A Girl Called Honey

Six

The bartender, standing down at the end of the bar, looked at Richie and obviously didn’t much care for what he saw. Richie was impaled by the look; he squirmed on it, his face got red, his eyes dropped. He knew what was coming.

With an exaggerated air of Job-like long-suffering, the bartender pushed himself off his elbow and came dirty-aproned strolling down the length of the bar. Stopping in front of Richie, he said, in a weary voice, “How old are you, kid?”

Richie met the barman’s eyes for just a second. In Richie’s eyes were pleading, in the barman’s implacability. Without a word, Richie slid off the stool and skulked, round-shouldered, back to the cold and sunlit street. He turned left, aimlessly, and walked along with his hands in his pockets, imagining himself, after an extensive course in judo, coming back and drop-kicking that bartender through his back-mirror.

The hell of it was, Richie was eighteen. And eighteen was legal drinking age in New York State.

But he just didn’t look eighteen. He was short and skinny to begin with, and that didn’t help. His face was weak and watery, and that didn’t help. And he’d been living soft. He’d put on over twenty pounds, and he’d spouted acne instead of whiskers, and that didn’t help. The twenty pounds didn’t make him look less skinny. It just made him look like a skinny sixteen-year-old with baby fat on his cheeks.

Nine chances out of ten, he could have shown his Air Force ID card (being on active duty, he had no draft card) and been served without question. But he was terrified to show that card anywhere, just as he was honestly terrified to try to get a job or to open a bank account (assuming he had money to put in it) or get to know anybody besides Honour Mercy. Richie Parsons’ concept of Authority was basically the same as George Orwell’s in 1984. Authority was a Big Brother, mysteriously everywhere, all-knowing and all-seeing, waiting to pounce upon Richie Parsons the second he made a mistake, and bear him whimpering back to Scott Air Force Base, where the whole squadron would line up to kick the shit out of him, and then he’d probably go to Leavenworth or something.

The days, for Richie Parsons, were long and empty. And the nights were even longer. Staying in the apartment all the time, waiting for a Knock On The Door, was too much for his nerves to stand. And Honour Mercy was practically never at home. Her work now took her away, usually, in the early evening, and she was never back before two or three in the morning, and sometimes she wasn’t back until long after sun-up. She’d even been away over a whole weekend once, off on somebody’s yacht, she and a number of her coworkers, with a group of rich college boys and a photographer from a men’s magazine. That was only two weeks ago, and Honour Mercy was already haunting the newsstands, wondering if they’d used a picture of her. “They probably won’t, though,” she kept saying. “The only picture he took of me was one I don’t think they could use.”

The point was that Richie was most of the time alone. Honour Mercy was the only one he knew that he could freely associate with, and she was usually either working or sleeping.

Besides that, Honour Mercy seemed to be changing. Her attitude toward Richie was undergoing a very uncomfortable transformation. She was talking more and more frequently, lately, about the fact that Richie wasn’t working. She was even beginning to nag a little about it, as though he could safely go off and get a job somewhere, when he knew without question that it was too dangerous to even think about.

Honour Mercy was changing in other ways, too. Sometimes, her customers would take her out to dinner or a show or something first, and Honour Mercy had by now seen most of the Broadway shows and been to a lot of the midtown nightclubs. She was learning to dress like the ads in the fashion magazines (though nothing in the world could shrink her bust to fashionable boyishness), and a faint southern-ness in her speech was rapidly disappearing. She was, in a word, becoming sophisticated, and she and Richie no longer had quite so much in common.

It was a problem, and Richie gnawed worriedly at it as he wandered down the street from the bar where he hadn’t been served. Life had been comparatively sweet for him the last couple of months. With neither the cloying demands of his mother or the harsh demands of the Air Force to contend with, he could live at his own slow pace. He had no duties, no responsibilities. But now, with Honour Mercy on the one hand growing away from him, and on the other hand becoming more insistent that he should find a job, life was getting complicated again, and Richie, as usual, didn’t have the foggiest idea what to do about it.

He was walking east on 77^th Street, toward the park. Central Park West was straight ahead, at the end of a row of brownstones. When he got to the corner, he hesitated, wondering where to go next. The park was loaded with frantic, round-eyed boys who kept trying to pick him up, and that made him nervous. To the right was midtown, where he could probably find a bar that would serve him if he looked long enough and hard enough. To the left was home, eight blocks away, but this was Thursday afternoon and Honour Mercy would be at the hairdresser’s.

