by Oakley Hall
And he thought of Slim Farley, who had quit the job at Visalia to go to Los Angeles when he had knocked up a girl. They had talked about it a lot after Slim left, laughing over it, and Ben realized that it was he who was out of step, not Jack. Jack was going to work this out according to his lights and his lights were the same as those of the others they knew. It was he who was out of step, and he wondered why he saw it differently.
He tried to remember what Jack had told him of his boyhood in Lodi. Jack had talked about his mother and his brother Ster and he had talked a lot about a girl named Margie Watson. But there was probably not much difference in the way he and Jack had been brought up. They had both been poor, they had both been in the CCC, they had known each other throughout the period when they were changing from boys to men. Yet somehow, without pride, without righteousness or conceit, he realized that he had retained something Jack had lost, or else he had come into possession of something Jack had never had a chance to possess.
8
“She was really cute,” Jack had said. “Really cute, damn her. A little hefty in the tail, but nice legs and a nice set of cans. She always wore a sweater that buttoned up the back and some kind of girl’s-club pin right on the end of her left one. Real thick kind of dark hair in bangs, and those big blue eyes that looked good to everybody else except she couldn’t see anything with them. She was a song leader and she used to come talk to me when I was on the bench during the football games. I used to always sit on the end of the bench whenever I came out so she could come over. If that bastard Bud Greene didn’t get there first. She sat next to me in the sixth period English class too. Ward and Watson.
“Margie Watson,” Jack had said, laughing and shaking his head. “She always sat there in class with one leg under her, like she was trying to hatch her saddle shoe or something. I’d lean up to scratch my knee, trying to see where it went. But I never could, damn her. She put some kind of oily stuff on her legs so’s they’d shine, and when she got up after class there’d always be a red place on her calf from sitting on it.
“I used to walk her home after school. She lived over on Pine Street in a pretty new big house because old man Watson was vice-president of the bank. And Jim Grant’s station where I worked after school for twenty damn cents an hour was way down that way too. We’d stop and have Cokes at the Owl Drug Store. Bleeding my nickels out of me. I didn’t have many nickels, either.
“It was in Miss Counselman’s class she asked me to go to her party. The old biddy had a business letter or something up on the blackboard and she was pointing at it with a pointer and yapping away and everybody was scribbling it all down. I thought Margie was, too, but she tore a sheet out of her binder and folded it up and stuck it under my elbow. I remember what it said: ‘I’m having a birthday party next Friday night. Would you like to come?’
“Well, I almost came right then. My old heart was going budoingg, budoingg, budoingg. I thought sure as hell she’d hear it, so I said ‘Sure’ so loud old Counselman heard me and turned around and gave me the beady eye.
“After school when I was walking home with her she told me all about it and when to come and all. But I was getting pretty scared. I knew damn well they were going to dance and I didn’t know how, and I’d never been to any kind of party like that before. I was beginning to wish to hell I hadn’t snapped at it in such a hurry. Aw, and—you know—I’d always felt real big and clumsy and stupid in front of Margie—you know how you do— but I kept thinking, this is it, man, this is it, this is the big deal. But then I kept worrying did she know about Ster being kicked out of school for getting caught in a gang-bang with May Pearl Jackson in the boiler room a couple years before, and I kept worrying about did she know Ma ran the Sacramento Diner.
“Aw, hell,” Jack had said, grimacing and shaking his head and avoiding Ben’s eyes. “I was really screwed up. Well, and I didn’t tell Ma till the last minute I was going to Margie’s party. I was getting so I hoped the Watsons’ house would get struck by lightning or Mr. Watson’d walk in front of a truck or something. Or that maybe I’d better go walk in front of a truck. Just a little one, with fenders that bent easy. Jesus, Ben, I was sweating. But then Friday night came around and I had to tell Ma I was going out and I knew damn well what she was going to say.”
