A Girl Called Honey

Nine

Tires screeched and kicked gravel as the big car pulled off the road and squealed to a stop on the shoulder. The driver leaned across the seat, opened the door and stuck his head out.

“Want a lift?”

She ran to the car. In the back of her mind she heard her mother cautioning her not to accept rides with strange men. But then there had been many things that her mother had told her. It was no time to start listening to those things.

“Where you headed?”

“New York.”

“Hop in.”

She hopped in. The car was a new Buick and it was big. So was the driver. A shock of straw-colored hair topped his big boulder of a head. His hands were huge and they held the steering wheel as if it might fall apart unless he personally held it together. When she had closed the door, he let out the clutch and put the accelerator pedal on the floor. The car responded as though it was scared of him.

“Nice car you got.”

The man nodded, agreeing. “She’ll do a hundred easy,” he told her. “One-twenty if I push her a little. The mileage isn’t much, but if I wanted to worry about mileage I’d get myself a bicycle. I want a car that’ll move when I want her to move.”

He had what he wanted, in that case. When Honour Mercy looked at the speedometer she noticed that the little red needle was pointing at sixty-five and edging over toward seventy.

“That’s why I travel this road,” he went on. “Thruway takes you from Albany down to New York just the same, but those troopers watch the Thruway pretty close. Limit’s sixty and when you go much over sixty-five they stop you and hit you with a ticket. That’s no fun. Costs a guy twenty, thirty bucks for the ticket plus a few bucks in tolls. No fun at all.”

The needle was pointing at seventy-five.

“You come from Albany?”

She nodded.

“Figure on hitching? Reason I ask is I didn’t see you standing with your thumb out. Just walking. Looked like you were trying to walk clear to New York.”

This was precisely what she had been doing, but she didn’t think the man would accept it as a logical explanation. “I was having trouble getting a ride,” she said. “So I just started walking for a few minutes. I thought maybe I’d have more luck if I went on down to the first intersection.”

He nodded and she decided that she had picked the right reply. “I’m not from Albany myself,” the man was saying. “Pass through there a lot, though. I live up in Rome; got a business up there. You know where that is?”

She didn’t.

“Yes,” she said.

“Have to run down to New York a lot,” he went on. “On business. So I come through Albany. Don’t stop there too often, but this time I made a breakfast stop on the outskirts. I like a cup of coffee now and then when I drive. Keeps my mind on what I’m doing.”

The needle pointed at eighty.

“Quite a thing up there last night, wasn’t there? I had a look at the paper while I was eating; just had time to skim over the front page. Quite a thing. Double killing and all. You hear about it?”

She shook her head. Richie had evidently made the papers, she thought. Maybe if she just let this man run off at the mouth about it she could learn a little more about what had happened.

“Quite a thing,” he said. “Quite a thing. Young kid checked into a hotel with a girl, went out for a walk and a guy came up behind him and blew his head off. Shot him smack dab in the face and there wasn’t a hell of a lot of his face left afterwards. Least that’s what the paper said. They seem to build these things up.”

She shuddered. He looked at her and misinterpreted the shudder as normal female revulsion and patted her knee to soothe her. When he touched her she wondered how long it would take him to make a pass at her. She knew he was going to; knew that was why he had picked her up in the first place. He would make a pass at her and she would let him do whatever he wanted to do with her. He was going to New York and he would take her there, and in exchange he had a right to the temporary use of her body. That was fundamental.

“Who did it?” she managed. “Did they catch the man who did it?”

“Sure did,” the big man said. His hand was still on her knee, not to calm her, not now, and the speedometer needle was moving toward ninety. She hoped they would live to get back to New York. Because that was all that mattered — getting to New York and becoming Joshua’s mistress. That was what she had to do and the man with his big hand on her knee was just another means to the end.

“Caught him in the act,” the man said. “Just about in the act. Red-handed, the way they say it. Paper said he was standing there with the smoking gun still in his hand when the police took hold of him. Didn’t make a fuss or anything.”

He lapsed into temporary silence, becoming preoccupied with her knee, and she had to prompt him. “You said double killing. Who else did he kill?”

“Didn’t kill nobody else. Killed himself. Police had him up at the station house and he took a dive through the window. Fell a couple stories and that was the end of him.”

She shuddered again, as memory tried to intrude, then regretted it because it only got the hand more interested in her knee. Now who in the world would want to kill Richie? It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to her, and she decided that it must have been a case of mistaken identity.

