Pulling A Train

by Harlan Ellison

  There were more in the house. He was sure of that. But it didn’t matter now. He didn’t owe any allegiance here now that Demoiselle was dead. All the good turns that had been done were wiped away now. The slate was clean. She was dead, and he wasn’t about to buck the Syndicate for Auld Lang Syne.

  A gunman came through from the hall with Ginny, naked and wrapped in his grip as a protecting shield. She was half-conscious with terror, and there were finger marks across her huge breasts where the gunman had taken his time with her before the irregularity of the gunshots from the living room had brought him forth. He had expected something wrong, but not the scene that greeted his eyes. One companion ripped to shreds, pumping wetly onto the rug, and the other two dead, thrown in a corner like bags of dirty garbage.

  The pop of Deek’s silencer startled the gunman and only the moist redness that ran down over his face—where his right eye had been—convinced him that he had been shot. Ginny had been a poor shield. The gunman scrabbled at his shattered face and screeched like a goosed showgirl. Then a simon-stupid expression split what was left of his face and he died…standing there. He was leaning against Ginny, and she was too petrified to step out of the way.

  Deek clambered up from the floor, sweat rippling his vision. The girl was pasty-white from face to fanny. “Come on, moron,” Deek mumbled, grabbing her by the shoulder. As he jerked her toward himself, the body of the slain Syndicate man toppled forward, broke its nose as it crashed against the sharp edge of the undamaged coffee table, and sprawled onto the rug.

  “There’s two more of them…they…th-they’re up there k-killin’ everybo—”

  Deek cut her off with a disinterested shrug. “That’s their look-to, not mine. The ones left haven’t seen my kisser, Ginny, and I ain’t about to let ’em, either. I’m splitting. C’mon.”

  She was a drag at the end of his arm. “C’mon, willya, fer Chrissakes!”

  “I can’t,” she moaned. “They’re up there killing everybody and—”

  “Forget it, willya!” he snarled. She looked again at the massed corpses in the living room, and her eyes took on a deathly-green cast. She stared at Deek as though he were something inhuman, some sort of public executioner. “I’m—I’m n-naked,” she objected.

  “Tell it to the Legion of Decency,” he brushed away her remark. “Lady, there’s a couple of hoods up there who’d as soon kill me as spit on me…so rumble your tail or I’ll leave you here for them to shoot.”

  She whined again, and he dragged her into the kitchen, through the door and across the airshaft, carefully having closed the door behind them. Then into the basement where he found a pair of too-big overalls and a filthy T-shirt which she donned, trembling.

  In a few moments they were out on the next block, and walking fast. Instead of cooling down, things were getting hotter by the moment. Deek Cullen was becoming scared. Worse than scared: trapped.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bowery Passion

  IT WAS A BOWERY LOFT. Deek had known the cat who had lived there until the building had been condemned, and though most of the front of the pad had gone when the wreckers had sent their half-ton smashing ball through the wall, it was dark and warm and best of all, private.

  Ginny sat slumped against the wall, smoking. The bright orange tip of her butt winking harder then softer as she dragged deeply. It was that kind of night. When the sky bit off in little flakey chunks and what you thought meant a helluva lot. It was that kind of night, and Deek was feeling tired, even watching the girl.

  Sometimes it all seemed so damned useless. He was an I’ve-been-around-too-much-maybe eighteen years old, and what he wanted was something so big and so hungry sometimes he felt it wasn’t worth the trouble. Just lie down and pull the dirt over and get cool, very very cool. Like sleep.

  “I’m cold,” she said from across the room.

  “Eat crap,” he murmured back at her. Not because he meant it, or because he was angry, but because he felt very much out of it, very hung up on being hung up, and she was a big-teat nothing with no brains and no moxie and nothing but her sense between her legs. So he said it.

  “I’m cold…”

  He leaped to his feet. “You’re no more goddam cold than I am, you stupid slut, so shut your big mouth or I’ll dump you out through that wall. Now go the hell to sleep.” He sank back against the empty wall, and scanned the night sky through the rent in the masonry.

