Cry Hard, Cry Fast

by John D. MacDonald

  “I’d think a place like this would get knocked off.”

  “Knocked off?”

  “Held up. You know. Robbers.”

  “Geez, honey, it’s such a crummy little place.”

  “Well, that’s the kind they pick. You know. Crazy kids.”

  “Honey, let’s sleep for a while. Come on, Stan. Let’s take a nap, huh?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, if I owned it, I’d have some protection.”

  “Aren’t you sleepy a bit, hon? You could take a nap, but you’d have to be out of here before it’s light.”

  “I’m not sleepy,” he snarled.

  “Well, you don’t have to get snotty about it.” She yawned. “I shouldn’t have ought to let you come in here anyhow.”

  “I guess I just feel like talking. I didn’t mean to get nasty.”

  She put her arm around him, patted his shoulder. “That’s okay, darlin’. I’ll talk if you want to talk. What should we talk about?”

  “I was wondering if your boss ever got held up.”

  “Oh, him! He’d fight for his life to save a dime. He keeps some kind of gun in the drawer under the cash register.”

  “Take it home with him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He filed that fact away. It glowed in his mind. Her hand crept across his bare chest. He lay on his back with his hands behind his head. She giggled and said, “Daddy, you should have let me sleep some. Now I’m getting all gay again.”

  He forced himself to turn toward her and enfold her in his arms. Her body was moistly hot and her hair smelled of short order grease.

  Later he asked, casually, “On account of you live right here and he lives down the road, do you open up in the morning?”

  “Wha?”

  He shook her soft shoulder. “Hey, do you have to open up in the morning?”

  “Up till now. Not tomorrow, hon. Remember? I never open up this crummy joint again.”

  “You’ll have to give him back his key.”

  “Wha?”

  “His key, damn it. Where’s his key?”

  “Gee, beer makes me sleepy. It’s in my purse.”

  He waited in the cabin, beside her, until the sound of her heavy breathing began to fill the enclosed space. He looked at her. Pale moonlight shone on a shadowed eye, a breast as white and heavy as lard. When he was certain her sleep was deep, he sat up and found his shoes, stood up and put on his clothing. He took her purse over to the window and found the key. The spring on the screen door tingled as he opened the door. He waited, listening to her breathing.

  He tried the key in the back door of the restaurant. It turned easily in the lock. He went inside. The kitchen was small and it smelled bad, smelled of water-damp boards that rotted under linoleum, smelled of food scraps that decayed in out-of-the-way corners, smelled of the cold acid suds of the dishwater. A partition divided the kitchen from the eating area. There was a single swinging door with a round porthole in it. The dim glow of the night light came through the portal, making an orange highlight on the square white corner of the old refrigerator. Frazier pressed his fingertips against the door, opened it a crack and listened for traffic. The highway was silent. He moved into the restaurant proper, moved along behind the counter. The night light was a single orange bulb over the cash register. A refrigeration compressor started in the kitchen, startling him for a moment.

  Frazier felt alert and alive. His fingertips tingled. His body felt hard and quick. His breathing was shallow with excitement. He moved closer to the cash register. He heard the hard onrushing song of a fast car. He crouched behind the counter, fingertips against the worn duckboards. The car hammered a fast hole through the night, dragging small whirlwinds behind it. Frazier stood up and found the drawer under the cash register. It was a wooden drawer, shallow, locked. He felt the underside of the drawer, felt the give of quarter-inch plywood. He knelt, listened to the silence, drove his fist up against the underside of the drawer. The wood splintered. He listened to the silence again. Two more cars went by. He got his fingertips in the split and gently pulled the wood apart. A gun in a leather holster slid down into his hand. He pulled the gap wider, reached in and felt a small box. He knew by the feel that it was ammunition. He removed the box, took the gun from the holster, slid the holster back up into the drawer and pressed the splintered bottom back into place. The gun was a stubby, short-barreled revolver. He felt the barrel opening with his finger. He decided it was a .38, a better gun than he had planned on. He had expected a .32 automatic. He stood up and put the weapon in one side pocket of his trousers, the box of ammunition in the other. He had to duck once more as a truck labored by, heading toward the dawn. He went back through the kitchen, let himself out and locked the door. He took the key back to the girl’s cabin. He put it in her purse. When he pushed the door open the spring made that noisy sound again. “Whozzat?”

