I'll Call Every Monday

by Orrie Hitt

  “Take it easy,” Irene said. “You turn at the next left road.”

  “I guess you’ve been there.”

  “I’d like to know who hasn’t.”

  “How come?”

  “Wait till you see it.”

  I took the next road to the left. It was a dirt road, but in good condition. For a short distance it followed the crest of a hill, then it sagged slowly down a gentle incline. The pines were taller and bigger here, not so much undergrowth, and the ground lay like a brown carpet of clean-smelling needles. Through the woods I could see the flash of water in the sun.

  The lake was a large one, lying like a great saucer in the wide valley, rolling away into the distance until it almost joined the horizon. The pines stood dark green and majestic around it, the curtain broken only by the white birch trees that thrived near the water’s edge. A fair-sized island, capped with the giant pines, nestled in the center of the lake.

  “Jesus!” I said, halting the car. “It’s beautiful!”

  She didn’t say anything, or if she did I didn’t hear her as we got out of the car. My mind was racing back to that club again, seeing the beauty of it once more, and finding here a sight that was equally breath-taking.

  “Shep painted a picture of it once,” Irene said, standing beside me on the huge dam. “It wasn’t too bad.”

  “He tried,” I said.

  I looked around. No man, no matter how good he was, could have captured the thrill of standing on that dam. The bulk-head was made of huge quarry rocks, laid flat like a stone wall, and extending across the neck of the valley in a ribbon of gray. The grass all around was green and soft and down below the blue water from the lake foamed and roared as it cascaded over and down the spillway. A blue heron came along, flying low, its long legs stretched out in back.

  “God’s land,” I told her.

  She took one of my arms and placed it around her waist, leaning close to me.

  “A part of God,” she said.

  We stood there like that for a long time, just looking at it, drinking it in as a thirsty man gulps water.

  “How could Dell have traded it?” I asked, thinking of those workmen who had smoked cigarettes over his grave and of the girl who had turned on the gas, thereby purchasing a television set and a used car for a couple of drunken parents.

  “What, Nicky?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’d think that his wife could sell it, wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose she could.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to.”

  “That’s probably it.”

  “Money could be made here, Nicky.”

  “There’s no doubt about that.”

  “Fifty thousand would go a long way,” she said. I shuddered. Somehow, fifty thousand dollars of that kind of money didn’t seem to have any place in beauty such as this. “I guess it would.”

  “We can think about it.”

  “Sure.”

  We turned back to the car and got in. I sat there for quite a while, watching the heat over the water and the line of the woods beyond. I could see how the cabins, a lot of them, would fit along the shore, with boat docks out into the water and a swimming hole to the right of the dam. On the bluff above would be a good place for a small clubhouse and a parking space for cars.

  Everything was there except the money.

  “Well come over here for a picnic some day,” Irene said as I backed the car into a wide spot between the pines.

  I drove slowly up the road, watching the shine of the water in the mirror until the trees cut it off from view.

  “A lot of days,” I told her.

  We reached the main road and I looked a question at her.

  “It’s only a couple of miles to the road that leads to the hotel,” she said. “We can go down that, past the house, and see if he’s home. If he isn’t you can let me off and I’ll tell him I got a cab in from town. If he is home, you can drive me to where I can get a cab and I’ll come back in that.”

  The week end had dried up and blown away.

  “He’s going to get suspicious,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” She sat near me on the seat, and I could feel the line of her thigh pushing at me. “He knows I get lonesome. Who wouldn’t, living the way I do? I can’t go out up here very much because of those God-damned pictures.”

  “I mean, if we keep on seeing each other during the week. He’s going to wonder about you being out so much.”

  “This time of the year I always go for walks in the woods a couple of hours a day,” she said. “He won’t miss me.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, I do.”

  We got to the road that led up to the hotel. I swung down it, toward town.

  “A couple of hours isn’t very long,” I said. Her lips came up and brushed my cheek. “You’re right,” she whispered. “After this beautiful week end it isn’t anything at all.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “But it’s all we’ve got,” she said. She glanced around the car. “We can make the most of it. We can always go for a ride. We can drive up to the lake, Nicky.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “I’m glad you’ve got a car with two seats,” she said, rolling those blue-gray eyes at me.

  I grabbed her and kissed her. The car almost jumped off the road while I was doing it.

  “Nicky!” she said, jerking away. “Look! His car!”

  It was parked alongside the road, under the shade of some maples near a small brook.

  “Well, he’s not home,” I said, driving on past.

  “I wonder what he’s doing there?” she said.

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “I can’t understand him getting so near the water. He won’t even drink the stuff any more.”

  I laughed and turned in at the driveway that led up to their house. I parked near the garage. For a brief moment we clung together, our lips hot and pulsing.

  “I’ll see you Tuesday night,” she said. “Around seven. Pick me up down there where we saw his car parked.”

  “All right.”

