Pulling A Train Read online

  They’ve published learned studies of that period, naming names. But I was the one who was the shadowy intelligence—misusing that word shamelessly—behind the bulk of what was selling hundreds of thousands of copies per month.

  I made this guy I detested a couple million bucks.

  Then I couldn’t take it any more, and I got out just in time. (But that’s another bit of history.)

  He got me back by promising to give me my own “class” line of mainstream paperbacks to edit, and I came back from New York after a year to work on it, Regency Books, and to update Nightstand, for almost another year. Then I bolted again, and never returned.

  At one point, early on in the first stint, we needed a book fast, to fill a production hole, and I cobbled together ten reprints of my old hard-boiled crime-magazine and men’s magazine stories (juvenile writing, at best), added a new title story, and it came out as Nightstand #1503. It was the third in the line.

  “Paul Merchant” was a closely-held secret of mine for decades. I was damned close to ashamed of the book.

  No point in even apologizing for those original eleven stories. I did ’em for the buck. I was married at the time, needed the money, and did what everybody does. I pulled the plow.

  The stories are simplistic, not the greatest literature ever proffered, but I got a thousand dollars for the tome. That was big money in the Fifties. It was my third book published, in a lifetime of more than a hundred such. But the only one not under my name.

  Many of the titles used on the stories had been changed outrageously by various editors, from their original manuscript titles (such as the Joycean Portrait of the Artist as a Zilch Writer to the goofy, but, well, less pretentious, The Lady Had Zilch) under the pseudonym “Cordwainer Bird.” The less said about the appellations of these stories, the better.

  For a very long time I didn’t include this volume on the “book card” page of my more prestigious and better-known books. But Miriam kept at me, and now—as I mentioned earlier—I’ve somehow managed to live at least 77 years without winding up face-down under a railroad trestle, or with a bullet in my head.

  I wrote a lot about street gangs way back then. I’d done an extraordinary amount of background work in the genre, up to and including actually running with such a gang in Brooklyn. So these stories are pretty accurate for the time.

  But this is another time, a lot later; and I dunno, I’m not shamefaced about this work. It wasn’t what I came to be known for, what earned me a lot of accolades and got me into the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, holder of a science fiction Grand Master award, a couple of Mystery Writers of America “Edgar” trophies, Nebulas, Hugos, British Fantasy Awards, Honorary Degrees, and four “best of” plaques from the Hollywood Writers Guild…but it exists.

  And I’m past the point where I need to hide my head for anything. I think the more you reveal, the less blackmailable you are. It ain’t never the crime, it’s always the cover-up that brings you down.

  So Paul Merchant (and other noms de plume I used), who wrote for the buck and cops to it, rides again. Miriam, Susan, and Harlan Ellison are responsible parties. It is my hope that you won’t think too badly of me, and might be entertained enough to try one of the other hundred or so books and movies with my name on them.

  Caution: Please use both hands when perusing this volume.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  a/k/a “Paul Merchant”

  31 October 2011

  Sex Gang

  (as by “Paul Merchant”)

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Girl In The Alley

  DEEK HADN’T WANTED TO RAPE THE GIRL.

  It had been only a purse-snatch, initially. Scudball had come up with some good-cut pot, and Deek had been short of bread, so the quickest way to get some was a purse-snatch. But when he had reached out from the alley and wound his fingers in the girl’s hair, it had become something else.

  He had yanked her harshly into the black mouth of the alley, clapping his other hand across her full lips before she could scream. Then he had turned her… reaching for the handbag. But the girl had strangely begun to grind her hips against him, and Deek’s passion had risen.

  The girl pressed herself against him, more than his rough treatment demanded, and he felt the softly-rounded mounds of her breasts, the structure of her brassiere, the hard, raised points of her nipples, even through his T-shirt. His hand slipped from her mouth, but she didn’t scream.

  Instead, a soft, animal mewling passed between her lips, and she mouthed gently, “Do it!”

