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Don Carpenter Hard Rain Falling

Hard Rain Falling

Don Carpenter (1931–1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling, which the Independent described as ‘bring[ing] gold to grit’. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a twenty-two-year career. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Carpenter committed suicide in 1995.

Don Carpenter Hard Rain Falling

With

an Introduction

by Stuart Evers

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First pubished in the United States of America by Harcourt 1966

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Contents

Introduction: Dream a Little Dream vii Hard Rain Falling 1

Dream a Little Dream: Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling

Stuart Evers

‘After a while,’ Bob Dylan writes in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, ‘you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course.’ He is remembering his mental landscape while writing ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, but he could equally be describing Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling. The difference is that for Dylan the rain is on the horizon; for Carpenter it’s already lashing the ground.

Hard Rain Falling – Don Carpenter’s debut novel, published in 1966 – is bleak and punishing, corrosive with violence, racism, sadism and institutional brutality. It is unremitting in its depiction of the degradation of the lowest of low lives. Yet beneath this is a humanity, a clear-eyed, almost innocent vision of how people cling to one another, and how despite the constant downpour, there are shards of light and temporary places of shelter. It is a novel that never settles – and never once allows its reader to settle either.

As a reading experience, the novel can be jarring. The force of the language, the excessive use of racial epithets, the casual use of the word ‘rape’, can be alienating, even shocking to a modern reader. Even back in 1966, though, Carpenter knew what he was

Don Carpenter

doing. The language of the street and of the gutter is a constant reminder that the propriety of twentieth-century American idealism was an illusion, a grand American dream.

Dream is a word used often in Hard Rain Falling, and reading Carpenter is to feel that, as in a dream, the laws of cause and effect are being torched, that all logic is burnt out and melted. It’s there right from the beginning. The prologue – exhibit A in the defence against Elmore Leanord’s second rule of writing fiction, ‘No Prologues’ – draws us into this askew world, in which a motorcycle accident leads to a fight, which leads to an offer of employment for the man who caused the accident and won the fight, and later to the birth of a child. Things just seem to happen. Matter of fact, no matter what the fact. ‘Not long after that the State police came and got the girl’ reads one such line, as though a weary drunk is nearing the end of a barroom confession.

When we meet the girl’s son, the now seventeen-year-old Jack Levitt, broke on Portland’s Fourth Avenue, desperate for money, desperate for the things that money can buy him, the dreamland continues.

‘He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour . . .’

As Jack goes on, it becomes a shopping list of the American Dream: status symbols, luxuries, a gun. These are the urges and desires that will be the downfall of Jack, as it will be for many of the characters who make their way into his orbit. The need to consume, to have the means to consume, overwhelms them until they cannot conceive of the consequences.

‘Everything is a dream,’ Jack thinks. ‘Nothing hangs together. You move from one dream to another and there is no reason for the change.’ That Jack still thinks this after his

Hard Rain Falling

incarceration as a minor, and the degradation he experiences there, means it won’t be long before he is back behind bars.

Carpenter’s exploration of the physical and psychological trauma of life inside – the sensory deprivation of ‘the hole’, the labyrinthine codes and strictures of guards and inmates, the soul-crush of boredom – is balanced by moments of tenderness, of insight, even love. It is a rich, confrontational, wholly believable account of the consequences of Jack’s actions.

While Carpenter is exceptional on evocations of place, quickly nailing the specifics of Portland and its surrounds, and his dialogue feels authentically ripped from the mid-century demi-monde, it is the characters that people the novel who make it extraordinary. Whether minor or major, they ring with truth, no matter how dreamlike the world around them.

Jack Levitt is a dazzling creation: fully formed, yet battling through his own psyche; but Billy Lancing, Jack’s friend and unfortunate pool hustler, is likewise deeply affecting. And together, their unusual, ever-changing friendship, becomes the beating heart of the novel, even as it builds towards a quietly shattering conclusion.

