Big City Girl (8 page)

Sewell Neely hopped off the freight as it was coming into the yards at Houston and walked across the acres of tracks in the dark. It had been almost twenty-four hours now since he had come up out of the river bottom onto the highway. He had caught a freight coming through the bottom shortly after he had crossed the highway bridge, and had ridden it until daybreak. Then he had left it and hidden out all during the day under an abandoned farmhouse. Sometime after nightfall he had been able to board another.

He had on a raincoat he had stolen from a helpless and passed-out drunk in a boxcar. With the coat buttoned up to hide the ruin of his clothing and his hand in the pocket to keep the handcuff out of sight, he could get by as long as he kept moving and no one got a second look at him. I might be any bum unloading from a freight, he thought, unless somebody gets a good look at my face in the light. It’s probably in every paper in the state.

It was a long walk, keeping to side streets and away from lighted areas. I hope she’s home, he thought. If she’s still working the four-to-midnight, she ought to be. Unless she’s got a date. Probably not, though. She’s a funny one. Guys coming in to eat, trying to date her up all the time, and she brushes them off.

It was upstairs over a motorcycle salesroom in a rundown neighborhood. There was a drugstore, still open, on the corner. A prowl car slipped past, cruising, and he could feel the tingling along his spine and the tightening of the skin across the back of his neck like a dog’s hackles rising. I can feel ‘em, he thought. If I live long enough, I’ll be able to smell ‘em, like a wolf. If one went by in the dark while I was asleep I’d wake up and growl.

The sign said, “Hskpg. Rms. & Apts.” There was a„ dark stairway going up, and the hallway at the top was dimly lit with two small unshaded bulbs, one at each end. The first door was marked “Mgr.” and there was a bell, with a printed cardboard sign, the kind they sold in dime stores, saying. “Ring for Manager,” stuck on the plaster above it with Scotch tape. There was no one in the hall and he walked down the center of it, going softly like a big cougar on the worn carpet, smelling the odor of ancient dust and stale cooking that always clung to places like this.

It’s going to be rough if she’s not at home, he thought. I can’t stand around here in the hall at one o’clock in the morning. Or if she’s moved and somebody else answers the door. Sorry to wake you up, Jack, but I’m looking for a girl named Dorothy, and don’t look at my face, you might recognize me. I think the reason they always catch you in the end is that they wear you out. They get you tired. They work in shifts and you work all the time, and when you get a chance to go to sleep your nerves are still working. Well, if you want to take a vacation you can always go and give yourself up. They always got the welcome sign out for cop-killers. Take a long rest in the back room with the light in your eyes.

It was the last apartment on the right. There was a crack of light under the door and he could hear, very faintly, the sound of music. It sounds like Dorothy, he thought. She does that. It’s against the rules to play a radio after ten-thirty, but she always does, turning it way down and getting up close to it to listen.

He knocked softly and waited. There was no answer. He rapped on the door again, a little louder. There was the sound of someone moving, and a girl’s voice on the other side of the door said, “Who is it?”

“Lufkin,” he said. He had first met her in Lufkin when she worked in, a restaurant there and he was working in a sawmill. It was a long time ago, before he got in trouble with the law the first time, but she would know who it was.

The door opened and he stepped inside quickly and she shut it. Nothing had changed in the apartment. It was one room, with a window looking out into the alley, but the shade was pulled now. On the right there was a door going into the tiny kitchen, and on the other side there was a bathroom door, closed now, and the bed was on that side, a cheap iron bedstead with the enamel flaking off. On the right side of the room, between the closet and the kitchen door, there was an old velvet-upholstered sofa with sagging springs and the nap worn off the cushions. At the head of the bed, by the window, there was a little table with a dime-store lamp on it, and the cheap AC-DC radio in its white plastic case, the case broken and patched with Scotch tape. Late at night after she had come home from work she would sit on the bed with her face close to the radio and listen to it, to the music of the dance bands in big hotels across the country.

She was always very quiet, and now she stood back from him without saying anything. There was something about her that always made him think of an Indian, perhaps the quietness and the tall, straight way she stood. She was almost five feet nine and very slender, but she never slouched the way some tall girls did. Her hair was black and very straight, like an Indian’s, and she wore it in a long turned-under bob down on her shoulders. She had very dark brown eyes that looked black at night. He had slept with her a lot of times, mostly when he was hiding out from the police, and always afterward, for a little while, he would remember the funny way she had of lying very close to him, her face near his on the pillow and her eyes wide open, watching him and not saying anything. Her eyes would be very big then, and still, while she lay there just touching him somewhere and looking at him. She was a funny one, all right.

