Points South by
Fletcher Flora
From the collection Heels Are For Hating and Other Stories by Fletcher Flora
Published in 2010 by Wonder Publishing Group
* * * *
POINTS SOUTH by FLETCHER FLORA
(First
published in Manhunt, June 1954)
*
* * *
I drew an ace, and I needed it. With the pair that I
already had, it established something substantial. Luck was going my way. I
lifted my eyes from the cards to the face of Leo Gall, and I thought to myself
again that it was like a fat olive with features. His eyes were screwed back
into little puffs of skin as he examined his hand, and his pimento-red lips
were pursed into the shape of a wet kiss. It was a face I didn't like, though I
pretended to like it for my health's sake, so I slanted my line of vision off
over his shoulder to the face of Hilda Hearn.
Hilda was tired. About midnight she'd gone into the
bedroom for a nap, but when she'd returned a couple of hours later, it was
obvious that the nap had been too late and too short to do her much good. The
muscles of her face had a tight, drawn look, her eyes were smudged, and her
mouth was a soft scarlet smear. She slept too little and smoked too much, ate
too little and drank too much, did too much of everything bad for her and too
little of anything good, but tousled and smeared and worn to the bone, she was
still a lovely assembly of female parts. Sprawled on the sofa with a highball
in her hand, she combed free fingers through copper curls and sent me a smoke
signal from smoldering eyes.
"One grand," Leo Gall said.
Beside me, between me and Leo as the betting went, Hugh
Lawson cursed softly and bitterly, slapping his hand into the discard. His
mouth and eyes were pinched at the corners by the long strain of losing, and
his fingers shook as they fumbled a cigarette out of a limp pack and carried it
to his lips. I did some quick calculation and figured he must have dropped at
least twenty grand. Just about what I'd contributed myself to the fat welfare
of our host. I also figured Hugh could afford it about as much as I could,
which was not at all. He was a slim guy with a lean, hungry face and blond hair
cut very short and square on top the way a lot of college boys wear it. He'd
got most of his education in pool rooms and clip joints, but he looked a hell
of a lot like a college boy.
"Out," he said.
I put my faith in three bullets and met the thousand. I
couldn't bump it, because I didn't have a good bump left. A couple of hundred
in chips, that was all.
"One raise, I'm a dead duck," I said.
Leo laughed softly and wetly behind a red, white and
blue mountain. "Credit's good, boy. With me, it's always good."
Around the circle 90 degrees, Kal Magnus sighed and
rolled his soaked cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. His hand
struck the discard and flew apart, but his expression was genial, signifying
his indifference to luck that always ran one way or the other and would be good
next time, or the next or the next, if it happened to be bad tonight. Being
able to carry your luck comfortably from bad to good makes a hell of a
difference in your attitude. Kal's was bad tonight, all right, ten grand bad,
but you'd have thought he was playing for matches.
He said, "If you're worried about me, you're
wasting it. I'm out."
Leo smiled. It was a very small smile, slightly sad. It
was the one he'd been using all night. The one he used when he was looking down
your throat.
"No raise? That's too bad. Well, you paid to see
them, Andy, so have a good look."
He spread them slowly in ascending order, five little
cards worth my last grand, and whichever end you read them from, going up or
down, they came out straight. Better any time than three lousy aces.
I added my junk to the discard and said, "Take it
away."
He took it. On the ring finger of his right hand was a
diamond worth more than the pot. In the thick nest of black hair growing above
the second joint of the finger, it looked like a glittering egg. And it was
then, watching his fat hands rake in my dough, that I got one of those crazy
ideas a guy sometimes gets when it's late, too late, and the world's gone sour.
It was then that I began to think what fun it would be to clobber him. We began
to settle the score, and all the time we were settling it, I kept seeing those
fat white fingers with the black hair growing out of them. I saw them over and
over in a dozen repellent engagements—dealing cards that brought me no luck,
dragging in the fat pots, creeping like slugs over the soft flesh of Hilda
Hearn.
