Some Came Running (102 page)

And as for the way he thought, well, it was no longer even conceivable to him to think of living some kind of a life without writing in it. Day by day, hard, craftsmanlike writing, saying all those things he felt, and thought, and wondered, and believed or did not believe (but saying them only by inference, through the craft of the work itself) about people and their ways. It might not be the highest work in the Universe; but it was the highest ever attained to by sniveling creeping man, scrambling along holding on to and clutching his gold bag and his scrotum like some hairy tarantula dragging along its precious egg bag.

And the sum of what he wanted to get said was that each man was a Sacred Universe in himself and at the same time, inextricably, a noisome garbage pail whose bottom had rotted out and was poisoning the garden air and needed to be got rid of posthaste. That these two were not only inextricable, but were actually one and the same. And that therefore there was no Evil; and probably no Good; only Growth, only change, and the pain of change, and the ecstasies of that pain, to embrace. And all of which every single one each in his own way tried so hard to shy away from. And most of all, that people—and their institutions—were not nearly so important to the Universe as people and their institutions tried so mightily to have believed.

No, he didn’t think at all like he used to, like he thought a year ago.

And he owed it all, or most of it, to Gwen French, he told himself. Some to Old ’Bama, and some also to Bob French, perhaps. But most to Gwen. Because he had once fallen in love with her, and had made up his mind to make her love him, too. And she had. Finally. And not only that, had helped him; had worked with him patiently, putting all her really large knowledge of literature at his disposal, making his aim her own. And he loved her very dearly for it. Whatever her wild, lurid past. And whatever her sexual predilections now. He had just about made up his mind he was never going to be able to seduce her.

With a kind of start, Dave the artistic social rebel, Dave the hater of convention, realized suddenly that he had—by some oddball twist—worked himself into the position of the typical damned husband with his little invalid wife at home whom he couldn’t sleep with but could cherish and love and look after and his mistresses whom he did not love but could get his sex from. In many ways, his situation with Gwen and with Ginnie Moorehead (and of course, all the other women he slept with) was just about the same damned thing. Well! he thought, feeling a little silly, and somehow frighteningly embarrassed; Well, what do you know. And he hadn’t even seduced her yet.

It was just about this time, not very long after the party—and coming almost inevitably, if one looked back on it—that Doris Fredric tried to seduce him.

The fall had come on slowly, this year, and had lasted long. The heat of August and early September had lingered on clear to the first of October, and then had come the month of gradually chillier nights and bright blue warm days, and the trees gradually turning, and now in November, it was still Indian summer and people still went safely around in shirtsleeves. The college was particularly beautiful right now, and Dave had driven out past it numerous times to look off across all the big old trees to where shoulder-padded boys kicked booming punts on the practice fields and brown-legged girls in gym classes squealed themselves through games of touch or softball. It was hard, looking at them, not to go back and remember how you had been yourself in school, to nostalgically remember the “golden days” of your “lost youth.” The town was creeping back into Dave some way, powerfully, emotionally, inexorably, a powerful current carrying below its surface the jumbled flotsam of dead uprooted memories. Watching the seasons change across its face had a great deal to do with it. He had never thought he would ever love this miserable, beautiful, backward-in-all-the-wrong-ways, progressive-in-all-the-wrong-ways, petty, little Illinois town.

But he did.

Watching the seasons change did something else to him, too. It made him come gradually aware that he was running out his string, was not, in fact, getting at all younger. Each week that passed brought its change in the season, unavoidable, relentless; making him poignantly aware that one more week of his life was gone. And where he had only been thirty-six a year ago, now he was all of thirty-seven. And soon he would be forty.

Forty!

Dave Hirsh, whom he had known and loved and lived with since he was six and ten and seventeen, forty!

There had been a time when he thought of forty as ancient, and of thirty as old age. Now both seemed young. And it would drive him back to work with a vengeance that it generally would take him three full hours working time to get over.

