So Many Doors

by Oakley Hall

  His eyes were blind. He had never known he could hate like this. He had never known rage and madness and somehow terror like this. He knelt and closed the cases on the tumbled clothes, and cinched them fast with the worn leather straps. Carrying them he walked heavily through the kitchen and down the back stairs. He dropped them in the middle of the drive. There was no movement, no sound, from where the squat darkness of the shed loomed, but it was now too dark to see.

  He strode back into the kitchen. Mary looked at him enquiringly, then her black eyes knew. Juan sat at the table, staring at his half-emptied plate in carefully arrested motion. A hoarse, unfamiliar voice said, “Put my dinner on the table!”

  Mary brought his plate and put it down between the knife and fork that marked his place. Half-rising, he reached across the table and pushed together the other knife, fork and spoon, and pushed them toward her. He saw the fat brown hand pick them up.

  He heard Ward’s car start up, stop. When it drove past he didn’t look up from his plate. Frozen in bitterness and hate like a block of ice he thought with a kind of brutal triumph that after supper he would go over and tell Denton.

  And he did. And after that he never spoke to Denton again, trying to drive his daughter from his mind as he had driven her from his house. For nine empty, wasted years he had tried, and then one afternoon even the emptiness was gone, when her lawyer telephoned from Bakersfield to tell him she was dead.

  Part II

  BEN

  1

  All his life, Ben Proctor had tried to understand people. He had always tried to understand why they were the way they were, what made them that way, and what they thought, and he believed he understood people better than most. Growing up, becoming a man, in a period when there was much anger and little understanding, he knew he had been seldom angry, and that he had mostly understood. He knew this quality was the reason he had the job he had, and was the reason he was good at his job.

  When he had been elected general secretary of the local, he had known it was because everybody liked him. At first he had been hesitant to accept the post, because he was not sure of himself. He knew himself too well. He believed he was a better than fair grader operator, but he did not think he was qualified for union work.

  He had succeeded, however. The members instinctively trusted him; in a way, he was still one of them, and they knew he was doing his job as one of them. It was possible that he might rise to be president of the local, if anything ever happened to Johnny Keefe, which was not likely, but he knew it was impossible that he ever rise further than that, and he even doubted that he could make good in the presidency. He did not have the personal drive. He was not pushing or hard-boiled enough. It was too easy for him to see the other fellow’s side of a matter; it was impossible for him not to see the other side, and seeing it, he must consider it.

  When Slim Farley had sent him the clippings from the San Diego paper, he had been so profoundly shocked that for a time he could not breathe. He had set out to get drunk. He had stayed drunk and had not come to the office for two days, and he had immediately gone to look for Harry and Push. He had new friends now, but Harry and Push had been his friends in the years when he was seeing a lot of Jack Ward and V. Next to Jack, he had always counted them his best friends, and he had sought them out.

  He was ashamed now that he had felt he had to get drunk and that, drunk, he had insisted upon talking about Jack. He had not wanted to talk about Jack, but he had, and of course they had talked to Red Young, too. For the first time he had felt that he was an outsider, that Harry, who was a cat-and-carryall operator, and Push, who was a grade foreman, were on one side of some kind of fence, and he, Ben, who worked for the union, was on another, and all they had in common now was that years before they had all been cat skinners working on the same jobs. Their conversation had been restrained, almost apologetic, and he remembered that he had done most of the talking himself, drunkenly. Push and Harry had not said much. They had seemed to know how he felt, and they had been careful not to say anything against Jack. And he supposed they must have known how he felt about V. With embarrassment he remembered that it was he who had done all the talking about Jack and V. Push and Harry had tried gently to confine the conversation to reminiscing about Red Young.

  Now he was sitting in his swivel chair, hunched forward with his elbows on the desk, his mind crowded with Jack Ward. A warm wind came in the open window behind him and ruffled the papers on his desk and turned cold the sweat under his arms. He was freshly shaved, he had had a Turkish bath, he had been told off by Johnny Keefe, and he was trying to focus his thoughts on the lists of dues delinquents he held in his sweating hands. But he could not. He was thinking about Jack.

