33

I woke up alone. A folded hand towel cushioned my head, and the weapon Miss Loveburn’d used to brain me-a glass ash tray with a Wing & Thigh decal inside it -rested on my chest like some kind of weird volume knob. I turned it with one shaky hand; pain boomed inside my head from ear to ear.

Somebody’d moved me from Miss Loveburn’s cubicle to a low couch in a hallway almost exactly like the one with the fish tanks and calendar paintings-except it had only a bare wood floor and exposed ductwork under its ceiling. I sat up and looked around. The doors along this corridor hinted it ran parallel to the one down the other side of The Wing & Thigh’s horizontal-refreshment boxes. I could hear some refreshment going on-thumps, moans, happy cries-beyond the door at the foot of my couch.

“How you feelin, sweety?” A fortyish woman dressed like a USO hostess-stylish, proper-touched the lump on the back of my head. “You look right chipper, considerin.”

I winced away. The hurt and bafflement on my face kicked her into den-mother mode. She said her girls-as well trained in self-defense as in bedroom arts-reserved force as an option if impatient Johns tried to “git tough.”

“Gitting tough undercuts the agreement freely agreed to by both parties with the exchange of our standard fee,” she said. “You tried to git tough. Sabrina could’ve had you dumped in the alley, but it hurt her to think of sech a dummy tenderfoot coming to out back. So you got to sleep off yore mickey”-she nodded at my ashtray-“righ chere, sweety.”

Five doors away, a beefy-faced man leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and his biceps agleam. He gave me a chin dip and a smile more sorrowful than mean.

“I’m Fidelia Florida Foxworthy,” the woman said. “Sabrina had some business to tend to elsewhere. We couldn’t leave you where you was layin, sweety, cause Mamie had to take over in there. And we couldn’t take you down to yore pals cause it’s not smart to show off a client with a head knot. So Burley”-she nodded at the bouncer-“told yore pals you’d had sech a fine time with Sabby, you wanted to try out another gal or two at yore own expense.”

This story panicked me. I brought my wrist up to my ear like a man listening to a watch ticking.

“I don’t wear one either,” Miss Fidelia said. “Burley, what time you got?”

The bouncer checked his watch. “Quawduhaffatin.” His voice rolled like a tidal wave of honey.

My God, I’d missed dinner with Phoebe and her mama! I likely didn’t even have Curriden and his buddies waiting for me. Worse, unless you had an extension from Mister JayMac, curfew on the night before a game was eleven. I’d never get to the Pharrams’ to apologize and back to McKissic House before the clock bonged eleven and my transportation-taxi, hay wagon, bike-turned into a pumpkin!

I grabbed the nearest door knob and tried to yank open the door attached to it. The door wouldn’t yank.

“Cain’t go in there, sweety,” Miss Fidelia said. “Mamie’s working. They’re all working. Or better be.”

I jumped onto the couch, hurried over it, stepped down, and wiggled the next door knob on the row of cubicles. It didn’t budge either. I dashed to the next door and rattled its knob.

“Burley! Burley, stop him!” Miss Fidelia cried.

Burley came pelting down the hall after me, Jell-O-wobbly love handles rolling faster than his voice had. I’d just about used up all available knobs before one turned, a door clicked open, and, falling down, I barged into the cubicle behind it, landing crash on a rope rug and scrambling back up as Burley grabbed the door and hit his ear on the jamb when his grip on the knob reversed his momentum.

On the bed in this room, I just had time to see, a Wing & Thigh gal in a halter top and denim cutoffs using her lipstick tube to transform her client’s moony white butt into a winking Popeye the Sailor. My entrance put an end to this end-directed artwork. The girl screamed and sidearmed her lipstick tube at me. Her John’s Popeye the Sailor face rolled over, popping his Fighting Red cock and balls, color by Tussey Cosmetics, into view along with his face. His eyes bugged out round and white as his ass cheeks, then narrowed again.

Burley collided with the girl in the halter top as I yanked the far door open and careened into a fish tank on a hospital cart. The cart rolled a foot or two, but caught on the rug and bucked to a halt. The tank kept going. It crashed down, shattering and spilling ten gallons of algae-ridden liquid murk and two pounds of tropical fish. The rug acted like a blotter, and the beached fish hiccupped along its waterlogged strip like a silver conga line.

“Stop, you damned liddle peckerwood!” Burley shouted.

I hopscotched over the crumpled aquarium tank, the fish, the broken glass, beelining it towards the doorkeeper’s desk and the door to freedom.

“What the hell!” shouted the victim of Popeye interruptus in the hanky-panky cubicle. “What the fuckin hell!”

I squeezed past the doorkeeper and double-timed it down the stairs. At the landing below Miss Fidelia’s cathouse proper (or improper), I had a choice. I could go through the lefthand door into the eatery, or I could xylophone down the stairs into a storage room with an exit on a service alley. I chose the door back inside-safety in numbers.

But witnesses or no, Burley clattered into The Wing & Thigh in pursuit. Four dogfaces had chosen that moment to come up the same stairs. I slipped between or edged around them all, then sprinted down the row of crowded tables to the one where I hoped Curriden and friends would still sit sucking marrow from their chicken bones. Ha. I should have hoped Tojo would yield his imperial forces to me personally.

“Grab that peckerwood!” Burley shouted, jiggling through the crush. “Thatun wid the goddamn ears!”

A GI on the first floor caught me by the forearm. “Where you goin, Dumbo?” He’d thought up this nickname for me all by himself.

Burley barreled up and knocked the dogface loopy with a pudgy elbow. “Thanks, Mac.” He took my neck tie in his fist. “ Moron ’s in my custiddy now. You can toodle-oo.”

Phoebe’d hate me forever. I’d never make curfew. Hell, my life could peter out in a trash-filled alley. Burley began to drag me towards the rear. Folks waved bye-bye as he hauled me past, a guy putting the come-along on a scared terrier.

“Please be so kind as to unhand my friend.”

Burley and I turned around. Jumbo stood in the middle of the place in his Abraham Lincoln frock coat and a pair of black trousers large enough to outfit three or four regulation-size groomsmen. His face would’ve stopped Big Ben. It blanched the lip rouge of a half dozen females and sucked in the cheeks of a whole platoon of doughboys.

“Who the hell’re you?” Burley didn’t quail-I’ll give him that-but his voice pitched itself oddly high.

“Henry,” Jumbo said. “Henry Clerval.”

“Henry,” Burley said. “Oh, Henry.”

“Careful, fella,” a GI told Burley. “S Hank Clerval, the best first baseman in the CVL.” He said this with such respect that CVL almost seemed a vowelless code for Clerval, like YHWH is for Jehovah.

“I don’t watch it,” Burley said. “Baseball.”

“Well, he could crack you like an aigg,” the GI said. “He inhales pickaninnies for breakfuss.”

“That last is a damnable lie,” Jumbo said.

“Sorry,” the GI said. “Swear to God, sir, I’m sorry.”

“Henry,” Burley mused. “A simpering Henry.”

“Let go of Daniel,” Jumbo said, but Burley kept his grip on my tie, which snaked over my shoulder, pulling my head towards him on a hurtful cant. “What has he done to incur your anger or to warrant punishment?”

The question stumped Burley for a moment. All I’d tried to do was take what Curriden’d paid for (now, though, the memory of my attack on Miss Loveburn filled me with self-shudders) and then flee The Wing & Thigh upon learning the time: attempted rape and a missed dinner engagement.