Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (4 page)

‘He’s in the wrong business, way he can drive a car,’ I said, looking at Holiday. ‘He can handle a hell of an automobile.’

‘You don’t think I let everybody drive that Zephyr, do you?’ Mason said. ‘You said it, Cotter. That Jinx is some jockey. Yes sir.’ He was so pleased at getting his car back in good shape that I knew the announcer on the police radio had given him a good scare with all that big talk about a gunfight. ‘You’ll be needing him again, won’t you?’ he asked Holiday. ‘Real soon?’

‘I suppose so.…’ she said.

‘Got anything lined up?’

‘I’ll have to talk with Ralph first.’

‘You do that right away.…’

‘I will. Stash him away for an hour or so …’

‘I’ll stash him good. I got an interest in him,’ Mason said.

I did not know what they were talking about. They were speaking across me, bouncing their words off my shoulders, but it was as if I had not been there. Then Holiday put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘We better not be seen together. I don’t think they’re expecting us to hole up here, but we better not be seen together. I’ll call you as soon as I can.’

‘I’ll stick around.…’ I said.

The boy who had been changing the license brackets, Nelse, came to the edge of the group. His right forefinger was bleeding and he flung the blood off, looking at Mason.

‘Is that all?’ he asked.

‘Needn’t even have done that,’ Mason said. This was clean. The cops was just making it sound good.…’

‘Goddamn!’ Nelse said. He stuck his knuckle in his mouth, sucked the blood off and spit it on the floor. ‘Ain’t that just like cops? Always beating their gums…’

He held out his hand and Mason took a ring of keys from his pocket and laid them in it. Then Nelse walked to the rear, somewhere behind the cars.

Mason turned to Holiday. ‘I’ll worry about that stuff in the car,’ he said. ‘You worry about getting together with Cotter.’

‘Keep your pants on, Vic keep your pants on,’ Holiday said. ‘I’ll call you as soon as I can,’ she said again to me, walking away, toward the front, toward the glare of sunlight in the big door. It was the first time I had seen her walking, and seeing her move like this, in silhouette, excited me all over again. She had beautiful legs and a pleasant body and she rolled a little with each step, the effortless sensual roll that very few women can ever acquire, no matter how diligently they practice. She had talent all right, a fine and wondrous talent; but she was simply more than one man could handle and I knew it, but I also knew that I had been a long time waiting.…

‘Make yourself at home …’ Mason was saying.

I looked at him. His blue eyes were wide and bland but there was a wise frozen smile on his lips and I could tell what he had been thinking too. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Incidentally, you made a couple of cracks I didn’t get. Mind clearing ’em up?’

‘Yeah? What?’

‘You said a couple of times that you had an interest in me. What exactly did that mean?’

‘Don’t you know this set-up?’ he asked, a little surprise in his tone.

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ I said.

‘Holiday owes me a thousand dollars for this job. I did it on credit.’

‘Wasn’t that risky for you?’ I said.

‘Well, she’s the kind of a dame it’s hard to say no to,’ he said. ‘I’ve done things for her before. She always paid off.…’

‘One way or the other?’

‘One way or the other,’ he said mildly. ‘Of course, everything’s gonna be great now that she’s got you to help her,’ he said.

That’s what you think, that she’s got me to help her, I thought. You won’t be long finding out who’s going to help who. ‘I’m sure of that,’ I said.

‘Crawl in a car and take a nap,’ he said. ‘I’ll wake you up when she calls.’

‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘But, first I got to have some milk.’

‘Milk?’

‘Milk. It’s been two years since I had any milk.’

‘I like milk myself,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘We got something in common, anyway.’

He winked at me. ‘Yeah. But it ain’t milk,’ he said.

‘Yeah. But it ain’t milk,’ I said, walking out.

The sidewalks were full of people and the street was full of trucks. It was a dead-end street. Two blocks down, to the south, it ran into a big produce market and stopped. The market was a single mass of movement and noise. The other way, to the north, the direction from which we had come, was the business district, with many tall buildings. It was a big town and that was good.

