by Orrie Hitt
“He said he had a letter from somebody — about you. He wouldn’t say who wrote to him, but — ”
“The stinking little bitch!”
“Johnny!”
It wasn’t enough that she’d nicked me for six grand, she had to keep right on short-circuiting everything I tried to do.
“Give me the rest of it, baby! All of it!”
“That’s all — what more could there be? He’s going to have auditors in — oh, it’s awful! Just awful!”
“Yeah.”
I wished that I was back in the box factory, hammering boards and yelling at the hump-backed foreman. I wished that I was almost any place except where I was.
“I didn’t quite believe him, Johnny. I stopped down to his office this afternoon. They all hate you down there.”
“Sure. They’re jealous. They think I spend all my time sitting in some bar. They stink.”
“They know about that thing over in Waymart, Johnny. And they wonder.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s dishonest, Johnny. Dishonest.”
“To hell with them!”
She moved away from the window and across the room. She still held her head high and proud but her shoulders pulled down like they had heavy weights on them.
“You don’t love me, do you?”
She had all the words there this time. I could feel them rolling up and choking in her throat and burning her mouth. Her eyes were dry and glistening at the same time. I thought about her father and three weeks and I thought a lot about what she’d just told me. Somehow, I knew that she had to know and I had to tell her.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Thanks for being honest about that, at least,” she said, her voice half a whisper.
“Okay.”
“You don’t feel anything, do you?”
I shrugged.
“You just think it’s finished?”
“I guess that’s the way it is.”
“Well, guess again, Johnny.”
“You name it.”
She came toward me slowly. She didn’t seem to be crying but there were tears rolling down her cheeks. Her breasts were full and pulsing and I could see the gentle roll of her swollen stomach.
“Don’t worry,” she said, whacking me across the face, “I’ll name it.”
I rubbed the spot where her fingers had struck. I knew that she had cut me with one of her fingernails because I could feel the blood, soft and warm and sticky.
“You’re going to stay married to me, Johnny Reagan. Don’t ever think you’re going to walk out and leave me high up on a stump.”
“Now you’re talking like a slut.”
“You taught me,” she said and let me have it again, but not so hard this time. “And you’re going to teach me something else, too. You’re going to teach me that you’ve got some guts and that you can live with someone you don’t even like. You’re going to live with me and support me, Johnny, for a long while. You’re going to give our kid a name and watch him grow up — even if it kills you.”
I didn’t say anything. She was right. I’d used her — or thought I had — and now I didn’t want her any more. She had every good reason to be plenty sore. Only she wasn’t very smart. She didn’t know me. I wasn’t buying anything I didn’t need.
“We’re going to get an apartment,” she said acidly. “And you’re going to live in it with me. If you don’t, you’ll not only have trouble with dad at the office when he gets back but I’ll also have charges filed against you for rape.”
“What!”
“You heard me, Johnny dear. Rape. It’s a nasty word and they’ll never believe it. But I’ll drive you down in the gutter so far you’ll never crawl out.”
I could see her, then, this wife I had married. She was rich and I was poor but we had one thing in common. Neither one of us wanted to lose anything. But one of us would. Plenty.
“I believe you would,” I told her.
“Try me!” she taunted.
I needed three weeks, maybe four, and it would all be over. One way or another it would end. Either Connors would move fast enough to clip me for borrowing some of his dough or I’d be sitting in a spot where I could throw a harpoon and catch Cynthia Noxon in a very sensitive area. I needed those three weeks and I had to buy them at any price.
I got my wife in my arms and started paying, the price.
She yelled a little at first and she told me not to but after a while she didn’t fight so hard. I kissed her and she kissed me back and she kept whispering in my ear how sorry she was she’d been so rotten.
“Kiss me again, baby,” I said and turned out the light.
“I’m too heavy to carry,” she said.
“I’m a big boy, honey.”
I carried her all the way upstairs and into the bedroom. We stood by the bed and I helped her undress. Her lips were hot against my neck and her hands wouldn’t leave me alone.
“Men are so lucky,” she said.
“I don’t know why.”
“I’ll show you why,” she whispered.
And then we were together on the bed, two twisted bodies offering each other nothing except the pleasures of the flesh.
Maybe it didn’t even amount to that.
CHAPTER XIX
Jingle Bells
HIS NAME was Goldstein and he had a junky little store down on William Street. He’d been there for thirty years, selling anything he could get his hands on, and the place was littered with the stuff he hadn’t been able to sell.
“I don’t know why you don’t set fire to it and jump out the door,” I said, laughing.
That’s another thing you learn in the insurance business — some people you can kid with, putting them at ease, and others have to be played straight and stiff. This Goldstein was one of those who could be kidded into a corner. He had a kind, round face and bent shoulders. For all of his business years his gray eyes were innocent and steady.
“Sometimes I feel like it,” he admitted, absently pawing through a tin box filled with rusty bolts and nuts and screws. “Honest, I must have a million bolts around here some place that’ll fit that door knob, but I’ve looked every day for a week and I haven’t been able to find one yet.”
