Some Came Running

by James Jones

  And once again—as always, apparently—right was on Frank’s side. And Dave could already divine all the statements he would make to prove it. Well, he didn’t know whether he was ever coming back or not. Well, he shouldn’t have left like that without notice, and then not sent any word. Well, what the hell was he supposed to do with the damned thing? Sure; he would say all those things. In all his life—and he had had some pretty big hates going for Frank—Dave had never hated his brother as he did right now.

  “It’ll look a lot better once you get it cleaned up,” Albie said from behind him. “Mostly it’s just dirt. The battry’s deader’n a doornail, and the right rear tire’s plumb flat. But it ain’t really in near as bad a shape as it looks. I’ll help you change that right rear tire if you want. It should have been up on blocks and had the batt’ry tooken out.”

  When they went closer for a better look, Dave found that Albie was right. It wasn’t really ruined. But the knowledge did not make him feel any less hatred for Frank’s just, free from wrong righteousness. The little door over the keyhole was stuck shut from disuse and he had to prize it open, and when they looked in the luggage compartment for the spare, they found it was completely flat also.

  “Slow leak,” Albie said.

  “You’d better get back and watch your phones, hadn’t you, Albie?”

  “Screw the phones,” Albie said, bugging out his eyes, and rubbed his palm over the dirty fender, leaving a brighter streak. “I like cars,” he said, as though he were speaking of people. “Anyway, there won’t nobody die for lack of a taxi for a few minutes.”

  “Well, there ain’t much we can do here with it, anyway,” Dave said, reaching in and slapping the seat. A thin film of dust had covered everything.

  “No,” Albie said, “an you’ll need to git a new battry from the garage anyway.”

  Back inside Dave called the Dodge-Plymouth service garage and told them who he was and that he needed a battery and a tire fixed.

  “Is that that ’42 Plymouth that’s been sittin down the taxi lot past two three months?” the mechanic’s voice said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll need more’n one battry to start ’er then,” the voice said. “I’ll bring along a booster’n hook ’em up parallel.”

  The mechanic who arrived in a few minutes in a red pickup truck was lean and dour, with flat, passionless eyes, and very nearly unhuman except for the chaw of tobacco in his jaw.

  “You jack ’er up, Harv, and run them two tars down’t the shop,” he said to the other man he had brought with him, after he had looked it over and raised the hood, and dragged two batteries out of the truck. “Bring first one back soon’s you get it done, Harv.” Together they went to work.

  In half an hour, the sluggish motor was chugging reluctantly, and Harv was back with the right rear wheel and had it on, and the mechanic drove it, and Dave rode with him and spent the afternoon in that dim and oily half-world of the echoing-big garage peopled by these laconic, strangely unhuman members of an alien race, while they washed his car and greased it, and changed its oil, and fixed its other tire, and flushed its gas tank out, and changed its spark plugs, and retuned its motor, and in the end it seemed like another car entirely. His bill was twenty dollars—not counting the new battery.

  “Drive ’er around a bit,” the mechanic advised him as he left. “’ll loosen ’er up.”

  So he drove to Terre Haute and had dinner alone, hating Frank and his pompous rightness, and afterwards feeling a little tight on several martinis, had a taxi driver drive him to a whorehouse, before he went home and went to bed.

  The next day, he saw Frank.

  “Where were you?” Frank said when he called the store. “I tried to call you last night. I’ll come over to the hotel.”

  “You still afraid to have me come into your store?” Dave said.

  “Hell, no,” Frank said. “But I thought if we were gonna talk, we’d want to talk in privacy. And there sure as hell ain’t none of that here.”

  “I’ll be here,” Dave said.

  Chapter 41

  FRANK HUNG UP THE telephone irritably and looked across the office at his mistress. She, however, did not look back, because she had her head down and her back to him. So he winked at the back of her pretty neck. It was something he had taken to doing lately when he was upset because it soothed him. Sort of a private rebellion against the pronouncements that they should never in any way at all let on that there was anything at all between them. Edith kept them admirably, and for that matter so did he himself, but sometimes he had an impulse to rebel a little, privately. What was half the good of having a mistress if nobody in the world but you and her knew about it? (Oh, of course, there was lots of good!) But if nobody but you and her knew it, then to all intents and purposes, at least as far as everybody in the world was concerned, you didn’t have one!

  Frank rubbed his hand over his face to clear his head. That damned Dave. And so now he was back and all ready to cause more trouble. Already causing it. He was worse by far than the Old Man. Why did it have to be him who had a brother who wanted to be a writer and a crackpot artist? Nobody else in Parkman had a brother like that. Damn it, he had no sense of social responsibility at all! Other people had sane, affectionate, normal brothers. Well, he would have to go over there now and see what kind of a trouble-causing scheme he had cooked up now. He rubbed his hand vigorously over his face again.

  “Edith, honey,’’ he said to the back of his mistress’s bent head, “I’m goin to have to go over to the Parkman and see that damned brother of mine.”

  She raised her head and turned to look at him, no hint of anything on her face except the attentiveness of a good office girl. “Yes, sir, Mr Hirsh,” she said crisply; if anything she was even less friendly now than before—at least when they were here in the store.

