The Neon Jungle

Chapter Four

Walter Varaki lay on the bed with the pillows bunched under his head. The bed lamp made a bright light on the book he was reading. He had a cigar in the exact center of his mouth. He was vaguely conscious of Doris moving about the room, preparing for bed. It was the second time he had read the book. He was reading faster than usual, so he would get to the place where Mike Hammer takes the big blonde up to his apartment. That Hammer! There was a guy knew how to live. They didn’t mess with him. Not twice, anyway. He had what it took with the women. He wasn’t stuck in any two-bit grocery business.

“You know those damn cigars make me sick. I told you enough times. They make me sick!”

He took the cigar butt slowly from his lips and turned his head and gave her a look, the way Mike Hammer would have looked at her.

“That’s a damn shame,” he said, making his voice gravelly.

“A lot you care.”

“Look, you’re sleeping in the next room because you want more room in the bed now. Why don’t you move your clothes in there and let me alone?”

“You know I don’t feel good, and you got to try to make me sick with those stinking cigars. Everything around here smells like food or cigars.”

He looked at the cigar. It had gone out of its own accord. He put it carefully in the glass ashtray. “It’s out.”

“Thank you so much,” Doris said viciously.

“Boy, you have a happy disposition.”

“Would you be happy, looking like this?”

She looked as if she were going to have the baby in the next ten minutes, but according to the doc it was still nearly a month off. That was a lot of yak about pregnancy making them bloom. Her black hair was stringy and sticky-looking and her complexion was all over pimples. He looked at her and wondered how the hell he’s ever been able to think he was in love with her. Talk about her being sick. It turned his stomach to look at her. She’d always had a sharp tongue. These days she couldn’t say anything pleasant to anybody. Sat around all day feeling sorry for herself.

“There’s another jailbird coming on Monday,” she said.

He turned back to his book. “Yeah.”

“I told you to tell him not to have any more of them coming here. I got to raise a kid in this house. It looks like I’m going to spend the rest of my life raising kids in this crummy old house. I should have known you were giving me a big line with all that talk of getting out of here and going in some other line of work. You’ll never get out. And I’ll never get out. The least you can do is keep him from filling the place up with crooks and tramps. I don’t want that Bonny touching my baby.”

“Settle down, for God’s sake they’ll hear you all the way downstairs.”

“I don’t give a damn if they do. Nobody ever asks me for my opinion about anything around here.”

“They don’t have to ask you, baby.”

“You didn’t ever have that Vern Lockter looking at you the way he looked at me that day.”

“You come prancing down the hall half naked, what you expect?”

“You just don’t give a damn, do you?”

“Doris, for God’s sake!”

“Go ahead. Curse at me. The old man won’t let you go. You’re the only son he’s got left. One son and a man-crazy kid staying out half the night all the time. He won’t let you go. Not him. He’ll never pay us enough money so you can save enough to get out of here. We’re both stuck. We might as well face it.”

“Why don’t you go to bed?”

“So you can enjoy your book. So you don’t have to listen to me. So you don’t have to pretend... Oh, hell!”

“Good night, for God’s sake! Good night!”

She stared at him, then snatched her pajamas from the back of the closet door and went into the adjoining room and slammed the door. He gave a long sigh of relief and tried to get back into the book. But he needed a few minutes to quiet down. He tossed it aside and relit the cigar end, sucked the smoke deep into his lungs.

It seemed like there was a plot against him, the way everything worked out. God knew he’d never wanted to work in the store. Take Henry. He’d loved it. It was funny to think of never seeing Henry again. Way back there somewhere were the good days, when Mom had been around, when the store had been in the downstairs part of the house, when Teena had been too little to walk. Back when he and Henry had made raids on the store, with Pop and the help cussing them out.

No, he’d never wanted to work in the store. He’d taken those business courses in high school so he’d be able to get away from the grocery business. Everything seemed to go to hell for you when you weren’t looking. Twenty-seven already, with twenty-eight coming up too soon. Too damn soon. Doris had raised a lot of hell when he’d given up four years’ seniority at the post office to come back here and help out while Henry was in the Army. Now Henry was gone for keeps and it looked like he was stuck forever. And it looked like Doris would go on nagging for the rest of her life. Having the kid just made it worse, made it more impossible to get away.

He thought of her in the next room, lying heavily in the bed, and it was hard to think that she was the same Doris of way back when. He remembered that he first started watching her in typing class that next to last year of high school. She sat diagonally ahead of him. Doris Antonelli. All the little things about her made his heart go fast. The way she sat so straight, and the way the yellow pencil looked shoved into her black hair, and the way her eyes were so quick, and the trick she had of flicking at her lower lip with the very tip of her tongue.

They’d started talking in the halls first, and it was a long time before she’d go out with him. Her people were real strict with her. They lived way the hell and gone out, and he remembered how it was, the incredible shocking softness of her lips that winter night inside that storm-door arrangement on her front porch, and then missing the late bus and walking all the way back through the snow, not even minding the cold, thinking of how she had felt in his arms.

