“I … I don’t know … what the hell … is wrong with me,” he managed to say.
“Sweetie, you’re on the dirty ragged edge. Something chews your heart, Jimmy. It’s a people-trouble. It can only happen to people, you know. Vegetables never get churned up.”
“This … is so damn silly, for God’s sake.”
“It ain’t manly, you mean?”
He struggled for control. “Today … yesterday, I mean, I felt good without knowing why. Now this. I’m cracking up.”
“Darn you anyhow, James Wing. I don’t want to know people can be racked up. Not elderly types like you. I had my little turn at it. It’s a scene I don’t want to make again. You coming out of it? Go wash your face, sweetie.”
He delayed in the bathroom for long minutes, staring at his puffy red eyes in the mirror because he felt ashamed to face her. When he came out, she was sitting on the bed. She patted the spread beside her. “Come sit and listen,” she ordered. She took his hand. “This is the story of a girl bitched by biology, sir. When I was thirteen I looked exactly like I look right now, almost. My face was a little thinner and my hair was mousy brown, but all the rest was as you see it. One minute I was in my happy little world of scabby knees, hopscotch and bicycling, and the next minute I came bursting up out of my girl-scout uniform and discovered, to my alarm, I’d turned into a big freak. And freaks, my dear man, either hide or turn into clowns. So I went into my clowning era. The marks of it are still with me. It didn’t last too long. It lasted like until I found out that what was freaky to other little girls was just nifty for little boys. I was getting no appreciation at home, for some dingy reasons I won’t dwell on, so I gloried in all the approval I was getting, and was too damn careless, and got into a scandal bit which got nastied up by the police coming into it, and I had to change schools. Then began my sneaky era, where I still got cheers, but kept it out of the papers. Then I fell in love. I was true as blue. I trotted after him like a big dog, all happy and panting. It lasted into college, my love era. I couldn’t see he was really a filthy little prig, I’d trusted him and told all, so when he was ready, he bounced me out of his life on the grounds I was a loose woman, all of which had happened before I met him. Then I had the bad time, Jimmy. The tears that come for no reason, and a kind of reckless joy that comes for no reason. It’s a pendulum thing, like something came loose and starts swinging around in your head. I wasn’t mourning a lost love. By then I despised the cruddy little stinker. I’d just gone raggedy. But I came out of it, and soon thereafter I went to Lauderdale. Now are you all right?”
“How about your people?”
“Really and truly they couldn’t care less, and never have.”
“What do you think is going to happen to you?”
“I’m going to dally around, finding coffee and cakes, until the President of the World finds me, sweetie. He’s going to fit the word ‘man’ as if it was invented for him. When he laughs, they’ll have landslides in the Andes. And he’ll be after a big, durable, true-as-blue girl, with so much ready waiting love to give he’ll be the only one who can take the pressure. And every one of my kids will have the living be-Jesus appreciated out of him. I’ll kiss them and applaud them all day long.”
She raised his hand to her lips for a moment, then said, “He won’t be like us, Wingy, sweetie. All scabs and sores and busted feathers. We’re the half-people, you know. It’s the wise bastards who keep shoving us out into the traffic.” She smiled at him, her blunt features oddly leonine in that light. “Nobody will push my President of the World around. He’ll be solid and sound, scaled big enough so it’ll take all day to walk around his heart. What, or maybe who, has bitched you up, dear?”
“I have no idea.”
“So it’s either something you are doing or something you’re not doing. No fee for that analysis. And now if I should say make way for love, will you start flipping again?”
“Not this time, Miss Holmes.”
