A Girl Called Honey

Eight

There was a full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door and Honour Mercy, emerging from her shower, toweled the steam from the surface of the mirror and looked at herself, trying to find comfort in the appearance of her body.

But there was no comfort there, there or anywhere else. “He’s going to leave me,” she told the girl in the mirror. “He doesn’t need me anymore, and he’s going to leave me.”

She wondered if Richie himself knew yet that he would be leaving her soon, and she thought that he was probably beginning to suspect it. The difference in his attitude, the way he had sung in the shower, the fact that he was now out of the hotel somewhere; they all gave indication of the change in Richie Parsons that was making her unnecessary to him.

A month ago, Richie wouldn’t have dared set foot it Albany. Once in Albany, he wouldn’t have dreamed of registering at the city’s most expensive hotel. Having rented a hotel room, no power on earth would have moved him from that hotel room, to roam the streets of his home town late at night.

She understood some of the causes of the change. She was a major cause. When he had been at his most bewildered, his most frightened, she had given him refuge and friendship. More than that, she had given him an appreciative sexual partner, without which he would never have emerged from his cringing, cowering shell. She had built up his ego, supported him, comforted him, protected him, and his personality had developed character.

There were other factors, too. The longer he had successfully avoided capture by the authorities, the less the authorities were a menace in his mind. And with that threat waning, he gradually had less reason to cover, less reason to be afraid.

The decision to come to Albany was the final step in the change. He had made no decisions at all since he had run away from the Air Force; Honour Mercy had made all the decisions for both of them. Now, at last, he had made a decision of his own. And his decision had been to brave his terror where it would be the fiercest. In his own home town.

As she thought about it, it occurred to her that there was a step missing in the chain. Richie was a different person today — had been a different person when she met him at Grand Central — from the Richie of yesterday. Something had happened that had forced him to make the decision; and then he had made the decision, and the change had been complete. But what had forced the decision?

The man who had asked him for his draft card? She considered that, and rejected it. No, it would have had to be more than that. An incident like that would simply have sent Richie running for shelter to their apartment, and he wouldn’t have ventured out on the street again for days. There had been something else; something more than what he had told her.

For the first time, Richie had kept something from her, had lied to her. And that knowledge only confirmed the idea that Richie was going to leave her.

She dried herself hurriedly, taking no enjoyment from it. Usually, she luxuriated in the shower, and in the drying after that, with a huge soft towel like this, rubbing her skin until it tingled and shone. Tonight, she couldn’t think about such things. She patted herself dry as quickly as possible and went out to the other room to look at the clock-radio on the nightstand.

Richie had said he was going to be out for an hour at the most. He had gone out for a walk a little before ten — proving to himself his new independence and fearlessness — and then he had gone out at eleven o’clock exactly. This time, to talk to the man he knew who might be able to arrange false identification for him. And he had promised he would be back within the hour; he would be back by midnight for sure.

The clock-radio said that it was now quarter to one.

“He isn’t coming back,” she said. She said it aloud, without realizing she was going to, and then she listened to the echo of the words, and wondered if she’d been right.

Would he do it this way? He couldn’t, that would be too cruel, too unfair. To leave her stranded here, in a city she didn’t know, in this expensive hotel room, with no money, with nothing — that would be too terribly cruel.

But it would be the easiest way out, for him, and Honour Mercy knew her Richie well. Richie would always take the easiest way out.

If he isn’t home by one o’clock, she told herself, I’ll know he’s left me.

Fifteen minutes later, she said to herself: If he isn’t home by one-thirty, I’ll know for sure that he’s left me.

When the big hand was on the six and the little hand was on the one, she started to cry.

When the big hand was on the eight and the little hand had edged over toward the two, she finished crying.

By the time the big hand had reached the nine and the little hand hadn’t done much of anything, she was dressed and lipsticked, and ready to go.

