The Neon Jungle

Chapter Fourteen

Jana heard a faint creak on the staircase. Gus, beside her, filled the warm still air of the room with harsh metronomic snores. She heard a sound of water running. She turned her head and looked at the luminous dial of the bedside clock. A little after twelve. That would be Vern, the last one in. All in, now. Except for Teena. Teena away in some strange place. In a white bed in a white place with white lights in the halls, and a smell of sterilizing.

The nights were long. Unbearably long. It seemed impossible to exhaust the stubborn body. She thought longingly of the harvest times. The roar of the binder and the prickling of dust and chaff on sweaty faces. And working as hard as a man through the long hot days until your back was full of bitter wires, and the hard bed became as deep and soft as clouds, and morning came the instant you closed your eyes.

She remembered the barn dances, the sturdy stompings, the hard twang and scrape of the music, the nasal chant, the prance and bounce and the hard locked arms, and the quick, frank, stirring touches during the fast music beat. It had all happened in a faraway world where everything looked golden. The barn lights, the fields, the folded glow of the sun. She remembered the shy boy from down the road. Peter. The October day on the fresh spread hay in the unused box stall they had lost all shyness. After that they were together whenever they could manage it. All in a lost golden world. They had never seemed to think or talk about anything beyond the times they could be together. And then it had all ended that terrible day in August. That picnic day.

Peter had driven the two of them out there in his family’s pickup truck. Vast sandwiches, dandelion wine, and nearly half of a not quite stale chocolate cake. They’d walked from the pickup carrying the picnic lunch down to their place — a steep cut in the bank with a soft flat bed of moss and grass. The cut angled back so that when they were at the very end of it they could not see the lake at all, nor could they be seen by anyone unless that person looked directly down at them, a project that would be considerably hampered by thorn bushes.

With the sun directly overhead so that it shone down on the soft green bed and on them, warmly, they had made love for quite a long time and then, vastly hungry, had eaten every scrap of the food. The sun no longer came into the cut and they drank the wine and then made love in the green shadows. Then he had pulled on his swimming trunks and gone out of the cut and she had lain back, feeling the wine in her, feeling the prickle of the grass against her, feeling the contentment and the drifting sweet exhaustion. She had thought she heard him call and she remembered that she had smiled. At last, yawning, she had put on her own suit and gone out. He was not there. He was always playing jokes. She called him, guessing that he had come out of the water and hidden himself. He wouldn’t come out. She called him and then she sulked and she called that she was going to drive the truck home and leave him. She grew angry and while she was angry the sun moved behind a cloud in the west. The blue lake slowly turned gray and the wind made it choppy. The wind was cool and she hugged herself, shivering. The day was suddenly lonely, cold and empty, and she was no longer angry, but frightened as she looked at the grayness of water.

They found him when dawn was beginning to make the harsh floodlights look pale. She had refused to leave. She sat on the hill wrapped in the blanket with her father’s hand tight on her shoulder, watching the slow movements of the boat lights. She saw how it would be for him down there, with his drowned hair, and his thin tanned face, and the lean strong body that had loved hers.

They hooked his flesh at dawn and brought him up, and some of the boats came in and the others headed down the lake, back to their home docks.

She went down the hill with her father’s arm around her, and looked at him before they carried him up the hill to the county ambulance. She thought he would look frightened, or as if he had died in pain. But his face was swollen, darkened, and absolutely expressionless.

She knew that they would inevitably have married. Both families had expected it. The funeral time was not hard. It was like something happening in a movie. She wished only that they could have created a new life within her that last time there in the cleft in the hillside, so that in some way there would be preserved that thin tanned face and the look of him so that he would not be so completely dead. It had been clear to her that she would have to get away from that place where he always stood, waiting for her, just out of sight around every corner. The wish to go to school in Johnston seemed a good enough answer. It was also clear that there would never be anyone else. Never.

