“Kick his damn head off, George!” the woman yelled.
“You better stop,” someone said. “You’ll kill him if you aren’t careful.”
A police siren keened on the heavy night air, rising and falling, coming fast.
The police cruiser turned the corner and squealed to a stop. The crowd moved back, and suddenly there was no sound other than the sobbing moans of the man on the sidewalk. He was lying on his back now, motionless, his face battered to a swollen, bleeding pulp. One wrist had been broken, and two inches of bone shard had pushed through the skin.
Fifteen minutes later, Donna sat on a wooden bench at the station house, talking to Sergeant Clinton. The police had taken her attacker to a hospital under guard.
“You sure you wouldn’t rather we took you home in a squad car?” Clinton asked.
She shook her head. “My folks, they would...”
“All right, then,” Clinton said gently. “But make sure you bring them right back here with you. We got to get your statement, and we got to have your folks here on account of you’re a minor.”
Donna turned and walked slowly out of the station house and along the street until she reached the corner. Then she quickened her pace, and another five minutes brought her to Center Avenue, the main drag along which she walked every evening, and for which she had been heading when she had paused to look in the store window. She was still shaken from her experience, but rapidly beginning to return to normal.
Half a block farther on, she stopped before another store window. And at this window too a man was looking at the display. He was about the same age and size as her attacker had been, but he looked all right, not funny and wild-eyed like the other one. This man, she knew, would be okay.
She glanced both ways along the avenue, and then she said softly, “You want to have a party, mister?”
The man looked at her, first with surprise and then with interest.
“What would it cost me?” he asked.
She smiled at him. “A fiver,” she said.
David Goodis
(1917–1967)
In the mid-1940s, David Goodis seemed to be on the brink of monumental success. A busy, published writer since 1939, he was the author of a reasonably well received first novel, Retreat from Oblivion (1939). He had discovered the pulp magazines and found he had a knack for combat fiction, especially in the air-war genre. Throughout the war, he provided a host of colorfully titled novelettes (“Sky-Coffins for Nazis,” “Doom for the Hawks of Nippon,” “The High-Hat Squadron from Hell”) for pulps such as Battle Birds, Air War, and Dare-Devil Aces. Under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Ray P. Shotwell and David Crewe, and the house name Lance Kermit, he contributed stories to such detective pulps as New Detective and Big-Book Detective. It is said that he also wrote torrentially, although pseudonymously, for the principal “shudder” pulps — Terror Tales, Horror Stories, and Dime Mystery — until their demise in 1941, although no one has yet cracked his pseudonyms for these markets. There is no doubt that he wrote radio scripts for Superman as well as Hop Harrigan: America’s Ace of the Airways (for which he became associate producer in 1945).
Goodis’s annus mirabilis was 1946. His novel Dark Passage (about an innocent man on the run) was sold to the Saturday Evening Post for $25,000, and the Warner Brothers film studio picked it up for the same, then-staggering sum. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall starred. A promotional photograph shows a grinning Bogart with his arm through Goodis’s and Goodis’s other arm around Bacall. At that time, this was a portrait of triumph and fame. A six-year contract with Warner Brothers followed, its first fruit being a Goodis co-script (with fames Gunn) for The Unfaithful, which, along with Dark Passage, was a huge success. There followed three years of unsensational script tinkering before Warner’s dropped him completely.
Goodis fled home to Philadelphia and sat in his room, day after day writing archetypical noir paperback originals about small and hopeless lives. His first paperback original, the bestselling Cassidy’s Girl, was published in 1951. Both his writing and his life during the 1950s were obsessive to the point of madness. He wrote short, bleak sagas of lives lived at the edge of common decency, often tumbling over into a stew of alcoholism, paranoia, debilitating poverty, and failure. His own lifestyle could also be described as seriously eccentric, and for the last fifteen years of his life, he lived as a virtual recluse with his parents in Philadelphia.
First published in Manhunt in December 1953, Goodis’s “Black Pudding” is a tale of violence, hatred, and revenge — with the unusual addition of a modicum of hope.
J. A.
Black Pudding
(1953)
They spotted him on Race Street between Ninth and Tenth. It was Chinatown in the tenderloin of Philadelphia and he stood gazing into the window of the Wong Ho restaurant and wishing he had the cash to buy himself some egg-foo-yung. The menu in the window priced egg-foo-yung at eighty cents an order and he had exactly thirty-one cents in his pocket. He shrugged and started to turn away from the window and just then he heard them coming.
It was their footsteps that told him who they were. There was the squeaky sound of Oscar’s brand-new shoes. And the clumping noise of Coley’s heavy feet. It was nine years since he’d heard their footsteps but he remembered that Oscar had a weakness for new shoes and Coley always walked heavily.
He faced them. They were smiling at him, their features somewhat greenish under the green neon glow that drifted through after-midnight blackness. He saw the weasel eyes and buzzard nose of little Oscar. He transferred his gaze to the thick lips and puffed-out cheeks of tall, obese Coley.
“Hello, Ken.” It was Oscar’s purring voice, Oscar’s lips scarcely moving.
“Hello,” he said to both of them. He blinked a few times. Now the shock was coming. He could feel the waves of shock surging toward him.
“We been looking for you,” Coley said. He flipped his thick thumb over his shoulder to indicate the black Olds 88 parked across the street. “We’ve driven that car clear across the country.”
Ken blinked again. The shock had hit him and now it was past and he was blinking from worry. He knew why they’d been looking for him and he was very worried.
He said quietly, “How’d you know I was in Philly?”
“Grapevine,” Oscar said. “It’s strictly coast-to-coast. It starts from San Quentin and we get tipped-off in Los Angeles. It’s a letter telling the Boss you been paroled. That’s three weeks ago. Then we get letters from Denver and Omaha and a wire from Chicago. And then a phone call from Detroit. We wait to see how far east you’ll travel. Finally we get the call from Philly, and the man tells us you’re on the bum around Skid Row.”
Ken shrugged. He tried to sound casual as he said, “Three thousand miles is a long trip. You must have been anxious to see me.”
Oscar nodded. “Very anxious.” He sort of floated closer to Ken. And Coley also moved in. It was slow and quiet and it didn’t seem like menace but they were crowding him and finally they had him backed up against the restaurant window.