Psychos Page 25

  Finally Jesse picked out two girls and dragged me over to them. I couldn’t get too close because of their smell, but the younger one seemed to like me. She had a nice smile. I looked at Jesse’s face. He was grinning at them and then at me. His complexion had gotten real bad since we’d started travelling—there’d been more and more zits on his face every day. Now they were huge. One burst open and a long skinny white worm crawled out. I looked at the girls—they didn’t seem to notice.

  “His parents are putting him up for adoption so we ran away. I’m trying to hide him until they change their minds.” Jesse’s breath stank.

  The girls looked at me. “Really?” the older one said. Her face had tiny cracks in it. I looked down at my feet.

  Both of the girls said “I’m sorry” about the same time, then they got quiet like they were embarrassed. But I still didn’t look up. I watched their sandaled feet and the black bugs crawling between their toes.

  The older one could drive so they hid us in the back seat of their car and drove to the end of the drive that led to the farmhouse where their family lived. We were supposed to go on to the barn and the girls would bring us out some food later. We never told them about my bike and I kept thinking about it and what people would say when they found it. Even though I never used the bike anymore I was a little sorry about having lost it.

  I also thought about those girls and how nice they were and how the younger one seemed to like me, even though they smelled so bad. I wondered why girls like that were always so nice to guys like us, guys with a story to tell, and I thought about how dumb it was.

  After we were in the barn for a couple of hours the girls—they were sisters, if I didn’t mention it before—brought us some food. The younger one talked to me a long time while I ate but I don’t remember anything she said. The older one talked to Jesse the same way and I heard her say “You’re a good person to be helping your friend like this.” She leaned over and kissed Jesse on his cheek even though the zits were tearing his face apart. Her shirt rode up on the side and Jesse put his dirty hand there. I saw the blisters rise up out of her skin and break open and the smell was worse than ever in the barn but no one else seemed to notice.

  I finished eating and leaned back into the dirty straw. I liked the younger sister but I hoped she wouldn’t kiss me the same way. I couldn’t stand the idea of her open, loose mouth touching my skin. Underneath the straw I saw that there were hunks of gray flesh, pieces of arms and legs and things inside you I didn’t know the name for. But I covered them over with more straw when nobody was looking, and I didn’t say anything.

  And now Jesse says he figures it’s about time we did another one. He thinks I’ve forgotten. But I haven’t.

  I’ve been thinking about the two sisters all night and how much they trust us and how good they’ve been to us. And I’ve been thinking how they remind me of the Wilks sisters in Huckleberry Finn and how Huck felt so ornery and low down because he was letting the duke and king rob them of their money after the sisters had been so nice to him. Sometimes I guess you don’t know how to behave until you’ve read it in a book or seen it on TV.

  So he gets up from his nest in the sour straw and starts toward the barn door. And I get up out of the straw and follow. Only last night I took the hammer, and now I beat him in the head until his head comes apart, and all the stink comes out and covers me so bad I know I’ll never get it off. He always said he’d fight really hard if he knew he was dying, but his body doesn’t fight back hardly at all. Maybe he didn’t know.

  I hear the noises in the farmhouse and now there are voices and flashlights coming. I scrape my fingers through the straw to find all the pieces of Jesse’s head to make him look a little better for these people. I lie down in the straw beside him and close my eyes, leaving just a sliver of milky white under each lid to show them. I drop my mouth open and stop my saliva. I imagine the blue-green colors that will come and paint my body. I imagine the blisters and the insects and the terrible smell my breath has become. But mostly I try to imagine how I’m going to explain to these strangers why I’m enjoying this.

  In for a Penny

  BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

  Everybody screws up once or twice. And a lot of us get caught. So you gotta respect a man who does his time, pays his debt to society, and moves on. The world is not forgiving, but you do what you can. Chalk it up to youthful craziness. And prepare to start anew.

