right. Turn on light. Close door.’
A woman’s voice answered, heavy with drink or sarcasm, ‘You got a house rule says I got to have the light on when I eat peanuts?’
‘I’m an old man, I can’t stay up all night to stop funny business.’
‘Nobody sent for you.’
‘Nobody sent for you, neither, lady. Keep closed .’
He would close it and closed it would remain, though he had to lock it himself from the outside and keep the key in his pocket all night.
Hardly a week passed but someone, on one of the floors commanding a view of the street, seeing a pair of aces from the Saloon Street Station making for the entrance, would give the old man joyous warning over the banister: ‘Visitors, Jailer! Company!’
And always it was the new ones who gave the most trouble. The old-timers, like the dealer and his wife, battled, like respectable people should, behind closed doors. Schwabatski’s ears had long ago turned out the sort of roarer that the dealer and his Sophie sometimes put on. To a stranger it would have sounded like one word short of murder; but the Jailer would shuffle past, explaining it to himself: ‘They want to love each other – but they don’t know how.’ And shrug upon his way.
It was the rooms from which no sound came at all, while man and wife were together in there, that caught Schwabatski’s ear. It was from such rooms that real trouble came, the sudden glass-splintering crash, the moment of panting stillness and then the unspeakable flat-level scream of straight terror as the woman stumbled out of the roomwith the blood down the side of her face and her particular prize behind her with the broken bottle in his hand.
Schwabatski never worried about the dealer’s yellow door. There Sophie sat, her ash-blond hair in pin curls, one hand on the wheelchair’s arm and her army blanket across her knees, toying aimlessly with a combination flashlight-pencil, pressing the tiny light off and on, on and off. A dog howling down Schwabatski’s shadowed stairs recalled a casual promise made down her memory’s spiraled stairwell.
‘When you gonna get me the dawg you promised?’ she asked as Frankie closed the door carefully behind him. ‘You promised me you was sure gonna bring me a sweet lit-tul dawg. Well, I’m still settin’ ’n waitin’ but I don’t see no damned kind of dawg except a jailhouse dawg ’n that’s you. Why you always promisin’: “I’m gonna bring you the cutest puppy-pup” –’ n then a beat-out deck ’n a dirty shirt is what you really bring – I suppose you think I don’t even know where you was again?’
‘It wasn’t no pet shop, Zosh.’
‘Who told me?’
‘Who always travels the news around here? Piggy-O, the Information Bureau.’
‘ He asks me how am I feelin’, he don’t just shove in here without even sayin’ how’s anyone feelin’.’
‘How you feelin’, Zosh?’
‘Don’t call me “Zosh,” I ain’t no greenhorn, I wasn’t born in Slutsk, I was born on eart’ on Awgoosty Boulevard ’n my name is Soph- ee -a – say it.’
‘How you feelin’, Soph- ee -a?’
‘No damned good at all. I got gas on the stomach. You got gas on the stomach?’
Something more subtle than gas weighed on her stomach. Behind the curtain of loneliness which had sheltered her childhood a sick dread had grown. Of being left, some finalevening, alone in a room like this small room with no one of her own near at all.
A dread she sometimes evaded by reaching for an outsized album labeled, in her own childish and belabored hand, My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence . When she had finished scissoring these letters out of red and green Christmas wrapping paper they had looked so large and cheerful she had gone on to embroider the title with comic-strip cutouts: Superman and Bugs Bunny, Tarzan and Little Abner cavorted in a wanton carnival among lady spies in sheerest negligee and announcements of double-horror features and double-feature horrors from the
A woman’s voice answered, heavy with drink or sarcasm, ‘You got a house rule says I got to have the light on when I eat peanuts?’
‘I’m an old man, I can’t stay up all night to stop funny business.’
‘Nobody sent for you.’
‘Nobody sent for you, neither, lady. Keep closed .’
He would close it and closed it would remain, though he had to lock it himself from the outside and keep the key in his pocket all night.
Hardly a week passed but someone, on one of the floors commanding a view of the street, seeing a pair of aces from the Saloon Street Station making for the entrance, would give the old man joyous warning over the banister: ‘Visitors, Jailer! Company!’
And always it was the new ones who gave the most trouble. The old-timers, like the dealer and his wife, battled, like respectable people should, behind closed doors. Schwabatski’s ears had long ago turned out the sort of roarer that the dealer and his Sophie sometimes put on. To a stranger it would have sounded like one word short of murder; but the Jailer would shuffle past, explaining it to himself: ‘They want to love each other – but they don’t know how.’ And shrug upon his way.
It was the rooms from which no sound came at all, while man and wife were together in there, that caught Schwabatski’s ear. It was from such rooms that real trouble came, the sudden glass-splintering crash, the moment of panting stillness and then the unspeakable flat-level scream of straight terror as the woman stumbled out of the roomwith the blood down the side of her face and her particular prize behind her with the broken bottle in his hand.
Schwabatski never worried about the dealer’s yellow door. There Sophie sat, her ash-blond hair in pin curls, one hand on the wheelchair’s arm and her army blanket across her knees, toying aimlessly with a combination flashlight-pencil, pressing the tiny light off and on, on and off. A dog howling down Schwabatski’s shadowed stairs recalled a casual promise made down her memory’s spiraled stairwell.
‘When you gonna get me the dawg you promised?’ she asked as Frankie closed the door carefully behind him. ‘You promised me you was sure gonna bring me a sweet lit-tul dawg. Well, I’m still settin’ ’n waitin’ but I don’t see no damned kind of dawg except a jailhouse dawg ’n that’s you. Why you always promisin’: “I’m gonna bring you the cutest puppy-pup” –’ n then a beat-out deck ’n a dirty shirt is what you really bring – I suppose you think I don’t even know where you was again?’
‘It wasn’t no pet shop, Zosh.’
‘Who told me?’
‘Who always travels the news around here? Piggy-O, the Information Bureau.’
‘ He asks me how am I feelin’, he don’t just shove in here without even sayin’ how’s anyone feelin’.’
‘How you feelin’, Zosh?’
‘Don’t call me “Zosh,” I ain’t no greenhorn, I wasn’t born in Slutsk, I was born on eart’ on Awgoosty Boulevard ’n my name is Soph- ee -a – say it.’
‘How you feelin’, Soph- ee -a?’
‘No damned good at all. I got gas on the stomach. You got gas on the stomach?’
Something more subtle than gas weighed on her stomach. Behind the curtain of loneliness which had sheltered her childhood a sick dread had grown. Of being left, some finalevening, alone in a room like this small room with no one of her own near at all.
A dread she sometimes evaded by reaching for an outsized album labeled, in her own childish and belabored hand, My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidence . When she had finished scissoring these letters out of red and green Christmas wrapping paper they had looked so large and cheerful she had gone on to embroider the title with comic-strip cutouts: Superman and Bugs Bunny, Tarzan and Little Abner cavorted in a wanton carnival among lady spies in sheerest negligee and announcements of double-horror features and double-feature horrors from the
Similar Books
