Our apartment was on the second floor, rear, and the hall always smelled of fish. Most of the people on the South Side were poor and fish was cheap. The smell was worse upstairs and I hoped that it hadn’t found its way into the apartment. I had gotten used to the smell of the garbage out back — half the wives just tossed it at the cans and missed — but I had never gotten used to the combination of odors. The apartment door wasn’t locked and I went in. The lights were on in the living room and Amy lay on the couch. She was naked. She had been going to put on a robe, or had had it on, but it was now lying on the floor.
“Drunken bitch,” I said.
She opened her eyes.
“I heard that.”
“So what?”
There was a bar on the corner, a place I
didn’t like but the beer was always cold. Anybody who had the
price of a drink could get taken care of and the owner never asked for proof of
age. Some of the kids from the South Side hung out there and the girls were
tramps. When the weather was good they made love in the alleys and when the
weather was bad there were rooms they could rent. A room for that purpose cost
from three to five dollars and most of the girls took care of more than one
boy, sometimes getting into trouble and having babies that the welfare department
had to take care of. That night I remembered Amy, a no-good little girl who’d
never had a chance to be anything but a tramp. The poor damned kid. I’d asked
her to be a wife — but she couldn’t be a wife. How far back had the odds been
stacked that made her turn out a bum? That had made me one too, for that
matter? I thought of Joy’s baby. He’d be a bum too, some rotten day
that would serve as a coming-of-age …
Thanks for the original artwork.
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