He wanted something to drink, but he didn’t feel like braving the histrionic weariness of any more bartenders. On the other hand, he could buy a six-pack of beer in any grocery store, take it home, and wait for Honour Mercy to come back.

All right, that’s what he’d do. He walked uptown, on the side away from the park, and turned left at 85^th Street. The apartment was in the middle of the block, and a tiny grocery store was two doors farther down. He walked slowly, having nothing in the world to hurry for, and when someone said his name as he was passing his building, he almost fainted.

He froze. He stood still, staring down the empty sidewalk toward Columbus Avenue, and the voice ran round and round inside his head. “Richie Parsons?” A strange voice, one he’d never heard before, and there had been a questioning lilt on the last syllable.

It was Authority. It had to be, nobody knew him here, nobody wanted to know him. He froze, and wished desperately to disappear.

The voice repeated his name, still with the rising inflection, and Richie forced himself to turn and look at the Authority that had descended upon him.

But it didn’t seem to be Authority after all. There was a black Lincoln parked at the curb in front of the building, and there was a man in the driver’s seat, looking out at Richie. He was middle-aged, black-haired, with dark and deep-set eyes, a thin-lipped wide mouth and a heavily lined face. He seemed Stern and he seemed Successful and he was obviously Rich, but he didn’t look like Authority.

He didn’t look like Authority because his expression was one of polite curiosity, the expression of a man who has asked a not-too-important question and is waiting for the not-too-important answer. Such was not the expression of Authority.

Richie hesitated, wondering what to answer. Should he deny the name, go on down to the corner, go to a movie, wait until this man had given up and gone away? Or should he admit that he was, in fact and in essence, Richie Parsons?

The man had called him by name. He could have gotten the name only from one of two sources: Honour Mercy or Authority. The latter, despite his expression, seemed the most likely. Authority, in a Chinese-eyed Lincoln?

The man broke into his hesitation by smiling and saying, “Don’t worry, Richie. I’m not the law. I’m a friend of Honour Mercy’s.”

“Honour Mercy?” he echoed. He was at a complete loss.

“Hop in,” said the man. “I want to talk to you.”

“Talk to me?” When Richie was confused, more than usually confused, he was in the habit of repeating what was said to him, turning it into a question.

“Don’t worry,” said the man. “I’m not going to turn you over to the Air Force.”

Richie stared at him, and fought down the urge to say, “Air Force?” Instead, he said, “How do you know about it?”

“Honour Mercy told me. Come on, hop in. I’ll explain the whole thing.”

Richie couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he hopped in. He walked around the Mandarin front of the Lincoln, opened the shiny black door, and sat tentatively on the maroon upholstery.

The man immediately started the engine, which purred at the lowest threshold of audibility, and the Lincoln pulled smoothly away from the curb.

For the first part of the ride, the man was silent, and Richie followed his example. They went directly across town first, and up a ramp to the Henry Hudson Parkway, where the speedometer needle moved up to fifty and hovered, while the city rolled by to the left, and the Hudson became the ocean to the right. They dipped into the Brooklyn Battery tunnel, emerged on the Brooklyn side, and headed almost due east.

Brooklyn was, as usual, snarled with traffic. Their ride was hyphenated by red lights, and the man began to talk. “My name is Joshua Crawford,” he said. “I’m forty-six years of age, I’ve got two children, both of them older than you, I’m a well-to-do lawyer, and I’ve believed in the straight-forward approach all of my life. I want you to know this about me, I want you to know anything you want about me. For two reasons. First, I know at least as much about you. Second, I want you to have the full facts in the case before you make your decision.”

“My decision?” Richie was confused again.

“Just hear me out,” said Joshua Crawford. “I’ve known Honour Mercy now for about two months. You might say we were business acquaintances. Her business, not mine. Something — I’m not sure what — made me think of Honour in an unbusiness-like way. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t make a habit of befriending whores. This time, something is different. I can’t define it any closer than that.”

A traffic light ahead of them switched from green through orange to red, and the purring Lincoln stopped. Joshua Crawford looked over at Richie Parsons. “Has Honour Mercy mentioned me at all?” he asked.

“No,” said Richie. “She doesn’t tell me much about her — about her work.”

