The Way Some People Die

Chapter 21

I tapped on the door.

“Who is it?” the girl whispered.

I tapped on the door again.

“Is that you, Ronnie?”

I answered yes. Her bare feet padded across the floor, and the door opened. “He was easy–” she started to say. Then her hand flew up to her mouth, and her eyes darkened at the sight of me. “Augh?”

She tried to shut the door in my face. I pushed through past her and leaned on the door, closing it behind me. She backed away, the fingers of both hands spread across her red-smeared mouth. She had nothing on but a skirt, and after a moment she remembered this. Her hands slid down to cover her breasts. They were young and small, easy to cover. The bones in her shoulders stood out, puny as a chicken’s. A part of her left arm was pitted like ancient marble by hypo marks.

“Yours is a keen racket, sister. Can’t you think of anything better to do with your body?”

She retreated further, as far as the unmade bed in the corner of the room. It was an ugly little room, walled and ceiled with sick green plaster that reminded me of public locker rooms, furnished with one bed, one chair, one peeling veneer dresser and a rug the moths had been at. It was a hutch for quick rabbit-matings, a cell where lonely men could beat themselves to sleep with a dark brown bottle. The girl looked too good for the room, though I knew she wasn’t.

She picked her sweater off the floor and pulled it over her head. “What business of yours is it, what I do with my body?” Her red-eyed breast looked dully at me for an instant before she covered it. “You get out of here or I’ll call the key-boy.”

“Good. I want to talk to him.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re a policeman.” There was something peculiar about her eyes.

“A private cop,” I said. “Does that make you feel any better?”

“Get out of my room and leave me alone, then I’ll feel better.”

I moved toward her instead. Her face was pinched thin and white by an internal chill. The peculiar thing about her eyes was that they had no centers. I looked through them into darkness, cold darkness inside her. A tremor started in her hands, moved up her arms to her shoulders and down her body. She sat down on the edge of the bed and gripped her knees with both hands, bracing her limbs against each other to keep them from flying apart. A shadow crossed her face as dark and final as the shadows of death. She looked like a little old woman in a gold wig.

“How long has it been?” I said.

“Three days. I’m going crazy.” Her teeth began to chatter. She closed them hard over her lower lip.

“The bad stuff, kid?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“A lot of good that does me. I haven’t slept for three nights.”

“Since Tarantine went away.”

She straightened up, having repressed the tremor. “Do you know where Joey is? Can you get me some? I’ve got the money to pay for it–”

“I’m not in the business, kid. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Ruth. Do you know where he is? Do you work for him?”

“Not me. So far as Joey’s concerned, you’ll have to sweat it out.”

“I can’t. I’ll die.” And maybe she was right.

“How long have you been on the kick?”

“Since last fall. Ronnie started me.”

“How often?”

“Once a week, about. Then twice a week. Every day the last couple of months.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. They cut it. It was costing me fifty dollars a day.”

“Is that why you started shaking down tourists?”

“It’s a living.” She raised her heavy eyes. “How do you know so much about me?”

“I don’t. But I know one thing. You should see a doctor.”

“What’s the use? They’ll send me away to a Federal hospital, and then I’ll die for certain.”

“They’ll taper you off.”

“How do you know, have you had it?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about. It turns you inside out. I was down on the beach last night and every time a wave slapped the sand it hit me like an earthquake, the end of the world. I lay back and looked straight up and there wasn’t any sky. Nothing but yellow specks in my eyes, and the black. I felt the beach slanting down under me and I slid off in the black. It’s funny, it felt as if I was falling into myself, I was hollow like a well and falling down me.” She touched her stomach. “It’s funny I’m still alive. It was like dying.”

She lay back on the rumpled bed and looked at the ceiling with her arms under her head, her breasts pulled almost flat, her nose and mouth and chin carved stark by strain. Sweat was darkening her narrow golden temples. The sick-green ceiling was her only sky. “I guess I’ll have to go through it again, though, before I really die.”

“You’re not going to die, Ruth.” That was my statement. But I felt like a prosecutor cross-questioning a dead girl in the lower courts of hell. “What were you doing on the beach last night?”

“Nothing.” Her answer was like a memory of an earlier, happier life: “We used to go down to the beach all the time before Dad went away. We had a dog then, a little golden cocker, and he used to chase the birds and we used to take our lunch down to the beach and have a picnic and light a fire and have a lot of fun. Dad always collected seashells for me: we made a real collection.” She propped herself up on her elbows, wrinkling her blank young brow. “I wonder where my seashells are, I don’t know what happened to them.”

