Wild Town

by Jim Thompson

  Rosie…

  Slowly, his eyes lifted up to the mezzanine, seeking her, then shifted to the huge square-faced clock at the head of the lobby.

  Eleven-thirty. She’d be, or should be, up on the room floors at this time.

  Bugs pushed himself up from his chair. He strolled over to the elevator bank and ascended to the twelfth floor. He was very calm, casual. Maybe, he guessed, the full implications of his predicament hadn’t had time to register on him. Or it could be that he found it hard to feel anything much toward Rosie but hurt and irritation. At any rate, he had seldom been calmer, more sure of himself, in his life.

  She had admitted herself to his room with her maid’s key, and was now busily at work. Bugs got some cigarettes and a clean handkerchief out of his dresser drawer, said that, yes, he had been getting out of the room early the last couple of nights.

  “Figured I was getting stale, y’know, just eating and sleeping and working. I’m going to try getting out a lot more, from now on.”

  “Well, now, I think you should, Mr. McKenna,” she nodded seriously. “This night work…well, of course, I’m very happy in my job. But I do find myself getting into a rut.”

  It was an opening, she’d handed it to him herself. Casually, Bugs moved into it. “You get that way, too, huh? Well, look, I’m driving over to Westex City the day after tomorrow. Pulling out right after work. How about coming along with me?”

  “With you?” She gave a start. “But—but—”

  “Fellow I’ve got to see a few miles the other side of Westex. Owns a lot of property in that section. I’m having him rush me some money tomorrow, so I’ll have to go over and fix up a note or something.”

  “But…well, that’s awfully nice of you to ask me, Mr. McKenna. But I—”

  “I could drop you off there in town, and pick you up in a couple of hours. Don’t suppose it would be very exciting for you; just the ride and lunch. But—”

  “Mr. McKenna,” she said. “Mr. McKenna…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t think I’d better. There isn’t as much prejudice here in the Southwest as there is in the South, but I am a Negro, and—”

  “So what?” Bugs shrugged. “You don’t look like one. You won’t be wearing a sign on your back.”

  Her eyes flashed; her lips came together in a proudly angry line. Because even for Bugs McKenna, the statement set a new high or low for tactlessness. And, yet, maybe it was that tactlessness—the apparently complete lack of guile—that turned the trick.

  She stared at him a moment, eyes narrowed, lips compressed. Bugs looked back at her, the very picture of innocence personified. And, suddenly, she was laughing, bubbling over with delicious amusement.

  “All right, Mr. McKenna.” She dabbed at her eyes. “I’d like to go very much, if you’re sure you want me. And as you say, I won’t have a sign on my back.”

  “Now, I didn’t mean that like it sounded,” Bugs said, sheepishly. “I—”

  “I know. I know how you mean it.…The day after tomorrow, you said?”

  “That’s right. I’ve got an appointment here in town tomorrow. Anyway, I have to be here to receive the money this fellow’s sending me.”

  It went over perfectly, it seemed to Bugs. She left and he locked the door and sat down at his writing desk.

  He took a half-dozen sheets of stationery from the drawer, tore them into crude oblongs. He stuffed them into a lettersize envelope, and stamped and addressed it. Later that night, he mailed it at a box outside of the hotel.

  The night passed in the usual manner of his nights. Retiring at the end of his shift, he followed the routine of the previous two mornings. It wouldn’t work indefinitely, he guessed. Joyce was a very determined dame, and she was playing for big stakes. So, sooner or later, she’d start pressing. She’d ignore that sign on his door, or insist that the operators put her calls through.

  But…first things first. He’d take care of her when the time came. Right now, there were other things to be taken care of.

  He arose at five o’clock, was on his way in thirty minutes. There were a couple of call-slips in his box—and he leaned over the desk to make sure they were call-slips. Leaving them in the box, he went out the doors to the street.

  He bought a bouquet of flowers, the best that five dollars would buy. Also, after a little mental calculation, he bought a one-pound box of candy. Carrying these modest burdens, he knocked on Amy Standish’s door at five minutes of six.

