The Neon Jungle

Chapter Eight

After the fourth ring a woman answered at the number Vern Lockter called. “Is this Mrs. Fallmark?” Vern asked cautiously.

The answer was equally cautious. “Yes. Who is this, please?”

“Mrs. Fallmark, this is Varaki’s Quality Market. We’ve just been checking our records and we find that on the order that was delivered to you yesterday, the canned cat food wasn’t included. You paid for it as part of the order, but it was left out by mistake.”

“But I’m positive it was—”

“This is Vern, the delivery boy, ma’am.”

“Oh. Would you mind holding the phone a moment? Let me check and make sure. I can almost remember putting it away.”

He stood in the silent store, holding the phone. She came back on the line. “I could have sworn I put it away.”

“We didn’t want you to be caught short, ma’am.”

“Will you deliver it Monday, then?”

“It’s no trouble to run out with it right now. I have to come out that way anyway. I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.”

“All right, then.”

He hung up, pleased with the way he had handled it. There had been four cans of cat food on the Saturday order. If the phone were tapped, that would check with the order. He put four cans of cat food in a paper sack, went back through the house, and got in the truck.

Mrs. Fallmark lived with her juvenile husband in a residential district that had once been fashionable. The house was pseudo Moorish, finished outside in a weary shade of yellow cement plaster. He turned into the drive and parked behind a dusty new Buick. He carried the sack onto the back porch of the house and rapped on the screen door. The inside door was open. A cat peered around the corner of the kitchen doorway, looking down the short hallway at him, legs crouched.

Mrs. Fallmark came to the kitchen doorway. “Bring it right in, Vern,” she said. She was a heavy matronly woman with a blue-purple tint to her gray hair. Her hair was always so carefully waved that it looked carved from stone.

He walked in and set the sack on the kitchen table. The cat stalked around him.

“What’s this all about?” she demanded. “What are you doing here on Sunday? I’ll be damned if I like it.”

“I’ll be damned if I have any interest in your opinion. I want four caps and a hypo.”

“I don’t retail.”

“Right now you do. And it isn’t retail. It’s a free gift.”

“Who do you think you are, Vern?”

“I’m the delivery boy. This is an emergency. I got orders from topside. Pick it up from you. They don’t want me contacting any pusher. They said come to you. And just incidentally, if it came to a case of their getting along without me or without you, who do you think they’d pick? Don’t let the fact that I bring groceries go to your head. I either get the four caps and the hypo in three minutes, or you get cut off at the pockets.”

“Big talk!”

He went over and leaned against the sink and lit a cigarette. He looked at his watch. The cat nuzzled his leg with the side of its head. “Suit yourself,” he said.

“An emergency?”

“A user who might spoil the delivery setup.”

She turned heavily and walked out of the kitchen. She was back in a few minutes. She handed him a new hypo in the original plastic and cardboard case in which it had come from the druggist. The seal was broken. He slid the box open and saw the caps and slid it shut.

“Thanks for being so obliging, Mrs. Fallmark.”

“You go to hell.”

He stood inside the screen door, looking out. The street was empty. He got in the truck and drove back to the store. He had been gone forty minutes. He saw that the ancient Varaki sedan was parked behind the store. The timing had gone bad. It made it a little tougher. As he came in the door Gus called him. “Vern? Vern, that you?”

He went to the living-room door. “Believe it or not, I had to make a delivery. You owe me overtime, Pop. That Mrs. Fallmark called up and said we forgot to put in the cat food on yesterday’s order.”

Walter was squatting in front of the television set. He looked back over his shoulder. “The hell she says! I made up that order. I put that cat food in. Four cans, or six. I forget.”

Vern smiled and shrugged. “So she mislaid them. So we lose four cans of cat food. She’s a good customer.”

“Every week a big order,” Gus said.

“A good program is coming up, Vern,” Walter said.

“I’m taking me a nap. Hard night last night.”

He went back into the kitchen and got a noisy glass of water. While the water was roaring into the sink, he used the cover of the sound to take a spoon from the silver drawer and slip it in his pocket. He went up to his third-floor room and stood in the silence for a moment until the rib-cage fluttering died down. He had heard Bonny’s music still playing, as he came down the hall.

He shut his door as he left his room, and went as quickly and silently as he could down to the second floor. He could hear the gusts of mechanical laughter coming over the television downstairs. He hoped it would hold them down there.

He went into Teena’s room and she came up off the bed, drawn as tight as harp strings. Her whisper was too aspirated. “You got it?”

He nodded. He went to her dressing table and opened the box. She stood close beside him, so close he could hear her hard fast breathing. He fitted the hypo together, held the sharp tip briefly in his lighter flame.

“Can you do it?” she whispered.

“I’ve watched it done.”

“I’ve never given it to myself. God, we’ve got to be careful.”

She went to her closet and came back with a thin red belt, which she wound tightly around her left arm, above the elbow. He had poured the white powder, faintly yellow-tinged, into the bowl of the spoon. He set his flaming lighter on the corner of the dressing table. She said, her voice shaking, “You cook and I’ll fill the hypo, and take it off the fire when I tell you, or it’ll be gone. Then you take the hypo quick and do it.”

The powder over the flame moved, changed, melted.

