Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

  In another voice she said, “Somewhere along the way it gets determined just what a person is, and for the rest of his life he’s stuck with it. Whoever else he may try to be is just play-acting. I guess you know you’ll have to go, Chip.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess you knew it all along.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “Once you got to do something, there’s nothing but to do it. Tonight is better than tomorrow. You’ll take my car.”

  “I can’t—”

  “It’s no use to me. I haven’t driven it myself in ten years. It’s almost as old as you are. I don’t guess it has as many miles on it, though. You can drive, can’t you?”

  “I have a license. I’ve used the Reverend’s car a couple of times on errands.”

  ‘This has a stick shift. You know how to work it?”

  “In a sort of academic way.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it. I’ll make the registration over to you. Oh, now, it’s not so much. A 1954 Cadillac, what would I get selling it? Not even an antique yet. That star of yours will guarantee against a ticket anywhere in the state, and by then you’ll be comfortable driving it. I let the girls use it. It runs all right. It’s still a Cadillac. Always will be, old as it gets.”

  I said, “Lucille.”

  “You want to take her along?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She would go.”

  “I know. I keep feeling I ought to take her.”

  “You could take her with you. But she’d never really be with you. No more than you could stay here. Listen to me. You can hurt her now quickly or spend fifty years killing her by halves. Because whether you stay here or take her with you one thing is sure, and that’s that she will never complete you. And you would never tell her that but she would always know, and never know why.”

  I swallowed.

  “The Sheriff will get a report and he’ll tell her about it. You had an accident on a road out of town. You were driving my car, and you were in a wreck and were killed, and the body was shipped north for burial with your parents.”

  “The Sheriff—”

  “Claude will tell her that. He’ll get that report.”

  “How?”

  “From me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Claude Tyles knows all a man has to know about who you have to be whether you want to or not. Sometimes what you have to do is stay. Not in a place, necessarily, but with a person. He had to, and he did, and he knows. For my part, I’ll see she gets the baby taken care of. Whichever she wants, having it and then getting shut of it or just getting shut of it. If she’s even pregnant in the first place, which we’re none of us sure of. Chip?”

  “What?”

  “You can feel as guilty as you want to, but all it is is foolishness. What the two of you had was good for the two of you. Nobody can ask more than that. It’s no kindness to take something good and keep it going when it’s no good no more. She had a beautiful young romance and her lover died. Why, you’ll be more in her memory than you ever could have been in her life.”

  She gave me a couple old suitcases of hers. I packed everything and put the suitcases in the trunk. I went back to say goodbye to her and she looked as though she wished I hadn’t.

  “You send me a card from time to time. Just so I’ll have an idea of where you’re at. No need to sign it or the snoops at the Post Office’ll have something to talk about. I don’t get that much mail,” she said. “I guess I’ll know who it’s from.”

  THIRTEEN

  THERE WAS A STRETCH OF TIME THEN when nothing happened you would want to read about. I didn’t do much but drive, and I didn’t work too hard at that, either. I would push the old Cadillac until I came to a town that looked decent enough and pick out one of the large Victorian houses with a sign in front that said TOURISTS OR ROOMS or something of the sort. They would generally be run by a widow living alone, or two old maids, or a widow and her old maid sister, and the rooms were clean and comfortable and only cost two or three dollars a night, which was less than half what the cheapest motel would charge. Sometimes they included breakfast, or sold it to you for something ridiculous like fifty cents.

  I stayed in so many of those places I have trouble remembering which was which. They were all the same in so many ways. There would always be a small portable television set, and it would be the only piece of furniture in the house that was less than thirty years old. There was usually a spinet piano in the parlor that no one had played in almost that long, and if I stayed more than a night the woman would ask wistfully if I played the piano, and would be sad to hear that I didn’t.

  “No one ever does,” she would say. “I suppose I ought to sell it for all the use it is, but I cannot bear to, Mr. Harrison. I just cannot bear to sell that piano.”

  If they all sell them all at once, the market for second-hand pianos is going to collapse overnight.

  There were always framed photographs on the piano, and on the carved sideboard in the hallway. You could tell the frames were silver because they were usually slightly tarnished. And there was generally a vase of cut flowers on the sideboard next to the photographs, and there were potted plants all over the place. The plants were usually green and healthy.

  Sometimes there would be a cat or a dog. More cats than dogs, all in all. The cats tended to keep to themselves. The dogs tended to be very small, and bark a lot, primarily at me.

  I couldn’t tell you just how many houses like this I stayed in, or how much time I spent this way. I wasn’t very much involved in time, for some reason. I would be very conscious of the time of day because as soon as it was nine or ten at night I could go to bed and not think about anything until it was time to get up the next morning. But I didn’t bother with days of the week, or what month it was, or that sort of thing. I didn’t read newspapers or look at television. I knew there was a whole world out there but I didn’t want to think about it. I had a bath every night and put on clean clothes every morning and when my clean clothes began to run short I did a load of wash in my current landlady’s washing machine. Some of them didn’t have washing machines of their own but knew a neighbor who would let me use theirs.

