1 | mary hogan

Love and romance filled the paperback racks in drugstores. Mary Hogan never found love, never looked for it, never believed in it. Love was sex and sex was power. You're on top or you're on the bottom.

She bought the daily paper for the funny pages and the crossword puzzle, a habit formed to blunt the hours between rutting sessions. Too long she was on the bottom. Why did men force her legs apart despite she'd been paid to spread them? She took their money and stared up their nostrils. Each thrust of their filthy schwanz provoked fantasies of pale throats stretched taut and slit like rotten fruit burst open. She'd sold ripe apples for five cents on Chicago streets during the Hoover panic, until a clever man in a chalk stripe suit taught her a better exchange rate. Unschuldige Jungfrau! Münzen aus der Fotze!

She'd made her coins and now she was free of it.

Mary Hogan scanned the empty lot in front of her tavern and down the deserted ribbon of county trunk D stretching east to west. No out-of-state plates. No suspicious faces. Just the whisk of trees against a moon gray and ghostly in a sieve of stars. A spectacle not seen in Cicero where smoke from monstrous factories smudged the sky at night. The brothel on Cermak had stunk of booze and cum when the shifts changed at the Hawthorne Works. The windows opened from stale rooms onto brick alleys.

One day her past would catch up. The crime outfits spread their tendrils. Joey O held influence in the big cities and smaller ones like Joliet and Madison, as far east as Boston and west beyond Denver. She hoped she was safe holed up in this dot on the map. Hiding in the sticks. No newspaper, no school, one church and hers the only tavern. She'd left behind her leopard cowls and cloche caps, divvied up the more flamboyant of her costume jewelry with the girls, her soiled doves. Let her eyebrows grow out natural. Despite the money she'd skimmed from Joey and the outfit, her life in Pine Grove was as small and inconspicuous as she could make it.

Five o'clock and the tavern empty. Dusk settled early so close to Christmas, chasing farmers back to their familial bliss.

Look around, Mary Hogan. Ten rickety tables with mismatched chairs, pop cooler broken for a month, peanut machine neglected. Two narrow windows faced the road, her apartment slapped on at the back like a cement dollhouse. Colored bulbs strung around the ceiling pipe and a two-dollar tree by the wood stove were all the yule she could muster. Nothing like the corner Santas ringing bells outside Goldblatt's on State Street, the paper mache reindeer riding lampposts on Randolph, the windup toys at Woolworths. The rush and beating heart of a big city. She'd been out of circulation for five years. Was it worth it?

She rang a No Sale on the cash register to spring open the coin drawer. Figured the tavern could spare a few nickels. There were only two Hank Williams songs on the Select-O-Matic jukebox and she punched them both. Dropped ten cents in the slot.

In Chicago she'd listen to Edith Piaf on the phonograph in her furnished room alone. The little sparrow wore black to mourn the tragedy of existence. Her songs expressed the sophisticated sorrow of dark cafes and fated rendezvous, of women with eyebrows plucked and drawn.

Hank pleaded, "Why do you run and hide from life—"

Mr. Williams sang more crudely of lost love and broken hearts in a sharp, nasal moan stripped of guile or romance. A voice rubbed raw by pain. But Mary felt as if she didn't have a heart to break, that she was trapped so completely inside an airless vacuum like the television tubes offered in this year's Sears catalog. The constant vigilance wore her out.

She poured a cup of warmed-over coffee. Lowered her ample bottom to a chair facing the windows. A slow leak whistled from the cushion as her two-hundred pounds settled in for the landing. Sweet mother of Jesus, it felt good to shift the load off her feet.

When the door opened, she set her coffee down.

She recognized him. The scrawny farmer. He'd been in the tavern this afternoon with another fellow. Nursed his beer for an hour. Rubbernecking was more like it. She knew the look, knew her size could provoke desire.

He stood uncertain in the entrance, gawping at the empty room. The cold gray night behind him. "Close your mouth and shut the door," she said.

Funny she hadn't heard a truck pull in the gravel lot, nor been warned by headlights through the windows. "Where's your truck?"

"Oh, I parked around the side. Had to rotate the distributor. Rough idle."

