Some Came Running (26 page)

“That ain’t the point,” ’Bama said.

“Hell, take Lois and Martha out if you want to,” Dewey said. “They’re the best romps in the bunch.”

Hubie looked a little uncomfortable at this suggestion, but he loyally didn’t say anything. Dave listened to them indifferently. He no longer cared at all whether he got fixed up or not. He sat quietly, but surcharged with an energy of misery, of soul hunger, that he knew might burst out of him at any moment like a sky rocket into something ridiculous, looking at a young unpretty but very nubile and because of it very lovely young woman who was sitting in a booth almost directly across from him and had been watching him—or at least their table—to the point of practically ignoring her boyfriend.

“You know, I suppose,” ’Bama said. “Because you’ve laid them all.”

Dewey grinned sheepishly. “Well, I’ve been out with Ginnie.”

“Everybody’s been out with Ginnie,” ’Bama said, unimpressed.

Dave continued to look quietly at the young woman who had turned back after he caught her looking at him, and was now talking animatedly to her boyfriend. The more he looked at her, the more lovely she seemed. In spite of the fact that she wasn’t pretty at all. Her nose was too big, her face was too thin, her neck was too thin, too, and too long. And yet something in her eyes, some look of love there to be given, and obviously it was not for her boyfriend, made her not only lovely, but almost beautiful. By God, she was beautiful. So many, he thought. There were so many women in the world like that, who had so much unincited love to give, and were aching to give it. Why couldn’t any of them stumble on him? He could love that girl over there.

“
I could
put it on the basis of personal friendship,” ’Bama said, “and
ask
you to go back up there. As a favor to me.”

“Well, if you did that,” Dewey said, “I’d have to go. But I’d sure hate to.”

“Well, I wouldn’t do that,” ’Bama said. “But how about if I go up to the booth and talk to the girls awhile and tell them you’ll come back, if Lois and Martha will move over into the next booth? Will you and Hubie walk up there and sit down with them in the empty booth then?”

Dewey shrugged. “Sure. I guess. We’ll do it for you. But, quite frankly, I’d just as soon sit right here. I’m having a good time.”

“But you’ll do it?” ’Bama said.

“If you’ll get them to move first,” Hubie amended.

“We’ll do it,” Dewey grinned.

“Okay,” ’Bama said. “I’m off.”

They all watched the tall gambler push back his chair and rise and go languidly up to the booth of girls, his hat pushed back just to his widow’s peak. He slid into the empty space next the two girls on this side, his back to their own table and facing Lois and the other two, and began to talk. Dave turned back to look across at his unpretty but very nubile young woman, who had looked up to watch the outcome of this new movement. She looked away quickly. He would have sworn she was watching mostly him.

“I didn’t know he was married,” he said, turning his head back to the table, “until he told me just a while ago.”

“He doesn’t
look
married,” Hubie agreed.

“Yeah, he’s married,” Dewey grinned. “He bought himself a farm down in the south end of the county out of his first big killing after he came here—down in the Dark Bend River region—and installed his wife and two kids there and left them. He goes back down there once every couple of weeks or so. Most of the time, he stays in town here. Rents a room.”

“But he’s seldom there,” Hubie said. “I heard she’s pregnant again,” he said to Dewey.

Dewey laughed. “She probly is.”

“You mean she stays there and farms the place all by herself?” Dave asked, looking again at his nubile young woman.

“Naw,” Dewey said. “He’s got a man and his wife living there, too, in another house. They farm it on shares. She just stays down there, and manages it, sort of. His old mother lives down there too part of the time, I guess; when she’s not at his brother’s.”

“Have you ever been down there?” Dave asked. He took another drink, quietly, in spite of the churning energy of misery and frustration and malice—of fright, abstract and objectless—boiling inside of him, and turned to look at the young woman again. She had just crossed her legs. They were too thin, too. It didn’t matter.

“Yeah we been down there a couple of times,” Dewey said. “’Bama wanted me and Hubie to paint it for him once, but we’ve never got around to it.”

“What kind of place is it?” Dave said. “Nice place?”

“Naw, just one of them old old-time houses. The land’s good. He knows farmin, ’Bama.”

“Must be a fine life for her,” Dave said.

