The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “If you wanted to go to New York,” I demanded, “why the hell didn’t you just go? Why make it so difficult?”

  Because, didn’t I see, she said, if she had gone to New York, still “alive,” her mother would have written her letters constantly, telling her how lonely and miserable she was without her and begging her to come on back home, and finally Margaret might have given in to her—out of homesickness for the town, not out of any love or pity for the mother? Or, if not the mother, Slater would have written her, or he might even have come up there to find her, after disposing of his wife, so that the two of them, he or her mother, would have hounded her forever.

  But how did my arrival on the scene change all of her plans? The very first time I had mentioned the possibility of taking her to New York, she had quickly rejected the idea.

  It was the movie, she said. Remember? Remember how Robert Mitchum goes to New York and has to get involved with that Jewish girl in order to discover that he should have stayed back home in Omaha after all? Well, she said, somehow that movie had made her change her mind, it had made her realize that if she went to New York she would want to come home again, and then when she met me and talked with me and discovered how much I wanted to leave Little Rock, she felt she had a mission: to talk me into staying. Curious, because I had felt I had a mission too: to save her, to take her away from her mother. Had both of us succeeded?

  “From that first moment we met,” she said, “I have wanted to make you stay, but you—”

  “If you really wanted me to stay,” I broke in with bitterness, “why have you been giving me all this run-around? Do you just like being chased? Are you trying to play hard-to-get?”

  “I’ve had reservations—”

  “Reservations! What do you think I have been having? I don’t know whether you’re off your rocker, or not, or what. I don’t know if you love me or even if you ever could love me! You’ve got me so bewildered and flustered and exasperated that I don’t even know if I have even reservations any more! I don’t even know if I should keep on seeing you and talking to you!”

  “It’s your choice,” she said, but not coldly. Gently she said it. “It’s all your choice. But I just want you to know how hard it has been for me to reach any definite conclusions about you. There are several reasons. One is the fact that you deserted me when you went away to college, and even if it wasn’t desertion, I couldn’t help feeling resentful about it for a long time. Another reason is that you were always so hard to talk to, even if you are so much easier to talk to now. Another reason is your attitude, some of the things you’ve said recently. That first night, for instance, when we had that long talk after you found me at the movie. You acted so terribly jaded, you were just a world-weary bird of passage, you said, and you have this raw streak of cynicism in you that sometimes is very galling, because it’s obvious to anybody that you aren’t really cynical at all, you’re just lost and confused. I don’t mind your lack of strength or inner conviction, because I’m a pretty weak person myself in that respect, but I wish you wouldn’t try so hard to hide it by being so cynical and flippant and all. You make facetious remarks like you wish you were a rat, and you quote Latin like some fusty Oxonian, and you do such a poor job of concealing your sex drives that it’s almost embarrassing. And some of my reservations were confirmed this morning when I talked to Doyle. I told him I didn’t know who you really are, and I couldn’t very well go away with you, or even try to talk you into staying, if I didn’t know anything about you, so I asked him please to tell me anything he knew about you which would be…well, which might shed any unfavorable light on your character. At first he wouldn’t, he said you were the nicest guy he’d ever known, practically faultless he said, but then after I continued to badger him about it, he confessed some things, just a lot of little things, but—”

  “Like what, may I ask?”

  “Well, for instance you used to pick fights with other boys, just to show off your boxing skills, and because you felt insecure and had to take it out on other people.”

  “Aw, crap!” I said. “Nobody’s perfect. If you’d care to hear about all the bad things Dall used to do, I could entertain you for an hour with them. I could tell you about how he—”

  “We’re not talking about Doyle,” she said. “We’re talking about you, and why I had reservations about you. But if you’ll just let me finish, I’ll say this: Despite all those reservations, and your imperfections and so forth, I’ve been able to discover recently, very recently”—she smiled impishly—“that you are really a very nice guy, and you have a heart of gold, and you are kindly and courageous and even more intelligent than I thought you were.”

