The Neon Jungle

by John D. MacDonald

  “Be it ever so humble,” Ginny said. “Sit on the chair, Teena.”

  “Sure. Do we take a fix here?”

  “Could be,” Bucky said, giving her a cool crooked smile. Bucky and Fitz sat on the bed, side by side. Ginny leaned against the window frame and folded her arms.

  “Why are you all looking at me like that?” Teena asked nervously.

  “Well, it’s like this.…”

  “Shut up, Fitz,” Ginny said. “I’ll handle this. You need a fix, Teena?”

  “Oh, God, Ginny! It’s like things crawling all over me.”

  “How many free rides you got off us?”

  “Gosh, I don’t—”

  “Plenty, kid. You think maybe it grows on trees? You think you get it free because of your charming personality? It’s time you started earning your fixes, dear. Like a good little girl.”

  Teena glanced from one to the other. They were all looking at her with a cold expectancy. “What’s this all about?”

  Ginny said, “I’ve made a few contacts since I quit that stinking school. I got a good source now. I can take care of you every time you want it. You can start taking care of your end of the deal right now.”

  “How?”

  “There’s a room right down the hall. There’s a guy in the room. A friend of a friend. I described you. He paid for you, honey. He paid me. All you got to do is go down there and be nice to him. When you get back, the fix will be waiting.”

  Teena felt something shrinking inside her. “Somebody … I don’t know.”

  “Are you thinking you’re better than me?”

  “No, Ginny. No, but …”

  “What difference does it make? He’s a nice guy. Room Thirty-eight, Teena.”

  “I … can’t.”

  Ginny crossed close in front of her, so close that her leg brushed Teena’s. Ginny opened the top bureau drawer. She flipped open the little box and held it out. “All yours when you get back, honey.”

  Teena hugged herself. She felt cold. “I … I can’t.”

  “It’s just the first time that’s tough, Teena,” Ginny said gently. “I got contacts. It’s safe here. You ought to be able to take care of your habit with no more than four or five … dates a week.”

  “Remember I get a fix out of this too,” Fitz said worriedly.

  Tenna looked at him. He was looking intently at Ginny, his mouth tight. “Because you roped her?” Ginny said. “You won’t free-ride forever. And you got a bigger habit.”

  “So far,” Bucky said softly.

  “Shut up,” Ginny said. “I’m running this.” She looked at her watch. “You better get down there, kid.”

  “Give me the fix first. Then I’ll do it.”

  “He specified no zombie, kid. You get it later.”

  They all kept looking at her. She got up slowly. She felt as though she would break if she moved too quickly. She made herself think of how it would be, afterward. She made herself think of flame, spoon, and needle, and the wonderful tenseness of the last few seconds of waiting. She half heard Fitz’s sigh of relief. She went out into the hall. “That way,” Ginny said, pointing. “Thirty-eight.”

  She moved down the hall, feeling as if she were moving in a dream. The doorknob of Room 38 felt chill in her hand. She turned the knob and pushed the door slowly open. It was a room like Ginny’s. A heavy man sat on the bed. He had a bald head. He had small dark eyes. He held a cigarette mashed between thumb and middle finger. He looked sharply at her, grinned, snapped his cigarette against the wall, and, standing up, said, “Come on in and close the door, honey.”

  Teena turned and ran, instinctively yanking the door shut in his face as she turned. She fled down the hall. She heard a harsh yell as she got to the head of the stairs. She went down the first flight so fast that she came up against the wall at the landing, stinging her hands. She was crying with fright so that she could barely see. She heard Ginny call her angrily, shrilly. She pushed open the heavy fire door that opened into the bright June afternoon. She ran down the alley and turned toward the railroad station. She sobbed aloud as she ran, and after she became aware of people stopping to stare at her, she slowed to a fast walk, and kept her face turned away from those she met. She looked back and thought she could see Fitz standing way back on the sidewalk.

