The Kind One (23 page)

“Me neither.”

   IT WAS THE middle of July, and it was hot. I sat on the black davenport wearing only my undershorts. The sun was shining through the shrubbery outside my window, and throwing shadows on the hardwood floor.

I imagined taking my new yellow broom and briskly sweeping up all the shadows. They ended up in a tidy little heap of darkness in the corner, while the floor was filled with nothing but light.

   “I DON’T GET it,” I said.

“Don’t get what?” said Darla.

“Why you’re moving in with him. I thought you wanted to get away from him.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with what I want. I don’t pay for my apartment, he does. And he doesn’t want to pay for it anymore.”

We were on our way to her apartment. She wanted me to help her pack a few things. She took out a Lucky Strike, leaned toward the dashboard, and pushed in the electric lighter.

“But that doesn’t mean you have to move in with him,” I said.

“Oh, it doesn’t? Tell
him
that.”

The lighter popped back out, and she applied it to her cigarette.

“What’s up with Tommy?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I heard Teddy and Nucky talking about him, but they clammed up when I walked in the room. Then I asked Bud about him, and he said he’d gone off to take care of his sick aunt in San Francisco.”

“Yeah. That’s what I heard.”

“Hey, Danny? It’d be nice to have one person in my life I knew would never lie to me.”

I thought about it a minute.

“Okay. I know where he’s at. And it’s not San Francisco.”

She sighed out some smoke, said: “I get the picture,” then stayed silent the rest of the way to her apartment house.

We took the elevator to the top floor.

When we got in her apartment, Darla said: “Whew! It’s like an oven in here. Danny, would you be a darling and open some windows? I’m going to make a drink. Like one?”

“No thanks.”

She went in the kitchen, as I spread out the curtains and lifted the front window. I had a pretty good view up and down the street. The red Buick was parked not too far off. I couldn’t see inside, but I could see some smoke drifting up from the driver’s-side window.

I’d never been in Darla’s apartment before. I looked around the living room. Everything was nice enough, but except for a stack of unopened mail on a side table, there were no indications a particular person lived here. It was kind of a high-class version of where I lived.

I went in her bedroom and opened the window there.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught some movement, but then saw the movement was me: my reflection in a mirror over a bureau. A few weeks ago I’d gone out to Venice Beach with Dick, and we went to one of those places where you try to knock over wooden milk bottles with a baseball. There was this guy whose job it was to scurry around and re-set the milk bottles after they’d been knocked over. He looked like a monster. His skin wasn’t anything but slick pink scars. I asked the guy that ran the game what had happened to him, and he said he’d been burned up in an oil-well fire in Signal Hill a few years back. So then I started wondering what he used to look like, and who he really was under the scars. And now, as I looked at myself in the mirror, I started wondering who I really was under Danny Landon.

Darla’s reflection joined mine. She was holding a stubby tumbler full of ice and vodka. She looked at me, smiling a little.

“In love with your own reflection?”

“No.”

Now her eyes moved to herself.

“I stand in front of the mirror sometimes. I take off all my clothes, and I look at every inch of myself, and I wonder how long it’s going to last. ’Cause that’s all I’ve got, is what I look like.”

She took a gulp of her drink, and walked over to a closet. She started taking out pairs of shoes and putting them in a cardboard box.

“Need any help?” I said.

“No. Just relax.”

I saw a stuffed lamb sitting on the bed. It had blue glass eyes and a simpering smile and a red bow around its neck.

“Where’d you get the lamb?”

“Mr. Bruff gave it to me. For Christmas.” And then, after a moment: “He wants to marry me.”

“Bud?”

“Yeah.”

“But he’s already married.”

“He says that situation will be taken care of very soon.”

“Just tell him no.”

“
You
just tell him no.”

“I heard a rumor. That there’s some important people that aren’t happy with him, and his future in this town is limited.”

“What do you mean? They’re gonna send him to visit his sick aunt in San Francisco?”

“I guess so. So maybe if you can just hold out a little longer, your problem will be solved for you.”

“Just my luck, somebody’ll plant a bomb in his car, and I’ll be with him when it blows up.”

“That’s not gonna happen.”

