Читать книгу Kiss Me Hard - Thomas B. Dewey - Страница 8

I lay still, sucking air in big gasps, waiting for the pain in my chest to subside. I got the bottle out of my pocket, twisted the cap off, wiped the mouth with my sleeve and tipped it up. The warmth of the whisky relaxed my throat, spread through my chest, my stomach, filtered down through my belly, even my legs. I had another. My condition began to slide back to what, for me, was normal. I held up the bottle and peered at it. There were still three good shots left. The hand that held it shook only a little. I put the bottle back in my pocket.

The girl lay still beside me. Her head rested on one out-flung arm and her other arm lay beside it. Her knees were drawn up. Her dress had slid halfway up her bare thigh and still clung to her skin. I reached over and put my hand on the stuff of her dress. It was still very wet.

I got on my knees, found a packet of matches in my pocket, struck one and leaned down over her bare feet. They were mostly black on the bottom and corrugated, as if she had gone barefoot most of her life. But there were two or three broken places on each sole and they were bleeding slowly.

I found a handkerchief, none too clean, and reached for the bottle. I held it up, hesitating. I studied the bottle and swore softly to myself. I had played a sucker’s role practically every minute for the last twenty-four hours and maybe it was time to stop. Any time a lush like me began to think of washing a girl’s feet in hard liquor—good or bad—the world stopped moving.

I unscrewed the cap again, held the handkerchief against the mouth of the bottle and tipped it carefully. Just as carefully I held it upright while I applied the damp handkerchief to the sole of her right foot, dabbing at the places I could see were bleeding.

Her foot jerked spasmodically. I looked around and found her raised up, supporting herself on her hands, staring at me. I held the bottle toward her so she could see it.

“Alcohol,” I said.

I don’t think she heard me. She leaned there, watching me and her feet held still while I dabbed the precious fluid on the torn spots. When I finished I held the bottle up again and I felt better. The level was almost the same as when I had put it away the first time. You get so you can judge levels with great accuracy.

She was staring at the bottle as I put it away in my pocket again, but I pretended not to notice. I didn’t feel good about it, but I thought I would feel worse if I offered it to her and she took it. I shoved it down deep in my coat pocket, turned and sat up with my arms around my knees, looking out the door of the swaying car.

Pretty soon I felt her beside me. She sat the same way I did, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees. We started around a slow curve and she fell against me, then straightened up right away. Her face turned to me and she said something I couldn’t hear.

In the open doorway with the clatter of the wheels and the heavy squeak of the couplings beating our ears, everything had to be shouted. If she wanted conversation, we’d have to move farther inside.

I stood up and reached out my hand. She took it and I pulled her up to her feet. We stood, swaying, looking at each other and finally I took her arm and led her back into the car, toward the front of the train. The noise let up.

“Can’t hear anything over there,” I said.

She looked up at me with her little white face. “I said, ‘Thank you’,” she said.

I nodded. “I said, ‘Don’t mention it.’”

It was real smart talk.

We straightened out from the long curve and she lurched again. I held out my hand and she fell against it. Her ribs were prominent and she felt like skin and bones, but her breast was large and firm under the wet cloth. When she was steady on her feet I dropped my hand.

“Better take those wet clothes off,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

The air blowing in from outside was cool but not bitter. I took off my coat and held it out to her. Then I remembered the whisky bottle and grabbed it out of the pocket. I walked over near the door and set the bottle down on the floor. I was still holding the coat. When I turned back to give it to her, she was pulling the dress off over her head. I stopped where I was for a couple of seconds and then went on over and handed her the coat. From what I could see of it in the dark interior of the car, her figure was good. But I wasn’t much interested. I was hungry and I was getting thirsty again and I still felt like a sucker. I figured that she would get along all right, now that she’d got started and I could ditch the freight in the morning. At the rate we were going, we’d be out of the state in a few hours.

She slipped into the coat and buttoned it in front. It dropped almost to her knees and her hands disappeared when she let the sleeves hang straight. She put the ends of the sleeves together in front of her and hunched her shoulders forward and I saw that she was still cold.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t inspected the other end of the car. I walked back there, past the open door. The sweet smell of alfalfa drifted into my nostrils and at first I thought it came from outside. Then I stumbled against a thick, hard-packed stack of it, reached down and found a bale under my hands. I struck a match and looked at it.

