Authors: Harlan Ellison
She looked at him and said, “Popcorn is all, thanks.” Her tones were Bronx. Lower Bronx. He bought an open-topped box of hot buttered stuff and walked beside the girls into the theater, keeping hold of the popcorn. The investment had not been cinched yet.
They went up to the balcony and found three seats amid the smoke curtain. Rusty sat between the two girls and was annoyed when the fat one wasted not a moment, placing her warm thigh close to his leg even as he sat down. The smaller one settled herself, adjusted her skirt primly, and thoughtfully chewed her gum. After a moment she leaned over, put her hand on Rusty’s and said sweetly, “C’n I have the popcorn please?”
He handed the box over and slipped toward her slightly. His hand went around the back of the seat and dropped low on the front of her shoulder, just above one of her small breasts. She made no move to remove it.
It wasn’t a very good movie. But that didn’t matter.
After the show, Teresa took Patty aside and talked to her very low and excited for a few minutes. Rusty leaned against a poster of the coming attraction and lit a cigarette. He heard Patty say, “Like hell. I saw ’im first.” Then the voices of the two girls sank into a low monotone again and Patty shook her head a few times. Teresa finally took a bill from her little clutch-purse and slipped it into the fat girl’s hand. Then she gave her a shove, and an imperative nod of the head, and Patty moved out into the street, with a belligerent and semi-hungry stare back at Rusty and the girl.
“Okay,” Teresa said, coming across the lobby to Rusty. “Now if you wanna go get somethin’ ta eat, I’ll go with ya.”
Rusty nodded his head at the retreating back and wobbling buttocks of Patty, heading toward Eighth Avenue. “Won’t she tell your folks?”
Teresa unfurled a fresh stick of gum, popped it into her mouth, rolling it up as she did it, and waved away his comment.
“My
folks? My old lady’s dead and my old man wouldn’t care what happened to me as long as I kept bringin’ in that twenty a week for rent.”
They walked out onto the sidewalk and he started to steer her up the street to Romeo’s where the thirty-five-cent plate of spaghetti seemed about right for this date. “Whaddaya do for a livin’,” Rusty asked.
She cocked an eyebrow at him and a little half-titter escaped her small mouth. “I work in a office down on Nineteenth Street. Accountin’ an’ like that, y’know.” Rusty knew. He knew many young guys and broads who had been forced out of the streets into these treadmill jobs. If she cleared forty-five dollars a week she was lucky. Twenty to her old man for rent… no wonder she was looking for a pickup come Sunday nights. She was past kid age when she could scream over Eddie Fisher and Elvis without being self-conscious. She had reached the age when she was worried about the future and knew she was not pretty enough to make a good match. She had reached the age when comic books no longer appealed to her. She was a lost one, too—a transition person—stuck in a groove and too confused to find her way out.
Sunday night pickup. Just out of the jailbait class. And raring to romp.
They ate their spaghetti in relative silence. She liked Fats Domino. She did not like the movie they had seen—wasn’t that Jayne Mansfield just too cheap in them tight red dresses why hell
I’d
never wear a dress like that. True, thought Rusty, all too damned true. She did not like New York mugginess. She did like Rusty. She would not at all mind the idea of going to a hotel with him.
She was old enough to buy a bottle at the state store, but it was closed. Rusty knew a place where Sunday did not matter. She only hesitated a moment when Rusty suggested a fifty-fifty split on it. She bought a bottle of good Scotch from the man and Rusty wondered how she knew good from bad. She didn’t seem to have the brains.
They had no trouble at the Southern Hotel—Rusty had been there before and knew the system. Two bucks extra and they weren’t disturbed all night.
She wasn’t very good in bed and later in the night, when the sounds from the airshaft had diminished, she cried against his unresponding shoulder. She cried about the trouble she had curling her hair, and the way her nose swelled with allergies in the summer, and the way she loved him, and the sorrows that only the city and the night and life can bring. Rusty hardly heard. He was sunk in his own black thoughts.
It did no good; Dolores was dead, Moms was dying inside, there was no thought at all of Pops, and he was garbage from top to bottom. Everything was sliding downhill again. It did no good to make the attempt. It did no good. What the hell, it did no good.
