by James Jones
“You look like you do all right.”
’Bama grinned. “Well, it ain’t because I’m holding down no high-payin job at the damned Sternutol Chemical.”
“I thought it was,” Dave said.
’Bama grinned again. The word gambler had not been mentioned, but he was still obviously flattered. He put his foot up on the next bench and lit a cigarette from a pack in his topcoat pocket. “I had a heavy date over at the Eagles Lodge tonight with a poker game until I met up with you,” he grinned. “I figure I just about made my ante money.”
“It must be a good game.”
“We have some good ones around here. Now and then.” He grinned in that style he evidently thought was wicked. Then he moved his head. “Well, you ready to go?”
“Sure. Anytime. I’ve just been sitting here watching it snow.”
Without moving his feet ’Bama swung his torso around to look. “Yeah, it is pretty, ain’t it?” he said, trying to sound interested. He took his foot down and crushed the half-smoked cigarette under a sharp-pointed toe. Then he walked over to the windows and stood looking out. “Use to snow some down in Alabama where I come from, but never nothin like it does up here.” He stood there with his hands in his topcoat pockets. “I figured you’d never get up here tonight,” he said to the windows. “I figured you’d still be down to yore brother’s having that big shindig welcoming home party.”
“Well, I’m not,” Dave said.
“Yeah,” ’Bama grinned, swinging around. “I can see that.”
“I came straight here from there,” Dave amended.
“What’s the matter?” ’Bama said, coming back grinning to the bench. “You have an argument?”
“No. Me and Frank never argue. We understand each other.”
“If you do, yore the first two brothers ever did,” ’Bama said. “Me and my brother been fightin about the goddamned Sternutol Chemical for ten years ever since I come here.”
Dave looked at him questioningly and he moved his head toward the east.
“He works out there.”
“Oh.”
“And he thinks I oughta work there,” ’Bama grinned. “But I ain’t about to.”
“You don’t look like you need to.”
“Damn right, I don’t.”
“Then why’re you worrying?”
“Awww,” ’Bama said. “He’s a poker player himself. Used to live off of it till he got married. Now he plays over at the Moose Lodge all the time. I play there. But he thinks I ought to have a steady job. It’s his wife. He thinks it ain’t respectable, now, unless you work.”
The lights were all off now except the one above them, and the houseman pottering around back in the dark interior, probably putting the rubberized covers on the tables. Now he came up over on the other side by the cigar counter carrying a case of Cokes and began replenishing the soft drinks chest.
“I guess we’d better get out of here,” Dave said. He looked up at the near wall where there was a big blackboard with the collegiate basketball scores and the high school scores for the Wabash Valley and Eastern Illinois Leagues. Indiana had won. Bradley had won. So had Parkman, but so had its two arch rivals, Paris further north and Robinson further south. “Before we get thrown out,” he said.
“Sit still,” ’Bama sneered, “yore all right.” He opened his topcoat exposing a pint bottle in the side pocket. “I just bought him a drink. I got to stay on the good side a my business acquaintances. He won’t throw us out.”
“But does that include me, too?” Dave grinned.
“It does as long as yore with me. We kin sit here till two,” ’Bama boasted. “If we want to. Although I don’t know why the hell we’d want to.”
“I don’t, either,” Dave said. “To keep from going home, I guess. Let’s get on down to Smitty’s.”
’Bama snorted. “It’s always the same old answer, ain’t it? Evidently, what you need is a woman. Well, that’s where we’ll find them.”
“Only about like I need to breathe, is all,” Dave said.
“Hell, what you need is a wife. Why don’t you get married?”
“Why don’t you?”
“I am,” ’Bama said.
When Dave didn’t answer, the tall Southerner said: “I been married since I was nineteen down in Alabama. I got two kids.”
Dave still couldn’t think of anything to say. “I just figured you were single,” he said finally.