Honour Mercy Bane was a pragmatist. “Go to Newport and be a bad woman,” her parents told her, and she went. “We’ve got to pack up and get out of Newport,” Richie said, and she packed. “Talk to me,” said Joshua Crawford, and she talked.

And now, now she was alone and penniless in a strange city, with a huge hotel bill that would be hers alone to pay, and once again she was a pragmatist. It was quarter to two in the morning, and time for Honour Mercy to go to work.

Honour Mercy had learned a lot, changed a lot, grown a lot since Newport, too. Six months ago, in this situation, she would have been at a loss. She would have tried to hustle on one of the wrong streets and spent the night in jail. Now, she knew better. She left the room, pressed the button for the elevator, and said to the operator on the way down, “Where can a girl find some work in this town, do you know?” Because elevator operators in hotels always did know.

He looked at her blankly, either not yet understanding or playing dumb for reasons of his own. “Lots of Civil Service jobs with the state around here,” he said.

“That isn’t exactly what I was thinking.”

He studied her, and chewed his cud, and finally made up his mind. “Management don’t allow hustling in the hotel,” he said.

“Don’t tell me where I can’t,” she told him. “Tell me where I can.”

“I get off duty here at six o’clock,” he said.

She understood at once, and forced a smile for his benefit. “I imagine I’ll be back by then.”

He nodded. “When you go outside,” he said, “walk down the hill to Green Street. Turn right.”

She waited for more directions, but there were no more forthcoming, so she said, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

The elevator reached the main floor, and she walked through the empty lobby to the street, and started down the State Street hill.

Six blocks south and one block west of the Conning Towers, Joshua Crawford sat in a chair beside the CID man’s desk and said, “I just don’t remember a thing. It’s all a blank.”

“Lawyer Crawford,” said the CID man, with heavy emphasis on the first word, “I hope you aren’t going to try for a temporary insanity plea. You had the gun on you. We can prove premeditation with no trouble at all.”

Crawford rubbed a damp palm across his face. “I must have been crazy,” he whispered, meaning it sincerely. “I must have been crazy.” He looked pleadingly at the CID man. “My wife,” he said. “This is going to be hell for my wife.”

The CID man waited.

“In many ways,” said Crawford seriously, “my wife is an excellent woman.” His hand came up to his face again.

The CID man waited. He was bored. He had nothing to do but wait now. They always cried before confessing.

The first two blocks of Green Street were dark and narrow and lifeless, except for an occasional derelict asleep beside an empty bottle in a doorway. The third block was just as narrow, but brightly lit from a double row of bars, and people were constantly on the move. Cars were parked on both sides of the street, leaving only one narrow lane open in the middle for the one-way traffic, of which there was practically none. The derelicts who were still shakily on their feet were all over this block, mingling with short, slender, bright-eyed homosexuals, hard-looking hustlers, strange-uniformed sailors — since Albany is also a port city, shipping grain and manufactured goods to the European markets — and clusters of skinny, black-jacketed teenagers. It didn’t look good to Honour Mercy; it was lower and harder and more primitive than anything she’d ever run into before, and so she kept on walking.

The fourth block was half-bright and half-dark. Bars were scattered here and there on both sides of the street, but crammed in with them were dark, empty-windowed tenements. And in the doorways and ground-floor windows of the tenements were women, watching the street. This was closer to the world Honour Mercy knew, and so she stopped at the first dark doorway on her side of the street and looked at the Negro woman standing there, “I just got to town,” she said.

“Come in here off the street!” hissed the woman.

Honour Mercy, surprised, did as she was told, and the woman said, “What you want?”

“I just got here,” repeated Honour Mercy. “I don’t know what things are like.”

“They ain’t good,” said the woman. “The goddam police is on the rampage.” She laughed harshly at Honour Mercy’s blank look. “No, they ain’t honest,” she said. “They just greedy. They want all the bread they can get. The only way to make a dime in this town is hustle on your own and take your chances on being picked up.” She looked out at the street and ducked back, clutching Honour Mercy’s arm. “Get back in here!”

