“That sounds very nice,” Mrs. Samuels said stiffly.
“What I was thinkin’ was maybe you’d let me take Chris along with me.”
“Well, I really don’t know what to say. I’d have to talk to his father. Are you sure you’d like a little boy along on your vacation?”
“He’s real good company, you’d be surprised,” James said, unaware of all that he was saying.
Late that night, after Sol Samuels had had a particularly prolonged wrangle with a doll-faced star who was tough as snakehide, he and Mrs. Samuels discussed James’s invitation.
“But, Alma, darling, I tell you we don’t know the fella. After all, we simply brought him in off the streets.”
“He had beautiful references from Westchester.”
“Those people never answered, Alma. Maybe they don’t even exist.”
“Any man who loves children so much,” Mrs. Samuels said vaguely.
Sol Samuels still had his doubts. Alma answered him with the old argument that he spoke out of jealousy and guilt for not spending more time with his only son. It was a slightly unfair if rather unanswerable kind of reasoning and finally Sol threw up his hands. “All right, dear, all right. Now I’ve got to work on my speech for the convention.”
The trip into the mountains with James was Chris’s version of going to heaven. There was a bigness, an importance about the way he felt that was more than his word keen could ever suggest. It was dry and hot under the summer sun. They climbed and suffered manfully. Then they would come upon a stream, with a natural pool three or four feet deep and they would stretch out alongside it and lower their mouths to the surface of the cool water. Chris saw beguiling shadows under a trickling waterfall and cried out, “Look, Jimmy, look!” James laughed as the sub-limit trout darted out of sight. “Next time whisper,” he said. “We’ll drop a fly on their noses and see if they’re hungry.”
Later in the day they found a real trout pool and they rolled up their pants and stood in the melted-snow water up to their knees. Chris got his line badly tangled in the underbrush and had no luck but James finally brought one to the net, about ten inches long and so lively that it kept flopping in the basket that Chris was allowed to hold. It made his heart pound with joy and excitement and some sort of fatalistic sorrow as he heard the flip-flopping get stronger and stronger, and then begin to slow down and weaken. There was a long silence, perhaps two minutes, and Chris raised the lid and peeked in to see if the fish was dead. It jumped toward the light and Chris slammed the lid down just in time. James managed to net another one about the same size, just as the sun was ducking down behind the folding range. Then came the best fun of all, starting the fire and frying the fish.
Chris would never eat fish for his mother or Winnie, but James’s fish were different. He ate his whole portion, with fried potatoes that he had sliced himself and that James had taught him how to cook. Then he threw the remains into the fire and watched the paper plate flame up and twist into ashes. They sat around the fire talking, James with a pipe in his mouth exhaling little clouds of smoke into the still night air. Chris liked the smell of it. So much sweeter than his father’s stinky old cigars. Chris asked James to tell him all over again about his fight with Jocko Kennedy in the Yellow Dragon in Manila. Later they talked about the woods and Chris thought it would be fun to live up here the rest of his life, being a mountain ranger and putting out forest fires and catching bandits and things like that. James laughed and said that was only because Chris was still very young. The day would come when he would be happy to take over his father’s studio and have some oomphy red-headed star for his girlfriend. And James would come to the studio gate and Mr. Bigshot Chris Samuels wouldn’t even let him in.
Oh, no, no, that would never happen, Chris cried, and he wished inside of him that James would forget about the studio and how rich or important his father was, or that he was going to be. He didn’t want his father and the studio along on this trip. This was to be just Jimmy and Chris camping out in the mountains. Maybe they could find gold together and set up a mine and be partners for life. How much more fun that would be than any old studio.