If this sounds somewhat vague, then this is purposefully so. Knowing even just a little of what will happen to Jack would rob from the narrative the feeling of living in the moment here and avoid ‘next’ repetition without thought for what happens next. It would also deaden some of the key moments of the book: you will know them when you read them – moments that take Jack far from the places we expect him to go, and far from the places we expect books of this kind to explore. Better to just take it as it comes, like Jack, and live each moment, in the moment, until the last.

Hard Rain Falling

This book is dedicated to my wife and to B ob M iller

‘They can kill you, but they can’t eat you.’

– Folk belief

Incidents in Eastern Oregon

1929–1936

Three Indians were standing out in front of the post office that hot summer morning when the motorcycle blazed down Walnut Street and caused Mel Weatherwax to back his pickup truck over the cowboy who was loading sacks of lime. The man and woman on the motorcycle probably didn’t even see the accident they had caused, they went by so fast. Both of them were wearing heavy-rimmed goggles, and all Mel saw was the red motorcycle, the goggles, and two heads of hair, black for him and blond for her. But everybody forgot about them; the cowboy was badly hurt, lying there in the reddish dust cursing, his face gone white from pain. The Indians stayed up on the board sidewalk and watched while Mel Weatherwax and one of his hands carried the hurt cowboy into the shade of the alley beside the store.

The doctor got there after a while and then he started cursing, too, as he sat on his knees and probed the cowhoy’s body with his fingers. Quite a few people were standing around, now, watching the doctor, and some women among them, but that didn’t stop his cursing. It turned out there were some broken ribs, and moving the cowboy had probably rammed the broken ends through his lungs. He died less than an hour later, still lying in the alley, and by this time the sun had moved enough so he was out exposed to the heat again. One of the town women was standing over him with a parasol trying to shade him, but

Don Carpenter

she was so busy talking to a friend that the parasol got waved around, and didn’t do the cowboy much good. He had already died some time before the woman noticed it, and then she gave a little scream and jumped back and went off down the street looking mortified.

There was still a crowd around Mel Weatherwax after the body was hauled off and he was telling again what had happened when the young man from the motorcycle and his girl friend walked back into town. He had his goggles pushed up into his dusty hair, and she had hers down around her neck, and there was a purplish bruise on her cheek. They were both dusty and tired-looking, but the young man pushed his way into the crowd and said to Mel Weatherwax, ‘Hell, I busted my motor. Is there a garage in town?’

‘Sonny boy,’ Mel said, ‘you just killed one of my cowboys. Nobody in this town is going to fix your damn motorcycle.’

The year was 1929 and the Depression had already been on two years in that part of eastern Oregon, so Mel wasn’t worried about getting another hand. But he was glad to have that boy there to blame the accident on, and once the idea caught fire with him he lost his temper and hit the young man in the face, knocking him back through the crowd, stumbling, until he came to rest right at an Indian’s feet. The young man wiped the dust and sweat off his face with the back of his hand and looked up, grinning, at the Indian. A handsome young man, his teeth made brighter by the sunburn on his face. ‘I’m damned,’ he said, ‘a damn Indian.’ Then he got up and attacked Mel Weatherwax, and pretty soon some of the other men had to drag him off. The girl stood back from it all, in the shade, and watched. She was slender, dirty, blue-eyed, and very young, and she looked tired, but she had a glitter in her eye as she watched the fight, as if she liked what she saw. After that, when anyone saw that look in her eye, he knew there was going to be some trouble.

Hard Rain Falling

With the fight over, things calmed down, and Mel, being defeated, offered to buy the young man a drink, and they all moved off toward the Wagon Wheel. With that job open none of the men out of work were going to let Mel out of their sight until he had made his pick. As it turned out, the young man got the job, and he and Mel and the other hand rode out of town in the pickup together, leaving the girl at the hotel by herself. On the way out to the ranch they picked up the motorcycle and put it in the back, and out at the ranch they tried to fix it, but some of the parts were broken, and the frame was bent. Harmon Wilder, the young man, told everybody he had stolen it in Oakland, California, and didn’t care what happened to it. There wasn’t any funeral for the dead cowboy; he didn’t have any family and, since it was early summer, all the men on the ranches were too busy. His body was put into a wooden coffin and hauled out to the ranch and buried there.