Honour Mercy, not understanding what was going on, cowered with the woman in the darkest corner of the entranceway. Outside, a three-year-old Buick drove slowly by, two men in the front seat. The car was painted black, with small gray letters on the front door reading, “POLICE,” and a red light, now off, attached to the top of the right fender.

The car slid by, slow and silent, and the hand gripping Honour Mercy’s arm slowly relaxed. Honour Mercy, impressed by it all, whispered, “Who was that?”

“The King,” said the woman, and the way she said it, it wasn’t as funny as it should have been. “He runs this section. He’s the only cop in the city dares walk down this street alone. He goes into a bar — crowded, jumpin’ — and he picks out the man he’s after, and he says, ‘You come with me.’ And he walks out, with the guy at his heels, and nobody stops him. Any other cop in this town try that, he’d get his badge shoved down his throat.”

“How can he do it?”

The woman shrugged. “He breaks heads,” she said. “And he’s straight. He don’t take a penny, and he don’t make a phony rap. Get rid of him, you get somebody bad down here to take his place.”

When Honour Mercy left the hotel, it had seemed simple enough. She would go to work. Now, it didn’t seem so simple any more. This city had a set-up unlike anything she’d ever seen before.

“You got a pad?” the woman asked suddenly.

Honour Mercy shook her head.

“No good,” said the woman. “You stuck to guys with cars. That means you got to stay on the sidewalk, where they can see you. And where the law can see you. You ought to wait till you get a pad.”

“I need money tonight,” said Honour Mercy. It wasn’t strictly true. The hotel wouldn’t start asking for money for a day or two at least. What Honour Mercy needed tonight was to work, to be doing something that would take her mind off the defection of Richie Parsons.

The woman shrugged again. “Then you got to hit the pavement. Look out for one-tone cars, specially Buicks and Oldsmobiles. That’s the law, whether it says so on the car or not.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Honour Mercy. “I appreciate it.”

“We all in the same racket,” said the woman.

“What — what are the prices around here?”

The woman looked her over. “You’re white,” she said. “And you’re young. You could get away with charging ten.”

Ten. That was low pay indeed, low, low pay after New York. Honour Mercy decided right there to get enough money together to get back to New York as quickly as possible. Back to New York, where the organization was so much smoother, the prices so much higher, the clientele so much better. Back to New York, and, come to think of it, back to Joshua Crawford.

Joshua was going to ask her to be his mistress. She knew that, but she’d avoided acknowledging it before this, because it would have brought up the problem of Richie. But now that Richie had left her, there was no problem. She would get the money quickly, get back to New York, and she would become Joshua Crawford’s mistress. It would be a good life.

“Thanks again,” she said to the woman, and left the darkness of the doorway.

She walked for twenty minutes before she got a customer. Single-color Buicks and Oldsmobiles had driven by, slowly, the drivers watching the sidewalks, but she hadn’t even glanced at them as they passed her. She had walked purposefully, as though to a set destination, when cars like that passed her, and she hadn’t been stopped.

The customer — or customers — arrived in a late-forties Ford, amateurishly painted gold and black. There were four teenagers in the car, and the driver slowed to a crawl, matching Honour Mercy’s speed, and they went half a block that way before he murmured. “Hey. You lookin’ for somebody?”

She turned and gave him the big smile. “Nobody in particular,” she said.

He stopped the car completely. “Come on over here.”

She went, studying the driver’s face. He was about seventeen, sharp-nosed and dissatisfied-looking, with a crewcut. The other three were all in the shadows within the car, but she knew they would look very much like the driver.

When she got to the car, the driver said, “How much?”

“I charge ten dollars—” she noticed the change of expression in time “—but with a group like this, of course, it’s cheaper.”

“How much?” he repeated, more warily.

