by James Jones
There was some rustling.
“I’m taking off,” Landers said harshly, as soon as she came on. “I’m going over the mountain. Do you want to run away with me? Have you got someplace to go?”
“You’re what, you’re what?”
“Hush!” Landers barked. “I don’t want Strange to hear this. Or even know about it. Are you where he can hear you?”
“No. No, I’m in the bedroom.”
“Then, listen. I’m skipping. Pulling out. Do you want to go away somewhere with me?” She must have somewhere she could take him that was safe, some home, some place.
“But, Marion, I can’t do that,” Mary Lou wailed. “I’ve got a boyfriend. I’m in love. He’s on his way up here, right now. We’re going to get married, I think. We’re—We’re in love.”
“Oh,” Landers said, “well.” He stopped, at a loss. It had not occurred to him Mary Lou would not go, and he had no other resources. He should have guessed it about Mary Lou. But there must be somebody. In the world. Who was willing to hide him. The cold was beginning to get to him so badly his teeth were chattering into the phone. But he couldn’t think of anyone.
“I could maybe get Annie Waterfield for you,” Mary Lou said. “She’s back.”
“Is she there?”
“No. But she’s supposed to be coming over. I could try to get hold of her for you.”
“You have her phone number?”
“I have her home number here in town.”
“All right, get her for me. And I mean, get hold of her. Don’t fuck around. Don’t tell her I’m going AWOL. I want to tell her. But you get hold of her for me, hear? Or I’ll—Now, give me Strange. And keep your mouth shut. To Strange and everybody.”
Cold as he was, and shaking uncontrollably, he talked to Strange for several minutes, to kill Strange’s suspicions. If he had any. It appeared that he had some, and when Landers hung up he did not think he had allayed any.
He was too cold now to stand out on the cab stand and wait for a cab. He went inside the little local PX and drank three cold mugs of beer at the bar. They warmed him and gave him some spirit. He had a full half pint of whiskey back at the company barracks, and wished he had brought it, but did not want to go back there after it. Lucidly he had on his regular ODs and had his GI overcoat, instead of a field jacket uniform.
The little local PX, one of five on the big post, was nowhere near the size of the big main PX beer hall. But it still had plenty of room, and plenty of beer drinkers. It was warm and funky with the smell of tobacco smoke and damp GI wool and stale beer. There was a magnificent feeling of safety in numbers about it and its crowded interior. It was an illusion. But at least these guys here, bitter and sour or happy and acting up, were on the right side of the line. They would at least die in bunches and groups, not alone. Landers had a distinct feeling of hating to leave its warmth, as he buttoned up his GI overcoat and turned up its high collar. He went outside.
It was a long, chill ride in the taxi. There was no trouble getting out of the post’s main gate, in a cab. He found nobody had kept their mouths shut to anybody, when he got to the Peabody.
Rather than argue it out with Strange, Landers claimed his rights with Annie Waterfield first. Mary Lou had gotten hold of her and she was there waiting. Nobody could argue against that with him. When they had locked themselves in the bedroom, he thought he had better tell Annie the truth. Until they made their way to the door and got inside, and shut the door and locked it, he took refuge in the statement that he was only taking a little AWOL vacation of a few days, or maybe a week, and that he was being covered for, in his company. But inside he told Annie the truth.
He did not tell her before the sex was taken care of, though. Annie had her own rights. “You’re in much better shape than you were before you went out to O’Bruyerre,” she said, running her hands over his bare shoulders. Landers had to admit he did not require much urging, mental distress or not. After they had sixty-nined awhile and come that way, and he had gone down on her while she had a multiple orgasm of at least two or three, he fucked her and came again himself and they lay on the bed side by side replete while he fondled one of those gorgeous breasts.
“Have you got any money?” she said.
“A little over eight hundred dollars. In a bank.”
“That should last us a week or ten days,” Annie said. “We can go up to St. Louis.”
“I can probably get a few hundred more off of Strange,” he said.
