Sin Hellcat

Ten

I am not a violent man by nature. My earliest memories are memories of acute physical cowardice, and I have been known to go to great lengths to avoid a fight. And that is one of the tragedies of the modern world. All our brain-workers (for this is the term they persistently apply to us boys who make the yokels buy things they don’t need) have gone physically soft. We are vicious enough, and we will twist a verbal knife as deftly as Cyrano ever wielded a blade, but the physical sends us scrambling for the exits. We have but one sword, and it is a poor thing used only upon women, and our hands are better at holding pencils than making fists.

A sad affair.

Which makes it all the more amazing. Because, while my fist was in the air and on the way to the nose of Dixon Whittington, a most unseemly thought raced through my feverish brain. I won’t hit him hard enough, I thought sickly. I haven’t hit anyone in years, I don’t know how anymore, and I was never much good at it to begin with. I watch Kirk Douglas movies and an occasional prize fight, but I haven’t hit anybody and I am about to mess it up. I’ll pull the punch or something. Or, oh, God, I’ll miss him. I’ll just flail at empty air and seem like a total fool.

A lot of thinking while throwing a punch. But my thoughts stopped suddenly, you see, because my hand ached. And my hand ached because my fist had just collided quite magnificently with the nose of Dixon Whittington. The punch, by God, had landed. I hadn’t, by George, pulled it.

Not a wee bit.

I stood there for a moment and merely watched things. I watched Dixon Whittington, the troll, with his thick veined nose more misshapen than ever. Blood streamed from those black hair-filled nostrils. The color combination at least was passable — like red leather seats in a black Jaguar. And I watched him reel backward, ever so slightly, until he was sitting on the floor and covering his revolting nose with a hairy paw.

I watched. And out of the corner of one eye I saw Jodi gaping and smiling at once, and reaching to take my arm. And out of the corner of my other eye I saw Rhett, laughing like an Indian and slapping his hands to his knees. And out of the corner of my third eye—

No, that’s wrong.

“You socked him,” Jodi was saying, hysterically.

“You socked him,” Rhett was saying, jubilantly.

“Socked the old bastard,” Jodi squealed.

“What’s a bastard?” Rhett asked, undaunted.

The old bastard, speak of the devil, was getting to his feet. He pawed at the air with his hands, and that was a mistake because it let the blood come pouring through those black holes of Calcutta once again. There was blood on his fingers, too. I looked down at my hands, and there was blood on the knuckles of the hand I had hit him with.

“Now what the hell,” the troll grunted. “Now what the hell.”

“Old bastard,” Rhett chirped. “Old bastard old bastard old bastard old bastard—”

Jodi covered his mouth with her hand, demonstrating again that she had a way with children. And the slut appeared in the doorway, looking thoroughly puzzled, and Dixon Whittington swung a heavy hand to the side of her face, demonstrating that he had a way with women. The slut went back, presumably, to her bottle. And the troll fixed two uncertain eyes upon me.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

I probably should have hit him again. But picture please the scene in its entirety. Picture driving a furious fist into the nose of a total stranger, and imagine him getting up bloody and bowed, and staring at you, and telling you he doesn’t get it. Would you have hit him again? Would Kirk Douglas?

I didn’t. I placed hands upon hips and played a waiting game, and he looked from me to Jodi to Rhett to Jodi to me. And then he looked at Jodi, and he seemed to be concentrating on her ample bust, and I’ll be damned before I’ll let a troll look at my unlawful wife that way. So I hit him.

I got that poor old nose again, and he sat down again, and there was more of that red stuff. He tried to hold it in with his hands and the damned blood leaked through his fingers. I thought of a few speeches from Macbeth. I tried to decide whether a person could have a fatal hemorrhage through his nostrils. And the troll stayed right where he was again, which was on the floor.

He looked up at me. Not at Jodi now. Not at Rhett.

At me.

“Listen,” he said, “just tell me what it’s all about. That’s all.”

I’d heard that question at least once before. I quite possibly had heard it on many an occasion, since a desire to know what it’s all about is universal in human experience and particularly prevalent in my circle of friends, but there was one time that sprang at once to mind.

It happened at our house.

Remember the house? I’ve mentioned it, haven’t I? The suburban hide-a-wee, the Rockland County Split-Level Colonial with wall-to-wall carpets and floor-to-ceiling walls? I’m sure I have. Our hate nest amongst the crabgrass, where Helen and I lived a life of mutual animosity in rustic splendor.