I closed my eyes and kept them closed for half a minute,
but the fingers were there behind the lids, so I opened them again, and the
first thing I saw was his red, wet mouth. The lips were so soft and thick and
full of blood. They looked as if they'd smash on his big white teeth like a
glutted leech.
I went sort of blind, I guess. Blind to everything and
everyone but Leo Gall. And I functioned for a few seconds in the terrible
urgency of a single grim compulsion.
I stood up and leaned across the table and clobbered
him.
He got a glimpse of knuckles coming at him, and his face
had, for a split second, a ludicrous expression of surprise. His chair rocked
back on its rear legs, hung for a moment in balance, and then crashed over. He
hit the floor on his shoulders and skidded like a clown on ice, but there
wasn't really anything funny about it. His head smacked the sharp edge of the
frame of the sofa Hilda was sprawled on, and there was a dull, sodden sound
like the bursting of a rotten melon, and he lay very still on his back with his
fat gut rising like a strange and ugly growth from the floor, and it was not
funny at all.
Hilda stood up very slowly, the movements of her arms
and legs possessing the unreal quality of action in slow-motion. She stood
looking down at Leo. "Jesus," she said. "Oh, Jesus."
Hugh Lawson's breath whistled shrilly through his
nostrils, and Kal Magnus heaved his ponderous bulk erect. He turned his eyes
from Leo's prone carcass to me, and his broad face was flat and still and hard
as stone.
He said tonelessly, "You tired of living,
Andy?"
I didn't bother to answer.
I went over and knelt beside Leo. I felt for his pulse and found it. Then I
passed my hands swiftly over the obvious places for a gun, but there was no gun
on him. I knew he would come out of it soon, and I didn't want him coming with
death in his hand. My death, I mean. Chances were it'd come soon enough. Soon
and sudden, if I was lucky. Soon and not so sudden, if I wasn't.
Standing, I looked across the body at Hilda. Her lips
were slightly parted, and the tip of her tongue appeared between them to slip
slowly around the red circumference. Her eyes were hot and cloudy behind lids
descending to veil an intense inner excitement.
On the floor between us, Leo stirred and shuddered and
came up jerkily from the hips, leaning back for support against braced arms. He
shook his head from side to side and brought one hand forward and up across his
split lips. He sat there on the floor and looked in a stupefied way at the
smear of blood on his hand. At last, moving like an old, old man, he got one
knee under him and rose slowly to his feet. His eyes were as dull and lifeless
as dirty metal disks. They slid from face to face until they reached and
remained on mine, and his voice was a gassy whisper escaping through loose
teeth and blood and swollen flesh.
"You dirty bastard! You scummy little louse! Get
out of here! Get the hell out of here fast! And right now you better start
living it up. Right now you better start to live up all your God-damn life in
the next twenty-four hours, because maybe you'll have that long and maybe you
won't."
Hilda took a step toward him, lifting one arm with a
jerk, as if she were breaking ice in the joints. "Look, Leo. It was just
one of those crazy things. Andy just went nuts for a second, that's all."
He turned to face her. His mangled lips were working,
and a trickle of saliva leaked out of one corner of his mouth and down across
his chin. "The hell you say! So we just forget all about it, is that it?
So we kiss and make up? Well, it's nice to know you're so damn concerned about
the lousy punk. If that's the way it is, maybe you better get the hell out,
too."
"It's not that way, Leo. You know it's not that
way."
His voice broke controls, skidding up to a high,
feminine scream. "Get out! Get the hell out, you Goddamn tramp!"
