“Good. The boat’s been in storage. I forgot to stock the liquor chest and I’m dying of thirst.”
“Right this way, ma’am.”
They walked out the wharf to where Dean’s car was parked and drove to the Casa Munras, at the other end of Monterey’s business district. They took a table in the lounge and Dean ordered.
Truly lifted her glass and drank deeply, then put it down to lean on her elbows and smile warmly at Dean. “You know,” she said, “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again. I owe you an apology.”
“For what?”
“Well, for one thing, for not seeing you as you really are. I’ve just realized that you’re a man of many disguises.”
Ruth laughed nervously and looked from one to the other. “I didn’t know you knew Dean very well.”
“I don’t. He was kind enough to take me to Clyde Davenport’s ranch one morning.”
Dean alibied quickly, “You remember, Ruth. You were still in bed at the time.”
“I was?”
“Yeah.”
She pouted and said, “I could have gone to a ranch breakfast, though. I didn’t look that bad.”
“You looked like hell. Besides, you were feeling sorry for yourself and you were sore at me. So I went with Miss Moore.” He lifted his fingers to brush back the hair at his temples and asked Truly, “But what brings this up?”
“Clyde Davenport.”
“Oh.”
She smiled and said, “Yes. The day after that barbecue I remembered that you were chuckling to yourself all the way down from the ranch to Salinas. Then, too, I didn’t leave Salinas right away. It was a hot day, if you’ll remember, so I drove over to a bar and had some cold beer. Then, on my way out of town, I saw you standing on a corner talking with a group of Mexicans. Later that night, at home, some friends of mine dropped in and I thought you might like to join us. I called your house, but your man told me that you hadn’t come home yet. That night the Bide-A-Wee sign was planted mysteriously in front of the Davenport house by a bunch of Mexicans. Now, I called your house at eleven, but I’ve learned since that you were supposed to have been home at nine. In other words, I know very well that you put that sign in front of Clyde’s house.”
Ruth said smugly, “That wasn’t hard to figure out. I’ve guessed it all along. It’s so typical of Dean.” To establish a proprietorship of which Truly seemed to be unaware, she cooed, “Isn’t it, darling?”
Truly laughed and said, “It will do you no good to deny it.”
Dean frowned and took a heavy swallow of his drink. “I hope you haven’t mentioned this to anyone else.”
“Of course not.”
“Good. I don’t admit you’re right, but if Clyde knew definitely I was the one he’d move heaven and earth to crucify me.”
“And the little I know would be definite enough for him?”
“That would be enough.”
“I shall be very circumspect and keep my blabbing little mouth shut.”
“O.K.”
“But I’m glad I learned this about you. It places you in an altogether different light. Personally, I don’t know anyone else who’d go to so much trouble and run such a risk simply for a laugh.”
Dean smiled with her, but did not bother to explain that getting even with Clyde was much more important than the laugh. In her set it was the laugh that was the important thing. Perhaps she thought she recognized a kinship with him. At least, she had shed her cold aloofness and was even friendlier than she had been at the barbecue.
Ruth didn’t care for a conversation that excluded her, so she started gossiping about people they knew. Truly was not interested and was soon bored. She had one more highball, then yawned deliberately in Ruth’s face and got up to leave. Dean offered to drive her home, but she would not allow it. She had a waitress telephone for a taxi. Dean left Ruth at the table and escorted Truly outside when the cab arrived.
As she got into the rear seat she left the door open and asked Dean, “Do you have anything scheduled for this coming Sunday?”
He thought of a tentative arrangement with Ruth, but said, “Nothing important. Why?”
“I’m having a few people out to the Monkey-Do Sunday afternoon. Nothing special. We won’t cruise anywhere. Just a lazy day in the sun, if the weather’s good. I’d like to have you aboard.”
“Don’t I raise your hackles any more?”
“No.” She smiled.