  “Thanks loads,” I said, “but how did you ever arrive at such a conclusion?”

  “For one thing, you jumped into the river after me—”

  “What was I supposed to do? Throw rocks at you?”

  “You could have done one of several things. You could have run up and down the bank in helpless confusion. You could have just stood there hollering for help. You could have gone off looking for a telephone to call the police. You could have hesitated a minute too long before jumping in after me. You could have taken the trouble to remove not only your shoes but also your coat and tie and trousers. But you didn’t do any of those things. You just jumped right in after me, and I saw how you kept going under and staying under to look for me. Then when you saw me, and discovered that I was swimming on across, you could have been so disgusted that you might have climbed back out onto the bank and gone away and I would never have seen you again, because I will admit that it was a very silly thing for me to do, a very prankish thing, even a very cruel thing. But you didn’t turn back in disgust. You came on after me. You followed me all the way across the river. Why?” She stopped and waited for my answer. “Why?” she said again. “Why did you do that?”

  I thought about this. Now I was sitting up beside her, no longer reclining, no longer staring up at the sky. My wet clothes were beginning to chill me, although the day was still very warm. I ran my hand across my hair and flung some water from it. I looked at Margaret. The answer to her question disturbed me very much. “My perpetual curiosity, I guess,” I said to her, but I knew that was wrong, and I amended it. “No, I guess maybe I really do love you after all. You must have some kind of spell over me. Even if I think you’re crazy, even if you exasperate the blue blazes out of me, I think I must somehow be your slave.”

  She laughed gaily.

  “But tell me,” I said, “are you sure that was your only reason for jumping into the river? Just to test me? You didn’t perhaps think there might be a fifty-fifty chance that you would drown after all?”

  She said again that she had just been testing me, trying to see what I would do in such a situation, and she was very sorry if her test had offended me. “But if you’re going to stay,” she said, “I have to know who you really are.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to stay,” I corrected her. “I said I might. It’s a horrible decision to have to make.” I wondered if she would continue doing crazy things all her life, and if she knew that she would, and if she had contrived this test just to see if I were prepared to put up with her in the future.

  “Will you take me out to dinner,” she asked, “and talk to me some more about it?”

  “In this?” I said, indicating my drenched and soiled seersucker. “You’re all dressed up nice, but unfortunately I didn’t think to cache away a box of dry clothes in advance. And they never have found my suitcase yet, even if I had the nerve to go over and get it, looking like this. I’d get arrested for indecent or indecorous exposure or something.”

  She stood up. “I’ll be right back,” she said. “What are your sizes?”

  “My sizes?”

  “Yes, your shoe size and shirt size and trouser size and all?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to buy you some new clothes. You’ve worn that seersucker sui
t too much already anyway.”

  “What are you going to do for money?” I asked her.

  She took out the twenty dollars which had been in her box and said, “I couldn’t think of a better use for this money.”

  “Twenty dollars won’t buy much in the way of a complete outfit.”

  I’m not going to get you a suit,” she said. “Not yet, anyway. Just a shirt and trousers and shoes and socks and”—she giggled—“unmentionables.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said. I took out my billfold. It was soaked, including the bills. I took out three tens. “Here,” I said. “Save your own money…or your mother’s. If you wave these in the air as you walk, maybe they will dry out.”

  She took the limp bills and said, “Now, your sizes.”

  I took out my Ring-Master and my ballpoint. The ballpoint worked all right, but the Ring-Master was so wet I was afraid it would disintegrate if I tried to open it, so I put it back into my pocket and wrote my sizes on the underside of Margaret’s wrist.

  “I will wear your sizes forever,” she quipped, holding her inscribed wrist aloft, and then she walked off into the trees and disappeared.

  I sat on the bank alone and drew up my knees and hugged myself to fight off the chill. Where was she going to find a men’s store this time of day, anyway? My wristwatch wasn’t working, but judging from the sky I would say it was close to seven o’clock and the stores would be closed. Maybe I should have asked her to find me a nice commodious barrel somewhere.

