by John Dunning
They were survivors, though. Whenever something threatened the house, a miracle seemed to happen: Holly would get work downtown, money would come from her father—something would happen so she could get up the mortgage. A few times her father had come home. He looked around Sadler and talked of how things were getting better: how maybe in another year or two he could come home for good. But he never did.
Her mother died in 1937. Carnahan arrived too late for the funeral. He hung around for a week, stayed away from old friends, and left again when he saw that Holly could take care of herself. But she always got her penny postcard. It came every Monday, year in and year out.
Tom had met her on a train: her first trip east, to visit her father in New York. She was twenty-two then, in the summer of 1938. Jack had never known anyone that young who bristled with intelligence and wit and had the manners to go with it. But she never showed off: he loved that about her from the start. She dismissed her abilities as trivial and counted her understanding of the world as her father’s accomplishment. “That’s my dad talking,” she would say. “He made sure I knew what to read, from the time I was able to crawl down from the high chair.”
She didn’t know where life was taking her. She had always wanted to sing with a big band but the only singing she’d ever done was in the Sadler Presbyterian Church. Her voice was full at fifteen, and sometimes she thought she could lift the roof off that little wooden building with nothing more than the power in her lungs.
“So that’s me,” she said, blushing slightly. “What about you?”
Dulaney was born in Charleston, and he too was formed by his father. For years Jack’s father had lived in sin with Tom’s mother, Megan Rooney, and the boys were raised as brothers. Aunt Meg was a lifelong Catholic and could not get a divorce from her old husband, wherever he was.
His schooling ended with his father’s death but his education had never stopped. He read hundreds of books before he was twenty and remembered much of what he had read. He and Tom were big strapping kids and had found work even in the worst years of the depression. In their late teens they went on the road together, working their way across the country and through the cities of the East and Midwest. For a time Jack had bounced drunks in a Manhattan speakeasy. He had walked horses at Belmont and had loaded hundred-pound sacks of cocoa beans on the Brooklyn waterfront. He took up boxing and had once sparred with Jack Sharkey. In one furious round Sharkey had busted his ear and made him disqualify ever after for the military. He had uncorked a powerhouse right and dropped Sharkey flat on his ass, but he didn’t tell her that. It would seem too much like bragging.
His love affair with words continued and he began to write, supporting himself with odd jobs. He and Tom drifted through the Midwest, doing terrible grunt work on an Oklahoma pipeline. There he met a writer, Jim Thompson, and in Oklahoma City, Thompson took him to a few meetings of communists. He didn’t like the politics and soon stopped going. But Thompson liked him, and when Thompson became head of the WPA Federal Writers Project in Oklahoma, he hired Dulaney as a writer at $65 a month. They were putting out a road-by-road guide to the state, and Dulaney’s job was to travel the back roads and write what he saw.
Its lasting impact was what he learned from Thompson. Dulaney had always been a careful, plodding writer. He believed in the powers of the unconscious mind and the importance of dreams, and he was trying to teach himself to meditate immediately after sleep, to call up those hidden visions for his use as a writer before they slipped away forever. The mind worked while the body slept, but Thompson taught him another kind of writing. How to get it said fast, because if you wanted to make a living you had to deal with magazines that paid half a cent a word. You couldn’t be Hemingway at rates like that.
Holly was thrilled that he had written a novel. Alfred A. Knopf had published it in the spring of 1937, billing it as a story of the proletariat. Sales had been nil, but it had a short second life when Senator Bilbo of Mississippi denounced it as dangerously communistic and untruthfully sympathetic to the Negro. But Dulaney had lived it. It was neither untruthful nor pro-communist, and he wore the condemnation of rednecks easily and well.
She had never been to New York and she wanted to see it all. Not the tourist traps: she wanted to see the neighborhoods. She waved off the Statue and the Empire State in favor of a day on the Lower East Side. Walking where people lived and worked was what she liked best: browsing in their shops, listening to accents still mired in Old Europe. She had a nose for finding the city’s most authentic eating places and she would eat anything; she had an iron constitution, she never got sick.
At night she was off to dinner with her father, and Tom made his first shivery confession. “I never felt like this before, Jack. Man, I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.” On Friday and Saturday her dad had to work overtime and Tom took her to a Harlem hot spot. The next night they insisted that Jack come along and the three of them wound up in Yorkville. “I’ve heard it’s like some neighborhood right out of Munich,” she said. “We can get a close-up look at what the Nazis are up to.” Their cabdriver was a beefy Irish pug who lectured as he drove. “This used to be a great neighborhood. All kinds of people before the heinies took it over. There’s still an Irish section on Eightieth between Fifth and Lexington but it’s going to hell south of there. Lots of coloreds on Seventy-ninth, nothing but spics on Ninetieth. But this is what you came for. This is what it is today.”
He turned into Eighty-sixth, awash with Bavarian glitter. “They call this street Hitler’s Broadway.”
