Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

Robert Sampson was fascinated by pulp magazines. He published seven books on the subject and wrote countless articles for various “fanzines,” “prozines,” and mainstream periodicals. He was also a collector of pulp fiction — yet not a collector, for rather than storing his rare finds in plastic bags and locking them away from the sun, he read and enjoyed them, using them as they were meant to be used.

Sampson’s ultimate aim was not to legitimize pulp fiction, for part of its charm had always been its illicitness. Rather, he wished to celebrate its color, its wild invention, its absurd luridness, its exhausting pace, its glorious vitality. He was interested in both American and British versions of popular fiction, the kind of subliterary stuff that George Eliot once referred to as “spiritual gin.” Above all, he was intrigued by the mental and emotional processes that go into making an author a super-seller, such as the British phenomenon Edgar Wallace, who wrote a quarter of all books sold in Great Britain from 1927 to 1932.

Sampson envisaged a multivolume study dealing with all aspects of the pulps: the different genres (crime fiction, fantasy, science fiction, air-war, war, adventure, mystery, weird menace, Western, history) as well as the writers, editors, and publishers, many of whom were still alive in the early 1970s, when Sampson began his project. He called the series Yesterday’s Faces, and in 1991, the year before he died, the fifth (and penultimate) volume was published. As a monumental survey and critique of twentieth-century popular fiction, it is unique and invaluable. Other critical works include The Night Master (1982), on the superhero the Shadow; Spider (1987); and Deadly Excitements: Shadows and Phantoms (1989), which doubles as a nonseries commentary on pulp magazines and a volume of memoirs.

In his early years as a radio continuity writer, Sampson cracked one or two fiction markets, including Planet Stories and the digest Science Fiction Adventures. His story “Rain in Pinton County” appeared in New Black Mask in 1986 and won that year’s Edgar award for best short story from the Mystery Writers of America. Other stories appeared in A Matter of Crime, Weird Tales, Spectrum, Spectrum II, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction (1989).

“To Florida” concerns a man headed straight for hell and is a masterpiece of contemporary nihilism.

J. A.

To Florida (1987)

Music blared as a ton of pink rocks flattened the orange bear. He sat up bonelessly, rubbing mauve stars from his head, and marched off the television screen, aggressive and undaunted.

Teller, not watching the bear’s problem, started recounting the money. His fingers danced through the stack of twenties like hunger in motion, like a love song, caressing.

A purple boxing glove belted the bear across a yellow room. Laughter screamed.

Teller glanced up, then down. His face was insolently wary, the face of a kid grown up to find out it was all a lie. He wore heavy sideburns, very black, and a lot of undisciplined mustache. He was on the short side of thirty, and looked soiled and a little crazy.

The apartment door bumped open. A girl’s voice said apologetically, “Whoops, slipped, I guess.” She backed into the room, angular and ugly, almost twenty. She wore blue jeans and a dirty pink sweatshirt. A big gray yarn purse, striped blue-yellow-green, had slipped to the crook of her arm. She clutched two sacks of groceries.

“Jerry, can you grab a sack?”

“Dump ’em on the table.”

“They’re slipping.” She sidled crabwise across the room, showing too many teeth in a mouth like a frog’s. She thumped the sacks on a green painted table holding an air conditioner and the remains of last night’s Kwik-Karry Chicken. The window behind the table puffed cold air at her.

Jerry said to his hands, “You know what? I’m fixing to take me down to good old Florida and have a time.” He stroked the money. “I’m gonna drink me some beer and soak up some of that sun.”

“Yea, Florida,” she said. And speaking saw the money in his hands. All the expression flattened out of her face. “Is that yours?”

“Mine.” Their eyes met. “What you think, Sue Ann? Want to run down to Florida?”

She eyed the money, wary, surprised. “You got enough maybe we could give Mr. Davidson some? For the rent. He keeps calling.”

“He gave me this.” His quick fingers doubled over the bills, thrust them into the pocket of his shirt.

“He didn’t.”

“Go look in the kitchen and see. But don’t squeal, now. Don’t you squeal.”

“He wants we should pay him something.”

“Look there in the kitchen.”

She looked into the kitchen and her shoulders lifted slowly and slowly settled.

“Is he dead?”

“Naw.”

“I mean, really, is he dead?”

“I told you no. I just tapped him. Not even hard.”

“His one eye’s open.”

“So he sleeps with one eye open.”

She swung around to look at him. Apprehension twisted in her face like a snake in a bottle. “If you hurt him, we better not let anybody know.”

“We’re gonna be gone. I got his car keys. I’m cuttin’ out.” He waited for her enthusiasm and his face hardened when it did not come. “I figured you were so hot to run down to Florida.”

“To Florida. Well, I guess... sure...”

He heaved up from the recliner, boot heels cracking on the uncarpeted floor. “You get yourself together.” He grinned, watching her mind stumble after his words. “I want to go get me some of that good beer.”

“Jerry, you’re sure Mr. Davidson’s all right, aren’t you?”

“I said he was OK. Get packed.”

“Should I put a blanket over him?”

“You just let him be, now.” He pulled her to him with one arm, pressing hard, but that didn’t reassure her much.

She went into the bedroom and began opening and closing drawers. He shook his head and, grinning, went to the table, and heaved up the air conditioner. It was a small window model, the simulated wooden front very new. Through the open window he could see out along Holmes Avenue, glowing with spring dogwood, white and pink. Above the flowering branches spread a pale blue sky, featureless as painted wood.

He carried the air conditioner out into the hallway. From the back apartment, a radio hammered rock, violent and forlorn, into the dim air. He used two fingers to open the front door, carried the air conditioner across the porch, along a cracked brown concrete walk, to the light blue Toyota parked by the curb in the bright morning sunlight. He dumped the conditioner into the backseat and straightened up, working his fingers.

“Jesus is Lord, and salvation is at hand,” said a voice at his right ear.

Behind him on the sidewalk stood a hook-nosed old ruin, all bone and wrinkles, holding out a printed tract. “Let me give you the Lord’s word, brother. It ain’t too late for the word.”

“Ain’t that nice.” He stepped around the scarecrow, who smelled sourly of upset stomach. As he climbed the porch steps, the old voice called, “All sins forgiven in the bosom of Jesus, brother.”

In the apartment bedroom, she had pulled out all their clothing. The bed was piled with stuff that looked and smelled like specials at the Saturday flea-market.

She told him, “I don’t know what to take.”

“All of it.”

“All of it?” She snatched up a pair of shoes.

“You think we’re coming back here?”

Confusion blurred her face. “You got to open the filling station tomorrow, Jerry.”

“You think so, huh?”

He loaded two cardboard boxes of his own clothing into the Toyota’s trunk. The old boy with the wet eyes was talking Jesus at a house up the street. When he reentered the apartment, she was still staring at the clothing, jerking her arms. Impatience twisted his mouth.

“You ready?”

“Not yet. Not yet.” She blundered into uncoordinated motion.

“Like a scared blind hen,” he muttered, stepping into the kitchen.

It was a long, dirty room painted pink. A narrow window spilled sunshine across unwashed dishes, paper sacks, fruit peelings, empty cans, a squadron of flies. The room stunk sourly of garbage and cigarettes. Old Man Davidson lay on the floor by the sink, his head in a jumble of beer cans. One eye glimmered palely under a sagging lid. He was a sharp-nosed runt with reddish hair. His mouth lolled open and a fly tilted and curved above the lard-colored lips.

“Show you to bad-mouth me,” Jerry said to the figure on the floor. In half an hour, he hustled her out the door, her arms dripping loose clothing. He put on a wide-brimmed brown hat, banded with pheasant feathers, and a shabby leather coat with the hunting knife tucked down in one pocket. It was tough that the television was too big to load into the car. “Hell with you,” he said and closed the door.

No one called good-bye. He fed the Toyota gas and they eased off between the exuberant dogwoods.

Half a block down the street, she clutched his arm. “I forgot the groceries.”

“Let ’em sit.”

“They’ll spoil.”

“So what?”

Thin brown fingers slipped across her mouth. “I used all our food stamps on them. Got some ribs for you.”

“Now, that was nice.”

“They were for you.”

He said in a flat, rapid voice, “Look, if we drive back, maybe somebody sees us in his car. You ever think of that? Then what you going to tell them?”

She stared at him, brown eyes blankly confused.

“What you going to say?”

“I... Well...”

“You got to think about that.”

She said faintly, “I just didn’t want them to spoil.”

“Well, OK. We’ll just go on.”

“I’m sorry, Jerry. I didn’t think about the car and... and all.”

“Shoot, you don’t have to think. You just sit there and have you a good time. We’re going to Florida.”

The Toyota shot around a yellow truck and picked up speed past rows of Victorian houses built close together, painted in shades of green and brown. They looked orderly and neat, like old women waiting for relatives on visiting day.

At the Friendly station, they stopped for gas and he bought a six-pack of Old Jack beer at the carryout. They drove north, then, along streets of grimy stores, small and set far apart with dust-gray windows and trash spilled along the sidewalk. The stores were replaced by narrow fields, still brown, stippled with weed stalks and bordered by trees blurred with new green. Beyond the trees, small hills humped up, dark with cedar, dappled by the dull rose and white of flowering trees.

“It’s just so beautiful,” Sue Ann said.

“Here we are,” he said.

He slewed the Toyota onto a gravel apron, jerked to a stop before a building the shape and color of a dirty sugar cube. Above the open door slanted a hand-painted sign:

In the doorway under the sign leaned a fat man without much hair, his circular face tarnished red-brown by years of sun. He watched Jerry work the air conditioner off the backseat.

“You jus’ come in here right now,” the fat man said.

Jerry plunged past him, banged the air conditioner onto a scarred wooden counter. The little room was hot, smelling disagreeably of rubber and cardboard. Orange boxes of auto parts packed the wall shelves. The floor was patched with flattened coffee cans, blue and red against silver-gray wood.

Jerry said, “Wanna sell me this air conditioner.”

The fat man worked his belly behind the counter. “It works, does it?”

“You give it a feel. Probably still cold.”

Thick brown hands deftly unfastened the grill. “She looks nice and clean.”

A door opened in back and a big old man, gone to bone and loose gray skin, limped into the room. The effort of moving thickened his breath. He inched over to a wooden chair by the counter, lowered himself into it joint by joint, said in a remote voice, “She’s getting cold out there, Dandy.”

Jerry said, “How much you fixing to give me for this beauty? Worth three hundred dollars, easy.”

“Oh, now, then,” Dandy said. He grinned at his fat hands. “It’s early for air conditioners.”

The old man grunted, spit at a blue can, looked at the air conditioner with sour suspicion.

Jerry said, “I got to get rid of it. They broke my lease.”

Fat fingers snapped the grill into place. “What do you think, Mr. Stafford?”

The old man sniffed, grunted, painfully extended his legs. “Expect she’s stole.”

“Like hell,” Jerry said, jerking his head. “What’s with you?”

“Couldn’t be nothin’ like that,” Dandy said. “I know this young fellow. He’s been in here before.”

“You know it,” Jerry said. Back stiff, hands jammed into his pockets, he stood without moving, watching them, grinning very slightly.

“Tell you what,” Dandy said. “You maybe got the bill of sale, I could give you, like, say fifty dollars.”

Stafford said in his sick old voice. “We don’t need no stole stuff.”

“Why don’t you shut up your mouth?” Jerry said to him.

