by James Jones
It was in many ways a very enviable life, and Dave could have just gone right on living it indefinitely. His novel was coming along well, so much so that for the first time he actually believed that someday he might finish it. He was, for the first time since he could remember, suffering no acute unnerving loneliness to drive him into Walpurgis Night escapades. In fact, the only thing wrong anywhere as far as he could see was the fact that he was putting on so much weight from so much good food and lack of exercise. But even this didn’t bother him.
’Bama, of course, who ate tremendously when he did eat but as often as not ate little or nothing, gained no weight at all. He still slept with his whiskey bottle and hat beside his bed and still got up in his underwear in the morning reaching for both. He had bought himself three new summer suits, all made to order by an expensive tailor on Lincoln Road and cut to the style and cut of his old suits, but outside of these, he had changed not at all.
As far as Dave was concerned, they could have gone right on, living this life for the rest of both of their own. But there never had been any doubt that ’Bama intended eventually for them to return to Parkman. He was not the least bit flattered or impressed by the status they had acquired on the beach, or by his reputation as the “Tall Drawl,” a genu-ine character. Once every week or two, he would send a postcard home to his wife, which generally read “Everything fine. I’m fine. How is everybody there?” but never bothered to put a return address on it; and finally at a ritzy antique shop on Alton Road he found the kind of potbellied iron pot and teakettle he was looking for and shipped them home to her via express collect because as he explained they took better care of things sent collect. As far as he was concerned, Miami Beach was not a damned bit different or more romantic than Parkman or Terre Haute and he was, Dave reflected, probably right.
Only once did they ever discuss Dave’s reluctance to go back to Parkman, and that was one afternoon sitting in the dimness of Winnie’s Little Club over their drinks. It was not any attempt on Dave’s part to put pressure on him to stay, but Dave had had an exceptionally good day working on the novel and he suddenly burst out excitedly that he wished they never had to go back.
“Why not?” ’Bama countered, eyeing him, and Dave went on to try to explain why, floundering badly. Mostly, it was because he was doing so much more and better work here, he said. Back there, it would be the same thing it had been before. The miserable, cheap little room at the Douglas; and the terrifying loneliness that went with it. Somehow loneliness was always much more terrifying when you were living cheaply and had no money, Dave thought, had ’Bama ever noticed that?
“No,” ’Bama said, “can’t say as I have.” His look was a little puzzled, as if he either did not know what loneliness was, or else accepted loneliness as such a foregone conclusion he could not see what it had to do with it. “But, hell,” the Southerner went on, “if you was to go into that poker pardnership with me like we’ve talked about, and quit that damned worthless job with Frank, you’d have enough money. You could get you back that apartment in the Parkman and live as high as we’ve been livin here.”
Perhaps so, Dave thought. But there was more to it than that. It had something to do with the way they were buddying around together here. They complemented each other. And more important, ’Bama kept him from flying off the handle with his wild-ass crazy stunts he pulled in an effort to escape from that terrifying loneliness that always dogged him, and always hurt his work.
“Well, that’s easy to fix,” ’Bama said. “We’ll just rent ourselves a house when we get back.”
“Do what?”
“Shore,” he said. “There’s plenty of houses around town we could rent or lease. Probly, we’d better lease one. So they can’t throw us out later if we happened to throw a wild party or two.” He thought for a moment, his eyes squinted. “Old Judge Deacon could fix it for us,” he said at length. “Old Judge and me are old buddies,” he grinned. “Well, come on. If we’re going to pick them two broads up, we better get to moving.”
This conversation occurred almost two months before they left Miami, and after that ’Bama referred back to its decision a number of times. Once Dave got acclimated to the idea, the thought of it left him feeling heady and excited, not only because of the life they would live, but also because of the work he thought he might be able to get done. He had already begun to contemplate doing a novel about Parkman.
