Ed Lacy - The Woman Aroused
“You just want to talk to him?” he asked suddenly.
“That's all. In fact, if it turns out he can help me, I'm willing to pay him for his time.”
The bartender called out to somebody at the other end of the bar, “Ed, go around 126th Street and find Ollie. Tell 'em I want to see him—now.” He turned to me as the man left the bar, said, “He'll be back in a couple minutes. Like a shot?”
I said no and lit a cigarette. He moved away to wait on a customer, then returned and put his big fat head next to mine, whispered, “You know how it is up here, got to be careful with them.” I was astonished at the fellow's gall: this was supposed to be the protective intimacy of two white skins in a black ghetto—made by white skins.
I didn't know how to answer him without getting angry, so I turned my back, glanced around the bar. It was fairly crowded and they were all watching me, without looking directly at me, of course. Although I'd been to Harlem many times, mostly to see the shows or night spots, this was the first time I felt like a white man in Harlem.
In about five minutes the man returned with Ollie, who was the fellow who had helped hold Lee last night. He came over to me, said in a surly voice, “What you want?”
I nodded toward a vacant table and we sat down. I asked, “Where can I find the man who was beaten up last night?”
“What you want with him? What you coming back to start a mess? Willie wasn't doing nothing and now...” He stopped, then muttered, “Ain't it enough he's beat up?”
“I'm sorry about the beating, and I'm not here to start anything. I want him to help me. He... eh... seemed to know the young lady. I'd like to find out what he knows about her.”
“You was with her, you ought to know about her.”
“Look, let's not argue about what I ought to know. I assure you I'm very sorry about the beating your friend Willie got last night. I don't know why it happened, but I'd like very much to find out. I won't cause him the slightest trouble. I only wish to speak to him.”
Ollie looked at me for a moment, then said, “Well... Okay, I'll take you to him. Maybe do some good. His wife is a little angry, you know, Willie coming home beat up and some big mouth telling her he was annoying a white chick. My God that gal sure hits.”
As we stood up, I said, “I'll make it worth your while, and Willie's.”
“You don't have to do that,” he said with a kind of weary dignity.
We walked down Lenox Avenue to 123rd Street, and west to a brownstone. Ollie rang the bell three times and soon a young, slender, coffee-colored girl opened the door, said, “It's you, huh.” She didn't think much of Ollie.
When she saw me her eyes became uneasy. Ollie said, “Come on, Daisy, let us in, this man wants to talk to Willie. He's the guy with the lady last night. He can tell you it wasn't nothing messy. How about that, mister?”
“That's right,” I said. “The young lady is a little... well... excitable at times, high strung. She turned on Mr.... Willie, for no apparent reason.”
“I'm Willie's wife,” the girl said, standing aside. When she moved she had a certain grace about her, and if she had the clothes, she would have been a very attractive kid.
I followed Willie inside the house. We went up two flights of stairs that were covered with a shabby green carpet, the girl following us. The inside of the rooming house seemed clean and neat, but it smelt of too much use, of too many people living there. As we turned into a room the girl said to me, “You'll have to excuse the way things look... with Willie sick I haven't been able to tidy up.”
The room was very small, with one window, and every bit of space being used. In a double bed that took up 90% of the room, Willie was lying, his face still bruised; and on the one chair, the narrow chest of drawers, and from a wire stretched across the room, clothes and towels were hanging. The room was smaller than my bathroom and I wondered how anybody could live in one room. (Of course I didn't know I was shortly to be living in rooms even worse than this one.)
Willie was astonished, and upset, on seeing me and as he sat up, he groaned, and his face filled with pain. Ollie said, “This man came over to the ginmill, said he wanted to see you, says you can help him. Says he ain't for making no trouble.”
“First he'd better explain to Daisy about...”
“He's already told me,” the girl said. “Although it don't make good sense, a woman beating up a man.” It made me sad to see she had bad teeth, when she spoke.
