by Oakley Hall
He and Arlene always talked for a long time after they had gone to bed at night. He liked Arlene better than anyone else in the family. She was a year and a half older than he, a senior in high school, a thin girl with ears that stuck out like his, which she tried to hide by wearing her hair in a long bob; but she had a sweet, big-eyed face and freckles across her nose.
Arlene was in love with Bill Rasmussen, whose father owned the hardware store down the street. She liked to tell Ben what a big basketball star Bill was, although Ben went to the same high school and knew well enough, and how Bill was going to get a basketball scholarship to Stanford and be a lawyer. The night Bill asked her to go steady she woke Ben when she came in and talked about Bill, about how in love with him she was and what he had said to her, and she turned on the light to show Ben the little gold basketball Bill had given her. In the light her lipstick was smeared all around her mouth and the top button of her blouse was unfastened, but her eyes were bright and she looked beautiful, even with the pink tips of her ears showing through her hair. She kept him awake almost all night, talking about Bill.
That was the way he met Doris Rasmussen. Doris was thin too, even thinner than Arlene, with jet black hair like her brother’s, and blue eyes that looked rimmed with black because of her long eyelashes. She was in Ben’s class at school and none of the boys liked her because she was quiet and never talked to anybody and she didn’t seem to have any girl friends. “Doris Rasmussen doesn’t have any buddies or any bubbies,” the boys said.
One day after school Arlene asked Ben if he would double date with her and Bill and Doris. Mrs. Rasmussen had told Bill he had to get Doris a date, Arlene said. Ben said he would and the four of them went to a show and after the show to a place on the highway for hamburgers and coffee. Ben was shy and Doris even shyer and so they did not say much, riding home in the rumble seat of Bill’s car, both embarrassed to look at Bill and Arlene necking in the front seat. And after that about once a month Arlene would talk around and talk around, until finally she would have to come right out and say that Mrs. Rasmussen had told Bill he had to get a date for Doris again. And then they would all go to a show in Bill’s car, and afterward out for a hamburger, with Bill and Arlene necking in the front seat, and Ben and Doris sitting in stiff and uncomfortable silence in the rumble.
The night after the basketball team won the tournament, there was a beach party at Half-Moon Bay. More than ten couples were going, most of the first string of the basketball team and some of the other seniors. Ben and Doris went along too, riding in the rumble seat of Bill’s car with their feet on two cases of beer and a cake of ice sliding and bumping around in a washtub, listening to Arlene and Bill and Harry Brooks and Edith Klineschmidt singing in the front seat.
At the beach party they built a fire and cooked hot dogs, and then sat around in a circle and sang and told ghost stories and a few faintly dirty stories, and drank beer. Ben sat next to Doris on the blanket he had brought, not singing, but watching the others, watching Arlene and Bill who sat across the fire from him drinking beer out of the same bottle, and from time to time he tried to think of something to say to Doris.
It was a dark night, with clouds over the moon and a breeze coming up from the ocean. When the fire died down and the stories and songs wore off, it was decided, after a great deal of giggling and protesting from the girls, that they would all go in swimming naked.
Ben withdrew with the other boys, who were talking loudly for the girls’ benefit and whispering among themselves. He undressed a little apart and when the girls shouted from the water that they were in and now the boys could come, he did not go down to the beach right away.
When he did go, he went far to the left of the others, walking slowly along the beach, which was faintly white in the darkness. The ocean was black, and the sky was black, with the moon glowing coldly behind a scud of cloud. Behind him he could hear the shouting and the laughter fading into the steady whispering of the surf. Then he heard someone coming out of the water, and he almost ran back into the bushes. But he did not, watching the white figure detach itself from the darkness. It looked like one of the boys. The figure came toward Ben along the beach, looking down and scuffing its feet in the sand. “Hi,” Ben said, and then he saw that it was Doris.
