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

by David Goodis

  But with all of these ladies it was only once, it was never more than a night of having fun. He didn’t need to fluff them off next morning when they asked for another date; they seemed to realize he wasn’t in the market for anything serious. Or if he was, they couldn’t provide it, because this was no ordinary male and it would take something very special to really reach him in there deep.

  When it finally reached him it went in very deep and took hold of him and spun him around and made him dizzy. And it was very odd, the way it happened, it was almost silly. At first he couldn’t believe it. He tried to tell himself it was impossible. But the only thing impossible was getting away from it. There was no way to get away from it.

  He’d been invited to a stag party given by a big name in the entertainment field. He didn’t like these smokers because he didn’t go in for filth and he told his manager he wasn’t going. His manager said it was important that he attend, you can’t brush off these big shots, in this game it’s all a matter of getting in solid with the right people. So finally he gave in and went to the smoker and it was a lavish affair with the best of food and drink and the comedians knocking themselves out. Gradually the evening became dirty and they showed certain motion pictures imported from France. It was weird stuff and it became very weird and presently it was the kind of cinema that made Gene somewhat sick in the stomach. But he couldn’t walk out. It would be more embarrassing to walk out than to sit there and watch it.

  They finished the movies and the stage was lit up and the girls came on. The man sitting next to him said, “Now you’re gonna see something.” He tried not to see it, tried to look down at his coffee cup and finally managed to focus on the cup and keep his eyes aimed there, away from the ugliness taking place on the stage. The all-male audience shrieked encouragement to the all-female cast that came out in pairs, then in trios, finally in quartets performing stunts that made the onlookers shriek louder. But all at once there was no shrieking, no sound at all, not even from the musicians up front. He wondered what was happening, and he looked up.

  He saw her walking across the stage. That was all she was doing. Just walking.

  She wore a gray-green long-sleeved high-necked dress of velvet. He saw the gray-green eyes and the bronze hair, saw them very clearly because he had a special-guest seat at the front-row table.

  He heard the master of ceremonies announcing from the wing, “This—is—Celia.”

  Then the music started, and she began to dance. The music was very soft, on the languid side, and the dance was a slow mixture of something from Burma and something from Arabia and something far away from any place on earth.

  It wasn’t a strip tease. All her clothes stayed on, and there was nothing vulgar or even suggestive in the motions of her body. It went high above that, far beyond that, it was a performance that had no connection with matters of the flesh.

  The audience didn’t make a sound.

  He wasn’t conscious of the soundless audience. He wasn’t conscious of anything except a certain feeling he’d never had before, a feeling he couldn’t begin to analyze because his brain was unable to function. He was dizzy and getting dizzier.

  She finished the dance and walked off the stage. He heard some applause, a vague sound that didn’t mean anything because they didn’t understand what they were applauding. Certainly it wasn’t the kind of applause that called for an encore. They wouldn’t be able to take an encore. She’d done enough to them already. They hadn’t come here to be immobilized, to be made to feel like worms crawling at the feet of something they didn’t dare to touch or think of touching. They stirred restlessly, anxious to forget what they had seen, impatient for the next number, wanting it to be very raw and smutty and ugly to get them back to earth again.

  Two girls came onto the stage. One of them wore masculine attire and the other was entirely naked. Gene didn’t see them. He was up from the table and going somewhere and not knowing where but knowing he had to get there. He was in a corridor, then another corridor, then seeing Celia walking out of a dressing room and toward the stage door. He said hello and she stopped and looked at him.

  He smiled and said, “I hope you don’t mind.”

  She frowned slightly. “Mind what?”

  So then he came closer and said, “I wanted to see you again. Just had to get another look at you.”

  She let go of the frown and smiled dimly. “Well, that’s all right,” she said. “That happens sometimes.” She leaned her head to the side and said, “Aren’t you Gene Lindell?” He nodded, and wondered what to say next, and heard her saying, “It won’t be easy, Gene. You better not start.”

  It was a fair warning aimed at herself as well as at him. It was a warning they both ignored. There was really nothing they could do about it. They went out through the stage door and minutes later they were in a cab and the driver was saying, “Where to?”

  Gene was looking at her and saying, “Just drive.”

  The cab moved slowly through downtown traffic. Gene went on looking at her. The cab got past the heavy traffic and headed toward the big municipal park. Gene tried to speak and he couldn’t speak and he heard her saying, “We shouldn’t have started. Now I think it’s too late.” The cab was moving along the wide avenue of the parkway, going deeper into the black quiet of the park, and she was saying, “It’s like this. There’s a man. He’s crazy jealous.”

  “I bet,” he said.

  “Look,” she said. “What’re we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Good God.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  She looked at him. “You know how bad it is.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  She gazed past him, out through the cab window, at the black lacework of trees and shrubs sliding backward, going very fast. “Tell you what,” she said. “Better take me home. Let’s forget it, huh?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “I’ll tell the driver,” she said. She leaned forward to give the driver her home address. Her mouth opened and nothing came out of her mouth. She fell back in the seat and shook her head slowly and mumbled to herself, “It’s no use.”