  He was surprised it was not V who tormented him, but he knew he had first to try to understand Jack. He knew too that this was impossible, because he had not seen Jack since the war, and Jack must have changed. But his mind would not let it alone, and finally he surrendered and tossed the blurred lists of names on the carbon-smudged flimsies into his in-basket.

  The chair squeaked as he swung around and leaned back. He clasped his hands behind his head, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the black-bright street outside his window, remembering the CCC camp where he had first met Jack.

  2

  He had not liked Jack at first. He had already been in the CCC almost a year when Jack joined. Jack had been immediately accepted into the circle of oldtimers, like Ralph Mogle and Campanelli, from which Ben was still excluded. But they had been in the same tent once, when they were up in the mountains fighting a fire. Ben had brought a stack of Fighting Aces magazines with him and Jack borrowed them to read at night. They were both still in their teens then and they talked together about the airplane fighting in the late war, about Eddie Rickenbacker and Raoul Lufberry and von Richthofen’s Flying Circus, and Jack bragged a little about how Mogle was teaching him to run the bulldozer.

  They were camped in their squad tents in a little high valley, the tents lined up in three rows behind a stone cabin, over the door of which hung a sign that said “U. S. Forest Service.” The cabin stood at one end of a rumbling wooden bridge and all along the road and up the sides of the mountain the trees were burned. A few had fallen but most of them still stood upright, without branches, like tall, charred poles. The underbrush was burned into a low tangled black carpet, and soot hung heavily in the air.

  Ben walked slowly along the road with his shovel over his shoulder looking for smouldering wood. When he found any he broke it up with the shovel and smothered it with dirt—sometimes a fallen log would smoulder for days before it blazed up. He was hot, dirty and tired, and the soot in the air itched on his sweating skin, around his collar and under his belt. He had walked the mile up and down the road above the foresters’ shack three times since lunch, and he had buried all the embers he could find. Here and there on the slope above the road a tree was still burning but these had been isolated, the underbrush cleared away in a wide circle around them.

  As he rounded a bend in the road, Ben came upon Jack sitting on a charred gasoline can, scraping his shovel back and forth across the soot-covered surface of the road. “Hi, Ben,” he called.

  “Hi,” Ben replied, squatting beside him and bracing himself on his shovel. Jack was smoking, holding the cigarette cupped in his hand. “How’s it going?” Ben asked.

  Jack rolled his eyes and groaned. “Oh, Christ, I’m shot. This gets old after a while.”

  Ben grinned, wiping his hands one after the other on his pants’ legs. “When do you suppose we’re going to haul out of here?” he asked.

  “Beats hell out of me. We pull out of here it’s just to go out on another one. Big bastard going up by Yosemite, I hear.”

  “Yeah, I heard that too,” Ben said. When they were silent, everything was silent; it was necessary to listen to hear the distant clink of shovels and from somewhere up on the mountain, the steady cough of Mogle’s bulldozer.

  Jack finished his ci
garette, snubbed it on his shoe, shredded the butt and threw the paper over his shoulder. He jerked his head toward the sound of the dozer. “Boy, that’s the life,” he said. “That’s a white man’s job. To hell with this rooting around with a shovel.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. He sat down on the ground, straightened his leg out and rubbed the knee. It still got sore if he walked too much. Through the damp, taut cloth that covered the inside of his knee, he could feel the long, jagged, tucked and bunched scar. He ran his fingers gently along its length.

  “You should have come up with me this morning,” Jack said. “He would have let you run it.”

  “Aw, I don’t know him. I guess I don’t like him very well. He talks too much.”

  Jack glanced at him quickly and grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. He’s the greatest cat skinner and woman skinner there ever was. Just let him get started telling you about it, unh?”

  “I guess it’s kind of all he’s got.”

  Jack frowned. “Sure,” he said finally. “He gripes me too, but what the hell, it’s a good chance to learn to run a dozer. That bastard Campanelli wouldn’t ever let anybody run his.”

