by James Jones
But that was not what was worrying Norma. What worried Norma was her getting into the Park. It came out later on in the evening when they were in his place, over home in Illinois.
“Its all right coming in the evening, Van, because lots of people come to swim then. But what about driving out through the gate at four every morning? After the first couple of times the gate guards will suspect something.”
“Let them suspect,” he said. “What can they do?”
“They could do a lot. You know how strict the Park authorities are about that. You know what people think of a girl who does what I’m doing. And how do you think I’ll feel, having them stare at me funny.”
“They wont even notice you,” Sylvanus said. “Listen, this Fandalack deal wasn’t my idea in the first place. I’d just as soon we got married tonight, if it wasn’t for all those big plans for a church wedding your mother is making.”
“Its not the plans for a church wedding that are keeping us from getting married right now,” Norma said meaningly.
“Okay,” Sylvanus said. “I know it. But is it unreasonable to want to wait until that novel comes out in the spring so I’ll at least have a little money? We couldnt live in a one-room apartment like this, without even cooking facilities.”
“It wouldnt be unreasonable,” Norma said, “except that you dont have to do it.”
“I’m not going to go into your father’s business!” Sylvanus said.
Norma was not looking at him, and her face looked to him to be sagging, like a dead sail without wind.
“Anyway,” he said hastily, “at least not until this one book is done.” Maybe they would pick it for the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Norma was looking at his mantel, at the Jap bayonet hanging crossed over its scabbard that he had cut off and made a fighting knife out of when the medic who brought him in had stolen his, and at the grandfather’s old cap and ball rifle with its tiger-stripe maple stock his grandfather had hunted the stump for and carved out himself. She was not looking at him.
“All right, Van,” she said resignedly. “You run it. And if we get into trouble over not being married, you run that too.”
“Listen,” he said. “We’d go right down and wake up a JP right now, if we could, and get married right now, if we could.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said desperately. “We’ll tell them we’re married. I’ll tell the guy when I rent the cabin.”
“But we arent, Van. Not by the law. What if they ask you to see the license?”
“They dont ask to see the marriage licenses, what they want is your money. They want it too bad to take a chance of offending you.”
“All right,” Norma said tiredly. “You run it however you want.”
“It’ll work out fine that way. And they wont look at you funny. Honest they wont.”
“All right,” Norma said tiredly.
“Okay then,” Sylvanus said happily. “Then its settled. Come here to me. And lets see you smile with that pretty face,” he grinned at her happily.
“All right, Van,” she said. She smiled tiredly. “But, Van, women don’t …”
“Stop that,” he grinned. “Hear me? Or I’ll stop it for you. In fact, I think I’ll just stop it anyway,”
He did not hear what she said then, against his mouth. It sounded something like, “Is that all you ever think about?” But he did not care.
II
So they left it at that. He wrote for the cabin. There was no trouble at all. Mr Lemmon, who had the contracts for the concessions, was very nice when Sylvanus drove the old Plymouth over to see him. He made out the gate passes for both Sylvanus’ car and his wife’s without noticing or commenting that her license was Indiana and his own Illinois. Sylvanus took the cabin for a full month, the last two weeks in July and the first two of August.
It was a nice cabin, set on a little hillock between two tiny brackish inlets on one of the long fingers of clean lake, in a patch of second- and third-growth timber. It cost him $30 a week, and he rented a boat for the four weeks at a dollar a day. They charged 50¢ an hour for a boat, otherwise. The whole thing came to about $170, after he stocked up some canned beans and bacon and bread.
Last year he had spent three weeks up on Sheepshead and Betsy Lakes back in from Tahquamenon Falls in Chippewa County Michigan for $95. But then he didnt have any cabin then, only the sleeping bag. And he hadnt had any Norma.
He had to borrow almost a hundred from Arky to make the hundred and seventy, but he did not tell Norma that.
Up there on Sheepshead, there hadn’t been a sound in the silence for days except the sound of his breathing and the plop of the plug in the lake and the wind in the tops of the tall spruce on the lake. Here, cars of shrill tourists hummed by on the asphalt a stone’s throw from the door and you could always hear babies crying faintly in the distance and the strident-voiced mothers’ commands. Even out on the lake fishing you could not escape babies crying faintly and strident-voiced mothers trying to command a good time. They came and went in boats all around you. He preferred the big woods. In the big woods there never seemed to be garbage, and he felt safer out in the woods than he did in the towns. The bears and the deer and the cats seemed so placid and calm, after people, and who would ever want to drop an atom bomb on just woods?
This was a town camouflaged to resemble a woods, complete with all modern conveniences such as flush toilets and trash baskets and fountains. The tents of the traveling campers were as closely packed as the bungalows in a residence section of Vincennes or over at home, so that the campers had practically all of the discomforts of living outdoors, and almost none of the benefits, and all of them in the eyes looked soul-hungry. That look in the eyes bothered him, and he worried whether Norma would like it after all.
