The Kind One

by Tom Epperson

  “You know, Darla—I’m not a killer.”

  “Yes you are. You just don’t remember. And I’ll bet it’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget how.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m trying to say…I wouldn’t ask you to do it just for me. You’d be doing it for yourself too. You’re his prisoner too. Anybody that gets close to him becomes his prisoner.” Now she turned over, and looked at me. She moved some hair away from my forehead, and her fingers brushed over the dent in my skull; it seemed like such an intimate thing, as if she were touching my private parts. “And then you and me—we could go away together.”

  “Go away where?”

  “Wherever you want.” She was wearing her charm bracelet, and now she fingered the crescent moon. “How about the moon? Everything would be very clear and bright and clean and glowing. And nobody would ever bother us.”

  I could tell the vodka and Veronal were like a giant wave washing over her. Her eyes were becoming all dim and dreamy. She turned away from me, and snuggled up to the lamb.

  “Life’s so funny,” she whispered to the lamb, and then, as her eyes closed: “Nobody’s ever loved me like Mr. Bruff.”

  Chapter 15

  THAT NIGHT I was unpeeling one of the extraordinarily tasty oranges I’d plucked from the dwarf orange trees in the courtyard, when I heard from outside: “No, Jerry! Please!”

  It was Sophie’s voice. I went to the door.

  Sophie and Jerry were on the sidewalk in front of Sophie’s bungalow. Jerry was bending over something, and Sophie was yelling: “I’m sorry! Honest I am! Don’t do it, Jerry!”

  Then Sophie’s trampish mother Lois came out the door, wearing only a full slip which her big sloppy breasts were in danger of spilling out of. “Go ahead, Jerry!” she slurred, obviously loaded. “Do it! Show the little bitch who’s boss!”

  I headed out the door and across the courtyard. To my left I saw Dulwich, wearing his many-colored silk smoking jacket and tasseled slippers, going in the same direction. Sophie was still yelling and she was pulling at Jerry’s elbow and now I could see what he was up to: he was squirting a can of lighter fluid over Sophie’s tap-dance shoes.

  “Don’t do it, old man!” said Dulwich, but Jerry already had his lighter out and now the red shoes went up in a whoosh of blue flame.

  Sophie screamed.

  Lois slapped her face and said: “Shut up!”

  “Leave her alone, you bitch!” I yelled.

  “I’ll ask you to mind your tongue, Danny, especially where Lois is concerned,” said Jerry haughtily; he was wearing pin-striped gray trousers and a stained undershirt. “This here is none of your affair. Nor yours neither, Mr. Dulwich, with all due respect. It’s a family matter. Sophie is being punished because she was a bad girl.”

  “The filthy names she called us,” said Lois. “I don’t know where she ever learned such language.”

  “From you, you cunt!” said Sophie.

  “Now that’s enough!” said Jerry as he roughly seized her upper arm.

  Sophie tried to jerk and twist out of his grasp. “Let go of me, you ugly ape! You’re not my father! You’re just some bum that lives off my mother!”

  “You’re gonna pay for that, Sophie!” said Jerry and now he started to drag her inside.

  Dulwich stepped over the burning shoes and dispatched an elegant left cross into Jerry’s ribcage and then a whistling right cross into Jerry’s jaw right below his ear. His head snapped sideways and his knees buckled and he fell on his butt.

  Dulwich stood over him, rubbing his knuckles and waiting for him to get up. Jerry massaged his jaw and gave Dulwich a look of bleary reproach.

  “I’m surprised at you, Mr. Dulwich. I thought you was a gentleman.”

  “Assuming for the nonce that I am a gentleman, my only regret is to have sullied my knuckles with a man like you.”

  Sophie took the opportunity to dart inside and slam the door. Her mother was right behind her; she rattled the doorknob futilely.

  “She locked us out, the little brat!” She began to pound on the door and shout: “Sophie, open the door! Sophie! Unlock the door now!”

