The dark end of the street, all around footfall and catcall and gin-reek. The card cheat and I our backs on the brownstone wall. Pasted around us like masterpieces tattered are papers with faces upon them unsmiling and begging to never be found. Papers shouting of baptisms and of services and each paper torn a little from the wind. Cigarette smoke around. Streetcars rattle. The call of a long black train pulling down to the sidings. Smoke pluming dragonlike to the overhead night. Somewhere underneath all sounds the roll of the river now and then can be heard. Floodplains on the far bank empty save the tracks of steel and sleepers and above only cold blue stars and in the field unseen beyond the barrooms and bedrooms revival tents shake like condemned men in electric chairs. Preachers sleep uneasy in the wind. Guideropes flail whiplike, loosened from their moorings, and the cottonfields too sway as though given life.
Eyes around all a-shuttered and a-staring. Heartless romantics wrapped with women and women wrapped in baptist red. All pass by. Blue notes and blue smiles in each barroom. Suitcases by each table, timeworn leather and careworn faces. On each floor sawdust and glass. Each man wears a suit and each woman a dress. Chairs are circled and empty upon the street like the remnants of some drunkard’s gathering and upon the table totemic are gin bottles now emptied.
Dancing feet clatter and crack upon wood floors and the noise is ritual. In the hall there is fuss and fight and pitch and bawl, smile and shout, dancing the floorboards to destruction. We stare down the street and the shadows dance over the street in the frame of lamplight. The card cheat turns to me.
Tonight is the party, he says. Would you like to come.
No I can’t, I say. I’m waiting for a train.
He says no more and I say no more.
Over the riverdark street men and women walk from the shine of streetlight to the dark and are lost. Their number is replaced and the movement moves me almost to tears. Street seats are taken and drinks are taken and telephone numbers are taken and all soon enough are lost.
Open-strung guitars sound from each musician in discrete frequencies. Voices chime and clatter. The drumroll of shoes. Moonless and bible-black above. The air turns. The street crowds and glows and each light grows and is held in vacuum. The streetlights pull luminescence to them and reach saturation and burn and collapse upon themselves. Chorale rising and nothing else save the street and barrooms and the edge of the world at the dark end of the street. Men and women reach that perimeter and darkness falls upon them in respect and they fall and are not seen again.
A woman passes and the card cheat smiles and she smiles also and stops and they talk and I flare a wooden match and smoke. She goes away and stands spotlit beneath a streetlight. The card cheat watches her and there is blood in his eyes. He looks away and smoothes down his tie of Oxford blue with his good hand.
How do you aim to leave if you ain’t got no money.
I never said I got no money.
Well do ye.
No.
Well how do ye plan to leave.
I don’t know. I could ride the blinds.
You could ride the blinds.
I could.
Maybe you could. Just as well stay here.
I’ve been here a day too long already.
Have you, he says.
I nod. There’s nothing more to be said. The card cheat rolls tobacco and passes to me a cigarette and I pass to him matches and we smoke. Over the street men and women unwise and unwell from drink come to the street from darkened horsehair alleys and some with hair mussed or ties unstraightened look about themselves. I look to them and look at the card cheat and his head is bowed as though he were a man desperate in prayer.
A call, a cry. We look to our left and over the dirt road a man falls and a pennyknife falls by him and both hit the ground simultaneously and a man turns and runs. A round crumple-brimmed hat is upturned in the dust. The rounders stare and spit and smoke and the women shake pale and sob and sobbing they stand until a policewagon rattles dust from the road. Blueshirt and blackshod they fall from the runners vulturelike to the darkened man. Like witches they circle and stare and we stare also. Pockets are lifted as others watch and the lifters shift shadowward. A doctor is sent for and the doctor he does come and he crouches by the man and only shakes his head and at that movement there is sobbing renewed from the women and the rounders they bow their heads and some for a moment doff their hats.
A blanket now is draped over the man. An officer picks the fallen hat from the road and places it upon the blanket. Questions are asked and rounders gather and answer and the man is taken and does not come back. The card cheat pushes himself from the wall and he shuffles over the street to that stain of darkness where the man had laid and there he crouches and there he picks a small white thing from the dust. He looks about himself still crouched and he straightens and his good hand moves in the manner of some magician and the thing in his hand disappears. A cat somewhere cries like a strangled baby. Unwatched he returns and already that man is some detail of the night past.
