Killdozer! (30 page)

I’ll have a few tid-bits for you another time. Right now I am of a mind to make my daily pilgrimage to the local curate’s brick outhouse where I can function with a modicum of security from German artillery. A couple of days ago this ancient outhouse, with me in it, seemed the target … for a shell went through the garden wall and burst close enough that my hind cheeks felt the hot breath and blast. I tho’t my favorite part(s) would be missing and, had this been a less sturdily built house of contemplation and human passage, I have no doubt but that I would now be a cipher in masculine dress, a nullity fit for some ladies’ bath house as an attendant, or something equally frustrating.

Write soon, my favorite people, and tell me all about life on Euclid Park Drive.

Love,

J
OE LOOKED DOWN
at Mousie, walking so sedately beside him, and he thought, you’re a second-rater, and so am I. Her name wasn’t Mousie, but Sara Nell. He always called her Sara Nell except when he thought about her, and then she was Mousie. It was her hair, maybe, or the nose that was so very well shaped only one and a half sizes too large for her face. She had a little pointed face. Anyway it was Mousie, and it wasn’t affectionate.

“What’s the matter, Joe?” Her voice was lovely, though. And her eyes. She always seemed to be interested in what she was saying, and her eyes widened all the time she talked. In between times they never seemed to narrow, but got longer.

“Nothin’. Thinking.”

Thinking about the kind of girls you saw so often in taxis, so seldom on the bus. So often on TV or in the movies, never in a store or bowling or anyplace around. On TV and the movies you can watch big good-looking guys soften ’em up, push ’em over. The big good-looking guys talk fast and they always have the right answer, and they just mow them down. You never saw a movie about a guy didn’t have enough chin, who never had the right words at the right time and who had none at all when he was mad, or afraid, or when he really meant what he was saying. What kind of a chick would look the second time at a guy like that? If that’s what you are, you wind up walking along the street with Mousie because you can’t do better.

She was watching him, not looking where she was going, holding his arm very tight and close the way she always did. He liked that, but he never could figure it with the way she turned away when he tried to kiss her. He said, “I was thinking about the picture we saw, the second one.”

“Oh. Didn’t you like it?”

“Sure I did. Sure. It was swell. It didn’t seem too phony either. I mean, the way he wiped out those two machine-gun nests, it could happen that way, I guess. And when he helped move all those wounded, and then dropped, and you realized he had a bullet in him all that time, that really sat me up. Only—”

“Only what, Joe?”

“Oh—nothing. Nothing much, just that I don’t see him making all those wisecracks to that army nurse when he was hurt. Did you ever know anybody like that, Sara Nell? Are there guys like that, that don’t ever get scared, and grin when they fight, and like say something funny when they get hurt?”

“I imagine so. I’ve seen—well, anyway, they wouldn’t pay any attention to
me
.”

Oh, Joe thought. But I do. I do, but one of those guys wouldn’t. You take the next best thing. He took his arm from her suddenly, so quickly that she opened up her long eyes and stared at him. They walked on, a little apart.

“I’m sorry, Joe.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know,” she said very softly. “I just suddenly felt sorry.”

Mousie! he thought furiously. You make me mad. You watch me all the time. You never say what you see. Why did I have to meet up with you? What good are you doing me? You’re just as bad as I am. Why don’t you tell me to go jump in the drink? … But heck, she didn’t mean anything. She was just trying to be—“Let’s go in here and have a drink before we go home.”

She looked up into the neon glare above the entrance. “They ask how old you are.”

“Not here they don’t.”

“All right, Joe.” All right, Joe. All the time, all right, Joe.

They went into the place. It split the difference between a twist ’n’ fizz joint and a real bar. It was mobbed. There were tables and booths and imitation morocco and all kinds of noise. “There’s some seats,” said Sara Nell as Joe hesitated.

“But there’s a girl—”

“Nonsense,” said Sara Nell. “One girl in a booth that is s’posed to be for four. Come on.”

Joe thought he ought to be the one to find the seats, but why make anything of it? They slid side by side into the booth. Joe slung his hat up and out and for once it landed on a hook. Sara Nell laughed and patted his shoulder and the girl opposite smiled.

“Order me what you’re having,” Sara Nell said. She burrowed into her black handbag and came up with a compact. “I’ll be right back.”