Dandy said, very quickly, “No need to holler, son.”

“You want this or not?”

“Fifty dollar the best I can do.”

“No way, man. Hell with that.” White light leaped into his eyes. “I wouldn’t carry this thing across the street for fifty dollars.”

“We don’t hold none with thieving,” Stafford said, loudly triumphant.

“It’s worth one hundred dollars, easy,” Jerry said.

Dandy shook his head. “Not to me.”

Stafford yelped, “Get that stole thing out of here right now.”

Jerry made a small, bitter sound. He put his chin down on his chest, and a tremor, beginning at his hips, shook upward through his chest, shoulders, neck. His eyes became not quite human.

In a soft voice, he said, “Who asking you?” Then, very loudly, “Who asking you?” The sides of his mouth grew wet. “And so damn what?” He jerked the air conditioner up from the counter. Held it poised. Wheeled left and flung the machine into the old man’s lap. Stafford shrieked as the chair legs snapped off. He slapped against the counter screaming and pitched heavily onto the floor, hands clawing his legs. “They’s broke.”

Jerry flipped the hunting knife from his jacket pocket and slashed backhand at Dandy. The fat man banged himself back against the shelves. Orange boxes slipped thumping into the aisle.

Jerry leaned across the counter, his eyes intent, yellow-tan teeth showing under his mustache. He whipped the knife around, splitting Dandy’s tan shirt. As he slashed, he made a thick, grunting sound. Dandy squealed frantically as a thin, red line ran across the top of his shoulder.

Jerry got over the counter, fell into the aisle. His body felt hot and slow. Hunched over, he moved toward Dandy, knife blade out in front of him, a bright splinter.

Dandy said in a voice full of wonder, “Oh, this is a terrible thing.” His eyes were round. As Jerry moved toward him, he jerked a rack of cans thunderously into the aisle.

Jerry stumbled over a can, fell, hitting one knee. Taking small, quick steps, Dandy shuffled back from the knife. He got to the rear door. His eyes, round in a round pale face, stared past the edge of the door as it whacked shut.

“You better watch,” Jerry yelled. Jerking around, still holding the knife out before him, he darted back along the littered aisle, snatched the cash box from under the counter.

The box, chained to the shelf, snapped out of his hands. Change sprayed into the aisle among boxes and cans and broken glass. He clawed up a five, a one, another one. Dimes glinted among orange boxes. He found a quarter, a ten, two nickels. Urgency choked him.

He swung over the counter in one hard twist. The old man lay contorted against the counter, eyes rolled up, mouth open exposing his dull yellow tongue. He breathed like a compressor. The air conditioner canted across one leg.

Two steps to the door and out. Seven steps long across the crunching gravel, fury in his legs, rage lifting his shoulders. He felt laughter like hot fat boiling in his chest and throat.

He slid behind the wheel. Sue Ann gaped at him, excited, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

“No damn thing.”

The Toyota leaped away spewing gravel. “They tried to cheat me.”

As the car skidded onto the highway, Dandy appeared at the side of the building. His arms were extended and from hands clenched before his face projected the dark snout of a revolver. Then a screen of bushes lashed past, hiding him.

“Cheated me, by God.” His boot rammed the accelerator.

Gray-shaded clouds skated sedately across a pale sky. Beneath the clouds spread calm fields, furred with new light green. From Stafford’s dirty sugar-cube the road was a lean gray strip stretched north past a small housing development, a small store. Beyond the fields rose a sudden hill studded with the brick buildings of A & M College, sober, dull red blocks following the hill’s contours like bird nests along a cliff. Hill and buildings looked neatly peaceful as a European travel poster.

The Toyota hammered north, eighty miles an hour. Wheels jittered on the road. Fields reeled past. The pedestrian overpass swelled toward them, was over them, shrank behind. The car leaped, floated above a small rise, light as blowing leaves.

“Oh, my God, Jerry, what is it?”

Down the road by the lumber yard, a fat yellow truck wallowed onto the highway.

“Oh, Jerry!”

He tapped the brakes, cut left, cut back across an oncoming pickup, the driver’s face shocked.

“Cheated me,” he yelled. Tapped the brakes. They slid through a four-way stop, jerked left. Accelerated past shabby apartments screened by vivid forsythia. On the main highway, he slowed, turned south.

“Jerry, what happened?”

He said, “I made them remember me.”

His eyes were white stones.

Five miles down the road, rolling west at thirty-five miles an hour through streets lined endlessly with small houses. Each had its own yard, its own driveway, its own bush. He yawned, as dull-headed as if he had slept. A black child in a red cap waved at them.

“I was so scared,” she told him. “You looked so funny.”

“How’d I look funny?”

“You just did.”

He gulped beer from a can. “You’re OK, Lu Ann. You’re nuts, but you’re OK. I think you’re fine, you know that?”

“You scared me.”

She looked like no one he had ever seen before. The lumpy face shone with tear smears. The big teeth, the loose dull hair belonged to a stranger. Only her voice was familiar, stumbling, hesitating, the voice of a confused child.

“... please don’t say that. It’s what Daddy said.”

“What?” he asked her.

“He looked at me. He looked at Momma. He said...” The thin voice faltered and shook, unsteady with shame. “Said, ‘You take that dumbnut brat with you, too.’ He said that. My daddy. ‘Take your ugly brat with you.’ He’s in Saint Louis now. I won’t forget him saying that.”

His empty beer can clattered behind the seat. “Open me another one.”

“Am I ugly?”

“You?”

“Yes, am I ugly?”

“Shoot,” he said, “where’s that beer?”

“You don’t have to say I’m pretty. I know I’m not pretty. I know what pretty is, like on television, all shiny like there’s sun on them.”

“You’re all right,” he said, sucking beer.

“But he didn’t ought to say that. Was your daddy nice?”

At last, Jerry said, “He played him some games with us.”

“What like?”

“Held up his two fists all closed together. Says, ‘Which hand’s the candy in, kid?’ So you guessed. You guess wrong — bamo! He fetch you one up the side of the head.”

“That’s awful.”

“Never was any candy. Not in either hand. He tells me, ‘Don’t expect nothing cause that’s what you’re going to get.’ ” He clattered the empty can into the rear. “That’s right, too. You better know it. Both hands empty, all the time.”

“That’s terrible.”

Her face disgusted him. It was brainless, narrow, and brown, shapeless, the teeth ledged in a loose pale mouth. Now, at last, he remembered her name. “Give me one of them beers, Sue Ann.”

Twenty miles west of Huntsville the highway intersected I-65 South. Between ploughed fields a broad concrete strip undulated beneath a filmy white sky. The Toyota began to eat miles.

“Now we’re going down to Florida,” he said.

“Yea, Florida.” She leaned toward him, fingers closing over his right arm, a disagreeable soft pressure. “You glad you’re taking me to Florida, Jerry?”

“Oh, God, yes.”

“I’m sorry they cheated you.”

“Took that air conditioner in and they say, ‘Why this looks like you stole it, we’re gonna call the police.’ Said, ‘You better leave that old air conditioner here, we’ll call the police.’ ”

“You showed them.”

“I showed them good. I messed them up good.” In his mind the old man screamed as the pale highway flowed toward them. “You bet I did.”

“You didn’t hurt them?”

“Damn right I did.”

“You shouldn’t do that, Jerry. That isn’t right.”

“OK for them to hurt me, though,” he said, stiff-voiced.

“No, no. I mean...” She struggled with the soft stuff of her mind. “It’s in the Bible. Don’t be mean, that’s what it says.”

“Your tongue’s sure bubbling.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. I don’t think people are really mean. Like my daddy. He just yells. When he’s drunk, he’s sweet.”

He burst into laughter. “You’re somebody, you sure are, Sue Ann.”

She pulled back from him. “Now don’t you laugh at me.”

“Listen,” he said, “nobody’s got candy in their hands. You just remember that.”

“I’d give you some candy.”

“I guess you’d try, wouldn’t you?”

“You know I would.”

Under their wheels, the road down Alabama pulsed like a concrete heart.

“This thing’s a gas hog,” he said. “We better pull her in and fill up.”

They pulled off the highway and wound through a complicated series of small roads to a combination filling station, restaurant, and general store, spreading out under a bright orange roof. He gave her five dollars and she went inside, among the strange voices, and bought crackers, two large coffees, and four comic books with shiny girls wet-faced on the glowing covers. As she came out, he hurried up to her, white-faced and tight-lipped as if he had just smelled hell.

“You come on here.”

They drove around back of the restaurant and parked by a big square trash container. “That damn Dandy,” he said. “Look here.”

Two bullet holes punched the light blue metal, one above the license plate, the other over a taillight. Impact had dimpled the metal and the edges showed raw and clean. There was a strong smell of gasoline.

He said savagely, “Just creased the tank. Put a big old crack in it. It’s been slopping out gas all this time.”

She goggled at him, making inconsequential sounds.

“That Dandy fellow. I didn’t even hear him shooting.”

“Can... can we fix it?”

“Shoot. Can’t run along showing bullet holes. Turn on the lights at night, maybe blow the whole back out of her.”

Fingers crept over her teeth. “Who’s Dandy?” she asked faintly.

“Might tape it. Probably work right loose. Tank’ll hold maybe four gallon. But shoot — I’m not going to drive all over Florida sticking gas in this sucker every hour.”

“Can’t we go to Florida?”

“Will you shut up?”

“Please don’t be mad, Jerry.”

“Don’t you start whining. Give me a hand.”

They unloaded the trunk, piling reeking cardboard boxes by the side of the car. Under the floor mat shone a pungent skin of gasoline.

“Better not chance it,” he said at last. “Give her a spark, she’ll flare up like the sun in a sack.”

As they stared into the trunk, a dirty station wagon rolled past behind them, packed to the windows with staring children and luggage.

“I gotta get me another car,” Jerry said. Briefly his long arms beat at his sides, a furious sudden violence.

In their inconspicuous place behind the road stop, they waited in a numb paralysis of time, the journey compromised. From out front engines sounded, voices rose, and doors slammed and reslammed, a purposeful outcry of activity emphasizing their inactivity and isolation. Limp in the Toyota, Sue Ann fingered through a comic book. Alone by the dumpster, Jerry fidgeted, a wolf watching empty plains, glancing impatiently off toward the main parking area.

After a long time, a black Lincoln, arrogantly polished, rolled past with three people inside. It was followed by a red Ford with a young woman driving.

“Hey, can you give me a hand?” he called.

She drove slowly by, not looking around. He snarled after her and waited. After another ten minutes, a truck full of ropes eased past.

“Hey, can you give me a hand? Just need a second.”

Then a small tan station wagon drew to a stop and a thin-faced young man with glasses and neat dark hair leaned out and asked, Trouble? in a cheerful voice.

“Look,” Jerry said, “I need three hands for a second and I only got two.”

The young man elevated his eyebrows and, grinning, pushed open the car door. “Like the way you said that.” He was long-legged, long-armed, and walked with shoulders bent forward, as if being tall bothered him. He left the engine of the wagon running.

“This is a problem,” Jerry said.

The tall man said, “You sure got a gas leak.” And then, in an interested voice, “Those bullet holes?”

Jerry took a blackjack out of his hip pocket and hit the tall man hard on the side of the head above the right ear. The blow made a solid, single sound. His glasses flew off. Long legs buckled, folding him over the edge of the trunk. His head and shoulders dropped inside. Jerry shuffled sideways, struck twice more. He placed the blows carefully, leaning into them. He tried to heave the tall man into the trunk, could not turn the body. Legs dangled.

