Entrapment and Other Writings by Nelson Algren
Then she was out the door with the chubby under the arm simply clickety-clacking down the hall and me right behind her—but I had to swing back to turn the key in the lock so she had a headstart. But I could take two steps to her one because of her heels and gained almost a flight on her before she hit the second-floor landing. Had it been five flights down, instead of only four, I would have caught her and dragged her back upstairs by those same heels; but she hit the lobby clickety-clacking so fast the desk-clerk glanced up. I had to slow down to a stroll.
Did you ever, all your born days, hear of a simple-minded whore so purely determined, at whatever risk to herself and others, to have her own way?
She was waiting for me, under the marquee, with the chubby tight about her.
“You are the most pig-headed country fool ever to walk in shoe-leather,” I filled her in right off, walking on the outside to cover the coat the best I could—“you are the slyest country-sneak ever to thrash about the cheapest bar in town”—I kept giving it to her all down Madison, meanwhile keeping on the hawks for the two-man squad that keeps an eye on Enright’s—“I’ve tried reasoning with your childish brain. I’ve whupped your pitiful hide till my arms ached—and you’re still the most calf-brained smalltown idjit a man ever got himself chained to.”
“Is that why you like me so much, Little Daddy?”—she got in just as she swung ahead of me into Enright’s—“because my mind is even weaker than your own?”
The lights in the holly-wreaths hanging across Enright’s bar mirror had been switched off for a week. He hadn’t gotten around to washing off the HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS chalked across the mirror.
Beth began taking off the stupid coat, taking her time to make certain that every woman in the joint had a chance to see she wasn’t wearing cat-fur, that it was the real thing. I just stood there studying her reflection.
“Just who do you think you’re showing off for, Baby?” I asked her. After all, the only other woman to see her, at the moment, was Lucille, a teen-age lush who never leaves the joint, that Enright uses as a B-broad because the chick drinks hard stuff along with the marks—and that’s all she gets out of sitting there, too.
The used-to-be hooker, Zaza, that Enright keeps in the dark at the back bar, still comes on like a hooker. But all she is now is a deadpicker and Enright gets half of what she steals.
“Little Daddy,” Beth-Mary told me kind of low, when she finally got the chubby off, “you didn’t make a whore out of me. I made a pimp out of you.”
Then she tossed the coat across the bar and turned her back on me like I didn’t exist.
You can always treat a woman too good. But you can never treat one too bad. My mistake had been in giving the broad her leadership. Now she was out of hand.
“Just because you got another beef going with your old lady,” Zaza tells me the second I sit down, “don’t mean you have to make up to me.”
It’s hard for a hustler to work a joint where she’s not on speaking terms with anyone but the bartender. I took note Zaza was glad to have my company even though she wasn’t about to admit it.
Zaza must have been goodlooking before she worked lumber camps. Now she was just burned-down timber.
Yet not so burned down but she might not help a trusted friend to get a certain clarinet out of hock. The broad needed someone to talk to so bad I figured she might just come up with twenty. Might just.
“I’m the one to blame for everything,” I took full responsibility for my idiot, “she’s a wonderful, wonderful child—and that’s just where the trouble comes in. Because it’s just what she is—a mere child. Life can’t be just all a matter of getting kicks. Life has its serious side.”
Zaza looked me down then up from my Keds to my high hairline, then down again.
“Say something serious,” she finally asked me.
“Buy me a drink. I’m serious.”
“Why should I? Enright don’t want you hanging around your old lady when she’s working, so you come back here thinkin’ I’ll be grateful to have your company; only I ain’t. You’re going to put down the same old story on me, how you’re going to swing with another mink chubby any day now just to see how I look in mink. Only you aren’t. I’d be lucky if you swung with a pair of Goldblatt earrings for me.”
“Earrings?”—I picked her right up on that—“You want earrings, baby? Just don’t go away.”
