Peyton Place (17 page)

“Met some whore, that's what he done, and he's showin’ her a big time. On our money.”

“Oh, Christ!” moaned Lucas. “Oh, Christ, help me!”

“That sonofabitch McCracken. Gone out to get drunk.”

“His whole goddamn family drinks. Every last one of the McCrackens is a drunk.”

“On our money.”

Angus Bromley managed to reach a spot under a beam, and now contemplated the wide rafter over his head. Slowly, he raised himself up on his toes, his hands sliding carefully over the top of the beam over his head, and at last his fingers wrapped themselves around the neck of a quart bottle. He lowered this treasure painstakingly and held it before his eyes.

“Beautiful,” he murmured, caressing the shoulders of the bottle as if they had been those of a perfumed woman. “Beautiful, beautiful.”

He sat down abruptly on the floor and hastily broke the seal on the top of the bottle. The cap rolled, unheeded, across the floor while Angus raised the mouth of the bottle to his lips.

Kenny Stearns turned his head sharply at the sound of a bottle cap dropping on cement, and he saw Angus—drinking.

“Look!” cried Kenny to the other men. “Angus has got a bottle!”

The men turned toward Angus, who wiped his mouth and quickly hid the bottle under his shirt.

“You're crazy, Kenny,” he said and smiled ingratiatingly. “You're drunk, Kenny. Drunk and seein’ things. I ain't got no bottle.”

“Bastard!” shouted Kenny.

He rushed toward Angus, who had not had time to prepare for an onslaught. He was felled and lay on the floor. Kenny managed to rescue the bottle just in time. He held it in his hands and kicked viciously at Angus’ head, and Angus groaned and did not move again. In a few minutes, he began to snore.

“Greedy bastard,” mumbled Kenny and turned to face the others. “Who wants a drink?” he yelled.

All the men began to struggle to their feet, and even Lucas lowered one of his hands to look at Kenny.

“Anybody here that can take it away from me gets it,” said Kenny, and without another word raised the bottle to his mouth.

The men, like starving animals, snarling and crafty eyed, approached Kenny slowly, circling him, watching for an opening.

Kenny laughed. “Anybody who's man enough to take it away from me gets it,” he said, and then raised his foot unsteadily to push at the first man who rushed him.

Kenny had the advantage of a leaning place, for his back was against the broad cellar chimney, but the others had nothing to balance them but their equilibrium which was, at the moment, nonexistent. In ten minutes it was over. The sound of four snoring men filled the cellar and covered the noise of Lucas’ whimpering.

“Bastards,” gloated Kenny. “Tellin’ a man to go to hell right in his own cellar. I guess I showed ’em. To hell with them.” He approached Lucas. “You're the only friend I got, Lucas,” he said. “The only real, true friend in the whole world. Have a drink.”

He did not relinquish the bottle, but held it to Lucas’ lips while Lucas swallowed thirstily.

“That's enough,” said Kenny, withdrawing the bottle, and Lucas, already saturated with alcohol from the long weeks of drinking, fell unconscious to the floor.

Kenny sat down, leaning against a wall, and took a long pull from the bottle. At once everything began to swing dizzily in front of his eyes, and he was transported back to a wonderful time when he had taken Ginny to a county fair and they had gone for a ride on the Ferris wheel. He half closed his eyes and saw the bright lights of the fairgrounds and heard the thin music of the calliope.

“Once more,” he said, and obediently the Ferris wheel began to turn.

Kenny took another drink. After six weeks of the most prolonged spree in town history, Kenny's cellar floor was covered with vomit and feces. The stench had floated up through the floor boards of the story above and Ginny Stearns had long since moved in with a friend of hers who lived down by the river. But to Kenny now, his cellar was a beautiful place of carnival and pleasure.

“Once more,” he cried, wanting to stay on the Ferris wheel forever. “Hold my hand, Ginny. Don't be scared.”

Kenny looked in the direction of his sleeping friends and saw Ginny's smile.

“Here we go!” he shouted, and reached for her hand.

But abruptly she was gone and Kenny was alone in the Ferris wheel.

“Stop!” he yelled. “Stop! Stop! She fell out! Stop this goddamned thing!”

But the wheel turned faster and faster, and the music of the fair was suddenly sinister, a gay tune gone wrong and played in a minor key.

“Ginny!” he cried. “Ginny! Where'd you go to?”

