by James Jones
“We’ll find out anyway, Slade,” one of the guys called after him teasingly. “We’ll find out anyway, tomorrow.”
And they would, too. It was a threatening promise of what he could expect to be coming his way. Outside he lay the wrapped package carefully in the basket of his bike, kicked up the kickstand and pushed off throwing his leg over. Well, to hell with them. Let them find out. Let them find out he had the hots for and was in love with (Oh, sweet lovely name.) Margaret Simpson. He didn’t care. He was proud of it. So let them find out. They would anyway.
At home he went in and straight upstairs to his own room and put the wrapped box carefully away in a drawer of his dresser, and he did not tell anybody, neither his parents nor his kid sister, about it. But that night, after supper and the radio and homework and some reading, when he went to bed, he lay with his arms behind his head and thought about it. Finally he got up and took it out and unwrapped it (He could put it in a paper sack tomorrow to take to school to keep it clean—and hidden.) and looked at it. He was both excited and scared about tomorrow. He wished there was somebody he could talk to about it. He hoped it would be all right, and he thought it would. Certainly it would be the best, the most expensive valentine any girl in the class would get. That was for sure. But you couldn’t be sure with Margaret. She was a pretty sophisticated girl, Margaret. Love and desire for her welled up in him at the silent pronunciation of her name, and he put the box carefully away and climbed back into bed. Actually, he had never spoken to Margaret about his feeling for her. Maybe he should have. His love for her, he corrected himself, (And of course he couldn’t speak to her about his having the hots for her, The very idea of that made his face feel flushed and made him feel guilty. He shouldn’t even feel that about her. But then, the two things were entirely different, weren’t they. They didn’t really have anything to do with each other at all, did they.) his love, he said again. Actually, she was easily the most popular girl in the class, and had been elected most popular girl last year in seventh grade, and undoubtedly would be again this year in eighth grade, as well as being the best looking. She wore lots of skirts and sweaters, with the sleeves pushed up, and she had the best developed chest in 8A. Actually, she came from a very poor family, and lived in a very poor tacky little house on the far side of town. Her mother was dead and she kept house for her father and those of her five big brothers who still lived at home, which was two. Actually, she was really much better off than that sounded though, because old Mrs Carter, who was rich and has a sort of estate like right next door to Margaret’s, had taken her under her wing as a motherless girl and paid for all her clothes and things and was going to send her to college. Also, all her five brothers were musical, as she was herself, and played instruments and had played in bands around town, and so Margaret herself had been singing with a band that one of her brothers ran, at places like the Elks Club and the Country Club, ever since she had been in sixth grade. That, right there, probably accounted for a lot of her sophistication. Everybody said she was really very talented as a singer and might have a chance to go a long way someday. Also she made excellent grades; always.
Well, he bet she had never had as expensive, or as big, a valentine as this before, even from a sophomore; and thinking about her in the warmth of the bed under the warm covers, John rolled over and curled himself up and went to sleep. But he was still worried.
Once, two years ago it was, almost, during the summer after sixth grade, he had tried to make love to another little girl. This little girl was two years younger than him, the same age as his kid sister, and she lived across the street and they all used to play together a lot, with all the other kids from the block, in the summer. But one night, after dark, just the three of them, his sister, this girl, and himself, were sitting on this girl’s porch across the street. The porch light was out so it was dark and he and the little girl were in the swing, his sister in a chair not far from them. All afternoon and all evening, when they’d been playing, this little girl had been poking him and pinching him and grabbing him and tickling him and accidentally falling against him, and then giggling. He had assumed from this that she liked him and was giving him a sort of invitation, so in the swing in the dark, strangely excited, he had put his arm around her and whispered to her to let him kiss her. Actually, he didn’t even completely get his arm around her because she had moved away from him immediately in the swing before he could; and where before she had been warm and practically rubbing herself against him she now was suddenly cold and untouchable. Still excited, in a wholly new way he had never felt before, he had slid over after her in the swing and tried again, tried several times, whispered for her to please let him kiss her, with the same result. So, knowing vaguely that this was the way adults did it in similar circumstances and feeling dimly there must be some magic open-sesame in the words themselves, he had whispered: “I love you.” It was the first time he had ever said the words, except possibly to his mother, but they now had a completely different meaning. They did not, however, open any doors for him. The little girl’s reaction was forceful and immediate. “You’re lovesick,” she said accusingly in an almost angry voice full of contempt. “That’s what you are. You’re lovesick.” It was a word he had never thought much about or paid any attention to, although when he heard her say it he knew it was a word he had heard before somewhere, and it was clear to him in some subtle way that it was a word this little girl had only learned recently and was using for the first time with the same sense of surprised discovery her use of it was also giving him. Lovesick. He had got up out of the swing and left the porch immediately and gone home, leaving the two girls, his sister and the other one, there giggling. But instead of going in the house, where he would have to face his parents, he had gone around behind to the vacant lot next door in the center of the block, where the kids of the block all played, and sat down by himself on the terraced hillside of it, filled with a strange admixture of emotions the like of which he had never felt before, but the sum total of which was bad. Very bad, and very sad, and very unhappy. And whenever he thought of the two girls giggling, he felt sick-mad all over. It was a beautiful warm summer night, and the stars shimmered and shown overhead with a marvelous clarity and even the milky way looked bright. Lovesick. It was like some strange and terrible new disease he had discovered in himself without any preparation for it at all, and he kept saying it sickly over and over to himself: “I’m lovesick. I’m lovesick. I’m lovesick.” and he was afflicted with a sense of terrible doom that brought horror and terror and fright and helplessness into him through some opened gate, together with a vague, but sure, knowledge of forces at work in people that would inevitably, someday, destroy him. Finally he got up and went in the house to bed, and after that he did not think about the incident often but whenever he did it brought a sense of shame, and a flush to his face, and the terror, diluted now, would creep back into him, and when he awoke on the morning of Valentine’s Day he did not know whether he had dreamed about it during the night or whether he had thought about it just as he was dropping off to sleep, or whether it had just popped into his head for no reason as he was waking. But he was still worried.
