Odds Against Tomorrow

by William P. McGivern

  “She’s got to help herself,” Kelly said. “You can hold her hand maybe, but that’s about all. She’s got to forget him—you can’t do that for her.”

  It took the sheriff an instant or two to understand what Kelly meant. Then he said “Yes,” and rubbed a hand roughly over his mouth, speaking against a painful constriction in his throat. So that was it… Why hadn’t she told him?

  “She’s doing fine,” Kelly said, misunderstanding the bitterness in the sheriff’s eyes. “If he wasn’t smart enough to hold onto her, he’s no bargain.” He hesitated then, his cheeks suddenly hot. If the old boy didn’t know… “A stranger makes a good wall to bounce things off,” he said, inwardly cursing his tactlessness.

  “Why didn’t she tell me about him?” the sheriff said so softly that Kelly had to lean forward to catch the words. “That’s what I’m wondering.”

  Kelly felt like biting off his tongue. “I’m terribly sorry. Naturally, I thought—”

  “Naturally. Naturally a girl tells her father. Who was he, by the way? Or are you supposed to keep her secrets?”

  “There’s no sense huffing and puffing,” Kelly said quietly. “At her or at me.”

  The sheriff was slightly startled by Kelly’s tone; not many men would use that voice with him when his temper was up. Then he smiled wearily, and said, “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  “He was a man she met in New York. They saw each other for a year or so. Then things changed. With him.” Kelly raised his hand and let it fall. “Your daughter took it like a big girl. No scenes, no recriminations, no rebound nonsense. She just packed up and came home.”

  “I don’t understand her,” the sheriff said helplessly. “But that’s not her fault, is it? It’s mine. I just don’t understand.”

  “You won’t be the last man to say that about a woman.” Kelly retreated gratefully into the protective cliché. He distrusted too-tidy explanations of emotional conflicts. And he distrusted people with quick solutions for them. Loose talk about Oedipus complexes and sibling jealousies made him uneasy. The amateur analyst might be right; that was the hell of it. Buckshot usually hit something. You could even hit a hornet with buckshot but that was no way to stop a swarm of them.

  Things would work out. He believed in that philosophy because he was a hopeful man; he had learned to wait cheerfully.

  So they didn’t get along. Well, that would work out. The sheriff was a demanding man without knowing it. He had grown taller and taller with the years and now he was too damned far from the ground. He needed to be brought to earth—to change a few diapers, get a flailing little foot in the eye occasionally, stock up his wallet with some new baby pictures. Solving her needs would solve his, Kelly figured. Making her happy would make him happy. It would be a nice job for some guy. Two birds with one stone. A rewarding kind of job. But it couldn’t be rushed; it needed patience and humor.

  They heard footsteps on the stairs, and the sheriff stood up quickly, forcing the conversation from his mind. Kelly said, “Let me do the talking, will you? I know what their trouble is, I think.”

  The sheriff nodded; his respect for Kelly had gone up considerably in the last few minutes. “You go ahead,” he said.

  The doctor opened the door and ushered his daughter into the room. “Sit down and get nice and comfortable, honey,” he said. “This won’t take long, will it, Sheriff? We’ve told you everything we can remember.”

  “We’ll be quick as we can,” the sheriff said. He smiled at the girl. “Feel better after your nap?”

  “Yes, thank you.” She sat on the sofa with her slippered feet tucked under her, looking sweet and young and rested; but Kelly saw the nervousness in her tightly gripped hands.

  He took a sheaf of notes from his pocket, and sat down in front of her. “You know what the subconscious is, I suppose, Carol.”

  “Well, more or less.”

  Kelly smiled. “That’s a good answer.” He realized that behind this teen-aged poise and dignity was a very frightened little child; he could see the pulse beating rapidly in her throat, and the quick rise and fall of her soft bosom.

  “I was once in love with a very beautiful girl,” he said, with nothing in his voice to mark the comment as irrelevant.

