Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [105]
“I got to go home,” Jack muttered doggedly. He told the driver his address, and they moved off.
“Go home,” one of the sailors said. “Why do you have to go home? We got to find a whorehouse an get fucked.”
“No fucking,” Jack said. “Too drunk to enjoy it. First one has to be good. I got to go to work tomorrow. Thass why.”
They couldn’t talk him out of it, and had to let him off on Pine Street, in front of his place.
“We goin to Stockton,” one of them said. He was sticking his head out the back window, and abruptly he vomited down the side of the cab, just as it moved off. Jack gave them a salute and went up the stairs, drunk and afraid. When he got in bed, the fear subsided a little. He was safe now. Nobody could pick him up and put him in jail. He was safe. But he could not go out and get drunk like that again. He could get in a fight or get braced, and go to jail, and back to San Quentin. They had him. He was free, but he couldn’t do anything. Those sailors. Talking about their 72 hours of freedom. What did they know? He fell asleep.
In the morning he had a vicious hangover, far out of proportion to the pleasures of the evening, and he went about his work dully. Out in front, while he was putting a tray of cherry tarts (which smelled disgusting) into the display case, a group of late partygoers were seating themselves around a couple of the little tables, and Jack saw beyond them a Rolls Royce parked in the yellow zone. What attracted Jack’s attention was a pair of men’s shoes sticking up out of the back window. Jack grinned painfully and hoped the man in the car felt worse than he did. He straightened up after placing the tray on the shelf, feeling the needles of pain back of his eyes, and found himself face-to-face with a woman, one of the party outside, pretty, disheveled, her eyes glassy. She looked rich and expensive, and young. Her lipstick was freshly applied and dark against her skin, but her mouth was puffy and reddish around the edges. She was staring at Jack from behind dark glasses. She pointed down into the case.
“Gimme one of those fucking tarts,” she said in a bored but expensive voice.
Mr. Markowitz and the counterboy were both out at the tables, hovering over the drunks, but Jack said, “I don’t do that,” and went back into the bakery. The woman’s vulgarity had irritated him, perhaps because he had always supposed the rich had their own vocabulary to go along with their money. But then maybe the woman wasn’t rich at all, but just ran with the rich. Maybe none of them were rich and had just stolen the Rolls. Maybe the guy inside was dead, a couple of bullets in his chest. Ha ha. Maybe the woman will take pity on me and buy my freedom.
Mr. Markowitz came into the bakery, his face composed and intent. He came up to Jack, who was greasing pans.
“Look here, my boy,” he said, “one of the customers said you insulted her. What happened?”
“Nothing,” Jack said. He kept on greasing the pan. “She asked me to wait on her and I said I didn’t wait on people. That’s all.”
Mr. Markowitz shrugged, his eyes blank. “I’ll tell her it’s a union regulation or something. You sure you didn’t do anything? She’s kind of funny.”
Jack reported the conversation as accurately as he could, feeling nauseated from the smell of lard and irritated with Markowitz for not just taking his word and getting the hell out of there.
“Well, it sounds like her all right. But we got a business to run. You should have helped her. Suppose you trot on out there and apologize to her. Okay?” He patted Jack on the shoulder, smiling.
“Do I have to?”
Mr. Markowitz looked at him carefully. “No, you don’t have to. But what the hell...“
“Okay,” Jack said. He went out to the tables, wiping the lard off on his apron.
There were three women and two men, and one of the men, with curly gray hair and a gray mustache, looked embarrassed. The other man was younger, slouched down in his chair, his face bearing an expression of righteous indignation. All three women were unapproachably beautiful, and drunk. The man with