by Peter Rabe
“She must have interfered with your routine,” Rand said.
“Ah — . I was afraid to ask,” I said.
He didn’t answer anything and I stubbed my cigarette out. I worked at it ‘til the paper split open and the tobacco fell out.
“There was a woman last night?”
“Yes.”
“Did I sleep with her?”
“You slept Yeah.”
I suddenly felt very irritable. “What I asked you,” I said, “was, have I got carnal knowledge of this woman?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Why not, damn it to hell?”
“You mean, what happened that you didn’t lay her, don’t you?”
I got up and went to the bathroom. I kept my eyes away from the mirror but bent down over the sink and washed with cold water. When I came back I felt much more detached.
“You know, Rand, I could tell you a harem story about sex, after you get out of the bucket That first night out of the bucket is a thing like the Arabian nights. I figured out all the details, on long evenings in the cell.”
“You were talking about it.”
“Yeah, that’s something, huh? I was talking about it.”
“You seem to have a thing about skin. You kept admiring that.”
“Jaysis — ”
“You were quite a talker.”
“What else?”
“About Tooley. You kept talking about him.”
“That sonofabitch,” I said.
“Why that tone?” said Rand. “Tooley is dead, isn’t he?”
“He was a filthy old bastard,” I said, “and the fact that I spent three of my seven years in the same cell with him makes it more so, and the fact that he took the walk to the chair three weeks past doesn’t make it any less so.”
“Speak kindly of the dead, Gallivan.”
“Why?”
Rand stayed on the topic of Tooley. He wanted to know how well I knew Tooley, because he, Rand, hadn’t liked Tooley either. He said all this interested him, because he rarely disliked anybody, especially someone like Tooley, whom he hardly knew, except for time during yard work. That kind of thing.
“He got the chair for murder, didn’t he?” Rand asked me.
“Yes, and that used to kill him — I mean — used to give him a charge. He used to say, ‘One lousy murder, and an accident yet, and they give me the works. But the one hundred times I pulled it off at the trade — ’ Big time dope racket.”
“I know.”
“For all those times, he said, they didn’t have one single thing on him.”
“Professional pride.”
“I think,” I said, with a lot of vinegar in the tone, “that it made his death kind of a triumph for him.”
“How come you don’t like him?”
“I told you. He was a filthy old bastard.”
This was a fact and there was no other reason for my feelings about Tooley. He had been one of those aging men with the leer of an ape, the emotions of a kid during puberty, and we had been cell mates for almost three years. For that matter, three years in the same cell with Saint Francis would have done the same thing to me.
“When Tooley …”
“I just as soon talk about something else,” I said. “Not about the jug.”
Rand didn’t insist He said I could talk about anything I pleased.
“About that woman last night, Rand, I would sure like to know more about that. After all, my first time out, and so forth.”
“Sentimental, ain’t you?”
“I collect firsts. I would just like to know …”
“You want to see her?”
“You mean now?”
“She’s in the next room,” and when he saw my face he said, “Honest. You want her?”
I didn’t know if I wanted her. It was a little bit too much like the Arabian Nights.
I got myself another drink and sat down again. I said, “This is all so easy. Walking out of prison, taking a car, a fine room in a fine hotel, a, no doubt, fine female. It’s all so damn — ” I took a long drink and put the glass down. Outside the sun was sharp and brittle. “It’s ominous,” I said.
“That’s because you don’t know a damn thing about how much went into all this,” said Rand and got up. “I’m going out,” he said.
He put on his overcoat, a scarf, and a hat Then he nodded at me and left the room.
Ominous had been the wrong word. I sat on the couch with my empty glass and made the ice cube slide back and forth. Ominous was the wrong word because there was no real weight to any of this. The day, instead, was frighteningly casual.
• • •
I listened to the radio for a while — music and disc jockey chatter, and once the news. The prison break was two days old in the news. Three prisoners were still at large, capture imminent, though. This was interesting. Also, five prisoners who had participated in the riot were dead, shot while escaping. They even had the names, this being factual news. One of the cons shot to death was Smitty.
After that I drank one fast, to keep the film on my brains. Then I got up and went to the bathroom where I stood and looked in the mirror. I pulled up my tie, combed my hair, and said, I’ll be damned if I shave for that whore. Then I went out in the hall.
There wasn’t a real hallway outside, but a small foyer opposite the door, with some easy chairs, a low table, and a fireplace full of green plants. Two hallways went off the foyer.
There was a man in one of the easy chairs and when I closed the door behind me he lowered his paper. He smiled at me and said, “Hi, Gallivan.”
I said, “Hi,” and leaned against the wall.
He kept standing there, smiling.
“What you got on your mind, Gallivan? Nothing foolish I hope.”
“I didn’t have anything on my mind.”
“You’re all likkered up.”
“Just a little. To get the edge off.”