Grunting with the effort, he hauled the tall man out and wrapped both arms around his body. He lugged the limp figure along the side of the Toyota. Sue Ann stared at him, face convulsed.

“Get out of there,” he snarled at her.

She leaped away, scattering comic books on the cement.

He stuffed the body onto the seat, fought the long legs into the compartment. The head flopped over to expose an ear webbed with blood. From the rear, he jerked out a gray blanket, threw it over the body, pulled the head right, hiding the scarlet ear.

She was crowded against him, breath loud. “Is he dead? Is he dead, Jerry?”

“No, no.”

“Oh, Jerry.”

“Get that car loaded.”

“Oh, Jerry.”

He came at her, furious and tall, shoved her violently against the Toyota. She yelped as her head cracked against the glass. “Listen to me. Move.”

They tumbled boxes into the station wagon. They jerked their possessions from the backseat, rushing between the cars, stuffing sacks, arm-loads of coats, shoes, fishing rods blindly into any unfilled space.

A Volkswagen pulled in behind the wagon, blasted its horn. “Get this thing outta the street, buddy.”

“Go on around.”

“Dumb jerks parking in the road.”

The Volkswagen snarled around the wagon and was gone. Sweat iced his body; his fingers were lengths of marble.

“Let’s go,” he said to her.

“Oh, no,” she said, backing away. “No no no.”

He said in a soft distant voice, “Sue Ann, get in that car or I am going to have to hurt you bad.”

Her mouth fell open. She went back from him, taking small uneven steps as if moving ankle-deep through a marsh. She tottered around the car, got in. He darted back to the Toyota and, leaning in the driver’s side, fumbled under the gray blanket until he found the tall man’s wallet. He locked all the doors. Stuffing the wallet into his pocket, he swung into the station wagon, eased it away from the building, down the road, turned left, moving with precise care, went down the clipped access road to I-65. The wagon handled fine. Sue Ann, staring and white, slumped in the corner.

The fingers of his right hand felt greasy. Making a fist, he saw the back of his hand smeared darkly with blood.

From the car radio a slow voice whined the lyrics of “Whiskey Woman.”

Behind the voice pulsed guitar, bass, drums, filling the interior of the automobile with urgent pressure. Over that sound their intense voices went back and forth, birds riding a heavy wind.

“You did. You beat on him.”

“I had to.”

“Oh, you didn’t have to. Take away your hand. It’s bloody.”

He clenched the fist, lifted it, rotated it before her face. “You see blood? You tell me, you see blood?”

“You beat on him and beat and beat. I heard you.”

He said thick-voiced, “You shut up and hear me. I had to get us a car. Us with a shot-up old bomb, the police maybe lookin’.”

“Police?”

In the southwest, mouse-gray clouds ledged in the silver sky.

“You don’t know anything at all, do you? You sit there like a dummy, big grin on your dummy face, don’t know a thing.”

Fear came between them and she strained away from him, her back against the door, feet jamming the floor.

“We need a car, I took us a car. Nobody going to give us a car. Nobody going to give us anything. You need it, you go and get it.”

“You was always so nice.”

“I’m same as I always was.”

“No, you’re not.” She stared at him and it was like looking into a long tunnel with a fire burning in it, far back. “You’re glad you hit him.”

“I didn’t and you wouldn’t be in this car right now, going to Florida, going to have you some fun.”

She began to cry. Country rock poured from the radio. They were building in the fields beyond the highway, orange iron skeletons rising in the sun, with trucks shuttling back and forth and men small among the shining beams.

Eyes on the fields, she said, “You don’t like me any more.”

“I don’t want to hear that. I’m not going to listen to that all the way to Florida.”

“It isn’t right.”

He felt the shaking begin then, the glorious deep trembling that would build and rise, wave on rich wave, half fear, half joy, a terrible exhilaration lifting him out of himself to tower gigantic, invincible, striding, and magnificent.

“It’s what I do.”

Her voice, muffled, wept. “But you hurt them, Jerry.”

“Shoot,” he said, feeling his body stretch and grow. “I busted their heads. Didn’t hurt them. Didn’t feel a thing. Old Davidson, too.”

“Mr. Davidson?”

He said, with cold satisfaction, “I knocked his head loose of his shoulders. Him with his mouth — ‘Gimmie, gimmie, you pay.’ Him with a big fat wallet and a nice blue car.”

“He’s a nice man.”

“He’s nothing now. He’s dead on the floor with his head cracked.”

“Dead?” she asked. “Dead?” Her mouth went quite square and bloodless.

He began to laugh. “You wanting to put a blanket on a dead man.”

“I want to go home. I want to go home, Jerry.”

He laughed.

“You let me out.”

She was across the seat then, snatching at the wheel, jerking it toward her. The car reeled right. He smashed her hand away as the metallic shriek of tires cut above the music. The world outside weaved and bobbed. He drove the back of his hand against her face, wrenched the wheel, accelerated, felt the skidding berme under the tires and the pop of stones flung against the body, felt the sheering lurch back onto the highway. Fought the wheel, tapped the brakes as the station wagon steadied. Struck past her snatching arms.

He slammed her forehead, her ear, drove her back, hands up before her face, smashing the hands back into her face. Awkward blows, slow and deliberate as if he were pounding nails.

She made a thin, high sound, like tearing flesh.

Steady on the road, the wagon lost speed as he pumped the brakes. They swerved to a stop on the shoulder.

“You get out,” he said.

She squealed thinly, without sense, brown eyes rolling.

“Don’t hurt me, Jerry.”

He showed her the point of the knife. It glittered unsteadily in the sunlight, the hot tip jittering in arcs and circles, trembling with a dreadful eagerness. She grew quite still.

“Out that door, Sue Ann.”

“Please please please please.”

He yelled at her. “I’ll do it if you make me. I don’t want to.”

The door opened. She sprawled out onto the shoulder, one hand before her face, palm out. She slipped and fell heavily, crying out.

Leaning across the seat he said, along the length of the knife, “Now you stay gone.”

“Jerry, dear.”

The door slammed. The station wagon leaped forward, kicking up dirt. It picked up speed, rushing south, full of towering mindless power. In the rear mirror he saw her staring after him, her figure dwindling, hidden by a gentle rise, reappearing smaller as the road rose again, still motionless, a huddle of pink by the white highway. Perhaps looking after him.

Five miles down the road, he saw her gray yarn purse on the floor. He cranked down the window. After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the purse, opened the worn brown wallet inside. It contained a dime, a nickel, seven pennies. He shook the change onto the seat, dropped the wallet into the purse. Then he hurled the purse from the window. It bounded among the road weeds, leaping flying twisting.

The sun was low now. It was hard to see where the purse had gone.

He drove in silence for ten miles, listening to the radio.

At last he said, “She could have come on to Florida if she wanted to.”

He began to sing softly with the music. He had a pleasant baritone voice, warm and with a sort of lilt to it.

Andrew Henry Vachss writes of a dark — indeed, pitch-black — world, one that he not only has visited, but still inhabits. In his early years, Vachss’s work experience was wide-ranging and intensive. He was a case worker for New York City’s Department of Social Services, a special investigator for Save the Children in Biafra during its bloody civil war, and director of a maximum-security institution for juveniles. All these occupations, as well as his current work as a lawyer in New York City, seem to reflect the subject that has absorbed Vachss for more than fifteen years — the saving of children from neglect, dispossession, victimization, physical and sexual abuse, and all the attendant horrors that can be inflicted on them by adults.

An angry man, Vachss writes to make others angry, to make them sit up and sweat. His fury is relentless and unforgiving; in his public pronouncements on the subject of sexual abuse, there is an Old Testament thunder to his disgust. In Vachss’s writing, old-fashioned vengeance is often a trigger to the action. In his novels, his chief weapon against the fearsome dark forces is the character Burke, a renegade who lives in New York and has no papers, no Social Security number, no official identity. Technically, he does not exist; yet he lives, furiously in fact, righting wrongs with savage abandon. He is aided by a group of similarly dissentient outcasts, including former madam Mama Wong (who serviced the military at Fort Bragg during the Korean War), the midget Prof, the Mole, Max the Silent, and Michelle the transsexual hooker, who all bear an uncanny resemblance to the 1930s pulp hero Doc Savage and his disparate and bizarre team.

Vachss started his novel-writing career with Flood (1985), a weighty tome about the search for an unhinged rapist-murderer. Gradually, over the years, his style has been pared down to the bone and become distinctly minimalist. His books hurtle along at white-knuckle pace. “It’s a Hard World” is his earliest crime short. The protagonist is not Burke, although he demonstrates all of Burke’s ingenuity in staying ahead of the game — in staying alive.

J. A.

It’s a Hard World (1987)

I pulled into the parking lot at LaGuardia around noon and sat in the car running my fingers over the newly-tightened skin on my face, trying to think through my next move. I couldn’t count on the plastic surgery to do the job. I had to get out of New York at least long enough to see if DellaCroce’s people still were looking for me.

I sat there for an hour or so thinking it through, but nothing came to me. Time to move. I left the car where it was — let Hertz pick it up in a week or so when I didn’t turn it in.

The Delta terminal was all by itself in a corner of the airport. I had a ticket for Augusta, Georgia, by way of Atlanta. Canada was where I had to go if I wanted to get out of the country, but Atlanta gave me a lot of options. The airport there is the size of a small city; it picks up traffic from all over the country.

I waited until the last minute to board, but it was quiet and peaceful. They didn’t have anybody on the plane with me. Plenty of time to think; maybe too much time. A running man sticks out too much. I had to find a way out of this soon or DellaCroce would nail me when I ran out of places to hide.

Atlanta Airport was the usual mess: travelers running through the tunnels, locals selling everything from shoe shines to salvation. I had a couple of hours until the connecting flight to Augusta, so I found a pay phone and called the Blind Man in New York.

“What’s the story?” I asked, not identifying myself.

“Good news and bad news, pal,” came back the Blind Man’s harsh whisper. He’d spent so much time in solitary back when we did time together that his eyes were bad and his voice had rusted from lack of practice. “They got the name that’s on your ticket, but no pictures.”

“Damn! How did they get on the ticket so fast?”

“What’s the difference, pal? Dump the ticket and get the hell out of there.”

“And do what?”

“You got me, brother. But be quick or be dead,” said the Blind Man, breaking the connection.

The first thing I did was get out of the Delta area. I went to the United counter and booked a flight to Chicago, leaving in three hours. You have to stay away from borders when you’re paying cash for an airline ticket, but I didn’t see any obvious DEA agents lurking around and, anyway, I wasn’t carrying luggage.

With the Chicago ticket tucked safely away in my pocket, I drifted slowly back toward the boarding area for the Augusta flight. It was getting near to departure time. I found myself a seat in the waiting area, lit a cigarette, and kept an eye on the people at the ticketing desk. There was a short walkway to the plane, with a pretty little blonde standing there checking off the boarding passes. Still peaceful, the silence routinely interrupted by the usual airport announcements, but no tension. It felt right to me. Maybe I’d try for Augusta after all; I hate Chicago when it’s cold.

And then I spotted the hunters: two flat-faced men sitting in a corner of the waiting area. Sitting so close their shoulders were touching, they both had their eyes pinned on the little blonde, not sweeping the room like I would have expected. But I knew who they were. You don’t survive a dozen years behind the walls if you can’t tell the hunters from the herd.

