David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and '50s (Library of America) (9 page)

“I’m not sick.” It was way under a whisper.

“Then what’s the matter? What are you sitting there like that for? What’s wrong with you? What are you doing sitting there like that? What are you doing? Answer me, what are you doing? What are you doing?”

The little man raised his head slowly and he was gazing straight ahead and still he looked at nothing. Then he said, “I’m thinking.”

T
HE LIGHT
changed again.

Parry tried to put pressure on the door handle. He couldn’t collect any pressure.

The motor stopped.

Parry wanted to hear the motor going. He said, “Start the car.”

The little man pressed his foot against the starter. The car jumped forward and stalled. The little man started the motor again, the car inched forward.

“Don’t go against the light,” Parry said. “Wait for the light to change.”

The little man crossed his arms on the steering wheel, leaned his head on his arms. Parry got some pressure on the door handle, got the door handle moving, then took his hand away, wondered why he was taking his hand away, wondered why he was staying in the car.

The light changed.

“All right,” Parry said. “The light changed. Let’s go.”

The little man brought his head up, looked at the light, looked at Parry. Then he had the car in first gear and he was letting the clutch out. He was driving the car across the intersection, turning the wheel slowly, bringing the car to a stop at the curb.

Again Parry had his fingers on the door handle. He looked at the little man and said, “What are we stopping for?”

“Let me look at you,” the little man said.

“What?”

“Let me take a good look at you.”

They faced each other and Parry had his right hand hardening slowly, shaping a fist. And the fist trembled. He wondered if he had the strength to go through with it.

The little man said, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I didn’t do it,” Parry said. “I didn’t do it and I won’t go back.”

“You won’t go back where?”

“
I won’t go back.”

The little man put a hand to his forehead, rubbed his forehead, rubbed his eyes as if he had a headache. He said, “Nobody claimed it was your fault. It was just one of those things. It was an accident.”

“That’s right,” Parry said. “That’s what I told them. It was an accident.”

The little man brought his face closer to Parry’s face and said, “You don’t look so good to me.”

Parry was trying to make his way through a huge barrel that rolled fast and messed up his footing. He heard himself saying, “What are you going to do about it?”

And he heard the little man saying, “I think you better let me take you to a hospital.”

The barrel stopped rolling. Parry said, “Stop worrying about it.”

“I can’t help worrying,” the little man said. “Will you do me a favor? Will you let a doctor look you over?”

Parry was working the door handle. He had it down now and he was getting the door open. He said, “I’ll do that,” and then the door was open and he was out of the car, the door was closed again, the light was changing and the car was going away from him.

He got his legs working. The pain in his head was going away, and he found it easy to breathe, easy to walk, easy to think. The whole thing was beginning to lean toward his side of it. He really had a grip on it now and it was going along with him. Everything was going along. And everybody, so far. Beginning with Studebaker, although with Studebaker it was involuntary. With the policeman who had looked under the blanket it was sheer carelessness. With Irene it was her own choice and the reason for that choice was an immense question mark despite the things she had told him. With the taxi driver it was human kindness. With George Fellsinger it was friendship. With the old woman in the candy store it was bad eyesight, because if her eyes were halfway decent she would have checked his face with that picture on the front page. And he knew she hadn’t checked it, because if she had it would have brought a parade of police cars to the scene of the accident a few blocks away from the candy store. With Max it was as Max had
put, just one of those things. He had to forget about it, because it didn’t matter now and he had to check off everything that didn’t matter. He remembered his wrist watch and the hands showed him 2:55.

The slip of paper came out of his pocket and he glanced at the address, pushed the paper back in his pocket and walked faster. In a few minutes he was there. He looked up along the windows of a dilapidated four-story building. The windows were dark, except for reflected light from dim street lamps that showed dirt on the glass. The alley bordering the building was very black and waiting for him. He walked down the alley.

The alley branched off to the right at the rear of the building. He went that way, came to the door. He touched the door. He touched the knob. He handled the knob, turned it. He opened the door.

He went in and closed the door. Weak greenish light from one of the upper floors came staggering down a narrow stairway. The place was very old and very neglected. Parry went over to the stairway and let some of the greenish light get on the wrist-watch dial. The hands said 2:59. He was on time. He was all set. He started up the stairway.

