Shabby Street

by Orrie Hitt

  I had two more drinks.

  Everybody went home at five but I waited until five-thirty before I went out there and opened the cash box with the key Connors had left me. I took two hundred dollars out of my wallet and dropped the bills inside. Then I locked the box and put the key in my pocket.

  Things were working out pretty good.

  CHAPTER X

  Seduction

  I GOT OUT to Willow Lake around seven. The Connors cabin was the only place where there were lights. The other shacks were closed up, some just until hunting season — that would be the later part of October and most of November — and the rest until the next spring.

  I parked the car in the drive and walked through the shadows to the porch. She pulled the door open and the light from a big blaze in the fireplace fell outside.

  “You’re on time, Johnny.”

  “Never find me late for steak.”

  Or any kind of meat, I thought, looking at her. She had on a black dress, cut real low, and she had a tiny watch pinned over her left breast. I knew what time it was, all right. It was time to stop looking.

  “I didn’t fix anything yet,” she said. “Come on in.”

  It was hot in there and I took my coat off right away.

  “Drink?”

  I hung my coat over a chair.

  “Sure.”

  She brought me beer because she knew I liked beer. She had a shot of something or other and a glass of plain water. She spilled some of the drink across her hand and I got the impression that she’d been hitting it up just a little.

  “Loneliest, stinking damned place in the world,” she said.

  I knew, then, that she was feeling a trifle high. She walked across the room, weaving carelessly, and slumped down on the davenport.

  “First time I ever heard you say anything like that,” I told her.

  “First time Mother hasn’t been around to guard her precious daughter.”

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  “They wanted me to go with them.” She held up the drink, staring at it. “Isn’t that a laugh? I should go with them so I could get to bed at ten every night and watch the sun come up in the morning.”

  I didn’t say anything. I looked around the fireplace but I couldn’t see where she’d started to fix anything.

  “Another drink, Johnny?”

  “Okay.”

  I poured them this time, mixing hers with the water and keeping it as weak as possible. I didn’t want her getting gassed and crying on my shoulder half the night.

  “I like it better here, anyway,” she said.

  “I thought you were moving in to town tomorrow.”

  “I might change my mind.”

  I sat down in a chair, facing her. She set the drink on the floor and leaned back, closing her eyes. Her knees parted for a second and I stopped watching her face.

  “There’s something I wanted to tell you,” she said slowly. “I’m glad you could come out.”

  “All right.”

  She sat up again, straightening her skirt. Then she leaned forward with the light from the fire slashing her across the face She looked like a second edition of her old lady.

  “I haven’t seen you since your promotion,” she said. “Except the day you brought me back from New York and I forgot about it then. Congratulations, Johnny!”

  “Thanks.”

  “For one solid year you’re going to be a great big wheel.”

  “I don’t get it, Beverly.”

  “That’s how long they’ll be gone.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I figured on six months.”

  She smiled and picked up her drink.

  “You ought to feel better,” she said, across the glass, “now that you know.”

  I finished the beer but it might as well have been water. My mind was going around like a squirrel on a wheel. She’d always acted all right before but now I could feel her sticking the needle in and probing around. Maybe it was because the old man liked me and he kept talking to her about it and she got sore at him for thinking some other people were alive in the world.

  “Mr. Collins was out here this afternoon,” she said. She looked at me straight, her eyes black and deep. “You’re a louse, Johnny.”

  “He’s a crook.”

  “Everybody’s entitled to a mistake.”

  “Not that kind.”

  She finished her drink in silence. I kept thinking of all of the things I could say to her and all the things I shouldn’t say. I just kept my mouth shut.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she admitted, standing up. The black dress pulled in tight around her body, rolling up into a tiny bunch above her hips. “Well, what’s the use of arguing about it?”

  “I don’t know. Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

  I followed her movements as she went over and stood in front of the fireplace.

  “No,” she said. “That isn’t what I wanted to tell you, Johnny.”

  “What, then?”

  The flames roared through a dry piece of chestnut wood and a couple of embers shot out onto the stone hearth.

  “You’re a pretty big guy in my father’s book, Johnny.”

  “He’s given me a nice break,” I said.

  She turned around with the fire to her back. I could see the shadows of her legs against the red coals. Her throat was long and white and her face looked flushed with something other than the drinks or the heat in the room.

  “Don’t hurt him,” she said. “Don’t ever do that, Johnny.”

  I knew how it must have been for her that afternoon with Moss coming around and her thinking about things. Maybe she’d taken a couple of fast ones so she could think better, only they’d mixed her up all the more.

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” I said. “You can put that one in mothballs, Beverly.”

  I went across and stood in front of her, my eyes not telling her anything about what was going on inside. She was just a young kid who had her nose in somebody else’s business.

