by James Jones
“For five hundred dollars!”
“Well, no,” Dave said, vaguely. “I had some other cash.”
“What’d you pay?” Frank felt a little relieved.
“Seven-fifty.”
“What was it?”
“A 1942 Plymouth,” Dave said. “Good condition.”
“Tires?”
“Good tires.”
“I could of got it for you for six-fifty,” Frank said. “I told you I was a silent partner in the Dodge agency. That’s on the q t by the way.”
“I didn’t want to wait,” Dave said. “I needed it then.”
“Well, that’s all right,” Frank said, getting the contracts out of his pocket. “It just means you’ll have to take a little less percentage of the business.”
“That’s all right with me,” Dave said. “But I needed that car.”
“Well, there’s no need to get mad about it,” Frank said. “It’s your money. I see you got some pretty nice clothes, too.”
“I didn’t have any. I told you. I had some other cash on me. And then I won a little on the horses.”
“That ’Bama,” Frank said. “He’s a very good pool player; and he’s a crackerjack poker player. I don’t know how he is with the horses.” He looked up from the couch.
“It’s his hobby,” Dave said. “He makes his money on cards and pool. He just plays the horses for fun.”
“He sure drinks an awful lot,” Frank said. “More than’s good for him. Well, here’s the contracts,” he said. He spread the several copies out on the coffee table.
“Don’t those have to be changed now?” Dave said.
“No. There aren’t any amounts mentioned,” Frank said. “And I can have my office girl change the percentages later and we can both initial it.”
“Don’t they have to be notarized or something?” Dave said. He was watching the papers with a kind of fascination, as if they were poisonous snakes. He looked ready to jump back if they moved.
“My office girl’s a notary,” Frank said. “She’ll do it for me later.”
“Oh,” Dave said. He nodded. “How come there’s so many copies?”
“For filing,” Frank said. “You get two, I get two, and one for the corporation files.”
“Okay. Gimme a pen,” Dave said. “Where do I sign?”
“Don’t you want to read it first?”
“Hell, no. I wouldn’t know what I was readin, anyway.”
“Well there’s one thing I think I ought to read to you,” Frank said, getting his pen out of his coat. He turned to the last page and read out loud the “Give or Take” clause he had had the judge insert, and then explained it, looking up at his younger brother.
“Okay, okay,” Dave said. “Gimme the pen. Now where do I sign?”
“This line,” Frank said, “and then initial each page. Sign every copy the same way.”
In silence, Dave got down on one knee and riffled through the various copies, signing and initialing.
“Sign my life away,” he said with a malevolent grin.
He finished, capped the pen, and handed it back to Frank who signed them, too.
“Well. Now that that’s over with,” he said, “what about a drink?”
“I might have one,” Frank said. “To celebrate.”
Dave nodded and went to the phone table where the liquor and ice were. “I took a trip down around New Lebanon this morning,” he said. “Went down to the old farm.”
“The Dark Bend River?” Frank said with surprise.
“Yeah.” He came back with the glasses. “I almost wish Granddad had never sold it.”
“I haven’t been down there for years,” Frank said.
Dave grinned malignantly. “I took a case of beer, and a couple sandwiches, and went down to see the old family cemetery.” He took a long drink from his glass. “But—the beer got warm; and the sandwiches got squashed; and the roads were muddy and I almost got stuck twice; and got all wet wading through the weeds; and then most all the tombstones were all broken up or fallen over and it was all grown up in bushes under the trees.” He grinned again. “Always happens to me.”
Frank studied his brother a moment. “Our family took up that land in 1887,” he said. “Grandad didn’t sell it; he lost it. It wasn’t good land.”
“It still ain’t,” Dave said.
Frank took a drink from his glass. “I wanted to talk to you about the name of the cab company. I left it blank until we could talk about it. I think a good name would be Hirsh Brothers Taxi.”
“Oh, great Christ!” Dave said. “No.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because!” Dave said.
