by Ed Lacy
“Thanks,” I said.
Joe hesitated, then said, “Well, guess you're a man now, know all about girls.”
“I had a clap two weeks after I hit Berlin.”
“Walt! You never wrote you were sick...?”
“Who was sick? Nothing to it now. Give you a couple of shots of penicillin and you leave the hospital the same day, ready to do more bedwork. Plenty of VD over there, but once you get a steady piece, you don't have to worry.” The kid sucked on his cigarette and it was out. He took out a lighter, lit the butt, blew out a heavy cloud of smoke through his nose. “Got a couple of Swiss lighters, too. Nothing little Walter skipped.”
I wanted to leave, I didn't like the look on Joe's big face: as if something was hurting him and he didn't understand what it could possibly be. He needed a skinful, but quick.
We didn't talk for a while and the kid lit another cigarette. The way his-cigarette hung from his lip if he had smoked king size he would have burned his tie. Walt asked if we were still the big wheels at Sky Oil, and a lot more small talk. Joe just sat there, staring at the kid and, for the first time since I had known him, speechless.
Walt stood up, stretched, walked over and turned on the radio. He went from station to station, listening to each for a split second, then shut the radio off. Taking a handful of pretzels he went back to the couch. “Radio's a piece of junk. Going to buy us a television set, one of these slick combination jobs—radio, phono, and television. Got a lot of buying to do. Need suits, shirts, shoes—the works.”
Joe smiled weakly, “Sure, have to buy you a suit. I... eh... was wondering about this summer. I mean, I can get you a job at the office before you start college in September. Of course if you want to rest this summer, that's okay with me. Say, hope you've been giving school a lot of thought, like I wrote you. Any idea what college you want to attend?”
“I have been giving it a lot of thinking,” Walt said slowly. “Fact is, I may not want to go to school. Thinking of opening me a package liquor store.”
“What?” Joe jumped as if about to strike the kid.
“Sure, as a vet I get a preference and it's a good business—stock can't spoil or get old. And if the depression comes, people only hit the bottle more, so...”
“By God, you'll go to college! What the hell you think I sent you into the army for?” Joe shouted.
“Relax Joe, he's just come home. You can talk this over later when...” I said.
Walt gave me a cool grin. “That's okay, Jackson, might as well get this straightened.” He turned to Joe. “Now look Pop, I ain't the little snot-nose kid that went out of here three years ago. I'm an operator, a slick one, a real smart little bastard, if I say so myself. I've learned to hustle—big-time hustling. College is okay, but I haven't time for that now. Maybe later I'll take something in business administration—polish up my hustling.”
“Later? What the hell you think...” Joe said.
“Know what I got in my pocket, six thousand bucks, all good American green stuff! And in the sole of my army shoes at the bottom of the barracks bag, I have another five grand in money orders—all made out to me.”
Looking stupid with astonishment Joe mumbled, “Six and five...”
“Eleven grand,” Walt said proudly. “Also got some jewelry—rings and stuff, but the stones may be phony.”
“Walt, how did you get that dough?” Joe asked, his voice taking on an almost stern, comical 'father's' tone.
“By using my head,” Walt said, his voice cocky. “The country yokels went crazy getting a girl for a couple of cigarettes. Right from the start I got smart—I let those dopes buck for the stripes, get stupid-happy over selling a jit candy bar for a buck. I sucked around, got in with the medicos, formed a partnership with the supply sergeant. We sold big stuff—medicine, cases of food and clothing. Even had a cracker with us that made a still and we refilled old whiskey bottles. Know what a bottle of whiskey, real whiskey, will bring in a German night club?”
Joe didn't (or couldn't) speak, and I said I had no idea.
“At least a hundred bucks. We sold them our bootleg stuff—and it wasn't bad whiskey either—for fifty. Hell, what I got is peanuts.. If I'd been a field officer, or if my partners hadn't been so damn yellow, we'd have cleaned up a hundred thousand, at least.”
The room was heavy with silence, broken only by Walt crunching pretzels. He stood up, stretched. “I'm kind of tired. Played crap all the way across, so I haven't had too much shut eye. Came out with a little over four hundred. Those jokers didn't have no real dough on them, and here they're coming back to the States. Well, tomorrow I'll look around, get orientated, as they say in the soldier's manual.”
He dragged his barracks bag into the bedroom. Joe still sat there, looking miserable and sick. I thought how odd it was that it took the army to bring out the Joe in Walt. Joe was always talking about a “sideline to make easy dough. Get us a mail-order racket, where you sit on your can and watch the dough roll in.” Before, Walt had been so reserved and quiet you wouldn't have thought he was Joe's son....
Walt came out of the bedroom, shirt off, khaki undershirt showing off his wiry shoulders and arms. He had another cigarette hanging on his lower lip. He stopped at the entrance to the bathroom, said, “Joe, we got to get a bigger apartment. Look around for that tomorrow, too.”
“Nothing wrong with this,” Joe said, looking up at the picture of his wife.
“It could be fixed up, but it's too small. I need a room for myself. You know, whenever I shack up. I want....”
