The Kind One (7 page)

I noticed people looking at us respectfully as we passed, like we were all big important guys, like we had the world by the tail, by its bushy tail.

We stopped off at a table near the door where some guys were playing cards. “Hey, Floyd,” said Bud, “let’s see what kinda balls you got. Let’s cut the cards for 10,000 bucks.”

Floyd, who had three or four chins spilling out over his collar, looked around at the other guys at the table, who were grinning at him expectantly; then he set down the deck in front of Bud.

“Okay, Bud. Let’s go.”

“Go ahead, Danny,” said Bud.

“Huh?”

“Cut the cards.”

“Aw, no, Bud, not me—”

“Go ahead, kid. I got a feeling.”

People at other tables were watching now. The cigarette girl paused in her tour of the room, and waited high atop her legs. I felt my heart speeding up as I reached for the deck.

Three of hearts.

The guys at the table started to laugh—Floyd too, his chins shaking. The cigarette girl smirked at me. But Bud didn’t bat an eye.

“Hey, it ain’t over yet. Floyd?”

Floyd shook his head and sighed like this was all a tiresome formality and reached over and cut the cards.

Deuce of spades.

The guys at the table were howling now. I heard some cheers and applause coming from some of the other tables. The cigarette girl gave me a nice smile, showing rosy gums and even white teeth. And Floyd’s face and all his chins were turning as red as a brick. “You know, Bud, I don’t actually have that kind of money on me right at this moment—”

“Don’t sweat it, Floyd. I know you’re good for it. Just bring it around tomorrow.”

Then Bud slapped me on the back as we went out. “See, kid? You’re a winner.”

   Bud and I were in the back seat of his bulletproof black Lincoln sedan as it sped northward on Sepulveda toward Hollywood. Teddy Bump was driving. Dick and the two Tommys were behind us in another car.

Bud was smoking a cigar and sipping some whiskey on the rocks; he was in a good mood.

“I figured something out tonight. It’s like silent pictures and pictures with people talking. Most of them old movie stars couldn’t make the switch. It turned out the guys had voices like fairies and the broads sounded like cats that was getting their tails stepped on. Same thing since they made booze legal. A lotta guys are gonna fall along the wayside. But not me. I’m gonna be smart about all this.”

I nodded. Bud rattled around the ice in his glass. “What do you think of Schnitter?”

“He’s okay.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“I didn’t say anything was the matter with him.”

“Come on, Danny, I know you. Spit it out.”

“Well…if you were to eat a bunch of bad oysters and you’re puking your guts out all night, and then you finally fall asleep, but you’re still sick, and you’re having these horrible dreams, they’re like the worst nightmares of your life, and you’re thrashing around in bed and moaning…well, Schnitter’s the kind of guy you might be dreaming about.”

Bud puffed on his cigar and looked at me.

“That sounds nuts, I guess.”

“No, Danny, I understand your meaning. I’ve noticed you’re usually very sharp about people. I always take what you say very serious.”

We rolled on through the dark awhile, and then: “Bud? Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“How old am I?”

He seemed taken aback. “How old are you?”

“Yeah.”

He looked away from me and out the window. There wasn’t much to look at.

“Twenty-five, kid. You’re twenty-five.”

   “SMELL ME,” SAID Darla.

She offered me her wrist. I could see green and blue and purple veins under the skin which seemed as thin and white as tissue paper.

It made me dizzy she smelled so good. Like sticking my head in a bucket of flowers. “Nice,” I said.

“It’s Mitsouko. Jean Harlow’s favorite. I bought twenty bottles.”

We were driving away from Bullock’s Department Store on Wilshire. On the radio the announcer said Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker had been killed by lawmen in Louisiana.

“So they finally got them,” said Darla.

I’d been guarding her body for three and a half weeks. I was obviously an intimidating force, since there hadn’t been a single attempt to attack or kidnap her.

