We came back through Phipps, under the open windows, past the lampshades with the limericks that glowed with the lights off and the beds that were shared by dolls that said “Mummy” and giant teddy bears. We came down through the trees, orange and lemon, across the court where green dinks floated in the fountain, to where the car that had also survived the accident was parked. It was low, with nickel-plated wire wheels, a small visor-type windshield, a cockpit seat, and the word Bugatti under the hood, stamped on the motor. Proctor helped Lawrence cover it with a tarpaulin. The barbed wire had scratched it up but not so you would notice it.
Our swanky suite of rooms had real leather chairs, Van Gogh reproductions on the walls, and a set of Loeb Classics on the built-in bookshelves near the door. They had come out in a crate from Brentano’s in New York. Lawrence had told his mother that one of his friends was very scholarly. The north wall of the study was a picture window facing the foothills, the green Phipps campus, and the mountains brown and distant in the summer haze. In December, after the rains, they would move in close. The foothills would turn green, with violet shadows, the gray road up the mountain would turn black, and the rocks in the stream bed would shine in the moonlight as if they were wet. The channel through the wash would would run fire all day, run ice all night.
My room was on the north, facing the mountains, and I could see the rolling dips in the road where the carloads of frosh, coming down from the mountains, dropped so low they were out of sight, the sun bright on the yellow buttons of their dinks. A really good-looking class, better than average; every man in the class would gain weight on the average, neck and lose his first love on the average, smoke and have his first sinful thoughts on the average, but not above average. No, just average. A very fine class. No problem like Lawrence, who refused to ground-stroke, no marksman like Proctor, with a hole in his foot, and, needless to say, not a man on the campus with the clap. Just pimples, and the average run of athlete’s foot.
Lawrence came back from the hospital with a phonograph that never needed winding and an album of very dirty songs that Dickie had sent him from France. It didn’t really matter, however, since they were all in French. In the evening Lawrence would put on the records and let them play till he fell asleep, when Proctor would go in and switch off his light, turn off the machine. Lawrence kept a sponge-rubber grip under his pillow that he would squeeze while listening to the records, the idea being that he would learn to hold a racket again. But that would take time, as the dean said, when he asked me over to talk about Lawrence, and until that happened he had this serious adjustment to make. What to do, that is, with all the free time he now had.
In October we began to see what he had in mind. He would go to bed early, listening to his records, then he would wake up about one or two o’clock, take a shower, and go for what he called a little spin. There was no law against it. It was very safe driving at that time of night. If there was a valley fog he went up the mountains and cruised around in the moonlight, somewhere above it, and if there was no fog he might drive out to Twenty-nine Palms. Or down to Tia Juana, from where he’d bring us back black-paper cigarettes. There was no law against it, if he wanted to do it, but the problem was he didn’t like to do it alone. He liked to cruise around with somebody else in the cockpit. Somebody like me.
Proctor couldn’t stand the gaff. He had a full schedule and sat up nights working on his novel. Lundgren couldn’t make it because his long legs wouldn’t fit in the car. When he rode in it at all he had to hang his legs outside. The cockpit was very small, and his knees wouldn’t fit under the cowl. So that left me. It turned out that I fit in the seat pretty well. I couldn’t spare the time either, not really, but someone had to handle Lawrence’s adjustment, and I preferred riding around to taking on his Sophomore English themes. We found a girl at Phipps to do that in exchange for a run of blind dates.
You don’t talk much in a cockpit type of car, with your face in the wind. If we started early, a little after midnight, we could drive to Yuma and back before morning, or be in Las Vegas just about the time the winter sun came up. Lawrence didn’t drive so fast, on the average, but he just didn’t trouble to stop. On the cold, foggy nights we might pull in for hot coffee, but not much else.
As he usually got me up around one o’clock there was not much point in my going to bed, so I would sleep all afternoon, then work right through till I heard him getting up. The day seemed to start for him with that drive rather than to end. He took a shower and brushed his teeth as if he were going out to the tennis courts. It wasn’t every night, but I would say we averaged four nights a week. I wore a beret to keep my hair from blowing, and because of the strong draft back through the motor I wore a pair of Proctor’s sweat pants, to keep it from blowing up my legs. We could go from sea level to ten thousand feet in less than an hour. Both the fog and the mountains, at that time of the morning, could get pretty cold.
One little problem we had was gas, which we carried in five-gallon oil cans. Lawrence never seemed to know, when he started out, where he might end up. One night we had breakfast in the Harvey House at Needles, another morning we had it in Tia Juana, and we often stopped for chili in a diner outside Bakersfield. One night we drove over and had a moonlit look at Owens Lake. When it was light enough to see we took in Death Valley, then came back across the mountains to the valley and turned up on the campus just in time for my eleven o’clock Chaucer class.
I got in a good nap after lunch, as a rule, but Lawrence got by on the sleep he got in the evening, plus the fairly long naps in his Phipps History of Art seminars. He wore a trench coat in the car, but nothing on his head—his hair was too short to blow around—and for driving he had that pair of finely stitched Swiss gunning gloves. They took on the color and the feel of a good pair of driving hands. He wore them all the time, washed them in the shower, and let them shape-on while they were drying. They gave him the look of a nice welterweight boxer doing a little roadwork.