After a while Chris got very sleepy from looking into the fire and James told him it was time to crawl into their pup tent. While Chris was lying in there thinking about the day, suddenly it began to thunder. The sound of it seemed to roll along the mountain slope and fall away into the valley below. Then lightning struck as if it were hop-skipping from scrub pine to pine around the tent. Chris would have been very scared if James hadn’t been there. But James was there. He had moved into the tent and was squatting by the entrance flap looking out at the summer storm. Chris was sure James would know what to do in any emergency. Muscle-weary, but pleasantly so, he drifted off into visions of heroic comradeship, prospecting in Arizona where a bad man jumps them to steal their claim but he and Jimmy fight back like wildcats You thought we didn’t know how to box, huh? This’ll teach you flying together in a Navy PBY forced down in enemy waters and sailing their little rubber lifeboat into a desert island cove where fish were jumping all around them Good boy Chris pull ’im in this’ll keep us going ’til the search plane spots us.… How long Chris had been sleeping he had no idea but suddenly he was awake again and for a funny moment he thought he was home in his own familiar bed. Winnie must be running a bath for him. He stretched out his hand and felt the dark canvas of the tent. Oh, the sound of running water was the brook outside. But what was this dark form kneeling over him? Half awake he cried out his fear of it. “James?”
“Yeah.”
He felt better. But what was Jimmy doing so close to him, and looking down into his face while he slept? And what did he have in his hand? Chris could feel it as he lifted his own hands instinctively. A rope. “James?” Chris said again, in a quavering voice and after a moment or two he was reassured as the chauffeur’s voice sounded more like him again. “It’s OK, kid. It’s me, kid.”
“What are you doing with that rope?”
James cleared his throat and said, “It was getting kinda windy. I thought I’d go out and see if I can batten down the flaps.”
Before Chris could answer, James was gone. It was spooky quiet and dark inside the tent. It shouldn’t take Jimmy very long, Chris was thinking. Minutes passed. Chris huddled uneasily in the darkness. Why was it taking so long? Chris felt his way to the entrance flap and called “Jimmy, Jimmy!” There was no answer. “James! Jaaaaaa-mes …!” No answer. Chris crawled back under his covers and tried to think what to do. But the thinking got all jangled up in his head: too frightened to think. There was a cold clammy panic filling him up inside. He yelled JAMES so loud it strained his throat. Then he started to cry. He couldn’t stop crying. It became a harsh hysterical rasping. Lost in the mountains, deserted and left to starve, like a scene from an old movie of his father’s. Oh James, James, Jimmy, come back, come back, his mind begged the rainy out-of-doors. He lay still for a while, burrowing into his fear and then he heard the footsteps coming toward the tent and James was back.
“Hi, fella,” he said, “afraid I wasn’t coming back?”
Chris threw himself into the chauffeur’s arms and tried, as James had taught him, not to cry.
“I walked back to the car to get a tarpaulin to throw over the tent,” James explained. They had driven up the mountain as far as the dirt road would take them and then had walked in to find the campsite.
“Oh,” Chris said. “That’s OK, Jimmy.”
He did wonder why James hadn’t told him he was going but he didn’t want to mention it for fear that James would say something that would make him ashamed.
The next morning was fine again because the sun was shining and Chris found some salamanders in the stream. At first he called them little alligators, but James, who seemed to know everything, explained to Chris that this was their full size, a kind of water lizard, and that you could pick them up without their biting you. Chris thought they were beautiful, with their shiny dark-green bodies decorat
ed with bright-yellow spots. He was anxious to take some home with him. He got a milk bottle to carry them in. It was such fun to look at them through the glass. Watching their silent, dark green struggle in the bottle, he had almost forgotten the scare of the night before. He spent the whole morning chasing salamanders—“water dogs,” James called them—and would have been happy to catch and play with them all day but when the sun was overhead James thought they ought to be getting on back to town. Chris had expected them to stay another night but James said he didn’t want to keep Chris up here too long. And anyway he had someone he had to stop in and see on their way home.
