'Do you think I could have a gingerale?' he asked.
She brought him one and Jack drank it while he finished waxing the dancefloor. At quarter to twelve Smokey ordered him back to the storeroom to 'run out a keg.' Jack managed the keg - barely. At quarter to one Smokey started bawling for people to finish up. Lori unplugged the juke - Dick Cur-less died with a long, unwinding groan - to a few halfhearted cries of protest. Gloria unplugged the games, donned her sweater (it was as pink as the Canada Mints Smokey ate regularly, as pink as the false gums of his dentures), and left. Smokey began to turn out the lights and to urge the last four or five drinkers out the door.
'Okay, Jack,' he said when they were gone. 'You did good. There's room for improvement, but you got a start, anyway. You can doss down in the storeroom.'
Instead of asking for his pay (which Smokey did not offer anyway), Jack stumbled off toward the storeroom, so tired that he looked like a slightly smaller version of the drunks so lately ushered out.
In the storeroom he saw Lori squatting down in one corner - the squat caused her basketball shorts to ride up to a point that was nearly alarming - and for a moment Jack thought with dull alarm that she was going through his knapsack. Then he saw that she had spread a couple of blankets on a layer of burlap apple-sacks. Lori had also put down a small satin pillow which said NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR on one side.
'Thought I'd make you a little nest, kid,' she said.
'Thanks,' he said. It was a simple, almost offhand act of kindness, but Jack found himself having to struggle from bursting into tears. He managed a smile instead. 'Thanks a lot, Lori.'
'No problem. You'll be all right here, Jack. Smokey ain't so bad. Once you get to know him, he ain't half bad.' She said this with an unconscious wistfulness, as if wishing it were so.
'Probably not,' Jack said, and then he added impulsively, 'but I'm moving on tomorrow. Oatley's just not for me, I guess.' She said:
'Maybe you'll go, Jack . . . and maybe you'll decide to stay awhile. Why don't you sleep on it?' There was something forced and unnatural about this little speech - it had none of the genuineness of her grin when she'd said Thought I'd make you a little nest. Jack noticed it, but was too tired to do more than that.
'Well, we'll see,' he said.
'Sure we will,' Lori agreed, going to the door. She blew a kiss toward him from the palm of one dirty hand. 'Good night, Jack.'
'Good night.'
He started to pull off his shirt . . . and then left it on, deciding he would just take off his sneakers. The storeroom was cold and chilly. He sat down on the apple-sacks, pulled the knots, pushed off first one and then the other. He was about to lie back on Lori's New York World's Fair souvenir - and he might well have been sound asleep before his head ever touched it - when the telephone began to ring out in the bar, shrilling into the silence, drilling into it, making him think of wavering, pasty-gray roots and bullwhips and two-headed ponies.
Ring, ring, ring, into the silence, into the dead silence.
Ring, ring, ring, long after the kids who call up to ask about Prince Albert in a can have gone to bed. Ring, ring, ring, Hello, Jacky it's Morgan and I felt you in my woods, you smart little shit I SMELLED you in my woods, and how did you ever get the idea that you were safe in your world? My woods are there, too. Last chance, Jacky. Get home or we send out the troops. You won't have a chance. You won't -
Jack got up and ran across the storeroom floor in his stocking feet. A light sweat that felt freezing cold, seemed to cover his entire body.
He opened the door a crack.
Ring, ring, ring, ring.
Then finally: 'Hello, Oatley Tap. And this better be good.' Smokey's voice. A pause. 'Hello?' Another pause. 'Fuck off!' Smokey hung up with a bang, and Jack heard him recross the floor and then start up the stairs to the small overhead apartment he and Lori shared.
7
Jack looked unbelievingly from the green slip of paper in his left hand to the small pile of bills - all ones - and change by his right. It was eleven o'clock the next morning. Thursday morning, and he had asked for his pay.
'What is this?' he asked, still unable to believe it.
'You can read,' Smokey said, 'and you can count. You don't move as fast as I'd like, Jack - at least not yet - but you're bright enough.'
Now he sat with the green slip in one hand and the money by the other. Dull anger began to pulse in the middle of his forehead like a vein. GUEST CHECK, the green slip was headed. It was the exact same form Mrs. Banberry had used in the Golden Spoon. It read:
1 hmbrg $1.35
1 hmbrg $1.35
1 lrg mk .55
1 gin-ale .55
Tx .30