A Swell-Looking Babe

by Jim Thompson

  They were bolder than the others, see? They could think faster than the others. Sure, everyone knew who Tug’s boys were, but the boys weren’t with her, understand? They just happened to be around when she decided to check out.

  They made her call for a porter. Then, they set her baggage out in the hall, and told her to wait there until the porter arrived. And when he did, well, they were just down the hall a few steps, just coming out of another room — it appeared. And very casually, oh, so innocently, they all headed for the elevator together. True, one got ahead of the other, but what of it? Doubtless the second guy had had to pause to tie a shoelace.

  Dusty stepped off the elevator, hurried toward the entrance to the lobby. He was panting unconsciously; the pounding of his heart grew wilder and wilder. The next step, now—how would he and Tug manage that! She’d have to pay her own bill. She’d have to leave the hotel alone. They wouldn’t dare let her, but they’d have to. God, what else could they do? And once she got out on the street—or, Christ, even before she got to the street even here in the lobby…!

  They couldn’t hold a gun in her back down here. They couldn’t follow her right up to the cashier’s cage, wait until she paid her bill, and then march her out to the street. They couldn’t, but they had to! They had to without letting anyone know they were doing it. And how the hell could they manage that?

  Blindly, Dusty entered the lobby. The swelling pride was gone, now; disintegrated as suddenly as the sickness. And the sickness was coagulating and mounting again, taking charge of his every fiber and cell.

  He and Tug, rather, Tug and his boys would never get away with it. They were a bunch of stupid stumblebums, and they’d got him in twice the mess he’d already been in, and—

  The four were just emerging from the elevator. They passed within inches of him as he paused near the check stand, too stricken to proceed into the lobby proper. Blinded, choking with sickness and terror.

  Hell, why had they had to do it like this? Why try to do it so damned right that it was bound to be wrong? They shouldn’t have bothered with her baggage or her bill. Just left the bags in her room, and let the bill go unpaid. Of course, that would cause troublesome inquiries eventually. The hotel would chalk her up as a skip, and her name and description would be circularized in every hotel in the country. Her baggage would be opened and examined. Her hometown police would be notified. And if it appeared that she was a responsible person—that she’d simply dropped out of sight in this city—well, it could be tough for anyone who’d had contact with her. But that would be better than this, wouldn’t it? You’d stand a chance that way, and this way there was no chance. You were licked before you started.

  …The baggage porter was heading toward the taxi entrance. She was proceeding up the lobby toward the cashier’s cage. Quite alone, now, for the two men had dropped well behind. They had paused to talk, casually, letting her go on alone. Leaving her to scream or run—to appeal to that blurred figure who stood in front of the cashier’s cage.

  She went forward slowly, stiffly, like a person walking in her sleep. She was almost there, almost safe, completely beyond the reach of her guards.

  Why doesn’t she do it? Dusty thought angrily. Just do it and get it all over with.

  A voice rang in his ears, booming, familiar. Tug Trowbridge’s confident, ever-cheerful bellow. It penetrated the chaos of Dusty’s mind, clearing his terror-blurred vision.

  Tug. It was he who stood at the cashier’s window. Now, he stepped back politely, making room for the woman, and called again to the two men:

  “Hey, you guys! Been waiting for you.”

  They looked up. They allowed themselves to discover him. They joined him.

  The three of them stood in a semi-circle, only a few feet withdrawn from the cashier’s cage. Ringing her in (although no one would have suspected it), while they held inaudible but patently earnest conversation.

  She finished paying her bill. She picked up her change awkwardly, and turned away from the wicket. And Tug put an end to the conversation with another bellow.

  “Well, that’s that,” he announced to the lobby at large. “We’ll get busy on it right away, and—hey, you lug! Get out of the lady’s way, will you?”

  The man addressed stepped out of the “lady’s” way. They all stepped out of her way, gesturing and murmuring politely.

  She stood motionless for a moment. Then, head bowed a little, she started toward the taxi entrance. The three men fell in behind her.

