Pushover

by Orrie Hitt

  “No,” I said. Somehow, I couldn’t get back into the light spirit of the thing. “We were just talking.”

  Neither one of us had said anything about going back to town but we just sort of naturally moved over to where the Caddy was parked.

  “She’s got a rugged life,” Sandy said as she got in. “That husband of hers hasn’t done a tap of work since they’ve been married. Only sits around the house and draws pictures.”

  “Another artist?”

  “Another one. Only he can’t afford it.”

  We rode toward town and I kept the Caddy moving all the way. We talked about the roast and how nice the people had been and we both got a bang out of it when we realized that neither one of us had paid for the tickets. But it didn’t last long, not for me, not laughing that way. The little charge I’d gotten from the liquor was gone and all I could think of was Gloria and what she’d told me about the kid. It was like having a sick headache. I wanted to drive my skull into a wall somewhere.

  I stopped the car in front of Sandy’s house and I didn’t try to fight my way inside. I just told her that I’d had a nice time, and thanks, and I’d see her later on.

  “I had a nice time, too,” she said, lingering over the door. “Really I did.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night,” she said.

  I watched her go up the steps, her hips rolling gently. I was still thinking about her when I parked in front of a tiny bar in the downtown section. After that I stopped thinking about almost everything. I just went inside, parked myself at the bar and got myself good and drunk.

  It had been in the making for a long time.

  8

  I WOKE up with a beauty the next morning. My eyes throbbed and my head ached and I tried to heave but it didn’t do any good.

  “You must’ve had a ball,” the waitress in the diner down the road from the motel told me.

  I’d been eating in there almost every morning and, usually, I kidded around with her. She was short and blonde and she had a shape that encouraged extra coffee breaks. But this morning I wasn’t interested. I was sick. And not from the liquor. From inside. From inside where psychologists tell you that your subconscious has established a line over which you may not cross. No matter what you have done. No matter what the gain. No matter what kind of a bastard you are.

  I had a bromo, some tea real dark and by the time I’d left the diner the blonde had worked herself into a quarter tip. She even had me smiling a little, not because I felt like it but because I was in the fund-raising business and in that racket you never have a dark day unless it’s on Sunday.

  Along about eleven I met Al downtown and we talked about things and how they were going. He gave me a hundred and forty bucks, along with his sales tickets, and I stuffed them into my pocket.

  “I’ll be out of town for a while today,” I told him. “You work the area around the Square and don’t forget those eye doctors upstairs in those buildings. I’ll be back tomorrow and we’ll blast them good.”

  “I ought to be getting under way in the next couple of days,” Al said. “You know, get the next job lined up.”

  We were out on the street, standing there, and the sun came down hot. It was going to be another scorcher.

  We’ll ride this one out together,” I told him. “I’ll need your help all the way through.”

  “But — ”

  I knew what Al’s trouble was. He wanted to sneak a couple of extra days with that wife of his over in Scranton. I waved his objection aside.

  “Take next Monday and Tuesday off,” I said. “And get enough, while you’re at it, to last a couple or three weeks.”

  Al’s face colored. I couldn’t understand it. He could talk about some other woman that way but whenever I even hinted at sexual activity in connection with his wife he just froze on it. I don’t know. I guess marriage lessens some barriers and creates others.

  I left him and went down to the bank. I asked if the draft had come through from Waverly and it had. I told them that a girl would be in to cash a check for a grand, maybe the next day, and that they should take care of it. I was a trifle surprised to find that the auto dealer had already been there with his.

  On the way out of town I stopped at the library. The girl on the desk didn’t remember me and she said I’d have to join the Historical Society before I could go unstairs. I couldn’t find my card, the one I’d gotten the first day in town, so I paid her two bucks and she gave me another card.

  Madeline had set up one corner of the room, the east corner, where she wouldn’t get all the afternoon sun, and near three big windows which were open. I could hear the sounds from the street below and the breeze that came in, pushing the dust around, was hot.

  She was over at the big racks, where the back issues of the Clarion and the Register were stored in huge leather binders. She puckered up for me as I went over to her.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “God,” she said, straightening. “Isn’t this awful?”

  I kissed her and told her it was.

  “The only time anything is ever cleaned up here is when somebody looks for something. And nobody’s looked in years.”

  “Gold dust,” I told her. “We couldn’t live without it.”

  She’d worn a smock to work, which was thrown over the back of one of the chairs, but she’d gotten herself down to red shorts and a red halter. There was a dirt smudge on one side of her face and her hands were almost gray. Her face and body were wet with sweat and, right at the moment, I was about as close to her as I wanted to get.

  “I’ll have that air conditioner sent up right away,” I said. “If that bitch downstairs yells about it, tell her the library can have it after we’re finished.” I walked around, looking into the cases of Indian relics and frontier treasures. “And I’ll get another one for your apartment. You can’t go on working like this.”

  “Thanks, Danny.”