They wouldn’t be carrying; bringing handguns into an airport was too much of a risk. Besides, their job was to point the finger, not pull the trigger. I saw how they planned to work it; they had the walkway boxed in. But I didn’t see what good it would do them if they couldn’t put a face on their target.

The desk man announced the boarding of Flight 884 to Augusta. I sat there like it was none of my business, not moving. One by one, the passengers filed into the narrow area. The sweet southern voice of the blonde piped up, “Pleased to have you with us today, Mr. Wilson, and my eyes flashed over to the hunters. Sure enough, they were riveted to the blonde’s voice. She called off the name of each male passenger as he filed past her. If the women passengers felt slighted at the lack of recognition, they kept quiet about it. A perfect trap: if I put my body through that walkway, the little blonde would brand the name they already had to my new face, and I’d be dead meat as soon as the plane landed.

I got up to get away from there just as the desk man called out, Last call for Flight 884.” They couldn’t have watchers at all the boarding areas. I’d just have to get to Chicago, call the Blind Man, and try and work something out. As I walked past the desk, a guy slammed into me. He bounced back a few feet, put a nasty expression on his face, and then dropped it when he saw mine. A clown in his late thirties, trying to pass for a much younger guy: hair carefully styled forward to cover a receding hairline, silk shirt open to mid-chest, fancy sunglasses dangling from a gold chain around his neck. I moved away slowly and watched as he approached the desk.

“I got a ticket for this flight,” he barked out, like he was used to being obeyed.

“Of course, sir. May I see your boarding pass?”

“I don’t have a goddamn pass. Can’t I get one here?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the desk man told him, “the flight is all boarded at this time. We have four more boarding passes outstanding. We can certainly issue one to you, but it has to be on what we call the ‘modified standby’ basis. If the people holding boarding passes don’t show up five minutes before flight time, we will call your name and give you the pass.”

“What kind of crap is this?” the clown demanded. “I paid good money for this ticket.”

“I’m sure you did, sir. But that’s the procedure. I’m sure you won’t have any trouble boarding. This happens all the time on these short flights. Just give us your ticket, and we’ll call you by name just before the flight leaves, all right?”

I guess it wasn’t all right, but the clown had no choice. He slammed his ticket down on the counter, tossed his leather jacket casually over one shoulder, and took a seat near the desk.

It wasn’t a great shot, but it was the best one I’d had in a while. I waited a couple of heartbeats and followed the clown to the desk. I listened patiently to their explanation, left my ticket, and was told that they would call me by name when my turn came.

I didn’t have much time. I walked over to where the clown was sitting, smoking a cigarette like he’d invented it. “Look,” I told him, “I need to get on that flight to Augusta. It’s important to me. Business reasons.”

“So what’s that to me?” he smirked, shrugging his shoulders.

“I know you got ahead of me on the list, okay? It’s worth a hundred to me to change places with you. Let me go when your name is called, and you can go when they call mine, if they do,” I told him, taking out a pair of fifties and holding them out to him.

His eyes lit up. I could see the wheels turning in his head. He knew a sucker when he saw one. “What if we both get on?” he wanted to know.

“That’s my tough luck,” I said. “I need to do everything possible to get on the flight. It’s important to me.”

He appeared to hesitate, but it was no contest. “My name’s Morrison,” he said, taking the fifties from my hand. “Steele,” I said, and walked toward the desk.

The watchers hadn’t looked at us. A couple of minutes passed. I gently worked myself away from the clown, watching the watchers. The desk man piped up: “Mr. Morrison, Mr. Albert Morrison, we have your boarding pass.” I shot up from my seat, grabbed the pass, and hit the walkway. The little blonde sang out, “Have a pleasant flight, Mr. Morrison,” as I passed. I could feel the heat of the hunters’ eyes on my back.

I wasn’t fifty feet into the runway when I heard, “Mr. Steele, Mr. Henry Steele, we have your boarding pass.” I kept going and found my seat in the front of the plane.

I watched the aisle and, sure enough, the clown passed me by, heading for the smoking section in the rear. I thought he winked at me, but I couldn’t be sure.

The flight to Augusta was only half an hour, but the plane couldn’t outrun a phone call. The airport was a tiny thing, just one building, with a short walk to the cabs outside. The clown passed by me as I was heading outside, bumped me with his shoulder, held up my two fifties in his hand, and gave me a greasy smile. “It’s a hard world,” he said, moving out ahead of me.

I watched as two men swung in behind him. One was carrying a golf bag; the other had his hands free.

Readers of hard-boiled and dark-suspense fiction are unlikely to be familiar with James Hannah’s name. A Texan who earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hannah is a short-story writer whose small but impressive output has appeared exclusively in such literary magazines as Cimarron Review, Crazyhorse, Florida Review, and Quarterly West. His first collection, Desperate Measures (1988), includes ten stories about “desperate people, desperate solutions,” in the words of his publisher, in which “there is no god but chance, and life’s surprises are seldom sources of joy.” Noir writer James Crumley called them “stories for brave readers,” and indeed they are.

It would be inaccurate to pin a “hard-boiled” label on Hannah’s fiction; nevertheless, the best of his tales have all the elements of style, characterization, insight, and social commentary of the classic hard-boiled story. Junior Jackson, the narrator of “Junior Jackson’s Parable,” is the most desperate of all of Hannah’s desperate people, and a true noir creation: it is difficult to imagine a more completely disaffected and dissatisfied individual, or a world more disordered than the one in which he exists. His parable is a dark and cautionary one about life and wasted lives in the American Southwest as the twentieth century lurches headlong toward its final days.

B. P.

Junior Jackson’s Parable (1988)

I tore out to Mama’s. Punched the old Chevy pickup and slung gravel halfway down Papermill Drive. I’d left the goddamned phone out in the service bay at the Firestone store dangling after the bitch’d hung up on me.

I flew past the Sonic. Luckless sonofabitch, I kept saying. Luckless, worthless, sorry stupid sonofabitch. And pushed down harder on the accelerator, rattling the shitty unleaded through the carb.

I guess I’d had enough. Roger Blake, my court-appointed lawyer, said that later a hundred times. He painted all sorts of pictures of me and her and him — mostly true — but some I couldn’t quite make out. Wondered who the hell he was talking about exactly. But the fucking D.A.! What a peckerhead he was. When he called his surprise witness a couple of days before the trial ended and grinned down at me, all three of us knew I’d really fucked the duck. I dropped my stare to my ugly worthless hands.

But I didn’t only have the shotgun on my mind. That’s what the peckerhead kept harping on. The shotgun. Twelve-gauge. Buckshot, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I mean, it passed through my mind, sure, but I’d had enough, you know. I guess I was mainly just going to Mama’s and leaving everything behind — the Firestone store, our mobile home over in Regency Gardens behind Wal-Mart, the Casbah Club. Daddy’s gun came to me somewhere on the farm-to-market road. Came and went. Came back some more. Sitting in his closet behind boxes of coveralls he’d saved from the mill, old broken Emerson fans. In my mind maybe I even crammed the gun back deeper, covered it with clothes.

Remember, you’d had enough, Roger Blake reminded me. And he wasn’t lying; I’d had all the shit a man can take. Luckless bastard.

Mr. Stroud had yelled from the front of the Firestone store, over some cutouts of Richard Petty. The two women customers behind him and to his left open-mouthed. Ed, the other underpaid employee, standing up under a car on the rack as I skidded past, burning rubber. His eyes bugged out. Where I have a limp, he has a twisted, smaller-than-a-twig right forearm. He tucks tools in the bony crook. Together we hobble, gimp around the place. That story another example of my luck. Up under a car at Walker’s Sinclair over by the tracks when I was just sixteen and the jack decides to let down. Simply spews out fluid in a long spurt and drops the fucking Buick across my shin. Sixteen and the makings of a gimp. Some quack at the county hospital working by the hour patched me up. A couple of okay years and then it starts hurting like a bastard right after I get in the Navy.

I’m driving past the road to the dump, gimpy leg aching, and I reach down to rub it. What do you think it all means? I’m asking. First I keep reeling it around over and over. Then I blurt it out to the noisy Chevy cab — coffee cups rattling, cigarette packs slithering from side to side on the dash. But I don’t even smoke. I don’t take the time to light up. Now that shows you the state I’m in.

“Why that day? That particular time?” Roger Blake asked me on the stand. But I don’t know. I’d had enough bad luck. But I didn’t mention luck. I kept that to myself. “You’d been married a little over two years?” “Yes sir.” “She’d been Bud Frazer’s girlfriend before your marriage?” “Yes sir.” Marriage, I’d thought. Shit on that.

“Hey, come on by for a beer when you get off, okay?” she’d said as soon as I’d answered the phone. I’d tucked the greasy receiver under my chin.

Ed had scuttled past, edged by me, his little arm clenching a ratchet and some extensions. Me and Mary Louise had been up late the night before fighting. She’d been high on something. Some pills he’d gotten her. She’d come in at three. But just a week before, she’d sworn no later than nine or ten from now on. Just a few free hours, she’d said, after she finished work at the Catfish Castle. Free hours, she called them. Shit on that too.

“You’re takin’ those pills again! Don’t lie to me, Mary Louise.” I raised my voice and Ed looked away, scampered back up under the Cougar; he was used to all this. “Goddammit, you promised you’d stop. You said you’d leave him alone!” I swallowed to stifle a whine.

The house was always a mess. We’d argue and then drink. Bud would drop by to talk. He was from South Carolina and he’d served time for murder and assault and other shit. Mary Louise told me about his tattoos once. Even about the one on his dick — a dozen arrows that swelled into rockets. She’d laughed and snuggled up to me and said she was all mine now but those tattoos of his are hilarious. Are, I kept thinking. She’d said are.

The prosecution wanted to take out the part about the arrows but the judge decided not to. Twenty-four eyes batted when Roger Blake said penis over and over.

“Hey, boy.” She’d given Bud the phone or he’d taken it. I heard her laughing in the background. Some band was warming up at the Casbah Club.

“Come on by and I’ll buy you a couple. We’re havin’ a fine time already.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Huh?”

“I thought you were going to leave her alone.”

He was big and moved like a bear or one of them sloths at the zoo. He went to sheriff department picnics. He drove a truck for Gulf Freight Lines. And he scared everybody shitless.

“Come on by and we’ll party. Come on.”

“You said you’d leave her alone. You said you would.”

The band tuned up some more and Mary Louise buzzed something into the receiver. Bud laughed right into it for a minute. Then I listened to the band playing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” out of key and awful-sounding on the phone.

“Suit yourself, you little motherfucker.”

“Let me talk to her, Bud. Put her on.”

“Oh, Bud,” she laughed, and then, “Come on, you old asshole. We’ll have a good time. Bud’ll buy.”

Remember all them examples in church? I’d come into Big Church, as Mama called it, from Sunday School and there were these stories the preacher’d tell. The very same plane this guy missed crashed not ten minutes after he’d missed it. Somebody’d gone from whiskey to heroin, his life on the skids. But one afternoon, as he’d laid dirty and lonely and sick on an overdose, he’d watched a trail of ants on the floor. Helping share the burden of a breadcrumb. And he’d seen his own need for other people’s help.