The greenish light didn’t come from the first floor. It didn’t come from the second floor. It came from a hanging bulb on the third floor, and it illuminated several of the mottled glass panels in splintered doors. There was an advertising specialty company and a firm of mystic book publishers and an outfit that called itself Excelsior Enterprises. Parry walked down the corridor. He came to a glass panel that had the words—
Walter Coley
. And underneath—
Plastic Specialist
. A suggestion of yellow glow came from the other side of the glass.

Parry tapped fingers against the glass.

There were footsteps from inside, a trading of voices. Then more footsteps, and then the door opened, and the taxi driver stood there. The taxi driver had a half-smoked cigar between his teeth.

“How’s it going?” the taxi driver said.

“It’s going all right,” Parry said.

The taxi driver stepped back. Parry walked in and the taxi driver closed the door. This room was trying to be a waiting room. It was nothing more than an old room with a few chairs and
an old rug and sick wallpaper. The yellow glow came from the other room. The taxi driver went forward, opened the door leading to the other room, walked in and Parry followed.

It was another old room. It was very small. There was a single secondhand barber’s chair from about fifteen years back. There was a big sink and three glass cabinets stocked with scissors, knives, forceps and other instruments designed to get through flesh. There was a short thin man, seventy if he was a day, and his hair was white as hair can be, and his skin was white kidskin, and his eyes were a very pale blue. He wore a white sport shirt, open at the throat, and white cotton trousers held up by a white belt. He looked at Parry’s face and then he looked at the taxi driver.

The taxi driver chewed on the cigar and said, “Well, Walt—what do you think?”

Coley put a hand to the side of his jaw, supported his elbow with the other hand. He got his eyes on Parry’s face again and he said, “Around the eyes, mostly. And the mouth. And the cheeks. I’m going to leave the nose alone. It’s a nice nose. It would be a shame to break it.”

“Will I need to come back again?” Parry asked.

“No. I wouldn’t want you to come back again anyway. I’m taking a big enough chance as it is.” He turned to the taxi driver. He said, “Sam, I won’t need you in here. Go into the other room and read a magazine.”

The taxi driver walked out and closed the door.

Coley pointed to the ancient barber’s chair. Parry sat down in it and Coley began working a pedal and the chair began going down. The chair went down to a shallow oblique and Coley pulled a lamp toward the chair, aimed the lamp at Parry’s face and tugged at a short chain. The lamp stabbed a pearly ray at Parry’s face.

Parry closed his eyes. The towel-covered headrest felt too hard against his skull. The chair was uncomfortable. He felt as if he was on a rack. He heard water running and he opened his eyes and saw Coley standing at the sink and working up a lather on white hands. Coley stood there at the sink for fully five minutes. Then he waved his hands to get some of the water off and he held his hands up in the air with the fingers drooping
toward him as he came back to the chair and looked at Parry’s face.

“Will it take long?” Parry said.

“Ninety minutes,” Coley said. “No more.”

“I thought it took much longer than that,” Parry said.

Coley bent lower to study Parry’s face and said, “I have my own method. I perfected it twelve years ago. It’s based on the idea of calling a spade a spade. I don’t monkey around. You have the money?”

“Yes.”

“Sam said you can afford two hundred dollars.”

“You want it now?”

Coley nodded. Parry took bills from his pocket, selected two one-hundred dollar bills, placed them on the top of a cabinet neighboring the chair. Coley looked at the money. Then he looked at Parry’s face.

Parry said, “I’m a coward. I don’t like pain.”

“We’re all cowards,” Coley said. “There’s no such thing as courage. There’s only fear. A fear of getting hurt and a fear of dying. That’s why the human race has lasted so long. You won’t have any pain with this. I’m going to freeze your face. Do you want to see yourself now?”

“Yes,” Parry said.

“Sit up and take a look in that mirror.” Coley pointed to a mirror that topped one of the cabinets.

Parry looked at himself.

“It’s a fairly good face,” Coley said. “It’ll be even better when I’m done with it. And it’ll be very different.”