  Deek’s hand in the girl’s hair flattened, cupping the back of her head. He pulled her mouth against his and her lips opened as the hot spear of his tongue entered moistly. He ground against her. The smack of her handbag hitting the wet cement of the alley was drowned out by the sound of her high heels as she moved her legs against his thighs.

  Her arms went under his and palmed out against his back, her nails catching in the fabric of his T-shirt. They stood there almost silently, an occasional choking sob of passion coming from the girl. The faint glow of the street light was a constant reminder to Deek that he wasn’t after fast sex but dough, and he moved slowly, steadily, the girl fastened to him. They went back down the alley, past the stacks of water-logged cardboard cartons, past the garbage cans, past the bricked-up doors. She hung on him, moving and moving and not even realizing he was taking her deeper into the darkness.

  “Come on,” she breathed moistly into his ear, “come on!”

  She began slipping down his body, and he fell to his knees in front of her. “Right here,” she urged him, guiding his hand under her skirt, “do it here.”

  Deek’s hand touched the cool roundness of her upper thigh, and thoughts of the purse-snatch fled from his mind. The chick was really asking for it, and she didn’t seem to give a damn how, when, why or where as long as it was NOW. He moved his hand up her leg, feeling the smooth skin indent under his questing fingers.

  His hand met the rounded elastic edge of her panties, and paused only a moment touching the silken surface. He moved his hand again, quickly, sharply.

  She gave a heavy, indrawn sob, and moved her legs against his.

  Then she pulled him down on the cement of the alley, atop her. “What’s the matter with you, what’s the matter?” she begged.

  Deek’s free hand—without conscious volition—pressed the skirt up over the girl’s thighs till it was bunched at her hips. She helped him roll down the panties, and aided him when he fumbled with himself.

  Then, he rolled back on her, and again she moved, helping him, startling him by her brazenness. She directed him, urging his passion, and the fire burned suddenly between them…her gasp as he met her rang briefly in the alley and a leaping thought of the fuzz hearing at the call-box on the corner drew him away from her for an instant.

  “Don’t…stop…” she pleaded, grasping him by the hips, thrusting him down and in closer once more. The vagrant thought fled from Deek’s mind and he plunged on, driving driving driving till she arched her hips from the cement, burying her teeth in his shoulder.

  His hands went to her hips, and he lifted her slightly, their pistoning movements pinnacling higher and higher, till they chorused together, and her short, tearing wail signaled the decrescendo.

  He lay there for a long moment after it was over, abruptly wondering what had happened…how had he come to lie in this alley when he had simply been after some dough to get a blast of pot…

  The girl was still melted to him, her arms tightly around his back and murmuring soft things, lost things that had no meaning, no reality.

  He looked at her then, with the wet-shine of the alley reflected in her dark eyes, reflected like oil slick on asphalt. He saw the planes of her Italian face in sharp dark relief from the street light. He caught the nimbus of black hair that fanned out around her face, and the flaring nostrils. She was an attractive girl—a bit hard-looking, perhaps, but nice to see.

  “What’s your name?
” she asked him.

  She was looking at him, and he hadn’t realized it.

  Deek Cullen abruptly realized what he had allowed to happen to him. He had been suckered by a chick. On the move for a blast of pot he had made a pitch for her purse and been pulled in by her hot spread. Now there was a chick who knew what he looked like; a chick who was asking his name.

  “Rumpelstiltskin,” he said, pulling away from her. She started to sit up, the white pillars of her thighs bright in the reflected light, the skirt still a dark mass about her waist. He caught her across the mouth with a balled fist that knocked her back. Her head hit the cement with a whack, and she half-rose to meet his second blow. The fist took her under her left eye, and she gasped in agony.

  Deek wound a hand in her hair, dragged the head forward and belted her three times crack! crack! crack! till her eyes rolled up in the sockets and she fainted.

