Some Came Running (81 page)

“Frank’s pretty hard to make mad,” Dave said; “especially, when it has anything to do with business.”

“Well, that’s yore job, see? You got to make him mad enough,” ’Bama said. “But I don’t think that that’ll be so hard to do. He’s probly already mad enough at you now, for takin off and all. And he probly expects you to go back to work for him. If you just act even a little snotty, he’ll probly blow his top off.”

“Why don’t we just forget all this and let me go tell Frank I want out and that I want to sell him my share?”

“Christ—no!” ’Bama said. “That’s just what he’d want! If you do that, yore not even goin to get yore original five thousand out of it. He’ll start talkin about how business is bad, and he guess it wasn’t such a good idea as he use to think for a business. Look,” he said. “Business is no differnt than anything else, Dave. All you got to do is know people, and remember to read the fine print. Business is no differnt than playin poker. And yore a good poker player, Dave.”

“Sure,” Dave said. “I know what you mean.”

’Bama looked at him thoughtfully. With his thumbnail, he pushed his hat back a quarter of an inch. “I guess it is all pretty hard to explain, I guess. Unless you already know beforehand what it is I’m talking about. And you don’t! Course, it would have been easier if you had wanted to buy instead of sell. That way it was all set up. And I must admit it would have tickled me to see you all set up as a respectable businessman in this town,” he grinned. “But I guess it wouldn’t have been such a good idea. It would almost certainly hamper yore writin,” he said, “and that’s what we got to think about now.”

“I think I understand it all right,” Dave said. “All I have to do is make him think I want to buy when I really want to sell.”

“That’s it!” ’Bama said. “Now you’ve got it! Well, now do you think you’ve got clear everything I said?”

“I suppose so,” Dave said. “I think so.”

“I— Yeah,” ’Bama said. “Yeah. Well!” he said, and slapped both hands down on his thighs, pushing himself up to his feet. “I better get to going. I’ll see you in two—three days at the latest. Then you can tell me all about how it turned out, and we’ll see what Ol’ Judge has got for us in the way of a house.”

He seemed a little glad to be getting away, Dave thought, and realizing what an oaf he was in anything to do with business, he didn’t blame him any. After ’Bama had gone, he mixed himself another whiskey and water and went to stand with it at the corner window and watched ’Bama come out below and cross Wernz Avenue and get into the big black ’37 Packard and drive off. He was a real friend, by God. And a man didn’t get many friends like that in his lifetime. Nursing his drink, he stood looking out at the town, which still looked so totally different—not different outwardly so much, because of the spring; but different inwardly, because of the change in him. That was why really, of course. Damn! That ’Bama was sure a swell guy.

Still holding the now half-finished drink, he walked over to the phone to call up Frank. Might as well do it now and get it over with. Then, before he went to see him he’d have another stiff drink and build his courage up to do it the way ’Bama had said. Christ, what a coward! But Frank had a sort of Indian sign over him and always had. It came from Frank having played father to him for so long and being the one who gave the orders. It got to be a sort of psychological habit.

Standing with the phone in his hand, but not having dialed yet, he suddenly remembered his childhood, and how he had used to want to sleep with Agnes. When he was a little bitty kid. That was before Agnes had taken such a dislike to him and he used to let her play the mother to him and dress him and undress him and give him baths so she would see him naked, and later even after he got in high school, she used to fondle him and rumple his hair and he tried to concoct ways of getting her to see him naked then, but never had nerve enough to carry any of them out. Thinking about it later, he had thought she had known, but she had never said anything about it. It had become a sort of delicious secret with him. He wondered if Agnes remembered any of that today. Probably not. And yet it might be one of the reasons she disliked him. Christ! he hadn’t thought any of all that in years.Frank turned out to be not in town when he called the store. He was up in Springfield on business, Edith Barclay said, but he was expected back at the store tomorrow. Dave recognized her voice. (She recognized his, too. He could tell.) So he told her who he was, as if he thought she hadn’t recognized him, and asked her about his car. She knew nothing at all about it, Edith said, but Mrs Hirsh would probably know. So he called Agnes up at home.

As soon as she heard him she recognized him, and he could hear that thin, unpleasant edge come into her voice that she always got whenever she spoke to him. Well, to hell with them. He didn’t have to worry about what they thought anymore. Yes, the keys were there, she said, at the house. The car was parked on the lot at the taxi stand.