“Well then, how about Hirsh and Hirsh Cab Company?” “Look,” Dave said. “You’re not startin a big city operation. You want everybody in town laughing at you?”
Frank looked angry. “All right, what would you call it?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Red Checker Cab. Or Black and White Cab. Something like that. But don’t give it a big pompous name so everybody will be laughin at you.”
“I like that Red Checker Cab,” Frank said. “We can have a red-and-black checkered band around the side like the black-and white-checkered ones in Chicago, you know?” He thought a moment. “Paint the cars yellow.”
“Black,” Dave said.
“But if we have red-and-black checkers—” Frank started, then thought again. “Okay. Black. We can run a little green stripe along the outside of the checkers.”
“Keep it inconspicuous,” Dave nodded, “now look. Now everything’s settled, when do I start to work for you?”
“You won’t be workin for me,” Frank protested.
“All right then: us.”
“Well, I’ve got a lot of things to take care of. Rent a building. Get the cars. Hire some drivers. All the paperwork. It’ll take at least a week.”
“That long?” Dave half-snarled. “Okay, look. I’m going to move out of here and get a room in the other hotel. The Douglas. Start savin money, now I’m poor again. So you can reach me there when you’re ready for me.”
“Okay. But there’s a lot of these things you could help me with,” Frank said.
“Okay. Anything you want me for, just call me at the Douglas,” Dave said, as if anxious to have done. “Do you want me to write you a check for five thousand now? I’ll have to close out my account. Five thousand’s all I got in it.”
“Why don’t you get a bank draft instead?” Frank said. “And then sign it over to me.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I’d just rather you do that,” Frank said.
Dave grinned. “So the draft will go through the Cray County Bank, hunh?”
“No,” Frank said. “Not at all. It’s just better business, that’s all.”
“All right,” Dave said. “I’ll send Freddy over to do it before the bank closes this afternoon.”
Frank grinned. “Why? Don’t you want to go over yourself?”
“No,” Dave said. “Not at all. It’s just better business, that’s all.” Again, he grinned that wry, malevolent grin.
Frank looked at him a moment, and then ducked his head and chuckled. “Touché.”
“Okay,” Dave said. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” Frank said, looking up. He composed his face into an expression of sternness. “There is somethin else. Just one more thing.”
“What’s that?” Dave said, looking as though he wanted to sigh.
“It’s about my office girl. Edith Barclay.”
Dave turned to stare at him over his glass. “What about her?”
“I want you to stay away from her, that’s what,” Frank said, his indignation almost getting away with him.
“What’s the matter?” Dave said, grinning, “you rompin her yourself?”
“No,” Frank said. “Of course not. I make it a hard and fast rule never to get involved with any of my help.”
“You do, hunh?” Dav
e said. “Then it’s a rule you made since I left here.”
“What I’m tryin to say is,” Frank said, “is that I’ve got a damned good office girl there. And I got no intention of losin her because she gets in some kind of a mess with you.”
“Okay,” Dave said, still watching him. “But don’t try to give me all this crap about you being such a damned plaster saint. Anyway, you flatter me unduly, I think.”
“It’s possible for some people to learn something from their previous mistakes,” Frank said with stiffened dignity, “though you may not be used to people like that.”
“Possible,” Dave said. “But not probable. And not you. Or me. But you don’t need to worry about me bein interested in your office girl. I’m not. However, if I was nothin you could say would stop me from tryin. See?”
“I don’t care about you,” Frank said. “Or what you say. Or what you think. You just keep away from my office girl, you hear?”
“I hear you,” Dave said. “And you heard me: If I want to, I will.”
Frank went to the door and then turned back. Dave was looking him coldly, and clearly, in a way Frank had never seen him look before. For a moment, he was afraid he had gone too far, without somehow realizing it.
“Look,” he said from the door. “I don’t want us to get in an argument. We’ve got a good deal here,” he said, shaking the contracts. “I’m just askin you to help me out with this girl, that’s all.”
