The Duke stood in Irish Johnny’s Tavern, five new stitches in his scarred face under the bandage, and read his poem to the people who only wanted Saturday night to start again with the loud blare of the music and the heavy mass of the dancing and a kind of oblivion. He read without stumbling over the words, not reading but hearing it in the smoke of the gaudy tavern room. Hearing it as it had come to him when he stood in the snow and remembered the girl whose mother had always dressed her so well.
There was no laughter now. The Duke was doing what he had to do. Fred and Dorothy Margon were listening, and no one wanted to look stupid. Walter Ellis and Joey Brant were listening, and no one wanted to offend Mr. Ellis. So they sat, and the band waited to come back and start Saturday night again, and I went to the telephone and called Lieutenant Derrida.
Walter Ellis moved his chair, and I faced Joey Brant across the tavern table. “High steel pays good money, but you haven’t been making good money in a long time. You were home whenever Professor Margon went to talk to Alma Jean. You were home when Dorothy Margon watched Alma Jean. You haven’t been working high steel for over a year. That’s why she went out on the streets. You even had to sell Alma Jean’s jewelry to buy whisky at Cherry Valley Tavern. One of those pieces wasn’t hers, though, and that was a mistake. It was the cross the Duke gave her the night she was killed, the one he wrote about in his poem. You knew someone else had given it to her, but you didn’t know the Duke had given it to her that night, and it proves you killed her. You grabbed it from her neck before you knocked her off that bridge.”
Lieutenant Derrida stood over the table. The room was watching now. The Duke with his poem in his hand, Walter Ellis sad, Fred and Dorothy Margon holding hands but not looking at each other. Derrida said, “It’s the cross the Duke gave her that night, has his initials inside. Your boss says you haven’t worked high steel in over a year, just low-pay ground jobs when you show up at all. When the bartender. Crow, saw we had proof and motive, he talked. You left the tavern when it closed, didn’t get to the sweat lodge until pushing 3:30 A.M. You brought the jewelry to Crow after she was dead.”
Joey Brant drained his whisky, looked at us all with rage in his dark eyes. “She didn’t got to go on no streets. We was makin’ it all right. She got no cause playin’ with white guys, sellin’ it to old men, working for black whoremasters. I cut him good, that black bastard, ’n’ I knocked her off that there bridge when she was out selling her ass so she could live high and rich with her white friends and her gamblers and her black pimps! Sure, I hit her. I never meant to kill her, but I saw that cross on her neck ’n’ I never give her no cross ’n’ I hit her and she went on over.”
I said, “Her mother said she would only go on the streets for a big reason. You know what that was. Brant? You know why she went back on the streets?”
“I know, mister. Money, that’s why! ’Cause I ain’t bringing home the big bucks like the gambler ’n’ the professor ’n’ the black pimp!”
“She wanted to hire a psychiatrist,” I said. “You know what that is, Joey. A man who makes a sick mind get better.”
“Psychiatrist?” Joey Brant said.
“A healer, Joey. For a scared man who sat at home all day and drank too much. An expensive healer, so she had to go out on the streets to make the money she couldn’t make any other way.”
“Shut up, you hear? Shut up!” His dark face almost white.
I shook my head. “We know, Joey. We talked to the psychiatrist and your boss. You’re afraid of heights, Joey. You couldn’t even go to the edge of that bridge parapet and see where she had fallen. You can’t go up high on the steel anymore, where the big money is. Where a brave goes. Up there with the real men. You became afraid and it was killing you and that was killing her and she had to try to help you, save you, so she wanted money to take you to a psychiatrist who would cure you, help you go up on the steel again where you could feel like a man!”
“Psychiatrist?” Joey Brant said.
“That’s right, Joey. Her big, special reason to make big money the only way she knew how.”
Joey Brant sat there for a long time looking at all of us, at the floor, at his hands, at his empty whisky glass. Just sat while Lieutenant Derrida waited and everyone drifted away, and at last he put his head down on the table and began to cry.
Derrida had taken Joey Brant away. The Duke had stopped reading his poem to anyone who would listen. I sat at the floor-side table with Fred and Dorothy Margon. Out on the floor the Saturday night people clung and twined and held each other in their fine shimmering clothes, while in the mural the silent yellow women and bent blue men frozen in the red and yellow sky watched and waited.
“Dance with me, Fred,” Dorothy Margon said.
“I’m a bad dancer,” Fred Margon said. “I always have been a bad dancer. I always will be a bad dancer.”
“I know,” Dorothy said. “Just dance with me now.”
They danced among the faceless crowd, two more bodies that would soon go their separate ways. I knew that and so did they. Fred would teach and write and go on examining life for what he must write about. Dorothy would go to New York or Los Angeles to find more out of life than an assistant professor, a would-be writer. What they had to do.
The Duke has one kind of courage and Fred Margon has another. Joey Brant lost his. Fred Margon’s kind will cost him his wife. Alma Jean’s courage killed her. The courage to do what she had to do to help her man, even though she knew he would not understand. He would hate her, but she had to do it anyway. Courage has its risks, and we don’t always win.
In my New York office-apartment, Sada Patterson listened in silence, her worn plastic handbag on her skinny lap, the ramrod back so straight it barely touched my chair.
“I knew she had a big reason,” she said. “That was my Alma Jean. To help her man find hisself again,” She nodded, almost satisfied, “I’m sorry for him. He’s a little man.” She stood up. “I gonna miss her — Alma Jean. She was my last: I always dressed her real good.”
She paid me. I took the money. She had her courage too. And her pride. She’d go on living, fierce and independent, even if she couldn’t really tell herself why.
Jim Thompson
The Ripoff: Part II
Jim Thompson’s admirers tout his twenty-nine novels, published in paperback between 1942 and 1973 as unequaled in postwar American fiction. His work has become popular among French cinéma noir directors fascinated by existential American violence. The Ripoff, a work in progress at the time of Thompson’s death, is published in NBMQ for the first time. This installment is the second of four.
The story thus far: Britton Rainstar, the impecunious son of a disgraced American Indian professor, lives in the rundown mansion that formerly belonged to his family, on the edge of an encroaching garbage dump. He is recruited to write for the PXA Holding Company by Manuela Aloe, who becomes his lover. Then inexplicable — and frightening — things begin to happen.
8
More than a month went by before I met Patrick Xavier Aloe. It was at a party at his house, and Manny and I went to it together.