“Say two weeks, then,” she said. She sat up and leaned on her elbow, and her young breast became heavy in his cupped palm. “But I have to say,” she said, looking down at him, “that I don’t think it’s such a good idea. I don’t think you ought to do it, Marion. Besides.”
“Besides, what?” Landers said.
“Besides, I’ve got this trip to New Orleans I can take, if I don’t go with you. That’s what. I’ve got this Navy flyer I met here who’s being transferred to New Orleans. He wants me to go down there with him and stay three weeks or a month. I hate to give that up to go off with you, with practically no money, and the chance of you getting picked up always hanging over our heads. I have to admit it.
“Have you got anyplace we could go and be safe? Some kind of refuge, or place only you know about? That was more what I had in mind.”
She didn’t answer. She continued to sit, leaning on her elbow. “Don’t do that. I’m trying to think.” She took his wrist and moved his hand away from her breast.
“You know,” she said, “it’s kind of crazy, but I do have a place like that. I don’t go there much.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s my dad’s.”
“No good,” Landers said. “If somebody here told on us, that you were with me, that’d be the first place they’d look.”
Annie’s voice trilled with a young, bright laughter. “And a fuck lot of good it would do them. My dad’s the sheriff.”
It was almost square in the middle of west Tennessee, way west of Nashville. No cities around anywhere. Did Landers have any idea how country west Tennessee was? There was no reason why Landers couldn’t go up there and stay as long as he liked. All she would have to do would be to call her dad, and give Landers a note to him. Her daddy had been sheriff there since before she could remember. Actually, since the county law was that a sheriff could not succeed himself, her daddy and his number-one deputy traded places every four years, and the deputy would be sheriff for a term. “But there’s never any question who the real sheriff is,” Annie laughed. “That’s my daddy.” Barleyville was the county seat, her hometown. “A great name,” she laughed, “for the county seat of a dry county. In Barleyville, the saying goes, there’re two kinds of people. Baptists and drunks.” There were also a lot of Holy Rollers.
“It doesn’t sound like the swingingest place in the world,” Landers said.
“You’d be surprised. Booze and juke joints may be illegal, but there are plenty of them around,” Annie laughed. “And my daddy knows them all. He owns half of most of them.”
“Any Army camps around there?”
There was one. Fort Dulane. About fifteen or twenty miles from Barleyville. But that wouldn’t matter. Her daddy would know every provost marshal and MP there. “He’ll get you a pocketful of blank pass forms, if you want them,” she laughed.
“But you wouldn’t be going with me,” Landers half asked.
“No, I don’t think so.” She really wanted to make this trip down to New Orleans. And she didn’t go up to Barleyville much any more. She had taken a boyfriend up there for a week a couple of different times, but it upset her daddy so and made him so sad she had about stopped it. “And if I go up there alone, there’re five or six old flames of mine from back in high school, who come buzzing around like bees around a sugar cube,” Annie laughed. Her bare breasts swayed deliciously, and quivered. “Of course, they’re all of them married, if only to stay out of the draft. It tends to create a certain havoc. While I’m there.
”
Landers studied her. “Do you fuck them?”
Annie laughed again. “Well, it doesn’t really matter if I do or not. Believe me. It doesn’t.”
“I guess not.”
“I have,” she said. “Have fucked them all. At one time or another. In the past. And all that kind of upsets daddy, too.”
She got up off the bed and went to the spindly little hotel desk and got a sheet of hotel stationery out of its drawer. Carefully she tore the hotel letterhead off the top, using the big desk blotter edge as a straightedge. Then she tore off the bottom line that carried the hotel’s name, address, and phone number. She held what was left up to the light. While she did all this, she went on talking gaily, about her family.
