It's Cold Out There Read online

  It’s Cold Out There

  by Malcolm Braly

  IT BEGAN ...

  . . . with JD Bing, a large, a very large man, who didn't show the desperation he felt. His broad, pale face was set phlegmatically, and it appeared hard, not with the hardness of rock but with the dense, smooth solidity of fungus. His big arms and shoulders strained the shape of his cheap coat. His hat rode his head like some vandal's debasement of a colossal statue.

  The '50 Ford he drove was smeared with oil and dirt and marred with evidence of hard and frequent use. The seat stuffing spilled in gray, visceral wads, the head liner hung in tatters, and the door on the driver's side was smashed shut where someone had calmly made a left turn into it. JD, though clearly in the right, had sped away, half-sick with anxiety. His anxiety was chronic. He was in a line of work saturated with desperation and the sour sweats of failure, and he sensed that door-to-door selling might be little more than a training period where he would first learn to accept the humiliations that would become the routine exchanges of everyday life when he finally found himself on skid row.

  Success at door-to-door selling depended almost entirely on a special knack, a kind of kitchen magic similar to "card sense" or a "green thumb," and unless you had it, you could depend on a hungry and hard way to go. JD didn't have it. He could sometimes anger his prospects, but he couldn't frighten them. He couldn't hook surely into the vital and galvanic nerve of their guilts, and more often than not it was JD who finished an interview feeling lousy and no good, his courage for the day exhausted.

  But there was nothing else he could turn his hand to. At thirty-seven he found himself completely inexperienced, untrained, and unconnected because of the thirty-seven years he had lived he had spent twenty of them in prison and now, discharged into this alien world he had been told was the real world, he was almost as bewildered and helpless as an aged nun cast from her convent.

  What had he done? It was sometimes almost impossible to recall, and he had to force his memory to rebuild that night, pulling the hard bone of fact from the sickened flesh of regret and self-justification until he had reassembled the skeleton of the original monster that had eaten his life.

  He had just turned seventeen when he and his buddies, armed with .22 rifles, had attempted to rob a filling station, and while they didn't get a dime, they had proven the effectiveness of their weapons before they were through by killing a police officer. Since there was no way to determine who had fired the fatal shot, though each of them blamed the others, they were all held to be equally guilty of murder under the law, and JD's friends, both older, were sentenced to death; while JD, too young to be executed, was given life. After twenty years, years that often found JD wondering if his long-dead partners weren't after all the lucky ones, he walked out into the awful freedom of a world as alien as the bottom of the ocean.

  JD found himself to be nonexistent. No past employer had ever seen him, and no one he asked for work was willing to make the effort to see him. Their eyes focused beyond him as if he were inhabiting a vacuum, and they were "very sorry, but. . . ." No store had ever extended him credit, no bank had ever held his money, and even scrutiny as all-seeing as that of the computers recording Social Security data had never glimpsed him. He stood unshaded by reference or recommendation, a man trying to begin his life at an age already beyond the age where many employers hesitate to train and many more will not hire as a matter of set policy. More than that—he was an enemy alien in his own country.

  After a month of free-world scuffling, JD couldn't have told himself whether he thought he was going to make it or not. He had been hustling Universal Encyclopedias for a week without a sale and now he was down to nickels and dimes. Today he had to sell a set of books. That was as much as he allowed himself to realize. It was—as he put it to himself—root, hog, or die!

  He was doing a cautious forty-five miles per hour in the slow lane of the Santa Ana Freeway when he saw the large overhead signs beginning to signal the off-ramp leading to the suburb assigned to him. He braked abruptly and winced when a horn began to complain directly behind him. A moment later a long white convertible sliced up alongside, and he was aware of some kid's exasperated face. "If you can't drive it, park it," the kid shouted. A girl rode close beside him, and as they passed and pulled ahead, her long blonde hair streamed back toward JD. The numb mass of his resentment stirred slowly. Goddamn punk! he thought.

