The girl he had wanted came into the room. She had on a pink robe and sandals. Her hair had dark and light amber streaks in it. He expected her to smile or to make some show of recognition when she saw him. She didn’t speak, and her pale blue eyes looked at him for a moment and then turned away blankly as she took off her robe and dropped it over the brass bedstead.
“Miss Emma said you give Rita some trouble. This is just a straight date without no trouble, hear.”
“I didn’t bruise nothing of yours the last time I was here,” he said.
“Miss Emma says you give Rita a bad time.”
“I didn’t pay for no drunk whore to yawn in my face.”
“Well, I don’t want no trouble. Rita says you were acting flip. I give a straight lay and that’s all. You go see one of the other girls if you want something else.”
“Do you remember me?” he said.
“Lots of fellows come in. They’re one and the same to me, honey.”
She lay down on the bed in a receptive position. She rubbed the insides of her thighs with her palms. He poured a drink in his glass from the fifth and drank it down.
“Let’s go, honey. There’s others waiting,” she said.
“Get on top.”
“That means you got a complex about your mother.”
“Watch it.”
“Some fellows want to lay their mother and they don’t know it. I read it in a magazine once.”
“Get on top and do what you’re supposed to,” he said.
“I know my job. You don’t have to worry about that.”
She got on top of him and smiled stupidly. She raised up on her knees and then sat back. She touched him and adjusted herself again, supporting herself with one arm, and sat once more on his legs.
“You’re going to have to do better than that,” she said.
“It’s the whiskey.”
“You give Rita all you had. You ain’t got another lay in you,” she said.
“Wait a minute. I’ll be all right. I was all right before you come in here.”
“Are you saying you can’t get nothing on for me?”
“No. It’s just the whiskey. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
“Come back tomorrow,” she said.
“I hired you for the afternoon.”
“You ain’t got it to put in, honey.”
“I paid seventy-five dollars for you and that other bitch, and you ain’t taking off.”
“You see me tomorrow night and I’ll give you one free.”
“You bitch,” he said.
“Take it easy.”
“You ain’t cutting out on me.”
“I’m not going to stay here and play hand games for you, mister. When you can get something on come back and I’ll take care of you.”
She took her robe off the bedstead and started to put it on. He sat up and pulled it off her. The sleeve caught on her arm and ripped at the shoulder. She grabbed the robe in both hands and jerked it away from him and got off the bed.
“All right, flip man,” she said. She pushed a buzzer on the wall by the light switch and put on her robe. Her shoulder showed at the rip in the seam. He got off the bed and came towards her. She pushed the buzzer again.
“I’d like to watch him beat the piss out of you,” she said, and went out the door.
“You goddamn whore.”
He put on his shirt and trousers. He felt shamed and enraged at the same time. His head spun when he reached over to pick up his shoes. He forgot to put on his socks. He wanted retribution against the two prostitutes and the madam. They had gotten him for seventy-five dollars. He was going out in the hall and either make the girl return to the room or get his money from the madam. Back home they’d burn a whorehouse down with coal oil if a man got treated like a nigger. They’d put the whores in jail and let any bum with a dollar in his overalls lay them. Said she’d gotten better jazzing from a sixteen-year-old. I could split her in two. I ain’t going to take no insults from a bunch of whores.
The door opened and a big man whom he hadn’t seen before walked in. The man had a flat, scarred face and tattoos showed through the black hair on his arms. The hair on his chest curled out over the top of his shirt. He had a short wood club in his Sand the handle wrapped with black tape and a hole drilled in the end filled with lead. Emma stood behind him in the doorway. Her hard eyes looked over the man’s shoulder at J.P.
J.P. backed away and got his knife out of his pocket. He opened the single blade and held it before him. He had seen a knife fight in a poolroom once and he remembered to keep the knife at an upward angle to parry a thrust or blow. He tripped backwards over the chair. The big man flicked the club across J.P.’s hand and knocked the knife to the floor. J.P. felt the bones in the back of his hand break, and a pain shot up his arm into his shoulder. He held his wrist with his other hand, and the man hit him across his good arm. He fell back against the boarded window and dropped to the floor. His trousers came loose and uncovered his buttocks. The pain was more than he could bear. His mouth opened and the muscles in his stomach tightened and convulsed. He felt that his arms were jerking without control when he tried to move them. The room was pink like blood diffused in water.
“The sonofabitch,” Emma said.
“Do you want to put him in back?” the big man said.
“I knowed he was going to cause trouble when he first come in here.”
“He don’t look like much now,” the big man said.
“I give him the two best pieces in the house, and he gets one of them drunk and he tells Honey he can’t get nothing on for her.”
The man picked up the knife off the floor and folded the blade and put it in his pocket.
“Give me the stick,” she said.
She leaned over J.P. and hit him across the jaw with the club. His face snapped sideways against the floor. His eyes were still closed and his mouth was open and a mixture of saliva and blood drained out on the hard-grained wood. His expression didn’t change. His broken hand had begun to swell.
“Put him behind the tracks,” she said. “Maybe one of the bums will give him the kind of swish action he wants.”
The big man picked J.P. up over his shoulder and carried him through the hallway and down the stairs. Honey stood in the doorway of the kitchen, smoking a cigarette, and watched them. She picked her teeth with her fingernail. The man took J.P. out the back door towards the railroad tracks. The brambled area behind the building was littered with broken glass and refuse that had overflowed the garbage cans. The man carried him over the tracks and the gravel bedding to the jungle. The trees and grass were powdered with dust from the passing trains. The man put J.P. down and went back to the building.
J.P. lay on his stomach with the side of his face in the dirt and his arm twisted under him. A train roared by and the ground thundered under him, although he was only vaguely aware of it. He slipped in and out of consciousness; he was at the bottom of a dark place without pain, and then the yellow light of afternoon came into his mind and he felt he could open his eyes but the bone-throbbing pain in his hand began and he choked on the blood in his throat and fell away into nothing again.
Two men walked through the dust-covered trees and brush. One of them was thin and suntanned with a sharp, lean face. He had only one eye; the iris of his blind eye was broken and its color had run out into the cornea. His hair was stiff and uncut, and he wore a pair of pin-striped trousers that were shiny from wear. The other man was smaller and thinner than the first, and his trousers sagged on his buttocks. He had a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth that had gone out, and his teeth were brown with rot. There was a needle hole in his arm which he had gotten when he sold blood at the blood bank. He followed the man with one eye through the trees. He took a sip off a bottle of port and screwed the cap back on and put it in his pocket. He didn’t want the first man to see him drinking. They were supposed to share the bottle. They stopped when they saw J.P. on the ground. The man with one eye touched J.P. with his foot.