Read Online The Neon Jungle by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page B

up and caught his shoulders and pasted her mouth hard on his, shoving herself against him. He flung himself wildly away from her so that they both nearly fell. She stood and didn’t say anything. The hall light shone from behind her. She looked at him and then she went inside. She and her whole family stopped trading at the store. He couldn’t tell Gus and Mom what had happened. It kind of scared him and made him half sick at the same time. Like the way he had scared himself a long time ago, back in that place. One of the sisters slapped him hard and he had to wear those bright red gloves for punishment for two days, even at meals. The mouth of the girl was somehow mixed up with the shame and the red gloves. So after a while they stopped talking about any girls.
    He was drafted when he was thirty and sent to Fort Devon, where he spent two and a half years cutting meat in demonstration classes. It wasn’t as bad as that place, but almost as bad. He made sergeant and got a room to himself, which helped some. He kept and used the smile and the laugh and the big voice. It would have helped if he had known that long ago. He didn’t make any friends. He wrote Gus and Mom and the kids once a week. Teena was about seven then, Henry was twelve, Walter about sixteen.
    Somehow it was all different when he got back. It had never been the same again. Somehow, in the two and a half years, he’d lost some important thing that had been there before the war. Something was barely out of his reach. The work was the same. He was a good butcher, and he knew it. Better, even, than Gus. The house was the same. They were all just farther away from him. He would sit with them in the small upstairs living room and feel closed out as he sat and smiled and nodded at things they said. It made him feel funny and he’d go up to bed, or go out and just walk. He wondered if the Army had made him restless or something. Like in that lecture they gave you when they discharged you.
    He walked a lot and he was alone a lot. He had never been able to get any pleasure out of reading. So when he wasn’t walking, working, sleeping, or eating, he would sit in his room.
    There was a lot of work when the new store was built. It was as though building the new store had made things start to happen. Start to happen too fast. Mom got sick and died. Then that Vern Lockter came and took the delivery job. Walter quit his post-office job and came back with Doris, who never smiled back when he smiled at her. And he could hear them fighting a lot. Henry went in the Army. Anna, who never talked, came to cook and clean. Gus married Jana. Henry’s wife came to stay. Henry got killed. Things were happening too fast and he wanted to hold out his hands and stop them.
    But the bad trouble, the nightmare trouble, started after Vern Lockter came to work. At first it seemed fine. It seemed as though he was really going to have a friend, someone to talk to, the way Vern kept coming to his room and talking to him. He didn’t seem like the kind of young fellow they’d put in jail. Vern would come and sit around in his room and make a lot of jokes. Rick couldn’t understand all of them, but he always laughed anyway. And Vern used a lot of words Rick had never heard before. It was funny the way, at first, he had felt as though Vern was just a young fellow, and the way it sort of changed so that, unless he stopped and thought, it was like Vern was older. He told Vern a lot about himself. He told him about how it was in that place, long ago. And how it was before the war. And about his job in the war and all. He talked about how they used to hurt him back in that place. He started telling Vern how it was with the girl, but Vern started looking at him so sort of funny that he tried to make a joke out of it.
    He couldn’t remember exactly how he started going around to places with Vern. Vern had a lot of friends, all right. Vern taught him a lot of things. How to bowl and all. Then there