Free The Only Girl in the Game by John D. MacDonald Page A

more fireplace-type atmosphere, and then back through the night to the tired old workaday smell of money. I’m going to schedule the hell out of your day, truly.”
    She did. They were in the middle of fifty thousand years of silence, and it was a restoring thing. They moved the luncheon table to a sunny place out of the chill wind. They ate like wolves, and later they talked and they napped, Betty on the fireplace couch, he atop a gray blanket in one of the wide deep bunks.
    It wasn’t until after dinner, sitting on the Indian rug in front of the fireplace flames, that he said, “Okay, so you won’t volunteer any information until I ask. Or, if it’s a secret, I’m out of order. But is this your place?”
    “In a funny kind of way, I guess it is, Hugh.” Her voice was soft and thoughtful, and she was looking at the flames and mesquite coals, half frowning, hugging her legs, chin on her whipcord knees.
    “Mabel Huss actually owns it,” she said. “She’s a fat, sloppy, ignorant woman, Hugh. Ignorant in book ways. Sheruns a motel in Vegas, a little old junky place on one of the old streets, all crowded in between a furniture store and a big shiny operation with a name that haunts me because the neon used to flash in my window. Super-Drug, Super-Drug, Super-Drug, it said, all the night through. It was a cheap place, the cheapest I could find, and I was way down, Hugh. There are little pockets of despair in Vegas for people who are way down, Hugh. Down as far as they can get. The thing is, in Vegas or anywhere, you aren’t put down by the cruel world all by itself. You have to get in there and help the bastards bring you low. That’s something hard to learn. It’s so easy to blame everything and everybody else.
    “I can skip the stinking details, except to say Mable was carrying me on credit for no good reason in the world, and there was one way I could get out of the whole dreary deal, but it was a way that made me feel a little sick to my heart to think about. But I was scared, and even though it wasn’t long ago, I was inconceivably younger than I am right now. I had that special kind of stupid pride which made me feel I couldn’t get on the collect phone and yell help to my father in San Francisco. So I decided to be real hardcase about it, and I told myself it was that kind of a world, and I walked right through the door the bastards were holding open for me. And it was worse than I had thought, Hugh. Don’t ever romanticize evil.
    “I solved my problems in what they call one fell swoop, buddy, and I caught the brass ring, and it was so damn bad, every implication of it, I knew I had to die. I had lost myself. And though I didn’t have to, though I could have started going first class right away, I went crawling back to Mabel’s Comfort Motel, knowing that all the trouble I’d thought I was in before was nothing at all. I spent twenty hours in a stupor of self-disgust, and then that fat woman, without saying much of anything, loaded me and some cartons of food in her old car and drove me out here and left me. It was a special kind of wisdom, Hugh. This is the kind of aloneness you need when you have to mend yourself, when you have to form some kind of adjustment to the sort of person you have suddenly become through making a bad error.
    “She left me here for five days, and when she came out and got me, I’d put myself back together. Her husband built this place. They had good times here. He died. She’s never wanted to sell it or rent it, and she hadn’t wanted to spend time here herself. But she knew what it would do for me.She knows I still need to come here from time to time, to put myself together, so I have her permission to come here any time. I stop at her place once in a while and tell her how I’m making out. This is the first time I ever brought anybody here.”
    “I feel honored, Betty.”
    She turned her head to smile at him. “Ah, you should be! If you’re real good, maybe I’ll