And so Dave sat back and waited, working and living up the high life and getting fatter, and no longer feeling depressed about going home. He knew ’Bama well enough by now to know that when the tall Southerner had got a genuine bellyful he would just get up some morning and say it was time to go.
And that was just the way it happened. One morning, he got up and put on his hat and socks and poured himself a small glass of Jack Daniels Black Label and wandered out in his underwear into the sitting room where Dave was already making coffee in the kitchenette and sat down with the whiskey and said, “Well, I guess we’ve about wore this here place out, don’t you?”
They had left in December with the remnants of a dying snowfall still on the ground, and they were returning in May when everything had been turned a fresh vivid green. They had left this country as two strangers more or less on friendly terms, but they were returning as intimates whose common stock of shared experiences had welded them into this incongruous friendship that was so taken for granted now that it was no longer even thought about or mentioned. A friendship that had begun, and was to embrace, the most productive period of Dave Hirsh’s life.
Dave happened to be driving as they rounded the long curve east of the river and the towers of the Israel bridge hove into sight and beyond it, five miles away across the bottoms, the hill where Parkman perched. Excitedly, he eased down on the accelerator, wanting to get there, and he knew that he no longer gave a damn what Frank and Agnes and the rest of this fossilized town thought or said or did.
And more important, he knew he no longer cared at all what Gwen French did or didn’t do. This feeling lasted about two weeks—or to be precise, until the first time he saw her.
Chapter 39
IT HAD NOT BEEN UNTIL Dave failed to show up for Christmas that Gwen had begun to think there was anything amiss about him not turning up for work at his brother’s taxi service. She was hoping he had quit. It was ridiculous enough, if he was so idiotic as to let Frank talk him into putting all his money—that he could have lived on while he wrote his book—into some stupid business venture; but to go to work in the damned place, that was even worse! All that really mattered was his book, and Gwen could not help but feel that the job at the taxi service was solely an evasion of the issue on Dave’s part because he was afraid he could not write the book. So she was really glad to hear he had not turned up for work.
But when he did not come over Christmas, and then as the holidays passed on into New Year’s, and he still did not come, she began to wonder if it were not something else that had happened. Her own Christmas party she had given Christmas Night so as not to conflict with the party Agnes and Frank were giving that day. What she had expected was that Dave would come over Christmas Eve and, having no place much else to go, stay the night.
She had already, earlier, when handing out the presents, quietly set Dave’s in a little pile where he could get them later, laughing about it as she did so. She and Bob had both bought him little presents, just something to show him he was not outside, was liked and wanted, as had both Wally (and through him, Dawn), at her suggestion. Bob had gotten him a beautiful, and quite expensive, set of handmade cufflinks and tie tack; and she herself had bought him both a Roget’s Thesaurus and an uncommonly good combination coat-wallet and notebook because she wanted to give him something that would have to do with his writing. There was nothing to do but to put them all back for him. Then she threw herself into the gaiety of the party.
(It was a fascinating experience, to watch Dawn and Wally together here after having seen Dawn with
Jimmy Shotridge so short a time ago. Where there it had been Jimmy Shotridge who had followed Dawn around adoringly, worshipping at her shrine—here the positions were reversed and it was Dawn who worshipped Wally. Dawn was not as obvious about it as Jimmy had been, but the result was the same. And the effect, upon Wally, was the same as it had been on her with Jimmy. It seemed to thicken his whole head, and even the muscular expressions of his face, expanding all of them outward several inches with smugness until he actually looked gross. He was pompous as hell. Gwen had been noticing this same quality in his work for some time, flashes of it, but this was the first time she had ever seen it in physical action, or actually learned the reason for it. Wally was in love with Dawn—or, more accurately, Wally was becoming sure that Dawn was in love with him; just as Dawn was sure that Jimmy Shotridge was in love with her. Of course, none of this had transpired while their parents were there, only before and after. They could let themselves go, around her, because they felt she was their friend. She was, from watching them, pretty sure they were not sleeping together yet, but eventually would be; just as she was sure that, unless something she did not anticipate occurred, Dawn would also sleep with Jimmy Shotridge, if not for revenge, then in self-defense. God, what a mess.)
