In the Slammer With Carol Smith Read Online Free

turned up. In the eyes of all the Cat Club was committed to serve the drifter, occasional or serial, which each of them still was. Or had once been. If she could understand the balances here, she would maybe better understand her own, but that was not why she came.
    Whenever anyone new came, one of the others stayed with him or her for the night, ministering to whatever needs. Sometimes a regular slept over but never steadily. Now and again one disappeared, forever, far as the Club knew. There were crises, violences, but, in the phrase of one of the occasional, a woman who called herself Mavorneen, ‘Those always valve out. Like a bath-tub don’t run over.’ Many of the names here were elaborately self-pointing; you call yourself Mavorneen surely because you want to hear people calling you that. Ordinaries like Carol were happy just to be—’ as she once said, when pressured, ‘—echoed enough.’
    Preferences could be loud here, and mostly abided by, if remembered, but it was easier to forget, rather than rebuff. Forgetting was natural here. The past wasn’t forbidden altogether, but habitually ignored. Little blurts gave you inklings of a person. Now and then somebody let loose with a wild riff.
    ‘On medical know-how, you people could run a health column,’ a transvestite said, after a lively general discussion as to whether he should soak his swollen high-heeled foot or bind it, and at which clinic he would be best served. Hard drugs were not barred; nothing was. But most exaggerated conduct, not finding much of that at the Cat Club, eased itself out. Medications, on the other hand, were rife; comparisons could be made as at a bazaar, and even swaps. While it was okay to exhort against medical aids, including the psychological, to proselyte for those was frowned on. No one here would ever remind her to take her pill, although once she and Mavorneen, shrugging at each other, had gulped theirs at the same time. Though never repeating that. Sex happened. People went upstairs for it, to the least shaky parts of the condemned house.
    Little was repeated here, individually. Instead there was a flow.
    ‘It’s a halfway house,’ she said to Alphonse.’ ‘Only—only not to get to the other side.’
    Rumor persisted that he had started the place after his girlfriend O.D.’d. Nobody could corroborate. ‘Not everybody’s a sex nut,’ Mungo said. ‘Though I fathered two children myself.’ After that blurt he had not been seen again.
    ‘It’s my ace-in-the-hole,’ Alphonse himself said. ‘Case I get thrown out of the Y.’
    Everybody there laughed. When she was a kid, the Young Men’s Christian Association was the norm. Or the Young Women’s, in college, for those who were too square. Now, whether or not it was the norm again, it wasn’t for those here.
    ‘He could almost qualify, Arturo could,’ a girl said. A dancer who did ruffly steps while she was talking to you, she Hispanicized all names. ‘Lucky he drinks.’
    Everybody fed the cat. It was the only one who had rules, in the form of a calendar you checked once you’d done it, over which was scrawled DON’T FORGET THE WATER BOWL. All this was done behind a screen that separated the front window from what had been the store proper, in which there was also a narrow stall with a rear toilet better than the basement one, and a sink. Alphonse bought the cat food, anyone who could contributing, and whoever volunteered did the cat’s box. The cat didn’t seem to care who took care of it. Sometimes it prowled the vandalized upper house, where a window was left open for it. There was no light in the store window, but by night the cat was there, paws folded, eyes slitted, under the street lamp. Daytimes, children tapped to it, through the pane.
    Now and then Carol too disappeared from the Club, if only so that she could drift back. Once, after such an interval, Alphonse said on her return, ‘You have good manners,’ so there was no need to explain. On