104
JASCHA KESSLER
"See, you crazy thing?" Davie said over his shoulder to the
girl, "I told you once, and I told you again:
I
give the orders!
Because I'm head busboy, see! That's one
you
owe." He laughed
and slid his arm under the sheet. The girl reacted by fastening her
teeth in his shoulder. He jabbed his elbow into her breast, and she
subsided. He leered at Acker, confidentially, and said, "How about
that, eh?" Acker stamped his foot, and Davie changed his expres–
sion, "Okay, have it your way. Whatever you want, Mr. Acker. I'm
listening. But first sit down, huh? Please? You make me nervous
the way you look. Like a dead man."
If
Acker had thought that he did not quite know what he
wanted to say when he first laid eyes on this trio, he was worse off
as soon as he gave in and sat down, in the only place he could. Im–
mediately, he felt the woman's strong, somnolent stomach pressed
warm against the small of his back: the misery which had stiffened
his spine and sustained him thus far became as water, as nothing.
The boy dragged at his cigarette and said, surely, Acker thought,
laughing in his heart at him, "Better? Now, sir, you just have a
little to drink, you just take it a little easy for a minute, you'll be
all right."
Reassuringly, Nurse patted his knee, then ' she poured and
reached him a full chill glass from her bottle of purplish-black
wine and he-fool, fool that he knew he was-drank it. So, what
difference could it make? he answered himself. He had finally
found what he wanted. She said, "Mr. Acker, you know something?
I an immigrant too. I come across water to these States here."
"Really?" he said. "I don't follow."
"I'm not like these lowdown, no-class Americans here, like that
girl across the way there-all right, you black thing, you can laugh,
you don't know any better!" she scolded the girl. "You see, I was
born in Jamaica. And I been educated too; trained for a nurse. My
first husband, poor man, he was a lawyer, 'fore God, and he was
West Indian man, Trinidad. You know?"
"Really?" he said. "That's nice."
"So you don't have to be afraid with me, Mr. Acker," she
concluded soothingly, with a logic that baffled him as to its pur–
pose, "and it will be all right, because we understand better than
those poor things, the ignorant way they been brought up over
here." She put that square, strong hand on his knee again.
