The Neon Jungle (4 page)

And Lockter had been imprisoned for aggravated assault.

Paul slipped his report in a Manila envelope. He folded up the card table and prepared for bed. Somebody was playing a radio too loudly. Neon winked faintly against the tan lace curtains. He decided he would try to see Mrs. Henry Varaki on Monday when he went to the store with Jimmy Dover. He remembered seeing her. A tallish girl, quite pretty, with a quiet voice and a sulky mouth.

WALTER VARAKI LAY on the bed with the pillows bunched under his head. The bed lamp made a bright light on the book he was reading. He had a cigar in the exact center of his mouth. He was vaguely conscious of Doris moving about the room, preparing for bed. It was the second time he had read the book. He was reading faster than usual, so he would get to the place where Mike Hammer takes the big blonde up to his apartment. That Hammer! There was a guy knew how to live. They didn’t mess with him. Not twice, anyway. He had what it took with the women. He wasn’t stuck in any two-bit grocery business.

“You know those damn cigars make me sick. I told you enough times. They make me sick!”

He took the cigar butt slowly from his lips and turned his head and gave her a look, the way Mike Hammer would have looked at her.

“That’s a damn shame,” he said, making his voice gravelly.

“A lot you care.”

“Look, you’re sleeping in the next room because you want more room in the bed now. Why don’t you move your clothes in there and let me alone?”

“You know I don’t feel good, and you got to try to make me sick with those stinking cigars. Everything around here smells like food or cigars.”

He looked at the cigar. It had gone out of its own accord. He put it carefully in, the glass ash tray. “It’s out.”

“Thank you so much,” Doris said viciously.

“Boy, you have a happy disposition.”

“Would you be happy, looking like this?”

She looked as if she were going to have the baby in the next ten minutes, but according to the doc it was still nearly a month off. That was a lot of yak about pregnancy making them bloom. Her black hair was stringy and sticky-looking and her complexion was all over pimples. He looked at her and wondered how the hell he’s ever been able to think he was in love with her. Talk about her being sick. It turned his stomach to look at her. She’d always had a sharp tongue. These days she couldn’t say anything pleasant to anybody. Sat around all day feeling sorry for herself.

“There’s another jailbird coming on Monday,” she said.

He turned back to his book. “Yeah.”

“I told you to tell him not to have any more of them coming here. I got to raise a kid in this house. It looks like I’m going to spend the rest of my life raising kids in this crummy old house. I should have known you were giving me a big line with all that talk of getting out of here and going in some other line of work. You’ll never get out. And I’ll never get out. The least you can do is keep him from filling the place up with crooks and tramps. I don’t want that Bonny touching my baby.”

“Settle down, for God’s sake they’ll hear you all the way downstairs.”

“I don’t give a damn if they do. Nobody ever asks me for my opinion about anything around here.”

“They don’t have to ask you, baby.”

“You didn’t ever have that Vern Lockter looking at you the way he looked at me that day.”

“You come prancing down the hall half naked, what you expect?”

“You just don’t give a damn, do you?”

“Doris, for God’s sake!”

“Go ahead. Curse at me. The old man won’t let you go. You’re the only son he’s got left. One son and a man-crazy kid staying out half the night all the time. He won’t let you go. Not him. He’ll never pay us enough money so you can save enough to get out of here. We’re both stuck. We might as well face it.”

“Why don’t you go to bed?”

“So you can enjoy your book. So you don’t have to listen to me. So you don’t have to pretend… Oh, hell!”

“Good night, for God’s sake! Good night!”

She stared at him, then snatched her pajamas from the back of the closet door and went into the adjoining room and slammed the door. He gave a long sigh of relief and tried to get back into the book. But he needed a few minutes to quiet down. He tossed it aside and relit the cigar end, sucked the smoke deep into his lungs.

It seemed like there was a plot against him, the way everything worked out. God knew he’d never wanted to work in the store. Take Henry. He’d loved it. It was funny to think of never seeing Henry again. Way back there somewhere were the good days, when Mom had been around, when the store had been in the downstairs part of the house, when Teena had been too little to walk. Back when he and Henry had made raids on the store, with Pop and the help cussing them out.

No, he’d never wanted to work in the store. He’d taken those business courses in high school so he’d be able to get away from the grocery business. Everything seemed to go to hell for you when you weren’t looking. Twenty-seven already, with twenty-eight coming up too soon. Too damn soon. Doris had raised a lot of hell when he’d given up four years’ seniority at the post office to come back here and help out while Henry was in the Army. Now Henry was gone for keeps and it looked like he was stuck forever. And it looked like Doris would go on nagging for the rest of her life. Having the kid just made it worst, made it more impossible to get away.

