The Bitch

by Gil Brewer

  She was still stretched out on the couch, lying perfectly still, holding both hands over her face.

  I went on through the hall and out the front door into the bright shaft of sunlight.

  • • •

  I drove for a time, not knowing where I was headed. Finally the dirt road ended and I got out of the car and walked through a short stretch of damp jungle and stepped up on the old wall overlooking the bay. Here, on this point of land, you could stand and see the Gulf of Mexico and the misty distance, blurred by sun. On the horizon a small fleck of freighter crawled. You could imagine the sound of the washing sea against its sides, the steadied thump-thump-thump of the engines. You could imagine the feel of the steel deck plates beneath your feet, the roll, and the everlasting throb, and at that distance, the crazy shrieking of the gulls. You could stand in the stern and watch the wake of the water, the straight path of furrowed white, fanning slowly into greens and blues and grays.

  On the shore, beyond the wall, the tide was out and fiddler crabs ran like rain among twisted gnarls of dirty oysters and mud. The odor of sulphur was strong, but not unpleasant. An enormous white crane stood at the water’s edge on one leg and small waves lapped about its foot. It too was watching the horizon.

  I walked along the wall until I heard the sound of bubbling water from nearby. I jumped down into the grass and walked over through some palmetto and cabbage palms, in under the shade of a tremendous live oak. There was a small spring, the water whitely frothing beside a narrow plank that reached across the depression in green grass. I walked along the plank and knelt down, breathing the sulphur and tasted the cold spring water. It was really rank, but refreshingly cold.

  I knelt there for some time, not exactly cursing—just thinking what a bitch she was. Because she’d got me thinking her way, thinking how it would be with her—out there someplace with all that money. It would be possible to have all that money. Currency. Green leaves. So I had that to think about along with everything else, too—because she was a beautiful woman. Only you knew it would be good for a time, and then she would be beautiful to someone else, too.

  There was a rushing, pounding noise and I stood up. The crane I’d seen down by the water slanted past overhead, its shadow flushing dark across the ground. It vanished, veering tight up against thicker jungle growth and then straight into the jungle.

  It was a sick house, that house. I wondered how it would all turn out? She knew that if she got a divorce, she would never get alimony out of him. He could pad a lawyer well enough for that. She was taking a chance.

  I stepped off the plank and started over toward the car.

  I was taking a chance, too. Only it didn’t matter anymore with me. I had to have that money. I’d settled that long enough ago to know all the arguments against it. None of them weighed in heavy enough to count.

  “Sam’s smart,” Janet said. “Why can’t you be like him? Tate, Tate—I love you, but you’re not doing anything with yourself. I can’t stand knowing you’ll never get anywhere. I’m used to nice things—my family—and I married you and got nothing. Because you won’t try! We can’t keep on and on like this, don’t you see? Your brother really owns that agency, he’s made good. But you—where are you, Sam?”

  Yes, where was I? I loved her, I wanted her for keeps. I’d never succeeded at a damned thing. I’d never made it any damned way. I was a failure in her eyes. Sometimes she’d try to buck me up, and now that was great, wasn’t it? My life was a thick volume of glorious errors, of hurt to other people, of angry mistakes. With Sam always around to right things, to ease Janet’s pain. To smooth everything nicely.

  Didn’t he know I felt it all? Did he think I was blind to feeling?

  I opened the car door and stood there. It was a little past noon. The sun was white and hot. Out on the Gulf the mists seemed to sizzle in the glare. A flight of teal cut inland, high and sloping.

  Didn’t he know?

  I would go on and on with his damned agency, and what would we ever have? “Why can’t you be like Sam?” she would say, every other night out of the year, until she went away. Because sooner or later I’d pull some damned thing. And nobody understood that, either. They pile up and pile up on you, and you get down and down, until all you can do is fight, or quit. And if you quit, you’re dead, and I wasn’t ready for that yet, either.

  I put my forehead on the window-ledge of the car door, laying it hard against the metal. The metal was hot, but it felt cold against my head. It was good. I pressed hard down, feeling the car give.

