she knew that the nights were made for something besides sleep

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They carried Sandy Herbert off to the hospital in the middle of the night. She'd been having pains all evening, hollering and yelling with them, and when her old lady finally got the doctor the doctor said she was losing the kid.
"Thank the Lord," Mrs. Herbert said.
"But I don't want to lose the baby!" Sandy wailed. "I want my baby!"
"You wanted to find the father, too," Mrs. Herbert said. "But before you could finish counting how many prospects there were you ran out of fingers. The kid will be better off dead. And so will you." ... 
On the way back to Duncan the next morning I drove around and paid Sandy's hospital bill. The woman at the desk gave me a receipt and coughed once or twice. "Would you like to see Miss Duncan?" She made sure to put a lot of emphasis on the Miss. The girl was single, she'd gotten herself into a jam and the old hag was having a ball of it.

"That's one thing you'll never have to worry about," I told her, getting sore. "Nobody in his right mind is ever going to waste his strength to get you that way."

"Young man, if you think for one minute you can talk to me like that, why—"

"I'll talk to you any way I want," I said, leaning over the counter. "Who the hell are you, a saint or something to throw a slur at a nice kid?"

"Nice kid! Indeed!"
"Button your mouth," I said, turning away.

could he escape in the arms of a woman or with a bottle of booze?

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She shrugged, “There isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t give a quart of his blood to see a naked woman. It’s funny. We’re all pretty much the same. I go to a nudist camp every summer — my father doesn’t know that — Sex isn’t important there. It’s what you are that counts.”

Eddie couldn’t imagine himself ever going to a nudist camp. It would be too much for him to bear, playing volleyball and swimming with pretty young girls in all their naked loveliness. He simply couldn’t believe that there were men who could do it and not get all worked up.
“Oh, come on. You didn’t go to no nudist camp and not have some man after you. You think I was born yesterday, huh? If you were some skinny little babe without those headlights I might fall for it, but not the way you look. Any guy goes for a pair of knockers and — ”
“Why are all men alike?” she demanded. “Why do they all want the same thing from a girl? None of that stuff goes on in a nudist camp. We have our games and enjoy the sun and there isn’t any more to it.”
“Crap.”
He didn’t understand what she was talking about, and he didn’t believe her. How could a bunch of naked men and girls run around and not have desire boiling inside them? It was true that most girls looked better with half of their clothes on than they did with them off but it was still, to his way of thinking, a road to sex.

She was like something that had been let out of a cage, something wild

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“You ever been on Quaker Street? When I was fourteen the guys were taking it away from me, for free. The old lady even had a couple of roomers who didn’t know what beds they were supposed to be in. When I was sixteen I wouldn’t let anybody and my old lady said I was stuck-up. She wanted me to go to college — Jesus Christ, can you beat that one! — but when I got out of high school I didn’t find a job right away and I put a price on it. After that she said I was a whore. How do you figure that, mister?”

“I don’t,” I said.

 “They all are,” she said. “Every one of them. Every woman’s one. They do it for money or they do it for a roof over their heads or they get a license and do it for kids. What’s so different about us? A guy wouldn’t keep one around if she didn’t, he wouldn’t stay in the house with her long enough so she could shut the door. You tell me, will you? What’s so different about us?”

She kept talking and I shut my eyes, trying not to listen to her. Her mind kept ploughing through the muck of Quaker Street, hunting reasons as to why she was as good as anybody else. She said something about a carnival and a guy who’d left her. Pretty soon all I could hear were the words, meaning nothing, and after that I didn’t even hear the words.

"The things he wants me to do I’ve got to be drunk to stand."

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She had a couple of drinks and returned to the floor. This time her body caught the jungle beat of the orchestra and she had the insane urge to strip herself naked, to show them that she had the best body along the street. It wasn’t the first time she had felt this way and she didn’t understand it. She knew that her gown was dipping dangerously low in front but she didn’t care. It was her last night and she would give them something to remember her by.

"You give me a kid and I’ll split your head open," she told me.

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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 …