“Every one of them, Mose.”
Mose wore the face of Christ.
And they had done that thing to him.
They had all done it. The Bronsons and Judson and Talliaferro. The G.I.s in that stockade had done it too, and answered for it in yelps of anguish as the billy stick splintered shin bone.
Keefler warred against all the foulness in the world, against everyone who had helped hold the knife that had spilled Mose onto the dirty sidewalk of the Sink. In his mind, even Lee Bronson had helped hold that knife.
When he got off the bus his lips were moving and there was a quiet madness in his eyes. And he hit the artificial hand against his thigh so as to feel more clearly the aching and the pain.
Chapter Three
Lucille Bronson
She paused in the living room, head tilted to one side, and tried to hear what that man named Keefler was saying to Lee, but the man kept his voice too low. In the silence of the small house she could hear the excited beat of her heart, the heavy high-placed thudding. There was no way of knowing how much or how little Keefler knew. She had not liked the look of him. He had mean, wise little blue eyes, and he had looked at her in a way that was too knowing.
She went back through the living room and into the bedroom, shrugged out of the beach coat and flung it on the chair. Her suit was nearly dry. She stepped out of her clogs, peeled her suit down and stepped out of it, walked through into the bathroom and hung it over the edge of the tub. She paused briefly in front of the mirror over the sink and looked at the puckered marks the tight bra built into the suit had made on her breasts.
When she walked back into the bedroom, she went to her bureau to get clean underthings, and then changed her mind as she realized that some slight tactical advantage might be obtained by remaining naked. That is, if Keefler knew anything and had told Lee. But she didn’t know how Keefler could know anything.
It had only happened twice. But if Lee found out, it wasn’t going to make him feel any better to know it had only happened twice, and the first time it was really sort of like an accident. One of those things that can happen and it’s really nobody’s fault. The only thing to show was from the first time, and that had been her lip swollen and the cut inside it where this tooth back here is turned a little crooked, the one the dentist said didn’t matter because it didn’t show and it would be hard to try to straighten it. The front ones had always been straight so there never had to be any of those braces.
She sat on the bench in front of her dressing table and put her heel up on the bench, soaked cotton in nail polish remover and began to take the old cracked nail polish from her toes.
There was no way that Mr. Keefler could possibly know she had seen Danny twice. Once about two weeks ago — no, it was a little more than two weeks because it was on Friday, on Friday in the morning and that would make it two weeks ago yesterday. He hurt her mouth and when Lee saw it she told him the thing she made up about it, about how she was getting the hat box down off the top shelf of the closet and it slipped and hit her in the mouth.
It was one of those things that just happened. It hadn’t been meant to happen either time, either fifteen days ago or Thursday, the day before yesterday. But maybe he meant for it to happen Thursday because he didn’t leave his car in front like before.
She remembered how it was when Danny stopped on that Friday morning. She remembered she’d set the ironing board up and she was ironing the candy-striped skirt, the one with the tricky little pleats that you had to be careful about. And the television was on in the living room. You could sort of follow what was going on by listening, even if it was kind of hard sometimes, and then if it sounded exciting, you could hurry in and look at it and then come back out when it got dull again. She remembered she had been ironing the candy-striped skirt on account of Ruthie was going to come by about two and they were going to go down to the matinee of that new Bill Holden one. She wanted to wear it on account of it was a stinking hot day and it was a cool skirt and, because Lee had the car, they were going to walk to the bus and once you got downtown it was another four blocks nearly to the State. So she had decided to wear the candy-stripe with just a half slip. The white rayon blouse was thick enough and full enough so she was going to get away without wearing a bra no matter if Ruthie did make some smart crack about her bobbling all over the place. Ruthie made those cracks on account of if she didn’t wear a bra she’d be all hanging down to her belt practically. It was funny Earl didn’t pick up a good buy in a used car for Ruthie, seeing as how he worked at that business and could get a good one, but it looked like he was as stingy as Lee almost.
Anyway, it had been something after eleven, maybe a quarter after, and the skirt was nearly done when she heard the familiar creak of the middle step of the three steps up to the small back porch and then a big man just outside the screen door with the sun behind him so she couldn’t tell who it was, even when the man said, “Hi, Lucille.”
When she started to the door he pushed it open and came in and she saw it was Danny, Lee’s brother. She didn’t know him well, having seen him only two or three times and then Lee had been there and a lot of the time the two of them had talked about people she had never heard of. It felt kind of funny to be alone with him, because she couldn’t keep from thinking about how he’d been in jail three times and he was really a kind of a gangster. She remembered how Lee had told her parents about his brother Danny and how they’d been so upset about it they’d practically wanted to call the whole thing off. Lee could have kept it to himself and saved all that trouble, but that was Lee for you. He always had to go ahead and do just what he thought was the right thing to do, no matter what it cost people.
She remembered the first time she had met Danny and how he was so different from what she had thought. She had thought maybe he would be sort of like George Raft or maybe the other type like Ernest Borgnine, but actually you couldn’t have told about him, hardly. In one tiny little way he was a little like Van Johnson, but older and heavier and just a little bit beat-up looking.
So when he came in, she told him Lee wasn’t home and he wouldn’t even be home to lunch on account of he didn’t have enough time on Fridays on account of his schedule to come home. But Danny kind of ignored that and sat on one of the kitchen chairs and told her to go right ahead with her ironing.
He was quiet and kind of funny-acting, and it made her feel funny to just keep right on ironing. She had felt conspicuous in that tight old pair of blue-jean shorts and the skimpy yellow halter and barefoot and all. She tried to make conversation with him, and went in and turned off the television and saw his car out there at the curb and came back and tried to talk some more, but he just sort of grunted and kept frowning and didn’t seem to pay much attention. He was wearing a wonderful looking pair of slacks, pale gray with sharp creases and black stitching down the sides and on the pockets, and a blue cotton shirt with a white horizontal stripe, and short sleeves. His arms were big and brown, and his hands made his cigarette look small and very white.
She finished the skirt and put it on the hanger and she half expected him to jump up and try to help when she folded up the ironing board, but he just sat there, not watching her at all, but watching the pattern in the linoleum.
“Would you like a beer?” she had asked. “Or some coffee maybe?” You certainly couldn’t tell he’d been in jail any three times, but you could tell he was worried about something.
He seemed to make up his mind, and he didn’t even answer about the beer or the coffee. He snapped his cigarette all the way across into the kitchen sink and he looked right at her and he said, “I got a problem, Lucille, and maybe you’re the answer, but I don’t know. Anyway, you’re the only one I’ve been able to think of.”