“Do they know why the man did it?”

“Nope,” the driver said. “Don’t know a thing. All they know is his name and the name of the guy he killed. The young fellow’s name was Shaw, Anthony or Andy or something of the sort.”

For the merest shadow of a second her heart jumped at the thought that Richie hadn’t been killed after all, that the dead boy was somebody else. Then she remembered that Shaw was the name Richie had picked out for himself. That was the way he’d signed the register at the hotel.

“Can’t remember the other one’s name,” the driver continued. “It’s on the tip of my tongue but I’ll be damned if I remember it. Just took a quick look through the paper before it was time to hit the road again.”

The “quick look” had nearly committed the whole story to his memory. Honour Mercy could picture him, gulping down his coffee and reading the grisly article with his eyes bugging out of his head.

“Seems I ought to be able to remember the name,” the driver said. “But I can’t.”

“Was he a... gangster?”

The man shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Wasn’t even from Albany. Came from New York. One of them New York lawyers. I’ve met some of those fellows and I wouldn’t put anything past them. Sharp ones, them.”

A warning bell sounded inside the back of Honour Mercy’s head. It wasn’t possible, she told herself. It was a coincidence, that was all. It couldn’t be, just plain couldn’t be.

But she was afraid. Memory was crouched, ready to spring. She looked out the window at the ground that was passing by very swiftly, then looked at the speedometer needle that told how fast the ground was passing by, and then looked at the hand on her knee.

Not Joshua. She was going to Joshua, that was the important thing. It hadn’t been him.

“His name,” she said, slowly. “Funny thing you can’t remember it.”

“Hardly makes a difference.”

“I mean,” she said, “the way you remembered the other one, the boy who got shot. Just seems funny that you couldn’t remember the name of the one who shot him.”

“Yes, funny,” the man said. “Right on the tip of my tongue, too. Paper must of mentioned it a dozen times, if they mentioned it once. And I’m usually pretty good when it comes to remembering.”

Think, she thought. Say it wasn’t Joshua.

“Damned if it isn’t coming back to me now,” the man said, excited at the prospect of demonstrating just how good he was at remembering things. “Some sort of a Bible name, now that I think about it.”

She couldn’t breathe.

“Sure,” the man said. A vein was throbbing on his broad forehead. “Sure, that’s what it was. It’s coming now. Who was it fought that battle at Jericho? The one they got that song about?”

“Joshua,” she whispered.

“Yep,” the man said, happy now. “Joshua. Last name was something like “Crawfish,” but that ain’t it. It’ll probably come to me in another minute if I think about it awhile.”

She wanted to tell him not to waste his time but she couldn’t because she knew that if she opened her mouth she would scream.

She was in her apartment off Central Park West, alone, and she ached all over. Her body ached, first from the four boys, and then from the big man who had driven her to New York, and whom she had obligingly permitted to lead her into the privacy of a motel room en route.

And her lower lip ached from biting it, and her head ached because her brain was spinning around. But the worst ache of all was somewhere inside.

She was alone.

That was it. She was alone, completely alone, and she had not been alone since that time when she stood with a ratty cardboard suitcase in her hand in Newport’s Greyhound station.

Alone.

There was no one with her, because Richie was dead, and there was no one to call, because Joshua was dead. And, because Richie and Joshua had been the only two people in her world, this left her, according to the inexorable laws of mathematics, alone.

Alone.

And, incidentally, penniless.

That was silly, because she had quite a bit of money in the bank. But it was after three and the bank was closed, so for the moment the money in the bank was quite useless. Actually she could do without money until the bank opened for business again in the morning; the refrigerator was filled with food and all she had to do was cook it and eat it. And even if the refrigerator had been empty, she could easily last until morning without eating. The big man had bought her a meal which she had forced herself to eat. She wouldn’t starve.

But if she stayed in the apartment she might go out of her mind. That’s what would happen — she would go crazy. She would look at the walls and look at the ceiling until the walls closed in and the ceiling fell on her, and she would go crazy.

Because she was so damned alone.

For a long time there had been no problem. She was with Richie and the two of them shared an apartment and a bed and a way of life. There was a pattern and she lived within the pattern.

Then there wasn’t Richie, all of a sudden, but there was still a pattern. The pattern centered around Joshua. She would go back to New York and let Joshua ask her to be his mistress, and then she would live with him, sharing his apartment and his bed.