  She took me over to the table and showed me what she’d done. I read a couple of pages of the script. The copy seemed fast-moving and loaded with facts. It was good enough. What the hell could the suckers expect for two bucks on a church fund-raising book?

  “About last night,” I said. “Nothing’s changed?”

  She kissed me. And when she kissed me that way, with every hope and desire she ever had on her lips, I didn’t mind the sweat at all.

  “I saw him last night,” she said. “We had a terrible row. But he’s gone. This morning, on the six-twenty train. He even called me from the station.”

  I invested another kiss. Things were bumping along in fine style.

  “He’s going to cut out my allotment,” she said. “The one I’ve been getting.”

  I didn’t know she’d been receiving anything.

  “To hell with him,” I said.

  She kissed me again and this time she clung to me.

  “He was — hurt. I felt sorry for him.”

  “Well, it couldn’t be helped.”

  Her eyes found mine.

  “I hope it’s the right thing for all of us, Danny.”

  I told her it was, no doubt about that, and I kissed her some more. I even got my hands down there to where it made her jump and then she laughed and got away from me. She said if we kept it up we wouldn’t be doing anything at all that we couldn’t take care of later and that she was already behind with her typing. I guess she wanted me to tell her to hell with that, let’s play, but I didn’t. I just said, okay, I’ll fix you later, you baby doll, you, and after one more wet one I went downstairs and on outside.

  Life seemed almost worth living again.

  I stopped on the outskirts of town and got gas into the Caddy.

  “Cheap bastards could have filled it up,” I said to the attendant.

  I went into the station, over to the pay phone, feeling good. I’d write a letter to the Caddy people about the crummy gas deal. I might even ask them if they needed money so bad why
didn’t they take up a collection or bring out a fund-raising book. I grinned, found the number of the store and dialed it.

  “You’ll never believe this,” I told Gloria when she got on the phone. “But I regret last night.”

  And I did. Not for getting sore or roughing her up a little, but for what she’d told me about the kid. It had been there, that thing about the kid; all through the alcoholic haze of the night before and the bright morning sun outside. I didn’t know what I was going to do about it, or what I was going to do, but I knew that, if it were so, a grand would never settle it for either of us.

  “For some reason,” she said, “I believe you.”

  A guy can be a creep in a lot of things and he can screw the slobs right and left but when you get a deal like that tossed your way you have to meet it with both eyes open. If you’re like me, you don’t want to meet it. You want to run around it and leave the whole business parked out in left field. But you can’t. You’re like a wild animal with an unwanted cub, a wild animal caught in a corner. You want to blow out of there and let fate or charity take care of the rest of it but you know that the woods, no matter how deep, will never be deep enough in which to hide.

  “I’ll pick you up after work,” I said. “I’d appreciate talking to you, Gloria.”

  Her voice hardened.

  “We haven’t got anything to say to each other, Danny.”

  “We do if you want that grand.”

  She hesitated a long time.

  “All right,” she said finally. “Five-thirty. And leave your nastiness at home.”

  “Sure.”

  I told her so long and paid the attendant. I asked him how far it was to Middletown and he said he didn’t know. It didn’t make any difference. I had to drive there anyway and it wouldn’t make it any shorter if I knew how long it would take me.

  I made it in a couple of hours.

  Middletown, if you’ve never been there, is a nice place. They call it the Golden Era City, though I don’t know what that means. All I know is that there is as much difference between Middletown and my home town of Port Jervis as there is between day and night. Or black and white. Or progress and retreat.

  When I got to the print shop I found that Harrison was out to lunch. This suited me fine as it gave me a chance to talk with some of his help, especially the linotype man, and to get a slant on how fast things were moving. I knew most of them from previous visits and they all seemed to like me. I don’t know, of course, whether they liked me or if it was because I brought work into the place and a lot of work meant no lay-offs. At the moment, I found, business was slow.

  Harrison got back around one-thirty and we spent the next hour going over the new book.

  “Fifteen thousand copies,” he said. “That’s your biggest run yet.”

  He was a short, gray-haired man in his late fifties and he had a pleasant face, marred only by a nerve that kept jumping in the corner of his right eye.

  “But I only want the invoice to show ten thousand,” I reminded him. “You bill me right, for fifteen, but you show ten as the run.”

  He’d done this for me before, several times, but he’d never seemed too happy about it.

  “I hope your reason for doing this isn’t what I think,” he said.

  “And what do you think?”

  “Income tax.”

  “Hell, no. You get a tax man in here and you show him the right figures on me. That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  We walked to the door and he seemed relieved.

  “Of course it’s none of my business,” he said. “I was merely curious, that’s all.”

  We discussed the book some more, about using sixty pound stock instead of eighty, plus the type of cover illustration, and then I put the bite onto him. He squealed a little, the way a fighter squeals when he claims a phony foul, but before I left he’d come down a nickle a book on his price. A nickle on fifteen thousand books is a lot of money and, besides, no printer ever expects you to take the first price that you kick around.