I walked on up the street, looking for the retail market I had spotted on the way in. It was nice and comfortable being out in the open again, moving among people who paid no attention to you. The street noises were pleasant and the grind of the trucks was like spring music. The market turned out to be in the next block,
HARTFORD’S
, the signs said. It was a cheerful market, with a bakery on one side and an ice-cream booth on the other and the vegetable department in between, with its neat rows of vegetables and fruit I went through the enamelled turnstile by the cashier’s counter and on back to the icebox, passing along between tiers of canned goods and bottled goods and packaged bread and cookies. It was wonderful, like a fairy land.

The icebox was the biggest icebox I’d ever seen. It took up the whole back wall. The door I opened was man-sized, and the cool, moist air tumbled out, smelling of butter. I saw no bottles of milk. There were many packages of cheese and stacks of beer and soft-drink cases and piles of melons and enough butter to fill a freight car, but I didn’t see any milk. As I stood there, holding the door open, telling myself that this was always the way, I heard a scraping sound behind me and I turned and there was a man in a white uniform dragging a wooden box which was filled with bottles of milk. He stopped beside me and when he raised up I saw that he was an old man and was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles.

‘This is like rubbing Aladdin’s Lamp,’ I told him.

‘Late getting away from the plant this morning,’ he said. ‘Danged bottle-washing machine busted.’

I smiled sympathetically and picked two quart bottles out of the wooden box. Just then a slender man wearing a neat double-breasted suit paused in the aisle.

‘We’re both a little late this morning, Joe,’ he said to the milkman.

‘Oh, hello, Mister Hartford,’ Joe said. ‘Yeah. Danged bottle-washing machine busted.’

Mr. Hartford nodded and went on. He had a bundle of currency in his hand, tied with a string, and a couple of bank books. I looked around to see where he had come from. A flight of steps led to an office directly above the big icebox. That was where he had come from. Yes, sir.…

‘What time do you usually get here?’ I asked Joe.

‘Oh around nine-thirty,’ he replied, starting to empty the box, putting the bottles of milk on a metal shelf just inside the door.

‘You deliver to that other market up the street too, don’t you? That – er – what’s the name…?’

‘You mean the A-One. Sure. That’s my last stop before coming here.

‘I thought I’d seen you at the A-One,’ I said. ‘Well, so long.’

‘So long.…’

On the way out I picked up a package of Fig Newtons. I paid the cashier for the milk and the Fig Newtons, and walked back to the garage, taking my time, still feeling nice and comfortable, looking in the windows at electrical supplies and boats and fishing tackle and second-hand typewriters and adding machines, just like any other guy.

At the rear of the garage there was a station wagon with the hood off and the motor removed and I opened the door and crawled inside. I put one bottle of milk on the floor and shook the cream off the top of the other one, and then opened the box of Fig Newtons and settled down to my picnic. I didn’t care if Holiday ever called. This was wonderful, being hemmed up in the station wagon nice and cosy and in the half-dark that felt vaguely familiar, vaguely reminded me of something and I sipped the milk experimentally, for the first taste of something you have craved for a long time is never what you have imagined it will be, but after the fourth or fifth sip I knew that this was finally the real thing, much too good for the common people. I ate some Fig Newtons, measuring them to last through the two bottles of milk and they came out almost to the last crumb.

I stretched out on the seat, taking the thirty-eight revolver out of my pocket and putting it on the floor beside the empty milk bottles, making myself comfortable again, thinking about the market up the street. Mr. Hartford had a bundle of currency in his hand and two bank books and I knew where he was going. He had said to the milkman that they were both a little late this morning, and since the milkman had told me that he usually arrived around nine-thirty that meant Mr. Hartford didn’t start for the bank before nine-fifteen. That wasn’t chicken feed he was carrying, either. Well, I thought, I’ll meet that milkman at the A-One Market tomorrow between nine-five and nine-ten. I’ve got to make a start sometime.…

I was just on the edge of dozing off when I got a whiff of something, something burning. It didn’t smell like fabric or anything familiar. But I sat up quickly, looking around, and then I got a good whiff of it. I still couldn’t define it or tell where it was coming from, but it was pretty strong. I got out of the station wagon and looked around and under it but it wasn’t here. Near by, in a corner, Nelse had the Zephyr on a hoist and was lubricating it. I picked up the pistol from the floor board, putting it in my coat pocket, going back to him.

‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.

‘The stuff Mason’s burning, I guess’

‘What stuff?’

