Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [28]
“Yes, sir,” Billy said. “I just come down from Seattle to visit my aunt.”
“You won a lot of money this afternoon, Billy. But you had a lot when you came in, too. Where’d you get the money?”
“That fifteen dollars was my trip money, sir.”
“When are you going back to Seattle?”
“Sunday night, sir. On the train.”
“That’s good,” the cop said. He stood up. “Just a friendly talk, boy. No harm. You’re a pretty good pool gambler, boy.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
You motherfucker!
Billy stood, trembling with rage and relief, and watched the cop amble back to the bar, where he picked up a half-empty glass of beer and drank from it. God damn you, Billy thought, you rotten cop motherfucking bastard! Billy knew he had been braced just because the cop saw him and wanted to pass the time; had probably hoped that Billy would have fallen apart under the questioning and confessed to a couple of rapes and assorted chicken theft and mopery; braced him as a matter of routine, known that Billy had lied to him and didn’t care; just passing the time; probably off duty and having a beer before going home or on duty. Billy’s whole body trembled, and he walked into the men’s room and threw cold water on his face, and then wiped it off with a paper towel. He stood up at the big smelly urinal and tried to urinate, but it would not come. He stood there, trembling, waiting, occasionally shaking himself angrily. “Come on, dammit, pee!” he said through his teeth. But he knew all his rage was not directed at the cop; there was something under and behind it; the thought that they had not, after all, sent the police after him.
Why didn’t you? Why haven’t you tried to find me?
He wanted to burst into tears. It loomed over him: he was alone, unwanted, unsearched for, hounded by the police, useless, black. But even that didn’t matter; not the blackness. He wasn’t even black, just yellow. That didn’t matter; he could pat flour all over his face—he had done that once as a little kid—and they would still ignore him or laugh at him; it was him, not the blackness; him they didn’t want and let run away and did not care if he ended up in a strange jail and left to rot. With the dreadful clarity of self-pity he saw himself as he really was, a frightened little baby who hadn’t the guts to stand up to the accident of his birth, who hadn’t the character to make the world like him or eat it. Just another yellowbelly, just another fool who gave money away and hoped people would take pity on him.
“What the hell, I thought you fell in,” Denny said to him, grinning. He stood up to the other urinal, flipped out his penis, and began to piss noisily. “Man, you’re gray in the face; did that fuggin cop scare you?”
Billy pretended he was finished, and went to the sink. “Hell yes, man.”
“He’s an asshole,” Denny said. “Do you colored guys ever sunburn?”
Billy looked up at him. There was no mockery in Denny’s face. “Sure,” Billy said. “Just like anybody else.”
“I mean, you got sort of red hair, like me. Red-haired guys burn like hell, no?”
“That’s why I like to stay down in a nice cool poolhall,” Billy grinned.
“Yah, but your balls get moldy. Less go party-time.”
Well, well, Billy thought. Well, well.
He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare, and by the time they got to the top of the stairs and piled into the car, he was bubbling with humor, and when he got up on Jack Levitt’s lap—the only place he could sit—he said, “Now, every time we go over a bump, you owe me a dollar.”
“Have a beer,” Levitt replied.
“Make him pay for it,” Bobby Case said from the front seat. “He’s got all the fuggin money.”
“He don’t pay for shit,” Denny said. “This party’s on me.” Everybody in the car laughed, except Kol Mano, who was intent on cruising Broadway one more time, in the hope that they could pick up some girls. When they went past the