A Moment of Doubt Read online

  “My name’s Jas,” I suggested to her, and held out my hand.

  “Myra,” she rejoined immediately.

  My hand went dead in hers. The name recalled the fictional incident to me. Windrow met a woman called Myra in this very bar in Cable Car to Hell , after he found the hanged sailor in the Seaman’s Chapel at Fisherman’s Wharf. The sailor had been the single thread to tie a nefarious pederast real estate magnate to a series of bath house murders being kept under wraps by the police for fear of a panic in the gay community, and had been wearing women’s underwear under his sailor suit. So far so normal. I strained to recall what I could of the conversation ensuing in the bar. At the time of the writing, I’d only visited this bar a few times, and never actually seen a woman in the place, let alone a woman called Myra, with hennaed hair, and drinking vodka on the rocks. Then I remembered another detail. In the course of their conversation, Windrow had asked Myra why she was throwing down so much vodka at ten o’clock in the morning.

  “Body’s got cancer oughta keep a heat on,” she had replied.

  But she had no half tongue, no mechanical larynx.

  And, as with the fictional Myra, the real Myra now volunteered some information.

  “Cancer,” she said, touching a disk of scar tissue on her throat the size of a silver dollar. I must have been staring. She opened her mouth and an angular appendage darted awkwardly out, a quarter of it missing. It looked like a cutaway illustration in an anatomy textbook. “Got my tongue, too,” she buzzed, rather helpfully, holding out a Chesterfield. “Got a light?” The bartender reached between us and flicked a lighter before I could mutter that I didn’t smoke, adding, as if diffidently, nor was I thinking of taking it up.

  The other patrons stared silently at the bottles behind the bar and thought their own thoughts.

  “You still smoke?” I blurted incredulously. “Didn’t, I mean, don’t cigarettes have something to do with . . . cancer? Aren’t they, ahm, related?”

  “So they say,” the woman buzzed, exhaling smoke. “Don’t much matter to me, though. Nobody’s keepin me warm nights.”

  “Now Myra,” the bartender began.

  “You shut up, Joe,” she buzzed sharply. “Why should I quit? I lived a good life.”

  “That’s true,” said the tall man at the end of the bar, with a queer look in his eyes. “That’s true . . .”

  “But Myra,” Joe began, “it ain’t like it’s over . . . .”

  The woman smiled and I glimpsed a handsomeness in her features that I hadn’t noticed before. She sipped her drink. “It was a good one, wasn’t it Mike,” she buzzed.

  “Aye,” agreed the tall man, “that it was.”

  “Don’t ye be gettin Irish on me now,” said the Irishman between them with a wink over his drink at me. I smiled weakly, in an attempt not to betray the vertigo flirting with the contents of my stomach. For I was beginning to suspect that I had made up the woman sitting next to me. At the time I had endowed her with the ridiculous but catchy detail of being an inveterate chain-smoker who wouldn’t quit smoking in spite of the fact that she had cancer. Now, several years later, here she was, apparently quite real, in an acute state of decrepitude well advanced from that in which I’d abandoned her, the moment Martin Windrow had walked out of this bar. But that had been in a novel . Not in a bar .

  I experienced no sense of panic or despair or fear, such as I might have expected. Quite the contrary. A warm sense of community pervaded the bar. The sun came in the window at my back. The waterfall on the Olympia sign continued to cascade silently. A fly tentatively inspected the edge of the pool of beer widening around the base of my glass. All in all, there seemed to be a warmth about the place that I could only compare to the one I experienced when browsing deep within . . . within . . .

  Within the memory banks of the huge Crow Mignon computer.

  Things slowed down inside the Shoe Inn, as if my circuits, beginning to recognize the inevitability of a collision, had filled my veins with noradrenalin. A certain ocheroid tinge suffused the air. This was not altogether inconsistent with the normal atmosphere of the place. On the contrary, it made me feel as if I fit in there less awkwardly.

  I looked curiously at the tall man. And who was this fellow who seemed to have shared tender moments with Myra, ostensible figment of my imagination? Had I conjured him up too, only to have forgotten? I could not place him. What a brutal godling I must have been, to have discarded these characters only moments after breathing life into them! To have abandoned them to the cruel courses of the utilitarian devices only whimsically and momentarily installed, for the purposes of getting Windrow from one page to another, from the last murder to the next, from the lousy neglected shelf one level up from the floor to the tacky evanescent glory of a dump near the cash register! Heart of Mercury indeed!