He staggered to his feet and looked around wildly while the lights of the fair swung crazily all around him, dipping, swaying, hurting his eyes.

“Ginny!” he screamed from the top of the Ferris wheel.

And then he saw her. She was walking arm in arm with a smiling, oily-looking man. The stranger was dressed in city clothes, and he looked up at Kenny, trapped in the wheel, and laughed out loud.

“You bastard!” shouted Kenny. “Come back here. Come on back here with my Ginny!”

But Ginny was laughing, too. She turned her head and looked up at Kenny, her red lips parted so that her teeth showed, square and white, and she laughed and laughed.

“You bitch!” cried Kenny. “You dirty, whorin’ bitch!”

Ginny laughed harder than ever and shrugged her shoulders and looked up at the city-dressed stranger. Kenny could see her painted nails resting against the man's dark sleeve, and he could feel her breasts and thighs straining through her dress to rest against the stranger's side.

“I'll kill you,” he screamed, standing up in the Ferris wheel. “I'll kill you both!”

But Ginny and the stranger began to walk away, still laughing, as if they had not heard Kenny's threat. They walked slowly, and Ginny reached up and put her finger tips against the stranger's cheek. Kenny dropped the bottle he held and tried to get off the Ferris wheel. He dashed crookedly toward the stairs in his cellar, and when he reached the top, he fell heavily against the door. It would not budge.

“I'm locked in,” he shouted, his fingers moving senselessly against the wooden panels. “I'm locked in this goddamned Ferris wheel!” His fingers touched the door's strong double bolt without recognizing it. “Let me out!” he called to the man who was operating the Ferris wheel. “Let me out, you sonofabitch!”

But the man kept the wheel going, smiling up at Kenny, his head like a skull and his yellow teeth gleaming dully in the dark.

Kenny ran down the cellar stairs and grasped the ax that he had put down next to his woodpile weeks before. He turned toward the grinning Ferris wheel operator.

“I'll chop my way out, you bastard!” he shouted.

He ran up the cellar stairs and when he reached the top he began to chop at the panels of the door in front of him.

“I'll kill you both,” he yelled at Ginny and the stranger, who had stopped their walking now, to stand and stare at him. Ginny's smile was gone, replaced by a fear that contorted her face and made her mouth droop, and Kenny's heart exulted.

“I'll get you first, you rotten bitch,” he called. “I'll get you and hack your pretty face all to pieces.”

The ax bit into the wooden door panels once again, and this time Kenny had to struggle to loosen it for another swing. At last he freed it from the wood and raised it above his head. He aimed for the bottom of the Ferris wheel car and swung the ax in a tremendous arc.

Suddenly his foot was bleeding. While he stood and stared stupidly, blood was gushing in a fountain through the sliced leather of his shoe. It poured out redly, all around him, so that he was lost in it, drowning. Kenny Stearns fell forward, out of the Ferris wheel into the crowds below, while Ginny's laughter rang in his ears.

It was Dr. Matthew Swain who found Henry McCracken. The doctor was on his way home from a call in the country when he saw something in the ditch at the side of the road. Immediately, he braked his car to a stop and got out to investigate, and in the gleam of his car's headlights, he saw a still figure, lying face down, in the dirt. It was Henry, unconscious, unbelievably dirty and bleeding from a nasty gash on his forehead but, as the doctor said later, it was Henry, still breathing and stinking to high heaven. Dr. Swain looked at him once and then picked him up, slung him over his shoulder and carried him to the car where he bundled him into the back seat. He drove straight to the Peyton Place hospital where Henry was entrusted to two nurses who stripped him, washed him and moaned their fate over every inch of Henry's filthy body.

“Cheer up, girls,” said Dr. Swain, after he had stitched Henry's head. “Give this boy a few hours’ sleep, and you'll be falling all over yourselves trying to get a chance to wait on him.”

The two nurses gazed at Henry's drooling mouth and still unshaven face, with its neat forehead bandage giving him a slightly rakish look, and shook their heads at one another.

“You're the limit, Doc,” said Nurse Mary Kelley, who was not noted for the originality of her remarks.

“No, I'm not,” said the doctor.
“He
is.”

Mary made a face at the doctor's retreating back.

“Go home and go to bed, Doc,” she called after him. “And don't stop to pick up any more like this one on your way.”

“Don't kid me, Mary,” said the doctor. “You love ’em all with a wicked lust. Good night!”