“She's an unusual woman,” I said. There wasn't any place to sit, so I stood. Willie, who was wearing torn underwear, pulled the sheets up to his chin, looked at me, wondering what I wanted. “About last night,” I went on. “I'd like to know what you said to the young lady that caused her to turn on you. I...”
“So you were speaking to this white chick!” Daisy said.
“Aw, take it easy, baby,” Willie told his wife. “I wasn't doing nothing out of the way.” He turned to me, “Look Mr....?”
“Lamont. Tony Lamont,” I said, giving him a phoney name for no reason.
“Look Mr. Lamont, I only asked if she was the girl we'd taken in over in Venice. That's all, and you saw what she did. She must be the same one, never mistake a girl so strong and tall as she is, built like a man—around the shoulders, that is. And no mistaking that face... I mean that nose that looks like it was just stuck on.”
I said, “I've been a friend of this young woman for some time. But she rarely speaks, acts rather strange. I thought if I could find out more about her, someone who knew her, why... I might be able to help her. Now assuming this is the same girl you think....”
“She got a tattoo on her left arm?” Willie asked.
I nodded eagerly—at last I was getting someplace.
Willie smiled. “Knew it was her.”
“Do you know her name?”
Willie shook his head. “No, we used to call her Liebchen, that's kraut for darling. See Mr. Lamont, back in '45 I was with an MP outfit in Italy. Bari, Foggia, Rome, Venice... I lived in all the big cities there. Lived fine. It was real great.”
He paused, looked around the shabby room for a moment as if I suddenly wondering why he had ever returned to Harlem.
“Well, when they captured Venice they made it a rest camp, sent us up there to guard some of the hotels. The Limeys were in charge of the town and as waitresses for the hotels, they brought down a load of gals who had been slave labor for the krauts in Austria and Yugoslavia. She was one of them. That's where I first saw her.”
“Yeah, that's what we called her, too, Lee—short for Liebchen,” Willie said.
“Lee was a slave laborer in Germany?” I said, beginning to understand a lot of things, too many to think about.
“Sure. She was about 17 then, and the krauts had taken her when she was a kid. All that hard work had made her big and strong, like a man. She's slimmer now, but then she had arms and legs as strong as any man's. She was like wild—wearing only an old torn dress, an old pair of army shoes on her big feet, and her hands were calloused. And Lord but she was hungry! We felt sorry for her, guess we gave her the first decent treatment she ever had. We got her some clothes, found a guy in Venice to tattoo an American flag over the number the krauts had put on her arm. We gave her plenty of candy, all the food she could eat, saw she didn't work too hard.” Willie glanced at Daisy. “I didn't fool around with her. Maybe some of the others tried, too, you see how she's built. Anyway, I don't know if any of the boys got anyplace with her, but nobody forced her. The krauts had also used her for that, too. She was with us about a month and seemed to be getting along fine, you know, laughing a lot... acting her age, like a kid.
“One day one of the white officers saw her hanging around our quarters and snapped his cap. He was a peck, you understand. A bunch of white soldiers came up for the rest camp deal, but the hotels were all full of other GIs, so AMGOT takes over a small house on the Lido—that's an island where all the swank hotels were—for these boys. They was all pecks too, whole outfit of crackers. They slept in the house and ate in one of the hotels. This officer sent Lee and another gal, an Italian babe, over to the house to make up the beds, clean up. Now all I'm telling you from here on is what I heard, I never saw any of it. But I know when Lee left us she was pretty well tamed down, talked about the 'kind Americans,' and how much she loved us. Called Americans the 'Liberators,' and all that. Well, we heard these crackers lined her up, for the whole three weeks they were up there... we heard they tied her to a bed. Maybe that's one of them tall stories you always heard in the army, but all I know is when we saw her again, she seemed even wilder than when she first came from krautland. That's all I know about her. I'm glad she made it to America, anyway.”
“You have no idea of her real name?”