  “Dear Mike . . . ,” the woman buzzed sentimentally, and a tear gleamed in the tall man’s eye. “You were such a fool in 1955.”

  “Don’t despair, Myra,” smiled the bartender. “Some things never change.”

  I hastily threw a five on the counter and hurried out of the bar. Two blocks east I entered the newsstand and found four Martin Windrow books among the pornography and romance titles in the back. Cable Car to Hell was one of them. Sure enough, inside was a sequence I barely remembered having written.

  When next he looked up, Windrow saw he had walked about two miles from the Seaman’s Chapel, all the way along the Presidio, past Fort Mason, Gas House Cove, the Marina Green, to Fillmore, and a couple of blocks down Fillmore to Chestnut. He turned into the first bar he came to—and left immediately. As with the second and the third. Th ese were all highly polished oak places, hung with ferns, bound in brass, mostly uncurtained glass on at least two sides, with double doors standing open to the bright sunny air. Not his kind of joints. He recalled the Sea Witch, a few blocks down, a few doors up from the second and probably last remaining seedy influence on this entire side of town, the Presidio Th eater, representing that interesting residual phenomenon of the nineteen-sixties, pornography for nice people.

  The Sea Witch was a narrow, dingy place, there was a catbird seat right against the door as you came in, with about twelve tarnished chrome and tattered red naugahyde cushioned stools making their way down the bar towards the single bathroom at the back. Beyond that there had once been a narrow galley, now gone, and the space left behind was piled high with cartons full of new and used long necked brown bottles of Hamm’s, the only beer they served in the Sea Witch. You could always count on no more than three or four regulars being there, unless there was a wake someplace later on, when the place would be full. Not many of this kind of people lived in this neighborhood in San Francisco anymore. Windrow wondered if many of this kind of people lived anywhere anymore. A middle-aged lady held down the catbird seat, with plenty of makeup so badly applied it looked like her lips were out of focus. As Windrow sat to her left the bartender, a man with many miles on his face, squinting against the smoke rising from his cigarette, dropped an icecube into the lady’s drink and covered it with a generous slow pour out of a bottle of Popov. Then he set the bottle on the bar between them and lit her Chesterfield for her. A tall man stood at the far end of the bar. He had a cigarette in one hand and one foot up on the rail, and he stared deep into the mirror beyond the bottles behind the bar. All the gestures, all the moves in this place seemed as if they had been rehearsed for the cabaret scenes in To Have and Have Not , forty years before, and were now endlessly being reenacted—parodied—by an aging company of geriatrics with time on their hands and nothing else to do but perfect their stagely business, while they quietly drank and smoked the day away. It was the kind of joint that opened at six a.m. and had a few customers right away. All of them would be home in bed, quietly smashed, by three or four. A second shift would sift in about noon. These would be domesticated by sunset, dark at latest. Unless there was a wake someplace. In which case they all would still be there at nine, seriously drunk,
talking blarney, and the joint might get crowded.

  Apparently there was no wake today. Only one other customer was in the place. He was an Irishman, short, with thin hair and a nose swollen by drink, who now appeared from the direction of the bathroom and took a stool at the bar in front of a screwdriver, midway between the seated lady and the standing, tall man.

  It was Windrow’s kind of place . . .

  There they were, all four of them, slightly younger. I checked the copyright notice on the back of the title page. 1984.

  Windrow took the stool between the woman and the pay telephone to the left of the door. “Bushmills, with a beer back,” he said. The bartender retrieved an icy long neck and stood it on the bar.

  “Buy Myra the drink,” the tall man said, swaying slightly. “Fella too.” He slurred his speech a bit, and Windrow could see the man had a pretty good heat on, for ten o’clock in the morning.

  “Aw let the fella buy his own drink, Mike,” the woman next to Windrow rasped, and she smiled at Windrow. Her voice was a jagged mass of sound, made up of spikes and jolts of frequencies that struggled through some unmentionable thicket in her throat, between her lungs and her mouth. It sounded like the old woman was on intimate terms with all the whiskey and cigarettes in the Marina District. Either that, or someone had kicked her in the throat. Windrow couldn’t decide. It didn’t seem like the joint was that rough . . . .