The next year was the last year for both of them, and they dated three and four nights a week, sometimes the movies, sometimes just walking together, sometimes just sitting in her living room until her old man would stick his head out of the kitchen and clear his throat a couple of times and he had to leave. Funny how, now, he remembered that they had talked and talked and talked, but now he couldn’t remember what it was they talked about. Maybe they should have saved some of that talk until after marriage. It would have given them something to do.

He hadn’t been thinking of marriage then. He’d been wanting to have her without that. And the way she acted, he thought he could, but somehow there didn’t ever seem to be the right place or time. Without seeming to think about it or try, she always managed it so they weren’t in the right place at the right time, but in the places where she was safe.

Even after he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, if it was O.K. with her folks, he couldn’t get any further with her, and it got so he couldn’t sleep right at night. Her folks said he had to have a job and have money saved. Pop and Henry kidded him about his Eyetalian girl, but they seemed to like her well enough. He told Doris you’d never catch him dead in the grocery business. There were the two jobs that weren’t any good, and she was working too, and they both saved, and then he got the post-office appointment.

Even after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him. In fact, after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him do more than just kiss her. It was a great big wedding. Her folks spent a lot on it. There was a lot to drink, and a couple of the usual fist fights, and afterward they went on the train to Montreal. They had to sit up on the train, and they got to the hotel at eleven in the morning, and she said it was daylight and she wouldn’t until night.

And when finally it happened, she acted like he was some kind of an animal or something. She acted like it was something she had to let him do because they were married. In the daytime when he’d just put his arm around her, she’d stiffen right up. It was the damnedest thing he’d ever heard of.

She wasn’t too bad while he’d worked at the P.O., but she’d certainly been mean and nasty since they’d been back at the store and since she got pregnant. And she’d got worse after Bonny had arrived. He’d watch Bonny and Doris would watch him watching Bonny, and there’d be a bad time after they got to bed.

Maybe Henry was dead, but he’d had a good deal there while he was on that leave and didn’t come home. Hell, you could tell from looking at her that she knew the score. The way she walked and the way she was built. Henry always got the breaks. Pop had treated Henry right. You could tell Henry was the favorite son.

Everything went wrong for you when you weren’t watching. Now it was like God spitting in your eye to have the two of them right in the same house. Bonny and Jana. They’d fixed it so he had to walk around looking at them all the time, and him married to a damn stringy stuffed dummy. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.

But they were going to find out, all of them. He got up in the darkened room and knelt quietly by the bureau and pulled open the bottom drawer, inch by inch. He felt in, under the clothes, and touched the wedding portrait. He and Doris, standing there. She had no damn reason for ever sliding it out of the slot in the heavy yellow paper folder. It made him feel safe just to touch it. To touch it and think of the crispness of the fifty-dollar bills slid down behind the glossy print. There were twelve of them now. And a man could go a long way on six hundred bucks.

It had taken him since March to get hold of that many. There was no point trying to hold out on Doris on the money Pop gave him every Saturday night when he paid off the others. Doris wanted all of that.

So he’d gone about it another way. Between them, he and Jana did the bookkeeping, the way the accountant told them to. The problem wasn’t to fool Jana. That was easy. The problem was to fool the machine. He had thought about a lot of different angles. Finally he found one so simple it had to work. Pop liked to pay the wholesalers in cash when they brought a bill around. The cash would come out of the register and the receipted bill would go in. Later Walter posted the bills to a ledger. He kited the receipted bills and took the difference from the register. A penciled figure one could be readily changed to a seven. Some of the bills had been made up on a machine. Those could not be altered. Pop seemed to have lost a lot of his intense interest in the business. The decline in profits would make little difference to him.

He closed the drawer and went back to the bed. Twelve paper pieces of freedom, and by the time Doris had to go to the hospital, he might have a thousand dollars.

He undressed in the darkness and got into bed. The ashtray clattered down between bed and wall. He left it there. Each night he went to sleep making up the same dream. He would be pacing a hospital corridor. They would come out and tell him that Doris had died in childbirth. Grief would turn him into a crazy man. They’d have to give him a sedative and keep him at the hospital. After she was buried, and after a reasonable period of mourning, he’d make a play for Bonny. She’d be feeling sorry for him. She’d comfort him. He wouldn’t want to marry her, of course. Not after hearing what Rowell said, and the way he said it.

Then he went into the variation of the dream. The second shock of losing daughter-in-law and grandson would kill the old man. That would leave him owning the store, living in the same house with Jana and Bonny.

Then there was always the third possibility. Doris would have the kid, but on the day she was due to come home, he’d take off with Bonny. They’d head for the Southwest. Things were alive down there.

He could see the two of them. They’d pull up in the parking lot of one of those fancy gambling houses and park the convertible. Bonny would be a sort of a hostess. He’d have her wear long evening dresses, tight-fitting, made of gold and silver. And he’d wear a tux, midnight blue, and walk around through the tables and sort of keep an eye on things. The sharpies would stay away from his place. They’d know he wasn’t the kind of guy you could fool with. Every once in a while he’d send a fat money order to Doris and the kid.

Tonight the dreams weren’t working. Tonight the dreams were sour. He turned on the light and found his place in the book. Mike had just got the big blonde into his apartment.

Walter Varaki slid into a more comfortable position and began to read hurriedly. He was Mike Hammer. The grocery business was far away.