Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter Read Free Book Online Page B

wonder when they’re comin home?”
    “Aw hell, I seen the kid Wednesday or Tuesday. They won’t be back for a week. Hey, we can stay all fuckin night.”
    “That’s what I was thinking. Have another couple of drinks, find the money, sleep, an cut out just before dawn.”
    “What if we find a couple thousand bucks! Hey, we could go to Mexico, too!”
    “Lemme try some of that gin now,” Jack said. “I never drank any of that, either.”

Three
    Billy lay in his bed in the Couch Street hotel and half-listened to a dim, fragmented conversation between a man and a woman in the next room. He was familiar with the subject of the conversation; he had heard it a thousand times at home: The war was over, the easy West Coast money was being pulled out of Negro reach, prices were going crazy, finance companies were getting stonyhearted again...Billy grinned bitterly. It’s like they wanted the war back, so they could make more money.
    The man in the next room was trying to convince the woman that they should move to Detroit, where he was certain he could get work; she, on the other hand, did not want to leave her mother’s family. The argument went back and forth dully, and Billy stopped hearing it. He had his own troubles.
    He got out of bed and took off his jockey shorts and went to the sink in the corner, turning on the hot-water tap. A thin stream of water fizzed out, barely lukewarm, and Billy took his washcloth out of his bag and gave himself a sponge bath, standing on the hotel towel and drying off with his own thick, fluffy towel. It always made him feel good to get clean, made him feel sharp and aware, and he smiled at himself in the mirror, and then, for fun, showed his teeth in a chimpanzee grin. Still naked, he brushed his teeth. They were small, well-formed, beautifully white, and he was very proud of them, as proud as he was of the small corded muscles of his arms and legs. He was skinny, bony-shouldered, yes, but it was deceptive. He watched the muscles of his forearms as he scrubbed his socks against each other and then rinsed them out; muscles he had built by doing pull-ups and the rope-climb at school; and for a moment he regretted having left school. But the feeling did not last; if he lacked the easy comfort of going to school, he had something far better—his freedom of action. That was more important than reading all those books about the white world that were such lies even
he
could see through them. This was much better.
    Except for the thing that had wakened him from his sleep, the eye-opening, sudden awareness that he had been hustled the evening before. It had come to him with the impact of a kick in the chest: that pair of guys at the Rialto had cut him up, and done it easily. But what had made him sit up, fully awake and completely angry, was that he had let it happen. He was no mark. How had it happened? What had he been thinking about?
    “
Stupid!
” he hissed at himself as he got dressed. Pure case of buck fever, so excited by the idea of playing there, playing the best in Portland, that he forgot all about hustling, just automatically pretended that everybody in the world was just like him and wanted to play their best, for themselves. He could just see those two guys, in the men’s toilet or someplace, splitting his money. Laughing at him. Well, they had a right to laugh; he had been a fool.
    The voice of the man in the next room rose in sudden, wall-shaking anger: “
But what we goin do when Cholly Chill gets heah?
”
    Billy made a face. Southern accent, very heavy; Billy could imitate that kind of accent easily. The guy probably came West for the easy war money, and now he was worried about what to do when winter came. Too bad for him; go back home and pick cotton and eat hog jowls, or whatever the hell they did in the South.
    Do you know how lonely you are?
    Billy was startled; it was not quite a voice, more than a thought.
What
, he thought,
lonely? I been lonely all my life. You