Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [8]
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