She thought rapidly. Seventeen-year-old boys, she knew from past experience, had a habit of not lasting very long. She could probably go through all four of them in fifteen minutes, including time lost changing partners. If they didn’t have to drive very far to find a place where they could park in privacy, and if they didn’t waste too much getting down to business once they’d parked, she might even be able to get back in time for one more trick tonight. Thinking of this, and judging, as best she could, the amount of money the boy and his friends would be able and willing to spend, she came, almost without a pause in the conversation, to a number.

“Twenty-five dollars.”

She waited through the whispered consultation. Once they’d figured out that that was only six dollars and twenty-five cents apiece, the consultation was rapidly over. The door to the rear seat opened, a tall blond-haired boy stepped out, and the driver said, “Okay. Climb aboard.”

To her left was the blond boy. To her right was a short, black-haired, large-nosed boy, who looked terribly nervous. Up front, the boy beside the driver was black-haired and spectacled. She gave each of them a mental tag, to keep them straight. There was the Blond, the Driver, the Glasses, and the Nervous.

The car turned left at the next intersection and drove through dark and twisting streets. The Blond put his hand on her knee and squeezed experimentally. Remembering that she wanted them to be in condition to make short work of it, she smiled at him and squeezed back. He grinned and slid his hand up her leg, under the skirt, then murmured, “Why don’t you get the panties off right now? Save some time.”

“All right.”

It took a lot of squirming, in the crowded back seat, to get them off, and she made sure she did a lot of the squirming against Nervous, to her right. She wanted to get him in the mood, too, and she was afraid that would take some doing.

The squirming did the trick. When she was settled again, the Blond’s hand was once more up under her skirt, and the Nervous had a hand inside her blouse. He tugged at the bra and whispered, betraying the fact that he was still nervous, “Take that off, too.”

More squirming this time, complicated by the fact that the Blond’s hand was doing distracting things beneath the skirt, and finally her blouse was open and her bra off and lying on the ledge behind the seat. The Nervous bent forward and kissed her breast, and the Blond’s hand was still moving beneath her skirt. She closed her eyes and stopped thinking.

The car was on a main street for a while, and then off that, and there were occasional glimpses of the river off to the left. They passed warehouses and trucking concerns and bakeries, all closed and dark and silent now. They passed the spot where Richie Parsons had stopped living three hours before, but there was no longer any sign that there had been violence here tonight. This was also the spot where the cruising prowl car had so unexpectedly caught Joshua Crawford, open-faced and panting, the gun still in his hand, in the hard bright beams of its headlights, but the spot bore no witness of him, either. The car drove by, and farther on it turned left again, toward the river, and then right, and stopped.

Honour Mercy was ready. She wouldn’t have to fake her responses with these boys. But she still retained enough presence of mind to say, “Money in advance, boys. That’s standard.”

The four of them got out of the car, leaving Honour Mercy in the back seat, and consulted together outside. The Driver came back, finally, with the money. A five-dollar bill, a bunch of wrinkled singles, and two dollars in change. Honour Mercy stashed it all in her purse, stashed the purse on the window ledge with her bra, and smiled at the Driver. “Are you first?”

“You bet I am,” he said.

She’d given him the right nickname. He came at her fast and brutal, crushing her down in the cramped back seat, driving her down and back, half-smothering her. But his very force betrayed him. He was finished before he was barely started, leaving Honour Mercy moving alone. But he seemed satisfied as he crawled out of the car again, and walked over to the waiting group.

The Blond was second, and he had read books on the subject. He tried to come at her slow and gradually, full of technique. Under normal circumstances, she would have followed his lead, because she enjoyed the niceties of technique, no matter how academic. But there had been the hands and lips all over her on the ride, and the Driver had just finished with her, and she was in no mood to be gradual. She sunk her teeth into his shoulder and her nails into his buttocks and he forgot the textbooks.

They stopped together, rigid and straining and open-mouthed, and when he left, the inside of the car was beginning to be heavy with the acrid perfume of love.

