The Neon Jungle Read online

  Then there was a long time when everything was mixed up. Henry said later it was eleven days. It was like coming out of a long jumbled tunnel, full of noises and shoutings and crazy whistling lights, into a sudden calm place. She opened her eyes. A big-shouldered kid with a blond burr head in Army khaki with sergeant’s stripes sat by the narrow window, his chair tilted back against the wall. It was very quiet. Beyond the window was fog. Beyond the fog was a muffled heavy bleat, metronomic, as though some great animal were caught out there. Traffic whispered through the fog with muslin horn sounds. It was a strange room and she did not want to turn her head, as that seemed too great an effort. She closed her eyes for just a moment, and when she opened them again the window was dark and the sergeant was not there. She turned her head a bit toward the source of light, and saw him sitting by the lamp, still reading.

  He seemed to sense her stare. He put the book aside and came over to her and stood frighteningly huge beside the bed and laid the back of his hand against her forehead with a miraculous gentleness.

  “What happened?” she asked weakly.

  “You mean who shoved you, Bonny? A pneumonia bug. You didn’t have any resistance.”

  “Who are you?” Her voice felt trembly.

  “Henry Varaki. Don’t try to ask questions. I’ll see if I can cover it. I was just walking around with one of the guys. You were out like a light. A guy was holding you up against a wall and beating hell out of you. We took care of him quick and took you to a hospital. For some damn reason they wouldn’t take you. You felt like you were burning up. My buddy had a friend who gave him the use of this place, so we brought you back here and rounded up a doctor. Malnutrition, alcoholism, pneumonia, anemia, and possible internal injuries from the beating you took. My, that doctor was real intrigued with you, Bonny. He said he could get you in a charity ward, but I couldn’t swing any special nurses or anything, so I figured I could take care of you myself. My friend went on east. It’s been … let me count, eleven days. You’ve had glucose and oxygen and all the antibiotics in the book, Bonny. The doc comes in every morning to check. You’ve been out of your head until day before yesterday. Since then you’ve been mostly sleeping. He said this morning you’d probably wake up clear as a bell today.”

  He sponged her face with gentleness. He held her head up and held a glass to her lips. She was far too weak to sit up alone, much less stand. He took care of her needs with a calm deftness that was so matter-of-fact that she felt neither shame nor shyness. In the morning, before the doctor was due, he gave her a sponge bath. She looked down and was shocked at her pale wasted body, at the shrunken breasts, the spindle legs, the hipbones that looked sharp enough to pierce the pallid skin.

  The doctor came. He was a gruff, bustling man. He addressed most of his questions to Henry, a few to her. He wrote out two prescriptions and said, “You’re a tough young woman. Keep this up and you’ll come back fast. Henry, go out in the other room and close the door.”

  “Why, Doc?”

  “Just do it, Henry.”

  Henry left the room and closed the door gently. The doctor looked at her. His expression changed, became harder. “You are not only tough. You are lucky. You owe your life to him. He is a rare young man. I don’t know whether you can understand how rare. You people are always looking for angles. All you can do for him is get your strength back as fast as you can and get out of here. You’ll be doing him a favor. When he was a kid I bet he kept birds with broken wings in boxes, with homemade splints. He didn’t sleep for the first fifty hours you were here. He was on his way east. A thirty-day leave before shipping out. Don’t try any of your sleek angles on him, young lady. You barely escaped burial, courtesy of the city of San Francisco. Don’t try to say anything to me in explanation or apology. At this particular moment, I don’t particularly want to hear the sound of your voice. I heard enough of what you said in delirium. So did Sergeant Varaki. It wasn’t pretty. What made it particularly ugly was the very obvious fact that you started with education, background, decent breeding. Something was left out of you. Garden-variety guts, I’d imagine. Don’t go back to your alley-catting until the sergeant is over the horizon.”

