Джонатан Крейг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 12, December, 1953

Szykora was still beating her up. She denied this, but she couldn’t cover up all the bruises and marks. Once, she went in a bar with Tom for a beer. They were sitting in a booth together in the back of the room and she was swearing that Mack Szykora wasn’t hitting her any more. With a swift movement, Tom caught her wrists in one hand and with his other, flicked the hem of her dress back up to her waist. Her thighs were firm and white above her stocking tops — except for the long red stripes where a belt had cut into the tender flesh.

She put her hands over her face and cried softly.

“Listen, Cherry,” Tom begged, “leave him before he really hurts you. Before he kills you some night.”

She took her hands away from her face and got out of the booth. “Leave me alone,” she whispered miserably. “Just leave me alone!”

How could you help a girl whose eyes were dead, the way hers were? A girl so afraid of a man, she was letting him slowly kill her?

One night Tom was on Prescott Street, off duty, in plain clothes. He stood in the thick shadows and listened to them row. It was worse tonight. They’d been keeping quiet since that night Rivas had arrested Szykora. But tonight the big iron worker was too drunk to be cautious. The sound of him cursing and slamming around inside the house could be heard across the street. In the saloon, Harry served a foaming glass of keg beer to a customer and they exchanged knowing smiles.

Sweat covered Tom Rivas’ face. He couldn’t stand any more of it. He threw a half-smoked cigarette into a gutter and started toward the house. Just then the front door burst open and Mack Szykora came reeling out in his shirt sleeves. The big man stumbled across the yard, headed to the saloon for more beer.

Tom met him in the shadows. “You dirty bastard,” Rivas cursed. “I told you to leave that woman alone.”

Szykora reeled and blinked, picking out Tom Rivas’ features in the darkness. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said thickly, “it’s th’ copper. And without his monkey suit.” A giant paw caught the front of Tom’s coat. “You listen, you damn copper. You keep away from here. You leave my wife alone. I know you been sniffin’ around her. I heard talk.” Szykora was whipping himself into a murderous rage. “She’s my wife. What I do to her’s my business — you hear me, copper?”

Rivas slapped the big man’s hand away from his coat, and hit Szykora with all his force. It was like throwing your fist at the side of a stove. Szykora shook his head and swept Rivas up like a rag doll, hurling him against the dark wall of a warehouse. Then Mack Szykora picked up a rock the size of a large cabbage and came at the half stunned policeman, raising it to smash Rivas’ head.

Numbly, Tom drew his service revolver and, lying there propped on one elbow, shot Mack Szykora in the face. Doing it gave him a great deal of pleasure.

Tom Rivas got in no trouble over the killing. Some men had come out of the saloon and they testified that it was justifiable homicide.

After the funeral and after the grand jury acquitted him, he went down to Hunkytown to see the girl. “It’s going to be all right now, Cherry,” he said, taking her gently into his arms. “I’m going to treat you right. You don’t know what it’s like for a man to treat you right.”

“Thank you, Tom,” she said numbly. She registered absolutely no emotion, neither grief nor joy at Mack’s death. Submissively, she allowed Tom to kiss her, but her lips were like clay under his.

He realized that he had never seen her display any kind of emotion; she was a strange woman.

Tom figured that her natural emotions had been stifled by the years of fear she had lived through in Mack Szykora’s house. She’d married him when she was sixteen. It would take a lot of tenderness and patience on his part to make her warmly human again.

As the weeks passed, he was good to her. As good as a man could be to a woman. He brought her gifts. He took her to fine restaurants where she had never been.

But she never showed a thing, other than to say, “Thank you,” very politely. She allowed him to kiss her whenever he wanted. She didn’t refuse a thing — she was like a statue that he could use in any way he wished. Several times he parked and kissed her and got a little more intimate, unbuttoning her blouse or brushing his hand along her leg. She was completely submissive, allowing him anything he desired. But he did not claim her. He wanted her more than anything in the world. He wanted to marry her. But not until she could come to him as a woman should, with fire on her lips and a warm response in her beautiful body that was made for a man to love.

He was living under a great strain, now. It was telling on him. He was thin. There were great shadows under his eyes which burned with a dark, restless fire. A man could stand only so much of what he was going through.

One night after he had been wooing Cherry for three months, he went down to Hunkytown to pick her up for their usual date. He went down to Prescott street to the house across from Harry’s Place, her house now, since the death of Mack Szykora.

He went in and waited while she finished the little feminine rituals required of a woman, touching a powder puff to her nose here and there, drawing a lipstick across her mouth carefully. Tom Rivas stood at one side of her mirror, watching her lithe, graceful movements, the soft curve of a bare arm, the valley of her bosom as she leaned toward the mirror and her deeply cut blouse fell away from her breasts. She was a beautiful, desirable woman, with her Slavic inheritance of large dark eyes, high cheek bones, a wide full mouth and a skin like moonlight. Tom stared at her, achingly, and with a sudden cry, he grabbed her arm and brought her up, crushing her wide red mouth under his, like a starving man.

“Cherry,” he cried against her lips.

Lips that were like clay, body like a statue.

She stood there letting him kiss her, letting him do whatever he liked. She was like a sleepwalker.

He shook her roughly, digging his fingers into her soft white shoulders. His face was slick with perspiration. “What’s the matter with you?” he gasped hoarsely. “What kind of woman are you? Don’t you ever feel anything?” He was shaking all over, sick with frustration.

Her eyes filled. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. He had been good to her and she was genuinely sorry that she could not give him what he desired.

“Don’t you like me, at all?”

“Of course I like you,” she answered quietly. “I like you, Tom.”

“Then what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you wake it up? Why do you treat me like this? A man can’t make love to an ice statue.”

All she could say, numbly, was, “I’m sorry, Tom. I... I can’t help the way I am. I’m sorry.”

Rivas dug shaking fingers into his hair. It was like ramming your head against an invisible barrier. What could he do? He became filled with rage at something he couldn’t see, couldn’t fight with his own hands. He began cursing her. “You filthy little tramp. There’s somebody else — isn’t that it? You’re sleeping with somebody else.”

“No, Tom,” she answered simply.

“Yes there is,” he screamed, and hit her across the mouth. “I’ve done everything for you — killed for you, and you go out and lay with some bum.” He struck her again, leaving red splotches across her cheek.

She took a step away from him, her head going back. Her lips parted, teeth gleamed. Something stirred in her dark eyes, something he had never seen before.

The months of frustration, desire and bafflement exploded in an uncontrollable fit of jealous rage. Listening to his own words, he had convinced himself that she was frigid with him because she was sleeping with another man. He hit her again and again, with blind, unreasoning anger.