“I never knew a man who understands women like my daddy. But maybe that’s natural, with him having four daughters.” She was nineteen, her next youngest sister sixteen. The two younger ones, who had come along ten years later, were now nine and eight. “Love babies,” Annie laughed. “You know. When people almost break up and then get back together, they often have a baby or two.” That was what happened to her folks. Her daddy had had a mistress, or at least that was the local story. Now they were separated, though still married, and her mother lived on the other side of town with the two younger girls in a fine old expensive brick house, and was the mistress of one of the local politicians who was a bigwig in the state senate in Nashville. His wife, a Barleyville girl, and their kids lived in Nashville. Loucine, the sixteen-year-old sister, lived with their daddy in their big old house across town that their daddy had bought for them when Loucine was born. Loucine, at the moment, was about eight months pregnant and still unmarried.
“Sounds like a wild wide-open place, Barleyville. For a country town,” Landers said from the bed.
Annie stopped writing the note to her father and looked up, nude, her face laughing. “Are you kidding, country town? It’s country people who really know what people are like. That’s why they’re all Baptists.”
“Or drunks,” Landers said.
“Or drunks.” She finished the note, and signed it and folded it up. “I don’t want to put this in a hotel envelope,” she said. “It would just make daddy sad. Will you get a plain white envelope and put it in it?”
Landers took it and put it away carefully. When he looked back up, Annie still in the desk chair, still nude, had begun to laugh outrageously. “What’s the matter, now?” he said.
“Nothing. Nothing. Just laughing. I was just thinking how you won’t be there three days probably, before you’ll be fucking my pregnant sixteen-year-old sister. Old Loucine.” She began to laugh again.
Landers felt shocked. “Oh, no. No, no. I wouldn’t do something like that.”
“I don’t see how you’re going to avoid it.” She stared at him, her face grinning more. “You’re shocked,” she said.
Landers felt irritated. “No, I’m not. Not shocked.” He made himself grin. “But I don’t want your daddy the sheriff to throw down on me with his shooting iron.”
“My daddy would be more likely to throw down on you if you didn’t,” Annie laughed. “I told you he understood women, didn’t I? Well, women are going to get love made to them. One way or another. And it doesn’t matter what they call it. Or if they don’t call it at all. Or don’t mention it even, which is more likely. Well, my daddy was born knowing that, from a baby. I guess that’s why women have always found him so attractive.”
Landers found he had no answer.
“Come on,” Annie said. “We might as well get dressed. I still have to call daddy for you.”
“Listen, don’t call from out there. I don’t want Strange and those others—”
“Don’t worry. I read your plans. You don’t want Johnny Strange to know where you are, or to tell your Sergeant Winch.” She smiled. “In actual fact, I was planning on taking you home with me to my place. I’ll call daddy from there, and you can listen. Then I thought I’d see you off at the bus station.”
“Well,” Landers said, at a loss, “fine. But why are you so nice to me?” He felt perturbed. There had been whiskey available up here at the suite, and now he had drunk enough to make his courage considerably reinforced. But he was upset by the extravagance of her help. It made him want to look around for exits. “Why?” he said, and made himself grin. “Tell me why?”
Annie laughed. “I suppose it’s partly because I’m not going to Barleyville with you. I feel a little guilty.” She paused. “But I’ve had to run a couple of times in my life,” she said more seriously, “and I know what it’s like. Especially if you have no place really to run to.”
“Let’s get something straight,” Landers said stiffly. “I’m not running anyplace. I’m leaving an untenable position.”
“That was what I meant,” Annie smiled. “Besides, you’re a nice boy.” She took a deep breath, and sighed. “But before you go through with this, I wish you’d think twice, Marion.”
“I’ve thought twice,” Landers said shortly. “More than twice.”
While they dressed, she went on talking to him, about her sister Loucine. Now that they were moving, Landers wished that she would shut up about it all. It was as if having once got started talking about her family, she did not want to stop. Loucine had come down here to Luxor for a while to stay with her, she said, when the baby began to show, but Loucine had hated Luxor. After two months she had gone back home, to face it out. She preferred that to staying in Luxor.
“Nobody said anything to her?” Landers asked, tying his shoes.