  “If there’re any calls of importance comes in for me, have them reach me over there,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, I’ll do that, Mr Hirsh,” she said, and nodded, and there was nothing but complete impersonality on her face. It was kind of titillating in a way, but he disliked it nevertheless. Christ, she almost never called him “Boss” anymore, or smiled. Sometimes he almost believed she actually disliked him, and became depressed and almost frantic. All this was only in the store, of course; when they were alone in bed, man, she was passionate as hell. But when they were in the office alone together like now, at least she could give him a lovin look.

  But just then, just as he was thinking this, Al Lowe stuck his head in the door to ask about the account of a woman who wanted a Sunbeam coffeemaker and wanted to charge it, and Frank had to admit that this time for once Edith had been right.

  “Sure, let her have it,” he said to Al. “She’s good for it.”

  “Well, she already owes us over fifty dollars,” Al said.

  “Let her have it!” Frank said. “She’ll pay. If it takes her a year. You got to remember, Al, that this business is based on good will and ‘trust.’ And refusin to let somebody that you know is good charge something, is not a good way to build goodwill.”

  “Okay, Frank,” Al said, his open boyish face expressing admiration. “Just as you say.”

  Frank tossed his head a little. “I didn’t mean to be irritable with you, Al. Dave’s back in town. I got to go over to the hotel to see him.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Al said.

  “It sure as hell is,” Frank said, looking at him waspishly.

  He had begun to suspect Geneve had her cap set for Tony Wernz IV—if only anybody could ever get Tony sober enough to be interested in a woman. You’d sure never think Al had the Bronze Star, or Silver Star, one of those medals like that, for bravery in action, he thought with a kind of irritable amazement.

  Edith was ignoring both of them. Al’s eyes flickered toward her, lightly, before he brought them back to Frank.

  “Don’t forget about those phone calls now, Edith,” Frank said, deliberately making his vo
ice irritable at her.

  “Yes, Boss,” Edith said, barely looking up, “I’ll remember it.”

  “Was there anything else you wanted, Al?” he said.

  “No. No, Frank. I just—” he said, and then his voice dropped, “wanted to say how sorry I was about Dave.” The voice lifted, “I’ll go take care of Mrs Catlett.”

  “Good,” Frank said and got up. “Well, I guess I better get to goin over there.”

  He got his spring hat and then paused to slip out of its tube and light, a cigar, but Edith did not even look up at him. An aura almost of coldness seemed to push him away from her. Well, Christ, I hope she knows what I was doin, and ain’t mad at her, he thought with a momentary twinge of panic, and looked back at her, and then walked out through the dim dusty storeroom. In the contrastingly clean bright display room, puffing on the cigar, he nodded to Mrs Catlett as he passed. Al was already wrapping her coffeemaker for her. The other clerk, a man now instead of the country girl who had finally married her soldier, was on the other side of the U of glass cases, polishing off the glass top.

  He had decided to brave the May weather without his spring topcoat and at the door pulled down his coat skirts and his hat brim and stepped outside into the coolish bright day, the big fat Churchill resting comfortably between his teeth. He had already decided to walk around to the Parkman, instead of taking the Buick.

  That damned Dave. Always causing him some kind of inconvenience!

  Well, under his tutelage—gradually—Al Lowe had practically taken over the management of the store, so that he did not even need to be there at all if he didn’t want to. Al didn’t know it yet, but he already was managing the store—in just about everything but name. Frank had been carefully grooming him toward that. As soon as he found it out, he’d have the last thing he needed: the confidence. Then he would be the manager.

  It could just as easily have been Dave, Frank thought with a kind of irritated sorrow. If he had settled down when he was young and worked hard and been a good citizen, like the rest of us.

  Dave was going to be mad about his car. Well, that was just too bad. Frank still didn’t feel he had done wrong about it. Sure, he could have put it inside somewhere, and blocked it up, and taken the battery out, and drained the gas tank; it would have cost him a good bit; but he still could have done it. But what he had done he had done deliberately, to teach Dave a lesson. It was time he learned that he couldn’t always go running along through life expecting everybody else to take care of him all the time. And time he learned to have a little responsibility, whether it made him mad at his brother Frank or not. Someday he would thank him for it.

  Two things were disturbing him—making him thoughtful—about Dave. One was the rumor, pretty well conceded to be fact, that he had taken off with ’Bama Dillert the gambler, when he left. He had nothing against ’Bama; he had played poker with him lots of times, and would again. But playing poker with ’Bama was one thing, and becoming his bosom friend was another. He had not said anything when Dave started running around with him; but when Dave took off with him for a four months’ trip somewhere, it was time somebody put him wise to just what kind of social status ’Bama had in Parkman. The other thing was that Dave had moved back into his old rooms at the Parkman. That could only mean that he had some money again. He was going to have to be cautioned about what kind of a spectacle he made of himself when he spent it. Parkman wasn’t big citified like wherever they had gone. It was a small town and you had to live accordingly. He was going to have to get settled down and get back to work like he should.

