John D. MacDonald
Cry Hard, Cry Fast
chapter 1
TWO hours before the accident occurred, Devlin Jamison drove over the crest of a hill on the pitted two-lane asphalt and saw, far below him, the multiple lanes of the east-west highway, the yellow octagon of the stop sign. The shocks bucked and the pale blue Cadillac convertible swayed as he went down the rough hill and came to a stop at the sign.
When the lanes were clear he turned right, heading west, accelerating smoothly. As he gained speed he began to notice an annoying thumping sound in the front end. The car had been completely checked in a reliable garage before he had started the trip. He wondered if he had knocked it out of line on the rough country road. The sound was noticeable at forty, vibrated the steering wheel at fifty and began to smooth out at sixty. At sixty-five he could no longer detect it. He checked the gauges, shifted his position slightly, drove on with the needle steady at sixty-five, handling the car with unconscious skill.
Ten minutes later a sign warned of traffic signals ahead. As he slowed down the thumping sound once again intruded itself. Beyond the light was a row of service stations, gravel blue-gray in the hot spring sunlight, buildings blazing white, pumps standing in holiday colors on concrete islands.
Jamison moved into the right lane, saw the yellow truck moving up behind him, signaled his turn and hurried it somewhat, coasting up to one of the stations. An attendant came out from the grease rack, wiping his hands on a ball of waste.
Jamison got out of his car, stretching long legs. “Is there any way you can check the alignment?”
“No, sir. We can’t do it.”
“The damn thing is thumping.”
“There isn’t anybody close by. About twelve miles west of here, on the left, is a place called Barney’s Service. They’ve got the equipment.”
Jamison thanked him and got back in the car and drove on. Once he was up to speed he could no longer hear the thump. It could have been the rough road or maybe Gina had hit it against a curb the way she…
He tightened his hands on the wheel as the grief and loss threatened to overwhelm him again. He cursed the trickery of grief. It would back off from you a little way, crouched and waiting, tail tip twitching restlessly. It would wait. It would wait until you were so far off guard that you started to think of Gina in the old way, fondly, amused at the eccentricities of her driving, aware of your love for her. It would wait for that moment and then pounce and shake you and say in your ear, “There is no more Gina. She’s gone.”
She’s gone, and this trip is no good. This trip is a uselessness. He felt awkward, taking this trip, as though playing a part. He was taking the trip because the others wanted him to, felt it would do him good, insisted on it. Now he was going through the motions because it seemed important to them.
He knew how it would be on this morning back in the bright offices of Stock, Jamison and Valient. Probably Joe Valient would wander into Stanley Stock’s office and say, “Well, I guess Dev got off this morning.”
Stanley would be, as he was about everything, pontifical. “This will do him a great deal of good, Joseph.”
And they would nod at each other in the big bright office, sane, reasonable and untouched. Jamison realized how useless it was to resent them. They were doing what they thought was best for him. To be accurate, there was a leavening of self-interest in their plan for him.
Stanley Stock had admitted it. He had said, a week ago, “Dev, the three of us have made a good team. I have the contacts, the head for business. Joe Valient has all the steam in the world. Of the three of us you are the only creative architect. Without you we could get along. But with you, Devlin, with your sketches and imagination, we can keep on landing the juicy contracts.”
Devlin remembered smiling apologetically and saying, “The wheels just don’t seem to go around any more, Stanley.”
“I’ll be blunt with you, Dev. This whole thing has been a dreadful shock to you. You’re brooding about it. You’re not doing yourself or the firm any good. Joe and I have talked it over. We think you ought to pack up and go away for a while. Put your golf clubs in the car. It’s May. Take off. Come back in the fall. We won’t expect to hear from you. Lord knows we’ve got enough to keep busy on this summer. You owe it to yourself to get away, Dev. Get away from here and from the house where you lived with Gina and all the local memories. It won’t hurt as much when you get back.”
