by Oakley Hall
“No, I guess she wouldn’t.”
Jack removed the cap from his face and slowly raised himself to a sitting position, pushing down with his hands and sliding his hips back. “Now, just what the hell’s it to you?”
“I told you,” Ben said. He spat on the ground and kicked a pile of dirt over the spit. “I just hate to see you taking her over the jumps. I think it’s pretty Goddamn miserable.”
“Okay. I’m a heel.”
Ben didn’t say anything, feeling Jack’s yellow eyes searching his face. He removed his cap and ran his hand, hard, over his hair, and then pulled the cap low on his forehead.
“Aw, Jesus, Ben,” Jack said. “Quit the Christering, will you?”
“Sure,” Ben said. Jack was still staring at him and he made a second pile of dirt. He made this bigger than the first. “You just don’t know what you’ve got!” he said suddenly, loudly. “You don’t even know what you’re doing!” He wished he could tell Jack what he thought, but he would not permit himself any more sloppy talk. He knew he was wrong already in even talking seriously about this. He grimaced and scraped his boot over the second pile of dirt.
“You hot for V?” Jack asked gently.
“I just don’t like what you’re doing to her,” Ben said. And then he said, “It gripes me because I like you, and I don’t…” He stopped. He could see Toussaint plodding down the grade toward them, dust pluming around his feet. He was carrying the three water bags, bent away from them to balance their weight.
Jack was silent for a long time, but finally he said, “I’m no good for her, Ben. You ought to see that. I’ve got to let her down some way, and I’m doing it the easiest way I know.”
“Sure,” Ben said. Sure, he said to himself, as he got up and stepped around to the front of the cat. He cranked the starting motor and it caught with a series of small, vicious explosions. He shifted in the cat engine too soon, and turned to look at Jack, who was walking slowly across to the Adams.
Ben took the water bag Toussaint handed him and tossed it into the cab. Toussaint stood watching him as he climbed up on the tracks, frowning.
“How come you mad at Jack, Ben?”
Ben sucked at his lower lip and kicked the friction brakes loose. “Nothing,” he said, knowing that Toussaint could not hear him in the roar of the engine as he opened the throttle. Toussaint put his hand to his ear and squinted up at him.
“How?”
“Nothing, Goddamn it!” Ben yelled. He watched Jack climb up on the Adams, then he savagely jerked up the dozer blade, shifted into gear and let the clutch slam out so that the cat lurched spastically forward. Then the tracks bit into the ground and the cat settled down, the tampers rolling and jolting behind, the knurled feet spiking into the soft earth under the weight of the water-filled drums. Ben sat, half-turned, with his shoulders slumped and his hands resting on the dozer control, watching the feet bite deep, bruising and scarring the earth.
That night Ben heard Petey’s car honk out in front, and Red hurriedly stuck a pack of cigarettes into his shirt pocket, ran his comb through his hair, and went out and down the stairs. Ben had been asked to go along, but he had said he had some letters to write, and now he stepped to the window to see if Jack were with them. He was, and Ben saw Red hurry out the door and get into Petey’s coupe. The door slammed shut and the coupe sped off down the street, the exhaust pipe crackling and popping.
He was lying on his stomach on his bed, with a tablet in front of him and a pencil gripped between his fingers, wondering what to say to his mother, when there was a knock on the door. He sighed and got up to open it. V stood there, holding her purse in both hands in front of her.
“Hello, Ben,” she said. “Could I talk to you a minute?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure, V.” He turned quickly, pulled the covers up on the beds and pushed his and Red’s work clothes off the green armchair. “Sit down, V. I’m sorry it’s such a mess.”
“Oh, that doesn’t matter.” She sat down and smiled a stiff smile at him, sitting as she had when he had first seen her, knees and feet close together, hands clutching the purse in her lap. Her brown eyes watched him gravely as he got her a cigarette and an ashtray, and lit the cigarette for her. She wore a black, pleated skirt and a sweater that was too big for her, the sleeves rolled into fat lumps around her wrists. Her hair was clean looking, long and loose and dark-blonde.