“You want... Listen, this is my house and it's what the hell I want that goes! You'll do what I tell you to, understand!” Joe shouted, his fat face flushed.
Walt stood there, the smile on his thin face mocking and cool. “Don't go off the handle, Pop. Maybe I'll get my own apartment—with a room for you. We'll see, I got a lot of plans to work out.” He made a motion toward me as if he was firing a pistol, walked into the bathroom and shut the door gently.
Joe stood up, looked around wildly, then picked up the box of pipes, was about to hurl them at the wall. I grabbed him. “Easy. He's young, been through something you and I will never know about. Give him time.” .
Joe nodded, tears in his eye. “Yeah. I'm okay, Georgie. It's... he was such a good kid and I looked forward to having him back. Now... now I feel like a damn stranger in my own house.”
I was glad to walk out of Joe's house that night, thankful I was free of his problems and those of all fathers. I suppose one reason Flo and I never stayed together was my desire to lead the simple life—duck other people's neuroses. I had enough to do worrying about my own complexes—or lack of them.
Joe soon snapped out of it. Later, when he was down at the cottage for a week-end, he was back to normal, full of admiration for Walt—the same admiration he'd have for anybody with eleven thousand.
When Joe left, Eddie—Flo's kid brother—came down. He was a handsome kid, tall and with a big skinny frame, and the only member of her family I liked.
We were on the beach early Monday morning and Eddie's serious, quiet, talk was a relief from two days of Joe's gabbing. We sunned ourselves, talked of going over to Sag Harbor and fishing for blows. Eddie said he'd called Mr. Henderson before he left, who said Slob was fine, coming up for his meals regularly. I wondered if the cat ate the old man's concoctions—cats are smart.
Eddie was getting red from the sun and I stared at the ugly scar that looked like twisted burnt skin on his left shoulder, and the small scar farther down his back—where the bullet had come out. The slug had done something to one lung—exactly what I never knew—but he wasn't able to do any heavy work, received a full pension from the government. He rolled over on his back, dug his toes into the sand and laughed. “This is the life, sun and the sea air and no sweaty clothes on. I feel as if no other world existed but this beach and the pretty girls in their brief suits. My headache is gone, too.”
“Something wrong?”
; “My head's been throbbing... for the last few months.”
“Sounds like a cold, or one of these new X sicknesses. Been to a doctor?”
“Sure, he said it was mental, that I worry too much. George, has the world gone mad, or is it merely me? My God, I read the headlines, listen to the news over the radio, and my head becomes full of pain. And on rainy days when I can feel my wound and I hear this war talk... another war and my wound isn't properly healed yet. It doesn't make sense.”
“Far back as I can remember, there's always been some sort of war talk. Hell, we can't let Russia, or anybody else, walk over us.”
“Nuts,” Eddie said. “We ought to learn by this time that war never settles anything. But it seems nobody learns, all they do is forget. Look how the vets forget the things promised them. Mention the Four Freedoms now and it sounds like double talk. Ah, headache starting again.”
“Maybe the sun's too strong for you? Had your eyes examined recently?”
Eddie turned over so he faced me. “Funny, that's exactly what the doctor asked. He was a fellow from my old outfit. He gave me a thorough check-up. Said to forget the world and the headlines for a while.”
“That's good advice?”
“Good? It's impossible! We never worry about cars but we keep our eyes open when we cross the street. How can we shut our eyes when it seems the world is going out of its way to get knocked down by a tank.” He dug up a little mound of sand with his fingers, made a tunnel through it with a finger and the mound collapsed. “George, how do you plan, think of anything decent, when such blundering headlines leave you in a cold sweat?”
“You take it too seriously,” I told him. “Doc find anything wrong with you?”
“Said I was suffering from some sort of nervous tension, something like combat fatigue. Odd thing was, he didn't realize he's a victim too, for he said it with a straight face, as though one could and did live in a vacuum. That's what this war of nerves, this strain in the air, has done to him—a fellow who was calm and crafty on the battlefront, now he walks around with his eyes shut. I really blew my top when he told me, Eddie, what are you worrying about? Suppose war does come—you're exempt with your wound.' Jesus, I felt as though my head was coming apart. A fellow I once respected talking like that. George, we've all gone off the beam.”
“Well he was right,” I said, feeling in the mood for an argument. “I don't pay much attention to the saber rattling because I'm over age. Now if I was younger—I'd worry plenty.”
He sat up. “You really mean that. This selfishness, this sickness, has infected you too.”
“Let me tell you the facts of life—we translate the law of self-preservation into... be selfish, take care of old number one. It's the way of our world, and don't shut your eyes to that.”
“Sure, if the world ran smoothly, if everybody had enough food, security, I'd say leave me alone, I'd say being selfish works. But we live in the midst of needless misery and want, and that's wrong... unnecessary!”
I smiled. “Be careful, you're talking like a Communist. The sand is probably crawling with the FBI.'
