by Gil Brewer
“Well, two hundred, mebbe. No more. And that’s going pretty high, too.” Canne was freckle-faced, heavy jowled, and dressed sleekly in a tan sport suit. It was obvious to Canne. He was beating a poor hick.
“All right. It’s a deal. I need the cash.”
“Haven’t I seen that car before?”
“You may have. I came to town a week ago, been working here since then. Probably saw it around town.”
“Sure. I’ve seen that there car before.” His eyes were big and I wondered that he didn’t get them full of dust. There were purple veins strung in a webbed shield across his nose.
When he’d paid me and I’d signed the car over in Jim Phelby’s name, I said, “Can I use your phone?”
He was reading the registration I’d found in the glove compartment. As I stood there in my worn overalls, jittery, impatient, a police car wound past outside with siren wailing and moaning like the passionate shepherd. It may have been a fire. It could be the police were going to a ball. But I was certain all that hurry was for me.
“Sure, go on, use the phone,” Canne said. He wiped his nose, folded the registration, tossed it into a desk drawer among odds and ends of papers.
I called the airport, which was only ten miles away. Their next flight to Tampa, Florida, would be in a half hour. Could I make a reservation? Certainly, no need, really, plenty of space. Reserve me a seat, anyway. All right.
Next call: Western Union, charge Albert Canne. Is this all right, Mr. Canne?
NORMA MEET ME DREW FIELD TWO O’CLOCK THIS AFTERNOON
Yes, honey, it’s all right.
Next call: Send a cab right over to Canne’s cars. What’s the address here, Mr. Canne? Two-ten Lee Street. That’s right, right away.
Next call: Is this the Riverview Sanitarium? Yes, Miss Watkins, speaking. She was excited, breathing hard, and I could see, in my mind’s eye, her mashed-potato breasts heaving beneath her uniform. Miss Watkins, would you tell Jim Phelby his car is at Canne’s car lot? Tell him that—wait a minute, Miss Watkins—tell him Eric Garth says he’ll see that two hundred dollars plus expenses are wired to him by tomorrow morning. Yes, thank you. I’m sorry, Miss Watkins, good-bye. She was having a time.
“Aren’t you James Phelby?” Mister Canne said. The papers and pencils in his shirt pocket weighted it down badly.
“Certainly.”
“Oh.”
I went out front to the walk. Pretty soon the cab came along and I directed the driver to the airport. “And step it up, will you?”
“Sure thing.”
“Stop right there, will you?” I said three minutes later. “By that clothing store.”
The cab braked to a stop. “Only a minute,” I said, climbing out. The driver yawned and scratched his neck. “Listen,” I said, handing him a twenty-dollar bill, “while I’m in here, go some place and buy me a fifth of whisky.”
“What kind?”
“Rye. Any kind.”
“Done.”
I went on into the clothing store. We were on the main business street in Sordell. As I entered the store, I wondered vaguely what Leda had done with my car. It had been a new car. Well, there were lots of new cars, but if I’d had it, I could have had more money from Canne, and there wouldn’t have been any possibility of Watkins tipping the police where I’d been.
Because they’d trace the call, I was only hoping for one thing. Jim would be with the police, hunting for me, and Watkins wouldn’t be able to say I’d phoned. They wouldn’t be able to trace me to Canne’s car lot until I was on the plane for Tampa. Or maybe even in Tampa. That would be the thing I had to hope for. Radio could stop me at Tampa plenty quick. I’d march off the plane into the arms of Florida police. An escaped lunatic.
I bought a cheap pair of pants with the cuffs on, because I couldn’t wait for them to be altered. “I’ll need a jacket,” I said. “A shirt, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
They wondered why I was in a hurry. I didn’t tell them. I bought a hat, too, something I’d never worn as a civilian. Altogether, I looked exactly like somebody who was running away from a sanitarium after I’d put the clothes on.
“You can keep the overalls and shirt,” I said.
The clerk’s hair was marcelled, perfumed, and he didn’t want to soil his fingers touching the overalls.
“Really,” he said. “We don’t want them.”
“That’s a shame,” I said. “Because you’re stuck with ’em.”
“But what ever will I do with them?”
I told him an impolite way to rid himself of them. He blushed madly and I went on outside in my new duds.
I climbed aboard the plane with the fifth of whisky under one arm. I felt like an escaped convict. Then I knew that’s what I was, for real.
The stewardess came down the aisle with some orange juice. It made a fine surreptitious orange-juice cocktail with the whiskey added. I had to share it with my seat companion, a psychiatrist headed for Miami.
“I’m going down to take a cure,” he said.
“Oh.”
“But this won’t hurt. I’ve been on the stuff for five years. My wife insists it’s too long.”
“Think it’ll do you any good down there?”
He smiled tiredly, stirring his orange-juice highball with a well-manicured little finger. “Does it ever?”
Chapter 9
His name was Hatchell and the pretty stewardess and I had a difficult time pouring him off the plane. He knew he had to catch another plane in two hours for Miami.
“Think you can take it?” I said.