“Same here. All right, I’ll be there. But I — well — ”
“Ruth?” she asked. He nodded and she thought a moment, then sighed and said, “Bring her along — if you must. Frankly, she’s a crashing bore to me, but Steve and Betty seem to like her. So she may fit in.”
She waved to Dean as the cab pulled away. He stood there in the dark for a moment thinking of her words. Why wouldn’t Ruth fit in? As far as he was concerned, she had no difficulty fitting in wherever they chose to go. Dean had always felt rather proud of being in her company. What could Truly possibly mean by a remark like that? Dean was puzzled, but he also began to wonder.
Even that night, at Ruth’s home, with Ruth at last happily asleep in his arms, he was still thinking about it. He lay in bed wide awake, staring into the dark and seeing in his mind’s eye the images of Ruth and Truly standing together. They were totally unlike, sure. Ruth was short and a bit on the chubby side and bubbled with friendliness toward almost anyone. Truly was tall and slim and willowy behind a cool barrier that she had erected between herself and the world. Where one was self-possessed and arrogant, the other was sympathetic and earthy. Where one dressed as if she had just stepped from the pages of Vogue, with no compulsion whatever to impress —
That, he realized, was part of it. But why? He sought about frantically in his mind and then, for the first time, using Truly as a yardstick, he knew what she and her type would think of Ruth. Ruth had that necessary compulsion to impress. She wore her minks and ermine at every possible opportunity, quite often when furs were definitely out of place. Dean could remember occasions when he had remonstrated with her about wearing a fur, when an evening had been so warm that he had been forced to wear a linen jacket.
Her answer had invariably been, “What’s with you, Buster? Them that has ’em wears ’em.”
He pulled his arm from under Ruth’s body and sat up in bed. She stirred and rolled to her side, but did not awaken.
He thought of Ruth’s display of jewelry. Again using Truly as a yardstick, he could understand that possibly some bad taste was involved. Ruth certainly enjoyed loading herself down with jewels. He had always rather liked that himself, but now he wondered. He thought of the women he knew who had come from secure backgrounds. The night Truly had been dancing at the Lodge she had worn but a single strand of pearls at her throat and one slim bracelet on her wrist. Betty Moore was not at all addicted to jewelry. Jan Parker had a fortune in jewels, but she, too, wore only one or two pieces at a time. None of the other women he could think of covered themselves with jewelry the way Ruth did. He wondered again, Bad taste? and decided, Must be.
He reached for a cigarette and the flare of the match brought Ruth awake. She sighed and turned into his arms and snuggled her nose in the hollow of his shoulder. She yawned and asked, “Can’t you sleep, darling?”
He inhaled deeply the heavy aroma of perfume in the room and shook his head. “I was just thinking.”
“What about?”
“Nothing much. By the way, Truly invited us out to her boat Sunday afternoon. Care to go along?”
Ruth was wide awake and asked suspiciously, “Did she invite me, too?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t say that so easily. She and I aren’t exactly bosom pals. She’s not like her brother, you know.”
“I — ah — I understand she has some kind of fixation about Steve.”
“You can say that again. Jees, she sure gives that poor Betty a bad time.” She sat up, too, and clasped her arms about her knees. “I’m damned if
I can figure how women get that way. So all right, Steve is a great guy and it’s only natural his sister should think so, too. But she goes ’way beyond that. No one is good enough for Steve. How Betty puts up with it is beyond me.”
“She seemed like a nice person.”
“Oh, she is. The best.”
“Doesn’t Steve know Truly is jealous of his wife?”
“Yes, I think he does, sometimes. But he’s fond of Truly, too, you know, and he doesn’t like too much criticism about her, even from Betty. It’s an unhealthy situation.”
“Why?” He asked jokingly, “You don’t think there’s incest, do you?”
Ruth took the cigarette from him, inhaled deeply, and handed it back. Dean swore under his breath and crushed out the cigarette in an ash tray. He had never said anything about it to Ruth, but he hated having a woman puff at his cigarette.
Ruth said slowly, “No, I don’t think there’s physical incest. In fact, knowing Steve, I’d swear there isn’t.”
