Hard Rain Falling (2 page)

There were worse things than being broke, but for the moment Jack Levitt could not think of any of them. He stood on Fourth Avenue in downtown Portland looking into the window of a novelty store, his hands in his pockets, his heavy shoulders sloped forward. Two items caught his eye, the first a not-very-convincing puddle of plastic vomit, colored a bilish yellow, with bits of food sticking up from the surface; the second a realistic heap of dogshit, probably made out of plaster of Paris and then colored brown. Somebody made these things to sell. Somewhere there was a factory in which workers stood at assembly lines and turned these items out, and the workers got paid for it. Jack wished he could think of something like that to make money with. But he knew he had neither the imagination nor the energy for inventive work. He smiled to himself. When you’re broke, all kinds of crazy ways of making money come into your head. Rolling drunks. Walking into a store (like this one, for example, empty except for an old man in the back reading a newspaper) and grabbing the guy by the shirtfront, giving him a couple of pops on the mouth, and emptying the cash register....Or he could go down to the labor employment place on Third, a few doors up from the burlesque theater, and try to get a job. Except that all along the Burnside skid row there were men standing out on the sidewalk or leaning against buildings, and there would be a whole cluster of them at the employment office, trying to get work. When Jack had first run to Portland a few months before, he had thought all these men were bums, but they weren’t. They were just workers out of work. Fishermen, dock workers, lumberjacks, fry cooks, men who had been to barber college, and only a few winos. Gypsies, too, whole families of them sitting out in front of their storefront homes, and Jack knew the gypsy girls, the pretty ones in their costumes, would smile and wink at you, and beckon you into their place, offering what no gypsy woman ever delivered, and then, once inside, asking for some money “to bless,” and gypsy men would begin to glide out of the curtained shadows.... The men were mostly used-car dealers, and would race around town in dusty old cars, stopping people and asking if they wanted immediate cash for their car, or offering to repair dented fenders. They would say that they would remove “that ugly dent” for three dollars, and if you went for it, five or six of them would pile out of the car with hammers and start banging away on your fender, and they would turn your one big dent into dozens of small dents, and then demand three dollars
apiece
, surrounding you and arguing furiously about the sacredness of a contract and they had witnesses; and if you absolutely balked and refused to pay anything at all, they would offer to buy the car. If you didn’t want to sell, they would eventually go away, but not without argument. Another great way to make money. Only, Jack was not a gypsy.

He was, in fact, a young man who had a hard time getting work. Not that he wanted to work, but he did want money, and right now, in daylight, that seemed the only way. He was seventeen, and very hard-looking. He had penetrating, flat, almost snakelike blue eyes which ordinary citizens found difficult to look into, and his head seemed too large for his body, accentuated by the mop of wild blond curls he seldom combed. He looked mean without looking angry, and his huge fists seemed capable of smashing skulls, almost as if they had been made just for that. Jack was not the picture of the model employee, and even when he smiled there was too much ferocity in his expression to relax anyone.

Yet he was only a boy, and most of the hardness was a mask, developed over the last dozen years of his life because he had discovered that nobody was going to protect him but himself. On a smaller, thinner, less powerful-looking boy, his expression might have been mistaken for self-reliance, and commended.

He turned away from the window, taking his hands out of his pockets, and began to walk up the street. People who saw him coming got out of his way. It was a gray Portland day, and this helped him to feel sorry for himself. He was down to his last few dollars and locked out of his hotel room. He had quit his job and did not know where he could get some more money. He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense “wanted.” He did not feel “wanted”—he felt very unwanted. He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognize that he preferred his singularity, his freedom. All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to “How High the Moon” and “Artistry Jumps.” That was what he wanted. So it was up to him to get these things. Already he felt better, just making a list of his desires. That put limits on them. And he knew that every single one of his desires could be satisfied with money. So what he really wanted was lots of money. Say, ten thousand dollars.

He was really in a good humor when he got to the poolhall which was one of his three hangouts (the other two were a street corner and another poolhall), and he ran down the stairs cheerfully, and when he saw his friend Denny Mellon he called out, “Hey, daddy, have you got ten thousand dollars you can loan me?”

Denny frowned and said, “What do you need it for?”

“Houses and lots,” Jack chanted.

“Well, okay. I thought you was going to waste it on war bonds or somethin.”

A few minutes later Jack was involved in a game of tencent nine-ball, and he had forgotten all about his troubles.

Jack was not friendless. Shortly after coming to Portland he found the location of the local hard kids and joined them, and in the gang he had a certain status as one of those who would stop at nothing, one of the really tough boys, like Clancy Phipps and his brother Dale, a leader because (so it seemed to the rest of the boys and girls) there was no proposition too dangerous for him. In Portland the hard kids were called “the Broadway gang” and they hung out at the corner of Broadway and Yamhill. The gang started during World War II, and still goes on. These were the kids who were not liked or wanted enough at their high schools, or who despised school themselves, and who wanted the excitement Downtown promises; the ones who were in trouble with the schools, the police, their parents—nearly everybody—and so gathered together into one loosely knit gang. There were perhaps fifty of them, boys and girls both, and the makeup of the gang was in a constant state of flux; members would vanish into the Army or jobs, or get married, or make friends at their own schools, or go to the reformatory in Woodburn, or leave the state and go to New York or San Francisco; and new members kept coming along, many like Jack, to be recognized and admitted to the group on the criteria of toughness, a lack of conventional morals, a dislike of adults, and a hatred of the police.