The next time the Indians saw the girl she was waiting on tables in the hotel restaurant. None of them went inside the hotel; they saw her through the big window that looks out over Walnut Street. In those days they didn’t have jobs; they lived on checks they got at the post office from the Federal Government. The checks didn’t stop until late in the 1930s when the lumber business got so busy the mills started hiring Indians. So in 1929 some of the Indians would come to town almost every day, and stand around in front of the post office, talking and watching the town goings-on. If the chance came up they would get some whiskey and take it off somewhere and drink it. They got to know Harmon Wilder pretty well, because unlike a lot of the other cowboys he didn’t mind buying the Indians whiskey. He even went drinking with them once or twice. And once, when the two Federal agents from Portland came to town and closed the Wagon Wheel, Harmon and a couple of others drove up to Bend and bought a case of Canadian Club, and Harmon sold

Don Carpenter three quarts of it to the Indians. It seemed as if the whole town was drunk that night, although it was just millhands, cowboys, and five or six Indians. Those two Federal agents got into a fight trying to find out where the liquor came from, and one of them was hit over the head with an empty bottle and had to be driven forty miles to the hospital.

Not long after that the State police came and got the girl. Her name was Annemarie Levitt, and she had run away from her family in Portland, and she was only sixteen years old. She was gone all told for about six weeks, and then came to town again on the bus, took a room at the hotel, and got her job back in the restaurant. By this time everybody could see that she was pregnant. Before she went back to Portland, Harmon used to come in to town on Saturday nights and visit her for a while before he went over to the Wagon Wheel, but afterward he wouldn’t even talk to her on the street.

By the time the first snow fell in late October, everybody in town knew her parents were not going to send the police after her again, and that she was not going to go back to Portland of her own free will. By this time of year the cowboys could come to town every night if they had any money; Harmon was lucky at cards, and so was in town quite a lot. He had not changed; he was still wild, still drank too much, but every once in a while he would stop by the hotel to see Annemarie, and at least once she hitched a ride out to the ranch to see him.

Annemarie Levitt didn’t come to live with the Indians until late in the following spring, 1930, after she had gone up to Bend and had her baby at one of those homes for unwed mothers. She came back to Iona without the baby. No one knew which drove Harmon crazier, not knowing where or what his child was, or seeing the mother of his child living with the Indians. Maybe it wasn’t either of those things; maybe it was what she did to his face.

Hard Rain Falling

She did not love Harmon any more; she proved that one afternoon not many weeks after she got back to town without the baby, and Harmon stopped her on the street. He was carrying a bottle of whiskey and was half-drunk already, even though it was only the middle of a gray winter day; stopped her, said something to her nobody else could hear, and then laughed and tried to give her the whiskey bottle to have a drink, and she took it and swung it in a wide arc, upward, hard, and smashed it against the side of his face and sent him flying. The snow that had been plowed off the street and scraped off the boardwalk was lying in hard dirty heaps, and Harmon tumbled over the snow and left a bright smear of blood on the crust and ended up face down on the hard ice of the street; and Annemarie stood there with the neck of the bottle in her hand, laughing at him, and then threw the neck down on top of him and walked off, leaving him there in the street with his jaw broken, his cheek cut open, the blood pouring out hot and then freezing to the street. There were a few people who saw the whole thing from across the street, but nobody stopped to help Harmon; his reputation in town was already too bad for him to expect any help, and finally he got up himself and staggered down the street to the Wagon Wheel. Some hands finally took him to the doctor and then drove him to the hospital. No, she did not love him any more. Maybe she hated him. Maybe that was strong enough to bring her back. Then, when she hit him with that whiskey bottle and laughed to see him helpless and his blood freezing to the street, she stopped hating him and started hating herself. Portland had driven her crazy. Even at sixteen she hated it; she was the despair of her family, the only child; wild, already in trouble with the police once or twice before she met Harmon and on impulse ran off with him; she would sit in her room upstairs after her parents had sent her to bed and wait for them to go to sleep and then get dressed again and go out the window

