Ride the Pink Horse (5 page)

A lighted sign hung out over the sidewalk. He didn’t read the big red letters. He read the little blue ones. “Kansas City Steaks.” As he read, he saw a couple of men go up to the door and walk in.

It didn’t take him sixty seconds to reach the corner. The cafe was open all right. There were plenty of people sitting around the counter, people in booths. Sailor went in.

He found a place at the counter between a guy in shirtsleeves and a doll in a cheap silk dress. The doll looked at him out of big eyes when he straddled the stool. He didn’t look at her. He fixed his eye on the long tall sandy drink in the chefs cap. Kept it there until the guy came over and asked, “What’s yours?”

“Couple of steak sandwiches without garbage, side order French fries, bottle of milk.”

The guy said, “Rare?”

”And thick.” He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. The doll said in a flat nasal Kansas twang, “What’s happened to the pie, Gus?” She said it like she thought she was something cute but she wasn’t. She had a face like a rubber doll, round and empty, and a Kansas twang in her nose. She didn’t know that her eyes were predatory; she thought they were big baby-blue eyes and that nobody could see what kind of a spirit she had.

Gus said, good-natured, “We’re baking it. Keep your shirt on, Janie.”

He dumped a glass of water in front of Sailor and a handful of tin to eat with. You could fish your own paper napkin out of the container.

The girl said to the girl beside her, “The service here is getting terrible.” She said it to the other girl but she kept the corner of her eye on Sailor. When she started to crawl in his lap, he’d slap her down. Until then he’d ignore her. Though she could probably find him a bed. Trouble was what went with it

He hunched her out of sight with his shoulder. The guy on the other side of him was shoveling in ham and drinking coffee. He wasn’t with anyone; he was like Sailor, all he wanted was food. Sailor said, “You don’t know where I could get a room?”

“Naw.” He didn’t stop eating. “No rooms during Fiesta.” He wasn’t interested in gab and Sailor didn’t bother him again.

You couldn’t outrun Fiesta even in a hashery. Across the circular counter were costumes, costumes in some of the booths. Youngsters mostly, blondes and red heads and brunettes with gawky looking guys. Kids with good appetites, with nothing on their minds but having fun; Zozobra is dead, long live Fiesta. When he was the size of the punk with the ears, directly across, McIntyre had already run him in once for stealing cars. Mac was just a flattie then. They’d both come up in the world quite a ways.

He’d always liked Mac. Mac didn’t lecture; he said take it or leave it. If you steal cars, you’ll do time. What Mac didn’t know was that the boys behind the car barns had a better angle: If you don’t get caught stealing cars, you won’t have to do time. He hadn’t seen much of Mac since he moved north. A hello now and then, when you weren’t expecting it. Mac hadn’t tried to move in. Mac was honest you could say that for him. He wasn’t looking out for a cut He believed what he told you. You hurt somebody and you’re going to get hurt yourself. He was an honest copper, in his mind and heart as well as in his job. That was why the reform commissioner had named him head of Homicide. Now he was out working again.

It had to be something big to put Mac on the street. Something like nabbing ex-Senator Douglass for murder. That silly hat he was wearing might fool some of the yokels but not anyone who’d ever seen Mac at work. Who had ever noticed Mac’s quiet slate eyes.

Gus slapped down the thick crockery platter, two open steak sandwiches oozing pink juice on the toast, another platter with French fries. “Coffee?”

“Bottle of milk.” His mouth was full already. The potato was too hot. He crunched it, keeping his tongue out of the way.

“Yeah, I remember.” Gus opened an ice chest, pulled out the milk.

“Make it two,” Sailor said. He didn’t wait to cut the sandwich. He bit in big and chewed. He’d known he was hungry but not this hungry. The milk was even better than the beer had been. He finished half a glass while he was still chewing.

He didn’t recognize the man with the full greasy mouth, the red-rimmed eyes, the dirty collar line at first. Not until the mouth opened to push in a hunk of bread and meat. He was looking in a mirror. The man was he, dirty, crumpled, his unkempt hair straggling from under his hat down on his forehead, beard shadowed on his chin. He had to find a place to clean up before seeing the Sen tomorrow. He could sleep on a park bench but he must shave, shower, change to fresh linen. He chewed in ugly impotent rage at what the Sen had done to him this day. He ought to be made to pay for the indignities. Five thousand wouldn’t be enough to make up for it.