The summer that had passed now, become a swiftly dwindling knot somewhere in the moving string, had been an excellent one. The house itself was fun to live in. Something was always going on through someone. And the strange, tall, sneering Southerner he lived with and had become so close to was always an increasing surprise to be around. Sometimes Dave felt that, in spite of all the time they had spent together now, he didn’t know ’Bama at all. ’Bama, it turned out, was an ardent horticulturist. There did not seem to be anything he was not interested in. Excepting only people; people bored the living hell out of him.

The horticultural phase all started because of the vacant lot next to the house. Early in the summer, ’Bama had taken up the subject and the thorn of the vacant lot. It had evidently been let go for some years, and ’Bama didn’t like it. It looked like hell, he said. The next thing Dave knew the gambler was back from town bearing a brand-new two-hundred-dollar motorized mower and an armload of rakes and scythes, and for a week they worked like dogs in the moist early summer heat, drafting Dewey and Hubie and even Wally when they could, to cut and clean it up. And from this ’Bama discovered lawning. He found a book on lawn care at the local hardware dealer’s and devoured it and then went back and returned from town with an additional three hundred dollars’ worth of equipment, a lawn spreader, fertilizers, weed killers, and seed. And from there, it was only a simple step to wanting to put in some shrubs and trees on both the vacant lot and their own lot, too, and the next step after that was, of course, flowers. And even Dave, who had never given a damn about flowers or gardening or anything like that either, began to get the fever, too.

It was an easy matter to get the permission of the owner of the vacant lot to do all this, since it turned out that Judge Deacon himself owned it, having bought it up once thinking to turn a dollar someday on the resale for a home site. So they went to Terre Haute and bought an easy five hundred dollars’ worth of flowering shrubs and evergreens and young maples and flowers, three truckloads in all, which they began putting out after ’Bama had drawn up to scale on graph paper a plan of just where he wanted everything. If it was extravagant spending, it was all for pleasure and not profit. The judge, after seeing it, offered to sell the whole lot—which was about the size of half a football field—to ’Bama for only a very little profit. But ’Bama would have none of it. He didn’t want to own it. He only wanted to work on it and fiddle with it.

It was late in the season to be doing all of this, and just about everybody was quick to tell them this. Everything would surely die. ’Bama—who already knew a lot about farming—ignored it all and went ahead with his plan in sneering, arrogant disagreement. Even Dewey and Hubie got the fever and worked and sweated doggedly, cursing ’Bama like the ex-Infantrymen they were for ever having got them in on this. Almost nothing died; the evergreens and maples put out new growth, the shrubs developed, the flowers came up beautifully, and by the end of summer what had been a weed-grown vacant lot had developed into a beautifully laid out budding garden, which received a good deal of talk all over town—as evidenced by the number of cars belonging to the respectable elements which would drive slowly past—without ever stopping, of course—to see for themselves. This, of course, tickled Judge Deacon, and Dewey and Hubie would sit in the house drinking whiskey and chortle with glee as the “respectable” people drove by to see
their
garden.

And then, just as suddenly as he had begun it—although he carefully kept up his watering regimen—’Bama lost all interest in it. His attitude was well displayed by what he said to Dave one evening when they were sitting out on the patio-porch looking off across it.

“Look at all that damned stuff out there,” he said suddenly. “We went to work and planted it and took care of it, and now it’ll go right on growin and probly still be there when we’re both dead.

“Kind of ridiculous, ain’t it?” he said softly with that sometimes chilling grin of his.

He apparently cared no more for it than he did for Miami Beach when he had been there, or for anything else once he had seen it and done it and was through with it. But he kept carefully to his water schedule just the same, and when the fall planting season came went to work replacing the few things that had died.

