We Leave Together, стр. 22
“Who’re you looking for, anyway?” said Pup.
“I’m watching for cutters, just like the sergeant says.”
“Calipari says you got some girl around here.”
“So?”
“So, none of the boys met her around with you. I heard she was a Senta.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, I saw a Senta with a face only half as ugly as you’d think. It’s who you’re looking for, right?”
“I ain’t looking for her.”
“She went over that way,” said Pup, pointing down one of the smaller cross streets that led to the heart and soul of the district: the labyrinth of animal pens beside the massive abattoir. “If you were looking for her, that is.”
Jona smacked Pup behind his head. “Don’t be yourself,” snarled Jona. Jona dashed to the cross street after Rachel. Jona reached a new block at the edge of the Pens.
Pup laughed and called out his best wishes to his walkabout partner’s back.
Rachel didn’t notice the king’s man watching her through the crowd. She walked to work with a serious face. Already, her eyes glazed over into the grind of stripping sheets, mopping floors, and dumping chamber pots into the sewer grates behind the building.
Jona leaned against the wall where he stood. He watched the door close behind her.
Pup showed up next to Jona. “She work there?” asked Pup.
“Guess so,” said Jona.
“She’s not… You know what I mean…”
“She’s a maid.”
“Still…”
Jona hit Pup hard upside his head. Jona sneered at the new corporal like Jona was about to shove a knife in the boy’s gut.
Pup laughed. He stood up straight. He pointed into an alley. “Hey, Jona,” he said, “If you’re looking for cutters, they’re on the other side of the street.”
Jona kicked Pup in the gut, hard. Pup doubled over, trying not to laugh as much as he was hurting with the muddy boot print on his stomach. Jona turned back to the whorehouse. Jona watched at the windows for the woman he loved in the windows.
“Want me to let you go for the day?”
“Not a thing to a thing between you and me and you’re starting something you can’t finish.”
“Oh, poor Lord Joni, lovesick and all that nonsense! Poor you!”
Jona smacked him across the face, but Pup kept laughing even as Jona kicked the air where Pup dodged and ran away.
When night got close, Jona was still there. Jona scribbled a note on a scrap of paper from his pocket. He flagged down a shopgirl, and paid the girl a few coins to take the note to Calipari.
The note said something quite nearly true. Jona had a lead on a birdy, and he wanted to see it out, and he should be checked out with Pup in the records.
Jona waited. In every tavern in town the six o’clock bell rang. In the Pens, the butchers and cutters and drovers and porters walked from the killing floors in one stinking clump. Jona hopped into the crowd. He pushed his way across, shouting at the men walking that he needed to get across the street.
Jona slipped in the inn along with the stinking workmen.
His uniform pushed the crowd back. His uniform attracted every eye in the room. The innkeeper stood up from his stool. He had trouble focusing his eyes. A half-chewed weed dangled from his lips like a wet, black noodle. He pulled the plant out, and threw it down behind the counter.
“Hey, king’s man!” shouted a butcher. He sat down at a table with a woman. He already had a pipe in his hand. It trembled a little. He clutched the pipe too strong, his hand giving away the fear his face refused to show. “You tossing us all in?” shouted the butcher.
The girls at the table giggled.
Jona shook his head. Jona pushed the butcher’s hand with the pipe under the table. “Don’t let me see any pinks, and I won’t,” said Jona, “No raid tonight. You fellows work hard all day, and you’re trying to relax. I’m just looking for the same. Foreman don’t mind you, then I don’t.”
The butcher nodded. “I am the foreman,” he said. He kept his shaking hand under the table.
Jona turned to the innkeeper. He nodded at the man. “You own this place?”
The innkeeper nodded. He tried to speak, but he coughed instead. A pimp reached over the counter to pound the man on the back.
Jona smiled. He put his hands up. “Nothing to it,” he said, “I didn’t come here official or anything. Even king’s men want to piss at the end of the day, right?”
The innkeeper kept coughing. Finally a ball of phlegm emerged from his throat. He stumbled over to a pisspot and hacked out a black ball of weed, blood, and snot. The innkeeper hobbled back to his stool behind the counter.
Jona gestured to the pisspot. “You sell that to the fullers?”
The innkeeper shrugged. “Sometimes,” he said.
“They won’t take it with all the eater’s weed in it. Gets into the cloth.”
“I won’t sell ’em that one.”
“How much for a room?” said Jona.
“What you need a room for, king’s man?”
“I told you I ain’t here on official business. I need a room, is all. How much?”
“How long you need it?”
“What’re you charging.”
The pimp next to Jona was no dandy. A rusty spike was strapped to each leg and one empty eyesocket was un-patched like the man was gazing through old gore. He placed one bent finger on the counter. “You should charge him triple,” the pimp said.
Jona rolled his eyes. “Treating me different from any other paying customer on account of my clothes is undignified. I could’ve come in here with all my boys ringing bells and rolling everyone into the tanks, but I come in here respectful and alone with money to spend like any working man at the end of the day.”
The innkeeper looked over at the pimp and shook his head. The innkeeper shrugged at Jona. “I’m sorry king’s man, but I think we’re full up right now.”
“Full up?” said Jona.
The pimp