There was about half of it still intact. The wires had been broken and the part that had been used was scattered over the floor. I started to kick the loose stuff into a pile. After a while I was kicking it into two piles.

“Hey!” I called to the girl.

She came slowly toward me, hunched into my coat, her hands still out of sight in the sleeves.

I pointed to the piles of hay on the floor.

“Next best thing to an innerspring mattress,” I said.

A little smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. It was the first one. It made her look almost pretty, in spite of the still wet, stringy hair, the paleness of her face and the outlandish costume.

I lay down on one of the piles and tested. It was deep enough. It cut down the bouncing of the car and it was warm.

The girl watched me. I indicated the other pile and she went to it slowly, knelt, tried it with her hand and then lay down on it, on her back, her white face turned to me. She smiled again. She was still cold. Every few seconds a tremor would run through her from head to toe and she would hunch into the coat.

I got up and went to the other end of the car and picked up my bottle and the little bundle she’d been carrying before we got on. The bundle was wrapped in an old-fashioned oil slicker, tied with binding twine. I carried the stuff back to where she was lying on the pile of hay.

“Got any dry clothes in here?” I said, holding up the bundle.

She shook her head.

“Just the raincoat,” she said, “and two sandwiches.”

My mouth filled.

“Sandwiches?”

“Are you hungry?”

“Since you ask me—” I said.

She reached up for the bundle and I handed it down to her. She unrolled the slicker and came up with a battered paper sack. Out of it she took a sandwich of white bread with what smelled like boiled ham inside. She offered it to me, and I took a bite. It was a little damp, a little ragged around the edges and the bread had been packed into a thin, tasteless wad of dough. But it was the first food I’d had for more than eighteen hours and it went down all right.

The girl ate about half of hers and put the rest back in the sack. She still shivered with cold and I kicked at the bale, loosening the alfalfa in it, and started to cover her with it, piling it on thick. She lay still on her back, her face looking up at me as I worked. Finally there was nothing but her face showing out of the pile of hay.

The sandwich was like a stone in my stomach and I took a swig of the whisky to dissolve it. I looked over and the girl was watching me. There were two shots left. I would want another before going to sleep and I’d need one to straighten me out in the morning. I knew that as soon as the bottle was empty, the pain would set in, the desperation.

If she had looked away from me, I think I might have held out. But the little white face didn’t move. Her eyes stared darkly, intently at me out of the pile of hay.

I offered her the bottle.

“No, thank you,” she said.

I was torn up inside and my voice came out gruff and harsh.

“Better take some. You got chilled.”

I held it closer.

The pile of hay moved and her hand came out of it and closed around the bottle. I looked away while she drank it. When I looked back, she was holding it out to me. I took it and replaced the cap. She had only sipped at it. The level hadn’t dropped more than an eighth of an inch. I stashed the bottle away in the alfalfa, near where I planned to put my head.

I looked over at the girl and found her eyes were closed. She lay very still under the hay. I didn’t see any more shivering.

I got myself some more loose stuff out of the bale and stretched out, pulling the hay over me to my chin. The air was colder and would get steadily colder until dawn. But the alfalfa was warm and there was plenty of it.

It took a long time for me to relax. Finally I pulled the bottle out of the hay under my head and took a swig. I put the cap back on and shook it to see whether there was any left. There was a little. I stuck the bottle back into the hay. After a while I went to sleep.

I woke once before dawn and something had changed. A rough edge of cloth rubbed at my neck. It was my own coat, the one I’d given the girl when she took off her wet dress. I looked over at the other pile of hay.

Only her small white face showed in the dark.

It was the lurch and jarring as the train slowed that woke me the next time. Daylight spilled into the car. The brakes went off, came on again, went off once more and came on to stay. I got up from the pile of hay, dusted off my coat and put it on. I found the bottle and stuck it in my pocket. I walked to the door and looked out.

The sun was rising toward the rear end of the train and was out of sight from where I stood. That meant we were traveling northwest. I leaned out and looked ahead but saw no sign of a town. There was a high water tower and a small yellow frame building near it, but no other buildings. I figured we must be on the B. & O. line, probably heading for Chicago.

