by Jim Thompson
He continued to stare. Gradually, a slow flush spread over her face, and her hand moved timidly to the front of her dress, tried to narrow the gap of its neckline.
“I’ll bet I look a sight,” she murmured self-consciously. “I was racing around all day cleaning house, and I didn’t have time to fix myself up. I—I usually plan things better. But I guess I’ve gotten kind of off-schedule since I quit working, and—Mac,” she said, “Mac…what’s the matter, darling?”
Darling. Dear. Honey. That’s what she was calling him these days. The same names she had used to call Ford—if she wasn’t still doing it.
“Matter?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“Well—you know. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?” Bugs shrugged. “Just thinking, I guess. Wondering how you were getting along with Ford these days.”
“But”—she set down her coffee cup nervously. “I don’t see Lou anymore, honey. I told you that.”
“Yeah, I guess you did tell me that, didn’t you?” he said deliberately. “Haven’t figured out where he gets his money yet, have you?”
“Mac…” She put a hand over his. “Let’s not talk about that again tonight, please? You’ll just get upset, and it won’t change anything—”
“I don’t know how you can do it!” he raged suddenly. “He’s running a wide-open town, isn’t he? He’s rolling in dough, isn’t he? You know he is, and you know he can’t be drawing much more than three thousand dollars salary a year. And yet you sit there and tell me he isn’t a crook!”
“Please, dear. Can’t we just—”
“Why don’t you admit it?” He jerked his hand from beneath hers. “Why do you go on defending him? Why, when you’ve got all the facts right in front of you, do you—”
“Mac, I’ve tried to explain. The town’s always been more or less open, as you put it. The people want it that way. They’d never vote taxes to stop something that they see no real harm in. And with so many thousands of newcomers…well, you can understand how it is, honey. How can one man with a few deputies do anything but what he is doing? Just keeping things out in the open where they can be watched, and keeping them under control.”
“Oh, sure, sure. I’ve heard that yarn before. Every crooked cop in the country has the same alibi.”
“I don’t say it’s right, Mac. I don’t believe Lou thinks it is. But he’s realistic, and—”
“And he’s got a nice thing going for himself.”
She looked at him steadily, almost without expression, for a moment. Slowly, she pushed her plate back, spoke in a quiet, even voice.
“I don’t know where Lou’s money comes from, Mac. I never asked. He never explained—presumably for good reasons of his own. No, wait”—she held up a hand. “Let me finish. When I say good reasons I mean it literally. Because whatever else Lou is, he is honest. I know he is. So does everyone else who’s known him for any length of time.”
“But that doesn’t make sense!” Bugs insisted surlily. “If he—”
“All right, it doesn’t make sense, then. But it’s still the truth.”
Bugs scowled and jabbed out his cigarette. Amy studied him, her gray eyes defiant, debating something within herself. There was a fiddle-string tautness about the silence. A feeling of tension mounting to the breaking point. Then, she smiled and it was as though the sun had come out from behind a cloud. And, grudgingly, Bugs found himself smiling back.
Grudgingly, yet with a vast sense of relief…
Amy came around the table and kissed him on the forehead. She tousled his hair, fondly, her lips curved with a kind of dreamy softness. It was very peaceful. Never in his life had he known such peace. Then, abruptly, he pulled her down into his lap.
“Amy…” he said. “Amy, I—”
“Tell me about it, darling. Tell me…” Her warm mouth brushed lovingly against his cheek. “It’ll be all right, whatever it is. If it isn’t, we’ll make it all right.”
“Nothing,” Bugs said. “I mean—”
And there was no longer anything. Or, rather, that is all there was. Anything, something. Not someone, but something. Buttocks, and breasts, and thighs and—
He was crushing her mouth with his. Pawing and clutching and grasping at her. One hand was thrust high beneath the prim little dress, roamed there crudely and cruelly. And one of her breasts filled his other hand. And—and she was silent and unprotesting. She said nothing, made no movement of her own. She merely looked at him.