  “What?” the sheriff said, staring at him.

  “This was quite a while ago. But she was a knockout, Carol.”

  “Oh?” She looked interested. “What was she like? I mean, was she a blonde or a brunette or what?”

  “I don’t remember,” Kelly said. “I struck out with her pretty completely. There was another guy with looks and money—so she foolishly brushed me off like a speck of lint.”

  “How old was she?” Carol said doubtfully.

  “She was ten,” Kelly said, “and very flighty and immature for her age.”

  “You aren’t serious.”

  “Yes I am, Carol,” Kelly said quietly. “I’m being very serious. I don’t remember what the girl looked like because I don’t want to. Part of my mind simply hides her from me, so I won’t worry about her. We forget things, Carol, without knowing we’ve forgotten about them—that’s our safety valve, a protective device we all use without realizing it.”

  “But I’m not hiding anything from you. Really, I’m not.”

  The doctor patted her shoulder. “Of course, honey.” He looked at Kelly. “But I know what you’re getting at—and believe me, I’ve tried to be honest.”

  “You owe your lives to that Negro,” Kelly said. “He made a bargain to bring you back and he stuck to it. Even at the risk of getting a bullet through his head.”

  “I know, I know,” the doctor said. “He saved Carol’s life and I can’t forget it. But I’ve tried my level best not to let that influence me.”

  “I’m sure of it,” Kelly said. “But think about this possibility: you may be unconsciously trying to repay him for saving your lives. You don’t want to dredge up anything that might put his neck in a noose.”

  “I’ll tell you this much,” the doctor said sharply. “When he’s caught, I’ll see that he gets the best lawyer in the state to defend him. That man behaved with courage and honesty—in spite of everything else he’s done.”

  “Fine,” Kelly said. “Do everything you can for him. But think of this in the meantime: those men will move when it gets dark. They’re armed and desperate. Someone will get in their way. Think about that person for a second. A police officer with kids waiting for him at home, a salesman or a housewife, a young girl, maybe. Whoever it is may wind up dead. And you can’t help the Negro then. You can only help him now—before he’s hounded into more trouble.”

  “I haven’t held back a thing,” the doctor said with a stubborn edge to his voice.

  “Let’s go over a couple of points anyway,” Kelly said. “Forget about the car, the roads, the weather. Just concentrate on the living room of that house.”

  “There is nothing more I can tell you. Floor boards of uneven width. Hand-hewn beams. We’ve gone through all this. There are hundreds of homes like that in the country. Old, pre-Revolutionary houses with two-foot stone walls, and fireplaces you can walk into. That’s what brought a lot of wealthy people into the area—the fun of renovating those old relics. I didn’t see anything distinctive. I was treating a wounded man and wondering if my daughter was going to be killed before my eyes. Maybe I missed something that would help you find the place. But can’t you understand that I wasn’t in the best possible mood to be taking an inventory.”

  “And I was blindfolded,” Carol said. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Yes, of course,” Kelly said, looking at his notes. “But you both mentioned that there was an odor of food in the house. Something that reminded you of sauerkraut. You used the word ‘reminded’ each time we’ve come to this point. You mean it wasn’t sauerkraut—but something similar? Could you pin it down exactly, do you think?”

  The doctor was frowning. “It seemed like sauerkraut. Didn’t it, Carol?”

/>   “I don’t know. I said sauerkraut because you did, I guess. But it wasn’t like food at all—” She was frowning faintly, not looking at any of them, and Kelly sensed that her thoughts were searching for a memory buried deep in her mind.

  “What was it, Carol?” he said gently. “It wasn’t food, was it?”

  “No, it was more like—well, the chemistry lab at school. It was something sharp and unpleasant.”

  “I think you’re right,” the doctor said slowly.

  “Was it some kind of acid?” the sheriff said.

  “No—I’m trying to remember.”

  They were silent for a moment, and Kelly held his breath. “Daddy, wasn’t it like a mustard plaster? That’s all I can think of.”

