David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and '50s (Library of America)

by David Goodis

  The revolver was only inches away from the policeman’s head as Harbin came lunging toward Baylock, calling to him, pleading with him to forget the policeman and pull out of there. Again Baylock turned and looked at Harbin, motioned Harbin to stay away, then put two bullets in the policeman’s skull.

  Rain came showering into Harbin’s eyes. He wiped the rain from his eyes and stood still and looked at Baylock. He had no thoughts about Baylock. He had no thoughts about anything or anyone in particular. He saw Baylock examining the bodies of Dohmer and the policemen. He followed Baylock toward the road and watched Baylock examining the body of the policeman who had been hit in the face.

  “Get in the car,” Harbin said.

  Baylock straightened himself, walked away from the Chevrolet and blindly opened the door of the police car and began to climb in.

  “Not that car,” Harbin said.

  Baylock turned. “Where’s our car? The car we got?”

  “Right in front of you. You’re looking at it.”

  “I can’t see it,” Baylock let out a cough, then a series of coughs. “Let’s go back to the Spot. Let’s be at the Spot.”

  Harbin walked over to Baylock and took him toward the Chevrolet and helped him get in. Then Harbin was behind the wheel of the Chevrolet, putting it in gear, taking it out onto the road, getting it in second gear, working it up fast, the transmission grinding hard as the car went into high gear. The tires made a big splash through water that filled a hollow in the road. Then the water became higher further on up the road and they began running into a succession of lakes in the road. It seemed to Harbin that the interior of the car was a part of the lakes. The steering wheel felt like water. His body felt like it was all water.

  “What are we doing?” Baylock asked.

  “We’re in the Chevrolet. We’re going to Atlantic City.”

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  “That’s where we’re going.”

  “I want to go back to the Spot. That’s the only place I want to go.”

  “Where’s your revolver?” Harbin wanted to know.

  “Look at all the rain. Look how it’s raining.”

  “What did you do with your revolver?” Harbin asked. “Did you drop it?”

  “I guess that’s what I did,” Baylock said. “I must have dropped it. We better go back there and get it.”

  “What we better do,” Harbin was saying aloud to himself, “is get off this road.”

  “Let’s get off this road and go back to the Spot.”

  The road was level again and there were no more little lakes. Lights showed up ahead and Harbin could see it was one of the small towns that blotted the Black Horse Pike on its way to Atlantic City. He looked at his wristwatch and the hands read past two in the morning. It was too late to catch a bus or even a train. Their only way to get to Atlantic City was to stay in the car and take it onto a side road and keep it on the side roads away from the policemen who would soon be cluttering the Pike and stopping every car. He saw a road branching off to the right and knew it represented a chance. It might be a negative chance but he couldn’t stop to think about that. The Chevrolet went onto the side road and followed it for a few miles, then cut onto another road that paralleled the Pike.

  Baylock said, “We’re going the wrong way.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I know. We been making wrong turns.”

  “You’re crazy,” Harbin said.

  Baylock said, “We ought to have a gun.”

  “We ought to have a lot of things. We ought to have a special apparatus that pulls back on your hand when you go for a gun.”

  “I tell you,” Baylock insisted, “what we need is a gun. If I hadn’t dropped my gun back there I’d have it now. I can’t begin to tell you how much I miss that gun.”

  “If you don’t shut up,” Harbin said, “you’ll go even crazier than you are now. And you’re plenty crazy now. Why don’t you shut up? Why don’t you try to get some rest?”

  “That’s what I ought to do,” Baylock admitted. “I ought to fall asleep. I’d feel a lot better if only I could sleep.”

  “Give it a try.”

  “Wake me up if anything happens.”

  “If anything happens,” Harbin said, “I won’t have to wake you.”