He released her suddenly and shoved her to her feet. He jumped up and started for the door, paused without turning around.
“Well,” he said gruffly. “Why don’t you say it? Might as well say it as think it.”
“I thought there might be something you wanted to say, Mac…” She waited a moment. “But, anyway, I’m not sure what I think. So, perhaps…”
“Yeah?”
“Perhaps there’s nothing to be said. Why don’t you go on in the living-room, and I’ll be with you as soon as I stack the dishes.”
He went in and sat down. She joined him after a few minutes, and again apparently she had decided to forget and forgive. It was all right, she told him with her eyes, her smile, her warmth. He hadn’t meant what he’d seemed to, and she knew that he hadn’t.
She sat down at his side on the lounge. She talked, talking for both of them, trying to bring him out of himself. Then she played a few pieces on the piano, singing in her soft sweet voice. And nothing seemed to help. The bitter blackness crept slowly upward and around him.
What’s wrong with me? he thought a little wildly, with that small rational segment of his mind. She’s all I’ve got, the only thing left to cling to, all that really matters. Everything else is headed for hell on a handcar, and now I’m trying to pile her on too. And—
“Mac…” She was seated at his side again. “I don’t like to keep asking you, but—”
He glared at her silently, daring her to ask again if he was in any kind of trouble. She left the sentence unfinished, moved smoothly to another topic.
He’d never been through the house, had he? Well, there was nothing much to see, of course, but if he’d like to look around…
They began with the basement, with its faint sweet-sour smell of straw and apples and earth. From there they went up the back stairs to the attic—huge, ghostly and shadowed with the discards of by-gone days—and then down to the second floor.
Amy led the way from room to room, determinedly friendly, fighting with everything she had against his growing ugliness.
Once she asked him how he liked the place, how he would like to live in a big old-fashioned house like this one. Another time she said she supposed she’d have to sell it, since there was no work for her here in Ragtown, and she hardly knew where else to go, or what she would do if she did go somewhere else. She’d always lived here, and her folks had always lived here, and—
“This was their room.” She opened the door of the largest room, one with two four-poster double beds. “Poor darlings they had an awfully hard time of it. Dad fell off a horse and broke his back, and he was bedfast until he died. And Mother, she was never quite the same after he passed on. She lost interest in everything, and—”
…And, God, he thought, that must have been hard on you, honey. Harder than anything I went through with my folks. They meant well, even if they did do a lot toward mixing me up. And they didn’t ask anything of me, and I didn’t have much to give them—or anyone—if I’d been asked. But you, a girl like you, gay and full of life and pretty as a picture—you, tied down out here in the prairie nowhere, tied to two dying people, watching the years slip away from you…
That was the way his thoughts ran. But he said…
He wasn’t quite sure what he said—the wording of it. But the sense of it was clear enough.
She looked up at him slowly, white-faced, eyes sick with shock. Then, without a word she led the way out of the room and into her own.
> She gestured toward a spindle-legged love-seat, covered with faded pink satin. He sat down on it, started to make room for her, and she sat down on a straight-backed chair.
“Now, about the questions you asked, Mac,” she said quietly. “The answer to the—”
“Never mind,” Bugs grunted. “I wasn’t thinking how—”
“—the answer to the first one is, yes. I hadn’t thought much about it, but I suppose that his father and my parents being invalids for so long, did give Lou and me a strong common bond. As to the second question, the answer is no. Our parents’ illness did not make things convenient for us. We didn’t take advantage of it for the purpose you implied. In fact—”
“Skip it,” Bugs growled uncomfortably. “I—I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Of course, you mean it. You’ve been working up to it ever since we became acquainted. I can’t blame you, I suppose, although I am disappointed and hurt. I hoped you’d accept me without question, as I’ve been willing to accept you. Since you can’t do that, however, I’m going to tell you something…”
…She had thought she was in love with Lou Ford, made herself believe that she was. And she had clung to him, chased him, fought to hold onto him, despite his determination not to be held and the obvious fact that he was wholly unsuited to married life. For, you see, she had felt that she must marry him. She had never gone with any other men. She had been unable to marry at an age when most girls did; and now he was the one remaining eligible, the one man of her own kind. And without him—as she saw it—there would be nothing. No real reason for existence. None of the things that make life worth living. Only a yawning, lonely emptiness, stretching endlessly through the endless years ahead.