  She shut her eyes. She heard the doctor leave and heard him talking to Henry in the next room. The tears scalded out through her closed lids. After a time she wiped them away with a corner of the sheet.

  Henry came in, grinning. “He says he doesn’t have to come back, Bonny. Congratulations. You can go in for a checkup after you’re on your feet.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Hey, don’t go gloomy on me. My God, I’m glad to have somebody to talk to. Somebody who makes sense, that is.”

  Slowly at first, and then more rapidly, she began to gain weight and strength. He bought her pajamas and a robe. She leaned weakly on him while she took the first tottering steps. One circuit of the room exhausted her.

  “How about my room?” she asked. “How about my clothes?”

  He flushed. “I got the address out of you one day when you weren’t too bad. I went over there. She’d moved your stuff out of your room. You owed six bucks. I paid it and brought the stuff back here. I went through it. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Your clothes were pretty sad, Bonny. I gave the works to the Salvation Army. I got your personal stuff in a little box. Papers and letters and some photographs and stuff like that.”

  Everything in the world in one small box. She closed her eyes. “Will you do something for me, Henry?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s a silly-sounding question, will you do something for me, after … everything. Go through the box, Henry. Take out my Social Security card. Take out my birth certificate. Take out the photostat of my college record. Throw everything else away.”

  “Everything?”

  “Please.”

  The next day he shamefacedly gave her an envelope. “All the things you wanted saved are in there. And I stuck in a few pictures. Your mother and father. I figured you ought to hang on to those too.”

  “They were killed in—”

  “You talked about that a lot. I know about that. You better save the pictures. You have kids someday, they’d like to know what your people looked like.”

  “Kids someday.”

  “Don’t say it like that, Bonny. Don’t ever say it like that.”

  That was the day she sat on a stool in front of the kitchen sink of the apartment with a big towel around her shoulders while he washed her hair. It took four soapings, scrubbings, rinses to bring it back to life. And then, when it was dry and she brushed it, he admired the color of it, and in the midst of his admiration she saw him suddenly get the first increment of awareness of her. It was something she was well practiced in seeing. She was still slat thin, weighing less than a hundred pounds, and she was without makeup, and he had seen her body at its ugliest, and heard all the ugly bits of her history, and yet he could still have that sudden glow of interest and appreciation in his eyes. It made her want to cry.

  She began to take over a small part of the cooking and cleaning on the twenty-second day of his thirty-day leave. On the bathroom scales she weighed an even one hundred. She was five-seven and considered her proper weight to be about one twenty-two or -three. She had not weighed that much in over a year.

  “I’ve got to have clothes to get out of here, Henry.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll have to buy them. You’ll have to tell me about sizes.”

  “I’ll give you the sizes. Get something cheap. Have you written it down for me? All the money you’ve spent so far? You can’t have much left.”

  “I’ve got some. Doc took it easy on me.” He flushed brightly. “And I’m only telling you this so you won’t worry. Pop sent me two hundred bucks. I got it day before yesterday.”

  “You’ve got to go home, Henry. You’ve got to see them.”

  “There’ll be time.”

  “There won’t be time. You keep saying that. They’ll never understand w
hy you didn’t go home. Never.”

  “They know me pretty well, Bonny. They know if I didn’t go home, there’s a damn good reason.”

  “There’s no reason good enough.”

  He had talked a lot about his family. The Varaki clan. “There’s us three kids. Me and Walter and Teena. Teena’s the baby. High-school gal. Walter’s older than I am. Dark coloring, like the old lady was. His wife is Doris. She gives old Walter a pretty hard time. She’s a pinwheeler, that gal. Then Jana is Pop’s second wife. He married her last year. It was like this. You see, Mom died three years ago. Some of Jana’s relatives, farm people, sent her to stay with us so she could go to business school. She’s two years younger than Walter, and two years older than me. Big husky farm girl. With her in the house, Anna, that’s Pop’s older sister, came to sort of keep house for us. Then Pop up and marries Jana. It made the whole family sore as hell. Especially Doris. Anna stayed on. Pop and Jana are happy. Well, hell, it’s a happy house. Great big old ruin of a place. The market used to be in the downstairs. Pop built a new market right next door right after the war. It’s run like a supermarket. Mostly the people that work there live in the house too. There’s three floors. Ten bedrooms. Always something going on. Usually something crazier than hell. Pop and his old cronies play card games in the kitchen and yell at each other in old-country talk. Everybody pitches in.”