  He sent the Chevrolet onto a narrow road that aimed east. For the better part of an hour he followed the road, then had to turn where the road turned, going north. Instead of taking him toward Atlantic City, the road was pulling him away, but he had to follow the road and wait for it to start east again. He heard the heavy breathing of Baylock and every now and then Baylock mumbled something that had no meaning. A new atmosphere came into the car and it was the atmosphere of complete solitude, as though Baylock did not exist. Outside the car, the storm came sweeping in from the ocean. Now the road was sliced by another road that went east. Harbin made the turn. He listened to the rain and the bang and smash of the storm.

  Chapter XI

  THEN, FAR out in the ocean, something unnatural took place with the northeaster and threw it acutely off its course. The waves that had been big and fast, dashing in on Atlantic City, now began to calm down, and the rain became a light rain that lessened to a drizzle, and toward four in the morning the storm was ended. It ended completely only a few minutes before the Chevrolet arrived in Atlantic City, the full thick black that meant soon it would start getting light, and Harbin took the car down a small street leading to the Bay. He parked the car at the end of the street, walked to the dock and saw a few cabin cruisers were bouncing lightly on the water. It seemed that here the water was deep enough for the purpose Harbin had in mind. He knew he had to do it before the sky lighted up. He walked quickly to the car, got in, put the car in reverse and took it back up the street for thirty yards or so, then pulled the emergency brake and gave the sleeping Baylock an elbow in the side.

  “You got the legs, Baby,” Baylock moaned. “You got the wonderful kind of legs. Keep your dresses short so I can see your legs.”

  “Come on, wake up,” Harbin said.

  “Now see here, Baby, you—” Baylock blinked several times, opened his mouth, held it open and closed it hard, tasting his mouth and making a face at the taste of it. He sat up straight and rubbed his eyes. He looked at Harbin.

  “We’re here,” Harbin said. “I’m throwing the car in the Bay. Help me get the bags out.”

  “What bay?”

  “You’ll see it. Let’s do this fast.”

  They took the bags from the car, all the bags except Dohmer’s big brown suitcase. Then Harbin climbed into the car and put it in gear, driving it toward the Bay. He had the door open and he opened it wider as the car approached the water. The edge of the dock came up and he leaped out of the car and started running back toward the bags and Baylock. He heard the splash and hoped the water would be deep enough to cover the car, maybe even deep enough to hide it, but he didn’t have time to go back and make sure. Approaching Baylock, he waved Baylock on. Baylock picked up the two smaller bags and began running, leaving Harbin one more small bag and the suitcase containing the emeralds.

  They covered two long city blocks and were on the third when a cab cruised up the street. Baylock yelled to the cab and it stopped for them. They piled in with their bags. Harbin said he wanted a cheap hotel. The driver took a second look at Harbin’s attire. Harbin, amiable, asked him what he was looking at, and he said he wasn’t looking at anything special.

  The cab pulled up in front of a miserable-looking place on a small street off Tennessee Avenue. Harbin paid the fare, tipped the driver a quarter and said he wished he could give more. The driver smiled good-naturedly, threw the cab in gear and drove it away.

  They entered the hotel and the clerk took them up to a room on the second floor. It was a two-dollar double. It looked terrible. The window opened out on the wall of another building and Baylock said they would suffocate in here. Harbin said they wouldn’t be here lon
g enough to suffocate.

  Baylock asked, “How long we staying?”

  “Until I get Gladden.”

  “When you getting her?”

  “Now.” Only he didn’t feel like going now. He wanted the bed. He was very anxious to hit the bed. His muscles were tired, his arms, after all the arduous driving, were extremely tired. But worst of all were the eyes. His eyes wanted to close and he had to work hard to keep them from closing.

  Harbin lit a cigarette, and walked out of the room. Downstairs in what they used for a lobby he saw a pay phone on the wall and mechanically he took from his coat pocket the folded paper on which was written the address of her hotel and the phone number. He wanted to call her, to tell her he was in town and would see her tomorrow. It would be more convenient to call. It would allow him to walk upstairs and fall into bed. He couldn’t remember a time when he had been so tired. The pay phone invited him to start dialing, but he knew that phoning wouldn’t be enough. He was deeply aware of the importance of going to her, being with her.

