The Man Who Lost the Sea (39 page)

“Hello—Smitty? Thought you’d be mad. You wouldn’t want to do a little job … you would? Well you’ll have to scramble. Get over to Doc Tramble’s and say you want the pills for me. Yeah. Then take ’em over to Fordson Alley and North Broad—you know, right by the movie—there’s a guy there frantic for ’em. See if you can get a dollar apiece. Sleeping tablets. Yeah. Hurry now … He’s moving, he’s ambling up past the movie. I don’t know what he looks like. Just look for a guy looks like he needs some sleep. Hurry now. See ya.”

Now that’s a surprise. I thought I’d botched it up with that Smith but for good. A good boy. Calmed down, too. Wonder if he’s going to pull that wife of his away from the old man. Hope not. Set up a hell of a rattle, the two of ’em at once.

So Gorwing ambled through the evening, through the town. He walked in a cloud of, or in a murmur of, or under the pressure of, or through the resistance of the not-mist, not-sound, not-weight, not-fluid presence of human need. Want was there, too, but want of that kind—two teen-agers yearning for a front-drive imported car in a show window, a drowsy child remembering a huge bride-doll in Woolworth’s, the susurrus of desire that whispered up in the wake of a white-clad blonde who, with her boy-friend, walked through the lights of the theater marquee—this kind of want was simply there to be noticed if he cared to notice it. But the need … he watched for it fearfully, yet eagerly—for sometimes it paid off. He hoped that for a while nobody would get hit by a car without getting killed outright,
or that some hophead wouldn’t suddenly appear with that rasping, edgy scream of demand. Ow. Wish Smitty would get to that guy with the sleeping pills.

Need was a noise to Gorwing. No, not really a noise. Need was an acid cloud, a swirling blindness. Need might mount up out of the nighttime village and make him faint. Need might pay off. Need, other people’s need, hurt Gorwing … but then each person had one or another difference, one or another talent; this one bad perfect pitch and that one had diabetes, and he wasn’t, after all, so different from other people.

You’re a freak
.

Strangely, it was not too easy to be funereal at this funeral. The flowers were sad, of course, such a scrappy little bunch, and the man was saying all the right things … and it was sad how easily the men handled the coffin; poor little old man, so wasted away. But you couldn’t feel badly about him now; he’d been glad to go, and it was good that he’d had, for those last weeks, just what he’d yearned for for so many sick lonesome years—someone who sat near and brought him things and listened to him ramble on about all the old places and the friends and family who were passed on, dead and gone and yet waiting eagerly for him, some place. No, it wasn’t any tragedy. Sweetly sad, that was it … and oh, such a bright beautiful day!

Eloise Smith hadn’t been out in the fresh air, the sunshine, since … “Eeek!”

It was a small scream, or rather squeak, and really no one noticed. But Jody, oh Jody was standing right next to her in a dark suit, with his hat—the one they called his Other hat—held over his heart, his head bowed. He looked … peaceful.

She bowed her head, too, and they stood quite close together until the man finished saying the old simple words, and the handful of earth went
tsk!
—a polite expression of sympathy—on the coffin lid. Then it was over.
“Bye, you old dear,”
she said silently but with her heart full.

Then there was Jody. “Oh, Jody. I don’t think I—”

“Shh. Eloise, come home. I need you.”

“Jody, you’re going to make me sound mean, and I don’t want to be mean. But you don’t need me or anybody, Jody.”

Smith moistened his lips, but loosened no special, just-right winning words; he said, could say, only: “I need you. Come home.”

“Wait—there’s Mr. Gorwing … Wait, Jody; I have to speak to him. Will you wait over there, Jody? Please?”

“Let me stay with you.”

“Honey,” she said, the wifely word slipping out before she realized it, “he’s sometimes sort of … funny. Unpredictable. I wish you’d wait over there and let me talk to—”

“He won’t mind. We’re old friends.”

“You know Mr. Gorwing?”

“Sure.”

“Oh dear. I didn’t know. He … he’s a kind of saint, you know.”

When Smith, coolly regarding Gorwing, who was talking to the funeral director, did not answer, she went on nervously—she had to talk,
had
to, oh
why
had he turned up like this, all unexpectedly? “If anyone’s in need at all, he has a way of finding it out; he—”

“I’m in need,” said Smith. “I need you.”

“Jody,
don’t
.”

