Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

  And as far as the gambling part of it was concerned, I suppose I was suited for that, too. I had played cards a few times without getting caught up in it, and I couldn’t imagine ever risking anything important on whether two pair was the best hand at the table or what number would come up on the next roll of dice. And why anyone would drop a perfectly good quarter in a slot machine was beyond me.

  Now it seems to me that the one thing you wouldn’t want to be if you ran a gambling operation is a gambler. It was like a blackout alcoholic owning a liquor store, or a sex maniac running a whorehouse. You would just eat up all the profits. And at the time I was kind of interested in gambling in a spectator-type way. I mean, as long as it’s not my money, the excitement’s fine.

  I would be rich, and I would be comfortable with what I was doing, and I would be good at it. The whole thing would be officially illegal, but there are laws and laws. And even if Sheriff Tyles stopped being sheriff sooner or later, by then I would be one of the important men in Bordentown. It doesn’t take all that much to be one of the important men in Bordentown, it’s not like being President of the United States. I would be important.

  I kept just playing all of this through my mind. It was like Lucille had said, a television set in your head that you can’t turn off.

  The thing was, I liked the program.

  Of course thinking about all this made me think about Lucille, too, because she was part of it. Until I talked with Geraldine (or listened to her, because she was the one who did all the talking) I took it for granted that I was going to leave Bordentown sooner or later. I was in no rush, and I had more or less forgotten all that business about Miami, until the Sheriff reminded me, but I would be leaving sooner or later.

  And, although I didn’t like to dwell on it, when I left Bordentown I would also be leaving Lucille.

  Oh, once in a while I would play around with the thought of taking her with me. But I don’t think I ever gave that any serious consideration. In Bordentown, for an hour a day five days a week, she was perfect. In the rest of the world, and on a full-time basis, she just wouldn’t work out. (Maybe that line makes me sound like a shit, but it’s honest. She wouldn’t work out for me and I wouldn’t work out for her and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.)

  But if I stayed in Bordentown, that meant I would eventually marry Lucille.

  In that kind of situation, she would be perfect, actually. It was her home town and she belonged there. The idea of the preacher’s daughter marrying the keeper of the cathouse sounds pretty ridiculous, but I can’t think of anybody who would have gotten really uptight about it. Except maybe her father, but who was going to tell him? And why should he pay attention?

  It would be perfect for Lucille, and in that situation she would be the perfect wife for me. And what I always wanted was a job with a future and a girl who loved to have me make love to her. Which meant I would be getting everything I always wanted.

  That was the whole trouble.

  I once read a book by Fredric Brown called The Screaming Mimi. (I also read about twenty other books by Fredric Brown, and there wasn’t one I didn’t like. I like lots of books, but I don’t always finish one feeling that I’d really like to meet the author sometime. I always feel that way about Fredric Brown.)

  Anyway, this book starts with two drunks sitting on a bench, and one of them says that you can always have what you want as long as you want it badly enough. (The catch is that, when you don’t get it, that just goes to show that you didn’t want it badly enough.) The other guy sees a beautiful girl pass by and says that what he really wants is to spend a night with her, and for her to be stark naked.

  Well, this happens at the end, only it isn’t quite the way he hoped. (I don’t want to spoil the book for you.) But the ultimate point, the philosophical point, is that if you want something badly enough you will get it, sooner or later, and then you’ll find out that you don’t want it anymore, and maybe you never really wanted it in the first place.

  So this is what kept going through my mind, not steadily but off and on. It was all there, and all I had to do was reach out and take it.

  But did I still want it?

  I liked Bordentown, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to live there permanently. I mean, I like swimming, but I’d hate to spend the next fifty years in the middle of the ocean. And more important, there was this major question of identity that was suddenly bothering me. I liked the idea of running the Lighthouse and putting down roots there and all, but I wasn’t convinced that it was me.

  Oh, even the way I was talking, the South Carolina accent. I wasn’t consciously putting it on. I talked that way without thinking because everybody else talked that way and I tend to fall into the patterns of wherever I am. But if you woke me up in the middle of the night I wouldn’t sound that way. So it felt natural when I did it but it really wasn’t, not inside.

  And the attitudes I had. Like being against long-haired hippies and black people and Yankees and everything else. It didn’t particularly bother me to act that way, or to use the word nigger, for example, because as far as I was concerned it was just part of doing the Bordentown thing for as long as I happened to be there.

  But if I was there forever I would be doing all of that business forever, and when you do something long enough either it becomes real for you, which might be bad, or else you spend your whole life living a lie, which might be worse.

  If I stayed in Bordentown, it meant I would probably never in my life rap with anybody the way I had rapped with some friends in the East Village, the way I rapped with Hallie the one night I spent with her. I might make a lot of friends, and I might get to know them very well, but they would never really get to know me.