  When she reached home she went softly up the stairs to her second-floor room and shut the door. She lay on her bed. Every time she shut her eyes she could see him, see his grossness, see the bald head with the gleam of sweat.

  And then her mind slid uneasily back to the look of the box Ginny had held out. And the crawling wanting began again, worse than before. She rolled her head from side to side. She held her fists hard against her forehead.

  There was the box and the slick, sweet needle gleam, and the teaspoon, caked and blackened with delight, and the waxy stub of candle. She could have pretended the other thing was happening to someone else. Such a little unimportant thing to do to acquire something that would deliciously end the crawling want, the itching, the grainy eyes.

  She heard Jana’s warm mellow voice. “Telephone, Teena! You up there, Teena? Teena!”

  Teena held her forearm across her mouth and bit it, making a pain she could barely stand. Jana stopped calling. Teena looked at the deep white notches in her arm that began slowly to turn red. She doubled her fist and hit her thigh as hard as she could. The pain knotted her muscles, cramped her leg. She wondered if they would give Fitz a fix anyway. Probably not. He’d be half wild by now. Suddenly she remembered the single stick she had hidden in her jewelry box. She had not wanted it before, wanting only the sick sweet swoop of the way the needle would hit, the way Bucky had fixed her in the vein the last time, drawing blood back up the needle and hitting her hard again.

  Her hands shook and she had a terrible moment when she thought it was gone. Then her fingers touched the dryness. As she lifted it out, some of the contents spilled. She made a little paper scoop and took a deep breath and made her hands stop shaking long enough to pick up every shred and work them all back into the coarse paper tube. She lay on the bed and took the match and lit it and held it a moment and then touched the paper. She breathed as fast and hard and deep as she could, never taking the cigarette from her lips. The red line of burning climbed steadily up toward her lips. She kept it up until she had to pinch one tiny corner of the very end, until the last deep drag stung her lips.

  She had been afraid of the distinctive smell of it in the house. But this was an emergency. She got up and disposed of the tiny butt that was burning her fingertips. She opened the windows wider, went back to the bed. It was, she thought, like being given spun-sugar candy when you wanted a steak. Like being hit with a handful of feathers when you wanted a sledge hammer swung hard against your heart.

  The twisting need for the delayed fix roiled slowly under the surface easement of the stick, but it was a bit farther away. It was just far enough away to keep her from getting up and going back to the man in the room. It was just far enough away so that she was able, after a time, to trip and fall headlong into an exhausted sleep.

  Six

  RICK STUSSEN, the big fat blond butcher, thought of himself as an amiable man who, through no fault of his own, had got into a mess that seemed destined to get steadily worse until, finally, the whole world was going to blow up in his face. He spent a lot of time thinking about it. He would sit in his small back room on the ground floor of the Varaki house and he would tell himself that he would think his way out of this jam. And each time his thoughts would veer off into the past, and he would wonder how on earth this could possibly have happened to him. And sometimes he would cry. At such times the sheaf of bills hidden behind the loose section of baseboard was no comfort.

  He was forty and he didn’t know where the years had gone. He had come into the store when he was sixteen, when Walter had been a little kid, toddling around and getting into things. At sixteen, as now, he had been big around and blond, with rather small pink
hands. He’d lived up on the third floor then, because the store took up most of the downstairs. Those had been the good years. From sixteen until the war came.

  It had made him a part of something. And before that he had been a part of nothing. A part of gray yards where it always seemed to rain, and you were always lining up for something, and the sisters rustled when they walked. You cried when you were hurt, so the others were always finding new ways to hurt you.

  Coming to be a part of the Varaki family was different. It was being a part of something. You could get out when you were sixteen if you had a job.

  The bad years came right after he went to work, a year or two later. That was when Gus almost lost the store, and there was just Gus and Mom and him to handle everything.

  It was good to be a part of everything and work hard and watch the kids growing up, Walter and Henry. Teena didn’t come along until later. He always got along fine with the kids. Helping out. Staying with them when they were small and Gus and Mom wanted to go out.