“I do, he said softly, earnestly. “You’ve got to come back. I can’t manage without you.”

“Oh, that’s silly! You have your—”

“I have my nothing, Ellie. I—I gave the money away, almost all of it. I got a job, but I’m only beginning, and the pay isn’t much. I’m running a wood lathe in the cabinetmaker’s.”

“You
—what?
”

“You’ve got to help; maybe you’ll even have to go to work. Would you, if there’s no other way? I can’t make it without you, Ellie.”

What she was going to say through those soft trembling lips he would not know, for Gorwing interrupted. “Miz Smith—you know who he is?”

She flashed a look at her husband and really blushed. Gorwing laughed that wolf’s laugh, that barking expression of mirth and hurt, and said, “I’ll tell you who he is. He’s the only person in the whole world who ever came up to me and asked
me
what
I
needed.” He
clapped Smith on the shoulder, waved a casual hand at Eloise and walked away toward the cemetery gate. She called him once; he waved his hand but did not turn his face toward them.

“We’ll see him again,” said Smith. “Ellie … will you just let me tell you what this is all about?”

“What
is
it all about?”

“Can I tell you all of it?”

“Oh, very well …”

“It’ll take about twenty-three years. Oh Eloise—come home.”

“Oh, Jody …”

The shy man crouched in the hospital stairwell and peered through the crack of the barely-opened door. There were no white-coated figures in the corridor that he could see. He had long ago abandoned the front way, the elevator and all. Slipping in through the fire doors during visiting hours was much better. He pushed the door open far enough to let him into the corridor, and let it swing silently closed.

He gasped.

“Hello, Johnny.”

Right behind the door as he opened it, oh God, the doctor. Johnny bit his tongue and stared up into Doc Tramble’s face. It blurred.

“Hey now, hold on,” said the doctor. “You better come in here and sit down.” He took Johnny’s forearm—and for a split second they were both acutely aware of Johnny’s tearing temptation to snatch it away and run; and of its crushed quelling—and led him across the corridor into an empty private room, where he lowered the sweating visitor into an easy chair. Dr. Tramble pulled up a straight chair and sat close enough to force Johnny’s gaze up and into his own.

“I don’t know if you can take this, Johnny, all at once, but you’re going to have to try.”

“I got a second job, nights,” said Johnny hollowly. “With that I can catch up some on the bills. Don’t put my wife on the charity list, doctor. She couldn’t stand it. She—”

“Now you just listen to me, young fella.” He reached into the wall, got a paper cup from a dispenser and filled it from the ice-water jet. With his other hand he reached into his side pocket and took
out a folded paper, which he planked down on Johnny’s knee. “The bill. I want you to look at it.”

Painfully, Johnny unfolded it and looked. His jaw dropped. “So much …” Then his eyes picked up an additional detail on the paper. “P-p-paid?” he whispered.

“In full,” said Dr. Tremble. “That’s point one. Point two, Madge gets her operation. MacKinney from the Medical Center got interested in the case. He’s going to do it next week. Point three—”

“Her operation …”

“Point three,” laughed the doctor, “she gets that room to herself now, all paid up, and you have the privilege of telling that to her snide roommate. Point four, here is a check made out to you for five hundred. Drink this,” and he pushed the water at him.

Johnny sipped, and over the cup said, “B-but wh-where …”

“Let’s keep it simple and say it’s a special fund for interesting cases from the Medical Center, and you know these endowed institutes—all this money is interest and there’s nobody to thank so shut up and get out of here. No—not to see Madge! Not yet. You go down to the office and they’ll cash that check for you. Then you grab a taxi and voom down the street and buy flowers and a radio and a big box of dusting powder and a fancy bed jacket. Git!”

Numbly, Johnny walked to the door. Once there, he turned to the doctor, opened his mouth, shook his head, closed his mouth and without a word went for the elevators.

Laughing, the doctor went down the corridor to the telephone booth, dropped a coin, dialed the poolroom.

“Gorwing there?”

“Speaking.”

“Tramble. All set.”

“Yeah, doc, I know. I know. Oh God, Doc, it’s so
quiet
in this town …”

“Little devil,” said the old lady admiringly, which was odd, because she detested squirrels, especially when they were after the birdseed and suet set out on the feeder. Birds make a great deal of difference to the bedridden. Yet, “Oh, but you have got a brain in your head,” she murmured, for the squirrel, after two futile attempts to climb out to the feeder, was making for the slender branches directly above it.