  Even Lucille. I could marry her and live with her for the rest of my life, and she would never really know who I was. Even if I didn’t try to keep anything from her, even if I opened up completely. There was no way for me to get through to her that completely.

  And sooner or later that part of me that no one knew about wouldn’t even be there any more. Because I would be the only one who knew about it, and I would tend to forget.

  This scared the hell out of me.

  The trouble with writing all this down is that there’s no real way to get across exactly how I felt from day to day. See, it was never a constant thing. It was a seesaw, really. I would feel very strongly one way on one day, and the next day I would feel very strongly the other way. And after a little while of this I would be aware of the pattern myself, I would know while I was feeling like staying in Bordentown that the next day I would feel like running for my life. When you get like that it’s really terrible because you’re afraid to trust yourself. You don’t dare make a decision because you know that whatever you decide will seem like the wrong choice in a day or two.

  If I left, that was the end of it. I could never come back, and I would probably never have a chance like this for the rest of my life. And if I stayed I would gradually get in deeper and deeper, and we would expand the Lighthouse, and I would marry Lucille, and by the time I realized I should have left, I would be too tied down and it would be too late, and I would spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t get out while I had the chance.

  What I wanted to do was keep my options open as long as possible, but you can’t, really, not for very long.

  Lucille helped keep me sane, or as close to sane as I was. My moods kept switching and she was vaguely aware of this but she had her own moods to contend with. And no matter what mood either of us was in, those lunch hours in her bedroom helped. I always wanted to make love to her, and she always wanted me to, and it always worked. Sex isn’t the only thing in the world, despite what you might read in The Swinging Swappers. But when it’s good it can do a lot to take your mind off the other things.

  Until finally one afternoon I got so groovily lost in her warm body, so completely out of myself and away from myself, that when the world settled together again all I could think of was
how much I owed her. Not what I felt for her, or what future I wanted with her or without her, but how much I owed her.

  I wanted to give her something, and it seemed to me that I wasn’t giving her enough. I wasn’t even sharing thoughts with her, and I couldn’t do that, not yet, but there was one thing I could give her, one phrase I had been holding back all along for no good reason at all. There were words I could say that she had been waiting to hear, and I could say them whether they were true or not.

  I turned and looked into her eyes, and she looked back into mine. And I said the three words she had been waiting so long to hear:

  “I love you.”

  And she looked back at me, drinking the words, her eyes widening as she heard them. And she opened her mouth hesitantly, and I heard the echo of my own words in my head and waited for her to speak.

  And she said three words back to me:

  ELEVEN

  “CHIP, I’M PREGNANT.”

  TWELVE

  “GERALDINE? THERE WAS THIS THING I was sort of wondering about.”

  “What we talked about awhile ago? I thought you might have been thinking about it.”

  “Well, I was sort of doing some heavy thinking about the business. And then this one little point got stuck in my head, and I thought I would just ask.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Well, I was sort of wondering what you would do if one of the girls, if Rita or Claureen, if one of them got pregnant.”

  “I’d be powerfully surprised,” she said. “Rita’s step-aunt did a knitting needle abortion on her when she was fourteen, and they had to take out some of the parts you need if you want to have a baby. And Claureen had to go to the hospital for a scraping a year and a half ago and while he was in there the doc tied off her tubes.”

  “Well, Jo Lee or Marguerite, then. I mean, you know, any girl who happened to work here.”

  “Just any girl.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any girl at all.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Like Lucille Lathrop, even.”

  “—”

  “Chip, I’m an old woman. I’ve been years in the same business and seen every kind of man there is to see, and I can tell whether a man’s getting it or not, or if he’s the kind of man who wants it or not. And I know you’re getting it, and getting it regular, and I know you like what you’re getting. And you’re not getting it here where it’s all over the place for the taking, and you’re not out catting around, so where else would you be getting it?”

  “You’ve known all along?”

  “Took it for granted.”

  “Does anyone else—”

  “Claude Tyles asked what you were doing for love, and I imagine I led him to think you were alternating between Rita and Claureen. When did you find out she was pregnant?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “How long gone is she?”

  “Almost two months.”

  “She’s sure about it?”

  “She seems to be.”

  “Instead of stealing rubbers from around here, you should have told me and I would have gotten pills for her. You can’t count on rubbers, don’t you know that? Well, that’s under the bridge. What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Marry the girl? Have an abortion? What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She did something odd. She put her hand on top of mine for a minute, then gave a squeeze and took her own hand back.

  She said, “Chip, if she just told you today then you’re in a bad way. You sure she didn’t tell you a week ago?”

  “No. Why?”

  “You didn’t suspect until today?”

  “Never.”

