Big Money (11 page)

The minute he'd read the letter he tore it up. Nothing doing, bad enough to go back to grinding valves without starting that stuff up again. He sat down on the bed with his eyes full of peeved tears. It was too goddamned hellish to have everything close in on him like this after getting his commission and the ambulance service and the Lafayette Escadrille and having a mechanic attend to his plane and do all the dirty work. Of all the lousy stinking luck. When he felt a little quieter he got up and wrote Joe for Christ's sake to get well as soon as he could, that he had turned down an offer of a job with Triangle Motors
over in Long Island City and was working as a mechanic in order to tide over and that he was darn sick of it and darned anxious to get going on their little proposition.

He'd worked at the repairshop for two weeks before he found out that the foreman ran a pokergame every payday in a disused office in the back of the building. He got in on it and played pretty carefully. The first couple of weeks he lost half his pay, but then he began to find that he wasn't such a bad pokerplayer at that. He never lost his temper and was pretty good at doping out where the cards were. He was careful not to blow about his winnings either, so he got away with more of their money than the other guys figured. The foreman was a big loudmouthed harp who wasn't any too pleased to have Charley horning in on his winnings; it had been his habit to take the money away from the boys himself. Charley kept him oiled up with a drink now and then, and besides, once he got his hand in he could get through more work than any man there. He always changed into his good clothes before he went home.

He didn't get to see Doris before she went to York Harbor for the summer. The only people he knew were the Johnsons. He went down there a couple of times a week. He built them bookshelves and one Sunday helped them paint the livingroom floor.

Another Sunday he called up early to see if the Johnsons wanted to go down to Long Beach to take a swim. Paul was in bed with a sorethroat but Eveline said she'd go. Well, if she wants it she can have it, he was telling himself as he walked downtown, through the empty grime of the hot sundaymorning streets. She came to the door in a loose yellow silk and lace negligee that showed where her limp breasts began. Before she could say anything he'd pulled her to him and kissed her. She closed her eyes and let herself go limp in his arms. Then she pushed him away and put her finger on her lips.

He blushed and lit a cigarette. “Do you mind?” he said in a shaky voice.

“I'll have to get used to cigarettes again sometime, I suppose,” she said very low.

He walked over to the window to pull himself together. She followed him and reached for his cigarette and took a couple of puffs of it. Then she said aloud in a cool voice, “Come on back and say hello to Paul.”

Paul was lying back against the pillows looking pale and sweaty. On
a table beside the bed there was a coffeepot and a flowered cup and saucer and a pitcher of hot milk. “Hi, Paul, you look like you was leadin' the life of Riley,” Charley heard himself say in a hearty voice. “Oh, you have to spoil them a little when they're sick,” cooed Eveline. Charley found himself laughing too loud. “Hope it's nothin' serious, old top.” “Naw, I get these damn throats. You kids have a good time at the beach. I wish I could come too.”

“Oh, it may be horrid,” said Eveline. “But if we don't like it we can always come back.” “Don't hurry,” said Paul. “I got plenty to read. I'll be fine here.”

“Well, you and Jeremy keep bachelor hall together.”

Eveline had gotten up a luncheonbasket with some sandwiches and a thermos full of cocktails. She looked very stylish, Charley thought, as he walked beside her along the dusty sunny street carrying the basket and the Sunday paper, in her little turnedup white hat and her lightyellow summer dress. “Oh, let's have fun,” she said. “It's been so long since I had any fun.”

When they got out of the train at Long Beach a great blue wind was streaming off the sea blurred by little cool patches of mist. There was a big crowd along the boardwalk. The two of them walked a long way up the beach. “Don't you think it would be fun if we could get away from everybody?” she was saying. They walked along, their feet sinking into the sand, their voices drowned in the pound and hiss of the surf. “This is great stuff,” he kept saying.

They walked and walked. Charley had his bathingsuit on under his clothes; it had got to feel hot and itchy before they found a place they liked. They set the basket down behind a low dune and Eveline took her clothes off under a big towel she'd brought with her. Charley felt a little shy pulling off his shirt and pants right in front of her but that seemed to be on the books.

