Some Came Running

by James Jones

  “I’ll quit if he will,” Jim said.

  “All right; so will I,” Frye said.

  “But that don’t mean I’m givin up,” Jim said.

  “Well, I ain’t giving up,” Frye said.

  “All right, if you both want to go ahead, go on,” ’Bama said; “but I still say let’s have a drink of whiskey.”

  “Okay,” Frye said.

  “All right,” Jim said.

  “And nobody’s quit,” ’Bama pronounced. He got the whiskey, and after they had had a drink, tears began to trickle down Jim Custis’s cheeks and he went to his uncle and put his arms around him. “I’m sorry, James,” he said. “Damn it all. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t do nothing like that to you for the whole damned world,” he sobbed.

  “That’s all right,” the giant Confederate said, tears coming into his own eyes. “There, there. It’s all my fault. I started it.”

  “I want to go home,” Jim wept. “I want to go home to my wife.”

  “I guess we all better go home,” James Frye said. “And these gentlemen want to be gettin on down the road to Miami, anyway. We’ve held them up long enough with our damned craziness.”

  “We’re all right,” ’Bama said. “We’re fine. Here’s you guys’ knives back.” Both of them thanked him profusely, and when ’Bama got the car turned around, they went out and got into it, Jim still weeping in the back alone, James Frye in the front with ’Bama and Dave. Frye had a beautiful black eye and the skin was torn on the side of his cheekbone; and Jim had an inch-long cut in one eyebrow and one ear that was swollen nearly double, and both of them had numerous knots and contusions all over them.

  “You have to turn left up here,” Frye sighed. As they drove along he talked. The play would be closing soon, he said. He would degenerate right back into the way he used to live, reading books from the college library and chasing the local pigs and his goddamned wife and farming. It was a hell of a prospect.

  “God knows what we’ll do then,” he said.

  As if in answer, from the backseat, Jim Custis cried out, “Go home! That’s what! Just take me home to my wife,” he said. “You talk too much, James.”

  “I guess he’s right at that,” Frye said, and went on talking about The Play. It had been the most wonderful experience of his entire life. For the first time, he had learned what art and creativeness really were. And then suddenly, he quoted several lines from Lanier’s The Marshes of Glyn, fingering his beard sadly.

  Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,—

  Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,

  Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,—

  Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves . . .

  God, James Frye said, wasn’t it awful to have to go home? No matter what we did, or didn’t do, no matter how we tried to evade it, in the end there always came that time when we had to go home.

  It was a symbol of life, by God, he said. Slowly, as he talked, the confidence he had exhibited in the afternoon came back to him and with it the supreme vainness about himself that went with it. “You know, the trouble with me was I was born just about a hundred years too late. I should of been born before the Secession. Then I would have died in the war, and I’d have been all right, happy.” He paused a moment. “I’m a goddamned Rebel, that’s what I am! You nigger lovers from the North, you can’t tell me a nigger’s better’n a white man! I’m a white man, and a goddamned Unreconstructed Rebel! No damn nigger’s as good as a goddamned white man! Here’s where I get out,” he said. “That’s my house right over there.”

  ’Bama stopped the car. And Dave, who was dead for sleep but could not sleep as long as he found himself around the tremendous violent vitality of this man, and who had read for years about the evil portents of such men who made such statements, found that he was smiling. There wasn’t anything evil about it at all, or even dangerous really. It was just a simple idea. James Frye might, if forced, carry it to fire and sword, and if pressed, even his own life. But it was still just a simple idea; erroneous, sure; but no more erroneous or evil than a lot of other simple ideas. And instead of feeling his spine chill and a sense of evil sweep over him, he only felt protective toward this man.

  “You don’t hate Negroes, do you?” he said, grinning in spite of himself.

  “Hate them?” James Frye said, looking startled. “Hell, no. Why should I hate them? That wasn’t what I said.”

  “Did you ever think of tryin writing yourself?” Dave said.

  From behind the beard came a sort of muffled wry smile. “Oh sure,” James Frye said. “I’ve thought about it. But I don’t think I could ever do it. Not well. I think I’d be too inclined to make myself out too much of a hero. You know what I mean?” He opened the car door and got out. “Well, maybe I’ll see you boys again some time,” he said. “But I don’t suppose so. You’ll get Old Jim here home all right, won’t you?” he said.

  “Just take me home to my wife,” Jim Custis moaned from the backseat, “I want my wife,” and commenced to weep again.

  “We shore will,” ’Bama said through the open door.

  “Then I’ll say no more,” James Frye said, and shut the door. As they drove on off they could look back and see him standing in the road, the moonlight catching silver lights in his long hair and his beard. He waved once and turned toward his home.

  He was the kind of people Dave had always had an affinity for. The kind of people, as Old Van Loon had said once in his Life of Rembrandt, who would lie, and cheat, and fight, and whine, and die in the gutter, but who were always in the end just what they were. And Dave loved them just as much as Old Van Loon did.