“Well,” he said politely, “I’ll send Albie or whoever’s at the taxi stand down for them. Will that be all right?”

Yes, it would be perfectly all right, Agnes said. He hung up and mixed himself another drink. Life was such a strange, complex, incomprehensible thing. He noted that in spite of the fact he didn’t care what they thought anymore, it still bothered him to know that someone didn’t like him. That was what the trouble would be with Frank, when he saw him, he thought; and he was supposed to make him madder.

Albie Shipe was sitting behind the main desk in the taxi office, his feet cocked up on it, smoking a big black cigar and reading a comic book when Dave walked in.

“Well, damn!” Albie said, bugging out his eyes like a comedian, and threw the comic book down and got up. “Look who’s here, back from the dead! Where the hell ya been so long, boy?”

“I been in Florida,” Dave said. “Hi, Albie.” They shook hands.

“Florida, hunh?” Albie said, letting his whole face sag and then lifting it up into a broad grin. “Look at me! I been promoted since you left.” He swept an arm around to include the desk. “I got your old job now. Take all the calls, and make out all the dispatches, and write up all the figures even. What do you think of that, hunh?” he said and bugged out his eyes. “So you been in Florida. I thought I heard somebody said they thought you and Ol’ ’Bama had went off tomcattin someplace together.

“Say! You’ve put on a helluva lot of weight, ain’t you?”

Dave grimaced. “I’ve been livin good.”

Albie grinned. “So well whatta you know! Ol’ Dave! Well, when are you gonna come back and do me out of my job?”

“I don’t think I’m comin back, Albie,” Dave grinned. “Looks like you’ll get to keep the job.”

“Aw, now,” Albie said with comic earnestness. “Come on, now. I wouldn’t want this job if it’d mean cuttin you out of it. You know that.”

Dave shook his head. “I don’t want it. I got a better deal. Me and ’Bama are goin into partnership gamblin. But it’s on the q t.”

“Anything that’s on the q t’s on the q t,” Albie said, narrowing his eyes and putting his finger up beside his nose.

“I’ll tell you what I came over for, Albie,” Dave said, and told him about the call to Agnes and the keys.

“Sure!” Albie said. “Nobody’s in right now; but I’ll go down and get them for you myself. “I’ve bought me a car since you been gone! I’ll go in my car and I’ll get them keys. What do you think of that, hunh?” He hustled to the door, the footfalls of his heavy body making the little lunchroom building shudder. “You watch them phones for me while I’m gone, will ya? Oh. Uh—if you ain’t sure what to do if somebody calls up, I be glad to explain it to you?”

“Go to hell,” Dave grinned.

Albie laughed and left, and from outside Dave could hear the chugging roar of Albie’s car, and sat down at the desk where he had sat so many times before and looked out at the dingy redbrick backs of the square’s business buildings that he had stared at so many times, feeling high and happy and free, and in a few minutes Albie was back with the keys.

When they went back outside and he saw the car, his happiness left him and he was infuriated. For a moment, he wondered furiously if that wasn’t why Albie had so slyly reminded him about watching the phones: just so he would get to be there and watch his face when he saw it.

To say it looked like the last rose of summer would have been putting it mildly. What had once looked like a pretty good “used car” now looked like an “old car.” An old wreck. It stood by itself in the very back corner of the cinder lot, and all the dirt and weather of four months of winter had assailed it unmercifully. He tried to tell himself that if it had stayed on the street where he had left it, it would have been the same; but it was not the same. Frank had taken it, that was the difference. Frank had taken it, and with a bullnecked sanctimonious righteousness deliberately put it out there and left it sit. Sure, Frank was angry at him; and that was why he did it. But it was still a petty, pompous, dirty little trick to pull.

And once again—as always, apparently—right was on Frank’s side. And Dave could already divine all the statements he would make to prove it. Well, he didn’t know whether he was ever coming back or not. Well, he shouldn’t have left like that without notice, and then not sent any word. Well, what the hell
was
he supposed to do with the damned thing? Sure; he would say all those things. In all his life—and he had had some pretty big hates going for Frank—Dave had never hated his brother as he did right now.