I took a slow stroll toward the front bar past Lucille. She gave me her baby-lush smile but I didn’t even rap to her. Just strolled on by and came up behind Beth-Mary as if I meant to give her a hug. Instead I yanked her earrings off both at once—she yelped and swung about. But I was already strolling back. Now she knew she wasn’t the only one who could make a fast move in our family.
Lucille didn’t lush-smile me this time by. “I can get me any pimp in town!” She let me know how I stood with her now.
“Without an ID card?” I asked her and kept on moving. Yet I took care, when I got to the back bar, to put Zaza between me and the front door. Just in event anyone from the front bar should want to see me about something.
I squirrel-eyed the front bar and, sure enough, I see Beth-Mary coming. But I failed to take note of the shot-glass in her hand.
“Here, honey,” Zaza told her, holding out the earrings to Beth, “I don’t want them. My ears are pierced.”
Beth-Mary ignored the offer. She purely hates the idea of any other broad buying me anything. Especially a clarinet. “Daddy,” she asked me, “can I just talk to you?”
Now I knew I had her hanging. I just let her hang.
“What do you think,” I asked Zaza, leaning a bit back from the bar to make sure Beth didn’t miss a word I was saying, “of a woman who’ll use her daughter’s education-money for her own midnight-score? What kind of a woman would put her habit ahead of her husband’s musical career?”
Zaza lay both earrings down, very carefully, on the bar in front of her. She looked at them like she wanted no part of either one.
“I’m talking about what a drag a woman with a habit can be,” I kept right on, “what a-day-to-day burden—”
Had Enright not walked out from behind the bar just as Beth pitched the shot-glass it would have skulled me instead of him. Zonk!—he spun half-about right into Zaza, nearly knocking her backward off the stool. She grabbed the bar with her left hand and swung her handbag with her right and zonk!—Enright went out cold face-down across the bar with his big behind sticking out.
“Call a priest! Call a holy father!” Lucille began hollering and ran out into the street to get one. Enright started to sag. I caught him around the waist and Zaza and Beth-Mary were helping me to get him up straight when two cops stormed in followed by Lucille. Who did she think she was working for?
“Who hit him?” Cop One wanted to know, taking Enright away from me.
“That one skulled him with a shot-glass,” Lucille got right in there, pointing out Beth-Mary—“and that one”—pointing out Zaza—“skulled him with her handbag!”
Enright raised up as though all he’d been doing with his head on the bar was resting it—“I’m not pressing charges!”
I’d never seen a man come around that fast before.
“And I don’t blame you,” Cop One went along, taking Enright’s big moon-face between his hands and studying it like a map. There was a black and blue bruise on one side where the shot-glass had grazed it and a lump, just starting to come up, on the other.
“I fell over a beer bottle,” Enright explained everything.
I sat at the back bar looking straight ahead because I felt Cop Two’s eyes on me.
“Get the two broads into the wagon,” Cop One told Cop Two.
“Which two?” Cop Two wanted to know; not taking his eyes off me.
“The one who pitched the shot-glass and the one who swung her handbag.”
“I’m not pressing charges neither!” Lucille suddenly came back into her right mind; and handed Cop One her ID card.
“Did I ask you to show me that?” he asked her. She put it back in her bag.
“That’s right,” Cop One congratulated her. “Keep it safe, honey, you’re going to need it at the station.” Then he turned to Cop Two: “Take all three of them.”
“What about him?” Cop Two asked.
“Put the broads in the wagon.” Cop One decided, “I’ll take the pimp in the squad so’s they don’t fight over him all the way to the station.”
The pimp? That just might be me. Just might.
Yet neither one of those stupid bulls so much as noticed a mink chubby lying across the front bar.
Now every few minutes I heard the big door at the block’s far end being opened. Yet I never heard it being shut. As if it had opened just far enough to let people with bills in their hands in to squeeze through. If you can’t let somebody out for free, I thought, for God’s sake let somebody in for nothing.
