Hard Rain Falling (39 page)

“Oh, yeah? What’d they get you for?”

“I cornholed a cabdriver and took his money.”

The driver pulled over to the curb fast and got out and pulled the back door open. “Out,” he said.

“Have a drink, honey,” Jack grinned.

“Aw, shit.”

“Come on, have a drink an take me home. I dint cornhole
you
, did I?”

The driver took a quick short drink and got back in. “You’re puttin me on,” he said.

“Fuck yes, I’m puttin you on. You dumb son of a bitch.”

“Leave me alone, will you? I’m takin you home. I know how you feel. Don’t take it out on me.”

“Who’ll I take it out on? How about the niggers? Can I take it out on them?”

The cabbie laughed bitterly. “Sure. They takin over. You know what we call Yellow Cab now? The Mau-Mau Taxi Compny. They hire all the niggers, you know.”

“Goddam niggers takin all the good jobs,” Jack said bitterly. “Runnin all the banks. Fuckum. Fuck you, too.”

The driver sighed.

When they got to his place, Jack got out and paid off the driver. “Hey, pal,” he said, “how’s about comin in and blowin me?”

The driver stared at him with hatred, and put the cab in gear.

“No,” Jack said. “I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

The driver averted his eyes; Jack could tell he was thinking it over; coming in, seeing the money, trying to get it, knowing Jack was putting him on, yet tempted anyway. Jack laughed at him. “You got your price, don’t you?” he said. The driver gritted his teeth and drove off. Jack giggled. He felt mysterious and disembodied. He knew he hadn’t really wanted a fight. The cabbie was just working. No reason to hit a working man. Just get inside, go to bed and have a nice long drink.

He woke up in the morning sick with a cold, hung over, and feverish. He threw up several times, and tried to drink some whiskey, threw up again, and went back to bed. He was sick for three days, his head swollen and soggy, his hands trembling. He stayed about half drunk most of the time, and if it did not help him get rid of the cold, it did make him more comfortable. He didn’t shave and didn’t eat, and the cold just went away of its own accord, leaving him empty, sober, and shaky. He went down to the store and got some food, and when he came back there was a postcard for him in the mailbox. It was a picture postcard of the Mormon Tabernacle, and on the other side was a note from Sally. She was visiting her mother and stepfather with the baby, and would be home on Friday, love. Jack hadn’t even known she had a mother and stepfather; if she had ever mentioned them, he had forgotten. He went to bed again after eating, and that night he was back at work.

But he could not go on allowing his emotions to rise and fall at Sally’s whim. Try as he would, he could not understand her, unless the obvious was true and she had simply grown tired of being married to him. Perhaps to her the marriage had been an experiment, and the experiment had failed. Perhaps all marriages had some of this quality, and if there wasn’t a binding force stronger than love—or was it only passion?—something like a religion, a code, a blind facing-away from the messy inconclusiveness of life, a marriage was doomed from the moment the man and woman regained their sight. He did not know. He wondered how many people stayed married out of spite or from fear of being alone. He wondered how many children were raised in homes without love, where the counterfeit was accepted as the coin, where the words were warm and the eyes and heart cold. He wondered why he and Sally had never become friends. That could have made all the difference.

Later, after it was all over and he had stopped struggling against the loss of his wife and son, and time had washed the bitterness from his blood, he would marvel at how long he had managed to stay innocent, dramatizing his adversity the way a kid does, as if to prove that it exists. By then the past would lie half-buried in his imagination and the future would stand before him as implacable, faceless, and beyond his power to control as it always had—but with the calming difference that now he knew it and accepted it. By then he would realize that the freedom he had always yearned for and never understood was beyond his or any man’s reach, and that all men must yearn for it equally; a freedom from the society of mankind without its absence; a freedom from connection, from fear, from trouble, and above all from the loneliness of being alive. By then he would understand that fulfillment was only temporary, and desire the enemy of death.

