Some Came Running (62 page)

Ginnie’s round face appeared to crumple into frightened chaos, from which her eyes peered forth like a hunted rabbit’s. “Well, God, I was only tryin to make—I didn’t mean to—” she stammered, and then gave up and merely sat, peering at him defenselessly.

Everybody in the booth had turned to look at him with surprise, and the sort of dumb frightened guilt on Ginnie’s face left him stricken.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I was thinkin.”

“Thinkin about what?” Dewey said.

“Thinkin about life, damn it!”

Dewey grinned. “Well; that’s enough to make any one of us holler like we was jabbed with a pin.”

“It’s just that I don’t like that name,” Dave explained. “Everybody used to call me that when I was little, like I was some kind of a pet dog or mascot. Or their personal possession. I never have liked it.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Dave,” Ginnie said, smiling at him dully. Whatever it was, the terror, was beginning to recede from her eyes now. “I didn’t know. I won’t call you that no more.”

“I think we better get out of here,” Dave said, rubbing his hand hard over his face. “How about it, Ginnie? You ready to go?” He got out his wallet and put six ones on the table. “That should be enough.”

“Any time you are, Dave,” she said.

“’Bama tells me you’re workin on a book now,” Dewey said to him suddenly.

“Yeah,” Dave said reluctantly. “That’s right.”

“Was that what you were thinkin about a minute ago?” Dewey said.

Dave turned back to look at him. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it was.”

Dewey nodded. “I figured it was.”

“Let me out of here, please, Lois and Dewey, will you?” Ginnie said. They got up.

“This book,” Dewey said. “Is it about Parkman?”

Dave shook his head. “No.”

“I thought maybe it was,” Dewey said. “Well, somebody ought to write one about this damned town.” He grinned that glitter-eyed rebellious grin of his.

“Let’s you and me do it, Dewey,” Hubie said. “We can write it in our spare time after we get back in the Army.” Martha Garvey turned her head to scowl at him, and he grinned.

“This is where I came in,” Dave said. “Well, we will see you-all.”

“Yeah,” Ginnie said from beside him. “We’ll see you-all.”

“Sure. Come back anytime,” Dewey grinned. “I reckon we’ll be here. If Lois’s money holds out, that is.”

Dave nodded at him, and made himself grin a little, as he escorted the short dumpy Ginnie to the door. He was aware of a sort of lull behind him in the place, as everyone more or less stopped what they were doing for a second and watched to see who was taking whom out. This made him inordinately happy, with a kind of savage pleasure, a sort of deliciously enjoyed vulgarity, and he took the rotund Ginnie by the arm so all could see. Ginnie positively beamed. He only hoped damned Edith Barclay was watching from her back booth with her Harold. Watching; and thinking about it. Make it harold, he amended: lower case: from her back booth with her harold.

Outside, he led the apparently very happy Ginnie to the Plymouth.

Sure didn’t take much to make her happy, did it? One of the advantages of being dumb. In the car, he drove her back to the Douglas Hotel. It was the “Hotel Francis Parkman,” but it was the “Douglas Hotel.” Funny, what myriad minute forms our snobbisms took in permeating everything, he thought.

“I thought we’d go to my room at the Douglas,” he said as he rounded the square. “I don’t know of anywhere else to go. I—I guess it’ll be all right. I’ve never taken anybody there before, though.” He looked at her hesitantly.

“Oh, yes, it’ll be all right,” Ginnie said. “That old night man, he don’t care,” she said. “Nor the day man, neither, for that matter, honey.”

S
HE WAS QUITE RIGHT
.
The night man merely looked up, once, with his countryman’s flattened eyes, then looked back down at his magazine, thereby replacing his face with the pink top of his bald head which, eyeless, continued to stare at them.

As they walked across the lobby that was divided slightly (into Office and Lounge) by the old frame staircase, Dave rather wistfully wished he had as much aplomb about it as Ginnie had. In the room, after first pulling the blind, Dave got out a fifth of whiskey and set it on the table. When he turned around, trying desperately to think of some adequate way to begin operations, Ginnie put her fat arms around him and kissed him on the mouth.

They disrobed in silent unison and then just as silently went to bed. It was as simple as that, he thought with astonishment.

And for one night in his life, at least—well, perhaps not the
first
time; but certainly the first in a long time—Dave had his fill of sex. He was not only filled, he was runneth over, saturated, and thoroughly bored with sex. He found, to his irritated surprise, it did not relieve him near as much as he had earlier thought it would.