  “A mustard plaster?”

  “Maybe there was someone sick in the house,” Kelly said.

  The doctor began to pace the floor, snapping his fingers rapidly. “Not mustard, not acid—wait a second.” He stared at the sheriff. “Balsam Peru—Do you remember that stuff?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s what it was—Balsam Peru. How that helps I don’t know, but I’m certain of it. Balsam Peru!”

  “What is it?” Kelly said.

  “An old patent medicine, a cure-all like Doctor Pratt’s Salve or Mother Mercer’s Remedy.” Excitement had brought color into the doctor’s pale tired face. “You remember it, Sheriff. Years back there wasn’t a home in the county that didn’t have a jar on hand. They used it for burns, aches and pains, damned near anything. Carol mentioned a mustard plaster, and that jogged my mind toward medicine.”

  “We may be able to trace that,” the sheriff said. “There’s not much call for it any more.”

  “We’ll check the doctors and the drugstores,” Kelly said, standing and looking at his watch. “Doc, can I use your phone?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s in the hall.”

  Kelly hesitated, looking down at the little girl’s unhappy eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said, and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “Believe me, you’ve done him a favor. You’ll understand that someday.”

  “I wish I did now,” she said, slowly.

  The doctor pressed her shoulder as Kelly went into the hall and scooped up the phone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AT THREE-THIRTY Earl turned away from the window and pulled his overcoat about his shoulders. The weather was starting to work for them; clouds had come up an hour or so ago and rain was falling on the black earth and beading the windows with soft, gray moisture. Darkness was settling fast. The night would be cold and windy, with the rain lashing at everything. They could leave now, he thought, moving out under the cover of this murky weather.

  “You better go up and get Sambo,” he said to Lorraine. Earl limped to the table and poured himself a short drink, using up the last of the bottle. He felt cold and empty, but very calm. “When we drop Sambo we’ll head away from the main highway. Go out the back way. I know the roads.” He drank the whisky and stood perfectly still as the warmth spread slowly through him.

  “The sooner we start the better,” Lorraine said.

  “Sure,” Earl said. “We’ve got to roll. Wind ’em up.” He looked at her with a little frown shading his eyes. “That’s the Army command for starting up truck convoys. Did you know that, Lory? Wind ’em up.”

  “Do you feel all right?”

  “I’m fine. We’ll dump Sambo and get rolling. Go get him.”

  Lorraine turned and went into the kitchen. Earl heard her heels clattering on the back stairs. She crossed over his head, going down the hall to the room where Ingram was watching the road. Crazybone had gone up an hour or so ago to keep him company.

  The old man lay with his eyes closed, his slow breathing sounding like the wind rustling a pile of dry papers.

  Earl limped about pointlessly examining the junk on top of the mantel, studying the sturdy old beams and floor boards, pausing once to frown at the broken radio on the table. I’ll never see any of this again, he thought. Never see this room again in my life. Why should that bother him? he wondered. It was a cold, stinking dump. No man in his right mind would want to see it again. But leaving it reminded him of the other places he had left. He stood fingering the glass, while a dizzying succession of rooms and barracks and Army camps flashed through his mind. He was always the guy who had to leave, he thought. Everybody else stayed put, cozy and snug, while he hit the road. He never went back anywhere. There was no place on earth that called out to him, no stick or stone or blade of grass that belonged to him and nobody else.

  Was it because he was dumb? Because he couldn’t feel what other people felt? The confident peace he had known after talking with Ingram had deserted him; he was uncertain again, worried and tense, afraid of the shadows in his mind.

  Talking with Ingram he had licked this feeling. Or thought he had. Everybody was alone. Not just him, everybody. But what the hell did that mean? How did knowing that help you? he wondered.

  The old man stirred and peered at him, pulling the blankets up about his scrawny throat. “You fixing to leave, eh? Think you’ll make it?”