  They followed her down the steps, and out to the street. They lingered on the walk while she tipped and dismissed the porter. Then…

  Heart pounding with relief, his exultation growing again, Dusty moved out into the lobby at last. He stepped over to the front post, with its direct view of the sidewalk, and watched this final and most important step.

  Not that he doubted its success. He and Tug had swung the deal this far, and they could swing this. But just how—how was something he hadn’t thought through. It was a fearful stumbling block which only Tug knew how to surmount.

  She had a cab waiting. It was her cab, called for her by the porter, and her baggage was loaded into it. And if they tried to pile in with her…

  They did pile in with her. They almost shoved her inside and climbed in themselves. The door slammed, and the plain black vehicle pulled away from the curb, disappeared in the traffic. And Dusty was puzzled for a moment, but only a moment.

  Naturally, the driver hadn’t squawked. He was one of Tug’s boys. He’d been posted at the entrance in advance, and with a cab already there, why should the porter have called another one?

  Dusty grinned. He turned back around, grinning, and looked straight into Bascom’s eyes.

  His throat went suddenly dry; his contorted lips felt as stiff as stone. For, obviously, Bascom knew. He had seen it all, and he knew what it was all about. He didn’t know why it had happened, perhaps, but he knew what had happened. The fact of his knowledge was spread like a picture over his pale, old face.

  “W-well?” Dusty said. And then louder, boldly, “Well?” for something else was spread over the room clerk’s face: Terror and sickness far greater than he, Dusty, had known that night.

  “Bill…” Bascom’s voice was quaveringly servile. “I—you don’t hold any grudge against me, do you, Bill? I know I may have appeared to give you a pretty rough time, but it was only because I—”

  “Yeah?” Dusty’s grin was back. “What are you driving at?”

  “I don’t want anyone else to suffer for it, Bill. For the way you might feel about me. You wouldn’t do that, would you? You wouldn’t try to put me on a spot by—by—” Dusty’s grin widened. Bascom was scared out of his wits, and he damned well should be. The woman was his responsibility. He’d been flagrantly stupid in ever letting her have a room. Now, if something happened to her—if, through her, the hotel became involved in a scandal—Bascom’s name would be mud.

  Dusty stared at the clerk. He shrugged contemptuously. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Please, Bill. I know how you feel about me, but—”

  “Do you? Well, that’s good.”

  The old man’s eyes blazed. Then all the fire went out of them, leaving nothing but lifeless ashes.

  “I’ve got some calls here for you, Bill. I took care of them for you while you were gone.”

  “Well,” said Dusty, ironically. “Well, well. Now, that was certainly thoughtful of you, Mister Bascom!”

  He shuffled through the call slips, then glanced at the lobby clock. Yawning, he flicked the slips with a finger, scattering them over the counter, sending some of them down behind the counter. “Save them for the day shift,” he said. “I’m about due to knock off.”

  8

  The exalted mood lasted until he reached home. It began to fade as he ascended the steps of the shabby old house. After five minutes with his father it was gone completely.

  Dusty could not say what it was
about the old man that wrought such a sudden and sharp change in his mood. Perhaps, he admitted glumly, a little guiltily, there was really nothing. Mr. Rhodes had made himself fairly presentable. He looked and talked almost as well as he had in the old days, and for once—for once!—he did not need money. Still, there he was; that he was at all was the trouble. Someone who provided nothing, yet had to be provided for. Someone to be accounted to. Someone who served as a reminder of things that were best forgotten.

  Feeling ashamed, Dusty gave the old man five dollars. (“Spend it on anything you want to, Dad.”) But the gift, admittedly made for his own sake and not his father’s, did nothing to dispel the pangs of conscience. He retired to his room, writhing inwardly, gripped in the black coils of an almost unbearable depression.

  He undressed quietly. He turned on the electric fan, and lay back on the bed. He lighted a cigarette…and as the minutes ticked by he continued to light them. One from the butt of another.

  The humid summer air moved back and forth across his body. It did not actually cool, but it dried. And always there was more to dry. He thought, forcing himself to think back to the beginning—the only beginning he was aware of—and the perspiration rolled out of his pores, dried under the lazy exhalations of the fan.