By then he would realize that all the dramatic alternatives his pain brought to mind could not possibly satisfy him forever, but that they, too, were forms of his lifelong fistfight with an invisible enemy: to have killed her—he dreamed sweetly of this—would have satisfied his childhood urge to murder long after he stopped needing the urge as protection; to have walked, as he saw himself in horrible self-pity, out to the Golden Gate Bridge for the last long drop to eternity would have been only an act of revenge, hurting no one but himself. There were other alternatives, too, born out of a need to act, a need for drama. He could have become a professional thief, revenging himself on a society he no longer loved or hated. He could have gone for junk or alcohol as weapons against his pain; they worked for some men, but he knew they would not work for him. He could have left the city and chosen a square of dirt far away in the mountains of the West and become one of those sour, lonely farmers whose only friends are distant clouds and mountain rims—indeed, it was still an attractive dream, one he could not quite abandon. He could have gone to college and become sharp and gone into business and made ten million dollars and shown them all. He could have turned poet, living the quiet life, accepting in spiritual gain what he had lost in material failure.

Only once, in those months of self-sorrow and anguish, did he actually do anything. Caryl Chessman, twelve years a symbol of one man against the machine, lost his final appeal, and Jack joined, stiffly, self-consciously, a group of young men and women who marched across the Golden Gate Bridge, up the long freeway to San Quentin, and stood in all night vigil to protest the murder. In the long night he came to sense something of these young people: they were different from him; not just a younger generation, but different, harder, more sure of their rights and the rights of man. They were even a little frightening. In the morning, after Chessman was dead and they were walking back to the city, some teen-agers came along and jeered at them, called them filthy names and laughed at their passive expressionless refusal to be angered. Jack wanted to be like the others, untouched by the jeers, but he could not. One young punk stuck his acned face next to Jack’s and spit; without thinking, Jack hit him twice in a surge of delicious wrath, leaving him bleeding and unconscious for his friends to carry away. The other demonstrators looked at Jack without admiration and without sympathy, and for the rest of the march home no one spoke to him. He could not help agreeing with them. The only hope for the world, for Billy, was to rid the earth of fighters.

There were other, perhaps more rational, alternatives. He could have remarried. He came to see that marriage was not an institution, not even an idea, but a rational social process whose function was to raise children properly. He could have more children, and raise them into rational adults. It would be a risk, but it would be worth it. There could be love and dignity in that kind of life. But it was not so easy. He had no work, no profession, no obsession, and it would occur to Jack that a man without a craft might turn too much of his energies onto his family, and burden his children with too much love and too much care. It would be a crippling thing to do, as crippling as the orphanage had been. So marriage would remain an alternative, rather than becoming an ambition.

Gradually, through his books, his records, his long walks alone, the mere passage of time, he would begin to come to terms with his life as it was. He became an observer. He began to taste his food and to smell the air. He saw things and felt them. The earth became real, and at times he was capable of sensing the pleasure of existence. Other times were not so good. There were evenings when he would drink too much and get to feeling sorry for himself, and at such times he was easy to provoke. Among the regulars of North Beach he became known as a likable but unpredictable character, and it amused him to see the wariness in their eyes.

His life was temporary. He continued to park cars for a living, and he stayed in hotels and ate in restaurants, but for the time being, that was enough. Not that he planned to spend the rest of his life this way. He did not plan anything.

When Sally got back from visiting her parents things were different. Often Jack came home from work to find the old Chinese baby-sitter there and Sally gone. She would come in late, often in the morning, and Jack would refuse to ask her where she had been. Often he heard the roar of a sports car outside just before he heard her key in the lock. When she came in she would be drunk as often as not, and sometimes very affectionate. But Jack would pretend to be asleep.

It could not go on like that. One morning when she came in particularly drunk, Jack heard her singing, and heard Billy cry out. He opened his eyes and turned on the overhead light. Sally had the baby in her arms and was dancing at the foot of the bed. The baby was crying angrily. Jack got up and took Billy away from her and put him back in his crib. Sally stood in the middle of the small room, rocking slightly, her face blank. Her lipstick was smeared and she looked just as she had the first time he had seen her. He wondered if his millionaire friend Myron Bronson had brought her home.