  Ben didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t want to swing this God damn thing the rest of my life,” Jack said. He pushed himself up with the help of his shovel, scratched his chest and stretched, yawning. “Hell,” he said. “Let’s get at it again, unh?”

  Ben nodded and rose, still massaging his knee with his hand. “You got a gal at home?” he asked, as they walked up the hill together.

  Jack shook his head. “Nope. Women give me a pain.” He screwed up his face and swung his shovel like a baseball bat at a charred bush. “You?” he said.

  “Well, kind of,” Ben said. “You know. We write all the time, but what’re you supposed to do about it? Can’t get married.”

  “To hell with getting married,” Jack said. “To hell with that. Slip it to her till you get sick of it, then check out.”

  “Aw, she’s not that kind, Jack.”

  “Stop it!”

  Ben halted abruptly. He felt the blood rush to his face. “I said she’s not, God damn it!”

  Jack looked surprised. “Okay, she’s not. Okay, she’s some new kind. Sorry! Jesus!”

  “You been talking to Mogle too much,” Ben said as they walked on, but he wasn’t angry anymore. He liked Jack, and he knew Jack liked him, and somehow, that day, they began to be friends.

  The next fall when Campanelli left the camp, Jack was assigned to his dozer. Jack began giving Ben lessons, and when Mogle quit to get married, Ben and Jack were the two bulldozer men, and as such had an important place in the CCC camp. Then, in March, Jack’s mother died of cancer, and Jack asked Ben if he would come to Lodi to the funeral. “I don’t think many people’re going to be there,” he said embarrassedly, without looking at Ben. “I’d kind of like to have you come along with me. If you’d want to.”

  So Ben got permission to go to Lodi with Jack. At the funeral were several old people, and Jack’s brother Sterling, a pimply faced Marine several years older than Jack, in blues and a swaybacked barracks cap. Afterward Ben and Jack and Sterling went out to get drunk, and the next day Jack and Ster sold Mrs. Ward’s lunch wagon for seven hundred dollars, split the money ceremoniously and Ster took the train back to San Francisco.

  That night Jack suggested they go to a hotel, have call girls sent up, his treat, and have a party. At first Ben hadn’t wanted to. He was ashamed for anyone to see his scarred leg and he had never been with a woman, but then he thought he might as well get it over with. So Jack bought a bottle of bourbon, rented two rooms in a shabby hotel with cracked yellow paper on the walls, and they had their party.

  Ben got drunk as quickly as he could and he didn’t remember what his girl looked like, except that she had frizzy, ginger-colored hair and white shaved legs, and once in the night when he woke up he had smelled her breath and it almost made him sick. In the morning when she left he pretended to be asleep.

  They had only been back at the CCC camp a short time when they heard about the Public Works jobs in Bakersfield. They left and took a room there together. Jack was hired to operate the bulldozer that pushed the carryalls scraping in the cut, Ben as a grease-monkey, and after a month or two the grade foreman had Ben take over the cat and tampers.

  When the job was finished they moved up the valley to Visalia for a while, then to Fresno, then Porterville, and back to Bakersfield again. In Bakersfield they lived in a run-down apartment house near the railroad yards. They were both just twenty-two then, and they talked a lot about what they had done and what they wanted to do, making a bargain that they would shut up and go to sleep when they heard the long, keening rattle of the milk train in the yards.

  For a while Ben was jealous of Jack; not because Jack was the better cat skinner, but because Jack was more successful with the girls they knew. Jack was tall, well-built, and, Ben supposed, handsome in a way. He had a hard, flip, confident manner with women, while Ben was quieter; and he was shorter and thinner than Jack, with thin brown hair and jug ears. After a while Jack settled down a little and did not brag so much about his conquests. It was then that he and Ben began to accept each other fully.

  Then V turned up. That was in the early summer of 1938. One night when Ben came home from the state highway job, she was alone in the room, sitting on the edge of Jack’s bed and looking very young and forlorn. Instantly Ben was sorry for her.

  3

  She sat on the edge of the bed watching him as he came in. He stopped just inside the door, pulling it closed behind him so that the doorknob punched him in the back and he had to take another step forward.

