Some Came Running (51 page)

“Haven’t seen my chicks in a
long
time,” Doris said, and reached over and playfully rumpled the shoulder of Dawn’s sweater. “It looks like you’re out having yourselves a time.”

“Hello, Doris,” Dawn said almost worshipfully.

Wally resented the tone in Dawn’s voice. Also, he did not like being called one of Doris’s chicks since he had never gone to school to her.

As if she sensed this, Doris turned her demure child’s face to him. “How’s our star author today?” she smiled. “How’s that novel coming? I’ve been hearing a lot about it lately.”

She looked at him shyly. She had startlingly baby blue eyes—even bluer than Dewey Cole’s, he thought.

Wally shrugged. “Not very good. It’s slow work, Doris.”

Doris shook her head, smiling. “Oh, now you’re spoofing me. Gwen was only just telling me about it the other day. She thinks it’s wonderful.”

Wally
knew
this was a lie. He had asked Gwen not to say anything about it to anyone, and she had agreed with him that it was best not to talk about it. Also, he was wondering why, if Doris was going to come over and sit with them, she hadn’t done it before ’Bama Dillert came in.

“Oh, it’s coming along, I guess,” he said. “I think it’ll be good when it’s done. But it’s just hard work.”

Doris smiled and shook her cherrywood-colored hair again. “All novels are,” she said, as though she knew everything about novels. But Gwen had told him she didn’t.

As if feeling she’d put enough time on this, she turned back to Dawn.

“How is the drama club coming, sweetie?” she said.

Dawn wrinkled her nose. “Oh, Doris, I’m having a terrible time.”

Doris listened with an intent eagerness, as the younger girl laid out her troubles. She looks so absolutely demure, Wally thought. And so innocently childlike. And so completely virginal. Everything about her. It made you doubt all the stories. How any woman could look so
completely
virginal, and still sleep with all the men she was supposed to have slept with, was totally outside his knowledge. Unless it was that she herself really
believed
she had not slept with them. It might be that. Otherwise, the stories just had to be lies.

“Everything will work out all right,” she said to Dawn. “You’ll see. Remember how it was last year. That’s a terrific new combo, isn’t it? Have you ever played with them, Wally?”

“No, but I know them all,” he said. “They’re all Terre Haute boys.”

“They play my kind of music,” Doris said. “For my money, I would just as soon they didn’t play dance music, and not dance, just listen.”

“That’s about the way I feel, too,” he said.

“Who was that tall man that stopped at your table?” Doris said.

“That’s ’Bama Dillert,” Wally said, congratulating himself.

“Oh!” she said. “Is that the gambler?”

Wally nodded.

Smiling, Doris looked over at him in the booth with Dewey, her face demure. “I never knew who he was,” she said, turning back. Then she laughed. “Maybe I ought to get him to teach me to play poker? Daddy says I’ll always be the world’s worst poker player.”

“I doubt if he gives lessons,” Wally said, unable to resist. He got a warning glance from Dawn. Doris was unable to see her.

“That’s the most beautiful dress, Doris,” Dawn said, reaching over to touch it. “Is it new? It’s the most beautiful outfit I’ve seen in a coon’s age.”

“Oh, this old thing?” Doris said, looking down at herself. “No, it’s not new. What do you think, Dawn?” she said, looking up. “Should I meet the big bad gambler?” Before Dawn could answer, she said, “Well, maybe you’d better introduce me to him anyway, Wally. It’s worth a chance. I would dearly love to just sit down some night—and take all of Daddy’s money.”

“Sure, I’ll introduce you,” Wally said, and grinned at her knowingly.

Doris looked back at him blandly and then smiled. “If you were to get him back over here to your table, I could walk by a little later.” She shook her hair and grinned. It was an affective grin, completely innocent, and Wally found he still did not know.

“I’ll see you later, kiddies,” Doris said, and got up and went back to her own booth.

“Well, what do you think?” Wally said.

“You mean you think she wants to sleep with him!” Dawn said.

“Well, you gotta admit that might be a faint possibility,” Wally grinned.

Dawn shook her head.

“No, I don’t think so. Not with him. Anybody else maybe. I think she wants to learn to play poker. Just like she said. She’s an awful child, really.”