I’ve mentioned it, all right. But I haven’t told you how we acquired it, or when. We acquired it shortly after the wedding, and we acquired it because Helen wanted it. I had wanted it myself, during those moments when visions of domestic bliss had not yet been washed away entirely by the realization that Helen was colder than a well-digger’s ass in Little America. But after we left Bermuda I would have been as happy to remain in Manhattan forever.

Not so with Helen. She wanted charge accounts and heavy furniture, and she wanted a massive life insurance policy with herself as beneficiary, and above all she wanted a house.

Why, you ask, do women want houses? Why did this woman, who had no children and seemed totally uninterested in accumulating any, want a big house instead of a tidy little apartment? That house, my friend, was security. That house, holding a pair of the most secure souls who ever should have graced a psychiatrist’s waiting room, was warmth and stability and everything nice, as far as my icebound bride was concerned.

You see, it’s easy to run out on your wife when you live in an apartment. You pack a suitcase and you go. There’s no car, because you don’t own one, and there’s no money tied up in the house, and you just get on a plane and don’t come back. But once that breezy broad has conned you into buying a house, you’re stuck with her for life. You can’t put the house on your back and go away. You either leave her the house when you run or you get a divorce and divide the house down the middle. And either way she wins.

Anyway, we bought this house. We bought it during one of my relatively rare I-married-this-bitch-and-maybe-if-I-make-nice-she-won’t-be-so-hard-to-live-with moods, and I would have done anything then to make her happy, so I bought a house. We went out looking for houses. We saw majestic old pre-revolutionary homes in upper Westchester with high ceilings and a view of the Hudson, and I liked them. We saw Franklloydwrightish contemporaries with planes and angles and zip level colonial with an attached carport, and we bought it. I’ll leave you to guess who liked it.

And there were we, anyway, Helen and I, in our house. Linda Holmes was a thing of the past, aborted and forgotten, and I was living the commuter’s life. I put in my two hours daily on the 8:12 to New York and the 5:15 to Boondocks Station, and I mowed my crabgrass and wrote my ad copy and functioned, all things considered, as a model citizen of twentieth-century America. Suburban model, that is.

Until I discovered the next door neighbors.

Now there’s something about Suburbia. In Manhattan I had had at least six hundred next-door neighbors, and the only one I ever knew was an old wino named McHenry who wandered into my apartment one night to borrow a cup of grog. But in Reckless Rockland you were supposed to love thy neighbors as thyself and simply because they had bought the house next door to you. They could be horse thieves, they could be dullards, they could be syphilitics — this did not matter. You knew them, dammit. You had to.

The Sheggittses lived next door to us. Harry Sheggitts was an engineer with a crew and a slide rule tie-clasp (does that not sum him up?) and Bonnie Sheggitts was a lithe and limber copperhead. That is, she had copper-colored hair. She wasn’t a snake, exactly.

We played bridge with the Sheggittses, and if anyone knows a better way to destroy an evening, I’ll have to hear about it sometime. We played ping pong with the Sheggittses, and there’s a better way than bridge, now that I think upon it. The high points came when Bonnie lurched across the table after a hard rebound, giving me a good look at her own high points. But a glance of breast-flesh covered with cotton is not enough to carry an insupportable evening.

We bowled with the Sheggittses, and we picnicked with the Sheggittses, and we drank with the Sheggittses, and if there was one thing I didn’t want to see after a bitchy day at MGSR&S, it was Harry Sheggitts’s pink face shining at me over his slide rule tie-clasp. I was so sick of the nuances of neighborliness that I almost missed out on my share in the Great American Dream, suburban division.

Then this Friday came around. It was one of those long lazy days in early autumn, and when I awoke with somebody else’s head on my shoulders I knew at once that the bully boys at the ad farm would not see me that day. I buried face in pillow and listened to bombs going off in my head, dozing like a tired Londoner during the Blitz until nineish, whereupon I called my office and told them I had a small case of impetigo complicated by tertiary syphilis and that they wouldn’t see me until Monday.

“I feel hellish,” I told Helen. “I think I’ll stick close to home today.”

“They won’t deduct from your pay, will they?”

The kind and considerate helpmate with her heart in the right place. “No,” I said. “They don’t exactly pay me by the hour anymore. You can relax now.”

I had a slow leisurely breakfast, complicated by my inability to taste anything. I sat in the backyard and let the morning go to hell, and in mid-afternoon I was still in the backyard and Helen was out buying things. It was her favorite sport, running far ahead of guess-what, and she was good at it.

And there, Dear Reader, was Bonnie Sheggitts.