  She laughed and got out, taking the bag along with her. “You’re my baby,” she said.

  I tried to grab her and kiss her again, but she swung away playfully, running to the house.

  After she went inside I backed out to the road. I drove slowly, approaching his car, wondering what he was doing up there and if he had seen us. I came from the opposite direction this time, so that I could look up there along the brook, across the big rocks where the water raced and foamed. I was almost past before I saw her. I couldn’t see all of her, just her head, but I knew who she was. I parked the Buick a short distance beyond his car.

  I got out and walked up over the slight rise of land, not quite knowing why I was doing it but doing it just the same.

  She must have recognized the car and heard it stop, because she was crawling down off a big rock when I got up there. She was dressed in a black bathing suit, a one-piece affair, that threw all of her curves at you all at once. He was over by the brook, his easel board propped against a stump. I could see that she had been posing for him up there on that rock.

  “Hello,” I said, going down over the rocks like a cat descending a thick-barked tree.

  She didn’t say anything. She stood there in the shade of the big stone, her face angry, her pointed breasts sticking out at me from underneath the suit.

  Shep Schofield knelt there by his easel, waiting for me to come up to him. He didn’t have to wait very long.

  I looked at the picture. It was just of her head, not finished, but it had a marked resemblance to Sally.

  “Well,” I said, not really knowing what to say. “Sorry.” Schofield stood up, placing his brush carefully on a tray of assorted colors. His grin, a trifle weak, told me that he had expected me to belt him one.

  “I don’t know why you had to bust up things!” Sally st
ormed, coming over to us. Her body was youthful and full and it put a lump in my throat, just watching her walk the way she did, swinging free and letting her appeal pour out unrestrained. “Now the light’s almost gone and he won’t be able to finish it.”

  “We can do it the next afternoon you’re off,” Schofield said.

  She smiled at him.

  “But you’re not the one who’s been standing up there. I feel like a statue.”

  “She’s a good subject,” Schofield told me. “But it takes time. There’s something about her that’s hard to grasp.”

  I knew what he was talking about. Something innocent and clean and almost impossible to catch with the brush. Like the lake. Like a lot of things. Like Irene.

  “I guess Mr. Weaver thinks he’s my guardian,” Sally said, looking straight at me.

  I made no reply to that one.

  “But I guess he doesn’t keep track of things so good,” she went on, plunging the needle in deeper. “Did you know, Mr. Weaver, that I now have two jobs?”

  “No.”

  She glanced at Schofield.

  “Or is it three?”

  “Three,” he said.

  I looked at the canvas again.

  “Well, I know of two of them,” I said.

  “I also sing with the band at night.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I even think I’ll go with them when they leave.”

  “That’s even better,” I said, throwing it right back at her.

  The tears crowded up into her eyes and she turned away.

  “Why don’t you leave me alone, Nicky?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I will.”

  “Can I count on that?”

  The silence brought her head around and our eyes locked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Write it down in your book.”

  I thought she was going to haul off and let me have one, but Schofield started messing around with his brush and she got interested in that.

  “There’s still some light,” he said. “I could catch it as it comes over your hair.” He nodded in the direction of the big rock. “That is, if you want to?”

  Her smile was for him alone. She went back across the stones stepping carefully in her black sneaks, and climbed up on the rock again.

  “Like this?” she wanted to know, blending her body against the red of the sky.

  I walked off, leaving them there. I could hear him telling her to turn her head just a little more, that one leg not so much out in front, the other arm back. She kept changing her position and asking him if she was doing right, and did he have some more of that oil that drove the bugs off? I was glad when I got far enough away so that I couldn’t hear them. They didn’t have anything to say that would interest me.

  She was just a beautiful kid I’d put on that pile of sheets in Miss Hankins’ laundry, having her, and later feeling so sorry about it that I’d gotten her a job. She was just a hot little piece who had crawled into my bed, not caring if she spawned a baby in there, and I’d been too drunk and tired and stupid to do anything about it. She was out of my reach now, far away, and that was good. She was a nice kid and she’d want my shirt and I didn’t have one any longer. I didn’t even have an extra one. I’d given both of them to Irene.

  And Schofield didn’t mean anything to me, either. He was a guy who had a lousy disease for any man to get, and I was merely sitting around waiting for him to die. Only I wasn’t sitting. His wife and I were only trying to grab a little fun and not hate him too much for having peddled those pictures of her while we were doing it. When it got right down to it, he was a creep with a fairly good brush hand, a dirty camera and the sign of death plastered all over him.

  What they were doing there in the rocks along the brook might be all right. And it might not. But I wasn’t going to try to do anything about it, no matter how it was. It was too late for that. I’d made my choice. I had what I wanted.

  I had Irene.

  CHAPTER XIII

  THERE WAS SOME DIFFICULTY SURROUNDing the retail credit report of the Schofield application, but I finally drank my way around that one. Most insurance companies order credit reports on all ordinary policies, and always on anything over five thousand. It was the one thing that had bothered me, because there was no way of avoiding it.

