Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Page 9

  That’s where Max and I pulled up in the convertible.

  Max was a wrap-up; I could have taken him any number of times on the way downtown except that I had satchels in the head. With initials J.J.O’S.

  He put his hand in his pocket.

  “Don’t worry too hard about me, Max,” I said. “You know me, pal. I’m regular. And don’t exert yourself, because you don’t have to impress anybody. After all, the boss is with his girl friend, so it’s just you and me, and maybe the boys upstairs.”

  “You shouldn’t have had to ought to fiddle with the boss’s tomato,” he said. “If you know what I mean.”

  There were no boys upstairs.

  We climbed up five weary, wooden flights and Max put keys into two Yale locks and directly we were in a kitchen with clean linoleum on the floor. Max bawled, “Hello? Hello, guys,” and nobody answered and he grumbled, “Hell,” and he slammed the door behind him. Everything was clean and new; sink and washtub and refrigerator and white table and cupboards and kitchen chairs and utensil closets and an army cot along one wall. Max was careful with the gun while he took off his hat and coat and tossed them on the cot. I tossed mine too.

  Then he slid out of his jacket and he let it drop to the floor

  and he slipped off his tie and he opened the top button of his shirt and hair of his chest pinked up like black wires. His stomach, thick and ponderous, bulged over his suspenderless pants like a bursting sausage, tight and strained against his shirt.

  I couldn’t rush him. He knew how to hold a gun.

  “Take it off,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Take off your jacket.”

  He reached up to a shelf over the washtub and his hand came down with the fingers ornamented in metal knuckles.

  “Take it off,” he said. “It’s a nice suit. What’s the sense to spoil it?”

  I took my jacket off. I hung it over the clean white kitchen chair.

  “Smart enough,” he said. “I’m going to have to mark you up. You take your shirt off too if you don’t want spots on it. You strip all the way down, if you like.”

  I stood still and I swallowed.

  Viggy O’Shea and his goddamn satchel.

  He came up to me and he shoved the gun, in his left hand, against my belly. He swung with the other hand and the brass scraped against my jaw and I bounced off the wall and I sat down. I shook my head and I stood up. He came back, gun first, and he swung again. My head got twisted around my neck. I sprawled on the uncomfortable floor, blood dripping on my shirt, the inside of my mouth swelled up to my teeth.

  I should have stripped down.

  I pushed up against the wall. “Max — ”

  “Don’t talk, bub.” He let go again, high on my left cheekbone and my face opened and the blood came down and the other side of my face slammed against the wall, which kept me on my feet, and I stood there on legs like pipe-cleaners and I heard myself moan and I didn’t like it. I wavered on my pipe-cleaners and I kept shaking my head like a preliminary boy at the Garden and then I saw him, vaguely, and I heard him.

  “What are you? A hero? A wise guy that wants a medal? Why don’t you go into a comma?”

  “Coma,” I croaked.

  “Comma,” he said, “like when you’re out like a light.”

  “Coma,” I said.

  “Coma, comma, you know what I mean, bub. You swoon,

  or you swan, or swoop, or something. You can’t hit a guy when he’s out like a light.”

  I saw him now, clearly.

  “You like dough, Max?”

  “I love dough.”

  “A lot of dough?”

  “I love a lot of dough. Dough gives with dames and dough gives with eats. What else do I want? Sleep? Sleep I can get for nothing.”

  “You married, Max?”

  “Sure I’m married.”

  “Kids?”

  “Two kids. Another one in the oven.”

  “I got dough, Max.”

  “How much dough?”

  “For you I’ve got a couple of G’s.”

  “You are a phony, creep.”

  “Why?”

  “Because nobody pays a couple of G’s not to get a licking, when they already got most of it.”

  “It’s not for that, Max.”

  “For what?”

  “For the valise.”

  “Valise?”

  “Right.”

  “For the valise … what?”

  “Two G’s,” I said. “Mostly for the valise.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

  He swung. With both hands. First he bounced my belly off my spine with the gun hand and then he lifted one under my chin with the metal-ringed right. I swooned for him, finally; I swanned and I swooped. I went out like a match in a hurricane, and I stayed out.

