stores and little travel courts packed with folks on their way to Miami or back to Ohio. He slowed at the big Tahiti Motel sign, the one with the shield and the spear, and turned in. The night was humid and he kept the windows down and slowed, looking for Edy’s station wagon. The thought of the station wagon made him think that she had kids, but they’d never discussed it and he really didn’t want to know.

The little cove behind the check-in office was lush and wild with palms and elephant ears in neat little rock groupings illuminated with red, blue, and yellow light. A few lights burned in the little cabins, and there was a Merc wagon and a Ford coupe. But he didn’t see Edy’s car.

He breathed out slowly and turned up the police radio in his Ford and headed north to Columbus Drive, skirting the edge of Tampa Heights, eventually up to Nebraska Avenue and Seminole Heights.

It must’ve been about ten o’clock when he turned down his radio and turned onto Alaska Avenue. Outside his house, he recognized Allison Wainright’s little Hudson sedan.

Dodge stopped at his mailbox, careful not to block in Al, and thought he must’ve turned up something on the Wall killing.

But as he threw his coat over his shoulder, whistling a bit, his straw hat slipping back on his head, he peered into the big pane glass window framed by shrubs and little shutters and saw young, dark Al Wainright holding his wife in his arms, turning her as if in a slow dance and rubbing her back.

Both of their eyes were closed. And he was smiling.

Dodge stopped whistling, climbed back in his car, and drove away.

Slow.

Back the way he came, retracing the route as if he’d never been home at all, past Tampa Heights and the old Victorian houses and down to Dale Mabry and the bars and motor courts and down to the Tahiti Motel, his blood almost boiling.

His face was flushed, as if he could not get out of the car fast enough. His heart pounded. His jacket and hat thrown in the passenger’s seat.

That Country Squire wagon was parked in the little nook, in the shadows away from the tropical Hollywood glow of the lights, and he walked right to the dark wood door, room 14, that stood right in front of the wagon.

And he knocked twice and Edy opened the door, smiling, whiskey in hand and ice bucket on a small table. A television played out some music of a variety show—Ed didn’t know which one; he barely was at home for television—and she stood there in the doorway, elbow resting high on the frame, with the glass of Lord Calvert.

Her mouth was very red when she smiled and walked back in slow and lazy to freshen her glass with ice.

Dodge checked that the drapes were closed and then turned off the television.

“I didn’t think—” she said.

And he grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet, resting the drink on the edge of the tiny motel sink and turning off the overhead light. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. He breathed through her mouth and unbuttoned her silk top and pulled her from her shirt and then unbuttoned her slacks, taking them down to her ankles. And she laughed a little as he struggled with the straps of her shoes and pulled at her panties and the latch of her brassiere.

And she was on the bed, naked, on her back and smiling, pillow under her head, that weird tropical glow coming in from the parking lot and the lonely zoom of cars outside that comes to you when you sleep in a motor court. The window air unit cut on and left this steady, dripping hum as he took off his clothes and tossed them on a chair.

He kissed her strong and hard on the mouth as he fit himself snugly inside her and felt with his left hand as she arched the small of her back and the way his hand fit tightly against that space of her spine as she let out all the air of her lungs.

He kissed her again and hugged her hard.

I FLIPPED THROUGH a
Gent
magazine, listened to a ball game on a small Zenith portable, and drank another Miller Hi-Life. I read through an interview with Dave Brubeck and a piece on Charlie Parker. There was a car guide on some convertibles that I would never be able to afford. I looked at the girls in their cheesecake poses and some underwater shots of a naked woman pretending she was a mermaid. On the radio, Mantle was having a hell of a night. I was having a hell of a night. The ideal bachelor in his compact, efficient apartment. Cold beer. Mickey Mantle saving the world. Naked women in living color.

In the bottom of the ninth, I brushed my teeth and was about to change out of my undershirt and trousers into a pair of pajama bottoms.

There was a knock on my door.

Eleanor.

She stood in the hall in a blue-and-white sundress and said: “That was a lousy as hell way to treat me.”

She’d been drinking.

I let her inside and walked back to my small kitchen table, where I folded up the
Gent
mag and tucked it under my
Webster’s
dictionary. She didn’t seem to notice the woman wearing a leopard-print bikini on the cover.

“You have another one of those?” she asked, looking at my beer.

“I do.”

“Well.”

I opened her a beer on the edge of my sink with a quick flash of my palm on the bottle top.

She sat down at my table in the bright light hanging over her and folded her hands in her lap and began to cry. I knew I’d been a hell of a bastard and got down on my knee and held her hand and told her that I was sorry. She held my fingers, only grabbing the fingers, and I could smell her breath and see the fresh circular red marks on her arm.

Scalded almost black.

I turned her arm completely over and saw there were a half dozen of them. She pulled her arm away and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come over here.”

“I didn’t know you knew where I lived.”

“You told me you lived in the Georgian.”

“I didn’t tell you what unit.”

She laughed in that awkward break between a laugh and a cry and wiped her face. “Some reporter I’d be if I didn’t look for your name on the mail slot.”

She sipped her beer, and I put on a short-sleeved dress shirt and buttoned up. I left it hanging out loose and tucked my bare feet into a pair of sandals that I kept for going to the beach. You could barely hear the end of the ball game and the fuzz of the crowd. Mainly, it was just very quiet.

“What happened to you?”

She shook her head, but looked at me dead center in the eyes. She shook her head more, as if talking might just break her. Her blond hair covered up her eyes as she dipped her head forward.

“You want to go for a walk?” I asked.

“A walk where?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I can’t sleep and just walk.” So we walked in the little neighborhood of Hyde Park, all through the old bungalows built by the bay and through the narrow streets and under the big, fat oak limbs covered in Spanish moss and around the picket fences and around the carriage houses that now held Chevys and Plymouths. Eleanor smoked and we kept a steady rhythm, a slow
thwap
to my sandals on the asphalt. A couple times, we could hear a dog stirred from its sleep as we rounded the corners from the streets of Southview and Marjory and passed the big bank windows of the bungalows and the little squares of apartments built in the twenties.

You could see women hanging up their stockings and old men eating at Formica dining tables or children watching a rollaway television. We saw a couple fighting and a woman drunk on her balcony. We saw a child sitting alone in a treehouse with a doll, her parents asleep in the house. There was an old man on his front porch who sat in a rocking chair, as if a transplant from another era, who waved to us and told us what a wonderful cool night it had turned out to be. We saw a cop car prowling through the neighborhood, that small spotlight bolted to the front fender illuminating us and moving on. There were a million windows in Hyde Park, and we moved through the neighborhood smoking and talking, a mutt dog trotting behind us for a good bit before disappearing. We saw a couple covered in shadows locked in a nude embrace.

The woman looked over her shoulder, perhaps hearing our short laugh, and pulled down her blinds.

“The nerve,” Eleanor said.

I had no idea where we were.

I held her hand and then moved closer and felt the blackened marks on her arm. She kept walking and moving ahead. I think she was still drunk.

“I’ll kill him,” I said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and she smiled and put her hands in the pockets of her dress. There was music far ahead of us coming from a carriage house, where a young boy was working on the engine of an ancient black car. Soon we rounded back onto Swann Avenue, which ran flat out to the bay where it dead-ended in a nice, big black puddle of moonlit water.

I asked her again what happened as we got back to the Georgian and I invited her inside.

She knocked at my chin with her knuckles a couple times, a mock fighter, and just said: “Thanks, Turner.”

And then she left.

ED DODGE was up at six and down at Abe’s Bail Bonds by seven, drinking coffee with Abe Marcadis in his spare office within sight of the Hillsborough County Jail.