  In the moonlight, the white gravel road was very long and they wound in and out of the dark slashes of pine for what seemed forever. Occasionally, they passed houses, unlighted and dark, but these obviously housed only the dead, if they housed anything at all. Once or twice in the backseat, Jim cried out, “Please take me home to my wife!” and then burst into a fit of weeping. Finally, they reached the blacktop highway and turned left.

  When they left Jim Custis out at his house, he hardly bothered to say goodby and made a beeline for the darkened front door. ’Bama waited a minute to see if he was going to be locked out, but the door was not locked and he disappeared inside.

  “Well, what do you want to do now?” Dave said. “Go somewhere and bed down?”

  “Christ, no,” ’Bama said. “All I want is to get back out on the road. I’ve had all of this place I can stand for one session.”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall asleep driving?”

  “No; I’m wore out all right, but I ain’t sleepy. I just want to get going.”

  “That’s just about the way I feel,” Dave said. His heart was pounding in his chest, in a sort of protest at the strain that had been put on it. He was so totally exhausted that even to move his arm he felt might burst his heart, but he was not sleepy. His whole mind was almost feverishly excited over his story “The Southerners,” which he had tentatively titled it, and over what Jim Custis and James Frye had given him for it. They had filled out the missing link in it: He had had the story and the theme and even the plot—but he hadn’t had any Southerners to go in it. He would use Jim Custis and James Frye. And somehow he would have to work some kind of a damned folk play into it, so he could use that beard and long hair Frye wore for his part as the Confederate sergeant. Then something clicked in his head: the Confederate. “The Confederate”—there was your title! The twentieth-century Confederate, the Confederate of 1948! The very use of the word for a story set in the present gave it an added twist and power, and added all sorts of implications. The thought was enough to send a chill of creativeness rippling up Dave’s spine and bring near tears to his eyes.

  James Frye had a lot of things he could write about, but he would never do it himself. Well, he, David Herschmidt, would do it for him, and make people see it for him. The story would
not be in a bar, it would be laid at the play; and the drinking would be done from half-pint bottles; and the knife fight would be between James Frye and Jim, and they would kill one or the other; and himself the Northerner, transposed to the mild mannered little director of the play from Cincinnati, would be the uncomprehending and horrified narrator. Christ, what a story it would make. The dying Jim Custis weeping and calling for his wife. Dave sat and thought about it, his mind racing, as ’Bama drove on out the road that led to Daytona where they would hit Route 1.

  “You know, this damned road wasn’t the best road we could of took,” ’Bama said; “I don’t know why I took it.” He mused a moment. “Guess it was just fate, hunh? Well, what do you think of yore Southerners now?”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” Dave said. “I’ve got an idea for a short story out of it that I want to write as soon as we get to Miami.”

  He did not remember when he fell asleep. But when he awoke it was to find the Packard parked in the driveway of a roadside park between the barbeque oven and a picnic table, and ’Bama sprawled back under the wheel with his hat over his eyes, asleep. The gambler had finally had to give it up. While he waited for him to wake, he got out and sat at the picnic table and made notes on the story in pencil, pleased that none of the excitement about it had left him. When ’Bama finally woke, he had already finished his notes and after a leak and a walk around the little park they got back in and started on, stopping at the first little town for some breakfast.

  They reached Miami shortly before noon. Dave had never been there before, but ’Bama had, and knew his way around, and drove straight across the Venetian Causeway to the beach. It was all very exciting and alive, with all the different kinds of palm trees and the Spanish-type buildings and you could smell the salt in the air. He drove straight to Forty-first Street and then to a little green and cream-colored hotel near the canal where he had once stayed before, and where he engaged a corner suite of three rooms overlooking the canal. And with the aid of half a bottle of whiskey, they each went to bed and slept the rest of the day and all that night, and then Dave went to work.

  It took him almost seven weeks to write the story. By that time, it had become a sort of novelette, one of stories whose awkward length made them almost unsaleable to any magazine. But he couldn’t have done it any shorter—not and got what he wanted to get—and anyway he didn’t care. For the first time for years, he had done something he could really be proud of, something he knew was good. But this time, there was some new added element in the pride that had never been in it before and that he could not name but only sort of dimly feel. It wasn’t sureness, and it wasn’t confidence (hell, he never had that). He felt like a badly battered, tough old veteran who had served in so many battles of the human ego, and had the wounds to prove it, that one more didn’t matter. Maybe, instead of confidence, it was just merely lack of over-confidence that he felt. Anyway, whatever it was, he knew that “The Confederate” was good—perhaps the first really good thing he had ever written—but instead of feeling high and cocky he only felt relieved and grateful. After he finished it, he copied it up in duplicate on his typewriter and put one copy away in his suitcase and the other in his typewriter case and went back to his novel.

  They had set themselves up an excellent routine. They would get up around eleven and ’Bama would take off almost immediately, leaving him the whole apartment to work in. Then Dave would brew himself a barrel of coffee and have at it—anywhere from four to six hours before he quit, sitting at the little desk in the corner sitting room where, when stumped, he could look out through the open windows at the people and the canal. When he had finished the story, he let ’Bama read it and was inordinately pleased when the gambler gave that it was very good and gave a really accurate picture of Southerners.