Don Carpenter and catch a streetcar downtown; but when she came back she would come right in the front door, and if they were waiting up for her she would lose her temper and tell them to mind their own business, and if her father tried to slap her or spank her she would hit him and scream at him until he just stopped trying, and then she would go back upstairs and into her room and lock the door. She must have met Harmon on one of these expeditions downtown because one night she just didn’t come home.

Harmon’s face was ruined; he lost all the teeth on the left side, and there was a scar running from just under his left eye through his lip and down his chin; his face now had a caved-in look to it, and his blue eyes lost all their brightness, and he was just plain mean from then forward until he died; living the life of a good hardworking cowboy, maybe not the kind of life he might have dreamed about in Oakland, California, but, for him, good anyway: eighteen hours a day when the cattle were on the range, half the anger cooked out of him by the sun, the dust, the hot acid smell of his horse under him; the work, even in winter, the thousand irritating must-be-done tasks attendant to cattle, drawing his surplus energy out through his arms and legs until there was barely enough for one yelling Saturday night a month left in him, one night to drink and smash windows and batter any face that presented itself.

He used to write letters, and come to the post office every chance he got to see if there were any answers. It was not long before everyone knew what he wanted. He wrote the letters to orphanages and State homes all over Oregon, trying to find out if there were any children in them named Wilder or Levitt; but he would come out of the post office and sit down on the bench and open his mail and crumple the letters up after he read them, his face black with rage, and so everybody knew he hadn’t found the child yet. Maybe the urge to find the child got cooked or burned out of him too; after a while he gave

Hard Rain Falling up, and people stopped thinking about him because he did not come to town any more at all, but stayed out on the ranch. Cowboys move around a lot, changing jobs, but not Harmon. He stayed with Mel Weatherwax until he died. Mel said he was a good cowboy and did not talk much, and if you left him alone he caused no trouble. Whatever made him run away from Oakland to the Wild West seemed to have been taken care of, one way or another. Maybe what he wanted was freedom. Maybe he looked around and saw that everybody was imprisoned by Oakland, by their own small neighborhoods; everybody was breathing the same air, inheriting the same seats in school, taking the same stale jobs as their fathers and living in the same shabby stucco homes. Maybe it all looked to him like a prison or a trap, the way everybody expected him to do certain things because they had always been done a certain way, and they expected him to be good at doing these strange, meaningless, lonely things, and maybe he was afraid – of the buildings, the smoke, the stink of the bay, the gray look everybody had. Maybe he was afraid that he too would become one of these grown people whose faces were blank and lonely, and he too would have to satisfy himself with a house in the neighborhood and one of the girls from high school and a job at one or another factory and just sit there and die of it. So he ran for the only frontier he ever heard about and became a cowboy. But of course he brought it all with him when he ran, and it kept at him, jabbing, destroying, murdering, until he himself was all gone and nothing was left but a man’s body doing work. And finally that died too. It was an accident. A horse kicked him and he died the next day of a brain hemorrhage; he had been trying to knock loose the balled ice under the horse’s hooves, and he slipped and wrenched the horse’s leg and the horse kicked out and got him right on the temple, and that was the end of him. The accident happened in 1936,

Don Carpenter and he was twenty-six years old, almost twenty-seven. He never did get to see his son.

Neither did Annemarie. She had been living with the Indians for a long time now, and seemed all right, but when she heard about Harmon’s death, something went out of her – something the massed hatred of the white people of the town had failed to diminish in all that time – and a few weeks later she killed herself with a 10-gauge shotgun. She was twenty-four at the time. The Indians buried her.

