The Neon Jungle

Chapter Ten

Paul got behind the wheel and Teena got in the middle. Jimmy got in and pulled the door shut.

“I think it’s a girl I know named Ginny,” Teena said.

Paul started the car. “A good friend?”

“I guess so.”

“Were you with her Saturday night?”

“I’ll tell them down there when I know who it is.” Paul saw her give Jimmy an oblique glance. “Why’re you coming too?”

“I got to go down there anyway. It saves a trip.”

“You just got out, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Fresh out. Why?”

“I was just asking.”

Paul turned off Sampson onto Crown Avenue and followed Crown east. He had to stop for a red light. Teena was staring straight ahead, her hands in her lap. Paul looked across her and gave Jimmy a quick nod. Jimmy casually moved his hands a bit closer to hers.

When the light changed, Paul turned right. For a moment Teena did not react, and then she straightened up. “Why’re you going this way? Downtown is straight ahead.”

“I have to make a stop,” Paul said easily. “It isn’t far out of the way.”

She leaned back. “Oh.”

She was silent while the blocks went by. They reached the city line and went on. She sat forward again. “There’s something fishy about this. What’s going on? Where are you taking me?”

“Just take it easy, Teena.”

“What do you mean, take it easy?” Her voice was getting more shrill. “Where are you taking me?”

“To a place where they’ll take care of you, where they’ll make you well.”

She sat still for at least three seconds and then exploded with a startling violence. Jimmy managed to clap his hands over her wrists. She drove her teeth down toward the back of his hand, but he managed to get his elbow under her chin in time. She was grunting and straining with the effort. She jabbed her left foot over toward the pedals and Jimmy hooked his big foot around her leg and yanked it back.

“Can you hold her?”

“I got her, Mr. Darmond.”

“I won’t go there! I won’t stay!” She struggled again, so strongly that she nearly broke Jimmy’s grasp, and then suddenly she lay back, panting. “I’m going to say you both got me in the back seat and attacked me. I’ll swear it. On Bibles.”

“Attack a junkie?” Jimmy said harshly. “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole. It makes me sick having to hold on to you.”

“Easy, Jim,” Paul said.

“Easy, hell. After this I’m going back and take a hot bath. Get a cure and maybe you’ll be worth looking at. The way you are, kid, you stink!”

She crumpled forward, doubling over her imprisoned hands. Hard sobs shook her. Jimmy winked blandly at Paul across her thin shoulders. Suddenly he yelped as she bit his hand. He snatched it free and she leaned across him and grabbed for the door handle. He cuffed her and grabbed her wrists again. She called them both foul names for the next few miles, then became silent.

By the time they reached the sanitarium, there was no more resistance in her. They drove through wrought-iron gates and up a steep graveled road to the main building. People walked in twos and threes around the wide green lawns.

They took her to the receiving desk and the large woman there smiled and said, “Christine Varaki? Hello, dear.”

Teena spat.

The woman’s smile did not change. She picked up her phone and called an extension and said, “Dorothy? Are you ready for the Varaki girl?” She listened and hung up. “There’ll be a nurse right down, dear. You look like the first thing you need is a good scrubbing and a shampoo.”

“The first thing I need is a fix, Fatty.”

“Mr. Darmond, the forms are in this envelope. Dr. Foltz said to tell you he’s sorry he’s tied up.”

A solid-looking redheaded nurse with a pugnacious jaw came clacking down the echoing hall. She looked intently at Teena. “Golly, kid, they told me you were going to be a bad one. You got a lightweight habit. Come on.”

Teena walked away with her with surprising docility. Only when she was forty feet down the hall did she look back. Her pallid face looked small, and she looked drab and thin beside the white confidence of the nurse.

They went back out to the car. When they turned out onto the highway Paul said, “Pretty rough, weren’t you?”

“A guy did it for me once.”

“Did what, Jim?”

“The first week I was up there. I was a hot charge. I was wired. Hard, man. One boy named Red took me off the strut. Caught me behind the laundry. Cuffed hell out of me. Proved to me I was a punk. A sixteen-year-old punk. It gives you a better look at yourself. I was doing the same thing. I hope it wasn’t too much.”

“I don’t think it was.”

They rode in silence for a few miles. Jimmy said, “Does the city bus come out this way?”

“There’s a bus that comes out.”

“I wonder if anybody’d kick if I came to see her, after they get her quieted down.”

“I don’t think they’d mind.”

“Her friends are probably on the junk too. They wouldn’t go within nine miles of that place. Somebody ought to go see her. Besides her family, I mean.”

“Do you think it will help?”

“She was pretty, I bet.”

“Very.”

It wasn’t until he parked in front of the store that Jimmy spoke again. He laughed and said, “It’s crazy.”

