Some Came Running

by James Jones

  But he learned a lot more about her from Edith. Jane was just about as worthless at her own house as she was at his. She made a kind of token gesture of cleaning it up, but if any real cleaning was ever done it was Edith who did it. Janie would fix supper for herself and John in the evening, and not do too good of a job at doing that, and the rest of the time she just lay around the house, weak, always worn out. She seemed to eat almost nothing anymore, Edith said. It was no wonder she lost so much weight. And yet she refused to go to any doctor, and just as stubbornly maintained there wasn’t anything wrong with her, and said she was just dieting to lose weight. Edith could not understand it.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Edith would say to him. “I’ll say something about her health, and she’ll just look at me with that old gravelly grin and say there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  She did not even go out any more at nights to Smitty’s, Edith said; and Edith, who had once been embarrassed by her always sitting there in the corner booth with the old men and had wished something would happen to make her stop doing it, now wished only that she could see her sitting there again, because it would mean she was feeling all right again. Once, Edith told him, she had got Doc Cost to come out to the house and take her by surprise to look her over; but Jane had refused to be examined. She had allowed him to peer down her throat and thump her chest, but she would not go out to his hospital. Doc Cost had tried to josh her into coming in with him then, but she had refused. She had agreed she might come in some time later and let him look her over, but then she had never gone. Doc had told Edith privately that she ought to get her down there and let him examine her. But Edith could not get her to go. Jane did not even drink beer anymore, or only a bottle now and then. It was frightening, she would say, to see this woman who had once been so big and strong as a bull, looking so fragile and thin that the first strong wind might blow her completely away. Sometimes Frank got almost more than he could take, about Jane. It seemed sometimes that that was the only thing he heard from Edith anymore. And anyway, he did not like to talk about sick people and death. It disturbed him, because it made him think about himself dying someday, and also because it made him feel so helpless because he couldn’t do anything for.

  But as if that were not enough, it had gotten to the place now, in May, after the wedding, that Edith was getting more and more reluctant to go out with him. She was afraid that something might happen to Janie while she was gone. Maybe she might collapse, or even die, and there would be nobody there to help her. John would be totally helpless, himself.

  “I simply don’t know what I’d do,” Edith would say, “if she died when I wasn’t there to maybe help her.” She would be almost weeping, and there was nothing Frank could do to comfort her. “I’ve treated her so terribly so many times,” she’d say.

  “Oh, come on now,” he would say, trying not to sound irritable. “She’s not going to die. Not for a long time anyway.”

  “I don’t know,” Edith would say. “Nobody knows. How can they know, when she won’t even go to a doctor? All I know is that she looks bad, horribly bad.”

  And so it came about that Edith started breaking dates with him. Not breaking them exactly; she would just simply come to him when nobody was around at the store and tell him that she could not go out tonight. That had been going on since before Dawnie’s wedding, and was still going on when Wally Dennis came by the store to say goodby on his way to the Army, and it kept on going on after that right on into May. And a month and more of that was almost more than any guy could stand. But there was more besides that to disturb Frank. Ever since that night back in January when he had first educated her into the subtle arts of lovemaking, it seemed to him that Edith had been drawing more and more away from him in sex. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on. It was more just a sort of feeling. She always went to bed with him when they did go out, but it was as if—as if—well, the only way he could say it was that she didn’t like it. She did it, but she didn’t like it. And well, hell, what was the point in having sex with somebody if they didn’t like it? Hell, the whole point of sex was to get them to like it, as much as you liked it. Otherwise, what the hell did you have? Somebody submitting.

  And it was this—even more than the way she was acting about Jane—that had made Frank not quite as sure of Edith’s love as he had once been, that day when Wally Dennis had come into the store to say goodby.

  And it didn’t seem to be getting a damn bit better after that, either.

  But if he was inclined to be a little unhappy over Edith, he could easily forget it in the development of the bypass, and in the development of young Walter. The two of them, between them, not only kept him happy, they kept him occupied most of the time, too.

  The bypass itself was fast approaching completion. The whole look of the land, out there, was changed now and it was hard to even remember what it had once looked like. The long raw-clay ribbon of the bypass grade swept up in a massive curve to the junction from the east, then curved on off beyond it to the west, making a distinct dividing line between the town side on the south and the countryside on the north. The stretch of good weather back in January and February had lasted long enough to complete all the major grading work. March and most of April had been rainy. But now in May, the weather had turned off good, and the minor grading work was being rushed to completion. Already nameless men with tractors were out along the right-of-way sowing ryegrass on the raw dirt. On the east side of the junction, the steel forms to contain the concrete were already in place nearly all the way to Route 1, and on the west side, they were laying more of them in every day, approaching the junction from the west. If the weather held good till the end of May, they said, they would begin pouring around the last week in May. Already the big concrete-pouring machines had been moved in, one at either end of the bypass. These machines would pour the whole thing in less than a week. And since they would be using that new fast-setting concrete, a week or so after it was poured, the road would be ready to use. All that would be left would be to paint the black line down the center and grade dirt up against the raw edges of the concrete after the forms were removed. Almost certainly by the middle of June, if not before, the new bypass around Parkman would be open.