She stood very still for a moment, her breasts held high
against her dress, and then she turned without speaking and went into the
bedroom. She returned immediately in mink and went over to the hall door and
out, still without speaking and without looking at any one of us. When she was
gone, I helped myself to my hat and followed. Behind me, Leo's shrill voice
said, "Don't try to run, punk. Wherever you go, wherever you try to hide …
"
There was more, but I never
heard it, because I cut it off with the door and went down the hall to the
elevator. Hilda had left the car in the lobby, and when I'd brought it up, Kal
and Hugh still hadn't come out of the apartment. Taking time to clear
themselves, I thought. Making certain that none of Leo's trigger men came looking
for them in whatever good time was convenient for killing. On the same trip,
probably, when he came looking for me. God knows I couldn't blame them. I could
blame them in no way for not wanting to share Andy Corkin's suicide. Descending
alone in the elevator, I cursed myself in the bleak and passionless futility of
irreparable idiocy, but it only came to the same result that most things had
come to in the life of Andy Corkin. To nothing, that is.
Outside by the curb, the taxi was waiting with its engine
running. The back door opened as I came out, and I scooted across the sidewalk
and inside. The taxi lurched forward, swerving out into the traffic lane, and
Hilda came over against me with a kind of restrained violence, her body
twisting around to a frontal approach, her soft mouth hungry and aggressive. I
snarled fingers in her short copper hair and pulled her face down so hard that
I could feel her lips flatten and spread and her teeth click sharply against
mine. Her breath was hot and labored, and after a long time she twisted away
and fell back in the seat, her breasts rising and falling in slow cadence with
deep, ragged gasps.
"Andy," she said. "Andy … "
"I just thought we'd better be making hay,
honey."
"Don't say it that way. Don't ever say it that
way."
"You heard Leo. Live it up, he said. Twenty-four
hours, he said."
"Why, Andy? For God's sake, why'd you do it?"
"I went blind, honey. I saw his fat fingers, and I
thought of you, and I thought of the fingers and you together, and so I smashed
his ugly mouth. Besides, maybe it was just getting too late. Maybe I'm just a
sour loser who should've stuck to penny ante. Who really knows what makes a guy
do something crazy? He does it, that's all. First thing he knows, it's
done."
"Now what, Andy? What're you going to do now?"
"Something pleasant, I hope. It's up to you."
"You've got to get away, Andy. Just till I've had
time to try to fix things."
"Run?"
"Call it what you like. If I can't get it fixed,
I'll run after you."
I shook my head. "There's no place far enough,
honey. And if there were, there's nothing fast enough to get me there."
"Jesus, Andy, you can't just sit and wait for it.
There has to be something we can do."
"There is. I said it was up to you. Something
pleasant, I said."
She came back then, and my
hands crept in under mink, and it was as if she was trying desperately to give
me everything in no time at all, but a taxi's no place for it, a taxi
prescribes limits, and so pretty soon I said, "We'd better go to my place,
honey."
"That's where we're going. I told the cabbie."
"Sweet baby."
"I can't stay, though, darling."
"Why the hell not?"
"I've got to get back."
"To Leo?"
"Yes."
"Don't be a fool. He kicked you out.
Remember?"
"Look, Andy. It was just because he'd been
humiliated, and I'd seen it happen. It was just because his bloated little ego
couldn't stand my seeing it. When I get back, it'll be different. By that time,
he'll be wanting me so bad it'll be stronger than anything else, even stronger
than the effect of my seeing him slapped in the chops like a fat brat."
Her voice sank to a thin complaint. "I've been earning the rent, Andy.
Believe me, I earn it in plenty of service and a thousand futile damn
regrets."
"Don't tell me. I don't want to hear it."
"It's for us, Andy. If I left him, it still
wouldn't clear things for us. He'd have us both killed. Can't you see it's for
us? You're the only one I really ever want it from, darling. Just you."
"You're forgetting something, honey. I'm the guy
who clobbered him tonight. He's going to have me taken care of, anyhow."
"Maybe not. Maybe I can stop him. If I go back
tonight, I think I can stop him. Not entirely, of course. He'll want something
out of you. Something to salvage his pig's vanity. But I can make it something
less than death. Then it'll be you and me, Andy, the same as now, and there'll
be a thousand nights together to make up for this one."
"Sure. You and me. You and me and Leo."
"We'll find a way to eliminate Leo later on. A safe
way. Sometime, somehow, we'll find a way."