  Her throat was intact! Damaged, but intact . . . .

  But Windrow didn’t give it that much thought. Th e memory of the young sailor’s blackened tongue, how it had swollen in his mouth and forced its way out between the dead man’s clenched teeth during the night, of the smell of death in the room, that overwhelmed even the pungency of the salt air and creosote and rotting barnacles from the underside of the pier, that seeped up through the floorboards of the chapel dedicated to the memories of sailors lost at sea, these would not let him yield his fullest attention to the matters at hand, not even to the shambles of a case that had started out yesterday so simply; let alone to the drunken man at the end of the bar, or the ruined larynx of the woman beside him. It was all he could do to choke down half his shot, then the rest, and follow it with a swallow of beer. But that seemed to improve things a bit . . . .

  “When, Myra?” the tall man croaked, watching his image in the dark mirror behind the bar.

  “Oh, Mike . . . ,” the woman chided.

  The tall man cleared the bar in front of him with the side of his hand. The glass shattered against the wall next to the bathroom and fell to the floor in pieces. Th e barroom became very still. The tall man continued to watch the mirror, and spoke very quietly. “When they going to cut it out of you, Myra?”

  The woman picked up her drink and held it to her mouth. After a pause she said, “Take it easy, Mike, it’s just a little cancer.”

  A nerve worked along the line of Mike’s jaw.

  “They’ll get it all out in a day, and I’ll be back in a week,” Myra added gently, but loudly. It seemed that any sentiment she wished to express required a certain a threshold of energy in order to suffciently vibrate what was left of her larynx, to get some coherent sound out of it.

  Precisely the observation I’d made only moments ago!

  The tall man’s teeth were clenched. “And if they don’t, Myra?”

  Myra took a sip of her drink and placed it carefully back down on the bar. The bartender parked one foot on the rim of the sink beneath the countertop, and carefully, deeply inhaled through his cigarette, his fingers poised nearby, waiting, as it quivered in his pursed lips.

  “Why then,” Myra rasped, watching her fingers turn her glass in the pool of moisture that had condensed down its sides, “why then I guess I won’t be back, will I . . . ?”

  “Hey, buddy!”

  “Ah,” the bartender said, dropping his foot to the duck-boards on the floor beneath him, “what’s all this about, anyway? Myra ain’t goin nowhere. Huh? Are ya, Myra . . . ?”

  “HEY, goddammit . . .”

  I looked up in a daze. The proprietor, a huge, unlit cigar sticking out of his face, glared at me from behind his glass counter. “Can’t you read, bud?”

  I looked around. There was nobody else in the store. “Who? Me?”

  “Yeah! You! Who the fuck—.” He impatiently removed the cigar from his mouth and jabbed it in the direction of a hand-lettered rectangle of shirt cardboard taped to the edge of a shelf teeming with pornography, a few inches from my nose. “‘Absolutely No Browsing!’” he yelled, quoting the sign for me, “Says right there, absofuckinlutely no browsing. You buyin that goddamn book?”

  “Buying, what, no, I wrote, I mean I . . . think I . . . have read it already . . . .” I sputtered to a halt, completely at a loss, for once, for words.

  “Then put it back,” the man said. “No browsin the skin mags.”

  “But,” I began, showing him the cover, “this isn’t . . . .”

  “Sez you,” the man sneered. And he prized his upper denture offits gums with a pop, displayed it on the tip of his tongue, and replaced it with a lascivious smack.

  I looked at the cover myself. It was pretty sleazy. Not bad, really. I’d nearly forgotten the tableau of a runaway cablecar trailing severed nude limbs of mangled gender into the yawning maw of a berserk Tenderloin. At the time I had complained about it to the publisher who, with malevolent relish, as if taking pains to polish the roundness of my education, informed me that if it weren’t for the great expense lavished by himself on cover art, books such as mine would scarcely justify their existence, let alone that of their author’s.

  Or, wait a minute, maybe it was the cover of Th e Gourmet I’d complained about?

  Maybe, by the time Cable Car To Hell came out, I’d learned my lesson? After all, by the time Cable Car to Hell came out, I was the publisher.