  The cab was moving very slowly on a narrow road that bordered a winding creek.

  “It’s getting worse,” she said. “I can feel it getting worse.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You are? Then do something about it.” Her voice was low and quivering. “For heaven’s sake, do something.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’re just gonna sit there? Not even gonna touch me?”

  “If I touch you,” he said, “I’ll really go nuts.”

  “You’re nuts already. We’re both nuts.” She took a deep straining breath, as though fighting for air. “I’ve heard them tell about things like this, the way it happens so fast, but I never believed it.”

  “Me neither,” he said.

  “All right, Gene.” Her voice changed, rising an octave to a medium pitch, level and cool and trying to stay that way as she said, “Let’s get it over with. We’ll find a room somewhere.”

  “No.”

  “We gotta do it that way. This way it’s miserable, it’s grief.”

  “And that way?”

  “Well, that’s fun, that’s having a good time.”

  “I’m not looking for a good time.”

  “I wish you were,” she said, and her voice dropped again. “I wish that’s all it amounted to. Maybe if we went to a room and got it over with—”

  “Celia,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Listen, Celia—”

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “I—” He saw the driver glancing backward and he said sharply, “Watch the road, will you? You wanna put us in the creek?”

  Celia gave a little laugh. “The creek,” she said. “We’re in the creek already. Up the creek.”

  “No,” he said. “It’
ll be all right. It’s got to be all right. We’ll think of something.”

  “Will we? I got my doubts. I got very serious doubts about that. The way I see it, mister, we’re miles and miles up the creek and it’s gonna be rough getting back.”

  “I don’t want to get back. I want it to be like this.”

  “You see?” She laughed again, brokenly, almost despairingly. “That’s what I mean. You can’t stop it and I can’t stop it and it’s really awful now.”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “It sure is.”

  She took another deep breath, braced herself for an effort, then leaned forward again and managed to give the driver an address. Twenty minutes later they arrived at the address, a row house in a somewhat shabby neighborhood. He opened the door and she got out. He started to follow her and she shook her head. He sat there in the cab looking at her and she looked past him, past the walls of the houses on the other side of the street as she told him her telephone number.

  On the following day he phoned and a man answered. He pretended he’d called a wrong number. A few hours later he called again. This time it was Celia and he knew the man was there because she said it was the wrong number. Late in the afternoon he tried again and she was there alone. She gave him the address of a taproom downtown and said she’d be there around midnight.

  It was a sad-looking place on the fringe of Skid Row, mostly ten-cent-beer customers. He arrived at eleven-fifty and took a booth and ordered ginger ale. It had to be ginger ale because he never used alcohol. He sat there drinking the ginger ale but not tasting it, waiting for her to show. Twenty minutes passed, and forty minutes. He had the glass to his lips when he saw her coming in and the ginger ale in his mouth was liquid fire going down. The sight of her was really combustible.

  At the same time it was softly cool, like floating in a pool of lily water. The sum of it was dizziness, and as she sat down in the booth facing him, he had no idea this was a booth in a taproom; he had the notion it was someplace very high above the clouds.

  They sat there talking. She ordered double straights of gin with a water chaser. She did most of the talking and she was trying to tell him why they couldn’t go on with this.

  For one thing, she said, he’d get his name loused up if he got involved with her. There was a big career in show business ahead of him, she said, and already he was in the public eye, he couldn’t afford to muddy his reputation. It would really be mud, she explained, because she was a bum from ’way back and she had a jail record for prostitution and all her life she’d been mixed up with small-time pimps and small-time thugs and ex-cons. Her first husband had been a second-story man shot and killed by a house owner, and that made her a widow when she was seventeen. Then came the prostitution and a ninety-day stretch and then more prostitution and a longer stretch. So then she was finished with the prostitution and tried to play it clean and got married again. This second one was a truck driver who seemed all right in the beginning but it turned out he was really an expert hijacker specializing in liquor jobs. They finally busted him to make him a three-time loser and send him up for fifteen to thirty. It was too long for him and one day in the prison laundry he drank from a bottle of bleach and died giggling. While she was wearing black she met the one she had now. It was a common-law arrangement and his name was Sharkey.

  “This Sharkey,” she said, “he ain’t so bad. At least, he tries his best to make me comfortable. Another thing, he don’t shove me around like the others did. First man I ever lived with who never gave me a black eye. So that’s something, anyway. But all the same, I ain’t kidding myself about Sharkey. I know he’s meaner than the others. Much meaner. It hasn’t come out yet, but I know it’s there. It sorta shows when he smiles real soft and tells me how much he trusts me. As if to say that if I ever disappoint him, he won’t be able to take it and he’ll do something crazy. That kind of meanness. That’s the worst kind. Soft and quiet on the outside, and on the inside really crazy.