I was tired. I was a tired, broke, sick damn fool, but I
had no particular desire to die, and I wanted Hilda wholly or on shares, any
way I could get her whenever she wanted to come. I leaned back in the seat and
said, "You save it for us, honey. I'll be waiting around."
The taxi wheeled into my street and stopped, and I got
out and stood beside it on the curb. Hilda leaned out after me, her face lifted
above her white, arched throat, and I leaned down and kissed her without
touching her with anything but my lips. Then the taxi pulled us apart, and I
went inside and upstairs alone.
What do you do with the
twenty-four hours that may be your last? Get drunk? Get religion? Go crazy? I
guess it depends on who you are, how much that next breath means to you. For what
it signifies, I had one drink, one cigarette, and went to bed. I also slept. I
slept long and well, and when I woke up I saw by the watch on my wrist that it
was far past
I got the drink at Stony's. Stony himself poured it for
me. He asked me how I was, and I said I was all right. After drinking half of
what he'd poured, I almost believed it. Someone in a booth paid a nickel for Many Times, which isn't a bad tune in
itself, but it started me thinking about Hilda trying to make Leo see that I
wasn't worth killing, and that wasn't good. I tried to quit thinking about it,
but little details kept forcing their way into my mind which may or may not
have been parts of the way it actually happened, so I lifted my drink to finish
it, and in the process I saw something that made me think for a moment that it
hadn't happened at all. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw a character named
Jack Steap, a thin guy with a body like ten-gauge wire and a face like the edge
of a razor. He was a guy for hire who worked for Leo Gall when Leo needed a
fast, professional job, and he was standing precisely behind the empty stool on
my right. One hand was in the pocket of his coat, very casually. I felt,
suddenly, dry and withered inside, all dead and done and ready for the fire.
He said softly in a thin tenor voice, "Okay, hero.
Let's go."
I turned on the stool, and it was then that I realized
that he hadn't spoken to me at all. His eyes and voice were directed toward the
customer on the other side of the empty stool. He'd come in a few minutes after
me, and we were now the only ones at the bar. He looked like a college guy. He
was wearing a hat, but the hair that showed below it was blond, and I knew it
was cut short and square on top. I was a little surprised to see that he still
had the price of a drink. Hugh Lawson, I mean.
If he ever recognized me, he didn't show it. He looked
over his shoulder at the gunsel and said, "You talking to me?"
"You, hero. Let's go."
"What the hell you talking about?"
Jack Steap showed his teeth
in a smile that was all on the plane. No depth, no meaning. "You know,
hero. Just for kicks, though, I'll brief you on it. I'm talking about your dropping
a bundle to Leo Gall last night. I'm talking about your coming back later to
reclaim it. It and the other lettuce Leo'd won, plus fifty grand or so he had
lying around for household expenses. It was real messy, the way you did it.
Smashing his skull that way. Leo's head was a real mess."
Hugh Lawson spun around slowly on his stool. His face
had gone white and slack, and the first wash of fear was coming up into his
eyes. His voice was a sick croak. "You're crazy! Leo was alive when I
left. Kal Magnus and I went together."
"I know. Kal went and stayed. You didn't. You went
back."
"I didn't! I swear I didn't!"
"Sure you swear you didn't. But you did. You were
seen, hero. You were seen leaving the apartment by someone else who went back.
Someone on Leo's team. So the word went out to Leo's boys. So the boys sent me
out to find you. So here I am. And so let's go."
A greenish tinge began to creep into the dead white of
Lawson's face. It was the face of a man who knew that nothing he could say
would make any difference. His mouth labored to create sound, but the most it
managed was a whimper, and his eyes slithered around desperately for help that
wasn't there. They crossed my face, his eyes, but I don't think I registered in
them. Then he was off the stool and running parallel to the bar. He must have
intended to duck around it and out the back way into the alley, but he never
made it. Jack Steap's hand came out of his pocket, and there were two muffled
detonations so close together that they almost blended, and Hugh Lawson stopped
and turned half around and leaned back against the bar like a guy who might
have stopped in for a short beer. After a moment, he slipped down to a sitting
position and toppled over sideways.