  This lies at the heart of many a great crime story, where banged-up guys with a rough road behind them find themselves back at the bottom and try to find their way home.

  Lawrence Block is a superb crime writer, as witness his multiple Edgar awards, Grand Master status with the Mystery Writers of America, and multitudinous fans, of which I am one. His modern, hard-boiled style shows great sympathy for down-and-outers on the path to redemption, win or lose.

  “In for a Penny” is one of his favorites. Mine, too. You’re about to find out why.

  Paul kept it very simple. That seemed to be the secret. You kept it simple, you drew firm lines and didn’t cross them. You put one foot in front of the other, took it day by day, and let the days mount up.

  The state didn’t take an interest. They put you back on the street with a cheap suit and figured you’d be back inside before the pants got shiny. But other people cared. This one outfit, about two parts ex-cons to one part holy joes, had wised him up and helped him out. They’d found him a job and a place to live, and what more did he need?

  The job wasn’t much, frying eggs and flipping burgers in a diner at Twenty-third and Eighth. The room wasn’t much, either, seven blocks south of the diner, four flights up from the street. It was small, and all you could see from its window was the back of another building. The furnishings were minimal—an iron bedstead, a beat-up dresser, a rickety chair—and the walls needed paint and the floor needed carpet. There was a sink in the room, a bathroom down the hall. No cooking, no pets, no overnight guests, the landlady told him. No kidding, he thought.

  His shift was four to midnight, Monday through Friday. The first weekend he did nothing but go to the movies, and by Sunday night he was ready to climb the wall. Too much time to kill, too few ways to kill it that wouldn’t get him in trouble. How many movies could you sit through? And a movie cost him two hours’ pay, and if you spent the whole weekend dragging yourself from one movie house to another…

  Weekends were dangerous, one of the ex-cons had told him. Weekends could put you back in the joint. There ought to be a law against weekends.

  But he figured out a way around it. Walking home Tuesday night, after that first weekend of movie-going, he’d stopped at three diners on Seventh Avenue, nursing a cup of coffee and chatting with the guv behind the counter. The third time was the charm; he walked out of there with a weekend job. Saturday and Sunday, same hours, same wages, same work. And they’d pay him off the books, which made his weekend work tax-free.

  Between what he was saving in taxes and what he wasn’t spending on movies, he’d be a millionaire.

  Well, maybe he’d never be a millionaire. Probably be dangerous to be a millionaire, a guy like him, with his ways, his habits. But he was earning an honest dollar, and he ate all he wanted on the job, seven days a week now, so it wasn’t hard to put a few bucks aside. The weeks added up and so did the dollars, and the time came when he had enough cash socked away to buy himself a little television set. The cashier at his weekend job set it up and her boyfriend brought it over, so he figured it fell off a truck or walked out of somebody’s apartment, but it got good reception and the price was right.

  It was a lot easier to pass the time once he had the TV. He’d get up at ten or eleven in the morning, grab a shower in the bathroom down the hall, then pick up doughnuts and coffee at the corner deli. Then he’d watch a little TV until it was time to go to work.

  After work he’d stop at the same deli for two bottles of cold beer and some cigarettes. He’d settle in with the TV, a beer bottle in one
hand and a cigarette in the other and his eyes on the screen.

  He didn’t get cable, but he figured that was all to the good. He was better off staying away from some of the stuff they were allowed to show on cable TV Just because you had cable didn’t mean you had to watch it, but he knew himself, and if he had it right there in the house how could he keep himself from looking at it?

  And that could get you started. Something as simple as late-night adult programming could put him on a train to the big house upstate. He’d been there. He didn’t want to go back.

  He would get through most of a pack of cigarettes by the time he turned off the light and went to bed. It was funny, during the day he hardly smoked at all, but back in his room at night he had a butt going just about all the time. If the smoking was heavy, well, the drinking was ultralight. He could make a bottle of Bud last an hour. More, even. The second bottle was always warm by the time he got to it, but he didn’t mind, nor did he drink it any faster than he’d drunk the first one. What was the rush?