Everything was rotten. Everything stunk. He hit her and she crept closer to him in the sticky sheets. He reached over and took the nearly empty bottle. If it ran out before the thoughts were drowned, he’d send her out for another.
She’d go. He’d make sure she went.
He finished the bottle.
It was a bad night all around.
Beside him in the dirty, rumpled, sweat-reeking sheets, the slim body of a strange girl lay humped and sleeping. He stared across and down at her for a long moment, trying to place her—then it all came back in sequence and his hatred for himself became even greater. She had cried and he had hit her in the face. She had not left him. He recalled dimly that he, too, had cried, and that was the reason she had stayed, clinging close to him in binding misery.
But the stench of sour liquor pervaded the cheap hotel room, seeping in and out of the cracked yellow paint, rolling around the rusty shank of the fire extinguisher pipe jutting from one wall at ceiling level.
The place was hot and muggy. He stumbled from the bed, dragging a sheet with him and stamped furiously at it, finally disengaging its cloying weight. He threw up the water-stained blind and the dim light of the gray airshaft poured across the bed. He turned in the face of it and stared at her naked body, sprawled sidewise across the mattress. It had been a lousy night. Poor slob of a broad. He slumped down in the seedy, overstuffed armchair near the silent radiator.
The picture of Dolores came back and he could hardly help comparing her with this girl in the bed. It was not a flattering comparison, and then he remembered this girl had one thing his sister had lost.
Her life.
He twisted in the chair, and bit his fist. He beat at the arm of the chair and golden spores of dust rose twistingly in the weak shafts of light from the window. He could feel the tears coming, he could feel his heart breaking. God, he could feel the edge of the Earth up-ending to send him screaming into the Pit. Rusty had never known such a pain, worse than switch, and worse than zip, and worse than broken bottle. It was the worst. It was so low, it crawled.
Moms was all alone. He had to get home. That had been bad yesterday. Real bad. Leaving her like that. He must be crazy, he must of been out of his skull. He had to get back.
He moved rapidly, then, and paused in his dressing for only a moment, considering whether he should waken the girl and say goodbye, take her to breakfast. He decided not to do it. The nights were one thing, but the days were another. For a minute he stood watching her deep, even breathing, watching her small breasts rise and fall, half covered by the not-quite-clean sheet. He felt terribly sorry for her, and for himself as well. He started to reach for his wallet—perhaps a dollar would help her out—then stopped his hand. She wasn’t a whore, he berated himself sharply. She wasn’t cheap although she was lonely. She wasn’t a slut just because she was afraid.
He reached into his hip pocket and took out his wallet.
In an inner pocket he found the souvenir Spanish coin he had been given by his mother, many years before, to keep as a good luck piece. (“Keep this in your pocket, and you’ll never be broke.”) The boy stared at it intently for a long second.
He laid it down on the soiled towel that lay across the bureau top as a doily.
He closed the door quietly behind himself.
The subway was nearly deserted. As he sped uptown, he could see trains zipping past in the opposite direction, laden with early morning office workers, their faces blank with half-sleep, their eyes directed to their newspapers, folded lengthwise for column-reading, and to avoid jostling the riders on either side. But Rusty’s train was nearly empty.
The train roared clankingly through the tunnels, the stanchions zipping by outside the window till they became one vertical blur. An old woman sat huddled against the far wall, beneath a spaghetti ad, looking as though the sauce was dropping on her, weighing her down. A young man with a tweed topcoat lounged across and up a few feet from Rusty, reading the day-old book review section of the
Times.
Every few minutes he would rub the bridge of his nose.
The constant machine thrummmm of the train somehow soothed Rusty. He thought of the million times he had ridden the underground, and it was a familiar thing. It made his thoughts easier, his thoughts clearer.
He thought of the times he had ridden this subway with his sister. She had been so gentle and slim beside him. Her face the playground of a thousand smiles. Her eyes the lights that lit the darkness. She was gone now. Dead. The family had two dead ones now—Dolores and Pops. He was as good as dead. He was no use to anyone and she was cold and gone.
Then his mind shifted, a camera playing across a landscape. He thought of the night before while the train lulled him. He had come to face his past again, last night, and though he had allowed himself to sink lower than he could ever remember, he now saw it all as clearly as in a crystal, and he knew there was a direction to everything.
