The Neon Jungle (15 page)

“My God, that’s something for
you
to say.”

“And I’d say the Dover boy is one of the best risks. He’s going to come out all right.”

“Unless he sees a chance too good to miss, you mean.”

“Someday, Andy, something is going to happen that’ll put you on my side of the fence.”

“Reform your kids, Preach. Don’t try to work on me. I’ve got enough troubles. Just make some other arrangements for Dover, will you?”

“Let’s let it ride, Andy.”

Rowell sighed, made a grotesque gesture of despair, and left.

Paul turned his attention back to his work, but he could not concentrate. It was as though Bonny stood close behind him, almost touching him, and he had only to turn the scarred and creaking swivel chair to be able to look up into the gray of her eyes and fold the slimness of her waist in his arms, the fresh clean fragrance of her in his nostrils.

He could isolate, pin down the exact moment when it had happened, there on the sun-spotted terrace with the brook sounds, with the look of her across from him, her head tilted a bit as she listened to something he was saying. She had listened with head tilted and then her gray eyes widened with a warm amusement, and her chin came up a bit and her round throat had been full of soft laughter, and in her amusement her glance had moved across his eyes, faltered, returned, focused then with a small narrowing look, almost of alarm, as her laughter faded. In that moment she had ceased to be the widow of Henry Varaki, ceased to be a person he could help in any way, and became to him a desirable woman, something of lilt and fragrance and need.

He remembered how he had talked to her, remembered his own ponderous, stuffy conversation. He thought of what she must think of him and he could not help flushing.

He got up from his desk and took the single stride to the dusty window and looked down at the June street below, at the paper-littered green of the courthouse lawn.

Betty had said once, “Paul, you have a knack of suffering about everything. You spend half your time thinking of what you should have done or should not have done, long after it’s finished and over and quite through.”

Now, Betty, you who understood me so well, you could explain to me why this is happening. It was never to happen again. You were enough for a lifetime. I want her. I want her so badly that now I think of how she stood there, throwing words at me the way a child would throw stones, telling me I could take her there by the gray stones. She has been badly hurt, by herself. Yet she has a great pride. She won’t accept pity. If she interprets my interest as charity, she will despise me. I know she has been used by many men. When I think of that, something turns over slowly inside me, like the first warning of nausea. Yet intellectually I can tell myself that it was not Bonny who was used. The men used her body, and her body was the device by which she was punishing herself for original sin. Somehow, some way, I must be able to tell her that it’s not pity, it’s not charity, it’s not lust. Nor is it the romantic love of adolescence. It’s a woman I want. I want her, mind, soul, body. Which is something you must understand, because it’s the way I wanted you. This is not lesser, or greater. It’s the same thing. I was not made to be alone.

In this year I have felt myself edging toward a funereal dryness, a crotchety exactitude. Now it’s time to come alive again, Betty.

He knew, standing there, that if he followed his impulse blindly it would take him to her to stand with blundering adoration in front of her, content to look upon her face. He half shrugged and smiled at himself and went back to his desk.

He phoned Dr. Foltz and asked about Teena.

“She’s a very disturbed child, Paul. The usual malnutrition. We’re giving her glucose until she can keep food in her stomach. We’re watching her carefully.”

“What’s the emotional response?”

“The usual thing. Sullen, bitter, rebellious, unresponsive. I got the lab reports on her yesterday. Outside of the addiction and being run down physically, she’s all right.”

“She was a very happy kid, Doctor.”

“She’s going to be a very unhappy kid for quite a while, particularly when the usual remorse sets in. Somebody will have to keep an eye on her pretty closely after she’s released.”

“I have somebody lined up, I think.”

“Good. I hate to see them slip back into addiction. If the first cure doesn’t take, it’s a fair gamble that no subsequent one will, either.”

“Let me know when she’ll be ready for the first visitor, will you, please?”

“Of course, Paul.”

Paul sat for a time with his hand resting on the dead phone in its cradle, and then he got up and went to lunch alone.