She wanted to walk. She was charmed by the European flavor as accordion music followed them down the block: lighthearted polkas from the dance halls and heartrending torch songs from the cabarets. They passed an open-air restaurant with yodeling waiters, doormen decked out in high socks and brief leather pants, suspenders, and Tyrolean hats. The neighborhood rippled with nightlife and almost everything seemed to be open.
“This would be lovely,” Holly said, “if only you could separate it from Hitler.”
They saw Nazi newspapers for sale everywhere. There were Nazi magazine stands, tiny film houses with movies of Nazi content, and in the windows of souvenir shops were brown shirts and swastikas. The young German woman stood in the doorway, smoking a cigarette and smiling blondly as they looked in her window. “Good evening . . . Can I interest you in some flagks from Chermany?”
Holly stepped inside. “I have some lovely things here,” the woman said. “A scarf, perhaps, from Berlin. I just got these last week.”
The scarf was a scenic cloth with subtle black lines separating its panels. But on closer look the lines became hundreds of tiny swastikas. “I was thinking of something more, um, you know, German American,” Holly said, and the German woman looked away and her smile faded to nothing. “You are in the wrong part of town for merchandise like that. Surely you must know where you are.” Holly smiled and said, “Aren’t I in America?” The woman came along behind her, straightening her scarves with exaggerated patience. “You want to go down to Times Square, you’ll find what you want there. Lots of American flagks, maybe even some British. You like the British?”
The woman went away but they could hear her in the back room, talking German on the telephone. Almost at once a group of young men gathered on the sidewalk outside the store. Holly came out and they continued their leisurely stroll with a pack of wolves on their trail. Tom draped an arm over Holly’s shoulder and whistled “The Star-Spangled Banner” in short phrases as they walked. They went into a place called the Konditorei and sat at a table in a corner. The waiter brought them pastries and coffee and was pleasant until the brownshirts gathered in his doorway. “No trouble in here,” he said. “You’ll have to leave now.”
“We’re not done eating yet,” Tom said.
The boys came in. None of them was older than eighteen. They took seats in an intimidating semicircle a few feet away. Their leader spoke: “So. Who are you people?”
Tom lea
ned forward and said, “So, who are you people?”
“We’re the Hitler Youth Movement. We’re here to save America from the Jews.”
“Lucky America. So what do I look like, a Jew?”
The boy pointed at Holly. “She was rude to Frau Hessin. She should go back and apologize.”
“Maybe it’s just a cultural misunderstanding. In this country it’s not polite to point at someone when the lady’s sitting right here in front of you.”
The boy cocked an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Absolutely. This is Miss Carnahan. And if you point your finger at her again I’ll break it off and shove it up your nose. Then you can go see Miss Gretchenweiler and tell her about it yourself.”
“You are insulting. You’d better pay attention. There are six of us here.”
“Seven. I guess they don’t teach you to count that high in the Hitler Youth Movement.”
“So, seven of us. Two of you.”
“Which almost makes it even. Maybe you’d like to call for help.”
The boy flushed red.
“Take your time,” Tom said. “We’ll wait.”
“You think the big man there scares us?”
“He does if you’re smart. He doesn’t talk, he just kills.”
The boy pushed back his chair. “He’s an idiot, he doesn’t scare us. I’d get out of Yorkville if I were you.”
They sauntered out the door and Holly let out a long breath. Tom said, “Finish your strudel stuff,” but she had lost her appetite for it. Now when they walked back up the street faces watched them from storefronts. People looked down from second-story windows and eyes followed them from across the street.
That was Tom. Afraid of nothing, impudent and brash. But he was nervous when he met her father, on her last day in town.
“I don’t think he liked me much,” he told Jack that night. “He was way too polite, and I don’t think I ever got to first base with him.”
She came over to say good-bye and Tom did everything but beg her to stay. “Come live in New York if you love it so much. What the hell are you doing back in that little town?”
She never answered that. She had a job there but it wasn’t important. Her mother was gone, her father hadn’t lived there in years, and she seemed to have no close friendships to hold her there. “She’s got nothing back there,” Tom said in disbelief, after she’d gone. “Can you imagine a great girl like her with no friends at all? And she still won’t give up that half-assed town.”
They wrote each other and in August Tom went to Pennsylvania for a visit. She came east again in the fall and they went club hopping on Fifty-second Street. Jack got a date for himself, a woman he had met a few months earlier. Her name was Bonnie and she was pretty and full of fun. But he couldn’t keep his eyes away from Holly. A dozen times he found himself staring, and when it finally happened that she looked at him, what he saw was what he felt, and he looked away quickly.
Her voice came out of the predawn darkness at Camp Bob Howser, toasting them all that Thanksgiving three years ago. A special toast for her father. “To you, Dad, you wonderful old cuss. You made me think. You made me learn. You gave me hope.”
Carnahan might have been his own father: a man of fifty-something who shared what he knew with reluctance and tact. If Jack had expected a scholar, he was surprised to meet a workingman like himself. A man in dungarees and a flannel shirt, wearing a battered fedora.