I’d taken her, in puffy pants and high black boots, to her weekly horseback-riding lesson at the DuBrock Riding Academy. I’d driven her, pale and sweaty and gritting her teeth, to see a Dr. Siegel in Beverly Hills for some kind of “female” complaint. I’d eaten triple-decker ice cream sundaes with her at Eskimo Ice Cream, which was a building shaped like an igloo, and had platefuls of steaming, gleaming, tender pork ribs at the Pick-a-Rib Barbecue Pit on Melrose. I’d gone with her to a bar in Malibu because she said they served great silver fizzes there, that’s a drink made with egg whites; I couldn’t have choked one down on a bet but she drank three then we drove on up the Coast Highway to Point Dume. It’s a finger of land sticking out in the ocean where Santa Monica Bay ends. We got out of the car and walked around. It was windy and the water was blue and there weren’t any clouds. A couple of hundred feet from shore a sea lion was sunning itself on a big rock. You could look up the coast and see the rest of California disappearing into the distance, and you could imagine disappearing into that distance too, not looking back, just traveling forever.

Point Dume was where Darla told me all about Darla.

She grew up in a speck-like town on the prairie called Nebraska City, Nebraska. Her father was the postmaster. One winter when she was twelve there was a terrible blizzard and no one could get out of the house for days. Her father just sat there drinking moonshine out of a mason jar and getting more and more worried because he couldn’t get the mail out to people and he felt like he was letting everybody down. Darla said she and her father were sitting at the kitchen table and her mother was standing at the stove cooking breakfast and her mother told her father to quit feeling sorry for himself. Her father didn’t say a word, just got up and started walking toward her mother and then Darla saw a gun in his hand and he shot her mother in the back of the head. Then he turned and looked at Darla.

The wind was howling outside and snow was blowing past the windows and she could see in her father’s eyes that he was about to kill her. She jumped up and ran in the bathroom and locked the door. He started beating on the door then throwing his weight up against it, and she tried to get the window open but it was jammed shut then he burst into the room.

She got in the bathtub like it was some kind of protection and tried to squeeze herself up into a little ball as he walked over and looked down at her. “No, Daddy, don’t!” she said, and he smiled at her and said: “Aw, honey, I wouldn’t never hurt you, I’m your daddy,” and then he shot himself in the side of the head.

She was sent to live with her uncle Gideon. He lived on a farm out in the middle of nothing. He and his wife didn’t have any children. She was an invalid and seldom left their bedroom.

Darla had to do all the cooking and cleaning like the stepchild in a fairy tale. She had to bring in water from the well and feed the chickens and once she even had to help Uncle Gideon slaughter a hog; she held on tight to the hog’s hind legs so it wouldn’t run off while Gideon beat it in the head with a sledge hammer.

One day Darla was sitting in the outhouse when she became aware that Gideon was spying on her through a crack in the door.

As the weeks went on it seemed like every time she looked around she’d find her uncle’s eyes on her. She was only twelve but she’d developed early and she looked sixteen, and she knew enough about the facts of life to know what was on Gideon’s mind.

She was out in the barn gathering eggs on a day in early spring when Gideon came in. He came up behind her and put his hand on her bottom and started rubbing and squeezing it. She told him to stop and he said: “I’m just giving you what you been wanting, you little whoremongering bitch.”

She tried to get away but he chased her around the barn, giggling all the while like they were two kids playing tag. She started taking eggs out of her basket and throwing them at him, and he dodged and giggled till one hit him in the forehead. Then his face turned dark with anger as he wiped off the dripping mess, and she made a break for the ladder that led up to the hay loft. She nearly made it all the way up but then he grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her down, then, still holding on to the one ankle, he dragged her over to a pile of hay. He yanked her dress up and her drawers down and climbed on top of her. She said the sounds he made while he raped her reminded her of how the hog sounded when it was being killed.

When Gideon finished he became enraged and slapped her face again and again. He said it was her fault he’d fallen into sin and it was her fault his brother had killed himself; he was sure Darla had tried to tempt his brother into doing what Gideon had just done and he had to kill himself to keep from doing it. As he got up and buttoned his britches he told her not to tell anybody what had happened or else he’d throw her down the well then say she’d killed herself because she couldn’t live with all the lies she’d been telling.

She ran away, but Gideon called the sheriff on her and he caught her and she was back on Gideon’s farm in less than a day.

