Hop Alley by Scott Phillips Read Free Book Online

her hand. She kept shaking her head and crawled back to the bed. From outside came a cry, a man’s voice. “Cilla!”
    I went over to the window and peered through the edge of the lace curtain. Downstairs at the door stood my friend and landlord Banbury. He stood patiently and didn’t act as though her failure to answer promptly was anything unusual. He consulted a pocket watch and continued to stand, facing the street.
    “Well, for Christ’s sakes, it’s just Ralph,” I said with some relief, tempered by a growing realization of the complexity of the situation facing me. “I thought he came over on Tuesdays and Fridays.”
    She shook her head. “Thursdays and Mondays, now.”
    “No use getting into a knot about it. I’ll go let him in.” I was already half dressed and buttoning my shirt.
    “Are you crazy?” she said, trying to whisper but betrayed by her anger into half shouting.
    “What else do you want to do? Turn him away? Have me stay here and listen from the wardrobe while you make the two-backed beast?” I moved toward the door and when I took theknob in hand the pitcher containing the bluebonnets shattered on the wall next to the jamb, dousing me with water.
    “Son of a bitch!” That was said loud enough for Ralph to hear, at least the last, explosive word of it, and I made my way quickly down the stairs.
    She was close behind me but she stopped cold when I opened the door. “Evening, Banbury,” I said.
    If he was surprised at the sight of me in his lover’s doorway at the hour of their regular weekly assignation, he maintained his aplomb. “Sadlaw,” he said, as nonchalant as if we had come across one another on the street.
    “Come on in, I was just on my way. Cilla took today for Wednesday.”
    “I see. Perhaps I ought to come back another time.”
    “As I said, I was already on my way.” Peering around me he saw her on the stairs, her dressing gown hurriedly wrapped about her shoulders and her feet accusingly bare, her auburn hair winding damningly down past her shoulders. His grin grew tighter and I shouldered my way past him with a faint apology. I heard her door closing and the sound of shouting, followed by those of a heavy object hitting a wall or the floor and glass breaking. Her curio cabinet, most likely, and certainly at her own hand; whichever of them had upended it, though, it would be Banbury who bought its replacement after the fighting had given way to tearful apologies, declarations of love, and finally to urgent copulation, likely as not right thereon the downstairs canapé. I climbed aboard my buggy, sorry for their trouble but happy to be temporarily drained of the source of my own.
    I STOPPED AT the dining room of the Wentworth House Hotel for a dinner of steak and fried potatoes, then made a visit to the Occidental Hall to have a glass of beer and see the miners and prospectors get themselves fleeced at the gaming tables. I watched one prospector in particular lose spin after spin on the roulette wheel, dropping a dollar or more on each try. His face was dotted with fresh scabs that suggested he’d tried to save money by shaving himself after a long abstinence, and he grew slightly more crestfallen with each successive failure of his luck to change. I watched the operator, too, and the cruel glimmer in his eye each time the wheel slowed and refused again to hand the wretch a small win, defying the laws of probability; fortunately for him the prospector’s familiarity with mathematics was probably limited to the simplest arithmetic. After a while it stopped being funny, and I left the poor fellow to it and hoped he wouldn’t lose his entire fortune trying to prove a point about luck.

TWO
    T HE O RIGIN OF THE W ORLD
    T he next morning was cold and overcast and useless for printing, and I went about my morning activities in an agitated state. This was made worse around midmorning when Augie Baxter turned up at the door with his sample case and an air of obsequious