Mary Kelley shook her head. “That Doc,” she said to Nurse Lucy Ellsworth. “He never minds what he says. I've known him all my life, but I'm still not used to him. When I was in training here I almost got discouraged and quit before The Doc had got done with his teasing.”

“Was he teasing you about this same fellow?” asked Lucy Ellsworth.

Lucy was comparatively new to Peyton Place and had not yet had a chance to become acquainted with its legends and anecdotes. She had come to town only six months before when her husband had obtained a job in the Cumberland Mills. John Ellsworth was a job shifter, perpetually discontented with his lot and forever looking for a plot of greener grass. Lucy had been a registered nurse when she married John, and she always said that it was a good thing she was, for she had had to work ever since to support the two of them, and later, the daughter who was born to them. Very often, Lucy Ellsworth said that she would leave John if it weren't for Kathy. But after all, a child needed her father, and John might have his faults but he was good to the little girl, and a woman couldn't ask for much more than that now, could she? Kathy was thirteen and in the eighth grade, and sometimes Lucy said that when the child was older, old enough to realize what was happening, then the two of them would leave John and his restlessness.

“Doc teases everybody about everything,” said Mary Kelley. “He takes it easy with you because you're new here, but just wait until he gets used to seeing you around, then you'll see what I mean.”

“What happened to almost make you quit when you were in training?” asked Lucy.

“Oh, it had nothing to do with Henry, here,” said Mary, mournfully smoothing the sheet over Henry's thin legs. “It was over this big, black Negro we had in here once. The man was in a terrible automobile accident, and they brought him here because it was the nearest place. He was the first nigger I ever saw, close to. Well, The Doc worked most all night patching that man up, and then we put him in the ward with the rest of the patients, except of course the others were all white people. Well, every morning The Doc would come out of the ward and whisper to me, ‘Mary, you watch that black feller,’ and every day I'd ask him why. I took my work very seriously then, and I was trying to learn everything at once. ‘Never mind,’ The Doc would say, ‘you just keep your eyes peeled. That feller there is different from any other man you ever saw.’ The Doc is a man who loves everybody. Black, white, green even, if there is such a thing, it doesn't matter to him. ‘What do you mean, different?’ I asked the Doc. ‘Because his skin's so black?’ ‘No,’ The Doc said, and I should have known right then that he was up to some devilment, but I'd just started in training and I had the idea that a hospital was no place for fooling around, besides, I never did get used to The Doc's teasing.

“‘No, Mary,’ The Doc said. ‘It's not his skin. I'm surprised at you, a smart girl like you.’ Well, I was almost crying I felt that bad to feel that maybe I'd missed something I was supposed to have learned in class. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked him, and The Doc leaned down and whispered in my ear. ‘Mary,’ he said, ‘don't you know that niggers fart black?’ Well, I can tell you, I was fit to be tied. ‘That's nice talk,’ I said, ‘from the man who brought me into the world.’ Oh, I knew that I was supposed to talk respectfully to all doctors at all times, even to The Doc, but I was so mad I just didn't care. The Doc never cracked a smile, but just looked at me, surprised. ‘No kidding, Mary,’ he said. ‘I wouldn't spoof you, not a nice girl like you. I just wanted to put you wise, in case you ever have to take care of a black man again.’ Well, fool that I was, I believed him. That's a trick of The Doc's. He can tell out-and-out lies with the straightest face in the world, and he can make anybody believe anything. I can tell you, I watched that black man. He couldn't even burp, much less anything else, without me right there by his side to see what I could see. I watched him for days, and finally one morning The Doc came out of the ward and walked up to me in the corridor. ‘There,’ he said, ‘what did I tell you?’ ‘What're you talking about?’ I asked him, and he looked at me, surprised. ‘Why, Mary, didn't you see it?’ ‘See what?’ I asked him. ‘Come on, quick,’ he said, and led me over to the ward by the hand. Of course, there was nothing there, and The Doc looked around, all innocent and puzzled, and he said, ‘Hm, that's funny, it must have all gone out the window.’ ‘What?’ I asked him, all excited by this time. ‘The soot,’ he said, and right away I got mad, thinking he was making remarks about the way we kids in training kept the room. “What soot?’ I asked him. ‘From that black feller,’ he said. ‘So help me, I was in here a minute ago and that black feller farted and this whole room was black with soot!’”