Part One

The Juveniles

There were worse things than being broke, but for the moment Jack Levitt could not think of any of them. He stood on Fourth Avenue in downtown Portland looking into the window of a novelty store, his hands in his pockets, his heavy shoulders sloped forward. Two items caught his eye, the first a not-veryconvincing puddle of plastic vomit, colored a bilish yellow, with bits of food sticking up from the surface; the second a realistic heap of dogshit, probably made out of plaster of Paris and then colored brown. Somebody made these things to sell. Somewhere there was a factory in which workers stood at assembly lines and turned these items out, and the workers got paid for it. Jack wished he could think of something like that to make money with. But he knew he had neither the imagination nor the energy for inventive work. He smiled to himself. When you’re broke, all kinds of crazy ways of making money come into your head. Rolling drunks. Walking into a store (like this one, for example, empty except for an old man in the back reading a newspaper) and grabbing the guy by the shirtfront, giving him a couple of pops on the mouth, and emptying the cash register . . . Or he could go down to the labor employment place on Third, a few doors up from the burlesque theater, and try to get a job. Except that all along the Burnside skid row there were men standing out on the sidewalk or leaning against buildings, and there would be a whole cluster of

Don Carpenter them at the employment office, trying to get work. When Jack had first run to Portland a few months before, he had thought all these men were bums, but they weren’t. They were just workers out of work. Fishermen, dock workers, lumberjacks, fry cooks, men who had been to barber college, and only a few winos. Gypsies, too, whole families of them sitting out in front of their storefront homes, and Jack knew the gypsy girls, the pretty ones in their costumes, would smile and wink at you, and beckon you into their place, offering what no gypsy woman ever delivered, and then, once inside, asking for some money ‘to bless,’ and gypsy men would begin to glide out of the curtained shadows . . . The men were mostly used-car dealers, and would race around town in dusty old cars, stopping people and asking if they wanted immediate cash for their car, or offering to repair dented fenders. They would say that they would remove ‘that ugly dent’ for three dollars, and if you went for it, five or six of them would pile out of the car with hammers and start banging away on your fender, and they would turn your one big dent into dozens of small dents, and then demand three dollars apiece, surrounding you and arguing furiously about the sacredness of a contract and they had witnesses; and if you absolutely balked and refused to pay anything at all, they would offer to buy the car. If you didn’t want to sell, they would eventually go away, but not without argument. Another great way to make money. Only, Jack was not a gypsy.

He was, in fact, a young man who had a hard time getting work. Not that he wanted to work, but he did want money, and right now, in daylight, that seemed the only way. He was seventeen, and very hard-looking. He had penetrating, flat, almost snakelike blue eyes which ordinary citizens found difficult to look into, and his head seemed too large for his body, accentuated by the mop of wild blond curls he seldom combed. He looked mean without looking angry, and his

Hard Rain Falling huge fists seemed capable of smashing skulls, almost as if they had been made just for that. Jack was not the picture of the model employee, and even when he smiled there was too much ferocity in his expression to relax anyone.

Yet he was only a boy, and most of the hardness was a mask, developed over the last dozen years of his life because he had discovered that nobody was going to protect him but himself. On a smaller, thinner, less powerful-looking boy, his expression might have been mistaken for self-reliance, and commended. He turned away from the window, taking his hands out of his pockets, and began to walk up the street. People who saw him coming got out of his way. It was a gray Portland day, and this helped him to feel sorry for himself. He was down to his last few dollars and locked out of his hotel room. He had quit his job and did not know where he could get some more money. He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense ‘wanted.’ He did not feel ‘wanted’ – he felt very unwanted. He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognize that he preferred his singularity, his freedom. All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to ‘How High the Moon’ and ‘Artistry Jumps.’ That was what he wanted. So it was up to him to get these things. Already he felt better, just making a list of his desires. That put limits on them. And he knew that every

Don Carpenter

single one of his desires could be satisfied with money. So what he really wanted was lots of money. Say, ten thousand dollars. He was really in a good humor when he got to the poolhall which was one of his three hangouts (the other two were a street corner and another poolhall), and he ran down the stairs cheerfully, and when he saw his friend Denny Mellon he called out, ‘Hey, daddy, have you got ten thousand dollars you can loan me?’