  He hadn’t wanted it all to change. And that was the funny thing. People were always pushing on you, trying to push you out of the one place you’d found where everything was warm and soft and safe, and there wasn’t any hurting.

  The only hard thing had been getting used to the people in the store, coming in to buy. Gus had kept after him until he learned how you had to do it. Keep smiling and talk loud, and say something about the weather and try to remember their names. It wasn’t too hard after you got onto it. It made you feel like you were hiding. You were hiding behind a big smile and a loud voice. He remembered the first few times he had been alone in the bathroom and happened to look in the mirror and see that big smile there, without even thinking about it.

  It was Mom who kept pushing at him. “You got to get a girl, Rick. You got to go out. You got to get a girl and get a family.”

  “Sometime,” he would say, smiling. “Sure. Sometime.”

  She had kept it up until he thought maybe it was the thing to do. She was a neighborhood girl. She was the only one he sort of liked the looks of, because she had a thin clean look. He remembered how hot his face got when he asked her for a date. They went out about six times. He didn’t touch her. She seemed to like him. They laughed and smiled and joked around. And the Varakis kidded him about her. It was the sixth time they went out. The last time. He took her up on the porch and he was going to talk about the movie. She reached up and caught his shoulders and pasted her mouth hard on his, shoving herself against him. He flung himself wildly away from her so that they both nearly fell. She stood and didn’t say anything. The hall light shone from behind her. She looked at him and then she went inside. She and her whole family stopped trading at the store. He couldn’t tell Gus and Mom what had happened. It kind of scared him and made him half sick at the same time. Like the way he had scared himself a long time ago, back in that place. One of the sisters slapped him hard and he had to wear those bright red gloves for punishment for two days, even at meals. The mouth of the girl was somehow mixed up with the shame and the red gloves. So after a while they stopped talking about any girls.

  He was drafted when he was thirty and sent to Fort Devon, where he spent two and a half years cutting meat in demonstration classes. It wasn’t as bad as that place, but almost as bad. He made sergeant and got a room to himself, which helped some. He kept and used the smile and the laugh and the big voice. It would have helped if he had known that long ago. He didn’t make any friends. He wrote Gus and Mom and the kids once a week. Teena was about seven then, Henry was twelve, Walter about sixteen.

  Somehow it was all different when he got back. It had never been the same again. Somehow, in the two and a half years, he’d lost some important thing that had been there before the war. Something was barely out of his reach. The work was the same. He was a good butcher, and he knew it. Better, even, than Gus. The house was the same. They were all just farther away from him. He would sit with them in the small upstairs living room and feel closed out as he sat and smiled and nodded at things they said. It made him feel funny and he’d go up to bed, or go out and just walk. He wondered if the Army had made him restless or something. Like in that lecture they gave you when they discharged you.

  He walked a lot and he was alone a lot. He had never been able to get any pleasure out of reading. So when he wasn’t walking, working, sleeping, or eating, he would sit in his room.

  There was a lot of work when the new store was built. It was as though building the new store had made things start to happen. Start to happen too fast. Mom got sick and died. Then that Vern Lockter came and took the delivery job. Walter quit his post-office job and came back with Doris, who never smiled back when he smiled at her. And he could hear them fighting a lot. Henry went in the Army. Anna, who never talked, came to cook and clean. Gus married Jana. Henry’s wife came to stay. Henry got killed. Things were happening too fast and he wanted to hold out his hands and stop them.

