Some Came Running (72 page)

One time, they were passing through a little town that sported the perennial signs you saw everywhere: Drive Slow. We Love Our Children. ’Bama merely snorted. “Why don’t they think up something new? Yas, they love the little bastards. That’s why they route the highway right past every school in town; to prove it. What they’re really hopin is that some son of a bitch
will
run over their damn kids so they won’t have to feed ’em.” Then he said: “Someday when I’m rich I’m gonna buy myself a whole town and put up my own damned signs: Drive As Fast As You Want To. We Hate Our Kids As Much As You Do.” Dave could not help but laugh, especially as, when they drove on through, they sure enough passed two schools.

Still another time, when the gambler saw a state patrol car bearing down on them going the other way, he quickly hit his brake several times lightly with his foot, slowing the heavy Packard down to around sixty-five, and snorted. “Bastards. It ain’t the expert drivers who causes their wrecks. It’s them damn twenty-mile-an-hour bastards. But it’s always the expert drivers who pay their damned fines.” He grinned through the window at the state troopers and waved as they passed.

He apparently hated trucks, and once after finally getting by a solid string of four of them that were driving almost nose to tail, he delivered himself of a diatribe on them, too.

“That’s against the law,” he said. “They’re supposed to stay one car length apart. Goddamned trucks. It’s got to be a damned custom in this country that everybody has to say what expert polite drivers truck drivers are. It’s got so damned bad that if you or me went out and said truck drivers were bums we’d get accused of being un-American or damn Communists. While the damned truth is, only about one in a hundred truck drivers is a decent driver—and since the war that percentage has been goin down and down. Too damned many punk hot-rod kids getting trucker jobs. And that ain’t the worst. Not only are they bad drivers,” he drawled, “but their damn stinking trucks are what’s ruinin our highways. The government can’t hardly get a highway completed, before the truckers have already wore out the other end of it so that they have to start all over resurfacing. And you know who pays for it, don’t you? We do. You and me. Every time you or me buy a gallon of gas, we’re settin them up in business and payin their maintainance bills.”

“I wouldn’t care so much,” he said after a moment, “myself. If they’d just hire some damned decent drivers.”

As if to prove him right, it was not ten minutes later, in a patch of rough hilly country where they were driving less than sixty, that ’Bama suddenly exclaimed “Shit!” and bore down on his brake harder than Dave had ever seen him do it. Even so, he did not press down hard enough to throw them into a skid. All this had happened before Dave had time to even see what was happening. Then he saw the truck ahead of them, apparently coming straight at them. ’Bama kept on braking coolly and edging over to the right as close as he could get without going off on the muddy shoulder, until finally he had come to a complete stop on the pavement.

What had happened was that at the top of a short hill in front of them, where there was a sharp left-hand turn onto a narrow bridge, and where there was a warning sign of twenty mph, a big tractor trailer had swung out coming off the bridge around the turn to pass another, slow-moving car on the downgrade. ’Bama had seen him almost before he started and thrown on his brakes. By the time they were completely stopped, the truck had almost made it, gunning desperately, and then whipping back into his own lane in the scant space ’Bama had provided by stopping. The truck appeared to miss the front of the Packard by inches. By the time Dave had grasped and understood all this, it was already over.

“Well, he made it,” ’Bama said coolly. “Well!” he said, turning to grin at Dave. “It’s a good thing there wasn’t anybody behind me, ain’t it?” Dave, whose own heart was thudding in his ears, could see the large artery in ’Bama’s throat pulsing. “That was a fairly close one,” the tall man grinned. “He didn’t miss us by much more than six feet.” He put the Packard in low gear and started off up the hill without so much as a backward glance. “That trucker probly had been tryin to get around him for the last thirty miles. Well, at least he didn’t speed up any, did he? even if he didn’t put on his brakes.”

They rode up over the narrow, rickety bridge and down and on along the other side of the valley. “This must be one of those bad stretches they told me about back up the way,” ’Bama said. Then he chuckled. “It’s funny, ain’t it? Just an inch or two, one way or the other. It makes all the difference.”

