Odds Against Tomorrow

by William P. McGivern

  “All right,” he said very quietly. It seemed important to conserve all his strength now; his wound ached dully, and he felt suddenly weak and empty, without weight or guts of any kind. “I guess I have to.”

  “Yes, you have to.”

  A shrill laugh sounded behind them, and Lorraine turned quickly, a hand moving to her throat. Crazybone stood in the kitchen doorway, the light glinting on her rimless glasses, and a childishly malicious smile brightening her tiny face. “Time to make Pop’s breakfast, dearie,” she cried with a pointless air of triumph. “Want to help me drag his bed back where it belongs?”

  “Yes, I’ll help you,” Lorraine said in a stiff, unnatural voice.

  “He fusses if he’s around the food,” Crazybone said, jerking and twisting her head about like a confused hen. “Tries to get at it.” She laughed and patted her thin gray hair with a coquettish gesture. “I never had the meanness to teach him manners, starve him a little bit. It would be easy in the winter when he can’t move around. I will sometimes, I swear. Just starve him a little.” She moved her head in a pecking gesture at Lorraine. “Oh, I’m bad, all right. Bad and sinful. But I don’t go around breaking up folks’ furniture. Not without cause. Come on now, help me drag Pop’s bed in here. Lend a hand, dearie. He’ll want his Bible, too, because tomorrow’s Sunday. And his medicine for his sores. Oh, we’ve got lots of work to do. Come on, dearie.”

  Lorraine forced her dry lips into the semblance of a smile. “Yes, I’m coming…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  INGRAM CAME downstairs at eight o’clock, his body pinched and shrunken within the folds of Earl’s big overcoat. He rubbed his hands together and crouched by the small blaze that Lorraine had started in the fireplace. Without looking at him, Earl said sharply, “You should drink something. You’ll freeze to death.”

  “I’m okay, just cold.” Ingram could hardly feel his hands; they were hard and dry as weathered bones.

  The old man was back in his customary place, snoring feebly under the mound of gray blankets. There was a worn Bible under his bed, beside a jar of medicine which generated the foul, acrid stench in the room.

  Lorraine stood close to the fire, hugging herself tightly; she had washed in cold water, and now her skin stung uncomfortably and the sinuses had begun to throb behind her forehead and cheekbones.

  “Maybe you better go upstairs for a while,” Ingram said to her. “We can take turns. It’s too cold to stay up there all day.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll come up when I get warm. We want to keep—” He stopped and stared at the splintered case of the radio. “Hey, what happened?”

  “I turned my ankle and stumbled against the table,” Lorraine said, watching Earl’s frowning face. “We heard the six-thirty news, and I was just turning off the radio.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Ingram said slowly. “But you heard the news, at least.”

  “We heard it,” Earl said without looking at Ingram. “I told you I’d listen, didn’t I?”

  “Sure, that’s right,” Ingram said, wondering what had got Earl into this mood; he was staring at the floor, his face hard and drawn with tension. Maybe his wound was hurting a lot.

  Lorraine walked across to the kitchen door, but stopped there and looked back at Earl. “Tell him what we heard,” she said.

  “Yeah, let’s hear it,” Ingram said, puzzled by the insistence of her tone, and the restless anger in Earl’s face.

  “It’s your lucky day,” Earl said, limping over to the windows.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cops don’t want you, that’s what I mean. I’m the only one they want.”

  So that’s what’s bothering him, Ingram thought. He glanced around at Lorraine, but she must have slipped through the door as Earl was speaking.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Ingram said. “The cops might have been confused for a while. But they’d get the real story quick enough.”

  “You’re just lucky, that’s all.” Earl stared out at the broad, black meadow that swept up to a stand of poplars a quarter of a mile from the house. Everything was cold and lonely; the very earth seemed beaten and helpless and forsaken. Crows winged through the damp gray air toward the bare trees, occasionally crying out pointless warnings against the silence. The sound tightened the sick, weightless feeling in his stomach, and made the muscles of his throat crawl with nausea. Say it, finish it, he thought. Lorraine was right. Who the hell was he? What did he mean to them? Not a goddam thing. A colored guy they’d never seen before. A loud-mouth, smart-aleck jig. Brush him off like a piece of dirt… He tried to pump up his anger, but he was too weak and sick…

  “You sure you heard that news straight?” Ingram said dubiously.