We were crawling along, about to stop, and I knew it would be smart to get off and out of sight before the brakie came to throw me off. I looked back at the girl, still asleep on the pile of hay. I didn’t want to be connected with her. I had enough to look out for in myself. But I couldn’t walk away from her.

I walked back and shook her a little. She turned her head toward me and opened her eyes slowly. It was the first good look I’d had at her face. It was pale and thin and there were heavy circles under her eyes. But I could imagine it being pretty, given some care and the right kind of makeup.

Her eyes blinked at the sunlight and she pulled away from my hand.

“Better get off now,” I said. “We’re about to stop.”

She blinked again. Her eyes were deep brown.

“All right,” she said.

I picked up her dress from the remains of the bale of hay. It was dry now. It looked like a dress that you might buy in a variety store for a dollar ninety-eight. I tossed it to her and walked away to the door. I couldn’t figure out what to do about her. I hated to think of her getting thrown into some stinking small-town jail or winding up with the ugly bruiser I’d cooled with the rock. But then again, I wasn’t Robin Hood. I hadn’t asked her any questions, because I hadn’t wanted to know the answers. My own story was sad enough. I didn’t need any more. I tried to tell myself she’d be all right now. If the train was headed for Chicago and she could stay with it, maybe she could find what she wanted in the city. If not, then she could keep on running—like me.

I pulled the bottle out of my pocket. There was a good shot left. Only one, but now I had money. I drained off the last of it and felt warm and calm in the sunlight. I threw the bottle into the end of the car.

The train had stopped. The land sloped in an open meadow from the edge of the right-of-way to a river fifty yards beyond. Willows grew thickly along the river banks. I glanced out the door toward the end of the train. A brakeman was climbing down from the caboose. I looked around and the girl was standing close behind me, clutching the wadded-up slicker in both arms.

I jumped down onto the gravel roadbed. The girl came to the edge of the door and hesitated, lifting one bare foot, then putting it down again. I remembered her torn, bleeding feet. I reached up and she crouched into my arms and I let her down easily. She winced when her feet struck the hot pebbles.

I picked her up. She couldn’t have weighed over ninety pounds. She held the slicker tightly and looked into my face as I carried her into the meadow toward the river.

Her eyes were big and dark and frank, like a child’s eyes. But she couldn’t be a child—not with those breasts.

Halfway across the meadow I stopped to look back. The brakeman had reached our car. He was standing by the open door, looking in our direction. When he saw me looking at him he lifted his hand and waved it in a pushing motion, telling me to keep moving. That was good. He didn’t want to talk to me, he just wanted me to stay off the train. We were probably in Indiana by now and maybe they hadn’t bothered to send out an alarm for me from that tank town.

I looked at the girl in my arms and grinned a little.

“We better not get back on that one,” I said.

She just looked at me out of those eyes.

It was hot in the sun, but among the trees it was cool and the deep grass under foot was soft and damp. I let her down and we walked onto the soft mud bank of the river. She dug her toes into the mud and squished her feet around in it. It must have felt pretty good.

She looked back at me and smiled slowly, a half-wistful, half-frightened smile. Her dark hair fell in a tangle around her face. The pale skin had smudge spots here and there, on her forehead, on one cheek, on her narrow chin.

“I feel dirty all over,” she said.

“Freight trains are dirty,” I said. “I’m sorry I don’t have any soap.”

She smiled a little more.

“Anyway, we have plenty of water,” she said.

Before I could catch her whole meaning, she had taken the hem of her wrinkled, flimsy dress and pulled it up over her head. She freed her arms from it and tossed the dress back onto the grass. She seemed to have no sense of shame or embarrassment as she stood there naked at the edge of the water. But she wasn’t giving an exhibition either. It all happened like a completely natural thing.

Why not? I thought. She wants to go into the water. She doesn’t want to get the dress wet again. She takes it off.

She waded into the river and I watched the water rise slowly around her, traveling up her thin calves, hiding her knees, her slender thighs, her hips that seemed wider than they should have been to fit her near-skinny figure. Finally she turned to look at me. The water came just to the under curves of her breasts. They seemed to float in front of her.

