The drowning pool

We went up an alley between two of them, to a yard oppressed by the black shadows of oaks. There was a trailer under the trees, on the far side of the yard. In the light of the headlights I could see that its metal side was peeling and rustling like an abandoned billboard. The littered yard gave off an odor of garbage.

“That’s our trailer there.” The girl was trying to be brisk, but there was a strain of anxiety rising in her voice. “No lights, though,” she added, when I switched off the headlights and the engine.

“He wouldn’t be waiting in the dark?”

“He might have gone to sleep. Sometimes he goes to sleep here.” She was on the defensive again, describing the habits of a large and troublesome pet whom she happened to love.

“You said ‘our trailer,’ by the way. Yours and Pat’s?”

“No sir, he just visits me. I got a bunkmate name of Jane, but she’s never home nights. She works in an all-night hamburger up the line.”

Her face was a pale blur, swallowed completely then by the shadow of the oaks. Their sharp dry leaves crackled under our feet. The door of the trailer was unlocked. She went in and turned on a light in the ceiling.

“He isn’t here.” She sounded disappointed. “Do you want to come in?”

“Thanks.” I stepped up from the concrete block that served as a doorstep. The top of the door was so low I had to duck my head.

The little room contained a sink and butane stove at the end nearest the door, two narrow built-in bunks covered with identical cheap red cotton spreads, a built-in plywood dresser at the far end cluttered with cosmetics and bobbypins and true-romance comic-books, and above it a warped, dirty mirror reflecting a blurred distorted version of the girl’s room, the girl, and me.

The man in the mirror was big and flat-bodied, and lean-faced. One of his gray eyes was larger than the other, and it swelled and wavered like the eye of conscience: the other eye was little, hard and shrewd. I stood still for an instant, caught by my own distorted face, and the room reversed itself like a trick drawing in a psychological test. For an instant I was the man in the mirror, the shadow-figure without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.

“It’s kind of cramped,” she said, trying to be cheerful, “but we call it home sweet home.”

She reached past me and closed the door. In the close air, the smell of spilled rancid grease from the stove and the sick-sweet odor of dime-store perfume from the dresser were carrying on an old feud. I wasn’t rooting for either. “Cozy,” I said.

“Sit down, sir,” she said with forced gaiety. “I’m out of rum and cokes, but I got some muscatel.”

“Thanks, not on top of beer.”

I sat on the edge of one of the red-covered bunks. The movements of the man in the mirror had the quickness and precision of youth, but none of youth’s enthusiasm. Now his forehead was bulbous like a cartooned intellectual’s, his mouth little and prim and cruel. To hell with him.

“We could have a little party if you want,” she said uncertainly. Standing in the full glare of the light, she looked like a painted rubber doll, made with real human hair, that wasn’t quite new any more.

“I don’t want.”

“Okay, only you don’t have to be insulting about it, do you?” She meant to say it in a kidding way, but it came out wrong. She was embarrassed, and worried.

She tried again: “I guess you’re pretty anxious to see Pat, eh? He might be down in his place in L.A., you know. He don’t usually go down in the middle of the week, but a couple of times he did.”

“I didn’t know he had a place in L.A.”

“A little place, a one-room apartment. He took me down one week end to see it. Gee, wouldn’t that be fu

“That would be a scream. You know where it is, so I can look him up tomorrow?”

“He won’t be there tomorrow. He’s got to be back on the job, at Slocum’s.”

I let her think that. “Too bad. I have to get back to L.A. tonight. Maybe you can give me his address.”

“I don’t have the number, but I could find it again.” Her eyes flickered dully, as if she hoped to promote something. She sat down on the bunk opposite me, so close that our knees touched. A pair of nylons hanging from a towel-rack above the bed tickled the back of my neck. “I’d do anything I could to help,” she said.

“Yeah, I appreciate that. Does the place have a name?”

“Graham Court, something like that. It’s on one of the little side streets off North Madison, between Hollywood and L.A.”

“And no phone?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Thanks again.” I stood up. She rose like my shadow, and we were jammed in the narrow aisle between the beds. I tried to move past her to the door, and felt the touch of her round thighs.

“I kind of like you, Mister. If there was anything I could do?”

Her breasts were pointed like a dilemma. I pushed on past. The man in the mirror was watching me with one eye as cold as death. “How old are you, Gretchen?” I asked her from the doorway.

She didn’t follow me to the door. “None of your business. A hundred years, about. By the calendar, seventeen.”

Seventeen, a year or two older than Cathy. And they had Reavis in common. “Why don’t you go home to your mother?”

She laughed: paper tearing in an echo chamber. “Back to Hamtramck? She left me at Stanislaus Welfare when she got her first divorce. I been on my own since 1946.”

“How are you doing, Gretchen?”

“Like you said, I’m doing all right.”

“Do you want a lift back to Helen’s?”

“No thank you, sir. I got enough money to live on for a week. Now that you know where I live, come and see me sometime.”

The old words started an echo that lasted fifty miles. The night was murmurous with the voices of girls who threw their youth away and got the screaming meemies at three or four a.m.

Chapter 10

I stopped at a lunch-bar east of the cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, for a sandwich and coffee and a look at the telephone book. It hung by a chain from the pay telephone on the wall beside the front window. A Graham Court on Laredo Lane was listed. I dialed the number and watched the sidewalk roamers. The young hepcats high on music or weed, the middle-aged men on the town, the tourists waiting for something to fulfill their fantasies, the hopeful floozies and the despairing ones, the quick, light, ageless grifters walked the long Hollywood beat on the other side of the plate glass. The sign above the window was red on one side, green on the other, so that they passed from ruddy youth to sickly age as they crossed my segment of sidewalk, from green youth to apoplexy.

A dim voice answered on the twelfth ring. Pat Reavis didn’t live at Graham Court, he never had, goodnight.

The counterman slid a thin white sandwich and a cup of thick brown coffee across the black Lucite bar. He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage.

“I couldn’t help hearing,” he said moistly. “You’re looking for a contract, I know a good number to call.”

“Write it in blood on a piece of rag-content paper and eat it with your breakfast.”

“Huh?” he said. “Blood?”

“What makes you think that sex is the important thing in life?”

He laughed through his nose. “Name another.”

“Money.”

“Sure, but what does a guy want money for, answer me that.”

“So he can retire to a lamasery in Tibet.” I showed him a Special Deputy badge which I’d saved from a wartime case on the Pedro docks. “Pimping will get you a couple of years up north.”

“Jesus.” His face underwent a sudden and shocking change. Old age ran crooked fingers over it, and held it crooked. “I was only kidding, I didn’t mean nothing, I don’t now any number. Honest to God.”