  …Yes, he remembered. He had been five at the time of the adoption. He knew that they were not actually his parents. But it had been an easy thing to forget. She made it easy, starved as she was for the motherhood she could not naturally achieve.

  He was her own-est, dearest baby, Mama’s very own darling-est sweetest boy. The days were one long round of petting and coddling, of wild outpourings of affection. She could not do enough for him. She would bathe him over and over, change his clothes a dozen times a day.

  The old man—not an old man, then, but much older than she was—had protested mildly. But he never actually interfered. He was very much in love with her, very happy in the status of family man. And it took no more than a few tears or a hurt look from either of them, woman or boy, to silence him immediately.

  Only once, to Dusty’s recollection, had his Dad (call him that; he had always called him that) demonstrated anything resembling firmness. That was when he, Dusty, was about nine. He had insisted that the boy have his own room and his own bed; he simply had to, he declared, and that was that.

  But that, as it turned out, was not that. Mr. Rhodes was away from home a great deal during those days—lecturing in winter, attending college for doctorate credit in summer. And during these absences, his edict was generally ignored.

  They would start off to obey, go through all the preliminaries. She would see him to his room, turn on the nightlamp, tuck him under the bedclothes. She would tuck him in very firmly, moving the bedclothes this way and that, adjusting and readjusting the lamp. She would look down at him, primly, her voice faltering a little as she explained why things had to be as they were. “You understand, don’t you, darling? Dad’s so awfully good to us and he knows what’s best, and if he asks us to do something even if it doesn’t make any sense—well, we simply must! It’s not because Mother doesn’t love you any more. She l-loves her boy s-s-so much that…Oh, darling, darling!”—a wail. “I can’t! I won’t. N-not tonight. Tomorrow but not tonight…”

  He liked their bed best. It was larger than his, of course, and he derived a strangely satisfying sense of security from being in it. He did not always feel secure, otherwise, despite the daily demonstrations of her and his father’s love. Almost always there was a feeling of unsatisfied want, of something withheld. Of incompleteness. But there with her in the big bed, just the two of them alone, he at last knew absolute safety: the haunting, indefinable hunger was fed. And he wanted for nothing.

  He believed he had been about eleven when it happened. It was on a Sunday morning, and she had been awakened early by a rainstorm, and so she had awakened him (not intentionally) with drowsy kisses and hugs. He burrowed close to her. He moved his head, sleepily, feeling an unusual softness and warmth. And suddenly he felt it withdrawn, or, rather, since he did not release his hold, an attempt at withdrawal.

  “Bill! Let go, darling!”

  “Huh?” He opened his eyes, unwillingly. “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, you can see, can’t you?”—her voice was almost sharp. “I mean, Mother has to fix her nightgown.”

  She fixed it hastily, blushing. She lay back down, rather stiffly, and then, seeing the innocence of his expression, she drew him close again.

  “I’m sorry, darling. Mother didn’t mean to sound cross to her baby.”

  “I’m not your baby,” he said, and this time it was he who drew away from her.

  “You’re—? Oh, well, of course, you’re not. Now you’re Mother’s big boy, her little man.”

  “I never was your baby,” he said.

  “B-but, sweetheart”—she raised up on one elbow, looked down troubledly into his face. “Of course, you were my baby. You still are. Has someone—did someone tell you that—”

  “I know,” he said. “I know what those are for. They’re for babies, what Mamas feed babies with, and you never did so I’m not.”

  “But”—she laughed uncomfortably. A faint crimson was tinging the pale gold of her face, spreading down over her neck and into the deep shadowed hollow of her breasts. “But, sweetheart”—there was a catch to her laugh. “Of course, I did. You just don’t remember!”

  “No,” he said, “I wasn’t your baby, so you wouldn’t want me to.”

  “But I would! I mean, I did! When you were a baby, I always—well, I always did!”

  He turned his body, turning his back to her. She tried to put her arms around him, and he jerked away roughly.

  “Darling! It’s true, darling. You don’t think Mother would lie, do you?”