“Good,” said Crawford. “That’s just another example of how she’s different. Practically any whore, if she gets a steady customer, and she and the customer are friends, she’ll go around boasting about it. Honour Mercy’s different. She isn’t a whore by nature. She shouldn’t be in such a business.”

His words hung in the air between them, the light switched back to green, and the Lincoln nosed forward again.

“I want to help Honour Mercy,” said Crawford after a minute. “I want to put her into what might be called semi-retirement.”

“Your mistress,” said Richie, beginning to understand at last what this was all about.

Crawford nodded without taking his eyes away from the traffic-filled street. “My mistress,” he said. “I have plans for Honour Mercy. A good apartment — better than where she is now. Money of her own, charge accounts at a couple of the better stores. She would, in every sense but the legal, be my wife. There’s a woman out in Dobbs Ferry who is my wife in the legal sense, and that’s all.”

While Richie waited for what he knew was coming next, Crawford spun the wheel and the Lincoln made a right turn. They were on a wider street now, with less traffic, and the speedometer needle inched upward again.

“I have plans for Honour Mercy,” repeated Crawford. “But you don’t fit into those plans. You were apparently willing to share the girl with all takers. I’m not willing to share her with anybody.”

Richie nodded, and a lost and helpless feeling was beginning to spread over him, and he wondered, with a vague fear, what Joshua Crawford’s plans were for Richie Parsons.

“We’re in competition, you and I,” continued Crawford. “Ridiculous, but true. And I think you’ll have to agree with me that there’s no contest.”

The silence lengthened again, and Richie realized he was expected to make some sort of answer. At last he mumbled, “I suppose so.”

“The easy thing for me to do,” said Crawford, “was let the police know where you were. Easy. But also cruel and unnecessary. I’m not a cruel man, Richie, and I don’t do the unnecessary. So I’m giving you your choice.”

“What choice?” asked Richie miserably. He could see no choice.

Crawford took one hand from the steering wheel long enough to reach within the jacket of his tailored suit and withdraw a business-size envelope. He dropped the envelope on the seat between them. “It’s getting cold in New York,” he said. “Winter is on the way, and you’re going to have to start shifting for yourself. There’s a one-way plane ticket to Miami in that envelope, plus five hundred dollars in ten-dollar bills. Enough to keep you alive until you find a place for yourself down there. You can take the ticket and the money and go to Miami, and that’s the end of it. Or you can decide to stay.”

Richie knew that he was now supposed to ask what would happen if he were to decide to stay, and he also knew what the answer would be. But he was supposed to ask, and he did. “What if I don’t go?”

“I call the police,” said Crawford, “and you go back to Scott Air Force Base.”

Richie looked gloomily out the window. He saw a street sign, and saw that they were now traveling on Rockaway Parkway, and it seemed to him that it shouldn’t be “Parkaway, we’ll rock away together.”

He parked his thoughts back where they belonged. Joshua Crawford was driving him to the airport, that was clear enough. He had to decide, he had to make up his mind what to do.

But what decision was there? Take the ticket and the money, take the plane, go away to Miami and see what would happen next. Or stay here and be taken by the police. What choice was that?

A sudden thought came to him, and he voiced it. “What does Honour Mercy say?”

“I haven’t said anything to her yet,” said Crawford. “I want you out of the way first.”

“How do you know she’ll become your mistress?”

“She will,” said Crawford. “If you aren’t around. And you won’t be around, one way or the other.”

Richie leaned against the door on his side and gnawed on his lower lip, sinking easily into depression and self-pity. He compared himself with Joshua Crawford, and he found himself coming in a very distant second. Joshua was rich, he was successful, he was assured, he was strong. He was driving this car, he could give Honour Mercy anything she wanted. Richie Parsons was young, he was poor and uncertain and weak and afraid. He could give Honour Mercy nothing but himself, and that was a poor gift indeed.

“What’s your choice?” Crawford asked him.

Wordlessly, Richie reached out and picked up the envelope.

“You understand,” said Crawford, “that this is permanent. If you try to get in touch with either Honour Mercy or myself, I’ll have to turn you in. You understand that?”

“Yes,” whispered Richie.

Somewhere, they crossed the line separating Brooklyn from Queens, and wound up on a divided highway, and the speedometer needle moved up to sixty. Then they turned off the highway to another highway and signs said that they were entering New York International Airport, known as Idlewild.

