Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

Manny’s legs were tucked up in the seat. Her head rested on my shoulder and my arm was around her. It was really a very nice way to be.

“Britt...” she murmured, breaking the drowsy, comfortable silence. “I’ve enjoyed myself so much today. I think it’s been the very best day in my life.”

“You’re a thief, Manuela Aloe,” I said. “You’ve stolen the very speech I was going to make.”

“Tell me something, Britt. I low does anyone as nice as you are, as attractive and intelligent and bubbling over with charm — how does he, why does he...?”

“Wind up as I have?” I said. “Because I never found a seller’s market for those things until I met you.”

It was a pretty blunt thing to say. She sat up with a start, glaring at me coldly. But I smiled at her determinedly and said I meant no offense.

“Let’s face it, Manny. The Rainstar name isn’t worth much anymore, and my talent never was. So the good looks and the charm, et cetera, is what I’ve sold, isn’t it?”

“No it isn’t!” she snapped, and then hesitating, biting her lip, “Well, not entirely. You wouldn’t have gotten the job if you hadn’t been like you are, but neither would you have gotten it if you hadn’t been qualified.”

“So it was half one, half the other,” I said. “And what’s wrong with fifty-fifty?”

“Nothing. And don’t you act like there is, either!”

“Not even a little bit?”

“No!”

“All right, I won’t,” I said. “Providing you smile real pretty for me, and then lie down with your head in my lap.”

She did so, although the smile was just a trifle weak. I bent down and kissed her gently, and was kissed in return. I put a hand on her breast, gave it a gentle squeeze. She shivered delicately, eyes clouding.

“I’m not an easy lay, Britt. I don’t sleep around.”

“What am I to do with you, Manny?” I said. “You are now twice a thief.”

“I guess I’ve been waiting for you. It had to be someone like you, and there wasn’t anyone like that until you.”

“I know,” I said. “I also have been waiting.”

You can see why I said it, why I just about had to say it. She was my munificent benefactor, she was gorgeous beyond my wildest dreams and she obviously wanted and needed to be screwed. So what the hell else could I do?

“Britt...” She wiggled restlessly. “I have a live-in maid at my apartment.”

“Unfortunate,” I said. “My housekeeper also lives in.”

“Well? Well, Britt dear?”

“Well, I know of a place...” I broke off, carefully amended the statement. “I mean, I’ve heard of one. It’s nothing fancy, I understand. No private baths or similar niceties. But it’s clean and comfortable and safe... Or so I’m reliably told.”

“Well?” she said.

“Well?” I said.

She didn’t say anything. Simply reached out and turned on the ignition.

Although Raymond Chandler’s Hollywood career was frustrating, he was involved with important movies: Double Indemnity (with Billy Wilder), Strangers on a Train (with Alfred Hitchcock), and The Blue Dahlia, made from his original screenplay. Sometime in 1946 or 1947, Chandler wrote this screen story on speculation but no one was interested in hiring him to develop it into a screenplay. Published only as a collector’s edition (Santa Barbara: Santa Teresa Press, 1984), “ Backfire ” is an example of the first step in the filmscript process, the “original story ” that precedes the “treatment” in which blot and characters are developed before going on to the actual screenplay. As Robert B. Parker noted in his introduction to the edition in which this story appeared, George is an example of the Chandler attitude: “. .. a vision of chivalric possibility, of hope, maybe only the nostalgia, that honor and courage in the defense of goodness is sufficient to endure.”

George comes home from the wars (I’m as sick of this as you are, I’m just spiralling) to find, say, his wife has been killed in an auto accident on a dark road in a fog at night, at a bad turn. He has no suspicions of foul play. (The cops had, but they didn’t get anywhere, so clammed up.) George finds the small town drear and too full of memories now, and he moves on.

He remembers Edna, his wife, always talked of her childhood in Poonville, Oregon. George says that’s as good as any. He goes on there and gets a job and rooming is tight, so he is introduced by Mary, a girl friend of Edna’s, to Joe, a nice guy, also out of service, and they room together. They become pals. George has asked Mary not to tell anybody who he was or anything about his being married to Edna. He doesn’t want talk or sympathy. He wants a new life in a new town, but it kind of helps his loneliness to think that Edna was a kid along these streets, and drank Cokes and ate ice cream in this drugstore, and went to this Bijou movie house, and waggled a little red and green flag over on the high school football field.

George is a nice guy, not simple, not bitter. Just lonely. Joe is a nice guy too, but his eyes are a little bitter and his mind is not so clean after the war. But the boys get on fine.

Joe finds out somehow who George is. And Joe is the boy who was stationed in Edna’s town in the war and went off the track with her and killed her because she wanted too much of his life.

Joe thinks George came there to get him, that this friendly act is just an act. Joe thinks he is in love with Mary. George is, but doesn’t know it yet. Mary is in love with Joe, who gets the women that way.

Little things begin to happen to George. Look funny. Almost got hurt that time. Then he does get hurt. Just misses being killed. Doesn’t know it himself, but another guy puts him wise. “Somebody did that on purpose, George.” George wonders, talks to Joe, Who the hell would want to hurt him? Joe thinks this is more act, kind of third degree. It’s beginning to get him. He ought to move on. But Mary has dough and she can be had. Better marry her first and then move on.

But George is doing all right with Mary too. Joe knows damn well that he either gets them quick or not at all. George is a distance runner.

Then George gets a letter from a friend back home. “I guess you’re all over Edna’s death by now, George. And you’ve made nice friends and met a nice girl. Maybe I ought to go on keeping my mouth shut, but I don’t like the way Edna got killed. Never did. I was talking to Beattie Lewis the other night, the cop who investigated it. Beattie never liked it either. He never liked the guy that was playing around with Edna while you were away, even if he was a soldier from the camp. The trouble is, Beattie says, this guy, Joe Westerman, wasn’t even in town that night. He had leave in New York. But Beattie sure would have liked to been able to convince somebody this needed a little more work. Only the chief just couldn’t give him the time.”

Joe Westerman. That’s the guy George is rooming with. In Poonville. Why in Poonville, of all the thousand small towns in the U.S.A. he could go to?

George asks him. Joe looks surprised. “My first camp,” he says. “I had a pretty swell time here too. Only I didn’t use all of my opportunities. Guy hates to think he didn’t do that. Matter of fact, why are you here, George?”

“My wife was born here.” “Wife? Never knew you had one.” “She’s dead. Auto accident.” He lights a cigarette and blows smoke idly. “That is, they said it was an accident. But I just had a letter — oh, well, let’s forget it, Joe. Guess I’ll take a shower.”

He does. Joe goes through his clothes. He doesn’t find the letter. George sees him do it. Joe does not see George.