Falling From Horses by Molly Gloss Read Free Book Online

him—I had the idea that Hollywood was a dangerous place compared to the towns I’d come from, and I was operating on a fairly short fuse. I gave him a look, and he looked back and smirked slightly and went on leaning there.
    So then I stopped at the corner to let Lily catch up to me. She had grown up in Seattle, which was closer to a big city than anywhere I’d ever lived, and in any case, Lily being Lily, she had this way about her, like nothing could throw her for a loop. She was walking along, looking at the storefronts and the street signs like it was all run-of-the-mill, and when she passed the man leaning against the car she gave him a brief look without any interest, and something in her manner must have shut him down, because he turned his head to look up the street like what was happening there was deeply interesting.
    When she got to the corner, Lily tipped her head back to look up at me and said, “What’s the matter?” I must have been scowling.
    It didn’t sound like a real question to me, so I didn’t bother to answer. I turned and looked down the block and said, “I don’t see any hotels.”
    â€œMaybe we should go into one of these shops and ask whether there’s a hotel or a rooming house anywhere close by. And make sure Gower Street is somewhere around here.” The signal light at the intersection glittered in her glasses.
    We were standing in front of a window with the words T HOR’S N EEDLE painted on it in fancy script. A fat man with his sleeves rolled above his elbows sat behind the dusty glass reading a newspaper. His fleshy forearms were dark with inked designs. He gave us a look and then went back to his newspaper.
    I had gotten over being sore at Lily by then, but I sure wouldn’t have let her push me into a tattoo parlor to ask about hotels. I said, “There might be something further along. We ought to walk another block or two.”
    She didn’t argue. We walked on up the street, and at the next corner she said, “What’s that?” and pointed across the lanes of traffic and halfway down the next block, to a neon sign in looping letters, SAINT JAMES . Under the sign a dirty glass door was propped open, and a couple of men sat on chairs along the front wall, taking in the afternoon sun or the passersby. We crossed the street and walked down to the building, and Lily went right up to the men sitting outside and asked, “Is this a hotel?” Both of them straightened up and said yes it was.
    We stepped just inside. There was a stairway at the back of the lobby and a desk to one side of it under a shadeless floor lamp. The man sitting behind the desk was studying a magazine spread out on the desk. He sat with his elbows propped and his chin resting on his upturned palms; he glanced at us briefly and then returned to his reading. The rose design in the flat-grained carpet was faded and worn through in a broad track from the front door to the stairs.
    Lily turned to me and said quietly, “It’s not very clean,” lifting her eyebrows as if she’d asked me a question.
    I said, “It’s all right, the rooms are probably okay.” But I didn’t want to go in and pay for the room with Lily standing at my elbow; I didn’t want the desk clerk or the men in front of the hotel to get the wrong idea. For that matter, I didn’t want Lily standing there while I figured out if I had enough money for the room. So I said, “I’ll walk you to the streetcar stop and then I’ll come back here and get settled in.”
    I thought she might argue. But she looked around the lobby once, then up and down the street, and after a little silence she said, “Okay. Thanks.”
    I walked her up the street to the next streetcar island and stood there with cars whizzing by within a couple of feet of us. We didn’t talk much. I asked if she knew where she needed to get off, and she said,