Memory (Hard Case Crime)

by Donald E. Westlake

  Little Jack and the rest of the crew didn’t bother him, but Edna still did. He hadn’t seen her since Sunday night, and knew he would never see her again, but she bothered him. His sin toward her had been, at the worst, thoughtlessness, but maybe thoughtlessness was the worst sin a human being could commit against another human being. It still stung him, at any rate, and was another source of his nervous energy.

  Going home after work Thursday night, he thought of what the next few days would be, if he weren’t planning on leaving. Tomorrow night, of course, he would go to the tavern; if he weren’t planning on leaving, he wouldn’t have to budget his money so tightly. The next night, he would go to the tavern again, and dance with Edna, and walk her home, and kiss her on her front porch, and slip his hand under her coat to touch her breasts. Sunday afternoon, he would sit at the dining room table for dinner with the Malloys, and Sunday night he would take Edna to the movies. Afternoons he would watch television, and nights he would work, and one day would be much like another, all blending in together, with only the Sunday to mark the passage of time.

  How easy it would be to slide into that, to join the long silent throng shuffling toward the grave. For him it would be as easy as breathing; all he’d have to do was rip up a few reminder notes. His memory would do the rest. But the thought of it left him weak with nervousness and fear, and he knew he could never want to let it happen.

  He was surprised to see, when he reached home, that the living room lights were on. The Malloys were always in bed well before midnight, so he hurried up to the walk, wondering if something was wrong.

  Matt Malloy was in the living room, sitting in his easy chair, smoking his twisted treeroot of a pipe. He was wearing slippers and workpants and an undershirt, and on the drum table beside his chair were a quart bottle of beer and two glasses, one of them half-full.

  Malloy took his pipe from his mouth and roused himself, as though he’d been dozing or in reverie. “Come on in, Paul,” he said. “I been waiting up for you. Have a beer.” His voice was a flawed rumble, delivering words slowly and precisely up from his chest.

  “What’s wrong?” Cole shucked out of his borrowed coat, left it on the newel post, and went on into the living room. Malloy had filled the other glass, and held it out for Cole to take.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Just want to talk to you. Grab a seat.”

  Cole sat down on the edge of the sofa, holding the glass in both hands but not yet drinking any of the beer. He could tell nothing from Malloy’s expression; he didn’t seem especially angry or joyous or sad, not anything in particular, just quiet and perhaps a little solemn. It was just about the same expression he wore whenever he talked about the history of organized labor.

  Malloy said, “You’re planning on going away.”

  So that was it. “Yes, I am.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Paul. So’s the Mrs. We’ve both grown what you might call fond of you the last two months. We’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too.”

  “I expect you plan to better yourself, I expect that’s what’s behind it.”

  “I guess so, in a way.”

  Malloy picked up his glass and drained it, then refilled it again and that emptied the bottle. He put the bottle on the floor beside his chair. “I don’t know exactly how to start,” he said. “I feel I want to tell you something, but I don’t know exactly how to start.”

  “My home is back east,” Cole told him, in what he knew was a vain effort to duck what was coming.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Malloy. “In a manner of speaking, you might say the Earth is your home. Depends on how you look at things.” He himself seemed dissatisfied with that; he frowned and shifted position and said, “Let me try to tell you what I mean. Take the Mrs. now, asleep upstairs. Just before you got home, I was sitting here thinking about high school days and the days when I was a young man, before I married. I can think of half a dozen girls I went with then, all different, all of them at one time or another the only girl for me. And maybe a dozen more I never did go with but wanted to. Most of those girls are still right here in town, married and got families of their own. I was thinking about them tonight, just before you come home. How, when all is said and done, it didn’t make much difference which of them I married.”

  Cole frowned at that. Instead of the arguments for staying he’d expected, he was getting a gratuitous look at Matt Malloy’s frustrations and failure feelings, and he didn’t like it. Especially if Malloy was going to sit there and tell him what was wrong with his wife; Cole liked Mrs. Malloy, she was one of the best people he’d met here.

  But Malloy said, “Don’t get me wrong, Paul, this isn’t nothing against the Mrs. She’s a fine woman, and I don’t regret for a minute that I married her. But I’m saying it really didn’t make much difference if it was her I married or Sarah Cook or Mary Ann Wheeler or which one of them. I’d still be pretty much where I am and who I am. My children would look different, and maybe be a little different—I might have daughters even, instead of sons—but I’d be pretty much the same man. There was one girl, now, Elsie Morlander, if I’d married her I would have most likely stayed in the Army, made a career out of it. But my work wouldn’t have been much different from what it is now, and I would have retired after twenty years and come back here anyway, and here I’d be just the same, only maybe working just part-time down to the tannery instead of full-time, and have a bookcase full of books on Army instead of on unions.”

