James M. Cain
Cloud Nine
Chapter 1
I first met her, this girl that I married a few days later, and that the papers have crucified under the pretense of glorification, on a Friday morning in June, on the parking lot by the Patuxent Building, that my office is in. It was around 9:30, and I was late getting in, on account of a call I’d had, from the buyer I had lined up for a house I’d signed on to sell, who had gone away unexpectedly and wired me to stand by. So I did, he called, and we closed, without even much of a haggle over the $65,000 I asked. As you can imagine, I was feeling pretty good, and whistled as I parked.
But then, when I got out of the car, this girl stepped up and spoke to me by name. She was a quite pretty girl, around eighteen as I thought, a cornhusk blonde with blue eyes, fair skin, and snubby nose, as well as a shape to write home about. She was no more than medium height, but beautifully formed in all departments. She was dressed as girls dress for church, not for school, play, or the supermarket, in dark blue silk, black hat, bag, and shoes. The dress showed plenty of leg, and yet wasn’t too terribly short. “Yes?” I answered. “I’m Graham Kirby. What can I do for you?”
“Mr. Kirby, I’m Sonya Lang.”
She said it as though I should know who Sonya Lang was, and I did have a vague impression I’d seen her somewhere before, but beyond that I didn’t place her or her name. “Oh—?” I said. “What is it, Miss Lang? Or perhaps you’d like to come to my office. It’s right here in the building.”
“Well — is there some other place we could talk?... I mean, it’s why I waited here, waited until you came, so I would not have to go to your office. The business I have with you, it’s better I not be seen there. I called in, to ask you to meet me somewhere, and when they said you’d be in directly, I walked over to wait for you.”
It all seemed a bit odd, but in the real estate business, which involves the homes people live in, you get a wacky fallout, and don’t pay too much attention. So I guess I was slightly impatient as I told her: “Miss Lang, I’ve a busy day ahead, and don’t have much time to spare. It would help if you’d give me some idea what this is all about—?”
“Okay, Mr. Graham Kirby, I will. I’m pregnant, that’s what it’s about, by your brother Burwell. I’m pregnant from him raping me, and I badly need your help. I need help on account of my family, on account of my father mostly, who’s threatening things I’m afraid of, things that concern you, or should, Mr. Kirby — but before you can do anything, or know what you’re trying to do, I’d have to explain to you, how things are with me. Well do we have to talk here, Mr. Kirby? Where the whole street can hear us? Or—”
“Please, Miss Lang! Please!”
My head was spinning, and I cut in with all kinds of stuff, to ease things off a bit and gain a minute to think — like saying how grateful I was, she had shown such discretion, in not going up to my office — virtually meaningless things like that. I’m not sure now, what I said. But then, when my bewilderment diminished, I told her, “We can go to my house, Miss Lang, where we’ll have the place to ourselves and you’ll be free to say anything. But will you give me a minute? To go up and clear my decks? So I’ll be completely free? To talk — or whatever you want of me?”
“Okay. Sure.”
“Would you care to wait in the car?”
“Yes, that’ll be fine.”
I put her in, and started around the front, headed for the sidewalk, which led to the building entrance, but then I thought: Wake up, get with it, didn’t you hear what this girl said? Suppose you take too long, suppose she gets tired waiting, and takes a notion to blow? What then? You wouldn’t know how to find her, and you can’t know what she’d pull. A girl pregnant by your brother is not a minor problem. She’s the first order of business on anyone’s office calendar. I walked back to the car and got in behind the wheel. “I think we’ll go now,” I said. “I can call my office from home.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Kirby.”
So we started out on our ten-minute drive, and on the way she had nothing to say and certainly I didn’t. There was time enough, though, for cold rage to move in on me, at Burwell Stuart, for the trouble he’d been to me, and of course to his mother, who of course was also my mother. Actually, he wasn’t my brother, but only my half brother, as my mother had married again, after my father died, and Burwell, or Burl as he was called, was the result. I suppose it was natural I didn’t like him, as I hadn’t liked his father, and in fact was horribly jolted, and not only jolted but ashamed, when my mother married him.
We had lived at Cabin John, on the Potomac above Washington, until I was eight and my father died. Then Harrison Stuart appeared on the scene, a big wheel in Prince George County, which is east and south of Washington, not north of it as Montgomery County is, where Cabin John is located.
My stepfather was a former county commissioner, powerful in Democratic circles, as well as with the ladies. It was his activities with them that embittered me, from the rumors I heard everywhere. He and my mother had a hookup, I would say, rather than a regular marriage, and she may have known of his outside activities, yet not have wanted to joggle the combos he had, which at least he made pay — and big too. But I got along with him so badly that when a lady she knew, by the name of Mrs. Sibert, Mrs. Jane Sibert, offered to take me in and raise me on her farm, I got down on my knees to my mother and begged her to let me go.
So she did, and my pleasant years began — in high school, at Yale, and in real estate, which was the business my father had been in. But it wasn’t the end of Burl. His father died when he was fifteen, but even before then, it was clear to all and sundry he would carry the old man’s torch.
By the time he was twelve he’d been mixed up with two girls, and then when he was a senior in high school he raped a teacher. He carried her books home one day, and when she asked him in he upped her skirts and raped her. Next day she went boiling over to Mother, to say what she meant to do. But Mother wasn’t home, and who opened the door was Burl. The second time around, she decided that being raped wasn’t so bad, and it became a scandal in school. So after he graduated she quit, and when he did his hitch in the Army she followed him to Japan when he was stationed there for a while, and then followed him back. On his discharge, he now being twenty-one, it had seemed that they would get married, but then she got killed, when her car hit a culvert wall, with her mother at the wheel, as the two of them were on the way to Bowie, where her parents lived. So that was the end of her, but I heard there were other girls, so his mother never knew, from one week to the next, what to expect. So I was all sulked up, just from thinking about it, and perhaps to cover, to have something to say, perhaps to cool it a little, I asked, in a conversational way, “Sonya, how old are you?”
“I’m almost seventeen.”
“Ouch.”
“What’s the matter, Mr. Kirby?”
“Nothing — I took you for older, that’s all.”
“You mean, when it happened, I was within the law.”
“Yes, I guess that’s what I mean — if you invoke the law. Sonya, I haven’t heard the details, but have you really thought about it, what invoking the law means? It protects the girl, that’s true, especially a girl under the age of consent, but she often finds out that its protection is just about the worst thing that can happen to her.”
“It’s not me. It’s my family.”
“Oh yes, you mentioned your father.”
“How old are you, Mr. Kirby?”
“I was thirty last September.”