Everybody always understood something. Everything fit together and made sense at the end. Explained the car wreck, the alcoholic’s whipping his wife, the sparrow falling from the sky. That and them parables. The Good Samaritan finally helped that hurt guy; the prodigal son’s daddy fixed a feast for him. Everything sorted itself out. A whole lifetime of sin, uselessness, bad luck was cleared up, explained, paid for, worked out in a minute flat.

A man came to sing once. His face eaten totally away by acid from an exploding battery. Not till that explosion had he really valued life. And later, faceless, he’d praised God for the moment of revelation. He’d warbled out “Oh, why not tonight?” his skin plastic and tight.

“Mary Louise, you leave there right now. You hear me?”

“But Bud brought me.”

“Don’t argue, dammit! You get someone else to take you home. You promised...”

She hung up. Or Bud did. She testified he did. But who knows about that? She’s back heavy into drugs already. And I got a letter from her lawyer yesterday talking about divorce, getting the mobile home and everything else. Sure, why not? What everything else?

I sort of lied. What else could I do? I said I was in a blind rage. Yeah, he’d been tearing my home apart. Yeah, he’d been supplying my wife with drugs. Yeah, I did suspect they’d been having sex. Shit, she soaked her underwear every night in the kitchen sink. I smelled him on her skin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was afraid of him. That’s the whole truth there. He was a scary fucker. Solid. Big. Tattooed. Somehow friends of the cops. Dangerous. Fill in the blank about him. And only use bad words.

But it wasn’t blind rage. It was too jumbled up for just that simple answer. But I knew the peckerhead wanted the maximum he could get — thirty years, or so Roger Blake had said. I knew I had to play up the passionate rage part, leave out the stuff about bad luck.

I drove up to Mama’s gate and turned off the engine. I caught my breath for the first time. But I didn’t leap out and up the steps. Nope. I settled back and shook out a Winston and lit it and sucked it deep.

Junior Jackson. That’s me. Junior luckless, meaningless Jackson. Crippled by a falling car. What’d Mama used to say...? “Jun’er, don’t hold them magazines over your eyes to read, somethin’ll drop out and blind you... stick right in your eyeball.” Good start, huh? “Don’t lean back in the chair, Jun’er, it’ll break and ram a piece up your spine. Damaged for life.”

Oh sure, blame your mama and daddy, right? But how about the old man? Fell off a log truck at thirty, crushed a shoulder, spends the rest of his life in a little pain, sitting in front of the TV in his vinyl lounger saying “It’s ever’ dog eat a dog out there.” “The world’s a fucking mess, Jun’er.” And later even more fuel. “What’s that shit about them Arabs and Jews?” Arabs and Jews. Nigras on the dole. Mama’d hobble in, her knees locked from arthritis — Arthur, Daddy called it — and they’d shake their heads over TV (when I was little it had been the radio; neither could read much). And when things got real bad they’d both sleep. Take to their beds if the car broke down, the well pump needed new packing, something had eaten her pullets. Living at home, I’d do the same. Until finally, after twelve, fourteen hours of silence with only the faucets dripping, the wind blowing across the eaves, one of us would crawl out of bed, make a pot of coffee, force his thoughts on the problem, wake the others up.

The first year with Mary Louise, I slept most of the weekends until I decided I might ought to go out with her and try keeping up.

They met me at the back door; Wolf, the old black-and-tan, as slow as Mama.

“Surgery’s the only thing, the doctor says. They’ll cut along here,” she bends gingerly to slide a finger over her kneecap, “and lift it out. Put in a plastic one.”

“Plastic... shee-it.” Daddy’s leaning over the table pecking at a bought apple pie they’ve picked to pieces.

“He was a wild man,” Mama said on the stand. I didn’t look at her then or later. The old man broke down in tears. I think he thought he was on trial for something himself. The Jews, Arabs, nigras had finally finagled him out of his lounger to humiliate him.

“Want some pie?” she’d asked.

Somewhere along the way it had dawned on me that maybe all this would become the moment of revelation like the ends of those parables. Do all this in order to get to the sense of things.

Hmmm, I thought. And went in to take the shotgun, check the shells, walk straight through the house to the front door.

That’s sort of how I went in the Navy. Then the goddamned leg gets worse and worse from all that marching and exercise and fighting them practice oil fires. So this Navy doctor says it’ll be fine and dandy after he opens it up and unpinches something and rotates something else. Shit, I don’t believe in doctors like Mama and I’m already homesick, so I’m out of there in a minute. All the way to Quartzite, Arizona, before they pick me up AWOL. Of course they didn’t just give me a medical. The monkey-suited bastards process me out with a D.D. Junior Jackson, D.D. So I finally did get to come home to work at Beasley’s Shell station, though it was a pretty crooked route.

The peckerhead brought up my run-ins with the law. But it was just the usual kid stuff and I’d never served any time for it. Just warnings and a couple of J.P. fines. Stealing a couple of tires, a tape player — that sort of thing. We’d drink, go to the high school games in town, drink some more and smoke some dope. End up smashing a window and taking tapes, radios, fuzzbusters. Everybody did it. It was more a sport — like hunting deer out of season — than something bad. We stole from each other most of the time.

But I quit it. When I got the job changing flats and mounting tires at the Firestone place, I went cold turkey. Some of the guys said me and Ed was sitting on top a gold mine, but I said no. Besides, I was the one who always got caught — figures — and this job was my only way to stay out of jail.

“She’s trouble,” Daddy’d said, his head level with his toes, looking between them at “Gunsmoke.”

Mama’d shook her head as Mary Louise’d drove off in her Camaro after her first visit.

It’d turn out bad. Trouble. Misery. Out of luck. First the Navy business and a dishonorable discharge. Then coming back to steal. What’d we teach you anyway? Then they’d troop to bed to recharge their last sparks into a smolder.

They were right. I was right, too — I’d thought the same thing when I saw her first inhale dope for a new world’s record. Saw the first boyfriend, Bud, she’d had since moving down from Norman.

But when she opened those long, brown legs what can I say? Nobody asked about that at the trial.

“He was like a wild animal I’m tellin’ you. All tussled hair, eyes wild, bugged out.”

“I don’t know. I can’t rightly say,” the old man kept saying. They must have done some Olympic sleeping the first couple of weeks. I know I did. They’d take me back up — who the fuck did I know who’d make bail? — and the nigras would catcall, thump burning butts at me, jeer. And I’d lay down and sleep and dream luckless dreams. A vacuum that sucked the hours up, shortened my life without refreshing me one bit.

All the shit at the Casbah’s a mess. It wasn’t like the movies. Not in regular motion or slow motion like them Peckinpah flicks. It was in fast motion; more like old Keystone Kop movies or WWI where doughboys scurry past, their legs pumping nine to nothing.

I sat and cried most of the first week of the trial. I was shocked by what had happened at the club. And it was so fast it could replay itself in my head fifty times a minute.

So I thought it over and over while the peckerhead D.A. trotted out everything about my life he could find. The theft charges they’d dropped; Mary Louise’s drug problem. Her and Bud. Poor old Bud Frazer, he’d say, a victim of us sorry white trash — that’s what he’d meant, anyway. And I’d think about it and couldn’t help crying. But not for Bud, you see. Fuck him. Though I was sorry about it all and pretty damned confused. I was crying for Mary Louise, who I glanced at now and then, who sat blank-eyed resting her clean shiny brown hair against the oak paneling. And I cried about my bad luck.

Toward the end of the week, Roger Blake began putting on people who knew Bud; people from South Carolina even, and they had some stories to tell. Bad-assed wasn’t the half of it.

“You’d seen him at the Casbah Club before?”

Old decrepit Mickey Cotter’d drank with us a hundred nights there. “Yes sir.”

“How’d he act in there? How’d he treat people?”

“Shit!”

The judge leaned over quickly and spoke to Cotter.

“Sorry, your honor.” He scratched his fuzzy chin and talked on.

I replayed the scene.

All the way back into town I’d argued with myself like them angels sitting on your shoulder — the good one and the bad one.

Way back in my mind I kept thinking that this would end it all somehow. I’d take her home, wash her face with a cold washrag like I’d done before, and put her to bed. Maybe I’d pull up her t-shirt and run a finger over her wide pink nipples.

The twelve-gauge shotgun bounced on the seat but I only heard it. I didn’t look at it at all. It was really for protection. Just in case, that’s all. I sweated and the air rushing in the rolled-down window only made me stickier. Dried in a film on my greasy face. I smelled myself, my body odor strong from the day’s work. But stronger than that by now.

But all this went fast as I rolled up in the parking lot at dusk, jumped out, went in and sat down at their table, ordered a beer and looked away for a time before I jerked my head around and told Bud to take his arm from her neck, the fingers of his left hand — crowded with nugget rings — squeezing her tight nipple. Houston Oilers, the t-shirt said, and I stared at the message.

Objections would interrupt me a little, you know. The peckerhead kept harping about me going all the way to Mama’s to get the gun. He wanted thirty years at least, Roger Blake kept saying. But my witnesses just talked about Bud. Someone said you’d need a couple of shotguns for him. You couldn’t find a single friend. None of his sheriff buddies talked. Homewrecker, ruined lives, tattooed penis, belligerent.

Belligerent, shit. I’d wipe my eyes, glance at Mary Louise who sat staring straight at the space just over the white-faced clock. Here like the TV shows. Perry Mason. Except this was less real. Everything seemed too soft. The tabletop gave a little. I sank too deep into the oak chair. The paper tissue the hardest surface anywhere around.

“Oh, I seen him do awful things to people at the bar. Cuss’em. Taunt ’em. Shove ’em around like he owned the place. Beat the... hell out of ’em in the parking lot.”

There were cars parked every which way as usual. I towed her through the door. She seemed dead weight, like dragging something that weighed a lot more than it looked. I shoved her in the pickup but going around to my door I stopped.

Bud moved like a bear from the door of his den to a car right in front of my Chevy. He grinned, rested a huge hip on the rear fender. The sheet metal dipped in.

“Let her out now, Jun’er. Be a good boy and let her come out to play with old Buddy boy. Okay, Jun’er?”

And this all quick motion too, sped up, the film sprockets rattling like mad, the machine clattering. I’m terrified, smell myself suddenly, but I’m all scrambled up with the need to do something final to free us for the feast, the happy ending. Something that makes good sense.

I jerked the gun out from under Mary Louise and through the window. I had come to kill him. The frames snapping faster, breakneck speed.

He cussed me, sitting idly on the fender. Then in his bear’s movement he lifted his hip off. Turned to see the people gathered at the door. I looked to see them all open-mouthed. A few took quick swallows of beer. The silver cans caught the parking lot lights.

I said something. Bud moved like a wall, or train, gliding easily toward me, his left hand out. Everything quick and full of things at the same time. Mary Louise blew the horn, held it down until minutes after I’d aimed for his head and then, finally, shot at his-legs, the dust coming up to tangle with his shredded khaki pants. I saw how I’d riddled the car’s fender. A tire hissed. Mary Louise let up on the horn and the people in front of the bar took a couple of steps and stopped again.

I couldn’t look at his face. I couldn’t kill him. I didn’t even pump in another shell. All I could think of was how much I hoped this ended it all. Though it didn’t seem much of an ending to anything important.

When Mary Louise screamed I stared in the dark window in surprise. Her finger jabbed at the windshield and I looked at Bud for the first time just to see him cough and spit in my direction and fall, bounce off my hood, land like a boulder in the floating dust. The single ricocheted pellet. Off the bumper and up through his left temple.

