Lawrence Block - The Girl with the Long Green Heart

Then early one afternoon we picked up the last draft at a post office in a very little Iowa town. He asked me if that was the last one, and I told him it was. He stopped the car and we sliced the pie. We had cashed one of the drafts so that we could even things out properly. He took his expense money out, and the rest divided up into two even piles. My end was a little better than the estimated fifteen. About eight hundred better, plus assorted nickels and dimes.

And he said, “I’m ready when you are, Johnny.”

“Now’s a good time.”

There was a motel coming up on the right. He nodded toward it. “Right here?”

“Cabins would be better.”

“Uh-huh.”

Three miles down the road there was one big shack and eighteen smaller ones. A sign advertised cabins for rent, three dollars for a double. There was one car in front of the office, another parked beside one of the cabins. Evidently they got the motel’s overflow and the hot pillow trade and nothing more. Doug pulled off the road and I went into the office and rang for the manager.

He had the too-blue eyes of the alcoholic with a complementary sunburst of broken blood vessels at the bridge of his nose. I told him I wanted a cabin, the farthest one up on the north. He nodded and licked his thin lips.

I gave him three bucks. “We won’t want to be disturbed,” I said. “You hear any party noises from our cabin, anything at all, you just forget you heard a thing.”

He winked at me. I let him dream his own dreams. Maybe he thought I had a fourteen year old girl in the car, maybe he figured I planned a spirited afternoon of rape. He did not mind.

I left the office and went back to the car. We drove over to the far cabin and parked. I opened the cabin door while Doug locked the car up tight. I nicked a light on. The cabin was stale and cheap. There was a bed, a bureau, and a chair. No rug on the floor. The mirror on the wall had a crack in it. I thought of a man or a woman waking up in a room like that one with a taste of whiskey and stale sex for morning company. A person could commit suicide in a cabin like that one.

Doug came in, closed the door, bolted it. “Whenever you’re ready,” he said, and I hit him in the face.

The punch didn’t do much. He was backing up when I threw it and my fist glanced off the side of his face. He missed with a left and threw a right hand into my chest over the heart. I suddenly could not breathe. I ducked away from him and got hit a few times. I got my breath back, ducked under a punch and hit him in the pit of the stomach, hard. He doubled up and almost fell.

I went for him and kept missing. He spun away and ducked and dodged while I threw everything but the bed at him. He said, “Old man, I’m going to take you apart.” I hit him again and he bounced back off a wall. I moved in low and he chopped me in the side of the head. A slew of colors danced inside my head. I felt myself slipping forward, put my hands out in front of me, caught his knee with the point of my chin. I snapped straight up and started over backward.

Everything was trying like hell to turn black. I wouldn’t let go. He was standing over me, and I threw myself at his legs and held on. He tried to kick his way loose but didn’t make it, and I got squared away and hauled his feet out from under him. He landed on top of me and threw a barrage of punches that bounced off my shoulders. I spun him around and tried to hit him but my arms wouldn’t move all that well. I got up. He came up after me and shoved and I went over on to the bed. I kicked him coming in. The kick didn’t have much power in it, but it caught him fairly square between the legs and put him on the floor again.

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

He got up from the floor and I hauled myself off the bed and we stood in the middle of the room hitting each other. Neither of us had the energy to be cute. We had stopped dodging punches. We just kept hitting each other. I don’t know if he felt the punches. I know I didn’t, not any more. I just stood there taking it and trying to beat the son of a bitch to the ground. I hit him and he hit me and I hit him and he hit me, over and over, just like that. We had screwed each other up but good, and we felt a clean uncomplicated hate for each other.

A heavy could have taken either of us. We were not strong-arm types. We were grifters, and grifters are rarely much help in a back-street brawl. He had some years on me, and maybe a couple of pounds, but we still wound up close to even.

Once his arms dropped and his eyes glazed over, and he stood there taking it while I hit him. He took a lot of punches before he went down. I stood over him, waiting, and he got up shaking his head and I swung and missed and he hit me square in the gut.

A little later he put another blow over the heart and I felt the way men must feel when they have a coronary. Everything froze, time and space, and I hung there breathless until he hit me in the face and put me down on the floor. I had trouble getting up. He asked me if I had had enough, and I pushed myself up and swung at him and missed, and he hit me again and I went down again. He didn’t say anything this time. I got up and hit him, and hit him again, and we were back in the swing of things.

All of this seemed to go on forever. I spent more time on the floor than he did, but not too much more. It got so that it took less out of me to get hit than to lift an arm and throw a punch. We were both of us too arm-weary to do a hell of a lot of damage. And it ended finally with me tumbling back against a wall and holding onto it and sliding down it toward the floor while he sagged backward and sat down on the bed and then lay backward, half on the bed and half on the floor. Neither one of us moved after that, not for a long time.

There was no john in the cabin, just a sink. He washed up, went out to the car to get us some fresh clothes. We took our time cleaning up and changing. We were both of us pretty bloody. He had a split lip, a few cuts on his face, swellings under both eyes. I wasn’t cut up quite that much but I had managed to lose one tooth somewhere along the line and my jaw was in fairly sad shape.

Doug was the first to talk. He was looking in the mirror, and he shook his head and said, “Beautiful.”

“We’re both pretty.”

“You can sure as hell take a few punches, Johnny.”

“I should have been a boxer.”

“Yeah. Both of us. I can’t find my cigarettes.”

I dug out a pair of mine and gave him one. We chucked our dirty clothes in the corner and went out to the car. He headed north, drove slowly.

“It was a good idea, stopping here,” he said after a while. “I was aching for a crack at you ever since Toronto.”

“Well, we worked it out.”

“We did at that,” he said.

I smoked my cigarette all the way down and flipped the butt out the window. I asked him what he figured on doing next.

“I suppose I’ll head for Vegas,” he said.

“To give the money back across the tables?”

“Part of it. Or I’ll beat them for a change. I like it out there. Get some sun, lie around the pool, get a little drunk, rest up while I figure out how to connect for the next one.”

“Sure.”

“I guess I’ll drive. I lucked out on the car, bought the first one off the lot and it doesn’t ride bad at all. I figure I can drive it to Vegas with no trouble.”

“You’ll want a new name.”

“Well, that’s no headache, Johnny. Pick a new name and sell it to myself and then register it in Nevada with Nevada plates. I’ll probably put it in my own name, I don’t know. Maybe not.” He was silent a moment. “I have to pass through Colorado, I guess. Or close enough to it. If you feel like riding along, feel free.”