Some Came Running

by James Jones

  One day when just the two of them were sitting alone in the kitchen, talking over how their poker percentages were still dropping, ’Bama suddenly began to talk about himself. Most probably it was talking about the money that did it. (They were at the place now, ’Bama had said, where it was nearly fifty-fifty: They were only winning slightly more than they were losing.) And it was perhaps this that started him to talking about his own finances. Anyway, he suddenly launched into how he was going to leave everything after his death. At first, he was very cool about it.

  “The farm’s all in Ruth’s name anyway, you see,” ’Bama said in that cold, precise voice that was always him at his best. “She’ll have the four hundred acres, and both houses, and all the stock; and what’s more, she’ll know how to take care of it. That’s what she likes. So her and the kids, and Clint and Murray and the others, will all be more than adequately taken care of. In addition to that,” he said, “there’s a good bit of cash there, already in her name. About thirty-five percent of everything I’ve won in the last three years since I got out of service, Ahve turned over to her. She’ll—” his voice wavered a moment, and he paused, “she’ll be a really wealthy widow. She’ll be able to marry again, and just about pick her own choice, with all that.” Again, suddenly, his voice wavered, and he drew a deep breath. And Dave sat helplessly and watched him bat his eyes. ’Bama, iron ’Bama, was actually blinking tears back out of his eyes! And it embarrassed Dave. “She’ll—” he said, “she’ll—be worth sixty or seventy thousand, all told. There’ll be enough to send all three kids to college if they want to go. And, what’s more important, all that’s in her name. No matter what happens to me, or how much I might happen to throw away, I would never be able to touch that. No matter how I—” This time, he could not blink fast enough, and the tears threatened to overflow. “No matter how I fall apart. No matter how I crap up or what happens to me.” ’Bama blinked and swallowed heavily and his lower lip was trembling. He was looking over Dave’s head at the wall. “So—that’s—all taken care of,” he said, his voice going up to a higher pitch on the last word. And two big, wet tears ran out of his eyes and down his face, slowly, almost hesitantly, as if—Dave thought—they were breaking new ground where no trail had ever gone before.

  Dave did not know what to say. Embarrassedly, he merely sat, trying desperately to keep his face from screwing itself up with what he felt.

  “I don’t know what’s gettin into me,” ’Bama said, more calmly; “I’m skitterish as a damn heifer anymore.” He wiped his face off with his hand. “Now,” he said and cleared his throat. “About you. I can let you have five thousand any time you want it, Dave.”

  “What the hell would I want your money for?” Dave cried. “You ain’t going to die tomorrow! That doctor said five or ten years, for Christ’s sake! And Doc Mitchell said maybe even longer!”

  “Well, you may wind up needin it,” ’Bama said, and again his voice quavered. “And any time you want to break up housekeepin here, it’s perfectly all right with me. I’ll understand.”

  “What the hell would I want to do that for!” Dave cried.

  “Well, you probly will, before long,” ’Bama said. “And I just want you to know it’s okay with me.” He sounded as if he was going to go on, but then he stopped. He looked down to where his glass of whiskey sat as if for a moment he didn’t know what it was. Then, suddenly, he picked it up and drained it and holding the glass drew his arm back like a pitcher about to uncork his fast ball.

  Don’t do it! Dave wanted to shout: You’ll regret it! You’ll be ashamed you did afterwards! But he couldn’t say anything, he could only sit and look. What right had he to say anything?

  There was that seemingly timeless pause, but which was really only a split moment, and then ’Bama threw and the glass struck the wall above the sink and shattered and ’Bama put his head down on the table, the pearl semi-western hat pushed back to expose that widow’s peak of his.

  “Why?” he said brokenly—saying the words that Dave had somehow known he was going to use: “Why does it have to be me? Why did it have to happen to me!”

  Dave did not know what to say. Embarrassed for him, aware with an almost physical pain of how much ’Bama would detest himself later for it, he could only sit and look. The iron man was broken, and he did not want the iron man to be broken. Out of everything, that was the one thing Dave had hung onto—hung onto for so long now that it seemed it had been there all his life. And now the iron man was broken.