There were color slides. The peckerhead brought them. The bailiff set up the projector and screen. The shiny pointer circled the stuff like chewed newspaper that had dribbled from his head onto the hospital sheet. And I cried.

I lied too. I’d gone to kill him, not just scare him, and I’d chickened out. Junior Jackson, the chickenshit sonofabitch who’d shot at the ground and missed. He’d got two superficial leg wounds, but one of the pellets had come up off the bumper and into his brain. Off the heavy chrome bumper of a blue and white ’57 Ford. Everything since made from shitty metal or plastic. But let’s talk luck, huh? That’s why I cried. Slept in the cell as if I’d died too. Mary Louise didn’t come by. I asked Roger Blake to talk to her for me. The D.A. wanted thirty fucking years. All I wanted was them to brick up the rusty bars and window and let me sleep. In my luckless dreams the shooting expanded so I could try to cram meaning in a thousand pockets of air where nothing happened. In the pickup. At Daddy’s closet door. Between the gun barrel and Mary Louise’s ass. Unlucky stupid bastard. I think only Bud came out prepared. I’m fucked up. Fucked over. She’s stoned shitless. Bud’s the man with his hand out, sliding along the fender. The dented metal popping out without a sound.

But this is the part that lays me out like you’d smacked me with a shovel.

About six days into the trial I’d cried myself pretty dry. After a shitty breakfast and kicking the huge water roaches I’d smashed that night into a pile, I’d change into the blue seersucker Roger Blake had brought me and they’d lead me down. I’d sit but not listen now, the courtroom breezeless, the suit hot, sweat dripping down the small of my back. They put everybody on: the police, the coroner with his lousy slides, everybody else in the Casbah parking lot. Mary Louise, me, the whole nine yards.

But Wednesday afternoon after a supper of hash browns and those link sausages Daddy called donkey dicks, I stretched out, used to the loud racket of the place. Nigras bullshitting one another with a vengeance. Cell doors clanging. The pile of roaches still there and big enough to give you the creeps.

Then Blake shows up and sits on the cot with me. He opens his fat battered briefcase full of legal pads and folders and rolls of Lifesavers and offers me a wintergreen and sits back, his hands across his stomach.

Mostly I’m numb by now. I think that’s why the noise doesn’t bother me anymore. Four weeks in here and I’m numb like a catfish you’d thumped on the head. Waiting for the cold knife up the asshole.

But Blake fidgets and shifts away from the light through my window and edges close to me, his breath a burst of mint the smell of Pepto-Bismol. He’s a good man, I’ve decided. But the busted veins that start on his nose and flare out across his cheeks say he’s got problems, too. I don’t think he’s any too lucky either and that figures in like everything else.

But he whispers something and reaches out to give my knee a tremendous whack and squeeze and then he bellylaughs and I have to sit up closer to get his drift. He talks on now, fumbling through the briefcase, but instead of another mint, he takes out some folders.

“Just be quiet about it. Keep your head down in there a few more days. It’s looking real fine.” And he goes on and on, fidgeting with happiness.

After he leaves I lay down in a state. “You haven’t been listening, paying good attention, looking at the jury like I have, that’s all. I didn’t want to say anything sooner though I noticed it after the business about the penis. Didn’t want to get your hopes up too much.” And he’d whacked me again a couple of times. “We’ll walk on this. Bud Frazer was a sorry bastard. It was almost a community service. Him a snitch for the sheriff, too. Some protection there. I’d guess five years probated. Probated, Junior.” He’d whacked me again, leaned back and crossed his arms over his stomach.

I’ll walk, I keep saying over and over. And toward morning — the moon flying across my high small window — I nodded and stood up for the millionth time. Goddammit, maybe it was all going to work out. I’d shot him by accident and that’ll walk me out of here and with that bastard gone me and Mary Louise’ll do fine. Now I’d feel the kick of the gun and hear the splatter of pellets against the fender and dirt but I’d shrug it off. God works in mysterious ways, Mama’d say.

I paced. Then I’d lay down. I felt light-headed, the man in the story, my stupid fucking life making some sense. If I’d shot the fucker down, they’d toss me in the pen for thirty years. But I had cried real tears too, and pity and mercy and all that stuff was being leveled at me, Junior Jackson. Junior Jackson, not guilty or maybe guilty but probated. He was sure and by full daybreak so was I.

It was a miracle. I ain’t no Pentecostal like Mama but that morning I almost shook with the Holy Ghost and spoke in tongues.

The trial was almost over. Maybe another three days. But that Thursday I didn’t care about anything. I listened more and saw how right he was. The jurors looked kind and sympathetic. I could see all this had been hard on them too. Once I started doodling on a spare yellow pad but like a hawk Blake’s hand swept over and took the pen away. I’d written my name down one side and next to it Mary Louise Jackson. I’d glanced around at her in the corner. All that dope didn’t do much for her wanting sex, but after seeing her there, her hair shiny and long, the light brown of acorns, my dick nudged the hell out of the seersucker.

After supper I listened to the bullshit. I reached around the wall of my cell and took a Kool from the guy next door. Willy’d been in about two weeks charged with car theft. We knew some guys in common, so we talked all sorts of shit. He smoked my Winstons and I smoked his Kools.

Almost dark Friday night, they took me down to their dirty little reception room where I’d gone to talk to Mama a couple of times.

Friday had looked even better for me. By Tuesday it could all be over, Roger Blake had said. I smiled at the fat fucker of a guard. He stood by the door and inhaled Pall Malls, gabbed to himself, waved his cigarette.

Mary Louise slumped at the filthy cheap table, her hair hiding most of her face.

My face lit up and I reached across the table to take her hands. This time my pecker rubbed rough twill.

“Hey, you okay?”

She looked up and nodded. Her eyes were flat as slate. Like looking into a blackboard for some emotions. She was high. It was in the slope of her shoulders too, and the way her head lolled a bit too loose.

“Shit, Mary Louise, you’re fucked up. I thought you were staying at Mama’s?”

She nodded. Her hands under mine were ice-cold, the coldest thing I’d touched in weeks.

But I was too happy to let her get me down for long. So I squeezed her hands, ran my forefinger up and down her palm. My zipper close to busting.

“Roger Blake says I can walk on this. He told you that, didn’t he?” She nodded. Mumbled something. “Honey, I love you, you know that. I only wanted us together. With him gone we’ll have a good chance now. Hell, we’ll move to Norman or somewhere. Houston’s booming, they say. Okay? I’ll borrow some money and rent my own station. Shit, I’ll sell a million tires. I’m good at that. Okay?”

And on I went until the guard had a pile of butts to match my cockroaches and he slung himself over to cough out a “Let’s go, asshole.”

I stopped at the door and watched her stand and look at me and then she grinned like she used to when we’d go to a high school game together and yell till we were hoarse.

I almost leapt up the cement steps, gimpy leg and all, and swung the door shut behind me. If I’d believed a lot in God, like Mama, I d have got on my knees. Then again, I thought about how everybody really does believe. They have to, specially when things start going right. So maybe I mumbled something and went to the wall to jerk a thumb up to Willy Devereaux, the car thief. He passed over a Kool and I traded him a Winston. And we hung our hands out and inhaled deep as we could and blew smoke towards the bullshitting nigras.

His old lady’d come by with some cookies. They were store-bought but we ate a dozen apiece. And I told him about seeing Mary Louise and how we’d move to Norman. He said he knew of a closed Conoco station in town, out past the loop. We wondered about the rent.

“But you’ll have to put all that good stuff off, huh?”

“Not a bit.”

“Shee-it, man, you’re gonna do some ser’us time in them Walls.”

I took a deep breath and blew puffs of Kool toward the babbling nigras. “My lawyer’s gonna walk me right out of here. And then I’ll open up that station. Batteries, tires — look at the price of gas. Hell, station owners must be putting back a fortune.” And we talked on. He shook my hand a couple of times. Told me he could use a job someday, knew a hell of a lot about cars. “I’ll bet,” I said. And we laughed and later I laid down but didn’t sleep. Instead I jerked off twice, one right after the other, while trying to forget Mary Louise’s cold hands.

I’m Junior Jackson, remember? Remember me? So you can guess the rest.

Sure enough. Monday morning bright and early the peckerhead brings Willy Devereaux out dressed in a lime-green seersucker suit. I guess maybe lawyers have some sort of deal at Weiner’s. And Roger Blake looks at me sharply, his veins like black ink lines across his face, and I just stare at him and then back at Willy.

Willy lies like a sonofabitch of course. Has me strutting and cocky, a stone-cold murderer. The court buzzes, the old blue-haired ladies in the audience whispering hard. Blake objects and objects but the judge makes him sit down. Later Blake tears into Willy about the deal he’d struck with the D.A. All that sort of shit. But when he comes back and sits in the oak chair, he doesn’t look at me at all. Instead he takes a roll of Lifesavers from his shirt pocket and bites off one end.

And I don’t look up at the jury because I know they’re staring at me with jaws locked tight, fingers squeezing each other. I don’t look at Mary Louise because I’m afraid she’s just looking at the clock. Instead I look straight ahead at a spot about a foot under the short flagpole the American flag’s on. There’s a crack in the plaster and it looks like a river from up in a plane. A river cutting through snow. I let it carry Junior Jackson off because it’s pretty fucking plain to see that this story don’t end like old Job getting a bunch of new sheep and camels, a wife and kids. Or with the prodigal son’s homecoming feast. Or even old Jonah spit up on the beach with a new line of work.

I’ve been here six months. Roger Blake says I’ll only serve three years max. “It could have been a lot worse,” he says. He don’t need to mention it could have been a whole lot better.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far: You call nigras blacks; you can make a mean shiv out of a sharpened tablespoon; if you drop the soap in the showers, don’t bend down to pick it up.

Now there’s some revelations to take to the bank. There’s the lessons. Maybe when I get out I’ll make my living going from revival to revival. I’ll stand up at the pulpit and give the bastards my story. At the end I’ll raise my arms high over my head, my face sweating, and deliver the meaning of it all. Won’t it be fine to see their faces before the organ starts up.

Much of the work of Faye Kellerman explores the traditions of Judaism and Jewish orthodoxy as set against the vast secular society that is the United States (particularly southern California, which Raymond Chandler once defined as a foreign land). Her novels detail the alienation that is experienced even though assimilation was supposed to have taken place two or three generations back. Her characters are often bigoted and unforgiving, unable or simply unwilling to jump off the doomed roller coaster of their own hatreds once they are launched into a course of action.

Kellerman is fascinated by the plot possibilities inherent in the interplay between characters, an interest strongly demonstrated in her main series featuring Los Angeles police sergeant Pete Decker and the young widow Rina Lazarus. In Kellerman’s debut novel, The Ritual Bath (1985), Lazarus is attracted to Decker, but cannot fully fall in love with him because he is a gentile. It is then miraculously disclosed that Decker was adopted as a young child and is, in fact, a Jew. While this rather suspect, “carried-off-by-gypsies-as-a-child” plot line obviates a good deal of future character conflict in the series, it does clear the ground for other, perhaps more complex, religious conflict.