  “Yeah, I heard it straight,” Earl muttered. “The delivery boy from the drugstore disappeared after the holdup.” The lie he had planned tasted bitter on his tongue. “He had a record. Did time somewhere. I guess he was scared the cops would figure he was in on the job.”

  “The poor bastard,” Ingram said. “They will figure that now.”

  “Don’t waste your sympathy on him. Worry about me, for Christ’s sake.” Earl turned from the window but he couldn’t meet Ingram’s eyes. “I mean something, too, don’t I?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ingram said. “We got to get you out of this mess. But how about that doctor? You mean the radio didn’t say anything about him?”

  “Not a peep. Your grandstand play paid off, I guess. You were the big hero, saving the doctor and his kid from me. That was smart, Sambo.”

  “You know I did right. You know that. If we’d kept them here the whole country would be swarming with cops. They wouldn’t just be waiting at roadblocks. They’d be buzzing around our ears like hornets.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” Earl said wearily and returned to the sofa. “But it saved your neck, too. The doc is covering for you.”

  Ingram picked up the radio and turned it around in his hands. “It’s pretty funny, in a way. I rob a bank and kidnap a couple of people and nothing happens. I overpark ten minutes at home and a dozen cops jump me. It’s funny.” He took a penknife from his pocket and sat down, studying the radio. “I guess we better split up when we leave here. You think that makes sense?”

  “Sure, you’re in the clear,” Earl said bitterly. “You might as well bug-out.” His thoughts were angrily confused; he had wanted Ingram to suggest this, hadn’t he? They’d stacked things so he’d leap at the chance to get away from them. So why chew him out for it?

  “Hell, I’ll stick if you want me to,” Ingram said, unscrewing the back plate of the radio. “But a white man and a colored man traveling together attract attention. You know that. You and your woman will have a better chance without me.”

  “Okay, okay,” Earl said shortly. “We’ll split up.”

  “I can go on foot,” Ingram said. “Hop the bus on the highway and be on my way. You and your woman shouldn’t have any trouble getting out in the car.”

  “Okay, goddamit, we’ll split up.”

  “We going to meet at the World Series?” Ingram asked with a faint smile.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Earl said, rubbing his forehead. “We’ll drink some beer and I’ll tell you what to watch for.” Why did he say that? he thought. Why keep piling up lies? “What the hell are you doing with the radio?” he said abruptly.

  Ingram had arranged a number of parts in a neat pattern on the table. “Maybe I can fix it,” he said.

  “Yeah? What do you know about radios?”

  “Can’t hurt to try, can it? These old sets were made good and solid. Like those old dollar Ingersoll watches. You drop ’em and they usually work better afterwards.” He peered into the radio, puckering up his lips in a soundless whistle.

  “No good, eh?” Earl watched him closely, sick and weary with a new fear: he didn’t want Ingram to know they’d lied to him. Let him find out when the cops grabbed him. Not here… “It’s too busted-up
, eh?” he said, unable to keep the hope from his voice.

  Ingram glanced at him. “Maybe, maybe not.” He went back to work. “If the rectifier tube is shot, there’s no chance. But it might just be the speaker leads are pulled loose. Something like that.”

  “Where’d you learn about radios?”

  “In the Army. I was in a communications section.”

  “Communications, eh?” Earl put a cigarette in his mouth and struck a match with a flip of his thumbnail. “That was a soft touch, I guess.”

  “No, sir. They worked us four hours on and four hours off for three days at a stretch. That was overseas, though. In the States it wasn’t bad.”

  “Where were you overseas?”

  “England. Near a town called Weymouth most of the time. But we got to London regularly.”

  Earl said dryly, “You call England overseas?”

  Ingram grinned. “You show me a way to get there on dry land.”