She was related to Gus’s dead wife. He missed his wife badly. Something about her seemed to remind Gus of the way his wife had been when they had both been young. In an odd way it seemed to help him to have her around. One night, a year and a half ago, they had been alone in the house. The others were out. She had decided to go to bed early. She came out of the bathroom to go to her room and found Gus standing in the hall. He looked at her very oddly. She had to go by him to get to her room. He caught her and put his strong arms around her and breathed quickly against her hair. She stood very still and cold for a time, and then sensed his loneliness and his need. And she sensed also a physical stirring within herself that seemed aside and apart from what she had felt in her mind for Peter. She gave herself to him in her room. In the act she found a release she had not expected. Afterward he cried and spoke to her in her parents’ tongue, which she could understand but not speak well, calling himself an evil man. In the darkness she told him of Peter, and made him understand. She said they had both lost the most important one. She said she would marry him, if he would be willing to do that.

They were married two weeks later, to the consternation of the family, to the heavy sour amusement of Anna. And the marriage, for Jana, turned out to be something entirely unanticipated. Gus forgot his grief in the joys of the young body of his bride. He grew visibly younger. He was a good virile strength to be with in the night, a good one to laugh with in the daytime. He made her small gifts of tenderness, and her heart grew warm toward him.

With the news of Henry’s death, he changed utterly. Within days he lost all the youth she had brought to him. He was no longer a lover. He was a sag-shouldered old man who slept beside her. She had touched him timidly a few times, with the courage of her need, only to have him mutter something incomprehensible and turn heavily away from her. She tried dozens of little ways to reawaken his desire for her, not only because she had learned to need him, but also because she thought that it would help him, that it would give him some little moments of forgetfulness. In the end she began to realize that to him she was now daughter rather than wife. And she resigned herself to tension and to nervousness, hoping that they would soon fade, hoping that the body would slowly readjust itself.

Tonight he had told her of Teena, and he had held her close in the big bed, his slow tears dropping hot against her shoulder. Being held close had finally begun to stir her, in spite of her wish merely to hold him and comfort him. She had restrained herself for as long as she could and then expressed her need in a way that was unmistakable to him, only to have him fling himself away from her and roll over, huddled in a grief he no longer wished to share. After a long time he had fallen asleep, and she lay in the darkness and tried to think of dull and trivial things.

At seven o’clock Tuesday evening, during the long June twilight, the store was closing. Walter locked the door as the last customer, a small boy with a loaf of bread, left and went behind the counter to help Bonny cash up. Rick was rearranging the meat case, taking some of the items into the cooler. Dover, the new boy, was filling the trash cans in the back behind the storeroom and lugging them around one by one to the curb out front for early-morning collection. Gus was working on the vegetables in the display case, snipping off wilted leaves with his thumbnail, picking out the spoiled tomatoes and tossing them into a small broken hamper that Dover would place out front. Jana had swept out and she stood in the left side of the display window taping to the inside of the windows the signs Walter had lettered indicating specials for tomorrow. The truck had driven in from the last delivery and Vern Lockter was tossing a few empty cartons into the storeroom. Everyone worked doggedly and silently. In past years the time of closing had been a good part of the day. Jokes and a few cans of beer opened and talk about the day’s business. But on this Tuesday night there was no talk. Just the low murmur of Walter and Bonny, checking the tape and machine totals, the wet splash of spoiled tomatoes, the click-chunk of the cooler door, the faint acid buzzing of the neon.

Jana stepped down out of the window and straightened the display she had moved aside. The day was done. The long evening was ahead of her, a long tunnel with a promise of restless sleep at the far end of it.

At seven-thirty they were finished and they left the store, leaving the night-light on. The big table was set in the kitchen. With Dover taking Teena’s place, there was the same number as before, seven. Gus and Jana, Walter and Doris, Vern, Rick, and Jimmy. Anna never ate with them. She ate after the others had finished, and while they ate she would plod from stove to table, clinking the cupboard dishes, serving slowly, expressionlessly. The food was plain and heavy. Jana looked along the table. Vern had just come downstairs. He did not eat with them as consistently as Rick Stussen, and when he did eat with them he was usually late coming to the table, as he spent quite a bit of time dressing for the evening. Tonight he was still in work clothes, though he had changed to a fresh T-shirt.

Doris said, acid-sweet, “What happened to the fashion plate? Losing your touch, Vern?”

“Going to rearrange some stock to make more room to make up the orders. How about coming out after, and seeing what you think of the idea?”