“Hello, Dorothy,” he said. He put his left arm across her shoulders and moved to kiss her, but she drew back slightly.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Ain’t you glad to see me?”

“Let me have your coat,” she said. “I’ll hang it up.

He took it off and the handcuff swung, the polished steel shining in the light. She looked at it once, and then quickly away. She took the coat and went into the bathroom with it to let it drip in the tub.

He sat down on the sofa. There was a package of cigarettes on the little coffee table in front of it, and he picked it up, the handcuff dragging across the wood. “Does it bother you?’” he asked.

She sat down on the bed across from him, with her hands in her lap.

“Don’t pay no attention to it,” he said indifferently, lighting the cigarette. “He was dead anyway, and a hand more or less one way or the other didn’t make no difference to him.”

“I just don’t want to look at it,” she said, her face white. “Do you have to talk about it? What are you going to do now, with the whole state looking for you?”

“Stay here, till some of the heat cools down and I get shut of this thing and get some new clothes. Then I’ll try to get out of the state.” It ain’t going to be easy, he thought.

She saw the long jagged tear in his coat sleeve and the pink-stained tatters of the shirt showing through. “You’ve been hurt.”

“Just cut it on some glass,” he said indifferently. “No use to do anything about it now.”

“But it might get infected,” she said anxiously. “We ought to fix it up.”

“I never get infected.”

“Have you had anything to eat?” she asked.

“Not since yesterday. Day before yesterday now.”

“There’s some ham in the icebox. I’ll fix you something.” She started to get up.

He looked at her. “It can wait. We can have breakfast in the morning. We better go to bed. It’s late.”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“Yes.” He grinned. “But not that hungry.”

“I’d better fix you something.”

He saw she was determined, and got up and followed her into the kitchen. There was a sink, a small icebox and a two-burner gas stove. He sat down at the table while she got the sliced ham out of the box and made two sandwiches and put them on a plate in front of him. She poured a glass of milk and sat down across from him.

“Who lives in there now?” he asked, nodding his head toward the next apartment. They had to be careful about making too much noise talking.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s vacant. There was a girl there, by herself. I think she was a hustler, because she brought a lot of different men in. About a week ago she brought in some drunk and made a lot of noise and the manager called the police and they took her away.”

After he had finished the sandwiches and milk they went back in the other room. He sat down on the sofa and she went back to the bed and sat there, watching him while he smoked another cigarette. Her eyes still avoided the handcuff.

She was even more silent than usual. The other times she would talk more, and smile now and then, and when she looked at him her eyes would be soft and happy, but now they were dead.

She had taken off her dress and stockings when she came home from work, and had on a blue cotton kimono or dressing gown or something of the sort that came open at the knees when she crossed her legs. She had nice legs, long and very smooth, and he looked at them, remembering the long time he had been in jail. She saw the glance and pulled the kimono together across them, looking, away from him and blushing.

“The first thing I’ll need in the morning is a hack saw,” he said. “And a little vise. I can work on this handcuff during the day while they’re tuning up them damn motorcycles down there. Nobody’ll hear the sawing.” He wasn’t thinking about the handcuff now, though. He was thinking about being in bed with her, remembering the smooth, warm feel of her in the dark and all the eager, responsive passion.

“You remember how the motorcycles used to wake us” up in the mornings?” he went on. “When we slept late and how we would lie there in bed not having to worry about anybody hearing us because they made so much noise?”

She made no reply to that. In a minute she asked, “Where do you get hack saws?”

“In hardware stores. But you can get little ones at the dime store, in the tool department. They break, but you can get spare blades. They ain’t as good as the regular ones, but it’ll be safer that way. Nobody’ll see you carrying it in.”

“And you want a little vise, too?”

“Yes. You may have to get that in a hardware store. Just a small one. The cheapest one they have. One you can clamp onto a table.”

“All right. I’ll get them in the morning.”

“We’d better go to bed now,” he said. To hell with all this stalling around, he thought. All that can wait till tomorrow.