  Austin told me about it one morning when I came into the office.

  “You’d better stop down and see this credit guy,” he told me. “The way things are, he says he can’t make out a report on it.”

  So I went down and saw him. It is the general belief that no one in a town knows who the credit man is, that he sneaks around like a cat in the dark of an alley. That isn’t so. Most insurance men and businessmen know who he is, because it is from them that the credit man picks up enough information so that he can fill out his report and collect a dollar fee.

  “Hello, Sol,” I said, going into his office. “Can’t you ever think for yourself?”

  Sol was a heavy-set man in an unpressed pair of brown pants and a blue shirt open at the throat. His office was small and he sat in the midst of a litter of books, papers and about a thousand copies of the latest edition of the city directory.

  “You oughta buy one,” he said, handing me one of the directories. “Ten bucks.”

  “For what?”

  “So you don’t have to ask so many questions.”

  “Here,” I said. “Maybe you can use one.”

  He laughed and waited for me to give him a ten. I did. When you want something from Sol you pay for it — first.

  “About this Schofield,” he said, leaning back in his chair, discharging a lot of garlic breath into the heat. “You got that all screwed up, Nicky. None of those three references you gave ever heard of the guy.”

  I had done that on purpose. Of course, Irene could have given me the names of people her husband knew, but they might talk to him about it after the credit report went through and that would have caused some trouble.

  “He’s an artist.”

  “I can read, Nicky.”

  “I wrote three apps that day,” I said. “I must have jumbled up the names.”

  He didn’t bother asking me why he hadn’t received requests on the others.

  “Take it from me,” I said, “he’s good.”

  “Sure, sure. Take it from an insurance man they’re all good.” He had a point there.

  “I hate like hell to call him about it,” I said. “People are funny that way. It’s sort of a flyer, Sol — you know, I don’t know if I can deliver it. I might kill it by going after him about that now.”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do, Nicky.”

  I’d had a couple of similar sessions with Sol before, and I knew what we were going to do. Sol always kept himself clean. He never had his hand out for an extra buck. But he’d seldom turn down a drink.

  “It’s too God-damned hot up here, Sol. Let’s go down to the bar and talk it over.”

  “It is hot, Nicky.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?”

  He sighed and stood up. He stuffed some papers in his pocket and came around the desk. We went out and he didn’t bother to lock the door.

  “I’ve been trying to collect on my theft policy for twenty years,” he explained. “Nobody seems to want anything I’ve got.”

  There was a bar near the corner and we went in there. A couple of guys just off a run on the railroad were drinking boilermakers and kidding the bartender about his waistline.

  “I wish to Christ I didn’t drink!” Sol said, downing the the first one straight. “I waste more days this way.”

  “You only live once.”

  “Ain’t that enough?”

  I had a lot of work to do so I took it easy, but I kept them coming at him like he was a guest of the Rotary Club.

  “I don’t know why you can’t fix me up on that Schofield,” I said after a while, testing the ice.

  “It ain’t right to do things like tha
t, Nicky.”

  “What about drinking?”

  “That’s different. The company trusts me to do what’s proper. They pay me for giving them the right dope.”

  “Don’t you trust me, Sol?”

  He watched as the bartender came over and poured him another one.

  “Why, sure, Nicky. I trust you.”

  “Then I don’t know why you’re causing me all this trouble. I go out and work my ass off to write business and you get your back up because I make a little mistake. You know how it is, Sol. A guy has to keep drumming all the time to make a living in this business. It’s tough enough arguing with the customers and fighting the company, without you getting in on it.”

  He put the drink away and hunched his shoulders.

  “Don’t do it no more, Nicky.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t ask me to make any more exceptions.” He’d said the same thing the other times. “Of course not, Sol.”

  “Promise?”

  “Right as right!”

  He reached in his pocket and brought out some papers and a pen. Then he moved along the bar to where the light was better and filled out the form. He put that in an envelope, sealed it, came back and handed it to me.

  “You mail it,” he said. “I wash my hands off it.” He squinted his eyes at the bartender. “Set ‘em up!”

  I had a drink with him and then got out of there. When I reached the car I opened the envelope and looked inside. He’d given Schofield a clean bill and I knew that the last bridge had been crossed. I found another envelope in the car, addressed it, and put the form inside. Then I walked down the block to a mail box and sent it on its way.

  I drove over to the office.

  “Good job,” Austin told me. He lit a cigar as big as a candle. “Marie’s got something for you. See her.”

  Marie had the death claim checks on Dell Walters and Ragna Dolan. The check on Dell was for five thousand, representing the death benefit of his group policy; the one on Ragna Dolan for five hundred and twelve, consisting of the face amount, plus a death dividend, less the premiums which had been in arrears. I put them in my wallet. I didn’t think of them as money. The ragged edge of a dream. A car. And a television set.