  He had talked about them enough so that she felt as though she knew them. Knew them better than some of the dim-faced people of the last few years.

  She wrote down the sizes, and he left her alone. He was back in two hours, burdened with boxes. There was a shiny inexpensive suitcase hooked over one big finger. The boxes towered almost to his eyes.

  “You got too much, Henry!”

  “Come on Bonny. Start opening. It’s like Christmas, hey?”

  “Too much.”

  He seemed to have an intuitive understanding of color, of what she could and couldn’t wear with that dark copper hair. Yet he had bought the sort of clothes she hadn’t worn in a long time. Nubby tweed skirts, soft pale sweaters.

  “I hope you like this kind of stuff,” he said nervously. “There was one picture of you in all that stuff. That stuff I threw out. You were in this kind of thing and I sort of liked it.”

  There were two skirts, three sweaters, two blouses, three sets of nylon panties and bras, two pairs of shoes, one with two-inch wedge heels and one pair of sandals with ankle straps. She went into the bedroom and put on one outfit. She looked at herself in the mirror, looking first at the fit and length and then suddenly noticing her own flushed face, eager eyes, half-smile. The smile faded away. She bit her lip. Her gray eyes looked enormous in the too-thin face. She went back out to him.

  “Bonny, you look swell! You look wonderful!”

  “I don’t know how … I don’t know how to …”

  He handed her a small box. “I picked up some junk jewelry. Dime-store stuff. A kind of a clip thing and a bracelet. I thought …”

  She sat and heard him come over, felt his hand warm and steady on her shoulder. “Look, I didn’t want for it to make you cry. Hell, Bonny. I didn’t mean it to work like this. Please, honey.”

  He went out again in the late afternoon to buy groceries for their dinner. She packed her things in the bag. She wrote a note.

  “Thanks for everything, Henry. I’ve got your home address. I’ll send the money there when I get it. You’ve been swell. Now you’ve got time to hurry home and see them and get back before your leave is over.” She signed it and read it over. It would have to do. There weren’t any right words to tell him. The doctor had told her what she had to do. And the doctor had been very, very right.

  Her legs felt odd and stilty as she went down the two flights of stairs and out onto the street. The sunshine looked too bright. Her feet looked and felt far away. She walked down the block and the shiny new suitcase cut into her hand. It was light and there was very little in it. The blocks were very long. People and traffic moved too fast. She heard the hard slap of leather against the sidewalk and she turned and saw him and she tried to run. He caught her and held her with his big hands tight above her elbows, hurting her. There were odd patches of white on his face and his blue eyes were so narrow they were nearly closed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Let me go. Let me go.”

  He took her back, one hand still folded tightly around her thin arm, the suitcase in his other hand. She walked with her head bowed. At the foot of the stairs he picked her up lightly in his arms and carried her up. She was crying then. Crying with her face turned against the side of his strong young throat.

  He got the door open and kicked it shut behind them. He dropped the suitcase, paused with her still in his arms and read the note, and then walked to the big chair in the living room and sat down with her, holding her, letting her cry the tears of weakness and frustration.

  It was a long time before she was able to stop.

  “Where would you have gone?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter.”

  “No.”

  “It has to matter to you or you’d have been better off if that drunk had killed you.”

  “I would have been better off.”

  “Self-pity. For God’s sake, sometimes you make me sick.”

  “I make myself sick.”