She got up. “You can sleep here on the bed,” she said, as if she had been waiting for and dreading this moment. “I’ll take the sofa.”

He ground out the cigarette in the ash tray and stared at her. “What the hell, sleep on the couch?” he demanded. “Since when? We’ll sleep in the bed. Both of us.”

“No,” she said.

“What do you mean, no? What’s the matter with you?”

She stood and stared back at him as if he were a long way off. “Nothing.”

“Well, where do you get this couch stuff?”

“Do you have to ask so many questions? Can’t you be reasonable about it?”

“Well, of all the silly damn— Oh, it’s that? Just my rotten luck. Of all the times to get here. But, Christ, why didn’t you just say so?”

“No. That’s not it.”

“Well, for God’s sake, what is it?” She had a perfect out, he thought, but she wouldn’t lie about anything. She’s a funny duck, all right. “Have you caught something?

”No,” she said coldly.

“Well, what’s the trouble?”

“I just don’t want to do it.” Her eyes were miserable, but she looked straight at him.

He went around the table and moved to put his arm around her. She backed away from him, the way she had before.

“Come on now, baby.”

“No,” she said. “I mean it, Sewell. No.”

He began to grow angry. “If there’s anything on earth crazier than a damned woman— I ought to clout you one.”

“I suppose you could beat me up. But it would make a lot of noise.”

“Oh, don’t be a damn fool. I’m not going to beat you up.” He sat down on the sofa again. “Pitch me one of those pillows. I’ll sleep here if you’re going to be that pigheaded about it.”

“You’re so big. You ought to take the bed.”

“To hell with the bed.’”

He punched the pillow angrily and stuffed it under his head. His legs stuck out over the armrest on the other end of the sofa.

She got her nightgown out of the closet and went into the bathroom with it. She kept her face turned away, but her shoulders were shaking and he knew she was crying. In a little while she came out, with the kimono on over the nightgown. She turned the light out and he heard her take off the kimono and get into bed.

Above the rasp, rasp, rasp of the hack saw he looked at her. It was afternoon and she was sitting on the bed dressed to go to work at three-thirty. She would not look at the handcuff clamped in the vise on the table.

“So you ain’t seen anything of her at all?” he asked, sighting at the groove he had sawed. It was slow work and he had already broken a dozen blades.

“No.” Dorothy shook her head.

“Any letter from her?” he asked with elaborate casualness. If anybody’s heard from the bitch and knows where she is, he thought, it’d be Dorothy.

She shook her head again. He comes and lives with me, hiding out, when the police are after him, she thought, but all he wants to do is get back to that blonde slut who’s left him three times already when he was in trouble. And I was the one who introduced him to her when we were working together in the restaurant in Beaumont. I wish I had died first. It would have been better for him, too. God knows he could get into enough trouble by himself, but she sure didn’t help matters any, after him for money all the time.

It was all right that other time when he was here, and at least I had that, and the other times before I introduced him to her, but now there isn’t anything. I wish I could be like I was before, and go with him, because he does want to so much, but if you can’t, you just can’t. Every time I see that handcuff I feel sick in my stomach. If he put that hand on me the way he used to I couldn’t help myself and I’d throw up. If only there could have been just once more. Just once more, knowing it was the last, so you could remember every little thing for all the rest of the time.

She stood up. “I’ve got to go to work,” she said dully. “You won’t go out anywhere, will you?”

He looked up from his sawing. “What the hell, you think I’m crazy?”

“I’ll be back around midnight. The restaurant’s not very far from here.” She moved toward the door.

“All right,” he said indifferently.

Rasp, rasp, rasp, the hack saw sang, lost under the muffled thunderings of motorcycles being tuned. When there was silence from below, he stopped and waited, smoking a cigarette and thinking.

“Look at this, Mad Dog,” Harve had said, holding the picture up between the bars. “This babe is stacked, huh? Of course, you’ve probably seen better, being a big shot and getting around the way you do, but us old country boys up here in the sticks always appreciate anything that comes our way, especially when it’s nice and obliging like this. Thought you might have seen her, maybe. She comes from your part of the country, down on the coast.”