“Sure,” Jana said.

Gus had eaten with his usual galloping haste. He stood up, still chewing, dropped his balled napkin on his plate, mumbled something almost inaudible, and left the kitchen to go to the living room and spend his usual three hours staring blindly at the television screen.

Doris said, “What makes him so gay tonight?”

“Lay off, will you?” Walter said.

“Oh, certainly. Lay off. The precious little darling of his had to go take a cure, and who around here gives a damn about how I feel? Does anybody ever worry about me? You’d never know around here I was going to give him a grandchild.”

Walter put his fork down and said evenly, “Shut up.”

“You don’t give a damn, do you?” She banged her coffee cup down. “You know what I want from you, Mr. Nasty? I want you to take me to a movie, much as it hurts you. And I want you wearing a necktie and a coat. I’m not going with you again with you looking like a slob.”

Walter sighed and picked up his fork. “O.K., O.K. A movie. Anything.”

“The show at the Central looks good,” Bonny said. They all looked at her. They had learned to accept her silences, and it was a faint shock to have her volunteer information.

Walter said tentatively, “You want to come, maybe?”

“If you don’t mind, either of you.”

“That would be swell, Bonny,” Doris said, with more warmth than the situation called for, and then immediately blushed. Stussen walked in to sit and look at the television.

“Maybe Jimmy would like to come along too?” Bonny said.

The boy blushed. “Sure. I’d like to.”

Vern finished his pie, lit a cigarette, and said, “Want to go to work now, Jana?”

“Sure.”

She walked ahead of him down the steps from the kitchen, and along the narrow shed passageway to the one door of the store that was left unlocked because it could be reached only through the kitchen. The market was dark except for the red neon ring around the wall clock. The long self-service counters were shadowy.

They went into the storeroom. Vern kicked a box out of the way and turned on the single bulb. The light was harsh.

He said, “See how it’s cramped in here? Now those cases of number-ten cans of juice don’t move fast. And they aren’t stacked high enough. I figure if we stack them high along that wall, it’ll give us more room to work in, and I won’t have such a hell of a job sorting the orders and loading them right. What do you think?”

“I guess it’s all right, Vern.”

“O.K. I’ll do it. Stick around and see what you think.”

“Let me help.”

“You don’t have to, Jana.”

“I don’t mind lifting.”

She helped him stack the cases. She could not reach the highest row, so she stood aside and watched him swing them easily up and shove them in place. They sorted by brand, so there would be no need to pull out a case in the middle of one of the stacks. She leaned against the wall by the light and watched the play of his back muscles under the T-shirt, watched the cording of his arms. She felt as though, in spite of the length of time he had lived there, she had never known him. There was a funny remoteness about him. Sort of like Bonny, and yet not remote in the same way. But Bonny was acting different lately.

“There!” he said, dusting his hands together.

“It makes a lot more room.” Near the corner was a long low row of other cases. She said, “How about those?”

“They can stay as they are for now, hey?”

He turned off the light and she turned toward the doorway and ran into his arm. For a moment she didn’t realize that what he had done was brace his right hand against the wall. It confused her to be blocked in that way.

“What are you doing?” she asked, speaking low because of the darkness. She tried to duck under his arm, but he lowered it. She turned the other way and found she was trapped there, between his arms. It scared her that he didn’t speak.

She knocked his right arm out of the way and plunged toward the dark doorway. Just as she reached the doorway, his hands came around her from behind, pulling her back against him, holding her there. She knew she should fight him, should struggle and call out. But his hands on her started a trembling that seemed to come up from her knees, a weak trembling that held her there, head bowed, pulled back hard against him as he dropped his lips to the side of her neck, nuzzling her neck, breathing into her hair. He pulled her slowly back into the dark storeroom, moving her, turning her slowly. The edge of the low stack of cartons cut the backs of her calves and she went down slowly, taking great shuddering breaths, feeling as if, under her warm skin, all her flesh and bone and muscle had turned to a warm helpless fluid. He was harsh with her, and it was over quickly.

