The Neon Jungle Read Online Free Page B

it looks like she can make out O.K. on her own.”
    Jana said, “That isn’t why Gus wants you to stay, Bonny. Not on account of this letter. It’s more than that. To him, you’re like a part of Henry. The only part left. We… all want you.”
    “But you don’t know. You don’t know what I was when Henry came along and…”
    Jana, sitting close, gently touched Bonny’s lips with her fingertips.
    “Shush, Bonny.”
    “But I want you to know all of it.”
    “Why? To punish yourself, maybe? We weren’t blind. We’ve watched you change. You aren’t what you were.”
    And she had stayed, and it was June, and she had learned to take a pride in the quickness with which she could handle the big cash register at the check-out counter. She rarely had to examine the packaged goods to find the price. The regular customers knew her, and she talked with them. The first burden of grief had lifted from the big house. Gus Varaki had not recovered from it completely, and it did not seem that he would. Some of the life had gone out of him. Bonny remembered the way it had been when she had first come there, finding Gus and his young bride standing close in corners, laughing together in a young way, blushing and moving apart when someone noticed them. There was no longer the busty, impulsive caress, a hard pinch of waist, a growl and nibble at the firm young throat. The loss of his son had in some odd way placed Jana in the role of daughter rather than young wife. And Jana no longer would watch her husband across the room in the evening after the store closed, and grow heavy-lidded, soft-mouthed, to at last go up the stairs with him, saying good night to the others in a faraway voice.
    Jana was the sort of girl who, at first glance, was quite plain. Face a bit broad, pale skin, shiny nose, hair that was not quite brown and not quite blonde and very fine-textured, body that was solidly built, eyes that were pale and not quite blue and not quite gray.
    But at third glance, or fourth, you began to notice the glow of health, a silky, glowing ripeness. Her waist and ankles and wrists were slim, and she moved lightly and quickly. You saw the soft natural wave in her hair, and you sensed the sweetness of her, the young animal cleanliness, and you saw then the softness and clever configuration of the underlip, the high roundness of breast.
    She had no cleverness or mental quickness. Routine tasks suited her best, and she could not seem to acquire enough speed on check-out. She could handle heavy sacks and crates with lithe ease. She ate as much as any man. And she had a good true warm instinct about people. She was a good wife for Gus. Yet Bonny guessed from the puzzlement she often saw in Jana’s eyes, from her frequent fits of irritability, that she was not being treated as a wife. She was receiving the affection of a daughter. And Gus walked heavily and did not smile much.
    Today the man with the clown face had come in. Lieutenant Rowell. A thick-legged, fat-bellied little balding man with thin narrow shoulders, and a face that made you want to laugh. Button nose, owl eyes, a big crooked mouth. His forehead bulged and it gave his face a look that was not exactly the look of an infant, but rather something prenatal, something fetal.
    He was from the local precinct. The area was one in which there were factories, alleys, down-at-the-heels rooming houses, poolrooms, juvenile gangs, tiny shabby public parks, candy stores with punchboards, brick schoolyards. There were long rows of identical houses. There was always trouble in the neighborhood. Rowell was, they said, a good cop for the neighborhood, inquisitive, bullying, cynical, and merciless. He had watched Bonny other times he had been in.
    Today he had said, without warning, and in a voice that stopped all other talk and motion in the store, “I like to know everybody I got in the neighborhood, Bonny. Everybody that moves in. It saves time. I got to get a transcript of the application