Most of them were like Jack Levitt in that they wanted a lot of money and wanted to do anything they pleased, at least for a while; but most of them saw it differently: they wanted to enjoy themselves
now
, because they knew in their hearts that soon they would get jobs and get married and start having families (like their own), and the fun would be over. If they seemed too noisy, too wild, too defiant, perhaps it was a little out of desperation, because lying before them were endless years of dull existence, shabby jobs, unattractive mates, and brats with no more future than themselves. Jack did not see things this way, and there was no reason why he should have. He did not know who his parents were, and he did not expect the future to be a repetition of the past because that was unthinkable—he at least had a vision of the future which included a wildness in itself, a succession of graduated pleasures and loves and joys, and if it was going to be a struggle, that was all right, too; he knew how to fight for what he wanted. In fact, that was almost all he did know. There were buried terrors, too; but he hoped that part of his life was finished. In this sense, he was that odd combination, a cynical optimist. His hopes were vague and even childish, but they were at least hopes, and their vagueness was a blessing; for many of the others, the future was all too clear.

At about the same time Jack Levitt ran down the steps to the poolhall, another boy whose future was vague, yet to him full of promise, got off the bus from Seattle. His name was Billy Lancing and he was the last one off; a slender, bony-shouldered boy of sixteen, hawk-faced, with sharp, too-old, calculating eyes. The color of his skin was a malarial yellow, and it was obvious from that and from his kinky reddish-brown hair that he was a Negro. He wore a white windbreaker and carried a small blue canvas overnight bag, which he put into a ten-cent locker there in the Greyhound depot; then he walked downstairs to the men’s rest room, slipped a nickel into one of the pay-toilet slots, and entered. When he came out the locker key was inside his stocking, under his right instep. This was important: inside the bag, along with all his clothes, were fifteen ten-dollar bills, rolled tight and kept together by a doubled rubber band—his caseroll, money he had won and scrimped and saved to make his break from home.

The key safe, he went to one of the sinks and ran cold water over his hands, and then splashed it over his face. The men’s room was full of sailors, and their talk and laughter bounced strangely off the tiled walls, an insane barrage of fragmentary noises. Except for the echoing quality it sounded to Billy just like his home in Seattle, the continual clatter and chatter of the people who lived in their housing-project apartment: his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, his old aunt from the South, his three grandparents; a home in which someone was always up, meals were always being prepared, somebody was always getting ready for work and someone else just home and having a drink of whiskey; the radio going, a child crying, another screaming with laughter; his aunt’s constant low bubbling voice from the corner beside the stove, talking about the times in the South and the cold and the rain; or his father and grand-father arguing Boeing this and Boeing that. When Billy thought of home he thought of noise, and now in the men’s room of the Greyhound depot in Portland, almost two hundred miles from the housing project, the old fear of suffocation, of being strangled by the noise, came over him again, and he felt his gut tighten and his palms go moist. I’m just scared of Portland, he thought. That’s all there is to it. Like any other kid. He went back up the stairs and out into the street.

Heavy gray bellies of clouds hung low over the buildings of downtown Portland, but it was not raining yet, and the side-walk was dry. Billy looked at the blue-and-white street sign: Fifth and Taylor. He knew from what they told him at the Two-Eleven in Seattle that there were three poolhalls in downtown Portland: the Rialto, on Park, between Morrison and Alder; Ben Fenne’s, on Sixth, between Washington and Stark; and a place everybody called “The Rathole,” on Washington between Fourth and Fifth. The top action was supposed to be at the Rialto, but Billy decided that he would like to try out the other places first. He walked over to a driver leaning against a Yellow Cab and asked him directions, and then began walking down the hill, toward Washington Street.

“The Rathole” was easy to find: a red neon sign, over an entryway between a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter and a real-estate office, saying “Pool-Snooker-Billiards” and a stairway down. As Billy started down, two businessmen were on the way up, laughing about something. One of them gave him an odd look and then turned sideways to let him pass. The stairs were incredibly dirty, and the concrete landing at the bottom was stained and covered with litter, smelling of stale vomit and urine. There was a small green wine bottle lying on its side in one corner, and next to it a paper bag from which the neck of a second bottle stuck out. Billy turned right and pushed open the swinging doors and walked down three more steps into the pool-hall.

To his right, a glass cigar counter with a few stale-looking wrapped sandwiches on top, a horse-pinball with the usual player bent over it, a telephone booth, a man in a white shirt, probably the proprietor, leaning against the counter and giving advice to the pinball player; to his left, six tables in a row, all pool tables. Three of them had games going, and there was a row of theater seats against the wall, with clusters of idle watchers opposite the active tables. Beyond the cigar counter Billy saw an entryway leading to a back room, and through it he could see the corner of a snooker table, and past that, more theater seats. There was a lot of noise coming from the back room, and with his hands in the windbreaker pockets, Billy walked over and leaned against the entryway. There were three snooker tables, and all three had games going; businessmen with their coats off, probably playing four bits a corner while they ate their lunch, laughing, all friends, all playing together every day at noon. One of them, Billy saw, was a policeman, plump, loose-faced, chewing on a sandwich. Billy was just about to turn around and leave when he felt something on his shoulder.

He turned and looked directly into the proprietor’s face. The mouth was tense, the words were harsh, but behind gold-rimmed glasses the gray eyes looked troubled, as if the eyes were trying to tell Billy not to mind the words, not to blame the proprietor. But then again, Billy thought as he went back up the stairs, maybe the old fart was just excusing himself. Billy paid no attention to the actual words; whether they were “Beat it, nigger,” or, “Take off, nigger,” or just, “Blah blah, nigger,” did not matter to him and he did not remember; it was not important; “The Rathole” was not the kind of place he was looking for. It was a dirty, two-bit joint full of pastime players and horsebettors in out of the weather; there was nothing for Billy there anyway.