“Now!” she said. He took it off the flame. Her hands shook badly. “Hold it steady, Vern. Please.” She filled it, handed it to him, worked her fist. The scarred vein bulged blue in the milky socket of the elbow. He held the needle up, pushed on the plunger until a drop stood yellowish on the point.

“Hurry,” she said. “Oh, God, hurry!”

He felt awkward, faintly ill, as he slid the tip into the vein. It was harder to puncture than he had thought it would be. He bit his lip. He watched, her mouth working. She looked like thin gray lines drawn on pale paper. He pushed the plunger slowly and emptied the calibrated tube into her blood. He pulled the needle free and watched her.

She stood braced, her eyes half shut. Her pale upper lip wormed upward over her teeth in a look that was savage and sexual. For a moment the whites of her eyes showed, the pupils rolled upward. The red belt slid, like a slow snake, to the floor. Hungry nerves fed on the drug and were mended. Her color changed. She looked at him and her eyes were soft and her mouth was soft. “Aw, Vern. Aw, honey!” she said in a sleepy, lazy voice. “Aw, how I needed that!” She went to her bed, seeming more to drift than to walk.

He stood there, feeling a refinement of the sense of power, feeling a hard domination. It made him feel bigger and stronger than anything that had ever happened to him. With this you could control another human being utterly, completely. She sat flushed on the edge of the bed, rocking slowly from side to side in beat with music only she could hear, and she looked through and beyond the high corners of the room. It was, he thought, like having a woman, only more so — distilled, intensified.

It was like something that had happened to him a long time ago, back in that faraway town of slag heaps, of rows of smoke-dingy identical houses that were set on the dirt shoulder of the deep ravine, that town where the coal dust was pocked deep in the faces of the heavy-shouldered men.

Two gangs of boys had been fighting each day after school, down in the ravine, down among the tough weeds, the twenty-year accumulation of trash thrown from the back porches of the houses down the slope. They fought with rocks, with air rifles, with slingshots. Vern had been alone, not a part of either gang, spying on both sides, moving too fast and too quietly to receive hurt, aiming carefully, hurling, then melting away into the brush, content with the yowl of pain and outrage behind him.

He had found the piece of sharpened steel rod, quarter inch, rusty, nearly two feet long. He put the blunt end in the pouch of his slingshot. He could pull it back until the sharpened tip rested in the fork of the wood. He crept up on the battle lines that afternoon, tense with excitement. He wiggled around a mound of debris and saw, startlingly close, just below him, a boy lying face down, peering along the barrel of an air gun. Vern was ten. The boy was fourteen. He didn’t know that then. It told about him in the paper the next day. The sharpened tip of the steel rod went through the upper tip of the boy’s ear and into his head. The boy let go of his gun, rubbed his face against the ground, scrabbled with his hands. He humped up in the air like one of those green worms and was motionless for a moment, as Vern watched, then slowly flattened out against the stony ground. None of his movements had dislodged the steel rod. Vern snatched it free and moved back toward his home, toward the high dirt bank. He went up a gully, unseen by anyone, and partway up he shoved the steel rod into the dirt, pressed the last few inches out of sight with the heel of his sneaker. He went up the shed roof and into his room, brushed the dirt off his clothes, and came slowly down the stairs into the kitchen. His mother stared at him. “I thought you went out.”

“No. I was looking at a book.”

“If you’re going out, stay out of the ravine. It’s filthy down there and those boys’ll hurt you. They’re too big for you to play with.”

He stayed on the high slope. He heard the yells and fifteen minutes later he heard the siren. Then he went down. The other gang had scattered. They had a hard time getting the boy out of the ravine. Finally one of the ambulance men took the boy over his shoulder. The boy’s arm dangled loose. His hair was long on the nape of his neck. He had needed a haircut. Vern watched all of it. It all gave him the same feeling he had now, watching the girl sitting on the bed, swaying slowly in her private world.

He looked at the girl and thought how fine it would be to continue this, to keep getting it for her, to keep making it happen again and again. To watch closely each time that spasmed change in her.

He took the needle apart and put it back in the box. The lighter had gone out. He snapped it shut and put it in his pocket. The routine actions brought him back to calmness, and he rejected the impulse. He thought she would object to his taking the outfit away. She did not even seem to notice that he was leaving. He closed the door behind him, after making certain the hall was clear. He went down the back way, through the empty kitchen, and down the cellar stairs. He hid the outfit beside the unfilled jar behind the pile of ancient trash.

The good feeling he had as he watched her had left him with a restlessness. The day was nearly gone as he went out the back way onto the street. He touched his hip pocket with his fingertips. There was fifty dollars in his wallet, he remembered.

He caught a downtown bus at the corner. When the bus crossed the invisible line of Rowell’s precinct, he felt better. This was one night when he did not want Rowell leaning on him. Make one mistake and they never let you alone. Tomorrow Darmond would be bringing the new kid around. Once this current problem was settled, it might be interesting to sound the kid out. He might turn out to be a useful type. It might be possible to shove a little of the risk off on him. Minimize risks. Maximize profits. Calculate all risks. Avoid impulse.

He began mentally to compose the note he would leave with the week’s collection the next morning, on top of the towel rack.