They were in Tennessee by now. It was still early morning. Now and then, cars came at them out of the winter grayness, swelled, grew, then passed and receded. Sometimes dwellings or a village appeared, rushed at them, then disappeared. Sometimes, too, human people were visible, moving. But none of these things really had anything to do with them. They had reached that stage of a long trip where, moving along a prescribed restricted ribbon of area, touching the earth itself only on four points of rubber, they had become insulated from everything. The world no longer existed, and they themselves hung suspended between two points on a map. It was not hard to believe, looking out, that it was they who were stationary and the rest of the world which moved.

And in a way, Dave thought, it might even be partly true—since they were moving westward just now and if you took into account the earth’s eastward spinning, and its movement around the sun, then it might very possibly be that they were moving slower than the earth. Wouldn’t that be funny? Actually making themselves move slower, in relation to the movement of the earth. Sometimes he wished he were a mathematician.

All he had to do, to do it, was to shuck off whatever it was that was Dave Hirsh. That was all.

For a moment, a pointless, confused anguish filled him. And almost like a revelation, which he seemed to see so clearly and still could not reach, he thought he could see that for a man to be himself, become himself, was really a very simple thing: All he had to do was to cease to be himself. All he, Dave Hirsh, had to do to become Dave Hirsh, was to not be Dave Hirsh at all.

Oh just once, to shuck off this slow ugly body that hampered and hemmed you in. But more than that, to be rid of this personality. This personality restrained and hampered and locked you out from everything more than your body ever did, and which you detested.

Yes, he hungered to be a mathematician. In the same way and with the same intensity Old Tom Wolfe hungered to be a poet. Only, Old Tom
was
a poet; and didn’t know it? What was that line we used to say as kids? He’s a poet and don’t know it? Well, D Hirsh is a mathematician and can’t do addition.

Oh, Jesus! he thought. Jesus, Jesus Christ!

Well, there was one thing he could do anyway. Never again would the name D Hirsh appear on a story or novel or poem. He made himself a solemn oath. If he ever did publish anything again—and he knew he would, this book—he would use his name like it should be, without affectation: David Hirsh. It would be a symbol; a symbol of the change in him, and in his viewpoint, personality, style, everything, by God! Like Old Cabell did. Better yet, he thought with a burgeoning excitement, he would use it like it always should have been all along, all his life: It would be David Herschmidt! That was what it would be. A solemn oath . . . But then, after having come to, and made, the decision, he found that nothing had really changed at all. He, the
him,
remained. A sort of terrified desperation gripped him.

Gradually, out of the welter, the faint knowledge of what had upset him and put him onto this tirade swam up through his consciousness: He never should have left Parkman. He never should have quit his book and come off on some crazy junket like this to Florida. He had no right to do it. He owed it to the world, to the damned world that he was going to shoot off at the ankles, not to do it.

Beside him, ’Bama still drove easily, if tiredly. Dave stole a look at him, possessed by a hatred for him so strong he could have done him bodily injury. He hated ’Bama for talking him into making this lazy, worthless pleasure trip to Florida, and Gwen French for not inviting him over Christmas when she knew how badly he wanted to come, and also Bob French for allowing her to do a thing like that and not stopping her. And he hated Frank for getting him to stay in Parkman in the first place.

If it wasn’t for all of them, he could be out in Hollywood right now with Francine, living peacefully, and working on this book without all this terror and anguish.

Inwardly, he drew himself up to his full five feet six inches. Well, he would do it without them. He would become a mathematician. A mathematician of the human soul. God knew the world needed one.

It was a large ambition for a man who was thirty-seven years old and had never yet done anything toward achieving it. But he could do it. And
none
of them could stop him. And he thought of that magnificent line from Stevens’s poem about “What Thomas an Buile Said in a Pub,” where God was about to destroy the Earth, and the one little man said: “Stay, you must not strike it, God; I’m in the way; and I will never move from where I stand.” And then finally, exhausted the turbulence his own emotions, he went to sleep.

