The Neon Jungle Read Free

little box. Papers and letters and some photographs and stuff like that.”
    Everything in the world in one small box. She closed her eyes. “Will you do something for me, Henry?”
    “Sure.”
    “That’s a silly-sounding question, will you do something for me, after… everything. Go through the box, Henry. Take out my Social Security card. Take out my birth certificate. Take out the photostat of my college record. Throw everything else away.”
    “Everything?”
    “Please.”
    The next day he shamefacedly gave her an envelope. “All the things you wanted saved are in there. And I stuck in a few pictures. Your mother and father. I figured you ought to hang onto those too.”
    “They were killed in—”
    “You talked about that a lot. I know about that. You better save the pictures. You have kids someday, they’d like to know what your people looked like.”
    “Kids someday.”
    “Don’t say it like that, Bonny. Don’t ever say it like that.”
    That was the day she sat on a stool in front of the kitchen sink of the apartment with a big towel around her shoulders while he washed her hair. It took four soapings, scrubbings, rinses to bring it back to life. And then, when it was dry and she brushed it, he admired the color of it, and in the midst of his admiration she saw him suddenly get the first increment of awareness of her. It was something she was well practiced in seeing. She was still slat thin, weighing less than a hundred pounds, and she was without make-up, and he had seen her body at its ugliest, and heard all the ugly bits of her history, and yet he could still have that sudden glow of interest and appreciation in his eyes. It made her want to cry.
    She began to take over a small part of the cooking and cleaning on the twenty-second day of his thirty-day leave. On the bathroom scales she weighed an even one hundred. She was five-seven and considered her proper weight to be about one twenty-two or three. She had not weighed that much in over a year.
    “I’ve got to have clothes to get out of here, Henry.”
    “I’ve been thinking about that. I’ll have to buy them. You’ll have to tell me about sizes.”
    “I’ll give you the sizes. Get something cheap. Have you written it down for me? All the money you’ve spent so far? You can’t have much left.”
    “I’ve got some. Doc took it easy on me.” He flushed brightly. “And I’m only telling you this so you won’t worry. Pop sent me two hundred bucks. I got it day before yesterday.”
    “You’ve got to go home, Henry. You’ve got to see them.”
    “There’ll be time.”
    “There won’t be time. You keep saying that. They’ll never understand why you didn’t go home. Never.”
    “They know me pretty well, Bonny. They know if I didn’t go home, there’s a damn good reason.”
    “There’s no reason good enough.”
    He had talked a lot about his family. The Varaki clan. “There’s us three kids. Me and Walter and Teena. Teena’s the baby. High-school gal. Walter’s older than I am. Dark coloring, like the old lady was. His wife is Doris. She gives old Walter a pretty hard time. She’s a pinwheeler, that gal. Then Jana is Pop’s second wife. He married her last year. It was like this. You see, Mom died three years ago. Some of Jana’s relatives, farm people, sent her to stay with us so she could go to business school. She’s two years younger than Walter, and two years older than me. Big husky farm girl. With her in the house, Anna, that’s Pop’s older sister, came to sort of keep house for us. Then Pop ups and marries Jana. It made the whole family sore as hell. Especially Doris. Anna stayed on. Pop and Jana are happy. Well, hell, it’s a happy house. Great big old ruin of a place. The market used to be in the downstairs. Pop built a new market right next door right after the war. It’s run like a supermarket. Mostly the people that work there live in the house too. There’s three floors. Ten bedrooms. Always