  “These stag-party jobs I do,” she went on, “if Sharkey was making a dollar he wouldn’t let me do it. But it brings in an average of a C note a week and we really need the cash, Sharkey’s accustomed to living high and he don’t know how to budget. He used to be a big man in the rackets and he got in bad with the bosses, not bad enough to get himself bumped, but enough to be told he wasn’t needed any more. Since then he’s been mooching around and looking for an angle and every once in a while he gets hold of something. Like a bootleg setup. Or numbers. Or girls. But it never amounts to anything, it always gets messed up before it can build. I’ve tried to tell him it’s no use, all these operations are strictly syndicate and an independent don’t stand a chance. So then he smiles real soft and says nice and sweet, ‘You do your dancing, Celia, let me run the business.’ And that always gives me a laugh. The business. Some business! He hasn’t made a dime in two years.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe if he didn’t have me, he could concentrate and promote something and make himself some decent money. He’s got the brains for it. I mean something legitimate like handling talent or selling used cars. On that order. But no, he’s got me and he wants me to have the best and his hands are itching for important money. The damn fool, last month he went out and borrowed three hundred dollars from God knows who, just to buy me a birthday present. Sooner or later I’ll hafta pawn it so he can pay the guy he borrowed it from. Well, that ain’t nothing new. That always happens when I get a present from Sharkey.”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know, maybe one of these days he’ll find that angle he’s looking for. He says it’s around somewhere, all he’s gotta do is find it. Lately he’s been getting too anxious and sorta jumpy and I’m afraid he’s headed for some genuine aggravation. He’s hooked up with a couple of strong-arm specialists, a husband-and-wife team that make a business of putting people in the hospital. Or maybe putting them away altogether. Anyway, it makes me nervous, because they’re living in the house with us and in the morning when I’m in bed I hear them in the next room, the three of them, Sharkey and Chop and Bertha, having their daily conference. I can’t ever hear what they’re saying, but I think I know what it’s leading up to. When it’s a strong-arm routine, it’s either extortion or protection racket or a collection agency for clients who want blood instead of money. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. It’s got nothing to do with you and me.”

  “Look,” he said. “If it concerns you, it concerns me.”

  She smiled down at the empty shot glass. “You hear that?” she murmured to the glass.

  “Listen, Celia—”

  “I know what you’re going to say.” She looked at him, looked deep into him. “I know everything you want to tell me.”

  “But listen—”

  “No,” she said. “It won’t work. There’s no way you can take me away from him. He just won’t let you do it. If you try, he’s gonna hurt you. He’s gonna hurt you bad.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I know you don’t. But you would if you could use your brains. That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s why I’m drinking so much gin. To steady myself and think straight. At least one of us has to think straight.”

  “Want another drink?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Better buy me a pint. Then maybe I can think real straight. Maybe I’ll be able to walk out on you.”

  “No,” he said. “You won’t be able to do that.”

  “I’m gonna try.” She pointed across the room, at the bartender. “Go on, tell the man to sell you a bottle. I’m gonna give this a real try.”

  He bought a pint of gin. And she tried. She tried very hard. At one point she said, “Well, here’s where I get off,” but somehow she couldn’t leave the booth. Then later she managed to get up from the booth and gazed past him and said, “Nice to have met you, and so forth,” and turned away and started toward the door. She made it halfway to the door and came back to the booth and said slowly and solemnly, “You bastard, you.” Sh
e sat down and lifted the half-empty bottle to her mouth and took a long quivering gulp. She went on with the drinking, taking it fast and then much too fast and finally she passed out.

  When she was able to sit up he phoned for a cab. She said she didn’t want to leave, she wanted to drink some more. She said it would be nice if she could really knock herself out and stay that way for a week, so then she wouldn’t be able to see him. Maybe that would do it, she said, with her eyes saying that nothing could do it, nothing could keep her away from him.

  He put her in the cab and they arranged for the same time, same place tomorrow night.

  So then it was tomorrow night. It was a succession of tomorrow nights in the booth in the taproom with ginger ale for him and gin for her. Sitting there facing each other and not touching each other, and it was three weeks of that, just that, just sitting there together until closing time, when he’d put her in a cab and watch the cab going away.

  Then on Tuesday of the fourth week she said she couldn’t take this much longer and if they didn’t find themselves a room somewhere, she’d have convulsions or something.

  He didn’t say anything, but when the cab arrived to take her home, he climbed in with her. He said to the driver, “Take us somewhere.”

  The driver took them to a cheap hotel that paid certain cabbies a small commission.

  In the bed with her it was dark but somehow blazing like the core of a shooting star. It was going ’way out past all space and all time.

  “Lemme tell you something,” she said afterward. “I gotta spoil it now. I gotta get dressed and scram outta here.”

  “No.”

  “But I gotta,” she breathed into his mouth. “It’s risky enough already. I don’t wanna make it worse.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Please.” She touched his arm. “Don’t get sore.”

  “I’m not sore,” he said. He was sitting up in the bed. He spoke thickly, falteringly. “It’s just that I hate to see you leave.”