Dark Maze

fierce shapes of survival. The survivor nearest the door sat with a brown bottle of beer in a right hand nearly twice the size of the left; his buddy on the next stool had a crease in the side of his head where an ear should have been. Down aways from these two, beyond the long row of others nursing dollar drafts and unfiltered cigarettes, there was an old doll in a blonde Woolworth’s wig and a gash of maroon on her lips picking at a scab on her neck. Our friend the dwarf was in animated conversation with the bartender down at the far end.
    Our entrance did nothing to disturb the essential somber peace of the place. People looked up, then they looked bade into their amber glasses. We were none of their business. Ruby thought we should settle down near our short friend from Bowery Avenue.
    “Hi ya there, buddy,” the dwarf said to me, breaking it off with the bartender. He winked at Ruby. The bartender’s face was flushed and full of twitching veins, like he had been arguing strenuously. The dwarf asked us sweetly, “You two been out spreading the good word like I as’t?”
    I said, “Sure.”
    The bartender snorted. Then he asked what we would like. Ruby said club soda and I said I liked the idea of a red and a Molson. Ruby did not approve, judging by the look she shot me, but at least she kept quiet about it.
    When the bartender brought our drinks and set them down, he tipped his head toward the dwarf and said, “Don’t pay no attention to the little pisser. Big Stuff, we call him. He’s trying to rile them up around here with his casino crapola.”
    Big Stuff protested, “It’s the casinos that’ll save our ass!”
    The bartender waved a clenched fist at the dwarf and Big Stuff feinted. Then the bartender said to me, “There’s other ways of bringing Coney Island back to life.”
    “Like hell!” Big Stuff hollered.
    “Keep quiet, you nasty little shit,” the bartender warned him. He pointed at us. “These here are friendly folks who dropped by for a friendly drink, which means none of your goddamn politics. So zip it. Or go peddle your handbills I someplace they’ll tolerate your crapola.”
    A few survivors took lazy note of this contention, not that they were prepared to expend any energy taking sides. But most kept drinking, or staring at drinks. The old doll kept picking her scab.
    The bartender stuck out his hand. “Haven’t seen you two in here before. My name’s Johnny, Johnny Halo. I own the joint.”
    I shook his hand and then Ruby did. “I’m Neil Hockaday,” I said. “May I present Ruby Flagg?”
    “Nice to have newcomers,” Halo said. He crossed his arms and waited for one of us to say something by way of explaining ourselves. But we kept our mouths shut, which forced Halo to put it to us bluntly: “What’s your business out here today?”
    “Christ on a stick,” Big Stuff said. “Can’t you let the nice folks have their drinks in peace?”
    “It’s all right,” I said. “Actually, I came by to use the telephone. You have one on the premises?”
    “Right over by the men’s can,” Halo said.
    I left Ruby for a minute and went to the telephone and confirmed the number as the one Logue had given me from the phone company logs. This was the Neptune, all right. I Put in a call to Logue at Central Homicide and when he answered I cupped the receiver with my hand to ask if anybody had picked up Picasso yet on the APB. No such tack, he said.
    Everybody watched me as I walked back to the bar. Everybody had made me. Halo, Big Stuff, the survivors—all of them.
    I sat down next to Ruby, and she right away sensed my predicament and changed the focus neatly by asking Halo, “So how long have you been here in Coney Island?”
    “I was born here, before Coney had a hospital. I never left here but once, which was the day they came and took me out of this sand and dressed me up in a uniform and sent me over to the sand in Africa with the 800 Regiment of the U.S. Army Engineers.”
    “All that sand,” Ruby said. “It must have kept you from being homesick.”
    “No way,” Halo said. “All the time I was gone, I couldn’t wait to get back to Coney. Because this here is God’s country...“
    Big Stuff interrupted: “For which now He won’t do nothing!”
    Halo glared at him.
    Then he asked Ruby, “You want to know how Coney I am? I’m going to tell you. I remember when a guy named Archibald Leach wore a sandwich board and walked around Surf Avenue on stilts