Denny frowned and said, ‘What do you need it for?’

‘Houses and lots,’ Jack chanted.

‘Well, okay. I thought you was going to waste it on war bonds or somethin.’

A few minutes later Jack was involved in a game of ten-cent nine-ball, and he had forgotten all about his troubles.

Jack was not friendless. Shortly after coming to Portland he found the location of the local hard kids and joined them, and in the gang he had a certain status as one of those who would stop at nothing, one of the really tough boys, like Clancy Phipps and his brother Dale, a leader because (so it seemed to the rest of the boys and girls) there was no proposition too dangerous for him. In Portland the hard kids were called ‘the Broadway gang’ and they hung out at the corner of Broadway and Yamhill. The gang started during World War II , and still goes on. These were the kids who were not liked or wanted enough at their high schools, or who despised school themselves, and who wanted the excitement Downtown promises; the ones who were in trouble with the schools, the police, their parents – nearly everybody – and so gathered together into one loosely knit gang. There were perhaps fifty of them, boys and girls both, and the makeup of the gang was in a constant state of flux; members would vanish into the Army or jobs, or get married, or make friends at their own schools, or go to the

Hard Rain Falling reformatory in Woodburn, or leave the state and go to New York or San Francisco; and new members kept coming along, many like Jack, to be recognized and admitted to the group on the criteria of toughness, a lack of conventional morals, a dislike of adults, and a hatred of the police.

Most of them were like Jack Levitt in that they wanted a lot of money and wanted to do anything they pleased, at least for a while; but most of them saw it differently: they wanted to enjoy themselves now, because they knew in their hearts that soon they would get jobs and get married and start having families (like their own), and the fun would be over. If they seemed too noisy, too wild, too defiant, perhaps it was a little out of desperation, because lying before them were endless years of dull existence, shabby jobs, unattractive mates, and brats with no more future than themselves. Jack did not see things this way, and there was no reason why he should have. He did not know who his parents were, and he did not expect the future to be a repetition of the past because that was unthinkable – he at least had a vision of the future which included a wildness in itself, a succession of graduated pleasures and loves and joys, and if it was going to be a struggle, that was all right, too; he knew how to fight for what he wanted. In fact, that was almost all he did know. There were buried terrors, too; but he hoped that part of his life was finished. In this sense, he was that odd combination, a cynical optimist. His hopes were vague and even childish, but they were at least hopes, and their vagueness was a blessing; for many of the others, the future was all too clear.

At about the same time Jack Levitt ran down the steps to the poolhall, another boy whose future was vague, yet to him full of promise, got off the bus from Seattle. His name was Billy Lancing and he was the last one off; a slender, bony-shouldered boy of sixteen, hawk-faced, with sharp, too-old, calculating

Don Carpenter eyes. The color of his skin was a malarial yellow, and it was obvious from that and from his kinky reddish-brown hair that he was a Negro. He wore a white windbreaker and carried a small blue canvas overnight bag, which he put into a ten-cent locker there in the Greyhound depot; then he walked downstairs to the men’s rest room, slipped a nickel into one of the pay-toilet slots, and entered. When he came out the locker key was inside his stocking, under his right instep. This was important: inside the bag, along with all his clothes, were fifteen ten-dollar bills, rolled tight and kept together by a doubled rubber band – his caseroll, money he had won and scrimped and saved to make his break from home.

