Savage Night

by Jim Thompson

  He was a writer, only he didn’t call himself that. He called himself a hockey peddler. “You notice that smell?” he said. “I just got through dumping a load of crap in New York, and I ain’t had time to get fumigated.” All I could smell was the whiz he’d been drinking. He went on talking, not at all grammatical like you might expect a writer to, and he was funny as hell.

  He said he had a farm up in Vermont, and all he grew on it was the more interesting portions of the female anatomy. And he never laughed or cracked a smile, and the way he told about it he almost made you believe it. “I fertilize them with wild goat manure,” he said. “The goats are tame to begin with, but they soon go wild. The stench, you know. I feed them on the finest grade grain alcohol, and they have their own private cesspool to bathe in. But nothing does any good. You should see them at night when they stand on their heads, howling.”

  I grinned, wondering why I didn’t give it to him. “I didn’t know goats howled,” I said.

  “They do if they’re wild enough,” he said.

  “Is that all you grow?” I said. “You don’t have bodies on any of—of those things?”

  “Jesus Christ!” He turned on me like I’d called him a dirty name. “Ain’t I got things tough enough as it is? Even butts and breasts are becoming a drug on the market. About all there’s any demand for any more is you know what.” He passed me the bottle, and had a drink himself, and he calmed down a little. “Oh, I used to grow other things,” he said. “Bodies. Faces. Eyes. Expressions. Brains. I grew them in a three-dollar-a-week room down on Fourteenth Street and I ate aspirin when I couldn’t raise the dough for a hamburger. And every now and then some lordly book publisher would come down and reap my crop and package it at two-fifty a copy, and, lo and behold, if I praised him mightily and never suggested that he was a member of the Jukes family in disguise, he would spend three or four dollars on advertising and the sales of the book would swell to a total of nine hundred copies and he would give me ten per cent of the proceeds…when he got around to it.” He spat out the window and took another drink. “How about driving a while?”

  I slid over him, over behind the wheel, and his hands slid over me. “Let’s see the shiv,” he said.

  “The what?”

  “The pig-sticker, the switchblade, the knife, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you understand English? You ain’t a publisher, are you?”

  I gave it to him. I didn’t know what the hell else to do. He tested the blade with his thumb. Then he opened the pocket of the car, fumbled around inside and brought out a little whetstone.

  “Christ,” he said, drawing the blade back and forth across it. “You ought to keep this thing sharp. You can’t do any good with a goddamn hoe like this. I’d sooner try to cut a guy’s throat with a bed slat…Well”—he handed it back to me—“that’s the best I can do. Just don’t use it for nothing but belly work and it may be all right.”

  “Now, look,” I said. “What—what—”

  “You look,” he said. He reached over and took the Luger out of my belt. He held it down under the dashlight and looked at it. “Well, it ain’t too bad,” he said. “But what you really need is a rod like this.” And he reached into the pocket again and took out a .32 Colt automatic. “Like to try it? Come on and try it on me. Stop the car and try them both.”

  He shoved them at me, reaching for the switch key, and—and, hell, I don’t know what I said.

  Finally, he laughed—different from the way he’d laughed before, more friendly—and put the Luger back in my belt and the Colt back into the car pocket.

  “Just not much sense to it, is there?” he said. “How far you want to ride?”

  “As far as I can,” I said.

  “Swell. That’ll be Vermont. We’ll have time to talk.”

  We went straight on through, taking turns about driving and going in places for coffee and sandwiches, and most of the time he was talking or I was. Not about ourselves, nothing personal, I mean. He wasn’t nosy. Just about books and life and religion, and things like that. And everything he said was so kind of off-trail I was sure I could remember it, but somehow later on it all seemed to boil down pretty well to just one thing.