There doesn’t quite narrow it down, does it? There, across the fence in her own backyard, was the copper-haired Bonnie. She was alone, stretched prone upon a terry cloth-covered chaise, wearing tight shorts and no bra. Her arms almost but not quite obscured her breasts. Her body’d been gloriously tanned — funny how you fail to notice such things while playing ping pong or bridge — and her hair was magnificent against the tanned skin, and I stood up and walked to the fence separating their yard from ours. I did this for a very simple reason. I wanted a better look at her.

And, slowly, her head turned. Her eyes opened, and looked at me, and her red mouth smiled. “Well, hello,” she said.

“Hello.”

“Helen home?”

“No.”

“But you are, huh?”

“Didn’t go to the office today.” Inspired conversation, no. But we and Harry and Bonnie had somehow striven to avoid inspired conversation. Helen talked about shopping, and Harry mouthed platitude to the eternal glory of (1) the engineering profession (2) the Republican Party and (3) God. “Stayed home,” I went on, brilliantly.

“Oh,” she said. “Come on over here, Harvey, and talk to me.”

I thought of climbing the fence. If I had, it would have buckled or I would have torn my slacks, or something. So I walked down our driveway and across in front of their colonial ranch — a specimen quite as absurd as our colonial split — and up their driveway, and there she was, by God, on the chaise.

“Harvey,” she said, “rub my back, huh?”

The Great American Dream, suburban div. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and love thy neighbor’s wife even more, and rub her back and kiss her in the kitchen and, when the opportunity arises, take her to bed. I rubbed Bonnie’s back, and I felt how warmly smooth her skin was. And, like a kitten, she purred.

“I’m not a tramp,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course, Bonnie.”

“But you can’t imagine what it’s like. Being married to Harry, I mean. It’s not heaven.”

“I can imagine.”

“Harry the engineer. I thought it would be better than typing letters and taking dictation for the rest of my life, and I guess I was wrong. He’s so dull, and in bed — you can’t imagine.”

My hands moved, gently, to her shoulders. They massaged, and she raised herself slightly on her elbows, and my hands moved to the tops of her breasts.

“Sex is a problem in logistics to him,” she said. “Or something like that. Harry has a slide rule at his legs, Harvey.”

Now there was an image with possibilities. But, muse upon it all you will, Bonnie offered too many possibilities of her own for me to think such a much of Harry. My hands had located those mammaries by now, and I held firm flesh in both hands, and nipples went stiff against my palms.

“Helen doesn’t understand me,” I said.

“I never thought she did.”

“She doesn’t. Not at all.”

Now lest you think I was boyishly banal with that line, I must explain something. Remember when you laid little girls in the schoolyard, and they asked you if you loved them? You didn’t, of course, but you said you did. They didn’t believe it, of course, but it made things easier. Before you lay an unmarried girl, you tell her that you love her. It’s a lie. She knows it’s a lie. You tell her anyway because it’s what she wants to hear.

My wife doesn’t understand me is the I love you of adultery, the sine qua non of seducing your neighbor’s wife. It may be true — it certainly was, in my precious case, for what it’s worth — but true or false it must be whispered intensely before you pin the horns on the man next door. So we went through that sequence, and then Bouncy Bonnie rolled onto her back and I covered her breasts with my chest and kissed her for all I was worth.

“I need you,” I said.

“I know. And I need you.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Too open. Too many people could drift around. Not here, Bonnie.”

“Where?”

“Inside,” I said. “Your house.”

“Can’t. The maid’s cleaning the place.”

So Harry Sheggitts had a maid for his wife. If the game were being played properly, the maid was young and willing and Harry was laying her from time to time. Another wrinkle in the Great American Dream.

“Your house, Harvey?”

“Sure. Fine. Helen’s out, she’s buying a store or two, we have plenty of time.”

“Oh, good. Oh, let’s hurry.” This because my hands were busy, and her pulse was racing, and she was ready. And so was I.

We could have run around her colonial ranch and up my driveway, but somehow that would have spoiled things. So we leaped over the fence, and I didn’t even tear my trousers, and we skipped into my split-level trap, she with her breasts bouncing and I with my tongue hanging out passionately.

Inside, I grabbed her and kissed her. Her breasts dug into my chest and her arms wound round me, and I very nearly threw her down on the floor. But there was poetry in my soul. I was married to a frigid Bridget if there ever was one, and I was about to bang the wife next door in my iceberg’s security nest in the boondocks, and when you do something like that you have to do it right. So I headed Bonnie up two half-flights of stairs, since split-levels never have anything you can call a real staircase, and I steered her into the master bedroom and plunged her down on the king-size extra-length bed, and I jumped her.

