The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  “O.K., Harry,” Hugo Cratz said.

  We drank and ate and between Hugo's Marine stories and my M.P. stories, we generally had a pretty good time. After supper, the Bee started to empty and Jo pulled up a chair and shared a beer with us at our table. I'd like to think that Hugo Cratz had an especially good time that evening. I'd like to think that between Jo and the beer and me he stopped thinking about his Cindy Ann—at least for awhile—and about the death that haunted his cramped apartment. He looked good, for what that's worth. Animated, ruddy. And he talked—talked for hours in a cheerful, spirited voice—about the past.

  Around eleven o'clock, while Jo tended the tables and the pianist tickled out a jaunty rendition of “St. Louis Blues,” Hugo leaned across the table and said, “I guess it's time.”

  I knew what he meant.

  “One thing, though,” he said. “I want you to know, whatever it is you got to say, I've had a real fine evening. And I thank you for it.

  “I've had a fine evening too, Hugo.”

  His thin mouth trembled a bit and he sighed.

  “If you want her back Hugo . . .” I didn't know quite how to say it, or maybe I just couldn't bring myself to hurt him that way. “If you want to maximize the possibilities ... you're going to have to do what I say.”

  “What're you building up to, Harry?”

  “Let's say the Jellicoes have hidden Cindy Ann away somewhere. Maybe they've got her making movies. Maybe they're hiring her out. I don't know exactly what the set-up is yet. That's the first thing I've got to find out.”

  “How you going to do that?” Hugo said.

  “I found out today that the Jellicoes may have her working in Newport. I've got some friends on that side of the river,” I told him. “One man, in particular, who knows just about every shady character in Kentucky. If the Jellicoes are running any kind of independent porno game or if they've got a stable of girls for sale, this friend will know about it.”

  “All right,” Hugo said. “I take it he ain't a friend in the strict sense of the word?”

  I laughed. “No. Just a contact I picked up over the years. Working with the D.A. and Pinkerton and so on.”

  “All right. What next?”

  “They've got Cindy Ann. That gives them the hole card as far as we're concerned.”

  “The whole deck,” Hugo said glumly.

  I shook my head. “Uh-uh. We've got the shoe box. That's the joker. From what I learned today, the Jellicoes don't want photographs like the ones you've got in circulation. Don't ask me why, because I don't know that yet. But, if I can convince them that those pictures of yours are valuable, maybe I can work a trade—what I know and what you know for Cindy Ann.”

  Hugo sipped meditatively at his beer. “When I was in the Corps they used to run us through a little exercise ‘bout once every other day. They'd station a machine gun up on a little rise. And this gun would spray live ammo across a field. And in this field there'd be rocks and logs and mud and standing water. And what we was supposed to do was crawl across it whilst this machine gun was firing over our fannies. It took a real nice sense of judgment to know when to lift up and when to duck down. Too high and you'd get your britches blown off. Too low and you'd just get stuck there whilst the rest of your buddies crawled on by. Strikes me that what you're proposing is a little like that exercise. You aim to convince the Jellicoes that those photographs are valuable. Strikes me that value can mean different things to different folks. You make 'em seem too valuable and that tree of Laurie's is likely to topple over on you. You make 'em seem not valuable enough and they're just likely to brush you off like a fly.”

  I smiled at him. “You should've been a detective, Hugo.”

  “I'd have been a good one.”

  “Yep.”

  “So where do I fit into this scheme of yours?”

  I took a swallow of beer and said, “You don't.”

  At first, he didn't say anything at all Just stared off into space—cogitating, digesting it. After a second he turned in the booth seat and looked me in the eye. “I want you to tell me the truth. If you want me out of the way ‘cause I'd just be in it every other second, that's one thing. If you're trying to get rid of me ‘cause you're worried about something happening to me, that's another. Now, which is it?”

  “I work alone, Hugo. That's what I get paid for. I'm not saying that you're less of a man than I am or that you can't take care of yourself. But, with the stakes so high, I do it my way or I don't do it at all. And my way means you clear out. You go off to Dayton and visit your son.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until I need you to come back.”

  Hugo took a deep breath. “All right, Harry. I'll leave tomorrow.”