Chris was sorry to be driving down the winding mountain road. Except for the scary part in the night, it was the keenest time he had ever had. He was ashamed of himself for letting James frighten him even for a minute. He held his two salamanders in the bottle on his lap and he asked James if they could come up again that summer and stay even longer. James said, Sure, sure they’d have lots of good times together, but he didn’t seem quite as easy to talk to as he had been driving up, or fishing the pools, or around the fire. There seemed to be something on James’s mind. They drove a long time in silence, with Chris trying to touch the water dogs through the mouth of the bottle.
When they got down into the valley and on into the neat little white bungalow section of north Hollywood, James said that the person he wanted to stop off and see was his sister. James honked the horn and she came out, a flashy, good-looking girl with orangey hair.
“Hello, you,” she said to James and she made a little kissing sound with her mouth.
“We’ve been up in the mountains camping out,” James said.
“Goody for you,” the girl said.
Chris saw that the hand of the girl played with James’s hand and that she seemed to arch and stretch against him like a cat he had once. And where had Chris seen her face before? Oh, now he remembered, on the wall over James’s bed, the one looking over her shoulder with practically no clothes on. James hadn’t said anything about her being his sister then.
“Here’s a kid your father ought to put in pictures,” James said. “She was Miss Spokane two years ago. Isn’t she a dead-ringer for Betty Grable?”
Chris wished they hadn’t hurried to come down from the mountain.
“He’s cute,” the girl said, tossing her orange hair toward Chris. Then she looked at James in a funny way. “You must have had fun up there.”
“I caught a lot of salamanders,” Chris said. “Look, I’ve got two of them here!”
“You should have been along,” James said. “Did you ever sleep in a pup tent?”
“Christ, I’ve slept everywhere else,” the girl said. She and James looked at each other and laughed. Chris wished they would get this over with. It had been so nice up there, just the two of them, standing in the cold, clear water looking for trout.
“You get back in the car now, I’ll be right with you,” James said to Chris, noticing how he was staring. “I’ve got something private I want to tell my sister.”
“Come back again, honey,” the girl said, and then she looked at James in that same way again. “When you’re a little bigger.”
Chris didn’t like them laughing together. This wasn’t like James at all, his pal Jimmy who invited him to his room over the garage and taught him boxing and fishing and how to slice spuds. Chris watched critically as James walked the girl back to her door. He put his arm on her shoulder and she brushed up against him again. Chris saw James whisper something in her ear and she flung her head back in mock anger and slapped him hard but fondly on the seat of his pants. Chris wished James would cut all this stuff out and come back to him.
On the drive through Hollywood to the Samuelses’ home James said, “Say, Chris, when your parents get back, we don’t have to mention this little visit to see my sister, OK?”
Chris did not exactly understand.
“It’ll just be our little secret, like letting you hold the gun. OK?”
That was OK with Chris. He was sure his mother and father had secrets they never told him. He looked at his salamanders through the milk-bottle glass.
“I’ll fix you up a tank for them,” James said.
“And when we go back to the mountains we can catch some more,” Chris said, feeling better again.
“Sure, we’ll go again. We’re gonna have lots of fun. Just remember now, you forget all about that little visit to see my girl—my sister.”
Chris had half forgotten it in his reverie of salamanders. He wished James wouldn’t keep bringing it up. He didn’t want it to be so much on James’s mind. “Tell me a story about how you were in the Navy and a big storm came up and the captain got washed overboard and you had to save the ship,” Chris said.
James laughed. “You already know it by heart. You just about told it right now.”
“Please, Jimmy.”
The rest of the way home James kept Chris entertained with this wild tale of the sea. Chris listened with his eyes staring wide, living it through again. By the time they turned up the Samuelses’ driveway he seemed to have forgotten everything but the fun parts of the trip and he was anxious to ask his mother and father how soon they could go camping together again.
James sat with Chris as the boy slowly talked himself on into sleep that night, talking of all the new things they had seen on the trip and all the things there were to look forward to on their next adventure. Chris was very tired and sleepy from their energetic two days and couldn’t keep his eyes open to talk to James as long as he wanted to.
James turned out the light and tiptoed out.
