The Way Some People Die

Chapter 20

There was no sign of Simmie when I got back to the arena. The man in the box office who sold me my ticket tore it in half himself and told me to go on in. The crowd was gone, except for a few small boys waiting around the door for a chance to duck in free. They watched me with great dark eyes full of silent envy, as if Achilles was fighting Hector inside, or Jacob was wrestling with the angel.

Inside, a match was under way. A thousand or more people were watching the weekly battle between right and wrong. Right was represented by a pigeon-chested young Mediterranean type, covered back and front with a heavy coat of black hair. Wrong was an elderly Slav with a round bald spot like a tonsure and a bushy red beard by way of compensation. His belly was large and pendulous, shaped like a tear about to fall. The belly and the beard made him a villain.

I found my seat, three rows back from ringside, and watched the contest for a minute or two. Redbeard took a tuft of hair on the other’s chest between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and tugged at it delicately, like someone plucking lilies of the valley. Pigeon Chest howled with pain and terror, and cast a pleading look at the referee. The referee, a small round man in a sweatshirt, rebuked Redbeard severely for thus maltreating his colleague. Redbeard wiggled his beard disdainfully. The crowd roared with anger.

Redbeard waddled across the ring to the corner where Pigeon Chest was gamely enduring his anguish, and smote the young hero lightly on the shoulder with his forearm. Pigeon Chest sank to his knees, pitifully shaken by the blow. Wrong beat its breast with both fists and looked around with arrogance at the crowd.

“Kill him, Gino,” A grandmotherly lady said beside me. “Get up and kill the dirty Russian coward.” She looked as if she meant it, stark and staring. The rest of the crowd was making similar suggestions.

Warmed by their encouragement, Gino struggled manfully to his feet. Redbeard swung again, with the speed and violence of a feather falling, but this time Gino ducked the blow and hit back. The crowd went mad with delight. “Murder him, Gino.” Wrong cowered and skulked away; all bullies were cowards. Wrong had a yellow streak down its back a yard wide, as the old lady said beside me. She could probably see the yellow streak through her bifocal glasses.

Since Right was triumphing, I could afford to take my eyes off the ring for a little while. The girl I was looking for was easy to find. Her bright hair gleamed from a ringside seat on the other side of the platform. She was sitting very close to a middle-aged man in a gabardine suit a little too light for the season and a Panama hat with a red-blue-yellow band. He had a convention badge on his lapel. She was practically sitting in his lap. With a kind of calculated excitement, her fingers moved up and down his arm, and played with his vest-buttons and tie. His face was red and loose, as if he’d been drinking. Hers was on her work.

Now Redbeard was on his hands and knees on the canvas beside the ropes. Gino was begging the referee to make him get up and fight. The referee grasped the evil Russian by the beard and raised him to his feet. Gino went into swift and murderous action. He threw himself into the air feet first and brushed the jutting red beard with the toe of one wrestling shoe. Redbeard, felled by the breeze or the idea of the kick, went down heavily on his back. Right landed neatly on the back of its neck and sprang to its feet in triumph like a tumbler. Wrong lay prostrate while the referee counted it out and declared Right the winner. The crowd cheered. Then Wrong opened its eyes and got up and disputed the decision, its red beard wagging energetically. “Oh, you dirty cheater,” the old lady cried. “Throw him out!”

The gilt-haired girl and the man in the Panama hat got up and started to move toward the entrance. I waited until they were out of sight and followed them. The rest of the crowd, heartened by their moral victory, were laughing and chattering, buying peanuts and beer and coke from the white-capped boys in the aisles. Right and Wrong had left the ring together.

When I went out the man and the girl were standing by the box-office, and the ticket man inside was phoning a taxi for them. She was clinging to the man like lichen to a rock. What I could see of her face looked sick and desperate. The fat gabardine arm was hugging her small waist.

By the time the taxi came, I was waiting in my car with the motor idling, a hundred feet short of the entrance. The taxi paused to pick them up and headed for downtown. It was easy to follow in the light evening traffic, six straight blocks to a stop sign, left on Main Street past Mexican movies and rumdum-haunted bars, down to the ocean boulevard again. Another leftward jog along the shore. The taxi paused and let them out.

Their destination was a small motel standing between a dog hospital and a dark and immobile merry-go-round. A sign over the entrance inscribed its name, THE COVE, in blue neon on the night. As I went by, the girl’s face, drawn and hollowed by the glare, was intent on the open wallet in the man’s hands. Her lean and sweatered body cast a jagged shadow beside the man’s squat open-handed one.

I parked my car at the curb on the other side of the boulevard. Beyond a row of dwarf palms the sea was snoring and complaining like a drunk in a doorway. I spat in its direction and walked back to the motel. This was a long narrow building at right angles to the street, with a row of single rooms reached by a gallery on each side, and open carports below, most of them empty. A light went on toward the rear of the gallery on my side, and for an instant I saw the ill-assorted couple framed in the doorway. Then a T-shirted boy came out, closing the door solicitously behind him. He heel-and-toed along the gallery towards the open stairway at the front. I kept on walking.