Then I heard a whole pack coming and got back out of the way in case they came through my door.
“Brideswell! Brideswell!” some kukefied broad was hollering, “have consideration!”—but it wasn’t Beth-Mary.
Someone was slammed against the door like the mother-cops had backed her up flat against it and were milling around. I could hear them milling; she couldn’t get loose. Then all the feet began going away fast way down the line. Till a cell door slammed.
That was when it came to me that Enright might already have bonded out my fool. She might be back at the front bar this very moment. the chubby in front of her, listening to whatever the old man was telling her she ought to do next. Like letting her Little Daddy kick his habit cold turkey in Cook County Jail while she went on feeding her own.
O Shining City of Seen of John I thought, if that fool of mine lets that old man talk her into that, there’ll be no use of her waiting on the courthouse steps when her Little Daddy comes down them; because she won’t have a Little Daddy anymore. Because Little Daddy’ll be clean, he’ll be his old self once more. What need then will he have for a country whore with marks on her arm?
No, Little Baby, there’s no hardluck story in the book that’ll work then. Because Little Daddy won’t even rap to you. He’ll walk right on by, hop a cab to the Trailways depot and be back in Old Shawneetown, never to leave again, by morning.
And when the baby is big enough to understand, Little Daddy’s going to tell her her real mother died young. And never give that piece of trade he left on the courthouse steps further thought.
Yet I really couldn’t believe Beth-Mary would come in on me.
On the other hand, there was the time in LA when she spent a whole afternoon in a movie with a nab. But maybe that was just because she liked the movie. Besides, that was different. I was setting home in my red foulard robe—the one with the tasselly sash—reading Mad. I wasn’t setting behind a solid door in blue jeans with a patch in the seat. Little Baby, aren’t you ashamed to let your Little Daddy walk around in tennis shoes in midwinter? Don’t you want your Little Daddy to look sharp?
And what does she have to show for five years of hustling, except that mink chubby? That, chances are, she’s had to forget by now.
The cold began coming up off the floor. But I knew it was from inside myself that it was really coming. I hadn’t used anything except paregoric for almost sixty hours; and that had been by mouth.
I got a cigarette out of my pocket and got it lit with one hand. I didn’t draw the smoke up my nose because I wasn’t sure what happens when nicotine hits paregoric. Hold tight, Little Baby, I told Beth-Mary, Daddy may be about to drowse about.
Way up and far off I heard a church bell inviting everyone to Sunday mass. Everyone except Beth-Mary and me. Us two fools; the only place we get invited is jail. Just jail.
Can we help it if we’re cute?
Then all the doors, both sides the other side of the solid door, were standing wide. All the broads had gone home. All the mother-cops had taken them home and not one of them was coming back. I was the only one left locked up.
Then someone pulled the shade.
I was in some kind of old country barn with just one weakass bulb burning high high up and swinging a little. All I was wearing was the red silk foulard robe with the tasselly sash. That I thought Beth-Mary had hocked in LA. I had nothing on under it. And there was a smell of burning; like in a lion-house.
I saw their shadows moving whenever the bulb swung a little; they were all lionesses. That I had to fight one by one.
That was to be my punishment for not being a broad.
Then the burning smell came stronger and I came to with my cigarette burning out on the floor under my nose.
I’d never had a dream like that before.
I got down off the bunk and put my eye to the string of light beneath the door.
“Beth-Mary!” I called under the door, “are you alright, Little Baby?”
Not a sound, not a whisper the other side of the solid door. If I could only hear her whining, “Little Daddy, can’t we just drowse about?”
I got back on the bunk and read the question again that that fool had chalked there in yellow chalk, right over my head. And suddenly I had the answer.
“At your mother’s house, fool,” I told him right out loud. But I didn’t have a piece of chalk, of any color at all, to write my answer down.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cigarette come rolling under the door. It came a full two feet into the cell before it stopped rolling.