  “Stan, honey. I’m going back to my place. It’s nearly light.”

  “Oh. We really going today, darlin’?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Mmmm. That’s good. That’s awful good.” He heard her contented breathing. He went back to his own place, shut himself in the tiny primitive bathroom and looked the gun over. It was a Colt Detective Special, battered, ugly, ancient and deadly. He sighted it. It fit his hand well. The cylinder was fully loaded, the hammer resting on a live round. There were nineteen rounds in the box. He dropped the rounds, loose, into his left jacket pocket, tore the cardboard box to small pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

  He took off his clothes, piled them in the corner, the weapon on top, and stepped into the cheap tin shower. The girl had made him feel soiled.

  She had gotten off work at eleven. They had sat on the steps of her cabin, her cabin lights out, with the two six-packs of beer and the opener.

  He had talked about the trip as a business proposition. “I’ve got a few hundred bucks. I can get Miranda out of hock and we can drive out there together. You say this Joey has a job lined up for you. Okay. So we keep track of what the trip costs and you pay me back out of what you earn out there. It’s like a loan.”

  Her reluctance was only token. She clinked her can of beer against his and said, “Stan, we’re in business. I can’t wait to see his face when I tell him I’m through.”

  “Let’s figure on getting out of here tomorrow morning, Donna.”

  “So why not? I can pack in ten minutes.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “Las Vegas, here we come.”

  He had leaned back with his elbow against the door sill. He ran the backs of his fingers up and down her bare arm. She giggled and moved away and said, “Remember? A business deal, Stan.”

  He had persisted. It had taken all of ten minutes before he had his arms around her, lips on hers, and she was drawing great shuddering breaths. And perhaps another twenty minutes before they had fumbled their way into the dark cabin, groping at each other, falling onto the lumpy bed.

  In the act of love he felt apart from her, hovering over her, high, cruel, cold and remote, despising her and what happened to his body. It had ever been that way with women. It seemed, always, a defilement of his “apartness,” a compromise of his cold need to walk alone. He looked down upon her induced anguish with contempt, feeling that his own response was weakness. Yet this was a thing to be done, a thing to bind her to him in stupid unquestioning faith and loyalty, because her greatest use would come if he could make her believe, without question, that black was white and up was down.

  Now he scrubbed his body vigorously, and turned the water cold to rinse away the suds. He dried himself, picked up the gun, turned out the light and found his bed in the darkness,

  He wedged the gun between springs and mattress. He thought about killing her. Maybe she would be the one. The others had been legal, authorized. He thought of how it would be. Take a back road into the hills. He’d aim at her belly and watch her face when he pulled the trigger. He smiled at the d
ark ceiling.

  The dream wrenched Jamison awake. The blue car was rolling like a tarpon and he was flying through the air.… He came awake trembling, his pajamas dank with cold sweat. He got up and went into the bathroom, took the pajamas off in the darkness and toweled his trembling body. It took a long time for his heart to slow down. He turned on the lights to find fresh pajamas. Later he sat in darkness on the edge of the bed, arms braced on his knees, cigarette glowing.

  He thought of Kathryn Aller. Her room would be dark. No, there would probably be a night light. The pale glow of it would be against her still face. The mind, deep in blackness, would not know of the room or the light. Beneath the stillness of her face the mind struggled for its survival, struggled to heal its hurts. The body, uninjured, rested and waited for command. Heart pulsed, organs performed their blind functions, glands secreted, muscles lay slack and waited. Deep in the mind all the bright memories would wait, unused, like cards in a drawer.