A foray into the past, The Quality of Mercy (1988), proves that Kellerman can easily handle other fictional structures. The book concerns Elizabeth I’s personal physician, Dr. Roderigo López, and his daughter, Rebecca. Lopez, who was ultimately hanged, drawn, and quartered for allegedly trying to poison his employer, may have been the template for Shakespeare’s Shylock. The finely delineated scenes of torture and violence in this book are certainly not for the squeamish. In fact, there is much that is deliberately, and necessarily, gruesome in most of Kellerman’s modern novels.

“Bonding” is quite unlike anything else Kellerman has written. It is not particularly violent, but rather an extraordinary mix of noir and sheer hopelessness, featuring a teenage heroine who is far outside the sphere of normal morality. On the surface, the girl seems to be a murderous monster with no redeeming features, yet Kellerman portrays her with such profound insight and humanity, and even humor, that the reader cannot help but understand her point of view. Nevertheless, both story and heroine are so hard-boiled they could break your teeth.

J. A.

Bonding (1989)

I became a prostitute because I was bored. Let me tell you about it. My mother is a greedy, self-centered egotist and a pill-popper. I don’t think we exchange more than a sentence worth of words a week. Our house is very big — one of these fake-o hacienda types on an acre of flat land in prime Gucciland Beverly Hills — so it’s real easy to avoid each other. She doesn’t know what I do and wouldn’t care if she did know. My father doesn’t hassle me ’cause he’s never around. I mean, never around. He rarely sleeps at home anymore, and I don’t know why my parents stay married. Just laziness, I guess. So when my friend came around one day and suggested we hustle for kicks, I said sure, why not.

Our first night was on a Saturday. I dressed up in a black mini with fishnet stockings, the garter lower than the hem of my dress. I painted my lips bright red, slapped on layers of makeup, and took a couple of downers. I looked the way I felt — like something brought up from the dead. We boogied on down to the Strip, my friend supplying the skins, and made a bet: who could earn the most in three hours. I won easily; I didn’t even bother to screw any of the johns — just went down on them in a back alley or right in their cars. I hustled seven washed-out old guys at sixty bucks a pop. Can’t say it was a bundle of yucks, but it was different. Jesus, anything’s better than the boredom.

The following day, after school, me and my friend got buzzed and went shopping at the mall. I took my hustle money and bought this real neat blouse accented with white and blue rhinestones and sequins. I also saw this fabulous belt made of silver and turquoise, but it was over a hundred and fifty dollars and I didn’t want to spend that much money on just a belt. So I lifted it. Even with the new electronic gizmos and the security guards, stealing isn’t very hard, not much of a challenge.

Let me tell you a little about myself. I was born fifteen years ago, the “love child” of a biker and his teenage babe. I think my real mother was like twelve or thirteen at the time. I once asked my bitch of a mother about her, and she got reaaallly agitated. Her face got red and she began to talk in that hysterical way of hers. The whole thing was like too threatening for her to deal with. Anyway, I was adopted as an infant. And I never remember being happy. I remember crying at my sixth birthday party ’cause Billy Freed poked his fingers in my Cookie Monster cake. Mom went bonkers — we hadn’t photographed the cake yet — and started screaming at Billy. Then he started crying. God, I was mad at Billy, but after Mom lit into him, I almost felt sorry for the kid. I mean, it was only a cake, you know.

Once, when I was around the same age, my mom picked me up and we looked in the mirror together. She put her cheek against mine as we stared at our reflections. I remember the feel of her skin — soft and warm, the sweet smell of her perfume. I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve such attention, and that frustrated me. Whatever I did, I wanted to do it again so Mom would hold me like this. But of course, I didn’t do anything. Mom just stared at us, then clucked her tongue and lowered me back onto my feet with an announcement: I’d never make it on my looks.

Well, what the hell did she expect? Beggars shouldn’t be choosers. It’s not like someone forced her to adopt me. The bitch. Always blaming me for things out of my control.

Did I tell you Mom is beautiful? Must have slipped my mind. We forget what we want to, right? Mom is a natural blonde with large blue eyes and perfect cheekbones. I’ve got ordinary brown hair — thin, at that — and dull green eyes. It’s been a real bitch growing up as her daughter. Mom turned forty last year, and she treated herself to a face-lift — smoothing out imaginary wrinkles. Now her face is so goddamn tight, it looks wrapped in Saran. Her body is wonderful — long and sleek. I’m the original blimpo — the kind of woman that those old artists liked to paint. I’m not fat but just really developed. Big boobs, big round ass. My mother used to put me on all these diets, and none of them ever worked. I finally told her to fuck herself and gorged on Oreo cookies. Ate the whole package right in front of her, and boy, did that burn her ass.

She gave me this little smirk and said: “You’re only hurting yourself, Kristie.”

“I’m not hurting myself,” I said. “In fact, I’m enjoying myself!”

Then she walked away with the same smirk on her face.

She once went to bed with this guy I was sleeping with. Can you believe that? Happened last summer at our beach house. I caught the two of them together. Mom got all red-faced, the guy was embarrassed, too, but I just laughed. Inside, though, I felt lousy. I felt lousy ’cause I knew that the guy really wanted to fuck her all along and was just using me as a stepping-stone.

You might ask where the hell was my dad when all this went down? I told you. He’s never around.

My friend and co-hooker came down with strep throat today and asked if I could service her regular johns. I said sure. So I go to the room she rents. It’s a typical sleazebucket of a place — broken-down bed, filthy floor, and a cracked mirror. Who should I see in it but my father? I turn my face away before he sees me. To tell you the truth, I barely recognize his face. Then I realize that he must have gotten a lift like Mom, ’cause his skin is also like stretched to the max.

I’m shaking — half with fear, half with disgust. That dirty son of a bitch. Doing it with teenage hookers. Then I remember a few years ago. How he eyed my friends when we sat around the pool. How he strutted out of the cabana wearing red bikini briefs and shot a half-gainer off the diving board. My friends were impressed. He popped through the water’s surface, a strange expression on his face.

It was lust.

I sneak another glance in the mirror.

He holds the same look in his eyes now.

What the hell do I do?

I think about running away, but I know my friend will be real pissed. Jesus.

My dad.

I can’t screw my dad!

Then I think to myself, My mom screwed my guy...

But this is something different. He’s my dad.

’Course, he’s isn’t my dad by blood...

And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him...

The thought starts to excite me. Yeah, I know it’s real perverse, but my whole family is perverse.

And at least it isn’t boring.

I take a quick hit of some snow from the vial I wear around my neck. Man, I need to be buzzed to pull this one off.

I’m real excited by now.

I drop my voice an octave — I can do that cause I have a great range and tell him to can the lights. He starts bitching and moaning that he likes to do it with the lights on, and where the fuck is my friend. I tell him my friend has strep and it’s hard to give head with your throat all red and raw, and if he doesn’t want me, fine, he just won’t get laid tonight.

He cans the lights. The only illumination in the room comes from a neon sign outside that highlights his semi. It’s a good-looking one, and it turns me on even further. But I stay well hidden in the shadows of the room.

I wonder what he’ll think of my body after laying Mom all these years. Maybe he’ll think I’m too fat, but the minute he touches my boobs, his you-know-what becomes ramrod-straight. I let him bury his head in my chest, kiss my nipples. I give him a line of coke, then I take another snort. My face is always hidden.

I ask him what kinds of things he wants to do, and he says everything. I say it will cost him a hundred and fifty, and he gets suddenly outraged. A real bad acting job. I know what he makes, and he could buy all of Hollywood if he wanted to. Anyway, by now he’s too excited to argue, and three fifty-dollar bills are slapped into my wet hand. I do whatever he wants as long as he can’t see my face.

When it’s over, I tell him I have a surprise for him. He’s lying in bed now, smoking a joint. Still naked, I saunter over to the light switch, then suddenly flip it on. The cheesy room is flooded with bright yellow light. We both squint, then he sees me. It takes him a moment, then I see his tanned, tight face drain of all its color. His eyes pop out and he begins to pant. His skin takes on a greenish hue and he runs for the toilet. I hear him throw up.

Afterward he cries in my arms. But we both know it’s not over.

Dad came home at eleven tonight. Mom and he start fighting. They always fight, did I tell you that? Probably why Dad started staying away. Anyway, it’s the first time I ever remember Dad coming home in like twenty years or something. I’m no dummy. I know what the sucker has in mind, and that’s okay by me. After all, I’m not really his daughter by blood, you know.

He comes into my room at around two o’clock. I make him pay, and no shit, he agrees. Man, I know you’re gonna think I’m sick, but I gotta tell you. My dad’s all right in the sack.

This goes on for the next month. If Mom suspects anything, she doesn’t say a word. Then a strange thing happens. Life is weird — very weird. A real strange thing happens.

We fall in love.

Or something like it.

We consider all the options. The first is running away and giving me a new identity so that we can marry. The idea is discussed, then tossed in the circular file. Dad makes a couple a million buckeroos as a TV producer, and no way he could make that kind of money outside of L.A. Neither of us likes poverty.

We consider having Dad and Mom divorce and I’d live with Dad. That’s out. California has stiff community-property laws, and the bitch would get half of everything!

There’s only one option left.

First off, I gotta tell you that neither one of us really feel guilty about our decision ’cause: A, I’m not my dad’s real daughter; and B, Mom has had this coming for a long time.

Way overdue.

We plan to do it next Saturday right after she comes home from one of her parties. She’s usually pretty sauced and hyped and has to pop some downers to get to sleep. We figure we’ll help her along.

She comes in at two A.M., surprised that I’m still up. I say I was having trouble sleeping and offer to make her some hot coffee. She nods and dismisses me with a wave of her hand. Like I’m a servant, instead of her daughter doing her a favor. I lace the java with Seconal. Halfway through the drink, her lids begin to close. But she knows something is wrong. She tells me she’s having trouble breathing and asks me to call the doctor. I act like I’m real worried and place the phony call. By the time I hang up, she’s out.

Both Dad and I are worried. She only drank half a cup, and we wonder if it’s enough dope to do her in. Dad feels her pulse. It’s weak but steady. A half hour later her heartbeat is even stronger. Dad says, “What the hell do we do now?” I think and think and think, then come up with a really rad brainstorm.

I get ten tablets full of Seconal, crush them in water, and suck the mixture into my old syringe. Did I tell you I shoot up occasionally? When the boredom is just too much. I haven’t done it for a while, but I keep the syringe — you know, just in case the mood hits me. I shoot the dope under her tongue. It’s absorbed fast that way and doesn’t leave any marks. A friend of mine told me that.

Dad feels her pulse for a third time. Squeezes her wrist hard. Nothing. Nada! We celebrate with a big hug and a wet kiss, then wash the cup and wipe the place clean of fingerprints.

A half hour later Dad places a panic call to the paramedics.

God, I’m a great actress, carrying on like Mom and I were like bosom buddies.

“Mommmeeeee,” I wail at the funeral.

Everyone feels sorry for me, but I don’t accept their comfort.

My dad has his arm around me. He pulls me aside later on.

“You’re overdoing it,” he tells me.

“Hell, Paul.” I call him Paul now. “I lost my fucking mother. I’m supposed to be upset.”

“Just cool it a little, Kristie,” Paul says. “Act withdrawn. Like someone took away your Black Sabbath records.”

I sulk for a moment, then say what the hell. He’s older. Maybe he knows best. I crawl into this shell and don’t answer people when they talk to me. They give me pitying looks.

The detective shows up at our door unannounced. He’s a big guy with black hair, old-fashioned sideburns, and acne scars. My heart begins to take off, and I say I don’t answer any questions without my dad around.