  When he got back onto the novel, he found that it had changed, too. For the first time since he had started it a couple of months ago in order to seduce Gwen French, he found himself approaching it with excitement every day. Anywhere from four thirty to six in the afternoon, worn out and sweating profusely, he would quit and shower and dress and walk past the expensive facades of Collins Avenue and meet ’Bama at Winnie’s Little Club for a drink, where the bartender there after a couple of weeks had got to know them and especially had taken a shine to ’Bama. ’Bama had become a great favorite with the Runyonesque lower-level denizens of the beach and members of the professional gambling crowd that hung out at the Little Club who had never seen anything like him, and there was always someone to come over and jaw with them and offer to buy them a drink, a compliment which ’Bama, albeit in a friendly way, invariably declined, although he would always happily buy anyone else one. He would have spent his afternoon—morning, it was to them—at the track, playing the horses with that quite mathematical passion; or, if for any reason the horses weren’t running that day, he would go off somewhere in the afternoon by himself. They would have two or three drinks at the Little Club, ’Bama always anxious to know how the work had gone that day, and they would talk about how he himself had made out at the track, and then they would go off to one of the better restaurants, usually with a couple of vacationing bachelor girls they had made dates with. Sometimes they had dinner alone—for them, it was lunch—but very rarely.

  ’Bama had been absolutely right on the availability of women in Miami Beach. They were there from almost everywhere, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, St Louis, Birmingham, Memphis, Cincinnati; usually in pairs, sometimes in threes or fours, all of them secretaries or business girls come to spend their two or three week yearly vacations. Many of them were obviously looking for temporary romance, which they just as obviously hoped might become permanent, and away from home where they were not known they could easily afford to be much more seducible. Chic, well dressed, well groomed, obviously able to take care of themselves, they were all attractive although none of them ever had the beauty of face or the magnificent bodies of the more or less permanent chorus girls who drifted around everywhere; but, as ’Bama wisely suggested, it was a lot better to stick to the vacationing secretaries. They were a lot less mercenary, and it took a lot less money to entertain them; and besides, they could have almost any of the chorus girls or models they wanted from anywhere from twenty to fifty bucks, so why should they spend eighty bucks on taking them out for the evening?

  No, the business girls were better. Here, too, Dave noticed, they set themselves up a pattern. Almost all of the bachelor girls could be made on the second date (if they couldn’t, you didn’t go back), and a great many could be made on the first date. Then they would be set up for anywhere from one to three weeks, depending on the length of the vacation and how much of it had already been spent when they met them. Then it would be back to the Bar of Music or the Five O’Clock Club at cocktail time to find another pair, and the process over again.

  After they were once made, it would be a sort of a semi-marital bliss for the rest of their stay. After taking them to dinner, it would be out to the track again, or perhaps to some play or the fights, then a big supper somewhere and then home to whatever hotel the girls were staying in, never to their own apartment. ’Bama would always immediately veto anything which might interfere with Dave’s work on the morrow, and having two women in the apartment was one of these. He kept Dave almost as rigidly in training as an athlete. Obviously, a great deal of ’Bama’s pleasure in this friendship came from the fact that he was being on intimate terms with a writer and artist; and was helpful to him in his work.

  ’Bama was not above using this selling point about Dave’s being a writer on the more intelligent-looking ones, at first. But he soon stopped this. It was quite plain that all of them were much more interested by the fact that they were meeting professional gamblers.

  Dave himself let ’Bama handle all the seductions. ’Bama handled them so skillfully, and Dave was wise enough to know that he apparently lacked some prerequisite and essential quality which ’Bama had
in abundance. They discussed this once, over their afternoon drinks at the Little Club. “A man has got to not care,” ’Bama explained, “whether he makes them or not. I mean, really not care. Because an act isn’t good enough; women know instinctively whether yore actin or not. You got to convince them you don’t give a damn if you make them, and the only way you can do it is really to believe it. Otherwise, they will know they can already handle you without giving in.

  “Now, I don’t mean you have to make them think you don’t care for them at all. You don’t see me insultin them like that, do you? No, what you have to do is make them believe that if they don’t put out yore goin to move on to one who will, but at the same time, make them feel that if they do give in to you, you could fall madly in love with them. That way, you see, they feel they have somethin to gain. Because that’s really all they want: to make you fall madly in love with them.”

  Whether ’Bama’s theory was accurate or not, his use of it in practice worked out admirably. Of course, all this was costing them a good deal of money. ’Bama always treated the bachelor girls royally; he never stinted when it came to entertaining them. This, of course, helped to cut down their bankroll. ’Bama could occasionally shore it up with winnings at the track, but more often than not, he lost, although this did not bother him in the slightest. But there was always a poker game handy somewhere, where they could repair and win themselves enough to carry them another two weeks. The strange occult winning streak at poker was still with them here, although it could not be made to work for anything else than poker. For that matter, they did no other gambling, except the horses and the dogs. But at poker they won—so consistently so that they began to be enviously recognized up and down the joints of the lower beach by all the denizens.