“Sure. Time heals all wounds,” Jamison had said bitterly and when his eyes had begun to fill he had gone over to the windows, his back to Stanley Stock.
After a few moments Stanley said, “Will you do it?”
He had sighed then. “I guess I might as well. I’m not much damn good around here.”
It had taken a week to get things in shape. He had dismissed the housekeeper, Mrs. Hartung, and told her he would phone her in the fall. He had arranged for a man to look after the grounds. This morning he had walked through the silent brooding rooms, looking at the things she had bought and the things she had loved. Her personal things were gone. The day after Gina’s death Nancy Valient had come in and packed up her clothing, cosmetics, costume jewelry without telling him. They were gone and he had never asked where. Nancy, full of understanding warmth and pity, had tried to take away all the too-personal things. But that cannot ever be done to a house where two people have lived in a good love.
He remembered some of the things Nancy had overlooked. The round scrawl of a half-finished grocery list on the kitchen bulletin board. A piece of green yarn she had used to tie her hair, which had gotten, somehow, into the drawer with his socks. The worst, the very worst, had been the present for his birthday. She had died the week before. He had found it in the hiding place where she always put presents. The card was with it, a comic card taunting him about his advanced age of thirty-four. He could not unwrap the gift. He took it with newspapers out to the burning barrel behind the garages and turned away as it started to burn. He smelled the stink of burning leather and knew that it had been something of leather, of very fine leather because she liked things that were very good. It had very probably been too expensive. Then he wished he had not burned it, that he had saved it as a last present from her.
Ever since her death he had found himself doing things that were almost grotesquely sentimental, or strangely cold—and regretting them immediately. It was as though he had lost the ability to act in a rational way. He had spent a whole evening remembering their worst quarrels, fixing them in time and place, remembering what had been said, remembering his own absurdities. Words cannot be taken back.
He had wondered how it would be, now, if it had been a poor marriage. Would he feel the relief of freedom? Would there be a hypocritical sadness? But it had been the best marriage. “DevandGina”—spoken as one word by their friends, because it could be sensed that they were one word, one entity. She had been joy, and she had been daring, and both those qualities—given to him by her—had shown in his work.
He could not stop his own irrational behavior, nor could he lift from his mind the heavy awareness of guilt. He knew his guilt was irrational, but it was with him. It made him wish there were something he could dedicate himself to, some great appointed task which would expiate guilt.
It had been a wet April morning and Gina was wanly wearing what she called her “rain face.” She despised rain and it invariably depressed her. With her own peculiar reasoning she refused to own a raincoat or umbrella. “If I owned that stuff I’d have to go out in it, wouldn’t I?”
“But you do anyway, punkin.”
“Not so much.”
At breakfast she had talked about a party they had to go to that evening, telling him to be sure to be home on time.
She said the cleaners hadn’t brought his gray suit back and she would have to go in and pick it up because this wasn’t a delivery day. He said he would pick it up. She said he always forgot things like that. He said he didn’t have to have it anyway. The other gray one was all right.
“But you look so darn good in the new one.”
“Would you say handsome?”
She tilted her head. “Well… let’s not get overcome here.”
“Do all beautiful women marry ugly men?”
“Not ugly either. Just sort of big and rough-looking. But important. Did I ever tell you how important you look?”
“Nope.”
“You always get tables in places, and good service. And people look at you and wonder about you. I think it’s a kind of reserve, or dignity or something. Nobody slaps you on the back, Dev. Or nudges you in the ribs.”
“Austere is the word you’re hunting for.”
“Austere? But I know better than that, don’t I, darling?”
“Did you know that when you blush the end of your nose stays white?”
“I am not blushing. I am an antique married lady. Go to work, you.”
“Don’t bother about the suit. It’s raining.”
“It’s no bother. You’d never remember it.”
And so he had not protested, had not demanded that she forget about the suit. That was the burden of his guilt. But how were you ever to know?