  Then I thought of my shoes. My shoes! Holy cow, if Margaret bought me some new shoes, they wouldn’t be elevator shoes, and if I had to walk beside her, I’d be an inch shorter than she!

  I gazed despondently out across the river, tempted for an insane moment to try to swim back over there and get my elevators and bring them back over here. But then I realized I could just as easily walk up to the Rock Island Railroad bridge and cross it. But I might not get back before Margaret did, and what would she do if she found me gone? And furthermore, wouldn’t she be curious to know how I had managed to retrieve my shoes, and why I was so determined to get them back?

  It was a racking impasse, and I wasted so much time brooding about it that I forgot to brood about why I was in love with Margaret if she was so naughty. When I finally got my mind around to this subject, Margaret was returning.

  She had found a small department store still open on Washington Avenue in North Little Rock after only a six-block walk, and she was laden with packages and smiling triumphantly. Her selections surprised me, because they were what I probably would have purchased if I had done the shopping myself. A short-sleeved sport shirt of blue-striped oxford cloth with button-down collar and tapered bottom. Dacron golfer-type slacks of a darker blue, pleatless, and a narrow black belt. A pair of debonair black moccasins which, I noted with some relief, had rather thick heels. Then there were a pair of argyle socks nearly identical to the ones I had, a white cotton T-shirt, and a pair of boxer-type cotton shorts. I remembered why she would have known that I preferred this style to the more common briefs.

  I took off my wet clothes and put these new ones on, and she watched me with the pride of a mother seeing her boy dress up in his first Easter clothes. I didn’t mind, but impulsively I turned my back while I was donning the shorts.

  Dressed neatly and happy again, I wadded up my old clothes and started to toss them into the river, but she stopped me and took them and put them in the hole where her box had been.

  Then we walked away from the river. I discovered that I could sort of walk on the balls of my feet, with my heels elevated, and this kept me on a level with her. We reached Washington Avenue and began searching for a taxi.

  “Are your legs stiff and sore?” she asked solicitously. “Why do you walk like that?”

  But then we found a cab, and got in and sat down.

  Chapter forty-one

  One thing I will have to admit: Mexico Chiquita is, for me at least, a finer restaurant than Jake Wirth’s, Locke-Ober, Durgin Park, Jimmy’s Harbor Side, or any of those other elegant Boston beaneries where I have richly dined with Pamela. I told Margaret, only half jokingly, that if I could cultivate a permanent craving for tortillas, tacos, enchiladas and cherry punch, I would have sufficient reason for staying in Little Rock and taking her to this eating-place once a week forever. Mexico Chiquita, which is in a nondescript building way out in the marshes on the east end of North Little Rock, has no menus; you sit down at one of their rugged oak tables and a Negro girl comes and begins dumping it on you, hot and spicy and filling, until you holler quits, and even after you holler quits they will try to stuff some lime sherbet down you for a chaser. Outside, trucks roar by on their way to St. Louis, and some of the truck drivers stop in and sit at the table next to you, and nobody seems to notice that you are wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt and the fellow on your left is wearing a soiled T-shirt while the gentleman on your right is wearing a dinner jacket. It is a convivial, homogeneous atmosphere, and a nice place to talk. We gorged ourselves, and had refills on cherry punch, and did an impressive lot of talking. But afterward, even though the satiety of Latin dishes imposed a contented truce on our verbal contest, we were no better off than before, no nearer any conclusions.

  Unable to make any definite decision, I could only tell her that I would have to think about it some more, and I would have to think about it alone. This was honorable of me, and I am proud that I could be that way about it. I think that it would have been an easy matter for me to have pretended that I was going to stay, just so I could get into bed with her a few times and find out what she was really like, and then to skip on out. As it was, I couldn’t get into bed with her until my mind was settled. Even if I could, she wouldn’t let me. This is the boat I was in. She was helping me row it, but she couldn’t guide it. That was all up to me.