  I had to do it—there was no other way.

  Tonight….

  With those sons-of-bitches who thought it was sharp, who thought they were pulling something funny, who thought sharp and clear and cool—and wrong. Johnny Morrell. Al Gunnison. I could see them, like those pasteboard cut-outs, standing in movie-house lobbies, with their forty-fives and their belly-guns, and their slick hair, their sharp, cool, clean-cut, tight-lipped smiles, and their gleaming shoes, their padded shoulders. They were something.

  I had to do it with them. That was the bad thing.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad alone.

  I lifted my head and it was aching.

  At midnight I was supposed to relieve the man Sam hired. Then Gunnison would come along and open the safe, and he would smack me on the head, and I could phone in the alarm in due time.

  It was very neat and unquestionable. It would be nothing against Sam—not really. It would just finish him, because he would have slipped. He would have used his brother at a time when he should have known better. Because all the fine little things about me would come to light. It could happen to anybody, only it would have happened to Sam.

  I stood there for quite a while, my head aching, thinking about everything.

  CHAPTER 4

  It had ceased raining. I left Al Gunnison in the car two blocks from the Halquist soft drink plant, and started back along the sidewalk. Rain sheened on the smooth cement, picking up lights where no lights existed, vagrant flashes and flares of yellow and red, the wavering reflection of a windy palm. Before I reached the first curb, two cars passed me, tires purring liquidly, and there was the faint odor of perfume and cigar smoke trailing through the clean midnight air. High above the city, pink-tinged clouds formed an enormous tent, beneath which strands of dark factory smoke scudded, trapped. A horn cried distantly, and from someplace came the faint and faraway ring of deeply satisfied feminine laughter. The city was lonely and sad tonight, and the air was nervous with my own fear. Every damned step was a step I didn’t want to take.

  On the Halquist block, I walked slowly along the high steel fence that circled the entire plant Beyond the wire mesh, tonsured grass flourished verdantly among cared-for palms and bushes. It had obviously been mowed earlier today, the thick, pungent scent of hashed greenings clouded the block.

  All I had to do was relieve the nightwatchman. I was next on duty. I had even called Sam and talked with him around eight-thirty, assured him I’d be on time. There had been no need of that, but I knew he expected it—and somehow it helped satisfy some of the anxiousness in me, too.

  I had not gone home. I hadn’t been able to.

  I had walked until it was time to meet Gunnison. I’d called Janet and told her I’d see her in the morning. That was for sure.

  “Honey,” she’d said. “You didn’t tell me you had to work.”

  “I clean forgot.”

  “Oh.”

  I was familiar with that expression, maybe a lot of men are. Just “Oh.” Nothing more, like Poe’s rapping on the door. Yet so damned meaningful. And I couldn’t explain to her—tell her what this would mean to both of us.

  Maybe I would never be able to tell her that.

  I had walked past the gate. I turned and went back and stood there a moment.

  In other parts of the city tonight, money lay as neatly un-secret as this, right here. Guarded flimsily, placed in safes that might, in the trade, be referred to as
cigar boxes. Yet they wouldn’t be touched. There was no need of a guard, really. If a safe was a mark, nothing like six guards could stop the action.

  It would be the other guard’s, Sam’s operative’s, fault It had to be. I didn’t even like that—but that’s the way it was. We both had keys for the lock on this gate, and when he left, he would recall locking the gate. Only he would never be able to prove that. He would lock it. Only I would unlock it—just as I did now.

  The key fitted smoothly and as I turned it in the large padlock on the chain, I knew it was the last step. I didn’t hesitate after that.

  • • •

  His name was Hornell. He stood just inside the door, in the anteroom, a member of the pudge family, his round face bloated with sleepiness, eyes and mouth grinning in tired, forced slits. He wore khaki trousers and shirt, a light blue sweater, a holstered gun. As I rapped on the door and opened it, he was checking his wrist watch.

  “Heard you unlocking the gate,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t come out.”

  “Uh-huh. How’s everything?”

