Pulling A Train

by Harlan Ellison

  The music was getting wilder, and she started getting the same way. Her hands came up, and pulled the full bob of her red hair up, till it spilled in a rich cloud over her face. Then her hands slid sinuously down her body, the fingers hooked, till they contacted the bottom of her sweater.

  A few writhes and pulls, and she had the sweater off, and the black lace of her bra only one-third concealed the mounds of rose-pink loveliness they contained. “Ch…Ch…Ch…” I found my lips chattering, my eyes wide and burning.

  She shhhed me to silence with a finger at her full wet lips.

  I should mention that I shhh easily.

  In a moment the bra was off. And here’s the beauty of her: the breasts stayed where they were. They didn’t spread into a pool of fat and drop to quiver around her belly-button. They were firm and round and tip-tilted—still pointing toward the juncture of wall and ceiling.

  It took forever for the skirt to unzip and fall in a tweed circle at her feet. The panties matched the bra.

  They didn’t conceal a helluva lot, either.

  Damn this family! I thought.

  The music swelled to a crescendo, and the panties started rolling. Down and down she rolled them, till they were a thin bandeau around her hips.

  My body was aching for her. I saw my arms extended in front of me, but so help me I couldn’t feel them move!

  As the record whirled to a beating finish, she had the pants off, and the dark, matted triangle between the lustrous white of her thighs was revealed. Then she was in my arms, writhing, screaming, scratching at my back with ten little daggers that left ten red furrows, pleading for the same unchained thing her mother had pleaded for!

  I never could refuse a woman…

  The next week went the same way. The daylight hours were spent in mortal combat with Dorothy and her hungry limbs. The darkling hours were tossed away in gay madness with Valerie and her fantastic body.

  I was so exhausted, I wanted to snore during my classes. My “deeply concerned” professors warned me I was going to flunk my ass into limbo. The coach wanted to put me on carrot juice. I went from 180 to 155 in no time. I was stopped on campus and asked why my eyeballs were hanging down onto my cheeks. I couldn’t answer.

  Finally, I decided to stay away from them both—for good.

  It worked fine for a few days. I was even beginning to feel a little healthier.

  I’d gone without seeing either one for almost a week, when Dot called.

  I was sleeping (I had been doing a lot of that lately) on a couch in the living room of the fraternity house, when a pledge came over and wakened me. “Woman named Candle on the phone for you, Wendell,” he said.

  “Which Candle?” I asked warily.

  “Didn’t say,” he answered.

  “Tell her I’m flying the first ship to the Moon and they can’t locate me.” I started to lie back down.

  “She says something about being preg…” he began, but I was off and running before he’d gotten the last syllable out.

  “Hello?” I quavered, into the mouthpiece.

  “Hello, Wendell, honey,” I heard Dot’s melting butter tones. “I haven’t seen you all week. Where’ve you been?”

  I lied some, and begged some, and swore some, but she threatened to go to the Dean unless I drove out there right away.

  I finally said okay, and went upstairs to change into something that wouldn’t get ruined if it was ripped in a hurry.

  Before I had a chance to leave, I got another call.

  “Hello, Wen?” said Val’s voice—strained.

  “Yeah,” I tried to tough it out.

  “I’m pregnant, Wendell,” she sobbed.

  I almost fainted. Good God, NO! Not two of them! No, no, no, no, no, no, no…

  I told her I’d see her. She said she was busy right now, but that she’d meet me at her house later that night, after her mother had gone to work. She signed off saying, “I’ll have to introduce you to my Mom, Wendell. You’ll just love her!”

  All the way to the Candle home, I made sure my mind was blank. That ain’t hard for you, Wendell boy, I thought.

  I pulled up in front of the house and ran up the walk. I pressed the buzzer, and almost immediately the door opened.

  By Valerie.

  I wanted to fold into the sidewalk, but she licked her lips and said, “Come on in, Wen, honey.”

  I must have looked like a somnambulist, because she steered me to a chair, directly facing the sofa.

  Dot sat on the sofa.

