The Neon Jungle

As It Was in the Beginning

There is a stone city and in it a gray neighborhood, and in the neighborhood there is a small market, a cement block structure with an umbilical shed attaching it to a large shabby house.

Trade is fairly good these days. People who traded there before the bloody maniacal mess on that soft June night say that all Walter needed to turn him into a man was the sudden hard burden of responsibility. Doris works in the store. She has grown considerably more plump, but that is not unbecoming. She has a sharp tongue, but Walter is able to quiet her infrequent tantrums with a single look or a word. Anna looks after the child, a boy who is just learning to walk, and the more eagle-eyed customers predict another.

There is a new butcher, a quiet, soft-eyed man, but he is not as good as Stussen was. James Dover does a lot of the buying and handles all deliveries and manages also to attend adult-education courses three nights a week at the university. The heavy schedule has leaned him and matured him. He and Teena had no time for a honeymoon. There was talk, of course in the neighborhood, but there would have been more if that hideous night in June had not provided a more drastic subject. But talk falters and dies and time changes things, and in one year a good true thing can be built on marshy ground. Rumor and suspicion dilute the few known facts until at last there is a mere residue of vaguest doubt that can be washed out of the mind of him who chances to see the look in a young bride’s eyes as she looks at the clean strength of her young husband.

As the papers in the newspaper files slowly yellow, the facts are forgotten. A few people remember the fourteen-hour tape recording made from the babblings of the crazy man. One hour of useful information was edited out of that tape. The information had no legal status, of course. Yet it was used to hound those mentioned in the tape until Karshner himself, in an almost apoplectic rage, quite suddenly died. Certain newspaper correspondents pointed out the wry fact that death came from the bursting of the same great artery that had burst in the thick chest of Gus Varaki.

Certain tentacles of the Johnston wholesale-retail drug organization were chopped off, and the organization suffered a temporary inconvenience. Yet the head of the beast was not touched, and in time new tentacles have grown, extending themselves cautiously through the dark places of the city. New children are learning how to float. Folded packets of hand-hot money are passed in the lobbies of the cheapest movie houses, in alleys, in the men’s rooms of cheap bars, in the candy stores near the high school. It goes on because as yet the rewards are greater than the risk for the conscienceless.

Perhaps, as Bonny believes, for people in the jungle of the city it is a matter of luck. Luck with, as Paul insists, a bit of faith, too. Not a specific faith. Just an ability to believe in something. Luck seems to have come back to the high-shouldered old house and the oblong fluorescence of the market.

Bonny and Paul went there last night at closing time for a reaffirmation of their own faith, their own luck. They are together, and they are married, and they are not as yet happy, though they hope to be. They swing between high peaks of great joy in each other, swing through the valleys of bitterness, of trying to hurt each other. They had to come across the city because they rent one of the faculty houses at the university and hope to furnish it properly with the money from the consultant work Paul is doing outside the classroom. They are not yet sure, either of them, that this marriage will work, yet they are trying to make it work.

They went to the market at closing time and after the door was locked Jim opened some cans of cold beer and the six of them talked for a time. They talked of small things and they laughed together in a good way. At one point Doris brought tension into the place by speaking bitterly of the money that was found in the coin locker with the one clear fingerprint that was identified as Lockter’s, and the impounding of that money, and how it ought to have been turned over to what was left of the Varaki family. Lockter, incurably paranoid, would certainly never see any of it, or see anything beyond the walls of that place where he is kept until the day when he will die, a crazed old man of many visions. But Walter gave her a short harsh look and she returned it for one antagonistic moment before her eyes softened and she smiled at some private secret and began quickly, almost apologetically, to speak of other things.

When Paul and Bonny left they walked hand in hand to the old car, in a rare moment of peace and accord. She sat close to him as they drove across the city, through the neon wasteland, through the stone jungle, holding close this small warm time of luck and of faith.