  On the way back I stopped in Port Jervis, had a late lunch and talked for a while with a couple of fellows that I knew. They said the town was in its hundredth year of search for new industry, that a lot of the men still worked down in the Ford plant and places like that. I agreed with them that it was tough, but what the hell, and around three I got out of there.

  I took it easy on the return trip to Port Jessup, rolling along with the top down and getting the best of the afternoon sun. At about five-thirty I parked in front of the store where Gloria worked.

  She didn’t come out until almost six.

  “You might know it,” she said, getting into the car. “That boss of mine spends all afternoon on the golf course and between five and five-thirty he wants you to do half a day’s work.”

  “Rugged.”

  I asked her if she wanted to eat and she said she didn’t care, that she’d called her husband and said she would be late.

  “This guy you’re married to,” I said. “What kind of a fellow is he?”

  But she wouldn’t say very much about him just then, only that he wanted to be an artist and that it was mighty tough getting started. It wasn’t until we’d had dinner and several drinks out at the Bays, a quiet place along the highway, that she seemed much inclined to talk about him.

  “I met him in Florida,” she explained. “That time I went down there with my aunt. He was living in the same house and he had a room on the third floor. I met him the first week.”

  She went on to say how despondent she had been about the failure of the policeman’s book and how she’d looked for the letters from me that had never come.

  “I think I loved you, Danny,” she said. “You have to understand that.”

  I told her I did. Looking back at it, it seemed to fit and, besides, I had no reason to squabble with her over it. Fighting with her would get me no place at all. I was looking for something, not quite sure just what, and I had to find it. There was a potential pattern in the back of my mind, pieces of a puzzle all scrambled up, but I couldn’t get it sorted out so that I could understand it. I don’t know just how you go about explaining something like that. I guess the simplest thing to say is that I didn’t believe her kid was mine and I was out to prove it. Oh, I know a lot of things happen that are unexpected but I’d always been careful with her, remembering that her old man was a cop. It didn’t seem possible.

  “I suppose he does all right with his art work,” I said to her.

  We were on our fifth or sixth drink and she was beginning to feel them. Her glass was empty but I didn’t motion for the waiter. I didn’t want her drunk, just talkative.

  She called the waiter over herself.

  “I didn’t know you drank so much,” I said.

  “He does lousy,” she said, my question about her husband just catching up with her.

  I decided it was a good time to give her the check, to get the impact of all that money across to her before she passed out. I’d written the check out earlier, in the car, and now I pushed it over to her. She picked it up and sat there staring at it and fingering it for a long time. It struck her with the force of a bomb when it landed and I told her to put it away before she messed it up with her tears.

  All of it came out, dining the next couple of drinks, and it wasn’t a pretty story. Why did she drink so much? She didn’t know. She wished she could stop. It took a lot of money, unless somebody bought them for her, and if they did that she felt guilty. She was on the square with her husband and anyway, when she got to drinking he tried to keep up with her. It made them both sick and the kid would cry and they’d stumble around, half in a fog, trying to separate the milk bottle from the whiskey and beer bottles. She put her finger on it when she said it was one hell of a way to live.

  How long had it been going on? Since that second week in Florida. Her aunt had gotten sicker and they’d put her in a hospital for about a month. Meanwhile, Gloria had occupied the room and her a
unt had given her plenty of cash to spend. She’d met this artist guy, one morning when she’d been talking to the mailman, and she’d been lonely and he’d felt no differently. The next day the mailman had disappointed both of them again and they’d had a drink, just to have something to do. The other drinks had followed because there hadn’t been anything else to do.

  “You don’t know how I waited for your letters,” she told me. “You’ll never know.”

  They kept it up, the two of them, meeting the mailman and getting nothing and then drinking for the hell of it afterward. He was a strange sort of guy, she said, kind of sickly and he had some weird ideals about art for art’s sake but he treated her nice, never even trying to kiss her, though she went to his room once in a while.

  “My aunt and I were there two and a half months,” she remembered. Her face pulled out of shape, briefly. “The week before we left I found out I was pregnant.”

  She hadn’t been able to tell her aunt but she’d told this artist guy and he’d said it was too bad, I must be a real bastard, and she had a bellyful of trouble, make no mistake about that. Her aunt gave her some more money, to buy presents to take home, but they bought bottles instead, spending their days in the woods drinking, and it was on one of those jaunts that they made their deal.

  “Danny,” she said now, her eyes pleading for understanding. “Danny, you don’t know what it’s like, to — to have that down inside of you and no man to — claim it.”

  I had to give her credit. Caught in a booby trap like that I think I might have taken a long walk off a short plank.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  They had married in Florida, just before leaving, and her folks had raised hell when she’d brought him home. She had fought back at them, sick because she had to, afraid to tell them the truth. She hadn’t seen a lot of them since then.

  “I’ve worked every day,” she went on. She looked tired and her body slumped. “He stays home and takes care of the baby and I work.” Her laugh was bitter. “But he’s cheaper than a baby sitter, believe it or not.”

  I decided that I’d come up against somebody who knew more shortcuts than I did. I told her so.