  It was a flake, the whole damn scene. A lousy flake.

  Forget all the jazz that came before. Forget all the stinkhole years in the railroad flats and the smell of sour liquor from somebody else. Forget all that. Take it just from the chick in the alley and the two of them in the car and that broad from the Settlement House, and the rumble in Demoiselle’s pad. (That made his stomach heave up, all the blood, and the sight of Demoiselle’s thigh…knowing it was going cold, all that death, Jeezus!) Just take it that far. And how did he get there?

  Why me, he kept thinking, why me? And the answer came, as clear as a waterfall into a pool, Because you stink.

  That was it. The cosmic someone who gibbered and capered and set the scales the way he pleased, that transuranic imbecile with the constipated intellect, he had decided Deek Cullen was going to have a rough row to hoe, so Deek Cullen was pulling tricks from his ears but suddenly, just to stay alive.

  Oh, God, it was piling up again.

  It was starting all over again.

  The running. The loneliness. The hungering for hundreds of intangibles. Not the things he could feel and touch and see but the blasted, hurting intangibles that gnawed gut-wise and never left him alone. That was what could kill you. Outright. Walking down the street and clutching the temples because there was hurt here, hurt and terror and no escaping.

  The girl said something from across the room, and he cursed her viciously. Death to the infidels! Philistines all!

  Deek Cullen lay back, laid his head back against the cool soon-to-be-demolished wall, and wept very quietly. Partially because it was release from the terrible tension and terror of the night—a night in which he had killed four men without hardly knowing he was doing it—and partially because he was what he was. And it wasn’t enough. Not for him. Not for anyone.

  He felt something soft on his cheek and looked up. The girl had left her position across the room and come to him on silent feet. She leaned over him, her long, dark hair falling over her face and caressing his cheek.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked politely; there was concern in her tone.

  Deek turned away. Nobody should see a man crying. “NOTHING!” he shouted at the wall. “Not a damn thing, so scram. Lemme alone.”

  “You poor kid,” Ginny said, slipping down beside him. He could feel the heat of her through her overalls. The clothing smelled rank from the basement where he had stolen them.

  “Don’t give me that goddam kid routine,” he drew back a hand to belt her. “I’m eighteen. I’m eighteen with the biggest—oh, hell, get away from me…” He turned back to the wall once again.

  Ginny leaned over him again and her hand went to his ear. “Cut it,” Deek said, as she played with his ear, running her finger around the inside shell, tickling him. But his voice wasn’t convincing.

  Abruptly, he wrenched away from the wall and grabbed her by her dark mat of hair, pulling her face down and crushing his mouth against hers. Her lips parted and his tongue entered, searching. She growled—a small animal—and slid down into his lap. His tongue searched her mouth, every warm crevice, every hidden recess, a small counterpart of larger desires. His hands slid under her hair, locked at the base of her skull, flattened out around her ears. Her eyes opened momentarily, then slid shut dreamily as he nipped at her lip. Suddenly he drove his tongue to the roof of her mouth and she thrust her hands reflexively down between his legs.

  Deek jumped as though speared with a live wire, and rolled her off his lap onto the dirty floor. He lay beside her for a moment, then slowly withdrew his hand a
nd ran it down her neck till he had it locked in the fabric of the T-shirt. He felt the neck band of it tight against her throat, held there by the tautness of her encumbered breasts. With a vicious jerk he ripped the flimsy covering from her. Her breasts exposed, she lay there on her back returning his kisses, and now guiding his hand onto her massive breasts. As he touched her warm flesh it felt as if he might burst into flame! The nipple stood up rigidly with her animal passion. He ran his finger around the hard, almost square-topped protuberance, feeling small puckers of goose flesh rise with each touch. He continued massaging the breast, making wider and wider circles with his talented, frenzied hand, but always returning to the nipple to stir her more deeply. Ginny was going insane with hunger for him.

