Three by Cain

by James M. Cain

  So in a couple of days we moved in. I found a Japanese couple that didn’t speak any English, Italian, or Spanish, and we had to wigwag, but there was no chance of their finding out too much. I was practicing Spanish morning, noon and night, so she and I would be able to talk in front of other people without using English, and I tried to speak it with an Italian accent, but I still wasn’t sure I was getting away with it. With the Japs, though, it was safe around the house.

  So then we breathed a little easier, and began to shake down into a routine. Daytime we’d lay around, mostly upstairs, in our bedroom. At night we’d walk down to the park and listen to the band. But we’d always sit well away from it, on a lonely bench. Then we’d come back, flit the mosquitoes, and go to bed. There was nothing else to do, even if we had thought it was safe to do it. Guatemala is the Japan of Central America. They’ve copied everything. They’ve got Mexican music, American movies, Scotch whisky, German delicatessens, Roman religion, and everything else imported you can think of. But they forgot to put anything of their own in, and what comes out is a place you could hardly tell from Glendale, California, on a bet. It’s clean, modern, prosperous, and dull. And the weather gives you plenty of chance to find out how dull it really is. We hit there in June, at the height of the rainy season. It’s not supposed to rain in Central America, by the books, but that’s wrong. It rains plenty, a cold, gray rain that sometimes keeps up for two days at a time. Then when the sun comes out it’s so sticky hot you can hardly breathe, and the mosquitoes start up. The air gets you down almost as bad as it does in Mexico. Guatemala City is nearly a mile up in the air, and at night that feeling of suffocation comes over you, so you think you’ll die if you don’t get something in your lungs you can breathe.

  Little by little, a change came over her. Mind you, from the time we left New York we hadn’t said one word about Winston, or what she did, or whether it was right or wrong, or anything about it. That was done, and we steered around it. We talked about the Japs, the mosquitoes, where Conners was by now, things like that, and so long as we jumped at every noise, we seemed to be nearer than we ever had been. But after that eased off, and we began to kid ourselves we were safe, she began moping to herself, and now and then I’d catch her looking at me. Then I noticed that another thing we never talked about was my singing. And then one night, just as we started downstairs to go out in the park, just mechanically I did a little turn, and in another second would have cut loose a high one. I saw this look of horror on her face, and choked it off. She listened, to see if the Japs had caught it. They seemed to be in the kitchen, so we went down. Then it came to me, the spot I was in. On the way down I hadn’t even thought about singing. But here, and any other place south of the Rio Grande, for that matter, my voice was just as familiar as bananas. My picture, in the lumberjack suit, was still plastered all over the Panamier show windows, Pablo Buñan had played the town not a month before, even the kids were whistling My Pal Babe. Unless I was going to send her to the chair, I couldn’t ever sing again.

  I tried not to think about it, and so long as I could read, or do something to get my mind off it, I wouldn’t. But you can’t read all the time, and in the afternoon I’d get to wishing she’d wake up from her siesta, so we could talk, or practice Spanish, and I could shake it off. Then I began to get this ache across the bridge of my nose. You see, it wasn’t that I was thinking about the fine music I couldn’t sing any more, or the muted song that was lost to the world, or anything like that. It was simpler than that, and worse. A voice is a physical thing, and if you’ve got one, it’s like any other physical thing. It’s in you, and it’s got to come out. The only thing I can compare it with is when you haven’t been with a woman for a long time, and you get so you think if you don’t find one soon, you’ll go insane. The bridge of the nose is where your voice focuses, where you get that little pull when you cut loose, and that was where I began to feel it. I’d talk, and read, and eat, and try to forget it, and it would go away, but then it would come back.