  He didn’t answer her.

  “You’ve g-got to believe me, dearest. You were always my baby, no one’s but mine. Why whose baby would you be if…if…”

  He didn’t answer her.

  “Now listen to me, Bill! I will not let you carry on like this! It’s an extremely foolish way for you to act, and…Oh, darling! My poor darling! What can I say to you?”

  Silence.

  “Darling…honey lamb…Mother wasn’t angry a moment ago. She didn’t really mind. She wouldn’t have minded a bit if you were still a little baby l-like…You understand, don’t you, darling?”

  Silence.

  “If I…Would it be all right, darling, would you believe me if I—we—If now…?”

  He was still silent, but it was a different kind of silence. Warm, expectant, deliciously shivery. They lay very still for a moment, and then she sat up, and there was the sound of soft silk against silken flesh.

  She lay back down. She whispered, “B-baby. Turn around, baby…” And he turned around.

  Then, right on the doorstep of the ultimate heaven, the gates clanged shut.

  She lay perfectly still, breathing evenly. She did not need to push him away, not physically. Her eyes did that. Delicately flushed a moment before, the lovely planes of her face were now an icy white.

  “You’re a very smart boy, Bill.”

  “Am I, Mother?”

  “Very. Far ahead of your years. How long have you been planning this?”

  “P-planning what, Mother?”

  “You had it all figured out, didn’t you? Your—poor old Dad, sick and worn out so much of the time. And me, still young and foolish and giddy, and loving you so much that I’d do anything to save you hurt.”

  “I-you mad at me about somethin’, Mother?”

  “Stop it! Stop pretending! Don’t deceive yourself, Bill. At least be honest with yourself.”

  “M-Mother. I’m sorry if I—”

  “Not nearly as sorry as I am, Bill. Nor as shocked, or frightened…”

  She was frightened. And being unable to live with her fear, she tried to deny its existence. It had never happened, she told herself—and she told him. That rainy Sunday morni
ng was a bad dream, or at worst no more than a misunderstanding, exaggerated out of true and innocent proportion by sleep-drugged minds. It had no reality, she said, and should be forgotten completely. And he did forget—almost. His conscious memory forgot.

  He was her son. He understood the importance of believing that, and so he believed. And ostensibly—even in the eyes of Mr. Rhodes—there was no change in their relationship. No untoward change. She was still lovingly affectionate with the boy, absorbed in his welfare. He was still mutely adoring in her presence. True, there was no longer any pouting and arguing about Bill’s sleeping arrangements. And, true, the caresses exchanged between woman and boy seemed considerably less fervent. But that, those things, were as they should be. Bill was growing up. Naturally he was pulling away from his mother’s apron strings.

  Dusty rolled restlessly on the bed, still thinking. His disinterest in girls, his “lack of time” for them: was she the reason? She was. He admitted it now. She had been the woman, the only one. Until he met her counterpart, in Marcia Hillis, there could be no other.

  So the years passed, and everything was forgotten. As far as it is within human capacity to forget. Mr. Rhodes remained active, but his health was failing. Their concern for him, and the necessity to take care of him, drew the two well members of the family closer and closer together.

  There were long, almost nightly discussions in the living room after the old man had retired. Conferences held in whispers, lights dimmed, so as not to disturb him. There were cups of coffee shared, and cigarettes passed back and forth. There was an intimacy of silences and sighs. Occasionally there were tears, with Dusty soothing her, drawing her head against his shoulder and stroking the thick lustrous gray hair.

  All the awkwardness between them disappeared. The bond of trust and interdependence strengthened. Some nights she fell asleep, and he carried her up to her room…a room no longer shared with her husband.

  The first night it happened, she had waked up. She kept her eyes closed but he knew she was awake, and for a terrible moment he was afraid she might scream or strike out at him. Still, since there was nothing to do but go ahead he went ahead, slipping off her robe, laying the thin-gowned body between the covers and carefully tucking them around its curving richness. Then, very gently, he had given her a chaste kiss on the forehead. And started to tiptoe from the room.