by Keene, Day
I had been right, in the bathroom. May had forgotten it was my birthday. I was damned if I’d remind her.
“I’ll put the sprinklers on,” I said, “while you’re setting the stuff on the table.”
“You do that, Jim,” May smiled.
It was almost dark outside by now. I snaked the bottle from the car and bought myself a big drink before I turned on the sprinklers. There was a big brown patch on the front lawn that hadn’t been there that morning. Even chinch bugs happened to me.
It was not a pleasant meal. The liver was tougher than it looked. May talked a lot about nothing. The Carters had bought a new sectional sofa. On time. Gwen Shelly’s washline had broken with a half-dozen sheets on it. Gwen was going to have Bob put up the steel wire lines on his half-Saturday off. The Benson kid had the measles. Did I know there were chinch bugs, or maybe it was army worms, in the front lawn?
I ate in a slow burn. Maybe if I had been able to afford to take May to the Chatterbox or Mirror Bar, she might have remembered that it was my birthday. Kendall ate at both places as a matter of course. But not the Charters. We had to save our money for a month before we could afford such an extravagance. Then, usually, we had to use the dough to pay my insurance or the light bill.
I excused myself to change the sprinklers and belted the bottle again. Pearl had said that May was a very lucky woman to have a husband like me. Brother, was that a laugh.
May knew I had a bottle in the car. I could tell, the way she looked at me. She opened her mouth to say something about it, then changed her mind.
I ate what I could of the liver. There was no dessert. I read the paper while May washed the dishes. Not even seeing what I was looking at, listening to the clatter of dishes in the kitchen, hearing the whirr of the sprinklers and the drone of the mosquitoes trying to find openings in the screens.
The whiskey was working on me now. Not relaxing or making me happy like it usually did; only manufacturing more bile. I thought of Kendall and Lou sitting out under the stars at Steve’s Rustic Lodge, eating a steak three inches thick. I’d never been able to take May to Steve’s. Not on sixty-two-fifty a week and a thousand places to put every dollar.
May finished doing the dishes and tidied up the dining room. One thing was for sure. We might be poor, but if cleanliness was next to godliness, May had a right-hand seat reserved. Finished, she sat on the arm of my chair.
“What you so quiet about tonight, honey?”
What was I so quiet about?
The bile in me spilled over. I had to tell someone. I told her.
“Kendall fired me today.”
Her body stiffened. “Why?”
“He didn’t say. He just paid me off and told me not to bother to show up in the morning.”
I waited for her to bawl. She didn’t. Instead, she just squeezed my arm, hard. “Well, don’t feel too bad about it, sweetheart. We’ll get by, somehow.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” May admitted. “You’ll get another job. I know you will. Anyway, we still have each other.”
I leaned over to kiss her.
May pushed my head away. “No. Not now, Jim. Please. You know what it will lead to.”
That was another laugh. I couldn’t even kiss her. On my birthday. After we’d been married ten years.
May brushed my lips with hers. “Later.”
“Yeah. Sure. Later,” I said, and went out to change the sprinklers again.
Night was full now. The kids on the street were gone. The cicadas and the tree frogs had begun their nightly symphonic discord. I killed what was left in the bottle. I’d never felt so sorry for myself. I stood in the car port, watching May move around the living room.
I’d lost my job. We might lose the house. And how did she react when I told her? She didn’t. All she said was, “We still have each other,” and pushed me away when I tried to nuzzle her a little. And now she was emptying ashtrays. As if nothing at all had happened. As if we had five thousand dollars in the bank, instead of being into a personal loan company for two hundred and twenty-four dollars on account of having to get a paint and valve grind job on our nineteen thirty-nine Ford.
I sucked the bottle, wishing it was full. Suddenly I wanted a beer. I debated taking the car and decided against it. May would hear me and raise hell. She’d say we couldn’t afford beer. Not with me having lost my job.
I walked across the grass weaving slightly, belching liver. May came out on the breezeway. Her voice, worried now, reached after me.
“Jim. Where are you? What are you doing out there in the dark? Come in, Jim. Please.”