Jack said, in a strained, tremulous voice, “‘Oh, now isn’t that sweet of her, dear? Is she a nice girl?’” and then he laughed and rubbed his hand over his mouth. “I said damn right she was a nice girl. Her old man was vice-president of the bank, how could she help being a nice girl? Well, then she took hold of my hands and told me she was sure I’d be a gentleman and have a nice time. She told me to be sure and be a gentleman about ten times. She’d been going on like that ever since Ster got booted out of school. When that Goddam Ster got caught and Mr. Prentiss called her up about it, it just about killed her, and she was half-sick all the time anyway. She kept getting fatter all the time till she could hardly walk for being so fat. Her face was real fat and white except kind of gray under the white, and her hair was all coming out gray where she parted it.
“Anyway, I went on upstairs and got dressed. I had a pretty decent pair of green pants I always saved for good, and I’d shot a day’s pay on a black-and-white-striped Filipino tie at Marchand’s. And I spit on my shoes and polished them up with some toilet paper. And then I put on my letter sweater.
“You remember it, don’t you? It was bright red with a big old H.M. on the front and a white stripe on the sleeve and white buttons down the front. Sure, you remember it. Well, it was new then and I thought it looked pretty slick, and, hell, I’d never had a coat or a suit. We never had any money to buy crap like that and what the hell would I have done with one anyway? I told you I’d never gone to any parties before and we’d stopped going to church when Pop got killed. Well, anyway, I put on the damn sweater. I was sorry Margie’d seen it so many times, but, what the hell, I thought I looked pretty slick.
“So then I went to the party. Somebody’s told me you ought to always get to a place about fifteen minutes late, so I walked real slow and I had a box of candy for Margie all wrapped up in tissue paper and pink ribbon and stuck under my arm. Oh, I was the boy that night, all right. When I got up on the Watsons’ front porch I combed my hair again and unbuttoned my sweater and then buttoned it up again and unbuttoned the bottom two buttons. There was a whole slew of nice cars lined up in front of the house and I felt sorry for these poor dumb bastards didn’t know enough not to come right at eight. But I could hear music from inside the house and I knew they were dancing and I damn near chickened out right then. Margie came to the door and she really looked good. She had on some kind of long blue dress left lots of bare around her neck and shoulders and she had a gold locket on a chain around her neck. She smiled at me kind of funny, like she’d gone into an unlimed backhouse on a hot day, and she kept pulling at the locket. But she told me to come on in.
“Well, you can see what a big clown I must’ve looked like, with my letter sweater and my green pants and my Filipino tie and a box of four-bit candy under my arm, and I was beginning to know it. I could see inside the house and guys were dancing. Bud Greene in a dark-blue suit and that bastard Chuck Ensminger in one of these black jobs with the shiny lapels they wear in the movies. And the girls all had on long dresses like Margie. Oh, Jesus, and the floor was all polished to hell and there was ribbons strung from the chandelier to the corners and the band was going at it, and I knew damn well I wasn’t going in there.
“So I stood there with my teeth in my mouth and my shoes full of feet, gawking and unbuttoning my sweater, and buttoning it up again, and fixing the box of candy under my arm, and Margie kept saying wouldn’t I come in, Jack, like she didn’t mean a word of it. I wasn’t going in there. I felt like I got sucked on some big joke or on a snipe hunt or something and I was blushing and sweating and…Damn!
“Well, I gave her some crap about my Ma being sick with the doctor there and all, and how I’d just
come by to tell her I couldn’t come. And I’ll bet she’d said, oh, she was sorry, Jack, and had the door closed before I could even turn around, which was doing pretty good.
“I ran down the steps and out onto the sidewalk, because another car’d just pulled up and I didn’t want anybody to see me. I didn’t know till I got down to the end of the block I’d forgot to give her her box of candy, and I turned around and heaved it as far as I could down the street toward Margie’s, like I’d dropped way back from scrimmage and was heaving one fifty yards to a fast end. I didn’t even hear it hit. Jesus, I was miserable and mad at everything and everybody and I was wishing there was some way I could go back there and spit in their eye, but what the hell could I do? I was really the big clown, and I ran all the way home and climbed up to my room over the shed roof because, honest to Jesus, I would’ve took off for China if I’d had to talk to Ma right then.”