  She sat stiffly, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap. One corner of her mouth twitched, as though she wanted to smile but could not, and there was no lipstick on her mouth. On the bed beside her was an old leather suitcase, and another stood upright on the floor at her feet.

  “Where’s Jack?” Ben asked.

  “He said he was going out and get something to drink.” Her voice was young and frightened, and the smile she finally managed was frightened. She had been crying, he saw, and he wished he had stayed down at the Hitching Post, drinking beer with Harpy and Petey Willing and Red.

  “I’m Ben Proctor,” he said. “Jack’s roommate.”

  “Oh, he’s told me about you. I’m Vassilia Baird. Everybody calls me V, though.”

  “Okay, V,” Ben said. “Any friend of Jack’s.” He picked up an armful of clothes from the rickety straight chair, dropped them on his bed, and sat down facing her over the back of the chair. Blonde hair grew low on her forehead and curved inward almost to meet her eyebrows at the sides of her face. She hesitated when Ben offered her a cigarette, then took one; her fingernails were unpainted and cut short. Ben lit the cigarette for her and she drew on it intently and exhaled a huge cloud of smoke.

  “I haven’t been smoking very long,” she said. Her smile grew a little more sure of itself. Her brown eyes looked directly into his, seeming to demand he keep the conversation going.

  Ben jerked his head at the suitcases. “Leaving town, V?”

  Her eyes dropped. She shook her head. Ben said quickly, “Well, it’s sure a lousy night.”

  “Oh, is it?” V got up and walked to the window with quick, nervous steps. She stood gazing at the dark pane. Ben could see the reflection of her blouse, startlingly white in the mirror of the window. He looked her over, remembering what Jack had said: She’s cute as hell, and I don’t think she’s ever even seen a man before. And she’s really stacked. And she was: long legs and high breasts and just enough flesh around her hips. Ben watched the curve of her cheek as she rested her hands on the sill and stared out the window. Her face was very young. Jailbait, he said to himself, but it did not express what he was thinking. He wondered if Jack had slept with her yet. Somehow he knew Jack had, and he hated it, because she looked young and fresh, and she did not look
like that kind.

  “It isn’t very nice, is it?” V said. She came back to the bed and sat down again, resuming exactly the same position. “Is it going to rain, Ben?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He flicked ashes from his cigarette into the cuff of his pants. “I guess it will,” he said angrily.

  “What do you do, Ben?”

  “I run a cat. Like Jack.”

  “Are you working now?”

  “I’m working on the new highway. Down south of town.”

  “Have you known Jack a long time?”

  “Three or four years,” Ben said.

  Her smile was strengthened again, as though she were glad of this, and he knew that now she was going to ask questions about Jack. He tried to think of something to say so that she wouldn’t, but then he heard footsteps on the stairs, on the landing, the door opened and Jack came in, carrying a paper sack. Ben glanced at him quickly.

  “Hi,” Jack said. “What do you know, Ben?”

  “Not much.” He got to his feet and said, “Well, I guess I’ll go out and get some dinner.”

  “Stick around,” Jack said. “Have a drink.” He put the sack down on the table beside the washstand, and took from it a bottle of bourbon and a bottle of ginger ale. The empty sack toppled over and fell to the floor. Jack brought down the two glasses from the shelf, rinsed out the glass their toothbrushes stood in, half-filled the three with liquor and ginger ale and handed them around.

  Ben watched V watching Jack. Everything she felt was on her face for him to see. She was smiling, still sitting stiffly, but when Jack sat down beside her she stopped smiling and looked up at him. Ben turned his eyes to the window; his face felt frozen and stiff. In the railroad yards he could hear a string of freights sliding by, the yard engine going, “Huh-huh-huh.” The window was black and depthless, reflecting the ceiling light like a white, artificial moon.

  “Well, here’s to every damn thing,” Jack said. He raised his glass. Ben watched a strained expression come over V’s face; her throat worked as she took a drink, and he knew it was the first she had ever had. He felt the expression on his own face change slightly to become the same as hers. He saw her shudder, and then she tried to smile.