That was the beginning of his strange relationship with Carnahan: strange because it largely excluded Holly, who was the reason for it, and Tom, who was Jack’s best friend and Carnahan’s certain son-in-law-to-be. Sometimes on a Saturday he’d meet Carnahan downtown and they’d kill an afternoon prowling through the secondhand-book stores on Fourth Avenue. In the evenings they’d meet in a neighborhood bar, where they’d sit and talk philosophy or their own short brushes with communism. Carnahan too had been to a few meetings in his day. “I was really taken with Marx when I first went out on the road. I was ready to buy the whole package. You see so damned much greed in this country, and the system seems to reward it again and again. But eventually you see the holes in that communistic ideal and you know that’s never gonna work.”
They talked literature and Carnahan read his book. “A damn good and honest work,” he said. In a Brooklyn pool hall he showed Jack how to make a cushion shot. He looked up from his beer and finally, in that quiet but direct way of his, said the unthinkable.
“This thing between Holly and Tom. It’s not right.”
Jack froze over his stick.
“What’s more, you know why it’s not right.”
Jack held up his hands, as if he could push the words away. “I don’t think we should talk like this.”
Carnahan leaned his stick against the wall. “Tom’s always wondering why she won’t move to New York. Listen, Jack, and know the truth. She won’t come here because of you. That child has seen more trouble and heartache than a dozen others her age. She can’t stand thinking that someday she might be the cause of you and Tom falling out.”
“She won’t be.”
“Maybe she should be, if it’s a lie that holds you together.”
“I really can’t get into this.”
Carnahan circled the table. “Well, somebody’d better get into it. And damn soon too.”
A light clicked on at Camp Bob Howser. The guard came through the barracks, rousing the men for their fifteen-hour day. In the kitchen, with the blackout curtains still pulled tight and the air heavy from last night’s mess, the men ate a breakfast of cold toast and warm mush. Dulaney heard the truck pull up outside, and he faced the coming day.
( ( ( 7 ) ) )
HE dropped off the truck as the sun hit the eastern sky and lit up the earth around him. The guard riding in back with the men turned his face to the west and Dulaney was gone.
He rolled into the ditch and splashed face first into a puddle of standing water. He elbowed up the ditch, ready to jump up and make the forty-yard run to the woods, but the outcry he expected never came.
Slowly he raised his head. Some of the prisoners on the flatbed were watching him but no one gave him away. The guard looked over the top of the cab, the shotgun resting on his shoulder, and the truck turned up a rocky trail and disappeared into the trees.
He ran due east. It was a risky move that would take him right past the work site. Maybe he’d be bold enough to walk up and ask ’em the time of day, like Rebel pickets did with the Yankee enemy in the woods around Charleston eighty years ago. They might not expect that. The dogs would know better, but often simpleminded men wouldn’t listen to dogs if the dogs didn’t do what struck them as logical. Think that and be caught, he thought.
The ground sloped down and he heard water rushing. A stream would be good when they set the hounds after him, but he never came across it. His need to run east was urgent, and gradually the sound of the water faded away.
A vision of Holly chased him down the gulch. He had a sharp premonition that he’d never see her again if he got caught, so he wouldn’t get caught. This is how simple life can be.
The sun was now well over the hills ahead. It shone through the trees and cast the forest in an eerie silver blue haze.
He was good with time and he knew when he’d been running ten minutes. He was good with distance and direction and he knew the work site would be coming up on his left any second now.
He thought of Kendall and the car. His confidence in the existence of a connecting road was not strong. There was a certain logic to it but it could be a mile away or twenty, he had no way of knowing. At best he’d have a forty-minute lead. Without a stream to wash away his scent, the dogs would run him to earth in two hours.
The woods thinned and he heard voices. He was close enough now to see the men. The truck was gone, the third guard with it. One of the remaining guards stood among the men; the other circled the clearing with his shotgun, coming within spitting distance before moving on past.
It was a simple country road, just wide enough for two cars to pass. He kept to the woods, hidden if a car should come from either way, near enough to run out if Kendall should come in the Essex. Underbrush raked his arms and face, drawing blood, but he ran this way for many minutes. Then he heard a car coming and he dropped to the earth.
He ducked his head as the car came in sight. Not the Essex: couldn’t miss that fire engine red. It was a black Ford; he saw no more before it was past and gone. Black Ford with a sticky valve, heading north into the deep woods.
He was up again and on the move, jogging through the brush. Made half a mile before he stopped in his tracks to listen. Heard the same car, same sticky engine, idling in the woods just ahead. The brush was very thick: he had to move slowly so as not to make a rustle. But as he eased ahead he saw what had to be the Essex, its bright red finish flashing through the trees. Then the Ford, which had pulled alongside and stopped with its motor running.
He saw two men but just shapes through the brush; couldn’t get closer without being seen himself. They seemed to be looking through the car, had the trunk up, and when they spoke he heard what they said.
“At least we know where he’s goin’.”
The Irishman.
“What do you want to do?” said the other after a moment.
“Poot everythin’ back, just as it was, and let’s get out of here.”
The trunk slammed shut. The Irishman came around to the shotgun side of the Ford. “If I get me hands on that fooker again it’ll be more than a few bad ribs he’ll be havin’.”
