blindfolded, and in the restraining jacket and the pants that two guards had slipped onto him, sat in his chair and lied to the two doctors and told them he felt ashamed of himself, and that when the Senator had opened the door Jack had been having a nightmare and he was sorry; but to be on the safe side he was transferred to the State mental institution in Salem, locked in a room in a long brown corridor, and given thirty days’ observation by the staff. He actually saw a doctor only four times, for fifteen minutes each time, and after the first visit he was given mopping to do and was permitted the use of the observation ward dayroom. At the end of the thirty days he was let out, still wearing dark glasses, his skin pale and raw. He knew he was just lucky. He knew that it was an accident that they had come for him at a moment when he was perfectly rational. If he had been deep in his dream of murder, as he had been when the State Senator visited, then he might have spent the rest of his life in the insane asylum. He was just lucky they had come for him in one of the few moments of sanity. He had happened to be urinating at the moment he heard the guards in the passageway. So he had not been off-balance. He had managed in all the time of transition afterward to keep a tight control on himself, and his eyes helped. His eyes hurt so fiercely that he concentrated on the pain as a way of keeping from thinking of murder; and by the time they let him out of the insane asylum, he had himself under control. He worked in eastern Oregon, bucking logs for a wildcat outfit in the mountains between Oregon and Idaho, for half a year, letting the sun and the hard work burn strength and calm into him, and when at last he got fired for fighting, it was all right, because he was not trying to kill the man; the man had gotten drunk and started bothering Jack, and so they fought, but as men fight, not animals, and after they both got fired they went to Boise together and got good and drunk together, and Jack knew that he was going to be all right. He was afraid that he would dream about the hole, but he never did. Or if he did, he never remembered it in the morning, and that was what counted. Jack wanted to have a good time for himself, and nightmares would have spoiled the delicious pleasure of sleeping in a bed.
When the girls finally burst into Denny’s room Jack felt a little depressed, but at the same time there was the usual excitement new things, especially girls, brought. They were two of a kind: long-haired, thin, with sharp, wolfish faces and children’s mouths gone hard. Their thin hard bodies were dressed in new, almost identical, black cocktail dresses, shiny blue pumps, and black hose. Too much eye makeup, cheeks too pale, eyes too small, brows too sharply drawn, voices brittle and toneless with self-imposed coolness. Beneath it all Jack could see that the girls were both plain. But the attempt to be hip, to dress like four-bit New York whores, was in itself stimulating.
Denny jumped up from the bed and introduced the girls as Mona and Sue, and they nodded, neither of them meeting Jack’s eyes, poured themselves glasses of whiskey, and plopped down on the bed, each with a comic book, and began with apparently deep concentration to read.
Denny grinned at Jack. “They’re shy,” he said. “How was the movie?”
“What a drag,” one of them said.
Jack sighed, and sat back down. He had been through so many scenes like this one. Everybody knew what was what, but nobody wanted to be straight about it. They would go on like this—bored, indifferent, edgy, too hip to live—until they got drunk, and then somebody would turn on the radio and they would dance in the tiny space between the beds, and somebody would push somebody down onto the bed, and in the darkness the four of them would be sorted out into fornicating couples almost at random, with the light coming in through the window shade, and later somebody would throw up, and some time after that somebody would suggest that they switch partners, and after an hour of dull bitching they might