She grinned and jumped up and pulled the orange dress off over her head. She held it by the shoulders and turned it to one side and then the other and said, “This little nothing in pumpkin is sadly rrrrrumped out, darn it. And I’m the gal who can do it. Sweetie, I think I’ll take a shower first, with this little number hanging in there and see if it’ll hang out some.” She put the dress over her arm and went to her suitcase and dug around in it, taking things out. She smiled at him and said, “Feel free to stare your little pink eyes out, Wingy. A boy told me once I’m like Mickey Mantle—the more I take off, the bigger I look. Imagine a thirteen-year-old kid suddenly carting all this around? I went up through four bra sizes in three months. Why don’t you pounce into the hay and have a little snooze? You’ll have the time for it. I take long, long showers, dear.” She got a hanger for her dress and went into the bathroom, humming in a small off-key voice.
He left the motel at a little after ten. She fell asleep while he was dressing. He bent over and kissed her on the temple before he left. She did not stir. A heavy tassel of the silver hair lay across her eyes.
As he drove by the airport a prop jet coming in startled him. It annoyed him to be startled. He did not wish to be roused out of a state which was neither trance nor lethargy, but an oddly quiet plateau, a place a little bit off to one side of reality.
After a dozen miles he recalled what it reminded him of. In his final year of high school he had been a third-string end, diligent enough and fast enough, but too brittle for the hazards of the game. They went into one of the last games of the season with three ends more useful than he out of action. He was sent into the game in the second quarter, and came hobbling out after the fourth play, with a sprained ankle. During the half, the trainer injected novocaine into his ankle and instep in three places, and bound it so tightly the flesh bulged over the tape. Within minutes he could put all his weight on it without pain. It felt like a hard rubber foot and ankle, springy enough, but not a part of him. He started the third quarter. In the middle of the final quarter he misjudged a tackle and broke the middle finger of his left hand against a flying heel and came out for good. All that evening he felt strange. The bloated ankle had been cut free and retaped, but it did not hurt. They told him it would hurt, later on. He had this same strange quiet feeling then as now.
He had awakened in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat. The pain of the splinted finger was nothing. The ankle felt monstrous. It bulged with every heartbeat. It felt like a balloon packed full of hot splintered glass. After he was off crutches he had limped for nearly a year, and it still ached when the weather changed.
So my sudden tears, he thought, were the sign of injury, and Charity was the novocaine. It will hurt later, when I try to laugh.
He had waited in the bed for her, wondering what she would be like. After a long time she had come to him, sweet and steamy from her long shower, friendly, talkative, busy, utterly without artifice. She brought to the bed a flavor of healthy, absentminded innocence. It was strange and casual, as though they had met at a party and were dancing together for the first time, taking turns leading, interrupting their conversation when the steps became tricky, apologizing for any small miscues, attempting more ambitious twirls and dips as they became more accustomed to each other, then dancing some simple placid step when they wished to talk. “So I found this stuff that doesn’t make my hair brittle and crack,” she said. “A kookie name though. Silva-Brite.” “I like it,” he said, “and I like the way you wear it.” At last her voice grew blurred and she said, in question, “Well, here we go?”
It was ended. She kissed the tip of his nose. “Sweet,” she said. “Very sweet and nice. I’ll sleep like stones now. Poor Wingy. You have to stagger up and churn back south. Poor dear man.”
“You’re quite a girl, Charity.”
She yawned. “I don’t like that tone of voice. You’re trying to patronize me. I’m just a girl sort of girl, bigger than most, friendlier maybe, who likes you well enough for a little chummy kind o
f love. I thought I could loosen some of those knots in your heart, that made you cry. So don’t quite-a-girl me. It wasn’t that big a scene.”
He was beside her, facing her from such close range her eye looked enormous. She stuck her underlip out and blew a fringe of silver hair back off her forehead.
“You made it exactly right,” he said.
“Good! I wanted you to have something good to go with the weeps.”
“That’s never happened to me before.”
“Hell, sweetie, neither have I, so at least you aren’t in a rut. Kiss goodbye. There. Now you can get up and scoot back and tell them the big pig has been shooed out of Buckie’s precious little life.” She winked that enormous eye. “Don’t tell them I was beginning to think about leaving several days ago.”