  “Sure there’s a hell…” I could hear him saying it now, now, as I lay here in bed with her breath in my face, and her body squashed against me…“It is the drab desert where the sun sheds neither warmth nor light and Habit force-feeds senile Desire. It is the place where mortal Want dwells with immortal Necessity, and the night becomes hideous with the groans of one and the ecstatic shrieks of the other. Yes, there is a hell, my boy, and you do not have to dig for it…”

  When I finally left him, he gave me a hundred and ninety-three dollars, everything he had in his wallet except a ten-spot. And I never saw him again, I don’t even know his name.

  Fay started snoring again.

  I got the whiskey bottle and my cigarettes, and went into the bathroom. I closed the door, and sat down on the stool. And I must have sat there two or three hours, smoking and sipping whiskey and thinking.

  I wondered what had ever happened to that guy, whether he was still in Vermont growing those things. I think about what he’d said about hell, and it had never meant more to me than it did right now.

  I wasn’t an old man by a hell of a long ways, but I got to wondering whether the way I felt had anything to do with getting older. And that led into wondering how old I really was, anyway, because I didn’t know.

  About all I had to go on was what my mother told me, and she’d told me one thing one time, and another thing another time. I doubt that she really knew, offhand. She might have figured it out, but with all the kids she’d had she didn’t get much figuring done. So…

  I tried to dope it out, a screwy thing like that. I added up and subtracted and tried to remember back to certain times and places, and all I got out of it was a headache.

  I’d always been small. Except for those few years in Arizona, it seemed like I’d always been living on the ragged edge.

  I thought way back, and if things had ever been very much different or I’d ever been very much different, I couldn’t remember when it was.

  I sipped and smoked and thought, and finally I caught myself nodding:

  I went back into the bedroom.

  She was sleeping in a kind of loose ball, now, with her rear end way over on one side of the bed and her knees on the other. That left some space at the foot of the bed, so I lay down across that.

  I woke up with her feet on my chest, feeling like my ribs had been caved in. It was nine o’clock. I’d had less than four hours’ sleep. But I knew I wasn’t going to get any more, so I slid out from under her and got up.

  I went to the toilet and took a bath, being as quiet about it as I could. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, fitting the contact lenses into place, when I saw her looking in the doorway.

  She didn’t know that I saw her. It’s funny how people will watch you in a mirror without thinking that you’re bound to be watching them. She was looking at the lower part of my face, my mouth, and I saw her grimace. Then, she caught herself, catching on to the fact, I guess, that I might be able to see her. She moved back into the bedroom, waited a moment, and headed for the door again, making enough noise for me to know that she was up.

  I slipped my teeth into place. I guess my mouth did look bad without them—kind of like it belonged in another location. But I didn’t give a damn whether she liked it or not.

  She came in yawning, drowsily scratching her head with both hands. “Gosh, honey,” she said. “What’d you get up so early for? I was sleeping sooo-ahh—’scuse me—so good.”

  “It’s after nine,” I said. “I figured I’d been in bed long enough.”

  “Well, I hadn’t. You woke me up with all your banging around.”

  “Maybe I’d better go stand in the corner.”

  Her eyes flashed. Then she laughed, half irritably. “Grouchy. You don’t have to snap me up on everythi
ng. Now, get out of here and let me take a bath.”

  I got out, and let her. I dressed while she bathed and started brushing her teeth—washing her mouth out a thousand and fifty times, it sounded like, gargling and spitting and hacking. I began getting sick at my stomach; rather, I got sicker than I already was. I threw down the rest of the whiskey fast, and that helped. I picked up the phone and ordered breakfast and another pint. And I knew how bad the whiz was for me—I’d been told not to drink it at all—but I have to have it.

  She was still horsing around in the bathroom when the waiter came. I got down another fast drink; then, I gulped and coughed and a whole mouthful of blood came up in my handkerchief.

  I raised the bottle again. I lowered it, holding my breath, swallowing as rapidly as I could. And there wasn’t any blood that time—none came up—but I knew it was there.