Idlewild was as big as Scott Air Force Base, which meant it was larger than any airport should be. There was a four-lane divided highway within the airport grounds, and sprawling low buildings far off the highway on either side bore huge signs giving the names of various airlines.

The temporary terminal was miles away from the main entrance, but finally they got to it and the Lincoln slowed to a stop. “Here we are,” said Crawford. He looked at Richie and his expression was now sympathetic. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I think this is the best way to do it. For everybody concerned.”

Richie mumbled something and got out of the car. Then, all at once, he remembered his uniform, still packed away in the AWOL bag and in the closet at the apartment he’d been sharing with Honour Mercy. “My — my clothes,” he said. He was poised half-in and half-out of the car. “I’ve got to get my clothes.”

“Buy some more,” said Crawford. His hand dipped down, came up with a wallet, six twenty-dollar bills were suddenly in Richie’s hand. “Buy some more,” Crawford repeated. “Your plane is leaving at six, and it’s after four now.”

“But I need—” He couldn’t come out and say it, about the uniform.

Crawford was impatient now. He’d obviously thought the whole distasteful thing was over with. “Is there something special you need?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“My — my uniform.”

Crawford looked puzzled, and then surprised, and then he smiled. “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for,” he said. “My apologies. The old deserter dodge, is that it?”

Richie was humiliated and defeated. He mumbled and nodded his head.

“I’ll mail it to you,” he said. “General Post Office, Miami. You’ll have it within the week.”

“I need it,” said Richie desperately.

“Don’t worry; I’ll send it to you.”

There was nothing Richie could say, nothing he could do. He stepped out onto the concrete, and the door swung shut behind him. He turned to say something — goodbye, something — but the Lincoln was already purring away. He watched it pull out to the main airport road and swing away, back to the city again.

The envelope was cold and crisp in his hand. Holding it tightly, he went into the terminal building and searched for the men’s room. Finding it, he invested a coin in privacy, and, once within the stall, opened the envelope. It contained the ticket, one-way, and some ten-dollar bills, fifty of them. With the money Crawford had just handed him, he now had six hundred and twenty dollars. And the ticket.

He’d been bought out, paid off, patted on the head and sent on his way. Never before in his life had he felt quite as weak and puny as he did this minute. He was the ninety-seven-pound weakling from the ads; but in his case the condition was worse. He wasn’t merely weak physically. He was weak in every way. He had no force, no stamina, no courage. He could stand up to no one. Crawford had bought him, paid him off—

A sudden thought came to him. Crawford had paid him off. Why? Crawford had waited until he was out of the way before approaching Honour Mercy. Why? Crawford hadn’t taken the easy and simple and inexpensive method of turning Richie over to the Authorities. Why not?

There was only one possible reason. Richie was more competition for Crawford than he had supposed, or than Crawford had admitted. There was no other explanation for Crawford’s actions.

He thought about the relationship between himself and Honour Mercy, of their meeting in Newport, of her unquestioning acceptance of him, of her no-strings-attached sharing of his lot with him. He remembered how readily she had left Newport with him, willing to go anywhere with him, to leave a steady income and a comparably good life because he was in trouble.

Lately, she’d been growing away from him, she’d been talking as though only laziness was keeping him from working and supporting himself. But still they lived together, still they shared the same bed and gave him freely of her money. Still, when they were in bed together, they made love and enjoyed each other as much as ever.

What if Crawford had gone straight to Honour Mercy and given her the choice? Which way would she have gone? Richie had supposed, for a few traitorous moments, that she would naturally go to the stronger and abler and richer man, the man who could offer her the most. But now, when he stopped to think about it, it was obvious that Crawford didn’t think that way. Crawford saw little Richie Parsons as a serious threat. And Crawford might be absolutely right.

That was why Crawford had taken this expensive and roundabout method of getting rid of Richie Parsons. If he had reported Richie to the Authorities, and Honour Mercy had found out who had turned Richie in, she would probably have had nothing at all to do with Crawford.

Of course. Crawford himself had said that he did nothing unnecessary, and only if Richie was a strong competitor for the affections of Honour Mercy was this expense of time and money necessary.

Having gone that far, Richie was stopped again. Because there was nothing he could do about it.

If he didn’t take the plane, if he went back to Honour Mercy, Crawford would turn him in. There wasn’t any doubt of that. If he went back to Honour Mercy, and Honour Mercy chose him over Crawford, Crawford could lose nothing by reporting Richie. But he could gain quite bit. He could gain revenge against Richie for having double-crossed the line.

