Ice-Cream Headache (17 page)

“You son of a bitch,” Norma said.

“Kind of hit home, didnt it?” he grinned.

“Get out,” she said. “Go back to Arky and Russ and their Terre Haute pigs they keep in stock. Thats where you belong. Go on, get out. Get out. You dont leave a thing, do you? When the warrior dies they not only burn the wives and the weapons and horses but even the dogs and the cats and the utility bills. Dont they? Get out.”

“I was just leaving,” he grinned, and went out the front door and down the homemade brick steps, thinking it was the first time he had ever really been actually glad they were not married, because there was nothing to make him come back now, thinking he should have mentioned that too.

But outside, where she could not see him, the grin faded out. He could not hold it. He was not mad any more. He felt sick at his stomach. Human beings could be so rottenly disgustingly stinkingly honest, when they got mad enough, and let themselves go.

As he walked out through the trees to the car the house was stiffly silent behind him as if she was listening. He walked very slow, hoping she’d call him. If she called he would go back. But he could not go back on his own hook. Because it would only be the same thing all over again. As soon as she realized she had won she would start right in making him pay. And nothing he could say would be able to reach her.

When he opened the car door he paused to give her a last chance to call. Instead, she started to sob. The sobbing came out clearly through the summer stillness under the trees. She was using the sobbing to make him feel guilty enough to come back without being called. She
still
believed the old carrot would work.

The old familiar sound of the sobbing hanging on the quiet peace of the air made him so furious with outrage he wanted to smash his fist into something. Into the Middle West maybe. The sobbing rode like an old-fashioned ketch, outmoded by steam, on the waves of blue air, affronting him with its absolute female confidence, so that in the midst of the fury he was suddenly bored, tired of the whole thing, the same going over and over, that never made any decision except the same old weary resorting to ruses that in the end they both always employed. He did not want that any more.

He got in the car and slammed the door hard. The sobbing stopped suddenly, as if shocked. But the echo seemed to hang on in the air over him, as he backed out to the asphalt.

He felt as if somebody had just taken handcuffs and a big rope off of him—so that he could reach in his hip pocket and find his wallet was gone.

He drove straight in to the courthouse in Sullivan. There was nobody there except one deputy in the sheriff’s office and the usual handful of loiterers out on the steps. The boy had already paid his fine and left with his girl. Mr Philips and Mr Ohls, they told him, had gone right back to Fandalack. He had not passed Philips and Ohls driving in, so he figured they must have stopped off somewhere to have a couple of beers before going back. It was hot work there, at the Park.

He drove very fast going back to the cabin. She was already gone. The sheets were gone off the beds and the curtains she had put up had been taken down. The place already had that fusty vacated smell in it. It was the same smell that had been there when he moved in. The salad bowl was still sitting on the sideboard with the spoon in the uneaten salad. He started packing his own stuff. She had not taken the extra food she had brought up for him. He packed it too. There would not be enough money left to go to Michigan now, but he could take a cabin at Lake Lawler for a month on the refund from the Park. His beans and bacon and bread and the two cans of coffee were still there. He packed it all.

Mr Lemmon was very nice about the refunds for the boat and the cabin. He did not ask Sylvanus down to the basement for a parting beer. Maybe he thought Sylvanus was leaving because of the boy. Sylvanus did not enlighten him. He was keeping his mind on Lake Lawler.

For a man who had made a fool out of himself twice in the same morning Sylvanus felt pretty sharp-edged yet. Lake Lawler was no Fandalack, but it served a purpose. Norma would have considered it more his kind of a place anyway, because while it might have been high class in the ’20s, it had all been down hill for Lake Lawler since then so that they had started catering to a less finicky clientele, and Norma’s parents would not let her go there any more, so it would be a good place not to run into Norma, and he felt he was not quite up to running into her yet for a while, and it had a dance pavilion with a jukebox on the lip of the lake and a beer concession behind it and there were plenty of dark places to park cars, he might even run into Russ and Arky down there, and if there were no bass in the lake there were at least bluegill and crappie, and it was privately owned so there would be no uniformed hoods running around wearing themselves out protecting its purity, a month at Lake Lawler looked pretty good, he did not feel so bad about leaving Fandalack.

