by Orrie Hitt
“The Buick flipped a gear,” I told her. “That crate was the first thing I could lay my hands on.”
“It looks nice with the top down.”
“Yeah.”
We sat some more like that, about as close together as two idiots at a rodeo. I lit a cigarette and pulled the smoke deep in. She made me nervous, acting this way. I knew she was upset and I wanted to ignore it but I couldn’t. I had this book on my back and she had to pull me out from under it.
“Look,” I said after a while. “I’m sorry. See? I’m sorry as all get-out, Madeline, but I’ve been up to here” — I pulled my finger across my throat — ”and it’s kept me hopping around, doing an Elvis Presley all over the damned town. Aw, sure, I know you’ve been having it too, up in that stinking library every day, but you’ve got no idea — ”
“Danny?”
“What?”
“Don’t they sell Fords any more?”
I got up in disgust. What kind of a question was that for a dame to ask, anyway?
“They sell Fords all right,” I assured her. “But not to Danny Fulton. I want a car that’s going to last.”
She moved out of the chair and came toward me. I hadn’t noticed it before but the only thing she was wearing was a negligee, one of those creations that clings and sags in just the right places. She didn’t have to make two guesses as to what I was looking at. She smiled.
“I didn’t expect you tonight, Danny. Otherwise — well, it was so hot and I just had to take a shower. And I didn’t eat. Not a bite. That library — it’s terribly hot in that historical room, and dirty.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “In the morning, the first thing, I’ll get hold of one of those portable air conditioners and have that lugged over there. How’s that?”
She stopped right where she was, not smiling, and looked at me.
“Danny, let’s not fight.”
“I’m not fighting. I’m only trying to make it easier on you.”
“But we are,” she said. “And you know it, Danny. You know it as well as I do. I said that about the car because I was mad at you, hurt because you hadn’t been around the way you used to.”
“Well, I’ve been working. I told you that.”
“And the air conditioner,” she persisted. “That’s because you haven’t been around, either, Danny. Oh, I’m not saying you wouldn’t do something like that anyway, but — ”
I went on over to the door. I was getting about as far with her as a kid using a toy truck in a pile of coal.
“You’re forgetting one thing,” I told her. “This is Port Jessup. This isn’t Waverly or any of those other places. This is Port Jessup, where your husband lives. This is where we have to keep it strictly on the up-and-up or we can both land in a lot of trouble. And you wouldn’t want that, would you? You wouldn’t want your Johnny to come home, to walk in through that door, and find me here, would you? That’s what I’ve been thinking about, if you want to know.”
I’d been thinking about it for a long time, all right. All of two seconds. This dame had her back up in the air and I had to get it down again somehow.
“I’ve already seen him,” Madeline said quietly. “This afternoon. He came to the library.”
“I didn’t know he was in town.”
“He got in last night.”
So Johnny had come home to his wife. So what did she want me to do about it?
“He’s leaving tomorrow morning.”
“Short visit.”
There was a moment of silence. The shadows got deeper, longer and the room got hotter.
“He wants me to go back with him.”
I’d had my hand on the doorknob but I got it off there in a hurry.
“I didn’t get very much work done today,” she said. “We talked a long time.”
I nodded. I couldn’t say anything. She had all the high cards and she was playing them out her way.
“He’s not at all like I thought,” she told me. Her voice was low, like she were talking to herself or saying some sort of a prayer. “Not like his folks. He hasn’t been running around, not the way I thought. And he didn’t write much because he’s been so busy.”
“That’s a hot one for the Navy,” I said. “I knew a guy who served four years and never had to get out of bed.”
“He’s been promoted twice,” she went on, ignoring me. “And he’s saved some money, almost a thousand. And he’s got an apartment, all furnished and everything. He — he brought pictures of it with him.”
She kept talking about it, moving around the room, the negligee hardly covering anything at all. I tried to sort it out in my mind, what would happen if she went. I couldn’t. Everybody, with the exception of Al — and Gloria, of course — thought I wrote those books. I don’t know why it made any difference whether I did or not, but it did. Writers, or the thought of writing, seemed to hold some strange fascination for the advertisers and when they thought they were talking to the king of the typewriter it made the pitch a lot easier and far more effective. To change now would be most critical and to run around looking for somebody to do the job would be even worse. With the exception of Gloria, who hated my guts, I didn’t know anybody who could throw a book like that together. And I didn’t know where to look for a writer. Once, a year or so before, I’d tried to find one, thinking that I might double my crew, but nobody seemed to know where you could locate one. Where the hell did they live, I wondered, under the rocks?
“Are you listening to me, Danny?”
“You’re going,” I said. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
“We talked a long time this afternoon.”
“I oughta dock you. Crappin’ me all up on my own time.”
It didn’t make her mad. She just laughed.
“You’ve got a good sense of humor, Danny.”
“This isn’t very funny.”
“The book is a third done.”
“And I only have to put out a hundred percent of it.”