  Sometimes I stayed one night and then left, I particularly if there was a yipping dog in the house, or if there were other boarders. If I felt like staying, I would have a look around the house for something that needed fixing. Usually I didn’t have to look very hard because the woman would apologize for whatever it is.

  “You’ll have to forgive the appearance of that room because it needs repapering, Mr. Harrison” . . . “The boy who used to do my yard work was drafted into the Army last month, Mr. Harrison, and I just can’t keep up with my rose beds” . . . “I don’t know how this house can go another year without painting, Mr. Harrison, but I had a man out to give me an estimate and, land, the price he asked!”

  I changed a lot of faucet washers and replaced a lot of broken panes of glass. I cleaned out some basements and mowed and reseeded lawns and trimmed shrubbery and hauled trash. I patched plaster, which wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and I put up wallpaper, which was. In Columbia, Missouri, I painted a whole house without falling off the ladder once. I guess that summer of apple-picking was valuable.

  That was for the woman who hadn’t known how the house could go another year without painting. She told me this at breakfast, and it was a breakfast that came free with my three-dollar room rent, and it was such a good breakfast and such a clean comfortable house that I figured I wouldn’t mind spending another week or two there.

  So I said, “Well, I could paint it for you.”

  “But I couldn’t afford it. The size of this house, and he wanted nine hundred dollars.”

  “If you’ll pay for the paint and brushes, and find out where I can borrow a ladder, I’ll do it for five dollars a day and my keep.”

  “Why, I just can’t believe that, Mr. Harrison! How can you afford to do that?”

>   “Well,” I said, “I don’t have all that much else to do, actually.”

  It was really very satisfying doing things like that. With that house, I saw that she bought the best paint, and I took my time and did a good job. At the beginning I’m sure she was scared to death I would fall off the ladder and kill myself. The same thing had occurred to me. But I didn’t, and the house got painted, and I slept ten hours a night in my room and ate three good meals a day, and when I washed out my brush for the last time she paid me fifty dollars and couldn’t believe that was all it was going to cost her.

  “It looks so fine now,” she said, walking around the house and admiring it from every angle. “It hasn’t looked so fine since he was alive. You don’t know what it’s been like, Mr. Harrison, thinking I would never live to see it looking right again.”

  It made me feel good to leave a place in better shape than I found it. Sometimes I felt like Johnny Appleseed and other times like the Lone Ranger.

  And I needed that kind of feeling, because if I let myself think about other things, about Bordentown things, I didn’t feel like Johnny or Lone. I just felt like a son of a bitch.

  That first night, driving the Cadillac generally north and generally east, I was too numb to feel much of anything at all. It was a good thing Geraldine sent me away right off. If I had had a night to sleep on it God only knows what I would have done, but I was on the road before I knew exactly what was happening and there was never a point where I could turn back.

  I kept wanting to for the longest time. But that was the one thing I knew I couldn’t do. I just couldn’t go back there again.

  The car was a good one, old as it was, and plain driving was a good way to get away from yourself while getting away from Bordentown. I hadn’t realized they made Cadillacs with stick shifts, even back in 1954. I don’t suppose they made very many of them. The ones they made, they did a good job with. I got the hang of shifting pretty quickly, and after that there was nothing to do but drive.

  What I would think about while I was driving, well, the hell with all that. Nothing very brilliant, I don’t guess.

  I stayed at a motel the first night, and didn’t sleep much. It wasn’t exactly the Hilton. It was what I think they call a hot-pillow joint, and the room next door to mine was one of the ones they would rent out by the hour. If the walls had been any thinner they would have been transparent. All night long the bedsprings squeaked and groaned, and all night long different men and women told each other they loved each other, and they were all of them lying in their teeth. I don’t suppose I would have slept much anyway, but this didn’t help.

  After that, though, it got easier. One thing the widows’ houses didn’t have was bedsprings wailing all night long. And I also learned that sleep was a great way to get through time without going crazy. I got so I could fall asleep right away, pulling the sleep over my head like a blanket, and I’d be good for ten hours, sometimes more. I never used to sleep that way before and never have since, just burrowing into sleep and sort of using it.

  Every day Bordentown was a few miles further south and east and one day deeper in the past. You just let the past slip away from you and one day you turn around and it’s out of sight.

  It’s that simple, and that hard.

  I wrote three letters, one to Sheriff Tyles, one to Geraldine, one to Lucille. This was just a game I was playing with myself because I knew I didn’t intend to mail the letters. What was interesting was that the one to Geraldine was the hardest to write. I would have thought it would be the other way around. I tore them all up when I was done, and tore the pieces into smaller pieces, as if the FBI might come around and try to put the stupid letters back together again like jigsaw puzzles.

  I also wrote a letter to Hallie telling her about the whole business in Bordentown. I actually expected to mail that letter when I was done with it, and I took a lot of time trying to get it just right, and of course when it was through I tore it up, too.

