Go to the Widow-Maker

by James Jones

  Hunt reached for the dashboard and the flask and gulped down another hot snort of the raw scotch as the headlights swept past two shaggy goats standing on some roadside rocks. Then just beyond them were three more. All of the natives down here seemed to keep them. He took another quick little, smaller drink before putting back the flask.

  If they had brought it out in the open or said something to him about it, he would have done something about it. But as long as they didn’t. . .

  When, three months later, a letter had come from Grant (another, one more letter) asking Carol to come to New York for a visit, he had decided then, Hunt remembered, to do something about it and had forbidden her to go. And Carol had said she was going to go anyway. She had shown him the letter. There was certainly nothing about a love affair in it, but of course they could have prepared this letter especially to show to him. But he began to wonder if maybe he hadn’t been wrong all along with his suspicions and his suspicious imagination. He didn’t really know. Carol said Grant was working on his first full-length three-acter along with carrying his studies and he was about to crack up and needed her help. And of course, Carol could go on her own if she wanted. She had some money of her own (though nothing like he, Hunt, had)—in spite of the fact that she had started neglecting her own real estate business since starting to write plays. Hunt had always taken a dim view of and had never paid much attention to this playwriting business. He knew nothing about plays and didn’t want to, but he was pretty certain no neurotic Indiana housewife or small-town-boy ex-Navy enlisted man were ever going to become bigtime playwrights.

  In the end, he gave her the money to go, though he never did know quite why. Probably because of that very thing: that she had enough money of her own to go anyway. If he was laboring under the illusion that it would be good to have her gone, he was soon straightened out on that. It was very lonesome not to have anyone, someone in the house when he came home at night; and the first couple of broads he brought home to the house after she left immediately began working on him as soon as they found out that his wife had gone away.

  She stayed away three months. Then she came home full of bitterness toward New York and carrying the first large group of books that would go into what would eventually become her really extensive occult library. During the last two months of Grant’s final year she made two quick flying trips to New York and after the second one came back with the information that Grant was totally disillusioned with school and with New York also. Neither had anything to teach him about playwriting and after his graduation he wanted only to go someplace off somewhere and work. So she had invited him to come back to Indianapolis and live with them. There was plenty of room in the house, and Grant’s tiny Navy pension was not enough for him to live on and work unless he held down some kind of full-time job.

  And thus began what Hunt was later to think of—and indeed thought now, driving back to the villa—as the best three years of his life. He still did think that now, though perhaps it was hard to understand just why. He reached into the glove compartment for the flask and another snort.

  Grant turned out to be the companion he had never had in his life. They made all the football games both local and collegiate together, the hockey matches, the fights, the baseball games, the Indianapolis 500 and the lesser races, the Indiana U basketball schedule. They also did a lot of serious drinking together, because Grant too liked the serious kind of low-bar-crawling Hunt enjoyed. Grant was full of strange and wonderful ideas about life, or so it seemed to Hunt. Ideas Hunt would never have thought about. He had finished his three-acter and it had been turned down by every producer in New York. He had then rewritten it while still in New York, with exactly the same results, except that a firm called Gibson & Kline had shown enough interest to ask him to rewrite it again along slightly different lines they themselves suggested which they thought might help it. This Grant engaged himself in when he came back from New York, using one of their upstairs bedrooms, and he worked like a demon at it, six, eight or even ten hours a day four or five days a week. But the rest of the time, the nights and the weekends, he was free and ready for whatever “action” happened to be going on. Weekends the two of them would drive to South Bend, or over to Champaign in Illinois, or down to Bloomington depending upon which team was playing where. Only in the matter of women was there any reserve between them, but on that subject they both for some reason remained reticent with each other. Hunt did not know if Grant was still having—or had ever actually had—an affair with his wife, but he did know—because he got it from the women themselves—that he and Grant were often screwing, or had been screwing, the same broads. It was the kind of friend Hunt had always wanted to have.

  Sometimes they would visit the two country farms Hunt had inherited but which never paid well, just to inspect and see how the tenants were doing, and during those times Hunt would show him some of all the many things of his childhood.

  Somehow it all went back to his own father and his own mother, the great huge roaring moustachioed figure that was his father and the tiny whining mealy-souled social snob that was his mother, and to the woodshed where—back even before the ’20s and college when their big place was not even yet part of a suburb and was practically a country farm itself—the woodshed where the huge powerful vague figure of his father would take him and make him drop his pants and underpants and bend over a barrel and strap him unmercifully on his bare bottom with his big leather belt to teach him discipline and the importance of being serious. Somehow, though Hunt did not quite know how, it was all tied in with that. His father. And his mother. Both of whom he hated, and feared, unmercifully. His father and his mother and the son he had never had, but had promised himself he would never treat as his father had treated him. Those unmerciful beatings. Why Grant evoked all that Hunt could not say, except of course that he fulfilled the image of the unhad son. His father, whom he had wanted so much to love but had never been allowed to, had made him into a solitary, a virtual recluse, and a loner. And the coming of Grant had alleviated all that so very much.

