James Chase: Just Another Sucker

I looked at Nina, sleeping by my side.

I had married her two years and three months before I went to jail. Then she had been twenty-two and I had been twenty-seven.

She had dark wavy hair and her skin was the colour of ivory. We both had agreed she wasn’t beautiful in the accepted sense of the word, but I had declared, and still thought so, that she was the most attractive woman I had ever seen.

Watching her, as she slept, I could see how much she had suffered. The skin around her eyes was too tight. There was a droop to her lips that hadn’t been there when I had left her to serve my sentence and she looked sad: a thing she had never looked when asleep in the old days.

She had had a rough time all right. I had left her three thousand dollars in our joint account, but this had gone quickly: my attorney’s fee and the last payment on the bungalow had taken most of it, and she had had to look for work.

She had had several jobs, then finally, as Renick had told me, she had discovered a talent for art and had got a job with a man who sold pottery to the tourists. He made the pots and she decorated them. She had been earning sixty dollars a week for the past year: enough, as she explained to me, to keep us going until I could take over again.

I now had only two hundred dollars left in my account. When that was gone, and unless I found a job, I would have to ask her for bus fares, money for cigarettes, and so on: the thought of having to do that demoralised me.

The previous day, growing desperate, I had tried to find a temporary job — anything that would bring me in a little money.

After tramping around most of the day, I came home still empty handed. I was too well known in Palm City to be offered a menial job. The guys who wanted a man were embarrassed when they saw me.

‘Aw, Mr. Barber, you’re kidding,’ they said to me. ‘This is no job for you.’

I hadn’t the guts to tell them how flat broke I was, and they were relieved when I made a joke and left.

‘What are you thinking about, Harry?’ Nina asked, rolling over on her side to look at me.

‘Nothing… I was dozing.’

‘You’re worrying, but you mustn’t. We’ll make out. We can get along fine on sixty a week. We’re not going to starve. You must be patient. The right job will come along.’

‘And while I’m waiting for the right job to come along, I will have to live on you,’ I said. ‘Well that’s wonderful. I’ll enjoy it.’

She lifted her head to stare at me. Her dark eyes anxious.

‘We’re partners, Harry. When you get a job, I’ll retire. As you haven’t a job for the moment, then I do the work. That’s the way a partnership should be.’

‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Harry… you’re worrying me. You may not realise it, but you have changed so much. You’re so hard and bitter now. You must try to forget. We have our lives to lead together, and this attitude of yours…’

‘I know.’ I got out of bed. ‘I’m sorry about it. Maybe if you had spent three and a half years in jail, you might feel the same way as I do. I’ll fix the coffee. At least, that’s something I can do these days.’

All this that I’m telling you about happened two years ago. Looking back on it, and taking it now in its right perspective, I realise I was a pretty weak kind of character. I can see I had let this frame-up and the prison sentence get on top of me. I wasn’t tough and bitter. I was eaten up with self-pity.

If I had had what it takes, I would have got rid of the bungalow, and with Nina, I would have gone some place where I wasn’t known and made a new career for myself. Instead I went around looking for a job that didn’t exist for me in this town and making a martyr of myself.

For the next ten days I went around pretending to look for the non-existent job. I made out to Nina that I was hunting all day, but it was a lie. After making a couple of calls and being turned down, I sought sanctuary in the nearest bar.

When I had worked as a columnist, I had never been much of a drinker, but now, I began really to hit the bottle. Whisky was the one magic escape for me. With five or six whiskies inside me, nothing seemed to matter. I didn’t give a damn if I had a job or not, I could return home and watch Nina slave at her art work without feeling like a pimp.

With a load on, I even found it was easy to lie to her.

‘I was talking to a guy this morning, and it looks as if we can make a deal,’ I told her. ‘He wants me to write a series of articles around his hotel, but first he has to talk to his partner. If it jells, it’ll pay over three hundred a week.’

There was no guy, no partner and no hotel, but the lie kept me important, and it was essential to my ego that Nina should still think I was important. Even when I was forced to borrow ten dollars from her, I still tried to save face by telling her before long, I would be in the money.

But continual lies grow stale, and after a while, I began to realise that when I told Nina a lie, she knew I was lying. She pretended to believe me, and that’s where she went wrong. She should have called my bluff, and maybe I would have snapped out of this pipe dream of mine, but she didn’t, so I went on drinking, went on lying and went on getting nowhere.

Then one afternoon while I was sitting in a bar facing the beach, this thing I want to tell you about started.

The time was a little before six o’clock. I was pretty sloshed. I had knocked back eight whiskies and was looking forward to the ninth.

The bar was small and quiet and not well patronised. I liked it. I could sit in a corner undisturbed and look out of the open window and watch the people enjoying themselves on the beach. I had been a regular customer now for five days. The barman, a big, fat, bald-headed guy, knew me. He seemed to understand my need for whisky. As soon as I finished one drink, he brought me another.

There weren’t many drinkers in the bar. From time to time a man or a woman would come in, shoot a drink down their throats, hang around for a few minutes, then leave. They were like me — without an anchor, lonely and trying to kill time.

In a corner, near my table and out of sight of the bar was a telephone booth. There was a pretty regular traffic to the booth. People came in, made a call, then went out: men, women, boys and girls. The booth was the busiest place in the bar.

While I sat drinking, I watched the booth: it gave me something to do. I wondered a little drunkenly who these people were who shut themselves in behind the glass panelled door: who they were talking to.

I watched their expressions. Some of them smiled as they talked: some got worked up: some of them looked as if they were telling unconvincing lies the way I had been telling unconvincing lies. It was like watching a stage play.

The barman brought me my ninth whisky and put it on the table. This time he stood by me, not moving, and I knew it was time to settle the check. I gave him my last five-dollar bill. He grinned sympathetically as he handed me the change. The grin told me he knew a drunk when he saw one. I felt like getting up and driving my fist into his fat, stupid face, but I took the change and as I started to look for a small coin to tip him, his grin widened and he went back to the bar.

It was at this moment, when I realised he knew the kind of lush he was selling liquor to, that I felt pretty ashamed of myself. I felt so goddamed ashamed, I could have walked right out of the bar and under a fast moving car, but that kind of an end took guts, and I had left my guts in Cell 114. I wasn’t walking in front of any fast moving car. I was just going to sit here and drink myself silly. It was better and easier that way.

Then a woman came into the bar. She walked to the telephone booth and shut herself in.