His boredom with the garden did not keep him from doing other things, however. During the rest of the summer, he worked off and on out in the little old two-car garage at building a workbench and wall cabinets for tools across the back so he would have a place to work on his Packard. He was quite capable of spending hours and hours of pure total concentration out there, working with his saw and square and hammer and nails. And as the chillier nights of fall came on, ’Bama bought an Army surplus space heater and set it up in the garage so it would be warm enough to work out there. Also, he said, it would keep the car motors warm in the winter, which was very good for a delicately tuned car, and made it much easier to start.

About the time he got the work benches finished, Wally brought his precious Randall knives down again for them all to look at, and ’Bama got the idea of making a knife himself with Wally according to the instructions in the Randall catalog. This necessitated the buying of a good motor-driven grinding wheel and an anvil, which they duly set up in the back of the garage. And after that the two of them spent afternoon after afternoon out there, while Dave wrote, working on a stock of files they had bought to make knives out of them, grinding them on the wheel, beating them on the anvil and tempering them in the space heater. And eventually, they got several pretty good ones, though, of course, nothing that could even compare with Wally’s Randalls. Once they were made, ’Bama oiled them carefully and put them away in a drawer and forgot them.

It was then that Dave remembered one of his own lost arts, something he had not thought about since back during the war when he had learned it: knife throwing. In the 3615th QM Gas Supply Company, there had been an old carny man who had once had his own knife-throwing act and, finding Dave had spent some time with them himself, had hung around with him and had eventually wound up teaching him knife throwing. It was an almost mathematically exact science, gauging the distances and the number of turns the knife would make to strike point-first. Wally and ’Bama, as well as Dewey and Hubie, took to it immediately. So he got them all out in the backyard and taught them, using the balanced knives that Wally and ’Bama had made. They set up a broad wood target of soft pine, which they had built and painted an outsized figure of a man on, and in the cool fall evenings they could be seen, standing in a group that moved slowly back further from the target, throwing the knives at it and betting who could come closest to the heart. It was in many ways the finest summer Dave could remember in his life.

But eventually, when he had more or less mastered that technique, too, ’Bama suddenly became bored or—at any rate, indifferent—to it, too. And after he stopped, gradually, so did the others. Apparently, ’Bama was that way with just about everything—except gambling—and that included women.

The episode with Doris Fredric occurred a little less than a week after the anniversary party they threw for Dave. It had that same strange, tangled, unbelievable quality about it that everything connected with Doris had, including the party and the strange, odd way she had moved about so coolly as if there were nothing at all out of the way in her being there while at the same time her mere presence there obviously betrayed to everyone what her position was.

Dave had just quit work for the day about four-thirty. Doris had been there since before four o’clock, coming there straight from the high school as she often did. And ’Bama was gone, having gone off somewhere alone after he got up at noon. When he quit work, Dave locked his little writing room and went on through the living room to get the book he was reading—Ralph Roeder’s
The Man of the Renaissance
—and went on out to the kitchen to mix a martini and fix himself something to eat. Doris was sitting in the living room, coiled up in a chair in that sweetly sexually attractive way of hers, her small old-cherrywood-colored head bent above some weighty novel whose pages she was languidly turning but obviously not reading. She was really very beautiful, and what was more was well aware of it and had obviously posed herself so as to bring out her best advantage—even though there was nobody else in the room. And Dave went irritably on and said nothing.

After a minute or two, Doris got up and followed him out to the kitchen bringing her book, and mixed herself a drink and sat down at the table with him. She did not say anything, did not even look at him, and Dave did not say anything, either; and so she continued to sit there, turning the pages of her book, while he went about fixing himself his regular five o’clock lunch—as if in some way all she wanted was the presence of someone near. For a moment, Dave felt a powerful pity for her and for the first time came close to liking her a little. But then how can you like someone that you don’t know who they are? that they themselves don’t even know who they are? They both of them sat there for over half an hour, while Dave fixed and ate his hamburger steak, both of them got up at least twice to fix themselves extra drinks, and not once was a single word said. And it was then that they heard ’Bama drive in. In a moment, he was in the house, dangling a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label from one of his hands, and bringing a drunken blear-eyed harridan of a woman in with him.