She halted. Her face jerked up toward him and he thought for a moment she was going to run away. He said, “It’s Ben,” but she did not move, standing stiffly with her arms at her sides. She was very white, with slim legs and flat hips like a boy, and her chest was flat as a boy’s. She stood a few yards from him and a little lower on the beach. They stared at each other, but finally she bent her head so that her black hair hid her face. “I didn’t mean to see you,” Ben said. “I was just walking along here.”
“That’s what we undressed for, isn’t it?” She whispered it, and he could hardly hear her, and then she raised her head again and stared back at him defiantly. It seemed to him that they stood there for a long time, silently, without moving, except that he could feel himself trembling and goosepimples came out on his arms and legs. The wind off the ocean felt cold, the sound of the surf seemed very loud. Suddenly Doris stepped forward, and with her head bowed and scuffing her toes in the sand, moved past him. When he turned, she was running, swiftly and gracefully, and she disappeared once more into the darkness, as though she had never been there at all.
In the rumble seat on the way home he kissed her. He kissed her passionately, with his arms tight around her, and although she was cold as ice and shivering, she pressed her lips to his viciously, her hands locked together and digging into the small of his back, her body arched up against him. Edith and Harry had stayed at the beach and were going to ride home with somebody else, and in the front seat Bill and Arlene were singing, and looking back from time to time, and then laughing and making cracks. When they sang Bill swung the car back and forth across the road in time to the song.
He never did know what happened, and afterward he never wanted to ask. He heard Arlene cry out, and with the cry there was a long scream of brakes, and then an enormous grinding crash that seemed to fill the world and jerked him away from Doris and out of the rumble seat into darkness with a terrible tearing pain in his leg.
When consciousness came back to him he was in the hospital. His skull was fractured and his leg broken in two places, and Bill and Arlene were dead.
He was in the hospital six months and they had operated five times before they were able to tell him they could save his leg, and by then he hardly cared. At first his mother and father came every day, and his mother always cried and had to go out. His father looked very old and very puzzled and never knew what to say. Martha Lee and George came a few times before they went up to Portland where George was to go to work for his uncle, and sometimes on weekends Jake would come down from San Francisco.
But after she got out of the hospital, Doris came every day. One side of her head was shaved and there was a thick white pad taped to the shaved place. They would talk for a few minutes and then she would read to him, and when she was tired of reading they would sit silently until it was time for her to go.
When he was released from the hospital he did not return to school. His father had had to sell the grocery to one of the chain stores and had bought a little house on the outskirts of town and a small grove of orange trees. Ben was still on crutches so he could not do much to help, and there was the cruel, ugly scar on the inside of his knee. He walked as much as he could, but that leg was smaller than the other now and sometimes he sat alone in his room with his pants off and stared down at the scar and thought about the night at the beach when he and Doris had looked at each other.
He saw Doris almost every week. They went to a show whenever he had any money, which was not often, or else sat in the living room talking if the Rasmussens were not at home, or went for walks if they were. But he was ashamed of his leg, especially when he was with Doris, and he could not bring himself to touch her now.
It was Jake who talked to him first about the CCC, saying it might be good for him; he would gain weight and get his color back. At first he did not like the idea, but then he thought of the money he could send home every month, and he decided he would do it. He did not tell Doris until the last minute, and she did not say much except that she would write him, and he promised to write her. But he was afraid to kiss her; even when she took hold of his arms and raised her lips to him, he only pecked at them, and then he left abruptly and limped home. In bed that night, he cried.
But they wrote each other religiously, his letters stiff and formal; Dear Doris, and Yours, Ben; her letters short and badly spelled and written in a weak, spidery script that made him come to think of her not as flesh and blood but as a kind of ghostly memory; Dear Ben, and Yours, Doris. For two years they had written. But when, after he left the CCC camp he did not go back to San Jose, she did not write anymore, and after a few unanswered letters he stopped writing too.