  Give me twenty-four hours, I said. To reach such a verdict, to satisfy myself that I could eventually cure my wanderlust and settle down, to make such a decision that would affect the course of the rest of my life, I would need twenty-four hours of solid solitary concentration. I glanced at the clock. It was 9:30 p.m., Thursday. By 9:30 p.m. Friday I would bring her my final word.

  Where are you going to stay in the meantime? I asked her. Naps’s house? She shook her head. You’re not going back home, are you? I asked her uneasily. Again she shook her head, and then she told me that she was going to continue staying at Dall’s house. The place was a mess, and the least she could do for him, she said, would be to tidy it up a little, and a day of hard house-cleaning would be good for her.

  We left Mexico Chiquita and found another taxi, which took us back to Little Rock. She asked me if I knew whether or not Dall had any tools like hacksaws or hacksaw blades. I said I thought he probably did, but why was she asking. Stay with me just a little longer, she said.

  The taxi took us to Dall’s house, and we searched in his toolshed until we found a hacksaw. Bowzer still had not returned home. I gave him up for permanently lost, strayed, stolen, or put to death. A fine dog, I told Margaret; it is too bad she never met him. A beautiful German shepherd. Now, I said, what are you going to do with this hacksaw? Commit hara-kiri?

  She said she had to get her clothes out of her mother’s house, and would I please help her. Her mother had padlocked the door of her room, and she wanted to wait until her mother and stepfather had gone to bed and then sneak up and saw off the lock and get her clothes out.

  “Now wait just a minute,” I protested. “You remember the first time we tried to sneak up there she caught us. And then when Naps tried to sneak up there to rescue you she caught him too. So If you think I’m going to—”

  “Please,” she said, gripping my arm. “We have to try, at least.”

  Reluctantly I gave in, and we walked to her mother’s house. It was near midnight now and the house was dark and, Margaret assured me in a whisper, they would be sound asleep. With extreme caution we tiptoed up the back stairway, making not the sli
ghtest sound this time, and I marveled at how skillful Margaret was at this technique—how many times, I wondered, had she sneaked out of the house at night to rendezvous with Slater? We felt our way through the attic without stumbling over all the junk, and found the door of her room and the padlock. I began to pass the hacksaw blade lightly over the lock, but even the slightest of my motions made an awful raspy noise; it reminded me of the startling sound my pants zipper had made the night before. Margaret whispered that the sound would not carry as far down as her mother’s bedroom, but I was skeptical. I tried to saw gently, but gentle sawing didn’t do much good. Margaret found an old blanket with which we managed to muffle the sound somewhat, and I stood there at that door for half an hour, unbreathing, sweating profusely, sawing away. Margaret listened for any noises from the house. I felt the lock with my fingers; I was making progress. In a rush of excitement to hack the remaining sinew of steel, I sawed too hard, made too much noise. The attic light went on, and Mr. Polk came rapidly up the stairs. We had no time to hide, and could only face him sheepishly. “Why, ’lo, Margaret,” he said, confronting us in his nightshirt. “What’re you doin?” She said, “We came to get my clothes, but the door is locked.” “Oh?” he said, and he was silent for a long moment, then he said “Hold on” and went back downstairs. I urged Margaret, “Come on, let’s get out of here.” “No, wait,” she said and put her hand on my arm. “Look,” I said, “I feel the same way about your mother that you do: I don’t ever want to see her again. Let’s beat it,” and I began to head down the stairs. But Mr. Polk came back up the stairs, holding a key in his hand. “Here y’are,” he said, and brushed past me and handed the key to Margaret and she unlocked the door to her room. Quickly she stuffed all of her clothes and a few miscellaneous belongings into three cardboard boxes, and Mr. Polk helped us carry these downstairs and out of the house. She gave him a kiss on the jowl. “Thank you,” she said with profound sincerity. He said, “Come see us sometime,” and waved as we walked away.