  If it had not been for that first goddamned damnable abortion, they might have had children. Or so Carol always told him. But, back then, Hunt hadn’t even wanted them, to tell the truth. Neither had Carol.

  Hunt Abernathy leaned over toward the glove compartment for the flask and took another, tiny drink.

  Of course, with the success of the first play and the resulting fame for its author, all that fun and happiness of those first three years had changed. Trips to Europe for Grant. Longer and longer trips to New York. Hunt didn’t give a damn about Europe, and damned little more for New York. Only when Grant was back in Indianapolis actually working did they see each other much at all. Grant had rewritten the first play as Gibson & Kline had suggested, only to have it rejected still again. Then he had worked two, two and a half years on still another play which he had had the idea for and which G & K had suggested he do in lieu of the first one. That was the play that became The Song of Israphael and a success. By this time Hunt, who had watched how hard he worked and seen what a strange novel inquiring mind he had, had come to believe in his eventual success and so was not surprised.

  But even when Grant was back in Indianapolis after that it was not the same. The available Midwestern sports and athletic contests no longer interested him so much. And his nights of low-bar-crawling that Hunt liked so much got fewer and fewer. Grant preferred to do his drinking in hotel cocktail lounges and more sophisticated bars. It just wasn’t any longer the same.

  Ahead of him Hunt saw the beachhouse loom up on the right and turned into the villa driveway. Once inside and off the highway he had himself a real drink from the flask, then pulled away on up the drive.

  He did not really know whether Grant had ever had an affair with his wife or not, that was the truth. He just didn’t know. And, really, he didn’t want to know. He would never know, now, and he did not want to think about it. Suddenly he giggled to himself. He had sudden
ly remembered something that had happened in some dive in Indianapolis years ago where he had been out drinking. A big truckdriver standing at his end of the bar, a guy he had known around the lower quarter of Indianapolis for a long time, had been talking and at the same time watching at the other end of the bar a huge, rather mean, forceful man they both knew who was a big drinker, big liver, life-of-the-party, and powerful man around the dives. The huge, dominating “big liver,” drunk now, was roaring out some story to the group at his end of the bar, forcing them by the sheer weight of his personality to listen and to laugh, and Hunt’s truckdriver had been extolling his virtues and bragging him up. Smiling, he had turned to Hunt. “He had my broad,” he said admiringly.

  This was something like that. Hunt had understood what he meant. Well, if he had had her, and he didn’t think he had, was reasonably sure he hadn’t, he hoped he had turned her over on her hands and knees and spread her wide open and slipped it into the big wet wide-open gash all the way, driving it in as hard as he could drive. The bitch deserved it.

  In front of him the villa now loomed up on the driveway loop, all its downstairs lights blazing and several of its upstairs bedroom lights still on also. As he stopped the car and got out and looked at it, one of the upstairs lights winked out. The image struck him. Grant’s leaving was like the flipping out of one more window light in the building, the mansion, of his life. There wouldn’t be too many more. And soon the house would be all dark. Hunt looked at the luminous dial of his watch. It was eight-thirty, and with a sigh of relief and pleasurable anticipation he realized it was Time. He could go in and have a serious before-dinner drink or two.

  He hoped Grant was happy with his new cunt anyway.

  29

  GRANT WAS THINKING about Hunt too. And also about Carol. There was little else for him to do. Though the food was good the airport dinner was a catastrophe, he and Lucky hardly spoke five words to each other, and by a quarter of nine they were finished eating with three more hours still to wait for the plane. There was nothing to do but go in the bar and drink.

  The old cunt had really done him in, finally. And the depression he felt at leaving Hunt for what was probably the last time, on top of the depression he was already carrying, bowed him down. He was much much more sad at the prospect of never seeing Hunt again than he was over never again seeing Carol. He brooded on it. Once, one time, in the bar over their scotches he hunched up his shoulders and started out with, “Look! All I was trying to do was protect their reputations. I’d been doing it for years when I met you. How was I—”—“I don’t want to talk about it!” Lucky interrupted in a cold, icy, but almost half-wailing voice. “I really and truly don’t!” She was all cold and ice. She was a one woman ski resort by God practically. He didn’t try again. Fortunately a stranger standing at the bar, an American from New York naturally, recognized him and came over and introduced himself offering to buy a drink because he wanted to ask Grant about an obscure philosophical symbolism about modern man in a technocracy which he thought he had detected (and which he in fact had) in one of Grant’s earlier plays. Grant asked him to sit down, and this kept them going until plane-time.