  Some of our neighbors had drifted out of their bungalows and were watching from a safe distance. Now Mrs. Dean came charging toward us, her pinched face furious and the dying flames from the tap-dancing shoes flashing in her glasses.

  “Good gracious heavens alive! What on earth is going on here?!” She was wearing a ratty sky-blue quilted housecoat over a pink nightgown. “This is the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court, not some slum!”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Dean,” said Lois, who seemed to be sobering up fast. “It was just a little family spat. Sophie locked us out.”

  Jerry climbed back to his feet, and stuck his hand in his pocket. “I’ve got a key.”

  “Oh, that’s swell, sugar.” Lois took the key and unlocked the door. “Sorry again, Mrs. Dean. We won’t be any more trouble.”

  “Well, you better not be. This is a respectable place, Lois. You’re practically naked. I’ll call the police if I have to.”

  Lois and Jerry headed inside.

  “Jerry?” I said. “Keep your hands off Sophie.”

  Jerry stopped and looked back at me. “I know who you are, Danny. I know you’re supposed to be some kinda hooligan or gangster. But you don’t scare me none, Danny. I grew up in a pretty tough neighborhood. I can take care of myself.”

  “Keep your hands off her,” I said, my voice rising, “or I’ll tie you to a slot machine and throw you in the ocean!”

  His attempt at a defiant sneer collapsed into a grimace of panic. He and Lois hurried inside and shut the door.

  Mrs. Dean looked down at the charred, smoking remains of Sophie’s shoes, and sadly shook her head.

  “Look at the burn marks on the sidewalk! Well, I’ll get Matilda over here to clean it up. Matilda can clean up anything.”

  “You’re pretty good,” I said. “With the fists.”

  Dulwich looked pleased. “Well, I did do a bit of boxing in my youth.”

  I was sipping scotch, while Dulwich was puffing on his opium pipe; now he looked at the photograph of Aubrey Joyce.

  “Aubrey and I were actually the best boxers in our school. I could never beat Aubrey, however. I think it may have been because his features were so beautiful I would unconsciously hold back a little for fear of marring them. He obviously had no such compunctions in regards to me. He probably felt that any rearrangement of my features could only be for the better.”

  I laughed, and Dulwich grinned. His cat was on his lap; he scratched her head, and peered at her as if he’d never quite seen her before.

  “What’s it like to be Tinker, Tinker?”

  “The day we gave the shoes to her? Something happened. With her and me, I mean.”

  Dulwich looked at me, and waited for me to go on.

  “She came over later, and she was—very affectionate, I guess you could say. And then she put her hand on my crotch.”

  He took the pipe out of his mouth. “You don’t say.”

  “So naturally I was pretty shocked. She told me she thought that’s what I wanted; then I guess her feelings were hurt and she ran away. I haven’t talked to her since.”

  Dulwich looked gloomy. “I wonder where she picked up that little trick.”

  “Jerry?”

  “Perhaps. But there have been any number of Jerrys. Who knows what sorts of lascivious doings she’s been exposed to?”

  “What can we do about it?”

  “I’m not sure there’s anything we can do, Danny. Beyond being her friend.” He smiled. “And making bloodcurdling threats against Jerry. Did that business with the slot machine ever really happen?”

  “Yeah. To a guy named Sal Tagnoli.”

  “Were you there?”

  I shook my head. “I just heard about it,” then I added: “I just heard about everything that happened before about a year ago.”

  �
�What do you mean?”

  “I’ve found out I wasn’t here before a year ago. I didn’t get beat up in Ocean Park. I got beat up somewhere else. Probably New York. I was taken here on a train.”

  If Dulwich was surprised by any of this, he didn’t show it.

  “Taken by whom?”

  “Bud Seitz. I’m supposedly the son of an old friend of his or maybe even his nephew. My name’s probably not Danny Landon. I’m probably not a gangster. Bud just made up all that stuff about me sinking the ship and everything and told everybody else to go along with it.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “I don’t know. But the thing is, I’m kind of like Steve Harrison.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy in that story you read us. In Super Detective Stories.”

  “Oh yes. But how are you like him?”

