“You got to cut that crap out, Sam.” Sandy looked at the telephone.
“Listen,” said Jordan. “Listen here. I got that for you. I just thought of it and got you this gift. What are you talking about?”
Sandy did not like his tone. It imposed on him. The whole crappy thing did, the lighter and Jordan. He gave a quick look at the phone, no help though, and then he had the words to make good, sharp sense and to get rid of this problem.
“You don’t come to the office any more every day. You don’t go and sit in just any bar any more when you and me have a beer. You don’t do one or two dozen things because I tell you you don’t, because there’s sense behind it, and because that’s part of the deal. The deal is you’re special. The deal is . . .”
“Don’t try to pat me on the head,” said Jordan.
“Shut your mouth and listen. Maybe this way it sinks in: You don’t talk about the work you do and you don’t breathe a word about the work you’re working up to doing. But you think about it. You think about it all the time till you got it stuck in your bones. I’ll use the square word, Jordan, like the squares would say it: You’re bad, Jordan, and you’re building to do the worst thing.” Sandy took a breath as if he had been shouting. Then his low voice got pointed and sharp. “So for the good of the company, Jordan, and to keep away trouble, don’t you put your name and my name right next to each other!”
“You’re making a thing . . .”
“Shut up. You don’t engrave it, you don’t say it, you don’t . . .”
“All I did was bring you a present. I didn’t bring it to the precinct station, I brought it to you.”
“I’m talking sense and business, Jordan, not personal crap. I’m telling you . . .”
“I don’t know why in hell you’re so jumpy,” said Jordan. He picked up the lighter and started to drop it back into the box.
“Gimme that,” and Sandy grabbed for it.
Jordan let him, because the lighter was Sandy’s.
“I’ll get rid of that thing and don’t you ever . . .”
“What did you say just now?”
Sandy did not answer. He watched Jordan’s face and with intentional slowness he dropped the lighter into his pocket and folded his arms.
“You going to keep it?” said Jordan. He did not like the sound of his voice.
I know him best, thought Sandy, and from where does he pull this crap all of a sudden. And if it’s serious, once and for all . . .
“Get the hell out of here, Jordan. I’m expecting a call.”
Then Sandy waited, while he stared at the bar, because he was badly worried for one long, stiff moment, when it struck him that he did not know Jordan very well.
“You going to throw away that lighter?” he heard.
And if he says yes, Jordan thought, what am I going to do . . .?
“Yes,” said Sandy. He rubbed his mouth.
Jordan tried his trick but it did not work. He was hating Sandy’s guts. He tried his trick again but what interrupted was a tired feeling and a tired thought. And if I walk out, then there’s nothing either . . .
“You can take it to a jeweler,” Jordan said, “and he’ll grind the words out for you.”
“Yes.”
The phone rang and Jordan said, “There’s your phone.”
Sandy nodded and got up. “Where you going to be tonight?” he said.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Jordan and walked out.
Nothing else happened, which meant Sandy got his way. And nothing showed with Jordan, because he was special.
Chapter 6
Penderburg looked homey and neat. The houses were red brick with gingerbread porches; there were big elm trees along the streets, and most of the week there was little traffic. Quiet streets and some even pretty. But the town sat in a valley of a most unnatural ugliness. The hills around the small town were geometric. There was a round hill of mining waste north, a long one with camel’s hump south, and a third one had a sharp tip and a conveyor going up the side. The conveyor was dribbling rock and shale, and from a distance the long machine was like a stiff-legged insect leaning up the side of the hill. The two older hills were gray and the new ones showed black shimmers. When it rained, they all shimmered.
At nine in the morning, when the sun shone and everything looked like small-town summer, Jordan drove into Penderburg.
The dead hills, he thought, made the sky look out of place. Hot shale hills and little brick houses and only the big sky didn’t fit.
Then he looked for everything which was important. He found 505 Third Avenue very quickly, an old apartment house with three stories and the trees in front reaching all the way up. There was an empty lot on the other side of the street, an old empty lot, with trees. Under the trees was a diner, made out of wood. Behind it a gray grass railroad spur, the hill dry in the sun, and also gray grass between the sleepers.
There were no other three-story buildings on the street. One-family bricks, frilly woodwork, a little tower worked into the side, blue shirts and white shirts on the lines in back.
He drove to the shopping square and started from there. It went, hotel, bus depot, church, porched houses, gray hill. Then back again. This time, railroad station, police station, bars, bowling alley, porched houses, the other gray hill. Next, movie house, porched houses, railroad sidings, warehouses, fence along mine, black hill. The highway went around this one. And the last tack not much different, with the other movie, other bars, dance hall Saturdays Only, gas station, gas station, state highway and out.
By late afternoon Jordan knew what was important. He knew streets and distances, how to come and go. He drove out of town and ate in a roadhouse which was five miles away.
He did not eat because he was hungry but because it was a way to spend time. He had to spend time.