  But once in the long darkened tube of the tourist section of the big jet, all of whose remaining passengers except himself and Lucky had boarded in New York for MoBay or Kingston and none of whom bothered to wake up enough to deplane for the twelve-minute stop at Ganado Bay, there was nothing left to do but think. He got himself a stiff drink from the slightly, cutely disheveled stewardess and sat back down. Lucky in the seat next the window had looked out her port all during takeoff and once airborne continued to look out of it though there was nothing to see now but stars. He would be damned if he would try to strike up a conversation with her. He was sick to death of swallowing his pride and kissing ass with proud women. He had had enough of that to last him all his life, and he damn well wasn’t going to do it. He was furious with her. How dare she? How dare she, who loved to brag so to almost anybody about her 400 men she had had in her life, take such exception to something like this? Were the sins of the fathers forever to descend to the sons? the sins of the mothers descend to the daughters? Well, he wasn’t going to play that game, that stupid, superstitious, Old Testament game. He still could not understand how he had so grossly miscalculated her reaction to his confession of having been Carol’s lover. Anger, yes; but this kind of near-psychotic despair that had descended over her, no. Certainly there was something there that he had not seen, or if he had seen it, had not understood.

  But underneath his anger, there was still this massive depression. And underneath the depression, like a dark sand cloud lying ominously below a layer of relatively clear water, was a terrible gloomy melancholy. Perhaps for this very reason his mind fell (in the susurrous quietly humming plane ramming and roaring its swift way through the night sky) back into recalling that horrible gloomy melancholy year of school in New York, and those first months and years he had spent with the Abernathys. Certainly his leavetaking of Hunt had helped thrust his thought in that direction also.

  It was Carol who first suggested he come stay with them after his discharge. He had been fucking her off and on for about five months then. And until then he had never given a single thought to its becoming anything like a permanent affair.— “What will Hunt say to that?” he had wanted to know.— “He won’t say anything,” Carol said. “He likes you.” —“Doesn’t he know we’re sleeping together?” he had asked. He remembered Carol had rubbed the corner of her lip with her curled forefinger.— “I don’t think he really does,” she said finally. “Or if he does, he won’t let himself believe it, or at least not think about it.”— “But me live with you? It’s a pretty dirty trick to pull on him,” he had said.— “Not when you consider all the things he’s done to me in my life,” Carol said. “And what else would you do? Go and get a job in some factory? And then try to write plays at night after you come home dog-tired from work?”

  The war was not even yet over then, and Great Lakes Station was like some great huge railroad yard, only this was a railroad yard for men. Hundreds of thousands of men in blue uniforms and white caps, coming in, going out, or stationed permanently. Not a face recognizable as a face among them. Echoes of the World of the Future, Grant thought with a shudder and went to get another stiff drink from the stewardess. You couldn’t even pretend you were a soul there, to them. Souls were suspended for the duration.

  Those of them in the hospital had had a ball. There was not a one of them but who expected to get discharged. The war was over for them. They had all received months and months of back pay in one lump. Five of them kept a two-room suite at the Drake at daily rates for five months. In all he himself had spent almost eleven months in Great Lakes Station, and in all the myriads of female faces that had passed into and out of the Drake Hotel suite or some other suite carrying bottles or carrying glasses he had enjoyed quite a large number, and had finally seriously almost settled on one. So he had had another girl there in Chicago when Carol finally made her offer.

  The other girl’s name was Billie Wrights, and she had been through at least three of his friends. He didn’t mind that and when they came together they hit it off, mainly because they both were so highly sexed. Billie had come up to Chicago from Memphis Tennessee meaning to make a killing as a lady welder before the war ended, and like so many other people do had wound up in the same profession she had left in Memphis, which was couture and ladies’ dresses. She was assistant manager at one of the larger independent ladies’-wear shops in Chicago. At another hotel, where he took her for privacy and to make sure that no more of his friends latched onto her, he taught her to go down on him and she liked it. He went down on her and she liked that. She liked everything, but being from Memphis was naive and had never done those other things. “But isn’t it perverted?” she asked him innocently one time, “doing those things? All I know is that I like it.”— “No, it’s not perverted,” he laughed. “It’s perfectly norma
l. Men and women. It’s only Bible Belt preachers who think it’s perverted.” Finally she took him home to her nice little apartment and it was an ‘affair.’ The only times he did not see her were when Carol was in Chicago, or when he got his monthly weekend pass and went home to Indianapolis.

  They talked a great deal, he and Billie, about him coming to live with her permanently in her apartment after his discharge. He could live with her and work on his playwriting, and she would keep her job, which she liked, and support him. Neither of them said anything about marriage. Then one day about a month before he was due to be discharged Billie took off her rose-colored glasses. “I just don’t see how we can do it, Ron,” she said, looking at him anxiously. “I want to. But I just don’t make that much money. You see, I make out with my salary and this apartment mainly because a lot of my meals and entertainment come from dates I have with men. I’ve noticed the difference since you’ve been coming here. And we won’t have your Navy salary after you’re discharged. Do you understand? You won’t be mad? I know you wouldn’t want me to be having dates with men.”— “I’m not mad,” he had said, with a strange kind of sad but pleasant melancholy, and patted the inside of her nude thigh, “and you’re quite right. We’ve been kidding ourselves. Come here. Bring it here.” Life. Life moves on, inexplicably. Carol Abernathy had made him her offer about six weeks before.