Squirrels she detested, and unpunctuality, physical sloppiness, rice pudding, greed, advertising (especially TV commercials, of which she saw a great many), dull-wittedness and Hubert. Hubert, her nephew, was not a dish of rice pudding nor a squirrel, but he embodied everything else on the list.

Partly.

Maybe that was it, she thought, admiring the detestable squirrel. Right down the line, from how Hubert looked to what he did (he was an assistant producer—that is, general factotum, bottle-washer, squeezer of shaving cream onto whipped-cream desserts, source of yes-sirs for all the business and all the talent—for a TV commercial packager) Hubert was what she detested—partly. Even mostly. But in no case altogether.

That squirrel now, she thought, leaning out, reaching up over the bed for the brass handle which swung there; that squirrel is all squirrel, the pretty little, speedy little criminal. Letting her weight come on the handle, she reached for the loop of quarter-inch rope which hung from a brass fairlead sunk into the window frame. Holding it carefully, she worked her way back to the center of the bed, let go the brass handle, and sat alertly watching the scene outside. At the very instant the admirable, damnable squirrel dropped from the tree-branches toward the feeding deck, the old lady pulled on the cord, and the feeder, sliding up its guy wires, moved out from under
the animal, which snatched vainly at it, then hurtled down spraddle-legged to the lawn. It bounced like a rubber toy, then scampered angrily away, its tail drawing exact trajectories of each long bound.

A little out of breath, the old lady swore cheerfully at it and released the rope, so that the feeder slid back to its resting place among the outer shoots of the birch tree. Like certain other devices around the place, the feeder was her deft idea and Hubert’s ham-handed workmanship. There again, she reflected. He wasn’t altogether three-thumbed. He
could
turn out a job of work. But he got things right only by trying every wrong way first. She shuddered at the memory of the weeks of bully-ragging she’d put him through to get it done. Anyway, it worked, and could be drawn up to her window every morning to be filled.

She glanced at the clock and put her hand under her pillow for the remote control switch of the television. She saw a lot of television, and, unabashedly, she enjoyed it. Especially now. She enjoyed this particular television set even when it wasn’t turned on. Hubert was trying to kill her with this television set, and she was knocking herself out trying to help him.

This was a totally different project from any birdfeeder. That had been done by nag and prod. The TV operation was far more subtle; suggestion, planned convenience, and an imitated stupidity on her part which Hubert was too stupid to know was imitated. And yet—she’d reluctantly admit—there was a certain doggedness about Hubert, this time. Of all the “almost” things he was, about this one thing he really seemed willing to plug along until he got what he wanted.

He had first tried to kill her—oh, a long time ago, now. It was because of Susie Karina. Well, perhaps there were other things, going back years, but Susie brought it to a head. Susie was a housemaid, and like a fool the old lady had let her live in, never dreaming that Hubert would make a fool of himself over any woman, but if he did, it wouldn’t be Susie. Well, she’d been wrong about that. The old lady was never wrong about money or pulleys or birds or bonds or timing-gears, but in the course of her long and lively life, so filled with things to do to keep herself to herself—every dime she had,
she had earned—she had bypassed the intricacies of this Thing that seems to be going on between men and women all the time. It was the one area where she could guess wrong, and she certainly did this time. Susie was a small, downcast, black-banged little thing with bite-able lips and a heart full of greed. The old lady was not quite as wrong about Hubert—ordinarily he wouldn’t have dared to raise his hat to a doxie on a desert island, so certain was he of his unfailing unattractiveness to women—but neither he nor his aunt reckoned on Susie’s barbarous ability to slide out of the camouflage and light fires with damp fuel. Score a man for his technique with women and you’ve drawn the height of his defenses, give or take a little; so a man like Hubert, whose total experience had been a game of post office when he was ten (by unanimous vote the girls sent him to the dead-letter room) was about as hard to get to as the bottom of a ski slope from halfway down.

It had actually gone on for months, right in her house, right under her nose. Not only was the girl quiet and, at her specialty, clever, not only was the old lady tuned to other wavelengths; Hubert was so benumbed by the experience that even this intimate aunt could not tell his change from the norm. He did not begin to stay out nights, nor sit and moon any more there his usual great deal, and there were no financial flurries at all—Susie coldly set her sights higher than her hat, even a new one.