  “I don’t really exist.”

  “Well, it’s clear you exist. Otherwise, to whom am I talking?”

  “I don’t know. That’s my point.”

  “How did you find out all this?”

  “A guy close to Bud told me. But I can’t tell you his name.”

  “Is his version of events to be trusted?”

  “I think so. But listen to this. I saw Darla today. She wants to get away from Bud, but thinks if she tries, Bud will kill her. So she wants me to kill him for her; then she says she’ll run away with me.”

  “My God.”

  “Of course she thinks it’s no big deal for me to kill somebody—that I’m this dangerous gangster that’s bumped off all these people in the past.”

  “Why don’t you tell her the truth?”

  “I thought about it. But what would it change? Darla would still want to escape from Bud, and she’d still think the only way to do that is for me to kill him. And I think she might be right.”

  “And you still fancy yourself in love with this girl.”

  I nodded. Dulwich gave me a keen look, as though he’d just figured out the solution to my problem. He leaned toward me, and tapped my knee.

  “I’d say you’re in a pickle, old boy. A definite pickle.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  Chapter 16

  I WAS WALKING with no destination in mind. The sun was going down, and the pavement was giving up the heat of the day. I went through an alley. Two tramps were squatting on their heels against a wall, sharing a bottle. They looked at me as I passed like they were thinking about knifing me and taking my wallet then spitting on my body as they walked away. Farther down the alley, amid a cluster of overflowing garbage cans, was the corpse of a dog. Flies were crawling around on a sore on its leg; now I recognized it as the forlorn beagle I’d given my ice cream cone to a couple of weeks ago.

  I found myself on Vine Street in front of Healy’s Bar; maybe this was where I’d been heading all along. Inside at their usual spots in front of the Custer massacre were George, Sonny, and Kid McCoy.

  “You arrived at an opportune moment,” said George. “The Kid is buying.”

  “He’s rolling in dough,” said Sonny. “Just filthy with it.”

  The Kid nodded with an air of solemn pride.

  “Congratulations, Kid,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Won a hunnerd fifty bucks in a Chinese lottery.”

  “Ain’t you heard?” mumbled an old man a few stools down; he was looking at us with eyes every bit as full of life as the boiled eggs floating in the jar on the bar.

  “Ain’t I heard what?” McCoy said.

  “They’re tearing down Chinatown! Getting rid of the Chinks! They’re running away like shithouse rats! High time, if you ask me. Polluting white women with their little yellow peckers. And I’ve heard they eat cats! Boil ’em alive like lobsters! No, I’ll be crying no tears for the poor Chinee.”

  “Oh, shut up, you old hooch-hister,” said the Kid. “Nobody asked you a goddamn thing. What are you drinking, Danny?”

  “Scotch. On the rocks.”

  “You heard him, Henry,” he said to the bartender. “Glad to see you ain’t still drinking that horse piss. That Russian crap. You get rid of that girl?”

  “Nah.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she purty?” asked Sonny.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Be you tee full,” sighed Sonny.

  “I was in love with a Jap girl once,” said George. “She was beautiful. Just like Danny’s girl. She was the daughter of my gardener. This was back when I had a big house on a hill in Echo Park, and I was still vice-president of the South Basin Oil Company. I told her I’d divorce my wife and marry her if she had eyelid surgery so she wouldn’t look like a Jap. She agreed to it. I found her a doctor and paid for the operation.”

  George stopped, like the story was over.

  “Well what the hell happened?” said McCoy.

  “Didn’t work. She still looked like a Jap. She ended up marrying a Jap. A fisherman. The last I heard, she was living on Terminal Island, eating raw fish and mending nets and raising a bunch of slanty-eyed Jap children.”

  “What ever happened to your wife?” I asked.

  “She took it pretty hard when we lost everything. I had to put her in the state insanitarium.”

  “She went insane?”