“He’s dead tired, he wore himself out up there,” James said to Winnie, the maid, as he passed through the kitchen.
“I’m glad he’s back safe. Good night,” Winnie said. She had been with the Samuelses a long time and did not like to see the new chauffeur going so familiarly through the house.
In the morning when Chris woke up the first thing he did was to see how his salamanders were, in the bottle. One of them was floating on the surface. He was dead. His color had sort of paled out and he wasn’t nearly so dark and shiny as he had been. Chris thought of them scampering alive in the mountain stream. It made him sad to see his little water dog floating lifeless in the bottle. He wondered if it had suffered very much. And whether the one still alive felt very lonely without his friend.
When Chris came down for breakfast that morning he was surprised to hear from Winnie that his parents had come home during the night. They had not been expected until that afternoon. He hurried up to see his mother, who was having breakfast in bed. His father was in the bathroom shaving. His mother kissed him and hugged him and said he looked tired and then before Chris could tell her about the camping and the storm that came up and the salamanders and everything, she asked him in a cross, serious way if he knew where James had gone last night. With a child’s innocent intuition Chris thought of the lively orange-haired girl who had slapped James in such an intimate way. But he kept silent while his mother told him why they were so angry with James. They had wired James to meet them at the station. Apparently he did not get the wire because he had left the house at nine o’clock, without permission, and had stayed out all night. They had called him from the station around one A.M. and there had been no answer. To make matters worse, when they got home by taxi they found that James had taken the town car with him. Daddy was furious. He had a special phobia about chauffeurs who used the cars at night for their own private pleasures. Sol wanted to discharge James immediately.
“Oh, please, please don’t let him go,” Chris begged. Who else was there to sleep with him in a tent and help him catch salamanders and build a tank for them to live in?
Chris’s father came out of the bathroom half dressed, half shaved and very angry. James would simply have to go, that was all there was to it. He was taking advantage of his friendship with Chris. Sol was sorry Chris had formed this attachment but he could no longer allow a child’
s temporary sentiments to protect an employee who was obviously irresponsible.
Chris knew his father when he got stubborn mad instead of the easygoing way he usually was. It made the boy panicky. His life before James now seemed terribly pale and dull. The things James had taught him. The things James had showed him he could do. These past few months for the first time he had things to talk about with other boys.
James was called in to the breakfast room while Mr. Samuels was having his coffee. James was extremely polite and subdued. Yes, sir. No, sir. If you’ll let me try to explain, sir. He explained that while the Samuelses were away he had spent so much time with Chris that he had needed an evening off for his personal wants, a haircut, some shopping and the rest. It was wrong of him to keep the car out all night, he admitted, but he had been visiting some relatives and when he suddenly realized how late it was he had thought it would be more practical to sleep over and return early in the morning. He would never, never take the car without permission again. He was devoted to the family, adored young Chris and would never risk losing the job again. James said all this very well, with a certain glibness, although with a pained expression on his face that seemed to reflect a rather intense suffering for the sins he had committed. In fact, his tone was not unlike that of a repentant sinner at confessional, in one of Mr. Samuels’s movies.
Sol Samuels was a stern grand inquisitor, Mrs. Samuels was as usual softening and Chris remained silent and begged his father with his eyes.
In the end, because Mr. Samuels’s defenses always crumbled before the combined efforts of his wife and son, James was allowed to remain on probation. “The slightest little act of disobedience and that is the finish, final,” Mr. Samuels intoned, gathering up the crumbs of his authority. “I am only tolerating you now because you seem to have made such a hit with Christopher.”
“He is a wonderful boy, sir,” James said soothingly.
Later that morning Chris helped James wash the car and then James said he was ready to fix up the tank for the surviving salamander. He seemed a good deal more quiet than usual. Evidently Mr. Samuels’s lecture had brought him down considerably. He didn’t play and tell stories as he had before. But Chris imagined it would take him a day or two to get over the scolding. Chris was the same way.
Love, Action, Laughter and Other Sad Tales Page 21