The screen door flopped open and he heard the laughter of an entering group. He was afraid to look, under his eyes he could see the costumes. They passed the opposite side of the counter and he pushed his hat forward over his eyes. After they had passed he looked after them. It wasn’t the Sen’s party. It was just another group of stay-up-late Fiesta revelers.

He ate faster then. He didn’t want to be caught in the glaring light of the hash house by the Sen’s crowd. His stomach was bloated when he finished and the cigarette tasted good again, not like an old dry weed. He picked up his check, paid at the cashier’s wicket and dived outside banging the screen after him. But the Sen and his party weren’t standing there ready to enter. There was no one on the walk.

From the corner the lights of the Cabeza de Vaca up the street sneered at him. Across, the lights of the little Inca ignored him. Damn them and damn their neon. He’d find him a room better than in those dumps.

He rounded the corner and retraced his way up the slight hill. He turned left and continued down the street. There must be some place with room for him. Book stores, jewelry stores, shoe stores, furniture stores. He walked on in the darkness, the shops growing meaner, the way more dark. Nothing across, a blatant movie house dark, he could pitch a tent in the lobby if he had a tent. Murky bars with muted sounds and sounds not muted, acrid smell of cheap liquor stenching your nostrils. Only a couple of blocks and the street ended. Nothing beyond. Dark little houses, country, vacant fields. Beyond that, mountains. No hotels, no room signs, not even a whore house. Nothing more in this direction and he turned back. He stood for a moment lighting another cigarette, trying to know out of his head what to do, where to go.

And standing there the unease came upon him again. The unease of an alien land, of darkness and silence, of strange tongues and a stranger people, of unfamiliar smells, even the cool-of-night smell unfamiliar. What sucked into his pores for that moment was panic although he could not have put a name to it. The panic of loneness; of himself the stranger although he was himself unchanged, the creeping loss of identity. It sucked into his pores and it oozed out again, clammy in the chill of night, he was shivering as he stood there and he moved sharply, towards the Plaza, towards identity. He heard the pad of walking feet as he moved and he slung his head over his shoulder quick, his right hand hard and quick in his pocket No one walked behind him. Yet when he moved again, he heard again the soft padding. He had a momentary stab of something like fright, remembering the black hatred in the eyes of the mug waiter. Then he realized. There was no one abroad but himself. It was himself he heard. His short laugh was an ugly, out-loud sound in the dark and the night. He walked on, striking his heels viciously into the broken sidewalk. He wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t afraid of the spic waiter or of any man who walked. He had never known man fear since the old man had been buried, his strap fastening his pants around his obese middle.

He walked back up the dark street one block, the second, and he cut slantwise across to the murky bar by the barber shop. Not because he wanted a drink. Because he saw the cadaverous frame of Ignacio, the guitar player, through the smoky open doorway. Because he would find Pancho, and Pancho would find a place where he might rest.

This wasn’t a dump like Keen’s Bar, this was a dive. A two-by-four saloon with a dirty bar and no fixings. Not even a juke. This was where men, poor men, went to get drunk when the whip of poverty fell too hard for endurance. This was the kind of saloon the old man had hung around whenever he had the price of cheap rotgut. Where the old man had spent the dimes that the old lady brought home for bread. When the old man couldn’t stand up on his feet, he’d stumble home and beat the hell out of the kids because there wasn’t any bread to give them.

The old man lay in a pauper”s grave where he belonged. The old lady lay beside him; it wasn’t her fault that she wore out scrubbing floors for bread and left the kids on the street. Some day he’d dig her up; have a white headstone put over her old bones. The girls were drabs, the boys worked for a living. Some living clerks, day laborers. All but him. That hadn’t been good enough for him. He’d known what he wanted, money, enough money to go North Shore. No small change. No more stir. Safe jobs. Big pay. He was useful to the Sen because he didn’t drink and he looked good in the clothes the Sen bought him. He was a good-looking kid and the Sen liked the men around him to look North Shore. He had good shoulders from boxing; he was quick and tough; he’d done the Sen’s dirty work since he was a punk of seventeen and never let the Sen down. The dirty stinking Sen.

A nice white headstone. Maybe with an angel praying on top it. Here lies. He didn’t know when the old lady was born or where. Died: Chicago slums, 1936. Rest in peace. The only peace she’d ever known.