There was a red-headed widow from Mount Carmel, Illinois, staying at Lake Lawler, leasing one of the bungalows—as distinguished from cabins—around on the other side of the lake, who was interested in artists and writers and did not like the Middle West either. She was afraid of a new husband taking her for what the first one had left her. She felt she had earned it and she meant to enjoy it. But she did not let this hurt her appreciation of art. She had chanced to read two of Sylvanus Merrick’s stories, and when she found out he was him, in the flesh, she was anxious to see what his novel was like. So he started in to read the whole thing to her. She bought wonderful scotch, and he thought perhaps he might get new ideas by watching her reactions. But when he read what he wrote to the widow she giggled at all the wrong places, the same places Norma Fry had always used to look shocked at. He even found after a while that he would take to defending the Middle West against her attacks.

It was as if in moving from Fandalack to Lake Lawler Sylvanus had moved from one end of a teetertotter to the other, a teetertotter whose bar and fulcrum was the great Middle West heritage and culture he had almost been ready to believe he had escaped. But he was willing to overlook this because he felt the widow would be a good antidote. Sylvanus had discovered he needed an antidote.

The cabin he had got at Lake Lawler was only one room and there were no trees around it. It was very hot, now that the rainy spell had finally broken, and at night the jukebox music from the pavilion pervaded the cabin and helped the heat keep Sylvanus awake. The sound of the cars that kept driving down toward the swimmers’ outhouses to park at the foot of the hill where his cabin was did not help either. A lot of giggling and laughter came from the cars. The people in the cars sounded very happy, they did not seem to mind losing sleep. Sylvanus Merrick, on the other hand, felt he needed a lot of sleep very badly. This was because the heat and the music and the cars kept him awake. And because he was determined to work.

Then, quite suddenly, the novel began to come again. Out of a clear sky. For no apparent reason. Coming all at once, the way the last dozen pieces of a jigsaw suddenly fall into place. He could even see the end of it. That was the fine thing about writing. Sylvanus even quit worrying about the Book-of-the-Month Club. Maybe that was what helped him to sleep. But then writing was the only religious ritual Sylvanus Merrick had ever found that did not require a third party and he worked at it very seriously in the same way a good Catholic has to go to Mass every morning, so that by evening he was always very tired now. Tired enough to sleep.

He gave up going over to see the widow. It embarrassed him to find himself suddenly defending the Middle West which he did not like, and he did not want to upset the balance now, or stop it, now that it had started coming again. He fly-fished for bluegill and drank beer at the concession and slept. Every now and then a great pressure would wake him up in the middle of the night and he would get up and get dressed and tramp hard four or five miles out on the highway under the burnished gunmetal sky that sparkled pulsatingly now that the hot corn-growing weather was here.

It was on one of these walks that it suddenly came to Sylvanus that maybe he should try living in the Far West, when this novel was done. He had never lived in the West. But he had read that it was the Western women who had first forked a horse, when the side saddle was still a God-given law of propriety. Surely, with mountains and deep woods all around them, they ought to be different out there, Sylvanus Merrick decided. All you had to do was get out of the great Middle West.

I’ve already given most of the interesting bits on this one in the Introduction. I remember it was the summer when they were filming
Intruder in the Dust
down in Oxford. A friend of mine studying to be a photographer on the GI bill wanted me to go down there with him and introduce ourselves to Faulkner, but I didn’t want to. Almost anybody can recognize Sgts Warden and Welsh in “The First.” I once served on a Graves Registration Corps detail where a man helped to dig up his own brother. That memory set me to thinking. Published in
Collier’s,
Summer, 1951.

“H
ERE’S THAT DETAIL ROSTER,”
Corporal Quentin Thatcher said.

“Thanks,” the first sergeant said. He did not look up, or stop working.

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Probably not,” the First said. He went on working.

“I wish you wouldn’t send Shelb down to the beach on this unloading detail. They’ve been bombing the Slot three or four times every day since the new convoy got in.”