  I did send Geraldine a postcard. I sent her a couple of them at different times. I could never once think of anything to write, so I would leave the message part blank or else just run the address across the whole length of the card. Miss Geraldine Simms, The Lighthouse, Bordentown, South Carolina. And the zip code, which I don’t remember, but I knew it at the time.

  A lot of the time when I was driving there would be hitchhikers on the road, guys alone or two of them together or sometimes a guy and a girl. Back when I did a lot of hitching I would always promise myself that if I ever had a car I would never pass up a hitchhiker. And the people who gave me rides generally mentioned that they had thumbed their way around when they were younger, and that was why they felt they had to stop for me in return, even though they knew that it was supposed to be a dangerous thing to do.

  Now I had a car, a big car with nothing but room in it, and there were all these people on the road, I never went a day without seeing a dozen of them, and I never once stopped. There were soldiers in uniform and hippies and straight-looking kids and older people, everything, and I passed them all up. Not because it was dangerous to stop, although I guess it is, but because I just didn’t want to talk to anybody.

  It was a funny stretch of time. I guess I wouldn’t want to go through it again.

  FOURTEEN

  I HAD TO WRITE THE LAST CHAPTER twice. The first time I did it, I put in a six-page scene that never happened. It was the first night after I left Bordentown, when I stayed in the motel with cardboard walls. The way I wrote it the first time, there was this long scene where I listened to a couple through the wall, and the guy finished before the girl was satisfied, and he just left her there, and she was storming around the room throwing things and crying. So then I went next door and brought her back to my own room and took her to bed, and afterward she was sleeping and I heard the same thing happen again in the room next door, except this time the guy was drunk and passed out before he could do anything. Whereupon the heroic Chip Harrison went next door and found the second girl, and she was also ready to walk up the wall and across the ceiling, and good old Chipperoo brought her back, too, and balled her in the bed while the first girl was still sleeping, and then the first girl woke up, and the three of us had this wild orgy with everybody doing everything to everybody else all at once.

  I filled up six pages with that crap. It was a pretty good scene, actually, and I think it would have been pretty erotic.

  But I thought about it and tore it all up and did it over the way it really happened.

  So I wrote that scene, and it didn’t bother me while I was writing it. In fact while I was typing it all out I could actually believe it really happened. Sometimes it’s a little frightening the way your imagination will take a lie and make it almost true.

  Then why did I tear it up? I could say it was because I didn’t want to put any lies in this book, but that’s not it because there are already a couple of lies in it that I’m leaving in. Just small lies, but that doesn’t make them true. The real reason, I think, is that putting in a scene like that would just make a lie out of everything that happened in Bordentown and lot of what went on afterward. Because that scene I wrote could never have happened. If the beginning of it happened, and if a guy did leave a girl there all unsatisfied, I never would have gone next door. Not the way I felt. If anything I would have just left the motel and gotten back in the car and kept on driving. And if I tried to do anything with a girl just then, if somehow I really did make an effort, I’m sure I couldn’t have managed to accomplish it.

  I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco, but for a while there I guess I left my balls in Bordentown.

  FIFTEEN

  I GUESS I KNEW ALL ALONG I WAS ON my way to Wisconsin. In fact the first night out I tried to figure out just how long it would take me to drive there if I drove sixteen hours a day and slept eight. (If I had tried it, I think I would have killed that Cadillac in a matter of days. It was good for another fifteen years if you didn’t push it more th
an fifty or a hundred miles at a stretch, but it tended to burn oil when it overheated and I would have thrown a rod or burned out a bearing sooner or later.)

  But the thing is that I wanted to be going to Wisconsin but I didn’t want to get there. I wanted to see Hallie. I always wanted to see Hallie, ever since that one night in September when she came to my room over the barber shop. The next morning she went to Madison to start college, and ever since then I had been not quite going there to see her.

  Because if I went there, and if it turned out that there was nothing there for me, then what would I do? I wouldn’t have Hallie to send postcards to, or to write letters to and not mail. Or to think about the way knights used to think about the Holy Grail.

  Once I was out of Bordentown I really didn’t want to see anybody right away, Hallie included. I knew that there had to be some time in between Bordentown and whatever was going to come after it. I don’t mean that I spelled all of this out in my mind, but when I think back on it I can see it was something I must have known.

  So I took my time, and took down a lot of storm windows and put up a lot of screens, and touched up woodwork and repaired furniture. And before long it was June and the colleges were out for the summer, so there was no point in rushing up there because she would be away on summer vacation.

  Of course I knew where she lived, in the same town where I originally met her, a little town on the Hudson between New York and Albany. It stood to reason that she would go home for the summer, and I suppose I could have gone to see her there, but the way I looked at it was that I was already out in the Midwest and it would make more sense to stay there and see her in Wisconsin when the fall term started.

  Which meant that all I had to do was kill a couple of months. I didn’t even have to pretend I was on the way to Wisconsin. All I had to do was kill time, and I was getting pretty good at that.

  I think some of the pressure came off about the time that the school year ended in Wisconsin. I don’t know that one thing had much to do with the other. Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, but within a week after the end of the semester, I did something I hadn’t done since I left Bordentown.