He thought of her in the next room, lying heavily in the bed, and it was hard to think that she was the same Doris of way back when. He remembered that he first started watching her in typing class that next to last year of high. She sat diagonally ahead of him. Doris Antonelli. All the little things about her made his heart go fast. The way she sat so straight, and the way the yellow pencil looked shoved into her black hair, and the way her. eyes were so quick, and the trick she had of flicking at her lower lip with the very tip of her tongue.

They’d started talking in the halls first, and it was a long time before she’d go out with him. Her people were real strict with her. They lived way the hell and gone out, and he remembered how it was, the incredible shocking softness of her lips that winter night inside that storm-door arrangement on her front porch, and then missing the late bus and walking all the way back through the snow, not even minding the cold, thinking of how she had felt in his arms.

The next year was the last year for both of them, and they dated three and four nights a week, sometimes the movies, sometimes just walking together, sometimes just sitting in her living room until her old man would stick his head out of the kitchen and clear his throat a couple of times and he had to leave. Funny how, now, he remembered that they had talked and talked and talked, but now he couldn’t remember what it was they talked about. Maybe they should have saved some of that talk until after marriage. It would have given them something to do.

He hadn’t been thinking of marriage then. He’d been wanting to have her without that. And the way she acted, he thought he could, but somehow there didn’t ever seem to be the right place or time. Without seeming to think about it or try, she always managed it so they weren’t in the right place at the right time, but in the places where she was safe.

Even after he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, if it was O.K. with her folks, he couldn’t get any further with her, and it got so he couldn’t sleep right at night. Her folks said he had to have a job and have money saved. Pop and Henry kidded him about his Eye-talian girl, but they seemed to like her well enough. He told Doris you’d never catch him dead in the grocery business. There were the two jobs that weren’t any good, and she was working too, and they both saved, and then he got the post-office appointment.

Even after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him. In fact, after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him do more than just kiss her. It was a great big wedding. Her folks spent a lot on it. There was a lot to drink, and a couple of the usual fist fights, and afterward they went on the train to Montreal. They had to sit up on the train, and they got to the hotel at eleven in the morning, and she said it was daylight and she wouldn’t until night.

And when finally it happened, she acted like he was some kind of an animal or something, She acted like it was something she had to let him do because they were married. In the daytime when he’d just put his arm around her, she’d stiffen right up. It was the damnedest thing he’d ever heard of.

She wasn’t too bad while he’d worked at the P.O., but she’d certainly been mean and nasty since they’d been back at the store and since she got pregnant. And she’d got worse after Bonny had arrived. He’d watch Bonny and Doris would watch him watching Bonny, and there’d be a bad time after they got to bed.

Maybe Henry was dead, but he’d had a good deal there while he was on that leave and didn’t come home. Hell, you could tell from looking at her that she knew the score. The way she walked and the way she was built. Henry always got the breaks. Pop had treated Henry right. You could tell Henry was the favorite son.

Everything went wrong for you when you weren’t watching. Now it was like God spitting in your eye to have the two of them right in the same house. Bonny and Jana. They’d fixed it so he had to walk around looking at them all the time, and him married to a damn stringy stuffed dummy. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.

But they were going to find out, all of them. He got up in the darkened room and knelt quietly by the bureau and pulled open the bottom drawer, inch by inch. He felt in, under the clothes, and touched the wedding portrait. He and Doris, standing there. She had no damn reason for ever sliding it out of the slot in the heavy yellow paper folder. It made him feel safe just to touch it. To touch it and think of the crispness of the fifty-dollar bills slid down behind the glossy print. There were twelve of them now. And a man could go a long way on six hundred bucks.

It had taken him since March to get hold of that many. There was no point trying to hold out on Doris on the money Pop gave him every Saturday night when he paid off the others. Doris wanted all of that.

So he’d gone about it another way. Between them, he and Jana did the bookkeeping, the way the accountant told them to. The problem wasn’t to fool Jana. That was easy. The problem was to fool the machine. He had thought about a lot of different angles. Finally he found one so simple it had to work. Pop liked to pay the wholesalers in cash when they brought a bill around. The cash would come out of the register and the receipted bill would go in. Later Walter posted the bills to a ledger. He kited the receipted bills and took the difference from the register. A penciled figure one could be readily changed to a seven. Some of the bills had been made up on a machine. Those could not be altered. Pop seemed to have lost a lot of his intense interest in the business. The decline in profits would make little difference to him.