“We’ll, the worst part of the script is finished. The Indian days and the days of the settlers, they’re all finished except for the final typing.”
“Don’t try to make me feel good,” I said. I went over to the end table by the davenport and got a cigarette. It tasted like hell. “It throws things all up in the air and you know it.”
“I’m sorry, Danny.”
I went over to her and stood very close.
“You don’t have to spit in my face,” I said bitterly. “H you were at all sorry you’d finish the job before you went out there with him. Almost anybody would do that. You just wouldn’t up and leave a guy with his pants dragging on the ground.”
“He knows about us.” Then, hastily, “I don’t mean that he knows about you and me — that way. But he knows what I’ve been doing, working for you and traveling around. He didn’t say it but I know what he thinks. And his family hasn’t helped. He said — well, he said if I didn’t go back with him then he’d know it wasn’t for us.”
Sometimes you get your fingers in a trap no matter what direction you point. I threw my saddle on another mental horse and galloped toward a new spot on her compass.
“You don’t love the guy,” I said. “You told me that. You thought he was playing it hot out there and you said you didn’t love him. You even talked about a divorce. And now you say you’re going back to California with him. I thought you were a level-headed girl. I thought you were one who knew your own mind. But I guess you don’t. I guess you’re like all the rest.”
She smiled at me with her lips but her eyes were somber.
“Did you ever think me different?”
In the future, I’d have to put my secrets under lock and key and throw them down the nearest sewer.
“You were different,” I said.
“Handy,” she corrected me.
I shrugged.
“There’s no use arguing with the jury after the verdict,” I decided. “You feel one way and I know
another.”
I was getting to her at last. I could see it, in the way her mouth lifted a little at the corners, the way her breasts thrust up and out.
“You were going to quit us in Waverly, weren’t you, Danny?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I was.”
“And you wouldn’t have told us. You’d have just walked out.”
“But I didn’t.”
She laughed and folded the negligee across her flat belly.
“Because the job here was too big. You couldn’t pass it up. If it had been a little one you’d have walked out on us. I know you would have, Danny.”
“Go on,” I said.
She turned away from me, almost crying.
“I can’t go on that way, Danny. I have to know. I have to be sure. I don’t want to be — dropped. I have to have some kind of security, something to hang on to.”
It hit me then, hit me hard. She wasn’t running to this guy Johnny, this husband of hers; she was running away from me. Christ! She wouldn’t say it, wouldn’t put it into words, but it was right there, all wrapped up inside of her; and all I had to do was pull the wrapping apart.
“Madeline,” I said. “Madeline, honey, I think you’ve got this whole thing all screwed up.”
“Oh, Danny!”
I got my hands on her and turned her around. I looked down into her eyes but if there were any tears I didn’t see them. I tried to mate the need in them with the dollar signs in my own and they matched like two Lincoln pennies in a coin collection.
“Kiss me, Madeline,” I told her.
Her lips were soft, warm and alive. I got my arms around her and pulled her in tight. The way she held there, almost fastened to me, gave me an idea that it was almost bonus time again.
“You’re not telling me what you’re going to do,” I said, my mouth moving against her lips. “I’m telling you. You’re telling that crazy husband of yours to hump himself back to the west coast and start a hotel in that apartment. Because you’re staying right here, where you belong. With me.”
She tried to pull away from me but she didn’t work very hard at it.
“It isn’t the job, is it, Danny?” I felt her eyes searching my face. “Tell me, Danny!”
“To hell with the job,” I told her. “If you want, we’ll chuck the whole thing and blow out of here. I don’t care, one way or the other. It’s just that I don’t want to lose you, baby. Not now. Not after you’ve come to mean so much. Maybe I’ve been a long time saying it, but — ”
“You’ve said it. And I feel it. Those are the important things, Danny.”
“You know it.”
“Kiss me,” she whispered, closing those big eyes. “Kiss me again!”
I did.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she wanted to know. Her fingers dug into the back of my neck and I hoped she wouldn’t leave any scratches there. “I almost went away, Danny.” She choked, her voice thick. Almost!”
“Well, I’m pretty stupid that way.”
“You just thought I was — easy.”
“I didn’t know what to think.”
“But you didn’t believe it?”
“No. Not for a minute. It was real.”
It had to happen. We were near the davenport and we were wound up so tight.
“This time it will be different,” she promised as I pushed her down into the cushions. Her lips were wild. “So different!”
I slid out of my fifteen-dollar shirt, looking down at her. I wanted to laugh. It’s never any different, only the first time.
“You’ll tell him?” I wanted to know. “You won’t change your mind?”
I didn’t want to do all this work for nothing.
“It’s finished for us.” Her eyes were closed, and she smiled up at me. Her body lay long and white and almost naked on the davenport. “It’s like it never happened.”
I stumbled going over to the window.
“What are you doing, Danny?”
“Checking the visibility outside.”
“No one can see in.”
I came back across the room. I didn’t care much if anybody saw or not. All I’d wanted to do was look at my wristwatch.
