Wild Town Read Free Page B

the sign no longer meant what it said; for visitors to enter, that is. It had been left on the door out of sentiment or shiftlessness. On the other hand…
    Well, there it was, wasn’t it? And why shouldn’t a stranger in town take it at its face value? What was he supposed to do—stand out here and beat the skin off his knuckles? He’d been told— ordered —to see Ford. Now this sign told him to enter.
    Bugs did so.
    He was standing in a narrow foyer, quite dark since the doors to the rooms on either side were closed. The only light streamed down from the stairway; from an open door, apparently, right at the head of the stairs. Muted sounds also drifted down the stairs. Scuffling. The creak of bed springs. A man’s sardonically soothing drawl, and a woman’s quiet, quickly furious voice:
    “Aw, now, Amy. You know I—”
    “I know you, that’s what I know, Lou Ford!”
    “But she don’t mean a thing to me, Amy! Honest. It’s just business.”
    “You’re a liar! What kind of business? Well? Go on, I’m listening!”
    “But I done told you, honey! It’s pretty confidential; somethin’ I can’t talk about. Now, why’n’t you just leave it at that, and—”
    There was an outraged sob. The sharp cra-ack of a hard-swung palm meeting flesh. Then, the girl came rushing out of the room; weeping in blind anger, clutching a handful of undergarments.
    Highlighted by the glare from the door, she began putting on her panties. She got them on, hopping from foot to foot. Then she slumped her shoulders, dropping her breasts into the cups of her brassiere.
    That was all that Bugs saw, all that he allowed himself to see. He got quietly back out to the porch, blushing deeply, shamed and embarrassed by what he had seen.
    He was like that, oddly. Modest. Excruciatingly old-fashioned, one might say, although he could not regard such things as a matter of fashion. He had killed. He had worked in shabby, disillusioning jobs. He had been penned up with degenerates for years. That had been his environment; violence, foulness and filth. And yet in all his life, he had looked on no more than three naked women. And of the three, one had been his wife.
    He wished the third had not been this girl. He wished, with a kind of gnawing hunger, that he had not seen her in her nakedness.
    And he wished, longed to see her again: to cherish her, treat her with love and respect. Because, yes, by God, she deserved it! No matter what she’d done, regardless of how things looked.
    He’d noticed more than her nakedness—and off-hand he would have said she was not much different than hundreds he’d seen: just a small, well-rounded young woman with a good-featured face and sandy brown hair pulled back in a bun. But then he had gone on looking. And suddenly he had almost gasped at what he saw.
    You know how it is. A three-hundred-dollar suit doesn’t knock your eye out. A Ming vase doesn’t shriek for attention. But the ultimate beauty, the perfection, is there; and you’ll always see it if you look long enough, see it and recognize it, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen it before.
    Even if you’ve caught so much crap in your eyes that you’re half-blind in one and can’t see out of the other…
    Bugs must have been standing on the porch for ten minutes, kind of dazed and dopey, lost in his own sad thoughts, when he heard the back door close. That snapped him out of it, recalled him to the gray facts of what he was and why he was here. And he knocked again, hastily and loudly.
    Ford responded almost immediately with a hail of, “Right with you.” A moment later there was the click-tap of boots in the hallway, and he opened the door.
    “McKenna? I’m Lou Ford. Come on in an’ set.”
    Bugs followed him down the foyer, and into what apparently had been the doctor’s one-time office. Ford looked as out of place among the rows of glass-doored bookcases as a man could look.
    He was about thirty, the chief deputy. He wore a