So there still wasn’t any choice. He still had to take that plane at six o’clock.

Richie felt miserable. This was the story of his life. The strong came along and took from him whatever they wanted for themselves, and there was nothing he could do about it. He could sneak around and take bits and pieces from others, coins and watches and wallets left carelessly where he could get his hands on them, but it wasn’t the same thing. He couldn’t go boldly up to anybody and take what he wanted. Yet other people could do that to him whenever they wanted. They could do it, and they did.

If only he didn’t have to be afraid all the time. If only he could go out and get a job, any job, just so he wouldn’t have to be living on Honour Mercy all the time. If only he could live without being terrified of Authority.

He had to think about it, he had to think this out carefully. He sat in the stall in the men’s room at the temporary terminal, Idlewild, Queens, New York City, fifteen miles from Honour Mercy Bane, and he tried to think of something to make the inevitability of her loss less inevitable.

If he had some sort of phony identification card — But still, his fingerprints were on file in Washington. If his fingerprints were ever taken—

For what? Why would anybody take his fingerprints? They don’t take your fingerprints when you just get a simple job somewhere. All he’d need would be false identification of some sort.

If he could steal a wallet — No, that wouldn’t be any good, he’d have to steal a wallet from somebody his age and his size and his hair-color and everything else. He needed identification that was clearly his. Besides, stolen identification would be just as bad as real identification.

There was a place where he might be able to get a fake identification card. Fake draft card, Social Security card, driver’s license, everything. It was a place he’d heard about when he was in high school, a bar you went to and the bartender, if you looked all right, he would pass you on to the guy who could give you the identification. The only trouble was, the place was in Albany, where Richie’s home was, and where the police would be most on the lookout for him.

Still, if he wanted to keep Honour Mercy, he had to have fake identification, he had to be able to work, he had to get free of this fear of Authority. If he wanted Honour Mercy badly enough, he would go to Albany and get the fake identification.

But, by the time he came back, Honour Mercy would have gone off with Crawford already, and he wouldn’t know where to look for her. Besides, false identification cost a lot of money.

He had a lot of money. He had six hundred and twenty dollars. He had a ticket to Miami, and he could turn that in for more money. And he didn’t have to come back for Honour Mercy; he could bring her along with him.

Of course. That would be a lot safer, anyway. The Albany police would be looking for Richie Parsons, but they wouldn’t be looking for him with a girl. They’d be looking for him alone.

And if he took Honour Mercy away with him, then Crawford couldn’t get her.

He hurried from the men’s room, searching for a phone booth, finally found one, and dialed home. It was quarter-past-four, according to the clock high on the terminal wall. Crawford had started back only fifteen minutes ago, and it would take him an hour at least to get to the apartment. If Honour Mercy were home—

She was. “It’s me,” Richie said, when she answered the phone. “It’s me. Richie.”

“Where are you?” she asked. “You sound as though you’ve been running.”

He was on the verge of telling her the whole story, but instinctive caution stopped him. Crawford thought Richie was dangerous competition. Richie was inclined to agree with him. But something told him not to chance putting it to the test. Instead of telling her the truth, therefore, he said, “Something’s happened. We’ve got to get out of New York.”

“Right now?”

“Right away. We can go to Albany. I can get some phony identification cards there, and then we’ll be all right.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go to Albany.”

She was right. He didn’t. The idea of it made him weak. But if he wanted Honour Mercy, he had to do it. And he wanted Honour Mercy. “I’ll explain when I see you,” he said. “Pack everything right away. I’ll meet you at Grand Central Station. By the — by the Information booth. Get two tickets to Albany. I’ll be there as soon as I can. An hour, maybe less.”

“What happened, Richie?”

“I’ll explain when I get there,” he said, and hung up before she could ask any more.

It took five long minutes to turn the ticket in for cash, filling out some silly form about why he wasn’t going after all, and then he ran out of the terminal and to the nearest taxi-stand. He climbed into the back seat of the cab and said, breathlessly, “Grand Central Station.”

The driver looked at him doubtfully. “That’s going to cost quite a bit, buddy.”

He had six hundred and twenty dollars. He had forty dollars and ninety-two cents for the ticket to Miami. And he was going to stay with Honour Mercy. “I’ve got the money,” he said, and the expansive smile was a new expression on his face. “Don’t you worry about it.”