  He knocked. He knocked and knocked. He noticed for the first time that all the shades were drawn, that there was no sound of activity in the house. He hesitated, uneasily, wondering if he could possibly have got mixed up on the invitation; whether it had been for tonight or some other night.

  And the door cracked open an inch, and Amy spoke to him through the crevice. “Mac”—her voice sounded muffled, choked up. “What are you—? Didn’t you get my message?”

  “Message? Oh,” Bugs said, remembering. “Well, I guess there was one in my box. But—”

  “I’m sorry. We’ll have to make it some other night, Mac.”

  “But look, what’s the matter?” Bugs protested. “What’s wrong? Did I do something that—”

  “No, it’s nothing you did. I—I can’t talk about it now, Mac. Now, if you’ll excuse me…please, Mac…”

  Bugs persisted stubbornly. Hell, if she was sick or something, he wanted to know about it. Suddenly her voice cracked, rose hysterically.

  “I said to go on! Leave me alone! I’ve told you and told you that I c-can’t talk, and if you had any sense you’d—you’d.…”

  The door slammed in his face. Bugs glowered at it furiously. Then, he flung the candy and flowers to the porch and stamped back to the car.

  He had a very bad time with himself for the next few hours. Disappointment mingled with anger, and anger with hurt. And…it was a very bad time. So bad that it burned itself out before much of the night had elapsed, and he could reason and be reasonable.

  Of course, there was no excuse for what Amy had done. Couldn’t be any that he could think of. Still, she had doubtless thought she had a reason for standing him up, even if she didn’t have. And no matter how sore he was—or had been—he couldn’t see her pulling such stunts for the hell of it. To see, that is, how much she could get away with. She’d been badly upset, too. She hadn’t liked it any better than he did.

  He became reasonably placid again, reasonably at peace with himself. By the end of his shift, he had firmly decided to forgive Amy…provided, naturally, that she was properly contrite, and that she satisfactorily explained her actions.

  …He picked up Rosalie Vara a couple blocks from the hotel. He had previously purchased a couple of containers of coffee and some sweet rolls, and they ate breakfast as they rode. Neither did much talking. Rosalie seemed very tired from her night’s work, and Bugs was reluctant to talk. In view of what he had to do—and what she was doing to him—even maintaining a decent silence was an almost intolerable strain.

  Westex City was a city in fact as well as name. Not a large one—the population was under fifty thousand—but one that was prosperous and important, since it was the field headquarters for various oil companies.

  It was less than sixty miles from Ragtown. But what with the narrow highway and the heavy traffic, it was almost eleven when Bugs and Rosalie arrived. He made arrangements for meeting her later—entirely unnecessary arrangements, he thought grimly—and asked where she would like to be let out. She said politely that any place in the business district would be fine, so he dropped her off seven or eight blocks from the post office.

  He drove on, as though he were heading out of town. Then, after a block or so, he whipped around a corner and sped back toward the business section.

  He found a suitable parking place. A side-street spot which was near his destination and hers. He left the car in it, hastened up to the main thoroughfare, and entered a restaurant.

  It was directly acros
s from the post office. Seated a few stools down the counter, he could see both entrances of the building.

  If he had been less intent on those entrances, if say, he had taken a good look around the restaurant, he might have seen—

  But, no, probably he wouldn’t have. The place was expensive, pretentious, dimly lit in the sometime fashion of such places. So, even if he had looked around, it is doubtful that he would have seen the two people in the distant rear booth.

  But he could be seen. Not by Amy Standish, since her back was to the entrance. But Lou Ford, seated on the opposite bench, could see him perfectly.

  He gave no sign of the fact to Amy, made no mention of Bugs’s presence. He went on with his meal, drawling idly, grinning at the girl’s bitter or dispirited rejoinders. But he was watching interestedly, nothing Bugs’s watchfulness, the course of his intent stare. And so he saw what Bugs saw. And when Bugs jumped up and left the restaurant, he also arose.

