Hot Night in the City Read online

  Each tried to out-scoff the other at the silly idea of owning land or air or clouds or water, and it wasn't long before everyone was purring and barking and hissing and meowing and croaking and gobbling and snarling until none could hear Old's soft voice; so he rose up and stared at them with terrible eyes, and ordered them to be still! Be still!

  And there was a sudden silence in the meeting lodge.

  "There now," growled Snake softly. "You must all be silent. Serves you right."

  "Oh, shut up!" cawed Coyote.

  "You shut up!" snarled Owl.

  "Everybody shut up!" commanded Bear in her thin, high squeak.

  "Don't you dare tell me to shut up!" yapped haughty Frog.

  And again the Great Meeting was a-roar with the noise of everyone silencing everyone else, while bewildered Mole turned around and around, asking, "Who said we must be quiet? Who? Who?" Exasperated by her constant confusion, everyone in the meeting turned and shouted at Mole, "Old said it! Old said it!" And Mole sat down, blinking and chastened.

  Then Old rose up and glared about him with a terrible wrath. "You petty things!" he roared. "You small-hearted things! You have no command over your passions! We shall never learn how to stand against Pale-eyes with all your babbling and spatting. Therefore, I command you to take the voices out of your mouths and put them into yonder woven basket until the meeting is over. Do as I say, and do it now!"

  And meekly did all the animals, even ill-tempered Bear and haughty Frog, pluck the voices from their mouths and drop them into the woven basket. Crow dropped in her hiss, and greedy Bobcat her croak; Dog put in her gobble, and haughty Frog her yap; Coyote gave up her caw, and placid Tree her bark; Bear surrendered her thin, high squeak, and Turkey her purr, and Owl her snarl.

  Then they all sat humbled before Old, who quelled his rage with long slow breaths before saying to She-Who-Creates-by-Speaking-Its-Name, "It is clear that the People must fight Pale-eyes and drive him away."

  Speaking within his heart, She-Who-Creates-by-Speaking-Its-Name said, "You will fight Pale-eyes, but you will not have victory. The People are brave and resourceful, but they are few, for all the Five Nations are but two thousand warriors, while Pale-eyes is ten thousand, and again ten thousand, and ten thousand more and more and more, all flowing across the Great Water without end."

  Old sighed deeply. "Then we have no choice but to learn to live beside him," said Old.

  "You cannot live beside him," responded She-Who-Creates-by-Speaking-Its-Name, "for he will destroy the land. The People are few and they tread the land lightly, staying at one place only until Earth is weary, then moving on so that she can rest and recover. But Pale-eyes is many and he will tread the land heavily, forcing Earth to bear until she is so warn and fatigued that she crumbles into the streams and is swept away forever."

  "Is there nothing we can do?" cried Old.

  "There is a way to save yourselves," answered She-Who-Creates-by-Speaking-Its-Name. "You can—"

  But if there was an answer it was never heard, for at this moment Turtle stumbled into the meeting lodge, out of breath and panting from her centuries-long dash to bring the terrible news. "Pale-eyes is coming!" she cried. "Pale-eyes is coming! He is right behind me!"

  All the animals jumped up in alarm and opened their mouths to cry out in terror... but no sound came. They looked like ghosts in horrid nightmares, with their wild eyes and their mouths open, screaming in silent panic. They rushed to the woven basket, pushing and shoving to get at their voices, and in their frenzied haste they snatched out whatever voice came to hand, clapped it into their mouth, and ran off into the forest crying, "Pale-eyes is coming!" Pale-eyes is coming!" Crow took the caw of Coyote; Dog grabbed the bark of Tree; Frog snapped up Bobcat's croak; Bear hooked out Snake's growl; Owl seized the Who? Who? of bewildered Mole, who took Bear's thin, high squeak, while Coyote snatched out Frog's yap and Turkey popped Dog's gobble into its mouth. Snake was beginning to swallow Crow's hiss when greedy Bobcat snatched most of it away, leaving Snake with only a little hiss, while Bobcat has a lot. Not content with most of Crow's hiss, greedy Bobcat also took Owl's snarl and Turkey's purr and ran out with all three in her mouth. Tree was last to get to the woven basket for, then as now, trees moved more slowly than other animals, and when she felt around the bottom of the basket there was no voice left for her, because greedy Bobcat had taken so many. So vexed was Tree that she swore to have nothing further to do with the animals and she became a member of the plant family, where she remains to this day.

