by Peter Rabe
If anyone thought I was important, this was no way of showing it. I was so nervous now that I didn’t know offhand which was better — yesterday’s shocks or today’s nothingness.
But they had taken the gun out of my jacket.
I stood there and then I heard the low voice first because it was talking more. I couldn’t make out the words but when the voice stopped another one rose, which I thought was a girl’s. They talked and I found the door. There were four leading off the hall, not hospital doors, but heavy, brown ones, with brass handles instead of knobs — something left over, most likely, from the time when this had not been a hospital.
I still couldn’t make out the man because he seemed to be talking low, but when the girl answered I could tell that it was Jessie.
“I can’t do it — ”
The man, short this time.
“I’m no good at it You know that.”
“It’s your neck more than mine, don’t you think?” said the man. I could hear him now because he seemed to be losing his patience.
She didn’t answer. Perhaps she made a gesture which showed her reaction, but I couldn’t know that.
“Well?” said the man.
“All right. I’ll keep trying.”
“Do that. And throw it a little, huh?”
This time she didn’t answer either, but if I understood the man’s meaning, I could imagine that she showed some kind of reaction.
“I’m going to breakfast,” she said and I got away from the door fast and just made the rubber plant when the door was opened.
She said, “Good morning,” and I turned around.
“Good morning. Uh, how are you?”
She came over and asked me if I had slept well.
“And you?”
“After that truck,” she said, “what do you think.”
“You look well,” I said.
I looked at her and it struck me that I had meant the platitude. Her face was smooth and rested and she stood up again, nice and pert.
“Did you eat?” she asked. “I’m going for breakfast.”
“Where?”
“That door. Did you eat?”
“No. I’m not familiar with the place, or the routine.”
“No routine.” She walked away and I followed her. “You just ask for something to eat,” she said, “and they bring it.”
If she thought that had been an explanation, she hadn’t done too well, and had she told me that this was the land of the Big Rock Candy Mountain I wouldn’t have believed that either.
The room wasn’t large but very pleasant. It was a dining room with long table, sideboard, place mats, and good chairs. There was even a chandelier, something spiny from Sweden.
To me, everything was much too ordinary.
“I’m going to have eggs for breakfast,” she said. “You too?”
“Do we clap our hands?”
“No. I call down, with that phone.”
“And with coffee, the same thing?”
“I thought you told me you had slept well,” she said and then she ordered at the phone.
I sat at the table and played with the place mat It was made out of straw and I couldn’t figure out why the strands didn’t come apart.
“They are glued.” She sat down opposite me.
“Oh. You see, it’s my background. For seven years I haven’t seen anything but tablecloths.”
“I forgot You worked in a laundry.”
“Yes. To this day I don’t know what all those sheets were for. I never saw them, except in the laundry.”
“Maybe the warden ate off them.”
“The warden? Do you know what the warden probably ate off? I have a suspicion he …”
“You’re awfully edgy, Gallivan.”
“It’s the big windows. I keep thinking I might fall out And the empty corridors. I keep worrying who murdered the screws and where did they stuff them.”
“There’s a laundry in the basement If you think you’d feel more familiar …”
“Tell me,” I said, “How come you know I worked in a laundry?”
“Rand must have mentioned it.”
“Yes. He is very talkative, that Rand.”
“Can’t you relax a little, Gallivan? We’re going to eat any moment.”
I ignored it and went right on. “There’s that laundry, then you mentioned Tooley …”
“You mentioned Tooley.”
“But you remembered it.”
“What do you want, Gallivan, a scene?”
“What else do you know?”
I thought she made a great effort not to let my tone affect her. I didn’t think she wanted to be with me, or to sit here and listen, but she stayed and looked pretty calm.
“Gallivan, I’ll tell you everything I know about you. Then we relax, all right?”
“Tell me.”
“I know why you went in …”
“I told you that myself.”
“And that you only got six years, not seven, and …”
“How come you know that?”
“Micky is the talker. I think he told me about the laundry too. Micky told me you only got six years but then you got in trouble and they stretched it to seven.”
“That was a blow,” I said. “That was as much of a blow as getting liberated three weeks too soon.”
“What trouble was it, when they gave you another year?”
“That?” I had to laugh, because I felt a little embarrassed about it, just like when it had happened. “I hadn’t been in long and still had normal reactions. One day there was a con in front of me — there was a line, we were always in a line. This con didn’t please a screw for some reason and the screw was riding the man. An old con.”
“And?”
For some reason I had to laugh again. Then I said, “Did I tell you who that con was?”
“No.”
“Tooley. He keeps popping up, doesn’t he?”
“You keep mentioning him.”
“Yuh. Anyway, there came the point when the screw belted him one, old man and all, and I swung at the screw.”
“You did that? In prison?”