  On Tennessee Avenue he walked toward the boardwalk. The sky was still black when he reached the boardwalk, but far out past the beach and the broken line of white breakers he saw the beginnings of thin dawn above the ocean. The boardwalk, still wet, looked as though a corps of polishing experts had been at work on it for weeks. Every fourth lamp along the railing was dimly lit and that was the only light except for the faint push of dawn coming in from the ocean. With that, there was the heat, the unnatural heat that couldn’t be coming from the ocean. It had to be coming from the meadows and swamps of New Jersey to the north of the seashore. Along the boardwalk the faces of the beachfront hotels were quiet and listless, waiting passively for the throngs who would come when summer arrived, merely tolerating the sprinkle of guests who now had the best rooms at off-season prices.

  He looked back at what had happened on the Pike. It was an actual display of the law of averages. It had been bound to happen sooner or later. Something on the same order had happened once before, a long time ago in Detroit, the night when Gerald Gladden had made the pavement wet with the red coming out of his skull. That night had formed itself to a pattern, and it was being repeated tonight. Because that night, as he ran from the police, he had moved in a direction that took the little girl who was Gerald Gladden’s daughter. And tonight the same thing was happening. He was moving toward Gerald Gladden’s daughter, to lift her up and carry her away before anything bad could happen to her.

  The pattern. And all these years, in modified ways, his every move had followed within the pattern. It was always necessary to get back to Gladden, to be with Gladden, to go with Gladden. It was more than habit and it was deeper than inclination. It was something on the order of a religion, or sublimating himself to a special drug. The root of everything was this throbbing need to take care of Gladden.

  A contradiction came into it. He saw the contradiction coming in, beginning that night in the after-hour club when he had suggested to Gladden that she go to Atlantic City and get herself a bit of rest. The contradiction lengthened as he remembered Gladden’s asking him to come with her and his saying no. It meant the pattern was beginning to fall apart, making him susceptible to the formation of another pattern and another drug and another religion or whatever in God’s name had happened to him as he sat there in the restaurant and found himself being dragged across space by the woman’s eyes.

  Yet now he was back within the vague yet stern boundaries of the Gladden pattern. As he concentrated on it the vagueness gradually took on emphasis, like a wispy scene gradually brought into clear focus by the turning of a lens. He was digging through the reasons, digging through the layers of reasons for all the moves he had made since the afternoon when Gerald Gladden had found him sick and starving on a western road. He had been an infant, sixteen years old but all the same an infant, an orphan infant, sixteen years old, with nothing in his mind but a drastic need for food, and the piteous bewilderment of an infant begging for aid from a world that wouldn’t listen. Only Gerald had listened. Only Gerald had picked him up and given him food. It was stolen food because Gerald had paid for it with money gained from the sale of stolen goods. It was illegal food but it was food, and if he hadn’t eaten it he would have died. Later, after their first job together, Gerald had explained this to him. Gerald liked to explain, not only about the tactics and science of burglary, but the philosophy behind it, anyway Gerald’s philosophy. Gerald was always contending that burglary is no special field of endeavor, and every animal, including the human being, is a criminal, and every move in life is a part of the vast process of crime. What law, Gerald would ask, could control the need to take food and put it in the stomach? No law, Gerald would say, could erase the practice of taking. According to Gerald, the basic and primary moves in life amounted to nothing more than this business of taking, to take it and get away with it. A fish stole the eggs of another fish. A bird robbed another bird’s nest. Among the gorillas, the clever thief became the king of the tribe. Among men, Gerald would say, the princes and kings and tycoons were the successful thieves, either big strong thieves or suave soft-spoken thieves who moved in from the rear. But thieves, Gerald would claim, all thieves, and more power to them if they could get away with it.