One night we went to Las Vegas and had coffee in a drugstore with a crowd of Hollywood boys and their women, and one of these babes, after sizing up Lawrence, came over and sat down. She was a fairly smooth blonde of the Marion Davies type. Somebody had told her that letting smoke drift from her nose did something for her.
“You sterilizing something, doll?” Lawrence said, but I could see she didn’t mind that. She even liked it, I think. Like Lawrence, it was unusual.
“You boys over here all alone?” she said.
“We drove over here with that in mind, baby,” Lawrence said.
“A boy like you think you can get away from women, honey?” she said, gasped in some smoke, held it down, till I thought sure it would come out of her ears.
Lawrence put his gloved hands on the table and said, “A little girl like you ever screw around with a boy wearing gloves?”
It wasn’t so much what he said, but how he put it, with the gloves, the palms up, there on the table, and all the smoke the girl had swallowed came out in a rush. She was wearing a short-sleeved sweater, and I could see the gooseflesh rise on her arms. Lawrence didn’t make a move, he just sat there, and when this girl thought her legs were steady she got up and joined the crowd standing around one of the pinball machines.
She left her Marlboro cigarette in the saucer of Lawrence’s cup.
That happened over the Thanksgiving recess. We didn’t have to rush right back to school, so we went up the east side of the Sierra Nevadas to Goldfield and Tonopah. Lawrence seemed to like something about the old mining towns. Under the seat in the car he had the Colt that Proctor had shot himself with. We were never held up or asked any questions, but I think Lawrence wished we would be, and he took shooting lessons on the theory that it was good for his grip.
We came back through Sequoia to Bakersfield, where we stopped at our usual diner, one that featured chili poured over hot tamales and side bowls of chopped onions. When we came in the cook was listening to the scores of the football games. He had a match
in his mouth, and when the last score was mentioned he broke off a piece of it, spat it out.
“You hear that?” he said and turned to look at Lawrence.
“Hear what?” Lawrence said.
“USC beat the Bears,” he said.
“Ha!” Lawrence said.
The cook nodded his head, then he thought it over, looked at Lawrence, and said, “What do you mean, Ha?”
“I mean Ha,” said Lawrence.
I had no idea what he meant. I had never heard him use it before.
“You didn’t expect it?” said the cook.
“What, my friend?” said Lawrence. The cook was an old man, a really old one, so Lawrence had to call him something other than that.
“The Trojans to win,” said the cook.
“Nobody ever wins, my friend,” replied Lawrence.
The cook looked at me, and I stirred up my chili.
“What the hell you mean, nobody ever wins?” said the cook.
“He means nobody wins them all,” I said, knowing pretty well he meant more than that. I didn’t want him telling the cook just what he did mean.
“That what you mean, kid?” the cook said, but when he said “kid” I said to hell with him. No one who wasn’t asking for it would ever refer to Lawrence as “kid.”
“I mean nobody wins,” Lawrence said calmly. “You can’t beat the game.”
“What game?” said the cook.
“Any game,” replied Lawrence.
“So you’re one of those—boys,” said the cook. He had it right on his tongue to say “punks,” or something like that, but somehow he didn’t. He put his hands on the counter and studied Lawrence as if he could see right through him.
“What he means is the game is the thing,” I said. “If the game is the thing, why, then nobody wins it.” That was not too good, but it was a way out, if anybody wanted it. I looked at the cook, and he looked fairly pleased. Then I looked at Lawrence.
“Bullshit, old man,” he said.
I think it might have passed over if it hadn’t been for the “old man.” I was facing the counter, the glassed-in pie case, and the hole where they pushed through the dirty dishes, where a sad-faced woman leaned with her head propped on her hands. When she heard the word pronounced by Lawrence she closed her eyes. The cook took a spoon from the bowl on the counter, rapped it on the counter, then pointed at a sign tacked over the pie case:
PLEASE WATCH YOUR HAT, COAT,
AND YOUR LANGUAGE
“Bullshit,” said Lawrence, backed off the stool, took a bill from his pocket, and dropped it on the counter. I followed him down the aisle to the door at the front.
“Give him back his dirty money,” the woman said, but the cook just stood there, holding the spoon, and we went down the steps at the side and got into the car. The cook came to the door and watched us drive off.
We did the stretch from Bakersfield to Los Angeles pretty fast. I mean, we did it in about an hour less than usual. But north of Pasadena we ran into smoke; they were smudging in the groves along the foothills, and we could see the pots flaring orange and red like Christmas lights. We stayed up on high ground, out of the valley where the smoke began to gather, cruising along on the narrow blacktop roads between the trees. When the road angled north or opened out into the wash, we could see the fresh snowcap on the peak of old Baldy. Lawrence never said a word, as a rule, but he let the car ease up a bit and remarked that he didn’t mind a little snow at Christmas.
I said that I did and I didn’t, which was the way I felt. I was thinking of Chicago, where the snow was not white very long. In the abstract I might like snow at Christmas, but in Chicago it was soon dirty slush.