Annie laughed. “What are they going to say? They’ve all seen unmarried pregnant girls. About as many as married.” She was putting on her lipstick. “You know, times have changed, even since you’ve been away overseas. This old war has changed everything a lot.”
Landers guessed that was true, but didn’t care very much. He did not answer her. “Now you just let me handle Strange,” he said.
But it wasn’t that easy to handle Johnny Stranger. Landers pretended that he was just going off somewhere for a few days with Annie, and that he was being covered for in his outfit at O’Bruyerre, but Strange wasn’t buying that.
“Listen, you crazy son of a bitch, Landers. I know exactly what you’re trying to pull. And you’re never going to get the fuck by with it. They’ll trace you down, and they’ll get you. They’ll get you, and they’ll do you in. So I’ll goddamn follow you, if I have to.” He reached and grabbed his own GI overcoat. “You crazy son of a bitch, I’ll follow you and camp right outside your fucking doorstep, until you come back.”
By this time it had all become a big joke to just about everybody in the suite, except Strange and Landers.
“You can’t do it. You’ll never get away with it,” Strange half shouted. “You’re ruining your fucking life. I’m not going to let you.”
Several people tried to shout him down. In the end Landers had practically to tear himself out of Strange’s arms, to get out of the door. It was only through the ministrations of Annie, plus some help from Frances Highsmith, that Strange was kept from following.
“I’m only taking him to my place, Johnny. I promise I’ll call you from there. I swear I promise.”
“Where is this place that’s your place?” Strange demanded, shouting. “Nobody knows where the fuck you are. I’d never find him.”
“No. And not just anybody’s going to know, where my place is. Either,” Annie said. “A girl’s got to have some privacy. In her life. Around this stinking mess.”
It was only on the strength of the promise to call that they were finally able to get outside.
And they did call him, after Annie had talked to Charlie Waterfield in Barleyville. Strange insisted on talking to Landers. Landers talked to him for five minutes, but was unable to convince him he was only taking a small AWOL vacation. He could only get off the line by promising faithfully that he would call tomorrow.
“I hate to lie to him,” he said heavily, when he fina
lly hung up.
“Come on,” Annie said. “If you don’t hurry, we’ll miss your bus.”
At the bus station he waved to her in the sea of faces until the bus turned out from the stall, and her face swung away with the others into invisibility. Then he was off on his single-handed, one-man adventure, alone. As soon as she was out of sight, it was curiously as if she had never existed. And deep down, he felt very righteous and very Christian, if a little sick.
But he couldn’t help wondering what kind of a looking guy Charlie Waterfield must be.
CHAPTER 27
IT WAS THREE in the morning, when the Greyhound pulled up for Landers in Barleyville. Landers hadn’t the least idea of what to expect. And didn’t much care. The windswept little town square was empty, nothing was open. The driver had some bundles of newspapers to deliver, depositing them against the closed storefront of the newsstand. Then the big door closed, and the hissing of the big bus’s air brakes whispered, fading across the square.
Almost at once, a tall figure in a sheepskin coat and a semi-Western-style hat stepped leisurely out from the shelter of a storefront, into the cold wind.
“Marion Landers?”
Landers said he was. “Charlie Waterfield. Annie’s dad,” the other said. He was a lean man, but even in the heavy sheepskin you could see he had the paunch of a heavy drinker.
“Might as well go somewhere where there’s lights and people,” he said.
There was an official sheriff’s car parked across the street against the courthouse square. The courthouse was a red brick and white clapboard affair. It had a Sheriff’s Office sign on it, and Landers realized Waterfield could have waited for the bus there, in his own office, where it was warm. Instead of standing alone out in the cold and wind, in a darkened storefront.
Waterfield was squinting up at the courthouse, through the bare branches of the big trees, from beside the driver’s door of the car. “Damn grackles. Roosting in the eaves again. Do it every winter.” He got in and slammed his door.
By the time Landers was in, he had a pint bottle of whiskey out. “Want a snort?” Landers accepted gratefully. Waterfield took one, then slipped it under the driver’s seat.