  Malloy drank some more beer. “I don’t know if this makes any sense to you or not,” he said. “You’re still young, not married yet, not settled into your groove yet, so maybe you just don’t know what I’m talking about. But what I’m trying to say, the choices you make in your life, they all seem big and important at the time, but as the years go by they all smooth out and things are pretty much as they would have been anyway. Every once in a while in a man’s life, he comes to a crossroads, you might say, a place where he’s got to make a decision about his whole future life. But like the fella says, all roads lead to Rome. The scenery might be a little different on each road, but after a while they all come back together again. And then one day you say to yourself, it didn’t make a damn bit of difference which way I picked back there. You’ll look back at the different girls you went with when you were young, and you’ll say to yourself, it didn’t matter a particle which one of them I married.”

  “All decisions aren’t like that,” said Cole.

  “No, they don’t look it,” Malloy told him, “not up close. Like what you’re deciding now. Whether you’re going to live in this town here or in New York City. It looks like a hell of a difference in that one, don’t it? But what is this town but a bunch of jobs and a bunch of neighborhoods and a bunch of people? And what is New York City but a bigger bunch of jobs and a lot more neighborhoods and a great big bunch of people? So twenty-five years from now you’ll take the subway to work instead of walking or driving, but how much difference is that? Maybe you’ll live in an apartment house instead of a house like this one, but on the inside it’s all the same. And a job is a way to make money to pay the bills, so what difference does it make what the job is or where it is? Twenty-five years from now you’ll live in a neighborhood and you’ll go to a job and your kids’ll be growing up, and that’s just the way of it. The place you live might be here or New York City or San Francisco, but who you are and what you are and what you’ve got to look back on will be all the same thing.”

  Cole shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Because you’re young.” Malloy smiled and shrugged. “I didn’t suppose you’d know what I was talking about,” he said, “but I had to go ahead and say it anyway. If you ever want to come back, you just write to me and tell me when you’re coming, that’s all you have to do.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I wish you every bit of luck, Paul.” Malloy heaved himself out of the chair. “And now I’ve got to get off
to bed.”

  “I’ll take care of the glasses and the bottle.”

  “I won’t argue about it, I’m tired.” He held his hand out. “If I don’t see you again before you go, goodbye and good luck.”

  Cole shook his hand, feeling solemn and a bit sad. But the impatience and the nervous energy overrode all other feelings, and when Matt Malloy went on upstairs to bed nothing of what he’d said remained in Cole’s consciousness. He took the two glasses and the empty beer both out to the kitchen, and then he went upstairs and to bed.

  Tomorrow night, he thought, and fell asleep smiling.

  13

  He checked his suitcase and canvas bag at the bus depot, and then went on to the tannery. Mrs. Malloy had insisted he keep the borrowed coat, so he was wearing it the same as usual. He had ten dollars and eight cents in his pockets, and he would be paid thirty-two seventeen. He’d have almost ten dollars left over after he bought the ticket.

  When he punched the time clock, the time on the card was exactly four P.M. It occurred to him that he would never punch out again, and this card of his would always be incomplete, like a hole in the world. The idea struck him funny, and he waited in good humor for the payline to form, not caring that he was still getting the silent treatment.

  It was only luck that these people didn’t know he was leaving. He’d told Edna, and he’d told the Malloys, but apparently neither had told anyone else. If the crew members had known he was leaving, it would have made the silent treatment superfluous and they would have abandoned it, if only to tell him he was a bastard for running out on Edna.

  It was about ten after four before the payline got started, but Cole was up near the front of the line and he still had over half an hour to catch his bus anyway. When his turn came he took the pay envelope from Joe Lampek, and headed immediately for the coat rack near the door, where his coat was hung. He paused there long enough to switch the money from envelope to trouser pocket, and to check and be sure it was the same amount as usual. Then he crumpled the empty envelope and the white paper ribbon listing his deductions, threw them on the floor, and shrugged into his coat.

  Most of the crew was still on the payline, and not looking in his direction. The others were sitting around on crates, smoking and talking together. They were excluding him anyway these days, so none of them noticed when he slipped through the doorway, shut the door behind himself, and walked away from the tannery.

  Plenty of time, plenty of time. He stopped at a drugstore on Western Avenue and bought a magazine to look at on the bus. He selected Life because it ran so heavily to pictures; he had trouble concentrating on reading matter of any kind.

  When he got to the bus depot, the clock high on the wall read exactly four-thirty. There were two pregnant women sitting on the bench, surround by parcels. They were talking about their doctors.

  Cole bought his ticket and asked if the New York bus was going to arrive on time. “Don’t ask me,” said the old man behind the counter. “It gets here when it gets here. On time usually, but not always.”

  He got his suitcase and canvas bag from the locker, and put them on the floor near the door. He was too keyed up to sit, but waited standing by the door, looking out through the plate glass at the street. He chain-smoked, and kept looking up at the clock.

  The bus was right on time. The two pregnant women glanced at it, and then ignored it, so it was something else they were waiting for. Cole carried the luggage out to the sidewalk, and the old man from the ticket counter came out to put the claim checks on and stow the bags away in the side of the bus. Cole boarded the bus, and found it nearly empty. He picked the third seat back on the right-hand side, and sat there while the bus remained parked at the curb in front of the depot. That was a lovely moment, a safe and beautiful feeling, the best of both worlds; to be on the bus, but the bus not going anywhere.