“My, you've got a beautiful body,” she said. Charley tugged uneasily at the end of his bathingsuit. “I'm pretty healthy, I guess,” he said. He looked at his hands sticking out red and grimed from the white skin of his forearms that were freckled a little under the light fuzz. “I sure would like to get a job where I could keep my hands clean.” “A man's hands ought to show his work. . . . That's the whole beauty of hands,” said Eveline. She had wriggled into her suit and let drop the towel. It was a paleblue onepiece suit very tight. “Gosh, you've got a pretty figure. That's what I first noticed about you on the boat.” She stepped
over and took his arm. “Let's go in,” she said. “The surf scares me, but it's terribly beautiful. . . . Oh, I think this is fun, don't you?”

Her arm felt very silky against his. He could feel her bare thigh against his bare thigh. Their feet touched as they walked out of the hot loose sand onto the hard cool sand. A foaming wide tongue of seawater ran up the beach at them and wet their legs to the knees. She let go his arm and took his hand.

He hadn't had much practice with surf and the first thing he knew a wave had knocked him galleywest. He came up spluttering with his mouth and ears full of water. She was on her feet laughing at him holding out her hand to help him to his feet. “Come on out further,” she shouted. They ducked through the next wave and swam out. Just outside of the place where the waves broke they bobbed up and down treading water. “Not too far out, on account of the seapussies. . . .” “What?” “Currents,” she shouted, putting her mouth close to his ear.

He got swamped by another roller and came up spitting and gasping. She was swimming on her back with her eyes closed and her lips pouted. He took two strokes towards her and kissed her cold wet face. He tried to grab her round the body but a wave broke over their heads. She pushed him off as they came up sputtering. “You made me lose my bathingcap. Look.” “There it is. I'll get it.” He fought his way back through the surf and grabbed the cap just as the undertow was sucking it under. “Some surf,” he yelled.

She followed him out and stood beside him in the shallow spume with her short hair wet over her eyes. She brushed it back with her hand. “Here we are,” she said. Charley looked both ways down the beach. There was nobody to be seen in the earlyafternoon glare. He tried to put his arm around her. She skipped out of his reach. “Charley . . . aren't you starved?” “For you, Eveline.” “What I want's lunch.”

When they'd eaten up the lunch and drunk all the cocktails they felt drowsy and a little drunk. They lay side by side in the sun on the big towel. She made him keep his hands to himself. He closed his eyes but he was too excited to go to sleep. Before he knew it he was talking his head off. “You see Joe's been workin' on the patent end of it, and he knows how to handle the lawyers and the big boys with the big wads. I'm afraid if I try to go into it alone some bird'll go to work and steal my stuff. That's what usually happens when a guy invents anything.”

“Do women ever tell you how attractive you are, Charley?”

“Overseas I didn't have any trouble. . . . You know, Aviaterr, lewtenong, Croix de Guerre, couchay, wee wee. . . . That was all right but in this man's country no girl you want'll look at a guy unless he's loaded up with jack. . . . Sure, they'll lead you on an' get you half-crazy.” He was a fool to do it but he went to work and told her all about Doris. “But they're not all like that,” she said, stroking the back of his hand. “Some women are square.”

She wouldn't let him do anything but cuddle a little with her under the towel. The sun began to get low. They got up chilly and sandy and with the sunburn starting to tease. As they walked back along the beach he felt sour and blue. She was talking about the evening and the waves and the seagulls and squeezing his arm as she leaned on it. They went into a hotel on the boardwalk to have a little supper and that just about cleaned his last fivespot.

He couldn't think of much to say going home on the train. He left her at the corner of her street, then walked over to the Third Avenue el and took the train uptown. The train was full of fellows and girls coming home from Sunday excursions. He kept his eye peeled for a pickup but there was nothing doing. When he got up into his little stuffy greenpapered room, he couldn't stay in it. He went out and roamed up and down Second and Third avenues. One woman accosted him but she was too fat and old. There was a pretty plump little girl he walked along beside for a long time, but she threatened to call a cop when he spoke to her, so he went back to his room and took a hot shower and a cold shower and piled into bed. He didn't sleep a wink all night.