When he had finished he had lain back on his bed, laughing, and he had seemed to enjoy telling it, as though by the telling, by making a joke of it, he was able to rid himself of the embarrassment that was within him.
Ben supposed that Margie was a mark on Jack; how much of one he could not know. It had sounded like a small thing, but for Jack it had probably not been small. Then there was the life they led, a life where there was not much place for marriage, and women had always been easy for Jack. But he knew there was no simple reason why Jack looked upon V in one way and he looked upon her in another. It was just that fundamentally their viewpoints were different, and Jack’s was more like that of the others they knew than was his own.
The next day when they were coming in from work he apologized to Jack. Jack grinned at him embarrassedly and did not speak right away. Then he said, “Aw, forget it, Ben. I know how you feel.”
“Well, I’m sorry I blew like that,” Ben said. “It’s no business of mine.”
“It is, in a way. You kind of got slung out of your room.”
“You’d do the same for me, I guess.” Ben paused, and then he said tiredly, “I don’t know. It’s just that…It’s just that she looks like a good girl and all that, and she’s kind of too young. I guess you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “Yeah, I guess it looks kind of poor, unh? But—you know—it kind of got tossed at me. I don’t like it, either. I know it stinks.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s tough, all right,” Jack said. “She’s only eighteen and I hate to see her slugged around before she gets to know the ropes.”
“Too bad she has to get to know the ropes.”
“Yeah, well, she’s sharp as hell. She’ll be all right. I’m just the first guy she’s ever known very well, is all.”
There was a false grin on Jack’s face, and Ben nodded tightly and moved away from him. He rubbed his hand across his eyes. His eyes felt hot and dry.
It was no business of his, he told himself, no business of his at all, but he had never felt so bitterly and furiously rebellious; at the injustice of life, at the monstrous heedlessness and cruelty and dog-eat-dog of the world. It was not merely at Jack now, it went past Jack, and, too, it was that he felt so profoundly sorry for V. And not merely sorrow, but an enormous, impotent, resentful pity; for he could see what was ahead for her as though it were written in a book for him to read and memorize.
9
Although he tried to keep away from them, he could not. Jack and V came to the Hitching Post several nights a week, and twice in the three months that followed Jack asked Ben over to the room for a drink. The room had not changed much, except that now the beds were made and the clothes that had usually been strewn around, put away. On the bureau were a large bottle of cologne, several jars and boxes arranged neatly beneath the mirror on a white handkerchief, and a framed photograph of V on a horse, looking very young and squinting into the sun. In the corner behind the closet door stood a pair of Texas boots.
Once he went to a movie with them, and once swimming, sitting beside the pool with his shirt off but with his trousers still on, so that V would not see his leg, watching them laughing and splashing in the big public pool, as Jack tried to teach her to swim.
When they came out they sat down, one on either side of him. Jack had on a pair of tight blue trunks and V was wearing a skirted gray wool bathing suit with a number 28 stenciled on the front that Jack had rented at the pool.
“This is such a funny bathing suit,” V said, grimacing and loosening it around her legs.
“You look great,” Jack said. “You look like Miss America of 1910.”
“I wish you’d buy me a bathing suit.”
“I’ll buy you a bathing suit when you learn how to swim.”
“How’s she doing?” Ben asked.
“She was doing fine till she swallowed about half the pool. See how it’s gone down? About a foot.”
“You shouldn’t have let go of me,” V said. “I got scared. I told you not to go away like that.” She leaned back and grasped the arms of her deck chair, closing her eyes against the sun. Her color was high and her face shone with drops of water. Water dripped from the skirt of her bathing suit onto the concrete beneath her chair.
“You should have come in, Ben,” she said. “The water felt awfully good.”