“What happened to your father?”

“I hardly ever see him any more. He went away when my mother left him: they ran a photographer’s studio in town. He got a job as radio operator on a ship, and he’s always way off somewhere, India or Japan. He sends my grandmother money for me, though.” Her tone was defensive. “He writes me letters.”

“You live with your grandmother, do you?”

She dropped back flat on the bed. “More or less. She’s a waitress in a truck-stop down the line. She isn’t home at night and she sleeps in the daytime. That was the trouble last night. The house began to breathe around me, in and out, and I got scared and I was all alone. I thought if I went down to the beach, maybe I’d feel better. It always used to make me feel good when I smelled the ocean. It didn’t work. It was worse in the open. I told you about the stars, how they were like holes in my head, and falling into the black. When I woke up from that, I saw the man come out of the sea and I guess I blew my top. I thought he was a merman like the poem we had in English last year. I still don’t know for sure if he was real.”

“Tell me about the man. Where did you see him?”

“Mackerel Beach, where they have the barbecue pits: that’s where we always used to have our picnics.” She raised one hand and gestured vaguely southward. “It’s about a mile down the boulevard. I was lying behind one of the wind-shelters on the sand, and I was awful cold.” The recollection made her shiver a little. “The black was gone, though, and I wasn’t falling. I thought the worst was over. There was a little light on the water, and I always feel better in daylight when I can see things. Then this man stood up in the surf and walked out of the water up on the beach. It scared me stiff. I had a crazy idea that he belonged to the sea and was coming to get me. It was still pretty dark, though, and I lay still and he didn’t even see me. He walked into the bushes behind the barbecue pits. I think he had a car parked in the lane back there. I heard a motor starting after a while. He was real enough, I guess. Do you think he was real?”

“He was a real man, sure. Did he have a bandage on his head?”

“No, I don’t think so. It wasn’t Mario. Ronnie told me about Mario’s boat getting wrecked, and I thought it might have something to do with Mario’s boat–”

“Did you see the boat?”

“No. Maybe I heard it, I don’t know. Half the time if a seagull screams it blasts my ears like a steam whistle and half the time I’m deaf. I can’t hear a thing.” Like most dope addicts she was hypochondriac, more interested in her symptoms than anything else and talented in describing them.

I said: “What did he look like?”

“There wasn’t much light. I couldn’t see his face. He was mother-naked, or else he was wearing a light-colored bathing suit. I think he had a bundle around his neck.”

“Was it anybody you know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Not Joe Tarantine?”

“It couldn’t have been Joey. I wish it was. I’d have known Joey, mother-naked or not.”

“He’s your source of supply, I take it.”

“I’ve got no source of supply,” she said to the ceiling. “For three days now like three years. What would you do in my place, mister? Ronnie’s got weed, but that just makes me sicker. What would you do?”

“Go to a doctor and taper off.”

“I can’t do that, I told you. I can’t. You’re from L. A., aren’t you? You know where I can get it in L. A.? I made two hundred dollars the last three nights.”

I thought of Dowser, who liked blondes. She’d be better sweating it out than going to Dowser, even if Dowser had the stuff to give her. “No, I don’t know.”

“Ronnie knows a man in San Francisco. Ronnie was a runner for Herman Speed, before old Speed got shot. Do you think I could get some if I went to Frisco? I’ve been waiting for Joey to come back. He doesn’t come. Do you think he’ll ever come?”

“Joey’s either dead or out of the country now. He won’t come back.”

“I was afraid he wouldn’t. To hell with waiting for Joey any more. I’m going to Frisco.” She sat up suddenly and began to comb her hair.

“Who’s the man there Ronnie told you about?”

“I don’t know his name, they don’t use names. He calls himself Mosquito. He pushed the stuff for Speed last year. Now he’s doing it in Frisco.” She leaned over to pull on her shoes.

“That’s a big city.”

“I know where to go, Ronnie’s told me.” She covered her mouth with her hand in a schoolgirl’s gesture. “I’m talking too much, aren’t I? I always talk too much when people are nice to me. You’ve been awful nice to me, and I thought you were a policeman.”

“I used to be,” I said, “but I won’t spoil your chance.”

She was looking much better, now that she’d made up her mind to travel that night. There was some blood moving under her skin, some meaning in her eyes. But she still looked old enough to be her own mother.