  “Good,” I said. “And no tricks, Hugo.”

  “Why, Harry!” he said. “Whatever made you say a thing like that?”

  We had another round of beers. Hugo seemed too damn cheerful, and I began to wonder just how seriously he'd taken my point. Around twelve, he said, “I been out too late.” So I stood up and took the check up to the bar. I was standing next to the cash register when someone shoved me so hard that I knocked over a couple of beer glasses.

  I turned around and saw the back of Big Mike's head. He was a fair-sized gent, Big Mike. My height, but a good fifty pounds heavier than I was and at least a fifth drunker. Maybe it was Terry and Morris Rich; maybe it was Abel Jones and the Jellicoes; maybe it was Cindy Ann; or maybe it was the beer and the talk and the sneaking suspicion that Hugo hadn't heard a word that I'd said. But that angry little man inside of me had had his fill of nastiness for one day. “I'm taking over,” he said. And I was just too tired and dejected to say, “No.”

  I tapped Mike on the shoulder and he turned slowly around. He was in his cups, all right. But he was one of those mean, deceptive drunks. His square, porcine face was flushed and sweaty; but the liquor hadn't gotten into his eyes yet. And those eyes were just aching for trouble.

  “Hey, Mike!” I said, clapping him on the arm. “You run down any more old men tonight?”

  “What're you talking about?” he said in a loud, gravelly voice.

  “Hell, I'm talking about that two bucks you owe me for those two beers of mine you drank.”

  Mike's bloodshot eyes narrowed. “I remember you. You're the boy that was sucking around with that old faggot.”

  “That's it,” I said cheerfully. “Now how about my two bucks?”

  “Go to hell,” Big Mike said.

  “Give the man the two bucks, will you, mister?” Hank said from behind the register. “You took the beer. I saw you do it.”

  “And who the hell are you?” Mike roared. “You can't even have a drink in this faggot bar without some fairy sucking up to you.”

  “Don't call me that,” Hank said.

  That was it. That was all big Mike had been waiting for. He froze like a guard dog before he pounces and stared with dull hatred at Hank. “What did you say to me, faggot?”

  “He said not to call him that,” I said.

  Big Mike whirled with impossible quickness and threw a deft right hand at my head. At the time you never know how something so swift and violent can miss its mark. Either you move or you fall—it's that simple. I moved, ducking in under Mike's right shoulder. He was a little off balance, but he'd be squared around in a second. And I wasn't going to wait. I threw a hard right jab and caught him full in the solar plexis.

  “Oh,” Mike groaned and fell backward onto the floor.

  As I started in after him, Hank slapped his arm across my chest.

  “Easy, Harry,” he said. “He's had enough.”

  “I want my two bucks,” I said between my teeth.

  “Here,” one of Mike's friends said. “Here, I'll give you the two bucks.”

  “I want it from him!” I said, kicking Big Mike hard in the ass.

  “Harry,” Hank said.

  Big Mike groaned.

  “I'll get it for you,” the one called
Al said. He bent over Mike and pulled his wallet from his trousers. “Here,” he said, tossing it to me.

  I pulled two singles from the billfold and threw the wallet on the floor.

  “Don't you ever bring that asshole in here again,” I said to Al. “You hear?”

  “Goodnight, Harry,” Jo cooed.

  I walked down to the restaurant level, plucked Hugo by the arm, and walked quickly into the warm night air.

  “Boy,” he said to me, as we turned for the parking lot. “Looks like I picked me the right man.”

  8

  MORNINGS AFTER are generally a bad time for me. Either the blood sugars are too low or my heart isn't pounding energetically enough or the dreamy rhythms of night are still playing in my ears. For half an hour after I've opened my eyes, I blunder through the apartment like a sleepwalker and try to fend off that first uncensored rush of memories. But the dead faces, the maimed ones, the friends whom violence has borne away, always crowd in. And that Saturday morning was no different. Tough black Roscoe Bohannon—dead three years—and beautiful Lauren Swift—dead one—an enemy and a friend, were there when I opened my eyes. Night travelers, lost in the daylight, they drifted like motes in the clear noon sun and wouldn't be chased away until I'd lifted myself from bed and plunged into a shower.