IT WAS on Wednesday that Bonny knew she was becoming aware of those around her on some other basis than their relationship to her. She had spent long hours since the lunch with Paul Darmond, going over and over what he had said to her, trying in every way to discount the sharpness of the scalpel.

Preoccupation with self had been a comforting insulation. You could hide within self, and look out of a narrow place at the world, the way an animal might crouch and be aware only of those who passed by and showed any interest in the cave’s darkness.

Paul had roughly stripped away the insulation and left the nerve ends shrill. She needed the warmth and comfort of the cave, but he had made it impossible for her to return.

It was like learning to live again. Years had been spent in the dim cave. Now she had come out of the dark place, had, rather, been hauled out physically, and stood naked in a bright place peopled with those she had been aware of only one-dimensionally.

On Wednesday morning in the bath she stood with her foot on the edge of the tub, drying neatly between her toes, and she stopped and looked at the slim ivory of her foot, examining herself in new awareness. This was the body that, in all justice, should have recorded faithfully the crumbled years. Yet the body had no look of violent use, and there was neither justice nor fairness in that. The firm, almost virginal look of her was like a taunt. Like a gift given in contempt. Thus, in giving it again, it would be something she had neither saved nor nurtured. And thus a gift of little value to the giver. She had seen the familiar shifting unrest in his eyes, and she felt again the warmth of his hand as it cupped her face. She slipped into her robe and belted it closely around the body that suddenly felt flushed and aware of him.

Jana was alone at the big table in the kitchen when she arrived. Anna nodded to her and expressionlessly cracked two more eggs into the frying pan.

“Good morning,” Bonny said. “It’s a lovely day.”

Jana seemed to become only gradually aware that she was no longer alone. She looked blankly at Bonny and at last smiled, almost shyly. She seemed to come back from a far place that was not pleasant to her.

“Is anything wrong?” Bonny asked.

Jana, surprisingly flushed. “No, there isn’t anything wrong,” she said too insistently. “Nothing at all.”

Anna set the juice glass and the breakfast plate down in front of Bonny. She set them down heavily. Jimmy Dover came quickly in and said, “I guess I’m sort of late.”

“Walter won’t open up for another ten minutes,” Bonny told him. She turned to Jana. “Are we the last?”

Jana blushed again. “Vern and Doris aren’t down yet.”

Her statement puzzled Bonny. There was no point in mentioning Doris. She never got up before ten. As she ate she examined Jana more carefully. Even in her preoccupation with herself, she had been remotely aware that Jana had acted restless and discontented for the last few months, while the old man had been lost in the cold remoteness of his grief for his son. Now the constant blushings gave Jana a look of rosiness, almost of soft contentment.

Vern came down with his automatic smile and his look of composure. And Bonny saw Jana blush again and conspicuously avoid looking at Vern. Bonny, with her new clarity and awareness, covertly studied Vern. A very cold and very handsome young man. And with, about him, a faint warning note of danger. A sleek young man, and a young woman of a husky ripeness, and an old man whom death had turned vague.

It was a situation so trite that it seemed almost implausible to her.

It’s none of my business, she told herself. Their dangerous little game is nothing that concerns me. Yet even as she told herself she should not be concerned, she seemed to feel the presence of Paul Darmond close behind her, see even a mocking accusation in his eyes. No man is an island unto himself. She could tell herself that in return for their taking her in, she had given them work. Service in return for warmth. Yet in return for warmth, perhaps warmth itself is the only acceptable currency.

She watched Jana get up and go around the table, taking her plate over to the counter. Bonny saw Jana turn and hesitate and then take the big coffee pot from the stove and carry it over and fill Vern’s cup. She saw the flick of Vern’s eyes up at her pink face. Vern was alone on the far side of the table. She saw his shoulder move a bit and saw the shudder that went through Jana. Saw the shudder and the stillness and the eyes go half closed as the black stream of the coffee slid beyond the cup rim to splash in the saucer. Jana took the pot back to the stove and Vern looked coolly across at Bonny, meeting her glance, raising one eyebrow in an expression both quizzical and triumphant.