  JD eased down the off-ramp into the community of Bellflower and drove at random until he spotted a large, square apartment court. In the past week he had made his way, door by door, through a dozen such courts with names like Le Sabre, The Cavalier, The Pink Pussy Cat, The Flamingo—this one was The Bali Hai. The name swooped across the front in large cutout letters, but the lime-green paint was faded and sun blistered, and the white stucco just below the sign was rust-streaked where the rain had leaked past the hidden nails. The rust streaks faded down toward the tops of some painted palms that had been dashed on the wall so as to appear as if they were growing from the small plots of baked earth bordering the entrance, but they were crudely rendered and resembled tattered green umbrellas somehow taken root.

  JD parked and set the hand brake. He rested his big hand on the sample case Universal Encyclopedias had provided him and looked up at the sky, depthless as some enameled surface. The sun rode toward noon. Already half a day gone, used in repetitious (Think Positive!) pep talk by the regional manager, then a two-hour drive, and still JD didn't move. How did you Think Positive! when the water was around your knees and rising fast. You thought about getting out and going to work on a farm, someplace quiet and uncomplicated, where they rang the chow bell at the same time every day. He was listening for the chow bell in the calm evening of a fairyland farm when he noticed an old man peering around the edge of the apartment court with the leery craft of a wild animal; his features, except for the pale blue eyes, were lost in a wild tangle of beard and dirty white hair.

  JD leaned forward to watch, fascinated as the old man padded toward him. He wore bib-overalls, faded almost white, and under the overalls a ragged coat sweater. He was barefoot, his feet brown and gnarled as roots, and he carried a croaker sack slung over his shoulder. Pinned with a slender finishing nail to the bib of his overalls was a torn piece of gray cardboard, and printed there in what looked like red crayon was: THE CROSS IS THE MARK OF THE BEAST.

  The derelict shuffled swiftly across the street and began sorting, with an attitude of thoroughness and system, through a garbage can. JD was finding this free world full of things that caused him to pause in amazement, and most of them filled him, with a gnawing sense of loss, but he had yet to root in the garbage. He felt better.

  He stepped out with his sample case, stretched, and looked up at the clear blue sky. Then he walked briskly over to examine the names above the mailboxes in the entrance court of the Bali Hai.

  There were ten apartments in two wings of five each, all facing on a central walk, and each apartment had been provided with a small area of fretful grass. Apartment A: Sanjit Parnahuma. Apartment B: Grover Alexander. Apartment C: Mr. and Mrs. Hugo Haas. Apartment D: Kristie Olson. The names didn't mean anything to JD. The Haases might have children, so he started down to Apartment C. He twisted a knob in the center of the door and heard a two-note chime sounding inside.

  The door opened six inches, and JD looked down at a broad, thick man in a blue cotton bathrobe. He had a bent nose and swollen pouches under his hard green eyes and was bald except for a thin fringe of ginger hair brushed straight across from the side. His scalp, looking hard as marble, glistened.

  "Yeah?" he said.

  JD began, "Well, I got this free twenty-five-dollar gift certificate for you—"

 
"Shit," Hugo Haas said bleakly. JD was aware of a woman's face, round and pleased, coming up behind the man.

  "What is it, honey?"

  "Nothing." Haas began to close the door.

  "Wait," JD said, beginning to fumble with his sample case. "Your free gift certificate—"

  "Jam it!"

  JD slammed his hand against the door, throwing it half open. He leaned over Haas. "Listen, sucker," he began. He had started to pour a week's accumulated frustration and anger at Haas when he realized that the woman he had dimly seen was naked. She stood with a startled expression, her hands reaching to cover herself. Suddenly the room seemed to heave, and something like heat lightning flashed in front of JD's eyes. His lips parted. He stared speechless and made no resistance as Haas shoved the door closed.

  Jesus! he thought. He closed his eyes, and the woman was as vivid in his mind as she had been in the flesh. He walked back to his car and sat down to roll a cigarette. His hands trembled, and his fingertips seemed hypersensitive. Except for one night in a burlesque theater two weeks ago, this was the first naked woman he had ever seen.