  Then the routines began. The morning coffee on the living room couch. The sound of the Zenith Globemaster, which I play constantly so that I'll always be in earshot of a human voice. The waxy feel and inky smell of newsprint. My half-hour passed, and I found that I could make a sentence, the first of the day: Get in touch with Hugo Cratz.

  I walked over to the phone on the rolltop desk beneath the living room window and dialed Hugo's home. The previous night filtered back to me as I listened to it ring. The turquoise blue discoloration of the first knuckle of my middle finger reminded me of the fight with Mike. And then I remembered the pleasure in Hugo's voice as we'd walked out to the car. He'd been too pleased, too self-satisfied, too nonchalant. He was up to something, I was sure of it. Formulating some scheme that would keep him from leaving town. At first, it might delay him for an afternoon. Then a day. Then a week. And, before I knew it, old Hugo would have manipulated me into letting him stay on—to bully and cheer me as I jousted with Lance and Laurie for the honor of Cindy Ann.

  That wasn't going to happen. If I had to put him on the bus myself and watch it leave and call like a worried mother when he arrived, that wasn't going to happen. The truth was I liked the old codger too much to see him hurt. And, if Coral was right, that's what could happen.

  He answered the phone on the twentieth ring, in that high-pitched, hurky-jerky voice and, when I reminded him that he was leaving that day, he said: “Yes. All right, Harry. Whatever you think is best.”

  I half expected to find him gone when I pulled into his driveway at half-past one that afternoon. But there he was, sitting on the porch chair, shading his eyes with one hand and gripping a straw valise in the other. I honked and Hugo walked down the front steps, cracked open the car door, and slid onto the seat.

  “What kept you?” he said cheerfully.

  I gave him a sidelong look. His chin was bristling again with salt-and-pepper stubble; and his nose took little swipes at it when he worked his jaws, which he did with mechanical regularity, as if he were chewing a wad of tobacco or talking to himself. And those wet blue eyes, like eyes in a clear aspic, were nervous and merry.

  “Just what are you so cheerful about?” I asked him, throwing the Pinto into reverse and backing out onto Cornell. “Did you call your son?”

  “Yep.” He nodded. “Called him this morning. He's been trying to get me to come up there for years. Said he'd build a room addition for me if I promised to stay for good.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, guiding us onto Ludlow and west to the expressway. “You call the bus station like I told you to?”

  “Sure did,” Hugo said. “She leaves at two-fifteen and arrives in Dayton at four-thirty. Ralph'll be at the depot to pick me up.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Did you remember to bring the key to your place and the shoebox?”

  “Got 'em in my bag, Harry. Just like you told me.”

  I bit my lip.

  “You sure are nervous, Harry,” Hugo said placidly.

  “I just don't want to forget anything, Hugo,” I said, turning onto I-75 and heading south out of the Clifton hillside along the sunny industrial flats on the outskirts of town. “I don't want to give you any reason to show up on my doorstep tomorrow.”

  “Aw, Harry,” he said.

  At two sharp we pulled up beneath the prancing neon greyhound above the bus terminal entrance. I slipped a quarter into the meter and Hugo moseyed toward the depot.

  “Wait up!” I barked at him.

  He stopped dead at the door and pretended to read the schedules and travel posters in the display cases.

  “You sure are nervous,” Hugo said again, as we walked out of the keen white sunlight and into the shade of the terminal.

  No matter how noisy a bus terminal gets—and on a July Saturday they get pretty damn loud—you can always hear your own footsteps echoing above the crackle of the loudspeakers, the hiss of air brakes, the soft sigh of bus doors opening, and the amplified roar of the diesels as they pull out of their loading docks. I don't know how they do it, how they calculate the eigentones and reflecting angles to bring the click of heels and shoe leather into such crisp prominence. Nor do I understand why bus stations are always made to look so dreary. Or why the people sitting on the hard blue-and-red plastic benches are invariably as cheerless and sullen-looking as the gaunt men and women in Walker Evans's studies of the rural poor. Even the attendants and guards are seedy and impassive; and everyone looks too damn bored to talk about it. If there's an urban hell, the bus station must come pretty close to being it.