“Come out in the kitchen,” he told her. She followed him, humming to herself.

He made a pot of coffee, and when they had both drunk a cup, he said to her, “This has got to stop. I won’t ask you where you been or what you been doing, but this has got to stop. You can’t take care of Billy and stay out all night, too. Forget about me. Think about him.”

“You think I don’t?” She grinned bleakly. “I think about him all the time.”

“Then stay the hell home and take care of him.”

“Just like that. Why should I?”

Jack gritted his teeth.
“Because you’re his mother!”

“You think I don’t know it? What the fuck do you know about it? Have you ever had to sit in a place like this and know you couldn’t do a goddam thing cause you had this
infant
around your neck? That’s what it’s like, you know. The baby is hanging around your neck and you can’t kill it and you can’t leave it, and it gets so goddam boring sometimes I want to die and you don’t know fuck-all about it. There. It’s got nothing to do with you at all, you just don’t know.”

“Self-pity,” Jack said to her. “I thought you were bigger than that. But all lushes are alike, aren’t they.”

“You’re right. Oh, God, how sorry I feel for myself! I can’t help it. I’m better than this; I’m better than you.”

This admission made Jack feel superior, and he said, “Okay, have some more coffee. Listen, we have to hold this thing together, whether we like it or not.” But even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. He was being stubborn now, not rational. It was, he knew later, the greatest punishment he could torture her with:
holding on
.

It was amazing how long it lasted, even after that. There would be long periods when Sally would stay home and “take care of the baby” (now walking all over the house, a tiny, sturdy, blue-eyed blond replica of Jack), stay home and knit, make good dinners, and seem to be perfectly contented. Jack cooperated; he asked for and got an extra night off a week, thinking that the sacrifice in money was worth the gain in time; and they went out to bars, to parties among Sally’s old friends, some of whom were glad to meet Jack and liked to talk to him about prison life; and days they went for drives more often, to the beach or the mountains, Sally and Jack in the front and little Billy in the back in his little car-seat. It was an excellent abstract of a rich, full life.

But then there were times when Jack would come home and there would be the Chinese baby-sitter, and, secretly pleased but refusing to admit it, he would heave a sigh, pay off the sitter, and wait for Sally. He no longer pretended to be asleep, because when she got home they would want to have their argument. Jack looked forward to the arguments because he always won. After all, he had the baby on his side, and all Sally had was the advantage of ending up the contrite sinner.

The arguments would take different turns. Sometimes Sally would say that it was Jack’s fault because he didn’t have a better job. But he could top that. Smugly he would tell her that rotten vicious ex-convicts like himself were not in demand as bank presidents. Once she retorted that he did not even try to find a job where he would work days, and he countered that by finding one, working in a downtown parking lot. It was a real triumph for him (a triumph of spite, but still a triumph); he worked all day and Sally stayed home with Billy all day. At night Jack insisted that they go out together. If he did not insist, she would. At the end of the month Jack discovered what he had really known all the time—they had no money to pay the bills.

He got scared. “We can’t go out for a month!” he told her. “We don’t even have enough money to buy food!”

“You’re going to keep me locked in here for a
month?
” was her shocked, victorious reply.

“Well, goddam it, we just don’t have any money!” There was no answer to that!

“Borrow some from Myron,” she said, and before he could counter with his “ethics” she added, “This time we really need the money. It’s not as if we wouldn’t pay it back.”

Jack accepted defeat and finally called Myron Bronson. Both Jack and Sally were horrified to discover that Bronson was in Las Vegas and wouldn’t be back for a week.

In the end, Jack got an advance of his wages, and they ate, but that was about all. They didn’t go out.

That lasted two weeks. On the night Jack came home with his paycheck, Sally was not there. The baby was asleep in his crib, but there was no Chinese baby-sitter. When he realized that Sally had actually abandoned the child, the last bit of love in him died; and so what followed did not have any real effect at all. His anger was real, but there was no passion behind it.