“Why? Because I run around?” The tall man snorted; then went on with cheerful cynicism. “Way I see it, a guy almost has to be married. The trouble with women is the nice women won’t put out and the others don’t do you any good when they do. They put out to everybody. And if the nice ones do put out to you, something happens to them and they seem to stop being nice ones after a while. I didn’t make the rules.”
“Maybe it’s that something happens to you?” Dave said.
“Naw. Not me. ’Bama stays the same. What is it makes men chase after women. An instinct of nature, I guess. Well, nature’s all fouled up then. Why didn’t it give women an instinct to chase after men.”
“It did,” Dave said. “They do. Only as soon as the men start chasing back, they quit.”
’Bama laughed. “Yeah, but they always call it by another name. Men like sex but women don’t. They can take it or leave it alone. Mostly they leave it alone. For them, it’s only what you call—a means to an end. And if the men don’t mostly leave it alone, too, they think all you want from them’s to lay them, which is mostly true, but if the men do leave it alone, too, then they think you don’t love them. For women, it seems to me sex is only just the one available means of getting children that they know of. And society says they got to have children.”
But it wasn’t true, it wasn’t all sex like he said, Dave was thinking desperately all the time ’Bama was talking. If it only were that! It was this wanting to be loved, Gwen French was right. Loved more than anything else in the world. He wanted to be loved by every woman he encountered. All of them. The more the merrier. He didn’t want them to fight over him. He wanted them to share him lovingly. It was the lack of all that love that had made him write what little he had written. She was right there, too. So that he would be loved. Loved by many women in general, and by one woman in particular—Harriet Bowman in Los Angeles. Used to be when he was thinking about his writing, he was thinking about them, too; and about her. When he was finishing up that second novel after she had married, he thought about her a lot—about how she would pick it up someday in a bookstore, see his name on it, be sorry for what she had missed. By God, he would make her regret marrying that lawyer!
Sitting there, dazed by the violence of his own emotion, he laid at her doorstep the heavy load of blame. If she had given him the love he needed, the kind of love that only he could have returned, he would not be here now, going through this idiocy of this damned fifty-five hundred dollars and the taxi service.
Once again, the knowledge of his own purely physical unattractiveness swept over him like a high sea over a freighter.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve got a theory. I think it’s all due to popular music. You know how you can sit around and listen to some love ballad and it twists you all up inside and makes you dream unreasonable dreams?”
“Never bothers me,” ’Bama said.
“Well, it bothers me. And I think it’s these damned songs that make us romanticize sex and love and women so much. They don’t do it in Europe. Not like we do here.”
“Listen,” ’Bama said. “I didn’t mean to give you the idea I was talkin about my wife a minute ago. I didn’t, did I?”
“What?” For a moment, he couldn’t grasp what he meant. “Oh. Why no,” he lied. “I assumed you were just talkin in general.”
’Bama looked relieved. “Well, that’s good. Because I don’t talk about my wife. At all. To nobody. I don’t have to. My wife stays at home like a wife’s supposed to. I wear the pants in my family. She does what
I tell her, when I tell her. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be there long.”
Dave felt like laughing. “Well, that’s the way it ought to be, isn’t it?”
“You damned right,” ’Bama sneered. “And that’s the way it’s gonna stay. Come on, let’s blow this joint and go on out to Smitty’s. That’s where all the stuff is.”
“Right,” Dave said. “Why not?” He went to get his greatcoat.
’Bama was waiting for him, holding the door open. “See you later, Curly!” he called to the near bald houseman. He led the way to a 1937 Packard sedan sitting a few doors down near the restaurant. Dave looked it over, mildly surprised. He had figured him for a Chevie or a Plymouth. This car was all black and nicely chromed and had the big radiator ornament of the woman in flowing drapes holding aloft a silvered wheel. It was still expensive looking in spite of being an old model. It looked nicely kept. ’Bama went up to it and began shoveling snow off the windshield with his bare hands.
“Let me do that,” Dave said. “I’ve got gloves on.”