  “B…b…but you two don’t know each other! You…you…can’t know…” I stumbled into incoherent jabbering, drooling and frothing.

  “Oh, pish,” said Val, waving my objection away with one slim hand. “We’ve known all along. The only reason we say anything now is that you seem to be drifting away.”

  “And we can’t let that happen,” Dot added, smiling at Val in a motherly manner. “You’re the first fellow we’ve had around in six years that can keep up with us!”

  They both smiled at me charmingly.

  I wanted to die.

  “I won’t do it!” I said emphatically. “We’re through!”

  “Oh, no we’re not,” Dot said.

  “If you say we’re quits, I go to the Dean,” she continued. “I’ll tell him you compromised my daughter. That’ll get you kicked out of the university good and proper.”

  “And,” Val added, smiling sweetly, “I’ll call your father in New York and tell him you compromised me—and my mother, and the chances are that’ll get you disinherited. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  They kept right on smiling—damn them!

  “How much do you want?” I asked.

  “Everything,” they said together.

  “Ev…ev…ev…?” I couldn’t get it out.

  “We just want you, doll-face,” Dot said. “That’s all.”

  My heart went flippity-flop and settled into my tummy.

  “Well, I suppose I could make out a schedule…different days for each of you. How would that be?” It was a last-ditch hope. I knew if I didn’t work it that way, I’d be a 97-pound scrawny in another three months.

  They laughed at me and came over, kissing me. “That’ll be fine,” Val said, starting to undress.

  “Yes, just dandy,” Dot agreed, dropping her quickly-unzipped dress.

  They stood in front of me, nude. Waiting. It would have made any man pant with eagerness. Me? It only made me want to faint.

  “Well, let’s go,” I said, starting to get up. I got two steps toward the bedroom, and Dot’s voice stopped me.

  “Oh!” she said.

  I turned around and she had an “Oh, damn it!” look on her face. “There’s one thing I forgot,” she said.

  “Yeah? What’s that?” I asked, worried.

  “You may have to revise that schedule a bit.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “My kid sister Cherry is coming to live with us next week. Oh, you’ll like her, I’m sure. She’s got red hair like both of us…”

  A Girl Named Poison

  (as by “Jay Solo”)

  THEY WERE waiting for him when he left the bowling alley. Three of them. And the girl. The one with the breasts pointed heavenward like a pair of land-to-air missiles. She was the one who had flirted with him shamelessly in the cocktail lounge adjacent to the lanes.

  They were waiting for him, and he went to her like a tot waddling to its pablum. She was standing just inside the circle of light thrown by the streetlamp, at the mouth of a service street leading to the rear of the bowling lanes.

  He should have been tipped by her brazen attitude. Nobody, but nobody comes on that way for free; and Harry had sworn, eight years before, after a particularly unpleasant episode with a seven-dollar and fifty-cent hooker, that he would never pay for it again. But he’d had two beers too many, and she was a helluva looking chick, and when he came out between the neon panels of the bowling alley, and she called to him, he moved t
oward her without caring, wondering or thinking.

  She had a wistful little smile on her lips, and it reminded him of a girl he’d known one summer, who had come to stay with an older sister who worked in the same office where he endlessly sorted invoices. The face was different, but it was the same smile, her smile, and that, more than the lust, or the need or anything about it, made him helpless to his reactions. Her hair was a pale, frosty blond, and though the eyes were shadowed by the night and the angle of streetlight gleam, he remembered them from the cocktail lounge as being Dresden blue.

  Tilted onto one hip, she stood waiting for him, and as he moved to her, there seemed no reason to speak; so he took her in his arms, and she suddenly went cold and hard and alien to his need for her.

  Before he could pull his head back to fathom what had happened to her warmth, one of the three heavies grabbed him by his hair and pulled him into the alley.