  3

  He was sitting at the table in his undershirt, hair on his upper arms and shoulders; with a bottle of beer and a thick meat sandwich on French bread.

  I was folded up in a near corner.

  I tried to say something.

  My chin wagged like a springboard after a high dive.

  Panic moved in me. I worried that the guy had really hurt me. I thought about a doctor. Doing something. Quick. I tried

  again. I made a sound like a scratched record on a run-down victrola.

  He heard me. He put the sandwich aside. “No more, bub. You had your licking. Now don’t go fooling around with the boss’s piece no more. And don’t talk about no suitcase. You could get a guy in trouble.”

  The gun was on the chair next to him and the chair wasn’t too far from me. Maxie was all right. Maxie was a good boy. Maxie was utility. But Maxie wasn’t brains.

  I tried to smile. My face hurt. The back of my neck hurt. Blood was in my mouth. I swallowed. My throat hurt.

  “You don’t look so good, peeper,” he said. “Maybe you would like some beer?”

  I tried to shake my head. It shook.

  I tried to stretch my leg. It stretched.

  So, while he filled a glass with beer and bent over and handed it to me, I hooked my foot in the rung of the kitchen chair. The one with the gun on it.

  I untangled my arms and I reached a hand out for the beer. I got my other hand around the glass and I drew it over, spillingly. I sipped some and it burned inside where my mouth was cut, but it helped. Then I raised the glass to my head and I turned it over and let the cold beer run down my hair. It felt good. I twisted my neck around. It twisted. I handed up the glass and he took it and he turned to put it on the table. I tilted the chair with my foot and I lifted my legs. That did two things. It got the chair in his way. It slid the gun into my lap. I grabbed it. I said, “Take it easy, Max.”

  I felt much better. A gun in your hand is medicine. Confidence does something to your blood cells. He watched me, small-eyed and wicked. He could have had me then: but Max was utility, Max wasn’t brains.

  I scraped away from him on my bottom. I scraped along, facing him, all the way to the other side of the room, and I sat against the wall and now I had him. We sat like that and we looked at each other and then he rattled up out of the chair.

  “Give it to me.”

  “I’ll give it to you,” I said. “Believe me.”

  “Give me the gun.”

  “Don’t be a chump, baby.”

  “I’ll break you,” he said, and he started coming, slowly.

  Poor Max without the brains. Now he was going to take me.

  “I wouldn’t, Max.”

  He kept coming. I shot him. In the left thigh. He kept on coming, slowly. I shot him in the same thigh again and he kept on coming and I let him have another one in the right leg and he kept coming and I saved the rest of them for higher up when he got real close, and then he dropped to his knees and he kept moving like that, panting, on his knees, and then he stopped.

  I didn’t wait.

  I got up on my feet and I went to him and I teetered and then I threw
one all the way from the shoe tops. I threw it with my right with the gun slanting sidewise. I threw it with everything that was left in me, bowling ball fashion, like you need a ten-strike and you hate the pins; but straightaway, no English. It caught him spruce on the point of the chin and I heard the crunch of vertebrae as his head flashed back and hit bottom, and there he was like a bent Buddhist; his toes touching and his knees touching and then the great inverted arc of his belly and then his head touching; and his breath came in gurgles like soda pop out of a bottle.

  I didn’t have to do it.

  Mostly, it was for business.

  A private richard must not absorb a licking unless he returns it twofold, approximately; it is one of the rules of our outrageous game. If not, he might as well shut up shop. He has lost prestige like blood out of a jugular swipe and there is no transfusion. The boys snicker about it, and they gossip like ladies around a mah-jongg table. It’s no good.

  I listened to him breathe, and I left him there.