Should she tell him the tavern was closed? Come back after supper? He was barely half her weight, she could handle him if it came to that. Well, she'd made bad decisions before. "I saw you earlier. What does the missus think of you spending so much time at the tavern?"

She could hear the scrape of his hand against his chin. "Ma didn't favor drink. Pa succumbed to a squirt now and then, I suppose."

"What about your other missus?"

The farmer stepped into the room. One step, at least. Tentative. Pulled the hunting cap off his head and held it with both hands across his chest like an accordion he might squeeze. "Isn't one."

She remembered now. The gossip was he lived alone, odd since most men came to her tavern to escape their wives and burdens. After four beers, one man was the same as any other. She looked him up and down. Patted the table. "Don't stand on ceremony. Sweep it on over, Jack Sprat."

"It's Eddie," he said as if she should know.

Hank's tinny voice sliced across the tavern. Eddie pointed his cap at the jukebox. "We heard little Jimmie Rodgers once, brother Henry and me. Came through Oshkosh. He could yodel with the best of them."

He stomped his boots and set his black wool jacket over the chair back. A skinny fellow. Fidgeted with his cap like a squirrel worrying a nut.

"What's your pleasure, Eddie? I don't do my serious drinking until later."

"Not much for high jinks myself." He grinned like a fool boy scout.

"If you're not here to drink, why are you here?"

His silence was enough of an answer. His simplicity refreshing. His heavy eyelid, a swollen deformation of the flesh, made him seem sleepy and unbalanced. Like Robert Mitchum if the actor were stranded on an island, or on a starvation diet, and didn't shave. And older. And a foot shorter. But there was something there. Eddie didn't seem half so bad—gentle and quiet, a plain slice of store bread. She'd had her fill of men who pushed, men who thought they owned the rights to a woman.

Hank's second song dropped in the jukebox. Twangy guitar filled the empty tavern. The colored lights and the scrimpy tinsel on the Christmas tree suddenly saddened her. Sad, sad little Mary Hogan. Didn't want to spend the night alone. Eddie lived alone, she could see it in his face. Or she projected a pain there, a shared wisdom. Of course he was shy. No one to talk to on his lonely farm, nothing to see but the four lonely walls.

Hank's voice rose above the guitar, "Another boy down the lost highway—"

Her life had been guided by a series of leaps. A quarter century ago, she'd made a leap. Left her child at the doorstep of St. Mary of Czestochowa, the gangster's church. The nuns would look after Christine. Life had turned mean and selfish after the crash, the favors of men cruel payments. There was no room for a child. A business decision, she told herself. An act of decency.

"You much for dancing?" she said.

She wasn't sure what she expected. Wasn't sure if this was business or a desperate leap, but she knew it was best to keep moving. The past lay behind her like a dark pit.

Eddie didn't say no. He looked around the empty tavern. "Ma didn't favor festivities."

"Then you've missed out, Eddie. Is your Ma here now?" She pulled his hand, soft for a farmer, with callouses on the tips like her own mother from sewing. Eddie looked around the tavern again, as if to confirm his mother wasn't watching.

"Don't be a wallflower, Eddie. I'll lead." She had danced by herself in her apartment listening to La Vie En Rose.

She pulled him up. He was barely a twig, and a stiff brittle one. The twenty by thirty foot tavern made a tolerable dance floor—tables ringed the walls leaving the center clear. Eddie shuffled in his farmer boots. He kept an arm's distance. He was no Arthur Murray, but his hands lay on her shoulder and waist as they should. She absorbed the heat pulsing from them. His head barely higher than hers. Then his arm bent and he stepped closer.

His fingers touched her neck. There was something tentative and spidery that made her want to recoil. She backed away, pretending they were taking a turn. Human warmth trailed in his wake as she led him around the tavern. He played the woman's role and followed.

Mary reflected on the stink of the human body, men more sour than women. The fuggy aroma of her whores on Rush Street in Cicero. The farmers here smelled of manure, but it was a fresh grass-fed odor. Eddie was more sweet, the stink of the unwashed, not the residue of hard work. Her girls had earned their perfume, but there was a sense of laziness to Eddie's smell. The men who worked the meat saw at the locker plant had it also, a trace of things unattended and left to rot. A hint of decay.