Hatchell groped blindly into the afternoon, winked obscenely at the stewardess, and said, “Most assuredly.” There wasn’t much left of the fifth. Hatchell had a tremendous capacity. “No difference,” he argued. “Fi’teen minutes I could diagnose your case.”
“Am I a case?”
“We all are,” Hatchell said. I left him standing quite straight and stern and neurotic on the front steps of the building in front of the parking lot.
He was headed for a fine place to take the cure.
Then it was afternoon. A lonely afternoon. And I suddenly knew it had been a fool gesture, wiring Norma to meet me at the airport. She wouldn’t be here.
Suddenly, through the tightening fumes of what whisky I’d been able to steal from Hatchell, California and the hospital became the peace I wanted. Home was an abrupt, ludicrous return to hell.
I moved on across the sunny street to where the cars were parked. Out on the field a transport’s engine bellowed.
“Eric!”
It was something like fear. Maybe that’s what it was. They hadn’t radioed to hold me at the airport, or they’d have been here long before this. It was something else. Something from before the bad time I’d had in Sordell. Norma’s voice and the part of the country you’d grown up in, and knew, that was unknown now.
She hadn’t changed much. She came across the street, walking fast as always, her tawny blonde hair all over the place. Then she started running. She wore a tight blue skirt, white blouse, and loafers.
“Eric! My God, you came. You really came back.” She stopped running about six feet from me, stood there breathing hard. She took another step toward me, smiling, then not smiling.
“Sure. Told you I would.” We stared at each other. Probably there were a lot of things that went unsaid insofar as a passerby might notice. But plenty was said in the way we looked at each other.
“I thought you were kidding,” she said.
“No time for that.”
“Oh.” She nodded, swallowed. “I took a chance, anyway. Thought maybe you were just blinded by an Alabama moon.”
I took off my hat, sealed it at an ash can. I missed. Home was like that. . . .
The transport bellowed plenty as it turned on the runway. I wondered how Hatchell was doing. Norma had put on some weight. It looked fine in exactly the right places as an adjunct to what she’d had some years ago. It had been f
ine then too.
“Are we just going to stand here?” I said.
“No.” She watched me intently. “No, of course not. My car’s right over here.”
“Good.” I followed her over to a dust-covered black Chevy sedan. The left front fender was crumpled and I recalled another crumpled fender. But this was different.
“Still heading for other cars’ lights at night?”
“Uh-huh. Habit now. Get in. Sure seems funny, Eric. It’s been a long time.” She gave me another intent, quick glance.
We got in. She drove away from the airport. I saw the way she watched me. Trying not to let me see all the questions, with her eyes big and brown and her teeth gnawing her lower lip. Hell. She’d been my girl. Only now she was more woman than girl. It came to me she might be married even, maybe with kids, too. It could happen.
I’d been through a war, gone crazy, been tied up in strait jackets, fallen in love with a woman who walked out on me the first rough time we had, and I was still hanging onto a dream. That Norma Dean was still my girl.
And there was another wild dream, too—the wild one that cropped up that day in Korea all full of blood and dark damnation. So go on home to the old home where your mother’s dying and see for sure if you want to kill your brother. See if you’re going to kill him now. Go ahead, find out. . . .
And Allen had withdrawn the charges. So there may as well not have been any hit-and-run. Why? Why had the man, Allen, withdrawn charges after being hospitalized? Why had I been tossed into the booby hatch? Why had Leda gone away?
Leda. It was like having warm syrup poured over your head, hot down your sides, flowing along the veins. Outside and inside, too. Leda. Leda and Norma—two very dissimilar women. Only maybe not. I no longer knew Norma Dean. Once I’d known her very well.
“We won’t talk much for a while, will we?” Norma said.
“No.”
“I decided that would be best. We just’ll sit here and not talk.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“Sure.”
She drove for a time and I didn’t think about anything except how dirty she let her car get—how she didn’t care about things like that. She only cared about people and trying to do what’s right. Norma.
“You’ve been gone a long time,” she said.
We turned onto the main highway toward Tampa, then took a cutoff that headed toward the coast down below St. Petersburg.
“I wasn’t sure you’d show up,” I said.
“Neither was I.”
“But you did.”
“I did.”
Her blue skirt was hiked above her knees. She wore nylons, and her legs were round and good to see. She had a nice body, better now than when I knew it last. Her breasts were fuller and they had more round firmness. Her thighs were thick and solid, but trim, and she had very slim, neat ankles. Her body was perfectly proportioned with a solidness not often seen. Her arms were like her legs and she had a seductive throat. I used to kid her about that. I always told her that her throat was like her thighs and sometimes it got you that way. There was nothing soft about her; nothing pale. But her skin was an olive, maybe, an off tan that was rich, and when you touched her skin it made you hold your breath. Because you didn’t know for sure what you were touching. Her hands were like that, too. Norma was quite a girl.
Leda was quite a girl. Quite.
“Were you hurt badly—in the war?”
“All how you look at it.”
“You seem a little more—well, sober, maybe.”
I took the fifth of whisky from its paper bag and held it up for her to see. “Have one?”
“Maybe.”
