Savage Night (13 page)

“You’ll have to watch it, then,” I said. “That’s why I’ve acted the way I have, Ruthie. It’s the only reason. I like you a lot.”

She stood blushing and trembling, the splayed hand gripping the brace of the crutch.

“That’s the way it is, Ruth. Keep it in mind. I think you’re pretty swell. If I don’t show it, it’s because I can’t.”

She nodded, looking like she was a dog and I owned her.

“Now, you can do me a little favor,” I said. “If you want to. I’m feeling a little rocky, but I don’t want to go back to the house and have everyone worrying over me, so—”

“Shouldn’t you, Carl? I mean, don’t you think you should stay in bed for another day?”

“I’m all right,” I said, “but I don’t think I feel up to school this afternoon. If you’ll tell Kendall, or anyone else that asks, that I’m eating lunch at the cafeteria—don’t let on, you know, that everything isn’t okay—”

“It will be, Carl. You’ll get used to it.”

“Sure, I will,” I said. “But I’ve had enough for today. I think I’ll just loaf around town for a couple of hours, get myself pulled together before it’s time to go to work.”

She hesitated, frowning sort of troubled. “You’re not…not awfully discouraged, Carl? You don’t intend to drop out of school, and—?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “Peardale’s stuck with me, and I’m sticking with it. I just don’t feel up to it this afternoon.”

She went on, then, on down the alley, and I went on up the street to a nice quiet bar I’d spotted the day I was with Kendall. I settled down in a rear booth, and I didn’t move out of it until three o’clock.

I wouldn’t have cared much if the sheriff or someone had spotted me there; they’d have had a hard time making anything out of the fact that I was taking things easy my first day out of bed. But no one came into the place that I knew. Hardly anyone came in at all, for that matter. So I just sat there, feeling more relaxed and rested the longer I sat, thinking and smoking and drinking.

I felt pretty good by the time I left.

What there was of me felt pretty good.

I got through my shift at the bakery. I put in a full eight hours there the next day, Saturday, and I got through them all right, too. So I got by all right. Just barely.

Because, like I said, there just wasn’t a whole lot left of me.

I wondered what would happen if something tough came up, something really hard to take. Something that I couldn’t handle in my own way, a little at a time, like I did the job.

And then it was Sunday, and I began to find out.

S
heriff Summers belched, and leaned back in his chair. “Fine dinner, Bessie,” he said. “Can’t remember when—
ughahh
—I et so much.”

“At breakfast,” said Mrs. Summers, wrinkling her forehead at him. “More coffee, Carl? I think, from the sound of things, that His Highness will have to settle for some baking soda and water.”

“Aw, now, Bessie. Why—?”

“No, sir. Not another drop. And kindly stop picking at the meringue on that pie!”

The sheriff grinned sheepishly, and winked at me. “Ain’t she a terror though, son? ’Bout the bossiest one woman you ever seen, I’ll bet.”

“I don’t think I’d say that,” I laughed.

“Certainly you wouldn’t. Only His Highness is capable of it.”

“He’s just being polite.” The sheriff winked at me again.

“But you’re not, are you? Quiet. Carl and I do not care to talk to you, do we, Carl?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, smiling.

And he and she laughed and smiled at me.

It was a nice day, any way you looked at it. Cool but sunny, just enough breeze to ripple the green-brown leaves of the trees. And it had got off to a good start. Kendall had let me set up most of my Sunday batches the day before and leave them in cold storage, and he’d insisted that I take all of today off. He’d really insisted, not in the way people do when they expect you to talk ’em out of it.

I was beginning to feel almost as much at home with the sheriff and his wife as I had with that old couple out in Arizona.

Sheriff Summers said he guessed he’d take a little nap, and Mrs. Summers told him by all means to go ahead. He went up to the front of the house where his bedroom was. She and I sat at the table a while longer, drinking coffee and talking. Then she took me outside to show me the yard.

Their house was one of those rambling old cottages which never seem to go out of date no matter how old they are. The yard was almost a half block wide and a block deep, and she’d tried to doll it up with flower beds and a rock garden in the rear.

I told her how I’d fixed up my little place in Arizona, and she said she could just see it and it sounded wonderful. We went from that to talking about the yard here, and hell, it had all kinds of possibilities. So I gave her a few suggestions, and she was tickled pink.

“That’s marvelous, Carl! Will you come over and help me some time—some weekend, perhaps—if I pay you?

“No, ma’am,” I said. “Not if you pay me.”