When she was gone Joe fixed his mind and the base of his tongue on a Cuba libre and let his eyes wander over the room. The girl opposite was watching him; he sensed it rather than saw it. It made him acutely uncomfortable. He tried hard not to look at her and very nearly succeeded. She was blonde and bigger than Mousie; that he could see out of the corner of his eye.… But if he was with Mousie he didn’t feel that he should—But heck, he could look at her, couldn’t he? She wouldn’t think he was crawling up her leg if she’d seen him come in with another girl. He obeyed his usual reflex when he felt confused, and took out his cigarettes.

“Please—”

The voice was husky, throaty. He looked across the table, right straight at her.

She was incredible. Her hair was long and thick, golden with firelights. He thought her eyes were green. Her face was round, the skin very white and flawless, and the lobes of her ears were altogether pink. She was dangling an unlit cigarette in her fingers, and was looking at his battered lighter.

“Oh, excuse me,” Joe said, and dropped his own lit cigarette into his lap. He flapped and plucked and got it, and corralled it in the ash tray, fumbled up his lighter, and spun the wheel. It caught with its usual bonfire effect.

The girl yelped, recoiled, then laughed and leaned forward. She watched him as she lit up, instead of the flame. He saw that her eyes weren’t green at all. They were blue, with a little crooked golden ring around each pupil. In the light of the booth’s little table lamp, the movement of her mouth on the cigarette showed up a fine line
of down on her upper lip. He had an impulse to touch it.

He snapped the lighter shut and displayed it. “Swedish,” he announced. “I got it off a guy on a ship. You can’t get ’em here. It’s sort of beat up now. It dropped out of my pocket one day and I ran a bulldozer over it.”

“A bulldozer? You run a bulldozer?”

He nodded eagerly. “You ever watch one work?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I rode on one once, for a couple minutes. They’re the biggest, strongest—”

“I know.” He nodded. He knew, too. He thought she had run out of words. Couldn’t find words for the blatting of those mighty engines, the unspeakable power of twenty-one tons of steel and racket and brute force, the whole thing obedient as cadets on parade. He looked across at her, at the miracle that had happened to her face to make it interested in his work, and in him. In
him
—and she with that calendar face, that TV Hollywood face.

“My girl fr—the girl I’m with, she never saw a bulldozer,” he said.

“Well, I have. Is it hard to run one of those things?”

So Joe talked about it. Something inside him filled up and burst warmly, and spilled out in words. He had never been able to talk to a girl like this before. There was a time in high school, a girl called Peggy, and he suddenly found himself talking about her, because this blonde miracle understood about him and the bulldozer.

“You remind me of a girl called Peggy, when I was a kid,” he told her. “Once I had a class with her, she sat right next to me, well I never could bring myself to say a word to her. You know how it is with kids. Well she passed and I flunked and after that I never saw her but on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays she would carry the flag in assembly. I used to live from one Wednesday to the next, just waiting for her. Just to watch. I never did speak a word to her. Well that went on for three years until the senior prom and she came with a friend of mine. And me stag. And he came over and said, ‘Hi, Joe, you know Peggy.’ I just nodded my head yes and she smiled at me. Know what I did? I left the dance,” he said in recalled wonderment, “I left and went straight on home.” He looked up from his kneading
fingers to see the blonde girl’s eyes fixed on his face. He blushed. “I guess I was a dope. As a kid.”

“I think that was cute,” said the blonde warmly. “Did you say your name was Joe? Mine’s Bette.”

“Oh,” said Joe. “Pleased t’ meecha. Mine’s Joe, all right. Betty.”

“Bette, with an E, not Betty. Betty’s such a common name, don’t you think?”

Joe, by now too far away from bulldozing and feeling lost, didn’t know what he thought, and didn’t have to, for he suddenly became conscious of two square hands with stubby fingers and an oversized signet ring on the table beside him. He looked up and saw that they terminated thick arms which in turn supported a pair of wide shoulders wearing an overpadded sports jacket. From a pink-cheeked baby face, a mean little pair of eyes leered viciously at him. One side of the mouth opened and said harshly, “Hiya, Bette. Who’s yer friend?”

“Oh! Gordon. Gordon, meet Joe. Joe’s just waiting for his girl. She’s powdering her nose.” There was an urgency in her deep sweet voice, and, looking up at the man’s little eyes, Joe felt a miserable cold lump form in his stomach.

