“Me trying to run a respectable house, that’s been running a shooting-gallery for twenty years, and him trying to turn it into a peep-show.”
“It’s us poor girls,” Miss Myrtle said, “causes all the trouble and gets all the suffering.”
“I heard two years ago he wasn’t no good that way,” Miss Lorraine said.
“I knew it all the time,” Miss Reba said.
“A young man spending his money like water on girls and not never going to bed with one.
It’s against nature.
All the girls thought it was because he had a little woman out in town somewhere, but I says mark my words, there’s something funny about him.
There’s a funny business somewhere.”
“He was a free spender, all right,” Miss Lorraine said.
“The clothes and jewelry that girl bought, it was a shame,” Miss Reba said.
“There was a Chinese robe she paid a hundred dollars for—imported, it was—and perfume at ten dollars an ounce; and next morning when I went up there, they was all wadded in the corner and the perfume and rouge busted all over them like a cyclone.
That’s what she’d do when she got mad at him, when he’d beat her.
After he shut her up and wouldn’t let her leave the house.
Having the front of my house watched like it was a.……” She raised the tankard from the table to her lips.
Then she halted it, blinking.
“Where’s my—”
“Uncle Bud!” Miss Myrtle said.
She grasped the boy by the arm and snatched him out from behind Miss Reba’s chair and shook him, his round head bobbing on his shoulders with an expression of equable idiocy.
“Aint you ashamed?
Aint you ashamed?
Why cant you stay out of these ladies’ beer?
I’m a good mind to take that dollar back and make you buy Miss Reba a can of beer, I am for a fact.
Now, you go over there by that window and stay there, you hear?”
“Nonsense,” Miss Reba said.
“There wasn’t much left.
You ladies are about ready too, aint you?
Minnie!”
Miss Lorraine touched her mouth with her handkerchief.
Behind her glasses her eyes rolled aside in a veiled, secret look.
She laid the other hand to her flat spinster’s breast.
“We forgot about your heart, honey,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Dont you reckon you better take gin this time?”
“Reely, I—” Miss Lorraine said.
“Yes; do,” Miss Reba said.
She rose heavily and fetched three more glasses of gin from behind the screen.
Minnie entered and refilled the tankards.
They drank, patting their lips. “That’s what was going on, was it?” Miss Lorraine said.
“First I knowed was when Minnie told me there was something funny going on,” Miss Reba said.
“How he wasn’t here hardly at all, gone about every other night, and that when he was here, there wasn’t no signs at all the next morning when she cleaned up.
She’d hear them quarrelling, and she said it was her wanting to get out and he wouldn’t let her.
With all them clothes he was buying her, mind, he didn’t want her to leave the house, and she’d get mad and lock the door and wouldn’t even let him in.”
“Maybe he went off and got fixed up with one of these glands, these monkey glands, and it quit on him,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Then one morning he come in with Red and took him up there.
They stayed about an hour and left, and Popeye didn’t show up again until next morning.
Then him and Red come back and stayed up there about an hour.
When they left, Minnie come and told me what was going on, so next day I waited for them.
I called him in here and I says
‘Look here, you son of a buh—’ ” She ceased.
For an instant the three of them sat motionless, a little forward.
Then slowly their heads turned and they looked at the boy leaning against the table.