I got down beside her and she came to me with a little moan. A couple of times before she had sought a release for her inward torment but nothing like this.
“Don’t ever leave me, Danny!”
“I won’t.”
Something tore and we laughed and then her open mouth was there on my neck, kissing and biting and moving upward.
“Love me, Danny!”
I loved her the way she wanted me to love her, quickly and violently, and pretty soon it was all over.
I wondered, lying there beside her, if I’d be able to pick Sandy Adams up on time or if I’d be a couple of minutes late.
7
IT WAS eight-fifteen by the time I got out to Summer Road. Sandy came down off the porch, even before I stopped, and I could see that her temper was kicking up a storm.
“Executives shouldn’t be late,” she said, getting in.
And executives shouldn’t have to work as hard as I did, either.
“My regrets,” I said.
The tires on the Caddy churned up the white gravel. I had the top down and the breeze whipped around us, clean and hot.
I asked her how we got out to Long Beach and she told me to turn right at the bottom of the hill. It was about twelve miles away, along one of the lakes.
“New car,” she said, finally.
“Yeah.”
Now that I thought of it, maybe the new car wasn’t such a hot idea after all. This dolly had a bundle of jack and a guy could do better than hour wages crying on her shoulder. Only it would be pretty hard to cry if you had a Caddy like this one parked at the curb. On the other hand, a girl like Sandy Adams might not listen to the tears of anyone who was small enough to be caught out on the highway in something as unpretentious as a Ford.
“I must’ve blown a piston,” I explained.
“In your old car?”
“No, in my skull. I needed this heap like I need a headache.”
We rode along in silence. The flat ground gave way to the hills and pretty soon we were crawling along a wide ribbon of concrete that swung up high away from the river. All around us was the darkness of the night and the smell of the woods. And her scent.
“That’s some perfume you’ve got,” I said. “I couldn’t even catch a whiff of that hay field back there.”
She gave me some French name that sounded like a hundred bucks an ounce. “You enjoy the smell of new mown-hay, too?”
“Yeah.”
She yawned and stretched on the seat beside me.
“So do I.”
If I’d have thought she was making an invitation out of the whole thing, I would’ve had that Caddy off the road before the wheels went around ten times. Only it wasn’t an invitation. It was just a statement of fact.
“It seemed to me that this would be a chance for you to meet a lot of nice people,” she said. “This corn roast, it’s a big affair.”
“Can’t be much corn around this time of the year. Too early.”
“It’s shipped in from the south. They hold it the same time every season. Early. It wouldn’t have much significance later on.”
“Who’s ‘they?’ ”
“Oh, the Port Jessup Police Department.”
I glanced down at the shirt and pants. I’d paid fifteen bucks for the shirt and twenty-two fifty for the pants. And all for the sake of going with a rich bitch to a policeman’s corn roast. Maybe Madeline was right. Maybe sometimes I didn’t know a triangle from a square.
“I almost didn’t wait for you,” she said. She sat up straight and lit a cigarette, her eyes on me. “I hate to be stood up.”
She passed the cigarette over to me and I took it. She lit another one and moved a trifle closer, holding the ligh
ter out of the wind. I got the glimpse of long, silken legs, the slight bulge of her tummy under the white skirt and the high, swollen breasts beneath the white sweater.
I tried to think.
Madeline hadn’t been as easy as I’d expected. Not once. But twice. And when the passion of the moment had finally slipped away she’d needed assurances. Did I love her? Would I stay with her always? She was giving up her husband, changing her future — would I be kind to her? Christ, I kept telling her yes, yes, yes. How many times did a guy have to keep saying yes to a woman like that? But I didn’t have to ask myself that question. I knew. He had to go on saying it until he didn’t need her any more and then he just didn’t say anything.
“I hope you’re coming along well with the book,” Sandy said to me.
“Not too badly.”
“And the ads?”
“Okay.”
We were high up in the mountains now and the air was cooler. I asked her if she wanted the top up but she said, no, it was fine the way it was. But just asking seemed to make a difference. She got careless about where she was sitting and after a while her thigh was against my leg and her head was almost on my shoulder.
“You’re a funny guy,” she said at last. “How come you ever got into this fund-raising business?”
I was going to fancy it up a bit, tell her that I’d studied it in some school, but I didn’t. I gave it to her straight, as much as I could without making a bastard out of myself.
“It’s a wonderful work,” she said when I’d finished. “You must get a great deal of satisfaction out of it.”
“I do.”
Money, I thought. Jesus H. Christ, gimme money, money, money.
“And you ought to make a nice living at it, too.”
“I get by.” I let that set for a spell and then I gave her one of the first hooks. “Only you don’t always make out on one of these things, you know. They always look good but you can never be sure what’s going to happen. Take Ravena last year, for instance.”
“That’s where they had a flood?”
I nodded and let the Caddy slow down to forty. I didn’t want to get out there to that corn roast too quickly. I wanted to give her my tale of woe while she sat there waiting for it.