  It was dark in there, and for a full half minute he could see nothing but the bombshell-red pain flashes of fists exploding against his mouth, his cheeks, the arched bones over his eyes. It was no fight. The first punch caught him flush on the jaw and sent him toppling skittering bumbling backward into the second heavy, who let out a grunt of air and kicked Harry in the groin. He went down to one knee, holding himself, and the third heavy grabbed him by both ears, double-timed a step and brought up his knee into Harry’s mouth. The Roman candles popped sputtered wailed and exploded, and the top of his skull went far away. He tried to rise, but there was blood on his face and on his hands, and he kept slipping, and two of the heavies held him while the third worked him over effortlessly, methodically, ruthlessly.

  He was long gone into the half-world of a gray-out when he heard the girl saying, “Okay, that’s fine. Leave something moving. Take his wallet and his watch and anything else he hasn’t got nailed down.”

  Then, hands were moving over him, scuttling like crabs, and pulling free of his shirt pocket the white envelope with the two hundred and fifty dollars in it. The money he was going to use to pay the medical bills. And his Helbros watch with the lovely slow sweep second hand. And his key-chain, and his wallet, and all his change, and even his sport jacket, which was ripped from skidding into the brick wall of the alley.

  There was a moment of returning consciousness, in which he tried to grab onto them, murmuring bloody nothings between his torn lips. He could see it very clearly, somehow—and in his mind it would permanently burn there—perhaps it was the ghostly glow of the streetlight; the beautiful girl, with her pale blond hair swaying smoothly, took three timid little steps to him, locked her fists together, and swung her arms as though they were a battleax. The piledriver caught him low in the throat and he was paralyzed with a pain that made all the rest seem transitory. His breath stopped in his throat, his mouth swelled to twice its size trying to find air, and a shock of ghastly numbing pain sailed freely down his body. The scream was all in his head; and they let go of his shoulders and biceps, and he fell flat-out, face-forward to the concrete. He rolled slightly, and only that saved his nose from breaking, from sending bone splinters into his brain, from killing him right there.

  He rolled and lay there.

  And she drew back a foot and kicked him as hard as she could in the rib cage. There was a tiny crackling sound in the still alley as her foot met his flesh, and she whispered just low enough to be heard by the night wind, “Dirty old man!”

  Harry faded faded vanished in a swamp of pain and torment, with the thought bubbling in him, as the blood bubbled from his mouth: Old man? But I’m only twenty-seven…

  It didn’t matter. A moot point. His mind, a part of it that was not screaming and clutching itself in anguish, heard them strolling jauntily away; and then his throat started to work again, and he realized he was deeper in pain than he had ever been before, even in Korea, and he slid all the way into unconsciousness.

  It was the day before Thanksgiving.

  And that is how modern fairy tales begin.

  Harry Treet left the hospital three weeks later. He walked with a decided limp of the left leg, and his rib cage was still laced and bound up like a Gibson girl in her corsets. His right eye was covered with a patch, and there was an ugly shaved circle on his head where they had worked on the hole left by the shoe of one of the heavies. All told, one hundred and sixteen stitches in his body, but neat; very neat.

  The first thing he did was check with the bartender at the alley. Never saw her before. One thing was certain: she wasn’t jailbait. A year or two over the line, but no longer dirty-innocent jailbait. He’d told the police he hadn’t seen who had done it, and in a way, he wasn’t lying. But he didn’t want their help. He was going to find them himself. The three heavies and the frosty blond gamine.

  He took to hanging around the neighborhood. It wasn’t his style. He had always been a solitary man, even during the hellish days in Korea; and after the hospital it had seemed even more necessary to be alone. All alone. But now he was moved by only one hunger—to find that girl. To do to her what she had done to him; to turn back the evil she had dealt him when he needed love; to restore himself to solitary loneliness by retrieving that moment of exposure, when he had opened himself as he swore he would never do.

  She had taken a bit of his need, and turned it against him. Now he was going to find her and make her pay for it. He wasn’t certain just how far he would go with her, but he knew she was in trouble. As for the three heavies, they were as good as down the hole.