Gideon told her if she was going to act like some kind of sorry no-account dog that wouldn’t stay in the yard unless it was tied up then that was how he was going to have to treat her. He chained her to the stove. He brought her food and water twice a day, and the only time he let her loose was to go to the outhouse. He’d go with her and stand in the door to make sure she didn’t run off.

Darla said that after about a week she wrapped the chain around her neck and tried to strangle herself, but it hurt too bad so she gave up.

Finally one night her aunt Bess crept out of the bedroom, wearing a flowing white nightgown that made her look like a ghost. She had a key. Darla could hear Gideon snoring as Bess unlocked the padlock. She whispered: “Now you just run, honey, you run away fast as you can. I’d go with you if I could.” So Darla snuck out of the house and ran down the road and the sheriff didn’t catch her this time.

She walked for two days, hiding whenever a car went past, till she happened upon a hobo jungle near a railroad yard. Three hoboes were cooking some stew and Darla was starving and they fed her. She stayed with them a few days and they were really nice to her. Darla said it was kind of like a Shirley Temple movie, three loveable tramps adopting a cute little runaway girl; one of the tramps even looked and talked like Wallace Beery, but then they all got liquored up one night and tore off her clothes and took turns with her.

So she ran off again. She hitchhiked. She tried to accept rides only with older husband-and-wife-looking couples who seemed unlikely to attack her. When asked what her story was, it never occurred to her to tell the truth; she would just say she was on her way home after visiting relatives. Her rides would often feed her and sometimes give her a buck or two.

Darla drifted eastward across the country; her only goal was to put as much distance as possible between herself and Nebraska. That summer she got caught in a thunderstorm out on a road in Indiana. She’d always been terrified of lightning and so she jumped in the first car that stopped.

It was a Model A Ford driven by a young Army lieutenant. Within ten minutes his hand was on her knee and headed north. She sunk her teeth in his arm and he yelled and she opened the door and flung herself out.

She bounced and tumbled in the rain till she came to a stop with her left arm sticking out at a crazy angle. The lieutenant’s car slowed down a minute then sped away.

Darla found herself just outside the city limits of Elwood, Indiana. She walked into town, her broken arm hanging. Lightning struck a tree in front of her and a big limb fell down on the ground. She saw a sign in front of a house that said: Woodrow Ames, M.D.

Dr. Ames turned out to be a tall silver-haired old man who set her arm with gentleness and skill. He complimented Darla for not crying or crying out. He was nearly finished when she started getting bad stomach pains then blood came pouring out from between her legs. He called to his wife to come and help, and the Ameses and Darla were all astonished when a tiny half-formed baby plopped on the floor like a dead fish.

Darla hadn’t known that her uncle Gideon or one of the tramps had gotten her pregnant. She began to cry and she told them everything. She begged them not to send her back to Uncle Gideon, and Dr. Ames said don’t worry, the only things that man deserved were a vigorous horsewhipping and a long prison term.

Dr. Ames and his wife had a daughter but she had grown up and had her own children and moved away, and now they were very lonely. They looked on Darla as a gift from God. They moved her into their daughter’s old bedroom. They felt bad about what had been done to her and they couldn’t do enough for her. They bought her new clothes and shoes and ribbons for her yellow hair and whatever kind of bright gewgaw a girl twelve going on thirteen might desire. They told everyone in Elwood Darla was the daughter of a distant relative who had died. They said they would like to adopt her legally if it was all right with her and she said yes.

On Sundays, they took her to church. She had a fine singing voice and joined the youth choir.

In September, she enrolled in school. She was in the eighth grade. She felt much older than her classmates and didn’t make any real friends. But she found herself popular because she was so pretty and everyone was eager to sign the cast on her nearly mended arm, and she liked school and studied hard and made good grades.

In December, there was a lynching.

An old white woman named Bathsheba Butler had been found in her house robbed, raped, and stabbed and hacked to death with a pair of gardening shears. Earlier that same day, a colored man named Beau Jack had done some yard work at her house, and he’d been seen trimming some bushes with those very same shears.