He closed the drawer and went back to the bed. Twelve paper pieces of freedom, and by the time Doris had to go to the hospital, he might have a thousand dollars.

He undressed in the darkness and got into bed. The ash tray clattered down between bed and wall. He left it there. Each night he went to sleep making up the same dream. He would be pacing a hospital corridor. They would come out and tell him that Doris had died in childbirth. Grief would turn him into a crazy man. They’d have to give him a sedative and keep him at the hospital. After she was buried, and after a reasonable period of mourning, he’d make a play for Bonny. She’d be feeling sorry for him. She’d comfort him. He wouldn’t want to marry her, of course. Not after hearing what Rowell said, and the way he said it.

Then he went into the variation of the dream. The second shock of losing daughter-in-law and grandson would kill the old man. That would leave him owning the store, living in the same house with Jana and Bonny.

Then there was always the third possibility. Doris would have the kid, but on the day she was due to come home, he’d take off with Bonny. They’d head for the Southwest. Things were alive down there.

He could see the two of them. They’d pull up in the parking lot of one of those fancy gambling houses and park the convertible. Bonny would be a sort of a hostess. He’d have her wear long evening dresses, tight-fitting, made of gold and silver. And he’d wear a tux, midnight blue, and walk around through the tables and sort of keep an eye on things. The sharpies would stay away from his place. They’d know he wasn’t the kind of guy you could fool with. Every once in a while he’d send a fat money order to Doris and the kid.

Tonight the dreams weren’t working. Tonight the dreams were sour. He turned on the light and found his place in the book. Mike had just got the big blonde into his apartment.

Walter Varaki slid into a more comfortable position and began to read hurriedly. He was Mike Hammer. The grocery business was far away.

MR. GROVER WENTLE was a very overworked gentleman. The high school was overcrowded. The teaching staff was barely adequate. And his secretary told him that Miss Forrest was waiting in the outer office with a disciplinary problem. It was the fifth time that day.

“Who is it?” he asked his secretary.

“One of the senior girls. Christine Varaki. Disturbance in study hall.”

He started to say wearily, “Send her in and…” He stopped and stared at his secretary. “Teena Varaki? There must be a mistake.”

“From the girl’s attitude I hardly think so.”

“Get me her record first. She’s due to graduate in a few weeks.”

The secretary sighed and plodded out. Mr. Wentle sat and remembered what he knew of Teena. Bright, capable, friendly. A good worker. Active in extracurricular activities. A rather sturdy, merry-eyed blonde, well liked by classmates and teachers.

The record brought to him was, surprisingly, up to date. The monthly grades had been posted. March had been her last good month. The grades for April and May were close to failing. He put the record aside. “Send her in. Tell Miss Forrest to return to study hall. It will be a shambles down there.”

Teena came in. He saw at once that the look of sturdiness was gone. She was much thinner. Her face looked shallow. She sat facing him, without invitation, and her stare was bright and hostile.

“This doesn’t sound like you, Teena.”

“Doesn’t it?”

The tone of her voice angered him. He waited until his temper was under control. “Suppose you tell me what happened.”

“I was reading a book. Forrest came along. It’s none of her business what I do as long as I keep quiet. She took hold of my hair. So I stood up and slapped her.”

“You mean she just came along and took hold of your hair?”

“I knew she was standing there. She told me to put the book away. I didn’t answer her. It’s none of her business what I’m reading so long as I keep quiet. She took my hair to make me look at her. So I slapped her and she brought me here. I’ll do it again the same way if she tries it again.”

“This isn’t like you, Teena.”

“You said that once.”

“I looked at your record. You were doing splendidly. What happened to you in March?”

“My brother died.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that. This is a big school. It’s hard to keep track of—”

“Don’t sweat.”

“What did you say?”

“I said don’t sweat yourself up about it. March was a long time ago. He got killed in Korea. That’s got nothing to do with this.”

“With how your attitude has changed?”

“My attitude is all right. I like it fine.”

“Others might not be as fond of it as you are.”

“My attitude is my business. You want to expel me or send me back to study hall? Either way suits me. It doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t care if you don’t graduate?”

“Not particularly. I’ll be eighteen this summer. I’m done with school.”

“If you get your grades up during exams, I’m almost certain I can get you a university scholarship.”

“Do I go home or go back to study hall?”

He looked into the hostile blue eyes and felt a sense of defeat. Sometimes you thought you had them, and then suddenly they were lost. There seemed to be more and more of them these last few years. Full of a new sullen hostility. Full of disrespect. He felt the weariness of his years and his position. In the dream he had planned to be a full professor by now, a departmental head at a college with a wide green campus, Gothic stone, chimes at sunset.