Another pattern.

And then, out of the blue, there wasn’t Joshua any more. And there wasn’t any pattern. There was simply Honour Mercy Bane alone by herself, all alone, terribly alone, with nothing to do and no place to go. In a day, two patterns had been shattered, in twenty-four hours or so, Richie had gone and Joshua had gone, and they had both left her alone.

And now?

Now there was no pattern. Nothing fit together. There were any number of things she could do, but nothing added up to a pattern, nothing gave her a life that got rid of the aloneness.

She would stay in the apartment, have something to eat and go to sleep. In the morning they would call her and tell her what tricks were lined up for her, and she would go out and handle her tricks and take home her money. She would live alone in her apartment and save her money and turn her tricks, and that would be her life.

And the walls would close in and the ceiling would fall, and one day would follow the other without shape or pat-tern, and she would go mad.

She would stay in the apartment, have something to eat and go to sleep. In the morning she would go to the bank and draw out all her money and buy a ticket to Newport. When she got to Newport she would find Madge and get her old job back, or get Madge to line her up a job at one of the other houses.

And she would live by herself in an empty room at the Casterbridge Hotel, and she would eat Gil Gluck’s tasteless food and walk up and down a flight of stairs for eight hours every day, and one day would follow the other without shape or pattern, and she would go mad.

She would stay in the apartment, have something to eat and go to sleep. In the morning she would go to the bank and draw out all her money and buy a ticket to Coldwater. When she got to Coldwater she would find her parents and fall on her knees and beg forgiveness, and Prudence and Abraham Bane would forgive her and take her back and she would get a job and live at home with her parents.

And she would eat grits and ribs and fatback, and she would read the Bible every day and go to sleep by ten, and people would stare after her when she passed them on the street, and one day would follow the other without shape or pattern, and she would go mad.

Alone.

And empty.

She got up from the bed, and that helped a little. She had a bite to eat, a pair of scrambled eggs with some cheddar cheese melted in them, and that helped. She took a bath and washed away the odor of the man who had driven her from Albany to New York, and that helped.

She left the apartment. That also helped. She walked halfway to the subway stop before she remembered that she had no money and consequently couldn’t buy a token for the train. She thought that she could stop someone on the street and ask for a token, or go to the man at the turnstile and talk him into letting her crawl under free. But she decided instead that she might as well walk, that where she was going was only a little over a mile and that the walk would do her good.

She headed downtown.

Eighth Avenue, which is what Central Park West turns into when Central Park is no longer to the east of it, was still Whore Row in the blocks of the Forties. And Honour Mercy, although she was wearing a sixty-dollar dress, and although her behind did not wiggle when she walked, still half-belonged there. She had not realized this, not consciously, but the men seemed to recognize the fact.

“Girlie!” one of them whispered from a doorway, his eyes hungry. She ignored him and went on walking. Another one mocked with his eyes; his lips curled, and he said. “How much, sister?”

She swept past him.

The one who took her arm was more difficult. But she got rid of him, too, and she kept walking. She walked a block or two more until she was at Eighth and 44^th, and here she stopped walking. She stood in front of a drugstore and pretended to interest herself in a display of ancient pharmaceutical instruments, but the mortars and pestles, symbolic of her work as they might be, were not nearly so fascinating as she made out.

Why had she stopped there?

In a vague way, it seemed to her that she might find a friend here, someone to talk to. She was a whore, of course, and Whore Row seemed the proper place for a whore to look for friends. She certainly didn’t want to turn a trick, a cheap ten-buck trick when she had all that money in the bank. So, obviously, she had come to Whore Row to see a friend.

The hell of it was that she didn’t have any friends. Not on Whore Row or anyplace else.

But that was silly. She hadn’t come there just to stand around like a lamppost. The whole thing didn’t make any sense at all.

She turned around slowly, feeling lost and more alone than ever with all of these strangers wandering busily back and forth around her. She told herself that somewhere there was a pattern and it was only a question of discovering it for herself, of locating the pattern and pinning it down and studying it closely.

Whatever it was.

Then there was a woman coming toward her, a woman with frizzy black hair and pale skin and too much makeup on her mouth and cheeks and eyes. At first Honour Mercy looked at her, thought whore and looked away. Then she looked again, and this time she recognized the woman and her eyes went wide and her mouth dropped open.

It was Marie.