  Bugs had given her a couple of minutes inside the post office. He reached the entrance just as she was coming out of it, shoving something into her purse. And her eyes widened, and she stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Why, Mr. McKenna,” she faltered. “What…I thought that—”

  “I know what you thought!” Bugs gripped her by the arm. “Come on!”

  “But—” Her trembling smile fell apart. She held back fearfully. “B-but—what have I done? Why are you—?”

  “I’m warning you, Rosie!” Bugs gritted. “I don’t want to hurt you, but if you don’t move I’ll move you. I’ll rip that arm right off you!”

  She held back a moment longer, started to say something else. Then, all the spirit seemed to go out of her, all the quiet pride and self-assurance. And she went with him meekly.

  He hustled her back to his car. He shoved her into it roughly, crowded in at her side. She was crying a little now, pressing her fingers against her eyes to hold back the tears.

  Bugs took her purse, and yanked it open.…

  12

  The place was a few miles outside of Ragtown; there are places like it near almost every town and city. Areas densely overgown with trees, cluttered with shrubs and bushes, laced with a winding maze of footpaths and car tracks. They are isolated, yet easily accessible. They have various names, all carrying the same slyly lewd connotation.

  …The two “girls”—women of about thirty—had draped their clothes over some convenient tree limbs. Now, stripped to their slips, they shivered in the chilly West Texas morning.

  “Wonder what’s keeping those guys?” grumbled the girl called Peg. “Why the hell couldn’t they undress here, like we did?”

  “Now, honey,” murmured her companion, Gladys. “Real swell fellas like that, you can’t ask a lot of questions. You don’t find guys every day that pop for twenty bucks.”

  “Yeah. I guess…You s’pose our purses are all right in the car, Glad?”

  “Why not? The fellas are lockin’ it up tight, aren’t they?”

  “Well, I wish I’d brought my coat with me, anyhow. I paid five hundred bucks for that hunk of fur, and—”

  “And what did I pay for mine, hon? Exactly the same, wasn’t it? We both started saving for ’em at the same time. Now, you know we wouldn’t want to drag those nice coats around these bushes.”

  “But I’m cold, darn it! I’m absolutely freezing!”

  “Well, now, you won’t be very long, hon. The fellas are bound to—”

  The sudden roar of a motor drowned out her sentence. A lessening roar as a car was slammed into gear and driven away. The girls looked at each other dumbfounded. They broke into curses, scampered a few futile steps in pursuit. Then, weeping, they fell into one another’s arms.

  Ed and Ted Gusick were stripping the purses as they drove. Slowing down, they tossed them into the bushes, then gathered speed again. And then, as they neared the highway, Ted suddenly slammed on the brakes.

  A man had stumbled out of the underbrush, tumbled directly in the path of their car. He lurched to his feet again—a man in shape only—a ragged, bedraggled, stinking bundle of filth. Cursing frightfully, he wobbled toward them.

  “Friggers! Caught you, didn’t I? Up’n the goddamned floor, an’ no friggin’ around about it!”

  “Listen, Mr. Westbrook…” Ted and Ed eased out of the car, watching him cautiously. “It’s me—you know, Ted Gusick. And here’s Ed, right here with me. Now—”

  “No ’scuses!” Westbrook bellowed. “Makes no difference who y’are. Either y’cut the stuff’r—I’ll show you, by God!”

  He came at them in a rush. Ted tripped him nimbly. Ed caught him under the arms, and lowered him gently to the ground.

  He began to cry, sobbing out curses as the tears streamed down his bristled, filth-smeared face. Ed looked worriedly at his brother.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “What are we gonna do with him, Ted?”

  “Do with him? Why, we’re gonna take him with us, you jerk.”

  “But—what then? I mean, what are we gonna do?”

  Ted didn’t have the slightest idea. Being at a loss for one—and and in typical Gusick fashion—he responded with a kind of self-righteous abuse.

  “I suppose you want to leave him here, you rotten son-of-a-bitch! Just walk off and leave a fine man like Mr. Westbrook. Well, I always thought you were pretty goddamned low-down, and now by God, I know it!”

