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double-parked to let her get well ahead, then crawled along in second half a block behind her. The pavement and the buildings deteriorated as we left the downtown section. Dilapidated flats and boarding-houses whose windows gave fleeting glimpses of permanent depression were interspersed with dim little bars and sandwich counters. The people in the bars and on the streets, brown and black and dirty gray, had dim and dilapidated personalities to match the buildings. All but the girl I was following. She swaggered along through the lower depths of the city as if she was drunk with her own desirability.
    Street lights were few and far between. On a corner under one of them a gang of Negro boys too young for the bars were horsing in the road, projecting their black identities against the black indifference of the night. They froze when the girl went by, looking at her from eyes like wet brown stones. She paid no attention to them.
    In the middle of the next block she entered the lobby of an apartment building. I parked near the corner and surveyed the building from the other side of the street. It was big for the street, three-storied, and had once been fairly pretentious. Tile facing surmounted its stucco cornice. Its second- and third-floor windows were masked with shallow wrought-iron balconies.
    But the dark tides of Yanonali Street had lapped at its foundations and surrounded it with an atmosphere of hopelessness. A patched earthquake scar zigzagged across its face. Yellow rust-streaks ran down from the balconies like iron tears. The lights behind the blinded windows, the illlit lobby open on the street, gave an impression of furtive transiency.
    I didn’t know the girl’s name, and she would be almost impossible to find in the warren of the building’s rooms and corridors. I went back to my car. The Negro boys wereStanding around it on the road in a broken semi-circle.
    “How fast will she go?” the smallest one said.
    “I’ve hit the peg a couple of times. A hundred. Who was the girl that just went past, the one in the fur coat?”
    They looked at each other blankly.
    “We don’t pay no mind to girls,” the tallest one said.
    “You want a girl? Trotter can get you a girl,” the smallest one said. “He got six sisters.” He performed a brief skinny-hipped hula.
    The tall one kicked him sharply in the rear. “You silence yourself, my sisters is all working.”
    The small one skipped out of his reach. “Sure. They working night and day.” He did a couple of bumps.
    I said: “Where’s the Meyer truck line?”
    “I thought he wanted a girl,” one of them said to the other. “Now he wants a truck. He can’t make up his mind.”
    “Keep right on going west,” the tall one said. “You know where the big overpass is?”
    “No.”
    “Well, you’ll see it, off to the left. Meyer’s is on the other side of the highway.”
    I thanked him and gave him a dollar. The others watched the transaction with the same bright stony look that they had given the girl. As I drove away, a tin can rattled on my turtleback. Their rattling laughter followed me down the street.

 
    CHAPTER 5 :
The road bumped over railroad
tracks, twisted through pine-smelling lumberyards, ducked under the overpass that carried the highway. Night-running trucks went over my head like thunder. The Meyer yard was almost in the shadow of the overpass, a black-topsquare hemmed in by high wire fence and flanked by a storage building. A truck was backed in to the loading dock, another stood under an open-sided shelter supported on concrete columns, and two others were parked inside the gate. The gate was open. I drove through and pulled up at the platform.
    A bald man in an oil-stained T-shirt was sitting on a packing case at the back of the platform. A thousand-watt bulb over the door of the warehouse held him in pitiless light. He was freckled and blotched all over, head and neck and arms, as if his maker had flicked a paintbrush at him. His