Eveline called him up so often in the next weeks and left so many messages for him that the clerk at the desk took him aside and warned him that the house was only intended for young men of irreproachable Christian life.

He took to leaving the shop early to go out with her places, and towards the end of July the foreman bounced him. The foreman was getting sore anyway because Charley kept on winning so much money at poker. Charley moved away from the Chatterton House and took a furnished room way east on Fifteenth Street, explaining to the landlady that his wife worked out of town and could only occasionally get in to see him. The landlady added two dollars to the rent and let it go at that. It got so he didn't do anything all day but wait for
Eveline and drink lousy gin he bought in an Italian restaurant. He felt bad about Paul, but after all Paul wasn't a particular friend of his and if it wasn't him he reckoned it would be somebody else. Eveline talked so much it made his head spin but she was certainly a stylishlooking rib and in bed she was swell. It was only when she talked about divorcing Paul and marrying him that he began to feel a little chilly. She was a good sport about paying for dinners and lunches when the money he'd saved up working in the shop gave out, but he couldn't very well let her pay for his rent, so he walked out on the landlady early one morning in September and took his bag up to the Grand Central station. That same day he went by the Chatterton House to get his mail and found a letter from Emiscah.

He sat on a bench in the park behind the Public Library along with the other bums and read it:

 

C
HARLEY
B
OY
,

You always had such a heart of gold I know if you knew about what awful luck I've been having you would do something to help me. First I lost my job and things have been so slack around here this summer I haven't been able to get another; then I was sick and had to pay the doctor fifty dollars and I haven't been really what you might call well since, and so I had to draw out my savingsaccount and now it's all gone. The family won't do anything because they've been listening to some horrid lying stories too silly to deny. But now I've got to have ten dollars this week or the landlady will put me out and I don't know what will become of me. I know I've never done anything to deserve being so unhappy. Oh, I wish you were here so that you could cuddle me in your big strong arms like you used to do. You used to love your poor little Emiscah. For the sake of your poor mother that's dead send me ten dollars right away by special delivery so it won't be too late. Sometimes I think it would be better to turn on the gas. The tears are running down my face so that I can't see the paper any more. God bless you.

E
MISCAH

 

My girlfriend's broke too. You make such big money ten dollars won't mean anything and I promise I won't ask you again.

Charley, if you can't make it ten send five.

Charley scowled and tore up the letter and put the pieces in his pocket. The letter made him feel bad, but what was the use? He walked over to the Hotel Astor and went down to the men's room to wash up. He looked at himself in one of the mirrors. Grey suit still looked pretty good, his straw hat was new and his shirt was clean. The tie had a frayed place but it didn't show if you kept the coat buttoned. All right if it didn't rain; he'd already hocked his other suit and his trenchcoat and his officers' boots. He still had a couple of dollars in change so he had his shoes shined. Then he went up to the writingroom and wrote to Joe that he was on his uppers and please to send him twentyfive by mail P.D.Q. and for crissake to come to New York. He mailed the letter and walked downtown, walking slowly down Broadway.

The only place he knew where he could bum a meal was the Johnsons' so he turned into their street from Fifth Avenue. Paul met him at the door and held out his hand. “Hello, Charley,” he said. “I haven't seen you for a dog's age.”

“I been movin',” stammered Charley, feeling like a louse. “Too many bedbugs in that last dump. . . . Say, I just stopped into say hello.”

“Come on in and I'll shake up a drink. Eveline'll be back in a minute.”

Charley was shaking his head. “No, I just stopped to say hello. How's the kid? Give Eveline my best. I got a date.”

He walked to a newsstand at the corner of Eighth Street and bought all the papers. Then he went to a blindtiger he knew and had a session with the helpwanted columns over some glasses of needle beer. He drank the beer slowly and noted down the addresses on a piece of paper he'd lifted off the Hotel Astor. One of them was a usedcar dealer, where the manager was a friend of Jim's. Charley had met him out home.