  Earl stood and limped back to the windows, savoring a sudden, stimulating anger; it was a sustaining emotion, a hot thing that burned away all the doubts that had been nagging at him. The wise-cracking about the Army had triggered it; that’s the way they all acted when they forgot their place. Puffed up, slapping your back and offering you drinks out of their bottle. Crowding close to you… Earl knew this as a general truth, but he wasn’t interested in general truths now; he was suddenly aware of a big truth; it was all right for him to hate Ingram. It was a responsibility, in fact, doubly important since Ingram had done him a favor. That was the essential thing. You treated people the way they ought to be treated—regardless of how they treated you. That’s what took guts.

  The thoughts beat warmly in his mind, suffusing him with a sense of virtue and confidence. It was okay to lie to Ingram; it was a duty. Earl wasn’t sure how he had reached these conclusions, but their truth couldn’t be denied; they rang vigorously through his whole body, drowning out the tiny voices of doubt and guilt.

  “So how was it overseas?” he said quietly, standing rigid and tense with his back to Ingram. “How was the stuff in England, Sambo?”

  “We didn’t have it too bad.” Ingram bent over the radio, frowning intently at one of the tubes. “We lived in barracks, and the CO was pretty good about passes.”

  “It sounds nice and cozy,” Earl said.

  “The Army’s the Army,” Ingram said. “Good deal or bad deal, it’s still the Army. You know that.”

  Earl watched him with narrowed eyes. “You must have liked England, I guess. They went for you over there, I heard.”

  “The people were real nice.” Ingram laughed. “You ask ’em for directions and they’d take your arm and walk halfway to where you were going, saying, ‘You cawn’t miss it, old chap, really you cawn’t!’” Ingram shook his head. “They talk like that, no kidding.”

  “You’ve got the limey accent down pretty good. Somebody must have taught it to you.”

  “I heard enough of it, I guess.” Earl limped back toward the sofa, staring at Ingram’s bent head. “You got along fine with the people, didn’t you?”

  “Most of them were friendly to soldiers. You know how that is. They’d show us pictures of their sons off in Burma or some place, ask questions about America.”

  “You must have given ’em an earful,” Earl said.

  Ingram shrugged and managed a smile. He could feel Earl’s anger beating at him like a blast furnace. What the hell was wrong with him? What had started him up like this?

  “Well, how about the people, Sambo?” Earl said. “I’d like to know about them. I never saw anything but mud and Germans.”

  “Well, they were friendly and nice, like I told you.” He knew now what Earl was getting at, and an old primitive caution stirred in his blood. “I didn’t get to know any of them real well, but they were always nice to us.”

  “You didn’t get to know any of them, eh?”

  “Well, I knew one fellow pretty well,” Ingram said. “Not for long, but that didn’t seem to matter. He was the kind of guy you understood right away, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m dumb, Sambo. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I met him in a bar one night in London,” Ingram said. “He was just standing there with a beer and we got to talking.”

  “You went into the bars with them, eh?”

  Ingram looked steadily at him. “That’s right. We used the same toilets, too. That’s what we were fighting for. Democracy. Community crap houses.”

  “So what about him?” Earl’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “What about him, Sambo?”

  “He was from Scotland,” Ingram said, still staring steadily at the anger in Earl’s face. “He was about sixty. He liked music. He asked me if I’d like to go to a concert with him the next day. I said fine. We went to the concert. Next day he took me and a buddy of mine around London. Out to neighborhoods where there were row after row of little brick houses with flower gardens in front of them. Then he took us to Piccadilly, and then to the East End where the people were so poor they never used up their Scotch and gin rations. All the little pubs had Scotch and gin. He knew a lot about history. He told us that an Englishman named Disraeli once said, ‘The good things in life are for the few—the very few.’ The Scotchman didn’t like that idea. He dropped us at Paddington Station and we caught the train back to our outfit.” Ingram let his penknife fall to the table. “That’s the story of the people of England.”

  “Well, why did he pick you up? Was he queer?”

  “You couldn’t prove it by me.”

  “And how about the girls? How about the shack jobs, Sambo?”

