by B. M. Bower
At the drug store on the corner of Second Street Bud stopped and bought the cotton, feeling remorseful for some of the things he had said to Marie, but not enough so to send him back home to tell her he was sorry. He went on, and met another friend before he had taken twenty steps. This friend was thinking of buying a certain second-hand automobile that was offered at a very low price, and he wanted Bud to go with him and look her over. Bud went, glad of the excuse to kill the rest of the forenoon.
They took the car out and drove to Schutzen Park and back. Bud opined that she didn’t bark to suit him, and she had a knock in her cylinders that shouted of carbon. They ran her into the garage shop and went deep into her vitals, and because she jerked when Bud threw her into second, Bud suspected that her bevel gears had lost a tooth or two, and was eager to find out for sure.
Bill looked at his watch and suggested that they eat first before they got all over grease by monkeying with the rear end. So they went to the nearest restaurant and had smothered beefsteak and mashed potato and coffee and pie, and while they ate they talked of gears and carburetors and transmission and ignition troubles, all of which alleviated temporarily Bud’s case of cabin fever and caused him to forget that he was married and had quarreled with his wife and had heard a good many unkind things which his mother-in-law had said about him.
By the time they were back in the garage and had the grease cleaned out of the rear gears so that they could see whether they were really burred or broken, as Bud had suspected, the twinkle was back in his eyes, and the smiley quirk stayed at the corners of his mouth, and when he was not talking mechanics with Bill he was whistling. He found much lost motion and four broken teeth, and he was grease to his eyebrows—in other words, he was happy.
When he and Bill finally shed their borrowed overalls and caps, the garage lights were on, and the lot behind the shop was dusky. Bud sat down on the running board and began to figure what the actual cost of the bargain would be when Bill had put it into good mechanical condition. New bearings, new bevel gear, new brake, lining, rebored cylinders—they totalled a sum that made Bill gasp.
By the time Bud had proved each item an absolute necessity, and had reached the final ejaculation: “Aw, forget it, Bill, and buy yuh a Ford!” it was so late that he knew Marie must have given up looking for him home to supper. She would have taken it for granted that he had eaten down town. So, not to disappoint her, Bud did eat down town. Then Bill wanted him to go to a movie, and after a praiseworthy hesitation Bud yielded to temptation and went. No use going home now, just when Marie would be rocking the kid to sleep and wouldn’t let him speak above a whisper, he told his conscience. Might as well wait till they settled down for the night.
CHAPTER TWO
TWO MAKE A QUARREL
At nine o’clock Bud went home. He was feeling very well satisfied with himself for some reason which he did not try to analyze, but which was undoubtedly his sense of having saved Bill from throwing away six hundred dollars on a bum car; and the weight in his coat pocket of a box of chocolates that he had bought for Marie. Poor girl, it was kinda tough on her, all right, being tied to the house now with the kid. Next spring when he started his run to Big Basin again, he would get a little camp in there by the Inn, and take her along with him when the travel wasn’t too heavy. She could stay at either end of the run, just as she took a notion. Wouldn’t hurt the kid a bit—he’d be bigger then, and the outdoors would make him grow like a pig. Thinking of these things, Bud walked briskly, whistling as he neared the little green house, so that Marie would know who it was, and would not be afraid when he stepped up on the front porch.
He stopped whistling rather abruptly when he reached the house, for it was dark. He tried the door and found it locked. The key was not in the letter box where they always kept it for the convenience of the first one who returned, so Bud went around to the back and climbed through the pantry window. He fell over a chair, bumped into the table, and damned a few things. The electric light was hung in the center of the room by a cord that kept him groping and clutching in the dark before he finally touched the elusive bulb with his fingers and switched on the light.