  “Your dad won’t know his agency when he gets back,” I told her. If I had my way nobody else would know it either.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have drunk anything and I shouldn’t have talked that way to you. I had no reason to say it, Johnny.”

  Maybe she didn’t know what it was, but she had a reason all right. She was upper class and I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs looking up at her. We both knew it — only I knew what it meant and she didn’t. It meant that she distrusted me because she didn’t understand why I should be there. It meant that I had to keep her in line or she’d cut the horses away from my wagon and I’d find myself going downhill in reverse.

  “What happened to the steak?”

  She was real close and I could see the points of her breasts jut up and out as she breathed. Her stomach was flat, hardly any at all, and her hips were rounded and full. She was ninety-nine percent woman. The other one percent belonged to her head.

  “There isn’t any steak.”

  “You’re a hell of a hostess.”

  “I guess I just wanted to talk.”

  “We might just as well keep on drinking while we do that.”

  She swung away and the bottom of her dress swirled up around her knees. She started to pour the drinks but then she stopped and stood staring out of the window.

  “God, it’s a lovely night!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not cold, is it?”

  “No.”

  “We ought to go for a swim.”

  “What!”

  She faced me, laughing. My eyes moved away from her face and down over her body.

  “The water ought to be warm.”

  “I didn’t bring my suit,” I said.

  “You could wear your shorts. It isn’t as though it were daylight.”

  I really didn’t want to go in, but the water might sober her up and I didn’t feel like squabbling with her.

  “Ok
ay,” I said.

  She walked toward the door.

  “I haven’t got any suit either,” she said. “So you know what I’m going to do.”

  We went outside and down the path, in the direction of the lake. I held her arm and she leaned up close once or twice but I didn’t do anything about it.

  “I’ll meet you out at the raft,” she said.

  She cut through the shadows along the shoreline and pretty soon she was out of sight. I could hear her walking through the dry leaves on the sand but after a while that stopped.

  I took off my clothes and put them in a pile. I took off the shorts, too. I couldn’t see any sense getting them wet and sitting around half the night while they dried in front of the fireplace. Besides, it was dark as the inside of a room out there and what she couldn’t see wouldn’t scare her.

  I walked down to the edge of the water and stepped in. I didn’t have any trouble getting wet. I’d stepped off into six feet of water.

  I came up, swearing, and she laughed at me out of the darkness. I pushed the hair out of my eyes and started cutting through the water in the direction of the raft. I went past it once and I had to come back, but before she got into the water I was sitting up there on the planks, waiting for her.

  “Where are you, Johnny?”

  “Right here.”

  “My, it’s dark!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep calling me so I can find it.”

  I began to whistle and she swam toward me. She had nice clean strokes and she hardly made any noise at all. She was beside the raft almost before I knew it.

  “Help me up.”

  I stood up and reached down for her hands. It was a good thing that it was dark because if she had seen me then she’d have drowned herself right there in the middle of the lake.

  “Air’s cold,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  We sat there, a short distance apart, listening to the sounds of the woods and the lake. From a distant ridge a fox barked sharp and clear, pushing a rabbit along fast. An owl hooted and over by the feeder brook, that wound down from the hills, a beaver hooked his long, pointed teeth into some green wood.

  “Funny how you hear things so clear at night,” I said. “I remember in the army how they used to give us demonstrations — eripes, you could hear a stick snap a mile off.”

  The raft dipped slightly and I knew she was moving away from me, to the other side.

  “You’re a heel,” she said quietly. “Or you wouldn’t have let me come out here like this.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Like I am, with just a — well, with what I have on.”

  I dropped my legs over the side of the raft and let my feet paddle around in the water. The water was a lot warmer than the air and I stopped shivering.

  “It was your idea,” I reminded her. “You invited me out here for dinner and then you wanted to go swimming.”

  “I’d been drinking,” she said. “You know that.”

  Something cold and stiff moved up along my spine. She was sober now and she was twisting it up so that it looked all wrong. The haze was gone from her mind and she was thinking clear, real clear, about how she’d never done anything like this before and what her mother and father would think if they knew. It scared me. It scared me for sure. All she had to do was pass them the word that I’d got her lit and the next thing she knew she was out there on the raft alone with me and naked. I was pretty certain I could get away with plenty, but that was one time up that I knew I’d be called out on strikes.

  I sat there thinking about her, cursing her, and wishing I’d gone to bed with Janet or got drunk or done something else. I had myself sitting right in the middle of a ripe melon patch, almost ready for picking, and now I had to go and pull a stunt like this.

  How dumb can one man get?

  “I didn’t mean to do anything wrong,” I said. “You ought to know that, Beverly.”

  “It seems so — awful,’ she said. “Sitting here like this. I — I wouldn’t even do it with a bunch of girls.”