He was inside the red murk of the bar and the stench turned his stomach. Rotgut. And marijuana. But he had to find Ignacio, find out where Pancho slept. He went along the bar, craning his head into men’s faces, dark, ugly faces, sotted with cheap liquor, babbling in their strange tongues. He went along smelling their dirty pants and dirty shirts, their dried sweat and dung and foul breaths. Until he found Ignacio.

He demanded, “Where’s Pancho?”

Ignacio looked at him as if he’d never seen Sailor before. Blank, black eyes, sad drunken eyes in his half-starved face. He said something in Spanish. “Quien es Pancho?”

The language barrier was stifling. More stifling than the foul smell of the dive. “Pancho,” Sailor shouted. He remembered then, Pancho Villa was the name he had given the fat man; he didn’t know the man’s real name. He said, “Your boss. The fat guy. The guy who runs the merry-go-round.” He found the Spanish. “Tio Vivo.”

The cadaver continued to look at him out of sad, blank eyes.

But he’d been talking too loud and the others at this end of the bar were listening, watching. Suspicious of Sailor’s city suit and hat, matted as it was; suspicious of his nose and his eyes and his English-speaking tongue. Suspicious and wary, waiting for Sailor to edge across the line, waiting with knives for him to start something. His fists knotted as the squat man behind Ignacio stumped forward. But the man didn’t lash at him, he grinned from behind his snag teeth.

“He say who ees Pancho,” the man said, grinning like a monkey. His accent was thick as the red smoke. “He no spic the Englees. He no understand what you say. I taal him.” He tapped his wilted blue shirt.

“Listen, you—”

“I am Pablo Gonzalez’” the man said. “I speak the Englees. He no speak the Englees. I taal him.”

“Tell him I want to know where Pancho is.” He scowled quickly. “His name isn’t Pancho. He’s the big guy. The boss of the merry-go-round. Tio Vivo.”

Pablo Gonzalez rattled Spanish at the blank eyes. Sailor waited, hopeful, hopeless. The thin guy was shaking his thin head.

“For Christ’s sake, he works for the guy—”

Pablo interrupted patiently. “He does not know where ees Don José Patrico Santiago Morales y Cortez—” his grin was more monkey— ”that you call Pancho.”

That ended it. He flipped a quarter at the monkey face. “Buy yourself five drinks,” he growled. He got out of the dive fast.

Ignacio was lying. Or the monkey face didn’t spic the Englees any better than the guitarist. The barrier of language was even more frustrating. If he could talk to Ignatz he’d find out where the long name was. Pancho had a name like a duke, not like a guy playing the carnivals.

He couldn’t talk Spanish and that left him where he’d been before, on the street. Walking up the narrow street, pounding the pavement of a hick town. Standing on a street corner in a dark strange town, with colored lights festooned above his head and grotesque paper masks leering at him.

There was nothing to do about it now but camp on the Sen’s doorstep. Give the old biddy at the desk a tall tale and get to the Sen. Scorn in the clean blue eyes of Iris Towers wasn’t as important as getting between the sheets. He walked on, past the dark shops, past the dim lighted pane of the hotel where his bag was parked, on to the corner. But he didn’t cross to the hulk of hotel. He stayed his steps. Stayed them to a voice in the night. A voice in song.

Through the trees he saw the gentle rocking of a gondola of Tio Vivo. The song came from there, a ragged minor song, lifted into the night. He turned his back on the hotel and he walked towards the little merry-go-round.

Sailor remained in shadow until the song was done. “Adios,” the singer sang. “Adios, mi amigo.” The sweet voice trailed into silence. But the silence was not the silence of the dark street with the mean shops. The leaves in the trees were rustling and the gondola creaking and the echoes of the sad song were in the ears. Pancho gurgled a bottle to his mouth. He lay sprawled in a gondola, his girth swinging it gently. His hat was on his knees and his bare feet were propped on the seat across. He lowered the bottle, smacked his lips, corked it and laid it in his hat. He saw Sailor then.

“Ai yai!” he cried. “Mi amigo!” His face dented with smiles. His arms flopped open, warm and wide. “Mi amigo! Where have you gone to? Come have a drink.”

Sailor unlatched the gate and entered the enclosure. “I don’t want a drink,” he said. “I want a bed.”

“I will share with you my bed,” Pancho vowed. “But first we will have a drink.” He held up the unlabeled bottle, peered through the glass and beamed. “We will have a drink and another drink. And I will sing for you.” He pulled the cork with his teeth, held out the bottle.