Blue City Read Free

focused. He saw me and sat up.
    “Stand up,” I said. “Pour some water on your friend’s face. I couldn’t be bothered with him.”
    “You’ll be sorry, fella. You don’t know what you just been messin’ with.”
    “Shut up or I’ll hit you again! With both hands.”
    “Tough, eh?”
    My left split his upper lip and my right closed his left eye. “See what I mean?”
    He leaned against the wall and put his black-grained hands over his damaged face. I went out to the bar, where the old man was sitting on a stool.
    “I like your class of clientele,” I told the bartender.
    “You back? I don’t recall as how we sent you a gilt-edged invitation.”
    “If the comic in the lavatory doesn’t come to in another five minutes, you better send for the police ambulance.”
    “You been fighting?” He looked at me with hypocritical disapproval. “We don’t allow any roughhouse stuff around here.”
    “I didn’t notice you raising a howl when this old guy got hit. What’s your cut?”
    “One more crack like that out of you!” the bartender yelled.
    A car honked softly in front of the tavern, and the old man slid off his stool.
    “Save it,” I told the bartender.
    The old man was at the door, and I called to him to wait a minute. “Do you live far?”
    “Just a few blocks.”
    “Fifty cents should cover it.” I gave him two quarters.
    “You’re a good boy, son.”
    “I just happen to like fighting. What’s your name?”
    “McGinis.”
    “If those characters give you any more trouble, let me know. I’ll be staying at the Weather House, I guess. My name’s John Weather. Better stay away from here, though.”
    “You mean the Palace Hotel? That’s the old Weather House.”
    “Yeah, I suppose they would change its name.”
    The taxi honked mildly again, and the old man turned away. “Wait a minute,” he said again. “What did you say your name was?”
    “John Weather.”
    “You any relation to J.D. Weather that I was telling you about?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Is that a fact?” the old man said. He got into his taxi and rode away.

chapter
2
    They had changed more than the name of the Weather House. The Palace Hotel had revolving doors instead of the big oak doors with the brass knobs that I remembered. The dim old lobby with the tobacco-colored, tobacco-smelling leather chairs had been cleaned out and redecorated. It was a bright, female sort of place now, with indirect lighting and new, colored chesterfields, and there were no old men sitting in it. The ground-floor poolroom where J.D. once played Willie Hoppe had been changed into a cocktail lounge with dark blue women painted on the walls. I looked past the bare shoulders of a couple of floozies at the door of the cocktail lounge and saw that it was doing a good business, which included the high-school trade. I couldn’t help wondering where the money from the business was going.
    I crossed the lobby to the room clerk’s desk. It bore a little wooden sign which said “Mr. Dundee.” Mr. Dundee looked at my rain-stained fedora, my beard-blackened chin, my dirty shirt, my canvas bag, my old field boots. I looked at Mr. Dundee’s wig-brown hair, carefully parted in the exact center of his egg-shaped skull. I looked at his fat,laundered little face and his dull little eyes, his very white hard collar and his pale-blue tie which was held in place by a gold-plated initialed clasp.
    I began to look at each of the eight manicured fingers with which he daintily clasped the inside edge of the desk.
    “What can we do for you?” he said, delicately omitting the “sir.”
    “Single without bath. I never take a bath. Do I?”
    He raised his thin eyebrows and blinked. “That will be two dollars and a half.”
    “I usually pay when I check out of a hotel. Who runs this place?”
    “Mr. Sanford is the owner,” said Mr. Dundee. “Two dollars and a half, please.”
    I took out a roll that looked bigger than it was and gave him three ones.