When I heard the door of the front office close, I turned and sauntered back. There was a pickup truck in the driveway beside the dog hospital. I went and sat on its running board in the shadow, and watched the lighted window. In no time at all the light in the room went out.

I noticed then that the boy in the T-shirt shared my interest in it. He had mounted the steps without my seeing him, and was walking very lightly toward the closed door. When he reached it, he flattened himself against the wall, tense and still like a figure in a freeze. I sat and watched him. He looked as if he were waiting for a signal to move. I heard it when it came: the girls voice calling softly behind the door. I couldn’t make out the words; perhaps the call was wordless.

The boy unlocked the door and stepped inside and closed it. The curtained window lit up again. I decided to move in closer.

There was another set of stairs at the rear of the building, where the gallery widened into an open sunporch. I stepped across a scrubby eugenia hedge and climbed the stairs; moved softly along the gallery to the lighted window, staying close to the wall where the boards were less likely to creak. I could hear the voices before I reached the window: the boy’s voice speaking with quiet intensity: “How can she be your wife? You’re registered from Oregon, and she lives here. I thought I recognized her, and now I know it.” And the man’s, strained and subdued by anxiety: “We just got married today, didn’t we? Didn’t we?”

The boy was scornful: “I bet she doesn’t even know your name.”

“I don’t,” the girl admitted. “What are you going to do?”

“You didn’t have to tell him that!” Hysteria threatened the man, but it was still controlled by the fear of being heard. “You didn’t have to bring me here in the first place. You said it was safe, that you had an understanding with the management.”

“I guess I was wrong,” the girl said wearily.

“I guess you were! now look at the mess I’m in. How old are you anyway?”

“Fifteen, nearly sixteen.”

“God.” The word came out with a rush of air, as if he’d been rammed in the stomach by a piledriver. I leaned at the edge of the window trying to see him, but the window was covered completely with curtains of rough tan cloth.

“That makes it worse,” the boy said virtuously. He sounded very virtuous for a night clerk in a waterfront motel. “Contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Statutory rape, even.”

The man said without inflection: “I got a daughter at home as old as her. What am I going to do? I got a wife.”

The virtuous youth said: “You’re remembering a little late. I tell you what I have to do. I have to call the police.”

“No! You don’t have to call the police. She doesn’t want you to call them, do you? Do you? I paid her money, she won’t testify. Will you?”

“They’ll make me,” she said glumly. “They’ll send me away. You, too.”

“This isn’t a call-house, mister,” the boy said. “The manager says if this sort of thing comes up, I got to call the police. I didn’t invite you here.”

“She did! It’s all her fault. I’m a stranger in town, son. I didn’t realize the situation. I came down here from Portland for the ad convention. I didn’t realize the situation.”

“Now you do. We let this sort of thing go on, they take away our license. The manager hears about it, I lose my job. And I’m not your son.”

“You don’t have to get nasty.” The older man’s voice was querulous. “Maybe what you need is a punch in the nose.”

“Try it on, you old goat. Only button yourself up first.”

The girl’s voice cut in shrilly: “Talk to him. You won’t get anywhere like that. He’ll tag you for assault along with the rest.”

“I’m sorry,” the older man said.

“You’ve got plenty to be sorry about.”

The girl began to sob mechanically. “They’ll send me away, and you too. Can’t you do anything, mister?”

“Maybe I could talk to the manager? It isn’t good business if you call the police–”

“He’s out of town,” the boy said. “Anyway, I can handle this myself.”

After a pause, the man asked haltingly: “How much money do you make a week?”

“Forty a week. Why?”

“I’ll pay you to forget this business. I haven’t got much ready cash–”

“You’ve got some twenties in your wallet,” the girl said. She had given over sobbing as suddenly as she’d started. “I saw them.”

“You shut up,” the boy said. “I couldn’t take a bribe, mister. It would mean my job.”

“I have about eighty-five in cash here. You can have it.”

The boy laughed flatly. “For contributing to statutory rape? That would be cheap now, wouldn’t it? Jobs are scarce around here.”

“I have a hundred-dollar traveler’s check.” The man’s voice was brightening. “I’ll give you a hundred and fifty. I got to keep a little to pay my hotel.”

“I’ll take it,” the boy said. “I don’t like to do it, but I’ll take it.”

“Thank God.”

“Come on down to the office, mister. You can use the fountain pen in the office.”

“Gee, thanks, mister,” the girl said softly. “You saved my life for sure.”

“Get away from me, you dirty little tart.” His voice was furious.

“Quiet,” the boy said. “Quiet. Let’s get out of here.”

I moved back to the sun-porch, and watched them around the corner as they came out. The boy moved briskly ahead, swinging his arms. The older man slouched behind with his hat in his hand. His untied shoelaces dragged on the floor of the gallery.