“How’d he come by that?”
“You remember Chilly Rosales?”
“Yeah.”
“One of Chilly’s cousins was a Spanish Town whore. This Aimee was her kid. The whore’s husband may or may not have been her father. He wasn’t home much. One night when he was home he took a butcher knife and cut up the whore. Aimee was watching. Then he went after the kid and chased her down three flights of stairs. He got close enough once to take a swipe at her and opened one of her arms from the elbow down. So there they were, both of them bloody as Jesus and the girl screaming and running out into the street. A cop heard the screaming and shot the guy dead. Since the whore was his cousin, Chilly took care of the girl for a while, until he creamed himself and his Cadillac in an accident one night.”
“Then Macy took her in,” I said, grinning crookedly.
“Well,” Rudy replied, “he said she needed to have somebody. She was wild as hell when he latched onto her. Diane toned her down. Took a long time.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said, shaking my head in astonishment.
“Yeah.”
“Who else is around, then?”
“Well, Diane and Aimee. Macy’s brother Owen, too. He’s supposed to be manager of the hotel but he don’t do nothin’ but booze and paint those pictures of his. Charley Rinke’s here, too, with his wife.”
It was a new name. “He’s sort of like you used to be,” Rudy explained, “except he ain’t big enough or mean enough to handle the contact work. Rides the books, mostly. There’s something about him I don’t like much. He struts, you know, like he was real dangerous, especially around people who don’t know no better, but any trouble and he’s the first to find some place where it’s safe to watch. I don’t think even his wife likes him. She’s been laid by some of the boys in town, especially Reavis. He does most of the heavy work these days, like collecting.”
I felt the first quieting nudge of sleep, and stirred sore muscles in getting up. “I think I’ll turn in. See you in the morning, Rudy.”
He went to the door with me. “How did you ever happen to go to work for Macy, Pete?” he asked suddenly.
I considered that for a while. “I guess Aimee wasn’t the first lost kid Macy ever took in,” I said, and walked outside.
Going up the hill, I thought about the way it had been; coming home from the war with each nerve bare from the endless nights of patrol and attack and retreat to find Jean, the wild beauty I had married at the end of college, slowly becoming a hopeless paretic. And nothing, nothing could stop the pitting of the brain that gradually turned her into a strange creature, with a halting walk and thick speech and weird hallucinations. I lasted long enough to see that she would be taken care of in the best institution I could afford. Then I cracked up. There were no memories for a while, not until Macy found me in some rathole, half-dead from whisky and grief, and flew me south to a small island in the Caribbean where I had the chance to start living again if I wanted to take it.
I remembered the day I stood high on a cliff, a storm blowing toward me from off the choppy sea, the wind high. Macy was yelling in my ear, his coat and tie whipping, hair in his face. He had a bottle in his hand and as he argued with me he raised his arm and threw the bottle over the cliff.
“You want another drink? If that’s what you want, go get it! I’m tired of fooling around with you. You got any guts, go get that bottle!”
And I stood there, shaking, cold, squeezing my face with my hands, wondering why it was so hard for me to take those steps that would end it. I stood there a long time until I wasn’t trembling any more. Then I turned and walked away from the edge of the cliff. I didn’t feel good because I was doing it. I didn’t feel as though I had won any great victory over myself. I didn’t feel anything.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Macy had said with a grin.
I turned and looked back at him. “With you, if you want me. If not, I don’t know where.”
But too many wires had pulled loose for me to hope that I could live normally again before many years. I needed the feeling of danger that the job with Macy offered me — until the healing was complete. Then I left him.
A woman was asleep on my bed when I opened the door of the room. Apparently she had been sleeping fitfully because she sat up, squinting painfully, as soon as I turned on the light. She seemed to be about thirty years old, small and tightly knit, with hair like dull gold. Without the puffiness under the eyes and the tension lines on her face, she would have been beautiful.
“Please turn it out,” she said, almost moaning. “It hurts my eyes.”
I turned off the overhead, switched on a small pin-up lamp over the dresser, throwing long searching shadows through the room.
“I didn’t know anyone was using this room,” she said, blinking. She sat tensely on the edge of the bed, as if constantly aware of some internal tightening. She wore a filmy pale green nightgown that dropped like a curtain from the mounds of her breasts to her lap. Her nipples showed prominently through the material. Glancing down, she became aware of her body and, without any fuss, took a robe from the floor and put it about her shoulders, drawing it shut indifferently, as if it didn’t matter whether I looked or not.
“I couldn’t sleep in my room,” she said. “I walked around the house and came in here and just lay down.” She looked at me. “I’m Evelyn Rinke,” she said.
I put my shirt over the back of a chair. “Pete Mallory.”
Her eyes inspected me openly and with great care. She seemed to have no embarrassment. The set of her mouth and sleepy eyes reminded me of a hungry young bird. “Yes,” she said. “I knew you were coming. I’ve heard them talk about you.”
She got up slowly, walked toward me and around me. “I guess you want to go to bed. You must be tired.” She tilted her head slightly, looked up at me. Her lips parted and I saw her tongue against her teeth. She stepped closer to me, her fingers grasping my arms, sliding over the elbows, along the flat muscles. Her fingers were long and hard, hot and dry. They tightened, relaxed. She drew her body against me, the material of the nightgown rasping softly. There was no softness about her body, no fleshiness. It was as hard as the fingers, had a feeling of strength, as if it could be used again and again with no slackening of the lean tight muscles. I could feel her trembling, feel her warm, vaguely sweet breath come in gusts. It wasn’t passion that made her tremble. Her eyes were restless and wild. She wanted me to put my hands on that body and gentle it, and then do with it as I pleased.
“Let me go to bed with you,” she said. “Let me sleep with you. I really need to. I need to sleep next to a man for a change.”
I took her arms and moved her away from me. She was beginning to perspire lightly. Tiny drops appeared on her forehead. Her fingers squeezed once again, then she backed away still more. Her eyes were cloudy. She didn’t seem upset that I had refused her, just disappointed. In withdrawing her fingertips, she touched the scraped places along my forearms. I looked at them. They were stippled with dried blood. Most of it had washed off during my swim.
“You’re hurt,” she said. “How did that happen?”
“I was trying to run away. Somebody was shooting at me.”
Her expressive eyebrows pressed down. “Does that happen often?”
“No. It hasn’t lately. Not since the war.” She wasn’t standing still now, but moving as though something inside was whipping at her. She breathed deeply.
“What’s your trouble?” I asked. “Nerves?”
“God, yes.” Her fingers clenched. “God, yes.”
“I know,” I said. “I had the same trouble once. The war did it to me.”
Mrs. Rinke smiled painfully. “Wars always end. I wish something that simple could help me. I’d drink, if it didn’t make me sick. How I’d drink!”
