Epitaph For A Tramp Read Online Free PDF Page A

few doors down from the entrance. I walked down the opposite side of the street to the liquor store and picked up a pint of bourbon. When I came back past the doorway this time three or four of the guys near her were working on it. It was all palsy enough so that she was laughing about something. I went back to the car and opened the pint.
    People drifted in and out or along the street. So did their conversation, and it was too muggy to roll up the window:
    “—Look, if you can call my mother Jocasta, and me narcissistic—”
    “ —Talk about paranoia—”
    “—The really accomplished Mexican painters, like Orozco and Tamayo—”
    The bohemians. The intellectuals. Tamayo and Tamayo and Tamayo, seeps in this petty paste from plate to plate. If they stopped that talk for three consecutive minutes the world would blow up.
    “—Do I know Willie? Why, he quotes me three separate times in one chapter—”
    “—If I saw Heathcliff on the street I’d just die—”
    It got to be ten. It got to be midnight and then one o’clock. You can drink a goodly amount of whisky in that time, say a pint. I was saving a buck or two by drinking it out of the bottle instead of across a bar. Be sensible that way for another decade and I could probably even manage that two-week cruise to the Bahamas I’d been dreaming about all those years.
    It was 1:49 when I tagged them. He was a tall slender kid with fairly good shoulders under his denim jacket. He was wearing tan slacks and a black knit tie and white sneakers and if someone had told him that the frat was holding a stag beer party he would have trotted off on the spot. Nobody told him. She had him by the arm and when they came up the stairs onto the sidewalk she said something and he laughed.
    They came past the car. She never saw me. They were both laughing now but she was not that tight. She walked easily and when they were turning the corner I saw his arm go around her hip.
    They walked two more blocks and then they went into a rundown building with a grocery store on the street floor. I was sixty yards behind them on the other side of the street. Next to me a sign in a plumber s window said, IS THERE WATER IN YOUR BASEMENT?
    After a minute a light went on two flights up. Third floor front. I lit a cigarette. The grocer was pushing haddock that year. I smoked the cigarette hard. I was still trying to finish it when the light went out again.
    I went across.
    There were a lot of bells and a lot of names. Lonergan. Goldman. Zachery. Hoy. Cranley. Philkins. When I was nine years old an avant-garde juvenile delinquent named Philkins knocked half the spokes out of the front wheel of my Western Flyer with a baseball bat. Or maybe that was Filkins. There was no lock on the outside door.
    There was one naked light bulb for each flight. There was a faint odor of turpentine. The walls were a drab schoolroom brown. The door I wanted was like any other dingy door in any other dingy walk-up anywhere. I wondered what I was doing there.
    I rang the bell hard, hearing it blast inside the apartment.
    A minute passed. If they had the turpentine I wondered why they didn’t get some paint. I heard him padding toward me. “Who is it?” he said through the door.
    “Delivery.”
    “Huh? Here?” The door opened. “You want Cranley, mister?”
    He was peering out at me, tying the sash around a blue robe. He was a good-looking boy, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three. The line of his nose was sharp and straight where the light from the hall cut it half into shadow. I would not have had to move my right hand more than ten inches from where it lay near the bell to change all that.
    “You sure you want Cranley, mister?”
    “Go back inside,” I said. “Tell her it’ll be cleaner if she’s got something on when I come in.”
    “What? Hey now, what is this? Who do you think you’re—”
    I took him by the front of the robe, moving close to him. “Maybe you better say you never saw her