“She doesn’t seem to mind it. Kids go to a country school. She’s not a bad-lookin woman. If she’d just fix herself up a little.”

“She probly doesn’t have much reason to,” Dave said.

“I guess not,” Dewey said. “Say, you knew my brother Raymond in high school, didn’t you.” It was not so much a question as an assumption.

“Yeah. That is, I knew of him. He was three years behind me. I remember him as a tough kid who was always getting into fights, even then,” he said, looking across at his girl again.

“Did you know that Scott girl who was in love with him?”

“No. Just by sight, is all.”

“She was really hung on him,” Dewey said.

“I never knew any of those rich kids,” Dave said.

Dewey’s assumption had touched something deep inside of him. It made him aware that, historically, at least, he was as much a part of Parkman as were Dewey and Hubie, or ’Bama, or Brother Frank. Or as that girl over there. It meant he existed here—if only as a birth certificate, and a record of grades (usually poor), and a rarely remembered bit of scandal—in a way he could never exist in Greater Los Angeles. And he needed that. But such existence was hardly compensation for a man who had an almost physical need to be loved by the whole world, either.

“As a matter of fact, I was always a sort of a black sheep,” he said. “Like you. A ne’er-do-well. The guys I ran around with were mostly all wild boys from down in the country who stole their old man’s homemade whiskey, or else stole his corn to make it themselves.”

With everything colored by his emotion, he thought he could sense that same sense of existence-in-Parkman in everyone else as he looked at them around the wall booths. They all knew they existed here, but were unsure they would exist elsewhere. That was why they stayed. That was why they enjoyed Dewey’s gang’s escapades like they did. It was a part of the town. And besides Dewey had the same thing in him. That was why he stayed. They were all obviously disappointed by Raymond’s exit, he thought, and were still hoping for some event or other to happen that they could carry home with them to talk about, but there was an affection in their scrutiny, too. Of a sort. They felt a sort of sense of civic possession for Dewey. They had known him all their lives. His father had been one of the town bums when they were kids. When Dave’s sweeping eyes came to the nubile girl across from him, she dropped hers again and began talking animatedly to her ignored boyfriend.

“Yeah, I remember,” Dewey answered him, his eyes glinting with a private malicious pleasure. “That was the same bunch that you got kicked off the football team with.”

Dave nodded, feeling both choked up and a wild driving energy to kick over tables, to smash. If Raymond were still here, right now, he’d be happy to fight him himself, love it. And for no reason. Just because he was miserable. Miserable with a self-lashing, tooth-gnashing misery that would have made being beaten up actually enjoyable.

“What I still don’t see,” Hubie said, “is why the hell you ever come back here.”

“For the same reason that you did, probly,” Dave said, looking at him belligerently; then he looked away, “I’m only here for a week,” he said. “Say, who is that girl over there against the wall across from us?”

Dewey swung around in his chair to look. The girl seemed to flush in the dim light, but she did not look at them or stop talking. “That’s your brother Frank’s office girl,” Dewey said. “Name’s Edith Barclay. Use to be a phone operator.”

“No kidding,” Dave said, he looked at her again,

“Yeah; I thought you already knew her,” Dewey said. “You been lookin at her like you did.”

“Nah,” Dave said. “I don’t know her. Brother Frank’s office girl, hunh?” That was why she’d been watching him.

“Nice-lookin girl, isn’t she?” Dewey said. “Guy she’s with is Harold Alberson. Works for Sternutol in the sales department. White-collar kid.”

“They engaged?” Dave said.

“Naw,” Dewey drawled. “Edith goes out with a lot of different guys. The way we hear it is Harold wants to marry her but she won’t give him a tumble. Or anybody else, we hear. But, of course, we don’t run in their circle.”

“What circle?” Hubie demanded. “Her old man works for the Sternutol just like mine.”

“I wonder if Brother Frank could be getting a little of it?” Dave said. His pulse was beginning to move from his chest up into his ears. He was contemplating doing something extravagant.

“I don’t know,” Dewey said. “I kind of doubt it. I never heard that. And I probly would have. But then again, I wouldn’t be surprised. Would you? Because she’s really a looker, ain’t she? Beautiful, really.”