  Then the driver shut the door and hunched over the big flat steering wheel, and the bus wrenched forward into time. In that instant, Cole felt a sudden kind of pain, as though in jolting forward the bus had broken some sort of invisible cord between Cole and this town, and now both were falling free of each other, drifting apart like detritus around a spaceship.

  Looking out the window, he watched the town go by backwards. He was afraid to be leaving here, afraid to be going into darkness and ignorance, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to go.

  He’d forgotten the name of the narrow river that snaked through town, but he counted the number of times the bus crossed it and it was three. Shortly after the third time, the houses stopped and were replaced by countryside, barren and brown and wintry.

  He sat gazing out the window, the magazine unopened on his lap.

  14

  Cole awoke to find himself stuffed and folded into his corner of the seat, though the seat next to him was empty. He stretched out his arms and legs, feeling the stiffness in them, and then realized what had awakened him; the bus wasn’t moving.

  Were they in the city?

  He sat upright, and squinted out though the window, but at first he saw only darkness. Then, near the front of the bus, he saw the line of tollbooths, and in the next instant the bus started forward again. He saw the tired-looking man in the gray uniform in the little booth on the way by, and then, looking back, he saw in green neon lettering stretched across the top of the booths, new jersey turnpike. So they were leaving the turnpike, and wasn’t New Jersey very near New York? He leaned his cheek against the cold glass of the window and peered forward, trying to catch a glimpse of the city.

  He wondered if he would recognize it, or any part of it. He wondered if he would arrive in New York City and step down from the bus and suddenly know all, who he was and where he was going and why he had had to make this trip. He hoped it would happen that way, but he was afraid it wouldn’t.

  More toll booths came up now, these for the Lincoln Tunnel. New York must be very close now, very close. His mouth was dry, and he felt he was beginning to shake; a treacherous part of his mind whispered of how pleasant it would be still to be at home.

  But that was wrong. Home was not the town left behind him, but the unknown city ahead. Edna had told him he’d once said he came from New York City, and that still did sound right, it did sound as though he must have come from New York even though New York was now as unknown to him as the moons of Mars.

  In his nervousness he lit a cigarette, and didn’t even mind its taste, though normally he couldn’t stand the taste of a cigarette immediately after waking up. His body was stiff from sleep, his eyelids were grainy, the palms of his hands were greasy with sweat, but in his agitation he didn’t notice any of it.

  The bus roared through the bright tunnel, and then up a curving concrete ramp and into the side of a sprawling building, where it pulled into an angled slot between two other buses. Cole and the other passengers stepped down and waited for their luggage, and then all moved away in a loose mass toward the escalator down to the main level of the terminal.

  Looking down at the main level from above, while riding down the escalator, he did feel faint intimations of visual memory, the stirring of belief that he had been in this building before. When he had been here, under what circumstances, for what purpose, he couldn’t tell. But everything he saw he seemed to recognize, as though seeing again a B-movie he had once sat through fifteen years before.

  He knew this building, but he knew it in a strange way, only as he came across it, without being able to anticipate what he would come to next. Walking along from the escalator, he couldn’t guess what was ahead, but on seeing the next object—the newsstand in the center of it all, the Information Booth off to the right, the Walgreen’s on the left—in the instant of seeing it he knew it was right and correct and in its proper place.

  He had been right to come here, to obey that note without understanding it. Already it was all coming back, memories and reasons; whatever had gone wrong inside him would soon be right again.

  Still, it was odd he couldn
’t anticipate, couldn’t remember ahead of time what next his eyes would fall on. It was almost as though nothing existed until he looked at it, the world had no existence before he saw it. And would it fade again out of existence behind him?

  He spun around, feeling a sudden terror, but the long yellow room full of overcoated travelers was still the same, and still familiar. It was now eleven-forty on Saturday night, and Christmas was next Thursday. Travel had already started to build up; the terminal was almost rush-hour full.

  He gazed at it all, feeling sheepish, and then turned back and walked on. He went out through the Eighth Avenue entrance, and stopped there on the sidewalk, for just a moment at a loss.

  What now? Faint stirrings of recognition were not enough. He had come here all this way blindly, trusting his unguessable earlier self to have had sensible motives and a workable plan, following through on a scheme he knew practically nothing about, doing it for only emotional reasons. If it had been left to conscious logical decision he would probably still be back in town, but he had been made so disturbed and so upset by the thought of staying that he had had no choice but to go.

  And here he was, and what now? He set his suitcase and canvas bag down on the sidewalk, and took his note from his pocket. There was the address: 50 Grove St. That must be where he should go now.

  Cabs were milling in front of him, at the curb, unloading old fares and loading new ones. Cole put his hand in his pocket and felt the money there, just under six dollars. He would have to spend some of it on a cab ride, he knew of no other way to find the place he wanted.

  He carried his luggage over to where two women were getting out of a cab, and he leaned down to say through the window to the driver, “Do you know where Grove Street is?”