She finished off the vodka, then held out the glass to me.

“Danny, would you be a dear and get me some water?”

I was glad she wasn’t asking for more vodka. In the kitchen, as I held the glass under the tap, I thought about her standing in front of the mirror without any clothes on. I thought about every inch of her.

When I went back in the bedroom, she was standing by the bureau, taking a medicine bottle out of her purse. She unscrewed the cap and tipped out three tablets into her palm.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Veronal.”

She took the glass from me and popped the tablets in her mouth.

“What’s it for?”

“It’s just a calmative. And don’t give me that look. My doctor gives them to me. It’s
medicine.
I’m not a dope fiend.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

She started taking stuff out of the bureau drawers. Frilly, silky, filmy, fascinating stuff.

“Damn,” she said. “I left my cigarettes in the car. Would you be a dear?”

Of course I would. I took the elevator down. The street was lined with palm trees, and a hot, dry wind rattled above me through the fronds.

The red Buick was still waiting, still spying. I suddenly felt mad. Like I’d had enough. I started walking toward it. I was behind it. Smoke was floating out of both sides. A shirt-sleeved elbow was sticking out of the passenger window. When I got to within about twenty feet, the engine started up, and the car took off, its tires making a brief screech.

I was surprised to find myself chasing it down the street and yelling: “Fuck you, you fucking bastards! Quit spying on me, goddamn it!”

The Buick sped away and was gone. Sweating and panting, I headed back toward my Packard. On the other side of the street, a woman and her two kids were looking at me fearfully; now they averted their eyes and hurried on.

I fetched the Lucky Strikes and went back up.

Darla was curled up on the bed, hugging the lamb, her eyes closed.

“I got your cigarettes.”

“Oh thanks, honey,” she said, not opening her eyes, and then: “Vodka and Veronal are
wo-o-o
nderful together.”

I stood above her, holding the pack of cigarettes she didn’t seem to want now, not knowing what to do next.

“Did I hear you yelling at somebody?” she asked.

“No.”

“I thought I heard you.”

“No.”

“You wanna lay down with me?”

Yes. I took off my hat and shoes. Her back was to me. I laid my head on the pillow right next to hers.

I breathed in her scent.

“Mitsouko?”

“Yeah. You still like it?”

“Uh huh.”

I eased my nose tentatively into her golden hair.

“Jean Harlow hasn’t got anything on you.”

She laughed. “Oh, stop it.”

“I mean it. You’re ten times more beautiful than she is. No.
Twenty
times.”

I lifted my head and with a finger pushed some damp locks of hair away from her neck and put my mouth there. Her flesh was very warm and was moist with perspiration. I slid my lips slowly back and forth.

She made a gentle, negative noise in her throat, and murmured: “Not now, Danny.”

My head sagged back onto the pillow, and I sighed. She reached back and gave my knee an understanding pat.

“Imagine what he’d do to us if we did it and he found out.”

“How would he find out?”

“Maybe I talk in my sleep.”

So I lay there in the perfumy heat within inches of Darla. We were both quiet for a moment; and then Darla said: “I had a dream. About you and him.”

“What happened?”

“We were on a ship. This big ocean liner, like the
Queen Mary.
We were on deck playing shuffleboard. We were all dressed in white, and we were all laughing, and having a good time, especially Bud, because he was winning. But then he turned his back on you, and you started hitting him with the shuffleboard stick. You hit him over the head, and he started staggering away, and there was blood everywhere, all over our white clothes, and you followed him and kept hitting him and hitting him. Bud was pleading with you, but your face, it was like a mask; it had no feeling in it.”

“You know, Darla—I’m not a killer.”

“Yes you are. You just don’t remember. And I’ll bet it’s like riding a bicycle. You never forget how.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to say…I wouldn’t ask you to do it just for me. You’d be doing it for yourself too. You’re his prisoner too. Anybody that gets close to him becomes his prisoner.” Now she turned over, and looked at me. She moved some hair away from my forehead, and her fingers brushed over the dent in my skull; it seemed like such an intimate thing, as if she were touching my private parts. “And then you and me—we could go away together.”

“Go away where?”

