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

way she sat so straight, and the way the yellow pencil looked shoved into her black hair, and the way her. eyes were so quick, and the trick she had of flicking at her lower lip with the very tip of her tongue.
    They’d started talking in the halls first, and it was a long time before she’d go out with him. Her people were real strict with her. They lived way the hell and gone out, and he remembered how it was, the incredible shocking softness of her lips that winter night inside that storm-door arrangement on her front porch, and then missing the late bus and walking all the way back through the snow, not even minding the cold, thinking of how she had felt in his arms.
    The next year was the last year for both of them, and they dated three and four nights a week, sometimes the movies, sometimes just walking together, sometimes just sitting in her living room until her old man would stick his head out of the kitchen and clear his throat a couple of times and he had to leave. Funny how, now, he remembered that they had talked and talked and talked, but now he couldn’t remember what it was they talked about. Maybe they should have saved some of that talk until after marriage. It would have given them something to do.
    He hadn’t been thinking of marriage then. He’d been wanting to have her without that. And the way she acted, he thought he could, but somehow there didn’t ever seem to be the right place or time. Without seeming to think about it or try, she always managed it so they weren’t in the right place at the right time, but in the places where she was safe.
    Even after he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, if it was O.K. with her folks, he couldn’t get any further with her, and it got so he couldn’t sleep right at night. Her folks said he had to have a job and have money saved. Pop and Henry kidded him about his Eye-talian girl, but they seemed to like her well enough. He told Doris you’d never catch him dead in the grocery business. There were the two jobs that weren’t any good, and she was working too, and they both saved, and then he got the post-office appointment.
    Even after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him. In fact, after the day was all set, she wouldn’t let him do more than just kiss her. It was a great big wedding. Her folks spent a lot on it. There was a lot to drink, and a couple of the usual fist fights, and afterward they went on the train to Montreal. They had to sit up on the train, and they got to the hotel at eleven in the morning, and she said it was daylight and she wouldn’t until night.
    And when finally it happened, she acted like he was some kind of an animal or something, She acted like it was something she had to let him do because they were married. In the daytime when he’d just put his arm around her, she’d stiffen right up. It was the damnedest thing he’d ever heard of.
    She wasn’t too bad while he’d worked at the P.O., but she’d certainly been mean and nasty since they’d been back at the store and since she got pregnant. And she’d got worse after Bonny had arrived. He’d watch Bonny and Doris would watch him watching Bonny, and there’d be a bad time after they got to bed.
    Maybe Henry was dead, but he’d had a good deal there while he was on that leave and didn’t come home. Hell, you could tell from looking at her that she knew the score. The way she walked and the way she was built. Henry always got the breaks. Pop had treated Henry right. You could tell Henry was the favorite son.
    Everything went wrong for you when you weren’t watching. Now it was like God spitting in your eye to have the two of them right in the same house. Bonny and Jana. They’d fixed it so he had to walk around looking at them all the time, and him married to a damn stringy stuffed dummy. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.
    But they were going to find out, all of them. He got up in the darkened room and knelt quietly by the bureau and pulled open the