Adultery can be fun. Now there’s a campaign slogan, sweetie — and already I can hear the brain-storming sessions, with all of us sitting around an oaken table and talking up ways to sell adultery to the American public. Give ’em something they don’t need, boyos. But adultery can be fun. Here I was, cheating on a wife I couldn’t stand, and here Bonnie was cheating on a husband I couldn’t stand, and what more could I have asked for?

Well, I’ll tell you. I could have asked for privacy.

We got rid of Bonnie’s shorts, and we got rid of all my clothes, and we pressed flesh against flesh and sighed together.

“Harry’s dull,” she moaned.

“My wife doesn’t understand me,” I grunted passionately.

And, with those rites out of the way, it was time. She let out a luxurious sigh and spread herself out upon her back, breasts rampant and thighs couchant. And, with the facility of an accomplished suburban do-it-yourselfer, I inserted Tenon A into Mortise B and grommeted industriously.

As we toiled together, it became obvious to me that one of two possibilities was true. Either Harry Sheggitts was neglecting this delightful female shamefully, or this delightful female was a card-carrying nymphomaniac. Because Bonnie rolled and swerved and buckled like a ship on the high seas, and moans tore from her red mouth, and she was having a high old time.

Remember an aside earlier? I mentioned, at the time, that I could have asked for privacy. This was true.

Because, just as we finished, just as a final groan tore from that throat and just as I filled her with the final evidence of my love and the last proof that, by George, my wife didn’t understand me, there was a third person in the room.

Helen, natch.

“I just don’t understand,” Helen was saying. And I thought: See, Bonnie? I told you she didn’t understand.

“Listen,” she said. “Just tell me what it’s all about. That’s all.”

I hadn’t had an answer for Helen. We survived that domestic crisis, although the Sheggittses moved to Fairfield County not long afterward, but I had no answer at the time. But now, looking down at the bloody form of the troll, I did have an answer. God knows where it came from. Madison Avenue trains one well — I’d been thinking on my feet for years, and I knew how, by George.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll tell you, you rotten bastard.”

I dipped into my jacket pocket, yanked my wallet free, flipped it open and gave him a very brief peek at a card. The card entitled me to charge gasoline purchases at any Esso station in the world, but I didn’t let him see all that much of it.

“Harvey Burns,” I snapped. “Continental Detective Agency. You’re trapped, buddy boy. You’re coming back to the States and you’re going to be in jail for ages. You’ll die there, you bastard.”

“You’re crazy.” blubbered the troll.

“Yeah?”

“I can’t be extradited. I—”

“You can be snatched.” I told him. “And that’s what’s happening. You can be marched out of here at gunpoint.”

“That’s illegal.”

I gave him a lopsided grin. Not like Kirk Douglas now, but more like Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. “So’s larceny,” I drawled, sort of. “And I got a hunch that nobody’s going to care how illegal the snatch is, Dixon boy. Once you’re back in the States, nobody’s going to ask how you got there, and nobody’s going to listen when you try crying to them. You’re going to die in jail, you bastard.”

Ever see a man die inside right before your eyes? The troll did that. His whole face went as red as his bloody nose, and then it turned white, and I thought he was going to do the heart attack bit right before our very eyes. But old Dixon was made of sterner stuff. He swallowed, and he gulped, and he drooled a little, and then his eyes grew crafty.

“Listen.” he said, “we could make a deal.”

“No deal.”

“I’ve got a lot of money,” he said, neatly baiting the trap he had already gotten caught in. “Do you know how much money I took from that corporation?”

“Seven hundred thou.”

“That’s right.”

“So?”

He wet his lips with a nervous tongue. “That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“I know. That’s why they want to toss you in the tank and throw the key away.”

“A lot of money,” said he, cringing. “I could... I could give you some of that money. You could go away, and I could stay here, and then—”

“No deal,” I said. But I made it sound weak. And bit by bit I let him twist my arm until he had me right where I wanted him. No business crook in creation is ever the match of a larcenous ad man. It’s our forte.

“I could give you twenty thousand dollars,” he said. He was standing up now, albeit shakily, and I replied to his offer with a punch in the nose. When he got up, fresh blood flowing through those nasal passages, he offered fifty thou. Instead of hitting him I told him to double it, and he was too nervous to haggle. He sent a servant for a suitcase full of money. One hundred thousand pretty dollars. A fat round sum.

“We got to take the kid,” I said. “You know — I have to say you skipped and I couldn’t find you, so I can hardly leave the kid. It won’t work.”