“Why?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I respond. Then I ask him if he has a warrant.

He laughs and says no.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t help you.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he asks.

“God, are you crazy?” I say. “I mean, with all that happened? I can’t concentrate on school right now. I mean, I lost my mother!”

“You two were pretty close, then.”

“Real close.”

“You don’t look much like her,” he remarks.

I feel my face changing its expression and get mad at myself. I say, “I’m adopted.”

“Oh,” the detective says. His face is all red now. “That would explain it.”

Then he says, “I’m sorry to get personal.”

“That’s okay,” I say, real generous.

There’s a pause. Then the detective says, “You know we got the official autopsy report back for your mother.”

I feel short of breath. I try to keep the crack out of my voice. “What’s it say?” I ask.

“Your mother died of acute toxicity,” he says. “Drug OD.”

“Figures,” I say calmly. “She had lots of problems and was on and off all sorts of drugs.”

He nods, then asks, “What kind of drugs did she take?”

Then all of a sudden I realize I’m talking too much. I tell him I don’t know.

“I thought you two were close.”

I feel my face go hot again.

“We were,” I say. “I mean, I knew she took prescribed drugs to help her cope, but I don’t know which drugs. Our relationship wasn’t like that, you know.”

“Why don’t we just peek inside the medicine cabinet of your house?” he says.

I shake my head slowly, then say, “Come back tonight, when my dad is home. Around eight, okay?”

He agrees.

Paul has a shit-fit, but I assure him I handled it well. By the time the detective shows up, we’re both pretty calm. I mean, all the drugs found in her stomach came from her own pills. And then there was the party she went to. I’m sure at least a half dozen people remember her guzzling a bottle or two of white wine. She loved white wine — Riesling or Chardonnay.

My mother was an alcoholic. Did I tell you that?

The detective has on a disgusting suit that smells of mothballs. It hangs on him. He scratches his nose and says a couple of bullshitty words to Paul about how sorry he is that he had to intrude on us like this. Paul has on his best hound-dog face and says it’s okay. Now I understand what he meant by not overdoing it. Man, is he good. I almost believe him.

“Sure,” Paul says to the detective. “Take a look around the house.”

I think about saying we’ve got nothing to hide, but don t. The detective goes over some details with Paul. My mom had gone to a party by herself. Paul didn’t go ’cause he wasn’t feeling well. At around three in the morning he got up to make himself a cup of milk. I was asleep, of course. He went downstairs and found my mother dead.

“Where’d you find your wife?” the detective asks.

“On that chair right there.”

Paul points to the Chippendale.

The detective walks over to the chair but doesn’t touch it. He asks, “What’d you do when you found her?”

Paul is confused. He says, “What do you mean? I called the paramedics, of course.”

“Yeah,” the detective says. “I know that. Did you touch her at all?”

“Touch her?” Paul asks.

The detective says, “Yeah, feel if the skin was cold... see if she was breathing.”

Paul shakes his head. “I don’t know anything about CPR. I figured the smart thing to do was to leave her alone and wait for the paramedics.”

“How’d you know she was dead?” the detective asks.

“I didn’t know she was dead,” Paul says back. His voice is getting loud. “I just saw her slumped in the chair and knew something was wrong.”

“Maybe she was sleeping,” suggested the detective.

“Her face was white... gray.” Paul begins to pace. “I knew she wasn’t sleeping.”

“You didn’t check her pulse, check to see if she was breathing?”

“He said no,” I say, defending my dad. “Look...” I get tears in my eyes. “Why don’t you leave us alone? Haven’t we been through enough without you poking around?”

The detective nods solemnly. He says, “I’ll be brief.”

We don’t answer him. We stay in the living room while he searches. A half hour later the detective comes back carrying all of Mom’s pills in a plastic bag. He says, “Mind if I take these with me?”

Paul says go ahead. As soon as he leaves, I notice Paul is white. I take his hand and ask him what’s wrong. He whispers, “Your fingerprints were on the bottle.”

I smile and shake my head no. “I wiped everything clean.”

Paul smiles and calls me beautiful. God, no one has ever called me beautiful. Want to know something weird? Paul’s a much better lover than he is a father. We make it right there on the couch, knowing it’s a stupid and dangerous thing to do, but we don’t care. An hour later we go to bed.

The fucking asshole pig comes back a week later with all of his piglets. Paul is enraged, but the pig has all the papers in order — the search warrant, the this, the that.

Paul asks, “What is going on?”

“Complete investigation, Mr. James.”

“Of what!”

“I don’t believe your wife’s death is an accidental overdose.”

“Why not?” I ask.

Paul glares at me. The detective ignores me and I don’t repeat the question.

“What do you think it is?” Paul asks.

“Intentional overdose.”

“Suicide?” Paul says, “No note was found.”

“There isn’t always a note,” the detective responds. “Besides, I didn’t mean suicide, I meant homicide.”

My body goes cold when he says the word. The pig asks us if we mind being printed or giving them samples of our hair. Paul nudges me in the ribs and answers, “Of course not,” for the both of us.

Then he adds, “We have nothing to hide.”

Now I’m thinking that was a real dumb thing to say.

They start to dust the Chippendale, spreading black powder over the fabric. Paul goes loony and screams how expensive the chair is. No one pays attention to him.

He stalks off to his bedroom. I follow.

“What are we gonna do?” I whisper.

“You wiped away all the prints?” he whispers back.

I nod.

“They’ve got nothing on us, babe.” He inhales deeply. “We’ll just have to wait it out. Now, get out of here before someone suspects something.”

I obey.

All the pigs leave about four hours later. They’ve turned our home into a sty.

Paul is becoming a real problem. He’s losing it, and that’s bad news for me. When I confront him with what a shit he’s being, he starts acting like a parent. Can you believe that? He fucks me — his daughter — then when he’s losing it, he starts acting like a parent.

Yesterday he didn’t come home at night. That really pissed me off. I reminded him that we were in it together. That pissed him off, and he claimed the entire thing was my idea and that I was a witch and a whore. Man, what a battle we had. We’re all made up now, but let me tell you something, we watch each other carefully.

Real carefully.

They arrested me this morning for the murder of my mother. They leave Paul alone for now. Apparently whatever they have is just on me and not him.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of relieved.

The same detective asks me if I want to have a lawyer present. I say yeah, I’d better, knowing that Paul will get me the best mouthpiece in town. He has to, ’cause he knows that it’s only a matter of time before his butt is on the line. I’m left waiting in this interview room for about an hour. Just me and the detective. Finally I say what I know I shouldn’t say.

I say, “How’d you find out?”

“Find out what?” the detective answers.

“About my mom being murdered and all.”

His eyebrows raise a tad.

“You mean, how’d I find out you murdered your mom?”

I know it’s a trick, but what the fuck. I don’t care anymore. I nod.

“Did you kill your mom, Kristine?”

He asks the question like real cool, but I can see the sweat under his arm pits.

“Yeah,” I admit. “I offed her.”

“How?” he asks.

“I laced her coffee with her own Seconal,” I say. “When that didn’t do the trick, I injected her with more. That finished her off.”

“Where’d you inject her?” he asks.

“Under her tongue.”

He nods. “Smart thinking,” he says. “No marks.” Then he pauses and adds, “So you’re a hype, huh?”

I shake my head. “Recreational,” I say.

“Ah.”

“So how’d you find out?” I ask again.

“Two other things set an alarm off in me,” the detective said. “The autopsy report showed bruises on the inside of your mom’s right wrist. Like someone squeezed her.”

“Maybe someone did,” I say.

The detective says, “Yeah, like someone was feeling for a pulse. Yet your dad denied touching her.”

I say, “Maybe she was playing a little game with one of her lovers.”

“I thought of that,” the detective says. “She went to a pretty wild party. But then the bruises would have been on both of her wrists.”

I don’t say anything right away. Then I say, “You said two things. What was the second?”

“Your mom had loads of Seconal in her body, along with booze and coke. She also had just a trace amount of heroin. Too little if she actually shot up a wad.”

“My needle,” I say. “I forgot to clean it.”

“It’s hard to remember everything, Kristie,” the detective says. “I found it when I searched the house the first time, but I couldn’t take it with me for physical evidence because I didn’t have the proper papers. I waited a week until I had the search warrant in hand, then took it. We analyzed it, found traces of Seconal and heroin. People don’t normally shoot Seconal. You should have dumped all your evidence.”

“I never was too good at throwing things away. Mom used to yell at me for that. Called me a bag lady, always keeping everything.”

I sigh.

The detective says, “Also, we powdered your mom’s meds and found they had been wiped free of prints. If your mom had committed suicide, her prints would have been on the bottle.”

“I should have thought about that,” I admit.

“Well, you did okay for your first time out,” the detective says. “The marks on the wrist were a giveaway. Started me thinking in the right direction. You — or your dad — shouldn’t have squeezed her so hard. And you should have used a fresh needle. And gloves instead of wiping away the prints.”

He leans in so we’re almost nose-to-nose.

“Close but no cigar. You’re in hot shit, babe. Want to tell me about it?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Why’d you do it, for starters,” he asks.

“ ’Cause I hated my mom.”

“And why did your dad help you?”

“What makes you think my dad helped me?”

“The bruises on your mother’s wrist were made by fingers bigger than yours, Kristie. It was your father who felt for the pulse, even though he emphatically denied touching her.”

“You can’t prove who made those bruises,” I say.

The detective doesn’t say anything. Then he sticks his hands in his pockets and says, “It’s your neck. You could probably save it by turning state’s evidence against your dad.”

I don’t say anything.

“Look,” he says. “I understand why you offed your mom. She treated you like shit. And your dad offed her so he could marry his girlfriend—”

“What girlfriend?” I say, almost jumping out of my seat.

“The cute little blond chickie that was on his arm last night.”

“You’re lying,” I say.

He looks genuinely puzzled. He says, “No, I’m not. What is it? Don’t you get along with her?”

I feel tears in my eyes. I stammer out, “I... I don’t even know her.”

“Don’t cotton to the idea of your dad making it with a young chick?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Why’s that?”

I blurt out, “Because I’m his girlfriend. We’re lovers.”

I hear the detective cough. I see him cover his mouth. Then he says, “You want to talk about what happens when you turn state’s evidence?”

I shrug, but even as I try to be real cool, the tears come down my cheeks. I say, “Sure, why not?”

Old Paul is on death row, convicted of murder along with rape and sodomy of a minor.

Me? I’m in juvie hall and it ain’t any picnic. The food is lousy, I’m with a couple of bull dykes, and everybody steals. So I can’t make any headway in the money department. A couple of gals here say they were raped by their fathers, and they wanted to kill their mothers too. They talk like we have a lot in common. I tell them to leave me alone. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But it’s cool. I’m beyond caring what the hell happens to me. Just so long as I don’t die from boredom.

All that attention. It was really exciting.

I’ve got to get out of here.

They assigned me a real sucker for a shrink. An older man about my dad’s age who gives me the eye.

I mean, he really gives me the eye.

The other day he told me he was going to recommend my release to the assessment board. He says I have excellent insight and a fine prognosis.

The other day he also asked me why I became a hooker.

I mean, what’s on his mind? I wonder.

Yeah. I have insight.

And I know what’s on his mind. And I’ll do what I have to in order to get out of here.

I need freedom.

At least juvie hall was a new experience for a while.

Just like killing my mom and fucking Paul.

I hate to be bored.