“Another symptom of our sickness—name calling. I don't give a damn if I'm called Red, Blue, or Black—I've seen suffering, horrible stupid suffering, and I can't live with it. Couldn't live with myself if I did. Maybe you can. You've never seen it and you're... you're...”
“I'm smug and comfortable,” I added. “Another fact: your Commie friends say a man's thinking is determined by his pocketbook. Very true. I'm comfortable, my status quo is fine. And the corollary: Communism doesn't scare me, under it I'd probably live much the same as I do now. I have no capital to lose. For all I know, Communism may be the next logical step in our industrial development. Back in the feudal days, the industrialists were looked upon as the dangerous wide-eyed radicals. As Joe says, everything is transit. But I'm not going to get myself in an uproar over Communism, or capitalism. Why do you?”
“Why do I what?”
I shrugged. “Stop it, Eddie. Why are you set to change the world single-handed? Your pension is about thirty bucks a week, you need only another year to finish your accounting, and you can take it under the GI Bill for free. You and Flo are the only kids. When your folks die, you'll come into a few thousand, and from Flo you'll inherit the house, and whatever she has socked away—which must be plenty. That's the future—but in the present, once you've graduated college, you could work a few hours a day, and with your pension, live very comfortably. Sounds a little hardboiled, but then I consider myself a realist, and facts are hard.”
“You're merely salving your conscience, rationalizing.”
“Could be. Aren't you doing the same with your weeping for poor humanity?”
“George, I can't stand by. Here's a little war yarn I never told you. You remember me before the war, an eager beaver at school, had a lot of the push that drives Flo. I was like that up till April 20, 1945. We liberated Auschwitz that day. It was sickening work, but easy in a way—little chance of running into a bullet. And there were the sick and the dying, the bloated stomachs of the starving—all that you probably saw in the newsreels. Outside the camp—the Nazis were getting ready to ship them someplace I suppose, we came upon a flat car piled with bodies, all looking like horrible skeletons in their ragged stripped uniforms. Skull heads, arms and legs covered with tight skin, caved-in cheeks, staring eyes. They were lying out in the cold like a stack of neatly piled wood... all dead. And then one of these skeletons raised himself. Somehow he was still alive. He looked at me, this pale dead-man, and all he did was smile... and die. The bodies didn't mean much to me till then. Why I damn near went crazy at the thought that here was a fellow like myself, starved of everything, even the ordinary kindness we never think about... and he gave me all he had left, a smile. I see that smile sometimes in my nightmares—the pathetic smile, as if he was forgiving me for all the craziness we've made in the world. Or maybe he was greeting me as another human. You talk about selfish; all right, I'm selfish as I can be... I don't want that to ever happen to another human on the face of this world... because that human might be me!”
“They say they have camps like that in Russia,” I said, enjoying baiting him—it was an easy lazy way of passing the time.
He looked at me with sad eyes. “You're like a witch doctor with magic words. Today when something goes wrong, we say the magic word—Russia. They say, they say... this I saw! If they have torture like that in the Soviet Union, then I'll fight them. Only so far I don't believe it because they haven't any reason for concentration camps. You yourself said you have nothing to lose under socialism and you're better off then...”
“Relax, Eddie, we're only batting the breeze. Flo tells me you live in a flea-bag room, spend all your time at meetings and picketing. Why don't you go back to school, reach a stage of personal comfort, then work for the good of others? Since we agree this is a selfish world.”
“George, you talk like a man from another world. How could I sit in a classroom, think of debits and credits, the hollow things, when I feel fascism in the air, see them getting set for more flatcars of humans shorn of everything, even a smile? Why I'd...” He set up, held his head in his hands. “Damn headache has returned again.”
I sat up. “My fault, I was egging you on. Let's forget talk. We'll take a swim to cool off, then go fishing. Blowfishes are the most amazing and stupidest creatures in the world. Even beat us humans.”
We didn't go in for any more heavy talk, fished and swam for the rest of the week, had a swell time. And then on the Friday before my week was up, I received a special delivery from Flo. There were two newspaper clippings in the envelope, nothing else. One was dated the same day, that Friday, and was merely a death notice, cold, impersonal, that read:
CONROY,—HENRY, beloved brother of Marion.
Services at Universal Chapel, 10 a.m.
Service private.
The other clipping bore a Wednesday dateline. It was a half column story about H
ank falling out of a window of his fifth story apartment, as he was standing on a ladder, hanging some curtains. It said Hank must have lost his balance, crashed through the partly open window to his death. His wife, Lee Conroy, was using the basement washing machine at the time of the accident...
I put the clippings down and was full of strange thoughts. First (and quickly) a wild thought that I now had seven thousand dollars... if I wanted to keep the money. Then vague puzzled thoughts: What an odd way for poor Hank to the... he was always so careful. Why wasn't he being buried from a church? Why no mention of his wife in the obituary notice? And above all, why the rush to bury him?
These were tiny thoughts, the big one was the tempting idea that nobody knew I had Hank's money. It was a hideous thought, well mixed with my sincere sorrow over Hank's death... yet there wasn't any point in denying—especially to myself—that it was very much in my mind.