Glasses came next, and he had a variety of ideas. There were other things he wanted done first, some of them very difficult in the back seat of a late-forties Ford, and she had a chance to cool down a bit and to begin to think again.

Glasses had her spend too much time with the preliminaries, and all at once the main event was canceled. But he smiled and shrugged and said, “That’s the way it goes.” And she knew that that was the way he had wanted it all along, and she wondered if he understood yet that he was homosexual.

Nervous came last, and Nervous wasn’t even ready. She realized, with a sinking feeling, that this was Nervous’s first time. The backseat was cramped, the air in the car was now too heavy for comfort, and she knew that she was a sweat-stained, disheveled and panting mess, stimulating to a man, perhaps, but not to a boy coming to sex for the first time.

She did what she could for him, smiling at him, talking gently with him, telling him that lots of men needed help in getting ready. She gave him the help he needed, half-afraid that it just wasn’t going to work out, and slowly she felt the interest growing within him. And when he was ready, she didn’t try to rush it, she tried to make it last, because she understood how important it was to him, this first time.

But nothing could have made him last. He was here and gone again in two shakes of his nervous tail, and then it was all over and she was alone in the back seat of the car and slipping back into her clothes.

They waited outside until she was ready. When she was dressed, she climbed out of the car, needing fresh air and a bit of walking to revive her completely.

The four of them were clustered around the front of the car, and she glanced at them, and all of a sudden she realized what was going to happen. She panicked, standing frozen beside the car, not knowing what to do.

The money, that was the important thing. The purse was still on the window ledge, and she tried to be casual in her movements as she opened the rear door again and got the purse.

But when she got back out of the car, they were bunched around her, and the Driver was standing directly in front of her, grinning bitterly and saying, “Where you going, Sweetheart?”

“Please,” she said. “I need the money. I need it.”

“Don’t we all,” he said.

Nervous, a step back of the rest, piped up, “Let her have the money, Danny. We can afford it.”

The Driver — Danny — whirled and snapped, “Shut up, you clown. Now she knows my name.”

“Let her keep the money,” Nervous insisted, but it was weak insistence, and Honour Mercy knew he was a poor, albeit willing, ally.

If she was going to get out of this, she’d have to get out by herself. While they were all distracted by Nervous, she might just be able to—

She got two steps, and the Driver had her by the arm and was spinning her around, shoving her back against the side of the car. “Where do you think you’re going, Sweetheart?” he asked again, and hit her solidly in the stomach.

The punch knocked the wind out of her, and she sagged against the car, clutching her stomach, her mouth open as she gasped for air. And the shrill voice of Nervous was sounding again, but she knew it was no use, and the sound stopped when the Driver snarled, “Shut that idiot up.”

She could do no more than stand, weakly, leaning against the car, trying for breath. When the purse was ripped out of her hands, she could do nothing to stop it. And when she heard the Driver say, “I think I’m going to teach this little bitch a lesson,” she could do nothing to protect herself or to get away.

One of the others — Glasses? — said, “What the hell, Danny, leave her alone. We got the money.”

“She wants a lesson,” insisted Danny. And he back-handed her across the side of the face.

She would have fallen, but he caught her and shoved her back against the side of the car again, and held her with one hand cruelly gripping her breast while he slapped her, openhanded, back and forth across the face. She cried out, finally having breath, and he switched at once, punching her twice, hard, in the stomach. As she doubled, he punched her twice more, on the point of each breast.

She screamed with the searing pain of it and fell to her knees. He slapped her — forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand — and dragged her to her feet once more, shoving her back against the car, and as he did so he kneed her, and ground the knuckles of his right hand into her side, just under the ribcage.

He wouldn’t let her fall. He held her with a clutching, twisting hand on her breast, and his other hand beat at her, face and breast and stomach and side, open-hand and closed fist.