  Old went forth to face Pale-eyes and fell before his firestick.

  As a reward for her heroic two-hundred-year-long dash to warn of the coming of Pale-eyes, Turtle was adopted into the animal family, an honor that she accepted for fear of offending them, but deep down she regretted forsaking her honored position as swiftest of the rocks to become slowest of the animals. But as she became an animal after all the animal voices were used up, Turtle still speaks the silent language of the stones. Listen very carefully to her someday, and you will hear it.

  AFTER HOURS AT RICK'S

  Last call was announced by Sam One and echoed at the far end of the bar by Sam Three. In obedience to the phoney traditions of Rick's Café Américain, a scratchy disk of As Time Goes By was put on the turntable to signal the end of the drinking day. The clock read two-ten, which meant it was five minutes before two. It is another tradition at Rick's to set the bar clock ahead fifteen minutes to create a little leeway for moving drunks out. All the regulars know this gimmick, so it doesn't work; but that doesn't prevent it from being one of Rick's instant traditions, like playing As Time Goes By and hanging huge blowups of stills from Casablanca on the walls, and calling all the barmen Sam. This last had a particularly precious embellishment: the barmen are known as Sam One, Sam Three, Sam Five, etc., because some wag once described them as an odd lot.

  Rick's has been the city's most popular meat market for the past four months, and four months hence, it will surely be out of fashion and probably no longer even in existence. That is the mutable way of things in Dallas, city of glass, Naugahyde, chrome, and Tomorrow.

  I had drunk enough to feel surprisingly sober and to regret having wasted money on hooch that failed to dissolve the crust of my devilishly attractive bitterness. I tipped back the last of my scotch-and-milk and asked Sam One for another before last call. When he told me that last call had already gone, I opened my eyes wide and demanded to know why nobody had advised me of so significant an event. He sighed operatically and made up another, taking care to label it 'a quick one'.

  I surveyed the bar with that dolefully sardonic expression I effect. Nothing but losers left at this hour. Two men sat arguing with hooch-blurred intensity: young, hard-charging sure-to-succeed types wearing the uniform that made mid-Seventies Texas businessmen look like ticket agents for minor airlines, white belts and white shoes, double-knit polyester slacks, and jackets in centennial primaries. Spaced out along the bar were three single males staring into their glasses, trying to figure out why they had failed to make out, not realizing that they were Darwinian rejects from the mating process—the kind who drive Volvos. At the end of the bar was a boozy, buxomy gal with big hair and an eyelash that had come unstuck at the corner. She was still waiting for the guy who had excused himself to go to the men's room half an hour ago. And two stools up from me was a woman in her mid-thirties, 'dressed for success' in a feminine version of a man's business suit. She had come in an hour ago when the action was peaking, and now she seemed a little embarrassed to have missed the tide of lust and ended up beached and alone.

  A sad lot, I evaluated. The culls, the losers, the shucks. And yet, there was I—me—sitting in their midst. Ironic. Ironic!

  An hour earlier, the bar had been full of action, with its clientele of mercantile types of both sexes, all playing it for more interesting than Nature had designed them to be, all hunting for crotch in this pasteboard jungle of music, laughter, hooch, and single-entendre jokes t
hat elicited loud guffaws, not because the mots were bons, but because the laugher wanted to show that he had got the joke and was—if only to that modest extent—with it.

  I had hooked an easy fish early in the evening, but I let her off the line—off my dizzyingly clever line, that is—out of fatigue and boredom and age. Age looms large with me. Lots of men have trouble with the arrival of male menopause, but with me it's worse; I just cannot accept the idea of being forty; and that's awkward when you're almost fifty.

  I downed my scotch-and-milk, pushed myself off the stool, and signaled Sam One for my tab.

  "That'll be thirteen-fifty, Mr Lee."

  "You took care of yourself, Sam?"

  "I always do, sir."