Ben blew out the match and sat down on the edge of the bed, one hand uncomfortably in his pocket. “It’s good to see you,” he said nervously. “You look good, V.” He started to say, How’s everything? but he caught himself. He knew why she had come.
“Thank you,” V said, and they both looked at the open window at the same time. The night was dark and warm, and a warm breeze came in and ruffled the pages of the tablet beside him on the bed.
“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?” V asked.
Ben shook his head. “I guess you want to talk about Jack, don’t you?”
The smile was fixed tightly on her lips, as though she held it there only by a terrific effort, and when she looked back at him he bowed his head and smoked his cigarette with quick, short draughts, waiting for her to speak. “Go ahead,” he said finally.
“He doesn’t love me, does he, Ben?”
“Jack’s a funny guy,” he began, and then he stopped. He wasn’t going to lie to her. He tasted something hard and metallic in his throat.
“You’re his best friend,” V said.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Ben, I’ve got to talk to somebody about it and you’re the only one I know. Please tell me the truth.”
He drew savagely on his cigarette, snubbed it savagely out. “All right,” he said. “I don’t think he loves you.”
He didn’t look at her to see how she had taken that. It was private and he would not intrude. He waited silently until she said, “Is he trying to get rid of me?”
“I think he is,” he said wearily, and then he looked up. Her face was ugly and creased, but she didn’t move, her eyes fixed on his. Finally she shut them. She dropped her head slowly, and he saw that she was crying, silently, only her shoulders shaking slightly, and he could see no tears. When she raised her head again, her eyes were open, helpless and scared, containing nothing but helplessness and fear, and one hand crept up the side of her face, the fingers working and tugging at her hair.
“V…” he said. “V…” He wanted to tell her that the word love didn’t mean anything. It was only a word used in movies and books and magazine stories that covered an infinite number of variations of emotions and feelings and sensations, but it did not really mean anything. He wished she had not used it. It was a word from poems and a million popular songs, but it did not mean anything. But he did not know how to explain this, and he did not know how to explain what he felt, somehow, should exist between her and Jack; did exist because, although she did not understand it, she must feel it intuitively; did not exist because Jack neither understood nor recognized it; and that he, Ben, only understood because he could see it in the round, detached from it because he could never have it, watching like a spectator at a game where the players were blind or blindfolded. But he could not formulate in his mind what he wished to express, or convert his confused thoughts into words, and so he did not speak.
“I don’t know what to do,” V whispered. She rose abruptly and walked over to the window, turning her back to him. He watched her back as she looked out, watched her hand holding the gray purse, the blurred and indistinct curve of her cheek. The room was silent. After a moment he heard the faint, lonely hoot of a train. He heard footsteps on the sidewalk; he could hear his own slow breathing.
“V,” he said suddenly. “If you want to hang onto him…Listen, you’ve got the tools. You’ve got the tools if you just learn how to use them.” Then he paused and said, “It’s too bad you have to.”
“I don’t know about things like that,” V whispered.
“You’ve
got to learn fast. You’ve got to hang on and learn fast.” He watched her, there at the window. The train whistled once more, and he knew she had been listening for it, too. “You’ve got to learn fast,” he said again, but she did not answer.
At last she took her lipstick from her purse and painted her mouth, using the dark glass of the raised window as a mirror. He watched her as she applied the lipstick slowly and carefully, and then, sick, he watched her walk to the door.
As she passed him he saw her face. It shocked him. It was as though it had been, for a moment, agonizingly contorted into the shape of everything inside her. But there was no grief there now, no fear; there were only the hard, cold, angular lines of complete determination. It was as though every quality but this had been suddenly wrenched out of her; as though all there was left was an iron and single-minded resolution. Revenge, he thought, and with the glimpse of her face, the thought frightened him; but then he knew it was not revenge. Knowing what it was he felt tired and wrung, and all at once the feeling welled up in him that he had to get away from this. He was going to get away from this.
