The Neon Jungle Read Online Free Page A

movies. Is there any law about having as much as we can, even if it isn’t perfect?”
    “Nothing has ever been more perfect for me. I’ve acted foul to you. I’m terribly, desperately sorry, Henry. So damn sorry.”
    “You’ll wear it?”
    “Of course.”
    Later she was able to laugh in a way in which she had not laughed in years. It was a good gayness. Later, in the darkened bedroom, she felt oddly virginal. She had to push the bitter, ironic thoughts back out of her mind. His big hands were tender and gentle, and there was a warm strength to him. Gentleness stirred her as fierceness never could. She felt strangely shy, almost demure. It was all sweet and moving, and he did not find out until afterward, when he kissed her eyes, that she wept.
    “Why, darling?” he whispered.
    And she could not tell him the truth. That she wept because she regretted the years that had left her so little to give him, and had turned her own responses into nothingness. He was big and gentle. A nice kid. She could feel that, and nothing more, no matter how she tried.
    “Why are you crying?” he repeated.
    “Because I think I love you, my darling,” she lied. And she knew that her lie was a strong fence that would be around her during the time he would be gone.
    The day he left he gave her the bus ticket and twenty dollars. He said he’d change the insurance and make out the allotment forms. He kissed her hard. She watched his broad back as he walked off. He did not turn again.
    She was on the bus two hours later. The wire from Henry’s father, Gus Varaki, had said, TELL HER THIS IS WHERE SHE LIVES NO NONSENSE.
    It was a long bus trip. Nights and darkness and flashing lights and muted sleep sounds around her. Early-morning stops at the wayside stations. The grainy, sticky, heavy feeling of sleeping in a tilted seat. She wanted to feel that the blue and silver bus was taking her out of one life and into a new one. But you could not empty yourself of everything, become a shell to be refilled. Wherever you went, you had to take yourself, take all your own corrosive juices and splintered memories and patterned reactions. Henry became unreal after the first day of travel. He was a gentle hand that touched her forehead, seeking the dry heat of fever. A big muscular kid who walked lightly. A faceless kid. A kid who joined the ranks of all the other faceless ones. His eyes had been blue, his hair coarse, blond, bristly. Mrs. Henry Varaki.
    Gus and Jana met her at the grubby bus station in Johnston. By then she was too weary to look for their reactions. She knew only that Gus Varaki was a thick-bodied stocky man who hugged her warmly, and Jana was a plain sturdy girl who kissed her. They took her to a car and drove her through the afternoon streets, through snow that melted as it fell. They took her to a big house and to this third-floor room. Jana brought food. She went to sleep after a hot bath. She did not awaken until dusk of the following day.
    It had taken her months to build confidence. Gus and Jana and Anna and Teena had helped. Walter seemed to have no reaction to her. His thin dark bitter pregnant wife, Doris, was actively unpleasant.
    It had taken a long time to rebuild. In March it was all torn down again when the wire came about Henry. The letter from his commanding officer came a week later, to the gloomy, depressed household.
    Gus came to her room and sat stolidly, tears marking the unchanging gray stone of his face. She told him twice that she was going to leave before he seemed to hear her. Then he looked at her slowly. “Leave us, Bonny? No. You stay.”
    “I’m no help to you. I’m no good here.”
    “We want you. What other thing I can say?”
    Jana later showed her the letter Henry had written his father. “I think I’ll be O.K., Pop, but in a deal like this you can’t be 100 per cent sure. If anything happens, make Bonny stay with you. Don’t let her leave. She hasn’t got any place to go. Keep her there until