  He had listened to Gerald because there was no one else to whom he could listen. There was no one else around. He had listened and he had believed. Gerald was the only external. Gerald’s teachings were the only teachings. Gerald’s arguments were not only forceful in delivery, they were backed with fact and qualified with history. Gerald’s mother had been part Indian, her mother all Indian, all Navajo. For Christ’s sake, Gerald would yell, take a look at how they robbed the Indians, and how they arranged a set of laws to justify the robbery. Always, when Gerald got himself started on the Navajo theme, he would go on for hours.

  Gerald would say that aside from all this, aside from all the filthy dealing involved, the stink of deceit and lies and the lousy taste of conniving and corruption, it was possible for a human being to live in this world and be honorable within himself. To be honorable within oneself, Gerald would say, was the only thing could give living a true importance, an actual nobility. If a man decided to be a burglar and he became a burglar and made his hauls with smoothness and finesse, with accuracy and artistic finish, and got away with the haul, then he was, according to Gerald, an honorable man. But the haul had to be made correctly, and the risks had to be faced with calm and icy nerve, and if associates were involved, the associates had to be treated fairly, the negotiations with the fence had to be straight negotiations. There were categories of burglars just as there were categories of bankers and meat-packers and shoemakers and physicians. There was no such thing as just a burglar, Gerald said, and always when he said this he would bang a fist onto a table or into his palm. There were scientific burglars and daredevil burglars and burglars who moved like turtles and burglars who darted in like spears. There were gentle burglars and semi-gentle burglars and of course there were the lowdown sons of bitches who were never content unless they followed it up with a blackjack or switchblade or bullet. But the big thing to remember, Gerald would say, was this necessity of being a fine burglar, a clean and accurate operator, and honorable inside, damn it, an honorable burglar.

  This big thing, Gerald would say, this thing of being honorable, was the only thing, and actually, if a human being didn’t have it, there wasn’t much point in going on living. As matters stood, life offered very little aside from an occasional plunge into luxurious sensation, which never lasted for long and even while it happened it was accompanied by the dismal knowledge that it would soon be over. In the winter Gerald had a mania for oyster stew, and always while he ate the stew he would complain the plate would soon be empty and his stomach would be too full for him to enjoy another plate. All these things like oyster stew and clean underwear and fresh cigarettes were temporary things, little passing touches of pleasure, limited things, unimportant things. What m
attered, what mattered high up there by itself all alone, Gerald would say, was whether things are honorable.

  Gerald would always come out strongly and challengingly with the contention that he himself was honorable and had always been honorable. Every promise he had ever made he had kept, even when it made him sick to do so, even when it placed him in actual jeopardy. There was a night when he had promised a girl he would marry her, and knew a moment later it would be a big mistake to marry her, to marry anyone. But he had promised. He couldn’t break the promise. He married the girl and he stayed married to her until she died. Telling of it, he would yell and curse himself but he would always end up by describing her as a marvelous woman and it was a damn shame she had to go and die. And besides, Gerald would say, maybe the marriage had not been such a bad mistake, after all. In order for a man to be honorable within himself, it was necessary to carry some sort of a responsibility, a devotion. It was natural and correct that this devotion be aimed at a woman.

  Looking back at the times long ago when Gerald had said all these things, Harbin heard them distinctly as though Gerald were talking aloud to him now. The sum of it was the center of it, the core of it, this big thing, this being honorable. Gerald had taught him how to open the lock of a door, the lock of a vault, and how to analyze the combination of a safe, and how to get past certain types of burglar alarms, but the important thing Gerald had taught him was this thing of being honorable.

  That was why, when he saw Gerald dead on the pavement, he had raced mechanically to get Gerald’s daughter and why, all these years, he had looked after Gladden. That was the only thing for him to do, because it was the honorable thing.

  Ahead of him, and rather near, the black bulk of the Million Dollar Pier took itself out upon the ocean. Just a little this side of the pier he saw the unlit electric sign of the hotel where Gladden was staying. It was a small hotel, hemmed in between boardwalk shops and apartments above the shops, but it had a certain independence about it, almost seemed to flaunt itself as one of the beachfront hotels, more dignified and elegant than the hotels off the boardwalk.