  "Wonderful. I have it on excellent authority—one Virgil, an Italian tour guide who works the rings of Dis—that the most attractive feature of hell is that the service is compris."

  Sam One guessed from my tone that this was supposed to be clever, so he made a weary effort towards a laugh but produced only a slight nasal sigh.

  Slight though it was, this sigh had an astonishing effect: the lights went out, and Rick's was plunged into darkness.

  A crash of thunder seemed to split the tarmac of the parking lot, then the lights flickered and came back on. All the drinkers were startled and frightened, so they laughed.

  I went to the window and looked out. A storm had broken over the city; hailstones the size of moth balls clattered onto the parking lot and bounced up to a height of three feet. The tinny rattle of the hail obliterated the sound of As Time Goes By, now playing for its second and last time.

  The only warning of an oncoming storm had been an odd greenish light at sunset, a kind of bathospheric afterglow. I had noticed it as I dropped into Rick's at six-thirty on my way home from the university.

  By the time the other customers joined me at the window, the diagonal streaks of rebounding hail had stopped and rain was drilling down, rapidly melting the hailstones almost before they stopped bouncing and rolling.

  "O, mutability!" I muttered.

  "Oh, shit!" muttered the woman at my side, the 'dressed for success' thirtyish one I had noticed up the bar.

  "No, just rain, I think," I said.

  One of the customers called back to Sam One, telling him that no Christian barman would send customers out in shit like this.

  "You see?" the woman said to me. "I told you."

  As everyone drifted back towards the bar, Sam Three was quick to explain that he couldn't sell any more drinks without risking his license.

  Fine, someone said. Don't sell us another round. Give us another round.

  And because most of us were regulars, Sam One shrugged and nodded to Sam Three, who, with cheerless fatalism, began to make everyone another of the same.

  "I hope you realize," I said, taking the barstool next to hers, "that the fact that these yahoos agree with you about the rain being shit does not constitute proof. The vox populi is almost always the voice of ignorance, which is why democracy is the least efficient thing since early experimental substitutions of waxed paper for toilet paper in an effort to reduce time wasted in the john. In the case of that particular guy, it was his inability to distinguish shit from Shinola that ruined his career as a television meteorologist."

  "He wouldn't make much of a shoe-shine boy, either."

  "True. Except in West Texas, where a wedge of dung under the heel of the boot is a symbol of status."

  "To say nothing of rural chic."

  "You're fun to banter with, lady. You have a well-developed sense of the ridiculous and a firm grasp on the whimsical. And what is more, you're quick on the uptake. I like the cut of your gibe, sailor."

  "Thanks, mister. What's that you're drinking?"

  "Scotch-and-milk."

  She made a dubious face. "Is it good?"

  "I've never thought of it as a moral issue."

  "You seem to have a low opinion of our fellow drinkers, stranded here in this Casablancan hailstorm."

  "Oh, they're all right in their way. Just a pack of moonstruck kids who sit all night on barstools in the hope of striking up a relationship that occupies that satisfying middle ground between romance and getting a quick lay."

  "Yeah, I know the type. Pitiful."

  "Yes, pitiful."

  And the conversation lay there for a while, as she pushed ice around in her drink. Mentioning getting laid by its name often has a stunning effect on the social flow.

  "What's your name?" she asked, without looking at me.

  "Marvin Lee. And yours?"

  "Martha Zinberg."

  "You don't look like a Martha."

  "Fifteen years ago, I didn't look like a Martha, maybe. But I'm afraid I'm growing into it. But you, you really don't look like a Marvin."

  "Thank you. It's unfair that Marvin Lee should be so patently wimpy a name, while Lee Marvin sounds all sinew and balls."

  "Poetry's a funny thing."

  "True. I remember giggling all the way through Paradise Lost."

  She smiled. "Do you come here often?"

  "And what zodiac sign was I born under?"

  "Hey, give me a break. I'm new at this sort of business."

  "Ah, the cry of the Sabine women. All right, yes. I come here often."

  "To pick up women?"

  "Certainly not! Or, to be more precise... why else? And how about you, Martha? Did you come here to get picked up?"

  "I thought so an hour ago. Now I'm not sure. It's my first time."