  “Sure,” Earl said. The old man sickened him; with his stench, with the fun he took from probing at them. “We’ll make it,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Taking the colored fellow with you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “All three of you, eh? Good-looking white girl, and a white man and a colored man. That’s a funny combination any way you look at it.”

  “Well, stop looking at it then,” Earl said.

  He heard Lorraine coming down the back stairs, and when she came quickly into the room, he knew something was wrong; her eyes were hard, and there was an anxious frown on her face. “He’s gone,” she said, staring at Earl. “You hear that! He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean he’s gone?”

  “Just that. He’s gone!” she cried.

  “Well, that makes it easier, doesn’t it?”

  “Don’t you understand? For God’s sake, can’t you think?”

  She looked close to hysteria; her face was gaunt and strained, as if her nerves were being stretched slowly and exquisitely to the breaking point. “God,” she said, “God.”

  “Now, Lory,” he said soothingly. “Sambo will be picked up by the police. And he’ll know we’ve lied to him. So he’ll probably talk. But that was going to happen anyway. I don’t see why you’re so worried.”

  “I’m sorry because you’re a fool.”

  “This is no time to be riding me,” he said slowly. “Just knock it off.”

  The old man tittered. “Shouldn’t be fussing at each other this way,” he said. “Look at me and Crazybone. Go weeks without a cross word.” He smiled slyly. “Go weeks without any words at all. That’s the best way.”

  “Lory, let’s go. Nothing’s changed. We’re all right.”

  “Are you ready?” she said wearily.

  “Sure, I’m ready.”

  “Have you got the car keys?”

  “No, Sambo took—” Earl stopped short, dizzied and weakened by the sudden heavy stroke of his heart.

  “Do you understand why I’m worried? Now, do you understand?” Lorraine cried furiously.

  “He wouldn’t take the keys. He wouldn’t leave us stuck here.” But the words sounded plaintive and foolish in his ears. “When did he leave, for God’s sake?”

  “That idiot upstairs doesn’t know. He went out the back door. That’s all she could tell me.”

  “Look, he didn’t take the car. I’d have heard him starting it.” Earl’s voice sharpened with excitement. “I can get it going, Lory. I’ll jump the ignition wires. Sambo didn’t figure on that. I’ll catch up with him someday, and—”

  “Shut up!” Lorraine cried softly; a draft of air blew into the room, sweeping coldly about her ankles.

  “What?”

  She held up a warning hand. They heard the front door slam, and then Ingram came in, hugging h
is arms tightly against his body. He wore a short woolen coat that belonged to the old man and his hair gleamed with rain water. “It’s getting awful cold out,” he said, stamping his feet on the floor. “Goes right through you.”

  “Where’ve you been?” Earl said. “We’re ready to leave.”

  “Just down to the road on a little reconnaissance. Everything seems quiet.”

  He watched Earl with a puzzled smile. “You people look like you just seen a ghost.”

  “Lorraine’s a little nervous, maybe.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Ingram said, glancing at her with the same puzzled smile. “You got a good chance of making it. The cops don’t know about you or your car. Once you drop me off you’re free as birds. Isn’t that right?” he said, turning slowly to Earl. “The cops don’t want me. And you two can make it in her car. Isn’t that the way we planned it?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Earl tried to smile but his face felt stiff and cold all over. “We drop you off, and away we go.” The words came out as if he were drunk, twisting awkwardly on his tongue. “So what are we wasting time for?” he said, almost yelling at Ingram. “Everybody knows the deal. What are we yapping about it for?”

  “You got it right,” Ingram said softly. “Everybody knows the deal now.”

  He stared at Earl without explanation, without speaking, and the silence grew and filled the room with almost palpable tension. And then Ingram’s face seemed to crumble, and a strangling little moan sounded in his throat.

  “We all know the deal, buddy,” he cried hoarsely. “The cops want me—they wanted me all along. But you didn’t tell me. That was part of the deal I didn’t know.”

  “Now listen, Sambo, you—”