They came back over, Wally and Dawn, for New Year’s Eve. Bob was off somewhere celebrating with a couple of his cronies and she was alone. The three of them sat up and saw the New Year in and talked and drank a little. They were both such nice kids. Completely blind, completely unprepared. What else could they be? Their parents had never taught them anything. How could they? They didn’t know, hadn’t been taught, anything themselves. So these two rebelled, instinctively, knowing only the negative, that whatever their parents had done had been wrong, obviously, so perhaps the opposite had a chance of being right.
After New Year’s, when she finally got around to taking down the tree, and Dave still had not shown up, she removed the presents and stacked them neatly in a little pile in the living room where they would not be obtrusive, and where he could get them when he finally did come. She was sure by now that this was more than just some drunken binge, but the days ran on down toward the middle of January and the end of term and all the work that that date implied, and she could not spend all her time thinking about one person. Nevertheless, at odd free moments she would discover herself thinking about him, briefly, with a kind of puzzled hurt that verged on anger, and wondering what had happened to him. Then she would plunge back into the papers and the work again. He was undoubtedly the most talented of all the potential writers she had had personal contact with—Wally was still too young to know yet—and that even included Mac Price who had run off to Chicago and not been heard from since. Was Dave, now, doing the same damned thing? If her theory of the self-destructiveness of talent, as propounded in the critical book on Dave’s Los Angeles group, was actually true, then that meant that Dave was not only the most talented but would be, conversely, also the most self-destructive. He might be lying dead somewhere right now, unrecognized and unidentified because of the absence of the papers he would almost certainly forget to carry with him. Oh, the silly goddamned son of a bitching fool! she would think irately, and plunge back into the work again.
After the ridiculous but necessary fiasco of final exams was over, she had more time, and more chances to speculate on Dave. She didn’t do it all the time, but she did it often—oftener than Dave in Florida would have guessed.
The thing that set her off was the fact that she had tried to remember whether she had actually invited him over for Christmas vocally. And the more she thought about it, the more sure she was she had not. She had not asked him. She had committed the unpardonable sin of assuming that he was an adult grown-up human being. And she knew suddenly then that this was the reason he had taken off like he had, without so much as a word to them and without even notifying Frank and Agnes. Because she hadn’t in so many words invited him over for Christmas! Oh the silly, foolish, colossally egocentric, something or other fool! she thought with a bright anger at him.
This was in February, and she took the little stack of presents and put them away in a paper sack on a shelf in the kitchen pantry.
Two weeks later, she called up Agnes, on some pretext or other, to see if they had heard anything of him. She was no longer angry now, and more resigned, but it was like some mystery that never let you rest until you’d solved it. The moment she mentioned Dave, she could hear Agnes’s voice become cat-smug at the other end, and her instinct was to slam the phone down in her ear. But in spite of the smugness, Agnes was willing to give her all the news they’d had. No, they hadn’t heard a word from Dave and had no idea where—or with whom—he was. But two weeks ago, Sherm Ruedy had called Frank up about Dave’s car. It was still sitting locked up on the street in front of the Douglas Hotel, and it had to be moved. He was giving Frank a chance to do something about it if he wanted to; otherwise he would haul it off himself. So Frank had called the garage and had them haul it around to the taxi stand and park it there. Then just a week ago, the man at the Douglas Hotel had called up. Dave had paid the night man a month’s rent in advance when he left, but now the rent was a month overdue and what did Frank want him to do about it? All of Dave’s clothes and things were still in the room. Frank had told him he did not intend to pay the rent, since he did not know where Dave was or even if he was coming back, and as for the clothes and things, for all Frank cared he could package them up and sell them. For the rent. But the conscientious little man at the Douglas had packed them up and said he would keep them for him, for a while at least. And that, Agnes said, was all they knew or had heard. Had they, Agnes said sweetly, heard anything over there?