  He smoked, tapping his ash out the window, and after a while he was calm enough to go back to work. Rechecking the mailboxes, he decided to try Kristie Olson in Apartment D.

  KRISTIE …

  . . . was dreaming when she heard the muffled clicking of her mutilated chime. She had deliberately broken the chime, using a pair of pliers, because it frightened her when it sounded in the night, reminding her of that anonymous voice on the telephone.

  She was dreaming but not truly asleep, and she was directing her dream, turning it into one of her favorites, where a pirate captain, who looked like Yul Brynner wearing a hairpiece, carried her—blonde, fragile, in a half-swoon—down into the silken and purple-shadowed cave of his cabin ...

  She sighed deeply, shifted her hips, and was suddenly fully awake. It was a moment before she realized she had heard someone at the door, and she suppressed a twinge of apprehension. Her covers were tangled, half on the floor, and again she wondered what it was she did in her sleep to tear her bed up so. She sat up, stretched, wrist pressed hard against her small teeth, and quickly stood up. She was slender, almost tall in heels, with the breasts of a fourteen-year-old and legs, hips, and bottom all considerably more mature. Her ordinary brown hair was bleached and tinted to a rich reddish-gold and even now it fell in slow waves around her face. She was described in terms varying from "exquisite" to "that miserable bitch."

  Someone knocked briskly, and she hurried into the living room to open the door a few inches. "Yes?" She looked up to meet the eyes of the man standing on her porch, and she was less aware of what he was saying than of his bulk, his harsh black hair, and heavy eyes.

  She said, "I'm sorry, but I'm not dressed," watching the effect of this information spread through the broad white face above her.

  "I'd be happy to wait on you."

  "Excuse me for a moment."

  She went back to her bedroom where she rapidly applied some lipstick, brushed her hair, and put on a light-blue dressing gown, tied at the throat with a large looped bow. She went back to the door.

  "Now you can come in," she said pleasantly.

  "Thanks. I'm JD Bing for Universal Encyclopedias."

  She nodded an acknowledgement, smiling gravely. She was already play-acting. This handsome man had come to show her a collection of jewels she was considering buying, and when she saw him looking around uncertainly, holding his hat and his sample case, she said, "Use the coffee table. Here, just push that stuff aside." She cleared away a litter of magazines, newspapers—folded open to the want-ad section—and novels checked out of the Bellflower Public Library. "There," she said and went to sit on the end of the couch. She crossed her legs and watched JD opening his sample case. He seemed acutely aware of her, and she took it as natural—a customer's man calling on a young and beautiful baroness. She began to feel a warmth of almost fearful excitement, the same kind of excitement she felt when that man called her on the telephone, but she didn't want to think about that. She wanted to enjoy this, but at the same time she assured herself she didn't intend to allow this common Don Juan the slightest liberty. She wanted him to be aware of the tension, to smell it, taste it, to sweat with it in the privacy of his tight suit, but remain too uncertain of his reception to attempt one of the doubtless clumsy moves with which he would open a seduction.

  JD settled on the other end of the couch, talking steadily, handing her one pamphlet after another. She took them, allowing her hand to brush his. His voice became an even drone, never quite separating into individual words, and the printed material under her unfocused eyes appeared a multicolored blur. She must remember to ask Nathan whether diamonds or sapphires suited her better—sapphires, perhaps, to match her eyes. She was aware of the bare fact of JD's physical presence, his anonymous maleness, a satisfyingly large and solid mass blurred on the edge of her vision but sharply recorded in her nerves—

  "You're not much interested in this encyclopedia, are you?" JD asked.

  She didn't quite grasp the sense of what he had said, but on another level of her mind she noted his change of tone and understood well enough. She shot him a brief glance, stopping short of his level stare. She sensed a blunt power in his face, colored by—colored by what? Amusement? Amusement!

  "Yes?" she asked coolly.

  "I don't think you give a rat's ass about this phony encyclopedia. If I was selling brushes, polka-dot paint, or frozen dog turds, it'd be all the same to you."