“Then ask me,” Dave said. “Don’t try to tell me.”
“I am askin you.”
“You don’t need to worry,” Dave said. “I ain’t interested in your office girl.”
“Okay, boy,” Frank said and grinned and winked, opening the door. “I’ll probably need you in the next day or two. I’ll call you at the Douglas.”
“Okay,” Dave said. “Just call me.”
Frank nodded, and the last thing he saw as he closed the door was Dave—red-faced and wavy-eyed—heading for the table where the liquor was.
He walked back to the store. He did not know that after he left, his brother sat down staring at the shuttered windows and let come into his mind what he had been feeling all morning and all afternoon during the interview: wondered, blackly, why in hell he had ever let his money, and himself, get tied up in this damned taxi service that tied him down to Parkman. Frank did know, however—during the next week, when he was working himself frazz-leassed—that his brother Dave was not being of much use to him. Whenever he tried to get in touch with Dave at the Douglas, where he had registered, Dave was not to be found, was out somewhere, could not be got hold of. He even called Dave one night at eleven-thirty, and Dave still was not there. That was about the way Dave remembered all his promises, he reflected.
When he got back to the store, Edith was at her desk working. Without pausing to think about it—except to expect her to be deeply grateful to him—he told her about having talked to Dave. Instead of being grateful, she got madder than hell. Madder than he had ever seen her. And formal.
“If I’d known you were going to do that, Mr Hirsh,” she said crisply, “I’d never have told you in the first place.” Her eyes looked like a cloudy sky, threatening lightning flashes.
“I only did it to keep him from takin advantage of the fact he’s my brother and bothering you,” Frank said.
“Nobody bothers me, Mr Hirsh,” Edith said. “I’ve been taking care of myself ever since my mother died, and that was when I was in high school. I don’t need any help, from you or anybody, sir.”
“Well, I’m sorry, then,” Frank said, still taken aback. So she was interested in Dave after all, hunh?
“As long as my work at the store is satisfactory,” Edith said, seeming to relent a little, “and I don’t cause any talk that might be detrimental to you or the store, I think what I do outside of working hours is my own business, Boss.”
“Then you are interested in Dave, hunh?” Frank asked.
“No, sir, I am not,” Edith said vehemently. “I told you that. I wouldn’t lie to you about it.” She softened, and smiled. “I just feel you haven’t any right to try and take my welfare in hand without consulting me first, and taking things which I told you in confidence and using them. After all, I only work at the store eight hours a day.”
“I didn’t know it was in confidence,” Frank said.
“Well, it was.”
“Okay, I’m sorry,” Frank said. “Look, here’s the contracts. There’s two or three small changes. And I want them notarized.”
“Yes, sir,” Edith said, taking them.
“Now about the changes,” Frank said, thinking he had really put his foot into it, and wondering why the hell he had ever bothered his head about it in the first place?
Well, he would see what happened with Dave. What he was planning, what he hoped, was that once he got the building and lot leased, he would turn it over to Dave to get fixed up and get the phones in and generally get it ready to start operating.
That was not the way it turned out, however, because when he finally got around to calling Dave two or three days later, he could not get him. He could not get him the second time he called, either. Nor the time after that. Nor any other time. So he finally wound up doing it all himself. As usual.
Dave, as a matter of fact, was having his own troubles. And he was spending a great deal of time at the Frenches’ over in Israel trying to solve them. Trying to realize his investment. It was a real job.
Chapter 21
DAVE HAD SAT FOR a long time by himself in the hotel room, after Frank left with the contracts. As soon as Frank had closed the door, he had got himself another drink and sat down in the chair with it. Then he just sat, holding it, and because he happened to be facing that way, looking out the window. When he became aware of it, he got up and closed the venetian blind and sat back down.