“Oh no,” Gwen said. “He wouldn’t have written us. But he had such an excellent book started. I hate to see it go down the drain. I told you about it.”
“Yes, I know,” Agnes said, “I remember. Well, Dave never was very dependable,” she said, and might have been saying, in so many words, “I told you so.” “Well, don’t worry about him, Gwen dear. Bad pennies, you know. I’m sure nothing could have happened to him; if we do hear anything from him I’ll let you know right away, dear.”
“Thanks, Agnes honey.” Gwen hung up, furious.
Agnes was really very likeable, and her friend—probably her best friend—in Parkman; but there had been several times over the phone when Gwen could have screamed into her ear like a fishwife. When she started putting on that smugness of hers— And then when she kept talking about Dave’s car, left to sit out there on the lot— And his clothes, stuffed away somewhere—
And there wasn’t a damned thing she could do about any of it. Well, there was something she could do about part of it: She could send Bob over to the Douglas and have him pay the month’s rent and get Dave’s clothes so they could at least be taken care of—and piss on what they thought, she thought.
Well, she had learned a couple of things from Agnes, anyway. She had learned that he had paid a month’s rent ahead, which meant he must have intended to come back. And she had learned that he had left at night, because it was the night man to whom he paid the money. But all in all, it wasn’t much. She still knew next to nothing. And it was not until the last week of March, when Wally Dennis happened to mention—just happened to mention!—that Dave had gone off with ’Bama Dillert, that she learned any more. Wally, apparently, had known it all along, since January.
Gwen had only the vaguest idea who ’Bama Dillert was. She had had him pointed out to her in town once or twice. A tall man in a western-style hat. He gambled. For a living. She also knew that Dave had been running around with him some. She had to pump Wally almost forcibly. “Well, damn it! sit back down and tell me about it.”
Well, Wally said looking startled. It appeared that he had run into Dewey Cole and Hubie Murson several times, out at Smitty’s Bar. He had discussed with them Dave’s leaving. Anyway, they said that the evening of the twentieth, Dave had been in to Smitty’s looking
for ’Bama. When he didn’t find him, he left right away. Next day he was gone. And so was ’Bama. Neither had been back since.
“Where do you think they might have gone?” Gwen said.
“Probably down to Birmingham. That’s where ’Bama comes from. But you never know. That ’Bama,” he said admiringly. “They might just as easily be in Mexico City or California.”
“How long have you known all this, Wally?”
“Oh, first or second week in January, I think it was. First time I ran into Dewey Cole, anyway.” He got up. “Anyway, it was just at the time when I was working on the last part of that chapter on the girdle factory,” he said. He gathered up his new chapter.
Gwen watched him as he left, feeling once again that desire to laugh disgustedly and shake her head. Writers! They lived in sealed cells made of the hardened juices of their own exuded egos. What she would have liked to do was run down the room, laughing merrily, and boot Wally down the stairs. God, would he be surprised!—and not have the vaguest idea what she did it for. Damn the little snob! she thought angrily. Lord, she was getting so she swore as badly as a longshoreman or a soldier, associating with all these damned writers.
Well, that was that anyway. She felt considerably relieved. If Dave had gone off with this ’Bama somewhere, at least, he was probably in fairly competent hands. A man who makes his living gambling like that had to be fairly competent if he makes a living at it. Also, this ’Bama apparently had a wife somewhere down in the country, and owned property down there; and that meant he would come back. Of course, that did not necessarily mean Dave would come back with him; but still it appeared to increase the chances that he would, and she was somewhat relieved. But over her relief was a sudden outraged anger at him that grew and grew until it sent shivers of fire along her nerves. He had so much talent. And then to be going off with some bum of a gambler like that! Even if he did come back, and go back to work. All that time wasted.