  Her hands came up his back and clawed through cloth into flesh. He could feel her raking him, but it only heightened his passion. The overalls were large on her and he tried rolling them down off her hips, but even though she arched up to allow him freedom, they would not pass her hips. He unzipped them and slid them down off her long legs in one fluid movement. He sat back on his haunches for a long moment staring at her naked body, one knee bent up, offering delicious shadows in the dark triangle of her thighs. He laid his hands flat on her legs and slid them up between, coming down on her as he did so. His hands were quick and then moist and, once, she even gasped as he penetrated her. Then he worked, stirring her with all the innate deviousness of an untrained youth. Soon she was rising off the floor, her back and belly covered with sweat, clutching him, pleading for his final torture.

  She helped him off with his pants, and when he lay on her again she did not wait for his own time, but grasped him and delivered him to the seat of warmth and they thrashed terribly and higher and higher till she arched up off the filthy floor completely, carrying him with her, and buried her teeth in his shoulder, to stifle the shriek.

  Then they fell back, and Deek worked a few minutes longer till he, too, was wracked by an apex of sensation.

  It was like the jack-hammer biting out bits of a street, gnashing at the heated air with all the frenzy of machinery tormented by humans who didn’t know how far it would go before running amok.

  He plunged down once again, heavier, just to go as far as he could, and gripped her by the buttocks, pressing in and her in and himself in and then it was over, as quickly as the crushing of a dusty moth.

  Done.

  He withdrew and rolled off her. She gasped at the brutality of the loss of inner warmth, pulsing. “You don’t have ta’—”

  “Shuddup,” he murmured, and found his pants with his hands in the darkness. When he was dressed he snaked a cigarette free of the crumpled pack in his pants pocket, and lit one. The girl was a pale smear against the many-hued darkness of the corner.

  “You’re a real strange character,” she said, softly. He drew in his belly with momentary annoyance, then caught himself before he sliced her with words.

  Why was he bugged?

  This girl had only done him favors. So why be annoyed at her? No reason. But all the reasons of all the people who—like this girl—had done their part to screw up his life. Moms and Dad and the fuzz and the two girls in the car, and Demoiselle who had known he couldn’t resist the broads and had hired him for a whorehouse…all of them. All of the dirty little people with a touch of rot about them who feasted on the sight of a good kid with a little off-direction getting shafted in life.

  He could not understand the thoughts that ran through him. But he knew he was unhappy, and dirty, and lonely and worst of all…and had he known enough to say it, God help him…damned.

  It was a long night, and he smoked enough to yellow the inside of his middle and index fingers. When morning came streaking the Eastern sky, like fingers of murky urine in a dirty grey pool, he felt worse than before. His eyes were grainy and his skin felt moistly clammy.

  The girl lay where she had been taken, her naked belly staring roundly up at him, and the curling dark mass of her womanhood beckoning.

  Deek ground out the last cigarette under his heel and decided to split that scene before he got hooked on it, hooked on her, like the needle-noses down on Junkie Row. He found his way down the rickety, bombed-out stairs, and hit the street wishing he had a ticket to Anywhere.

  He counted the change in his pockets, and it added up to a pair of greasy eggs on toast at The Hammer.

  He made his way along the Bowery, back toward the Village and a little anonymity.

  The Hammer was a diner, run by a Puerto Rican with bad breath, who had been thrown out of the Army because he could only understand (he said) two gringo phrases: “Chow down!” and “Line up for pay!” The food was bad, but the price was right. Deek ate his eggs without looking at them; it was enough to have to down the swill without seeing all the yellow-grey blotches of old bacon fat dried on the slimy hemispherical surfaces of the eggs.

  Once more street-borne, he stared at the thinning charcoal horizon line of buildings against the sky. New York was a good place, for all of it. For all the taint and all the angry, all the need and the hungry…it was still the best of all. Still the one scene that could be spooked without cutting a guy down to stupid talk and crab grass. Even New Rochelle, so near to the Apple, or the Bronx, or even the square end of Brooklyn with the tract houses butt-into-butt on one another—they were the sort of scene that wigged a guy.

