Free Empty Pockets by Dale Herd Page B

we were wrong, and there was smog, a faint brownish haze barely visible behind the new skyscrapers over in Century City. We looked back to tell her she was right, but she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere on the sidewalk or over across the street.
    â€œOh, Christ,” Lea said.
    We hustled up the street, going past the Scientology offices, there was a parking lot with some cars in it, then the corner, and then there she was, standing partway up the sidewalk that continued up the hill, facing down an alleyway, looking toward an older building of dirty white stucco.
    As we walked up to her, she shuddered. I looked at Lea. Lea didn’t know either. We looked where she was looking. Inside a window was a darkened apartment, a stand-up lamp dimly on next to an old TV on against a back wall. I didn’t know what she was seeing. Then back in the dark, sitting off to the side on a low couch, I saw two old women, both in housecoats, both very large, their legs out slack before them, facing the TV , its picture a dull, flickering blue.
    â€œOh, God,” she said, “I know what they’re doing . . .”

Pier Avenue
    D ave’s mother wasn’t exactly stupid. Twice she got a bottle off me by giving me the key to her room in the Hermosa Biltmore and telling me to come up later, but both times the door was chained shut from the inside and she wouldn’t answer. For obvious reasons I never told Dave about her and it became a source of amusement for me to watch her come to the door and give him the concerned mother routine of straightening his tie and pushing back his hair and then leave with a bottle of good Scotch that he would slip her. He claimed he kept track of the bottles she took but I never believed it. So much petty theft took place every day, with most of it happening during the day shift when Dave and I weren’t working, that I assumed he marked the bottle off as stolen. However he covered it though, it seemed to work as Arnie, the owner, never complained. And if Dave’s mother was using him to get free booze, I wasn’t any better.
    When I first went to work at the store I didn’t know anyone in Hermosa, and Dave and I got along all right. He was just breaking up with his wife, Jo, and when he learned I was quits with my old lady he started taking a bottle for us and we would keep it under the counter and get tight together while we worked, which suited me just fine.
    We started spending some free time together and several times spent the early part of the day shooting clay pigeons over in Palos Verdes. Dave was a hell of a shot, and something I’ll never forget was the way he’d look over at me after he’d made a hard shot and say, “Christ, I’d like to have met Hemingway.”
    He wasn’t kidding. As I got to know him better nearly all of our conversations would remind him of Hemingway. Dave had all the paperbacks by and on Hemingway and everything mentioned would be related to shooting and fishing or of going to the six-day bicycle races or boxing or bullfighting or Spainand Paris and Northern Michigan. Arnie said that one of the things that caused Jo to break with Dave was his obsession with Hemingway.
    I could understand that. After a time the Hemingway talk started getting to me. I had already decided to quit the job as nothing in Hermosa was happening for me by then, and as I was making this decision I spent less and less time with Dave and finally stopped drinking at work with him. He didn’t like it and stopped talking to me.
    The last night I worked in the store, though, Dave opened a fifth of Black Label in a farewell gesture and said that one time some famous critic had gone to visit Hemingway and Hemingway had slammed a bottle down on the table and said, Goddamn it, if you’re going to talk to me you’re going to have a drink with me.
    â€œSure, Dave.” I had to laugh. “I’ll drink with you.”
    â€œOf course