The alarm clock was still ringing, its luminous hands showing at exactly four-thirty in the dark, and he shut it off and switched on the light. It was always exciting. Nowhere in the silent, dark house did anything move or stir, nor were there any lights, nor movement, in any of the houses he could see through his windows as he dressed. Savoring the daily excitement, he dressed himself warmly—flannel shirt, two sweaters under his mackinaw, warm socks inside his boots, knit cap down over his ears, heavy scarf—then he took up his heavy fleecelined leather mittens and tiptoed down the stairs to the front door. Outside it was steely cold and the handlebars and sprocket of his bike creaked with frost when he moved them. The air burned his nose like dry ice, and as he tucked the scarf up over it and put on his goggles, his eyes were already watering. The freezing cold air flushing the last thre
ads of sleepiness and of reluctance out of his mind, he took off on his bike, giving himself joyously up to, and embracing happily, the discomfort which always made him feel important and as though he were accomplishing something, riding the bike downtown along deserted streets of darkened houses where nothing moved or shone and people slept except for a few boys like himself, scattered across town, converging on the Newsstand where the city papers would already have been picked up by the owner off the train.
Actually, nothing much happened at the Newsstand that morning. He was razzed unmercifully by the two who had seen him buy the box last night, and of course it was immediately taken up by all the others as they stood at the benches folding their papers and stuffing their paperbags under the bare bulbs in the back room—but he kept his mouth shut and said nothing and did not get mad, It was easy to do because he kept the mental picture of Margaret Simpson happily opening his box in the forefront of his mind, as a shield. Nobody could touch him when he thought of that. Anyway, the folding of the papers and the stacking of them in their proper sections only took ten or fifteen minutes, and then they were outside and separated, spreading out across the town, and he was by himself again, able to enjoy ecstatically again the physical discomfort that he suffered not only because of the money it made him but because it made him feel he was strong and had will power, and to dwell also upon, and to worry over in his nervous excitement, the valentine and his happy picture of Margaret, as he made his route. Then it was back home for breakfast and to change for school.
Twice as he was dressing, and as his nervous excitement mounted to almost unbearably unpleasant heights as the time left slid away, he almost decided once again to drop the whole thing. He could leave the box right here in his drawer and gradually eat the candy up himself, and no one would ever know where the box had disappeared to. But once again his ironbound promise to himself, which it was against his private rules to break, would not let him, and sustained him; that, and his happy picture of Margaret Simpson’s face, warm and loving as she opened up his box, and its natural sequence which automatically followed: of him telling her how much he adored her, and always had, from a distance, and her warm understanding of it, and then his hands and face moving against her lovely chest. When he took the paper-sacked box downstairs and his mother asked him curiously what it was, he told her it was a couple of books he was taking back.
On the way to school, as the other kids converged, it was harder to say that. He knew of course that the moment would come (It appeared to be rushing down on him swiftly, in fact, like a freight train.) when it would have to be made public. When there would be no avoiding saying what it was, or who it was for. So gradually he was forced back to saying simply, “Aw, nothing.” or “Nothing that would interest you.” Everybody of course knew by now though that it was a valentine.
There were several valentines on his own desk in the 8A room when he got there, from different kids, two of them from girls in the back of the room who thought they were stuck on him but whom he didn’t like because they both of them came from Sacktown and were poor, and not very smart, and often not even very clean. All these he opened and looked at, in a kind of daze of nervous excitement, hardly even seeing them, and then put them down. Then, painfully aware that he was being watched, he carefully pulled the big box out of its paper sack and laid it on his desk. Big; it was huge! It looked monstrous to him. He had attached a little card in a little white envelope to the ribbon which said: “To Margaret, with love, John Slade.” He stared at that a while. It had cost him deeply in pride and fear, to even dare to write it. That word. But he couldn’t stare at the envelope forever. Margaret Simpson had not yet come in the room, and it was still three and a half minutes till the bell rang. Abruptly, suddenly, he knew he couldn’t stand it, just could not wait any longer; he hadn’t made a promise to himself he would hand it to her, had he? And besides, if he waited to give it to her himself like he had planned, the way he was now he wouldn’t be able to say a word, not a single solitary goddamned word. Panic had enveloped him. He wanted only to be out of sight of everyone. The valentines on his own desk had given him an idea. Jerkily, cursing himself for looking so foolish, he picked up the box and walked across the room with it and laid it on Margaret Simpson’s desk, and then came back to his own desk and went out into the cloakroom pretending he had forgotten something in his overcoat.