  He shrugged, went over and sat down at a small table. There was a goose-necked lamp on the table, a small pad of paper, a clock and a pencil. Beneath the table on the floor were some battered magazines. As he sat down, he acted as if he’d decided to spend the night: It gave me a creepy, isolated feeling and I began to sweat. A lot of things came into my head, like Sam telling him to hang around, stuff like that.

  “Can’t understand it,” he said.

  “Understand what?” I was wearing a light slicker. I peeled it off and hung it on the coat-rack just inside the door.

  “Why you have to stand guard here? I mean, with your agency and all—why not hire somebody?”

  I walked over by the table. “We always work it this way. It’s our biggest account. One of us always stands the midnight to eight when Halquist has a big payroll—you know that. It’s my turn tonight. We just don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Chances,” he said. “Hell.”

  “Well—you never know.”

  “You guys are making enough. Why don’t you let the other guy make a little? Playing nightwatchman—what the hell you trying to prove?”

  “Not trying to prove anything.” His voice had been nasty. He was hungry for a buck. I felt a little sorry for him. At the same time, he was playing with dangerous ground and didn’t know it. I had to get him out of here. He hadn’t looked at me all the time he spoke.

  He was staring at the table top.

  “You in a tight, Hornell?”

  “Hell of a lot that is to you. I could have stood guard on this lousy place the rest of the night. I’m no sleeper.”

  Gunnison was supposed to come by in fifteen minutes after the time I left the car. It would be grand if he sailed in through the open gate now. I kept thinking, This is a warning. Drop the whole thing.

  That’s the way my mind began to work.

  “Well,” I said. “Give me the gun. You may as well take off. I’ll make the rounds.”

  He leaned back in the chair and looked at me now. The truth of it was, if he stuck around, I’d have to do something. The minutes were flying. I felt trapped.

  He stood up, still looking at me, and unbuckled the belt and holstered .38. He tossed it with a slam on the table.

  “You guys,” he said. “Grab every damned thing.”

  “I can let you have a little if you’re pressed,” I said.

  “The hell with you, Morgan. Grab, grab, grab—that’s all some guys think of.”

  All right. The hell with him. He was a sorehead.

  “Think for hell’s sake you were guarding a bank vault,” he said. “I was in there looking at that safe. A cracker-box, Morgan. Kick it and it’ll fall open.”

  I didn’t say anything, watching him.

  He turned on his heel and walked across the room and out of the door. He slammed the door. I went out after him and stood just outside the door.

  “Take it easy, Hornell,” I called.

  He didn’t say anything. He went on out to the gate and opened it and stepped outside, and fixed the padlock and chain and locked it. Then he walked on down the street, tossing the key in the palm of his hand. I watched him until he was out of sight. The rain had not yet started up again. There were no cars on the street, no nothing. I went back inside.

  I left the gun on the table and walked down the hall past the mimeograph room and stopped in front of the office. At the far end of the hall in dim shadow, you could see the beginnings of the bottling works. There were echoes from the vaulted ceilings, and bits of light flickered on curling metal pipes and machinery. It was an immense plant. You could smell the damned soda pop, the way it impregnated the air. I turned and went into the office.

  They hadn’t just asked me in with them because I had the key and could relieve the. guard, either. It was a lucky stroke that this wasn’t Sam’s night here. I couldn’t have asked him to change. It would have crocked the deal.

  They knew I knew the entire floor-plan of the place. Every alarm circuit, where to walk, where not to. Most of all, how to shut the thing off.

  In the office, I walked over to a desk, stepped high twice, reached down on the desk leg on the left hand side and flipped the switch. It was as if I were doing all these things in a deep, sick dream. But the money was inside me now, too—I couldn’t ignore that. Not this close to it.

  I kept thinking, Janet, Janet, Janet—like some fool kind of record. It was like my brain had busted loose. I was in a rut and I couldn’t get out of it. Just, Janet, Janet, Janet—like that.

  That damned Hornell.