  “Why me?” ’Bama said, weepingly, rolling his head back and forth on his arms. “Why me?”

  Dave got up quietly and went and began to pick the glass up out of the sink. He was ashamed inside himself, and he knew ’Bama would be ashamed later on that he Dave had been there. He wished somehow he could just shrink down into the floor, and just not be there for ’Bama to see when he looked back up.

  But when he turned back from the sink, ’Bama had already raised his head. He had pulled the hat so low Dave could not see his eyes, and under the brim he was wiping them with his hand.

  “I’m goin down to the farm,” ’Bama said, “for a few days,” and pushed himself up from the table.

  Dave for a moment did not say anything. “Why don’t you give up the drinking?” he said softly.

  “No!” ’Bama said from the door into the hall. “I don’t want to! There’s little enough damned pleasure in a man’s life as it is!” He turned and went on upstairs.

  “It’s not too late to stop,” Dave said after him.

  ’Bama did not answer him, but when he came back down, carrying his little diabetes cabinet, he stopped by the back door out to the garage. His hat was still pulled down low, and beneath its shadow he wore that wormwood-bitter grin. “Sure,” he sneered, “I could give up drinkin, and give up smokin, and go down to the farm and live and keep regular hours and a regular diet. I might live for twenty, thirty years like that. And what would I be? I’d be bored to death, and I’d be Ruth Dillert’s invalid husband.”

  “Ruth wouldn’t mind,” Dave said.

  “Yore damn right she wouldn’t mind! She’d love it,” ’Bama sneered. “My life ain’t never been like that, and it ain’t never going to be.”

  “That’s only pride,” Dave said.

  “Well, if it’s pride, it’s all I got,” ’Bama said. “By God, I’m goin to keep it.”

  Dave did not answer, and still the big man lingered by the door. “Listen—” he said.

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Dave said, and shook his head.

  “Thanks,” ’Bama said. He went on outside to the Packard.

  Dave listened as he got in the car and slammed the door and started the motor and raced it viciously. The ’Bama he had known a year ago would never ever have done that: raced his motor. And the ’Bama he had known a year ago would never have descended to asking him not to say anything; he would have known automatically that he wouldn’t say anything. Outside the car drove off, and Dave had another drink and went to bed.

  But perhaps the biggest evidence of the change in ’Bama was what happened with Doris Fredric on Easter Day. Doris was still coming down to the house, and still trying in her strange way to bind to her—by ties of love, he thought, heh-heh—the house and everyone who came to it. She was not succeeding nearly so well since ’Bama had set her down that time with the Terre Haute woman; but she was still trying although not as openly. It seemed that—to Dave’s imagination, at any rate—there was some psychological fascination for her in the place and all of them in it and the challenge she had set herself of dominating all of them. Ginnie as well as all of the other girls, were already her willing slaves. And Dave was convinced, from the half-resentful, half-smug way they treated her, that she had already slept with both Dewey and Hubie. Wally he was not sure about. But as things began to go bad for everybody at the house, Doris Fredric seemed to blossom and grow more beautiful and virginal every day. She had nothing to do with any of the troubles, of cours
e, but it was as if in some secret way she was nevertheless taking to herself all the credit for them anyway. She did not know, of course, anything about ’Bama’s diabetes, but she knew just as everybody else that something had happened to ’Bama after the shooting scrape in Indianapolis. It was almost, Dave thought maliciously, as if she had elected herself to the honor of the responsibility for that tragedy also—sweetly, and demurely, in her virginal way. She was, apparently, seeing herself more and more and more in the role of the femme fatale.

  ’Bama had gone down to the farm for Easter. The Saturday night before, Dave and he had played poker until after three at the Woodmen’s Lodge, and when they got home, he had unloaded Dave and loaded up his little diabetic’s cabinet and started right then for the farm. He might stay a week, he said. However, he came right back the same day. Sunday evening, Easter Day, he came storming into the house with his face black and lowering with rage.

