Росс Макдональд - The Doomsters

“What if I did?”

“You weren’t doing Hallman a favor. Or Tom, either.”

“I beg to differ. They were torturing him. They cut him off cold turkey. He had nothing to eat for over a week. You ought to’ve seen him when I picked him up.”

“So you put him back on horse.”

“I did not. He begged me to get him some caps, but I wouldn’t do it. It’s the only one thing I wouldn’t do for Tom. I did buy him some bottles of cough medicine with the codeine in it. I couldn’t just sit there and watch him suffer, could I?”

“You want him to be a hype for the rest of his life? And die of it?”

“Don’t say that.”

“What are you trying to do to him?”

“Look after him.”

“You think you’re qualified?”

“I love the boy,” she said. “I did what I could for him. Does that make me so lousy?”

“Nobody said you’re lousy.”

“Nobody has to say it. I tried to make him happy. I didn’t have what it takes.”

Fingering her heavy breasts, she looked down at herself in sorrow.

THE DOOR behind her opened. Tom Rica leaned in the opening, with one frail shoulder propped against the doorframe. His sharp tweed jacket hung loosely on him.

“What’s the trouble, Maudie?” His voice was thin and dry, denatured. His eyes were puddles of tar.

Maude resumed her smiling mask before she turned to him. “No trouble. Go back in.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. He smiled past her at me, detachedly, pathetically, as if there was a thick glass wall between us. She shook him: “Did you get a needle? Is that where you were?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said in dull coquetry, using his hollow face as if it was young and charming.

“Where did you get it? Where did you get the money?”

“Who needs money, honey?”

“Answer me.” Her shoulders bowed across him. She shook him so that his teeth clicked. “I want to know who gave you the stuff and how much you got and where the rest of it is.”

He collapsed against the doorframe. “Lay off me, bag.”

“That isn’t a bad idea,” I said, coming around the counter.

She whirled as if I’d stuck a knife in her back. “You stay out of this, brother. I’m warning you. I’ve taken enough from you, when all I want is to do what’s right for my boy.”

“You own him, do you?”

She yelled in a brass tenor: “Get out of my place.”

Tom moved between us, like a vaudeville third man. “Don’t talk like that to my old buddy.” He peered at me through the glass wall. His eyes and speech were more focused, as though the first shock of the drug was passing off. “You still a do-gooder, old buddy? Myself, I’m a do-badder. Every day in every way I’m doing badder and badder, as dear old mother used to say.”

“You talk too much,” Maude said, laying a heavy arm across his shoulders. “Come in and lie down now.”

He turned on her in a sudden spurt of viciousness. “Leave me be. I’m in good shape, having a nice reunion with my old buddy. You trying to break up my friendships?”

“I’m the only friend you got.”

“Is that so? Let me tell you something. You’ll have dirt in your eyes, and I’ll be riding high, living the life of Riley. Who needs you?”

“You need me, Tom,” she said, without assurance. “You were on your uppers when I took you in. If it wasn’t for me you’d be in the pen. I got your charge reduced, and you know it, and it cost me plenty. So here you go right back on the same crazy kick. Don’t you ever learn?”

“I learn, don’t worry. All these years I been studying the angles, see, like an apprenticeship. I know the rackets like I know the back of my hand. I know where you stupid hustlers make your stupid mistakes. And I’m not making any. I got a racket of my own now, and it’s as safe as houses.” His mood had swung violently upward, in anger and elation.

“Houses with bars on the windows,” the blonde woman said. “You stick your neck out again, and I can’t cover for you.”

“Nobody asked you to. I’m on my own now. Forget me.”

He turned his back on her and went through the inner door. His body moved loosely and lightly, supported by invisible strings. I started to follow him. Maude turned her helpless anger on me: “Stay out of there. You got no right in there.”

I hesitated. She was a woman. I was in her house. With the toe of her shoe, Maude pressed a faintly worn spot in the carpet behind the counter: “You better beat it out of here, I’m warning you.”

“I think I’ll stay for a while.”

She folded her arms across her breasts and looked at me like a lioness. A short broad man in a plaid shirt opened the front door and came in quietly. His smile was wide and meaningless under a hammered-in nose. A leather blackjack, polished like a keepsake, swung from his hand.

“Dutch, take this one out,” Maude said, standing away.

I went around the counter and took Dutch out instead. Perhaps bouncing drunks had spoiled him. Anyway, he was easy to hit. Between his wild swings, I hit him with a left to the head, a right cross to the jaw, a long left hook to the solar plexus which bent him over into my right coming up. He subsided. I picked up his blackjack and moved past Maude through the inner door. She didn’t say a word.

I went through a living-room crowded with overstuffed furniture in a green-and-white jungle design from which eyes seemed to watch me, down a short hallway past a pink satin bedroom which reminded me of the inside of a coffin in disarray, to the open door of a bathroom. Tom’s jacket lay across the lighted threshold like the headless torso of a man, flattened by the passage of some enormous engine.

Tom was sitting on the toilet seat with his left shirtsleeve rolled up and a hypodermic needle in his right hand. He was too busy looking for a vein to notice me. The veins he had already used and ruined writhed black up his arm from wrist to wasted biceps. Blue tattoo marks disguised the scars on his wrists.

I took the needle away from him. It was about a quarter full of clear liquid. Upturned in the bright bathroom light, his face set in hard wrinkles like a primitive mask used to conjure evil spirits, its eyeholes full of darkness.

“Give it back. I didn’t get enough.”

“Enough to kill yourself?”

“It keeps me alive. I almost died without it, there in the hospital. My brains were running out of my ears.”

He made a sudden grab for the needle in my hand. I held it out of his reach.

“Go back to the hospital, Tom.”

He swung his head slowly from side to side. “There’s nothing for me there. Everything I want is on the outside.”

“What do you want?”

“Kicks. Money and kicks. What else is there?”

“A hell of a lot.”

“You’ve got it?” He sensed my hesitation, and looked up slyly. “Do-gooder ain’t doing so good, eh? Don’t go into the old look-to-the-future routine. It makes me puke. It always made me puke. So save it for the birds. This is my future, now.”

“You like it?”

“If you give me back my needle. It’s all I need from you.”

“Why don’t you kick it, Tom? Use your guts for that. You’re too young to go down the drain.”

“Save it for the boy scouts, den-father. You want to know why I’m a hype? Because I got bored with double-mouthed bastards like you. You spout the old uplift line, but I never seen a one of you that believed in it for himself. While you’re telling other people how to live, you’re double-timing your wife and running after gash, drinking like a goddam fish and chasing any dirty nickel you can see.”

There was enough truth in what he said to tie my tongue for a minute. The obscure pain of memory came back. It centered in an image in my mind: the face of the woman I had lost. I blotted the image out, telling myself that that was years ago. The important things had happened long ago.