Almost a year later he got an announcement of her marriage to a John Rudolph Castle, and the next day a letter from his mother which contained a clipping from the newspaper, a terse two inches of print and a picture of a dark girl he could not recognize in a white wedding dress. He was hurt that Doris had not written him herself, but he sent her for a wedding present a set of eight individual silver salt and pepper shakers that cost him thirty-two dollars.
7
The next morning was clear and Jack came down with the new grader about nine o’clock. He had driven it from the dealer’s in Bakersfield, a big orange-painted Adams. He waved as he passed Ben’s dozer, standing up and leaning forward against the controls, and Ben watched the Adams jolt down the temporary road beside the levee, to where Push sat in his pick-up, watching the surveyors setting stakes.
At noon Ben and Jack shut down their rigs together, Push drove up with Harry in the front seat, and Red and the two blade men, Mac and Fred, standing in the back and clinging to the top of the cab. They sat around Push’s pick-up to eat their sandwiches and drink their coffee, Ben and Red together on the ground, Jack leaning against the running board with his long legs spread out in front of him, Push sitting behind the steering wheel, and Mac and Fred beside Jack on the running board.
“That’s a nice blade, Push,” Jack said.
“Yeah? How do you like an Adams?”
“Good. I never was on one before, but it handles damn good.”
“I’ll take a cat blade every time, though,” Mac said. “I don’t know why, but I just don’t like them Adams.”
“It’s the color,” Fred said. “That damn orange. Reminds me of some damn doctored-up orange juice I got sick as a dog on one time.”
“I suppose you’d got sick on lemonade you’d want to paint your cat blade some other color but yellow,” Harry said.
“You can get on that grade this aft,” Push said to Jack. “The surveyors got the stakes about all set.” The door was open and one of his feet rested on the running board next to Jack’s shoulder. He was eating a piece of apple pie and Ben watched the juice run down his fingers. Just before it dripped off his wrist, Push stuffed the rest of the pie into his mouth and carefully licked his hand.
“You going to get me a stake runner?” Jack said.
“I got one coming down after lunch. You mind a nigger?”
“Who you got?” Ben asked. “Toussaint?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“He was on my rig up at Fresno,” Jack said. “He taught me how to run a blade, he says. He’s a good boy.”
“I’d rather have a colored boy than a Mex any day,” Mac said. “That Mex I got’s a no-good bastard. Damn him.”
“I don’t know what you got him for anyway,” Fred said. “You knock up all your damn stakes just the same.” Mac kicked his legs out from under him and Fred plumped down off the running board. Red was grinning sneeringly.
“You guys know Jim Poston?” he said. “He was on a job I was on once. He never needed a stake runner. He could see right through about two inches of dirt to where a stake was and just skin the hairs off the top of it.”
“Red sounds pretty grouchy,” Harry said. “I guess he’s hungry. No dust to eat down in that cut today.”
“Yeah,” Red said. “I lose ten pounds every time it rains.”
Ben dug down in his watch pocket for his dice and rolled them between his hands. He got to his feet. “How about some craps?”
They all got into the back of the pick-up and spread a gunny sack on the ribbed metal bed, and rolled for high man. Push won the dice and made a little. Ben lost a dollar and the dice traveled around the circle. When Jack got them, Red said, “How about shooting for that V dame, big boy?”
Jack grinned crookedly and rattled the dice against his ear. “What you got to cover with, Red?”
“I’ll just take a piece of it,” Red said.
“How much is she worth?” Harry said quickly. Ben felt his eyes narrow as he looked at Red. Then he looked at Jack. Jack’s grin had faded and his cheek muscles were bunched up like fists. He ran his hand over his hair, watching Red silently. Red was stacking and pushing over a pile of silver. Ben could see the curl of his lips as he looked down at his thick fingers moving among the coins. No one spoke.
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s better if she isn’t covered,” Red said. “Have to ask Jack about that sometime.”