“You say you do and you don’t, old man?” Lawrence said and let the car slow up to almost a standstill.
“If you mean the snow,” I said, “I do and I don’t.”
Lawrence brought the car to a stop. “Is there anything you like outright, old man?” I looked at him as if I hadn’t caught the gist of what he said. “Anything you really like, old man? Anything you prefer to the usual bullshit?”
We were parked on a sloping piece of blacktop road in a grove of lemon trees. The new crop was nearly ripe, and in the car lights they looked like Christmas tree ornaments. There were quite a few things that I liked, naturally, but I couldn’t seem to think of a one of them. Besides, I couldn’t take the question seriously. It wasn’t like Lawrence. It was completely out of character. He seemed to think this word he’d picked up from Proctor covered everything.
“Don’t get me wrong, old man,” he said. “I admire it very much.”
“You admire what?”
“The way you take the bullshit with the straw, old man,” and I could see he meant that as a flattering remark. He didn’t have it just right, but I understood what he meant.
“Well, I try to take things as they come,” I said.
“I admire it very highly.”
“It’s not much to admire. I can’t honestly say I admire it much myself.”
“If I can’t do it I admire it.”
It must have been at the back of my mind, for I said, “Just what is it you admire in Proctor?”
“What he admires, old man. What he admires won’t let him down.”
“Well,” I said, thinking it might cheer him up, “one thing he admires is you.”
“You don’t say?”
“He admires you very highly.”
He shook his head slowly. “Bullshit, old man.”
“Just what the hell isn’t bullshit?”
I don’t think he expected me to put it to him like that. He was sounding like Proctor, and I suppose he thought that nobody ever put that one to Proctor. He thought it over for a while, then without saying a word he got out of the car. He went up front in the lights, then along between the lights to a shallow place in the ditch, where he waded through the weeds to where the pots were lit in a lemon grove. He went along one of the furrows, where the ground was plowed, and as he got close to one of the pots I saw him take his left hand and try to loosen the fingers of his glove. That took time, since he couldn’t do much with his right-hand thumb.
“What’s up?” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. I yelled “Hey” at him, but he didn’t turn his head. He just stood there, about a yard from the smudgepot, tugging at the fingers of his gunning glove, and without thinking one thing or another I climbed out of the car. He was a good fifty yards away from me. “Oh, Lawrence!” I yelled, playing for time, and as I stumbled through the ditch I tripped over a broken hoe handle. I picked it up without thinking, but I had it in my hand as I ran toward him, and when I got close enough to see what he was doing I hit him on the head. I didn’t get him square, because he was stooped over, one shoulder hunched up. He half straightened up, made a quarter turn so I could see his hand blackened by the smudge smoke, then fell on his back.
I think I might have hit him again if he had moved. He was out cold, but he had that goddam smile on his face. I picked him up, got him back to the car. When I dumped him into the cockpit some of the black on his burned hand rubbed off. Not the flesh, just the oily smudge that had blackened it. The hand was burned all right, but not so bad as I had thought. Then I wondered if I might have killed him when I hit him with the hoe handle; the right side of his head was sticky with blood. But I found that he had a strong pulse. I propped him up in the cockpit, the visor tipped back so the cool night wind would blow in his face, then I just drove around through the smoking groves until he came to. He had his head on my shoulder, and he left it there. He didn’t say a damn thing. I drove around another hour, till I felt sure about him, before I took him back to the dorm, where he climbed out of the car without any help from me and went up the stairs. I let him go on ahead while I spread the tarpaulin over his car. I did that, smoked a cigarette, then I went up and found him in the shower, with his smudge-blackened hand sticking out of the curtain, waiting for me. He stayed in the shower while I covered his hand
with some olive oil from Lundgren’s army locker and wrapped it up in one of Proctor’s face towels, pinned at the wrist.
“Thanks, old man,” he said when I’d finished, but I didn’t say a damn thing. All I could think of to say was that he was a crazy sonuvabitch. I went into my own room, closed the door, and while I lay wondering if he wasn’t really crazy, he played “Sam, the Old Accordion Man,” until Lundgren shut him up. When I knew he was asleep I got up and turned his goddam light off. He looked asleep, lying on his side so that the bump on his head was up and the hand with the towel wrapped around it like a baseball mitt on his chest. It seemed hard to believe that he was actually asleep, but I think he was. He could do just about anything he had a mind to, so he had done that.
They smudged all night up in the foothills, and in the morning when I went to my classes the smoke was over the valley like a dark pool of oil. In the afternoon I got in Lawrence’s car and went back to the grove where I had hit him, because when I hit him he had dropped one of his gloves. I didn’t want anybody turning up with something like that. They all thought we Were crazy, and that would put the cap on it.
In the evening Proctor stepped into my room and closed the door. I thought he was wondering what the hell had happened and wanted me to fill out the story, but I had made up my mind that this was too crazy for anybody’s book. It would die with me, since I would never write a book myself.
But he helped himself to my cigarettes, sat down on my bed, and said, “I’m not here to question you about the arson, so you can relax.”
“I’m relaxed,” I said, stiffening. “What’s on your mind?”
The Huge Season Page 16