“I was nuts. What I mean is, I still had outer-world reactions.”
“And the other one, was he grateful, at least?”
“I still got an extra year.”
The orderly from the night before brought the breakfast, and at first sight and smell of it I felt very good. Then I started eating and the feeling went slowly.
Because of what had happened between Tooley and me, he had started to talk a lot after that. Instead of keeping his mouth shut after lights out and leaving me to myself, he talked and talked, because I was now his buddy. “Pretty stupid, but a buddy,” he used to say, and he used to laugh about it and talk some more. I think he talked to me the way a lonesome man on a lonesome island would talk to a rabbit he had caught, because there was nobody else, and because it was safe.
“How long were you in the same cell with him?”
“Years.”
“I thought he was going to be hanged?”
“Not then. That was still pending, or appealed, something clever like that. He was also in for plain and fancy larceny, of some kind.”
“Dope.”
I looked up from my plate, but before I could say anything she told me, “You said that When you were drunk.”
Very possible. I finished the eggs, glad to be done, and took coffee. Maybe with the coffee I’d start feeling better.
“Would you pour me some?” she asked.
I reached over to pour for her and knocked the sugar bowl over. After her cup was full I didn’t tilt back in time and poured some more on the table. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t either. She wiped the table while I lit a cigarette. When she was done wiping she waited a moment before she said anything but kept looking at me. When I looked up she tried a small smile.
“It’s a quiet morning,” she said. “You’re having breakfast
with nobody looking over your shoulder, there’s a nice view out of that window. Why don’t you relax, Jimmy?”
“Jimmy?”
“Gallivan, if you want. But I thought it sounded friendlier.”
“It did.”
“But?”
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe the view, the breakfast, the whole genteel set-up.”
“You said genteel?”
“Like, for example that genteel trick of somebody padding into my room while I’m sleeping and lifting my gun.”
When she said nothing immediately I felt I had built up to the point nicely. Then she said, “But it wasn’t your gun.”
Simple. It hadn’t been my gun.
“That’s right. It was yours,” I said.
“I don’t own one. I just brought it to you.”
“I now feel like a thief,” I said. “One who’s been robbed, but a thief.”
She took a tired breath.
“Why are you kicking and punching, Gallivan? You don’t need a gun here. You don’t need anything here. You’re through.”
After a moment I asked her, “What did you say?”
“You’re through. You can go now.”
“Go now? Go away?”
“What more do you want, Gallivan? You’re out You didn’t have to lift a fìnger. You’re eight hundred miles from the prison, you had a good night’s sleep, you had breakfast. What more do you want?”
CHAPTER 12
I stared at her and after a while she put her head down and turned her cup back and forth, by the handle. This made a small sound, very faint.
I got up and went to the window where I stood looking out as if there was something to see. I had no idea if there was something to see.
“Well?” she said. The sound was like the cup on the saucer, that small.
“I don’t know, Jessie.”
I heard her get up and come over. It took a very long time.
“You’re free, aren’t you?” she said next to me.
I wished that had been funny. I would have said, yes, free like a bird. Free like a bird who knows there’s a cage but he can’t see it, because he’s a daytime bird but it’s always night now.
“You look very unhappy,” she said.
I turned my head fast, ready to be angry, but when I saw her face I saw that she was only trying to be kind.
I looked out the window again and said just a fraction of what I would have liked to have said to her. “We can’t get along at all, can we,” I said.
I heard her light a cigarette and then, “I’ve never been in prison,” she said. “But it must be hard.”
“Yes.”
“Do you need money?” she asked.
I was very glad she had said that, making the problem that simple. I nodded, almost glad to have such a real problem.
“Ask Rand,” she said. “Maybe he can help.”
“Rand again.”
“He’s the only one you know, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“He’s not bad,” she said.
I felt myself for cigarettes but there weren’t any. She held out hers and I took a drag on it. Then I gave it back to her.
“I’d like to see him now.”
“All right, Gallivan,” she said.
She went to the table where she put out her cigarette and I went to the door, to wait for her there. I hadn’t yet reached it when she stopped me.
“If you need — I mean, how much are you going to ask him for?”
“All I can get.”
“I could give you fifty dollars,” she said. “I could give you that now, and if you need more, there’s a little more — ”
She had talked faster and then, in the end, she had talked more and more low. If she had also said my name then, I think she would not have said “Gallivan,” but my first name.
I said, “No thanks,” talking just as fast as she had done in the beginning, but much louder. There was no clear thought behind my refusal at that moment, which was surprising, because in my situation I should have taken money from anyone. But that didn’t strike me then.
Neither of us said anything else. She took me across the hall to the door where I had heard the voices, hers and the other one. It must have been Rand that time, who had told her to get on the ball.
“In there,” she said. “And good-by.”
“You leaving?”