I walked on without answering. To hell with May. She hadn’t even remembered that it was my birthday. To hell with everything.
I was drunk enough to be cunning. When I didn’t come back, May would probably walk up to the Sandbar on the corner. We did what little drinking we did in the Sandbar. To watch the television. All the neighbors did. Because we couldn’t afford TV sets of our own.
I walked on past the Sandbar to the drive-in on Country Club Road and drank three bottles of beer, one right after another. All they did was make me thirsty. What I wanted was another bottle of Bourbon. I wanted a lot of Bourbon; enough to drown James A. Charters.
A Sunshine cab stopped for the light on Country Club. I made certain its flag was up. Then I opened the door and got in.
“Yes, sir?” the driver asked.
“Take me out to the beach,” I told him. Putting distance between me and May.
He wasn’t expecting a fare this far out. He was pleased to get one. “Sure thing, mister,” he said. “Where ’bouts on the beach you want to go?”
I named the first bar I thought of. “Let’s try the Ole Swimming Hole first.”
He swung in a wide U turn. He had to pass the Sandbar to get to the beach causeway. Bob Shelly’s Chevy was parked in front. Just parked. As we passed it on the far side of the street, May got out and walked into the Sandbar. She looked like she was crying.
It made me very sad. I didn’t want May to cry. I loved her. On the other hand, the least she could have done was to remember it was my birthday. If she had just said, “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” and kissed me like she meant it, I would have been satisfied. I couldn’t help it if I was a dub. I couldn’t help that I was a failure. God knew I had tried. I’d worked like a dog. For her. For ten long years. When the alarm clock rang I got up and went to work. At whatever job I had. Without a beef. Because I was doing it for May. Now I couldn’t even nuzzle her on my birthday.
“Kinda pitching one, eh?” the driver asked.
“Yeah. Kinda,” I said, sourly.
One of the barmen at the Ole Swimming Hole turned out to be Shad Collins, a lad I’d soldiered with, but whom I didn’t recognize at first because he’d gotten so fat.
“By God, it’s good to see you, Jim,” he said. He insisted on shaking hands. Then he set up a drink on the house. At eight bits a copy. “How’s it going, fellow?”
He seemed genuinely interested.
“Fine, Shad,” I lied. “Just fine.” To prove it, I laid a twenty on the bar and started to drink my way through it.
Things got slightly spotty after that. I listened to a swing band in some other bar. In still another bar, I danced with a cute little redhead who insisted I go to her beach cabana but whom I lost somewhere in the shuffle. There was a long ride in a private car, smelling the sweet-sour smell of the tide flats. With, of all things, roosters crowing on the other end and me cheering like mad about something. I talked to a lot of people. I ate a platter of broiled lobsters. I had more to drink. Then the night became even more kaleidoscopic, places and people and sounds following each other in jerky sequence with the rapidity of a piece of broken film racing through an old-fashioned movie projector.
In the white glare that followed the last of the film, a girl who sounded like Lou Tarrent said, “Jim. Jim Charters. Of all people.”
“Hiya, baby,” I yelled at her.
; Then I was bellied up to the bar in the Bath Club. Of which I wasn’t a member. In which I didn’t belong. Along with a party of wealthy-looking tourists, one of whom was asking me if I thought Palmetto Country would ever legalize gambling.
I thought it over. “Absolutely not,” I told him. “The churches run Sun City. And they’d never stand for anything that might cut into their take.”
Most of the men in the group laughed.
An old goat with a paunch nodded sagely. “That’s an angle I hadn’t considered. You seem to know your local politics, Charters.”
I looked down my nose at him coldly. “Why shouldn’t I? What do you think I am? A sixty-two-dollar-and-fifty-cents-a-week lawyer’s runner?”
Then the terrazzo floor came up and smacked me in the face.
3
I WOKE up lying on my back, breathing through my mouth. I was still panting from running so hard. It was like every dream I’d dreamed for a year. Someone was chasing me, while I stood anchored to one spot until fear wrenched me loose and I ran.