  Then I began to have these dreams. I’d be up there, and they’d be playing my cue, and it would be time for me to come in, and I’d open my mouth, and nothing would come out of it. I’d be dying to sing, and couldn’t. A murmur would go over the house, he’d rap the orchestra to attention, look at me, and start the cue again. Then I’d wake up. Then one night, just after she had gone over to her bed, something happened so we did talk about it. In Central America, they’ve got radios all over the place, and there were three in the block back of us, and one of them had been setting me nuts all day. It was getting London, and they don’t have any of that advertising hooey over there. The whole Barber of Seville had come over in the afternoon, with only a couple of small cuts, and at night they had played the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Beethoven symphonies. Then, around ten o’clock, a guy began to sing the serenade from Don Giovanni, the same thing I had sung for Conners at Acapulco, the same thing I had sung the night I came in big at the Metropolitan. He was pretty good. Then, at the end, he did the same messa di voce that I had done. I kind of laughed, in the dark. “… Well, he’s heard me sing it.”

  She didn’t say anything, and then I felt she was crying. I went over there. “What’s the matter?”

  “Hoaney, Hoaney, you leave me now. You go. We say goodbye.”

  “Well—what’s the big idea?”

  “You no know who that was? Who sing? Just now?”

  “No. Why?”

  “That was you.”

  She turned away from me then, and began to shake from her sobs, and I knew I had been listening to one of my own phonograph records, put on the air after the main program was over. “… Well? What of it?”

  But I must have sounded a little sick. She got up, snapped on the light, and began walking around the room. She was stark naked, the way she generally slept on hot nights, but she was no sculptor’s model now. She looked like an old woman, with her shoulders slumped down, her feet sliding along in a flat-footed Indian walk, her eyes set dead ahead, like two marbles, and her hair hanging straight over her face. When the sobs died off a little, she pulled out a bureau drawer, got out a gray rebozo, and pulled that over her shoulders. Then she started shuffling around again. If she had had a donkey beside her, it would have been any hag, from Mexicali to Tapachula. Then she began to talk “… So. Now you go? Now we say adiós”.

  “What the hell are you talking about? You think I’m going to walk out on you now?”

  “I kill these man, yes. For what he do to you, for what he do to me, I have to kill him. I know these thing at once, that night, when I hear of the inmigración, that I have to kill him. I ask you? No. Then what I do? Yes? What I do!”

  “Listen, for Christ’s sake—”

  “What I do? You tell me, what I do?”

  “Goddam if I know. Laughed at him, for one thing.”

  “I say goodbye. Yes, I come to you, say remember Juana, kiss you one time, adiós. Yes, I kill him, but then is goodbye. I know. I say so. You remember?”

  “I don’t know. Will you cut it out, and—”

  “Then you come to boat. I am weak. I love you much. But what I do then? What I say?”

  “Goodbye, I suppose. Is that all you know to say?”

  “Yes. Once more I say goodbye. The capitán, he know too, he tell you go. You no go. You come. Once more, I love you much, I am glad.… Now, once more. Three times, I tell you go. It is the end. I tell you, goodbye.”

  She didn’t look at me. She was shooting it at me with her eyes staring straight again, and her feet carrying her back and forth with that sliding, shuffling walk. I opened my mouth two or three times to stall some more, but couldn’t, looking at her. “Well, what are you going to do? Will you tell me that? Do you know?”

  “Yes. You go. You give me money, not much, but little bit. Then I work, get little job, maybe kitchen muchacha, nobody know me, look like all other muchacha, I get job, easy. Then I go to priest, confess my pecado—”

  �
�That’s what I’ve been waiting for. I knew that was coming. Now let me tell you something. You confess that pecado, and right there is where you lose.”

  “I no lose. I give money to church, they no turn me in. Then I have peace. Then some time I go back to Mexico.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You go. You sing. You sing for radio. I hear. I remember. You remember. Maybe. Remember little dumb muchacha—”

  “Listen, little dumb muchacha, that’s all swell, except for one thing. When we hooked up, we hooked up for good, and—”

  “Why you talk so? It is the end! Can you no see these thing? It is the end! You no go, what then? They take me back. Me only, they never find. You, yes. They take me back, and what they do to me? In Mexico, maybe nothing, unless he was politico. In New York, I know, you know. The soldados come, they put the pañuelo over the eyes, they take me to wall, they shoot. Why you do these things to me? You love me, yes. But it is the end!”

