“He said he would.”
Bertha Cool said, “To hell with what they say. It’s what they pay that counts. Well, anyway, dearie, take a streetcar. Don’t try to drive the agency car.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll need the car tonight. I can drive it.”
I walked out and piloted the agency heap out to my rooming-house, feeling like the tail end of a mis-spent life. I climbed into bed, took a big swig of whisky, and after a while drifted off into warm drowsiness.
It seemed that I was just really getting some good sleep when an insistent something kept trying to drag me back to consciousness. I tried to ignore it and couldn’t. It seemed to have persisted through an eternity of time in various forms. I dreamed that naked savages were dancing around a fire, beating on war drums. Then there was a respite and I dropped back into oblivion once more, only to have carpenters start putting up a scaffold on which I was to be hung. The carpenters were all women, attired in sunsuits, and they drove the nails to a weird rhythm of thump thump thump thump — thump thump thump thump — thump thump thump thump. Then they would chant, “Donald, oh, Donald.”
At last my numbed senses came to the surface enough to realize that the noise was a gentle but insistent tapping on my door, and a feminine voice calling, “Donald, oh, Donald.”
I made some sleepy, inarticulate sound.
The voice said, “Donald, let me in,” The doorknob rattled.
I got out of bed and staggered groggily as I walked over to the closet door for a dressing-gown.
“Donald, let me in. It’s Marian.”