  She was a nice kid and she didn’t know what it was all about and she had me in a spot. But I hadn’t come up from Clarke Street for nothing, I hadn’t gotten this far without knowing when to take a chance. She’d rolled out the barrel and she had me laying across it. I had to do something and I had to do it fast. And I knew what I was going to do.

  I pulled my feet up out of the water and slid across the raft toward her. I didn’t stop until I was right up close, until she was a dull blurr and the smell of her wet body was all around.

  “I wish you wouldn’t cry,” I said.

  “I’m not crying, Johnny.”

  “Then stop thinking of things that’ll make you cry. There isn’t anything wrong.”

  “Please!”

  I moved a little closer.

  “Maybe I’m the wrong kind of a guy for you,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking this way to you. Hell, the way I had to work, I’m lucky I finished high school. I’m not smart — not smart the way you are. I don’t even know what kind of a fork to use when I get out to eat. When they say come formal I don’t know whether to wear a tux or a raincoat.”

  I kept on talking and I kept moving in on her. I told her how much fun she was and how I liked her so much and why I hadn’t told her before. I said that we were almost alike, or we wouldn’t be there like this, and that we’d had a lot of fun and we hadn’t ought to spoil it now.

  “I like you, too,” she murmured.

  “You don’t have to fight it, baby.”

  I worked in about the agency and how I liked her father and all the good things I wanted to do for him. All the time I kept getting nearer. Until I could feel the heat of her body. Until I could hear her deep breathing. Until I touched her smooth skin and the rockets went off.

  “Johnny! Johnny!”

  I pulled her head around and mashed my mouth down on her lips. At first she tried to push me off but I kept boring in, going after her, and pretty soon her lips parted and her tongue came out, stabbing at me.

  She moaned a little as I took my mouth away and buried my face in her hair, against her neck, kissing her. I brought my left hand up and touched one of her breasts. She trembled and clung to me.

  “Baby,” I said. “Baby, I love you.”

  At a time like that, who could be sure? She got her hands in my hair and pushed my head around so that I had to kiss her again.

  “We shouldn’t, Johnny.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I kissed her again and my hand moved lower. She tried to hold my wrist, but she touched my bare skin, way down, and she took her hand away. She stiffened for an instant and then she let out a sigh and pressed her body against mine.

  “You knew all the time, didn’t you?”

  “Not until now.”

  “Neither did I.”

  She was awkward and I hurt her and she cried a lot. My knees burned against the hard planks, and the night and her flesh closed in. She called me a bastard and said that she loved me and she bit me a couple of times. All I could think about was what this was going to cost me — some day, some time — only I couldn’t stop it, I had to go on, because this was the only way for me.

  She still had her arms around me when we lost our balance and fell off the raft into the lake.

  CHAPTER XI

  Office Party

  THE PARTY got going real good around four. You start something like that right after lunch and everybody’s full of food and they feel out of place and they don’t drink much. But after a while somebody starts telling a joke, a clean joke, and they all listen. Five jokes later you can say anything that comes into your head.

  “We oughta have these things more often,” Sammy Grick told me. “Only next time let me bring my own girl. With her, I know how far I can go. If she’d been here, I’d have had her in one of those closets an hour ago.”

  I laughed and slap
ped Sammy on the back. He tried so damned hard to make you think he was important and that the women were taking their dresses off all over the place for him.

  “Hey, Johnny.”

  I swung around and saw Julie coming toward me. We were having the party in the back office, with all the desks and the other junk pushed up against the walls out of the way. She came across the open space, her heels high and clicking, her body hugged tight in a yellow dress. The material was so thin that I could see the dark shadows of the nipples on her breasts trying to beat their way through.

  “Telephone, Johnny.”

  Abe Wulderstein was half drunk and he grabbed her and started dancing. She gave a mock sign of defeat and tried to go along with him. I gave her a big wink and stepped into my office and closed the door.

  Janet was on the other end and she was hotter than a shotgun lying in the sun.

  “You stop calling me at the restaurant,” she said. “Every time I go in there they’ve got messages for me.”

  “Well, there isn’t any other place to leave them.”

  “You know where I live, Johnny.”

  I did. But since that night on the raft I’d been busier than a hound dog on the track of two rabbits.

  “Besides, I’ve got to give up work,” she said. “I won’t be working after Sunday.”

  The blood in my veins froze into a long icicle.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nerves,” she said. “The doctor says I’m sort of run down.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Her laugh came along the wire, breaking up into little pieces.

  “You don’t have to worry about that, Johnny. The doctor thinks I couldn’t get that way if I wanted to.”

  My blood thawed out in a hurry.

  “Well, I’ll get around to see you,” I said. “You keep the old light lit and I’ll throw stones against your window some night.”