The key safe, he went to one of the sinks and ran cold water over his hands, and then splashed it over his face. The men’s room was full of sailors, and their talk and laughter bounced strangely off the tiled walls, an insane barrage of fragmentary noises. Except for the echoing quality it sounded to Billy just like his home in Seattle, the continual clatter and chatter of the people who lived in their housing-project apartment: his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, his old aunt from the South, his three grandparents; a home in which someone was always up, meals were always being prepared, somebody was always getting ready for work and someone else just home and having a drink of whiskey; the radio going, a child crying, another screaming with laughter; his aunt’s constant low bubbling voice from the corner beside the stove, talking about the times in the South and the cold and the rain; or his father and grandfather arguing Boeing this and Boeing that. When Billy thought of home he thought of noise, and now in the men’s room of the Greyhound depot in Portland, almost two hundred miles from the housing project, the old fear of suffocation, of being strangled by the noise, came over him again, and he felt his gut tighten and his palms go moist. I’m just scared of

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Portland, he thought. That’s all there is to it. Like any other kid. He went back up the stairs and out into the street.

Heavy gray bellies of clouds hung low over the buildings of downtown Portland, but it was not raining yet, and the sidewalk was dry. Billy looked at the blue-and-white street sign: Fifth and Taylor. He knew from what they told him at the Two-Eleven in Seattle that there were three poolhalls in downtown Portland: the Rialto, on Park, between Morrison and Alder; Ben Fenne’s, on Sixth, between Washington and Stark; and a place everybody called ‘The Rathole,’ on Washington between Fourth and Fifth. The top action was supposed to be at the Rialto, but Billy decided that he would like to try out the other places first. He walked over to a driver leaning against a Yellow Cab and asked him directions, and then began walking down the hill, toward Washington Street.

‘The Rathole’ was easy to find: a red neon sign, over an entryway between a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter and a realestate office, saying ‘Pool–Snooker–Billiards’ and a stairway down. As Billy started down, two businessmen were on the way up, laughing about something. One of them gave him an odd look and then turned sideways to let him pass. The stairs were incredibly dirty, and the concrete landing at the bottom was stained and covered with litter, smelling of stale vomit and urine. There was a small green wine bottle lying on its side in one corner, and next to it a paper bag from which the neck of a second bottle stuck out. Billy turned right and pushed open the swinging doors and walked down three more steps into the poolhall.

To his right, a glass cigar counter with a few stale-looking wrapped sandwiches on top, a horse-pinball with the usual player bent over it, a telephone booth, a man in a white shirt, probably the proprietor, leaning against the counter and giving advice to the pinball player; to his left, six tables in a row, all pool

Don Carpenter tables. Three of them had games going, and there was a row of theater seats against the wall, with clusters of idle watchers opposite the active tables. Beyond the cigar counter Billy saw an entryway leading to a back room, and through it he could see the corner of a snooker table, and past that, more theater seats. There was a lot of noise coming from the back room, and with his hands in the windbreaker pockets, Billy walked over and leaned against the entryway. There were three snooker tables, and all three had games going; businessmen with their coats off, probably playing four bits a corner while they ate their lunch, laughing, all friends, all playing together every day at noon. One of them, Billy saw, was a policeman, plump, loose-faced, chewing on a sandwich. Billy was just about to turn around and leave when he felt something on his shoulder. He turned and looked directly into the proprietor’s face. The mouth was tense, the words were harsh, but behind goldrimmed glasses the gray eyes looked troubled, as if the eyes were trying to tell Billy not to mind the words, not to blame the proprietor. But then again, Billy thought as he went back up the stairs, maybe the old fart was just excusing himself. Billy paid no attention to the actual words; whether they were ‘Beat it, nigger,’ or, ‘Take off, nigger,’ or just, ‘Blah blah, nigger,’ did not matter to him and he did not remember; it was not important; ‘The Rathole’ was not the kind of place he was looking for. It was a dirty, two-bit joint full of pastime players and horsebettors in out of the weather; there was nothing for Billy there anyway.

Ben Fenne’s was different; he could see that right away. It was another basement, but the staircase coming down was wider and had been swept off; at the bottom there was a barbershop to the left and the poolhall to the right, and it was a bigger room, with a higher ceiling, more tables, more action; and instead of a cigar counter there was a long bar, of dark wood, behind which