Well, Harve was a good man with his little jokes, he thought, looking at the empty half of the handcuff, but he sure didn’t show much judgment there at the end, putting me in that car with only one hand shackled. Maybe he’s lonesome now and waiting for her. And maybe I can help him out before they get me. If I can find her.

Late in the afternoon he had the handcuff off. He rolled it in an old newspaper and threw it under the bed. Dorothy could get rid of it some way after he was gone. Picking up the razor she had bought for him, he went into the bathroom and shaved. After that, he took a bath and put on the new clothes she had bought. The trousers of the brown suit were too large around the waist, but he pulled them in with the belt.

Now I’m all dressed up, he thought, and got nowhere to go. I don’t dare take a chance on going out of here for another three or four days. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but listen to the radio and look at the papers to see if any of ‘em mention where my loving wife is.

When Dorothy came home about twelve-fifteen, he was asleep on the bed. She lay down on the couch, without disturbing him.

In the morning he had another idea. “Go out to a pay phone somewhere,” he said. He handed her the telephone number written out on a piece of paper. “Get long-distance and put in a call to our apartment. If you get her, ask her how she is and the usual stuff, but don’t say anything about me at all. The phone may be tapped.”

“All right,” she said lifelessly.

She came back in about fifteen minutes and shook her head at his questioning glance. “There’s some other people living in the apartment now.”

Then she hasn’t been home at all, he thought. If she’d gone back she could probably have kept the apartment, by laying the landlord or selling her pictures. There ought to be a big demand for her pictures, he thought coldly.

“What are you going to do now?” Dorothy asked him the morning of the third day.

“Try to get out of the state, if I can make it. That is, if I can’t locate her.”

“When?”

“In another day or so. Why? You in a hurry for me to leave?” he asked suspiciously.

“No,” she said. “You can stay as long as you want.”

“I’ll pay you back for what you’ve spent,” he said angrily, “if the money’s bothering you.”

“I don’t care anything about the money.”

“You don’t care about anything, do you? I never thought I’d see the time I could be here three days and never even get to touch you.”

“I didn’t either,” she said, looking at the floor.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Nothing seems to make any difference.”

It was hot in the apartment during the day, almost unbearably hot with the door and the windows closed. Restlessness had begun to ride him with its raking spurs almost from the time he had the handcuff off, and he would pace the floor of the small room in stocking feet, going on for hours. The thought of Joy began to be an obsession. When Dorothy brought in the morning paper on her way home from work he would snatch it away and read the news stories of the man hunt, looking for some mention of her. Then he would make her go out at noon and bring in the afternoon papers as soon as they were on the street. I can’t hang around here forever, he thought. I’ll go nuts. I’ve got to try to get out of the state, maybe to Florida or somewhere, and if I don’t find out pretty soon where she is I’ll have to go anyway.

The fifth day was torment. He could no longer sit still at all and there were moments when he felt that within a matter of hours he would go berserk and run out into the street to shoot it out with the first policeman he saw. Then he would get hold of himself and force himself to calm clown, knowing that when he did leave the apartment it was going to take all the cunning and cold self-control he possessed to get clear. He rarely spoke to Dorothy now. When she left at three-thirty to go to work he merely stopped his pacing for a moment to growl.

As Dorothy went out the doorway at the foot of the stairs she glanced at the mailboxes through habit, then stopped. There was a letter in hers. She opened the box and took it out, glancing at it curiously. She very seldom received any mail, and thought it might be only an advertising circular until she saw the handwriting.

She opened it. It was from Joy.

Dorothy slid it back inside the envelope and started to go back up the stairs. I might as well show it to him, she thought wearily. He’s so anxious to find her. Let him go on back to her once more.

Then she stopped, halfway up. If he goes there to see her, she thought, they’ll kill him. They’re bound to be watching all that country for him. I’ll wait till I come home from work tonight and that’ll give me time to think about it.

When she came home at twelve-thirty the apartment was empty. There was no farewell or note of any kind, but Sewell was gone.

She stood silently for a moment in the middle of the room, feeling the unbearable loneliness coming back. Then she changed into her kimono and sat down on the bed, just staring at her hands in her lap. He would never be back again, but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing seemed to matter at all any more. She didn’t even want to cry. After a while she turned on the radio and set the volume low. Moving up to the head of the bed, she put her face up close to the loud-speaker and listened to the dance band coming from the Edgewater Beach in Chicago.