She lay in darkness and heard him move about the room. Her breathing was beginning to slow when the harsh light came on, shocking her into a dazed scrambling. She sat up. He stood by the light switch tapping a cigarette out of the pack. The overhead light gave him a black and white look, like a sharp photograph.

“Stop your damn sniffling,” he said quietly. And she realized that was the first he had spoken since turning off the light. It made the tears come faster, but she tried to stop the crying sound. He was looking at her as if he hated her. It was as if he had punished her, had wanted to hurt her.

“You... shouldn’t have.”

“Me? I shouldn’t have? Honey, you don’t want to start putting the blame off on me. It seemed to me like it was both of us, Jana.”

“If Gus ever finds out, he’ll—”

“I imagine he could be a rough old guy about something like this. Figuring on telling him?”

“No. Oh, no!” She felt dulled and sated. He seemed to be standing a long way off, at the far end of some enormous echoing room. It seemed to take vast effort to stand up. She smoothed the crumpled skirt with the palms of her hands, combed at her ruffled hair with her fingers. He tapped ashes from his cigarette on the storeroom floor.

“We can arrange this better next time,” he said.

“No. I don’t want to do it again, Vern.”

“You did once. What difference does it make now? One time or forty times. It adds up to the same thing, doesn’t it? You liked it. So we’ll arrange it better next time. I’ve got it figured out. I know the mornings the old guy leaves at four to go to the farmers’ market. He went this morning. He goes Thursday. He goes on Saturday. I’ll see you about four-thirty Thursday.”

“Not there. Not in our room.”

“Keep your voice down, damn it. You can’t come up on the third floor. I know how to walk like a cat, honey. How can we miss?”

“I won’t do it!”

“You will, Jana, because if you don’t, I’m going to do a little heavy-handed hinting about your rubbing up against me, and I don’t know how long I can hold out. And I won’t hint to the old man. I’ll hint to Doris and let her carry the ball.”

He dropped the cigarette and put his heel on it.

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Yes, I would.”

“But you act like you... hate me or something. Why do you want to do that?”

“Why shouldn’t I want to come see you Thursday morning? My God, I’m normal. And you’re a very pleasant bundle, honey.”

She walked by him, not speaking. She heard him click off the storeroom light and follow her. He caught up with her, casually, in the shed passageway, put his arm around her, pinched the flesh of her waist hard between his fingers and the heel of his hand.

“Thursday, then?”

She made a faint sound of agreement. She felt shamed as though she could never look anyone squarely in the eyes again. Anna was sitting alone at the big table, eating. She gave them a stolid glance and shoveled another forkful between the slow-moving jaws.

Jana went in and sat in the living room. Three girls in shorts were tap-dancing in unison on the TV screen. Jana looked at Gus’s stone face. His hands, half curled, rested on his massive thighs. She watched for a time and then made herself go over and kiss Gus lightly on the lips before going up to bed. She took a bath as hot as she could bear it, lowering herself inch by inch into the steaming water, toweling herself harshly afterward until her skin tingled and glowed.

She went to bed, yawning in the darkness, lying loose-bodied in the darkness, trying not to think about it and trying not to think about Thursday morning when she would be alone in darkness, as she was now, and the door would open with stealth and she would hear him softly crossing the room toward her marriage bed. Yet just thinking about that spiraled an expectant excitement within her. And the expectancy heightened her sense of guilt and sense of shame, because she knew that she would welcome him. As he said, it was done. And if it were done again, it would make no difference. It had happened, and after all, it was Gus’s fault. What did he expect? For her to stop being a woman because he stopped being a man? It was his fault. All his fault. And Vern didn’t hate her. He had only acted that way because he was odd and shy and perhaps frightened. And he would never hint to Doris. That had just been a threat. When you looked at it squarely, it was Gus’s fault. They would be very careful. Nothing would happen. They would not be caught. Gus did not want her. Vern did. It would be all right. And she was not to blame, not for any of it.

She fought the guilt, feeling that she chased it back into a remote corner of her mind. It hid there, out of sight.

She felt the sleep coming. She felt it roll up against her, deep and black. A sleep like none she had felt in months. She felt as though, with each exhalation, she sank a bit deeper into the warm bed. There was no tension in her. She floated down and down into the soothing blackness.