  And suddenly, as if seeing for the first time in the as-yet-empty concrete forms the form of the road that would be laid down, the town began to wake up to the fact that it was going to have a bypass; and inquiries, from real estate dealers and would-be speculators, men like Tony Wernz IV and Harry Shotridge and Judge Deacon, began to be circulated about as to such and such a business site or this or that piece of ground. Most of the inquiries wound up at Frank Hirsh. It was gradually discovered that Frank Hirsh had title to a good three-fourths of the potential business sites along the bypass; and had, in fact, had title to them for some time before their imaginations started working. Frank himself, of course, could not have been happier. From the moment this bit of knowledge got bruited about among the “insiders,” Frank had more telephone calls and requests for business appointments than he could possibly handle and was spending less time at the store than he had ever done. It was a damned good thing that he had had the foresight to make Al Lowe manager of it. About the only time he spent at the store now was to pick up lists of his phone calls, make the calls, and then beat it out to another bunch of appointments. Since there was not room enough in the store’s little office, which he shared with Al, to have any privacy, he made all his appointments to be in the other people’s offices—or else in the Elks Grille or out at the Country Club—and he was on the go all the time. At the very first, he had contemplated taking offices somewhere around the square; but now, some odd quirk of pride and amusement made him decide against this: It looked so strange to everyone to find that the man who held the real key to any business to be done on the bypass did not even have offices to do it in. He could read it in their faces. And it tickled Frank’s fancy to continue.

  A few of them, notably Ha
rry Shotridge (who was now his daughter’s father-in-law), and Tony Wernz (who could not conceive of anyone in Parkman not leaping at the chance to make a deal with Tony Wernz), approached him about putting up capital to develop his holdings. Frank could only tell them, politely, what he told everybody else: He already had partners; he did not need any capital. Frank’s stock in Parkman rose even higher, immediately; and he merely sat back and watched it complacently. It was very noticeable in the personal invitations both he and Agnes began to get, to dinners, to parties, to private dances, all of them from people and to homes which they had both seen very little of heretofore.

  The scene with Old Judge Deacon was a particularly pleasing one, for Frank. Frank had learned an awful lot about politeness and aplomb up in Springfield from the Greek and Clark’s father-in-law; and he had been putting it to good use the last couple of weeks since the calls started. Judge Deacon, as a matter of fact, had called him three times before Frank was able to call him back. And it wasn’t entirely a put-on, either; it was the truth. When he finally did get over to the judge’s office, he could only stay a short while because he had another appointment—with Elias Crowder, of Crowder & Scott.

  The judge took it in pretty good grace, he had to say that for him. Much better than Frank had thought he would. He had been caught completely short, and he knew it. Not very hopefully, but more as a gesture of covering all possibilities, he, too, offered to put up capital if Frank needed it. And Frank explained to him, politely, just as he had the others, about his wealthy partners. The judge did not try to pump him about his partners, but it was plain he would have liked to know who they were. All he said was, thinly, that he assumed they were from out of town—to which Frank merely said nothing. When he had envisioned this scene a long time ago, Frank had imagined it as a verbal knock-down-and-drag-out, a no-holds-barred double barrage of insults. But there was, in fact, very little insulting this time on the judge’s part—no more than he was just naturally addicted to by his nature.

  Just before he left, the judge asked him if he still intended to stay on with them at the Cray County Bank; or did he want to sell out those holdings he had and put them on his new business.

  “Well, I might as well stay in the bank,” Frank said. “It’s all good solid investments. But of course,” he added, “I won’t be able to devote all the time to it that I used to, you know.”

  “No, I suppose not,” the judge said. Then he grinned his fat evil beady-eyed grin. “Well, you really pulled one off, Frankie boy.”

  It was a minor triumph, to have such a remark as that from Judge Deacon. And it seemed to Frank that his cup had finally runneth over. “Why, thanks, Judge,” he said. “I guess I just happened to think of it before anybody else did, is all.”

  The judge merely stared at him, and said nothing more except goodby.

  It was strange, and it was evident almost every place he went, what a sought-after person he had become in Parkman in the past couple of weeks. At least, among the town’s elite. The lower elements, the ordinary oafs with their ordinary businesses, hadn’t even waked up to what had gone on with the bypass yet. But they would, eventually. He told nobody anything about the Parkman Village Shopping Center. Time enough when it started going up. Then, by God, everybody would be aware of what was going on with the bypass.

  But in spite of all the sudden new interest in him, Frank did not let them interfere with his time with Walter. Nothing encroached on it. Back in February, when they had first got him, Frank had started taking him to all the Parkman High and Parkman College home basketball games. They had not missed a single home game of either the high school or the college; and of the Parkman High games away from home, they missed only one. They would drive forty, and fifty, and even sixty miles sometimes, to see them play up and down the Wabash Valley League. The college’s games away from home, played at even greater distances, they saw more than half of them. And anyway, as Frank figured, it would be the high school where Walter would be going to school first—and as far as that went, probably would never attend Parkman College at all. Next fall, he planned to take him up to Champaign to see the Illinois home football games, because it would probably be there that he would be going to school someday. And then later, as the spring came on and the basketball season faded, Frank started taking him to the track meets.