He just couldn’t believe he had really signed those contracts, those goddamned contracts. Everything in him had cried out to him not to sign them. Even when he knelt down by the coffee table with the pen in his hand. But he had gone ahead and signed them just the same. Why? It was silly, but it was as if he felt he didn’t have a right not to sign them after letting everything go this far, and letting Frank think he would sign them. Some vague sense of—of justice, was the only word he could give it; of self-punishment. He hadn’t wanted to sign them all along, from the very beginning, and yet every time he had found a loophole that might have saved him he had covered it up. It was as if he had made sure from the very beginning to get himself in this position, for the very reason that he hadn’t wanted to, in order to punish himself for something. For living, maybe.
And now that he was in it he felt trapped like an animal. He was frightened. Fright spread over him, and panic was like another living presence inside his skin. It was himself he was afraid of. Any man who couldn’t depend on himself more than that. A guy who deliberately did things to punish himself. Christ, he was liable to wind up like Van Gogh cutting off one of his ears or something. Fear made him want to jump up out of the chair and run.
Hell, a contract was like an oath! Once you took it you were bound by it. Even though you changed your mind two minutes later, you were still bound to it. And so Frank had outsmarted him. With the very thing he had come here not to do.
This was the first time in his life Dave had ever signed a real, bona fide contract, and he felt as if he had just lost another virginity. He had been losing one virginity after another all his life, it seemed, and now here was another one. How many more firsts were there going to be for him to lose? he wondered. Before he was allowed to quit.
There was a constant tendency in him, he found, to just keep shaking his head. To have turned over all his money that way, to have signed himself up to stay in Parkman like that—and for what, to work in a lousy three-car taxi stand—it was almost more than he could bear to think about. And all of it because he had convinced himself with some crazy logic that it was worth it—would be worth it—to
seduce this one woman. Gwen French.
The horrible thing was he thought he had figured it all out logically. But if he had figured it all out logically beforehand, that night in the snow on the square, now he could prove just as logically that he had figured it out wrong and should not have done it. That was the frightening thing. It didn’t leave you anywhere to stand. Logic. The ability to reason. Heh-heh. Yeh. It was a great trait in human beings.
Filled up with an unconsumed energy of misery and fright and self-accusation that had suddenly boiled over into a scalding inability to sit still, Dave got up and began to march around the room, the untouched drink glass in his hand, forgotten.
Well, he had done it now; he was in it. The fishhook was in his scrotum. He might as well collect his prize. If you can, that is. There was a frenetic desire in him get on with it, get the ball rolling. He was like a man who, having mistakenly agreed to get up on a stage before an audience and make a speech, now insists on going through with it down to the last bitter embarrassing dram of gall, even when everybody else wishes that in God’s name he would stop.
Prowling jitterishly about the room for all the world just like the caged animal he felt himself to be, he happened to look down at his hand and discover the drink glass in it. He stared at it a moment, and then set it down and sat back down in the chair to think. Gwen French. It wasn’t even sensible. But he had to seduce her now. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have anything at all to show for his five thousand dollars. What up to now had been one big lark suddenly had become a matter of extreme desperation. Grimly, he set about preparing himself for the first onslaught of the citadel, Bob French’s Last Retreat in Israel.
But then maybe—a thought which, strangely, had not occurred to him before—maybe a woman like that was, instead of being easier, actually the hardest type there was to make. She would know her way around, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t lose her head, would she? She would be able to pick and choose, wouldn’t she? And maybe after all she was really telling him the truth, when she said sex bored her and she wasn’t interested in it anymore.
Dave slumped down in the big chair, immersed in such a sense of defeat as he had not had in a long, long time. Oh, hell, he ought to just give it all up and take the hell off. Leave the money. Let Frank have it. He could always go back to Sister Francine’s in North Hollywood—the oasis, he thought—and live off of her and her husband. It would be rough, leaving on the bum again, after all these years, with no money now, hitching across country again, with no prospects. But he could do it. He had done it before. In fact, half of him hungered to do just that. Sneak away from this damned town in the black of night. And never come back.