The table was set for a meal—but whether it was dinner or supper Bud could not determine. He went into the little sleeping room and turned on the light there, looked around the empty room, grunted, and tiptoed into the bedroom. (In the last month he had learned to enter on his toes, lest he waken the baby.) He might have saved himself the bother, for the baby was not there in its new gocart. The gocart was not there, Marie was not there—one after another these facts impressed themselves upon Bud’s mind, even before he found the letter propped against the clock in the orthodox manner of announcing unexpected departures. Bud read the letter, crumpled it in his fist, and threw it toward the little heating stove. “If that’s the way yuh feel about it, I’ll tell the world you can go and be darned!” he snorted, and tried to let that end the matter so far as he was concerned. But he could not shake off the sense of having been badly used. He did not stop to consider that while he was working off his anger, that day, Marie had been rocking back and forth, crying and magnifying the quarrel as she dwelt upon it, and putting a new and sinister meaning into Bud’s ill-considered utterances. By the time Bud was thinking only of the bargain car’s hidden faults, Marie had reached the white heat of resentment that demanded vigorous action. Marie was packing a suitcase and meditating upon the scorching letter she meant to write.
Judging from the effect which the letter had upon Bud, it must have been a masterpiece of its kind. He threw the box of chocolates into the wood-box, crawled out of the window by which he had entered, and went down town to a hotel. If the house wasn’t good enough for Marie, let her go. He could go just as fast and as far as she could. And if she thought he was going to hot-foot it over to her mother’s and whine around and beg her to come home, she had another think coming.
He wouldn’t go near the darn place again, except to get his clothes. He’d bust up the joint, by thunder. He’d sell off the furniture and turn the house over to the agent again, and Marie could whistle for a home. She had been darn glad to get into that house, he remembered, and away from that old cat of a mother. Let her stay there now till she was darn good and sick of it. He’d just keep her guessing for awhile; a week or so would do her good. Well, he wouldn’t sell the furniture—he’d just move it into another house, and give her a darn good scare. He’d get a better one, that had a porcelain bathtub instead of a zinc one, and a better porch, where the kid could be out in the sun. Yes, sir, he’d just do that little thing, and lay low and see what Marie did about that. Keep her guessing—that was the play to make.
Unfortunately for his domestic happiness, Bud failed to take into account two very important factors in the quarrel. The first and most important one was Marie’s mother, who, having been a widow for fifteen years and therefore having acquired a habit of managing affairs that even remotely concerned her, assumed that Marie’s affairs must be managed also. The other factor was Marie’s craving to be coaxed back to smiles by the man who drove her to tears. Marie wanted Bud to come and say he was sorry, and had been a brute and so forth. She wanted to hear him tell how empty the house had seemed when he returned and found her gone. She wanted him to be good and scared with that letter. She stayed awake until after midnight, listening for his anxious footsteps; after midnight she stayed awake to cry over the inhuman way he was treating her, and to wish she was dead, and so forth; also because the baby woke and wanted his bottle, and she was teaching him to sleep all night without it, and because the baby had a temper just like his father.
His father’s temper would have yielded a point or two, the next day, had it been given the least encouragement. For instance, he might have gone over to see Marie before he moved the furniture out of the house, had he not discovered an express wagon standing in front of the door when he went home about noon to see if Marie had come back. Before he had recovered to the point of profane speec
h, the express man appeared, coming out of the house, bent nearly double under the weight of Marie’s trunk. Behind him in the doorway Bud got a glimpse of Marie’s mother.
That settled it. Bud turned around and hurried to the nearest drayage company, and ordered a domestic wrecking crew to the scene; in other words, a packer and two draymen and a dray. He’d show ’em. Marie and her mother couldn’t put anything over on him—he’d stand over that furniture with a sheriff first.
He went back and found Marie’s mother still there, packing dishes and doilies and the like. They had a terrible row, and all the nearest neighbors inclined ears to doors ajar—getting an earful, as Bud contemptuously put it. He finally led Marie’s mother to the front door and set her firmly outside. Told her that Marie had come to him with no more than the clothes she had, and that his money had bought every teaspoon and every towel and every stick of furniture in the darned place, and he’d be everlastingly thus-and-so if they were going to strong-arm the stuff off him now. If Marie was too good to live with him, why, his stuff was too good for her to have.