I
N
N
ASHVILLE,
’Bama stopped long enough to gas up and to find out about the roads. Apparently, the information he had been given was accurate, and Route 41 was not in too good a shape on south. Looking curiously stable for a man of his precarious habits, he leaned over a map out on the driveway with the station attendant while they discussed the routes. After he got back in, still clutching the marked map, and got them started through the congested downtown area, he explained what the attendant had said about the routes.

Dave, whom the stopping of the car had waked up in the station, had waked to find his previous mood all gone. Only a vaguely reasoned determination to change his writing name, and a stubborn intention to hold ’Bama and Bob and Gwen and Frank responsible for what happened to him and not to trust them, remained out of all that torrent of emotion. These; and an indefinite feeling that he had had a sort of revelation about life that he could no longer put his finger on. More than once during that acute emotional upheaval, he had been at the point of telling ’Bama to turn around and go back except that it would have made him look so ridiculous. And anyway he had been afraid to speak, for fear the grinding hatred he felt for ’Bama would have communicated itself to him. But now he was glad he hadn’t told him. And because he still felt that secret dislike that he was afraid for ’Bama to find out about, he was much nicer than he usually would have been.

The routes, ’Bama said—according to the attendant—were none of them in any too good a shape. But 41 was the worst, in bad shape almost all the way. There were two other ways, and ’Bama said he was in favor of the second route.

They took the second route. Dave didn’t care, and said so, and when ’Bama came to the junction he decided it by turning them off toward Shelbyville. It was 113 miles to Huntsville, Alabama, and they reached it before eleven. There they stopped for a sandwich and a bottle of beer, the first food they had eaten since the sandwiches in the hotel, and Dave noticed for the first time consciously something he had been aware of only vaguely in Nashville: They were in The South. Capital letters.

The total overall effect of it upon him was to instill in him a feeling of nervous apprehension. It had been noticeable in Nashville, this peculiarly Southern quality, but there it had had its edges rubbed off somewhat against the North. But here in Huntsville, it stuck out like a winter cardinal after a snowfall. For one thing, there seemed a tremendous suppressed violence among the men, in the expressionless faces, even when they laughed. Everybody seemed almost waiting to get into some kind of a fight, solely to relieve the tension, and the aura they emanated seemed to hang over the whole town like a dark cloud.

Dave had had the feeling before, in the South, and he could only think with relief of when they would get to Florida; but ’Bama seemed to be totally in his element. Another thing, his semi-western style hat no longer looked out of place because almost all the men here wore them, too. The same thing applied to his square shouldered suit and topcoat. Apparently, he knew Huntsville well, because he drove them right to a place where they could get a beer and a sandwich; and inside he joked and talked happily with everybody, and they did the same with him. From Nashville on, he had been talking with a gradually more and more pronounced Southern accent, and in the lunch counter it became even more noticeable. He was obviously pleased to be there; and yet as the accent grew, the look of suppressed violence about him that he always had about him grew more noticeable, too. Dave felt an intense relief when they were back out on the road and there had been no fights.

’Bama had filled the tank up again in Huntsville; he always did that whenever he stopped; cuts down on the condensation in the tank, he said. And when they were out on the highway again, he let go of the wheel several times and watched it closely.

“What did you do that for?” Dave asked him.

“Checkin the tars. If one tar’s low, it’ll pull the cahr,” he said. “It’s a good thing to do ever now and thin.”

Dave filed the information away. He did not say anything about what he had felt back in Huntsville, at least not then.

But it was not too much later that ’Bama—in an indirect way—brought it up himself. They had passed Guntersville, and were almost to Gadsden, when ’Bama suddenly began to talk about, of all things, the Civil War.

Did Dave know who Old Bedford Forrest was? he wanted to know. Yes, Dave knew; he had read a book about him once. Well right here, Gadsden, ’Bama said, was where Forrest chased Streight’s Raiders through; did Dave remember about that? Dave didn’t. He had a vague memory of the term Streight’s Raiders, but that was all. The single book on Forrest he had read had been years ago, out in LA with Francine. But as ’Bama talking enthusiastically began to sketch out the story for him it began to come back to Dave.