  I started looking for the satchel. I started at the far end of the railroad flat. I started way back in the bedroom. I fainted there. I came to and I was sick and then I went to the toilet and I took all my clothes off and I took a cold bath. I did what I could with my face in the mirror, it wasn’t too bad, but warm blood from inside my mouth kept running down into my throat. I tickled at the holes with the tip of my tongue. The inside of my cheeks felt like underdone hamburger. I wiped my body and I left my hair wet and I wondered whether I needed a stitch in the dry, wide, meat-exposed split on top of my left cheekbone that burned like a Latin lover that reads the magazines.

  I looked in on Max; then I started looking for the satchel again. I started at the far end of the railroad flat.

  I worked all the way back to the kitchen.

  I found it there, hidden under the porcelain cover of the washtub; not hidden, really; out of sight, more, like a cold sore under a mustache.

  I got it out and I sat on it and I put my head down between my knees and I waited until nausea crept down from my throat back into my stomach. Then I stood up and straightened out Max Crumb and I worried a moment about his delicate breathing. I stretched him out flat on his face and I left him there.

  I took the bag and I switched off the lights.

  Chapter Twelve

  I RESTED among the paint peelings and the rust of the stoop of the flaky white house, and I summed up. I didn’t feel well. I wanted to retch but I couldn’t retch. My stomach was bloated and stiff as a derby hat and electric trains were loose in my head. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to five in the morning. Dirt-gray dawn was ragged around the tenements.

  To my left, the street was all dark; to my right, a block away, a store window wore lights. I got up, slanted as a drunk with an extra load, and I dragged the bag and I dragged my feet. Toward the window with the lights.

  It was an all-night restaurant with a coffee urn and a counter and five stools and three tables. It smelled like old people in the heat of summer. I sat at a table and I looked at a boothless pay phone attached to the wall. I was alone; me and the flies. I reached for a jar with dried-up mustard and I whacked it against the wooden table.

  The old man waddled out of the rear.

  Sleep was angry in his eyes.

  “Good morning,” he said. He didn’t mean it.

  He was a large, bald man wrapped inside of a spotted white apron. “How do you? Would you like it something?”

  “I would like to sit for a while, if I may.”

  The fat man understood me.

  “Sure, sure. Would you like it to sit better by the counter

  with maybe coffee, or would you like it better to sitting by the table? Up to you.”

  “At the table. Like this. Thanks.”

  “Sure, sure. Would you like it something to eat?”

  I didn’t answer. I looked at him.

  “We got it lox on bagal with cream cheese, the best. We got it coffee, the best …,”

  He broke off and he said, “Good morning, Joe,” to the man in the cap who came in and opened his legs around a stool and looked at Fred Keats in the Mirror.

  The fat old man came close to me and put an arm around my shoulder. “You should better jump over to the hospital. Lox you can have later. Joe,” the old man said. “You will take him?”

  Joe backed off the stool and folded Fred Keats and put the paper in his back pocket. “I got a cab outside. Only I ain’t working yet. I’ll ride you flag up. It’ll cost you a fin.”

  “How far?”

  “Not far. But I ain’t had my coffee yet.”

  “Joe,” the old man said. “You are a crook and a robber.”

  I said, “All right. Do me a favor first.”

  “What?”

  “Look up the Square Deal Club. Ask for the Little Guy. If he isn’t in, someone will take a message. Say that Maxie got hurt in the apartment downtown. Then hang up fast.”

  “Say, what is this?”

  “It’s a favor for a guy that’s paying a fin for not far, flag up.”

  “Okay. Got a nickel on you?”

  Joe would be a rich man one day.

  2

  The pimple-faced lad behind the reception desk looked at the suitcase. “With that face and a bag? I don’t get it. You emergency, or would you like a room and bath?”

  “Emergency.”

  “What’s the bag?”

  “The bag was with me when I fell into the meat grinder.”

  “Oh. A funny guy. Sit down. I got to take some history.”

  I gave him some spontaneous history.

  Suddenly, furiously, he began to bob up and down, and then to spin, and then he disappeared, fast, before I knew it, like an orange pit when you swallow one.

  3

  I awoke to an antiseptic odor, snores, grumbles, and long lines of beds. I closed my eyes and I lay back comfortably; then I got up with a jerk.