He might never get to be the industrial designer he sometimes thought of himself as being, sometime in the future. He might never get free of the scum and filth of the streets.
But he knew one thing. He knew it sharp and clear and brightly shining the way a switch brightly shines. He was going to find the bastard who had killed his sister.
No heroics. No big man stuff. No fancy movie acrobatics. He was going to do it because it had to be done and because he knew he was the one to do it. The cops’d never find the guy. They didn’t know where to look. The cops’d never find him. They didn’t know who to ask. But Rusty knew. Rusty was part of it. He had helped Dolores along. He had fought with her that night, driven her into the waiting streets. He knew who to look for to give him the straight words and he knew how to make those people talk. He had the way and he had the drive. So it had to be him. He knew this as surely as he knew he would kill that man when he found him.
This time the apartment wasn’t dead stone quiet. This time Mrs. Ramirez and Mrs. Givens and Mrs. Guzman-Rolon from the building were there. This time a white-jacketed interne from the Charity Hospital was writing out a prescription and handing it to Mrs. Marroquin, who accepted it with furrowed brow and a pinched expression on her little brown, wrinkled face. This time Moms was down for an awful long count.
Collapse, he heard the interne say, before the man picked up his black bag and shouldered past, looking about with distaste at the shabby surroundings—not at all like the home of his parents on Central Park West.
This time it was bad. When it couldn’t get worse, it got lousy and lousier.
Rusty came through the open door with stark bewilderment shining dully in his eyes. The women turned as he came forward. Three of them sniffed the air, said something soft in Spanish, and slipped past, carefully, avoiding touching him. Rusty was alone with Mrs. Givens. He stared at her in mute appeal. She stared back with contempt on her dark face.
“You been away.” She said it so distinctly, even the accent was muffled. She said it with venomous undertones. Rusty was bewildered. Another shock right now was more than he could take and keep his balance.
“I—I stayed with a friend… overnight,” he stumbled. Her eyes mocked him. Her mouth twisted. She looked away, and her head tilted in a slight, peculiar movement.
“Su madre,”
and he knew Moms was lying in there, where the sunlight was cut to nothing by the drawn blinds. He knew she would be pale and gaunt between the white, white sheets, and he did want to go in to see her.
“How… how is she…” He could not finish.
“
Sinverguenza!”
she cursed him. “She is sick. She will die if she does not find some love. You live here, you don’t know her, you never know her! Now you all she got—and that
borrachon—
you don’t deserve to see her ever!”
Rusty flinched at mention of his father, but knew the woman was right. Pops was a drunkard, and a waste, and a bastard! He turned away, and wanted to run. She stopped him with a word, softly.
He turned back and she was bobbing her head in solemn understanding. There was no malice in her, just pity for the children of Angelita Santoro. She continued the up and down movement, her little head nodding evenly. Rusty felt the need to touch someone, to seek comfort somewhere. He moved toward the bedroom door, and she stepped back out of his way. She had been left by the protecting women of the building as a watchdog. She relinquished her guard only in crisis. She moved back for Rusty.
He looked down at her with a film over his eyes, as he passed, and his heart was very tight and very dry within him.
“Muchisimas gracias,”
he said softly, and watched his hand as it touched briefly at the thin fabric covering her shoulder. She bowed away without a word, and as he turned by the door, he saw only her back. She stared down from the window at the bedlam street outside. It was good to have friends.
He went into the room.
When he came out, when the sun had ceased its mechanical baking of the streets, when the night sky had rolled in across Manhattan, he was determined. Moms had come awake for a little while. She had slept deeply and it seemed to be nothing more than weariness that had felled her, but when she slowly rose up on her elbows—as he kneeled beside the bed, touching the edge of the sheet—he saw reason flood into her eyes. Then she looked at him and the message passed so clearly, so completely, so finally, there was no need for words. She put her white hand across his own tanned one and he kissed it fiercely. It was the message, and for the first time, really, the meaning to everything. There was a drive and a purpose and a goal. It might not have been the finest goal in the world, nor the most uplifting, but it was a real one. It was not something built in the mind; it was the stuff of blood and bone and flesh. Dolores’ bone and blood and flesh.