When she opened the door, she paused. She did not turn around and he did not rise, but she said coolly, “Thanks, Ben,” and then she went out.
When he heard her heels rapping down the hall he wanted to call her back, to tell her to give Jack up, not to tear herself to pieces in the trying. “V,” he said, but he said it softly, and she could not have heard him.
The next day Ben quit the highway job and went back to San Jose. He got a job running a bulldozer for a contractor named Rex McLean. He wanted no more of Jack and V.
10
Ben was working at the new naval base on the Peninsula the Monday the Pearl Harbor news started coming in. The next day he tried to enlist in the Navy. He was already 4-F, and the Navy wouldn’t take him, nor the Army, nor the Marines. He knew he was never going to be part of this, because of his leg.
In February they finished the grading at the naval base and moved down to Hamilton Field, where new air-strips were being installed. He knew Doris was working as a secretary in one of the offices at Hamilton Field, because his mother and Mrs. Rasmussen had mutual friends, but he made no effort to look her up. He saw her a few times, riding around with a fat captain in a new Chrysler convertible, seeing only her small white face above the car door, her black hair piled high in a bunch in front, and waving low on her shoulders in the back. He knew she was doing a good deal of partying and drinking and sleeping around with the officers at the field, because the mutual friend had told his mother that too. Her husband was a pfc down at Camp Callan.
But evidently Doris had heard he was working at Hamilton Field, because one Saturday afternoon she came out to see him, and when he was through work he took her home. She lived in an auto court which, because of the housing shortage, had been converted into a row of one-room apartments and in her apartment were large photographs of four men in Air Corps caps, all of whom looked very much alike, and a picture of her husband in his Army uniform, signed in a scrawling hand, “Your Johnny,” under the inscription, “To My Dear Baby Deer.” On the bed were three large, cloth-covered animals, a rabbit and a pink dog and a black-and-white dog, and on the bedside table were two glasses, one of them containing an inch of liquor in which a cigarette floated soggily, and a bottle one-third full of good bourbon.
They sat down on the bed and drank the rest of the bourbon without saying much, and then Doris cooked some chili on the hot plate and made some toast while Ben took a shower. After dinner Doris brought out another bottle of the good bourbon, which she said Hughey had given her. When they were drunk she sat on Ben’s lap and put her arms around his neck and cried drunkenly on his shoulder. That night he stayed with her.
He slept with her often after that. It didn’t matter to him that there were others as well, and although he felt badly about her husband, Doris said he knew about her and was going to get a divorce when he came back to San Jose. One night the fat captain came when Ben was there, and barged in past Doris and tried to hit Ben. The captain was drunk and when Ben pushed him away, trying to defend himself, the captain fell down, and Doris screamed at him and kicked him till he got up. The captain tried to hit Ben again, but Doris screamed, “You touch him and I’ll kill you! You touch him and I’ll kill you, you fat bastard pig drunk dog son of a bitch!” Ben held her as she tried to claw the captain, and the captain looked confused, and suddenly very young, and began to cry. When he had gone Doris had hysterics on the bed. Ben sat beside her until she quieted down, then he went out and got into his car. Down the road a way he stopped the car and sat for a long time with his face in his hands.
He had intended not to see Doris again, but a few days later she was waiting at the sentry box at the gate when he drove out of the field after work. When he stopped for the sentry she got in the front seat with him and he had to drive her home. In the apartment she began to cry and she made him come to bed with her, crying and saying she wanted to die when he had gone away.
In the morning when the alarm went off, Doris woke before he did, and reached across him to turn it off. She remained with her chest pressed against his and her cheek against his cheek and he could feel her breath on his ear. “Benny,” she whispered. “Johnny’s coming home on furlough next week.”
“Is he?”
“I got a letter from him day before yesterday. Do you want to read it, Benny?”
“No,” he said. “He wrote it to you.”
“He called me a whore nine times,” she said, and giggled. “Don’t you want to read it? He called me a bitch in heat twice.”