At a sign unseen and unheard the musicians play again. The rounders scatter slowly and are lost again to the barrooms and to the bedrooms above. Each light lost in each room is found again in another. We look at each other, the card cheat and I, and he takes from his pocket the thing he had recovered from the street. He unfolds in thin white hands a square of paper on which there is spiderlike writing. He looks and I look and even in the nearby shine of the streetlight there is not light enough to read.
What does it say, I say.
He strains and his nose is close to the paper as though smelling stained perfume from some faraway lover. He speaks and his voice is quiet.
Dear mother. I won’t be home for Christmas this year. I’m headed south, ma, headed for the promised land.
He stops and he looks to me.
That’s all.
That’s all, I say.
Aye.
I look down again and again the light is not enough to read by.
Is there an address.
Aye.
We should write to her.
To tell her what.
To tell her you know just what.
To tell her blue-eyed boy is dead.
Aye, that.
There’s things best left unknown.
You reckon so.
Aye.
The card cheat is silent and faraway are his eyes.
What’s the problem.
He shakes his head and he does not speak.
Another streetcar passes and from the back of it men jump and turn and jog alongside and offer their hands to the women there and spin them to the ground. All hands gloved in white and skeleton-bright in the centre of the street. Eyes pass to the arrivals and pass on to the streetcar in which brass shines and the driver stares from under a halfcocked hat. Those eyes watch their reflections in the glass and brass and do not see the people slumped and woozy from whisky within. A rag-man passes itinerant in the wake of the streetcar and leads a teetering dray and a horse blinkered and skeletal. The ragman stoops now and then and retrieves from the street things he deems of value and each time he stoops he raises a hand to the stovepipe hat upon his head. He is not watched and soon is gone and as the dray passes to the darkness a snort from the horse is heard.
A song picks up within a barroom and the street musicians they cease their playing with supplication upon each face. Rolls of piano and voices just as unsteady wash to the street and each person hears in that sound some voice that perhaps they knew once. Some memory of trashcan alleys or emptied morning streets or laughter over railway sidings. We stare over the street and we can see to the barroom and in that place people are clustered in dance. The electric lights bounce from all things glass or metal and those things are lent the qualities of precious stones for that time.
The card cheat is rattled by a cough and he bends double as though in the grip of some contagion. That rattle of spluttering fades and he spits between his feet and in the spit there is some faint sickly taint of redness. He straightens and in doing he looks to that same streetlight where the woman earlier he had spoken to still stands. I look with him and underneath that light the woman is talking to some tall dark-skinned man and the card cheat sighs. The dark-skinned man smiles and in his breast pocket is a handkerchief red as blood and he looks for all the world like the Jack of Hearts. Past the both of them on the street against a section of old fencing are three baggy-shirted men who shoot craps there. They pass between them a jug of bootleg whisky and from it each man takes a dram and passes that jug on.
The song from the barroom across finishes in a cheer that dissolves to the rattling of beerglasses. There is silence save the chatter of the street and roll of the river and that too fades a little as though unsure of its own existence without some tune. A low harmonica train-rumbles the air and soon the music again weaves around the street. Somewhere are feet all a-stamping upon wooden floors. A gaggle of barroom girls spin to the streetside and caw gulllike to each other and giggle and pirouette as dissolute dancers. Their hair around them sways as the folds of their frocks sway.
A round man with round glasses passes us and stops and rests on the wall and he stares to where we stare. Upon his jacket bloodlike there is the stain of drink and his tie around his fat neck is noose-tight. He wears a waistcoat of seagreen and that waistcoat is stretched over his stomach large and heavy as a medicineball. What hair there is on his head hides in the folds of skin there and is gunmetal grey. Standing by us he stares to where we stare and his eyes are dark and sad. There is whisky on his breath and faraway in his eyes.
God bless them pretty women, he says.
Aye, says the card cheat.
Aye, god bless.
Those women stand and circle and one of the women pulls from her purse a glittering hipflask of silver.