She dipped her arms into the water and threw some of it up into her face. She bent her head, wet her hair and scrubbed at it with her hands. When she straightened again she was beckoning to me with both hands.

“It feels good,” she called. “You ought to try it.”

I could see that it felt good. I could use a little scrubbing myself. I was getting anxious to push on to a town, find a liquor store and maybe a new job. But I’d have a better chance at the job if I washed off some of the road dirt first.

I took off my shoes and socks, coat and shirt and pants. I hesitated. Then I laughed. The old inhibitions die hard, I thought. She didn’t have any. Why should I? I found myself wondering where she’d lost them. I went ahead and stripped down to the skin and splashed into the water.

It did feel good. I hadn’t had a good swim for a long time. I struck out for the opposite bank, taking it easy and slow and I felt good when I got there. But the current had carried me downstream a few yards and it was hard work bucking it to get back to her. I came up, sputtering and coughing, in front of her. Her eyes were wide and awestruck.

“You can swim,” she said.

“Millions of people can swim.”

“Not me,” she said. “They’d never let me.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“They,” she said and looked away.

I scrubbed myself as well as I could, wishing I had some soap. The river water was none too clean, but it was all right if I didn’t stir it up too much.

I guided her over the slippery mud of the bank and we picked up our clothes and walked back among the trees. We found a clearing where enough sun came through to dry us and the grass was clean and dry. She lay down on the grass, on her back, her arms flung out, her eyes closed against the sun. Lying there, relaxed, her skin not so taut over her bones, she looked less skinny, more like a woman, curving and graceful. The sun or the exertion, or both, had faintly reddened her cheeks and there was some pink now to soften the stark whiteness of her face.

I stretched out beside her and looked at the patches of blue sky that showed among the leaves overhead. I felt relaxed and comfortable, no fluttering in the stomach, no shaking, no hollowness of hunger-thirst. It might have been a good sign, but I knew better than to believe it. You couldn’t get over it that way. You could relax once in a while, for a little while, and then the memories came crawling back. You had always deliberately drowned the memories and as long as you lived in the foggy, half-real world, under the anesthesia of drink, they would remain submerged. But when you came out of it, as your mind cleared, the memories rose to the surface, slowly at first, dull and formless, and then faster and faster and sharper and took full possession, stabbing at you, twisting in your head, your chest, your stomach. It all came back, the old pain, the hates, the fears. Every casual glance from a stranger was hostile, threatening. Every suggestion became a persecution. You got nailed to a cross a hundred times every hour. And so you reached for the glass and began to drown them again, the hateful, twisting memories out of the dark and dingy past.

I knew it would happen again, as always, even here in a sunlit grove by a quiet river, without problems, without hunger. A few minutes of peace, of warmth and contentment, and then I would begin to go taut again, to thrash about in my mind, struggling against awareness, dodging the pain, aching again for the anesthetic, the liquid fire with the horrible taste that brought quick and easy relief.

The girl spoke, her quiet voice a cymbal crash out of silence.

“Thank you for helping me,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said.

After a moment she said, more softly than before, “Do you want me now?”

She asked it flatly, without emotion or even expression. Each word had exactly the same tone and timber as every other.

I raised myself on one elbow and looked at her. The pattern of the leaves above us made half-toned lights and shadows over her white body. She looked at me, her dark eyes as flat and expressionless as her voice. When I looked into her eyes she turned her head away. When I didn’t move to her, she looked back at me.

“How old are you?” I asked.

She looked startled, as if she hadn’t thought about it for a long time.

“Twenty-one,” she said.

I put my hand on her, on her breast. Her skin was cool and still damp from the river. There was no response in it to my touch. She lay still, not looking at me, waiting. My hand had asked a question and she had made no answer. None whatever, of fear, of passion, of pleasure or pain. I removed my hand and lay back on the ground.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t done anything for you. Anyway, that’s not something you can earn.”

It was her turn to raise up and look at me. When I met her gaze there was something new in it, a kind of shy curiosity. She moved her arm up and partially concealed her breasts.

“What’s your name?” I said.

She hesitated.

“They called me Dolores.”

That was the second time she had mentioned some mysterious people known as “they.”