He thought, I’ll wait till the evening. I never work in the evening, because of the light, rarely in the evening, but what comes now is not the real job yet, the right part, but the wrong part which I have to get out of the way, I never work in the evening, which is always the dead stretch of time waiting to get done, but this time I have this thing to do and it will fill up the evening.
He cajoled himself like that and stroked his jumpiness so it would lie still like a cat. He waited till dark, which came late at that time of year, and drove back to the square in town. He left the car there and walked.
Warm and dark under the trees, he said. Leaf sounds up there, like something swarming. I’m nervous and paying attention to unimportant things.
The apartment house had lighted windows which showed in no special pattern. That one is Kemp’s, or that one is Kemp’s, or none . . . Jordan stopped at the entrance and looked past the door frame at the mailboxes inside the hall. He did not go in, he just looked in.
T. Kemp, it said. There was a newspaper in the box. Jordan went across to the diner.
There was a waitress behind the counter, and there was a man sitting but Jordan could see only his back. He could see that the waitress had a round face and moved slowly, and the inside of the diner was probably hot. The man wore a cap on his head. But Jordan was not really looking at him, or at the waitress, but now felt the gravel under his shoes. He stood in a tree-dark place outside the diner and heard the leaf sounds and felt the gravel points under his soles. He started to curse but interrupted himself with a quick breath. I’ve felt gravel before. I’ve watched before, standing like this, and have spent time before like I did today, laying everything out. And Kemp is in town, I know that; his name is on the box on the other side of the street, I know that; I know everything ahead of time, not counting the details; how it will end, not counting the details; and even that the back sitting there at the counter is not Kemp, and this relief now is fake. Relief is always fake . . . He stopped himself and felt the gravel under his shoes.
The man at the counter got up and was not Kemp. He was too young. When he came out of the diner he was whistling and kept doing it a
ll the way down the street.
Jordan felt no change. He had known that ahead of time, too. Then he went into the diner because he could not stand it to think back and forth any more.
The girl was at the sink and looked up when Jordan came in, but only to say good evening. Then she looked down again and washed dishes.
There was too much paint in the place. The diner was very narrow, with counter, stools, tiny booths, and circus paint everywhere. Red counter, green swivel seats, blue booths, trims and borders and thick colored paint.
“You wait just one second? Or you in a real hurry?”
“No. Go ahead and finish up.”
“If you’re in a real . . .”
“No. I’m not.”
She kept making soap-water sounds and then splashes when she dipped into the rinse, and once she looked over at Jordan but he did not look back. She had started to smile but he had looked away.
It would be easy to say more now, something about take your time, there’s no hurry.
She used her forearm to wipe hair away from her face.
Or something about how hot it is.
Her hair was very light brown and her bare arm was very smooth.
I can say nothing about that. There is nothing to say. I will have to talk to her because it is that kind of job, the kind I have never done before and should not be trying. What I do best has nothing to do with people.
“I’m ready now,” she said.
He told her coffee with cream and two doughnuts. He had no idea why doughnuts when she bent down at the counter and wrote the order on a pad. He thought two doughnuts are good. I can stay longer.
She wrote slowly and, bending over, her head was close to Jordan. He thought he could feel the skin-warmth coming from her, especially from her hair. The hair fell forward again, the way it had done at the sink, and she was so close, if she doesn’t brush the hair back again at the sides . . . Jordan put his hands in his lap and worked his fingers together. They felt thick with heat and stiff with it. She has almost an empty face, he thought, and that’s good.
“You want plain or powdered?” she said.
Jordan felt the draft on the back of his neck when the door opened, and if that’s Kemp I won’t have to talk to the girl at all . . .
“Sugar,” said the man, “two black and two all the way.”
He wasn’t Kemp either. He had a shorn head and a big waist which might have been all muscle. He grinned with gold in his teeth and smelled of grease.
“Stop it,” said the girl.
The man laughed and straightened up again after having tried who knows what, thought Jordan, because I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t looking when she put the cup in front of me, because here it is with the brown coffee smell lifting up to my face and I’m sweating. Naturally. It’s hot in here. Naturally.
The girl put the four containers on the counter and said, “That all you want, Davy?”
“Well, mam, if you really want to know, chicken, I could think . . .”
“Don’t talk like that, Davy.” Her face didn’t change at all when she said it, and it seemed she just looked at the man because he was there. Then she said, “You want plain or powdered?” and looked at Jordan.
“If you really want to know, chicken . . .”
“Stop talking like that, Davy.”
“Plain,” said Jordan.
“And yours is forty-eight cents,” she said to the trucker.
“How you been, chicken?” He worked change out of his pocket and grinned at her.
She put two doughnuts in front of Jordan and said, “Fine, Davy.”
The trucker put half a dollar on the counter and said because she was such a sweet chicken all around she could keep the change. He felt that was very funny, allowing two cents for a tip, and left it that way till she had picked up all the cups. Then he reached over, when it looked as if he was going to leave, and poked a quarter into the kerchief pocket on her uniform. This, he felt, was even funnier, and the only thing spoiling it for him a little bit was that she didn’t slap his hand away or move back or say anything he could use for a comeback.