But Norma liked it a lot when she came up the first evening. She loved the little patch of woods hemmed in by the fields, He was glad because he knew then if she could only see the big woods she would like them too, and he described them to her—the island of high ground like a ship in the gray sea of buckbush and leatherleaf that stretched off to the wooden ridges, the great tall sweet-smelling spruces like a grove of ships’ masts in the flesh that he camped under where there had once been a pole-shanty deer camp.
As he talked, she tinkered with the kerosene stove and made up the beds with sheets and hung up some curtains she’d bought and got him to take her fishing.
“Oh, it is wonderful, Van,” she said in the boat. She looked off across at the trees that echoed themselves upside down in the water and her face seemed to bloom, open up. “And I wouldn’t have come, if you hadnt insisted. Thanks, Van, for insisting,” she bloomed lambently.
“Wait till you see the real woods,” said Sylvanus.
“Lets make a pact,” she smiled brimmingly, “to do something like this once every year after we’re married. Just get out and go and get away from it all. Getting married doesnt mean people have to stop having adventures. What shall I cook you for supper? I feel like cooking. I brought something along to take the place of those old beans.”
“You wait,” he said. “You’ll see. We’ll live like this all the time after we’re married, only better. And not just two weeks out of the year to be free. We’ll be free all the time. Life should be all adventure. Not romance, but adventure.”
Norma pulled her line up and flipped it back in and the bobber danced drunkenly, repeatedly shattering the mirror as it re-formed. “But it has to be serious too, Van,” she smiled. “Dont forget that. Life cant be all play.”
“Play!” he said. “Play?” He had started to say something. He couldnt remember it. “Say,” he said. “Listen, you’re not still planning on me going into your father’s business, are you?”
She pulled her line in again and looked at the bait. The bait was all right. She threw it back out. “I want you to do what you want to do, Van,” she smiled. “Thats all I want.”
It was almost dark when they got in to shore and Sylvan
us Merrick, adventurer, half-hitched the boat on the arm of the stump and helped his mate up the steep part of the path. She had green corn all ready to put on and the chicken she had brought up to fry and the salad, already made in the icebox. She was efficient, and an excellent cook, and it was fine food.
He had just lit them both cigarettes while she poured them both coffee when he saw the headlights turn off the asphalt and heard the car pull in grindingly and then the voices of Russ and Arky on the path in through the trees.
They appeared in the doorway suddenly, as if conjured there in mid-stride without warning, although they had both heard them coming. Everything seemed to stay that way a long time. Then they were at the table without having walked there and unloading the bottles whose necks seemed to stick out from all over them like spokes from the hub of a rimless wheel.
He never did see the two women come in. They were just there, standing grinning inside the door, once when he looked.
It was as if he and Norma were moving in one time and the four of them in another so that the two only got their gears meshed now and then. Then he recognized what was causing it. He had had that experience before, in combat. It was because he was scared, frightened stiff, so full of fear it was running out of his ears and gumming his reflexes. Men had been killed in combat, doing that. Norma knew who they were. She had never met them, had not wanted to meet them, but he had talked about them enough so she could recognize them: Arky tall, sway-backed, hanging-bellied, wearing the pallor of a badly sick man who lives under too high a strain too long a time and the semi-western style hat that was to remind people he was no native of Illinois but had come here from Arkansas. Russ short, stocky, bullnecked and going to fat, but still with that natural coordination of incredible speed that was a family trait and had made him one of the best basketball forwards the U of Chicago had had in the ’20s, up to the time he flunked out and disappeared without trace until he suddenly showed up at home after the war. Both of them fog-headed and indistinct-eyed from drunkenness and wearing the haphazard civilian clothes they always looked out of place in, just as they must have always looked out of place in any uniform but a six-weeks-unwashed field uniform, because whenever they did happen to stop long enough to think of clothes it was always too late, an afterthought.
“Where’d you get this stuff at, Syde?” Arky sneered to Sylvanus. As a gambler Arky always sneered, like the wife of a Methodist minister always smiles. “You been holdin out on us. This stuff aint from around home. Hey, hey,” he sneered friendlily to Norma, “where’s old Syde been hidin you at, pretty thing?”
“And to think,” Russ said pontifically, “I ate Arky out all over Terre Haute because he wanted to bring some for you. I even called him perverted, because he knew you werent going out with anybody but Norma. And now look at the lie you given me. Hello, sweet thing,” he said profoundly to Norma.
“This is Norma Fry,” Sylvanus said. “Norma, Arky and Russ.” But he already knew it was no good, that his fear and the time lag had cost him the split second he needed to give them the tip-off.
Arky looked like somebody had thrown a cod-lock into him on an extra big hand. Russ looked pontifical and profound, even though his eyes were two badly frayed irises burnt into red cloth. Looking pontifical and profound was a habit Russ had picked up living in Hollywood, where he had spirited himself to after disappearing into the air of Chicago, and no little case of mistaken identity was enough to cause him to lose it.
“Well, howdy, mam,” Arky said, almost forgetting to sneer. “We dint know that you—we thought that he—what I mean is we dint mean t—”
“He means,” Russ said profoundly, “we are both pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Fry. We have heard a great deal about you, Miss Fry, from Syde here, and we have heard a great deal about you.”