“Wherever you want.” She was wearing her charm bracelet, and now she fingered the crescent moon. “How about the moon? Everything would be very clear and bright and clean and glowing. And nobody would ever bother us.”

I could tell the vodka and Veronal were like a giant wave washing over her. Her eyes were becoming all dim and dreamy. She turned away from me, and snuggled up to the lamb.

“Life’s so funny,” she whispered to the lamb, and then, as her eyes closed: “Nobody’s ever loved me like Mr. Bruff.”

   THAT NIGHT I was unpeeling one of the extraordinarily tasty oranges I’d plucked from the dwarf orange trees in the courtyard, when I heard from outside: “No, Jerry! Please!”

It was Sophie’s voice. I went to the door.

Sophie and Jerry were on the sidewalk in front of Sophie’s bungalow. Jerry was bending over something, and Sophie was yelling: “I’m sorry! Honest I am! Don’t do it, Jerry!”

Then Sophie’s trampish mother Lois came out the door, wearing only a full slip which her big sloppy breasts were in danger of spilling out of. “Go ahead, Jerry!” she slurred, obviously loaded. “Do it! Show the little bitch who’s boss!”

I headed out the door and across the courtyard. To my left I saw Dulwich, wearing his many-colored silk smoking jacket and tasseled slippers, going in the same direction. Sophie was still yelling and she was pulling at Jerry’s elbow and now I could see what he was up to: he was squirting a can of lighter fluid over Sophie’s tap-dance shoes.

“Don’t do it, old man!” said Dulwich, but Jerry already had his lighter out and now the red shoes went up in a whoosh of blue flame.

Sophie screamed.

Lois slapped her face and said: “Shut up!”

“Leave her alone, you bitch!” I yelled.

“I’ll ask you to mind your tongue, Danny, especially where Lois is concerned,” said Jerry haughtily; he was wearing pin-striped gray trousers and a stained undershirt. “This here is none of your affair. Nor yours neither, Mr. Dulwich, with all due respect. It’s a family matter. Sophie is being punished because she was a bad girl.”

“The filthy names she called us,” said Lois. “I don’t know where she ever learned such language.”

“From you, you cunt!” said Sophie.

“Now that’s enough!” said Jerry as he roughly seized her upper arm.

Sophie tried to jerk and twist out of his grasp. “Let go of me, you ugly ape! You’re not my father! You’re just some bum that lives off my mother!”

“You’re gonna pay for that, Sophie!” said Jerry and now he started to drag her inside.

Dulwich stepped over the burning shoes and dispatched an elegant left cross into Jerry’s ribcage and then a whistling right cross into Jerry’s jaw right below his ear. His head snapped sideways and his knees buckled and he fell on his butt.

Dulwich stood over him, rubbing his knuckles and waiting for him to get up. Jerry massaged his jaw and gave Dulwich a look of bleary reproach.

“I’m surprised at you, Mr. Dulwich. I thought you was a gentleman.”

“Assuming for the nonce that I am a gentleman, my only regret is to have sullied my knuckles with a man like you.”

Sophie took the opportunity to dart inside and slam the door. Her mother was right behind her; she rattled the doorknob futilely.

“She locked us out, the little brat!” She began to pound on the door and shout: “Sophie, open the door! Sophie! Unlock the door
now
!”

Some of our neighbors had drifted out of their bungalows and were watching from a safe distance. Now Mrs. Dean came charging toward us, her pinched face furious and the dying flames from the tap-dancing shoes flashing in her glasses.

“Good gracious heavens alive! What on earth is going on here?!” She was wearing a ratty sky-blue quilted housecoat over a pink nightgown. “This is the Orange Blossom Bungalow Court, not some slum!”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Dean,” said Lois, who seemed to be sobering up fast. “It was just a little family spat. Sophie locked us out.”

Jerry climbed back to his feet, and stuck his hand in his pocket. “I’ve got a key.”

“Oh, that’s swell, sugar.” Lois took the key and unlocked the door. “Sorry again, Mrs. Dean. We won’t be any more trouble.”

“Well, you better not be. This is a respectable place, Lois. You’re practically naked. I’ll call the police if I have to.”