“Oh no. I’ll be around.”
We couldn’t get along at all — and she had just offered to help me. She turned and walked away.
• • •
The room was like a club room, or for meetings maybe, and on the other side of the big table I could see a leather couch. Rand was lying on the couch, reading a paper. He had pulled an ashtray stand up to the side and there were plenty of butts in it I thought maybe he had smoked them. He didn’t look as if he had slept much the night before. Only his suit, another blue one, seemed unaffected.
He sat up when he heard me and then he put the paper away.
“Hi, Gallivan,” he said. He was rubbing his neck. “So the worst is over, huh? Sleep good?”
“Yes, thank you. Can I have one of your cigarettes?”
He watched me while I lit one.
“You look like you’ve come to say thank you again.”
I looked up and it wasn’t any easier to thank him this time, because this time I was going to ask him for something else right afterwards.
“Listen,” he said. “You’ve lived with cons for a long time, Gallivan, but you never were one and you didn’t become one. So there’s a lot of things you wouldn’t understand.”
“Yes?” I said, waiting to hear what he was driving at.
“You don’t have to make a formal thing out of a favor, because a favor’s got nothing to do with Christian love and so forth.”
“But?”
“I could afford it, is all. So forget it.”
He looked so tired and he had talked so straight, I suddenly liked Rand very much. It wasn’t a grateful feeling with the usual sense of obligation hanging on like a tail, I just liked him.
I think he saw that and made a brief smile.
“Thank you, Rand.”
He got up and stretched. He was either tired and done with talking, or now came the stinger.
“So — Good luck,” he said.
No stinger.
“And don’t look behind you,” he said. “It helps.”
It was the first time he had said more than the barely necessary and I would have liked to leave then, and remember about Rand the way he had been the last few minutes.
“Before going,” I said, “I wanted to ask you for one more piece of help.”
“Yes?” He half sat on the window sill and I couldn’t see his face because of the light.
“I’m strapped. I can’t even tell you when, or how, I’ll pay you back, but if you could …”
“Sorry, Gallivan. I’ve got nothing.”
I wished I could see his face better. He must have seen that I didn’t really believe him because he said, “That break cost me a fortune, Gallivan. More than I had.”
“More than you had?”
I sat down in a leather chair. The shock had caught up with me, the “No,” and I wanted to sit for a moment. I looked at the room with the leather and all the good, polished wood. I wondered what he meant by being strapped.
“I’m not the boss here, Gallivan. I’m a little helper. And the way it is now, broke too.”
He shrugged and came back to the couch. He let himself fall into it and rubbed his face.
“You want another cigarette?” he asked.
“Thanks, yes. And thanks, anyway.”
He lit his and mine and said, “What are your plans?”
“Distance,” I said. “A lot of distance.”
“Sure. That’s good.”
“Jessie might stake me. She mentioned something.”
“Oh?”
“Damn white of her.
After everything — ”
“How much?”
“Fifty, she said.”
“You want distance, Gallivan?”
I had nothing to answer.
“I might make it on fifty,” he said, “but not you.”
“Why not me?”
“You got no connections.” Then he said, “How were you planning this?”
“Just go.” Then I laughed, not for the humor, but because nothing else came to me. “After I find out where I am.”
“I can help you with that. You’re maybe three hundred miles south of Chicago, and …”
“I’m not going to Chicago.”
“Three hundred isn’t much distance, you mean.”
“Without connections, it’s no distance at all. I’m going to hit south. All the way south, into Mexico.”
“With half a C-note.”
“I can bum on less.”
“You know what that’ll mean, Gallivan? You’ll be flopping in all the places where the bulls are going to look. You’re going to ride rods where the bulls watch it, hitchhike where the bulls don’t like it, you’re going to look for hand-outs, day jobs, hide-outs, on the oldest circuit in the books of the bulls, the bums’ route.”
“Maybe,” I said, “it wouldn’t have been much different if I had left the pen after full time.”
“You got a point,” he said. “I know.”
I put the cigarette out, slapped my hands down on my legs, got up.
“Well. Wish me luck.”
“You want the map?”
“Yuh. I’d like the map.”
“Next town is five miles from here,” he said and gave me the map. “Called Florian.”
“As long as it’s on here.”
“You’re not going to be any asset to me. You know that, Gallivan?”
He was leaning against the table, looking tired as before, but frowning more. I said, “You look worried.”
“I am.”
“About me and fifty bucks?”
“I never thought of this before,” he said, “what with everything, but they’re going to nab you awful close to home plate.”
“My home is …”
“My home plate. Here.”
We were back to the first time I had asked the question, why he was helping me. If I kept being a liability to him much longer, I thought, maybe he’ll buy me a through ticket way down to the far end of Cape Horn.
“Stay here a minute,” he said and left the room.