“Oh. But really—”

“I’d enjoy doing it. I like to see things looking nice. I started to do a little work on the Winroy place—there’s quite a few things, you know, that need—”

“I do know. Yes, indeed!”

“But I haven’t felt like it was appreciated—more like I might be butting in. So I fixed the gate and let the other things slide.”

“Those people. I’ll bet they never even said thank you, did they?”

I shook my head. “For that matter, I guess I wanted to do the work more on my own account than theirs. The gate was the worst off, but those front steps have me worried too. Someone could get killed on those steps.”

It was true. They were in lousy shape, and someone
could
get killed on them without any help. But I felt ashamed of myself for mentioning it. It was just that I always had to keep pointing so hard at one thing that everything coming out of me—everything I said or did—pointed at the one thing, also.

“Well,” I said. “Speaking of work, I think it’s time I was getting busy on those dinner dishes.”

We’d been sitting on the back steps while we talked. I stood up and held out my hand to her.

She took it, and drew me back down on the steps.

“Carl—”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I—I wish I could tell you how much I—” She laughed sort of crankily, as though she was scolding herself. “Oh just listen to me! I guess I’ve gotten like Bill, completely out of the habit of handing out bouquets. But…you know what I mean, Carl.”

“I hope I do,” I said. “I mean, I enjoy being with you and the sheriff so much I hope you—”

“We do, Carl. We’ve never had any children, no one but ourselves to think about. Perhaps that’s been the…well, no matter. What can’t be cured must be endured. But I’ve thought—I seem to have had you on my mind ever since last Sunday, and I’ve thought that if things had been different, if we’d had a son, he’d have been just about your age now. H-he—he’d be like…if he was like I’ve always pictured him…he’d be like you. Someone who was polite and helpful and didn’t think I was the world’s biggest bore, and—”

I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice…Me,
her
son!
Me!
…And why couldn’t it have been that way, instead of the way it was?

She was talking again. She was saying that she’d been “so angry at the way Bill acted last Sunday.”

“It was all right,” I said. “He has to be pretty careful in the job he’s got.”

“Careful, fiddlesticks!” she snapped. “It was not all right. I was never so angry in my life. I gave that man fits, Carl! I told him, ‘Bill Summers, if you’re going to be swayed by those Fields—someone who is obviously malicious and petty—instead of believing the evidence of your own eyes and ears, I’m—’ ”

“The Fields!” I turned and looked at her. “What Fields? The only Fields I know are dead.”

“I’m talking about their son, him and his family. The relatives she lived with when she went back to Iowa. Bill wired them, you know, at the time he wired—”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t know. And maybe you’d better not tell me about it, Mrs. Summers. As long as the sheriff didn’t, I don’t think you should.”

She hesitated. Then she said, softly, “You mean that, don’t you, Carl?”

“I mean it,” I said.

“I’m glad. I knew you’d feel that way. But he knows that I planned to tell you, and he doesn’t object at all. The whole thing was so completely ridiculous in the first place! Even if he couldn’t see the kind of young man you were at a glance, he had those wonderful wires about you from that judge and the chief of police and—”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t know why this son would say anything against me. I couldn’t have thought any more of a mother and father than I did of them. Why, Mrs. Fields wrote me right up to the time she died, and—”

“I imagine that was a large part of the trouble. Jealousy. And you know how kinfolk can be when it comes to elderly people. No matter what you do, how much you do, they’re always convinced that you’ve abused the old folks. Imposed on them or swindled them or worse.”

“But I—I just don’t see how—”

“Honestly, Carl! Without ever having met you, I knew it was preposterous. They sent a five-hundred-word telegram back here, and it was simply filled with the worst possible…And, of course, Bill didn’t just swallow it whole, but he didn’t feel that he could disregard it completely. So—Oh, I suppose I shouldn’t even have mentioned it. But it was so unfair, Carl, it made me so angry that—”

“Maybe you’d better tell me about it,” I said. “If you don’t mind.”

She told me about it. I listened, sore at first, and then just sick. And I got sicker and sicker.

They—this Fields character—had said that I’d stolen his mother and father blind all the time I was working for them, and then I’d gypped her out of the station, paid her about half what the place was worth. He said I’d just moved in on his folks and taken over, and they’d been too scared of me to complain. He said—he hinted—that I’d actually killed Mr. Fields; that I’d made him do all the hard heavy work until he keeled over from heart failure. He said I’d planned to do the same thing to the old lady, but she’d taken what I offered her so I’d let her go “completely broken in health.” He said…

Everything. Every lousy thing that a smalltime stinker could think of to say.