It was a male look that she had seen many times before.

And she knew, seeing it, that she would talk to Jana—that the talk would be awkward, perhaps vicious, most probably ineffectual, but talk she would. For a thing like this could end in that ultimate violence. And this house had seen enough of violence.

She knew that there would be no chance until evening. She took over the cash register as the store opened, taking the currency and change from the brown canvas sack and counting it into the drawer. Gus Varaki did the day’s tasks like a sleepwalker. Rick Stussen cut meat deftly, thin blade flashing as he sharpened it, cleaver chunking the block, scraps plopping wetly into the box by the block. Walter worked in a morose silence. During mid-morning Doris paid one of her rare visits to the store to get a pack of cigarettes. Her manner was that of a princess forced to visit the kitchens to complain about the service. Bonny was startled by the look Walter gave her. Walter looked at his wife with a fury that made his mouth tremble.

Bonny began to watch him more closely. It was odd to come out of a selfish trance and see, so clearly, the forces of violence surrounding her. Teena first, and now Jana, and soon, perhaps, Walter.

One of the wholesale houses made the usual cash delivery at two o’clock. The delivery man was stooped and gaunt, with a collapsed-looking mouth.

“Can you give me my thirty-two bucks, Red? Or we gotta whistle for Walter?”

Walter came from across the store. He took the bill and studied it, went behind the cash register, and rang up $32.12 paid out and morosely counted out the money. “You eaten yet, Bonny?”

“I haven’t had a chance yet.”

“I’ll get Jana off those phone orders. Go on in and eat.”

Bonny was back on the job at two-thirty. During a lull at three o’clock she checked her totals, found an additional fifty dollars run up as paid out. That checked roughly with the dwindled size of the cash stacks. She thought no more about it until a customer paid with a rare two-dollar bill. As she did not want to leave it in the regular cash section of the drawer, where it might be paid out in error as a five or a ten, she put it in the compartment with the receipted bills. Something about that compartment left her with a distant creeping of suspicion. As soon as she has a chance she looked again. There was no longer a receipted bill for $32.12. There was a receipted bill for $82.12. The penciled three had been turned deftly into an eight, and a five written in front of an item of less than ten dollars. The alteration would stand a casual glance, but when she looked at it closely she could see the alteration had been made with a softer pencil than the one used to make out the original bill. She stared at it closely and then turned, with the altered receipted bill in her hand, and looked across the store. Walter was standing beyond one of the racks, looking directly at her, standing without movement and looking into her eyes. There was a stub of red pencil in his teeth. She put the bill back in the compartment and made herself turn away slowly, casually. The register would balance. The fifty paid out would match the amount the bill had been increased.

It gave her an instantaneous re-evaluation of Walter Varaki. She had thought of him as a wife-soured man, working dutifully at a job he did not care for, in order to help his father. A meek, submissive, hag-ridden man whose life was colorless.

Yet it must have been he who had stolen. It could not have been anyone else. Certainly not Jana. And not Gus, stealing from himself. Rick Stussen never touched the cash register. It could, of course, have been the new boy, but that was improbable. He would not have been in the store alone. He would not, as yet, know the routines well enough. Vern was still out on delivery.

It had to be Walter, and this could not be the first time.

She saw the ramifications of the act. Discovery of shortages would point invariably at her, at Vern, and at Jimmy Dover. Of the three of them, she was the logical choice. It frightened her. There was one person to turn to, and quickly. Paul Darmond would know what she should do, and yet… She began to think of the old man. One son dead. One son a thief. His daughter a drug addict. His wife faithless. Could a man stand that? And she realized anew that she was thinking now of someone else, thinking of the effect of circumstance upon another, rather than upon herself. And it gave her a strange warm pride to think she was now capable of this—a pride in herself and a feeling of gratitude to Paul Darmond.

The day ended and the store closed and the meal was eaten by all the people with their closed faces and their inward-looking eyes. An old house, and a high-ceilinged kitchen, and in the air a stale smell of regret and fear and lust.