  Ingram shifted his eyes from Earl’s face. He couldn’t face the senseless anger there. Why? he thought bitterly. Why should I have to apologize for what my body did ten years ago? “I’ll tell you this much,” he said, suddenly contemptuous of himself and contemptuous of Earl. “I never took anything in England that wasn’t offered to me. On a platter.”

  “A great war you had. You weren’t in the Army, you were in heaven.”

  “They gave me a soldier suit and put me on a ship. What was I supposed to do? Jump overboard and swim to the front lines with my rifle in my mouth?”

  Earl stood and limped back to the windows, embittered and consumed by his restless anger.

  “You should have tagged along with me, Sambo,” he said. “You’d have seen the war. I left the States a Pfc. Four years later I was platoon sergeant. There were only about a dozen guys in our outfit that made the trip the whole way. The rest were shot up in Africa or France or Germany. Anytime they got overstocked with Purple Hearts they’d send us back to the line.”

  “You were with the First, I guess.”

  “You heard about it, eh?”

  “Sure. That was one of the real Glory outfits.”

  “You’re frigging right it was.” He limped up and down the room, inflated with belligerent pride. “They took the greatest bunch of guys in the world to make that outfit, then killed half of them to make a name for it. You know something? Every officer we left the States with was killed in action. The CO, his exec, four second looies. All killed in action.” Earl moved to the sofa, feeling suddenly confused and weary. His mood was changing, softening; the cold knot of anger in his breast seemed to be melting. “One of our second lieutenants was just a kid,” he said shaking his head slowly. “A guy named Murdock. He played football at Santa Clara. God, he was a hell of an athlete. He had everything. Good-looking, a big grin on his face all the time. He was never discouraged about things. He was an optimist, I guess you’d call him. He kept everybody cheered up. He got hit in France. A bullet went right through his helmet, in the back, out the front. When we turned him over a couple of guys started swearing—it was just wrong to see him busted-up like that.”

  Earl had forgotten Ingram, forgotten the bitterly cold room with its medicinal stink, forgotten that he would die if the police caught him; everything was crowded from his mind by proud, painful
memories of the Army. It had been the best time of his life. There was no doubt of that. With all the mud and crap, the best time he’d ever known.

  He’d griped about it then, like everybody else, because he had been ashamed to admit what he really felt. Even combat was different for him than for the other guys. It made him wild and giddy, but it wasn’t like fear at all; it was a roller-coaster feeling, almost too exhilarating to bear. That’s why he’d yelled and shouted like a madman at times. Just to release the thing…

  They had put together five big years, marking them with graves that stretched all the way back to Africa. They were an outfit, something you gave to and took from at the same time, something bigger than just one hundred and fifty foot soldiers. Then the outfit broke up and the guys scattered all over the country. And there was never a postcard or a telephone call from any of them, never a way to keep the memories alive. It was like the whole thing never happened.

  Once, in Davenport, Iowa, Earl had met a man from the outfit—Hilstutter, a tough, savvy sort of guy, a good soldier. Hilstutter hadn’t changed; he was a little fatter, that was all. They stood talking on the sidewalk, Hilstutter nodding at him and saying, “Yeah, that was a bad night,” or “What ever happened to So-and-so, I wonder”—nodding as Earl talked on eagerly, recalling some of the big times in the Army. And then Hilstutter had said, “You haven’t changed, Sarge. You look great.” And he’d shaken hands after that and glanced at his watch. Had to get rolling, he said. Had to get home to his wife…

  And that was all. Earl had stared after him, watching the dumpy little man hurry off down the sidewalk, looking just like any one of a thousand guys you’d see in a crowded city. After soldiering together five years that’s all it meant to Hilstutter: a hello, a hand shake, a good-by.

  The real outfit was dead, he thought gloomily. The dead ones had made the outfit’s record—the silent dead of the old First. It was funny, the dead ones kept the memories alive. The others didn’t count. Scattered all over the country, watering lawns, growing fat and bald, forgetting the whole damned thing as soon as they got their discharge papers in their hands.