  I tried to argue, got up and tried to catch her, to make her quit that walking around. She slipped away from me. Then she flung herself down on her bed and lay there staring up at the ceiling. When I came to her she waved me away. From that time on she slept in her bed and I slept in mine, and nothing I could do would break her down.

  I didn’t leave her, I couldn’t leave her. It wasn’t only that I was insane about her. What was between us had completely reversed since we started out. In the beginning, I thought of her like she had said, as a little dumb muchacha that I was nuts about, that I loved to touch and sleep with and play with. But now I had found out that in all the main things of my life she was stronger than I was, and I had got so I had to be with her. It wouldn’t have done any good to leave her. I’d have been back as fast as a plane could carry me.

  For a week after that, we’d lie there in the afternoon, saying nothing, and then she began putting on her clothes and going out. I’d lie there, trying not to think about singing, praying for strength not to suck in a bellyful and cut it loose. Then it popped in my mind about the priests, and I got in a cold sweat that that was where she was going. So one day I followed her. But she went past the Cathedral, and then I got ashamed of myself and turned around and came back.

  I had to do something with myself, though, so when she went I began going to the baseball games. From that you can imagine how much there was to do in Guatemala, that I would go to the baseball game. They’ve got some kind of a league between Managua, Guatemala, San Salvador, and some other Central American towns, and they get as excited about it as they get in Chicago over a World Series, and yell at the ump, and all the rest of it. Buses run out there, but I walked. The fewer people that got a close look at me, the better I liked it. One day I found myself watching the pitcher on the San Salvador team. The papers gave his name as Barrios, but he must have been an American, or anyway have lived in the United States, from his motion. Most of those Indians handle a ball jerky, and fight it so they make more errors than you could believe. But this guy had the old Lefty Gomez motion, loose, easy, so his whole weight went in the pitch, and more smoke than all the rest of them had put together. I sat looking at him, taking in those motions, and then all of a sudden I felt my heart stop. Was it coming out in me again, this thing that had got me when I met Winston? Was that kid out there really doing things to me that had nothing to do with baseball? Was it having its effect, her putting me out of her bed?

  I got up and left. I know now it was just nerves, that when Winston died that chapter ended. But I didn’t then. I tried to put it out of my mind, and couldn’t. I didn’t go to the ball games any more, but then, after a couple of weeks, I got to thinking: Am I going to turn into the priest again? Am I going to give up everything else in this Christ-forsaken dump, and then lose my voice too? It began to be an obsession with me that I had to have a woman, that if I didn’t have a woman I was sunk.

  She didn’t go with me to hear the band play any more. She stayed home and went to bed. One night, when I went out, instead of heading for the park, I flagged a taxi. “La Locha.”

  “Sí, Señor, La Locha.”

  I had heard guys at the ball game talking about La Locha’s, but I didn’t know where it was. It turned out to be on Tenth Avenue, but the district was on a different system from in Mexico. There were regular houses, with red lights over the door, all according to Hoyle. I rang, and an Indian let me in. A whorehouse, I guess, is the same all over the world. There was a big room, with a phonograph on one side, a radio on the other, and an electric piano in the middle, with a stained-glass picture of Niagara Falls in the front, that lit up whenever somebody put in a nickel. The wallpaper had red roses all over it, and at one end was a bar. Back of the bar was an oil painting of a nude, and in the cabinet under it were stacks and stacks of long square cans. When a guy in Guatemala really wants to show the girls a good time, he blows them to canned asparagus.