She was in the operating room when he got to the hospital. One of the men on the ambulance had picked the suit in its paper cover out of the wet road. A wide bus tire had gone diagonally across it, tearing the paper, grinding the suit into the pavement when the wheels locked.
The fat policeman said, “I guess she just had one of those blanks people pull. The witnesses say she was hurrying, and she went out right between two parked cars and right in front of the bus.”
“She didn’t like the rain,” Dev said.
The policeman looked at him oddly. “They got her here fast, mister. That always helps.”
She was on the table over four hours. It was after seven, and dark, when they took her to a room. The surgeon had a tired face. The mask was down around his throat and he slapped rubber gloves against the palm of his hand.
“I won’t kid you, Mr. Jamison. I just don’t know. She’s had eight pints of blood. She was pretty torn up inside. It’s a case of waiting. We’ll keep a close watch on her.” He looked more closely at Jamison. “Better let me give you a pill.”
“I’m all right.”
They let him sit in the darkened room. The nurse sat on one side of the bed, fingertips on the pulse in the slack thin wrist. The night light made odd shadows. He heard a nurse laugh softly down the corridor, then rustle as she walked by the room.
He stood at the window. When he heard the sound he went to the bed. She was rolling her head weakly back and forth, saying, “Aaa. Aaa.” The smell of the anesthetic was thick and acid.
He took her other hand. Her eyes opened and she looked at him with recognition and comprehension, the corners of her mouth turning up the slightest bit. Her lips moved and he had to bend close to hear her. “I’m going to… make it. I’m going to… make it, dar… ling.” She died a minute later. There was running, and bright lights, and the glitter of needles and sharp instructions, but she was dead. He walked out alone and found that it had stopped raining.
He drove west in the Cadillac. He thought of their childlessness. It had disturbed them. Seven years married and no children. They had been on the waiting list of one of the adoption agencies. He supposed that would be canceled now. They would have some sort of routine of removing a folder from an active file, or crossing their names off a list. Until her death he had never thought of a child as being a way of keeping alive a part of Gina. Now the loss of the child that never was seemed acute.
He drove swiftly, mechanically, maintaining a steady speed. Cars smashed by on the opposing lanes, sprinkling chrome needles in the sunlight. The road was filled with people who had never known Gina, did not know of the loss of her, would never know her.
Jamison tried to think back to the days before Gina. Before Gina this present trip would have seemed far too good to be true. A big car, with the top down and sun darkening his face. Good clothes and six months to loaf—and five thousand dollars in traveler’s checks. It would have been exciting. A holiday. Because there had been poor years before Gina. He had worked for Stanley Stock. He had finished his courses under the GI Bill and gone to work for Stanley.
Gina had been the daughter of a client. That was the way he had met her. She had taken him out to see the land where the house was to be built. She had money. That had distressed him at first. He had been uncomfortable about it, even after they were married. Then he had won the two competitions. With the prize money, and a loan from Gina, he had bought into the firm. Stock and Jamison. They had done well, well enough to take in Joe Valient, well enough so that Gina’s money, even after the death of her father, did not seem so overwhelming.
They had gone out that day to look at the property, Miss Regina Lowery and Mr. Devlin Jamison. They had climbed hills, argued hotly. Finally he had said, “Look, Miss Lowery. If you are going to design this house, you need a builder not an architect. If I design it according to your instructions, you will end up with exactly what you are used to. I’ll do you a house you’ll learn to like, and that will be better for you because it will expand your artistic horizons.”
“Don’t look so fierce and indignant.”
“It’s my work, and I do it my own way.”
“Or not at all?”
“Or not at all.”
She tilted her head in a way that later grew familiar. “You mean that, don’t you?”
“I mean it.”
“Jamison, you are refreshing. Okay. Build us a house.”