  He swung irritably, landing a painful punch in Ed’s ribs. Ed swung, with identical results. These formalities dispensed with, they loaded Westbrook into their car, made him peaceful with a gently expert tap on the button and drove off.

  They lived in the old-family section of town, in an excellent apartment, which, before its transformation, had been the loft of the family barn. The building was on an alley, a good two hundred feet removed from the house. The lower floor was boarded up, and the only entrance to their apartment was from the alley. Briefly, they could just about do as they pleased, come and go as they pleased, without being heard or observed. And lovers of privacy that they were—for reasons which need not be gone into—they were delighted to pay the boom-town rental of three hundred dollars a month.

  They got Westbrook up the stairs unseen and installed him in the master bedroom. They bathed him, fed him, waited on and catered to him; and they continued to do so from that day on.

  They got him through the d.t.’s with drugs pilfered from the hotel doctor. They doled out drinks to him, trying to taper him off the binge. They were partially successful in this, getting him down to a mere few pints a day. But even this relatively small amount, combined with Westbrook’s totally hopeless outlook, was enough to keep him sodden. He had nothing to hang on to. Nothing to go forward or back to. So he succumbed to the booze, accepted its deadening and deadly embrace without resistance.

  Ted and Ed pleaded with him. They declared—as they believed—that he was the best damned hotel man in the country; one of the few real hotel men left—and if he’d just pull himself together…

  Things were going to pot at the Hanlon. A new manager had lasted just one day, and now old Mike was trying to swing the job himself, with the help of the chief clerk. And, brother, were they bitching up the joint! He’d be tickled to death to get Mr. Westbrook back, if he’d just get off the goddammed whiz. So—so how about it, huh, Mr. Westbrook. Get right off it, huh, sir, and everything’ll be swell.

  Westbrook wept babyishly, charging them with prevarication and boobishness. Then, getting a grip on himself, he lashed them with ear-purpling profanity. He would do something, all right! He would keep them under the closest observation, see to it that they did not cut his throat and steal his clothes, as, indubitably, they planned on doing.

  He would see to it that they conducted themselves properly while in his presence; that never in any way did they give any outward manifestation of their pimpish, thieving, shiftless, impertinent and generally bastardly souls. They would tell him no more of their goddamned lies about the hotel—and anything
they said would be a goddamned lie. He had put up with them as long as he intended to, and from now on, by God, they would toe the mark, or he personally would kick the crap out of them.

  “And I can do it, get me?”—this with a belligerently red-eyed glare. “You think I can’t, just give me a little more trouble.”

  “Yes, sir. Certainly, sir, Mr. Westbrook.”

  “All right, then. Open ’nother bottle, and be quick about it!”

  They obeyed. They continued to. In their feudal minds, the fact that a liege-lord had lost his sanity did not lose him the right to reign. He was still the boss. He was authority. He was a symbol of something which, far more than the socially enlightened, the Ted and Ed Gusicks find necessary to existence.

  During the day, they took turns about waiting on him. Before departing for work at night, they set out whiskey, food, and cigarettes, everything he might need or want, or think he needed or wanted. And never again did they mention the hotel in his presence. He had told them not to. Moreover, in his increasingly sodden state, it had become impossible to talk to him.

  One night, or, rather, very early one morning, Westbrook awakened with a feeling of having been reborn. His head was entirely clear. There was none of the hideous shaking, the gut-wracking nausea, which normally accompanied his awakenings.

  Actually, he was in a state of euphoria. Nature was giving him one last unhampered whirl at life before closing in for the kill. But the sense of optimism and well-being seemed entirely valid, and while it lasted he dumped every bottle of his liquor into the toilet.

  He had scarcely done so when he was plunged back into the abyss: to a far deeper depth than he had previously penetrated. A convulsion wracked him, doubled him with terror and pain. Invisible hands gripped his head, squeezing tighter and tighter and still tighter, until his brain squirmed and screamed in agony.