Dean laughed and said, “Look, baby. Remember me? I come from the wrong side of the tracks, where sex is something you grow up with and live with, like three squares a day, if you can get them. It’s nothing unusual for brothers and sisters to learn all about anatomy and sex from each other. Just for one example, there was an older brother and a young sister lived just across the field from our shack. Damned near every afternoon, when the parents were busy working — ”
Ruth interrupted by placing her hands on her ears. “Please, Dean. I don’t want to hear about it. You’re getting filthy.”
He waited until she had lowered her hands, then said, “I am not. I’m just telling you the facts of life. I think I know what goes on. That’s why I asked you about Truly and Steve.”
“And the answer is still no.”
“Then why do you say it’s an unhealthy situation?”
“Well — well, gee, it’s hard to explain. It’s not with Steve. It’s all in Truly’s attitude. Can’t there be a sort of mental incest? I mean, she loves Steve too much, she idolizes him too much.”
“I see what you mean. It’s all in her mind.”
“Yes. Betty was telling me something about it one time. Whenever Truly is around Steve she wants him all to herself and is jealous and mean about his attentions to anyone else, even his wife. But then she seems to realize it’s all wrong and goes away and that’s when she runs around with fighters and wrestlers and people like that. She swings from one extreme to the other.” Ruth paused, then yawned and said, “To hell with her. I’m sleepy. You should be too.”
She dropped to her back and pulled Dean down and they discovered that neither one was sleepy.
He had given little thought to Ruth’s protective attitude toward Steve, but the following morning an incident occurred that brought it forcibly to mind.
Freeman arrived at the office that morning before Dean. He had slept badly during the night and had been up roaming the house an hour or more before dawn. He went to work too early, without breakfast, then decided to eat after all and had a plate of greasy bacon and eggs at a truckers’ stop on the highway. The bad food upset his stomach and he arrived at the office in a sour frame of mind. It was a gray morning, heavy with fog, and lights had to be turned on in the office and the packing shed. Freeman was irritable and depressed. He growled at the bookkeeper and snapped at his secretary. He was barely civil to the shed boss, and when Vince Moroni dropped in with his usual morning report on field conditions he got in an argument with him. The big man shrugged philosophically and walked away.
Freeman knew he was wrong and knew also that if his mood persisted he would have a bad day. He got through his morning mail in a hurry, then walked out to the packing shed to watch the workers, hoping that the sight of physical action would cool him off.
The shed was about fifty feet wide and a hundred and fifty feet long. At the end opposite the offices, on the same level, was the ice room, where big blocks from the ice plant were crushed for use in the crates and were blown into the big refrigerator cars sitting on sidings by the shed. Above the ice room was a balcony where a worker nailed together the crates and sent them on down the line for packing. From end to end of the shed, toward the track side, was a long line of twelve “humps,” or stations, with an endless belt running from end to end on which the crates were carried. Opposite were the big doors where the trucks were unloaded and a large open space for handling the truck baskets. Each basket carried about ten crates of lettuce, which the field cutters threw in loosely.
Freeman stood aside on the open platform and watched a truck and trailer pull in alongside the unloading dock. Handlers jerked the big baskets from the truck and shoved them across the room to the humps. Chain block and tackle gripped one edge of a basket and tilted it in the air, so that the trimmers could get at the contents without difficulty. There were four trimmers, all women, for each basket. Before them was a broad working table. They took the lettuce from the basket and pulled the outer leaves away from the heads. If they found puffballs (lettuce without body) or cracked ribs or otherwise spoiled lettuce, it went down the cull chute. They were highly skilled and well paid and they worked very fast, yet the man standing at the table opposite them, the packer, worked faster than the four of them put together and with more skill, and did a multitude of jobs all at the same time.