The Blond and Glasses pulled him away from her finally, and she collapsed onto the dank, weed-choked ground, unable to move or make a sound, capable only of breathing and feeling the pain stabbing through her body from every place that he had hit.

After a moment, she heard the car start, and she was terrified that now he was going to drive over her, but the sound of the motor receded to silence, and she knew they had gone away.

She lay for half an hour unmoving, until the worst pain subsided, and then she struggled to a sitting position, and had to stop again, because movement brought the pain back, hard and tight, and she was afraid she would faint. And then she hoped she would faint.

But she didn’t faint, and after another while she managed to get to her feet. Behind her was the street that would lead her back to the downtown section. Ahead of her was the faint rustle of the river. To either side of her were the dark hulks of commercial buildings.

She knew she must look horrible, and with the lessening of the pain she could think about that. If she showed herself on the street looking like this, the police would pick her up right away. And even if she managed to avoid the police, she would never get through the hotel lobby.

Moving painfully, she made her way toward the sound of the river. There was a narrow, steep incline between two buildings which overhung the river’s edge, and old wooden pilings to lean against on the way down. The water was brackish and foul-smelling, filled with sewage and industrial waste, the filthy pollution of a river beside which industrial cities had been built. But it was water.

She knelt gingerly, and pushed her hands into the water. It was cold, and she waited, unmoving, letting the chill move up her arms to her torso, reviving her, restoring her, and then she lay prone and splashed the fouled water over her face, washing away the smudges and stains of her beating.

She almost went to sleep, and her head would have fallen forward and her face would have been underwater. She caught herself in time, and backed hastily away from the edge, terrified at the nearness of death.

She used her panties to towel her face and hands and arms, then threw the sodden garment into the water, and turned toward the street.

Midway, she found her purse, lying on the ground. She carried it out to the street, where a streetlight across the way gave her enough light to check its contents.

There was no money in it, but nothing else had been touched. Her hand mirror was there, and she inspected her face critically, seeing that the signs of the beating were still there. And her hair was a mass of tangled knots, damp and filthy.

She had a comb and lipstick and powder. She re-paired the damage as best she could, and when she was finished, she looked presentable enough, if she didn’t get too close to anybody. She smoothed and adjusted her clothing, rubbing out some of the stains, and started off for the hotel.

She was still weak. Every once in a while, she had to stop and lean against a building for a moment, to catch her breath and wait for the dizziness to go away. And when she came to the bottom of the State Street hill, she looked up at the hotel, so high above her, and she thought she would never be able to get up that long steep hill.

But she made it, finally, and entered the hotel lobby softly, circling away from the desk, where the night-clerk was busy with file cards, and getting to the elevator without being stopped.

The operator looked at her with surprise. “What happened to you?”

She, shook her head. “Nothing. Never mind.”

“Listen,” he said. “There’s cops in your room.”

She stared at him.

The weakness was coming in again, and she thought that this time she would faint for sure, but the operator was still talking, and what he said next drove the weakness away and left her pale and trembling, but only too conscious.

“Yep,” he said, nodding, chewing his cud, happy to be the news-bearer. “Some crazy queer shot him. Right between the eyes. Signed a confession and everything, and then jumped right out a window.” He shook his head, grinning. “Them coppers are sure mad,” he said. “It don’t look good when a prisoner manages to kill himself that way. Hey! Where you going?”

But she didn’t answer him, because she didn’t know.

She didn’t know until she was at the foot of State Street once more, and looking at the signs on a telephone pole. The top sign was shield-shaped, and said, “U.S. Route 9.” The bottom sign was rectangular and said, “NEW YORK,” with an arrow underneath.

New York. She nodded, and noticed she’d dropped the purse somewhere. She was empty-handed. Not that it mattered.

New York. She would be Joshua’s mistress.

She started walking in the direction the arrow indicated. A chill breeze snaked up under her skirt, and she was no longer wearing panties, but she didn’t notice. She just walked, and when false dawn was streaking the sky to her left, Albany was behind her.