  Deep in the earth all of Gina’s memories were cards in a drawer that was locked forever. All of her was stilled.

  At last he knew he could sleep again.

  Joyce Conklin was awakened by the sounds Paul was making in his sleep. They had both fallen asleep in her bed. He made thin whinnying sounds in his throat that would have been ludicrous had they not been so indicative of fright. His legs twitched as though, in his lost dream, he ran in endless terror.

  She put her hand against his cheek. “It’s all right, darling. Everything is all right.”

  He tried to start up, but she pressed him gently back. “You’re safe, dear. Everything is all right.”

  He seemed to stop breathing for a moment, gave a long trembling sigh and turned on his other side, pinning her arm. His breathing quieted and he nestled down into sleep. She smiled at his back and whispered once more, “Yes, everything is all right.”

  She felt an infinite tenderness toward this strange and complicated human being who was, so miraculously, her husband. She had sensed his torments, understood intuitively the way he had tried to hurt himself—and her. Now, strangely, he had been brought back to her out of the dark places of his soul. She was deeply grateful for that.

  Yet, watching him in the darkness, she knew in her heart that this would not last. He might be back with her for a year, or two, or three. Then again his malformed emotions would drive him into new areas of pain. For now she would let him believe that she believed that this regained closeness would be permanent. She would make as much of it as she could, as though storing away warmth against the inevitable winter. He would go away again and, with luck, would come back another time.

  This, then, was her destiny, her cyclical love. She knew she would not trade it. She knew it was what she wanted. Let others have the placid plateaus of uneventful contentment. Her love might descend often into pain and darkness, but when it arose again into the light, it reached higher and farther than others could know.

  She touched her lips lightly to his sleeping back, then gingerly wormed her arm out from under him. She slipped out of the bed and covered him over, giving the blanket little pats.

  She stood slim and nude in the darkness between the beds, looking down at the darkness that was his head on the pillow. Night breeze from the open window made a coolness around her flanks. She slipped into his bed, curling and hugging herself for the warmth that came quickly. She lay with her eyes wide open, watching him as he slept.

  The ache of hand and wrist brought Suzie reluctantly up out of her dreams. She had been sitting in Barney’s Merc with Devlin Jamison. It was night and Barney stood out by the hood of the Merc, ruining it. He kept tearing strips off the hood, just like it was tinfoil, and Mr. Jamison had his arm around her and they were both laughing at Barney.

  Every time she awakened there was the same little shock of realizing where she was and remembering what had happened. This time it was a little different because she wanted her mother. She felt lonesome in the night and she wanted her mother dreadfully. Just the touch of her. Just to know she was there. Suzie cried a little. She did not cry long. She reached for a Kleenex on the night stand and blew her nose heartily.

  She thought of the second visit from Devlin Jamison and the second visit from Uncle Bernie. She wished she knew what they had said to each other. They certainly had it all figured out. Just what she would do practically every single minute for the next five years. It had sounded like an awful stupid way to spend your life—going to school.

  But Devlin—she felt a warm tingling when she thought of him by his first name—had looked at her so solemnly and said, “I want you to promise, Susan, that you’ll do your very best.”

  Like a dope she had promised. Then Uncle Bernie had confirmed what was going to happen and said that Devlin was paying for it. It seemed such a darn pointless thing when…

  She suddenly held her breath and stared wide-eyed at the shadow pattern of the night light. Gosh, that could be it! What would an important man like Mr. Jamison want with a seventeen-year-old high school kid? But if he took that same kid and waited for five years, waited until she had every advantage and could be a good hostess, and companion and… wife.

  Brother! Sure, that was why he’d been so insistent and made her promise. He couldn’t tell her why, because he was afraid it would hurt her feelings.