By the time he was twenty miles below Tampa, she had begun to seem unreal. He told himself he had merely reacted in the fashion of a normal male. He had taken a successful hack at a promiscuous, restless, rootless twenty-year-old girl. They passed out no medals for that. He told himself it was a pleasant, vulgar, meaningless little episode. But it kept being more than that. It was finding contact with someone in a place where all you usually touched were mirrors. She had a mangled wisdom of her own, suited to the lonely places. She made him wish he were fool enough to pack and drive to Vegas and try to be President of the World.
The novocaine was thinning, and pain was just a little way underneath it. The car roared down through the Gulf towns, toward the heat of the middle of the day. He sat and steered and was carried along, feeling disembodied, fragile, a husk-man, fashioned of cardboard and spit, dried in a hot wind.
The girl asked him if he had an appointment, and when he said he didn’t, she checked with Leroy, and said Mr. Shannard could see him in about ten minutes if he cared to wait. He sat and turned the pages of an old magazine. The minutes ticked on toward two o’clock.
“Come in, James!” Leroy said with the sweet-sad welcome smile which crinkled the eagle eyes.
He went into the paneled office. Leroy closed the door and went around behind his desk.
“You got our problem lady off without mishap?”
“Off and winging.”
“I didn’t think she’d present much of a problem, somehow. Where did she elect?”
“Las Vegas. I had to put another hundred and forty into the kitty.”
“She worked you over very nicely, didn’t she?”
“Who reimburses me?”
“I guess that would be Elmo. And it won’t make him terribly happy.”
“She was going to be a problem otherwise. It seemed best to handle it quietly.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. I approve. But Elmo is our leader. And he will fret a little. By the way, our Mr. Flake is adjusting rapidly. He’s sore as hell, but for the wrong reasons. He stayed at Elmo’s place last night. This morning he learned he had been rude to her last night and she took off with some happy stranger for parts unknown, leaving him an unprintable verbal message. The switch in the story cost me eighty dollars, which somehow amuses the hell out of Elmo.”
“How did the morning paper look?”
“Surpassed our fondest dreams. Stroll anywhere in our friendly little city, James, and you will hear an enthusiastic populace buzzing about our new golden era.”
“And I’ve got more of the same to write,” Jimmy said and stood up. Leroy walked toward the office door with him. Jimmy stopped and turned toward him and said, “You certainly handled that girl with a lot of authority, Leroy.”
Leroy shrugged. “I picked what seemed likely to work the best with a girl of that sort.”
Jimmy felt a mild and wistful sense of disbelief as he heard his own grunt of effort. As Charity had mentioned, you get a good swivel, and you get your back into it. He saw Leroy’s eyes widen an instant before the pistol crack of palm against brown leathery cheek. His open hand blazed with pain. The slap spun Leroy halfway around, and he stumbled and braced himself, his hands against the paneled wall beside the door.
Jimmy stared at him stupidly, and suppressed the inane automatic apology which first came to mind. What do you say? My hand slipped?
Leroy seemed to stand for a very long time with his hands against the wall, his head bowed. He straightened up and turned around. Jimmy stood balanced and waiting, not at all certain he could whip the older man in a fair fight. He realized at that moment that it was not impulse, that he had brought the compulsion to violence all the way from Tampa.
Leroy was bleeding slightly from the left corner of his mouth. He looked at Jimmy with complete and hostile disgust. He took his handkerchief out and dabbed his mouth and sat down behind his desk.
“Feel better?” Leroy asked. “Sit down.”
Jimmy sat down. He felt strangely bland, mild, uninvolved.
“Noble gestures cramp my ass,” Shannard said gently. “Gallantry revolts me. It’s always based on a faulty image. I didn’t know you rode such a big white horse. What did you do? Bang her on the way to the airport and take a liking to her?”
“That’s neither here nor there.”
“You’re so right. It doesn’t illuminate the new problems.”
“Such as?”
“You’ve just done an amazingly stupid thing, James. Would it sound too pretentious if I were to say that it is the sort of thing which could change your future personal history?”