Sitting exhaustedly in the single armchair after the first ferocious session in the bed, her eyeballs red from fatigue and from liquor, Ginnie stared at him with a look almost of anxiety on her fat face while she sipped at her whiskey, suddenly began to talk about her life with a speed and energy Dave would not have up to now believed her capable of. She rattled off a story whose sole interruptions nearly, were the other three times they went to bed, and which began with her earliest thoughts and childhood dreams and continued through her school years and right on up to the present, and she was still rattling it off with no apparent diminishment when Dave finally fell asleep, exhausted.

The upshot of what she had to say was that she liked sex. She began with this, and came back to it a number of times, and every time she said it a look of anxious guilt came over her face as she peered at him to see his reaction. She not only liked it, she said, she loved it.

“Well,” Dave said, “there’s no law that says women
shouldn’t
like sex. That I know of.”

“Maybe not,” Ginnie said, still peering at him. “I don’t know what the law says. But everybody sure acts like there’s one. I’ll say that.”

“Well,” Dave qualified, “I suppose there is some kind of law about immorality. About adultery. Which means, I guess,” he said gently, feeling she might need explanation of these terms, “sleeping with someone you’re not married to. If you try to pin it down.”

Ginnie nodded. “That’s the one.” She continued to peer at him with her reddened eyeballs, merely observing.

“But just about everybody does that,” Dave said. He could not figure out what she was trying to get at. It wasn’t that she was afraid of him turning her in to the police. She knew better than that. It must be something else.

“Sure,” Ginnie said. “But some gets by with it and some doesn’t,” she added. “And, looks like, I’m one of the ones nobody don’t never want to get by with it.”

“That’s probably due to the respectable women,” Dave said. “Who would probably all like to do what you’re doin, but are afraid to take a chance on tryin it.”

One corner of her small mouth lifted itself up in a sneer. “Sure. That’s who hates me. You think I don’t know all the ‘respectable’ women in this town hates me? But what’s wrong with a woman likin sex? That shouldn’t be bad,” she said, peering at him, again, as if studying him for some reaction she either hoped for or expected.

And yet in spite of that, she went on, she loved sex. All her life she had. Even her earliest thoughts and her dreams as a little kid, she said, had been all about sex. She knew that now, although then she had not known what sex was all about. She told him some of them, such as the daydreams she used to have even as a little kid about how there had been a contest and she had won first prize for having the biggest titties in the county.

She told him other ones, too. Dave could see where they all could have had to do with sex per se; but he could also see where they might actually have had nothing to do with sex per se at all, but been only childish hungerings for attention and affection, and she herself only construed them as that, as sex, later.

It was really very interesting. In her dull, almost mechanical voice, Ginnie talked on, staring at him intently. Dave was interested in spite of himself. He would listen awhile, and then shut off his ears and think about it awhile (but still keeping his eyes on her, of course). It was like being able for the first time to go completely inside a woman’s head, because Ginnie apparently had almost no self-conscious awareness. In that, she was totally animal. God, he wished he could get Edith Barclay to talk to him like this; or even Gwen.

They interrupted Ginnie’s flood of words long enough to go to bed the second time, after which Ginnie got up immediately, almost as if she begrudged the time spent, got herself more whiskey, sat down in the chair, and staring dully at him, began to talk again.

She had lost her virginity at twelve—in the fifth grade—she told him, when her stepfather had made her do it with him in the barn. Wasn’t that terrible? They were very poor, you see, and lived on a crummy little farm just south of town, and her stepfather seduced her in that barn there, and she had liked it even then. Actually, she did not say “seduced”; but she did not say “raped,” either; she said, again, “made her do it with him;” and her whole point was that she had liked it even then.

Well, when she was in the seventh grade—that was five years later, and she was almost seventeen—that was when the trouble came. Her and another girl had been sneakin off to Terre Haute and goin out with fellows over there, and one of them given her a dose of clap. She hadn’t even of known she was sick. Well, her stepfather got her a date with a friend of his, and she not knowing nothing about it went out with him and give it to him. Well, he went to the doctor and he told on her, and the doctor told the judge and they got the truant officer and the health officer and that son of a bitch Sherm Ruedy come down to the school and arrested her and, well, in the end they sent her and the other girl away to a state girls’ school for a year.

“What did they do with the guy?” Dave asked. He had almost fallen asleep twice.

Ginnie’s mouth twisted up. “Nothin. He was married and had some kids and he worked at the Sternutol. The doctor and the judge and all kept his name quiet. And course, they never did find out about my stepfather.”

“Hell!” Dave said, wide awake now. “He was the guy something should have been done about.”

Ginnie nodded somberly. “If it hadn’t have been for him I wouldn’t never have got started in none of them things.”

“You’ve had it pretty rough, haven’t you?” he said.