“I know. Where was you going, Gallivan?” he wanted to know. He was still smiling but I didn’t believe his smile.
“There was this — this girl here last night. I was …”
“Oh, Jessie,” he said. He laughed. There was nothing cagey about it, though I didn’t know what he meant by that laugh. “That door,” he said. “But I don’t think she’s up.”
I didn’t give a damn about whether she was up or not, because if I had cared about that I would have to care about a great number of other things, even more important. I went to the door, I even knocked, but then I went in without waiting.
The room looked exactly like ours, except there was a woman in the bed. I saw the shape of her hips, one bare arm, the head with short, cropped hair. It was brown, with light streaks in it, and a little bit curly.
I looked at that pretty sight for a moment. It was very much better than my Arabian Nights, and quite different Then I almost left the room again. But when I made a sound with the door she gave a small start and turned around.
“Who are you?” Not very friendly.
I didn’t know how to explain it and wished I hadn’t drunk so much.
“Oh,” she said. “Last night.”
She sat up in bed, knees to her chest, and put her arms over her legs. She rubbed her head and kept looking at me. “You coming or going?”
I left the door and walked towards the bed.
“You drunk?” she asked.
I nodded. I felt like an ass.
“Why don’t you tell Micky out there in the hall to get us some coffee, huh?”
After I had done that I came back to the bed and asked her to give me a cigarette from her pack. She nodded at it and I got one for myself.
What are you staring at?” she said.
“Your face.”
“You don’t remember it, do you?”
“No.”
She actually had very large eyes but they were built in a long shape, just short of slitted, and if she were to
laugh her eyes would probably close, almost.
“You can stop looking,” she said.
I said, “Why not? Just why in hell not?”
“I don’t like to get stripped that way.” She blew out a drag and watched it “I strip,” she said, “but not with that kind of a look on me.”
Micky came into the room, bringing coffee. He put it on the night table next to the girl, winked at her, and went out. She winked back at him, but it didn’t change the expression of her face at all.
I decided that she was a hard little bitch and I didn’t get rocked by those eyes. I reached over, took the cigarette out of her hand, and lit one of my own.
“Where were we?” I said. “What did we do last night?”
“You were too drunk. May I have my cigarette back?”
I gave it to her and she kept it in her mouth — something that always looks tougher than hell to me, when a woman does it She tucked the sheet up under her arms. Her arms were quite slim, like a young girl’s, and the skin was of shiny smoothness.
She took the cigarette out of her mouth and held it over the edge of the bed. She put her other hand behind her head and looked at me with no special expression. She could have been looking at a street sign, but as if she knew the street perfectly and no signs needed.
“Do you often run into failures like this?”
“You seem to think I’m a whore,” she said.
“Naw Not you.” I put my hand on the sheet where it ran over her belly and smoothed out some folds. Then I put my hand on the edge of the bed again and looked at my fingers.
“Why did you ask, does it worry you?”
“No,” she said. “What you think doesn’t worry me.”
I thought that was just fine with me, this mutual feeling. The end of the blanket was next to my hand so I pushed my hand under it. I was looking down and didn’t know what she was thinking, nor did I care.
It was warm under the blanket and my hand felt like wood.
“Get me the ashtray,” she said. “You moved it too far.”
I pushed the ashtray over, so she could get at it, but I didn’t move anything else. Then I touched her side. I thought her skin was very warm. She was slim, because I could feel the slight dent of her ribs, but not thin.
“Why did you move?” I said.
“Your hand is cold.”
She hadn’t moved much, just slightly, and then I saw her put out the cigarette. After that she put both hands behind her head and looked at me. The skin was warm and firm, but I felt mostly the firmness now, because that was closer to the way she impressed me. Hard. Or I only read that into her, because actually she was just silent.
“You came to see Rand, didn’t you?” I asked her.
“Yes. Is that what you came in to ask?”
“That’s right. To find out what goes. Wouldn’t want to cross up Rand,” I said, “good friend like Rand.”
I felt the waist under my hand and where the hip curved out She wasn’t wearing anything on top but had on pajama bottoms.
She said, “You act it.”
“You don’t” I ran my hand up her back and left it there.
“I didn’t come to sleep with him,” she said.
The way she and I had been going, it struck me that this was the first time that she had bothered to explain anything. Either to tell me something, or to make clear that this, my being here on the bed, was all right with her.
I said, “You haven’t had your coffee.”
She looked at the cup on the night table and said, “It’s cold now.” She moved down in the bed, to lie flat She had small, round breasts.
I moved again because I wanted to hear what she had to say. I asked her what she meant by saying she had come to see Rand, that it sounded as if she had come on business.
But she didn’t answer. She turned a little, leaning into my hand. It might have been just indifference, I don’t know, but I thought she had done it in order not to answer my question. I tried it another way.