You couldn’t buy a man a drink.
I could if I had something to buy it with.
Ah. But there’s no harm in the asking.
No.
No.
The round man he pulls from his suit a pocketwatch with the face smashed and he squints at it and places it back as tenderly as a baby laid to rest. His great head slumps once more to the wall and he stares this time upward to the halo of streetlight.
I got three young children an I got a weeping wife an I’m here an I couldn’t tell ye why.
There is nothing to say and we say nothing.
I done lived here seventeen long years. An every night I come down an try to find a man to buy me but a dram of whisky.
Still he stares and he breathes and his great chest heaves and that movement is
like waterlilies upon unquiet water.
Most often they don’t.
Lucky enough. That whisky it’ll kill ye.
A pause and clean white light gleams from his eye.
If whisky don’t I don’t know what will.
A pause and clean white light gleams from his eye and he rubs a starched
handkerchief over his forehead.
Women I expect.
I look at the card cheat as his face splinters to a grin.
That’s the way of things, he says.
I look down. I can see my face in my shoes and the tattoos of shadow there. There is quiet between us and that quiet is filled by the street musicians and again the horn of a train tolling. Past the housetops as far as I can see smokestacks rise from that unseen locomotive. That smoke it banners to the night and is lost behind the glow of streetlight.
Did you see the man.
What man.
The stabbed man.
We saw him. The wagon took him off.
Aye. They took him on down to St. James, to the infirmary.
From the look of him that won’t do no good.
No.
May as well take him straight to the cemetery.
They’ll do that soon enough I expect.
I expect so.
Do you think he was a married man.
A married man an down here, now.
Well he may have been.
The round man still stares out and we stare now at him though if he feels it he makes no move that he does. The same faraway in his eyes is in his voice. He pushes from the wall with a branchlike arm and turns to us and he bows his head a little.
God keep you.
And you.
He is gone and down the street he walks past the crapshooters and the woman under the light and past the tattered posters and he looks around as he walks. From a barroom a man in a brown suit rolls into the round man and bounces from him and stops and squints and then smiles. Words are passed and they cross the street to a different barroom and inside they go.
A window above that barroom shatters and the glass catches streetlight as it falls and in the night looks snowlike. There is shouting and there is the sound of wood breaking and there is the sound of a door slamming. Distracted faces turn to the window and to the woman now framed there, her hair crowblack and colour high in her cheeks. Around her is wrapped a blanket blue. The light from the room frames her and the teeth of glass by her arms glint slippery and she looks like some devoured thing reaching in terror from a vast gullet. The card cheat and I look upwards at her and the card cheat speaks.
I know her, he says.
You do, I say.
Sure I do.
He rubs his mouth with the flat of his hand and takes his hat off and taps the brim and puts his hat back to his head. Black hair hangs from it like trophies of rattail.
From where, I say.
From around. Just around.
We watch as she cranes forth until her belly almost touches the windowpane. She stares down to the street and she swears at those below who look upward. They step around the glass as though around quicksand and they move on. From the barroom door a man stumbles drunken with his tie over his shoulder and his jacket over his arm and hat in hand and in the night his face is round and bright as a silver dollar. And she sees him as we see him and she swears again and spits his name and his name it seems is Henry Lee.
Do you know him, I say.
Not by name until now, he says.
But you saw him before.
Now and then. Sometimes with the rounders. Or the blackjack.
Seems they’re having a disagreement.
Seems so.
She shouts and he stumbles and swings to her and he swears also. A man dark and huge in tailcoat and breeches black moves to him from the doorway of the barroom and opens a vast hand and points as though offering direction to some pilgrim adrift. The woman shouts still and the dark man turns to her and hisses words and she glares yet is silenced. Words are passed and a pistol toylike in the huge man’s hand is seen.
We wait, the card cheat and I, and we hear the trains pull down and smoke the last of our cigarettes. The woman still is in the window and the men still are arguing and the woman still is under the streetlight. The lamplight from each bedroom shines through the blinds and casts down to the street and those who are up there soon will be down here. The street musicians play and the streetcars pass and the trains also pass and the dancing continues and we stand, the card cheat and I, our backs to our wall and our pockets empty and our eyes searching.