  Almost everybody was at the house, celebrating Easter in appropriate fashion, i.e., getting drunk. Doris, however, did not happen to be there. ’Bama looked around for her and then drew Dave off by himself. Doris had been down to the farm, seeing Ruth.

  “My God,” Dave said, “did she—”

  No, no. Nothing like that. She was too smart for that. And she would never admit that about herself anyway. But he, ’Bama, was onto her game. She was one of those broads who couldn’t stand prosperity; always had to have a fight going. What had happened, apparently, was that she had gone down there Saturday morning to buy some eggs. She had told Ruth she was going to have a big egg-hunt party for her freshman English class. She and her “kiddies” were going to color them and then hide them and have a party Sunday morning, after dawn services. Ruth thought she was just simply wonderful. Such a sweet girl. Doris had spent half the afternoon sitting talking with her and Clint’s wife. She was going to come back next week for some chickens, and she was going to start buying all her butter and buttermilk and fresh vegetables from Ruth because she thought she had a simply wonderful place down there. Apparently, it had turned into a regular mutual admiration society. Wonderful eggs. Wonderful chickens. Blah, blah, blah. And now get this: Didn’t she have any turkeys? She didn’t? Well, hadn’t she ever thought of getting in some turkeys and raising them? Ruth was high as a kite over the idea. Maybe she could even raise domestic pheasants, too, Doris had suggested. And she would come down next week and they could discuss it. She might even be willing to put some money in herself. Ruth had told him all about it this morning, as excited as could be over it.

  “Well, what did you tell her?” Dave said.

  He had told Ruth that Doris Fredric was probably the biggest whore in Parkman, and that she had better stay away from her. But you know Ruth; she’s not very bright. Ruth hadn’t believed him, and had been shocked.

  “What do you think her game is?” Dave said. “Doris’s?”

  “How the hell do I know?” ’Bama said blackly. “I just know she’s out for trouble. Maybe she’s just doin it to upset me. Or maybe she wants to cause trouble between me and Ruth. Or maybe there’s something in her that makes her think it would be amusing to be the best friend and business associate to the wife of the man she’s rompin, behind the wife’s back. I don’t know what she has in mind. But whatever it is, it’s trouble. And I mean to stop it. The smug little bitch.”

  “How’re you going to stop her going down there just to buy produce?”

  “I’ll stop her,” ’Bama promised. He raged nervously back and forth across the room. “That no-good whorish smug rich little bitch. I always knew she was a bum.” He turned and stared at Dave narrow-eyed. “Come on, let’s go downstairs and have a drink. I want to be there when she comes.”

  “Maybe she won’t show up?”

  “She’ll show up,” ’Bama said. “She wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  The party was at its full height when she did show up; the wit and liquor were flowing freely, everybody was laughing drunkenly and hysterically. Everybody, that is, except ’Bama. ’Bama sat by himself, scowling blackly and drinking drink after drink, or he paced back and forth and from one room to another skittishly.

  “That farm is the only damned thing I’ve got left in the world anymore,” he told Dave once. “The only place to go. And nobody is goin to crap that up for me. Not even if I have to kill them.” He was certainly not the cool, mathematical, methodical ’Bama who would have handled the problem of old.

  Doris came in looking her usual calm, beautiful self: petite, beautifully and expensively dressed, her small head with its old-cherrywood-colored hair held high above the long slender neck, and oh, so very virginal looking. Dave happened to be standing against the kitchen sink when she came in without knocking, and so had a ringside seat for everything. Looking at her as she came in (she went straight to one of the kitchen chairs and laid her coat across its back herself familiarly), he had to admit ruefully that she was really beautiful. If you did not count that slight puffiness under the eyes, she was really exquisite. She had—he was sure of it—actually become more beautiful lately, as things at the house had gone from bad to worse.