“The big guy that I hit with the rock,” I said. “Was he one of—them?”

She nodded slightly.

“There were three of them. He was her husband—Madeleine’s. Then there was another girl. Her name was Mitzi.”

“And they called you Dolores?”

“Yes.”

“But Dolores isn’t your real name?”

Again she hesitated.

“No.”

“All right. You don’t have to tell me your real name.”

Her voice was a bare whisper when she said, “My real name is Constance—Constance Jordan.”

It didn’t mean anything to me.

“All right, Connie,” I said. “My name is Chris.”

Her eyes had that flat look again. Her arm fell away from her breasts.

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

“Why shouldn’t I believe you?” I said. “What’s so special about the name Constance Jordan?”

She sat up slowly and reached for the wadded-up slicker that lay on the grass beside her. Slowly, hopelessly she unrolled it and dug around in it with her fingers. Finally she found what she wanted and held it out to me, her eyes still flat and empty.

It was a fragile, smudged scrap of newsprint, ragged along the edges, the print barely legible in the folds. It had been clipped from a Los Angeles daily. A part of the name of the paper ran vertically alongside the news story in the margin. Although it was datelined less than a year before, the paper was already beginning to yellow.

I held it carefully and read it. There was a fourteen-point, two-line head:

JORDAN ESTATE FINALLY SETTLED

Los Angeles, Calif., August 9, 1951.—Executors for the estate of Philip M. Jordan, millionaire oil man and financier, announced today that a final settlement has been made of the estate after nearly eight years of investigation and delay.

Bulk of the fortune goes to Jordan’s older daughter, Jean. A younger daughter, Constance, was kidnapped at the age of thirteen, on March 28, 1943. Final settlement of the estate was made possible by a recent decision in local courts declaring Constance legally dead.

Believed to have been seized in the street while she was returning home from school, Constance Jordan was never found. A telephoned demand for ransom of fifty thousand dollars was met and Philip Jordan, personally and alone, kept the rendezvous at which the money was to be delivered and the girl returned unharmed. He was met, as he stated afterward, by a man and woman. When he demanded to see his daughter before turning over the money, the man slugged him unconscious. A three-year search by police and the F.B.I. failed to locate the girl. Jordan was unable positively to identify the man and woman who met him from hundreds of police photos shown him. He died within three months of the kidnapping.

Under the provisions of Jordan’s will, the two sisters were to divide the estate equally between them when they came of age. With the younger daughter declared dead, the older girl receives the entire legacy. Many girls have come forward during the past seven years claiming to be the missing Constance Jordan. But although exhaustive investigation was made in every case, each claim was found to be fraudulent. Identification of Constance hinged on certain bodily markings the nature of which, “for obvious reasons,” was never made public. She had never been fingerprinted.

I handed the fragile clipping back to her. I remembered more about it now. I had been in Los Angeles at the time of the kidnapping of the Jordan girl. I remembered the tense headlines during the first days and the photos of the stricken father. I remembered how the story had died out as news and how it was revived every few weeks, as another girl stepped up to claim the fortune.

The girl beside me had put the clipping away somewhere in the folds of the slicker. She didn’t look at me anymore. She sat with her arms around her drawn-up knees, staring toward the river.

“What makes you think you’ll have any more luck than those other girls who tried it?” I said.

Her answer was simple and direct.

“Because I am Constance Jordan,” she said.

When I didn’t answer, she turned slowly and looked at me, her eyes alive again, pleading, intense.

“Will you help me some more?” she said. “I’ve got to get back. If you’ll help me, I can pay you when we get there.”

Something in my face must have told her I thought she was dreaming, because her eyes went flat and hopeless again.

“You don’t believe it,” she said. “But I’m Constance Jordan. I remember everything that happened. I remember that day, coming home from school. And everything after that. I remember!”

Her desperate hunger to be believed took hold of me. I couldn’t believe it yet. But she was getting under my skin.

I got to my feet.

“We’d better find a town,” I said.

She looked up at me for a long time, her eyes doubtful, still hopeless. Then she reached for her flimsy dress, pulled it over her head, stood up and straightened it over her hips. She wadded the slicker up into a bundle and tucked it under her arm. We started off.