She scuttled with him like two crabs across the dim floor. Artificial light made all rooms alike, a cold dark root cellar world. The sound of leather scraping the linoleum. Eddie looked as though he struggled to speak. Mary put a finger to his lips. She preferred the silence. She lay her head on his shoulder. Her hand slid down to rest on his hip. Or maybe she wandered lower.

Eddie startled then and pushed her away. A sliver of light from the bar lamp by the register cut across his face. A look in his eyes of befuddlement. Confusion. Mary was used to men ambushed by the urgency of their desire. She was big. Men could sink into her warmth, her weight, her soft dipping flesh.

"Anything in particular, Eddie?"

She couldn't see his face properly. The music went on but Eddie stood frozen, his arms dangling at his sides. Maybe she'd been wrong about the look in his eyes.

"I saw you earlier," she said, "window shopping. I don't mind."

He showed the signs of interest, looking hungrily at her waist and what was down there. "What size dress do you wear?"

"That's a strange question. Big enough to do the job." She wore her white belt-cinched blouse with bakelite buttons. "You don't like it?"

"Ma stitched a dress from four feed sacks. A hundred-pounds each. Red Comb scratch feed, dyed and trimmed with rickrack, just enough left for her underthings. Soft—you'd be surprised. Comes the wind, we'd read the company name on her bloomers."

Mary did a little tease with her shoulder. "My dress comes from the mail order, since you're asking. Underthings are soft too. Bonnie Maid step-ins. If you're good you can see them."

He blinked like he was fighting to keep his thoughts on track. Reached out to tangle his finger in her hair. "Ma wore hers up tight. Shorter than yours but the same color. Let it down at night, draped on her pillow. When she was sick it hung like a veil over her shoulders. The sweat glued to her skin."

If Mary didn't know better, she'd say he was drunk. Eddie was stuffed with odds and ends like that closet on the radio program, when Fibber McGee opened it everything came tumbling out in a crash. What went on in his mind?

"It's do or die," she said. Her hands on her hips.

He sniffed the air, lifting his nose to catch a phantom scent. Looked about the tavern as if he were trapped. Pulled his hunting cap folded from his back pocket and brushed past her to his jacket. "Got to go," he mumbled, apologetic.

And like that, the tavern was empty. She wasn't sure whether she felt shock or relief. A little bit of anger. Eddie wasted her time. The two songs on the jukebox left the tavern more silent than before. She switched on the overhead bulb, its wire mesh globe casting vague shadows across the floor like a net tumbling down to entangle her.

She settled into her chair, hearing again a wisp of air leak from the cushion. Her coffee was cold. The headlines in the local paper described a world as distant as ever. Senator McCarthy fighting with Eisenhower. A plane downed in the Pacific, all those lives lost. The stories seemed as foreign as dispatches from Korea. She flipped to the familiar safety of the crossword, her refuge from men. In a minute her hand stopped shaking.

It took another minute, two minutes, to realize she hadn't heard him leave. No engine, no truck. No headlights.

As the significance of the thought formed in her head, the front door to the tavern flapped open. A dry snow already falling, flecked white by the moon. The cold night air sucked into her lungs.

There was something wrong with him, she saw it right away. Had she missed it before? The tilt to his head. Dogs did that, hearing a voice on the breeze or a sound too high for human ears. His head cocked left, as if the growth over his eye weighted him down.

The overhead light exposed blank, unfocused eyes in his slack face, his stubble glistening. He bent slightly forward. His clothes wet and filthy, like he'd been rolling on the ground. A bulge in his trousers, but not the tent of desire she might have expected. The bulge went all around his waist as if he were wearing a child's diaper underneath his clothes. She could see it, the lip of it peeking over his belt, stiff and gray and skin-like. And a crisp scraping sound, a crackling when he moved, like dry leaves. He stepped toward her. She had noticed the odor before. It was stronger now.

His left hand was hidden behind his back. Was he holding flowers?

"Too late to apologize, Eddie. I've changed my mind. We're closed."

But it wasn't flowers. The pipsqueak held a small metal pipe in his hand, what looked like a ridiculous dull gray children's toy. He lifted his arm.

The hole in the barrel of the gun was black like a doll's eye.

It blinked white.