  But New York…

  He took the IRT back to the turf. Someone was after him, for sure: no question; but dogged or not, it was all he knew, and with the shank in his dresser drawer, and with trusties around to help out in a tough bind, it was the one place to settle.

  He cursed himself for having dodged out. He knew he should have stayed close and dug the scene with the chicks in that car. But he’d run scared. Now he was back.

  He came up out of the subway kiosk and caught the early morning sun straight in the eyes. Brown eyes that were good eyes, and eyes that fronted a brain with something perking. It was his scene. A tough one, because it had to be a tough one because it was a tough one and like that. But it was his, all his, and he was the loner that walked through it.

  While the kikes banded in the Long Knifes and the Puertos ran together as The Blooded Imperials and the Eye-talians stuck together as the Little Hands, he walked among them solo. It was a rough go, but he was tall, tall man in a world of little men, and he had picked up scars to prove he could do it alone.

  (The child who saw Deek Cullen leave the subway kiosk was ten years old with small specks of snot clinging to his under-nose. He wore U.S. Keds and a pair of jeans that were spotted with yellow paint. His hair was uncut, unkempt and unclean. His name was Cockroach in the turf, and he had been talked to by a girl without a name who had said, “If you see Deek Cullen, you come tell me and it’s worth half a buck.” At 8¢ a Popsicle, half a buck meant hours of cool mouth and sweet insides. The child named Cockroach saw Deek Cullen leave the subway kiosk, and he ran down one of the side streets with a number for a name…ran down the street to find a girl to tell he had seen Deek Cullen. Come out of a subway station kiosk and gimme my half buck.)

  Deek Cullen struck off across the street of cobblestones—left from another Manhattan era—and made for his pad. It had been all kinds of water under the dam since he had last seen that pad, and Deek Cullen, who had killed maybe in a rumble, now knew he had killed for real.

  And he liked the idea.

  He liked the feel of the thing, though not the sight of it. But he had done it, and from now on, he was something new. It was another Deek Cullen who came back from the runaway.

  His room was so small if they had screwed handles on it, they could have buried him in it. The room consisted of a brass bedstead that sounded like the Anvil Chorus when he had a broad in it, a dresser with drawers that stuck, a sink permanently encrusted with black scud around its inner surface, and a heavy cardboard wardrobe that held the meager store of his clothing. A threadbare throw rug covered a miniscule area of the bare floorboards.
r />   It was cheap to live there.

  It served the purpose.

  Who needs the Taj Mahal when it’s a drag to live at all?

  Deek Cullen slipped off his shoes without unlacing them, and considered going down the hall to the bathroom. The mental image of the water closet convinced him he didn’t need to go right now. First a little sleep.

  Beyond the tiny room the sounds of the loft building melted familiar. It was an old building, with once grand apartments cut up by an immigrant landlord into moneymaking smaller wall-holes. It was early morning; just after everyone had cut for work who had to cut for work, and the old ladies who lived off the pension checks still out doing whatever it was old pensioned ladies did in the early day. He could tell he was next to alone in the building. It had that feel.

  Abruptly he realized that he wanted the knife, and wanted it badly. He slid off the bed and went to the dresser. Under a pair of heavy wool gym socks he found the Italian stiletto and took it back to the rack with him.

  He laid down and looked at the closed knife for a long time. At the mottled white plastic that banded the knife on two sides. At the gleaming white of the steel edge closed into its trough. At the little button that hung in so cleverly waiting to be pressed. At the intricacy of the lock at the back of the blade.

  Then he held it up and away from his body, with his hand lengthwise down the closed edge of the body-form, and let his thumb settle idly, lightly, just caressing the button.

  Then a press…

  Then snick! and it came up swift as a cougar striking. The sunlight muggily streaming through the dirty lone window caught the blade and flashed its presence on the colorless wall in a bright smear of reflection. Deek felt more secure, more at ease. It had been foolish to ever go off and leave the knife, but when you’re scared…

  He heard footsteps in the corridor.