  “Oh, shut up! The doctor said to throw you out the minute you could walk. Fine! What does that make me? A sucker who wasted his leave. Something has to come of it. Something more than that.”

  They stayed there until the last of the dusk was gone and the room was dark. Darkness gave her a certain courage. She said, “What happens does seem to matter more than … it did before. I don’t know why it should. All this has been like … being born again. Being cared for like a baby. Fed, bathed, taught to walk. I could almost come back to life.”

  He kissed her lightly and stood up and set her on her feet. It was the first time he had kissed her. He said, “It was good to hear you say that, Bonny.”

  He turned on the lights. They squinted in the brightness and smiled uncertainly at each other, and talked in small casual voices through dinner and through the short evening until she went to bed after helping him make up his bed on the studio couch in the small living room.

  Two

  THE NEXT MORNING Henry was moody and thoughtful. He spent a lot of time standing at the windows, looking down at the street. He jingled change in his pockets. He paced restlessly.

  After lunch he got up and brought more coffee from the stove and filled their cups. He sat down opposite her.

  “I’ve got seven more days furlough, Bonny.”

  “I know. You said you could hitch a plane ride. Why don’t you, Henry? I’ll stay right here. Honestly. Then you could come back here, and by then I should be strong enough. I could get a job, maybe.”

  “I’m not going home. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  “Goodness! Don’t snarl.”

  “I’ve got something figured out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you it’s a big house. There’s room. God knows there’s plenty of work, so it wouldn’t be like you were sponging on the old man. He drives everybody. Then you’d be getting the allotment money. It wouldn’t be much.”

  She stared at him. “Allotment?”

  “I can’t leave you this way. I got to know that you’re set. And I know enough about you to know that you won’t be set unless you got a reason. And the only reason that’s going to mean anything to you is to have somebody depending on you and trusting you. I can get a cab and we can go fill out the forms and get the blood tests or whatever you have to have in California. And then, by God, you’ll be a Varaki, and you’ll have the whole damn family on your side. The way I figure it, it will be an arrangement. I haven’t written the family any of this. They won’t know a damn thing, except you’re my wife. And that’ll be all they need to know.”<
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  She rested her hands flat on the table and shut her eyes for long seconds. “What are you, Henry? Twenty-three?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “I’m a twenty-six-year-old tramp.”

  “Don’t talk like that!”

  “A tramp. A semi-alcoholic. A girl who works the bars and works the men she finds in the bars. A girl who … can’t even remember all their faces. It’s good luck instead of good judgment that I’m not diseased. Bonita Wade Fletcher. A great little old gal. I’ve been tossed in the can twice here and once in L.A. That’s what you’re trying to wish on your family, Henry. On decent people.”

  “My God, you like to wallow in it, don’t you?”

  “You’re playing a part now, Henry. A big fat dramatic part. Saving the fallen. Rescuing the scarlet woman. My God, look at me!”

  “I’m looking.”

  “I walk a certain way and talk a certain way and look at men a certain way, and your whole damn family would have to be blind not to see it. I’m just one big smell of stale bedroom and warm gin. No, Henry. Not on your life.”

  “I say you got to look at yourself and understand that you got to have some kind of a reason to prop you up. You forgot how to stand up by yourself.”

  “Love. Love goes with marriage. I couldn’t love you. I haven’t got enough love left for anybody. I gave it all away. Free samples.”

  “I haven’t said a damn word about love. This is just an arrangement. Goddamn it, you go back there to Johnston as Mrs. Henry Varaki and let the name prop you up until you can stand by yourself. Or maybe you don’t go for Varaki. Too foreign, maybe. Low class.”

  “No. No.”

  “I go away and I come back. O.K. By then you know. Either way we break it up legal. And to hell with you if you let me down.”

  “You said it’s a nice business. Profitable. How do you know I won’t stay tied around your neck, lushing on your father’s profits from the store for the rest of your life?”