  “Because you’ve been walking round in grand confusion for better than a week, and if it’s not that it’s something else, and now with this on top of it you must be in a bad way.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Chip, I’m too old to get shocked or disappointed or anything but older, and I can’t even get that too much. I’m not much for questions. But you got something that you got to tell to somebody, and I guess I can do a better job of listening than most. You can just put it straight out and not stop first to think how it’ll sound.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Or you can tell me to forget it and I will. I’m good at forgetting. I can forget just about anything.”

  “No,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out where to start.”

  The words were all there waiting, and once I opened the valve they poured out. A couple of times she filled in with a question but she didn’t have to do that very often. I just went ahead and talked until there were no words left. I probably said the same thing half a dozen times in different ways. If I repeated myself, she pretended not to notice. She sat there and took it all in until I was done.

  Then she went to the bar and came back with a water glass full of something. She handed it to me and I looked at it.

  “Just plain corn,” she said. For a minute I thought she was referring to what I had said. “Corn whiskey,” she said. “Drink it.”

  “The whole thing? It’ll kill me.”

  “The state you’re in, it would take a quart before you’d feel a thing. All this’ll do is settle you some. Go ahead and drink it.”

  I finished it in three gulps. It went down like fire. I guess it settled me some.

  “Now I’ll tell you a story, Chip. Story about a girl like Rita or Claureen, just a down-home girl who wasn’t much and wound up going with men for money. Her pa ran off when she wasn’t more than a bit of a girl and all she ever had from him was a postcard once in a while. Maybe she built him up a little in her mind but not all that much. Then one day after she’s been hustling for a time she hears from one of her aunts that got a telegram from Norfolk. My . . . this girl’s father was in a fight in a waterfront bar and some sailor broke a bottle over his head and he’s in the hospital with his skull fractured.

  “So this girl goes to Norfolk to see her pa, and he’s in a hospital there. She visits him but he’s in a coma, and after a week he dies without ever coming out of it. And she makes arrangements to ship the body back here to be buried next to my mother.

  “Now while this girl was in Norfolk . . . that’s two slips so far, I suspect you could put a name to this girl if you were pressed, couldn’t you? Doesn’t matter. This girl, while she’s in Norfolk, she meets this man and one thing leads to another. This man is in naval stores in Baltimore. A good family. He wants her to marry him and come on back to Baltimore.

  “And it’s like a dream to her. This man, he’s rich, and he’s a good man, and he wants her to marry him. But she thinks, Now, how can I marry up with him when I’ve got all this in my past? And what if he finds out?

  “So she decides to tell him, and she tells him. And he says what does he care, because that’s something that happened in South Carolina and what does it have to do with Baltimore, and as far as he’s concerned it never happened at all, and it doesn’t bother him one bit, and if it bothers her then she’s a fool, and he knows she’s not a fool.

  “And she thinks, well, it’ll bother him in the years to come. But if it ever does she never knows about it, he never once throws it back to her, as it turns out.

  “So she goes to Baltimore, and they’re married, and there were all these things she was afraid of, how his family would take to her and what his friends would think, and none of the things she worries about ever come to pass. She thinks maybe she’ll meet someone from her past and it’ll ruin everything, but none of this ever happens. There are all of these things she worries about and it turns out she needn’t have worried about any of them, because none of them ever come to pass.

  “And she’s an intelligent girl, Chip. She has a good mind. She always educated herself and paid some mind to how people talked, and she goes on doing this in Baltimore, and his family and friends like her. They accept her completely. Compl
etely. They never even think he married beneath him because they get to thinking that she comes from quality people down in South Carolina.

  “She’s there for three years, and in that space of time she sees that the things that worried her are nothing at all. And she has a child. A little boy.”

  She stopped talking and her eyes were focused into the distance at a point somewhere over my shoulder. Whatever she was looking at was in some other room.

  “And one day she said I’m not me no more. And she put a few weeks into thinking on that, and one morning she left the baby with the maid and took a taxi downtown to the railroad station. She wouldn’t look out that train window for fear she might get off at the next stop. She just sat there, this fine lady in these expensive clothes, and she stared straight ahead and didn’t see a thing.

  “She never looked back, ever.

  “Whether they looked for her or not she never knew. She left him a note saying she was running off with another man. She figured if you want to hurt somebody you do it quick and clean, and if you want to do one thing decent it’s to have the guts to make people hate you if it’ll be easier for them that way. Because the hate won’t reach you because you’ll be out of it, and if it’ll sear another person’s wounds . . .”

  She was silent for a long time, but I didn’t say anything because I knew she hadn’t finished.

  Then she said, “Of course, she wasn’t the same girl who went off to Norfolk three years earlier. She saw things in a way she never would have seen them before. She knew how to talk like a lady. She knew manners. But she could let them slide off and nobody knew the difference. Except for what she knew of herself.

  “She was lonely, but she would have been that anywhere. She was where she deep-down belonged, whether it was better or worse for her to belong there. She never regretted it. She would be sad sometimes, and she would wonder what happened to that man in Baltimore, and to that baby. . . .”