“Nope. I never handled any records, or did the paper work. We just called her Honey, or Lee. Never could understand those southern boys—no call to treat any girl like that, and they could of had all the chippies they wanted for cigarettes and candy bars. No sense acting like that. They treated the Italian gal rough too, but she was skinny, not very good looking. She's the one that complained, raised a big stink. There was a white captain there, Conroy his name was. We heard he blew his top and wanted to raise all kinds of hell, court martial them pecks. But the whole thing was hushed up. They were combat men, they said, and anyway I guess AMGOT didn't want to start nothing that would get the Eyeties aroused. They said these pecks were suffering from combat fatigue, drunk, and all that. This Capt. Conroy even took Lee to Milan and Rome to press charges, but I never did hear what happened. Sure a bang to see her walking on 125th Street, and dressed sharp, too.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You've told me a great deal. If you've had any doctor bills, or lost a day's work to-day—as a result of what happened last night, I'd like to repay you.”
Willie looked at his wife quickly, at Ollie, then said without looking at me, “That's okay. I didn't go to a doctor, and I'm not working—so didn't lose no time.”
Daisy, his wife, looked unhappy, as though she wanted to say something, ask for money. But she didn't. There was a moment of awkward silence, then I took out my wallet, handed Willie three tens. “Take this for the... eh... damage she did.”
“Like I said, you don't have....”
“Take it. In a way it's her money,” I said. “And thank you.”
I went out, down the stairs to the street and Lenox Avenue, where I hailed a cab.
I felt so depressed I wanted to cry. Poor, poor Lee and her smattering of German, French, and Italian, her horrible tattoo covering up a concentration camp number; for how many years of her life had she been branded and worked like a beast? What could such inhuman treatment produce but a distorted, hurt mind? And poor Hank. I understand now—only too well—how he had got into all this, what he had meant when he said, 'What we've done to her—all of us.” My God, from the time she was 10, what a pitiful, crazy, brutal world Lee must have known! Her big shoulders, the man's hands and feet, her strength—all the result of doing the hardest menial work. And when she reached the age when kids are attending high-school dances, the horrible, filthy, continuous rape. What small kindness had she ever known? Every sensibility beaten and dulled in her, except to eat and have a shelter, like an animal.
Added to everything I had given her a sweet, refined rooking!
I'd make it up to her. Going through Hank's papers, army records, I would find her real name, her home. Perhaps she had a father or mother someplace in this shattered world, maybe sisters and brothers (or were they merely ashes, their skin a tortured lampshade, the chemicals and fat of their body now clumsy cakes of soap?) I'd have to investigate, try to return her to her family, if they were still alive.
I'd begin at once, cancel my poker date at Joe's that night. When I reached the house, Lee was still in bed, holding Slob with one big hand. He was meowing, trying to get loose. I noticed he never fought or scratched her. I sat on the edge of the bed, gently stroking her face, wondering how many men had sat on the edge of her beds, or had they thrown her on the rough ground, backed her against some wall-? Good God, if she'd been 17 back in 1945, she was still a kid of 21 or 22 now! I gently kissed her face, said, “Hello, darling.”
“Hello,” she said blankly, hugging me in her impersonal manner. She pulled me towards her and I pushed out of her arms: touching her suddenly became a monstrous, obscene thing.
I ran my hand through her soft long hair, over her odd nose. (Had a rifle-butt broken that?) “If I'd only known. I want to make you happy. I never really meant to hurt you, and now I want to make up for everything.”
Lee said, “Hello, George,” and giggled.
“Liebchen.”
The word had a, (black) magic effect on her, she sat up quickly, staring past me as if she was alone. Then she burst into the most nerve-racking crying I've ever heard. Hoarse sobs that shook her great body. I was so upset I began bawling myself and when I went to hug her, she pushed me away with such force I was sent sprawling on the floor. For a moment she watched me with unseeing eyes, her face wet with tears. Then she giggled, asked, “George, we eat?”
I realized the comic figure I must have presented, smiled, and got up. “Yes, we'll eat in a moment.” I went to the phone and dialed Joe, told him I couldn't make the game that night.
“You're a blip. And Walt is going to play with us, too. That doll keeping you that busy? She must be some piece, the way you been sticking so close to home, and your bed. I...”