  Deek stood up shakily and zipped himself. He wiped a hand across his mouth and ran a hand through his long, nearly-blond hair. He felt weak behind the knees, his shoulder where she had bitten him throbbed painfully and he had a drained feeling in his gut and groin.

  He stumbled away from the twisted, unconscious form of the girl. It hadn’t been rape, at least that much was in his favor. It had been as much her hunger as his. He stooped and grabbed up the handbag, ripping it open viciously.

  He dumped its contents onto the cement and, kneeling, pawed through the rubble. Her wallet contained thirty-three dollars, a few subway tokens and perhaps another two dollars in change. He filled his pockets.

  A pack of gum lay yellow against the cement. A nickel was a nickel. He shoved the gum into the right hand pocket of his jeans.

  Then looking back at the muddy-dirty legs of the girl, and the darkness of her body where only shadows now penetrated, Deek Cullen slipped out of the alley, down the street…

  And was gone.

  The girl lay silently for the better part of an hour, then slowly, painfully, regained consciousness, regained all her thoughts, and one in particular: a face.

  Deek Cullen lived alone in an eight-dollar-a-week room he shared with the cockroaches. His mother had been sent away when he was sixteen, two years before, for using a flatiron on Deek’s father. Deek remembered the night he had come home with his mother from the movie and found the old man topping a broad from Herky’s Bar.

  It hadn’t been so much that the old man was knocking off a piece, or even that it was in his own home, or even that the bimbo was a hooker from Herky’s. But the cookie jar was empty. The old man had taken the vacuum cleaner money to pay the freight.

  Deek’s old lady had hauled the flatiron from the ironing board where she had left it when she had decided to take her son to a movie, and she used that thing like it was a battering-ram.

  The hooker had gotten bloody from the spattering.

  So they had sent Deek’s mother away, and Deek had cut when the juvenile authorities came after him, and he had kept dodging for two years.

  Now he was eighteen; a big eighteen, and sharp, and cool, and hungry, and devious. He could field a shank faster than anybody in the turf, he had more guts and brains than ninety per cent of the studs around, and he knew his way around. He knew how to use a rolled up copy of Ladies Home Journal as a lever to snap the door handle on a car he wanted to heist. He knew how to filter after-shave lotion and anti-freeze down through a loaf of pumpernickel, making Sweet Lucy or Sneaky Pete to sell to the wet brains on the Bowery. He knew how to con the broads, how to duck the fuzz, how to tap a till, how to mug a lush, stiff-arm a mark and lead a rumble.

  He knew it all; he was hard in the belly, fast in the legs and tight in the bed. Deek Cullen was a child of the gutters from which he had sprung, a creature of late evening and early morning, a deadly engine of destruction.

  He belonged to no gang, because there was a cunning to him that decreed weakness in numbers. He was a shade under five feet nine inches tall, he had almost-blond hair that was naturally curly and that curled tighter when it got wet, he had steady brown eyes and a lantern jaw. The scars on his right cheek had come from a disagreement with an Armenian restaurant owner who had felt unkindly about being held up on Queer Street in the Village.

  Deek Cullen had not been a virgin since the age of thirteen when a hot-box aunt from Racine had visited the family, found Deek sleeping in the raw while the family was working, and taken him like Hitler took Poland.

  Deek liked his women, didn’t drink, blew pot when he could afford it, did not attend school, occasionally worked driving a non-union soda pop wagon on the docks, bummed around, shot snooker, and in general wasted the time till something popped.

  Deek Cullen should not have attacked the Italian girl in the alley that night.

  It changed his life.

  No one saw the girl looking through the front window of The Blue Parrot Billiard and Recreation Hall. Not even beady-eyed Blue Parrot himself, standing behind his cigar counter, endlessly tapping two half dollars against each other as he stacked and restacked them with the dexterous fingers of one hand.

  Especially, she was not seen by Deek Cullen who leaned far over the table, making his unorthodox bridge of thumb and index finger, sighting down across the cue ball at the precariously-angled eighter.