That was the dream. The reality was this ugly brick school, the hostile eyes, the evil, the obscenities. The reality was this girl who sat insolently slumped, insolently staring.

“Teena, if something is bothering you, I wish you’d tell me.”

“Something is bothering me.”

“What?”

“How the story comes out. The one I was reading when Forrest yanked on my hair.”

“You come from a decent family, Teena.”

“You want somebody should play soft on violins about now?”

“Go back to your study hall.”

She got up and looked at him for a moment without expression, then turned and left his office, swinging her thin hips in the plaid skirt.

She got to the study hall just as the bell rang for the end of the period. Miss Forrest gave her a look of unadulterated hate. Teena looked back with the flat indifference of someone who looks at a door, window, chair.

She went down the aisle and scooped her books off her assigned desk and turned back toward the door. Fitz came up behind her.

“Make out?” he asked.

“Weeping Wentle made with violins.”

“You’re not out?”

She turned and looked back up over her shoulder at him. “Should I be?”

They went out into the hall. There was five minutes before the last class of the day. She leaned against the wall of the corridor, books hugged in both arms. Fitz leaned one hand on the wall and looked down at her.

“I got some sticks,” he said softly.

“How many?”

“Enough. Ginny’s got some caps. A hell of a lot of them. Bucky is all set with the car. How about it?”

“They want us along?”

“So why not? They want to pop. They want company. Ginny got the sticks and the horse. She says they’re both real george.”

“So why not? Like you said.”

He bent his arm so that he leaned his elbow against the wall and thus stood closer to her. There, in the crowded corridor, between classes, he slid his free hand up under the hugged schoolbooks. She shut her eyes and made a small sound.

“Around the corner on Duval,” he said, his lips close to her ear, “right after next bell.”

He took his hand away and left her. She stood for a moment, the strength returning to her knees, and then walked down to her next class, getting there just as the warning buzzer sounded. She went to her desk, slammed her books down hard, and sat down, flatly returning the indignant stare of the teacher. The class whispered, giggled, rustled. The teacher stood up and the interminable last hour began.

Teena sat and thought about Fitz. She thought about Fitz and thought about what Ginny had, and wondered whether there’d be enough. It was funny how the two were getting all mixed up in her mind. Fitz, fix. Funny how she’d thought he was so messy before. Always doing fresh things. And always in trouble in school. Running around with those girls they talked about. He and Bucky. Girls like Ginny. Ginny was nice.

The house had gone so sour when they heard about Henry. Like it had taken all the life out of the house, and out of her. All the life and all the resistance, so that when Fitz came around that same week, it didn’t matter whether she went out with him or not. Bucky drove fast. Scary fast. And Fitz in the back with her. “No honey, You’re not doing it right. Look. Like this. You put the cigarette in the corner of your mouth. See? But you got to leave your lips a little open so air comes in along with the smoke. Then you suck the smoke and air right down deep into your lungs. That’s the kid! Come on. Again, now. That’s the way, honey.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Give it a chance, honey. Give it some time.”

It was funny how fast it slowed the world down. She remembered how she could look at the speedometer and it said eighty, but looking ahead she could see every crack and pebble on the pavement, and it was as if she could hear the tick and thump of every cylinder in the motor. It was as if she could open the door and step out, the car was going so slow. Bucky had the place over the garage. His family had a lot of money. She remembered him saying that he was in public high school because he’d been thrown out of the schools where they sent him. The place over the garage had always been a sort of play room for him. It was full of kid stuff. They’d ended up there, the four of them. Floating. The music was something that was new in the world. Notes like the slow ripple of silver cloth. All dim up there. Bucky’s family away someplace. She smoked more, the way Fitz had taught her. And then Fitz had her watch Bucky and Ginny. Bucky heated a spoon over a stubby candle. She saw the gleam of a needle. Ginny stood with her face turned away. She worked her fist and Bucky held her arm tight and the blue vein came up, bulging ugly inside the delicate elbow. Ginny had funny black curly hair cut close to her head, and a cute shape and big wet brown eyes. She shook all over.

“What is he doing to her?” Teena had asked.

“Main-lining her. Capping her straight.”

Time went all crazy. It would drag and then speed ahead. There was the music. Teena floated. There was just one dim bulb and the music. She and Bucky sat on the floor in front of the speaker. Fitz gave her another stick and she went far away then, and after a long time she awoke to an annoying, awkward discomfort. There was a heavy weight crushing her, and the weight was Fitz. The music was slow and hard in the ear. Fitz’s eyes were so close to hers she could distinguish each separate lash. Bucky and Ginny were somewhere else in the room…

When they let her out by her house, Fitz had to call her back to give her her schoolbooks. They seemed strange to her, a part of a faraway world that had lost all importance. She went into the alien house full of strangers, full of strange faces and alien eyes. The clock in her room said ten-fifteen.