“Yeah,” Wally said. And yet he still was not sure. “Well, I better go get hold of ’Bama.” He started to get up.

“Don’t do it yet!” Dawn said. “Those two men would be sure to notice if you did it now. Wait awhile.”

He waited fifteen minutes—until Dawn said it was all right. They danced twice more and had another beer. After he called ’Bama off and told him, the big man waited another five minutes. It was all beginning to smack of a conspiracy.

“I think you like this playing matchmaker stuff,” Wally grinned at Dawn after he came back.

“Well?” Dawn said. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

’Bama came back and sat with them and in a minute Doris wandered by, ostensibly on her way to the ladies’ room. She stopped for a moment to speak, whereupon Wally jumped up and made the introduction.

Standing, ’Bama looked the banker’s daughter over. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “Well, I better get back to my friends, Wally. Only trouble is,” he added grinning, “they won’t let me drink any. So every so often, I have to go up to the bar to get myself a drink.” He did not look at Doris, and Doris herself was looking at Dawn. She had not sat, and in a moment she went on her way, to the ladies’ room.

“Well, if that ain’t the damnedest weirdest thing I ever took part in,” Wally said to Dawn after the others had both gone.

Dawn merely grinned at him excitedly. “When are you going up and sit in with the band?”

Wally made a face. “Not now. There’s too many people here. Wait’ll it thins out, later on. Then I’ll sit in on piano and have them take ‘Willow’ over. I know that one pretty good.”

So they sat and drank some more beer, and danced, and gradually the majority of the customers left. When he did go up to the bandstand later on, he noted that Doris Fredric was standing up at the bar talking to ’Bama. He caught the word
poker.
The petite cherry-headed Doris was looking up at ’Bama with a demure child’s expression. And ’Bama, with his semi-western hat, tall and with that tiny hanging belly, a reserved wry expression on his usually sneering face, suddenly looked a lot, Wally thought, like Gary Cooper. The two men—Wally looked to see—were still sitting in the booth.

Well, he thought, it’s things like this that make the world interesting and exciting. Puzzles.

He knew he ought to be getting home, and not drink too much, or get involved with a jam session. So he would be able to get up fresh and clearheaded and work tomorrow. It was a constant battle.

But he was still there, with Dawn, at nearly midnight when Doris Fredric left with her two men. Doris had had a number of drinks by then, and her eyes were a little glazed and puffy, but she still looked girlish and innocent and virginal. He had wanted so damn bad to stay and see what happened. But apparently nothing had happened. ’Bama and Dewey and their Terre Haute broads were still there, and they did not get up and leave after Doris had.

Wally collected Dawn and went home; and ’Bama and Dewey and their women were still there when he left.

T
HE WEEKEND
D
AVE
H
IRSH
had made up his mind not to spend at the Frenches’ turned out to be one of the pleasantest, most peaceful times he had ever had in his life after he changed his mind. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Especially, when looked back upon later. Because by then, it appeared as the last brief respite before the storm of the taxi service—a sort of ironic red herring, to trick men into false hope and not giving up, just at the time when Life or Fate, or Whoever it was, was secretly and gleefully preparing to lower the boom of misery on them.

He had lain in bed all day Friday, trying to sleep and failing, and waiting miserably for his damned body to throw off all the alcohol he had poured into it; three-fourths sick, still chilled from the night in the cornfield, and already hungover even before he was sober. It was one of those deep, bad hangovers in which a tight-drawn dehydration and some subtle deterioration at the base of the skull combined to make everything unearthly and strange, including yourself. Finally, in desperation, he had gotten up and dressed and driven back over to Israel, dead for sleep, to accept their invitation. They had forced a couple of martinis down him and fed him, and then the three of them had sat up in front of the fire until after one, discussing his novel and trying to lay out a form for it; and he discovered with amazement that he was no longer sleepy—and hardly even sick.

Everything seemed to smooth itself all out suddenly. There were no worries, and there were no fears. He seemed to have fallen into a state of complete desirelessness, and therefore of peace. Of course, it was only a mood. But it was a damned good mood. And that was the way it stayed for the next two days.