  "What? I'm sure I don't—"

  "You got any idea how many of you teases I've run into in the past week?"

  Kristie sensed the heat rising in her face, knew her cheeks would be hectic, and tried to summon a feeling of disgust, but her rising excitement wiped it away. The customer's man with the jewel collection vanished, and in his place a bandit leader stood watching her with lustful and contemptuous eyes. She shivered around the hard core of a rejection so casual, so degrading. Her hips shifted forward. Her eyelids beat with her pulse.

  "I fail to see—" she began breathlessly.

  "Listen!" JD said, taking her arm in his big hand. "I've got to sell some of these phony books."

  "—completely fail to see what your vulgar experiences have to do with me."

  "No, listen." JD persisted. "You're different. You're real class. Do you think you could take these books on a thirty-day trial basis?"

  She had taken his arm to loosen his grip on her, and his arm felt like warm rock. "You're so big," she whispered.

  "I lift weights," he said. "I did a lot of time—in the army. I put in a long hitch and I lifted weights to pass the time." He pulled her closer and rocked her gently. "A broad like you. A broad like you. If you take these books, you only pay twenty-five bucks today."

  In her dream, which she knew wasn't real, she had the bandit captain tell her that her ransom would be $25,000; $25,000 American, he stipulated, will save your life. Anything else is between you and me as man and woman. My father will pay, she said, for my life, and if you get pleasure from taking a defenseless woman, I can't stop you ...

  She felt herself being kissed, kissed hard, her teeth grating against his, and she let herself go completely limp, rolling her head from side to side and murmuring "No, no, no, no, no . . ." denying any responsibility for what was happening. It is rape, she told herself, and behind her closed eyes she seemed to look up into the intense blue of a Mediterranean sky, feeling the intricate irritation of the knotted grass beneath her back and the wind on her bare legs. She gasped and sobbed at the savageness of this attack. Then she was being pounded with furious energy, literally to the edge of her senses. She heard her own voice, her real voice, screaming with pleasure.

  When it was over, her eyes snapped open, and she was lying crushed beneath a door-to-door salesman who had neglected to shave that morning. They both were quiet for a moment. Then Kristie said, "Let me up."

  JD drew back and looke
d into her face, and she was amazed to see tears in his eyes. He was sucking air in ragged breaths, the tears standing on his broad cheeks, his eyes straining with some emotion she immediately took for weakness.

  "Get off me," she said sharply.

  "Lay still, baby," he said hoarsely, and she could feel that he was ready again.

  "Get off! Get off!"

  He sat up, and instantly she was up too, pulling her robe closed. She hurried into the bathroom. How did that happen? she asked herself. How is it possible for me to feel like that? When she dreamed of sex, it was gentle, romantic, a man stroking her hair and saying lovely things while she lay in a warm glow; but when she got it, it was savage. She was savage, and if the man were truly gentle, she despised him for it. She wanted it—the only word that would come to her was "dirty"—she wanted it fierce and dirty, and this just now was the best or the worst she had ever had. She prepared to forget how much she had enjoyed it.

  When she returned to the living room, JD was dressed except for his tie, which still hung askew. He held an order form and a ball-point pen. "If you'll just give me your name—" he began.

  "Jesus H. Christ!" She flared indignantly. "Do you really imagine I'd buy those cheap books?"

  "But you said—"

  "If you were any kind of a man, you'd offer them to me."

  "Any kind of a man? I was all the man you could handle a few minutes ago."

  "Oh, take a bow, hero," Kristie taunted fiercely. "Take a big bow. You were like an ape, a slobbering ape."

  "Yeah?" JD said unhappily. "Maybe you'd like an ape. An ape ought to just suit you."

  "An ape doesn't talk. An ape doesn't sell encyclopedias."

  JD dropped the order blank and grabbed her by the arms. He pulled her tight against him. "Listen, girl," he said, "I don't know why you got the needle out for me all of a sudden. There's a whole lot of things I don't know, but one thing I do know—you liked what I done to you, and I could do it again right now, and you'd like it again. Isn't that right?"