Marie, the prostitute who had been her first contact in New York. Marie, who had also happened to be a Lesbian, the first and last with whom Honour Mercy had come into mildly distasteful contact. When she left Marie she would have been perfectly content not to see the woman ever again, but now, because she was alone and fresh out of patterns, she discovered that she was glad to see her, glad to have the woman take her arm, glad at last to have someone, anyone, to talk to.

“Honey! Well, I’ll be damned!”

“Hello,” she said. “Hello, Marie.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Marie repeated. Her smile was somehow awkward and her eyes seemed out of focus, a little glassy.

“A long time,” Marie was saying. “Little Honey landed on the phone and high-hatted her old friends. Where you been, baby?”

Marie’s words were sleepy, coming through a filter. Her eyes were half-closed now and she barely moved her lips when she spoke.

“I’ve been living uptown,” Honour Mercy said. She had to say something.

“Uptown? One of those post pads off the park. That sounds nice. Post pads off the park. All those ‘p’ sounds. Goes together real nice with a swing to it.”

Honour Mercy opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. “You’re different,” she said.

“Different? Just because I like girls? That’s not all that’s different, baby. It’s my scene. You’ve got to be tolerant of another person’s scene, baby. It’s the only way.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“NO?”

“Your eyes,” Honour Mercy said. “And the way you talk and everything.”

Marie giggled. “I didn’t know it showed that much. I must be carrying a heavy load.”

Honour Mercy didn’t understand.

“C’mon out of the light, baby. Around the corner where the bugs don’t chase you. Light is evil.”

She let Marie take her around the corner to 44^th Street. They walked a ways and then the older woman led her into a doorway.

“You tumbled quick,” Marie said. “You hipped yourself fast. Or are you making the same scene?”

Honour Mercy was lost. Then Marie lifted her own skirt all the way, and when Honour Mercy’s face screwed up in puzzlement she pointed to her legs.

There were marks running up and down the insides of her thighs.

And Honour Mercy understood.

“Junk,” Marie said. “H, horse, junk. Sweet little powder that makes happy dreams. You put the needle in and everything gets pretty.”

“You ever make horse? Ever put the needle in and take it out empty?”

“No.”

“Ever make pot? Ever break a stick with a buddy? Ever smoke up and dream?”

She shook her head.

“Ever sniff? Ever skin-pop and smile all night at the ceiling?”

“No.”

Marie smiled. “A virgin,” she said reverently. “A little virgin with bells on. You better let me take your cherry, Honey. Better let Marie turn you on to the world, the pink world. You come with me.”

Marie took her arm again, but Honour Mercy stayed where she was.

“Aren’t you coming?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to come, baby. You want to see what’s wrong and what’s right. You see the way I am now?”

She nodded.

“High,” Marie said. “High in the sky with a pocket full of rye. Four-and-twenty spade birds baking in pie in the sky. Come fly with me.”

“I... what does it do?”

“Makes the world good,” Marie said. “Makes everything fit where it should. Makes a whore a queen. And a cat can look at a queen. Right?”

She hesitated.

“Come on,” Marie told her. “No charge, no cost. Sample day, every ride a nickel at Coney Island. Ever ride the comet, baby? Or the caterpillar?”

“I—”

“You will, baby. You’ll lie down and ride them all, every one of them. This time it’ll be you riding instead of some man riding you. You just come on and ride, baby. You just come with me.”

Marie had the same room as before. Honour Mercy sat on the edge of the bed, remembering the other time they had been together in Marie’s room, remembering what they had done. She wondered what they were going to do now, what it would be like.

Marie was holding a match under a teaspoon. A small white capsule rested in the spoon, and the heat from the match melted it. When it was all liquid, she pushed in the plunger of a hypodermic needle, then sucked up the liquid with it.

“Your leg,” Marie said. “Don’t want it in your arm or the mark’ll show. Want it in your leg, so pull up your dress for me. That’s right. And we’re not going to turn you on in the vein because you don’t need it, not yet. Just a skin-fix, that ought to be enough. Ought to put you up so high you’ll fly all over God’s little acre. That’s right, that’s the way.”

Marie sank the needle into the fleshy part of Honour Mercy’s thigh. Honour Mercy sat, watching the needle go in, watching Marie depress the plunger and send the heroin into her thigh. And she waited for something to happen.

And nothing happened. For a moment or two nothing at all happened and she wanted to tell Marie to stop teasing her.

Then something happened.

And she stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes and stared at heaven through the top of her skull.