It was a lie, of course, every word of it. I’d worked for those people for peanuts, and I’d have stolen from myself quicker than I would have from them. I’d paid Mrs. Fields more than anyone else had offered when she put the place up for sale. I’d even done a big part of the housework for Mrs. Fields. I’d made Mr. Fields stay in bed, and I’d waited on him and done the other work besides. He’d hardly been out of bed for a year at the time he died, and she’d hardly stirred a hand, and…

And this character said things like that about me.

It made me sick. These people—those two people I’d cared more about than anything in the world, and…And this was the way it turned out.

Mrs. Summers touched my arm. “Don’t feel badly, Carl. I know you were just as good and kind to those people as you could be and what
he
says doesn’t change the facts.”

“I know,” I said. “I—” I told her how much I’d thought of the Fields and how I’d tried to show it, and she sat nodding sympathetically, murmuring an occasional, “Of course,” and, “Why, certainly you did,” and so on.

And pretty soon it seemed like I wasn’t talking to her, by myself. I was arguing with myself. Because I knew what I’d done, but I wasn’t sure why I had done it. I’d thought I was, but now I didn’t know.

He was lying, of course; the way he’d put things had been a lie. But a lie and a truth aren’t too far apart; you have to start with one to arrive at the other, and the two have a way of overlapping.

You could say I had moved in on the Fields. They hadn’t really needed any help, and if they’d been younger and less good-hearted they probably wouldn’t have given me a job. You could say that I had made them work hard. Two people could get by fine on the little business their station was doing, but three couldn’t. And I’d saved them all the work I could, but still they’d had to work harder than they had before I came. You could say that I had stolen from them—just being there was stealing. You could say I had cheated Mrs. Fields on the price. Because all I had I’d got from them, and the place was worth a lot more to me than it would have been to an outsider. You could say…

You could say that I’d planned it the way it had turned out; maybe without knowing that I was planning it.

I couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t. All I could be sure of was that I’d been fighting for my life, and I’d found the perfect spot—the one place—to take cover. I’d had to have what they had. In a way, it had been me or them.

Those six years I’d spent with them…Maybe they were like all the other years. Just crap. Nothing to feel kind of proud of or good about.

“Carl…Please, Carl!”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“You’re sick. I can see it. Now, you’re coming right into the house with me and I’m going to fix you a cup of coffee, and you’re going to lie down on the lounge until—”

“I think I’d better go home,” I said.

I stood up and she stood up with me. And she looked almost as sick as I probably did. “Oh, I wish I hadn’t told you, Carl! I might have known how upset you’d be.”

“No, it’s—I just think I’d better be going,” I said.

“Let me call Bill. He can drive you.”

“No, I’d rather you didn’t,” I said. “I—I want to walk around a little first.”

She argued about it, looking and sounding like she might burst out crying any second. But finally she walked to the gate with me, and I got away.

I walked toward the house, the Winroys’, my eyes stinging behind the contact lenses; and it didn’t seem sunny or pleasant any more.

I could hear Ruthie out in the kitchen. No one else seemed to be around. I went out there, reached the whiskey out of the cupboard and took a long drink out of the bottle. I put it back in the cupboard, and turned around.

Ruthie was staring at me. She’d taken her hands out of the dishwater and was starting to reach for a towel. But somehow she never made it. She stared at me, and her face twisted as though a knife had been twisted in her; and she took a swing and a step on the crutch. Then her arms were around me and she was pressing me to her.

“C-carl…oh, darling. What’s the—”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just a little sick at my stomach.”

I grinned and pulled away from her. I gave her a little spank on the thigh, and I started to say, I
did
say, “Where’s—?” But I didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. I heard Fay coming up the front steps, that firm I’m-really-something walk of hers. And by the time she got the front door open, I was in the hallway.

I winked and jerked my head over my shoulder. “Just borrowed a drink of your whiskey, Mrs. Winroy. Had a sudden attack of stomach sickness.”

“It’s perfectly all right, Carl.” She gave me back the wink. “Sick at your stomach, huh? Well, that’s what you get for eating with cops.”

“That’s it,” I laughed. “Thanks for the whiskey.”

“Not at all,” she said.

I started up the stairs. About halfway up, I suddenly turned around.

I wasn’t quite sick enough to catch her at it; she was already entering the dining room. But I knew she’d been looking at me, and when I got to my room I found out why.

The back of my coat. The two white soapsuds prints of Ruthie’s hands.