’Bama shook his head. “Snow ruins leather. I got gloves.” He went on pulling the snow off with his bare hands, keeping up a running fire of conversation as he worked.
“Sonabich’ll be colder’n hell. Probly hard to start. I got cold plugs and the mixture set down lean for high-speed drivin. Got this bastard off a used car dealer in Indianapolis that didn’t know it had a good motor in it. Rather have it than one of them crappy new postwar ones they’re puttin out. Guy charged for all his cars as if they had good motors in them. He’d a known this one really had one he’d a charged a lot more. All it needed was a little work on the carburetor.”
There was a great affection in his hands as he worked on it, an affection that seemed incongruous to the cynical gambler he professed to be. It was almost domestic. He did not have any trouble starting it.
“Let her warm up a little,” he sneered after they were inside. “You’re not drivin, are you? You don’t have a car?”
“No.”
“Good. Then we won’t have to worry about pickin your car up if we line something up and decide to go someplace else. Dewey and Hubie will be out there and we’ll see what they got planned.”
“Where is this Smitty’s?” Dave said.
“Out north by the railroad, in that block of buildings. It’s the first one by the tracks.”
“Oh, I remember that place. There used to be a confectionery there.”
“I don’t know,” ’Bama said. “It’s been a bar ever since I come here. If you can call them bars in this county when they don’t serve hard liquor.” He put the car in gear and peered at the temperature gauge. “Almost normal. You know, you ought to get rid of that uniform. As soon as you can. The chicks around don’t dig uniforms much anymore since the war’s over.”
“Yeah, I mean to,” Dave said. “I just haven’t had a chance to get any civilian clothes yet.”
“That’s quite a parade of ribbons you got there,” ’Bama sneered as he backed the Packard out in the street. “That’s a lot of fruit salad for a QM, when you top it off with a Combat Infantryman’s, too. I noticed it earlier. You must have been in a good outfit.”
Dave named his division. “They drafted our company as Infantry during the Bulge, or we wouldn’t have had anything but the Good Conduct.”
“I was in the First Army,” ’Bama said indifferently. “Ninth Armored. I’m an old tank jockey. I was on your left flank then.”
“Then you were at Aachen.”
“Yeah, Aachen. Remagen, Seigen, all them places,” ’Bama said, peering behind him.
“So was I. They shifted us around all over,” Dave said, “you know: a QM Gas Supply Company.”
“Yeah,” ’Bama said, turning around and shifting into low. “Maybe you gassed our tank sometime.” He looked at his temperature gauge again.
Watching him, Dave was surprised again. Somehow he had not envisioned ’Bama ever being in the Army. Dewey had said he registered for the draft with him. But he had assumed that ’Bama had got out of it some way or other. He seemed more like a perpetual civilian, one of those cynics who spent the whole war scoffing and with reason from the sidelines. He waited for ’Bama to go ahead, to tell him something else.
Instead, ’Bama began to tell him about the bar they were going to. Rather than being proud of being in the Army, he gave the impression he was embarrassed by it, as if in catching him the Army had pulled a fast one, outfoxed him all the way around, and that such a fiasco was better left in the closet with the other skeletons.
“Smitty’s Bar they call it because a guy named B H Smith runs it. The real name is Drop Inn Dram Shop. Smitty named it that. It’s the only decent bar in town and that’s where all the loose stuff in town hangs out. They most all work at the brassiere factory. Maybe we can find us a couple there tonight.”
As he talked, he swung the Packard on around the one-way square, deftly following the few cut treadmarks in the fresh snow that was still falling and not packed yet, skinned it around the corner heading north, and ran on out, down the long hill, accelerating fast on the slick street, but completely in control with just the foot accelerator and the rear wheel traction. Dave realized belatedly that he was in the hands of the best driver he had ever ridden with.
Across the railroad, they pulled into the cinder parking lot beside the bar, and the lights and music coming from inside promised excitement. Laughter, love, and entertainment.
“Come on, let’s go on in,” ’Bama said, lighting a cigarette from the pack in his topcoat pocket.