Jimmy considered that for a moment. “You could be right.”
“Thank you. It was a quixotic gesture, expressing moral disapproval at the risk of some form of martyrdom.”
“Just defense of womanhood, maybe.”
“If so, it came twelve hours late, didn’t it? The main thing is this, James. I don’t like people around me who are capable of such wild unexpected stupidities. I find them hard to predict. They can upset apple carts. Do you follow me?”
“Up to a point, the point being that I am not around you, the point being that Elmo brang me into this, as I recall.”
“You know, I’m annoyed at myself for misjudging you so completely. I didn’t want you brought into this. I told Elmo as much. But I think I had all the wrong reasons.”
“Such as?”
“You’re bright and you’re capable, James. And you’ve done very damn little with those qualities. You seem satisfied to stay where you are and be what you are. You’re not hungry. There isn’t anything you want badly enough to go after it. The best way to control men is through their hunger, whether it’s for money, fame, importance, power, liquor, women, gambling or what have you. You’re a bored man, James. I told Elmo you’d go along with us, but without any particular conviction one way or the other, so it would be smarter to leave you out of it. He said he didn’t agree. He said you like to be on the inside, to know a little more than the next guy, so your ego would make you useful. Also he said that you would be a sucker for the argument that you could keep your friends from being roughed up too badly by playing along with us. In a sense, James, it has worked out as he thought it would, right up until now. Now you disclose a new facet of the Wing character. And it bothers me. It makes me wonder what other dangerous impulses you might have.”
“I’m just a bundle of neuroses, Leroy.”
“You’ve been a help, but Elmo says you have a tendency to drag your feet.”
“I haven’t been standing at attention and saluting. Maybe I just didn’t get the top jobs to do. Like Eloise Cable.”
Leroy Shannard tilted his head, pursed his lips, stared intently at Wing. “Elmo tell you?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be damned if I can figure out why. Everything he does usually turns out to have some reason behind it.”
“Maybe he knew we weren’t going to get along too good, Leroy.”
“Believe me, boy, if I could turn Eloise over to you or anybody, I’d gladly do it. It stopped being much of a pleasure a long time ago. I can’t wait for the money end of it to get all tidied up. There’s been some dumb w
omen I’ve enjoyed. And there’s been some earnest ones who’ve pleasured me. And I’ve nothing against a woman with a real loving nature. Also, a woman who can’t help being real active in bed is supposed to be a good thing to come across. But I’m telling you James, after the new has wore off her, a dumb, earnest, loving, passionate woman can give you the longest afternoons you ever spent in your life.”
“Martin should be grateful, you mean.”
“You’ve got a smart-pants way about you that just rubs me the wrong way, James. But now I’m quieting down a little. I’m going to tell Elmo about what happened here.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“The way I see it, we’re both being used by Elmo. He isn’t going to unload you because I don’t like you and don’t trust you. He’s going to keep the people he can use, and get rid of the ones he’s used up, so I can guess you and me, we’re going to be in this right along.”
“There’s one thing about you which puzzles me, Leroy. Half the time you speak like a bad essay in the Atlantic. Then you switch to a southrun folksy lingo as thick as Elmo’s. I have the feeling that when you get folksy, that’s the time to watch you the closest.”
“Watch me at all times, James. Watch me at all times.”
“Do we have anything more to talk about, actually?”
“Since trying to slap my head off, you’ve handled yourself well. Very smooth and quiet.”
“All I did was make the point I didn’t think you had to belt that girl the way you did.”
“You know the old story about the agricultural college that had a special course on mule training. The first day of class this old boy led a big skittish mule into the classroom, dropped the rein, snatched up an eight-pound sledge and give the mule one square between the eyes. The mule sagged, cross-legged and cross-eyed, tongue hanging, and nearly went down. The class gasped. The professor turned to them and he said, ‘The first thing you do in training a mule is you get his attention.’ ”
A Flash of Green Page 31