  Dewey was in the kitchen also, standing at the bar, alongside Dave leaning against the sink; the two of them had been talking about—of all things—the Army. There was on Dewey’s face that curiously sly, smug look—also half-resentful—as from behind that warped, ugly nose he looked out at Doris.

  Doris herself looked happier than Dave could ever remember having seen her look. As she turned from laying down her coat she smiled at both of them, almost maternally. But that was as far as she got. Because that was when ’Bama came storming in through the dining room door, his face black and ominous. It was as if he knew by some sixth sense that she had finally come in, or else had kept an ear peeled for the sound of the back door opening and closing.

  “Hello, sweetie pie,” Doris said, smiling her magnanimous, assured smile.

  “Sweetie pie, hell!” ’Bama said loudly. And everything became still in the other part of the house—excepting only the oblivious radio—and everybody began to come out immediately to the kitchen to see what was going on. Almost all the gang was there—everybody, including even Rosalie, except for Wally Dennis, and they came in at both doors, quietly, almost before ’Bama could even get his next sentence out: “What were you doin down at my farm?”

  Doris looked surprised, as if she had not expected this violent—and quick—a reaction to her gambit, and her baby blue eyes widened innocently, but at the same time with almost greedy little glints in them.

  “Why, darling!” she smiled. “I only went down there to get some eggs. Was there something wrong with that?” To Dave, it was incredible how self-assured she could remain in the face of ’Bama’s anger. He certainly couldn’t have.

  “Yore damn right there was!” the tall man cried. “And you know it!”

  Doris beamed at him, looking up at him demurely. “Why, ’Bama! You’re upset! I had no idea I would upset you like that, just by going down to your farm.” To Dave, it was clear she thought she had him. Never before had ’Bama ever lost his poise with her.

  “Yore not to go down there anymore,” ’Bama said.

  Doris’s smile was still virginally demure, but there was just a trace of stiffness in it now. “Well, I really don’t see how you can stop me. Why aren’t I to go down?” she smiled, demurely virginal. Dave could have punched her in the head himself.

  “I’ll tell you why,” ’Bama said through clenched teeth. “Because if you do, I’ll kill you. If I ever find out that you’ve gone down there again, I’ll kill you. Believe me.”

  Doris looked startled as if she had not heard right. Probably nobody had ever said those words to her before. She looked up at ’Bama wide-eyed, tried for a moment to control her face, and then for the first time since he had met her, anyway, Dave saw her role break down. Open fear came onto her face. She was scared. She believed him; and before this reality, her whole facade broke down. And she
suddenly looked like a little girl, of eight or nine, who has done something she was specifically told not to do, and has been caught in the act, scared and guilty.

  And while she stood, looking at him like that, ’Bama, his eyes narrowed murderously, reached out and slapped her in the face.

  It very nearly knocked her down. Her head snapping around to the side, she only kept her balance by wildly flailing her arms. For Doris Fredric is was a most undignified movement, and Dave was forced to admit he enjoyed it exceedingly.

  “You didn’t have to hit her,” Dewey said, and ’Bama swung around on him, his eyes blazing.

  “You want a fight?” he snarled. “You want a real fight, Dewey?”

  “No,” Dewey said softly. “No, I don’t want to fight with you, ’Bama.” Then he raised his eyes. “But I think I could whip you,” his pride made him add.

  “Then keep yore nose out,” ’Bama said, ignoring the last, and swung back around on Doris, who was standing with her hand on her face disbelievingly. “As for you, you get out. And don’t come back around here anymore. If you do, I’ll boot you right out down the steps. And don’t you ever go back down to my farm. Because if you do, I’ll kill you. I ain’t got very much to lose anyway. So you remembeh what Ah said.

  “Now git!”

  Keeping her widened blue eyes on him, Doris walked around him to where her coat was. She picked it up and came back around him, walking backwards. At the door, feeling it behind her, she paused, still looking at him, then she backed on out.

  And so another “love affair” was ended, Dave thought wryly; and another ant carried out another grain of wheat.