Chapter 13
SMITTY’S BAR WAS LOCATED in the south corner of a four-place business block that was known as the Madin Block chiefly because a man named Madin who built it.
The Illinois Northern Railroad, which was almost universally referred to as the IN, passed through Parkman about half a mile north of the courthouse, which put it just about halfway out to the edge of town. Out there, where it crossed North Main Street—the street, which with Wernz Avenue the real main street, forms a cross of thoroughfares into the square—a little business district had grown up around its depot: a grocery, a barbershop, a restaurant, two filling stations, and a bar (Smitty’s), with a couple of lumberyards across the tracks.
Although never much as a railroad, at one time the IN had been a powerful social force in Parkman. Being nearly halfway to town instead of out at the edge, it had given a much greater opportunity for superiority since so many more people could live on the wrong side of it. But recently, building space was getting harder to find and more and more people who could afford it were building nice homes on the north side of the IN tracks, a thing that no self-respecting citizen would have thought of doing forty years ago.
But just the same certain echoes of this former derogation, probably aided by coal dust and smoke cinders, still clung to the tracks themselves and to locations near them. B H Smith, Smitty, had overcome this liability with his own peculiar brand of fake heartiness, the judicious use of what he called “atmosphere,” and by buying an expensive home in a respectable section of town out of his profits. So that now Smitty’s was considered the bar to go to in Parkman and was even occasionally visited by some of the people who belonged to the Country Club, which Smitty had lately joined. He had also joined the Trap & Skeet Club.
Smitty himself, whom Dave had never met, was a big bluff excessively hearty man who laughed a lot, loudly, as if he thought he might in this way secretly hold at arm’s length all the slavering problems of his life which were threatening to devour him. He had shrewdly decorated the bar to look like a pre-Prohibition tavern, but he still could not, Dave learned from ’Bama as they left the Packard and went inside, make enough off of it to afford the Country Club and the Skeet Club and the Elks and the cabin which he, like the rest of the well-off people, had built out at South Lake.
’Bama, Dave found out immediately they were inside, also was counted as part of the atmosphere of the place, apparently. He
also saw that ’Bama seemed well aware of this and relished it. Smitty, who was talking on the phone behind the bar, treated him with the complaisance of a privileged character that he wanted to keep hanging around so as to amuse the more respectable customers, who evidently came partly for that reason. It wasn’t exactly snobbery, which the prideful ’Bama obviously would never have tolerated. It was more like a sort of tacit business agreement between them.
The same tolerance apparently held true for a group of five tittering young women sitting by themselves in a booth across from the bar drinking beer; and for Dewey and Hubie and two other men whom Dave saw sitting sprawled at a table in the back near the jukebox.
The front of the place, narrowed by the bar and a string of booths along the wall, was fairly well crowded. ’Bama moved into all of this with Dave in tow and the air of a man who has been in a place often enough to feel safe and familiar there. He nodded to several people who spoke to him, and gave the booth of young women a searching look.
“What’s the matter, Dewey,” he called from the front, and headed straight back for the table past the girls. “You and the brassiere factory on the outs again?”
There was a small titter of laughter from the booth of girls, which ’Bama ignored.
“Ah, that Lois,” Dewey’s voice carried up from the table. “She’s teed off and up on her high horse again. All over some little old thing or other. She’s gettin tempermental as some prima donna. You’d think she was a movie star or somethin.”
There were several laughs from the men at the bar. While he was speaking, they continued moving to the back. There were five small tables out in the wider floor space of the back, which could have been a dance floor but never had been (there was a city ordinance against drinking and dancing in the same place), but all of them were empty except the one the four men sat at. The back of the place was fairly well crowded, too, though. Dewey and Hubie still had on the same old Army clothes they had worn this afternoon. The two men with them were equally sloppily dressed. One of them, a tough-looking man with a beat-up face, very much so. Smitty was still talking on the phone up front and his bluff booming laugh periodically penetrated the jukebox music.