  "Your first time at Rick's?"

  "First time anywhere."

  "Married?"

  "Divorced."

  "Recently?"

  "Very."

  "Children?"

  "None. You?"

  "Which?"

  "Any of the above."

  "Married, yes. And I have produced an F-1... she who just yesterday was a little girl, all sugar and spice and unanswerable questions, but who will soon be entering Yale as what the acceptance letter called a 'freshperson'."

  "How do you earn your money, Marvin?"

  "I don't actually earn my money. I'm a university professor. 'History of Western Thought.' Creating faculty positions is our culture's way of providing for brilliant people who are emotionally underdeveloped."

  "That has the sound of a rehearsed line."

  "Just what it was. What about you, Martha? How do you earn your money?"

  "I'm a lawyer. My husband and I were in practice together."

  "Zinberg and Zinberg?"

  "No. Just Zinberg."

  "Ah! And was that the problem? Insufficient recognition for your contribution?"

  "...No, that was more a symptom than one of the problems. You want to hear about them? The problems?"

  "Nope."

  "Oh." She blinked. Then: "Well then, do you want to tell me about your problems?"

  "Sure. My wife is a wonderful human being. My daughter is a blend of beauty and wit. I got tenure eight years ago. And I publish articles in the major journals of my field with machinelike regularity."

  "These are your problems?"

  "Seen from the inside, yes. You see, I always wanted to be captain of a tramp steamer on the South China Sea. Or a novelist. Or a movie star. Or an apple grower in Vermont. And instead? Instead, I have a departmental committee meeting in the morning. Now there's excitement for you. What about you, Martha? Did you ever want to be an apple-growing movie star adrift in the South China Sea?"

  "No. All my life I wanted to be a lawyer."

  "Well then, you've won life's great battle! You've made out."

  "Not tonight, I haven't. My first shot at the swinging singles scene wasn't a screaming success. I realize that zaftig isn't in this season, but still... I mean, come on! This place was steamy with libido earlier on, and some of the boys were too drunk to discriminate. And yet... here I am. Still sitting here. Advise me, Marvin. What should I do? Offer green stamps?"

  "Do I understand you correctly? Are you as
king me for guidance on how to get yourself laid?"

  "I think I am. I'm not sure. After all, this is my maiden voyage... if a matron can have a maiden voyage. This is my first time out since the divorce. Maybe I just want to talk. Share ideas, dreams, insights, wisecracks." She tilted back her head and looked at me narrowly. "Come to think of it, maybe you're not the person to ask for advice. I mean, you're obviously no hotshot at the business of seduction."

  "I resent that!"

  "Well, you're still here, aren't you? You didn't find anyone for tonight."

  "Yes, well... that's the part I resent."

  She laughed. "You're sort of fun."

  "Fun? Wow! Like a barrel of monkeys? Gee! Actually, Martha, I did make out tonight. I ran my patented, all-purpose, never-fail Switch Routine on a girl, and she fell like the Roman Empire. So you see, when you assume that I am here, rather than sweating on the belly of some highly desirable chick, because I lack persuasive skills, you are full of shit up to your pink, shell-like ears—if you don't mind my waxing poetic."

  "Wax away. Are you drunk, Marvin? You sound pretty drunk."

  "Only my mouth is drunk. My mind is perfectly pellucid. Hey, if I had slurred that 'perfectly pellucid', that would have been funny. So? Do you want to learn how I made out, or not?"

  "Is it still raining?"

  "Like a cow pissing on a flat rock, as wits say in the Big Bend country."

  "In that case, teach me, Marvin. I'm all ears... pink, shell-like ears, that is." She crossed her legs and assumed an acutely attentive look.

  "All right, here's how it went. I approached this fish, dangled my classic 'switch' line in front of her, and pow! She was on the hook. All we had to do was down our drinks and in half an hour we'd have been in her apartment, making the beast with two backs."

  "So why weren't you?"

  "Well, you see, once the bait is taken and the hook is well set, my interest in landing the fish evaporates. I'm more a hunter than a killer. It isn't the tickle and squirt that attracts me. It's the constant reaffirmation that I can still harvest young flesh. Does that make any sense to you?"