  Her cheeks felt hot and a good warmth suffused her. She closed her eyes and, moving her lips, made a solemn promise. “Devlin, I promise that I will do just what you want me to do. I’ll study hard and learn all the right things to do. I’ll learn how to talk the way you do, and try to have good taste, and I’ll never do anything like with Barney, and after five years I’ll be just what you want me to be.” She tried to think of a suitable seal to finish off the promise, and then whispered, “So help me God.” She bit her lip and, after a while added, “And I’ll get slimmer in the hips.”

  The man sat in the dark third-floor office on a chair pulled close to the open window. His forearm rested on the window sill, and his chin was on his wrist. He could see down into the fenced rear yard of the Ace Garage. The street light shone on the cars in the rear yard, over a dozen of them. The man could see the ruined Cadillac, the gutted Olds. He put the night glasses to his eyes and the rear of the Olds looked close enough to touch. He could see where the streetlight touched a narrow segment of the two tires in the rear luggage compartment. He put the glasses down on the sill and yawned, scrubbed at his eyes. It was a hell of a long night. There had been lots of long nights and there would be many more to come. Years of them. Funny damn way to use a law degree, he thought.

  chapter 17

  AT eight o’clock Frazier walked over to her cabin and peered in at her through the screen. She lay on her stomach with her face in the pillow, snoring, the blanket down around her waist.

  He called her name three times and she didn’t answer. He went in and shook her awake. She rolled over and covered herself up and promised she’d get right up. He went back to his cabin.

  The owner arrived at eight-thirty. Frazier watched him head toward Donna’s cabin, jaw outthrust, face red. He heard them yelling at each other. He could not hear what was said. The man went lunging back to the restaurant, unlocked the rear door, banged it back against the side of the building and went in.

  At nine-fifteen Frazier went over again. She was asleep. He went in and grabbed her wrists and pulled her to a sitting position. She looked at him with dulled eyes. At last he got her awake. “Come on! Come on! We got to get on the road, sugar.”

  She yawned. “Okay, okay. Say, he was in here, yammering at me. I told him I quit.”

  “I know. And then you went back to sleep. Get up, damn you.”

  She pouted. “You don’t want to talk to me like that.”

  “Pretty please. Get up. Just for me.”

  “You get out and I’ll get dressed.”

  When he went over at quarter of ten she was in a bathrobe, washing things in the small bathroom sink. “Aren’t you ready yet?”<
br />
  “It won’t take long now. Honest. These things dry fast. They’re nylon.”

  “Are you packed?”

  “That won’t take only a couple of minutes. We don’t have to make any special place by tonight, do we?”

  “I’m itchy to get on the road.”

  “I hate having you see me with my hair like this. I’ll come over when I’m ready. I’ll hurry, honest.”

  It was five minutes of eleven when she came out of the cabin with a big dark blue suitcase and a bright red hatbox. She wore a pale gray sweater, dark blue slacks and sandals. She had a gray and white scarf tied around her hair. He had to admit to himself that she looked better than he had expected her to look.

  She looked at him shyly. “I guess I finally made it, Stan.”

  “I guess you did. Here. I’ll take the suitcase.”

  “Are we going to phone for a cab?”

  “It’s only a half-mile.”

  The owner came to the doorway of the restaurant and stood with his hands on his hips and watched them as they walked by the front door. As soon as they were by he spat and turned and went back inside. Cars whistled by them, kicking up dust from the shoulder.

  “I bet you think I’m terrible,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Last night. I was cheap to let you do that.” She looked appealingly up at him as they walked side by side. He noted that there were tiny beads of effort on her round face.

  “I don’t think that at all.” He searched for the words. “Donna, I think it was just the way it should have been. Just the way it had to be, with us.”

  She sighed and shifted the hatbox to her other hand. It thumped annoyingly against his leg. “Ooops. Sorry. Gee, Stan, I’m so glad you feel that way, honest. I was afraid of what you might think of me.”

  “Skip it, sugar.” He lengthened his stride.

  “Gee, you got long legs, darlin’.”