It had seemed an unbearable prospect. She had persuaded herself that it must be avoided, at whatever cost. And Lou Ford had led her to believe that it might be…in a certain way. So she had been ready to submit to him, and when she was, he had laughed at her. Jeered and teased her. Some other time, he had grinned. After all, that stuff was pretty cheap, could be, anyways. Why toss hers away when she might need it later?
Her immediate reaction was one of outrage, murderous anger. It had taken her a few days to see the way of what he had done; that in his shaming of her, his calculated cruelty, he had reinstated her sense of values so securely that they could never be shaken loose again. He had demonstrated that no matter how nominally desirable a thing may be, its price can be too high—and it is too high if the payment bankrupts the purchaser—and he had driven that message home, with painful emphasis, on several later occasions. She had resented the lesson; doubtless, she was still a little resentful. But she knew he was right, and after she met Bugs…
“I did a pretty cheap thing, Mac; one that I’ll always be ashamed of. And it’s not my fault that I didn’t do something a lot cheaper. But it is all I did. There was nothing more than…well just what you saw.”
“You mean,” Bugs frowned. “You mean you were nak—you had your clothes off, and you didn’t—uh—”
“That’s what I mean. Don’t you believe me?”
“Well,” he shrugged. “Well, sure, if you say so.” He ran a hand across his mouth, but not quite quickly enough. Not quickly enough to conceal the smirk of incredulity. “Well, sure,” he repeated. “Of course, you have to admit it sounds kind of, uh—”
“Funny? Is that what you were going to say, Mac? Well, perhaps you’re right. It is funny. And now that I think of it, there’s something still funnier.”
She got up and moved toward the door. He arose, too, thinking that she was leaving. But instead she closed the door, and turned off the light.
And in the faint moonlight which drifted through the window, he saw her body arched delicately as she drew her dress off over her head. She felt her way across the room, shedding her other garments, leaving them where they fell.
The bed creaked, and she said, “All right, Mac.”
His mouth felt very dry. He licked his lips, and stammered, “Aw, no, Amy. It doesn’t make any difference, even if—”
“Even. If,” she said. “Come on.”
Well. If that was the way she wanted it, you couldn’t blame him. After all he was a man, and a man couldn’t help being like he was made. And a man expected, and had a right to expect, a woman to be better than he was.
So…
So.
Bugs still knew very little about women. But by now he knew at least enough to realize that Amy had spoken the truth. And along with the inevitable ecstasy of his union with her, there was also abysmal shame and soul-sickening terror—terror of the loss he had suffered. For, naturally, he had lost her. He knew it even before he arose from the bed, from the hateful triumph over her body.
“Amy, I want to tell you something. I—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “Just get out.”
“But—but I didn’t mean it. I am in trouble; it’s got me half out of my mind. I didn’t want to tell you about it because—”
“Because you didn’t trust me. Because there’s nothing in you to trust or love or understand with. Just a lot of hatred and grudges and suspicion. N-now”—shakily she started to rise, her voice rising. “Now, you get out! Get out and don’t ever come back! Don’t ever come near me or try to—”
“Amy. If you’ll only—”
“Do you hear me? GET OUT!”
She advanced on him, eyes wild, small fists drawn back.
He grabbed up his clothes, and fled into the hallway.
20
He dressed out in the hall, hopping clumsily from one foot to the other, getting his shirt buttoned the wrong way, snapping a shoestring—making a botch of things generally in his haste to escape. In his mind’s eye he stood off from himself, examined the hulking, red-faced, panting and fumbling figure in the hallway. And it was as though he was staring into a fun-house mirror. He felt preposterously small and futile. He was livid with shame and embarrassment.