“Take the little bastard,” the troll said.

“You don’t mind?”

“Take him and shove him,” the troll said. “I need him like a hole in the head. If it weren’t for that little bastard I wouldn’t be shelling out a hundred thousand dollars. Bury him someplace, the little bastard.”

That almost got him another punch in the nose, but he would never have understood. So we left, with Jodi toting Rhett by the hand and with me toting the suitcase by the handle. I had Rhett’s suitcase, too. And we loaded ourselves and Rhett and the suitcases into a passing hack, and back we went to the hotel.

It had been a lovely morning.

“Harvey,” Jodi was saying, “I think you’re the cleverest and most wonderful man in the world.”

I told her that, in all probability, she was quite correct. We were in the hotel room, and Rhett was making a fist and pummeling me in the stomach. I had shown him how to keep his thumb outside his fingers and how to put all his strength into his punch, but he wasn’t doing much damage.

“Bastard,” he said, belting me. “Bastard.”

He was cuter than a bedbug.

“Harvey?”

“Mmmmm.”

“What do we do now?”

“We don’t go back to the States,” I said.

“Good.”

“Because I’m sick of Helen, and of advertising.”

“I’m sick of Al,” she said. “And of whoring.”

“I’m sick of New York,” I said. “And Rockland.”

“We could stay in Brazil—”

“I think I could learn to get sick of Brazil,” I said. “The troll lives here, and that alone could do it. Besides, all these old Nazis. They get to me.”

“What do we do then, Harvey?”

I moved Rhett gently out of the way and gripped her by her warm shoulders. “We have passports,” I said. “Passports for Harvey Christopher and Jodi Christopher and Rhett Christopher, as fine a family group as I’ve ever imagined. We have a suitcase filled with money, and it will take us well nigh forever to spend all of it. I’m sure we’ll manage.”

“You’ve got blood on your knuckles,” Jodi said.

“True.”

“My poor hero,” she said. “Harvey, are you in a terrible rush to get out of Brazil?”

“Well—”

“Rhett,” she cooed, “go sit in the bathroom for a while like a good little boy. Your father and I have something to do.”

“Is he my father?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m your father, and this beautiful woman is your mother.”

“Then who was the old bastard?”

“Just an old bastard,” I said. “Now go in the bathroom like a good boy.”

He went into the bathroom like a good boy, and I went into Jodi like a good man, and the world went into a tailspin, like the good little world it was.

That night we caught a plane to Buenos Aires, and we tried Argentina for size, but there were even more old Nazis around and they depressed me. So we went to Chile next, and we found a nice city in Chile, and we’re there now.

“Suppose they come looking for us,” Jodi asked once. “Suppose they want to take us back.”

“It’ll never happen.”

“No?”

“No. Bigamy isn’t something they extradite you for, and neither is desertion.”

“How about extortion and kidnapping?”

I told her the troll would never make much fuss on either count, and this pacified her. But just to make sure we’ve applied for Chilean citizenship. A nice country, Chile. Peaceful and quiet. You have to get used to the idea of snow in June and hot weather for Christmas but if the seasons are upside-down at least the rest of life is on more of an even keel than it ever was in New York.

So here we are, in Chile. We rented a cute little bungalooloo on the outskirts of town and I’ve been planting shrubbery around it and doing other things to make it a place to live in. Rhett’s at school now and speaks Spanish like a native of modern-day Manhattan, and he’s been teaching us. He scared one teacher a little, asking her how to say bastard in Spanish, but we weathered the crisis and all is well. Life is real and life is earnest, and it’s a pleasant switch.

I won’t tell you the name of the town, because you might be something of a troublemaker. I don’t think you could make much trouble even if I did, but we Ulcer Gulch boys are a rough breed and I take no chances. It’s a town, and we like it here. That’s all you have to know.

I’m happy, Jodi’s happy, and little Rhett is happy. A splendid little group. We watch 3½ hours of television every day, we use Breeno Toothpaste, and — regular as clockwork — our washing machine clogs up from too many suds.

You don’t believe it? In Chile? Chile’s the end of the world, fer Pete’s sakes, right? Never even heard a’ electricity, correct?

You better believe it, buddy, because if you don’t believe it, maybe the way you live isn’t so hotsy-totsereeny after all, right?

So keep your nose to the old grindstone, and run yourself up the flagpole and see who salutes you. I’d say it’s been fun, but it hasn’t, and it’s fun now, and I’m happy.

And that is why I never did get back to the office.

But on Mad Ave we always did take long lunch hours.