“What is?”

“That’s the first girl I’ve had a chance to talk to in two years.”

“This is going to be called a nervous breakdown, Jim.”

“Sure. I understand.”

They went in and Paul looked up Gus and told him there hadn’t been any trouble, and gave him the papers. Gus said he had decided to tell Walter, and Walter could help him with the papers.

Paul knew that Walter would tell Doris. And Doris would, with a delightfully superior sense of her station, suck hungrily at this new horror, seeing not the tragedy of it, seeing it only as a distortion of her own environment, a new flaw that could be used to point up her own purity, using it as a little hammer to drive home more neatly the sharpened tacks that held firm the endless ribbon of her conversation. In a week the whole neighborhood would know what had happened.

Bonny was behind the counter, wearing a pale cardigan and gray slacks. There was no one nearby when he went over to her. She looked up into his face. “Yes?”

“I wonder if I could talk to you. I’ve got an errand that shouldn’t take long. I’ll be back in three quarters of an hour. Maybe you’d let me buy you a lunch?”

“You all move in at the same time, don’t you?”

“It isn’t like that, Bonny.”

“What do you think it’s like? Didn’t they give you a badge you can show me?”

“I want to talk to you,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Actually I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“You do. But maybe you’d rather think you don’t.”

“Parlor psychiatry, Mr. Darmond.”

He gave her a remote smile and went out to his car.

Wentle was on one of his periodic tours of the big school. Paul waited in his office. There were dusty flags racked in the corners. There was a brooding picture of Lincoln. There were the hall sounds, feet shuffling between classes, babble, a high whinny of laughter.

Wentle came in, his mask of authority sagging into a puffy weariness. “Hello, Paul. Some days I think you should have my job. The problems seem to be about the same.”

“No, thanks. I’m ulcer prone, Grover.”

“You look like a man about to stir my ulcer up.”

“This might, Grover. It’s about the Varaki girl. Teena.”

“Trouble? Do you want me to call her out of class?”

“She isn’t here. She won’t be in again this term, Grover. She’s out at Shadowlawn, admitted today.”

“Drugs?” Wentle asked, his eyes dull.

“Yes.”

Grover Wentle got up and went over to the windows and looked down at the flat-roofed gym. “I should have guessed it last week. Such a change in attitude. I should have insisted that the nurse check her over. Disciplinary problem. Not like the girl.”

He turned from the window. “Great God, Paul, it isn’t enough that the classes are jammed, teachers hard to get. Five thousand and more students now. Just enough funds to handle bare maintenance. That charming time of life, adolescence. We want to give them outside activities. Teachers willing to supervise are damn rare. They don’t get paid for it. My God, it’s a hideous time of life when they run loose. Stuff that would sicken you. We found them using the auditorium, a bunch of them, as a big bedroom when they cut classes. That knifing two weeks ago. Running off pornography on the school mimeograph machine. They come from decent homes and get thrown into this millrace, and they think they have to conform. If they don’t, they’re labeled chicken. My God, Paul, it would strain you to the last inch to keep this place in line even without the drugs. A girl like Teena! I should have guessed it.” He smiled sourly. “I’m getting pretty good at guessing it, Paul. I ought to — I’m getting enough practice. What’s happened to kids? What’s going wrong with the world?”

“It’s a pendulum. Maybe it will swing back. Maybe it’s already started to swing back.”

“It better start soon, Paul. What can I do on this Varaki situation?”

“I want to know who she’s been running around with lately.”

Wentle placed his fingertips together, frowned. “I can call in a girl. Not a very attractive child, but she’s been of help in the past.”

Wentle had Miriam called out of one of her classes. She was a drab, owl-eyed girl with thin lips. She sat very straight in the chair beside Wentle’s desk. Her attitude seemed to combine the arrogance of the reformer, the secret excitements of the informer.

“Can you tell us who Teena Varaki has been running around with, Miriam?”

Tongue flicked the thin lips, eyes narrowed behind lenses. “Messy people, Mr. Wentle. Ginny Delaney. She dropped out a while back. I guess Teena’s boyfriend is Hobart Fitzgerald. Fitz, they call him. He’s always in trouble. Teena has been letting him... touch her in the halls.” Miriam blushed delicately. “I just happened to see them a couple of times. Then there’s Charles Derrain, the one they call Bucky. He cuts a lot of classes. He got thrown out of schools. Teena used to have nice friends. Now she’s just like her new friends. Messy. Dirty, even. Like she didn’t care any more. She never does her assignments any more and—”

“Thank you, Miriam,” Wentle said softly.

The girl stood up. “Is she in trouble?”

“I’m afraid so, but that’s just between us. She won’t be back this semester. She’s had a nervous breakdown.”