  I shadowed Hugo as he picked up his ticket and, together, we walked down to the basement lockers. Hugo got the shoebox out of his valise; and, after taking three of the photographs out and slipping them into my pocket, I shoved the box into a fifty-cent cubicle and locked it shut.

  “O.K., Hugo,” I said. “Let's go.”

  The old man pivoted lightly on one foot and said, “You don't have to stick around, Harry. I can find my way to the bus.”

  I smiled and shook my head ruefully. I'd known it was coming; I just hadn't known what form it was going to take. Actually I was a little disappointed that Hugo had thought he could get rid of me so easily.

  “Now just a second,” he said, as I tugged him by the coat sleeve. “Just a minute, here.”

  “It isn't going to work, Hugo,” I said.

  “I ain't no damn kid,” he said testily, “that has to be watched over every second.”

  I grabbed his arm firmly and picked up the straw suitcase. “Let's go.”

  “Now, Harry.”

  I walked him to the loading area and he cursed and muttered and fumed every step of the way. “You can't do this to me. This is a free country. ... I got my rights. . . . Damn it, Harry, let go of my arm ... the way they treat old folks in this city is a crime. . . .”

  When he saw that it wasn't going to work, Hugo grew sly and pensive looking. “I didn't call my damn son,” he said suddenly. “There ain't going to be nobody there to meet me.”

  “That's tough, Hugo. You'll just have to walk a few blocks.”

  “I'm recovering from a stroke,” he whined. “You ain't going to put me out in the hot sun and make me walk till I keel over, are you?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “That's what I'm going to do.”

  “You ain't got a drop of pity in you, Harry,” Hugo said bitterly. “If I drop dead on the streets of Dayton, my blood'll be on your head. Are you willing to live with that guilt?”

  “You'll be all right, Hugo,” I said with a sigh. “I called your son myself this morning. And he'll be there to meet you.”

  “You called Ralph?” Hugo said in a little voice.

  I n
odded. “This morning, Hugo.”

  He shrivelled like a spent balloon. “Damn,” he said, shaking his wispy white head.

  Hugo didn't say another word until the bus arrived. As the passengers queued up beside the door, he got slowly to his feet. “You'll be careful, now, won't you, Harry?” he said in a forlorn voice. “You won't let nothing bad happen, now, will you?”

  “No,” I said, smiling at him. “Nothing bad will happen.”

  “And you'll call me once and awhile, won't you? To let me know how things are?”

  “Sure I will.”

  “About the money,” he said, rubbing his grizzled chin.

  “We'll talk about that when I've got Cindy Ann back for you.”

  Hugo patted his coat pockets and his pants pockets and sighed. “Well,” he said, holding out his hand. “Looks like I got everything.”

  I shook his hand and said, “The key.”

  “Huh?” Hugo looked at me uncertainly.

  “The key to your apartment, Hugo. I want it.”

  Hugo blew a little air out of his mouth and cursed violently. “You don't miss much either,” he said, clawing at his pants pocket. “Do you, Mister Harry Stoner?”

  “I try not to.”

  “Well, just you keep it up,” he said as he walked up to the bus door. “You hear?” Hugo stepped up onto the bus. “And try to make this quick, will you?” he called out as the bus door sighed shut. “A few weeks with Ralph and I'll be ready for the V.A. hospital.”

  9

  ONCE I'D seen Hugo safely off, I walked up Fifth Street to a pancake house at the corner of Elm and contemplated the world over a plate of doughy waffles. From where I was sitting Elm seemed to be full of girls in bright summer dresses, and each one of them looked as if she had just stepped off the bus from Greenburg or Sunman or Milan. Perhaps from as far away as Sioux Falls, wherever the hell that was. Each of them had the same look on her face—that dreamy, vacant look that comes when the eye is turned inward and fully in love with what it sees. It was like an erotic daydream out there on the blazing street, a predator's dream of ripe and easy pickings, a world of Cindy Anns. I took a sip of bitter coffee and, when I looked up again, the girls seemed to have grown a lot wiser.