  The Indian looked at me pretty funny, and after he went back, so did the woman at the bar. I thought at first it was the Italian way I was speaking Spanish, but then it seemed to be something about my hat. An army officer was at a little table, reading a newspaper. He had his hat on, and then I remembered and put mine on. I ordered cerveza, and three girls came in. They stood on the rail and began loving me up. Two of them were Indian, but one of them was white, and she looked the cleanest. I put my arm around her, and after the other two got their drinks, they went over with the officer. One of them turned on the radio, and the other one and the officer began to dance. My girl and I danced. By rights I guess she was fairly pretty. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or two, and even in the sweater and green dress she had on, you could see she had a pretty good shape. But she kept playing with my hand, and everything I’d say to her, she’d answer in a little high squeak of a voice that got on my nerves. I asked her what her name was. She said Maria.

  We had another dance, but God knows there was no point in keeping that up. I asked her if she wanted to go upstairs, and she was leading me out the door even before the tune was over.

  We went up, she took me in a room, and snapped on the light. It was just the same old whore’s bedroom, except for one thing. On the bureau was a signed photograph of Enzo Luchetti, an old bass I had sung with years before, in Florence. My heart skipped a beat. If he was in town, that meant I had to get out, and get out fast. I picked it up and asked her who it was. She said she didn’t know. Another girl had had the room before she came, a fine girl that had been in Europe, but she had got enferma and had to leave. I put it down and said it looked like an Italian. She asked if I wasn’t Italian. I said yes.

  There didn’t seem to be much to do, then, but get at it. She began dropping off her clothes. I began dropping off mine. She snapped off the light and we lay down on the bed. I didn’t want her, and yet I was excited, in some kind of a queer, unnatural way, because I knew I had to have her. It didn’t seem possible that anything could be over so quick and amount to so little. We lay there, and I tried to talk to her, but there wasn’t anything to talk to. Then we had another, and next thing I knew I was dressing. Ten quetzals. I gave her fifteen. She got awfully friendly then, but it was like having a poodle bitch trying to jump in your lap. It was only a little after ten when I got home, but Juana was asleep. I undressed in the dark, got into bed, and thought I would get some peace. Next thing, the conductor threw the stick on me, and I tried to sing, and the chorus stood around looking at me, and I began yelling, trying to tell them why I couldn’t. When I woke up, those yells were still echoing in my ears, and she was standing over me, shaking me.

  “Hoaney! What is it?”

  “Just a dream.”

  “So.”

  She went back to bed. Not only the bridge of my nose, but the whole front of my face was aching so it was two hours before I dropped off again.

  From then on I was like somebody threshing around in a fever, and the more I threshed the worse the fever got. I went around there every night, and when I was so sick of
Maria I couldn’t even look at her any more, I tried the Indian girls, and when I got sick of them I went in other places, and tried other Indian girls. Then I began picking girls off the street, and in cafés, and taking them in to cheap hotels off the park. They didn’t ask me to register and I didn’t volunteer. I paid the money, took them in, and around eleven o’clock left them there and went home. Then I went back to La Locha’s and started up with Maria again. The more I had of them the worse I wanted to sing. And all that time there was only one woman in the world that I really wanted, and that was Juana. But Juana had turned to ice. After that one little flash, when I woke her up with my nightmare, she went back to treating me like she just barely knew me. We spoke, talked about whatever had to be talked about, but whenever I tried to push it further than that, she didn’t even hear me.

  One night the Pagliacci cue began to play, and I was just about to step through the curtain and face that conductor again. But I was almost used to it by now, and woke up. I was about to drop off again, when a horrible realization came to me. I wasn’t home. I was in bed with Maria. I had been lying there listening to her squeak about how the rains would be over soon, and then the good weather would come, and must have gone to sleep. I was the star customer there by now, and she must have turned off the light and just let me alone. I jumped up, snapped on the light, and looked at my watch. It was two o’clock. I jumped into my clothes, left a twenty-quetzal note on the bureau, and ran downstairs. Things were just getting good down in the main room. The army, the judiciary, the coffee kingdom, and the banana empire were all on hand, the girls were stewed, the asparagus was going down in bunches, and the radio, the phonograph, and the electric piano were all going at once. I never stopped. A whole row of taxis were parked up and down the street outside. I jumped in one, went home. A light was on upstairs. I let myself in and started up there.