  But the bad trouble, the nightmare trouble, started after Vern Lockter came to work. At first it seemed fine. It seemed as though he was really going to have a friend, someone to talk to, the way Vern kept coming to his room and talking to him. He didn’t seem like the kind of young fellow they’d put in jail. Vern would come and sit around in his room and make a lot of jokes. Rick couldn’t understand all of them, but he always laughed anyway. And Vern used a lot of words Rick had never heard before. It was funny the way, at first, he had felt as though Vern was just a young fellow, and the way it sort of changed so that, unless he stopped and thought, it was like Vern was older. He told Vern a lot about himself. He told him about how it was in that place, long ago. And how it was before the war. And about his job in the war and all. He talked about how they used to hurt him back in that place. He started telling Vern how it was with the girl, but Vern started looking at him so sort of funny that he tried to make a joke out of it.

  He couldn’t remember exactly how he started going around to places with Vern. Vern had a lot of friends, all right. Vern taught him a lot of things. How to bowl and all. Then there was that place they started going, playing the five and ten poker game. Once he caught on to the game, he liked it. He liked spreading the cards real slow so that they came into view one by one.

  It was all a lot better than before Vern came. He still couldn’t see why Vern hadn’t warned him that night about the game. It was in a new place. Vern had said he felt lucky and they went to the new place for poker. It was fixed up nice, with green on the table and chips that felt good. There were four men playing. They didn’t say much. They looked important. Vern said it was a private club.

  One of the men said, “Twenty-five and fifty all right for you gentlemen?”

  Vern took Rick Stussen’s arm and led him aside. “Think you can stand that?”

  “Sure. Sure, I can stand it, Vern.”

  “Be lucky, then, big boy.”

  It was a real quiet game. The man who had spoken was banker. He handed Rick and Vern each a stack of chips. Rick reached for his money, but the man said, “We’ll settle later, Mr. Stussen.”

  “Sure,” Rick said, smiling. “Sure thing.”

  Rick was worried about the stakes, but when he took the first pot with a king-high flush, he began to feel more expansive. He won another pot, and then there was a long spell of poor hands and his chips melted away. When he was way down, the banker handed him two more stacks, one of reds and one of blues, and marked the paper again.

  He saw that Vern would lose and then win. All the men played intently. Rick’s second batch of chips melted slowly away, with the temporary respite of only one small pot. The man gave him a third batch, and Rick said, with nervous apology, “My luck keeps up like this, I better make this the last batch.” He figured that at twenty dollars for each batch of chips, a sixty-dollar evening was pretty expensive.

  “Maybe you ought to quit now,” Vern said, looking worried.

  “Maybe Mr. Stussen’s luck will change,” said the bank
er. He was a small man with a red face and fluffy white hair. There were purple veins in his cheeks and on his nose.

  “I’ll try one more batch,” Rick said.

  And the last batch began, dismally, to melt away, eaten up by the antes, lost in the purchase of cards that didn’t help a pair.

  When there were only a few chips left in front of him, the man on Rick’s left dealt. He dealt very swiftly. Rick picked up his cards and spread them slowly. Ace, three, Ace, Ace. His throat felt tight. He slowly spread the last card until he could see the denomination. Ace. Give me some play on the hand, he said to himself. Give me some play on the hand.

  The man on the dealer’s left opened. Vern, the next player, stayed. The next man folded. The banker stayed. Rick said, “Just for luck I got to nudge that a little.” He tossed out two blue chips.

  The opener said softly, “I’m proud too. Back at you.”

  “I thought I opened this pot,” the next man said. “Let’s freeze out the ribbon clerks.” He raised.

  Vern tossed his hand in and said, disgustedly, “That makes me a ribbon clerk.” The next two men stayed.

  Rick said, “I better have another batch, please.”

  The man handed the chips over, marked the paper.

  Rick said, “I’ll try it again.”

  The dealer didn’t raise again. He groaned and stayed. The opener raised again.

  The man to the left of Vern who had folded earlier said, “Too rich for my blood, gentlemen.”

  The banker stayed and Rick, gloating inwardly, raised again. It was the last raise permitted him. The opener had one more raise coming. He used it. The banker stayed in and Rick stayed in. There were four of them left in. The dealer, the opener, the banker, and Rick.

  “Cards, gentlemen?” the dealer said.