It was dark in the room but enough light leaked under a fluttering shade to give me an outline to a bed, a dresser, and two chairs. I was, obviously, in a hotel room. Relief drenched my body. I looked at the luminous dial of my watch. The dial looked twice its normal size but I couldn’t distinguish the length of the hands. It was either twenty-five minutes after twelve or five o’clock. What morning?
The knocking on the door that had awakened me continued. Not loud, but insistent. Thump — thump thump. Like the beating of a heart.
My mouth was dry. My head ached. I wished I could remember more about it. I hoped I’d had a good time. I hoped I hadn’t spent too much of the severance pay that Kendall had given me. I was afraid to get up and look in my pants pocket.
I felt on the table beside the bed for cigarettes and matches. The cigarette tasted like a mixture of hot straw and chicken droppings. The name on the folder of matches was The Glades Hotel. Even my drunks were unspectacular. Other men got drunk and woke up in Miami or Tallahassee. Even in Atlanta, or as far away as Havana. But not me. I was still in Sun City. The same old treadmill was just outside the window.
Where did you work last? How long did you work for Mr. Kendall? How little will you work for? Where were you born? Why?
The thumping on the door continued. I wished whoever it was would drop dead. I snuffed the cigarette and turned on my side. And wished I hadn’t. I’d really torn it this time. I wasn’t alone in the bed. At some point during my drunk, I had bumped into Lou and done what I’d wanted to do for a long time. I’d been a complete heel.
Lou was lying on her back, her long pageboy bob forming a brown pillow for the white oval of her face. Her lips were parted in a smile, as if she were dreaming of something pleasant. The sheet was pushed to the foot of the bed. Only her feet were covered. She had a nice body. As nice as I’d imagined it would be. Almost as nice as May’s.
I covered Lou with the sheet. Then I swung my legs over the bed and took a step. Uncertainly at first. Like a baby learning to walk. My head too heavy for my neck. My heart pounding in time to the thumping.
I was still panting from running so hard in my dream. My voice was fuzzy and tickled my throat. “Who’s there? Who is it?” I panted.
The thumping on the door stopped. A man’s voice said, “It’s Mantin, pal. Open up. Let me in.”
I didn’t know anyone named Mantin. But at least it wasn’t May. I took another step toward the door and kicked a bottle. I picked it up. It was almost full of Bourbon. I uncorked it and took a big drink. It made me feel a little better, but not much. I carried the bottle across the room with me and unlocked the door.
The man in the hall was small. He had flat gray eyes well-spaced in a deeply tanned face. He was wearing a white silk suit. His hair was black. The panama perched on the back of his head had cost him a hundred dollars. His tanned face was heavily lined. He was, I judged, a man in his middle forties. He had a diamond on one hand as big as my thumb-nail. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his lips. He looked like a cracker who’d come into money. A lot of money.
I blocked the opening with my arm. “What’s the idea?”
Mantin ground his cigarette into the hall rug with his toe. Then, pushing my arm aside, he came into the room, closing the door behind him, softly. His voice was a drawled whisper. “Okay. So you’re sore. But like I told you last night, this means a lot to me. How you doing, Charters?”
He knew my name. His concern seemed genuine. I hated his guts. I wished he’d go away and let me think. “Fine. Just fine,” I assured him.
Mantin prowled the room. He lifted the shade and looked out. He looked into the bathroom. He even looked in the clothes closet. Then he came back to where I was standing.
“You sober enough to talk?”
“No,” I panted. “I’m not.”
“You’d better be,” he said coldly. “Like I said before, this means a lot to me.”
What meant a lot to him? I didn’t want to insult him by telling him I’d never seen him before. He seemed to know me, well. I tried to ease him out. “Look, Mantin. Why don’t you come back in the morning?”
He shook his head. “Uh uh. I can’t be known in this. That would really fix things.”
The spring on the bed squeaked faintly as Lou moved in her sleep. Mantin slipped a gun from a shoulder holster. Like I might have taken a fountain pen out of my pocket, the gesture purely automatic.