“Maybe you should buy a new lock,” I said.
“That’s an idea. I’ve got some locks around here, too.”
I’d had him figured at the proper angle, all right. Around sixty, easy going and as tight as the skin on a hundred dollar bill. The estate notice in the paper had said that he was inheriting around fifteen thousand from a sister and it had struck me good right off. Only I wasn’t after the whole fifteen — just part of it. And part meant half.
“It’s tough to invest a dollar these days and make a buck,” I told him. “All you do is sharecrop with the government.”
He grunted and played with the nuts and bolts some more. The way he had his head turned sideways I could tell that he was thinking. I’d been in there talking to him about twenty minutes and he knew who I was. I hadn’t said anything about the inheritance, only pointed out that he was a businessman and that he might be considering an outside investment.
“I wish I knew who sent you,” he said after a bit.
“Well, I couldn’t do that, Mr. Goldstein. As I said, a mutual friend suggested that I stop around. Maybe you’ve told him something about your plans and maybe you haven’t. In any case, he wouldn’t want you to feel that he in any way is betraying a confidence. You know how it is.”
He nodded and pushed the bolts aside. He took out a handkerchief, wiped off his hands and put on a pair of five-and-dime glasses.
“It’s got to be a good investment,” he said. “You’ve got to show me.”
“Glad to.”
I didn’t have a rate book with me and I didn’t take the trouble to ask him his age. A life annuity with an insurance company, if properly presented and explained, looks about as attractive to an active businessman as a woman without her teeth. I j
ust got out paper and pencil, wrote down seven thousand five hundred dollars and told him he could get a hundred bucks a month for life. I gave it to him fast and short so he could get it real clear.
“A lot more than the building and loans,” he said presently, studying the figures.
“A lot more than anybody.”
Hell, I wasn’t kidding him.
“And you get it every month?”
“Sure.”
“For how long?”
“Till the day you die.”
“And — after that?”
“What’s left, plus interest, goes to anybody you might name.”
“Hm,” he said, thinking about it some more and, “Hm,” again. Then he looked me straight in the eye and asked, “How do I know this is on the level? It sounds so good — ”
“Are you familiar with the Connors Insurance Agency, Mr. Goldstein?”
“Why, yes, I guess so. They’re downtown, aren’t they?”
“Over the building and loan.”
“Yes, I know about them. Big outfit.”
“Well, I’m the manager down there.”
“Oh?”
“Here’s my card. If you want, why don’t you call them and ask?”
It would be perfectly all right if he called because they’d just tell him who I was and let it go at that. Maybe nobody down there thought I was God’s gift to the insurance world, but they wouldn’t do anything to hurt the business.
“Oh, well,” he said, “what would you lie about it for?”
He was asking me.
“Suit yourself,” I told him. “I’ve told you what it is and what you can do. Maybe you don’t have the money. That’s not my business. All I do is tell you what we have and you can make up your own mind.”
He pulled the tin box over in front of him again but I knew that he wasn’t looking at the bolts and nuts and screws. He was picking them up and dropping them like they were fat five dollar bills. I could see by the twist of his mouth that I had him dancing on the end of a string.
“When would I get my first check?”
“A week from today.”
“As soon as that?”
“Sure.”
“And it’s a hundred dollars a month? Every month?”
“Right! No vacations for us.”
“For as long as I live?”
“Even if you last to a hundred and fifty.”
We talked some more about it and I kept on building him up to a point where he could hardly see straight. He said something about the door being left unlocked when we went out but I told him I’d drive him down to the bank, and back, and that we wouldn’t be gone long. We weren’t. He drew the money out of his account in a matter of minutes and I made par for the course getting it away from him. A half hour later I let him off in front of his shop and he thanked me for having stopped around. I thanked him and got out of there.
I’d given him a receipt and he’d favored me with seventy-five hundred bucks.
I guess both of us were happy.
On the way across town I stopped in at the Pig and Whistle and hoisted a couple of fast ones. Outside it had started to snow again and the juke box over in the corner kept playing “White Christmas.”
Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!
I had a couple more just for the hell of it. An elderly woman came through, collecting for the Salvation Army. I gave her a buck and told her to keep her hand out of the kettle. She told me to go to hell and tossed the dollar on the bar. I pushed it toward the bartender and kept on drinking.
The damn world was growing up fast. I had over seven thousand in my pocket and a couple of rabbits by the neck. One of the rabbits was Connors and the other was Cynthia Noxon. Connors could go crawl into his hole. With Cynthia, I might even follow her into the nest.
“Got your Christmas shopping done?” the bartender wanted to know.
“Yeah.”
“Stuff’s high as hell, ain’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I didn’t buy anything.”
He went down the bar and started talking to somebody else. I guess he thought I was drunk. I wasn’t. I was thinking so much I didn’t have time to get a load on.