  The girl had an olive complexion, dark black hair, and a thin white band-aid under her eye where the faint discoloration of a black eye showed. Her mouth was bruised. She looked and she looked and then she smiled faintly, spitting on the sidewalk. Then her face disappeared from outside the pool hall, and the street was empty.

  Two hours later, with an extra seventeen in dollars in the tight slit pocket of his jeans, Deek left Blue Parrot’s emporium and headed up the street to the cafeteria.

  The car was a canary yellow and black Impala convertible and it took the corner on three, hopping the curb as it roared on toward Deek. For a long moment his eyes were directed in their usual direction, gutterwards, but the sound of the panthers under the car’s hood snapped his eyes up. He saw the grille and he saw the four eyes and he saw the two girls in the front seat…

  The car sped up, two wheels on the curb, two in the street, and barreled down on him. For a second the bold horror of it paralyzed him, and then he felt a grip at the back of his T-shirt and he was yanked bodily off his feet, flung into a doorway, and lay there watching the car whip past.

  The Impala jumped the curb, hit the street with a jouncing jar and careened off around the corner at the end of the block. In an instant it was gone.

  Deek Cullen felt he had gone white.

  He looked up to see a trim pair of ankles and two nylon-encased legs. They were good legs. Firm in the calves and tapered all the way. He followed the legs till they disappeared under a tweed skirt and then he followed the skirt till it blossomed twinly into a peasant blouse.

  Her face was a pleasant face, but now strained with remembered terror.

  Deek had difficulty forming his words. The breath had been knocked out of him, he felt shakey all over. “Th-thanks,” he murmured.

  The woman smiled vaguely and made as if to move.

  “Hey, I said thanks,” Deek started to rise. The woman stared at him oddly, and he saw a banked fire in her eyes that meant something…he didn’t know quite what.

  “That’s all right,” she answered. The voice was a controlled thing, almost aloof. There was a touch of New Hampshire in it. “I saw the car coming before you did. Those girls would have run you down. “

  “Yeah,” Deek said slowly, looking in the direction the car had gone. “Yeah, they would’ve. Thanks again.” The woman was perhaps two inches shorter than Deek, and at least eight years older. There was a reserved beauty about her, and a small beauty mark by her lower lip heightened the delicate paleness of her face and throat.

  “You, uh, you from the neighborhood here?” Deek asked. “Do I know you?”

  The woman flushed slightly. “No, I don’t think so. I’m the new social worker at the Settlement
House. On Kilgore Street.”

  Deek nodded absently. This was some dish. Good tight skirt across wide hips. Nice chest, the real thing, too. And she looked flustered. Good in bed but ashamed of it. Maybe even a virgin. Even at her age, well…maybe still cherry. Maybe.

  “Well, I guess I got to show my thanks,” Deek said suavely. “Can I buy ya a cuppa coffee?”

  The woman flushed even more deeply. “No…n-no, I’ve got to get to the Settlement House. Perhaps we’ll meet some other time.” She started to walk away.

  “Well, hey, thanks anyhow for savin’ my life,” Deek yelled after her. She nodded and continued walking. He took notice of the tight way her legs scissored in the binding of the skirt. “Listen, I’ll, uh, I’ll see ya soon, y’know?”

  She didn’t turn, so he followed her, suddenly limping. When she had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and thrown him backward, his leg had struck the wall of the building. It took him half a block to catch her.

  “Hey,” he panted, drawing beside her, taking her forearm in his hand. “Y’don’t have to run off like that, y’know. You saved a guy’s life, the least you can do is stay and talk to him for a minute. That was quite a yank you gave me.”

  She had looked at him coolly at first, but now her full lips broke into a smile. “I was a counselor at a girl’s camp,” she explained. “Pulling kids out of the water built me up.”

  It sure did, Deek thought hungrily.

  “I don’t know my own strength, sometimes,” she finished, smiling engagingly.

  “You can strong-arm me, any day, doll,” Deek said.