A great deal of the weekend’s success, he was quite sure, was due to the fact that he had discovered the secret of Gwen’s nymphomania. Knowing it, he was relieved of all pressure. The natural element of doubt, which you had with every woman, was gone. All he had to do was be patient, and wait, until one of her moods hit her, and then he wouldn’t have to seduce her, she would seduce him. It was unbelievable how much it put the mind at rest.

Actually, there had been damned few peaceful times in his life. Without being more than only a little bit dishonest, he could say there were none. At least, he could not remember any. He had always been running after some damned woman or other. Drive, drive, drive. Trying to engage in some damned love affair he could not engage in; or which if he did, soon deteriorated so rapidly and left him right back where he started. But now all that was gone; for the time being anyway. He was momentarily at peace, and consequently his long weekend at
Last Retreat
was as though he had gone clear off the planet somewhere, to Bacon’s New Atlantis Utopia or someplace.

He slept late. He drank little. He listened to music. He walked along the river bluff with Bob or with Gwen or both, breathing in the chill November air. He played chess with Bob in front of the fire, at which he was soundly and consistently beaten; or he played with Gwen, who also beat him, making him re-swear an unkept resolution to himself that he would study up and really learn the game like they knew it. And he ate ravenously, of those strange delicious meals which Gwen seemed to throw together from practically nothing. But mostly he talked, with one or both of them, and the constant subject was this novel of his. The conversations ranged, widely, but always they came back to the novel. Gwen had told Bob his idea—the comic combat novel—and Bob was enthused and excited about it. He agreed with Gwen that it was brilliant; and he agreed with Gwen that the thing to do now was to find a proper form for it, the right mold. Not a rigid plot-mold, you know? That would never do. But a channel, rather; some simple time-plan form which would give him a beginning and an end to work toward so he would not dissipate himself all over the place, while at the same time leaving him plenty of room to move around within it. And he agreed with Gwen and Dave both that there should be no hero. No hero and no heroine and no love story. Don’t complexify it; this was not a big, long character novel, with personal plots. The beauty of the idea was in its simplicity. And half of your striking power would be in the simplicity and shortness of it, in the simplicity of the story itself and of its presentation. Bob was very excited. When he would get to talking, he would stride his long-legged frame back and forth across the room, forgetting the chess game, calm, and quiet, and the bright vital eyes snapping. It must have continuity, it must progress. What kind of form, then, to give it? If the people themselves are incidental? Oh, it is my move? Ah! you shouldn’t have moved that bishop there, my dear Dave.The three of them struggled with it all day Saturday, through two meals, three chess games, and four walks outside. In the end, it was Gwen who came up with the idea of patterning it somewhat on George R Stewart’s book,
Storm
. There, too, she said, the people were only incidental; the protagonist was the storm itself. Did Dave know the book? There was a copy of it here someplace that he could take home with him. The main point was that the life of the storm, from its birth in the Pacific to its death across the mountains, formed the framework and the continuity.

Bob agreed excitedly. And so did Dave; he began at once to elaborate it. It was really ludicrously simple. All he had to do was take an organization, preferably a green one, and follow it through some campaign from its first combat to—well, to the end: the end of the campaign, or the relief of the organization, or—perhaps—to the final replacement of the last man who had been with the original outfit. But in this case, instead of the organization itself being the protagonist and hero, the main character would be the experience of combat itself—but controlled by the humorousness and comicality of death and war, as opposed to the usual solemn heroism and horribleness that everyone affected. And that would be what would make it shocking. Actually, it was all really very simple.

It was strange, he thought, the labyrinthine complexities of thought people had to wander through in order to come up with a simple idea. And the simpler the idea you wanted, the greater the complexities you seemed to have to go through to get it.

It had been a long time since Dave had felt in himself or seen in others that almost religious love of writing, and completely selfless abstract enthusiasm for it, that writing could sometimes give to people. He had had it once or twice, as a young man, but even then it had been all tied up with ego. But here today there was no ego; it did not matter—to any of them—whose name would be on the book, who would get the money for it, who contributed the best ideas, or who contributed the least; all that mattered was that the book existed—existed now as an idea, and was about to be created as a fact. It filled him with a wild, euphoric happiness that made him want to yell out loud and slap them both on the back.