  “What time is it?” I asked the fellow next to me.

  He opened his eyes and he looked at me pleasantly. He closed his eyes.

  I asked the fellow on the other side.

  “Quiet,” he said.

  “Doctor,” I yelled. “Doctor, doctor.”

  “Shut up,” the fellow said. “Quiet.”

  An orderly that needed a shave came over. “What’s the matter with you?“

  “What time is it?”

  “Half past seven.”

  “I want to get out of here.”

  “What do I care? I’ll get the doc.”

  He came back with a tall, clean young man with brown, easy-smiling eyes. “How do you feel?” the doctor said.

  “I feel good.”

  I did feel good.

  “Is it all right, Doc, if I get out of here? Two and a half hours is a short visit, but I’ve got things to do.”

  He smiled, touched my head, and went to the chart at the foot of the bed. “Not so short.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Precisely, your visit has been thirty-eight hours and thirty-five minutes. We gave you a good deal of sedative, but I don’t believe that would account for it. You were tired, mister; overtired.”

  “What?”

  He sat on the edge of the bed. “You may as well have your breakfast, breakfast in the evening. On the house. You may leave any time you wish.”

  I stretched my arms until my elbows crunched. “What the hell,” I said. “Why not? Thanks.” I swung my legs over the bed and let them hang.

  “You’re all right,” the doctor said. “Three sutures up there on your left cheek. You’ll leave it alone. Those stitches absorb. There will be a slight scar. What happened to you?”

  “Brass knuckles.”

  “Oh.”

  “Doc.”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t have a Max Crumb here?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And my things? My suitcase?”

  “Everything is in order.”

  “Thanks.”

 
; “Not at all.”

  I had orange juice and toast and an egg and coffee and the orderly helped me halfway to the shower and then I didn’t need him any more. I felt fine. I took a shower and I looked in the mirror. My face was all right. The right side had a small bruise over the temple and a cut-scratch under the jaw. The left side, over the cheekbone, had a thin bulge covered with court plaster.

  The boy brought my clothes and the bag and I signed a paper and I gave him a couple of dollars and then I got dressed and I went out into a cool evening and I called Madeline Howell from a United Cigar Store. She wasn’t in.

  I took a cab to Fifty-ninth and Sixth.

  4

  I was glad to be home.

  I locked the door and I bolted it and I set the bag down in the middle of the living room and I got out of my clothes and I perked up a pot of coffee and I drank it. I diddled with my face in front of a mirror and I shaved and I trimmed my mustache and I dressed in my new brown double-breasted flannel and an Oxford button-down with French cuffs and heavy brown shoes and an ocher knit tie. I changed to a brown topcoat and a brown slant-down hat.

  I was ready for nothing.

  I picked up the heavy bag and I cursed at it fretfully and I locked the door behind me.

  I rode down to the office and I slipped the cab guy a bill to wait for me. The night man took me up, grumblingly, bag and all. I found the big ring of little keys in the bottom drawer of Scoffol’s desk. Viggy’s Gladstone had two straps and three locks. I tried twenty-two of the little keys before I got the one that worked. It opened all three locks. I shut them and I clipped off the key and I put the jingling ring back into the desk and I let the night man take me down, grumblingly, bag and all. The cab guy took me back home.

  I called Madeline Howell.

  She wasn’t in.

  I opened the bag, it was one hell of a big bag, and the cover sprang back and I looked at tapestries, well pressed, but puffing out with air, and they didn’t mean a thing to me. I brought out a suitcase of my own and I filled it with tapestries; and there were lots of tapestries left. I have four suitcases. I packed the four of them before I ran out of tapestries. I looked at Viggy’s bag in wonder and I shrugged. I don’t know. Maybe I don’t pack right.

  I went out and pushed for the automatic elevator and I clicked the stop dingus. I dragged my bags into the elevator and I went down to the ground floor. I clicked the stop dingus again and I dragged them out and lined them up outside of Dr. Ben Silver’s door. I unclicked the stop dingus and went back and pushed Doc’s button. The maid opened the door.