There was a little buzz, sort of, that he could hear from the cloakroom, and when he peeked around the door there were several kids standing around her desk looking at it, admiring it maybe. He stayed in the cloakroom. How he could manage to while away three whole minutes in the cloakroom he didn’t know, and once, as a subterfuge, he went back in to his desk and got some handkerchieves and things out of it, pretending he wanted to put them in his coat to take home.
Then, finally, one minute before the bell would ring, Margaret Simpson came in, with two boys who were on the gradeschool varsity basketball team, and they hung up their coats and went inside. John busied himself with his own coat and did not look at them. Completely degenerated now, no longer able even to control, he could not resist and sneaked to the door and stuck the top half of his head around it, grinning foolishly. Margaret Simpson was just showing the card, his card, to the two boys. She said something he could not hear, and then laughed and gestured with her head toward the cloakroom where he was hiding, and the two boys laughed. Then Margaret looked down at the big red box with amusement.
John, who had already seen enough, jerked his head back and crept back to his own coat, pretending to himself he had to get something out of the pocket. But then, when he got there, he leaned his face against his coat sickly and shut his eyes, trying to shut out with the light existence also. He put his hand in the pocket of the coat so he could make it look like he was hunting something in case anybody else should come in. How could he ever go back in there, when the bell rang? How could he possibly? Sickness ran all through him, all over him, in long waves, at the thought. And everybody had seen him standing peeking around the doorjamb like a silly idiot. He had ruined it. He’d messed it all up. He should have made himself stay and hand it to her. Then it would have been all right. He stood that way, clenching and unclenching his fists, until the bell rang, knowing it would ring, listening for it.
When the bell rang, he forced himself to walk to the door and to his desk and sat down, trying hard not to look at anybody.
A Bottle Of Cream
This one was written right after “The Valentine,” and is probably my favorite in the whole book. I like the mood and tone of it. I love the character of the bar-owner. I like everything about it. Particularly I like its form. I have tried since several times to reutilize the character of the bar-owner who exists in this story, but have never been able to recreate him. Apparently he belongs only in this story. An interested reader will note the reference to the tennis game against the garage which reappears as the main theme later in “The Tennis Game.”
EVEN WHEN I WAS very young, I had learned that telling the truth did not necessarily mean that you would be believed. Not that I was less prone to lie than any other child. But even on those occasions (and they were not what one could actually call rare) when I did tell the truth to grownups, and consequently expected to be patted proudly on the head, I more often than not found myself in hot water instead, was challenged and told I was lying anyway. Naturally, since I was not stupid, after a good big number of such painful experiences I began to realize that it did not really matter what you told people as long as it was something they wanted to believe—something that you knew by some sure sly instinct of childhood they would believe, because they thought that way—and that the actual fact of whether you were really telling the truth or not had nothing to do with it.
Not long ago I went with a friend to pay a reckless driving fine, and I quite by accident heard mentioned the name of a man who was intimately involved in these deep philosophic problems of my childhood and whom I had not thought about
for years. Chet Poore was his name. And, in my home city, I never heard him referred to any other way. I assume his first name was Chester. He was what you might call a criminal, sort of.
Now, this thing of going to pay a reckless driving fine is always a slightly embarrassing business, if not downright cowing. It was especially so in my friend’s case, since while the charge was reckless driving, the sin itself was actually drunken driving. In our State, as in most others I guess, though I don’t actually know, so awful has the crime of drunken driving become that the first time you are caught at it you are not even charged with it. You are charged with only reckless driving, but given a very stiff fine. But of course, as in my friend’s case, everyone involved knows that your sin is really drunken driving.
In case anyone is interested in the rest of the progression, the second time you are caught at it you are actually charged with it, and given a stiffer fine; and you lose your driving license for a year. Automatically. The third time you are caught at it you will probably spend a year in prison. And you will lose your driving license forever. This of course, in our day and age, is comparable to having your feet lopped off back in François Villon’s time, if not as bloody. If anyone should be so foolhardy as to be caught a fourth time, after all this and with no license to drive, I have no idea what the penalty is, and don’t want to. I shudder to think of it.
But this is how serious the crime of drunken driving has become today. This, of course, is due to two things. One is that perforce we are a nation of drivers in the U.S., and the other is that we are a nation of drunkards. Really compulsive drunkards. Everyone knows this, but it is considered impolite to say so. I myself attribute this peculiarly American type of drunkenness to the fact that as a nation we are so repressed in our social and sexual lives. But of course I cannot prove it. And even if I could, what? But I am forced to grin whenever, in my tavern that I run, I hear TV newscasters or read newspaper editorials that chide the Russian leaders for downing so many double shots of vodka.