  I’d already been damned sick in front of her once. If I was sick very much; if she thought I might be on the way down…down like Jake…

  11

  She came out of the bathroom feeling a lot better than when she went in, and with a fresh half pint of whiskey in me I wasn’t feeling so bad myself. We ate all the breakfast, with her helping out quite a bit on my share. I lighted cigarettes for us, and she lay back on the pillows.

  “Well?” she crinkled her eyes at me.

  “Well, what?” I said.

  “How was it?”

  “Best coffee I ever drank,” I said.

  “Stinker!” She let out with that guffaw again. I was getting to where I waited for that, too, like I’d waited for her snoring. “Mmm?” she said. “I do if you do. Want to come back to bed with mama?”

  “Look, baby,” I said. “I’m sorry as hell, but—well, you’ll have to be starting back.”

  “Huh!” She sat up. “Aw, now, honey! You said—”

  “I said we’d stay overnight. We’ve done it. It doesn’t make any difference whether—”

  “It does too make a difference! You haven’t been stuck in that God-forsaken hole as long as I have! I…Why don’t we do it like we planned, honey? I can go back tonight, and you can come tomorrow…that’ll give us a whole day together. Or I can stay—I’ll go over and stay with sis tonight—and come tomorrow, and you can—”

  “Look, baby; look, Fay,” I said. “I guess I hadn’t thought the thing through. I’ve had plenty of things to think about, and I couldn’t see that it mattered much whether—”

  “Of course, it matters! Why wouldn’t it matter?”

  “You’ve got to go back,” I said. “Now. Or I’ll start back and you can come later on in the day. I can’t stay at the house overnight unless you’re there. I’ve got to have you there to yes me, in case something pops with Jake. If he should get out of line like he did the first night—”

  “Pooh! For all we know he may not even come home.”

  “That’s another thing. He’s got to start staying there. All the time. You’ll have to see that he does. He can’t just be there on the one night that something happens to him.”

  “Hell!” She stamped out her cigarette angrily, and reached for the bottle. “Just when I think I’m going to…Well, gosh, honey. You could go back tomorrow, and I could go back tonight. Why wouldn’t that be all right?”

  “I’m afraid of it. I’m not supposed to have much dough. It doesn’t look right for me to take damned near three days to pick up a suit.”

  She slammed the whiskey bottle down angrily.

  “I’m sorry as hell, Fay,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “We just can’t take chances now. We’ve got too much to lose—” I went on talking and explaining and apologizing; and I knew she’d better snap out of it fast or she wouldn’t be able to get back to Peardale.

  Finally, she turned back around; maybe she noticed the tightening of my voice. “All right, honey,” she sighed, half pouting. “If that’s the way it is, why that’s the way it is.”

  “Fine. That’s my baby,” I said. “We’ll have our good times. Just you and me and thirty grand; maybe five or ten more if it’s an A-1 job.”

  “Oh, I know, Carl,” her smile was back. “It’ll be wonderful. And I’m awfully sorry if I—I was just kind of disappointed and—”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  She wanted me to go back to Peardale first. She wanted to laze around a while, and take her time about dressing. I said it would be all right. Just so she showed before night.

  We chewed the fat a while longer; just talking without saying much. After a while, she said, “Mmmmm, honey?” and held out her arms to me; and I knew I couldn’t do it. Not so soon, not now. God, Jesus, I knew I couldn’t do it.

  But I did!

  I struggled and strained, aching clear down to my toenails; and I kept my eyes closed, afraid to let her see what she might see in them, and…and I was in that drab desert where the sun shed neither heat nor light, and…

  …What about that afterwards, anyway? If there was an afterwards. What about her?

  I stared out the dirty window of the Long Island train, half dozing, my mind wandering around and around and drifting back to her. What about her?

  She was stacked. She was pretty. She was just about everything you could want in a woman—as long as you were on top or you looked like you might be on top.

