Free Live Free

The Men

Stubb’s room was the smallest and least desirable in the house, the left side back. Paper peeled from its walls, and its only window faced the abandoned house next door across an areaway filled with debris. There was barely space enough to hold a dresser and a narrow bed. His trenchcoat hung on a corner of the door of the stale-smelling little closet; his damp hat slumped on the shelf inside. His shoes stood on the radiator, and his sodden socks lay flaccid beside them.

Stubb himself lay on the bed in his shorts. He was neither reading nor sleeping. Without their glasses, his eyes seemed inadequate for his face, though it was, overall, not a large one. Several hours before, he had discovered Free, Barnes, and the witch as they finished their meal. There had been little left, but he had eaten what little there was—an odd slice of bread and as much potato salad as had lodged in the corners of the carton.

Perhaps with some vague notion of pleasing the witch, Barnes had bought a can of tamales. Unobserved, Stubb had swallowed the liquid that remained and stuffed the greasy paper “corn husks” into his pocket so he might lick them clean in privacy.

Now he muttered, “Cliff, you’re a herpid motherfucker,” and put his legs over the side of the old bed. They did not quite touch the floor. He looked at his wrist, then looked away again and ran his fingers through his thinning hair.

“He could,” he said. “For old times’ sake. What the hell.” He dressed again, augmenting his still-wet socks with newspaper shaped like the footprints of dance diagrams. One held Free’s ad, and Stubb paused to read it again.

Outside, snow no longer fell; an inch was turning to slush on the sidewalk. Stubb walked up the street to a diner where a plump young man sat reading a magazine behind the counter. Stubb glanced at the clock in back of him and boosted himself onto a stool. “Coffee,” he said. “Heavy cream and sugar, Murray. I like a lot of sugar.”

“I know you do, Jim,” Murray said as he put the cup on the counter. “You’ll get fat.”

“Not me.”

“You little guys eat the most. You never get fat. I don’t see how you do it. I don’t eat anything, and I’m as fat as a pig.”

Stubb lifted his coffee, holding it with both hands. The cream had cooled it, and it was syrupy with sugar.

“How the hell do you do that? Just pour it down your throat like that?”

“I guess I was thirsty,” Stubb said.

“I guess you were. How’s the op business?”

“Up and down, like any other business.”

“Coffee’s thirty-five cents.”

“Jesus, no wonder you’re fat.”

Murray looked from Stubb to a sign that read PLEASE PAY WHEN SERVED, then back to Stubb; but Stubb appeared not to see him. After a moment Murray went down the counter to refill a napkin holder, and Stubb, rising rapidly on his stool and bracing his feet on its rungs, leaned across the counter and reached beneath it for a telephone.

“Listen, you’ve got a customer who hangs around, tall man, about six one, one-seventy maybe one-eighty, Caucasian, clean shave, reddish hair going gray … . Yeah, that’s him, I want to talk to him … . Mike, this’s Jim. How’s it going? … Yeah, sure. Right … . Yeah, I figured you’d be in there, a night like this. No use freezing your butt off … . Listen, Mike, how’d it be if I came over and took it for an hour? Give you a chance to have a crap and maybe a look at the paper. What you getting an hour? Seven-fifty? … Mike, I didn’t say that’s what I’d want, I’d do it for five, and you’d be two fifty to the good. You know Cliff had me on it when they had six guys on him … . Mike, I’ll split it down the middle. Three seventy-five, and that’s my last offer.”

There was a click like the closing of the napkin holder. Stubb hung up and got down from his stool.

“You owe for the coffee,” Murray said. “And that’s not a public phone.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” Stubb told him.

It had started to snow again, flakes drifting down around the street lights. He pulled his trenchcoat tight at the neck. When he was some distance from the diner, he turned and glanced back at its window, still shining among the darkened stores: SANDWICH SHOP. He shrugged.

Free’s house was dark. Stubb rummaged through the kitchen, found nothing, and at last returned to his room. From a dresser drawer he took a ring of keys. With them in his pocket, he made his way to the door of the room in front of his own.

The bolt squeaked back. He stepped inside and closed the door carefully behind him before switching on the light.

It was a much bigger room than his, with two windows facing the street. There was a smell of perfume and stale ashtrays. Soiled lingerie, peach, pink, and black, lay in a corner. Jars of cream and bottles of cologne littered the dresser; in the center, precisely parallel to the dresser top, lay a Baby Ruth of the dollar size. Stubb reached for it, then drew back.

Swiftly he searched the drawers, leaving them no more jumbled than he found them. He looked under the pillow and the mattress, and even under the tattered throw rug. Then he switched off the lights, stepped into the hall, and relocked the door.

He had taken several steps from it before he saw the witch standing on the other side of the stairwell watching him. He grinned at her, though he could not see her expression in the dim light. “I’ve got a key, Madame S. She gave me one. I was going to wait for her, only it’s getting too late.”

The witch said nothing. He could just make out the whites of her eyes and the darker dark that was her hair.

“It’d be better if you didn’t mention it. Nicer—you know what I mean?”

Slowly she vanished. There was no shimmer, and her disappearance was not sudden like the bursting of a soap bubble, nor did she disperse like smoke or melt like the ferns of frost on a windowpane. She was and was not, with between the two a moment, the knife edge of time, when she was and was not.

Stubb was alone in the hall. He went around the stairwell until he stood where she had, fished out the paper matches with which he had lit Candy’s cigarette, struck a match, and held it up until it scorched his fingers, peering at the floor. Shaking his head, he rapped his temple and returned to his room.

Once more stripped to his shorts, he lay in the dark with his hands beneath his head. When he had rested so for perhaps half an hour, he muttered, “She doesn’t think more of that Baby Ruth than I do of my prick.”

Barnes’s room was across from Stubb’s. It was larger than Stubb’s, smaller than the fat girl’s, cleaner than either. Its walls were decorated with ads for various jokes and novelties. These were:

Besides all these, there was one picture that was more or less conventional. Suspended from a stick-on hook like an erectile penis, it showed a voluptuous blonde whose gown, brassiere, and panties would vanish if the room became humid.

It was not humid, however, and the blonde appeared fully dressed. Barnes was dressed too, in tattered nylon pajamas and a robe. His room boasted a small table in addition to the bed and dresser, and he sat before it composing a letter on the florid, gold-crested stationery of the nearby Hotel Consort. He wrote slowly and laboriously, the tip of his tongue occasionally protruding from one corner of his mouth. From time to time he kissed the point of his souvenir pen.

When he had completed this letter, Barnes drew an S-shaped flourish under his signature. After carefully retracting the point of the souvenir pen, he picked up the letter and read it with evident satisfaction.

Taking up his pen again, he addressed an envelope, crossing out the location of the hotel and substituting that of Free’s house. When the letter had been folded and sealed inside, he took a quarter-sheet of stamps from the table’s shallow drawer, tore off one, moistened its back with the tip of his hard-working tongue, and (with the greatest attention to its position) gummed it on upside-down.

After satisfying himself that it had adhered, he added the letter to a modest stack of similar ones on the left side of the table, stood up, and stretched. In his stocking feet, he padded across the room to the light switch. Drawing the blind down the single window left the room in a darkness that was nearly total.

The whisper of his feet on the floorboards came again, followed by a nearly imperceptible scraping as he shifted the picture of the voluptuous woman with the disappearing gown to one side.

The hole in the wall behind it showed no light. His finger explored it, and at last he thrust the souvenir pen into it. When he had satisfied himself that it had not been blocked, he replaced the picture and switched on the light again. Taking up a soiled supermarket tabloid from the bed, he began to read the classifieds.