“Pfc Shelby Thatcher,” the First said distinctly, without stopping working, “just because he’s the kid brother of the company clerk, does not rate no special privileges in my outfit. The 2nd Platoon is due for detail by the roster; you typed it out. Pfc Shelby Thatcher is in the 2nd Platoon.”

“So is Houghlan in the 2nd Platoon. But I notice he never pulls any these details.”

“Houghlan is the Compny Commander’s dog robber.”

“I know it.”

“See the chaplain, kid,” the First said, looking up for the first time. His wild eyes burned the skin of Quentin Thatcher’s face. “That ain’t my department.”

“I thought maybe you would do it as a favor.”

“What are you going to do when we really get into combat, kid? up there on the
line
?”

“I’m going to be in the 2nd Platoon,” Quentin said. “Where I can look out for my brother Shelb.”

“Not unless I say so, you ain’t.” The First grinned at him evilly. “And I ain’t saying so.” He stared at Quentin a moment with those wild old soldier’s eyes. Then he jerked his head toward the typing table across the mud floor of the tent. “Now get the hell back to work and don’t bother me. I’m busy.”

“Damn you,” Quentin said deliberately. “Damn you to hell. You don’t even know what it is, to love somebody.”

“For two cents I’d send you back to straight duty today,” the First said calmly, “and see how you like it. Only I’m afraid it would kill you.”

“That suits me fine,” Quentin said. He reached in his pocket and tossed two pennies onto the field desk. “I quit.”

“You can’t quit,” the First grinned malevolently. “I won’t let you. You’re an ass, Thatcher, but you can type and I need a clerk.”

“Find another one.”

“After I spent all this time training you? Anyway, there aint a platoon sergeant in the compny would have you. And I still got hopes maybe someday you’ll make a soldier. Though I wouldn’t know the hell why. Now get the hell out of here and take them papers over to the supply room like I told you, before I throw you over there with them bodily.”

“I’m going. But you don’t scare me a bit. And the last thing on this earth I’d ever want to be is a soldier.”

The First laughed. Quentin took his own sweet time collecting the papers. The two pennies, lying on the field desk, he ignored.

The pennies were still there the next morning when Quentin came out of the orderly tent for a break. He watched the First legging it off down the road toward Regiment, then he walked across to where the four men were sitting on water cans in the tracky mud in front of the supply tent like four sad crows on a fence. They had only got back from the detail an hour before.

“Any news yet?” his brother Shelb asked him.

“Not a bit,” Quentin said. “Nothing.”

The waiting was beginning to get into all of them. The division had been here a month now, and both the 35th and 161st had gone up to relieve Marine outfits on the hills two weeks ago.

“Where was the first sergeant going, Quentin?” Al Zwermann asked hopefully. “He looked like he was in a hurry.” Al Zwermann’s brother Vic was in C Company of the 35th.

“Just to Regiment,” Quentin said. “See about some kind of a detail.”

“Not another detail!” Gorman growled.

“Sure. Ain’t you heard?” Joe Martuscelli said sourly. “They done transferred the whole Regiment into the Quartermaster.”

“You don’t think it might be the order to move, then?” Zwermann asked.

“Not from what I heard over the phone. From what he said over the phone it was just another detail of some kind.”

“A fine clerk,” Gorman growled. “Why the hell dint you ask him what kind of a detail, you jerk?”

“Go to hell,” Quentin said. “Why the hell didn’t you ask him? You don’t ask that man things.”

“How’d the unloading go?”

“The unloading went fine,” Shelb grinned. “They only bombed twice, and I stole a full fifth of bourbon off an officer’s orderly on one of the transports.”

“Yeah,” Martuscelli said sourly. “A full fifth. And he has to save it all for his precious big brother.”

“You think you’ll have time to help drink it, Quent?” Shelb said, getting up, “before the First gets back?”

“Sometimes I don’t think we’ll any of us ever get to see any action,” Gorman growled.

“To hell with the First,” Quentin said.

“I’ll go get it then,” Shelb grinned.

“A hell of a fine way to treat your own squad,” Martuscelli said sourly, watching him leave.