  Two beers were enough. All it did was give him a little buzz, and when the second beer was gone he’d turn off the TV and sit at the window, smoking one cigarette after another.

  Then he’d go to bed. Then he’d get up and do it all over again.

  The only problem was walking home.

  And even that was no problem at first. He’d leave his rooming house around three in the afternoon. The diner was ten minutes away, and that left him time to eat before his shift started. Then he’d leave sometime between midnight and twelve-thirty—the guy who relieved him, a manic Albanian, had a habit of showing up ten to fifteen minutes late. Paul would retrace his earlier route, walking the seven blocks down Eighth Avenue to Sixteenth Street, with a stop at the deli for cigarettes and beer.

  The Rose of Singapore was the problem.

  The first time he walked past the place, he didn’t even notice it. By day it was just another seedy bar, but at night the neon glowed and the jukebox music poured out the door, along with the smell of spilled drinks and stale beer and something more, something unnameable, something elusive.

  “If you don’t want to slip,” they’d told him, “stay out of slippery places.” He quickened his pace and walked on by.

  The next afternoon the Rose of Singapore didn’t carry the same feeling of danger. Not that he’d risk crossing the threshold, not at any hour of the day or night. He wasn’t stupid. But it didn’t lure him and, consequently, it didn’t make him uncomfortable.

  Coming home was a different story.

  He was thinking about it during his last hour on the job, and by the time he reached it he was walking all the way over at the edge of the sidewalk, as far from the building’s entrance as he could get without stepping down into the street. He was like an acrophobe edging along a precipitous path, scared to look down, afraid of losing his balance and falling accidentally, afraid too of the impulse that might lead him to plunge purposefully into the void.

  He kept walking, eyes forward, heart racing. Once he was past it he felt himself calming down, and he bought his two bottles of beer and his pack of cigarettes and went on home.

  He’d get used to it, he told himself. It would get easier with time.

  But, surprisingly enough, it didn’t. Instead it got worse, but gradually, imperceptibly, and he learned to accommodate it. For one thing, he steered clear of the west side of Eighth Avenue, where the Rose of Singapore stood. Going to work and coming home, he kept to the opposite side of the street.

  Even so, he found himself hugging the inner edge of the sidewalk, as if every inch closer to the street would put him that much closer to crossing it and being drawn mothlike into the tavern’s neon flame. And, approaching the Rose of Singapore’s block, he’d slow down or speed up his pace so that the traffic signal would allow him to cross the street as soon as he reached the corner. As if otherwise, stranded there, he might cross in the other direction instead, across Eighth Avenue and on into the Rose.

  He knew it was ridiculous, but he couldn’t change the way it felt. When it didn’t get better, he found a way around it.

  He took Seventh Avenue instead.

  He did that on the weekends anyway because it was the shortest route.

  But during the week it added two long crosstown blocks to his pedestrian commute, four blocks a day, twenty blocks a week. That came to about three miles a week, maybe a hundred and fifty extra miles a year.

  On good days he told himself he was lucky to be getting the exercise, that the extra blocks would help him stay in shape. On bad days he felt like an idiot, crippled by fear.

  Then the Albanian got fired.

  He was never clear on what happened. One waitress said the Albanian had popped off at the manager one time too many, and maybe that was what happened. All he knew was that one night his relief man was not the usual wild-eyed fellow with the droopy mustache but a stocky dude with a calculating air about him. His name was Dooley, and Paul made him at a glance as a man who’d done time. You could tell, but of course he didn’t say anything, didn’t drop any hints. And neither did Dooley.

  But the night came when Dooley showed up, tied his apron, rolled up his sleeves, and said, “Give her my love, huh?” And, when Paul looked at him in puzzlement, he added, “Your girlfriend.”