  If he had just settled down when he was young, Frank thought again, he could have been just about anywhere by now. Managing the store, and lots of other things too. I would have been a good father to him. And he could have made me a fine son—if he’d only settled down.

  But he wouldn’t. And so instead, it was Al Lowe who would be running the store. He probably would have turned the store over to Al completely before now, if it had not been that when he did he would get to see Edith just that much less. It was hard enough meeting her as it was. They had arranged to get away together two nights a week pretty regular, sometimes working in an extra night when it seemed safe—but even on those nights, they could only stay out safely till eleven or twelve, or at the very most one o’clock.

  It had been a strange thing, he thought not without a certain vanity. Very strange. Here he had been, looking all around trying to find himself another mistress, and right there all that time under his very nose had been this young girl who was desperately in love with him. It must have been very hard on her. He was even inclined to feel more magnanimous to Agnes now; because if Agnes hadn’t seen fit to cause trouble between him and Geneve, he might never have found out about Edith.

  How long all this had been going on, Frank had no idea. But then, suddenly—the night he had taken Agnes and Dawn out to the Country Club, just shortly after he had seen Geneve sitting down at the other end with Al and some others—it had just hit him, the idea, that Edith Barclay was in love with him. You could have knocked him over with a feather.

  That was how it had started—with him, at least. With Edith, he didn’t know. She wasn’t a very talkative girl. Especially about herself. Except once in a while, like when she’d had a few drinks, but even then you couldn’t make much out of it that would help you later.

  He had been very careful. He had merely watched. He did not put much trust in these sudden “ideas” that came to a person. They might come to you for all sorts of reasons.

  But the more he waited and the more he watched, the more he became convinced that she was in love with him, and yet there was never anything he could actually point to as proof. There was never anything that might be construed as a sign she loved him. And yet in some funny odd way he had become more and more sure that she did.

  The trouble had been—he thought now—he might be wrong. Might still be wrong. Christ, he didn’t want to look like one of these businessmen who were always trying to sleep with their female help. Or like Old Judge Deacon and that secretary of his he had been sleeping with for years and years. Long ago, when he first began to get somewhere, he had promised himself he would never again sleep with his hired help. But of course, if Edith Barclay was really in love with him, that made it different. Only, how was he to know? In the end, still unsure, he had been forced to approach it in a way that would make it look like he was not approaching it. If it wanted to be taken as an advance, it could, but if not, it would appear to be only fatherly friendliness on the part of the boss.

  The system of inventorying Frank had instituted at the store was one in which all the work was done after regular hours. It was harder work, and longer hours, but he always gave everybody who helped a little bonus afterwards so that none of them would resent it. Usually, it took about two weeks. And this year, as they had last year, the three of them had done it, he and Edith and Al. As they had last year, which was Edith’s first year there, they instituted a system in which Al did the climbing around and called the items down to Frank who listed them on long sheets, which Edith in turn took and checked and corrected and copied up in quadruplicate on the typewriter. And, also as they had done last year, they made an arrangement whereby Al drove Edith home one night, and he Frank drove her the next. And that was where his plan fitted in.

  He had figured he would have just about exactly two weeks in which to work; or, six times of driving her. On his evenings driving her, he had concentrated on talking to her about her life and her future and her ambitions, and advising her about them. If there was anything she ever needed or any kind of boost he could give her along the way, all she had to do was ask. When people went to work for him, they became part of his family. They belonged to the team. That was the only way a business could be run. Successfully. You had to have teamwork. And as far as he was concerned Edith was on his team and he would help her any way he could.

  Edith herself did not say much; she seemed to just so
rt of sit there. She agreed with him, and once in a while she said yes, and once in a while she nodded.

  And he still didn’t know if she loved him. He was sure, but he couldn’t prove it.

  It seemed eons. And yet, by the end of the first week—that was three times of driving her—everything was decided. Decided, if not consummated.

  On Friday night when he drove her home, he stopped the car as usual under the Roosevelt Drive streetlight (she still always had him let her off at the corner streetlight) and prepared to let her out. He was still talking, admonishing her about her future, and in the urgency of what he was saying he reached out—sort of subconsciously, in that he didn’t really anticipate it; and yet with full consciousness of what he was doing, too—and put his hand on her knee over her coat, and in a friendly way squeezed it with his fingers to emphasize what he was saying, but ready to remove it instantly and deny that it was anything but fatherly, which it wasn’t.

  Edith did not do anything. She did not say anything, either. To all intents and purposes, she was unaware his hand was on her knee at all. So he decided to leave it there and keep on talking, while Edith continued to stare out through the windshield.

  Then, just when he was afraid he was going to have to remove it because he had no more to say, she had turned to him and with a kind of terrifying groan which startled him with its sort of grim desperate quality, had practically flung herself upon him and kissed him passionately on the mouth. He had barely had time to get his hand out of the way. With his ears still buzzing from the way his heart had leaped, and yet with a rising sense of triumph, he tried as best he could to get his arms around her comfortingly and returned her kiss. For the moment, he did not even care that they were parked under the streetlight.