“Thank you,” she said. He went out with his cups balanced on top of each other and laughing, to make the exit fit the rest of the act.
The girl leaned against the service board behind her and folded her arms. “Him and his manners,” she said.
Jordan moved his face to show he was listening but the girl wasn’t looking. She was stooping down a little to catch her reflection in the black window opposite, and with one hand she patted a wave in her hair. Then she fluffed it up again because of the heat. She could have been alone there. She sighed and folded her arms again. Where her uniform went over the round of her breast she had written Betty on the white cotton. She must have written it looking down at herself, thought Jordan. The script was that uneven.
“He must come in often,” said Jordan.
“What?”
“Your friend.”
“Him. Huh,” she said.
Then he did not know how to go on. He put his head down over the coffee and drank some. Do you have many steady customers coming in here? Like Tom, maybe, my friend old Tom Kemp . . . The questions felt wrong and stiff. He would say them stiff. Even hello and good-by if he had to say it now.
“I never seen you here before,” said the girl. “You just coming through?”
“Yes.”
He watched the light make patterns on top of the coffee. The light slid. He watched it and hated not having said anything else.
“Most of the time all the same people come in here,” she said. “That’s why I was remarking.”
But Jordan did not pick it up. He thought of the plain matter of fact in this, how much simpler the other part of the job would be . . .
“But they’re not all like Davy,” she was saying.
“You don’t like him?”
“He stinks.”
Jordan had no idea how to react to that, so he said nothing. He had not expected she could be this definite.
“You know the kind that thinks they own everything? Well, he’s like that. And I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like that either,” said Jordan.
“Like there was no other way to get along, you know? Well, there’s lots of ways to get along.”
“Of course.”
“Like being friendly.” She looked at the opposite window and frowned at the dark glass. “I’d like that to happen sometime.”
She was talking too much and Jordan felt bothered that he was letting her. What she said did not bother him, he felt, just the waste of time.
“Do all your customers live around here?”
“I’d like to know what’s wrong with being friendly, you know that?”
She’s dull, he thought. One thing at a time. I can ask her about Kemp and not worry too much how she will take it.
“I don’t think anything is wrong with that,” he told her. “I often think the same way.” He said it easily because he did not think about what he said. He felt it was small talk.
“Some do,” she said. “Some live around here but some just work down that end a ways. The yard and the depot.”
One thing at a time and one after the other. He was not worried about her. He also envied her.
Jordan felt the draft again and then saw dirty pants. The man sat down two seats away, and when he hit the seat he gave a great sigh. Jordan could smell the liquor.
“Without anything,” he said.
“They drive a truck,” said the girl, “and right away they think they got to be like a truck theirselves, you ever notice that?”
“Black and hot,” said the drunk and the girl got the coffee.
The best thing, now that this drunk is here, I pick her up later, thought Jordan. He felt some ease and smiled at her when she turned. It was easy and she smiled back.
Some miners came in and ordered things off the grill and a kid came in to take something out to the car. There
was talk and the girl was busy, and Jordan bent over to finish his coffee and doughnuts in peace. After a while he said, “How much is the bill?” and after that, when she would pay attention and look at him when he gave her the money, then he would ask her when the diner closed for the night.
“Onion like always?” she said, and the man next to Jordan said, “Same way, Betty. Don’t rush.”
She slid dirty dishes under the counter, which made a great crash; she put coffee on the counter, two cups, and turned back to the grill right away and put a raw hamburger patty on top. The raw meat hissed and steamed.
“Pass me the sugar, would you?”
Jordan thought he might smoke one more cigarette and drink one more cup of coffee.
“Would you reach me that sugar bowl over, please?” and this time Jordan knew that the man was talking to him, because his hand was on Jordan’s shoulder and he pointed across at the sugar bowl.
“Yes,” said Jordan. “I’m sorry.”
He picked up the sugar bowl and watched the girl turn around with the plate of onions and hamburger. She said, “I already put sugar in your coffee, Mister Kemp,” and she put the hamburger down on the counter. Jordan put the sugar bowl down again.
Everything shrank.
The man in the next seat said something else. “Thanks just the same,” he said, and put his hand on Jordan’s back once more, heavy and forever, but Jordan sat it out by not moving or breathing, though in the middle of that, from somewhere, he said, “That’s all right,” and then the hand was gone.
“Thirty-five,” said the girl.
Kemp, next to Jordan, was eating his hamburger.
“Did you want to pay?” said the girl. “I thought you said you wanted to pay.”
Jordan did not want to talk because he did not know what would come out. He picked his cup off the saucer and smelled the tar smell of the cold coffee.
“Another cup?” she said.
She took the cup and Jordan held the small piece of doughnut he had left. He bit into it, moved the piece back and forth over his teeth, felt the dryness of it and how it lay in his mouth like something which did not belong there. It stayed dry. He would never be able to swallow it. He put his hand up, slowly like everything else, and let the piece drop out of his mouth and into his palm. He put the doughnut into his pocket and left his hand there, too. The doughnut was still dry like a stone but the inside of his hand was wet, and his face.
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