‘Your stuff and hers. That prison suit.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I looked around. I still couldn’t see anything.

‘Where’s he doing it?’ I asked.

‘Over there,’ he said. ‘In the battery room.’

I walked across the floor to the heavy tin door that was set in a side wall. The door was partly open. This was where the smell was coming from, all right. It was coming through the crack of the door like it had been shot out of a fire hose. I pulled the door open and went inside. It was a small, dark room with a single window that opened into the alley. Below this window, on the left, was a long bench on which there were several storage batteries and a charging plant and an assortment of electric cables. At the rear of the room was another bench, thicker, on which were several steel tire forms and slender pipes and a lot of vulcanizing and tire-patching equipment. On the right side of the room was a big anvil and what looked like a forge. Mason was standing there, wearing a pair of goggles and gloves and holding a lighted acetylene torch which he was spraying over something in the forge. His back was turned and because of the hissing noise of the torch he didn’t hear me cross the floor. I stood there, looking over his shoulder. He was working on that old prison-issue pair of shoes of mine, and there were a lot of ashes that already had fallen through the grating. He held the torch on the shoes and they actually melted before the flame. They melted. I saw them melting.

Mason reached over to the tank to cut off the gas and saw me and jerked, surprised, still holding in his hand the nozzle which was spouting the blue-orange flame a foot long. His face darkened a little, and he cut off the gas. The flame died, the noise stopped, and it was unbelievably quiet.

‘I smelled it all the way outside,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t figure what it was.’

He hooked the nozzle of the torch over the top of the gas cylinder and took off his goggles.

‘You’re nosey, too, ain’t you?’ he said.

‘I just wanted to know what it was,’ I said.

‘That’s what it was,’ he said, nodding at the ashes. ‘You oughtn’t to look at a flame that hot without goggles. Twenty-three hundred degree blue flame is nothing to let your eyes fool around with.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ I said, turning to go.

‘One other thing to remember,’ he said. ‘I don’t like nosey people.’

Sometime later I felt somebody pulling at my arm and I waked up and it was Mason.

‘Holiday wants you on the telephone,’ he said.

I backed out of the station wagon to the floor. He closed the door behind me, looking in over the rolled-down glass.

‘I see you got your milk,’ he said. ‘You oughn’t to leave them bottles laying around. Or maybe you’re so clever you don’t have to worry about fingerprints.’

‘You’re beginning to get a little tiresome,’ I said. ‘That fingerprint stuff’s for kids. Where’s the phone?’

‘In the office.…’

I went to the office and picked the receiver off the desk. Holiday was at the apartment and everything was all right. She started telling me how to get to the apartment and I stopped her until I could get a pencil and piece of paper.

‘… Maywood bus to Monteagle Street. Marakeesh Apartments. One, One, Four. Yeah, I got it. Where do I catch the bus? … Second and Front Streets.’ I wrote it all down. ‘Yeah right away… Him? Oh, fine. We’re getting along fine.’ Mason came just inside the office, leaning against the door. ‘No, he’s not here,’ I said into the telephone, looking straight at him. ‘He’s in the back somewhere. You can speak freely.’ I continued to look at him, smiling. ‘Yeah. I noticed that. … Sure – so long.…’

I hung up the receiver. ‘She’s got your number,’ I said. ‘She says you’re a worrier. Are you a worrier, Mason?’

That burned him a little. He came all the way into the office.

‘I’ll be around when all you cocky guys are gone,’ he said.

‘See you later,’ I said. ‘And be sure and get my fingerprints off those milk bottles. You got an interest in me, you know.…’

I
GOT A NOON
edition of one of the newspapers and read it on the bus. We were in the headlines in spite of the news that that same morning the Navy dirigible
Akron
was believed to be lost somewhere in the Atlantic. FOUR SLAIN IN PRISON FARM BREAK, they said. TWO GUARDS, TWO CONVICTS. Such ruthlessness was to be expected, the story said, when hardened criminals like Tokowanda, the slain prisoner, and Cotter, the prisoner who escaped, were worked in open fields as convict labor, always tempted by the near proximity of freedom and finally were made desperate by its nearness. Men with records such as these, it continued to editorialize, should be confined behind the walls of the state penitentiary.…