“All good, I hope?” Sylvanus said, trying a joke.
It did not come off. Arky was still stammering when Norma was on her feet and at the door and, looking distantly at the two women from Terre Haute still standing there grinning, turning and going out the other door through the kitchen alcove.
“We dint aim to mean—” Arky was still less than sneering.
“From what we have heard, Miss Fry; you are one of the best” Russ was still saying profoundly to the now empty chair.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Sylvanus said, and followed her out.
She was standing with her hands on a tree and her forehead on her hands.
“Listen, honey,” he said. “Please listen.”
“I’m going home,” she said to the tree.
“Ahh, dont do that.”
“And I’m not coming back.”
“You dont mean that.”
“Unless you get them out of there, and get them out quick.”
“But I cant do that to them, honey. They dont mean anything. Its just an act they put on. They didnt know who you were. They didnt mean to insult you.”
“Then I’m going home.”
“But they’re my friends, I cant just run them off. They probably feel worse about it than you do.”
“Friends,” Norma said. “And what have they ever done for you? Except get you drunk and running with women. Women like those.”
“Well,” Sylvanus said, “they loaned me almost a hundred bucks so you and I could take this cabin.”
“I told you not to take money from them. And you promised you wouldnt. I told you I could have gotten it from Dad, if we needed it.”
“Sure,” Sylvanus said, “from your dad.”
“Doesnt your word of honor mean anything to you?”
“Listen, honey,” he said.
“Leave me alone. Just get out of my sight. I dont even want to see you. Liar! Promise breaker! I’ve never had anything so degrading happen to me in my life.” She stood up and looked at Sylvanus and Sylvanus opened his mouth. “No,” she said, “dont talk to me. I’m going home. And you can have your dear friends. And see how you like it.”
She went back to the cabin. Sylvanus stood in the dark by the tree with his arms feeling amputated, and hating himself because of the fear in him. He watched the lights of the cabin that made daylight spots on the ground, but not a sound came from it. Then she came back out, carrying her coat and her purse. She walked on the path past him. He turned and watched her. The car door slammed and the motor roared angrily and she pulled out, the headlights sweeping across like a machine gunner shooting him off at the ankles, and then she was gone, humming off down the Park asphalt into silence. In the next cabin over on the next little hillock he could hear people laughing and singing. He walked back to the house, his knees threatening him.
They were all four still standing just like he had left them as if he had not even gone out, except Arky was not stammering and Russ not talking profoundly, to the place where Norma was not any more. But they both looked like they might start in again any second.
“Sit down,” he said. “Have a drink.”
Russ was standing gravenly, nursing some dead pride in himself, staring deadly ahead at the wall. “Why thank you,” he said profoundly.
The still grinning women got themselves glasses. Sylvanus got one himself. It would be a great comfort in the coming prolonged silence of swallowing throats. Arky moved then, and took it out of his hand and set it back on the table. Then he rubbed his hand haggardly over his red-rimmed thick pallor. “Well,” he said, “I guess you had better go after her.”
“Go after her?” Sylvanus said. “What will you guys do?”
“By the time you’ve caught her and brought her back we’ll be long gone. If we known she was goin to be here, we never of come over anyways,”
“Dont be a damned fool,” Sylvanus said gallantly.
“Hell buddy, we dont aim to cause you no trouble with your woman, and you gettin married come spring. You cant expect no decent girl like her to approve of fellows like us.”
Russ turned his head slowly and stared at Arky a moment and then went ove
r and sat down with a glass by himself.
“I dont see why the hell not,” Sylvanus said valiantly. “If you’re my friends.”
“Dont you be a damned fool,” Arky said. “Decent women dont work that way. You may be a writer but even you’re smart enough to see that.”
“Maybe decent women got lots to learn yet.”
“Now you are a damned fool,” Arky sneered. “How can a decent women be any different than decent? Answer me that. If a man wants a decent woman he got to do what she says and be decent himself.”
“Oh,” Sylvanus said. “You mean like the decent guys you play poker with at the Moose and go on stags with to Sullivan.”
“Thats differnt,” Arky said. “They already married.”
“Yeah? Then maybe a decent woman aint what I want.”
“No? What kind you want then?” Arky sneered at him. “Something like these? Whats wrong with yore head, boy? You get ready and go after her, hear?”
“If she loves me,” Sylvanus said, “she’ll come back of herself. After she’s cooled off. I can wait.”
“If she loves me,” Arky sneered. “And her thinkin’: If he loves me, he’ll come fetch me and prove it.”
“I’m talking about something else altogether. If she loves me, she’ll come back herself and be willing to accept my friends.”
“Sure. And her tellin herself: If he loves me, he’ll come fetch me and offer to give up his shady friends.”
“Then it looks like a draw, dont it? Fifty-fifty, even-steven, kits all around.”
“Yeah,” Arky sneered. “Except that she’s decent. Wise up, Syde. You aint like us, you’re intelligent. You aint no bum, and you need a decent woman to settle down to and take care of you. Without a decent woman guys like you crack up.”
“Why all this decency stuff? I’m pretty decent myself.”