Harlan Ellison - Web of the City

Rusty plunked the change onto the wooden frame of the rifle machine, fitted the weapon to his shoulder and took aim.

The first shot knocked down a rabbit. The second did the same. The third and fourth shots missed. Then the shapes began to waver and shimmer and run like hot tar on a July street. The rabbits were no longer rabbits. The turkeys had no resemblance to turkeys. The farmer with the white goatee was not the farmer with the white goatee.

The farmer was Pops. The bear was Carl Pancoast, weaving back and forth, trying to stay in sight, but failing miserably. There somewhere, lost in the forest, trying to get out, trying to find a path through the trees and the snarling roots, was Rusty himself. There was Rusty, plunging through the foliage with his scarred forearms crossed before his eyes, his feet piston-pumping, the shadows trailing behind, the tree branches reaching for him. The wind rising in a keening whistle. The moon diving for cover behind cotton-batting clouds, the sky dark and gloating. There was Rusty running like hell, knowing he wasn’t gonna make it, goddammit, not even a little.

There was Pops, coming out of the woods with that stink smile on his jaw and his hands big as catcher’s mitts, ready to whack. There was Pancoast making imploring gestures, making sneaking, requesting, prodding gestures from behind the big old trees and Rusty running past, ’cause that was the way of it.

And there was Dolores.

It had to be. Crap yes. It had as hell to be. There she was swingin’ from a tree limb by her neck, with her tongue stuck out of the corner of her crooked mouth, black and swollen. There were her eyes, bugged huge and starting to water and all the flies on her. The flies that looked like Candle and Boy-O and Fish and Poop and all the rest. There was even a bunch of girl flies that looked like Cherry and Caroline and Weezee. And a big horsefly that was the Beast. She was swingin’ in the wind, with the fraykin’ night beatin’ on her and a scream coming out of her throat but how could that be if she was lynched and dead and swingin’? But it was. It was a scream. And it came up from the bottoms of her feet, high over Rusty’s head, and it rose through her twisted body, and it came out of her mouth, past that lump of charcoal that was her tongue, and it sounded like…

TILT TILT TILT TILT TILT TILT TILT TILT

“Looks like I shoved too damned hard,” the kid at the pinball beside him said lackadaisically.

Rusty moved his head slightly, shaking his brains back into shape. It had been so real, so deep, so interesting. He was there and he was here. The machine had already clicked off all his seconds and he noted a ridiculously low score. He leaned against the machine for a moment, steadying himself, feeling a strangeness inside himself, where the sorrow dripped into his blood stream.

Dolores gone. It didn’t seem possible. It was all a big joke, and soon someone would give him the clue-in, and he would laugh. But now, now, it was real, too real, and he had to get away from thinking.

He moved on down the line to the next machine, ignoring the kid at the pinball game who had slid another nickel in.

It was an hour before they palled on him and he felt the tugging inside. He had to move on. Move fast and run far. He left the Playland, not in the slightest satiated, the terror of emptiness and loneliness haunting him. Times Square was no better. At eye level it was a rippling obscenity of crowd motion and neon emergencies. Above the glare, the buildings rose in dirty spires. And above that—as though it had wandered into a private party and was too shy to make itself known—the night sky swirled past impregnated with dust and smoke.

New York has no stars.

Rusty walked carefully. The sidewalk was peanut butter. The movie loomed up overhead and reflex took over. It was a Jayne Mansfield picture and he realized that he wanted to see it… before what had happened had happened. He saw two girls getting tickets. His thoughts were not his own. The same crazy emotions that had drawn him here were drawing him into actions he knew he did not want to commit. He bought a ticket and followed the girls into the lobby.

One was brunette, her hair worn in the frowzy pageboy style of the Forties, unkempt and straggling about her face. She had pimples and her legs were very heavy. She wore her sweater and skirt badly; her breasts were monstrous under the pink argyle. The other was prettier, in a mousey way. At first glance she had seemed about eighteen, but a closer look, as they stopped before the candy counter, showed Rusty the other girl was over twenty. Some indeterminate age between high school anxiety and the frenzy of pre-marriage. They were on the loose and Rusty made the same sort of mental note he always made when he was stalking broads.

The mousey one was not as hot a job as the fat slob, but she had a round little po-po on her and she seemed to be at least moderately clean. He decided to make the pitch there.

The psychology of the streets had already been put into effect: never buy a ticket for a broad when she can buy her own. Pick the piece up inside, it’s cheaper.

Rusty moved in. His feet carried him without his knowing their direction. This was escape, goddammit, this was a way out—for the time being.

He moved in behind and his arm lightly brushed the smaller girl’s back. She turned and her face was just below his own. He stared at her boldly and the ritual began.

A slight, rakish grin spread across his even features, and he bounced the change in his hand. “Want some candy?”

The fat one looked interested from the first. That was no score and Rusty knew it. He’d had her pegged as warm drawers from the outset. He ignored the twin signal beacons that screamed CLARK BAR BABY RUTH RAISINETS from her tiny eyes, and looked squarely at the smaller girl. He was rewarded. Obviously they had not come to the movie for the movie. There would be none of the shallow fencing and double entendre he hated so much in boy-girl byplay.

She looked at him and said, “Popcorn is all, thanks.” Her tones were Bronx. Lower Bronx. He bought an open-topped box of hot buttered stuff and walked beside the girls into the theater, keeping hold of the popcorn. The investment had not been cinched yet.

They went up to the balcony and found three seats amid the smoke curtain. Rusty sat between the two girls and was annoyed when the fat one wasted not a moment, placing her warm thigh close to his leg even as he sat down. The smaller one settled herself, adjusted her skirt primly, and thoughtfully chewed her gum. After a moment she leaned over, put her hand on Rusty’s and said sweetly, “C’n I have the popcorn please?”

He handed the box over and slipped toward her slightly. His hand went around the back of the seat and dropped low on the front of her shoulder, just above one of her small breasts. She made no move to remove it.

It wasn’t a very good movie. But that didn’t matter.

After the show, Teresa took Patty aside and talked to her very low and excited for a few minutes. Rusty leaned against a poster of the coming attraction and lit a cigarette. He heard Patty say, “Like hell. I saw ’im first.” Then the voices of the two girls sank into a low monotone again and Patty shook her head a few times. Teresa finally took a bill from her little clutch-purse and slipped it into the fat girl’s hand. Then she gave her a shove, and an imperative nod of the head, and Patty moved out into the street, with a belligerent and semi-hungry stare back at Rusty and the girl.

“Okay,” Teresa said, coming across the lobby to Rusty. “Now if you wanna go get somethin’ ta eat, I’ll go with ya.”

Rusty nodded his head at the retreating back and wobbling buttocks of Patty, heading toward Eighth Avenue. “Won’t she tell your folks?”