“Yeh?” Gordon slid in next to Bette and said heavily, “Let’s jest sit here and help him wait for her.”

“He doesn’t believe it!” said Bette, and laughed with her mouth. “Gordon, where you been? I been waiting for you thirty minutes.”

“Hadda stop an’ paste a guy said he was going to make time with you, hon,” said Gordon, winking at Joe. Joe smiled weakly. There was something wrong about all this, and he wished suddenly that Sara Nell would hurry up.

“He’s a bulldozer operator,” said Bette, nodding at Joe, who nodded back like a marionette. And for just a fraction of a second the arrogance slipped off Gordon’s face, leaving it bland, years younger. Then he caught it again: “
He
is? Well—long as he din’t bring his bulldozer.”

Joe said, “Ha. Ha,” and was appalled at how hollow it sounded.

Sara Nell had slid in beside him before he fully realized she was back. She was saying something about she hoped she hadn’t been too long.

You have been, Joe thought. He said, “Sara Nell, this’s uh, Bette and Gordon.” Sara Nell bobbed her head as each name was mentioned. Bette said “Hello!” and smiled.

Gordon glanced briefly at Sara Nell’s face, intently at the front of her dress, shrugged his shoulders and turned in his seat to face Bette more directly. He said not a word.

Joe sat silent and miserable. A waitress scuffed up. “Cuba libre,” Joe said. Sara Nell shook her head. “I don’t want anything now.”

“Coke,” said Bette. Surprise slanted into Joe’s mind. She should have said “Champagne cocktail,” or something. Didn’t they always?

“I’ll have a drink with you,” Gordon said pointedly to Bette, “when you and him are finished.” The waitress shuffled off again.

“Aw, Gordon, don’t be like that. Joe didn’t mean anything, did you, Joe? Does he look like a wolf or something?”

Gordon flicked a glance, not at Joe, but at Sara Nell. He said, “Hell no.”

“Well, he isn’t,” said Bette complacently. “I know. He was telling me just before you came—”

Oh no, Joe thought, holy smoke, don’t tell him
that
! I didn’t tell you that about Peggy so you would—

But she was. In her own way, which wasn’t like what he had told her. She made it different. She made it as if he was still the same kind of a cube he was when he was a kid. She made it sound as if it had happened just yesterday, instead of three whole years ago, nearly four. He opened his mouth to say something, and nothing would come. He felt Sara Nell’s hand on his arm and realized he was half out of his seat, hanging there clumsily. He dropped back and closed his eyes and let the silly little anecdote come pouring over him like hot oil from a busted hydraulic line.

When Bette was quite finished, finished also with an expansion of how
very
cute she thought it all was, Gordon said,

“Shee—
yit.”

It made Joe jump. Bette apparently noticed nothing. Joe didn’t have to look at Sara Nell.

Joe said, “Aw, Bette, you shouldn’t’ve told about that.”

“Why not?” Gordon grated. “She can say what she wants. It’s a
free country, ain’t it?”

“Sure, but—”

“But nothin’, who do you think you are, Nicky Khruschev or something?”

“Gordon,” said Bette, “will you leave the kid alone?”

“Aw, it’s all right,” said Joe.

Sara Nell said suddenly, “Joe, will you take me home? I have an awful headache.”

Joe looked at her in amazement. He had never heard her voice be shrill before. “You got a headache?”

“Sure she has,” said Gordon. “Name’s Joe.” He brought his thick hand down on the table and guffawed.

“Very f—” Joe began, but something choked him. He had to swallow before he could say, “Very funny.” To Sara Nell he said desperately, “I ordered a
drink.”

“Please Joe …” she said. The face she had now, this was new to him too. “Please. Now. I feel sick.”

Joe opened his mouth, but before he could say anything Sara Nell was up and walking away. He rose, tried a smile and a shrug that somehow didn’t quite come off, reached for his hat and started off after her.

“Hey.
You
!”

He stopped. Gordon said, “Who’s supposed to pay for the drinks, deadbeat? Me?”

Infuriatingly, Sara Nell came back to him, accompanied him to the table. He said to her, “If it wasn’t for you—” He got his wallet out. Gordon was sitting back making his little eyes even smaller. Joe took out a bill and tossed it to him. “Here. When she comes. With the drinks. We got to. Go.”