  “Haven’t got one,” he said. “You live on Eighth Avenue, right? That’s what you told me. Eighth and Sixteenth, right? Yet every time you leave here you head over toward Seventh. Every single time.”

  “I like the exercise,” he said. “Exercise,” Dooley said, and grinned. “Good word for it.”

  He let it go, but the next night Dooley made a similar comment. “I need to unwind when I come off work,” Paul told him. “Sometimes I’ll walk clear over to Sixth Avenue before I head downtown. Or even Fifth.”

  “That’s nice,” Dooley said. “Just do me a favor, will you? Ask her if she’s got a sister.”

  “It’s cold and it looks like rain,” Paul said. “I’ll be walking home on Eighth Avenue tonight, in case you’re keeping track.”

  And when he left he did walk down Eighth Avenue—for one block. Then he cut over to Seventh and took what had become his usual route.

  He began doing that all the time, and whenever he headed east on Twenty-second Street he found himself wondering why he’d let Dooley have such power over him. For that matter, how could he have let a seedy gin joint make him walk out of his way to the tune of a hundred and fifty miles a year?

  He was supposed to be keeping it simple. Was this keeping it simple? Making up elaborate lies to explain the way he walked home? And walking extra blocks every night for fear that the devil would reach out and drag him into a neon-lit hell?

  Then came a night when it rained, and he walked all the way home on Eighth Avenue.

  It was always a problem when it rained. Going to work he could catch a bus, although it wasn’t terribly convenient. But coming home he didn’t have the option, because traffic was one-way the wrong way.

  So he walked home on Eighth Avenue, and he didn’t turn left at Twenty-second Street and didn’t fall apart when he drew even with the Rose of Singapore. He breezed on by, bought his beer and cigarettes at the deli, and went home to watch television. But he turned the set off again after a few minutes and spent the hours until bedtime at the window, looking out at the rain, nursing the beers, smoking the cigarettes, and thinking long thoughts.

  The next two nights were clear and mild, but he chose Eighth Avenue anyway. He wasn’t uneasy, not going to work, not coming home, either. Then came the weekend, and then on Monday he took Eighth again, and this time on the way home he found himself on the west side of the street, the same side as the bar.

  The door was open. Music, strident and bluesy, poured through it, along with all the sounds and smells you’d expect.

  He walked right on by.

  You’re over it, he thought. He went home and didn’t even turn on the TV, just sat and smoked and sipped his two
longneck bottles of Bud.

  Same story Tuesday, same story Wednesday.

  Thursday night, steps from the tavern’s open door, he thought, Why drag this out?

  He walked in, found a stool at the bar. “Double scotch,” he told the barmaid. “Straight up, beer chaser.”

  He’d tossed off the shot and was working on the beer when a woman slid onto the stool beside him. She put a cigarette between bright red lips, and he scratched a match and lit it for her.

  Their eyes met, and he felt something click.

  She lived over on Ninth and Seventeenth, on the third floor of a brownstone across the street from the projects. She said her name was Tiffany, and maybe it was. Her apartment was three little rooms. They sat on the couch in the front room and he kissed her a few times and got a little dizzy from it. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink.

  You could go home now, he told the mirror image. Tell her anything, like you got a headache, you got malaria, you’re really a Catholic priest or gay or both. Anything. Doesn’t matter what you say or if she believes you. You could go home.

  He looked into his own eyes in the mirror and knew it wasn’t true.

  Because he was stuck, he was committed, he was down for it. Had been from the moment he walked into the bar. No, longer than that. From the first rainy night when he walked home on Eighth Avenue. Or maybe before, maybe ever since Dooley’s insinuation had led him to change his route.

  And maybe it went back further than that. Maybe he was locked in from the jump, from the day they opened the gates and put him on the street. Hell, from the day he was born, even.

  “Paul?” “Just a minute,” he said.

  And he slipped into the kitchen. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought, and he started opening drawers, looking for the one where she kept the knives.

  Now Hold Still

  BY DAVID J. SCHOW