Dave studied her again, male ego engulfing him in wild vanity without any legitimate reason. Except that he wanted to do something, something wild. Dewey thought she was beautiful, too. It wasn’t just him. She had almost no breasts at all and overwide hips, even sitting down. But that glow of nubility from her changed them all into beauty.

“I think I’ll just step over and say hello to her,” he leered at Dewey. “After all, she’s practically family.”

“Go ahead,” Dewey grinned, and his eyes lit up again with that curious pleased glint of malice they got, every time something was said or done that might conceivably flaunt the proprieties of Parkman.

Dave took a last-minute gulp of beer and got up and sauntered across the room toward her booth, the old liquor-driven arrogance consuming his timidity completely. It was one of the few confident emotions, he ever got the pleasure of feeling in his life. Besides, he was committed now.

She saw him coming and her eyes widened and she quickly began talking to Harold. That pleased him. He felt very powerful. She must have been twenty-four or -five but looked at least twenty-seven. Harold was twenty-three or -four and looked it. Dave leaned one arm across the back of their booth behind Edith and grinned down at them.

“Hello,” he said. “You’re Edith Barclay, aren’t you? That works for my brother Frank.”

“Why, yes,” she said, “I am. Hello, Mr Hirsh, how are you?” and introduced him to Harold Alberson. Her voice was low, sexily nubile just like he’d guessed, and now it was troubled.

Dave felt even better. “Hi, bud,” he said magnanimously to Harold, still grinning. “I thought it was you,” he said to Edith, ignoring Harold’s hand. “Sooo, I just thought I’d come over and say hello.”

Behind him he could feel just about every eye in the other booths upon his back, watching intently. They knew who he was all right.

“How did you know who I was?” she said in the same low voice. Apparently, she was well aware of the watchers, too.

Dave grinned and said the first thing that came into his head. “I was in the store a few minutes this afternoon.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that!” she said. “But I work back in the office. . . .”

“I know that. You happened to come out front a minute with some papers and I saw you. You didn’t notice me.”

Her eyes, watching him with the hollow fortitude of the deeply embarrassed, flinched a little and betrayed she knew he was lying.

“It’s still the same old store, ain’t it?” he said.

She nodded. “I didn’t know you’d ever seen it.”

“I never had. Till today. But then Frank’s sent us pictures of it,” Dave grinned. “When’s he going to redecorate it?”

This was an unintended lucky shot, because her eyes showed surprise. She evidently wasn’t sure just how much of Frank’s confidence he had.

Edith smiled at him tentatively, hoping she had at last found some common ground. “Well, he’s been talking about it for a long time. He wants Agnes to do it for him. Agnes is awfully good with colors. Someday they’ll get around to it.”

Dave raised one eyebrow and grinned. “I seriously doubt it, Edith. They’ll just go on talking about it the rest of their lives. But then it won’t make much difference, will it, Edith?”

She did not say anything to that, and merely sat looking at him with those troubled, marriageable eyes. (He swore he could smell her, the marriageableness of her, a delicious ruttish smell compounded of damp female flesh and hair seasoned liberally with perfume. Oh, Christ, Hirsh. Cut it out. Get away from here.)

“Well, I’ve got to be getting back to my friends,” he grinned at them arrogantly. “But I’m glad I came over. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m coming up to the store again tomorrow. See Frank. I was out to the house tonight, for dinner.”

“It’s nice to have met you,” Edith said, her eyes not only embarrassed now but vaguely guilty, too, as if all this were somehow her fault. She did not mention she already knew he was going to be at the house tonight.

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Dave grinned, “I assure you. I thought I ought to come over when I saw you watching me.”

“I wasn’t watching you!”

It was an instinctive exclamation, and a guilty one.

“You weren’t?” Dave grinned. “Well, I wouldn’t contradict a lady. But when you sit and stare at someone, you shouldn’t act surprised when they come over and speak to you. Bye, Harold.”

He made a little bow with his head and turned on his heel and walked off, but not before he had seen the outraged start on her face and the look of mingled puzzlement at why he should want to deliberately embarrass her when she had not done anything to deserve it.

The truth was, he didn’t really know why himself. Except that she was so damned nubile, so marriageable, and because he was so filled up with such a goddamned churning driving energy of misery and lack of love that it had to come out someplace and anyway he resented her.