“Well, I guess I have,” Ginnie said. She looked vaguely pleased. Suddenly, she got up from the chair, still holding her glass of whiskey, and went straight to the typewriter on the desk.

“You ought to have somebody to look after you,” Dave said from the bed.

“Yeah,” Ginnie said. “But who?”

“Well, someday you’ll find somebody,” he said vaguely.

“Is that that book you’re writin?” she said.

“Leave that alone!” he said, and jumped up off the bed. There was an unfinished page in the typewriter, and he snatched it out and put it in a folder.

“I never looked at it,” Ginnie protested. “Honest, I didn’t.”

It was obvious she was lying. But Dave decided he might as well overlook it. Actually, he didn’t care if she read it or not. It was just that it was so terrible he didn’t want anybody to see it. An automatic reaction.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. I just don’t like for people to read what I write until it’s done.”

Ginnie peered at him with her red eyeballs. “What’s it about?” she asked.

“Oh, people,” Dave said. “Just people.”

“Am I in it?”

“What? No. Oh no. See, it’s about the war.”

“I thought maybe you might want to put me in it,” Ginnie said, looking at him.

That was the reason she had been telling him this detailed story of her life, then, Dave decided. The same reason probably, why Dewey had asked him all about it. And probably the reason for ’Bama’s interest, too. The power of the pen.

“This is about the war,” he said, “and there’s no women in it.”

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” Ginnie said. But before he had a chance to answer, she had turned and put her arms—still holding the whiskey glass—around him and kissed him on the mouth.

That was the third time they went to bed together.

It was during this that Ginnie did something which startled him half to death. Staring wildly at the ceiling, she cried out to herself in a loud, penetrating voice: “Oh, Ginnie, Ginnie, Ginnie!”

It was not only startling, it was also disconcerting; almost, in fact, as if he were not even there. He was powerless to understand it, or what she meant by it. He did not mention it afterwards because it would have embarrassed him to. Ginnie did not mention it, either, and apparently did not even know she had done it.

The rest of her life story she continued with afterwards, still rattling along almost hurriedly, as though she were afraid she might not get finished before he went to sleep. After the year at the girls’ school she had come home a wiser and more educated person, she said.

She had hung around town for a year or two—until her stepfather died—and then gone to Indianapolis. The war was on then, and work was easy to get in the plants. It had been very unpleasant in Parkman after she got back. That son of a bitch Sherm Ruedy had watched her all the time and apparently took great pleasure in warning her about once a week that he would pick her up if she didn’t walk the chalk line.

He would have, too, Ginnie said, sent me back; if he could ever have catched me. He made life unpleasant enough as it was, that son of a bitch Sherm, and so when her stepfather died and her mother kicked her out, she had went to Indianapolis.

It was plain to see she was deathly afraid of Sherm Ruedy. Dave suddenly felt sorry for her. He got himself some more whiskey, and resolutely prepared himself to listen.

In Indianapolis, she had worked for a while at the Allis-Chalmers plant, she said, and then at some other plants, and then she had quit factory work altogether and had took up singing. The town was wide open back then because of the war, and there was a lot of young soldiers from Camp Atterbury and Fort Benjamin Harrison coming in on the town with lots of money to spend. She rarely had to buy anything for herself, she said, and she made big tips into the bargain. She sang in several different bars out on West Washington and had done real well and everything was fine—until she got mixed up with that soldier boy from Camp Atterbury who was over the hill. He told her he was on furlough; but the truth was he had broke into the home of a poor old lady who worked out at the Base and who, as she had apparently told just about everyone on the base, kept all her money at home because she didn’t trust banks. Evidently, the boy had had to beat her up with a loose chair leg, and very nearly killed her, before she would tell him where the money was. It come to something over a thousand dollars. The poor old lady was still in the hospital, but beginning to recover, when the police picked him up at Ginnie’s little one-room apartment. Of course, she herself hadn’t known none of any of this at the time. He seemed like a nice sweet boy to her, and was always kind, and he spent money on her like water. Naturally, later on, she found out he was trying to get it all spent before they caught him. He damn near did, too. Well, after they had got him the police had turned her loose the very next day and said she was innocent of any crimes and knowledge. But, of course, it had made all the papers, and that was when she decided to come home to Parkman. When she got to Parkman, she found it had made the paper there, too, and it hadn’t helped her reputation none. That son of a bitch Sherm Ruedy had come around and told her he didn’t think she was innocent of all crimes and knowledge, and he better not ever catch her with more money than she was supposed to have or he would send her away again so quick it would make her head swim, and she better get herself a job right away if she wanted to stay in this town.