The next morning she had remembered. Memory had terrified her. This house was the real world. These school-books. That other was nightmare. The twelve blocks to school was the longest walk she had ever taken, and the sleet stung her cheeks, and she felt soiled and ashamed. She did not want to talk to Fitz. But she saw him in study hall, and made herself return his stare. Ginny had come up to her, later, in the girl’s room.

“What are you looking so pink-eyed about, Teena?”

“I… I just didn’t…”

“Watch the words around this outfit. We talked about you. You’re a good kid, Teena.”

“Thanks, but I…”

“The Christer types make me want to fwow up. You were a good sport. You didn’t chicken on us.”

“Maybe I should have.”

“Relax. It’s all for kicks. No damage done. We’ve got a party coming up. O.K.? See you at three.”

And she found herself going with Ginny again, and again they drove fast, this time over ice, and ended up in the same dim room. From then on, house and school became unreal and stayed unreal. It was more comfortable that way. If you did not care, there was no place inside you that hurt any more.

She couldn’t remember which time it was that Bucky gave them both the pops. Not in the vein, like he and Ginny took it. It wasn’t like the sticks. This was something that rolled down hot through you and exploded, and ran right back up to a delicious floating warmth, a feeling of owning everything, a feeling of being queen of Hollywood, star of a show.

After a pop, the sticks seemed lifeless. Ginny and Bucky wouldn’t come through again with a free cap for another pop when they were together again. They said they had a heavy habit to take care of. Fitz and Bucky quarreled. They made up, and there were a few more times when they were together again, and got a cap and a half apiece, having it cooked together, and Teena was crazy mad for a minute because Fitz got more than his half, but when it hit her, she got over being mad.

Now everybody had got mad again. The teacher droned on. She sat and thought about what Fitz had said. Sticks and horse. She thought sullenly, Horse for them and sticks for us. Meat for them and lollypops for us. But he had said they wanted company. Every time she thought of it, it made something turn over inside her. It had been too long a time. Three days. Her face was itchy and her eyes watered. It was funny about food. It would look good but you could chew and chew and it wouldn’t go down. Ginny had left school last month.

The interminable hour finally ended. Another week gone. A week end stretching ahead.

The three of them were waiting in Bucky’s car for her, where Fitz had said they’d be. She made herself walk slowly to the car. She could hardly keep from running.

She got in the back beside Fitz. “Hello, you people.”

“The pride of Johnston High,” Ginny said. “How you been making out, Teena?”

“Dandy. Just dandy.’

Bucky didn’t start the car. He turned around and stared at Teena. Ginny stared too. It made her nervous. She tried to smile at them. She felt as if her smile were flashing on and off like one of those airport things.

“I think it’s O.K.,” Bucky said.

“I know it’s O.K. I told you it would be O.K.,” Fitz said.

“What are you talking about? What’s O.K.?”

They didn’t answer. Fitz patted her leg. Bucky started the car up. “Where are we going?” Teena asked in a small voice.

“The family came back,” Bucky said. “We’re going to Ginny’s place.”

“Is your family away, Ginny?” Teena asked.

They all laughed at her, and it made her mad, so she sat back in sullen silence. Bucky drove downtown, past the railroad station, along a street of missions and cheap bars and shoddy hotels. He went down an alley and parked in a small concrete cavern behind an aged brick building. They went up back stairs for three flights. The air had a tired musty smell. Ginny unlocked the door of a small room with one window and they all crowded in. There was barely room for a sagging bed, bureau, and chair.

“Be it ever so humble,” Ginny said. “Sit on the chair, Teena.”

“Sure. Do we take a fix here?”

“Could be,” Bucky said, giving her a cool crooked smile. Bucky and Fitz sat on the bed, side by side. Ginny leaned against the window frame and folded her arms.

“Why are you all looking at me like that?” Teena asked nervously.

“Well, it’s like this  “

“Shut up, Fitz,” Ginny said. “I’ll handle this. You need a fix, Teena?”

“Oh, God, Ginny! It’s like things crawling all over me.”

“How many free rides you got off us?”

“Gosh, I don’t—

“Plenty, kid. You think maybe it grows on trees? You think you get it free because of your charming personality? It’s time you started earning your fixes, dear. Like a good little girl.”

Teena glanced from one to the other. They were all looking at her with a cold expectancy. “What’s this all about?”