The sheet was hot. It bothered Lou. She pushed it down part way with her hands, then squirmed out from under it. I thought she was waking up. She wasn’t. She turned on her side and lay with her back to us, making little contented noises in her throat. Then her breathing became regular again.
The room was in the front of the hotel, a few windows from the sign. A wavering finger of light felt its way under the fluttering shade. It outlined the delicate curve of a bare hip and went away again.
I began to sweat even harder. All I knew about Lou was her name and that there’d been something electric between us, a contact demanding to be made, from the very first time we’d met. But how she had gotten into my bed was an entirely different matter. The last time I had seen Lou had been in the County Building. When Kendall had tucked her hand under his arm and towed her down the hall. To keep their date at Steve’s Rustic Lodge. Then her voice came back to me, vaguely. Remembered from somewhere out on the beach.
‘Jim.’ she had cried. ‘Jim Charters. Of all people.’
And I had yelled, ‘Hiya, baby.’
Then all went black again. Mantin was still holding the gun. I hoped he wasn’t a former or prospective husband. If he was and rumor was fact, he’d have to shoot a lot of guys.
Mantin didn’t act much like a husband. He slipped his gun back into its holster. With the same ease he had drawn it. As if he had done it often. Smiling.
I like him better sober-faced. I squeegeed the sweat from my forehead with the bottle.
Mantin’s voice had all the warmth of a knife slash. “I know how you feel, Charters. I’m always sore as hell when I’m giving a twist a play and some dope butts in on me.”
I took a chance. “Then scram. And come back again in the morning.”
He removed his expensive panama and wiped the leather sweatband with a perfumed silk handkerchief. “Uh uh. She’ll keep. Believe me, son. Besides, I just came from talking to the captain and I want to get this started.”
I didn’t know him. I didn’t know any captain. I didn’t want to know either of them. I snarled, “So?”
Mantin’s voice was surprisingly gentle. “So the captain agrees with me that you sound like a right Joe. And I want to give you all the time possible to work your angles.”
The whiskey formed a hard lump in my stomach. Work what angles?
Mantin returned his hat to his head and the perfumed handkerchief to his pocket. “Come on. We can talk in the bathroom. The little lady might wake up and be embarrassed to see a strange man in the
room.”
Mantin lit the light. Then he closed the door and leaned against the basin. In the bright light reflecting off the tile, his face was vaguely familiar. A face seen briefly in a dream, against a background of music.
I remembered I was naked and wrapped a bath towel around me with one hand.
Mantin took a sack of Bull Durham from a pocket of the white silk suit, looking at the bottle in my hand. “You handle the stuff good, kid,” he said, gently. His voice was sad. “I wish I could. But I can’t. It makes a damn fool out of me. So I have to leave it alone.”
I tried to think of something to say. All I could think of was, “That’s too bad.” I said, “That’s too bad,” and took another drink.
The longer I looked at him the more familiar his face was. It was that sort of a face. If he was a cracker, he’d known money and power for a long time. In the bright light he looked more high class. His face could be kind of cruel, gentle or cold, depending on whether or not he was on your side.
The towel slipped while I was drinking. I set the bottle on the flush box and wrapped the towel around me again, tucking under the selvedge to secure it.
Mantin moved from the basin to the edge of the tub and sat down. “In the usual run of things,” he confided, “I wouldn’t put no trust in a guy whose acquaintance I make in a barroom. Drunks are a pain in the ass. I know. I’ve dealt with them all my life. But a gentleman having himself a time is different. And I’ve taken a liking to you, Charters. You’re smart, but you’ve still got,” he tapped the breast of his white silk coat, “what they call the milk of human kindness. More, you’ve got what it takes on the ball.”
I looked in the mirror of the built-in medicine cabinet. I looked sober. I wasn’t. I was drunk. I’d never been so drunk. I hadn’t the least idea who Mantin was or what he was talking about. I suddenly didn’t care.
I wished he’d make his point and get it over. What with losing my job with Mr. Kendall, probably spending my three weeks’ pay on my binge, being checked into the Glades Hotel with Lou, and having to go home and try to explain to May, I had enough trouble.