Robert Butler - Hell

“Let me do the talking,” Bogey says.

Hatcher is suddenly all right. He nips with his thumb and forefinger at the tip of his snap brim. “Right,” he says.

The two men climb the stairs. The light at the landing draws the shadow of the banister posts across their bodies first one way and then, when they turn, the other way, as if they are pacing in their jail cell.

At the fourth floor, their two fedoras come up from the light below and into the dark at the top of the stairs. Hatcher and Bogart stop on the threadbare runner that trails down the center of the corridor. At the far end is a thin slice of light at the bottom of a doorway. Bogey nods toward it. They move to the door and Bogey knocks.

From inside, a woman’s voice says, “Come in.” It’s a high, thin, nasally voice.

Bogey draws a sharp breath. Hatcher looks at him, but his face is a mask of black in the dark corridor. Bogey pushes the door open.

The tenement apartment is one room, simple and seedy, as simple and seedy as a cheap hotel room in some dirty little working-class burg. A sagging couch, a desk, a few chairs, a blank wall where the Murphy bed hides, all of it in colors that don’t even deserve the name “color.” Dingy grays and tans. And rising from a chair in the center of all this is the dame. A tiny body, fragile, chiseled features and dark, feverish eyes. Her lips are scarlet, painted large, like Satan’s own butterfly.

Hatcher and Bogey are standing before the dame and she’s looking at the two of them, one at a time, back and forth, like she’s trying to figure out which one of them is going to throw her over his shoulder and carry her out of a burning building.

Hatcher waits for Bogey to do the talking, but his partner isn’t saying a word. He looks at Bogey, whose face is lambent with repressed anguish, though nobody in the room would know what “lambent” means, even Hatcher at that moment, who is now very much Bogey’s fellow private eye. Hatcher lifts an eyebrow and rolls his shoulders in his wide-lapeled suit, wondering what’s going through his partner’s mind. Bogey doesn’t act like this around dames.

Finally Bogey speaks. “You’re not who you said you were.”

“Who’d I say I was?”

Bogey hesitates. “Nobody.”

“That’s me,” she says.

“You’re not who I thought.”

“I got no control over what you think.”

Abruptly Bogey turns to Hatcher. “You talk to her.” And Bogey heads for the window, which looks out into utter darkness. “I thought she’d be someone else,” he says, low.

Hatcher looks at the dame. She looks at him. She’s wearing a flimsy little flower-print button-front dress, and the buttons are big and dazzling white, just asking to be undone.

Hatcher still doesn’t know his lines, but he’s catching on.

He takes a drag on his cigarette, and being a gentleman, he turns his head slightly, blowing the smoke just past the dame’s right ear. He flips his head at the chair behind her, and she does what she’s told. She sits. Hatcher stands over her, but he parks his Camel in the corner of his mouth, casually brushes his suit coat open, and eases his hands into his trouser pockets. Just to put her a little at ease.

“So?” he says. The cigarette loosens and starts to fall from his mouth.

Hatcher grabs for it.

Meanwhile, Bogey stares into the nothing out the window as if it was something, and the voice in his head speaks: I thought it was going to be her. I don’t have any reason in this forsaken town to expect anything to turn out right, but somehow I thought it was going to be Baby at last. What a sap I am. Of course this is the way it ends up. You drink a lot. You crack some heads. Even to get her, there was the price of running out on your wife, and then maybe you even run around a little on her, out in the middle of the ocean heading for Catalina. You wouldn’t have done that except for Baby getting seasick and never being able to go with you on the ocean in the boat you enjoy so much. Even if it’s a little screwy, you try to keep a kind of a code about things. And you try to do your job straight. And you’re true to your friends. You give away your last two fingers of bourbon. But you find yourself running into a brick wall. The thing they call your flawed humanity. So you end up in a cheap room in a hot climate and your cigarettes all taste like dust and it looks like you’ve got an extended booking. Still, I wanted it to be Baby real bad. I wanted her to have her back to me when I came through the door and there’s just that thin long body and the rip curls of her dirty blond hair and she waits a beat or two before turning. Baby is Bacall, after all. She has a swell sense of timing. So she turns, and the hair falls a little over her face but you can see both her beautiful eyes, those wide-set eyes, and she gives me that little half smile and we’re together again. That’s what I wanted real bad. I may be a sap but I’m not stupid. I know what I’m wishing for. That Baby is spending eternity in Hell. I should be wanting real bad never to see her again. I should want her to be in Heaven playing a harp and looking swell in a white gown and wings. But I don’t want that. I want her with me. Which probably is why I’m here.

And Hatcher has caught his falling cigarette. But it has tumbled around and the tip of it touches his palm and the fire sears through his eternal skin and into his eternal capitate bone. Hatcher drops the cigarette and grits his teeth against the pain and tries not to cry out. He knows it would ruin the scene. He stays quiet. He’s a trooper. Then abruptly the pain stops, and he’s panting. But the dame doesn’t seem to notice. He takes a deep breath and stubs the cigarette out with the toe of his wing tip brogue.

He starts over. “So?”

The dame shrugs. “You already said that.”

Hatcher shoots his cuffs. “Listen, babe, you got something to say, say it.”

“I need your help,” she says.

“Everybody needs help in this town.”

“I want to get out.”

Hatcher answers her with a short guttural laugh, like hawking up phlegm from the back of the throat.

“Go ahead and laugh, wise guy,” she says. “But there’s a way out.”

“Yeah? Who told you that?”

“My ex-boyfriend.”

“And how does he know?”

“He did it once.”

“So he’s gone?”

“No. He’s back.”

“Why doesn’t he go out again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he forgot how. Memories are short around here.”

“And there are plenty of liars.”

She shrugs. “That’s why you private dicks stay in business. To sort out the lies.”

“So where is he now?”

“I don’t know. I try to avoid him.”

“I’d think you’d want to stay close. In case he breaks out again.”

“I avoid him.”

“Why?”

“Because whenever I get near him, I have to reach into his chest and pull out his heart, and it bursts into flames, and when it’s done burning, I eat it.”

For a moment, not surprisingly, what film theorists call the “aesthetic distance” has been broken for Hatcher. This is, after all, still Hell.

But before Hatcher can think further about this, Bogey is beside him again. “So you’re that kind of dame, are you?” he says.

The dame rolls her thin shoulders, which makes Hatcher reach inside his coat pocket and pull out a pack of cigarettes. “I guess I am,” she says.

Somewhere far off a police siren wails.

Hatcher pops a cigarette, puts it in his mouth, stuffs the pack — his brand is Lucky Strikes — back into his coat, and he finds matches in a side pocket. He strikes one. He lifts the flame to the tip of his cigarette, and he realizes the conversation has stopped. Both Bogey and the dame are watching him. Hatcher takes the cigarette out of his mouth and turns it around, elegantly, and offers it to the dame. She opens her mouth slightly. Gently he puts the sucking end between her lips. She closes them on the cigarette, and they brush the tip of his finger. He draws his hand away slowly.