Oh, yes, the neighbors certainly got an earful, as the town gossips proved when the divorce suit seeped into the papers. Bud refused to answer the proceedings, and was therefore ordered to pay twice as much alimony as he could afford to pay; more, in fact, than all his domestic expense had amounted to in the fourteen months that he had been married. Also Marie was awarded the custody of the child and, because Marie’s mother had represented Bud to be a violent man who was a menace to her daughter’s safety—and proved it by the neighbors who had seen and heard so much—Bud was served with a legal paper that wordily enjoined him from annoying Marie with his presence.
That unnecessary insult snapped the last thread of Bud’s regret for what had happened. He sold the furniture and the automobile, took the money to the judge that had tried the case, told the judge a few wholesome truths, and laid the pile of money on the desk.
“That cleans me out, Judge,” he said stolidly. “I wasn’t such a bad husband, at that. I got sore—but I’ll bet you get sore yourself and tell your wife what-for, now and then. I didn’t get a square deal, but that’s all right. I’m giving a better deal than I got. Now you can keep that money and pay it out to Marie as she needs it, for herself and the kid. But for the Lord’s sake, Judge, don’t let that wildcat of a mother of hers get her fingers into the pile! She framed this deal, thinking she’d get a haul outa me this way. I’m asking you to block that little game. I’ve held out ten dollars, to eat on till I strike something. I’m clean; they’ve licked the platter and broke the dish. So don’t never ask me to dig up any more, because I won’t—not for you nor no other darn man. Get that.”
This, you must know, was not in the courtroom, so Bud was not fined for contempt. The judge was a married man himself, and he may have had a sympathetic understanding of Bud’s position. At any rate he listened unofficially, and helped Bud out with the legal part of it, so that Bud walked out of the judge’s office financially free, even though he had a suspicion that his freedom would not bear the test of prosperity, and that Marie’s mother would let him alone only so long as he and prosperity were strangers.
CHAPTER THREE
TEN DOLLARS AND A JOB FOR BUD
To withhold for his own start in life only one ten-dollar bill from fifteen hundred dollars was spectacular enough to soothe even so bruised an ego as Bud Moore carried into the judge’s office. There is an anger which carries a person to the extreme of self-sacrifice, in the subconscious hope of exciting pity for one so hardly used. Bud was boiling with such an anger, and it demanded that he should all but give Marie the shirt off his back, since she had demanded so much—and for so slight a cause.
Bud could not see for the life of him why Marie should have quit for that little ruction. It was not their first quarrel, nor their worst; certainly he had not expected it to be their last. Why, he asked the high heavens, had she told him to bring home a roll of cotton, if she was going to leave him? Why had she turned her back on that little home, that had seemed to mean as much to her as it had to him?
Being kin to primitive man, Bud could only bellow rage when he should have analyzed calmly the situation. He should have seen that Marie too had cabin fever, induced by changing too suddenly from carefree girlhood to the ills and irks of wifehood and motherhood. He should have known that she had been for two months wholly dedicated to the small physical wants of their baby, and that if his nerves were fraying with watching that incessant servitude, her own must be close to the snapping point; had snapped, when dusk did not bring him home repentant.
But he did not know, and so he blamed Marie bitterly for the wreck of their home, and he flung down all his worldly goods before her, and marched off feeling self-consciously proud of his martyrdom. It soothed him paradoxically to tell himself that he was “cleaned”; that Marie had ruined him absolutely, and that he was just ten dollars and a decent suit or two of clothes better off than a tramp. He was tempted to go back and send the ten dollars after the rest of the fifteen hundred, but good sense prevailed. He would have to borrow money for his next meal, if he did that, and Bud was touchy about such things.
He kept the ten dollars therefore, and went down to the garage where he felt most at home, and stood there with his hands in his pockets and the corners of his mouth tipped downward—normally they had a way of tipping upward, as though he was secretly amused at something—and his eyes sullen, though they carried tiny lines at the corners to show how they used to twinkle. He took the ten-dollar bank note from his pocket, straightened out the wrinkles and looked at it disdainfully. As plainly as though he spoke, his face told what he was thinking about it: that this was what a woman had brought him to! He crumpled it up and made a gesture as though he would throw it into the street, and a man behind him laughed abruptly. Bud scowled and turned toward him a belligerent glance, and the man stopped laughing as suddenly as he had begun.