Christmas presents? Who the hell could I make happy under the Christmas tree? Beverly? We were still living together, up there in her old man’s house, but we weren’t working at it any more. The morning after the night we’d had the big row she’d blown her whistle again. She called me an animal and a couple of other things you only learn by reading Freud in a dark corner. I made up my mind she had some sort of a sex complex, like sex guilt or something similar, and I’d gone in for sleeping alone.
To hell with her.
Merry Christmas!
Maybe I should get a present for Janet. Yeah, that would be a scorcher. I’d get a gun, or a rope, and I’d put a great big card on it. One edged in black. And I’d write something on the card, like “Baby, swing yourself over a limb in a high wind,” or “Give yourself another hole in the head.” I laughed and the bartender’s look didn’t bother me a bit. Where the hell would I send her present? The little bitch was running with my dough — running light and free while I sat in a bar knocking my brains out.
And, then, I began to get just a little drunk.
I kept thinking about the hotel, where we’d met, and of that first night when she’d cried and became a woman. And, later, when we had an apartment and she’d ask me if we were going to get married. Stuff like that. And when she’d left me, wanting to forget, saying it was the right thing to do. The chills she used to give me when she thought she was pregnant and the end of it there in the hospital, without any money, waiting for me to pay the bill. Then, after that, the job she’d done for me at Waymart, looking sharp all the time and plenty distant, only to stab me at the earliest chance. Damn her!
“Another,” I told the bartender. “Keep ‘em running.”
“Okay.”
Sure, I’d send her a card. I’d write her a poem about how she looked that morning in my office, her clothes half ripped off, six thousand bucks richer because she’d thrown a hoop over my bank account.
“Fill it up.”
“Take it easy, Mac.”
“I am.”
So she was gone and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t go to the cops and say they had to do something because she’d stolen some money from me that I’d stolen from somebody else. I couldn’t do a damn thing about it except shut my mouth and hate her.
Merry Christmas!
Skoal, you drunken bum.
Maybe I should get a present for Julie — Julie, who hopped tables and who still lived on Clarke Street. Julie, with a bastard kid and the principle of a choir singer. Julie, who put a price on everything a few years late. Julie, the girl I had to leave alone.
“One for the road, mister.”
“Okay, Mac.”
One for the road and one for the woman I loved. Why couldn’t it have been different? Physically I was years away from Clarke Street, yet mentally I still sat right in the middle of it. Scheming. Ducking. Hoping. It was no different than lifting stuff off the five-and-ten counters or swiping fruit from the corner stand — except that the stakes were bigger, the profits bigger, the worries bigger.
“Another, Mister.”
“You sure as hell ain’t gonna make that road, Mac.”
“Who’s apt to move it?”
“I dunno, but it won’t be where you left it.”
“This one’s on Goldstein,” I said.
He looked at the empty stools on either side of me.
“That the friend with you, Mac?”
“Sure.”
He was still looking at the stools when the redhead came in and sat down on my right. She’d already hung up her coat and I got a pretty good look at her. Without the paint her face would have busted the mirror back of the bar, but the rest of her was all woman. She smiled and put up the for-sale sign. She smiled again. Cheap.
I had the drink on Goldstein.
Merry Christmas, sucker.
Only he wasn’t a sucker. Nothing was going to happen to his money. I’d use it for a while, maybe six or eight weeks, and then I’d take it back to him. I’d tell him that the company called the deal off, but the two payments he’d already received he could consider a bonus. It wouldn’t take me longer than that, no more than two months. With this seventy-five hundred plus the earnings of my office in Waymart I could put everything square with Connors. Twelve thousand! Brother, that was a lot of money. But it could be done. The old boy might know something had happened but he’d never know what it was.
“To Goldy,” I stated and rolled another one down.
Two months left of running dead ahead on a one way track. Then Goldstein would have his money in his pocket and I’d be clean. That ought to be about the time Cynthia Noxon would start crying that she was starving to death on lapses. Maybe I’d be able to sell her my agency in Waymart — sell her what she had stolen from me.
“This is the last one,” I told the bartender. “And fix one for Red.”
Yeah, I’d sell to Cynthia Noxon all right. For money. And something else. Something that ought to be strictly in her class.
“Thanks, mister.”
“Okay, Red.”
“How’d you know my name?”
I cocked my head and looked at her. Those lips were full and crimson and her eyes were as wild as the night. The lights from the back bar lit up her hair like a rocket.
She got up and moved her stool closer. When she sat down again she put one knee right up against my thigh and left it there.
“Lonesome, honey?”
“What do you think?”
Her left hand slid down and touched my leg. With her right hand she lifted her glass and drank, her stare never moving away from my face.
“It’s almost Christmas,” she said.
I grinned and spun a half dollar on the bar.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells — ”
“Shut up!” she said. “I’m going to cry.”
I stopped singing so she didn’t bother to cry. She finished her drink. Her hand kept moving around on my leg.
“I’ve got to run up to the place and see how my mother is,” she whispered. “Want to come along?”