The drowning pool

A big he

“I’m Helen,” she said with a rubber-lipped public smile. “You want a drink, you find a seat and I send a waitress to you.”

“Thanks, I’m looking for Pat.”

“Pat who? Does she work here?”

“He’s a man. Young, big, with curly dark hair.”

“Friend, I got troubles of my own. Don’t you go away mad, though. Try the waitresses if you want.” She took a deep breath when she finished, and the egg swelled up almost to her chin.

“Two bombs, beer chasers,” a waitress said behind me.

I asked her: “Is Gretchen here?”

“Gretchen Keck, you mean? The waitress jerked a flat thumb at a tall girl on the dance floor. “That’s her, the blonde in the blue dress.”

I waited till the music stopped, and crossed to an empty booth. Some of the couples stayed where they were in the center of the room, arms locked, face to face. A Mexican boy in blue jeans and a white shirt stood with the tall blonde. Gretchen was as light as the boy was dark, with a fair skin and a pull-taffy pompadour that made her taller than he was. They couldn’t stand still. Their hips, pressed flat together, moved in a slow weaving round and round until the music started and quickened their beat.

While she danced on a dime by herself, he moved in a circle about her, turkey strutting, flapping his arms like a rooster, leaping and stamping. He moved his head and neck in the horizontal plane, Balinese fashion, danced squatting on his heels like a Cossack, invented new gyrations of the hips, body and feet jerked by separate rhythms. She stood where she was, her movements slightly mimicking his, and his circle tightened about her. They came together again, their bodies shaken and snaked through their length by an impossible shimmy. Then she was still on his arched breast, and her arms fell loose. He held her, and the music went on without them.

In the booth behind me, a woman called in bracero Spanish upon the Mother of God to witness her justifiable act of violence. She thrust herself out of her seat, a gaunt Mexican girl with hair like fresh-poured tar. From her clenched right fist, a four-inch knife-blade projected upward. I moved, bracing one hand on the seat and pivoting. My left toe caught her instep and she fell hard, face down. The spring-knife struck the floor and clattered out of her reach. At its signal the dark boy and the blonde girl sprang apart, so suddenly that the girl staggered on her high heels. The boy looked at the knife on the floor and the woman struggling to her knees. His eyes watered and his bronze face took on a greenish patina.

Slouching and woebegone, without a backward look, he went to the woman and tried awkwardly to help her rise. She spat out words in Spanish that sounded like a string of cheap firecrackers. Her worn black satin dress was coated with dust. Half of her sallow pitted face was grimy. She began to weep. He put his arms around her and said, “Please, I am sorry.” They went out together. The music stopped.

A heavy middle-aged man in a fake policeman’s uniform appeared from nowhere. He picked up the knife, broke it across his knee, and dropped the blade and handle in the pocket of his blue coat. He came to my booth, stepping lightly as if he was walking on eggs. His shoes were slit and mis-shapen across the base of the toes.

“Nice work, son,” he said. “They flare up so fast sometimes I can’t keep track of ’em.”

“Knife-play disturbs my drinking.”

His red-rimmed eyes peered from a face that was gullied by time. “New in these parts, ain’t you?”

“Yeah,” I answered, though I felt as if I’d been in Nopal Valley for days. “Speaking of my drinking, I haven’t been doing any.”

He signaled to a waitress. “We’ll fix that.” She set down a trayful of empty glasses grained with the leavings of foam. “What’ll it be?”

“A bottle of beer.” I disturbed the bar whisky. “Ask Gretchen what she’s drinking, and if she’ll have one with me.”

The drink and Gretchen arrived simultaneously. “Helen says no charge,” the waitress said. “Your drinks are on the house. Or anything.”

“Food?”

“Not this late. The kitchen’s closed.”

“What, then?”

The waitress set my beer down hard so that it foamed, and went away without answering.

Gretchen giggled, not unpleasantly, as she slid into the seat across from me. “Helen’s got rooms upstairs. She says there’s too many men in this burg, and somebody has to do something to take the pressure off.” She sipped her drink, rum coke, and winked grotesquely over the rim of the glass. Her eyes were naïve and clear, the color of cornflowers. Not even the lascivious red mouth constructed with lipstick over her own could spoil her freshness.

“I’m a very low-pressure type myself.”

She looked me over carefully, did everything but feel the texture of the material my coat was made of. “Maybe. You don’t have the upstairs look, I admit. You can move, though, brother.”

“Forget it.”

“I wish I could. I never get scared when something happens, it always come over me later. I wake up in the middle of the night and get the screaming meemies. God damn that babe to hell.”

“She’s there already.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. These Spanish babes take things so hard, it’s getting so a girl can’t have fun any more.”

“You do all right,” I said. “If Pat can be believed.”

She blushed, and her eyes brightened. “You know Pat?”

“He was my buddy,” I said, almost gagging on the word. “In the Marines.”

“He really was in the Marines, then?” She seemed surprised and pleased, and was sharper than I thought.

“Sure. We were on Guadal together.” I felt just a little like a pander.

“Maybe you can tell me.” She bit her lower lip and got lipstick on her teeth. Even her front teeth were bad. “Is it true what he says, that he’s a secret agent or something?”

“In the war?”

“Now. He says him being a chauffeur is only a blind, that he’s some kind of an undercover man.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“He tells so many stories, half the time I don’t know what to believe. Pat’s a swell joe, though,” she added defensively. “He’s got a good brain, and he’ll go far.”

I agreed, as heartily as I could. “Yeah, a good guy. I was hoping to see him tonight. There’s a business opportunity in our organization, and he could get in on the ground floor.”

“A business opportunity?” The words had a magical four-color advertisement quality, and she repeated them with respect. The cornflower eyes saw Gretchen in an apron freshly laundered in the new Bendix, cooking for Reavis in the tiled kitchen of a new one-bedroom G.I. house in the suburbs of what city? “In L.A.?”

“Yeah.”

“He might be at my place. He waits for me in the trailer sometimes.”

“Can you leave now?”

“Why not? I’m a freelance.” The patter went on like a record she’d forgotten to turn off, but her thoughts were far ahead, on Gretchen in a new phase: attractive young wife of rising young executive Reavis.

She stroked the fender of my car as if it was an animal she could win by affection. I wanted to say, forget him. He’ll never stay long with any woman or pay his debts to any man. I said: “We’re doing good business these days. We can use a boy like Pat.”

“If I could help to get him a real good job—” she said. The rest of it was silent but unmistakable: he’d marry me. Maybe.

A few blocks off the main street I turned, as she directed, down a road lined with large old houses. The eroded asphalt rattled the tools in the trunk of the car. It was one of those streets that had once been the best in town. The houses were Victorian mansions, their gables and carved cornices grotesque against the sky. Now they were light-housekeeping apartments and boarding houses, wearing remnants of sleazy grandeur.