“We got off the subject before,” I said, “about last night You were going to tell me why you came and what you did.”
“I?” she said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Last time around you said that I didn’t do anything.”
“You just talked.”
“About what?”
“Like a drunk,” she said. “You talked about yourself.”
“You mean that took all night?”
“Just about You brought in all kinds of subjects.”
“What?”
“Tooley. You brought him up a few times.”
I took my hand away but then, from pure spite, put it back on her.
“Nothing about you at all?” I asked her.
“What would you like to know?”
“Why you’re here.”
“You seem to have made up your mind what I’m here for.”
“You never answer, do you?”
“Why don’t you take your hand off me,” she said.
I didn’t, but I said, “That’s right You’re here on business with Rand. Girl secretary to Rand, the kindly industrialist.”
This time she moved away. She sat up so that the blanket came down but she put her knees up, for more distance. There was expression in her face now.
“You mean crook, don’t you? Not kindly industrialist You mean sly, bigtime crook. Not like you. Oh no. You’re no crook or con at all, are you? In your case it was all a mistake and the fault of somebody else. And a mistake. You kept hitting that, when you were drunker. How you missed and got sent up for missing: that you wished you had shot him dead instead, and her too. But you,” she finished off, “aren’t a crook. Because you didn’t have the conviction!”
CHAPTER 4
She wasn’t completely right. For seven years behind the big wall I had been a mouse and for the two days I had been out of it, like a mouse’s shadow. But I hadn’t always been that way, though the time seems long gone.
Junior executive is just a big word for a small beginning. In one sense it didn’t fit me at all because I only spent eight hours a day at it, lacking that extra push which makes the successful ones look like maniacs in a slow moving breadline.
I felt I got enough bread in an eight hour day, but nothing else. In a while, I got the regulation matchbox house with lawn, the lawnmower in the garage, the car in the driveway, the week end in the country. We rented a cabin out there. We, because around that time I got married.
I had met her during working hours, which was strange enough, because she didn’t look like a working girl. And after half an hour in the same conference room with her, I didn’t think she acted like a working girl either. There was a contract up for renewal, which took a lot of conniving and talking. She was with the other team. She was supposed to take notes for the other team.
I think I gave her the eye first, because of the way she was built, and then she took it up as if she had invented the game. She played it with an impatient haste, without rules, without manners, while the conference continued about costs, materials, methods, and maybe profits. Past closing time though, and her getting impatient. So was I.
She and I left together. All this is no reason to marry somebody, but I did. Maybe I married her because she played a mean game of chess, or liked swimming because of the sunbath afterwards, or felt good while dancing, or because an eight hour day meant as little to her as it did to me. The other eight hours were her time, and my time; and then, in addition, also somebody else’s.
I bought the matchbox with lawn. I bought the lawnmower, I cut the damn lawn and talked about it as if I felt it was important I got more and more edgy because we looked so solid but there really was nothing.
Of course, she was much more honest about it.
That week end we were to meet at the cabin, but I didn’t go straight out there from work. I went home, and the car — she had the car — was still in the drive. And she and the other one were still in bed.
; If I hadn’t been edgy, with nothing more solid left than my pride, maybe I could have walked out, because there was nothing there for me. No. Not me, with eight hours of juniorexecutive work under my belt, with house and lawn, with lawnmower in the garage and new car in the driveway Even the bedroom scene looks like an act now, and I remember distinctly that it felt like it then.
Not to them, though. They were a petrified, captive audience. I went to the closet, opened it, took down a box, took out the gun.
I was actually shaking with rage and I’m sure they both thought it was something like wronged-husband-in-righteous-rage, though I felt confused and the anger was about that.
He jumped out of bed and ran.
If he hadn’t been bare-assed, maybe I wouldn’t have done a thing even then, but with that sight on top of everything else — to keep from going hysterical and bursting out laughing — I took a quick draw stance and shot him.
He fell down and screamed a lot, but he didn’t die. I don’t know what she did. She and I had been through for a long time.
• • •
“Is that why you act this way?” said the girl.
I looked at her and saw that she had lain down again.
“How?”
“The way you treat me,” she said.
I took the pack off the night table and offered it to her.
She took a cigarette, I had one, and we smoked.
“All I know is,” I said to the wall, “I’m scared.”
“You don’t think the break is going to work? Maybe you don’t know Rand.”
“I shot a man, for nothing. I paid for it in a way which I didn’t even know existed. And in a few weeks, in just twenty-one days, I was going to be done with the punishment too.” I shrugged and watched the ashes, how they whitened when the red ring moved back. “And now?”
“Twenty-one days from now,” she said, “what would you have done?”
“Something new. Something I had never done before.”
“And now?”
“That’s what I asked.”
I looked at her as if she must have the answers. When she didn’t say anything I looked out of the window where the sky was turning milky. Perhaps there would he more snow.