“It’ll look a lot better once you get it cleaned up,” Albie said from behind him. “Mostly it’s just dirt. The battry’s deader’n a doornail, and the right rear tire’s plumb flat. But it ain’t really in near as bad a shape as it looks. I’ll help you change that right rear tire if you want. It should have been up on blocks and had the batt’ry tooken out.”

When they went closer for a better look, Dave found that Albie was right. It wasn’t really
ruined.
But the knowledge did not make him feel any less hatred for Frank’s just, free from wrong righteousness. The little door over the keyhole was stuck shut from disuse and he had to prize it open, and when they looked in the luggage compartment for the spare, they found it was completely flat also.

“Slow leak,” Albie said.

“You’d better get back and watch your phones, hadn’t you, Albie?”

“Screw the phones,” Albie said, bugging out his eyes, and rubbed his palm over the dirty fender, leaving a brighter streak. “I like cars,” he said, as though he were speaking of people. “Anyway, there won’t nobody die for lack of a taxi for a few minutes.”

“Well, there ain’t much we can do here with it, anyway,” Dave said, reaching in and slapping the seat. A thin film of dust had covered everything.

“No,” Albie said, “an you’ll need to git a new battry from the garage anyway.”

Back inside Dave called the Dodge-Plymouth service garage and told them who he was and that he needed a battery and a tire fixed.

“Is that that ’42 Plymouth that’s been sittin down the taxi lot past two three months?” the mechanic’s voice said.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll need more’n one battry to start ’er then,” the voice said. “I’ll bring along a booster’n hook ’em up parallel.”

The mechanic who arrived in a few minutes in a red pickup truck was lean and dour, with flat, passionless eyes, and very nearly unhuman except for the chaw of tobacco in his jaw.

“You jack ’er up, Harv, and run them two tars down’t the shop,” he said to the other man he had brought with him, after he had looked it over and raised the hood, and dragged two batteries out of the truck. “Bring first one back soon’s you get it done, Harv.” Together they went to work.

In half an hour, the sluggish motor was chugging reluctantly, and Harv was back with the right rear wheel and had it on, and the mechanic drove it, and Dave rode with him and spent the afternoon in that dim and oily half-world of the echoing-big garage peopled by these laconic, strangely unhuman members of an alien race, while they washed his car and greased it, and changed its oil, and fixed its other tire, and flushed its gas tank out, and changed its spark plugs, and retuned its motor, and in the end it seemed like another car entirely. His bill was twenty dollars—not counting the new battery.

“Drive ’er around a bit,” the mechanic advised him as he left. “’ll loosen ’er up.”

So he drove to Terre Haute and had dinner alone, hating Frank and his pompous rightness, and afterwards feeling a little tight on several martinis, had a taxi driver drive him to a whorehouse, before he went home and went to bed.

The next day, he saw Frank.

“Where were you?” Frank said when he called the store. “I tried to call you last night. I’ll come over to the hotel.”

“You still afraid to have me come into your store?” Dave said.

“Hell, no,” Frank said. “But I thought if we were gonna talk, we’d want to talk in privacy. And there sure as hell ain’t none of that here.”

“I’ll be here,” Dave said.

F
RANK HUNG UP THE
telephone irritably and looked across the office at his mistress. She, however, did not look back, because she had her head down and her back to him. So he winked at the back of her pretty neck. It was something he had taken to doing lately when he was upset because it soothed him. Sort of a private rebellion against the pronouncements that they should never in any way at all let on that there was anything at all between them. Edith kept them admirably, and for that matter so did he himself, but sometimes he had an impulse to rebel a little, privately. What was half the good of having a mistress if nobody in the world but you and her knew about it? (Oh, of course, there was lots of
good!
) But if
nobody
but you and her knew it, then to all intents and purposes, at least as far as everybody in the world was concerned, you didn’t have one!

Frank rubbed his hand over his face to clear his head. That damned Dave. And so now he was back and all ready to cause more trouble. Already
causing
it. He was worse by far than the Old Man. Why did it have to be him who had a brother who wanted to be a writer and a crackpot artist? Nobody else in Parkman had a brother like that. Damn it, he had no sense of social responsibility at all! Other people had sane, affectionate, normal brothers. Well, he would have to go over there now and see what kind of a trouble-causing scheme he had cooked up now. He rubbed his hand vigorously over his face again.