  Walter liked basketball all right, and thought he would like to play, but it soon became apparent that he liked track much better. He would, he stated, much prefer being a runner to anything. Preferably a long-distance runner. Frank, who was mostly a football and basketball fan, had no idea why long-distance running would appeal to Walter so much, but it was clearly evident that it did. Whenever the mile was run at a meet they attended, Walter would sit forward tensely in his seat and grip his program, and his quick bright eyes would widen in fascination, and he would remain that way until the mile was run, when he would sit back looking emotionally exhausted. Frank didn’t know what to make of it, but if Walter wanted to be a runner, by God, a runner he would be; and Frank began to read up on cross-country and its rules and its season, which came in the fall.

  Walter liked baseball, too, though not as well as running. And while Parkman College did not have a very good team (the high school had none), Frank and he nevertheless went religiously to all the home games as the spring came on, and Frank planned on taking him to see several big league games during the summer in St Louis or Chicago.

  But probably most of all, more even than the sports, the thing that thrilled Frank most about Walter was the first time he took him out to see the bypass, and showed him the land they owned, he and his partners. It was good weather and just at the time when they were finishing putting in the steel forms for the pouring of the concrete, and Frank drove him all around and showed him the various places. Walter sat and watched attentively, while Frank pointed out the two corners which he and his partners owned and why they were more valuable than the other places. As soon as Frank was done explaining, Walter had pointed at the two opposite corners, the bare one and the one where the house of the dairy farmer Allis now stood, and asked who owned those two, and would not someone be able to build filling stations on them that would take business away from Frank’s side. He had grasped the whole principle immediately! Frank could not remember when he had felt so positively thrilled. So he had had to go ahead and explain about that part of the deal, too: how Allis had insisted on selling his north plot to the state because that would cut his land in two.

  “But that was silly!” Walter said.

  “It sure was,” Frank grinned; and then he had explained that as for the fourth corner, the one where Allis’s house now stood, it would probably never be any competition to them mainly because Allis would probably never want to sell his dairy farm; however, he conceded, it might happen that at some time in the future, Allis might sell, and that someone might build there to compete with them.

  “Then the thing to do would be to buy it first, before anybody else got it,” Walter said.

  “Yes; dependin of course on whether you could get it first, and whether it would cost you more money than buyin it would be worth.”

  Walter nodded solemnly.

  But the thing that fascinated him the most about the bypass was all the big road-building equipment. He could sit by the hour in utter silence and watch them work. One evening after the road men had quit work, Frank took him to get a closer look at them. They walked up and down the highway apron and inspected the sheeps-foot rollers and the huge cats and the heavy graders and earthmovers, and looked at all of them for over an hour and a half and were late getting home for supper. Walter did not want to climb up on the seats and hold the steering wheel and pretend he was driving, like you’d think a small boy would, he wanted to look at the workings and the motors. He wanted to find out what each mechanism was, and what it did, and how did you work that. Frank could only tell him a very little about them. But after that, whenever Walter asked for something—which was very
rarely (“they told us at the orphanage never to ask our new parents for things,” he said), that was what he asked for: to go out to the bypass and look at the graders.

  Frank scouted around in Terre Haute until he found a place which sold the miniature scale models of the LeTourneau road-building equipment, and bought Walter a full set of them. Walter would play with them by the hour. Frank, thinking he would make a big treat for him, got out hammer and nails and boards for the first time in years and built him a sandpile in the backyard to play with them in; but after Walter played in it a few times, he came to Frank—rather hesitantly—and explained that it did not work good. As soon as the wet sand dried out, it would crumble apart and ruin the roads he had built, and it was his suggestion that most of the sand be removed and replaced with regular dirt, which could be mixed with the remaining sand. So Frank had this done. After that, Walter would play with his LeTourneau models in the sand- or rather dirt-pile, making roads, grading them with his graders, rolling them with his sheeps-foot rollers, until they hardened into reasonably solid structures, and then would run his small cars on them until he tired of that particular road layout, and would tear it up and construct himself another. He was going to be a model-railroad-man sure as hell, Frank could tell.

  And Frank himself liked to sit out there with him in the evenings, now that it was warm, with a good stiff drink and the evening paper. Sometimes when he did so, tears would actually almost come in his eyes, and he would have to hide them behind the paper. This was something he had dreamed of almost all his life, it seemed. His own son, playing in the yard, himself sitting there with him, protectively, ready to be called on if needed. He had always wanted this. A daughter was fine, but your own son, who would carry on your own name— Well, there just wasn’t anything like it. He still halfway wished they had changed his name to Franklin. He would have got used to it soon enough.