Page 8 of Shadow Ticket
This is absolutely not the serious footloose-husband make-believe she’s comfortable with, too breezy, Hicks being the last type of dating material she should be getting anywhere near, in fact, but she can’t help herself. A big ape with a light touch. The light touch fools women into thinking he’s sensitive, which he isn’t.
“Nice thing with you,” sez April, “is I never have to be nervous about my stockings. Any other night out all it takes is him thinking about it and zing! Runs, like that. Price of a steak, out the window. Dollar bills with these li’l…wings on them. But you, all those pile-driver activities you’re so fond of and yet you never so much as put a wrinkle.”
“Shouldn’t tell me things like that, Cupcake, you know what happens. Now I’ll just have to get impolite about it.”
“Oh! You animal.”
“She noticed,” making a grab.
“Dammit now, Hicks, you ape.”
“Hearing that one a lot this week.”
“Oh, who’d that be?”
“Just one of those workday episodes, maybe somebody you know, maybe not.”
“How likely am I to know anybody at, well, your level, I’m sure, and stop that—you hear me? you’re making such a big assumption…”
“Me, I’m a perfect gentleman. You want to come on down off of there?”
“Oh, Hicks. If only you would just be married, to somebody, some nice girl, Lutheran, Catholic, don’t matter, Polish, Irish, long as you do the deed in a real church…Even got the hoop right here for you, shoplifted straight from the top sparkler joint on Wabash, your exact finger size and all, just waiting…Only get married, one li’l ‘I do,’ and then I’d be more in love with you than you could ever dream.”
Can’t help narrowing his eyes a little. Is she serious? “Yeah but, but ain’t there somethin…immoral about it, somehow? This wife I’d have to be running around on, this Polish trick, supposin I even fall in love with her or somethin, things like that happen, and what then?”
“Oh, but they all love their wives, it’s part of the deal. Something I may need to talk about someday with somebody, though maybe not with you.”
“So, these cute little hopefuls you keep sending around…”
“Sooner or later, one of them’s gonna hit the spot, you know, you might as well get prepared for that, ’cause you can’t hold out forever.” With the big smudged eyes.
“Check. Some beauty parade. Last one you tried to fix me up with, that Euphorbia? I’m still shakin.”
“Oh,” a mischievous gleam, “keep telling you, she had a license for that.”
“I can see what you’re looking to promote me into, don’t you know that’s a private op’s bread and butter, waiting all night across the street in the rain turning to snow for some window to light up and then go dark again. That’s a holy sacrament I wouldn’t wish on anybody, Toots.”
After raiding the icebox, waiting for April to finish with the makeup and so forth, Hicks sits gazing at a calendar on April’s kitchen wall advertising Mazda light bulbs, with one of those hyperilluminated Maxfield Parrish pictures of girls not what you’d call dressed for outdoor activities posing on rocks, in a steep and unforgiving landscape—cute, even innocent, but what are these two doing out here to begin with?
“And how’s moy, ick-oopwoyvatedick?” April has this habit of unexpectedly squeaking into a high-pitched flapper voice which men then have the choice of pretending is cute and going along with, or remembering they’re out of smokes or parked illegally someplace blocks away from.
Always another big selling point about Hicks is how it’s never worked on him, the baby-vamp vocalizing, the off-key attempts to rezone the boundaries of jailbait terrain. Just about every grown woman in Milwaukee has at least tried it on, a few drifting so far into it that you could argue they never came back out again.
“Only one thing, um, April, is, not tonight with this, OK…”
“No ick-oo dirl talk? Ooh! Hicksie-wicksie! What’oo poo-uh Apwiw do?”
“Well, let’s see, you could do Louise Brooks, or Clara Bow—”
“They’re from back before the talkies. Silent.”
“That’sthe word I’m tryin to think of—”
“Now don’t—”
“Don’t what again?”
“You no-account, you lowlife— Aah!”