“If you’ve got money to throw to the birds, brother, I guess I won’t make the proposition I was going to make. Thought I could talk business to you, maybe—but I guess I better tie a can to that idea.”
Bud grunted and put the ten dollars in his pocket.
“What idea’s that?”
“Oh, driving a car I’m taking south. Sprained my shoulder, and don’t feel like tackling it myself. They tell me in here that you aren’t doing anything now—” He made the pause that asks for an answer.
“They told you right. I’ve done it.”
The man’s eyebrows lifted, but since Bud did not explain, he went on with his own explanation.
“You don’t remember me, but I rode into Big Basin with you last summer. I know you can drive, and it doesn’t matter a lot whether it’s asphalt or cow trail you drive over.”
Bud was in too sour a mood to respond to the flattery. He did not even grunt.
“Could you take a car south for me? There’ll be night driving, and bad roads, maybe—”
“If you know what you say you know about my driving, what’s the idea—asking me if I can?”
“Well, put it another way. Will you?”
“You’re on. Where’s the car? Here?” Bud sent a seeking look into the depths of the garage. He knew every car in there. “What is there in it for me?” he added perfunctorily, because he would have gone just for sake of getting a free ride rather than stay in San Jose over night.
“There’s good money in it, if you can drive with your mouth shut. This isn’t any booster parade. Fact is—let’s walk to the depot, while I tell you.” He stepped out of the doorway, and Bud gloomily followed him. “Little trouble with my wife,” the man explained apologetically. “Having me shadowed, and all that sort of thing. And I’ve got business south and want to be left alone to do it. Darn these women!” he exploded suddenly.
Bud mentally said amen, but kept his mouth shut upon his sympathy with the sentiment.
“Foster’s my name. Now here’s a key to the garage at this
address.” He handed Bud a padlock key and an address scribbled on a card. “That’s my place in Oakland, out by Lake Merritt. You go there tonight, get the car, and have it down at the Broadway Wharf to meet the 11:30 boat—the one the theater crowd uses. Have plenty of gas and oil; there won’t be any stops after we start. Park out pretty well near the shore end as close as you can get to that ten-foot gum sign, and be ready to go when I climb in. I may have a friend with me. You know Oakland?”
“Fair to middling. I can get around by myself.”
“Well, that’s all right. I’ve got to go back to the city—catching the next train. You better take the two-fifty to Oakland. Here’s money for whatever expense there is. And say! put these number plates in your pocket, and take off the ones on the car. I bought these of a fellow that had a smash—they’ll do for the trip. Put them on, will you? She’s wise to the car number, of course. Put the plates you take off under the seat cushion; don’t leave ’em. Be just as careful as if it was a life-and-death matter, will you? I’ve got a big deal on, down there, and I don’t want her spilling the beans just to satisfy a grudge—which she would do in a minute. So don’t fail to be at the ferry, parked so you can slide out easy. Get down there by that big gum sign. I’ll find you, all right.”
“I’ll be there.” Bud thrust the key and another ten dollars into his pocket and turned away.
“And don’t say anything—”
“Do I look like an open-faced guy?”
The man laughed. “Not much, or I wouldn’t have picked you for the trip.” He hurried down to the depot platform, for his train was already whistling, farther down the yards.
Bud looked after him, the corners of his mouth taking their normal, upward tilt. It began to look as though luck had not altogether deserted him, in spite of the recent blow it had given. He slid the wrapped number plates into the inside pocket of his overcoat, pushed his hands deep into his pockets, and walked up to the cheap hotel which had been his bleak substitute for a home during his trouble. He packed everything he owned—a big suitcase held it all by squeezing—paid his bill at the office, accepted a poor cigar, and in return said, yes, he was going to strike out and look for work; and took the train for Oakland.