He hated himself, and he hated her for making him hate himself.
He dressed and was out of the house in a few minutes—minutes that seemed like hours. He stopped at the first bar he came to, tossed down five drinks in a row. And when he left he took a pint bottle with him. He went to the hotel, to his room, and began drinking.
The booze didn’t get him drunk; there wasn’t enough whiskey in Ragtown to get him drunk that night. It merely intensified his fury, increased and compressed it until it was like a great rat, trapped in a tiny corner, raging insanely for release of action.
But not tonight, he thought. Not—not any more tonight. But tomorrow night…
He would do it tomorrow night. Do something. Move decisively and irrevocably one way or another.
There was a soft rapping on his door, a familiar shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits knock. Grinning grimly, he got up and opened it, closed and locked it again as Joyce brushed past him. He moved back into the room with her, looked her up and down slowly as she turned and faced him.
“Well, Bugs?”
“Yeah?” He moved closer to her, backing her against the bed. “Yeah, Joyce?”
“Well”—she smiled nervously—“uh, nothing. I just stopped by to—to—”
“To see how I was getting along,” he nodded. “To see how I was feeling. Well, I’m plumb glad you asked, as your buddy Lou Ford would say. I’m plain tickled that you came by, and that’s a fact. Because—”
“Bugs—don’t, you’ve been drinking, and—”
“—because I feel pretty low-down. About as low-down as a man can get. And that don’t quite bring me down to your level, of course, but it’s close enough. I can’t crawl under the plank with you, but—”
“You rotten crazy bastard!” Her palm cracked against his face. “I’ll—I’m getting out of here!”
“Without your clothes, you mean? You go right ahead, but the clothes won’t be going. Not if you leave before I say you can. Well”—he got a grip on the front of her dress. �
�What’s it going to be?”
She bit her lip, forced a tremulous smile. Her hand moved coyly to his chest, twisted one of the misbuttoned buttons.
“Aw, Bugs. This isn’t any way for my Bugsy boy to act. What’s got into you, anyway, honey?”
“That isn’t the question. Not what’s got into me, but what’s about to—”
She snickered unwillingly. A strange excitement began to dance in her eyes. Still, she liked to call the shots; she’d gotten used to doing it. And she’d almost forgotten the days when things were different—painfully so—and the exquisite pleasure to be derived from that painful difference.
It was dim in her mind. Growing clearer, but not quite recognized as yet.
“Let’s not, Bugs, hmm? No, really, I mean it. I absolutely refuse, and you can’t make me! You—”
“Can’t I?” he said. His fingers dug into her flesh. “Can’t I, Joyce? Can’t—”
“B-Bugs…” A great shiver ran through her body. “Bugs! Y-you’re—you’re…Ahhhhhhh…”
…She lay sprawled on the bed, breathing in deep luxurious breaths. Exhausted, depleted, replenished. Bugs sat on the bed’s edge, smoking moodily in the darkness. Thinking that no matter how low a man went, there was always another low awaiting him. Even after this there was doubtless another one. And doubtless he would descend to it, and for as little reason as he had descended to this one, and the one immediately preceding it.
“Bugs, honey…” She found his hand, and he jerked it rudely away. “Maybe afterwards—after things are settled—we could clear out of this place. Go away somewhere together.”
“The nearest whorehouse, that’s as far as I’ll go with you. Park you there and put you to work.”
“Aw, now, Bugs. Not that I wouldn’t if it was necessary. I’d do anything for you, honey. But—”
“What makes you so sure it won’t be? Where else do you think you’re going to get any dough?”
“Huh!” She sat up abruptly. “What the hell do you mean where…Oh”—She broke off, seeing the sardonic jeer on his face, went back to her former meekness. “It isn’t just me, Bugs. If it was just up to me, I’d never think of trying to—uh—persuade you to do anything that you didn’t want to. But—”