  But I couldn’t see it, the one big long party which was what it would be like with her. I couldn’t see it, and couldn’t take it. What I wanted was…well, I wasn’t sure but it wasn’t that. Just to be by myself. Maybe with someone like—well, like Ruthie—someone I could be myself around.

  Ruth. Fay. Fay, Ruth. Or what? I didn’t know what I wanted. I wasn’t even real sure about what I didn’t want. I hadn’t wanted to be dragged in on this mess, but I had to admit I’d been getting pretty fed up out there in Arizona. I’d kept quiet about it, but I’d had more than one babe in my shack. Hell, the last month, I’d had two or three a week, a different one each time. And they were all okay, I guess, they all had plenty on the ball. But somehow none of them seemed to be it—whatever it was I wanted.

  Whatever it was I wanted.

  My eyes drifted shut, and stayed shut. The Man would probably have something to say about Fay. He might see a spot where he could use her again, or he might decide that she was a bad risk. He’d talk to me about it, of course. And if I wanted her, and was responsible for her…

  I didn’t know. I didn’t want her now, her or anyone else. But that was natural enough. Tomorrow, the next day…afterwards? I didn’t know.

  My head fell over against the window, and I went to sleep.

  It was hours later when I woke up.

  I was way the hell out to the end of the line, and the conductor was shaking me.

  Somehow I managed to keep from punching the stupid bastard in the face. I paid the extra fare, plus the fare back to Peardale. It was still early afternoon. I could still get back to Peardale well ahead of her.

  I went to the john and washed my face. I came back to my seat, studying the minute hand on my watch, wondering what the hell was holding us up. And then I glanced out the window, and started cursing.

  Mr. Stupid, the conductor, who should have picked up my seat check and put me off at Peardale—he and all the other trainmen were sauntering up the street together. Taking their own sweet time about it. Shoving and grab-assing with each other, and braying like a bunch of mules.

  They turned in at a restaurant.

  They stayed in there, doing what God only knows, because they couldn’t have been eating that long. They must have stayed in the place two hours.

  Finally, when I was just about ready to go up into the locomotive and drive off by myself, they got through doing whatever they were doing and sauntered back to the station again. They got there, eventually, back to the station. But, of course, they didn’t climb on the damned train and get going.

  They had to stand around on the station platform, gabbing and picking their teeth.
<
br />   I cursed them to myself, calling them every dirty name I could think of. They were trying to screw me up.

  They broke it up at last, and began climbing on the train.

  It was dark when we got into Peardale. A train from the city was just pulling out. I looked through the station door and saw a taxi on the other side—the only taxi there.

  He swung the door open, and I climbed in. And—but I guess I don’t need to tell you. I’d tried to be so damned careful, yet here she was, here we were, riding home together.

  She gave me a startled, half-scared look. I said, “Why, hello, Mrs. Winroy. Just come out from New York?”

  “Y-yes.” She bobbed her head. “Did—did you?”

  I laughed. It sounded as hollow as that conductor’s head. “Not exactly. I left the city this morning but I fell asleep on the train. They carried me out to the end of the line, and I’m just now getting back.”

  “Well,” she said. Just well. But the way she said it, she was saying a whole lot more.

  “I was all worn out,” I said. “A friend I stayed with in New York snored all night, and I didn’t get much sleep.”

  She turned her head sharply, glaring at me. Then she bit her lip, and I heard a sound that was halfway between a snicker and a snort.

  We reached the house. She went on inside, and I paid off the driver and went across the street to the bar.

  I drank two double shots. Then I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of ale, and sat down in one of the booths. I was easing down a little. It was a stupid mixup, but it was just one, and it would be hard for anyone to make anything out of it. Anyway, it was done, and there wasn’t any use worrying.

  I ordered another ale, easing my nerves down, arguing away the worry. I almost convinced myself that it had been a good break. It could be, if you looked at it in the right way. Because any damned fool ought to know that we wouldn’t be goofy enough to lay up in town, and then ride home together.