“You going to keep that up?” Jack said quietly. His body looked very stiff to Ben, and he was sitting up straight, resting his clenched fists on his knees. He stared steadily at Red, and Red flushed, laughed, and pushed a quarter out on the gunny sack.
“Go ahead and shoot, blade man,” he said.
When the game finally broke up and Ben rose, he saw Toussaint plodding down the grade toward them, carrying a shovel. Stiff black pants that were too big for him hung from his thin shoulders on yellow suspenders. A wide white grin blossomed on his black face as Ben waved to him. He stopped and pulled a stocking up out of his shoe.
“Hi you, there, Jack!” he called. “Hi you, Ben!”
Jack jumped down off the pick-up and walked across to meet him. He knocked the crumpled felt hat off the Negro’s head and slapped him on the back. Ben could see him grinning. “How the hell are you, Toussaint?”
“Pretty good,” Toussaint said. “Boss around here?”
“You go run stakes for Jack,” Push called, as he got into the pick-up. “Don’t you let him knock any out, hear!”
“Jack don’t knock but very few,” Toussaint said. “I taught him good.” Ben watched Red walk stiff-legged back toward the cut, and Push drove off in the pick-up with Harry and the blade men.
“Get your britches up on that Adams over there,” Jack said to Toussaint. “You’d stand around here all day, gabbling like an old rooster.” He stood with his back to Ben, his hands in his hip pockets.
Toussaint winked broadly. “That Jack mean,” he said. “You going whup me, Jack?”
“I’ll whup you you don’t get up on that rig,” Jack said, and Toussaint turned and hurried over to the Adams, as though he were terrified. He walked jerkily, his knees lifting high, his trousers flapping loosely around his ankles. Jack sauntered after him, without looking at Ben.
That evening Jack shut down the grader next to Ben’s cat, and they went in to make out their work slips together. They walked silently, but outside the timekeeper’s shack Jack touched Ben’s arm.
“Say, Ben,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you before.” He pushed his cap back on his head, avoiding Ben’s eyes.
“Yeah?” Ben said. He saw Jack look up expressionlessly as Red passed.
“About V,” Jack said. His narrow eyes looked for an instant into Ben’s, and then down at his feet. He rubbed his hand through the hair that protruded from under his cap. “Listen, Ben,” he said angrily. “I know you’re sore about the way I booted you out.”
“I don’t give a damn about that.”
Jack’s eyes flickered at him
again. “See,” he began. “The poor kid…” He scowled and kicked savagely at a pile of dirt. “Hell, here’s what happened. Her old man threw her out.”
“Why?”
“Aw, you know.”
“How’d he find out?”
“He caught us out in the shed. What the hell you want, a written report?”
They both looked down.
Ben saw Jack’s heavy boot kick at the pile of dirt again. Slip it to her till you get sick of it and then check out, Jack had told him once. He thought of V, sitting on the bed in their room, looking scared and lonely and trying not to cry.
“See?” Jack said. “What the hell am I supposed to do? I guess it’s kind of my fault.”
“Jesus Christ!”
Jack looked up.
“You’re Goddam right it’s your fault!” Ben said hotly. “Goddam it…”
“Christ, I know that, Ben,” Jack said. “But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. She hasn’t got any money or any other folks or any place to stay. It’s just…”
Ben jerked his hand up between them, and Jack stopped. “Just a minute,” Ben said. “You don’t know what you’re supposed to do, unh?”
Jack was silent.
“Yeah,” Ben said. “You know what you ought to do.”
“Aw, cut it out, for Christ’s sake!”
Ben felt suddenly weak. His right leg was trembling as he turned away, and he reached down and hit his fist against his calf. “You bastard!” he said, and he meant it.
He walked quickly into the timekeeper’s shack, made out his work slip and caught a ride into town with Push and Harry. But already the rage had begun to leak out of him. In a way he understood what Jack was thinking. Jack must feel he had been trapped. He knew that Jack recognized his responsibility, but he knew too that Jack was going to refuse to accept it.