And heard my fool’s high heels go clickety-clacking down the corridor.
And keep clickety-clacking away.
You’d think a pimp could do no wrong, for God’s sake, the way them two stick up for one another. You know what that old Southsea bartender told me before I come out here at this ungodly hour?—“You been a bad girl, Beth-Mary, you got to make it all up to your Daddy now. You can’t spend a whole night turning one trick anymore.”
I flew right at him—“You take care of your customers, old man, ’n I’ll take care of mine.”
For God’s sake, just because he goes my bond he thinks he can talk to me like my Little Daddy. Nobody talks to me like my Little Daddy. What do I care if people say he’s no good? Don’t I know that? Of course he’s no good. But he’s the best connection a hustling woman ever had ’n I’ll go all routes with him.
Don’t douse the light yet, mister. Just hang some old tie over it. Else I’ll sleep till the buses stop. Then I’ll have to hail a cab. One cab less, my Little Daddy’s out one day the sooner. I know he’s working up a perfect fit at me as it is out there.
He’s lucky to have someone outside working to get him out, as I see it. How many them locked-up cats got anyone outside hustling for them?
And had it not been for me forcing the old man to bond Zaza out with me, he’d have left her set until her day in court. Only I wasn’t about to leave her—Why should I? Was it her fault he walked into a flying shot-glass? So what if she swung on him with what was nearest to hand? What did he expect after almost knocking her to the floor?
When she opened that handbag at the station we both broke up. But the mother-cop just shook her head ’n asked “What happened here, honey?”
The inside of the bag was a mess of cold cream, broken glass with kleenex and bobbie pins stuck in it. What she’d hit Enright with was a two-pound jar of Pond’s cold cream; that she’d swung with on her way to work. Small wonder that old man went out cold.
She didn’t even claim the bag when we got sprung. “Nothing in it but a quarter and a few pennies,” she told me, “and I’d have to scrape cold-cream off them.”
Climb into bed any time you feel like, mister. I’ll jump in in no time. I just feel like yakking first for a while. Do you mind? It all just strikes me as so comical. I never robbed nobody my whole life. Even that credit-card we got the chubby on was by my Daddy’s hand. I couldn’t get my own hand in a rain-barrel. But I’m in and out of jail like a fiddler’s elbow all the same.
First thing he’ll want to know is how much did Enright put up for the chubby. When I tell him I sold it outright for three hundred to the old man, he won’t believe me. Not until I tell him the old man don’t know the coat is hot. That’ll put him in the switches—especially if Enright has turned it over. We can’t go back there if he has.
When he gets around to asking why three hundred, when bond is only a hundred-fifty, I’ll have to tell him I got Zaza out. He’ll find out anyhow.
Enright thinking he got all three on the hook is the biggest laugh of all time, Zaza thinks. He figures to get five hundred for the coat, tell us all he got is three so we’re all square, and make hisself two hundred.
“Keep the coat, old man,” I told him, “it’s yours. Just get us out of here.” Zaza kept her mouth shut when I told him that. And she was good as gold when we were locked up together, too.
“Please take these stupid earrings back, honey,” she asked me, “as a favor.” I took them back even though they don’t mean a thing to me. For a fact I don’t even remember who put them on me. It wasn’t the earrings, I told Zaza, it was the way Daddy went about getting them that got me burned—“I don’t hold nothing against you,” I told her—“if it wasn’t for my bad aim you wouldn’t even be settin’ here.”
“I’m just sorry about your having to give up your chubby,” she told me, “your old man is going to be hot at you for that.”
“Not for long,” I told her, “you don’t know my Little Daddy.”
Nobody knows my Little Daddy. Once in LA somebody gave him one of those tennis-bats. Right away he got to be jumping nets all over town. He has the flash notion he’s going to be a tennis-player and he don’t even know where the places are they play for God’s sake. My part is to buy him a box of balls and a pair of white shoes. Then everything’s going to be perfect.