A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The gin was murderous; juniper flavoring added to raw alcohol. You couldn’t tell which was worse, the flavoring or the base. But you couldn’t get it any better than that all over America at the time. If you wanted a good drink, you had to cross the border to Mexicali or Montreal.

Even so, the frump who ran the dump must have coined money: there was no overhead to speak of. Just the rank rotgut, a couple of cases of mixer a night, and the tubercular waiter, who looked like he was related to her (probably an illegitimate son) and therefore not on salary. Maybe a monthly fix to the janitor to keep quiet about it.

As I got drunker, every time I glimpsed the girl in the polka-dotted dress I got the weirdest optical illusion I’d ever had in my life. All the polka-dots seemed to swarm upward off the dress and hang there suspended over her, like a cloud of lazy bees hovering in mid-air. She’d move offside, in a plain orange-color dress. Then the dots would all go after her and land back all over it again. She was always just one step too quick for them to go along with her, they always had to catch up afterward.

After a while the sailors and their girls were no longer there, without my noticing at just which point they had left. Just a forlorn and forgotten White Rock bottle stayed on there to mark their place. Then the girl in the polka-dots was gone with her swain too, and that I didn’t mind. Then we were all alone in the place, and it was time for us to go too.

On our way to the door, the roughneck manageress accosted us.

“You didn’t give me my usual discount,” the girl with me told her.

“Listen, baby,” she wheezed, “I’m not in business for my health.”

“Well, I could have steered him somewhere else,” my girl pointed out.

“You wouldn’t have dared,” the other one jeered. “Is he hep?”

“Come on, forget about it,” I said, sensing that a row was brewing between the two of them, and not wanting to get caught in the middle. I went on out the front door of the Hat awhile, waiting for her to come after me.

The moment my back was turned, the thing erupted. There was a scuffling sound, a scream of rage, and then the noise of something falling heavily to the floor.

Then my girl came running out. She didn’t stop, but gave my sleeve a tug as she flashed past me. “Come on, don’t stand there! As long as she wouldn’t give me my cut, I took it away from her anyway.” She didn’t waste time waiting for the elevator, but went skittering down the stairs, so I went chasing down after her.

“She’s liable to call the cops, isn’t she?” I said jaggedly as we clobbered down and around and down some more.

“She wouldn’t take the chance,” she answered. “She’s running an illegal operation up there and she knows it. They’d close her down in a minute if she attracted their attention.”

Before we’d made the street a door opened above and a gin-corroded voice rasped down after us — or after her, I should say — “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these nights. And I hope tonight’s the night you do!”

We chased out into the street, caught our breaths a minute, and finally hooked arms again.

“Let’s go over to my place,” she said. “It’s not too far from here; we can walk it.”

I’d been hoping for this. This was what I’d been aiming at all evening long, ever since I’d first met her. And now it was here, it had been arrived at. All the intervening hours had proved not to be wasted after all. If she hadn’t made her suggestion first, I had fully intended at about this point or not too long after to ask her to come back to my own room at the hotel with me. But this way was better by far; I wasn’t at all sure the desk-man wouldn’t have stopped us on our way in.

As far as walking there was concerned, I liked that part of it too. I wasn’t sure I had enough money left to cover a taxi.

We walked along arm in arm, every now and then lurching a little, first to one side, then to the other. I couldn’t tell if I was responsible, or she was, or if it was the two of us together. Oddly enough, the gin seemed to have taken more of a hold out here in the chilly open than it had back in the warm stuffy room. Probably it was the cumulative build-up that was at work.

Presently we’d stepped into what looked like some sort of a furnished rooming-house. There were too many doors up and down the hall for them to be multiple-room apartments. She stood with lowered head chinking a key briefly, and then the door had closed after us and we were in a pitch-dark room.

“Put on the light,” I said in an undertone.

“No, we don’t need any,” she said in an equally confidential voice.

“I can’t see where I’m going,” I said. “I’ll knock myself out.”

“Give me your hand,” she said. “I’ll steer you. The fuse is blown; I have to get it fixed.”

I had an impression it had been done deliberately. Still, it might have been true. It had looked like that kind of a crummy building from the outside.