  “I’m afraid so. But she wasn’t alone. Did you know there’s twenty-nine private insanitariums in Southern California?” He gestured with the stem of his pipe as he talked. “Did you know that Los Angeles leads the nation in suicides, drug addiction, and bank robberies? People come here from all over to escape America, the nightmare of America. What they don’t understand is that Los Angeles is the most American city in the world. They bask in the sinister sunlight and peel their oranges and grow golden and die.”

  “Oranges!” snarled Sonny. “Mountains of fat, juicy oranges! They spray ’em with tar so can’t nobody eat ’em. Just to keep the dadblamed prices up when folks are sending their babies to bed hungry.”

  “Oh don’t start that shit again,” grumped Kid McCoy.

  “The Kid’s right,” said George. “I think the Fish Committee should investigate this bar for possible Communist activity.”

  “Well, I ain’t a Communist, but I’ll tell you what I am. I just joined up with a outfit called Mankind United. Pretty soon, everybody that wants one is gonna have a job, and it’s gonna pay at least 3000 bucks a year. And get this! Nobody’s gonna have to work morn four hours a day and four days a week!”

  “And how, pray tell,” said George, “is this economic miracle going to come to pass?”

  “Well, there’s this race of all-powerful midgets that live in the middle of the earth. They got metal heads, and they got ray machines that knock out people’s eyeballs a thousand miles away. We’re in contact with ’em, and they’re gonna help us out.”

  Kid McCoy began to laugh. He laughed so hard he started slapping the bar like he just couldn’t stand it.

  Sonny glared at him. “Yeah, Kid, you just go on and laugh. Let’s see if you’re still laughing one of these days when a ray machine knocks your fucking eyeballs out.”

  The Kid kept buying, and I circled down and down into a radiant whirlpool of cheap whiskey. Once I closed my eyes, and I saw a nurse dressed all in white with a lovely but cold face bending over me, and I could feel the vibrations of the train, and George said: “I got a new job.”

  I opened my eyes. “Yeah? Doing what?”

  “Selling oil leases. I even have an office. Not much of an office. I share it with some other fellows. Some real estate salesmen. Plus a fortune teller. And a mail-order faith healer. But it’s a start.”

  “Don’t give him any money, kid,” said the Kid. “Not a dime.”

  George looked hurt. “I wasn’t going to ask him for money. Did I ask you for any of your Chinese lottery winnings?”

  “No. ’Cause you knew I’d tell you to go fuck yourself.”

  “No, that’s not the reason. It was because I
knew you’d been hit in the head too many times to recognize a real opportunity when it came your way. In Santa Fe Springs the oil comes practically bubbling unbidden out of the ground. But no, I don’t want Danny’s money unless he’s in the mood to double it in no time. All I wanted was to share with Danny the fact I’ve put one tentative foot on the bottom rung of a shaky ladder that I trust will lead me back to the man I used to be. Before I became a desperate drunk living in a retired P.E. streetcar without power or indoor plumbing or faith or hope or love.”

  Sonny was looking at George with tears in his eyes. “You can do it, George. I know you can. If I had any money I’d give it to you. Ever red cent of it.”

  “I’m deeply touched. You’re a good man, Sonny.”

  “I’m deeply touched too,” said Sonny.

  He pulled a harmonica out of his pocket, blew a few experimental notes.

  “This here song is called ‘Run, Nigger, Run.’”

  He launched into a rollicking tune. The old man down the bar grinned and started clapping along.

  Custer, surrounded by howling red Indians and dying blue-coated soldiers, brandished his sword over his head. He was dressed in golden buckskins, and a long red scarf streamed from his neck. He didn’t look the least bit scared. Just defiant. In the foreground, one of his soldiers was getting his scalp peeled off by a terrifying Indian with a knife between his teeth.

  “What if somebody saw somebody kill somebody?” I said. “He didn’t have anything to do with the killing, but afterwards, he helped get rid of the body. Would he be guilty of a crime?”

  George and Kid McCoy were both staring at me. Finally George said: “I believe he would be guilty, yes. ‘Accessory to murder after the fact’—something of that nature.” Then he laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. “What’s the matter, Danny? You in some kind of trouble?”