Freeman strolled over and watched the long line of forty-eight women trimmers and the twelve packers. In all the years he had spent in the business he had never failed to be fascinated by a good packer’s work. The man grasped the lettuce as it was passed to him, judged its size and quality instantly, and placed it to his left in a box for fives or to his right in a crate for fours. As soon as a dozen heads were packed in the bottom of each crate he covered them with a heavy paper liner, grasped a broad shovel, dug it into crushed ice, and threw the ice on top of the liner. Another dozen, another liner, and more ice until the crates were filled, then another liner to cover the top and more ice on that. The crates were then shoved onto the moving belt to go to the lidder, the clincher, the labeler, the checker, the turner, and on outside to the loading dock and into the cars.
The packer was the key man of the business. He had to correct, by way of the cull chute, the occasional faults of the four women opposite him, and it was his quick and unerring judgment that determined the quality of the product and made for good or bad relations with the buyers in the East. Bad packers could ruin the value of a label, while good packers could increase it.
Freeman watched them, as interested as ever, but their quickness and their skill failed to raise his spirits. He became, instead, even more glum. He knew what was happening to them, to all of them. Dry pack was taking over and the skilled ice packers were on their way out. Dry pack was cheap and it was faster, so each year a greater and greater volume of lettuce went through the vacuum tubes. It was progress, but it was also a shame. Field workers did not have the skill of the packers or the trimmers. The lettuce was trimmed badly, too many puffballs and spoiled heads got through, and it was all packed in the dirty conditions existing in the fields. Quality lettuce properly packed was on its way out, and the quality packers, the skilled aristocrats of the business, were fast losing their jobs.
Freeman turned away from them and walked to the edge of the unloading platform to look out at the fog. Light was coming through and in another hour or so the sun would burn it away. It would eventually be a bright, hot day, with probably the usual wind sweeping through the valley, blowing hot dust over lettuce that was still damp with fog. It was the sort of weather that produced slime between the leaves.
All night long Freeman had been thinking of Tom Moore and his son, and of his own angry action that had compelled him to sign with Dean Holt. His anger had cooled during the subsequent weeks and he realized finally that he had probably cut his own throat. Steve was not the same sort his father had been. Steve’s word was undoubtedly good. He could have remained with the Moore outfit, and as soon as the estate was
settled he would have had a quarter of the business, a very fat quarter, indeed. Susan was also now aware of that fact and was not remiss in letting him know that if he hadn’t acted so quickly they would now be sitting very pretty.
But she hadn’t too much to complain about and, to give her credit, she did not really nag at him about it. He was now making twenty-four thousand and he had an excellent bonus interest in the best profit-making company in the valley. Given any sort of decent break, he knew that at the end of the season he would come out with a bonus, in addition to his salary, of at least eighty or ninety thousand dollars. It was more money than he had ever made and it could probably continue on and even grow year after year. And if Dean got on top, of course, and managed to acquire some land of his own, it could even amount to more than a quarter interest in Moore’s.
On the same side of the coin, Dean never bothered him, he never dictated to him, as he did to everyone else, he respected and admired Freeman’s genius as a salesman (the reverse of old Tom), and he was obviously pleased to have him in the business. Dean treated him more as a partner and often spoke glowingly of their future together. There was little doubt that the future held a great deal of promise.
But Dean was nevertheless the boss and, the really difficult thing to cope with, he had absolutely no understanding of ethics. Not that anyone else in the business was especially ethical, but the others did have certain codes they lived by and in accordance with which they conducted their business. Dean had no code of any kind.
Freeman was worried about ethics that particular morning. He had come across information that could further Dean’s interests and that could, in turn, seriously damage Steve Moore. Left to his own devices, he would have erased the information from his mind. He was no longer angry with the entire Moore clan and he had no desire to cripple anyone, especially Steve, who was fighting with everything he had to keep above water. But he had his own code of ethics, too, and that involved loyalty to the boss he was working for. He knew that Dean would want the information.
He stayed out in the shed, wrestling with the problem, until he saw Dean’s car pull into the parking area. Then he left the shed and followed Dean into the private office.
Hunger and the Hate Page 17