Miriam sniffed. She stared sidelong at Paul and left, taking short quick steps.

After the door closed Wentle said, “The teachers are too busy to keep track, Paul. I know it’s not doing Miriam any good to use her that way. She comes in and volunteers information.”

“Can you give me the addresses that go with these names?”

“Of course. What will you do with them?”

“Turn them over to the proper people. This is extracurricular for me. I seem to keep my nose in other people’s business.”

“I’m glad you do.”

“The worst part of it is telling their parents. I’m glad that doesn’t come up often. You’ll probably lose two more students, Grover.”

“Seniors, too. And they probably won’t be back. The parents won’t blame themselves. They won’t blame the kids. They’ll blame the school. And me. It’s a funny thing. When they’re the children of a good solid happy marriage, they seem to stay out of trouble. I guess Teena is an exception to that rule.”

“No, Grover. Her father married again. Her favorite brother was killed in March. Nobody has had much time for her since then. The house has been pretty gloomy for her, I think. It isn’t going to be enough to cure the addiction. We’ve got to cure the emotional causes too, or she’ll be back on it in a matter of weeks.”

“I’ll have those addresses looked up for you.”

It was a quarter after one by the time he got back to the market. As he walked to the door he looked through the windows and saw Jana behind the cash register. Of all the people who lived and worked there, he realized he knew the least — could guess the least — about Jana. He knew only that his response to her was thoroughly male. She had very little to say, yet in her silences there was no deviousness, no subtleties. She had a look of sturdiness, the uncomplicated woman. He saw her biting her lip and slowly punching the register keys as she totaled an order.

As he reached the door Bonny came from the back of the store toward the doorway, saying something to Jana that he could not hear. Bonny looked at him with cool recognition. She still wore the pale sweater, but she had changed from slacks to a coarse-textured skirt.

“It took longer than I thought. How soon do you have to be back?”

“I shouldn’t stay away more than an hour.”

Her attitude had changed. She was still cool, but there was not so much animosity. He closed the car door on her side and went around and got behind the wheel. She took cigarettes out of her purse.

“I’m in a mood to get away from the neighborhood, Bonny. There’s a place on the Willow Falls road. You can eat out back on a sort of terrace arrangement.”

“All right.”

The small coupé trudged sedately through traffic. Once they were out of the city the hills were warm green with June, and the air smelled of growth and damp change. He looked straight ahead, yet in the corner of his eye there was the image of her, the quiet face, the ripe liquid copper of her hair, a burnishment against the green changes of the countryside.

“It’s good to get away from it,” he said.

“I was trying to remember the last time I walked on a country road,” Bonny said. “God! Way back.”

“I thought you were going to refuse to come.”

He knew she turned toward him but he did not look at her. There was a sudden warm deep sound in her throat. Not a laugh. An almost sly token of amusement. “I wasn’t. I went to Gus. I said Rowell was more than enough to take in one week. I asked him to tell you to leave me alone. You know what he did? He grabbed me by the shoulders. His eyes looked like when the gas is turned low. He nearly shook me loose from my teeth. He said I was his daughter and I was of his house, and I would do what he said. He said I would go with you and talk with you and stop making nonsense. It shocked me and it almost scared me. After he settled down I began to get the pitch. I guess you’re what is known as a friend of the family, Mr. Darmond.”

“Gus is a very loyal guy. And I just... did him a favor.”

“About Teena? He said something about Teena that I couldn’t understand. What’s going on there, anyway?”

“I’ll tell you after we get some food. The place is just up the road. And call me Paul, will you, please?”

It was a small clean hillside restaurant, with bright colors, starched waitresses, checked tablecloths. There were four tables on the tiny terrace under the shade of vine-covered white latticework. The brook came down busily over brown rocks nearby.

As Paul walked behind Bonny to the farthest table he was aware of the way she walked, of the sway of skirt from the compact trimness of hips, how straight her back rose from the narrowness of the concave waist, how the sheaf of hair swung heavily as she turned to look back at him, one eyebrow raised in question as she gestured toward the table.

“Fine,” he said, and held the chair for her.

She looked at the brook, and at the vines overhead, the blue sky showing through. “This is nice, Paul.”

“I used to bring my wife here when we could afford it.”

“You used to bring her?”

“She died over a year ago.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know that.”

“There’s no reason why you should have known it. I recommend their chicken pie. It has chicken in it.”

“Imagine!” And again she made that warm sound in her throat. When her face was alive she was extraordinarily pretty. It was only when she retreated into expressionlessness that there was that look of hardness, of defiant glaze.

They ordered, and as they ate they talked of idle things, staying away from any serious subject as though they had carefully decided it in advance.