Parry relaxed in the chair. He closed his eyes again. He heard water running. He didn’t open his eyes. He heard the sound of metal getting moved around, the sound of a cabinet drawer opening and shutting, the clink of steel against steel, the water running again. He kept his eyes closed. Then things were happening to his face. Some kind of oil was getting rubbed into his face, rubbed in thoroughly all over his face and then wiped off thoroughly. He smelled alcohol, felt the alcohol being dabbed onto his face. Then water running again. More clinking of steel, more cabinet drawers in action. He tried to make himself comfortable in the chair. He decided it was impossible for
Coley to do this job in ninety minutes. He decided it was impossible for Coley to change the face so that people wouldn’t recognize it as belonging to Vincent Parry. He decided there wasn’t any sense to this, and the only thing he would get out of it was something horrible happening to his face and he would be a freak for the rest of his life. He wondered how many faces Coley had ruined. He decided his face was going to look horrible but people would recognize him anyway and he wondered what he was doing up here in this quack set-up in San Francisco when he should be riding far away from San Francisco. He decided his only move was to jump out of the chair and run out of the office and keep on running.

He stayed there in the chair. He felt a needle going into his face. Then it went into his face again in another place. It kept jabbing deep into his face. His face began to feel odd. Metal was coming up against the flesh, pressing into the flesh, cutting into the flesh. There was no pain, there was no sensation except the metal going into his flesh. Different shapes of metal. He couldn’t understand why he preferred to keep his eyes closed while this was going on.

It went on. With every minute that passed something new was happening to his face. Gradually he became accustomed to it—the entrance of steel into his flesh. He had the feeling he had gone through this sort of thing many times before. Now he was beginning to get some comfort out of the chair and there was a somewhat luxurious heaviness in his head and it became heavier and heavier and he knew he was falling asleep. He didn’t mind. The manipulation of steel against his face and into his face took on a rhythm that mixed with the heaviness and formed a big, heavy ball that rolled down and rolled up and took him along with it, first on the top of it, on the outside, then getting him inside, rolling him around as it went up and down on its rolling path. And he was asleep.

He had a dream.

He dreamed he was a boy again in Maricopa, Arizona. A boy of fifteen running along a blackened street. He was running alone and eventually he came to a place where a woman was performing on a trapeze. From neck to ankles the woman was garbed in a skin-tight costume of bright orange satin. The woman’s hair was darkish orange. The woman had drab brown eyes
and her skin was tanned. It was the artificial tan that came from a violet-ray lamp. The woman was about five feet four inches tall and she was very thin and she was not at all pretty but there was nothing in her face to suggest ugliness. It was just that she was not a pretty woman. But she was a wonderful acrobat. She smiled at him. She took the trapeze way up high and sailed away from it. She described three slow somersaults going backwards, going up, going over and coming down on the trapeze again as it whizzed back. Elephants in the three rings far below lifted their trunks and lifted their eyes and watched her admiringly. The trapeze whizzed again and she left the trapeze again, going up and up and up, almost to the top of the tent until she described the wonderful series of backward somersaults that brought her down again to the trapeze. She was tiny way up there and then she grew as she came down. She stepped off the trapeze and came sliding down a rope. She bowed to the elephants. She bowed to everybody. She came over to him. He told her she was wonderful on the trapeze. She said it was really not at all difficult and anyone could do it. He could do it. He said he couldn’t do it. He told her he was afraid. She laughed and told him he was silly to be afraid. She took his arm and led him toward the rope. The bright orange satin was flesh of flame on her thin body. She opened her mouth to laugh at him and he saw many gold inlays among her teeth. He pleaded with her to take him away from this high, dizzy place, this swirling peril. The trapeze came up to the limit of its whizzing arc and she left the trapeze, took him with her and they went up, somersaulting backward together, going up and over and he fought to get away from her and she laughed at him and he fought and fought until he got away from her. He went down alone. Down fast, face foremost, watching the sawdust and the faces and the colossal dull green elephants coming toward him. Down there they were attempting to do something for him. They were trying to arrange a net to catch him. Before they could get the net connected he was in amongst them, plunging past them and landing on his face. He felt the impact hammering into his face, the pain tearing through his face, hitting the back of his head and bouncing back and running all over his face. He was flat on his back, his arms wide, his legs spread wide as he looked up at the faces looking
down on him. The pain was fierce and he moaned and the mob stood there and pitied him. He could see her high up there. The orange satin twirled and glimmered as she went away from the trapeze in another backward somersault. She came down wonderfully on the trapeze and although she was way up there her face was very close to his eyes and she was laughing at him and the gold inlays were dazzling in her laughing mouth.