  I stood in the center of the office and looked at the safe for a while. Not long. Maybe fifteen seconds. Sitting there, black and squat, with the dial gleaming a little. I’d seen that safe a lot of times before and it had never meant anything. Oh, I’d thought about how it would be to have all that was in it—who doesn’t think those things? But it had never meant anything. Now it was the other way around. It was it, and it was as if the safe were alive, or something, sitting there, waiting—kind of grinning blackly.

  I got out of there. I went on back to the anteroom, and outside to the front gate. There was no sign of anybody. I unlocked the gate, fixing it so it looked locked unless it was closely inspected. Then I hurried back inside and went straight on down the hall that ran right angles to the other that led to the office. I walked clear to the end of the building and unlocked the door leading into the alley. The wall of the building itself fronted the alley on this side.

  I would have just made the outside rounds along the alley, and stepped into the hallway and seen all this happening. And that’s where Gunnison would belt me with his gun and make it look good. He probably would, the way he always looked—maybe break my head. So I’d lie there until they were clear, and then come around and crawl along the hall and phone in the alarm. I had to remember to trip the alarm circuit back on before I phoned. I thought about leaving that off, too, like the unlocked front gate—blame it on whoever was supposed to switch it on for the night. It would be too damned obvious.

  Gunnison had to come in the front way. This was in case he was seen. Morrell had made him do that. Gunnison got five thousand extra just for doing it that way. He was taking a chance—but if he came in the back way and was seen, it would queer the whole thing. I might be able to talk him clear, if he was seen coming in the front way.

  I came back down the hall, nervous as hell now. Gunnison was standing just inside the door of the anteroom. It was a little like being socked in the chest with a board.

  This was the “it” of “this is it.”

  • • •

  He was tall and stooped a little, wearing a blue Palm Beach suit and a soft gray felt hat. He had a horse face, the eyebrows very thick and black, his mouth very small and tight above the broad long jaw. Gunnison was a very patient man. Patience was a big part of his trade, and there was something of the actor in him. He drew on the
patience, moved with lazy, don’t-give-a-damn strides that belied what went on inside him. You could tell what went on inside him by his eyes. They were crazy.

  He stood there waiting for me to come up to him. Under his left arm, he carried a blue and gray-striped canvas satchel.

  I started to say something, but he cut me off.

  “Let’s get at it,” he said. “Where’s it at?”

  “You see anybody out there?”

  “Where’s it at. Nobody.”

  Those crazy damned eyes of his.

  I thought of Janet home in bed, waiting for me, because she never did sleep when I was out all night. She’d just lie there and stare into the darkness, and when I came home she’d be at the door—like that. I could see her in my mind’s eye, lying there, staring into the darkness, waiting. And she didn’t know.

  “Well, Morgan?”

  “In here.”

  I turned and looked out toward the gate through the door of the anteroom, and there was nothing. I led him down the hall and stopped at the office door.

  “You going to blow it?”

  “This it?”

  “Yes.”

  He shoved the door and stepped inside. “You leave that part to me,” he said. Then he stopped short. “What about the alarm?”

  “It’s all clear.”

  He glanced once at the safe and grunted. “This is pie,” he said. “Pure blueberry pie.” He stepped over to the safe and kind of brushed his hat off his head and it fell to the floor. He glanced toward the windows. Light from the street shone in on the safe.

  Janet didn’t know what was going on. Neither did Sam. Nobody did. I stood there looking at Gunnison by the safe and it kept coming into me like chills. It was really bad. The very worst.

  And I began to know for real all the reasons why I was doing this thing, and hating it, but doing it anyway. How Janet had been Sam’s girl until I met her, and how I’d swept her off her feet, never meaning to do a damned thing but exactly that. Only something happened, like it sometimes does—maybe the way her hair felt in my hands, the look in her eyes when she said my name, the little curl of her lips, and all that wonderful goodness that was so strongly a part of her—and that I didn’t have. That I wanted. Whatever it was, it became love or whatever you want to call it. And we were married and Sam stood out there on the sidelines, giving us the glad eye—really happy about it all the way. And sad, too. You could see that.