  Absently, I replaced Cable Car to Hell in its slot on the rack.

  “Sorry,” I murmured.

  “Shhe . . .” the news vendor said. He replaced his cigar in his mouth, leaned back against the edge of the seat of his stool, and resumed his perusal of the Police Gazette .

  So Myra had made it back from the hospital after all, I was thinking as I left the store.

  SEVEN

  Get completely drunk

  Fall into a pit of nerves

  Wake up somebody, somewhere else.

  Change ‘Martin Windrow’ to ‘Palmer Dendron.’

  Engage plum blossom speculation . . . .

  Create a genealogical chart of all the characters I’ve ever written. Show how they’re related, which books, and multiple appearances, etc. Include a system of asterisks [*] to show whether I made them up or stole them from real life. Use a cross [†] to indicate whether or not they’ve been killed off . Create extensively indexed appendices to detail and census methods of liquidation, time of day or night (duration if excruciating), location, whether or not Mercury was in retrograde, etc. List murder weapons.

  Distill wine from the plums.

  You don’t distill wine. One allows it to ferment.

  Download latest exotic modem software from user group’s electronic bulletin board.

  Upload Martin Windrow fanclub info, with genealogical chart and appendices. Publish and market it as a Concordance. Compuserve?

  Actually, have you ever seen a real private detective? He’s probably about thirty-two, maybe even younger. He has a beard and mustache, and they’re neatly trimmed. He wears a sweater vest and wool pants to keep from freezing ‘to death’ in the San Francisco fog. His hair is done every morning with a hair dryer, carefully razorcut and styled every two weeks, no matter what. Bundles of keys and loose change tend to fall out of his pockets because of the semi-stylish cut of the pants. He chews on the ends of pencils and pens, these instruments are all over the place and readily show this abuse, but he can never find one that works when he needs to jot down a suspect license or phone number. Just last month he was busted by a uniformed cop for running a red l
ight and couldn’t talk his way out of the ticket. All in a day’s work, he half shrugs and drops the pencil, but he ran the light in hot pursuit of a guy he’d been trying to get a line on for three weeks, who’d run it right in front of him and got away with it. Is that right, says the uniform, neatly clipping driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance to his ticket book, all in a row. Wait right here, sir, while I put you through the computer, just take a few minutes, no back talk, thank you, sir . . . . Didn’t get the license number of the car either, the cop says over his shoulder as he walks back to the idling cruiser, tsk.

  He’s left fuming at the wheel, aw double-D gosh darnarootie, danged rotten ironic twist of the if it waddnt for dumb rotten he wouldn’t have no guignon at all, not a-tall . . . . Hits the horn ring with his fist, the horn honks and he winces, checks the uniform in the rear view mirror, who glowers from under the visor, the underside of the visor lit by the glow from the screen of the DMV computer, the radio squawks, and our dick slides slowly down in his seat to wait for the ticket.

  The next time you see him, this real detective, he’s in the all-day mandatory driving school, to erase offhis license the points he’s otherwise going to get for running the red light. He’s just given up trying to get any sympathy from the instructor or the rest of the class, who were amused by his story for a few minutes, but it’s the same as everybody else’s—they’re all innocent—and anyway they would rather watch the educational film on cocaine abuse, starring a much re-habbed movie star. Our detective is left to chew on the end of a pencil, fitfully twisting the pages of the latest issue of Psychology Today in his lap, wondering how a convicted dope fiend can narrate a movie . . . show business . . . maybe that’s the answer . . . . You think I’m kidding . . . .

  “ . . . damn well the girl told you her whole dirty little story. We want to hear that story too, Mr. Windrow, every detail of it. We’ve had quite a few dealings with this little twitch in the past, and, frankly, I’m confident that if you tell it well enough Tiny here, even though he’s a devout, I mean, dyed-in-the-wool fag, so that you can be assured that he’d scream bloody murder and call the cops on himself if a real female so much as showed him her tits, if you, as I say, tell the story well enough, Mr. Windrow, knowing our fourth party as well as we do, I’m fairly confi-dent that it would be such a horny affair that Tiny here would get of all by himself. So that we can all see and partake of the splendid joy of it, yet remain uncontaminated.”