“I’ve got to get to work,” Ben said. “I’ll get some breakfast down at the corner. You go on back to sleep for an hour, honey.”
She reached down and rubbed her fingers over the scar on his leg, her chin still pressed into his neck. He thought she would stop it after a minute, but she kept tickling her fingers over the scar, breathing into his ear, and finally he pushed her hand roughly away. “I asked you not to do that.”
“Benny, we’re going to get a divorce. Do you want to marry me?”
He stared at her long sheaf of rumpled black hair, and then she raised her head and looked into his eyes. Her eyes were bright and strange behind the black eyelashes, and her pale mouth was twisted into a tight, thin smile. Suddenly he pulled the covers back, swung his legs out and got up. Doris sat up in bed, watching him as he got his clothes from the chair and put them on. He turned his back to her.
“Aren’t you going to say anything, Ben?”
“I have to think,” he said. “We’ll talk about it tonight.” When he went out the door she was still sitting up in bed watching him, her narrow shoulders hunched up, her chest flat and dead-white with her nipples looking like red twenty-five-cent pieces pasted on it.
He thought about it all day. He didn’t know whether he wanted to marry her or not. He didn’t know how he felt about her; he didn’t think he felt anything toward her one way or another. He felt only a kind of blank nothingness. And it was a poor life for a wife, he knew, moving around from construction job to construction job, never knowing where you were going to live, and where a wife might be a focal point in a life that had no focal point; too often she was only a piece of inconvenient baggage. What he wanted now was to go back to Bakersfield. Something—curiosity, he told himself—had been urging him to go for a long time. He thought he would go back. Merely in being near Jack and V he had felt something infinitely larger, infinitely more fulfilling than this affair, or even marriage to Doris could ever be.
That night, to avoid a scene, he did not go back to her again. He quit his job, went home, wrote Doris a letter and asked his mother to mail it when he was gone. The next day he packed his bags and put them in his car, and when he had kissed his mother goodbye and had shaken hands with his father, he drove south out of San Jose and over the Pacheco Pass, and then down the San Joaquin Valley, ignoring the thirty-five-mile-an-hour wartime speed limit. It w
as late in the evening when he got into Bakersfield, and he drove slowly along the main street, looking at the familiar buildings and the red and blue neon signs that glowed and hummed in the darkness. He did not know where he was going, but finally he parked his car in front of the Hitching Post and went in to see if anyone he knew were there.
The first thing he saw was the legs of a girl who was sitting on a stool at the end of the bar nearest the door. He paused, looking at the legs; they were long and tanned and the girl’s skirt had fallen away from her knees as she leaned back on her stool, her face turned from him so that he could see only her long, dark blonde hair. But he knew who it was, and then he saw Jack, sitting next to her.
Jack was leaning forward over the bar, talking, but his yellow eyes widened when he saw Ben. He grinned slowly. Then he yelled, “Ben!” and slid off the stool and was slapping Ben on the back. “Damn it, Ben,” he cried. “Where the hell you been?”
“Hi, Jack,” Ben said, and he could feel his face muscles pull painfully with his own grin. He had been away a long time, and now he felt as though he had come home. He squeezed Jack’s arm. Jack looked taller and leaner, older, and his face was thinner through the cheeks than Ben had remembered. His slanting yellow eyes were glinting happily; his mouth pulled down at the corners and he stuck out his lower lip.
“You jug-eared little bastard,” he whispered. “Goddamn it, it’s good to see you.”
“Hello, Ben,” V said, and Ben, still holding Jack’s arm, looked up at her. He didn’t like what he saw. She looked older too, sleek and blonder. Her smile was sleek and sure of itself; it was a smile he had never seen before, and only her eyes held the old, grave, innocent look he remembered. She had learned the ropes. He released Jack’s arm.
“How are you, V?” he said.
She looked at him levelly, smiling. Her chest was tan, swelling down into the top of her dress, and she wore no brassiere. He turned away and hit Jack gently on the arm with his closed fist. “It’s good to see you, man,” he said sincerely. “How’s everything going?”