  He thought he saw her one afternoon in a grocery, a little Puerto Rican bodega, and he sprinted through traffic as best he could with the game leg; but when he pushed through the doors of the store, he saw at once it was an older woman with grey hair, close enough to her frosty blond to be mistaken from a distance. He turned and left, spending the rest of the day slumped on a park bench, smoking. They had told him not to smoke, but he didn’t give a damn.

  The urgency to find her had blown itself all out of proportion. He could not understand it in terms of hate. He only knew she was his mission, from now on.

  And then, on the Sunday following his mistake, Harry Treet saw the girl. This time, for real. It was her. She was walking toward Prospect Park with a tall, broad-shouldered young man. Harry could not tell, but he seemed to be one of the three heavies. He followed them, at a distance.

  The girl did not seem to be involved with the man, because he tried to take her hand at one point, and she shook it off, moving apart from him a few inches. They continued walking toward the Park.

  Harry dropped back and hobble-hopped across the street, turning down an alley and coming out on the other side, parallel to them, but one street over. He raced as best he could, with his leg in such crummy shape, till he came to the Park. He slipped across the Avenue, and into the Park, and took up a position midway between the street where they were walking and the street he had come down.

  There they were. He watched as they looked both ways to catch the flow of traffic. Then they jumped, almost as one, as native New Yorkers have learned to do, into the whizzing maelstrom of heavy traffic, standing absolutely motionless like hounds on point, as the tons of hurtling metal spun past them, then darting into another clear space, standing, darting and finally gaining the opposite side.

  They walked on farther, toward Harry, where he stood concealed behind the thick bole of a tree. He watched, and as they came abreast of him, he could hear her saying, “Candy, I told ya, I’m not gonna do it. Andy made me do it the other couple times, and I did it ’cause I’m his deb, but you ain’t nothin’ to me, and I will not do it, so f’get it...”

  The young man hauled her to a stop, a few feet past Harry, who had slid around the bole of the tree to continue watching, but remain concealed. Now Harry felt his jaw muscles tightening as the young man, Candy, dragged the girl back to him. He pulled her up close, wrenching her arm up in its socket till she was on tip-toe.

  “Lissen, you dumb little bitch, I don’t give a shit how much y
ou don’t wanna do it; and I don’t give a damn about Andy, neither. He’s the Vice-Prez of the club all right, I know that, but I need some bread, too, and the best way t’get it is to hustle some yo-yo the way you’n Andy got it worked out.”

  “Well, I won’t, so let go of me! Candy! Let…go…of…me…!” And she kicked him. It was a solid whack against his shin, and he fell back, but still holding onto her. Then she jacked her knee up into his crotch and he let go hurriedly.

  She turned and ran.

  Right into Harry Treet, who stepped out from behind the tree, cocked back his right, and took her high on the point of the jaw as she raced toward him. The sound of it was like a thick twig cracking over someone’s knee, and the girl went down in a tidy flurry of thighs and petticoats.

  Candy was just getting to his feet, his face ashen, when Harry took ten quick steps to him and bolo-punched him full in the stomach. Candy, who had been one of the heavies in the alley that night, was concrete in the stomach muscles. He woooshed air and settled into a “U” at the force of the impact, but in a second he was back, and offering his jaw for Harry’s left. Harry brought it up from just above the knees, and took him flush along the left side. It skittered up Candy’s face, whanged off his eye-socket ridge, and sent him backward into the grass.

  He struggled to get erect, and Harry did a peculiar hop-skip to him, and with his good right leg, kicked Candy as hard as he could, in the throat.

  Candy fell back, arms wide as though he were singing an aria from I Pagliacci. His eyes rolled up, glazed, and then the eyelids fluttered closed, and he went to the nice land of soft pink-and-white bunny-rabbit dreams.

  Harry—breathing raggedly from his taped ribs and the strain of exertion—stumbled back to the girl, and grabbed her by the frosty blond ponytail.

  Unceremoniously, he dragged her to her feet. She came back to consciousness in fits and starts, and when she came fully awake, her hair pulling her up tight like a topknot, and saw Harry, and began to cry.