The whisky had blurred everything as I’d hoped it would, but somehow things suddenly needed more blurring. I uncapped the bottle and handed it to Norma. She turned, winked at me, and took a long, healthy slug. She handed the bottle back, I took one, put the bottle between my feet on the floor.
We began to pass familiar landscapes, though we were some distance from Cypress Landing. Norma drove fast, with her chin stuck out a little.
“Seems funny, coming home,” I said. It was more frightening than funny, but I couldn’t tell Norma that.
“Does it?”
“It’s been a long time.”
“Give me some more of that.” She motioned toward the bottle on the floor.
After she drank and I drank, I said, “You seem to like it better than you used to.”
“I’m a professional drinker now. I’ve got my photography shop. Drinking helps me not to see the old biddies I have to photograph. They never want to look what they are.”
“Good for you.”
“No.”
“All right. No, then.”
We drove on in silence for a while. Norma and I had gone to school together. We had played together when it was too early for anything else. Then we’d fished together when it wasn’t too early, only we didn’t know yet. Then we got to know and we only pretended to go fishing. You can’t fish on a blanket in a field of clover beneath a live oak’s shade. It was fun pretending to go fishing.
“I suppose you met lots of women?” Norma said.
“Sure, hundreds. I didn’t go fishing with any of them though,” I lied.
She motioned toward the bottle. I handed it to her. We drove quietly on through the afternoon with the sun splashing in patches or brilliant white lakes on the highway. The bottle tilted three times.
“I haven’t been fishing either, damn you,” she said.
“All right.” The whisky was touching her. “Why did you come?”
“Goddamn you.”
“All right.” We drove on for a while. It had been a long time not to go fishing and it was hard to believe. Only Norma was like that.
The bottle tilted again and flew out the window. It shattered on the highway. Norma wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, glanced at me quickly, then away.
“You punk,” she said. “You didn’t even write. You didn’t answer one of my letters. There, now I’ve said that. I’ve acted like any dumb bitch and it’s out of my system. It’s all right now.”
“Don’t be vulgar,” I said. “You didn’t have to come.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“I’m sorry I wired you.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
We drove on for a while. Even through the whisky the dream pursued me. Close to home. It became worse. I didn’t know my way around anymore. I was a pioneer. A slightly tight pioneer who was scared, who had too many things for one man to worry about. Much too many.
And Leda was right there in the car with us. Between us, like a hot brick wall. . . .
The sign read: “POP’S LIQUOR STORE.”
Norma stopped the car. “Go ahead,” she said. “Get another one.”
“Bottle.”
“Shut up and go ahead.”
I went on in and bought a fifth and came back to the car and we drove off toward Cypress Landing. Pretty soon we were in the country again.
Norma’s skirt was riding higher now. We were both riding higher. She had started in on the new bottle, taking small nips.
“How was she? What did she look like?”
“Who?”
“Hell.” She reached over and touched my arm, then put her hand on the wheel again. Her hair was sunny and she looked clean and good there in the car.
Maybe if I get real drunk, I thought. Maybe then I can forget there ever was a Leda. Maybe forget that my life’s been going to hell fast with all the dams breaking up, too. I knew I couldn’t forget any of it.
I was hungry for Leda and I was going all off inside without knowing what to do about it. I was wound up tight.
This girl beside you. She was your girl. What do you think she feels now? Why do you think she drove to the airport and met you? Why?
The car swerved a little on the road. Norma pulled it back, glanced at me, hiked her skirt up to her stocking tops. “Are my legs a
s good as those women’s you were with?”
“Better,” I said truthfully. “Better than ever.”
Norma wouldn’t be like this without the whisky and somehow I knew she wouldn’t be like this with anybody else. I began to feel rotten about Norma now. As though I didn’t have enough to feel rotten about. I wished quietly it was just the feeling rotten and not something else, too.
“Do you feel anything for me anymore?” She twisted in the seat and looked straight at me. “Damn it, I’m drunk. I want to know things. We’ve been talking like a couple of fools, Eric. We’ve known each other all our lives and did things and you wired for me to meet you like that and now. . . .”
“Sure,” I said. I patted her knee. It was warm and solid and the nylon was slick beneath my hand. My hand touched the warm flesh and Norma drove faster.
Then I began saying, damn, damn, damn, in the back of my head. Are you trying to be true to anything at all? Leda, Leda, but my hand remained on Norma’s knee and she held her lower lip between her teeth.
I took a long drink and the sky and horizon blended, then sharpened, then blended. I was drunk. There was a lake off there to our left and the car suddenly bumped over a dirt road. Spanish moss flopped heavily against the top of the car and pieces flew in the window while Norma and I jounced together, and she smelled good and was warm with my arm around her when the car stopped by the lake shielded by bushes and trees and moss with the engine dead, and Norma’s face next to mine was lazy wild with her eyes half open her mouth red and damp through all the tears.
“Eric. God, Eric.” She began crying, not harsh outside, but inside there, stricken with it, choking on it. “Make it business, then,” she said.
Her lips weren’t tender, they weren’t savage, they were Norma with Leda lurking off in the shadows with the yellow shorts in her hand.