“Oh, I just like to sit in the sun,” Ben said. Jack glanced at him quickly, and then the ice-cream man came by. Bells tinkled on the front of his white cart.
“You want an ice-cream bar, V?” Jack said.
Her hands relaxed and turned over, palms up and half-open. “I don’t want anything,” she said.
Ben sat watching her out of the corners of his eyes. Even though it hurt him to be around them, he loved to watch her. In the dozen times he had seen her he had come to know every one of her mannerisms: the way her eyes would widen and she would lick her lips when she was afraid she had said the wrong thing; the way she took Jack’s arm and bent her head to one side to look up into his face, as though she were asking a question; the self-conscious awkward grace with which she moved; the way she talked, straight and honest, like a man, her emotions told exactly in the sound of her voice, with no attempt at concealment.
Once, when Ben was with them at the Hitching Post, she spilled her beer in her lap and broke out with a stream of curses, and Jack laughed in his peculiar way, heartily, with his head tipped back, without smiling, because she had obviously not known what she was saying. Then Jack became serious and told her that women were not supposed to swear, that men swore because they were stupid and didn’t know any proper words to express what they meant, and that he would paddle her tail if he ever heard her do it again. She listened to him gravely, surreptitiously mopping at her lap with a napkin, watching him with round eyes. When he had finished, she nodded and smiled nervously at Ben, sitting silent and very straight, with her chin drawn back. It was then that Ben felt his heart go out to her, as though he had taken it very gently from his chest and offered it to her, and she had accepted it and thanked him with the little smile, and had carefully put it away somewhere so it would not get damaged.
Ben remained at the table when they left, and, watching them go, he felt a strong current of emotion running through him. Suddenly, in his eyes, they had both gained a profound and mysterious stature, which appeared to him so strongly he gasped. Watching them as they walked past the front window and disappeared, he was breathless, his eyes staring, his mouth dry, for clearly he had seen their capability together, and clearly he had seen their doom, and the sight remained indelibly printed inside his head.
He did not understand it, it shook and confused him, and after that he always tried to refuse whenever Jack asked him to go somewhere with them. He did not want to see happen what he knew was going to happen, and he tried to watch them from a distance, detachedly, grieving as it began to work out the way he had known it would.
The first time Jack and Petey Willing came by for Red, to go out and get drunk, Ben tried to tell himself this did not mean anything. But he knew it did.
And then he heard that Jack was seeing Peggy again. Then a month or so later he saw Jack at the Hitching Post with Ruth Adams, and one day a redheaded girl picked him up after work in a black Ford coupe.
Ben tried to stay out of it, he tried to consider it none of his affair, but he was Jack’s best friend and they were thrown together every day on the job, and there came a time when he knew he was going to say something to Jack, knowing it wouldn’t do any good, knowing it would just cause trouble between Jack and himself. But he had to say something.
The two of them, with the blade and the cat and tampers, were working together almost a mile south of the others. Sometimes Push and Harry would come down to eat lunch with them, but most of the time there were just the three of them, Jack and Ben and Toussaint.
One Monday when they had finished lunch, Toussaint had taken their water bags to try to find the water truck, and Jack was lying in the shade of Ben’s cat, his head on his bunched-up jacket, his cap covering his face. Ben sat beside him, his arms around his knees, leaning against the track. The metal of the track was burning hot, searing through his shirt, but he did not move, staring down at Jack.
Finally he licked his lips and leaned forward. His voice sounded stiff when he spoke. “Well, how’s she taking it, Jack?”
“Who taking what?” Jack’s voice was muffled under his cap.
“V. How’s she taking it?”
Jack grunted and raised one knee.
“Has she learned the ropes yet?” Ben said huskily. He picked up a handful of dirt and let it sift through his fingers into a pile between his feet. Heat shimmered off down the smooth grade to where Harry’s roller loomed, far off, and to the right he could see the tops of the cars speeding along the old highway.
“She’s not bitching,” Jack said.