He had designed it, hovered over it while it was being built. All the while he thought of it as a house in which he could live with Gina. He knew that was absurd. But that was the way it was built. And later it became their house and they lived in it together. Now it was an empty house which stood on a hill where once they had stood toe to toe, flushed with annoyance at each other, on a day just as nice as this one, nearly eight years ago.
Forty minutes before the accident he stopped for a quick lunch. When he slowed down and the thumping began, he realized he had passed the wheel alignment place many miles back. He sat at a counter. He could see himself in a mirror. He could see the empty place on his left where she would have sat. She would have ordered a hamburg with raw onions, lots of them. She was devoted to raw onions.
Where will I go, Gina? What is going to become of me?
It was the emptiness, mostly. The lack of some great task to perform. Guilt was with him.
He ate quickly and paid and left.
Fifteen minutes later he drove through a small town named Blanchard. The super-highway went directly through the town. Two traffic lights stayed red for an arrogant length of time, imposing the authority of Blanchard on the glittering, impatient traffic. Beyond the town he speeded up again. Three lanes headed west. Traffic was heavy in both directions. He was in the middle lane. Ahead of him the lane he was on and the lane to his right were blocked by slower traffic. He slowed and watched his rear vision mirror. The highway was divided by curbing and a narrow strip of coarse grass. Fast traffic moved by him in the lane to his left. Finally there was a gap, but it was being rapidly closed by a maroon car speeding up behind him.
Jamison swung into the left lane, pushing the gas pedal down to the floor. The big car responded, the needle climbing quickly past fifty and sixty and seventy. He planned to move over into the middle lane again as soon as he could, and let the maroon car by.
His front right tire burst. The car swerved right, nearly yanking the wheel away from him. He yanked it back in time to avoid diving into the traffic in the middle lane, but he overcompensated. The front left wheel hit the raised curbing and the whole f
ront end of the car bounced up, turning slightly in the air to come down heavily on the right wheel on the coarse grass strip, angled over toward the oncoming traffic on the eastbound lanes. Around him he heard the shrill panic chorus of tires on cement.
The front right corner of the car dipped and dug, and the back wheels hit the curbing, and the back of the car, with what seemed incredible lethargy, began to come up, the car turning, beginning the first motion of what was a long roll, lazy as a porpoise, as the big blue convertible turned in the air, in the sunshine, toward the oncoming crush of cars in the eastbound lanes. It was one-eighteen P.M., Eastern Daylight Time, Monday, May seventeenth, six miles west of Blanchard.
chapter 2
FIVE hours before the accident occurred, Alice Scholl, standing at her kitchen stove, heard trouble start behind her at the table.
“Why don’t you get your hair combed?” she heard Bert, her husband, demand of Connie. “Why don’t you get fixed up? Damn it, are we going to get out of here today?”
“I can’t,” Connie said with fourteen-year-old indignation. “I can’t yet. I can’t do anything. She’s in the bathroom.”
“Alice,” Bert yelled. “Alice, go on up and get Suzie to hell out of the bathroom. Right now.”
Alice turned the gas off under the eggs. She did not turn and look at Bert. She knew how he would look, his face pink and bright with anger. Bert Scholl was a smallish sandy-haired man with a vivid temper. His face had not changed much with the years. It was possible to look at him and see at once how he had looked as a very young man. He had husky shoulders and long muscular arms. He was proud of his arms and shoulders and wore T-shirts whenever he could. He had been in steel plants all his life, using his muscles, and he was inordinately strong for his size.
His face had not changed, but he had changed on the inside. Frequently, of late, Alice had shocked herself by realizing that she didn’t even like him any more. Long ago there had been a certain sensitivity, a tenderness even. He had tried to help her. He had become, in his home, a complete autocrat, either shrill with anger, or boisterously cheerful. His frequent use of her weary body was as quick and impatient and selfish as his anger. He had lost all the words of love. She sometimes wondered if being little had made him the way he was.
Cry Hard, Cry Fast Page 1