There was a long moment of dead silence in the bar, and
then the five or six customers in booths got up and out before the cops got in.
Jack Steap walked down along the bar, stepped over Lawson's
body, and went on out the way Lawson had wanted to go.
I went that way myself. I went out into the alley and
down the alley to the street and back to my apartment.
I went inside and closed the door and leaned back
against it with my eyes closed. Something was hurting inside me, and the
hurting was related to the death of Hugh Lawson. He was a guy I hadn't known
well and had neither liked nor disliked, but I didn't want him dead at the
hands of a thin weasel like Jack Steap for the sake of a fat pig like Leo Gall.
Not even when his death was maybe my salvation.
Hilda's voice said, "What's the matter,
darling?"
I opened my eyes, and there
she was. She was there like something beautiful and warm and real that I needed
like hell. I started for her, and she started for me, and we met and merged
somewhere between our starting places.
"It's all right, darling," she said.
"Leo's dead."
"I know he's dead. So's Hugh Lawson. I just saw him
shot down in Stony's place."
"Leo's boys think Hugh's the one who killed Leo."
"I know. That's what the gunsel said."
"Don't you see what it means, darling? It means you
and me in the open. You and me without a worry. We can go away for awhile.
South, I think. Somewhere a long way south of the border."
"Using what for money?"
She broke out of my arms then and went for her purse in
a chair. It was a big job, almost as big as an overnight bag, one of these
things on a strap that's worn over the shoulder. She picked it up and brought
it back and turned it upside down, and paper began to fall out. Green paper. I
thought it'd never quit falling. It fell and spread and piled up around my
feet.
I raised my eyes to her face, and it was still the
loveliest face I'd ever seen, smooth and creamy under copper, with a bright and
gifted mouth and smoky eyes.
"You," I said. "You killed Leo and put
the finger on Lawson."
She shook her head. "No. I put the finger on
Lawson, all right, but I didn't kill Leo."
"Lawson really did, then?"
"No. Neither me nor Lawson."
"Who?"
She looked at me and smiled and said, "You did,
darling."
I reached out and took her by the shoulders and dug in.
"What the hell's this? I never went back there."
"I know you didn't. Look, Andy. When I was a kid on
southside, I used to watch the fellows play ball in the street. One day a kid
we called Fats got hit in the head with a bat. He was out for a few minutes,
and his head hurt for a while, but pretty soon he started to play again, and it
was almost half an hour later when he dropped dead. Concussion acts like that
sometimes, and that's the way Leo died. You remember how his head smacked the
sharp frame of the sofa? He got up and chased us out, and he got ready for bed,
and he dropped dead."
"Wait a minute. The gunsel said his head was a
mess."
"That was just for looks, darling. He was already
dead when I got back. If I'd left him the way I found him, it would've been
easy to figure what had really happened."
"So you mess him up and help yourself to his money
and finger an innocent guy for the rap."
"For you, darling. For you and me."
"You think I'd touch the lousy money now? Or
you?"
"Yes, darling. The
money and me. Without us, it's so much paper. With us, it's more fun than you
ever dreamed of in that place we'll find below the border."
I kept on looking at her, and I kept on wanting her, in
spite of everything, and I told myself that there's a point beyond which you
can't go. You can skirt the dark edge, you can do things that later make you
sick to your stomach, but there's a point beyond which you can't go if your
soul is ever to be your own again. That's what I told myself, and I told myself
that I had reached the point.
Now I'll tell you something:
it's hot down here. It's hot as hell below the border.
THE
END
POINTS SOUTH is from the collection Heels Are For Hating and Other Stories by Fletcher Flora
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Brand is a small-time middleweight boxing professional just barely trying to make
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Highway 66, and guiltily he goes out to have a drink. At the bar, he is met by
the competition’s manager, and the latter makes a proposal: lose the fight and
get paid ten thousand dollars. The amount would actually cover the downpayment
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includes the stories: SHE ASKED FOR IT, POINTS
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