Originally published in Manhunt, August 1953
FRANKIE looked through a lot of bars before he found the old man. He was sitting in a booth in a joint on lower Market Street with a dame Frankie didn’t know. They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, and Frankie could see that their thighs were plastered together like a couple of strips of Scotch tape.
“Come on home, Pop,” Frankie said. “You come on home.”
The woman looked up at him, and her lips twisted in a scarlet sneer. The scarlet was smeared on the lips, as if she’d been doing a lot of kissing, and the lips had a kind of bruised and swollen look, as if the kisses had been pretty enthusiastic.
“Go to hell away, sonny,” she said.
She lifted her martini glass by its thin stem and tilted it against her mouth. Frankie reached across the booth in front of the old man and slapped the glass out of her hand. It shivered with a thin, musical sound against the wall, and gin and vermouth splashed down between the full, alert breasts that were half out of her low-cut dress. The olive bounced on the table and rolled off.
The woman raised up as far as she could in the cramped booth, her eyes hot and smoky with gin and rage.
“You little son of a bitch,” she said softly.
Frankie grabbed her by a wrist and twisted the skin around on the bone.
“Leave Pop alone,” he said. “You quit acting like a tramp and leave him alone.”
Then the old man hacked down on Frankie’s arm with the horny edge of his hand. It was like getting hit with a dull hatchet. Frankie’s fingers went numb, dropping away from the woman’s wrist, and he swung sideways with his left hand at the old man’s face. The old man caught the fist in a big palm and gave Frankie a hard shove backward.
“Blow, sonny,” he said.
For a guy not young at all, he was plenty tough. His eyes were like two yellow agates, and his mouth was a thin, cruel trap under a bold nose. From the way his body behaved, it was obvious that he still had good muscular coordination. He was poised, balanced like a trained fighter.
Frankie saw everything in a kind of pink, billowing mist. He moved back up to the booth with his fists clenched, and in spite of everything he could do, tears of fury and frustration spilled out of his eyes and streaked his cheeks.
“You get the hell out of this,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed, drinking and playing around this way.”
The old man slipped out of the booth, quick as a snake, and chopped Frankie in the mouth with a short right that traveled straight as a piston. Frankie hit the floor and rolled over, spitting a tooth and blood. He was crazy. Getting up, he staggered back at the old man, cursing and sobbing and swinging like a girl. This time the old man set him up with a left jab and threw a bomb. Frankie went over backward like a post, his head smacking with a wet rotten sound.
No one bothered about him. Except to laugh, that is. Lying there on the floor, he could hear the laughter rise and diminish and rise again. It was the final and utter degradation of a guy who’d never had much dignity to start with. Rolling over and struggling up to his hands and knees, he was violently sick, his stomach contracting and expanding in harsh spasms. After a long time, he got the rest of the way to his feet in slow, agonizing stages. His chin and shirt front were foul with blood and spittle.
In the booth, ignoring him, the old man and the woman were in a hot clinch, their mouths adhering in mutual suction. The lecherous old man’s right hand was busy, and Frankie saw through his private red fog the quivering reaction of the woman’s straining body. Turning away, Frankie went out. The floor kept tilting up under his feet and then dropping suddenly away. All around him, he could hear the ribald laughter.
It was six blocks to the place where he’d parked his old Plymouth. He walked slowly along the littered, narrow street, hugging the dark buildings, the night air a knife in his lungs. Now and then he stopped to lean against solid brick until the erratic pavement leveled off and held still. Once, at the mouth of an alley, he was sick again, bringing up a thin, bitter fluid into his mouth.
It took him almost an hour to get back to the shabby walkup apartment that was the best a guy with no luck could manage. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face, gasping with pain. The smoky mirror above the lavatory distorted his face, exaggerating the ugliness of smashed, swollen lips drawn back from bloody gums. He patted his face dry with a towel and poured himself a double shot in the living room. He tossed the whiskey far back into his mouth beyond his raw lips, gagging and choking from the sudden fiery wash in his throat.
Dropping into a chair, he began to think. Not with any conscious direction. His mind functioned, with everything coming now to a bad end, in a kind of numb and lucid detachment. Suddenly, he was strangely indifferent. Nothing had happened, after all, that couldn’t have been anticipated by a guy with no luck whatever.
It was funny, the way he was no longer very concerned about anything. Sitting there in the drab living room in the dull immunity to shame that comes from the ultimate humiliation, he found his mind working itself back at random to the early days at home with the old man. Back to the days when his mother, a beaten nonentity, had been alive. Not a lovable character, the old man. Not easy on wife or kid. A harsh meter of stern discipline for all delinquencies but his own. A master of the deferred payment technique. In the old days, when Frankie was a kid at home, wrongdoing had never been met with swift and unconsidered punishment that would have been as quickly forgotten. The old man had remarked and remembered. Later, often after Frankie had completely forgotten the adolescent evil he’d committed, there was sure to be something that he wanted very much to do. Then the old man would look at him with skimmed milk eyes and say, “No. Have you forgotten the offense for which you haven’t paid? For that, you cannot do this thing.”
Wait till it really hurts. That had been the old man’s way.
Remembering, Frankie laughed softly, air hissing with no inflection of humor through the hole where his lost tooth had been. No luck. Never any luck. He’d even been a loser in drawing an old man — a bastard with a memory like an elephant and a perverted set of values.
The laughter hurt Frankie’s mangled lips, and he cut it off, sitting slumped in the chair with his eyes in a dead focus on the floor. It was really very strange, the way he felt. Not tired. Not sleepy. Not much of anything. Just sort of released and out of it, like a religious queer staring at his belly button.
He was still sitting there at three o’clock in the morning when the old man came in. He was sloppy drunk, and the lines of his face had blurred, letting his features run together in a kind of soft smear. His eyes were rheumy infections in the smear, and his mouth still wore enough of the cheap lipstick to give him the appearance of wearing a grotesque clown’s mask. He stood, swaying, almost helpless, with his legs spread wide and his hands on his hips in a posture of defiance, and Frankie looked back at him from his chair. It made him sick to see the old man so ugly, satiety in his flaccid face and the nauseous perfume of juniper berries like a fog around him.
The old man spit and laughed hoarsely. The saliva landed on the toe of Frankie’s shoe, a milky blob. Without moving, Frankie watched the old man weave into the bedroom with erratic manipulation of legs and hips.
Frankie kept on sitting in the chair for perhaps five minutes longer, then he sighed and got up and walked into the bedroom after the old man. The old man was standing in the middle of the room in his underwear. His legs were corded with swollen blue veins that bulged the fish-belly skin. On the right thigh there was an angry red spot that would probably blacken. When he saw Frankie watching him, his rheumy eyes went hot with scorn.